hurts so good

So I am—and have been, and will be—rereading Infinite Jest, which I first read in 1996 (after it caught my eye on the New Fiction table to the left of the entrance of my beloved, too-soon-departed West 81st Street Shakespeare & Co. and then blew my mind by name-dropping Pynchon three times on its book jacket, Pynchon whose name I'd first heard 15, 20 minutes earlier and whose books I'd come to Shakespeare & Co. specifically to purchase, hence the kind of holy-shit reaction I'd had to finding him linked to a book that had not only caught my eye but had done so with so iron-like a grasp that it'd bent my course into New Fiction like light bent by a black hole—all of which is not entirely unrelated to where I'm headed outside parentheses, you'll see), and I'm struck by this idea of the pleasure that destroys.  The ultimate symbol of addiction–destruction in the novel is the film Infinite Jest, which (in what I've always seen as a reference or homage to Monty Python's funniest-joke sketch) is so intensely entertaining that, after only a few seconds of watching it, you're done for: you will never again be happy—not even barely OK—doing anything at all other than watching this movie again and again and again until you die—because you'll have no time for food or drink: Infinite Jest will have become your entire life.*  Of course Infinite Jest, the movie, is a kind of exaggeration or metaphor: Infinite Jest, the novel—which focuses less on its almost sci-fi premise than on 12-step recovery programs and (less obviously) monomania in academics and athletics—is all about the pleasure that destroys.

Part of the reason why the idea is so compelling is simply that it's a big issue in our society: alcoholism, addiction, compulsive behavior...  I, with Fromm, might say that all are symptomatic of a larger problem and that addressing them on their own is a little bit like taking a person with smallpox to the dermatologist, but obviously these are enormous problems in themselves.

However, forgetting "substances" (often capitalized in Infinite Jest—maybe only from the POV of the recovering addicts) and even forgetting whatever deeper cause I might have been alluding to above, we might note that the idea of the pleasure that destroys is one that has existed for centuries, millennia even.  Think of the sometime religious sense of pleasure as sinful and self-indulgence as a good way to bring down the wrath of God, the old showstopping formula: fun = evil.

So: is the appeal of the pleasure that destroys—both the intellectual appeal that makes a book like DFW's interesting and the visceral appeal that's sure to keep on keeping alcohol, tobacco, and narcotics from ever going out of style—a vestige of a Puritanical mindset (just as the god-shaped hole is a hole in society, not in the universe**)?  In other words, are we fascinated with self-destruction by means of pleasure because we're slow to forget a god known to fry people with lightning for ejaculating in the wrong place?  Or do they maybe both share a common ancestor, the fascination and the religious mentality, that transcends either and both?

But I'm putting too much emphasis on the Puritanism of it.  Dropping the judgment—and whether there's a common ancestor or not—I'm curious to know what the idea really is.  I say I'm putting too much emphasis on Puritanism because the question of reducing your entire life to the pursuit of happiness in the form of a pill or powder (or a ruinously entertaining film) is not really a question of open-mindedness***, but also because if we "solve" the problem with a formula like people are uptight, we lose a little subtlety, to put it mildly.  What I want to know is, what is this idea, really?  Why do people deliberately inhale poisonous fumes with the full knowledge that they're basically burning out swaths of brain?—and why have so many people believed in a God who was not at all pleased by pleasure, a Universe in which human beings paid for their fun with a lifetime of torment?

Of course the Puritanical part has a flipside: the idea that sex is evil (e.g.) suggests sexual hysteria, and you never hear anyone so focused on anal sex as your die-hard homophobe.  So then you might sum it all up by saying that human beings don't just like pleasure so much that they'll sometimes fuck themselves up getting it, but actually also sometimes prefer pleasure that fucks them up.  So what is this?  A fetishization of death, maybe, in which case the pleasure might be a kind of excuse or sugar coating for the destruction?

Or could it be instead a crazy kind of attempt to defeat death by tempting it, flirting with it, inviting it into your home and just laughing in its face?  Just as Adam and Eve gave Yahweh the flaming fantods**** by acquiring a previously only godlike knowledge of good and evil (hence the summary octogenarihexation***** from Eden before we gobbled up eternal life as well), are we trying to defang, maybe more like denut mortality by ingesting it—yes, like an apple—and not only not expiring with fear but also just loving it to death...?

In which case the question of who gets the last laugh is up, but maybe not so high as we'd like, for grabs?

* ...not in the same way that a 1,000-page book will become your entire life, but, well...you know, the comparison is there.

** Or is it that the hole is in the universe, but it's in the shape of religion, not God?

*** Arguably any open-mindedness that results in a terminally closed mind is automatically a problem, just as a market so free that it's shut down by monopolies, or a democracy so unfettered that it gives itself a totalitarian dictator, is automatically a problem.

**** a DFWism, more or less.

***** a Pynchonism, from Vineland, page 186...took about two hours trying to locate this shit.