Wednesday, February 10, 2016 // The Statement
6B
fear and self-loathing in santiago:
an introduction
by Adam DePollo
By way of an introduction to this column,
I’d like to say a few things about myself and
my idea for the series that I hope might help
you decide whether this piece is the one that
finally proves you can no longer justify reading
another word printed in The Michigan Daily,
even for the low, low price of $Free.99.1
My name is Adam DePollo, and I’ve held
several editorial and columnist positions dur-
ing my time at the Daily2 while writing on a
wide range of topics3 in a healthy smattering of
sections. But despite all of that work, my many
character tics and neuroses, the critical stanc-
es I’ve tried to take in my writing, my relation-
ships with friends and family and the many
hobbies I’ve been frantically cultivating over
the years have yet to coagulate into anything
I would feel comfortable calling a stable self-
concept. Or, in other words, I’m still eluded by
the intangible somethingness toward which
all of my efforts to date have vainly aspired:
namely, Objective Knowledge of the Self and a
concise answer to the Question of Questions,
“What is the Meaning of Life?”
Fortunately,4 however, I’ve been afforded
a rare opportunity this semester to leave my
home, friends and family back in the callous
Michigan tundra and spend the better part of
six months in Santiago, Chile, exploring life
on the planet’s much-discussed other hemi-
sphere.5 There, I will embark on one of the
perennial undergraduate quests that our Uni-
versity6 describes as a “study abroad program,”
but which I have already subconsciously desig-
nated “The Search for Self and Brief Glimpses
of Universal Truth 2k16: Santiago Edition.”
This column will, I hope, serve as an amusing,
inspiring and at times heart-wrenching record
of the Search, and, if we’re lucky, I might even
come across a few instances of what the Wiki-
pedia article on novelist David Foster Wallace7
describes as “earnest, unselfconscious experi-
ence and communication in a media-saturated
society” — the lack of which might, for all I
know,8 be what’s preventing me from figur-
ing it all out, landing my book deal and spend-
ing the rest of my life bumming around a villa
somewhere as a much less confrontational
version of David Duchovny’s character from
“Californication.”9
Now, in feeling compelled to write this, I
also assume that you (The Reader) want to
read about how a guy like me goes about “find-
ing himself,” which I think means that, like
me, you haven’t got it all figured out yet, either.
But, let’s not fool ourselves, that’s kind of a
weird way to go about figuring yourself out,
don’t you think? Why not just go out and be
yourself instead of reading about how some-
one else does it? What are we really getting out
of stories like these? Why, as a culture, do we
feel compelled to subject ourselves to this sort
of syndicated navel-gazing?
I can only imagine there’s a very complex
and multi-faceted reason for it, but, for my
part, I’ll say that my fascination with stories
about self-discovery stems from a combina-
tion of the fact that I’m a big fan of avant-garde
story-writing (shouts outDaniil Kharms) and
that stories of the self-discovery variety are
one of the few underground literary genres
still widely produced, even among non-liter-
ary-inclined people. Everyone has one10 and
we come up with them, more often than not, in
the privacy11 of our own heads, our skulls pro-
viding a calcium-rich cushion between these
stories and the creativity-squashing influence
of logic and fact-checking.
Because these stories are very rarely shared
in any sort of public setting, strange things
happen when people are asked to recount
them out loud. Just ask any stranger in your
nearest coffee shop how they “found them-
selves” (I have tried this) and the answer you’ll
get12 will likely be a sprawling collection of
sporadic anecdotes that sounds something like
an absurdist combination of a presidential can-
didate-style stump speech and an emotional
J.D. monologue from “Scrubs.”13 It’s somewhat
off-putting at first, but that really is, I think, a
pretty close approximation of what those sto-
ries we tell ourselves sound like when they’re
bumping around in our brains.
The funny thing, of course, is that formally
scatterbrained self-discovery stories of that
sort work perfectly well to get you through
the day and effectively do allow, who knows,
maybe millions or even billions of people to get
through their days without collapsing into a
puddle of wrecked nerves. That fact alone — in
my eyes, at least — pretty definitively demon-
strates that:
a. Any time you read a coherent “self-discov-
ery” narrative on a news site like this, you’re
dealing with a literary construction, i.e. a fic-
tion, i.e. not objective reportage of any kind of
“self” that exists in any tangible way.
and
1. The idea being that there is (in theory) some aspect of my character which would, despite
the many differences that I’m sure exist between us, allow for the development of some kind
of pathos or sense of kindred spirit between myself and you [the Reader], without whom this
column would be little more than a sort of frantic travelogue written by an über-self-absorbed
college senior who should probably be in therapy.a
1a. In practice it will be that, but with enough of you [The Readership, that is] racking up the
page count, we might dare to call this column a Small Slice of the Millennial Experience, which
is, as I’m sure you’re aware, another name for First Rate Journalism.
2. All of them (3+2 unofficial spots) in our Arts section, where I was given the ontologically
distressing nickname “Father Arts.”
3. Including underground music in Detroit, sexism and commodity fetishism in Drake’s hit
summer jam “Hotline Bling,” Grammy-winning jazz pianist Fred Hersch,student consumer
behavior and its influence on local Ann Arbor businesses, the philosophical and political char-
acter of eating dinner alone, etc.
4. Fortunately for myself, I suppose — but who knows! Maybe for the rest of humanity, too.
5. I’m hoping that the answers to my many philosophical queries have been hiding down there
in a spiritually resonant alleyway of some sort, or maybe under a vase in Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda’s house, which I have every intention of visiting and whose restroom it is my most pro-
found wish to experience first-hand (since the toilet is, in my mind, the only real seat of genius).
6. Since journalism is a cold mistress who won’t pay for things like this and my parents are
warm mistresses who can’t, the only reason I’m able to make this voyage is, naturally, with the
assistance of UM President Mark Schlissel — or, rather, the University’s illustrious Financial
Aid Department (Peace Be With It), which has, throughout my undergraduate career, had much
greater confidence in my ability to pay back federal loans than any other entity on this earth or
floating amid the ether of the great hereafter. I’m also assisted by our Uncle Sam in the form of an
incredibly generous grant through the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program,
which provides funding to allow “U.S. citizen undergraduate students of limited financial means
to pursue academic studies or credit-bearing, career-oriented internships abroad." Such interna-
tional exchange, I’m told, “is intended to better prepare U.S. students to assume significant roles
in an increasingly global economy and interdependent world.”
7. The first five chapters of whose magnum opus “Infinite Jest” I finished reading for the first
time last week; and let me tell you, that is a guy who can sure write a lot of things. Wow. And
his footnotes are really something — much more enthralling than your usual, run-of-the-mill
marginalia. I, too, often have more thoughts than I could fit into a single sentence, but when he
does it, it feels like you’re stepping into a whole new world with a much higher screen resolution.
The closest thing I can compare it to is the feeling I get when I look at the Direct Optical guy for
the first time after getting my new glasses prescriptions. All of the sudden he’s not only a Direct
Optical Employee, but a Direct Optical Employee with a lot of pores and an oddly-shaped little
scar next to his left ear, a deformity which I’m sure has some very interesting story behind it that
I don’t feel we’re quite chummy enough to be able to ask about without seeming rude. Life is full
of mysteries with the right corrective lenses.
8. He won a MacArthur Genius Grant, after all, so I’m sure his Objective Knowledge of the
Self speaks for my human condition, too.
9. Keep on the lookout for a TV Notebook from myself re: the various problems with “Califor-
nication,” which are too numerous to count here. The most egregious, however, might be that
the show ruins the perfectly pleasant idea of watching David Duchovny live out his days as a
villa-based sardonic novelist/good-hearted hyper-macho literary enfant terrible by structuring
itself around a prolonged, incredibly uncomfortable off-brand Nabokovian story arc wherein the
forty-something writer gets his mojo back by way of sex with a 16-year-old girl who quickly
turns into one of the show’s principal antagonists. It’s hideous.
10. History and the arts are rife with examples of the types of horrific problems that pop up
when we try to get around with (or just plain get around) faulty narratives about who we are
and how we got to be where we’re at.a Much rarer are stories about people trying to get around
with no such narrative whatsoever; can you name any off the top of your head?b There’s some
sort of conceptual barrier there which I’m sure someone has written an essay about at one point
or another.
10a. See: eye-gouging in “Oedipus Rex,” drunken arbitrary self-enthrallment in “The Tem-
pest,” the Holocaust vis-a-vis German post-WWI economic/legal sovereignty/national identity
crises, death aboard a glacier in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” drunken hotel room stupors
in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, drunken run-ins with nationalistic police officers in
“Ulysses,” the murder of a perfectly innocent dog in “The Babadook,” etc.
10b. The closest thing I can imagine is a story that doesn’t exist. I’m thinking a remake of the
movie “Memento” in which the anterograde amnesia-suffering protagonist never bothered to
give himself any tattoos and simply doesn’t give a shit about the fact that he wakes up devoid of
Illustration by Shane Achenbach