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Monday, September 15, 2008
THE BULL WHO KNEW THE RING
Flying Canyon
Flying Canyon
Soft Abuse : 2006
[Buy It]
This old bull life, once you knew the ring
Kick it back down, open up & sing
Bring me one last song for charity
This old boat ain't gonna make it out to sea. -Cayce Lindner, ???-2007
One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one. -David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
I am not sure where to begin. All morning, I've been procrastinating - compulsively checking emails, doing my stretches, making a slow lunch, balancing my check book. I'm all out of procrastination. Something needs to be said but I'm still unsure what it is. Let's start here, just to get the page moving:
On Saturday night, I was drinking a glass of wine at a cafe, killing time before a dance party. My phone vibrated in my pocket - a text message. I opened it, expecting a "you out tonight?" or a "call me." I was not expecting this: "david foster wallace killed himself yesterday." I felt something big and dark and ominously winged land upon my chest. I didn't get it. What was it supposed to mean? Some kind of sick joke?
I scrolled down. The message was from one of my editors at a local paper - not the sickly joking type. I walked back inside, jaw swinging loosely. My partner Ashley saw my face and said, "what," alarmed. My jaw was not responding. I held up the phone, with the message. "Are you okay?" she said.
I didn't feel okay. This is starting out all wrong. This is not about me. But I didn't feel okay. I've been vaguely affected by the deaths of celebrities and artists before - Tupac, Biggie, Cobain - but I've never felt the visceral response that I've heard people describe, until now. What I felt in those instances seemed more symbolic than visceral, an awareness of some turning point that affected me more on an academic than a visceral level. Does this sound cold? I don't know how to properly grieve for people I've never met. I don't know why Wallace's self-inflicted death should be realer to me and more demanding of comment from me than, say, the 25 people killed against their will in the recent train crash outside of Los Angeles. This is starting out all wrong. It isn't about me, or shouldn't be.
David Foster Wallace has hanged himself. His wife found him. Grief belongs to her, and his parents, and his friends. My grief is inconsequential, and spectral, and real. He was my favorite writer. I don't mean this to denote simple admiration, and I don't mean it in a way that projects the idea that I'm the type of person who likes David Foster Wallace to the world. This is more personal. I don't want to write an obituary, which pretends to objectivity. I don't want to write his story, which is not mine to tell, and which is hidden from me. This is about me, even if it shouldn't be. Let me make this clear. Wallace's death is about him and his family and friends. This is about me - this post. It's about whatever emulsion of Wallace came alive in the crucible of me, and became me. It's a selfish thing to write about. But suicide is a selfish act. We're all selfish. Wallace's death isn't about me. But this is. It's all I've got.
I discovered his books in my late teens. I'd dropped out of art school, having survived a convulsive teenage period of dark nihilism, dark drugs, dark metamorphosis. I was coming back into the light. I hungered for a literature I intuited but did not know. I was reading a lot of Vonnegut, which was close but not quite the cigar I was looking for. One day, in the library, I discovered Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's second story collection. I got it because the pages looked crazy and the blurbs sounded crazy. I read it, and it was crazy. I felt as if smoke were coming out of the top of my head. In hindsight, it's not surprising that the idea of narratives coming apart would appeal to someone who'd been through a long phase where every narrative he knew seemed to come apart. This was the beginning of something.
Then I read Infinite Jest and it changed me forever. It made me moody and troubled and alive. It made me simultaneously know that I wanted to be a writer, and despair of ever doing so. Nevertheless, I became a writer. Now I've read Infinte Jest three or four times. It's hard to say that without sounding as if you're bragging, because of that book's reputation for difficulty and pretentiousness, which it does not deserve. It is such a human and humane and generous book. It wasn't a War and Peace or Ulysses kind of thing for me, a badge of honor or improving ordeal. It was bread and water, sustenance. Every time I reach the end of its thousand-odd pages, I wish there were more. It makes me greedy. It's a place I love to go, and that I long to fathom more fully. Each time, it cores me and razes me and gestures toward rebuilding me. Everything's in it.
Most importantly, it contained a mind that I seemed to recognize in some fundamental way: something inside of me coming weirdly from outside of me, a crossing of that Self/Other divide that so heavily informed Wallace's writing and, one presumes, demise. That this sense of deep identification was unilateral seemed beside the point: in my inner life, which is to say, my real life, it was real. This voice became a part of me. In spending time with it I felt as if I were spending time with myself - my sometimes-cripping self-consciousness (the animating force of Wallace's brilliance), my complex relationship with irony and fear of desire, the idea of digression as some sort of release valve, a venting of some kind of inner infinity that feels like a pressure, and a winding path leading to infinity as well. All of this I recognized before I could articulate it. What does this have to do with Wallace's life and death. This is going poorly. Try again.
I devoured the essay collections and discovered I wanted nothing more than for editors to send me to obscure events and pay me to write "long directionless essay-ish things." I ironically attended a Poison concert, then went home and wrote a discursive twenty-page essay about it, complete with artlessly long title and copious footnotes. "And but so's" began to sprout in my prose like weeds. My friend and I optioned Girl With Curious Hair for a film we never made. In the essays, particularly in the essay E Unibus Pluram, I discovered Mark Leyner and John Barth and Don DeLillo and Max Apple, and for many years postmodernism and metafiction became my obsession. I read his essay on David Lynch and suddenly got Lynch in a way I hadn't before; a filmmaker I'd been simply intrigued by became, over the course of years, one of my favorite artists ever. Understand this: I was changed. Wallace was a route into things that were already waiting for me, which I did not yet know. But this is starting out all wrong. None of this is the point. (Why should there be a point? People die.) Try again.
David Foster Wallace has hanged himself. I am shocked but not surprised. I've never been able to fathom how he lived inside of that mind, never at rest, always chasing itself in a deep involuted spiral. I don't want to slip into an easy, Beautiful Mind type narrative - Wallace frantically inscribing equations on a window, tortured to death by his own brilliance, it's too much, it supposes too much, and Wallace himself derided this narrative in his pop-bio on Georg Cantor and the concept of infinity. I don't think his death is a symptom of his writing but I suspect his writing is a symtom of his death. It's hard not to. He was a math wonk and math wonks cater to this image, they seem to know too much stuff that's useful for so little. The sound of math and the sound of a mind devouring itself are the same. I think of a machine, humming and ticking in a depopulated void. This is an easy narrative. I'm trying to avoid it and slipping into it. Back up.
I wrote a review of his third story collection, Oblivion. This part is about me. A palette cleanser before we try again. Here's something I said:
Oblivion is a difficult book, and will be frustrating to some readers. Many fiction writers take a narrative arc, then pepper it with details at intermittent points along its length to engender a sense of self-containment and completion. Wallace excises a small segment of a narrative arc, and then packs it with a dense accretion of detail (with strategic omissions that befuddle and inclusions that seem, at first, meaningless to the narrative). Traditional fiction seeks to create an illusion of contiguity in the haphazard events of our lives; Wallace undermines the illusion of sequential narrative by filling a time-span with facts that often refuse to cohere as neatly as we're conditioned to expect.
I still think that's pretty good, as a description of how Wallace's writing works. I don't want this to be an opportunity for me to flex my writing muscles, in that vaguely seamy and selfish way that postmortem considerations frequently are. But I don't want Wallace to be dead either. Nevertheless, here we are.
But think about seeing the world that way, all the time. I am dangerously close to slipping into the tortured genius narrative. It is seductive, and he was a genius, and by all appearances somewhat tortured. It's drawing a firm connection that's problematic. I don't want to impose this narrative on someone who relentlessly exploded packaged narratives. When who knows what forces prevailed upon his private life, hidden from the fictions and essays. Who know what dark whirlpool of diabolical chemicals surged in his brain. I am trying to write about an event I cannot know, and so it keeps trying to be about me. Once more, with feeling...
Re-read the essays and remember how fucking funny Wallace was - uproariously, laugh out loud, never-forget-the-image-or-turn-of-phrase funny. That's part of what I don't get - he seems too funny to die. Does that make sense? That the harrowing and the hilarious seemed to perfectly coexist in his writing, and that his unflagging humor seems like it should have kept him afloat? That's it's hard to fathom intentionally leaving a world that is so funny and so interesting and so horrible? That time is pain and death is the absence of time, that death is not long but more than long - timeless - and that time is precious, as is pain, being so brief against the timelessness of death? I know a bit about dread and intuit things about death, but I'll stick around as long as the world is still funny and painful, which it is. But what am I talking about? This part is about me in a way that it really shouldn't be. Start over, try again.
It just so happens that I - damn it, there's that "I" again - go ahead - see where it goes. It just so happens that I was re-reading Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System - definitely a young man's book, which he wrote in his early twenties, but a better and more audacious book than most writers get to create in a lifetime - at the time of his auto-apocalypse. I read some of it on Friday and some of it today; it's not the same book that it was on Friday. Now, it's like reading a library copy that someone has highlighted in (which, side note, drives me fucking bonkers - I don't write in my own books and definitely can't read one someone else has written in) - emphases are shifted, passages become stupidly portentous. Suicide is an oblierative act, cruel to friends and family - I am not here to judge, but it is cruel, say that - which obliterates totally, reverberating like an endless bell through every corner of the departed's life and work. So this morning I open The Broom of the System and read passages like
...[W]e each ought to desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with Self, on one hand, and vast empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other.
I mean come on. Come the fuck on. This is too poignant and too easy, bathetically leaping off the page. But maybe it absolves me for this abortive post. Maybe Wallace would understand that I can only filter this through my empty, rattling personal universe, and that this is an attempt, like all of my writing, to pierce that veil of solipsism, which is so prominently explored in his writing and seems so inextricably linked to his death. This latter might not be true. I am talking about appearances and symmetries. Because that's what we're left to sift through. At any rate, if you read the story "Good Old Neon," you have to surmise that Wallace is somewhere or in some state now where he could really give a damn about how a stranger handles his death - he is no longer a whitecap, he has sunk into the benevolent simultanaeity of the sea. This is his image. It's a poor thing to wield someone's images against them, or to use them to explain them. But the instinct is understandable. It's all we have left.
It's terribly tempting to root through Wallace's writing for clues as to how he reached the point the reached - tying the knot, slipping it around...no. That's too much. This is not a tabloid. But it's hard not to think about. He was so fucking funny! Go back to the books. Read them like a detective, it's okay - we can't really help ourselves. Read "Good Old Neon". Think about the narrator's last afternoon, and Wallace's awareness of the pathos of it, as he rehearses all the acts he's performing for the last time. Think about Wallace's benevolent view of death and suicide and hidden inner feelings of fradulence in that story. Try to make it connect to what happened. Don't feel as if he was trying to warn us of anything, unless that's how you feel, which is fine. I don't think it was a warning or a cry for help. Threads were converging. Clouds gathering. Cosmic billiards ricocheting. That's it.
Read "Suicide as a Sort of Present." Try not to groan at the irony, or become angry, unless you feel angry, which is okay. Fucking Didion has manged not to pull the plug, and she... no. Don't. Read "Suicide as a Sort of Present." But try not tarry in that story for too long - it's a dead end, and it's dangerous. Counterweight it with "Death is Not the End." Now we are doing math. We are balancing an equation. Don't expect this to mean anything (this isn't about me, but I'm talking to myself, here). Read "The Depressed Person." Try to imagine that this is not his own mind he's describing, trapped in an endless spiral of solipsism and need. But then try to imagine what it means for a mind to imagine a mind, and think about whether or not there's a meaningful difference, between that, and being that mind. Remember that some of the most vivid passages in Infinite Jest described the texture of depression, a great dark winged shape pressing down. It's only natural for us to do this. But we shouldn't believe we know too much. It's too easy. Suicide is one ultimate mystery. The connection between a writer and reader is another. This is going poorly because I'm threatening to make it all sound simpler and easier than it is. I always thought writing was a bulwark for him, against the self-obliteration that always seemed the logical conclusion of his uncanny self-consciousness. I don't believe it's that simple but it's how I feel. This is getting too profound. I chose the picture of him I like best, from the Infinte Jest flap, with the bandana and the gauzy downcast expression. This is too sentimental. I don't know him. Stop trying. Simmer, in your mind. Feel don't think. Grieve for his friends and family in whatever abstract way you can. Know that he's fine now - whatever plagued him in life is over, and he's rejoined the greater flow. Try not to think about the moment of (Ben's phrase) "terrible clarity," it's too much like a movie, which is false. Know that he's fine now. Allow yourself to feel whatever you feel, and reconcile yourself to never knowing. Be quiet and small. Read the books. Let the equation remain unbalanced. Read, feel, grow. Be well. Do not say anything sentimental like "Goodbye, David." That is false. The books are still here, and the books are all you've ever known. Keep writing. Laugh at things that are funny; this is so important. Appreciate the people you know. Don't close on a poignant note. You've already gotten too fucking poignant with that Flying Canyon song, as if any two suicides were alike. Quote a passage. Choose one that isn't sentimental or poignant. Discover that this is, suddenly, impossible. Do it anyway:
A RADICALLY CONDENSED HISTORY OF POSTINDUSTRIAL LIFE
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.
Labels: brian, david foster wallace
posted by Brian
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