alas. poor yorick.
09.21.08
5:48 am
I would desperately love to say goodbye to David Foster Wallace. I want to engage in this uniquely human process where we sit around and think about one individual that will no longer interact with our lives, pretending we have the power to set them to a proper rest. To write down my memories and exorcise my dreams. I don't want them to tease me any more.
It's certainly the time of the year for such practices. It might be bemusing--Onion, that's a stern face--if it weren't so... devastating. All of a sudden everyone and their keyboards have taken to mourning the loss of this fascinating writer that used a lot of big words and still maintained a cult following. Remembering every little anecdotal interaction they ever had with this m/M/L. Taking every feeling and reaction and thought and memory and etching it into the permanent ether like a tombstone graffito: “The Washington Post was here.”
And i don't get this grieving process one bit but here i am queueing up for my turn. Wishing that i knew how to process this life's effect on mine, how to finish off this tourniquet. To lay out my baggage and let the closure come in. Which g.process is made even more difficult by my fundamental inadequacy in this regard; i am out of practice after all. This just haunts me: 10 years down the line This right here will be my only remains of dfw. And how can anyone--let alone this deeply affected, insecure version of me--stand up to such a task.
I'll accede to the demands of futile or never take a first step. I will never be able to get David Foster Wallace out. He is not someone a mind can even begin to process. Not out of my heart, not out on a page. Hopefully sometime out of obit-speak. But who knows: he makes it that hard. He takes too much of your internal voice with him and where are you without.
This is where i am: My life will remain unfulfilled. For ever and always, for death do us part. I have never imagined a life without meeting dfw; without becoming friends and engaging in the passion of shared battles; without becoming a true disciple and carrying on the fanatical torch of sincerity. He will never read a thing i've written! How will i ever know if i should even bother? Who else has the authority? Maybe i didn't expect to ever meet him. But it always could have happened. There was always the future. Now only regrets.
I'll tell you my cute little anecdotes. What lives on with me. I made him a mixcd once. I didn't know how to give it to him; i just left it in his box. I'll never know what he thought. Some of my friends had wanted to invite him to a dinner party. A dinner party. For collectively made food and drinks and games and earnest conversation. Why hadn't we already? What were we waiting for? Could he have appreciated that?
This is the extent of the stories i have. Not what happened, but what didn't. And i think that's what we're all really struggling with here. This pitiful collection of postmortem critics oozing out of our safe little rabbit holes like hyenas from the graves, eulogizing of interactions too brief. David Foster Wallace was someone we should have taken more advantage of -- as a person.
Somehow this regret is exactly what was so special about dfw to me. The most impossible thing to communicate about him is just how much he was appreciated. How that very sentence feels limp and pathetic while needing to tell the story. This Was Not the tragic death of a troubled celebrity. Not like anything i can conceive of happening. Not Smith or Thompson or Curtis, or even Cobain. Because even Cobain seemed to deal in the demolition of happy lies. Wallace reached under those and fought the sad truths. Cobain could also step right into your head without the intimacy of dialogue, but Wallace would go that extra step: he would show you how to deal with it. He would help you cope. It was as if he controlled life itself in his hands, as if he should have been controlling our every rhetorical move. Like he had walked through the valley and sent back a map. No, He wasn't divine, but he should have been. He should have led men.
And how do you cope with the suicide of someone like that? Drink the kool-aid? There's no way to communicate how vitally Important this loss is to everyone who dared walk in his door. Esoteric and inaccessible while simultaneously brutally open and intimate. Because his fans were just that touched. This was like losing a minister or mentor or even a father. Completely irreplaceable, a unique voice that nothing can come close to honoring properly. As i said, it makes me feel shamefully inadequate just trying. These are the sorts of facts that are both banal and profound. I'm using a lot of emphasis: i just can't come up with any other way to communicate the gravity of every single word i use to describe his effect on this world. They need to be meant in a way they rarely are. Just like how dfw would mean them himself, inserting the word fucking or juxtaposing the maddeningly complex and thunderingly blunt in an attempt to bend the English language into what it always should have been -- what he fucking needed it to be -- to get person to page.
I'm not even sure any of this will even mean step one to anyone who didn't already know this about dfw. But that's the damnable thing about it all: there were so many who were this passionate about him. People now realizing that “he was my favorite author” is not a sound everyone can hear. Richard J. Anderson. Ed Biblioklept. Josh Bishoff. Aaron Brewington. Peter Cook. John Farrell. Ali Fenlon. Katrina Fenlon. Emily Hashimoto. Jason Kahn. Nick Maniatis. Kelly Natoli. Megan O'Brien. Pat Polk. Agnieszka Rec. Shane Richmond. Hilary Roberts. Kae Von Schoick. A.O. Scott. Bill Stilwell. Martina Testa. Childs Walker. Emily Zeissler. Just some of the names fighting their insufficient tears. Remembering Wallace not with homages or accomplishment lists but with speechless i miss yous. All writing their endnotes and hyper-linking and going off on tangents or simply blurring clauses he would've kept straight just because they can and did feel love is what it was there any more we could have taken or given or not knowing what to do at all. All spending their time questioning not his twilight, what he was going through, what his daily fight was like, but themselves, and how they are supposed to deal with this.
Because how are we supposed to deal with this? We don't even have a copy of dfw's breakdown of the grieving process and what parts of it are effective and what parts are otiose, setting aside the fact that if such a blessed manuscript did exist, it could not possibly have described the grief of such a respected and vital man due to the fact that he would be writing it and not be actually dead, as if a supermodel were trying to chronicle the quotidian awfulness in superficial interactions. How do we get past this emptiness so sickening it makes you wish for even more than out -- it makes you wish that you were never even born, so that the whole damned experience could be avoided? How do we get on with Life?
Maybe this was supposed to happen. Supposed to being the operative how good-willed god planned on getting the dominoes over some rough patch. Maybe now is the time i finally internalize the equivalence between life and unfulfilled and learn what pursuing has to do with happiness. Maybe not another one here will end in suicide, because we'll always have 20 other people to call, people who understand a part of what we lack. Maybe 8 of these people will fall in a love that could not have existed without such sadness. Maybe we'll actually become the disciples we always wanted to be, start a cultural movement with a cause so pure it could only have been born from a leader that tragic. Maybe now every motivation will be urgent enough to kill off the last of those insecure regrets. But how do we to get to that point?! How are these dots connected? How do we process it? How do we process him?
And Why! What was so awful that the path to better days couldn't be drawn out, not even without such massive loss, not even by Wallace himself? Or is this the path he found necessary to free all that insecure paralysis? Here we are, still holding our breath for that suicide essay of explanation, not because of entertainment greed, but because we need some way to rationalize this tragic event with the ever curious, engaged, and entirely composed, together, collected man always in control of life and how we all cohere with it. Because He knows what water is and if it's really all that goddamn unpleasant, then what the hell am I doing here? Because we've been depressed too, and it's hard to keep paddling, but if someone like David. Foster. Wallace...
Is it better to have loved and lost? What about to have loved but never tried? To have never done a goddamn thing about it. Because you were too insecure. Shit maybe he would've LOVED to come to our dinner party. Maybe we could have figured out what he needed. He certainly wouldn't have been too tired to talk. Why couldn't we have avoided this? Maybe we could have known why!
I don't wonder why: i don't know why.
I just pretend i've moved on, any way i can. This. is. water.
For
a
voluntary
moment
of
a
!uniquely!
appropriate/pressing/inevitable/expressive (and don't even try and tell me i should've used the word poignant here: it's not)
silence
-"O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead."-
-"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?"-
-"It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out."-
-"The reality is that dying isn't bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective. The big picture, as they say, in which the fact is that this whole seemingly endless back-and-forth between us has come and gone and come again in the very same instant that Fern stirs a boiling pot for dinner, and your stepfather packs some pipe tobacco down with his thumb, and Angela Mead uses an ingenious little catalogue tool to roll cat hair off her blouse, and Melissa Betts inhales to respond to something she thinks her husband just said, and David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook and seeing my photo and trying, through the tiny little keyhold of himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he'd read about in 1991, like what sorts of pain or problems might have driven the guy to get in his electric-blue Corvette and try to drive with all that O.T.C. medication in his bloodstream — David Wallace happening to have a huge and totally unorganizable set of inner thoughts, feelings, memories and impressions of this little photo's guy a year ahead of him in school with the seemingly almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic and athletic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies, as well as of every last cutting remark or even tiny disgusted gesture or expression on this guy's part whenever David Wallace struck out looking in Legion ball or said something lame at a party, and of how impressive and authentically at ease in the world the guy always seemed, like an actual living person instead of the dithering, pathetically self-conscious outline or ghost of a person David Wallace knew himself back then to be. Verily a fair-haried, fast-track guy, whom in the very best human tradition David Wallace had back then imagined as happy and unreflective and wholly unhaunted by voices telling him that there was something deeply wrong with him that wasn't wrong with anybody else and that he had to spend all of his time and energy trying to figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even marginally normal or acceptable U.S. male, all this stuff clanging around in David Wallace '81's head every second and moving so fast that he never got a chance to catch hold and try to fight or argue against it or even really feel it except as a knot in his stomach as he stood in his real parents' kitchen ironing his uniform and thinking of all the ways he could screw up and strike out looking or drop balls out in right and reveal his true pathetic essence in front of this .418 hitter and his witchily pretty sister and everyone else in the audience in lawn chairs in the grass along the sides of the Legion field (all of whom already probably saw through the sham from the outset anyway, he was pretty sure) — in other words David Wallace trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way — with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can't ever truly know what's going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very conciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he'd had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, 'Not another word.'-"
-"It's almost midnight, and the libraries are closed."-
-"He's not friends or family. But reading him doesn't feel that way."-
[archilochusColubris]
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