The Ghost of David Foster Wallace

Oh David, who is going to rail now against:

Postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just kidding.

Warning: There are footnotes to this post. Those with short attention spans or an aversion to footnotes are not recommended to continue on. Reader discretion is advised.

"David Foster Wallace, Dead at 46" was not a headline I was expecting to see anytime soon and yet there it was. God bless Twitter for giving me up-to-the-minute news, at least. I have kept a short list of topics I want to tweet about at some time in the future and right there on my list from TWO DAYS ago was "why David Foster Wallace should be on Twitter." I've looked and looked for him on there and, as far as I know, he didn't have an account.

I can't remember exactly what David Foster Wallace piece I read first, maybe it was that article about the cruise ship? Or maybe it was actually Infinite Jest? I know I proceeded to consume everything he wrote as quickly as I could find it. Something just clicked for me. It was wordy, yeah. Sometimes it seemed like he intentionally used ginormo words just to be a bother, yeah. And then there were the footnotes. Footnotes pages long, footnotes that were a whole story unto themselves. Footnotes I started to look forward to more than the actual main piece, sometimes. But inside all of that, I just "got it" and I liked it a lot. A lot, a lot. So much so that I'm now sitting here crying, a lot. (*)

I was going to name this post "I Blame David Foster Wallace" wherein I list of all the things that are his fault. Oh right, like you don't have a list of things you blame on DFW? Pfft. It would have been funny if he wasn't dead. If he hadn't intentionally snuffed himself out.

So why does the suicide part bother me so much? Well I just found him enormously appealing and the idea that someone would be thinking so little of themselves, be so profoundly unhappy, to do that, makes me very sad. Very sad, indeed. I've created life, literally, and birthed it. I get knocked on my ass by the profound beautiful gorgeousness of life. I think of his poor mother. She grew his body piece by piece, bone by bone, tendon by tendon. I know what it feels like to love somebody that hard, like you'd die if anything happened to them, like a mother. I wish she didn't have to feel the pain of that loss, a mother's loss. It's hokey but it's true.

Just an FYI for the rest of you: if I like you that much, you aren't allowed to kill yourself. It's in my rulebook. Heads up to everyone I love and admire: I get suicide veto power. (#)

Below is an excerpt from his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. This is my philosophy, yes! Choose what to pay attention to, what to focus on, and construct your experience of reality thusly. But wait, heading into the second paragraph and it takes on a new, eerie context:

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about, quote, the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

“This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

I've been unable to talk about much else other than DFW on Twitter. Someone finally pointed that out to me, to which I concluded "I'm being haunted by the ghost of David Foster Wallace." This isn't entirely outside the realm of possibility and, guess what, it would be perfectly fine by me. Hear that Dave? Drop by and get paranormal with me any old time. (**) I even ran out and got some t-shirts printed. Sort of like my own morbid version of Field of Dreams. If I have t-shirts printed, it must come true.

In brief, I Blame DFW for:

1. Making me read a 1000-page book and wishing at the end that he'd hurry up and write a sequel.
2. My inability to microwave things without thinking of someone putting their head in there. (***)
3. My obsession with what the PGOAT looks like and whether or not looking at her face would actually kill me.
4. Making me believe that it's okay to be smart and funny, sometimes even simultaneously.
5. My fascination and frustration with tennis and my feeling of inadequacy at not understanding the trajectorical intricacies of tennis and other games involving balls.
6. Thinking about that coppery, metallic taste at really inappropriate times.
7. My trepidation about taking a cruise, ever.
8. An understanding that boys can get psycho-infatuated just like girls can, and the fact that I find that strangely comforting.
   
9. My new-found hatred for the procrastination that prevented me from ever sitting in one of his creative writing classes. He was right over in Pomona for crying out loud.
10. My inability to hear the word "assassin" without having a little giggle.
    
11. My inordinate use of the term "searing crush", which is, probably, one of the best descriptives ever.

Scrolling through some lists of his quotes, I'm struck by the number of quotes (okay 5) that are about the poignancy of the human condition:

• "This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside."
• "Fiction-writing is lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It's yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work."
• "To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now, I'm scared about how sappy this will look in print, saying this."
• "We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy is impossible."
• "The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness."

Finally, no online discussion of DFW could occur without mentioning the Howling Fantonds website. Where else are you going to get DFW-inspired inspirational-posters?

Picture courtesy of: Steve Rhodes

(*) Sorry I'm so sad. I don't quite know why. It is weirding me out and I'm now sad that I'm so sad and dwell-y but I'm working on getting over it. In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter, being a pouty, emocore, pain in the ass.

(#) After writing that, I discovered that DFW had gone off antidepressants in 2007 due to side effects but continued to suffer with overwhelming depression. He even had electro-convulsive therapy this summer and had been and out of the hospital. I didn't realize how much he was physically suffering because of his depression. Something very painful was happening to him, apparently, so I shouldn't be so glib.

(**) I mean it Dave, I'm here, waiting for the temperature to get colder. We can talk shop about everything you are learning on the other side. And you can give me tennis pointers. And writing pointers. Any kind of pointers, really, I'm not picky. Did I mention I miss you?

(***) Not only that, that someone would go to great lengths to design and construct one that would accept a head.