Everything and More*

* - Previously recorded. Written not long after the passing of DFW.

The Saturday night tripped to its usual close. Beck and I had just gotten back from dinner somewhere, our apartment a transitional moving-in-progress cardboard mess, and a week of 5:30 wakings had rendered us both unable to make it to Weekend Update. So after Beck announced, “I’m going to bed,” I walked into the study, intending to check e-mail and the Reader feed and turn off the monitor. No e-mail, and the first message from MetaFilter quoted a graduation speech I know as it plainly stated:

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. And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about. First reported by an anonymous tip to a blog, the Los Angeles Times has confirmed that David Foster Wallace has hung himself.

I still can’t read that without re-experiencing the abdominal drop, the utter vomit now impulse. I hear about celebrities dying — Bernie Mac, George Carlin, Paul Newman have all died recently — and my response is first, a tacit reorganization of the pop landscape as no longer featuring X, and second, a fleeting consideration of what I think of X, X’s work, the X image, whatever I have had real access to. But hearing about Wallace, this particular 17,000th story of a troubled artist “celebrity” death: this was not that. I learn of a family member or friend dying, and that “real person” experience, the my world adjustment, the immediate pain, the consideration of that individual are all (obviously) much more visceral. That part of your life is gone, that *person*, and you have to somehow accommodate that to continue. And people do; they must. But this was not that, either. I don’t know DFW in any real world way, outside of having read a lot of his work and internalized the pop concept of what he is and was. I’ve never even chased him down to sign a book. And so it seems a bit ludicrous to postulate that his passing somehow affects me more than the passing of a truly connected, near-and-dear person would. But in that moment – and in these passing recollections of that moment – it certainly did. I stirred every half hour that night, my unfailing waking thought being, “He’s dead.”

The argument, or the point, or just the reason this has such an impact is straightforward. He was a severe genius, someone with a brilliant ability to see, feel and know what goes on. There was no cap, no bounds to his subjects: media, politics, tennis, animal rights, commercial cruises, advertising, addiction, pornography, for heaven’s sake the history of number set theory and infinity, everything under the sun a potential topic for examination. The exalted kitchen-sink approach. If anyone had “access” to whatever’s left of our notion of truth, it was DFW. And so the simple, horrifying thought that accompanies his act is this linear notion: he could see, and what he saw and felt made him want nothing to do with this world, made him want to eliminate the head, eliminate the self that felt that truth. On a simple level, the truth as seen by our great artist is a truth so desolate as to inspire suicide. And that means this is an unspeakably terrible existence we all lead, we just may not realize it with his clarity.

That’s the burdensome cosmic argument: that the death of a writer like him represents the death of any conception of this modern existence true that can be both authentic and optimistic. People argue over his writing passionately—some hate the flamboyance, some love the fireworks display—but whether one approves of or detests his stylistic choices, one shouldn’t fail to notice that there’s no empty relativism here, not a mere smug look-ma-no-hands endpoint showiness to the acts. His writing portrays a invigorated hope for humankind, an honest inquiry into our struggles and a fundamental belief that there is meaning in the wasteland. These are not DeLillo’s detached no-one-talks-to-one-another dialogues, those fragmented accounts of isolated lives. DFW used irony, used all the bells and whistles that writing in the late 20th / early 21st centuries afforded him. But like Dave Eggers, the irony was not his target or endpoint. He had not given up on The Project. His addicts in Infinite Jest, his Hideous Men, his family who scalded their child in that memory-branding short from Oblivion: they do not exist for the sake of unfeeling nihilist commentary, but for the sake of an effort at true glimpses into the nature of things, into suffering, a nature that is real / meaningful and one that can be addressed in truth. Whatever comments you want to make about unbridled footnote use, that shtick was used in service to a profoundly humanizing effort, not one steeped in smart-ass ireverence.

So if that person who can see, who has unbounded literary talent and has used it as a path to knowing, whose interests and scope render him an across the board savant, if he looks at the world and has the suicidal response, then… what the hell could there possibly be for us?

The cosmic bleeds to the personal, even for a person I never came close to knowing. There’s literary evidence that he plainly saw things and felt things more deeply, more clearly than the rest of us. His essay on a former classmate’s suicide in Oblivion should make it clear that with regard to death, psychic pain, depression, DFW empathized more than we can fathom. And so there’s that aspect to this, too. Here was the tenderest of hearts, and now we know that what seemed to echo beneath the writing—that he had suffered depression, felt the horrors he so aptly described—was true. He was in so much psychic pain he needed to kill himself to relieve it. That’s terrible generally, but all the more if you believe he had an amplified sensitivity to reality. Do you know that feeling, really know it, and can you imagine that feeling embellished by brilliant insight? I find the comment that suicide is “the most selfish act” repulsive, a clear indication that the speaker is stupidly unempathetic. That is only the case if being that suicidal and not doing it carries the equivalent saintliness of “the most selfless act.” That pain, the internal tension of not wanting to be, is hell. And I can wholly appreciate DFW’s continued artistic, optimistic efforts in the face of such hell. That is truly incredible: someone who felt that deeply, who reportedly for some 20 years had an internal drive to end himself, still poured forth a litany of beauty. The web of drives, motivations and such in cases of suicide is clearly unspeakably complex, and any commentary that automatically decries the act as weakness or a failing, anything other than just tragic, needs to recognize the unfathomable, mystical bravery of all those days and nights that preceded the last.

Our most beautiful are our most fragile, and there appears to be a devastating correlation between being able to truly see the world and not being able to take it. I have tried to emulate DFW’s approach by having a sharpened, perceptive take on the world, but using that to extract meaning and not just some postmodern chaos. I embrace the kitchen-sink aesthetic, and every time I look into a topic sans fear of its being strictly in my field of study, that’s a bit of him that I honor. I obviously love his style, and to whatever degree it represents the worst of masturbatory postmodern literary tendencies, it also represents a spirit of challenge to our categorical concepts of what writing and language are and do. His metafictional essay on spiraling irony flayed my concept of what fiction is. His short story on target group advertising seamlessly obliterated rules of consecutive sentences being remotely related. I could go on; his spark inspired, and there’s the reason I’ve stalked the W section of the literature aisle since 1998. So in a sense, this is little more than hero worship, and a rendition of the crushing experience of being profoundly let down. But in another, this is despair, this is the idea that vision of meaning and the real condition of this world is incompatible with continued existence in it, and worse that the path out is a horrific one fraught with anguish. I feel terrible for his family, for him, for us. His pain must have been unimaginable, but with its cessation, we lose not just an author and his future works; we lose his sophisticated hope.