UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Tuesday, September 16, 2008
I am always disappointed by my reaction when people die. Even when it's somebody I knew fairly well, I don't usually cry and I don't usually lose sleep. Of my relatives, I've really only experienced the deaths of two grandparents, and those each happened during the callowest of my teenage years. In adulthood, I haven't yet lost anyone close enough to make me cry about it -- at least not until I got swept up in the emotional manipulation of the memorial services: nothing makes me cry more than seeing other people cry. So I worry sometimes that I'm cold, heartless, selfish, uncaring, even though I don't feel that way.
Usually, when someone dies, I think: "Yes. This is how it is supposed to be." When I think of all the ways it's possible to die, and the effort so many of my friends have put into self-destructive acts, I find it pretty miraculous that any one of us made it past 30. But most of the people I've known since high school are still alive. (I can think of one suicide, one car crash, and one overdose. But I'm probably forgetting some, right?) Still, I hear of death and think: "yes, this happens." Sometimes I even react to news of impending death, whether of the gravely diseased or the self-destructive, with a similar stoicism: "yes, they will die, as will we all." Am I sick, spiritually advanced, or in staggering denial of my own feelings? I read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for the first time back in 1998, starting about week before I graduated from college. The first time I read it, I thought it was one of the funniest books I had ever read. The second time I read it, about a year later, I thought it was one of the saddest. I was right both times. I loved IJ from page one, and I read everything Wallace wrote thereafter. A lot of my writing style was cribbed directly from DFW, and I was so open about my love of his work that many of my friends wrote me notes of condolence on hearing of his death. I was reading Infinite Jest, again, on the day he killed himself. My friends knew how upset I'd be before I really began to feel it. But I feel it now. As is probably obvious, I'm not spending too much time crafting this half-assed eulogy, and over time I'll probably understand my grief more. But here's what I think I know so far: I love Wallace's writing style because it mimics with terrifying accuracy the way my own personal mind works. The wild, obsessive digressions, the panicked self-questioning, the endless speculative fantasy-spinning, and the total fascination with the inner walls of my skull. I didn't ape his style because I thought it was cool -- it was more like he showed me 1) it was okay that my mind worked the way it did, 2) it was acceptable to transcribe it a little more faithfully, and 3) here's how you can do it. Like many Americans, I feel selfishly, ridiculously entitled to be entertained (this is one of Infinite Jest's major themes), and therefore I feel cheated of his future work in the same way I feel cheated by the untimely deaths of Elliott Smith and Heath Ledger. But this death hits me harder. Even though I'm sure we would have found each other insufferable in person, I feel like I lost a great spiritual teacher and friend. And in keeping with the other great theme of Infinite Jest, I feel the impossibility of communicating how I really feel. It feels like a wad of newspaper in my gut. Most writers intuitively understand and accept this impossibility like fish accept water; it's so obvious and all-encompassing that it is unremarkable. And while Wallace understood the fact too, he couldn't keep from flailing against it like those Asian carp that keep jumping into people's boats. I could have watched him flail for years. But now I will just have to try on my own to ensnare the world I see with an endless ribbon of mixed metaphors, braiding sentences around the cotton-candy maypole of life. 1 comments |
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MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" - misuse of reflexive pronouns, as when someone says "Please talk to Bob or myself." Come on people now. "Myself" is not just a fancy version of "me"! LEARN IT. - tattoos in the Courier font - any use of Comic Sans |