I will not be political.
I am consumed with the events of
the past weekend but I will strive as much as possible to ignore this burbling emotional
stew and to write about the things I had originally planned to write about. So
I will not speak of recent tragedies other than to acknowledge a morbid
coincidence I came across concerning the one line that was excised from the
essay I am raving about – David Foster Wallace’s This is Water – when it was converted from a 2005 Kenyon Collegecommencement address to posthumously-released book. The line, at the end of a
mini-riff on suicide, was this: “they shoot the terrible master.” DFW was
referring to the human mind – that “terrible master” – that sometimes turns its
wrath inward, mutinies against our better angels with devastating consequences.
**********
I chose, for my Advent digression,
a speech. The messy, unedited, un-excised version of This is Water, complete with David Foster Wallace’s asides about
sweating, his live-mic editing, and direct addresses to the crowd of graduates to
not feel that they were being lectured. I chose this piece, because while many
of DFW’s essays have stuck in my mind long after most prose has submerged into
forgetfulness, This is Water actually
changed my life.
This
________ will change your life! How often we say that. That movie changed
my life. This story will change your life. This song will change your life.
This recipe for organic free-range barbeque chicken pizza will change your life! The phrase has in
itself become a hyperbolic Mad-Lib, which by its overuse mocks the very meaningful
concept of change, belittles our attempts, however futilely, to recognize and
alter the arc of our existence.
I am not a scholar of DFW, I am not
an aficionado. I am a fan. I have loved every page of his prose that I have
read. I am 102 pages into The Pale King, which
is to say less than one-fifth of the way through. I finished (most of) Consider the Lobster. A good chunk of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. If
the essay is the essayist’s brain at work on the page, it is fair to say that
DFW had few peers in this regard. I love reading his work, yet a small part of
me is momentarily depressed by his stature on the page. It is a humbling dose
of reality to know that I am unlikely to ever replicate any of DFW’s greatest moments,
any more than I am likely to win an Oscar, or throw the winning touchdown pass
in the Super Bowl, or dunk on LeBron James in the NBA Finals. Perhaps peace in
adulthood is the acceptance of realistic expectations. Perhaps.
When DFW died during my first
semester in Tucson, I was aware that I was missing out on the moment. I knew of
the man, but was not that familiar with his work. I knew of his great opus,
that bible-thick book that was an absolute must
read, the voice of the generation, the great declaration of the absurdity of
(then) modern life in the 1990s. As the news of his death spread, and the
public accolades poured forth, I was ashamed to admit that I’d never actually gotten around to reading that
epic tome, much in the same way that I was ashamed to admit that I’d labored
through the first twelve pages of Ulysses
before returning it to the St. Paul library to be re-shelved amongst the other
lonely Joyce hard-covers. So when I say that This is Water changed my life, it is not in the broad sense born
from a prolonged, dedicated scholarship of an artist’s canon. DFW changed my life with a
mere handful of words. About standing in line. At the grocery store.
I think of DFW now, today, while
meandering through HEB (the Texas version of Gigantor Grocery Chain), and find I
am soothed among the masses. I smile and feel my connection to my fellow
humans. This is a significant metamorphosis on my part, for I am Gemini, and
partly ruled by an inner curmudgeon, a little grumbling mind-troll who dwells
in a damp, shady fold of my gray matter. He remains mostly mute inside the confines
of my cranium, but has publicly reared his ugly head on occasion when not properly
restrained. He is the legacy of my Germanic-Lutheran Minnesota curse. I suffer from an innate tendency towards judgment, a Midwestern certainty of correctness, as
if I were a bitter Vulcan trapped in an idiotic world. Mr. Spock finds your refusal to use your fucking turn-signal for its
intended purpose to be infuriatingly illogical! DFW, in a few short
paragraphs, helped me see that I can make a choice about whether or not my inner
curmudgeon is allowed to run rampant. So as clichéd as it sounds, This is Water changed my life. It is the
emotional Nicorette I ritually chew to soothe my ornery moments.
This
is Water is at the core a humanist manifesto in speech form, a plea to a
generation that DFW felt (and he was certainly not alone in this) was in danger
of being submerged by an easy addiction to distractive technologies. The
inability to just be where you are, consciously
connected to the real. As DFW makes his case for immersion in the tangible
moment, he asks not for sainthood – he acknowledges our (and his) inherent
human failings. He asks only that we try to get out of our own headspace every
once in a while, that we work to employ a little self-awareness, a touch of
empathy, that we acknowledge that our “natural, hard-wired default setting…is
to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything
through this lens of self.” Our natural solipsism is obvious enough to have
spawned its own legion of clichés: Get
out of your head. Stop navel-gazing. Stop shoe-gazing. Stop. DFW asks us to
take the first baby-step towards becoming better human beings – to be aware
that how we view the world is a
choice. That how we interpret what
happens to us is a choice. That we do, in fact, have the power to re-task our
mind from “horrible master” to “excellent servant.”
I’m not going to quote too much of
the work (you should read This is Water today – now – if you aren’t familiar with it), but the following chunks of what
I’m calling the Parable of the Grocery Store Line were the ones that set the deepest
roots in my mind:
“The traffic jams and crowded aisles
and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious
decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed
and miserable every time I have to shop.”
And:
“If you’re automatically sure that
you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then
you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and
miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know
there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a
crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but
sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the
mystical oneness of all things deep down.”
Did I mention that DFW was talking
about being stuck in a long line at Safeway? Is there a place that we could
imagine contains less “mystical
oneness?” Maybe these sentiments are obvious. Maybe I am inherently more
self-centered, more tethered to my inner-curmudgeon than most, and so what
should have been absorbed as simple commencement-ceremony platitudes were
tremor-inducing for me. But these simple words in The Parable of the Grocery
Line burrowed deeply into my mind and have taken up residence there, smothering
my inner curmudgeon. While standing in line at the grocery store, ruminating on
those words, taking deep breaths of our shared humanity, I have found moments
of nearly ecstatic peace, a lightheaded Zen I have only previously accessed in settings
of epic and isolated natural grandeur.
This ultimately is the reason why
we write, and read, and hash out the philosophy of Nonfiction on pizza joint barstools and classrooms and
couches and AWP panels and interactive forums such as The Essay Daily. It is
why I click upon link after shared link with my morning coffee – to become part
of the conversation, to see what everyone is talking about today. We want to
connect – to each other, connect the dots, to feel when we read that someone
else is speaking to us, to feel when we write that someone else might
understand us, that in the cacophony of this world there is still the
possibility of intimacy through words. That I understand, that I can see things
in a new light, that I feel what
you’re saying. Crackling connectivity.
The day I first read This is Water was one such moment of
this intimate connection. I knew, reading those words, that DFW had understood
this seasonal Midwestern malaise, that he was talking to me, confronting my
inner curmudgeon, poking and prodding me to at least make the token attempt at
being a better man. That’s a hell of a gift, in any season.
Kirk Wisland has spent the past few
years moving from town to town like an essaying Johnny Appleseed. During these
travels, his work has appeared in The Normal School, DIAGRAM, Creative
Nonfiction, and Paper Darts, to name a few. His current stop is Houston, Texas,
where he teaches English Composition and ponders his next move.
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