As It Were

I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but [...] I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it. - Descartes

Some writers write only about love. Some only about boredom, others failure or food. It seemed to me that David Foster Wallace wrote mostly of suffering. This suffering took many shapes, the critique of irony, of media, of gastronomy. I remember the first time I ever read anything Wallace penned I was wandering around the creaky old house in Maine trying to abate my insomnia with Budweiser and crackers. My father, an unquenchable reader and closet insomniac, plopped down the New York Times magazine.

"This guy makes tennis interesting," he uttered with rueful enthusiasm. "Read it."

"Carl? Carl!" My mother's scratchy roll call. "Are you coming to bed. Carl!"

And with a sigh my father vanished leaving me alone with tennis and shrill buzz of Maine's pastoral silence.

Much of Wallace's writing is like his life. You get the sense you're waiting for the next foot to fall. Like with every experience we try to have in life, reading one of his articles is in the beginning simple or rather straight shooting. I believe this was a technique he employed to trick a reader into trusting him enough to lead her from goofy male machoism into a maybe bleak treatise on the human condition. An article is never just about tennis, lobsters. And an article is never just about human suffering. Here is an excerpt from an article published in 2006 on Roger Federer:

"Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.(1)

(1)There's a great deal that's bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It's your body that dies, after all."

Here Wallace volleys the ball, not out of the park but out into the deep dark cosmos, kissing us all goodbye with a perfect spin into that black starless abyss.

Exhibited also in this passage is another favorite technique, the footnote. Wallace often used the footnote to break code with the editor, writer, reader trifecta. Here, in his notes, he tells the story he wants to tell, which may or may not break form with what is best for the article itself. Here he offers a compromise. Here Ruth Reichl is an article on the Maine Lobster Fest, and here in the footnotes is the more dynamic story I would tell were I not writing for you. And inevitably the footnotes are always published because they are the tiny signifiers that we can all relate to; they are not obscure reference points. I find them the most pensive and alive parts of his writing. The notes also create a call and response. They are never clever but simply the fractal sputterings of a brilliant mind. In reading them you start to get a glimpse of how David Foster Wallace's brain works. Or worked, as it were.

There is always anger around suicide. But I for one have never understood it. Wallace, it seems, struggled with depression for over twenty years and I am thankful that he survived that long. My mother explained to me once that she thought some people aren't (at least this time around) made to handle the weight the world wants us to. Some people were hunters, some gather. Some survive and some do not. Some people have stars in their pockets and some carry mountains.

When reading his articles earlier in my life I felt the profound sense that Wallace was speaking to or into the vacuum that is American madness.(1) It seems however he was faced with something much more harrowing, his own.

While Considering the Lobster for Gourmet Wallace forces you to ask does the lobster not suffer only because it cannot say it suffers. It struggles and claws and hangs on to its life as we would. We would not boil alive a cow, or a moose or a dear. The brilliance of this article is he forces you the reader to consider the hand you play in creating suffering, and your own suffering. In a chilling moment close to the end of the article Wallace contemplates the possibility that lobsters experience pain the way patients who experienced frontal lobotomies do.

"These patients evidently do feel physical pain, neurologically speaking, but don't dislike it; it's more that they feel it but don't feel anything about it- the point being that the pain is not distressing or something they want to get away from."

Wallace was seeking electo-convulsive therapy in the year before he died. There is something wild and American in that. And like the lobster how often is it that we can truly speak or even simply express our suffering. Is it American madness or rather sadness or is it my very own? Are we all somehow implicated when someone so fragile and titanically talented succumbs? And so I can't help but feel that here we are again mourning in the kitchen, trying to reconcile an ever-lonely chicken and the yearning of an egg.


(1) The kind of madness that brings me, via fiber optic cables and the grand delusions of contemporary democracy, a gun toting, bikini wearing Sarah Palin into my everyday consciousness. The kind of madness in which a woman in Alaska is forced to pay for a rape kit when she goes to the hospital after surviving the most violent and ugly of acts. The madness of hurricanes and bankruptcy.

Illustration by Harry Aung

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