back to the jest

After taking a little break from David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, I was happy to revisit it in recent weeks. It is, like the title cartridge, dangerously compelling. The text is sensual and honest, and for me, a testament to fin-de-siecle hypercorporeality. As disconcerting as the Jest often is, it is also deeply comforting and equally inspiring. David Foster Wallace knew: he saw what was happening and had the courage to write it down. Certainly, it is not for the faint of heart, but it is a near-perfect articulation of the moment: prophetic hyperbole written with staggering virtuosity, heart-wrenching clarity, and the poignant essence of our corporeal reality. Like the best art, it is about being human--being both frail and extraordinary; touched by ineffable and necessary suffering.

"It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting...Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy--happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love--are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location." [1]

1. Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infinite jest: a novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. (692-693)

consider the following from infinite jest

"...Joelle's limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glasses corner, hair of the flame she's eaten now trailing like legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the defaced veil and what's inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy driver [...] and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub's lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids' blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching." (240)

"And his younger and way more externally impressive brother Hal almost idealizes Mario, secretly. God-type issues aside, Mario is a (semi-) walking miracle, Hal believes. People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything that might be fair, they either curl up in their fire or else they rise. Withered saurian homodontic. Mario floats, for Hal." (316)

I admit that Infinite Jest has me completely rapt. But when you read the above, can you really believe that I would have any other reaction? Just read it. DFW writes about brotherly love and drug addiction with the same poignancy, elan, and breathtaking honesty; in doing so, he articulates the paradoxical complexity and sameness of life at the turn of the millennium. A failed sublation; the promise of transcendence forever out of reach.

infinite jester: communication

Once again, DFW comes to the rescue with a near-perfect articulation of the communication quagmire in which we presently find ourselves. I've written before about my troubles with technology and the modern world. Yes, we've heard it all before. With each day, each time I use Skype/Facebook/gChat, I am reminded of my conflicting complex relationship to technology, only complicated further by my past as a musician. As performers, we communicate directly, intimately. As instigators of sound, we "touch" our audiences--the sound we produce vibrates within the individual bodies of the attentive mass below us. Perhaps it is this idea of communication that causes so much strife for us in particular when communication becomes disembodied (the telephone, Skype, and the extreme case, instant messaging). Being so used to a forced and immediate intimacy, a surface communication--flat and superficial--creates unease and deep discomfort. Furthermore, as musicians, we are disconcerted by the distortion of power that disembodied communication creates. We are the instigator, the attacker, we initiate sound that penetrates a helpless vulnerable body. When communication becomes distant and disembodied, this power relationship is disrupted.

Surprise surprise, as I read Infinite Jest several mornings ago, I found David Foster Wallace articulating so perfectly my thoughts. Behold, the DFW "truth nugget":

It turned out that there was something terrible stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only elephony. They'd never noticed it before, he delusion--it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenance only in the context of its loss. Food old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume hat the person on teh other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation...let you enter a kind of highway-hypnoyic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in teh room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet--and this was he retrospectively marvelous part--even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided. [...] This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infinitely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.


Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.¹

Indeed, David Foster Wallace was writing about what it was to be "a fucking human being."²

1. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996 (145-146)
2. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011 (22)

overwhelmed by d.f.w.

I told my sister that I had started Infinite Jest; her response: "Prepare to have no life for the next two weeks."

How right she was. The prose is completely engrossing; my attention rapt, Wallace 'has' me. Akin to losing oneself in the magnificence of nature, or the painterly virtuosity of Gericault, or the conceptual elegance of Barnett Neumann, the experience of Infinite Jest is one of near-mystical transcendence. Completely sensual, the text engages the visceral mind, recalling imagery containing our collective memories of embodiment.

"The same small breezes make the rotted palms along the condominium complex's stone walls rustle and click, and a couple of fronds detach and spiral down, hitting the deck with a slap. All the plants out here are malevolent, heavy and sharp. The parts of the palms above the fronds are tufted in sick stuff like coconut-hair. Roaches and other things live in the trees. Rats, maybe. Loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds. All the plants either spiny or meaty. Cacti in queer tortured shapes. The tops of the palms like Rod Stewart's hair, from days gone by." (44)


"These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer." (46)

Aside from this verbal virtuosity, the "truth nugget" abounds in Wallace's work. Two examples hit me this morning, one about the experience of loss, the other the experience of American culture.

'Hey Hal?'
'...'
'How come the Moms never cried when Himself passed away? I cried, and you, even C.T. cried. I saw him personally cry.'
'...'
'You listened to Tosca over and over and cried and said you were sad. We all were.'
'...'
Hey Hal, did the Moms seem like she got happier after Himself passed away, to you?'
'...'
'It seems like she got happier. She seems even taller. She stopped travelling everywhere all the time for this and that thing. The corporate grammar thing. The library-protest thing.'
'Now she never goes anywhere, Boo. Now she's got the Headmaster's House and her office and the tunnel in between, and never leaves the grounds. She's a worse workaholic than she ever was. And more obsessive-compulsive. hen's the last time you saw a a dust-mote in that house?'
'Hey Hal?'
'Now she's just an agoraphobic workaholic and obsessive-compulsive. This strikes you as happification?'
'Her eyes are better. They don't seem as sunk in. They look better. She laughs at C.T. way more than she laughed at Himself. She laughs from lower down inside. She laughs more. Her jokes she tells are better ones than yours, even now, a lot of the time.'
'...'
'How come she never got sad?'
She did get sad, Booboo. She just got sad in her way instead of yours and mine. She got sad, I'm pretty sure.'
'Hal?'
'You remember how the staff lowered the flag to half-mast out front by the portcullis here after it happened? Do you remember that? And it goes to half-mast every year at Convocation? Remember the flag Boo?'
'Hey Hal?'
'Don't cry, Booboo. Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen--one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?'
'Hal?'
'She's plenty sad, I bet.' (42)

And the second, on the rampant escapism in American culture:

"American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels." (53)

infinite jest, day one

'My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. 'I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.


'I read,' I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. 


'But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.'


I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care.'


I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below me.


'Sweet mother of Christ,' the Director says.*


David Foster Wallace loved words. But more than a deep love--and thus intimate understanding--of words, Wallace's prose reveals his intrinsic instinct for rhythm, time, and thus coercion. He takes us with him. Sentences pile upon one another, gaining momentum and weight; culminating in a crash: "Please don't think I don't care." Palpable and heavy, Wallace's words have dimension and history.

* Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. (11-12)