Give Me Take You

Looks like Daniel Johnston and his “Hi, How Are You?” alien will make their way into space via Ukraine.

I really didn't see this one coming.  Not only that I really would've preferred David Foster Wallace stay alive and write for many more years.  If that sounds selfish it probably is.  David Foster Wallace was 46 years-old at his death, young for a major writer, with what will now look like a small body of work.  In his lifetime he published one insignificant youthful novel, two short story collections, two essay collections, and one precocious major-length novel.  His body of work was small but gave the impression of boundlessness, and the best seemed yet to come.  Possessing a scattershot brilliance that committed to nothing and understood everything, or tried, Wallace certainly hit (or gave the impression of hitting) the mark more often than not.  That was inspiring enough to make him looked up to by at least a couple of generations, his own and the younger (mine), during his own lifetime.

     I think it's safe to say that I believed in David Foster Wallace to a certain degree.  Believing in him perhaps had less to do with the actual books he wrote and more to do with what I perceived him doing with them.  I could attribute that to style, but that wouldn't really get at the stabbing-at-everythingness that his writing seemed to me to accomplish - more so than anyone else of the present era and not just as "the voice of a generation" or something as facelessly cliché that.  It was far more real and ridiculous, superhero like.  DFW was out there struggling to make sense of everything we were and probably more.  Probably some things were going on we as a culture hadn't even been able to see yet.  It was that he was out there and writing about it all in an extremely personal way.  He was doing it on a massive scale, and yet he didn't seem nearly so hard to get at as a Neal Stephenson or Thomas Pynchon (science doesn't pervade nearly every sentence in Wallace as it does with these two).  So with all that exceptional doing, I can best describe noticing on Facebook a friend with the status "Jane is David Foster Wallace R.I.P." as a halting moment.  Though I wasn't thinking on these terms exactly then, I understood that my confusions and insecurities were no longer possibly part of the watch of a superhero-like figure.  If David Foster Wallace was stopping, something in me had to as well.  I will embrace the cliché that "when he died, a little piece of me did too."  If it's safe to assume we all have ongoing personal diaries (some might call them dialogues, others histories) for themselves, somewhere built into mine was David Foster Wallace as a free agent, able to write his own dialogue into mine in a totally enriching and, in fact, life-affirming way.  So ya my concern over Wallace's suicide was immediately personal, selfish, confusing.

     I went back immediately to one of my favorite stories "Good Old Neon," a story from the perspective of a suicide, from his last collection of fiction Oblivion.  Prescient huh?  "Good Old Neon" was one of my favorites immediately upon its publication because of the inspired rambling quality of it.  As cheap a trick as this might sound in this discussion, it's effectively from the perspective of a successful golden-boy type who has committed suicide largely due to his fear of being a phony.  According to his own labrynthian reasoning he chronically uses the situations to present himself disingenuously, usually based on some input he's had from the recipient of the phony self.  David Foster Wallace is a character introduced at the end contemplating this person's death, and it seems to be based on a real life acquaintance of Wallace.  I read the story looking for answers, admittedly, or at least an inspiring new perspective considering Wallace's own suicide.  Essentially the story story offered none of that, but is still astounding for it's insight and spiritual even-handedness in dealing with one's own mortality.  At the end the only thing I believed I gained was having read an beautifully heartfelt and eloquent rant that showed there are an infinite number of ways to be conflicted and unhappy and that there are no easy answers for anyone's life.

     Now would be a fine time to have a quality perspective on this country - crumbling economy, an impending presidential election that that seems less like a potential turning point than opportunity to further prove how doomed we are, an fearsome political landscape overall.  I cannot help but think, to any-old obvious degree, of hanging yourself in your apartment being a fitting response in itself.  Wallace was on the campaign trail with McCain during the race for the 2000 Republican candidacy.  On assignment from Rolling Stone (Wallace is clear to point out he's not a political reporter, and that's what they were looking for) his experience was first published there in abbreviated form and then later as an unedited online publication titled "Up, Simba" (later re-published twice more, first in the collection Consider the Lobster, and just this summer on it's own as McCain's Promise).  If you can remember what McCain was like that far back, he was getting a lot of press as a man who could draw the young vote in record numbers.  He was a "straight talk" man and took a lot of stances that for a politician were quite rebellious:  banning soft money from his campaign, calling bullshit on a variety common cheap political campaign promises that can never be met, pointing to major political bodies as complicit in healthcare fraud, and so on.   He was as Foster describes him an "anticandidate" and that held a lot of appeal for people at that time.  We all can see how McCain has changed for this election.  He went from having the most backbone, to having none at all.  He appears to have given himself over completely to his campaign advisers.  Recently that's meant saying completely opposite remarks in a matter of days.  Instead of "straight talk" he's clearly on the floor now as just another politician desperate to be elected.  And the terribly sad thing is, it's working very passably well for him to be so fickle and underhanded.  Whatever bit of humanity this man had ten years ago on the campaign trail has mostly been bled out of him, likely by old age.  A friend of has a 15 year old poodle named Fudge that is so old and close to death that he's allowed himself to limit interaction with humans to his most sincere desire, he begs for food.  McCain looks a lot like Fudge to me.  At 72 he's near the end of his rope, solely wants to be president before he goes, and really doesn't care how pathetic and contrary he looks in the process.  Every once in a while it seems like McCain shows good reason to want to be president, and yet it's so fleeting I can't tell if he's remembering what he really holds to be true or if he's just forgetting what he's supposed to be saying.

     To be perfectly transparent, I read "Up, Simba," looking for answers also.  Perhaps Wallace had foreboding insights into McCain?  Was the prospect of his camp coming to power was one of the many back-breaking needles I'm sure he was dealing with?  Well, again, Wallace proves himself to be too good a writer for anything that easy.  "Up, Simba" is across-the-board very objective and fair, and even largely approving (his job was to show what was attractive about the man).  I learned not very much except that McCain's life showed some signs of a truly exceptional person somewhere in there.  Still, the closing sentences of the essay present a poignantly accurate, perhaps shamelessly honest paradox.  In the end it's not about what McCain, or any candidate is about, especially on the campaign stage.  What it ultimately comes down to is what's in our own hearts and minds.  McCain is not any more free of us than the suicide.  In the face of oblivion, potential or actual, reflecting on how ultimately responsible for everything about ourselves we are, it doesn't seem like that silly of an idea to live with.