Is This Water?
Reading Like a Contemplative Realist #2
[Image: "blue water texture" by ErrorTribune licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.]
The following essay originally appeared in a charming little webzine called Sostenuto, run by a fellow essayist and editor who you’ll find writing here now under the apt name of The Inscapist. It had an online presence of its own before moving here to Substack, and that is where this essay originally appeared. [ETA: It is now cross-posted here.]
The editors at Sostenuto were and are extraordinarily generous to give a home to this oddball reflection on literary influence and (maybe) mystical experience. Though it also veers into personal essay, something I don’t normally do much of, I share it here now because I see with relief that we’re having a more levelheaded conversation, finally, about Infinite Jest, one that deals with the virtues and failings of the work itself and isn’t totally fixated on the undeniably monstrous acts of its author during life, or on the undeniably odd (and too often caricatured) behavior of some of its fans.
There’s obviously some tension or contradiction hovering in and through the thought that a man who behaved so terribly to women could write literary work that helped any woman, ever, in any way, let alone a way so specific and so personal and so comprehensive as I’ve found some of his work has done for me; tension, too, in the notion that a writer who took his own life, an act that is never the answer, could help anyone find their own way back into wanting to live not just generally, but the particular life they’ve personally been given.
I don’t quite know what to make of this. I don’t claim to have any answers. Unstylishly, I subscribe to every teaching of the Catholic Church, even the hard ones, and yet there’s no contradiction between this and the belief that a suicidal person might act against himself and then at the last moment of consciousness repent and be forgiven and, by God’s mercy, pulled into the next life in a way that doesn’t mean utter ruin. At the risk of being doctrinal, I wonder if helping me out as he seems to do here could have been part of Wallace’s purgatory.
“What Is Most Solid”: Unruly Bodies and Spiritual Rescues in the Writing of David Foster Wallace[1]
When our lives first enter into conversation with a certain writer’s body of work, we may not even know it right away. The summer that saw the release of the epic novel of philosophy, precocity, tennis, addiction, and recovery, Infinite Jest—for the non-obsessed folks among us, that would be 1996—I was a twelve-year-old Catholic schoolgirl, beginning tennis lessons in an obscure public park in the Cottage Hill area of Mobile, Alabama.
Mid-metamorphosis, with an adult’s height and hip circumference and a child’s everything else, resulting in the silhouette of a stalk of garlic (first reedy, then bulbous), I was still young enough to be delighted with my secondhand Wilson racquet purchased at a Play It Again Sports for $6.99, its handle wrapped in stretchy royal purple foam tape (an additional $2.50) whose diagonal lines when looped around the racquet handle resembled a road cut into the face of a mountain, spiral-switchbacking toward the peak. (When was the last time a $2.50 purchase brought you half as much delight as purple foam tape can bring to a twelve-year-old?) Then, I had a visor with (the exact truth) my first name on the brim in dots of pastel puff paint, given to me the previous year as a favor at someone’s birthday party. A little rectangle of yellow spongy material had been factory-pasted to the inside of the clear plastic band, ostensibly to reduce slippage during play: still, the whole thing had probably never been meant to be worn at all, yet I wore it, and without irony, too, though I was starting to be old enough to be embarrassed.[2]
That summer in Mobile, among my age cohort, playing tennis had become The Thing to Do, just as, a thousand miles north in a New York publishing establishment that felt not worlds but galaxies away, to be seen reading Infinite Jest was de rigueur. Could the two phenomena, which will forever sit side by side in my mind, have been in any way causally related—the upswing in hyperlocal interest in a niche sport here; the success of the showstopping, doorstopping behemoth there? Almost certainly not: Mobile exists on the literary map for a number of reasons I can count without using all the fingers of one hand.
I went to a good school, and we talked a fine game, but outside that hyperprotected sphere, when it came down to cultural and budgetary brass tacks w/r/t the perceived value of reading vs. the perceived value of sports—well. But this strife is internecine, and beside the present point, which is that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in local philosophy. At the time Wallace’s name was to me an out-of-reach dream, noticed but drifted past in the Springdale Mall Barnes & Noble on my way to the Young Adult section. In a scrupulously Catholic family, even a bookish one like mine, twelve was way too young to be adding Wallace’s flavor of contemporary highbrow literature to any list of potential modes of escape from the local doldrums. Tennis, though, was not only wholesome enough to pass inspection but also seemed to promise much-needed augmentation of physical grace, even potential deliverance from a lifelong tendency to be snarled up in the labyrinth of my own two feet.[3]
The lesson group was crowded with a handful of local popular girls, who spent most of their time together, both off-court and on-, rehashing recursive intersocial dramas. Overhearing them was like catching wisps of dialogue from a TV show where, though you’ve never even flipped past this channel and don’t know the characters, you can tell that the same five plots are being recycled ad nauseam. Like Bartleby, I preferred not to.[4]
The coach in our session, too, paid little mind to their crosstalk. His attention was monopolized instead by an athletic but not too bright boy I’ll call Toph, a fellow parishioner and student at the Catholic church and school I attended, which really was called Corpus Christi. Toph had long elegant limbs that seemed to grow longer as you watched him walk, the kind of chest and back that spoke of eleven summers spent swimming, running, throwing, climbing, tumbling, fishing, hunting. Toph’s body had been well attended to, but his mind had been neglected. He had wild innate promise, but zero impulse control; his strength, terrific; his proprioception, lousy. Even his eye-hand coordination played him false: it seemed to visit him with an inconsistent rhythm.
Some mornings he’d slam serve after serve into the back third of the court, just shy of his ghostly opponent’s sneaker-heels, with a crisp pop of aggression. He’d leap, wave the racket, roar in triumph. Other days, highlighter-yellow arcs transgressed the twelve-foot divider between courts, chased by the coach’s shouts of apology. Trim older women in white, their bare limbs sunned to the texture and color of a good leather handbag, would yelp and stop their sets. They’d look at Toph with affection, dribble up the ball with their racquet faces, and lob it over. These women were mothers, grandmothers, indulgently accustomed to those proverbial boys-who-will-be-boys. They were unoffendable, unfazed, even charmed by the work in progress.
The coach’s face, however, twisted up into a red vortex like the hurricane symbol on the morning weather report. Did he see a past self in Toph—or a possible and undesirable future for Toph in his, the coach’s, own frustration and limited ambit? At any rate, the coach got tough with Toph. A tense father-son dynamic sprouted up, its intensity way out of proportion to the humidity-drugged pace of the clouds’ crawl across Mobile’s summer sky. The coach made Toph slow down to that pace. He demanded that Toph iterate one part of one move—say, the moment before serving—fifteen, twenty times in a row.
“You have to see where the ball is headed,” he’d say. “Set your shoulders. No, square them. Plant your feet.” The coach would grab Toph by the lateral muscles as though trying to relax his posture by force, to orient him where he ought to have been able to feel he should go.
By passage eight or nine Toph (certainly a kid with ADHD, by today’s standards, though I’ve no idea if anyone realized that then) would refuse to hear, or pretend to forget, any instructions he’d been given. He’d blaze forward whole-bodied into the serve, sending another ball slicing sideways into the rippling black mesh divider. Or else he’d give over and whale the ball down into the clay in front of the net with all the force of a quarterback’s spike. The coach would yell at Toph. Toph would slam his racket down on the court.
They’d spend, in these contretemps, what felt like but couldn’t have been hours—each lesson was only scheduled for seventy minutes. The other girls clustered at the baseline inspecting each other’s tan lines and scrunchies and charm bracelets. Tanless, unadorned, and bored, I scratched the mosquito bites on my ankles with the rim of my racquet and gawked at Toph: he was beautiful, yes, but this beauty sparked no state of limerence; what I enjoyed most about him was my own inability to tolerate him. I deliciously resented his ability to completely command the coach’s whole focus, to the exclusion of anyone else’s opportunity to learn anything at all. It was my first taste of an experience that it took me years to realize Toph had known in the classroom every day of his school career, sometimes inadvertently at my own hands: quicker readers, sharper calculators, more fluent writers daily soaked up teachers’ time and thus foreclosed on Toph’s own opportunity to advance in processes where a stronger engagement, a better comprehension could, maybe, have saved him some pain, along the way.
Years later, when I first picked up David Foster Wallace’s “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” I’d recognize Toph instantly in Joe Perfecthair’s on-court tantrum and resultant loss to Wallace, who paints himself as having been a far worse player. With no false humility, Wallace admits that what he could do, what neither Joe nor Toph could, was to work within the limits of circumstance and the body as they were, not as he would wish them. “Acceptance is its own verve,” Wallace writes in the essay: meaning both acceptance of nature in heat, cold, rain, sun, cloud, above all in wind and the limits of his own physical ability, as well as acceptance of the conventions of artifice in the enclosing parameters of court, net, and lines.
The moment I read it, the line took on a resonance for me, became something of a koan. In the circumstances under which I was reading, acceptance could begin to seem less like a spirituality for the lazy, a passive quietism, and more like a fight to the death for something close to peace.
*
Wallace’s confrere and contemporary Jonathan Franzen has written, “Fiction is my only religion.” Wallace himself is well known to have been obsessed with the human religious impulse, both as a personal and a professional interest. When we make religions out of merely human pursuits, though, we are making not icons but idols. It’s been posited that, in a certain sense, all fiction, memoir, poetry—all imaginative literature that creates within itself an intelligible order presented for the reader’s comprehension—can be said to be, to the extent it fulfills its own nature, “religious.” To the extent that such literature both considers experience significant enough to be worth observing, recording, and communicating, and presents this work of observation, record, and communique as the proper business of the human, it fulfills some of the functions that religion also meets: that is, it lays out a course of limitations and desiderata for human endeavor, as in the same breath it also presents a vision of that endeavor worth pursuing.[5]
But as Franzen’s words here tend to suggest, this business of literature both takes for itself, and leaves for its readers, a broad latitude in assigning meaning both to any given text and to the realities that text describes. Rather than prescribing significances, rather than demanding assent to its assertions or obedience to its syllogisms, fiction inherently invites its reader to believe not in truly concrete though unseen realities, not even in the immediate or tangible first-order realities of daily life, but simply and solely in the rendered universe and events of the text, in Henry James’ sense of “felt life.” Such “secondary belief” commands no assent of the soul, though it may shape the mind. Whatever lies beyond itself, a work of fiction can at its best only allude to, represent, not re-present, not make present, as for example Catholics believe a sacrament does. The kind of truth fiction can incarnate, the word it can give flesh, is a human word, not a divine one.
In this light all talk of a “sacramental” literature is analogical only. Any speech act, any instance of language, outside of certain firm and strict parameters can only signify, not make present the reality that it signifies. What gets itself called “sacramentality” in literature is often only a function of the author’s belief that her language does truly signify realities, hard concrete truths outside the boundary of self, and not merely illusions misbegotten under some mysterious perceptual distortion or veil of deception. Without adequation of both the mind and the text to reality, we chase down reading-as-vicarious-experience in vain. We seek truth on false pages, only to be thrown back on ourselves, more alone and disconsolate than before.
In contrast to fiction whose reverence is only self-referential, I wonder if it is possible to set fiction that, even as it realizes narratives that may seem hyperlocal and thus deeply limited, also achieves the effect of inspiring due honor toward the fullness of human experience, including our embodied spirituality. As an example I’d like to lift up a body of work that has often garnered, undeservedly, the label “irreverent”[6]—namely the fiction of David Foster Wallace, which I’d argue ultimately aspires to this kind of reverence for life in all its banalities and intensities. More than this, I’d argue that the work achieves a kind of lowercase-s sacramentality, if only in an analogical sense.
Wallace’s fiction instantiated the rise of the same New Realist or New Sincerity movement that he predicted in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram.” In that essay Wallace asserts that the ironic stance of his generation, which at first could effectively cut against hypocrisy and sentimentality, has now been overplayed to the point of being “enfeebling.”[7] Against an atmospheric inclination of the time to cynicism, Wallace quotes Lewis Hyde as saying that “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” Wallace peels back the curtain to show that the indignation against lost illusions underlying the postmodern project of toppling idols is itself “idealistic,” even in its way naïve, as it betrays demanding yet distorted expectations of human nature and experience, expectations that in their simultaneous intensity and shallowness are essentially adolescent.
Not only that, aesthetic iconoclasm is purely negative in character, “singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” Wallace projects that the next generation of “real rebels” among fictionists—led, Wallace modestly assumes, by Wallace himself—would be builders, not dismantlers. These writers would provide the “insights and guides to value” that readers once relied on literature to give; they would
have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. . . . treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. . . . eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. . . risk disapproval . . . . the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the Oh how banal. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.
Wallace began to practice what he preaches here as early as his short story “Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” in which he cheerfully dismantles the psychedelic “funhouse” metafictionalism of John Barth. Throughout Wallace’s oeuvre, from the deconstructed Funhouse, Inc., to the IRS office in The Pale King, his evident, constant, determined effort is to push through and beyond this edge of overstimulated overattention to too many oversaturated phenomena, in search of a childlike—but not childish, and above all not adolescent—freshness and receptivity. Wallace strains beyond both the disciplined precision of the tragicomic prose line developed in DeLillo’s early work and the surrealist maximalism of Pynchon—both influences on Wallace himself—in search of an all-embracing synthesis, surely small-c catholic in its scope, in his view the ambit of the only true avant-garde: the “après-garde.”
*
“Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way” instantiates, narrates, creates symbolism for, but also flatly and in direct terms explains what Wallace is after in fiction. It is what O’Connor would have called “a sketch with an essay woven through it.” As such, its admittedly byzantine, picaresque plot is slightly beside the point here. Even the piece’s main prescriptive argument, which tracks to the upshot of “E Unibus Pluram”—eschew hip irony, dare to pierce the reader’s heart, bring to bear a quality of attention that will make the reader feel loved, but in all this aim slightly to the side the way an archer does in order to hit the target—for our purposes here, this argument is secondary to the vicissitudes experienced by the minor character Sternberg.
In the story, Sternberg has little to do with the plot; in Henry James’ terms, he “runs beside the coach” in which the young MFA writers Mark Nechtr and his girlfriend D.L. ride as “king and queen.” From start to finish Sternberg as traveling companion does scarcely anything, except to experience an escalating series of the sorts of minor, quotidian physical torments also comically narrated as well-nigh unbearable in Infinite Jest. In quick succession Sternberg sports a painfully infected poison-sumac rash, suffers from constipation, must relieve himself in a public restroom (“a crowded, mirrored place”), while washing his hands splashes his slacks with water (“Great. That’s just great. Now it looks like he’s maybe wet himself.”), feels trapped on a car ride, experiences an unwanted erection, and throughout, from first to last, finds the worst alienation of all subsisting in the concrete visibility of his various discomforts, instanced in the emergent poison-sumac cyst:
Not good. Clear evidence of white blood cells, which implies blood cells, and so a bloodstream. From there it doesn’t take genius to figure out you’ve got a body.
Though the narration wants us to laugh at Sternberg (and by extension at ourselves), we can’t help wincing with him, as well: who among us hasn’t known inflammations, weird aches and itchings, fears of shame, futile ill-timed or out-of-context stirrings of desire? How much of our daily effort and attention, if we looked closely at what we actually do, would we find directed at avoiding, or distracting ourselves from, these inescapable yet unwelcome sensations? Sternberg’s whole narrative purpose as a character is to refuse us this distraction, to force us to accept residence within the inconvenient flesh as the precondition of all higher perception. Toward the end of the story, Wallace crosses the fourth wall, addressing us directly in a voice-over his characters cannot hear, to ask whether Sternberg will ever learn that “the body is a shelter, not a prison.” But a shelter for what, or more to the point, for whom?
By contrast, the late story “Church Not Made With Hands,” found in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, deals with equally unavoidable, but more grave and tragic because less universalizable and more intensely personal, sufferings of body and spirit. The abstract clarity of the essays and the comic lucidity of the early fiction equally absent themselves from the prose in this story. Instead, here we find thick and vivid opacity, even deliberate mystification:
Birds, gray light. Day opens one eye. He is lying half off the bed Sarah breathes in. He sees the windows parallelograms, from the angle. . . .
A dead Cezanne does this August sunrise in any-angled smears of clouded red, a blue that darkles. . . . Doves work the morning, sound from the belly.
To see this sort of thing from a writer so notoriously, even maniacally, committed as Wallace is to overexplanation and clarity is intended to, and does, arrest our attention. What drives this reversal of tactics?
My reading is that Wallace here intends to instantiate, even to induce in us, the experience of befuddlement and despondency in the face of natural evils that result in unwilling innocent suffering—but he wants to bewilder us beautifully. As a writer who, with Franzen, knows well that if you do not please the reader she’ll give you little enough chance to accomplish anything else, Wallace sets out immediately to intrigue and engage the reader’s capacity for intellectual pleasure before setting out to achieve some difficult work indeed.
To do this work, he alludes to a fictional near-drowned child, Esther, but one whom the epigraph leads us to believe may bear relationship to a real child, one E. Shofstahl, who died at the age of ten in 1987. However, Wallace doesn’t incarnate Esther in language. She’s seen only in the merest hints and suggestions. We’re told what has happened to her—her hair was trapped in a pool drain; she was held under long enough to cause brain damage—but her body is as absent from this story about spirituality as is that story’s God.
The main action of the story unfolds through the perception of Day, an art therapist, who is stepfather to the hospitalized Esther and new husband to Esther’s mother Sarah, who is Catholic. In the initial dream sequence Day “travels” back to a moment before his own conception; he is “split into something that wriggled and something that spun.” This spinning mirrors the mysterious “rotation” of the ending, in which the shape of the mystical rose window into which Esther ultimately disappears (as, despite the others’ prayers for her recovery, she dies) may also be that of a Dantean circle of heaven, or of purgatory.
Time and space have uncommon fluidity in this story, whose title references Christ’s description of his own body, and by extension that of the Catholic Church whose particularities so fascinated and confounded Wallace, as a “temple not made with hands.” Yet at the same time, within the text, certain instances of color, direction, shape, and “point” (Eliot’s “still point”?) function with maximum openness to interpretation, their referents left deliberately undefined by Wallace, rendered into the reader’s hands to be remade as she sees fit. Though Wallace, through Day, “dreampaints” these colors and shapes for us, he uses their very concretion to create a deliberate and counterintuitive abstraction, to enflesh the struggle to maintain a faith in the unseen, to express a persistent doubt experienced even within the certainty that the spirit is “what is most solid” in us.
In the story’s conclusion, Day’s prayer for Esther’s healing is visualized as a sort of swimming. Day’s soul, like Esther’s body, is brought up again from spiritual water but as though half alive, paralyzed: an inverted figure of baptism. Day’s failure, despite his capacious intellectual life and impressive power to “dreampaint” what cannot be strictly and literally visualized, is one of imagination. Day cannot picture anything alive outside the body, even as his spirit strives through liminal space and strains toward the sources of life. For this character, the spiritual realm is excessively fluid, insufficiently firm. It slips through his fingers like the water that, in traditional Christian symbolism, stands for grace.
*
At times we all long to be free of the body, to enjoy the privileges of pure spirit, to swim around space and time at will. Yet the condition of our consciousness of the abstract is the concrete. Hard as we may try to reduce our minds to ghosts and matter to machinery, the hylomorphic will not let us go: We are bodies inside souls, as much as souls inside bodies. Try as we may to fly free of that, to be unmoored from the body and the senses is only possible in the context of mystical gift, of radical loss, or perhaps, at times, both.
Flesh is both prison and shelter, home and exile. What Wallace brings forward most clearly throughout his work is the need to learn to live in the body and on the body’s terms, to bear our spirit’s exile with a good grace, to make home where home there was none and where in some sense there never can be one for a mind with capacities for the infinite, married to the finite before its capacity for consent. In this sense we are all the child-brides of materiality: in the very act of conception, spirit given away to matter long before we possessed ourselves. We mature only when we consent to the gift, to our existence as given. This consent is purportedly impossible but, paradoxically, also the only thing that can be done about our shared plight that will not make it worse.
*
Early in 2010, when I lay, not quite dying, but feeling like death—deep in the waters of post-birth injury and postpartum depression, aching and bleeding and leaking in all sorts of horrifically specific ways, unwilling even to step into the car because of the exquisite clarity with which I could imagine the possible means of consequent destruction of the tiny swaddled body in my arms, the shattering fragmentation of the hard plastic car seat with its minky velour cover, the crunch and squeak and groan of bone, metal, glass—so not really wanting to die die, in fact desperately wanting to live and to nurture life, but not really wanting to accept the conditions of modern bodily life either, profoundly unconvinced of the value of whatever events would now have to or be able to take place from within this distended heap of skin and fluids I dwelt in, terrified too of all the possible futures I could now imagine for the freshly baptized and chrism-anointed little body cradled on my chest, in which little body all forms of goodness in the visible universe now seemed to be centrally lodged: what was I letting him in for, really? Were the risks of getting an embodied soul through the hazards of this world and safely into the next one even worth taking on?
How I didn’t see this, at the time, as depression still isn’t clear to me. Part of the puzzle is that it didn’t look like depression to anyone else. Even happy, I’m a quiet person, so much so that my going silent alarmed no one. I passed my EPDS[8] with flying colors. I accepted that, if the people around me thought I was doing fine, I must then be doing fine. Externally at least, I was coping gorgeously with terrible psychic pain because I had, prior to motherhood, already become so used to psychic pain that it now felt like second nature not to feel it, not to react to it or respond to it in any way, not to acknowledge it existed. I don’t recommend this, by the way—if any of this resonates, address it, for mercy’s sake—but at the time it was where I found myself. And it was Wallace, unlikely candidate, who helped almost as much as any living human to pull me out of it. Wallace, with his hyperactive wit and garrulous, sometimes spurious charm, Wallace with his baroque spin on grotesquerie and glory, Wallace in his openly effortful, sincerely-manipulatively-sincere quest to lure, to seduce, his reader into his “deviant logics,” obscure geometries, and terrible lucidities—Wallace held my hand and walked me back into life, and he did this by a kind of alchemy I must stretch to describe: the performative instantiation of the principle he both outlined abstractly and rendered concretely. How much of our storytelling, after all, breaks down in the final analysis to this simple pattern?: Look, you’ll be okay. This happened to me, and I didn’t die.
It was my first encounter with the essay “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”—about physical transformation, seemingly unrelated incursion of external force, and subsequent spiritual change—in which Wallace’s disembodied voice first said to me: Look, you’ll be okay. This happened to me, and I didn’t die. Since college I’d been an admirer of E Unibus Pluram, of the classic “This Is Water,” and of the short fiction. But it was in “Derivative Sport,” after I gave birth the first time, that I first heard the voice of sanity again, sanity acknowledging pain, sanity unafraid of telling the truth about what it had seen and exactly how it had seen it:
I felt . . . alienated not just from my own recalcitrant . . . body, but in a way from the whole elemental exterior. . . . I began, very quietly, to resent my physical place in the great schema.
“This resentment and bitterness, a kind of slow root-rot,” Wallace goes on to acknowledge, is the main reason he didn’t live up to his potential as a tennis player—the death of that dream thus also, ironically, the eventual condition of our getting these uniquely prescient essays and marvelously bizarro fictions at all.
This resentment and bitterness, too, had sunk into my relation to the physical realm, and it would have to be resisted if I was ever going to recover. Aren’t you so happy? people would chirp at me. Isn’t he worth it? The baby was worth all of it, worth any misery I could imagine, worth more than I had endured, so much more—and after a thirty-hour labor I had been stitched shut again without lidocaine, just as my significant accidental overdose of epidural anaesthesia had, unbeknownst to the person doing the stitching, begun to fail. And then here lay this perfect creature, now with his own life outside mine: velvety-skinned, cosmos-eyed, the very definition of vulnerability, infinitely precious, infinitely fragile. How could I carry us both forward into a world that could hurt so much? How could my body ever say, especially to a body so unlike mine: Look, you’ll be okay. This happened to me, and I didn’t die. Was I even really going to be okay? I didn’t know. Would You’ll be okay be a lie? I didn’t know.
But the other thing that seized me about “Derivative Sport” was that in the context of a late-modern American consumer and materialist milieu, where nearly everyone worships in the cult of the body electric, here sat Wallace, this glorious individual, in the midst of it all acknowledging that it might be okay not to be, in this sense, a devout believer. Not to feel “body-positive.” Not to pay tribute to the neon god America had made. To acknowledge that even supposedly peak experiences of the flesh could disappoint. That that disappointment might be, ultimately, both less final and less defining than in the moment it might seem.
“Acceptance is its own verve.” I began to accept that no sudden flame, no magic incursion of violent wind, was going to swoop down and change the body I now dwelt in. It might heal from what had happened to it, but it wouldn’t ever become different from what it now was, essentially a mound of bread dough, pale, soft, pliant: good only to the extent it could be leavened and stretched, transfigured under high pressure; split apart, broken, turned into nourishment for others. It would never again be anything but this bread. But it could be, if I consented, bread with a soul.
*
The great grief for us as readers in having lost Wallace is that there would come a point past which he couldn’t say to us anymore: Look, you’ll be okay. This happened to me, and I didn’t die. “In apprehension how like a god!”—but a god he was not: The specific character of his pain made it impossible for him to give, anymore, of what he had already given so generously, this richly and realer-than-real texture of his interior vision which for so many of us radically expanded the perception of how it is possible to see and to speak. What it must have cost him to give us even this, most of us can’t quite conceive. Try to imagine, really imagine, what it would be like to have your seat of consciousness lodged inside a mind running at that many revolutions per second: a mind, furthermore, that struggles to sustain a faith even in hard concrete truths outside the boundary of self: a mind that isn’t totally sure anything really exists outside itself, or what it would mean to affirm such existence as good when you come right down to it, morally good, inherently good, when such horrors constantly happen as are known to happen, when all that seems good also dwells so thoroughly under siege both from outside and from within.
Imagine being a mind in a body capable of feeling, so exquisitely, both its own proximity to the transcendent and the depth of the ravine separating it from transcendence, acutely alive to the impossibility of ever bridging that gap unassisted, yet also fiercely alert to its own capacities and hungers for embracing what lies on the other side, maybe secretly unable to believe there didn’t really exist somewhere a perfect formula, form of words, that could close the distance, resolve the tension, make possible ever newer and better and more complete expressions of the quality of experience and the ultimate unity underlying multiplicity—drawn to the promise of such a form of words, yet also unable to trust such a form if it didn’t originate from his own nearly-infinite invention—and, most importantly, feeling that distrust as a continual separation, a form of live and constant pain.
Imagine, if you will, with such capacities inhering in you, what it would then feel like in your body to be so conscious, much more conscious than most of us because you’ve constantly and consistently tested them, of your coinherent limitations. To feel them pressing in on you like walls. Imagine having a mind like that in a body like that: and now imagine that with this materiality, this spirituality, you must put aside your self-transcendent glory in order to eat something, take a shower, try perhaps fruitlessly to sleep at night. You are the possessor and the custodian of such power, such beauty, and yet you still have to drive your car after class to the Champaign-Urbana Schnucks at seven-thirty p.m. in the sleeting February rain, walk in under buzzing fluorescent lights, and drive that wire cart with the one jammed and madly squeaking wheel down aisle seven to buy toilet paper. Try to imagine this feeling, like an act of kenosis. Can you? It’s not easy. Sometimes I can almost comprehend how he couldn’t handle it, anymore.
Does this seem that I am making light of such pain? Anything rather than that. Depression makes the comic seem tragic, the ordinary intolerable: it is the so-called “quiet desperation” that turns up the noise inside your head nearly loud enough to make your ears bleed; it is almost more than can be lived through, for almost no apparent reason at all. Yet there is something in us, too, that rebels against this kind of depression, that gets angry about the despair of the quotidian in twenty-first-century America, and I think Wallace as he still lives in his best work asks us to listen to that constructive anger, that pro-life rebellion: to cling to existence on the body’s terms, let it cost us what it may.
*
The summer we were thirteen, Toph drowned in Mobile Bay in a boating accident. He had fallen overboard; no matter how strong a swimmer he was, the undertow had taken him. Before the funeral Mass we girls hugged each other and screamed and cried, even those of us who hadn’t known Toph well: indulging, I now feel, our own feelings at the expense of the adults’, who cringed around the edges of the vestibule, knowing the loss’s real cost. My mother and I paid our respects and received the Eucharist and, the following weekend, drove down on our own to Panama City for a brief respite before the school semester began.
There under a plum-colored and clouded night sky, beside the base of a high-rise hotel, I floated, ugly duckling, little dumpling, face-up in a kidney-shaped neon-blue pool, within whose indentation there had been planted a spurt of palm trees bristling above a manmade waterfall. On the steps opposite, bronzed undergraduates wearing the bare minimum cavorted and flirted. I kept my own lap-suited half-formed personal self well out of proximity, sticking to the pool’s abandoned middle edge, where the waterfall’s flow most aggressively churned up chlorine’s metallic tang and its burble drowned out the young adults’ growls and squeals. Those flawless bodies terrified me. Liberty, exposure, the inevitability of being seen as you truly are, the possibility of rejection: their perfection stood for all these little deaths-in-life a thirteen-year-old perennially finds impossible to face. I didn’t exactly not want to live, but I didn’t want to do it on these terms. But were there, anywhere, to be found any other terms on which life might be possible?
The clean strong backs of the pallid high-rises sheltered us from the proximate noise of the ocean. In the relative quiet I contemplated the body of death in which my aches and distentions were suspended, the easy exit that lay all around. What happened next participates in the numinous, the unprovable. I drifted out of the physical—at the same time never leaving it, without gaining any of the sensory elevations, erasures, or perspectival changes people talk about in these cases. I didn’t dissociate in the sense of becoming unaware of my surroundings. Nor did I gain the ability to see myself as though from outside or above. There were to my knowledge no substances floating in the air or the pool whose secondhand effects might explain what happened next. I can’t explain it in any of the usual terms, except to say I both was and was not there, at the same time but in different ways. Where I had gone was blue.
Much later I would read—with a shock, already knowing it—a description of the exact metaphysical water, the precise nonspatial space into which I had gone, the same space into which Day’s praying soul, in “Church Not Made With Hands,” would rise:
The air’s blue looks black, he swims through the curtain, stars rain upward from his arms’ strokes. He pantomimes the crawlstroke through the stars. He can see her clearly, revolving. . . .
And again it is when he looks below him that he fails. Wanting only to see whence he’d risen.
But whatever was holding me didn’t fail me, and I didn’t fall. Without motion, my soul was taken by its hand, pulled up out of the blue pool into the plumblack air. Little girl, rise. Do you want to be healed? I didn’t hear words: I didn’t hear anything but lapping and slopping, my body’s ears filled up with water to the middle canal. But what the words were in themselves became the water I swam in. Amnion canceled out Lethe: I decided to live.
[1] Let’s acknowledge from the outset that I’m breaking a lit-world taboo regarding the writing of essays that double as Wallace-pastiches. We’re simply not to do it. We know this. Though I wonder how and why we know it: why aren’t we supposed to be allowed to take the very tools Wallace honed and apply them to, of all things, an appreciation of his own work? It seems to me this very taboo would have annoyed him, that he would have broken it himself had this been temporally and logically possible, that he would have approved of others’ breaking it as long as they could do so with some degree of individualism and style. It’s not as if I really think myself as clever as Wallace was, nor as if I would ever try to write like this on any other topic. But here, it seems not merely fitting but elegant: form proportioned to matter: which is the whole point.
[2] Then, there were the white Keds, the white terrycloth hoodie, the black lycra bike shorts, and the mulberry-colored cotton tennis skirt of which I was inordinately vain despite its being, due to the garlic-silhouette situation, a comically ill-advised fashion choice, if the word “fashion” can even be applied here, which probably not. The only other thing you need to know about my appearance, which will for the rest of this essay fade into the requisite merciful insignificance, is that dermatologically it involves the kind of tragic, terminal, roseate pallor unique to a certain subsection of the Irish, whose recessive genes totally dominate my phenotype. Thus of necessity, yet also under protest, before each tennis class I applied landslides of glaring white and gooey 50+ SPF that looked and smelled like Elmer’s glue—slicked in tacky fingerprint-gummed lines that remained visible, and olfactory, on the skin. Yet thanks to the Gulf Coast humidity, it didn’t even take running drills to touch off certain inevitabilities. Within the first ten minutes of every lesson I’d be as damp and bright pink as a steamed shrimp. Salt water rolled off me and on to the green clay, carrying my sunscreen with it in great chalky splashes. Later that day, at lunch, I would be as red as the shrimp’s chitinous tailfin and as still, trying not to anger my new carapace of sunburn.
[3] No luck here, I’m afraid.
[4] A whiff of sour grapes here, I’ll admit, but not a very pungent one: our scorn was mutual and proportionally balanced, not one-sided or in any way tragically Girardian. To the extent there was scapegoating, we did it to each other.
[5] [A citation from an interlocutor would be a really good idea here. I don’t have one for the very good, but insufficient, reason that this view is a widely held one in the literary circles where I work. In another draft I’ll do better.]
[6] a label that, it’s worth noting, had morphed into a standard blurb marker of trendiness in the early 1990s, meaning hardly more than “luminous” does today
[7] Already! In 1993!
[8] Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale, a self-response test designed to measure metrics of dysthymia in postgravid mothers and often administered by the OBGYN or midwife or pediatrician, but just as often neglected in postpartum care, possibly since it’s another bureaucratic hoop to jump through. Also many women may be, as I was, tempted to render phenomena with a better face on paper than the phenomena actually wear in reality.
Great essay, Katy! We at Sostenuto were, and still are, honored to have given it a home. Thought provoking as usual!