From the Black Notebook: Three Hospital Aphorisms

The best thing someone brought to me while I was in hospital was a pen and paper.  The most simple, ancient, and therefore profound, of bestowals.  Alas, it was in the dreaded blue ink…

—————————————————————————————–

The pen as downspout for the roiling excesses of mind, connecting sky and earth, roof and rain, thundercloud and gutter.

—————————————————————————————–

Nothing amplifies the natural lucidity of the human organism, the writerly acuities of perception and apprehension, like the deprivations of hunger, exile, illness and isolation.

“Alas, poor Yorick!” — R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

For a moment, I thought it was a hoax, such was my disbelief.
But then of course I quickly remembered the effect his absurd and profound novel, INFINITE JEST, had on me, and the great chasm of suffering that was its inspiration. Of all the lessons that the year 2008 seems to want to reinforce in our minds, the supreme sovereignty of death, disease and loss over everything is a likely candidate, and it’s running unopposed. Upon further reflection perhaps this is the message of EVERY year. There are pains and darknesses that some of us just can’t keep laughing away…

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead

By Claire Noland and Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 14, 2008

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.

Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.

Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday.

“What was a party is now a wake,” Ulin said as the news of Wallace’s death circulated. “People were speechless and just blown away.

“He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years,” Ulin said.

“He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s,” Ulin said. “And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything.”

Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in “The Broom of the System,” his 1987 debut novel; “Girl With Curious Hair,” a 1989 collection of short stories, and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments” (1997). In 1997, he also received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

A year earlier he shot to the top of the literary world with “Infinite Jest,” a sprawling, ambitious novel with a nonlinear plot that ran 1,079 pages and had nearly as many footnotes.

Critics marveled at the prodigious talent evident in his imaginative take on a future world, comparing him to Thomas Pynchon and John Irving.

In a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni wrote, “Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone.”

Other collections of fiction and nonfiction followed, including “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” (1999), “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity” (2003) and “Oblivion” (2004).

In June, to coincide with this fall’s presidential election, he reworked a 2000 essay about Republican candidate John McCain for a paperback published as “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope.”

Wallace was born Feb. 21, 1962, in Ithaca, N.Y., and raised in Illinois, where his father taught philosophy at the University of Illinois and his mother taught English at a community college.

A talented tennis player as a youngster, Wallace attended Amherst College and majored in philosophy before switching his focus to writing fiction.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1985 and turned his senior thesis into the basis for “The Broom of the System.”

After earning a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona, Wallace began teaching writing at Illinois State University in Normal in 1993.

In 2002 he was named the first Roy E. Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College.

Gary Kates, the college’s dean, called Wallace’s death “an incredible loss.”

“He was a fabulous teacher,” Kates said Saturday. “He was hands-on with his students. He cared deeply about them. . . . He was a jewel on the faculty, and we deeply appreciated everything he gave to the college.”

In addition to his wife, Karen Green, and his parents, Wallace is survived by a sister.

A memorial service is planned at Pomona College.

Parallel Bars

When cells dream of immortality, bodies die of cancer.

When greed is our inspiration, poverty is our reward.

From the Black Notebook: Fire Sermon

These pages filled with prayers for fire…Its imagined cleansing or galvanization.  A hubris no doubt to be checked by the furnace and its indifference to my desires, that is to say, it lays them bare for the burning they are.  The false hope that in the light of torch or the heat of kiln, a glimpse of truth might appear. Or that my heart might ignite into some self-illuminating beacon instead of the bitter, brittle and broken potsherds of a jug that once contained sweet wine, the blood decocted fruit from some solemn cultivar against the chaos of creation.  And yet still I yearn for the enlivening turn, the lick of flame, the blessed touch of destruction.

Double Take

Genesis of a political theory: The body and its health as primary locus of empowerment.

Measuring the Bed

The bed’s miles wide.
Beneath the blankets, fists multiply.
Knuckles spill out onto the floor.
Sleep is flammable; I’m burning;
And so sleep and I also are estranged…

If I could reach you,
If my fingers could unfurl
Their flag of forgetfulness,
If touch could breach the sea of sheets,
Make for shore.
But, there’s only pointing…

Asleep at last, I dreamt the beast
Stuffed in the chimney,
As in a children’s tale.
We chanted pain at it
And watched it pass
Thru phases of grotesquery,
A myriad of masks,
No end to the procession so long
As our chant of pain abides,
Uninterrupted save
For morning light and birdsong…

Planting my theodolite,
I survey the quilted creases,
A stranger in this land without
His crew, measuring the bed
I lay quietly,
Playing dead.

Temperature Truism

The flash fires of anger quickly cool to reveal the frigid expanses of clarity…

Road Menders: Sonnet # 2

Terrible: the grip of grey dawn, a
Heedless symptom tempting each and
Every Day, Night’s pipeline curl, the

Random starlight misconstrued as story,
Offertory ink in a pinholed curtain…
Amen to space’s godless vastness where we
Defenseless children glide the blue marble, Earth,

Mammon’s globe, our chimp coup playpen, and
Encapsule the offending tubercular invader, the
Nascent drifter of galaxies. We’re heirs to a faithless
Donation, undeciphered testament, stasis and
Echo, shockwave across the still waters,
Remaindered for a shard of Eternity,
Season to our history’s day, eon to our hour.

Dreams Dethrone

Dreams dethrone us from our solemn idiocies
By making us whole. We topple over with the weight
Of our swollen heads, as into a spiral falls the eye,
Or against a barrier a child climbs to prove that
Curiosity is the only freedom and that tears cast off
In ritual excess are meant to bless and sanctify
Earnest effort, to dampen danger with the rhythm of dance.

Dreams deny gossamer and azure, the easy displacement
Of our everyday eye, when wind and blue and spider might suffice.
They teach us that hulls are shaped by the strangeness of the sea
And that sails are the vegetable equivalent of clouds.

Dreams resist like rock, sculpt like marble, fit like tile, and negate
Ideas no less real than the hopeful swarm of all our objects,
Who wait like bodies malleable in the stretch and reach of slow time.

Hijacking Materialism for a Joyride in the Universal Rumpus Room (ad nauseum)

The chastening influence of chemistry — That all terrors, ecstasies, serenities, the smoldering coal-seams of awe, the entire spectrum of human consciousness and feeling in fact, could be translated into some molecular riot or transcribed into some synergistic confluence of organic compounds, ionic exchanges, or colliding enzymes…
But then, forsaking the fulminant legacy of our materialism, to bet on the long shot of Vitalism and wedge our epistemological best-foot-forward in the slamming door of a deterministic universe. Even our most prodigious calculations cannot keep pace with the steep drop-off in those odds. Now that’s my kind of gambit.