Both Flesh and Not: Essays
Page 21
Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the passage of the Military Commissions Act—if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. “We” meaning as a polity and culture. The premise does not entail specific blame; or rather the problems here are too entangled and systemic for good old-fashioned finger-pointing. It is, for one example, simplistic and wrong to blame the for-profit media for somehow failing to make clear to us the moral and practical hazards of trashing the Geneva Conventions. The for-profit media is exquisitely attuned to what we want and the amount of detail we’ll sit still for. And a ninety-second news piece on the question of whether and how the Geneva Conventions ought to apply in an era of asymmetrical warfare is not going to explain anything; the relevant questions are too numerous and complicated, too fraught with contexts in everything from civil law and military history to ethics and game theory. One could spend a hard month just learning the history of the Conventions’ translation into actual codes of conduct for the U.S. military… and that’s not counting the dramatic changes in those codes since 2002, or the question of just what practices violate (or don’t) just which Geneva provisions, and according to whom. Or let’s not even mention the amount of research, background, cross-checking, corroboration, and rhetorical parsing required to understand the cataclysm of Iraq, the collapse of congressional oversight, the ideology of neoconservatism, the legal status of presidential signing statements, the political marriage of evangelical Protestantism and corporatist laissez-faire…. There’s no way. You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by “informed.”8
In the context of our Total Noise, a piece like Mark Danner’s “Iraq:… Imagination” exemplifies a special subgenre I’ve come to think of as the service essay, with “service” here referring to both professionalism and virtue. In what is loosely framed as a group book review, Danner has processed and arranged an immense quantity of fact, opinion, confirmation, testimony, and on-site experience in order to offer an explanation of the Iraq debacle that is clear without being simplistic, comprehensive without being overwhelming, and critical without being shrill. It is a brilliant, disciplined, pricelessly informative piece.
There are several other such service essays among this year’s proffered Best. Some, like Danner’s, are literary journalism; others are more classically argumentative, or editorial, or personal. Some are quite short. All are smart and well written, but what renders them most valuable for me is a special kind of integrity in their handling of fact. An absence of dogmatic cant. Not that service essayists don’t have opinions or make arguments. But you (I) never sense, from this year’s Best, that facts are being specially cherry-picked or arranged in order to advance a pre-set agenda. They are utterly different from the party-line pundits and propagandists who now are in such vogue, for whom writing is not thinking or service but more like the silky courtier’s manipulation of an enfeebled king.
… In which scenario we, like diminished kings or rigidly insecure presidents, are reduced to being overwhelmed by info and interpretation, or else paralyzed by cynicism and anomie, or else—worst—seduced by some particular set of dogmatic talking-points, whether these be PC or NRA, rationalist or evangelical, “Cut and Run” or “No Blood for Oil.” The whole thing is (once again) way too complicated to do justice to in a guest intro, but one last, unabashed bias/preference in BAE ’07 is for pieces that undercut reflexive dogma, that essay to do their own Decidering in good faith and full measure, that eschew the deletion of all parts of reality that do not fit the narrow aperture of, say for instance, those cretinous fundamentalists who insist that creationism should be taught alongside science in public schools, or those sneering materialists who insist that all serious Christians are just as cretinous as the fundamentalists.
Part of our emergency is that it’s so awfully tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the “moral clarity” of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-
entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new vistas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it. I’m aware that some of the collection’s writers could spell all this out better and in much less space. At any rate, the service part of what I mean by “value” refers to all this stuff, and extends as well to essays that have nothing to do with politics or wedge issues. Many are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact-sets—whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids’ cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you’ve believed and revered turns out to be self-indulgent crap.
That last one’s9 of especial value, I think. As exquisite verbal art, yes, but also as a model for what free, informed adulthood might look like in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error. This is probably the sincerest, most biased account of “Best” your Decider can give: these pieces are models—not templates, but models—of ways I wish I could think and live in what seems to me this world.
—2007
trichome—hairlike or bristlelike outgrowth Trimurti—Hindu trinity of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer; Hindu version of the trinity: sits in chair w/three faces facing three different ways triskelion—figure w/three arms or legs coming out of a common center (exotic sex resembling a triskelion) triturate—to rub, crush, or grind into fine powder: to pulverize troche—small medicated or flavored tablet truckle (v.)—to be servile or submissive; (n.) bed w/casters for rolling stuff trunnion—pin or cylindrical projection on which (e.g.) a cannon pivots; also fans, PC monitor try square—carpenter’s right-angled ruler T-top—auto w/removable roof panels Tu enim Caesar civitatem dare potes hominibus, verbis non potes—saying: “Caesar, you can grant citizenship to men but not to words” uncus—a hook-shaped part (biology); nose? toe? uvulitis—inflammation of the uvula; special kind of sore throat vadose (adj.)—relating to water that’s above the groundwater table but in the ground vail (v.)—to doff cap; to lower your flag in submission valetudinarian—sickly, weak, morbidly health-conscious person vaunt—brag, boast; “an air of vaunt around him” venatic—of or related to hunting venery—pursuit or indulgence of sexual appetite; sexual act vermiculate—wormish vermiculation—wormlike movements; wormlike marks or carvings as on masonry vermiferous—wormy, worm-riddled vernalization—subjecting seeds or seedlings to low temperatures to speed up plant development vernation—the arrangement of young leaves within a bud vernissage—private showing held before art exhibition opens verso—left-hand page of book vestal—chaste, pure videogenic—like photogenic or telegenic but w/video vidette—mounted sentinel stationed in advance of an outpost vituperations—angry remarks volute—spiral formation as in whelk shell; spiral scroll-like ornament as on Ionic column welt—raised seam between sole and upper of shoe whelm—to cover with water, submerge whinstone—hard, dark kinds of stone like basalt and chert widdershins/withershins—in a counterclockwise or contrary direction wiggan—stiff fabric used for stiffening windrow—long row of cut hay or grain left to dry after harvest before bundling windrow—row of snow or leaves heaped up by wind wonky—shaky, feeble; wrong, awry woodbine—climbing v
ine with yellowish flowers wrack (n.)—damage from devastation, violence/ruin WYSIWYG (adj.)—desktop-pub./computer term for screen showing exactly what the printed page will look like wyvern—(heraldry): a two-legged dragon w/wings and a barbed tail yashmak—veil worn by Muslim women yawp (v.)—to talk coarsely or loudly yean—to bear young yenta—person/wom an into gossip, meddling (Yiddish) Yggdrasil—in Norse mythology, the huge ash tree that holds together earth, heaven, and hell by its roots and branches ylang-ylang—oil from Asian tree used in perfume
JUST ASKING
Q: Are some things worth dying for? Is the American idea1 one such thing? Who’s ready for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as heroes and martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?2 That is, what if we decided that a certain minimum baseline vulnerability to terrorist attack is part of the price of the American idea? That ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our way of life—not just of our soldiers and money on foreign soil, but the sacrifice of our personal safety and comfort? Maybe even of more civilians’ lives?
What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite everyone’s best efforts, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are worth the price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned of more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some safety or (b) some portion of the rights and liberties that make the American idea so precious?
Q: In the absence of such a conversation, do we trust our current leaders to revere and safeguard the American idea as they seek to “secure the homeland”? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for the moment that some of these really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we become so selfish and frightened that we don’t even want to think about whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?
—2007
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The David Wallace Literary Trust and the publisher wish to thank Sam Freilich, Vanessa Kehren, Victoria Matsui, Steve Kleinedler, Margaret Anne Miles, and Joseph Pickett for their invaluable help.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The following pieces were originally published in slightly different form in the following books and periodicals:
“Federer Both Flesh and Not,” originally published as “Federer as Religious Experience” in the New York Times, 2006.
Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1988. Some of the ideas and language in this essay appear in “E Unibus Pluram,” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Little, Brown, 1997.
“The Empty Plenum: David Markson’ Fus Wittgenstein’s Mistress” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1990.
“Mr. Cogito” in Spin, 1994.
“Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open” in Tennis, 1996.
“Back in New Fire,” originally published as “Impediments to Passion” in Might Magazine, 1996.
“The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2,” originally published as “F/X Porn” in Waterstone’s Magazine, 1998.
“The Nature of the Fun” in Fiction Writer, 1998.
“Overlooked: Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels > 1960” at Salon.com, 1999.
“Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” in Science.
“The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal, ed. Peter Johnson” in Rain Taxi, 2001.
“Twenty-Four Word Notes,” reprinted from the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus with permission from Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2004, 2008, 2012 by Oxford University Press.
“Borges on the Couch” in the New York Times Book Review, 2004.
“Deciderization 2007—A Special Report,” originally published as the introduction to The Best American Essays 2007, 2007.
“Just Asking” in The Atlantic, 2007.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College; his senior English thesis, the novel The Broom of the System, was published in 1987, and his senior philosophy thesis was published as Fate, Time, and Language in 2010. He earned a master of fine arts at the University of Arizona. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. He also published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion; the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster; a book about hip-hop, written with his friend Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers; and a book about infinity, Everything and More. Over the years, Wallace taught at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award and served on the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
ALSO BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The Broom of the System
Girl with Curious Hair
Infinite Jest
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Brief Interviews "1em" widtwith Hideous Men
Everything and More
Oblivion
Consider the Lobster
McCain’s Promise
This Is Water
The Pale King
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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.
There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously—it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!,” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important—they make up for a lot.
2 The U.S. media here are especially worried because no Americans of either sex survived into even the quarterfinals this year. (If you’re into obscure statistics, it’s the first time this has happened at Wimbledon since 1911.)
3 Actually, this is not the only Federer-and-sick-child incident of Wimbledon’s second week. Three days prior to the men’s final, a Special One-on-One Interview with Mr. Roger Federer* takes place in a small, crowde
d International Tennis Federation office just off the third floor of the Press Center. Right afterward, as the ATP player-rep is ushering Federer out the back door for his next scheduled obligation, one of the ITF guys (who’s been talking loudly on the telephone through the whole Special Interview) now comes up and asks for a moment of Roger’s time. The man, who has the same slight, generically foreign accent as all ITF guys, says: “Listen, I hate doing this. I don’t do this, normally. It’s for my neighbor. His kid has a disease. They will do a fund-raiser, it’s planned, and I’m asking can you sign a shirt or something, you know—something.” He looks mortified. The ATP rep is glaring at him. Federer, though, just nods, shrugs: “No problem. I’ll bring it tomorrow.” Tomorrow’s the men’s semifinal. Evidently the ITF guy has meant one of Federer’s own shirts, maybe from the match, with Federer’s actual sweat on it. (Federer throws his used wristbands into the crowd after matches, and the people they land on seem pleased rather than grossed out.) The ITF guy, after thanking Federer three times very fast, shakes his head: “I hate doing this.” Federer, still halfway out the door: "no problem.” And it isn’t. Like all pros, Federer changes his shirt a few times during matches, and he can just have somebody save one, and then he’ll sign it. It’s not like Federer’s being Gandhi here—he doesn’t stop and ask for details about the kid or his illness. He doesn’t pretend to care more than he does. The request is just one more small, mildly distracting obligation he has to deal with. But he does say yes, and he will remember—you can tell. And it won’t distract him; he won’t permit it. He’s good at this kind of stuff, too.