I Wish You Way More Than Luck
About a week ago I found myself in the situation of having a bus ride to work instead of taking my usual 2-mile walk. I had entered that malaise that can sometimes descend upon a person when it feels like all the usual podcasts and modes of distraction have been temporarily exhausted. Scrolling through the obligatory “Recommended for you” that every form of social media now seems to have as part of its underlying infrastructure, I came upon David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”, noticed it was about the length of time it would take me to get to my office and settle in, and having not read it in some time decided I would listen to the audio (which was, in fact, the original audio of the commencement address that was the occasion of the text).
The audio is from 2005. Wallace himself died in 2008, somewhat famously by suicide after a long and well-known battle with depression. Wallace’s writing often tackled the experience of being in the mind of someone whose psyche ultimately appeared to be working quite well against their own survival. There is the short story “Good Old Neon” from the collection Oblivion and the vignettes of the young girl in the psychiatric facility in the early episodes of Infinite Jest. He also reflects openly on his own experience at what is likely McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA in the released text “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”, the full body of the writer David Lipsky’s time with Wallace interviewing him for (I believe) Rolling Stone on the cusp of the release of the novel that would make Wallace a genuine literary celebrity the likes of which is hard to come by these days.
The aftermath of Wallace’s death would follow a familiar pattern for those whose death never really gets to be entirely their own. There was the intense period of hagiography, every person and outlet offering up praise and claiming an intense relationship with his work and the impact it had on them; followed by a (seemingly justified) villainization, as many of his relational exploits from early in his career came to light and he was revealed to, at times, have been an abusive and bullying presence in the lives of many of the women he came across in his life. How much of this was reconciled in his later relationship with Karen Green is hard to say and likely unimportant.
I wish I could punctuate the biographical note with the somewhat cliché notion that “nevertheless it was complicated” though it does not necessarily seem to be the case that it was. No more so than a human life is meant to be anyway. It is, though, ironic, as Wallace himself was an extraordinary writer of empathy and what it means to attend to the lives of ourselves and the lives of others. All other things aside, he seemed to write in a way that captured something essential about being alive in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, writing that was both hyper-intellectual, but whose intellectualism was often punctured by daring and devastating attempts at showing how that inner world was a mere representation of an undulating sea of interwoven emotions, personal history, and a kind of longing-as-human-suffering that was being habitually and maliciously dulled by the demands of late capitalism. It was to this that Wallace drew students’ attention during his speech.
I also want to point out, in ways that I am unsure of how or if it will connect to the broader theme of this piece of reportage, the timeline we are dealing with here. Again, the address was given in 2005, Wallace died in 2008, and the commencement was turned into a published text in 2009. Which places it before the modern media phenomena of Commencement Address as High Profile Celebrity YouTube Cameo. It seems like every graduation season we now get the inevitable deluge of mid-tier celebrities (mid-tier here simply meaning in the economic and “where they are in their career” sense) delivering otherwise earnest addresses as a way to amplify some aspect of their persona which has to do with them being a serious thinker capable of delivering serious thoughts. Some literary types still do this well (George Saunders commencement a few years after Wallace’s comes to mind, and Chimamanda Adichie’s a few years after that). But largely, this sincere opportunity to connect with those on the precipice of considerable uncertainty and a lifetime of entering what we often disaffectionately refer to as “the grind” has become a vessel for celebrity boosting and self-congratulatory platitudes.
Wallace’s speech is not that. Characteristically wry and self-aware, the speech is ultimately about the fact that life is likely going to get very hard for these graduates in a way that life had not been hard previously, and which cannot be easily corrected for through authenticity, empathy, or the passionate pursuits of one’s interests. That, really, the drudgery of life comes in those moments between the end of the work day and our ability to arrive at home, when we have to make a last minute stop at the grocery store—along with everyone else who is finding themselves also needing to make a last minute stop at the grocery store—and navigating the over-long checkout lines and mammoth SUVs that populate the parking lot without reflexively devolving in a narcissistic appraisal of how everyone else there is an annoyance and exists as an inconvenience to your needs and role as the most interesting character in your own life.
The talk is well-written and, as I learned from the audio, well-delivered. Wallace, similar to perhaps the only well-known and remembered portion of his posthumous novel The Pale King, invites us to pay attention to what we pay attention to. His kind of awareness was a major theme in his work as he reckoned with what it meant to grow up in a society where an endless stream of data and media was constantly competing to jam itself through whatever accessible sensory channel might be most readily available. Life, in ways that maybe it never had been before, felt dense. At least Wallace could make it feel that way.
I am, however, not interested in the speech. The speech is good. You should read it. Not listen to it. Read it. With pencil and notebook and coffee and any other implements one chooses to bring to the process of good reading. Because if you listen to it, you might find yourself susceptible to the same vulnerability that the crowd reveals itself to be susceptible to, which somewhat devastatingly misses the point of the speech altogether, made manifest in a single unexpected moment halfway through the speech.
What is this moment I am referring to? At around the 14-minute mark of the recording, Wallace offers recognition of his own vulnerability to tear into the people he finds himself surrounded by over the course of his evening commute. Lamenting the ways in which the hypocritical hatefulness and crudeness of middle-Americans seems to characterize the unsavory others he encounters in this process, laying into them with the nonchalant, bilious, and bigoted criticism Wallace would later chide himself for employing in his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”. And as he is lambasting the disgustingness, and smugness, and general offensiveness of these others and how inconvenient they are to Wallace’s preoccupation with his own needs and his own interests, the crowd does an unusual thing.
They applaud.
And not just applaud, but whoop and holler. Wallace corrects them—a grade-school teacher before his pupils instructing them not to laugh at the bad words in whatever banned book he’s teaching— and notes in the moment that this is meant to be an indication of how not to think. He does so with a knowing wink, but it reminds me of something else I had heard him share in interviews. In remarking on the response to his novel Infinite Jest, Wallace was often struck by how much reviews or those who had read the text mentioned how funny it was, when Wallace himself had thought he had written a profoundly sad and maudlin kind of text. Of course, with a title like Infinite Jest, and its play on the character Yorick from Hamlet, there is some balance of humor and tragedy intended, but anyone who has paid attention to the book while reading it will tell you that most of the time it is a challenging and unsettling read. Even parts that seem to be structured to impart some overt humor onto the text, usually do so by playing some personal tragedy of a character to truly absurdist levels. The text is humorous in as much as we often use humor to deflect from genuine horror and the text is just amplified enough to support a comedic interpretation.
Wallace’s appeal throughout is, in some ways, about allowing oneself to choose sadness. That when we hear him revel in the grotesqueries of his surroundings, rather than yap and squeal in unified pleasure we can grant ourselves the permission of accountability, permitting ourselves to be as disappointed in ourselves as we are in the aspects of the world that leave us feeling disaffected and hopeless. I had a couple of clients—past and present—come to mind as I was listening. Folks who are so certain of their misery and the influence of their surroundings in generating that misery and the difficulty of getting them to settle into a curious gaze towards that internal engine, that sinister governor, which is always already organizing how it is we are going to receive what we are going to receive.
We have, so many of us, been conditioned to reflect on the actions and facets of the world that negatively impact us with contempt, and a command towards modification of the environment, or the analysis of some power struggle meant to determine who did what to whom. We often forget the difficult, but far more valuable task, of slowing ourselves down and asking ourselves what the moment is showing us about how we are attuned to receive the world and in what ways that attunement may or may not be serving us. It’s a little CBT-y, but I don’t think what we are talking about here is as simple as maladaptive thoughts, or it is at least about more than what that means on the surface. For me, in my own pilgrimage of trying, every day, to become more of the kind of person I think I want to be, it was never about having someone tell me which thoughts were the “unhelpful” ones. It has always been about the ability to pay ever increasing attention to what otherwise might be so glaringly obvious as to be utterly ignorable. It has been in developing the capacity to slow down the intensity and speed with which a mind can organize an experience and notice “what else is here?” To always be willing to repeat to myself, as Wallace chants towards the end of his talk, “This is water. This is water.”
This is a task that has only gotten more difficult as more and more devices and means of technology have been born into this world to compete for our attention. That may not be true. And may, in fact, be some other crude interpretation of the present moment, meant to support unproductive assumptions about how much harder the world is for this and upcoming generations than it might have been for others. I think the state of the world, perhaps, signals otherwise. Whatever Wallace was talking about, whatever mechanism of being in the world solicited the pinnipedian bark and clap of an audience that was supposed to be smarter than that, supposedly well-bolstered by a liberal education meant to encourage critical and compassionate thinking about the world, it would seem the ability of the average individual to attend to the world around them continues to erode. This is not a call to acceptance or a perspectival relativism that would suggest all opinions and worldviews are valid. It is a call towards a kind of non-malicious curiosity about what makes others “other”, and what makes us “us” or me “me”, and a willingness to bring a more expansive and genuinely-bracketed kind of awareness to our interactions with the many real and imagined experiences we have over the course of a day, week, month, year, and a lifetime. Towards an attunement to the kind of small-n narcissism that so often seems to be the default setting of American culture and the difficult task of not assuming that because you’ve been practicing some sort of meditation or mindfulness practice for the better part of a decade, that you are somehow immune to this tendency, and therefore better than, the infinite expanse of others who have yet to ascend to your own modest tier of enlightenment and of watching for all the other pernicious little ways in which this kind of narcissistic self-aggrandizement and degradation of the other is capable of sneaking up on us. Or maybe the way in which it sneaks up is simply that you are a therapist and writer, aspiring to a kind of Wallace-like erudition, and pleased with the ease and facility with which you are able to diagnose some individual and societal malady. I’m not sure how any of us ever really escapes.
This task is, I think, ultimately impossible. But the pursuit of it is important. A group of attendees at an otherwise presumably austere and decorous event revealed just how difficult it can be, having been so consumed in the moment with their own delight in seeing a specific demographic smeared, that they forgot mere seconds before the Wallace had been sheepishly noting his own culpability of regressing into this petty and selfish mode of thinking about the world. This is water. As the title says, and Wallace closes his own address, I wish you way more than luck.
