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Week 2
What he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse of mirrors of fear
05.05.11 | Aaron Riccio | Permalink | Comments Off on What he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse of mirrors of fear

Skipping briefly ahead to the novella-length §22, we spend time with a first-person narrator who is suddenly struck by his ability to “double”; that is, to not only perceive the world around him, but to be aware of his own participation in that activity, of his choosing to do so. We’ll save deeper discussion of this for the upcoming weeks, but there’s a crucial observation on p. 180 that links the boredom of rote exams to the importance of “the ability to choose what one concentrates on versus ignoring” and which pillories the use of marijuana, an active choice that leads to a passive mental state. Here’s the frightening part: is there a connection, then, between being aware and being bored? That is, does the very act of exerting ourselves to be present exhaust us to the point of being miserable in that present? I hate to consider it, given Wallace’s self-awareness and eventual suicide, but can one know too much (i.e., the curse of the Tree of Knowledge)?

Let’s drop back, then, to the subject of this week’s title: the unlucky §13 protagonist, a k a, The Sweater: “As a child, he’d always been a heavy sweater. he had sweated a lot when playing sports or when it was hot, but it didn’t especially bother him.” That innocence, that “something particular about him” is soon lost, however: “In his seventeenth year, though, it started to bother him; he became self-conscious about the sweating thing.” Mirrors (and the “doubling” they suggest) begin to pop up; our hero begins to find himself influenced not by his own thoughts, but by his thoughts regarding other people’s thoughts — the reflections of his peers upon himself. (This is a common theme of many of the stories in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, particularly regarding the adjective “hideous,” a totally relational term that means nothing without comparators.) Whereas he was fine before, it is his awareness of his own place in context to others that is so self-shattering. Note, too, that this “didn’t happen in private, at home in his room, reading — in his room with the door closed it often didn’t even occur to him” and that his inability to verify the appearance he dreads — “he could never get a real attack to happen when he wanted it to, only when he totally, totally did not” — is what causes him to assume the worst.

It is here that he sucks himself into that common David Foster Wallace nightmare: the self-fulfilling cycle. (No surprise to hear that Adult World (I) and (II) were intended as parts of The Pale King: those stories focus on a woman so concerned with giving a proper blow-job that she becomes incapable of giving a proper blow-job; meanwhile, her husband becomes so obsessed with self-pleasure that he becomes incapable of receiving pleasure.) The Sweater attempts to become “unself-conscious” — mindlessness at its most literal — and instead ends up infecting his subconscious: “Without letting himself be wholly aware of it, he had started hurrying a little bit between periods to get to the next class early enough that he wouldn’t get stuck in a desk by a radiator, which was hot enough to jump-start a sweat.” He is doomed by consciousness, and again, Wallace warns us that while we are born to repress certain truths, the expenditure of psychic energy — i.e., focused awareness — allows it to break free. And once free, you cannot “re-repress” it; it cannot be shaken: “Consciousness just doesn’t work this way.” As this circular trap pinches shut around him, he has gotten to a point at which he is trying “to keep from conscious thought as much as possible without being wholly aware of why he was doing this.”

[If you’d like to go out on a limb here — and I’d argue that there’s little point in blogging a book into the collective unconscious (pun intended) unless you intend to do just that — then we could loop this closed system back to the ambiguous conclusion of §10, which defines things as closed (bad) and worlds as unclosed (good). Facts/things are dangerous in that they limit us; worlds/words are wonderful in that they are open to exploration/interpretation.]

The more we enter and participate with the world around us, the harder it becomes to no longer care what others think about us. For instance, when I was bullied in elementary school and felt alone, it was easy to shut out a world that seemed to reject me, but when I started feeling comfortable enough in college to have a reputation, a set of responsibilities, it was impossible for me to not care. And so the Sweater “absorbs” himself in other activities — similar to the distraction technique in which one pinches themselves to temporarily shut out the persisting itch of a mosquito bite — in an attempt to blot his consciousness and unconsciousness, though the “greebles” of awareness persist in him perspiring. Wallace ends with a bleakly hopeful premise: that although the Sweater’s condition has been provoked, arguably, by his doubling, it is actually “his true self trying to leak out,” and that the only cure or balance for awareness may be acceptance.
Week 1
When you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all
04.27.11 | Aaron Riccio | Permalink | Comments Off on When you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all

If we are what we eat, then we are also what we read (or devour, in the case of David Foster Wallace), and so it is that §1, which only seems to be a simple (but rich) list of descriptions, dictates what we can expect of The Pale King, and what we can expect The Pale King to do to us. This opening is a shell-game of perspectives, far more than “coins of sunlight” sparkling on a “tobacco-brown river.” It is, almost immediately, a series of contradictions, for while it is a “very old land” shaped with “quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs,” it is also a place with a singular moment in which “an arrow of starlings [fire] from the windbreak’s thatch,” and a place newly anointed with “dew that stays where it is and steams all day.” It is an “untilled” place, but it is processed enough to look like “flannel plains.”

The ground from above is “blacktop graphs,” the sky from below is “ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow” (and thereby the two never touch). From where you stand (note the second-person intrusion, the reader joining the author), things are defined and definite: “insects all business all the time.” And yet, down the road from where you find “Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew,” we have the unshaped: “The horizon trembling, shapeless.” In a moment, we will join Claude Sylvanshine en-route to Peoria via plane (§2); we shall then eavesdrop on two GS-9s in their “mindless monochrome drive up to Region HQ in Joliet” (§3); catch up on some IRS-related news (§4); flashback with Leonard Stecyk (§5), Lane A. Dean Jr. (§6), and Thomas Bondurant (§7); sit for a spell in a trailer park with Toni Ware and her mother “abroad again in endless night” (§8); and catch up with “the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona” (§9), and in this notably un-annular way, we will stress the kicker of that opening paragraph, which states that for all that we may see, experience, or be, “We are all of us brothers.”

Anything can happen when we play with perspective in this fashion: the worms baked (and then unbaked) in the earth each day will constantly make new shapes in the ground; the “core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A – L to beyond.” The word “illiterate,” repeated with the frequency of a oscillating propeller, can cease to mean anything and yet still be lovely in itself. So as we travel, let us pay closer attention to the things we do share in common with one another — the worms themselves, and not the shapes they temporarily make up — and consider the twins of entertainment and boredom that we so often use in casual conversation to connect us. Let old stalwarts like “How ’bout them Yankees?” or “Lovely weather today, no?” give way to the underlying mindlessness they represent in our “safe” interactions; as Wallace puts it: “The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not” and “The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception’s objects.”

So what is it that we all have in common? What it is that Wallace wants to show us as he moves from the aerial overview to a slow decent (“mainly a heightening of the specificity of what lay below”) toward a parking lot, “Each car not only parked by a different human individual but conceived, designed, assembled from parts each one of which was designed and made, transported, sold, financed, purchased, and insured by human standards, each with life stories and self-concepts that all fit together into a larger pattern of facts.” If it is the anxiety that comes with being unable to recognize ourselves (or ourselves in others, thereby leading to distrust), then let us listen to these fears; let us see them and in seeing them, be unafraid.

The unnamed GS-9 makes me worried that others will not understand me. Frederick Blumquist makes me worried that no-one will notice that I am gone. Leonard Stecyk makes me worried that I will never be good enough, and worried that, in realizing this, I will never really try to be good enough. Lane A. Dean Jr. makes me worried that I am not a good person, simply because I worry that I may not be a good person. (He worries that “He might not even know his own heart or be able to read and know himself.”) Additionally, worried that I, who have only rarely been in love, might have “no earthly idea what love is.” Worried that, like Toni Ware, I have become so accustomed to life the way it is that I have limited myself from what might or should be. Worried, like Sylvanshine, that man is nothing more than “the exact pocket of space that he displaces,” and terrified, like Wallace, that there is “some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us (whether or not we’re consciously aware of it) spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least feeling with our full attention.” But hopeful, too, in that we are all brothers, and that there is more than mere distraction. That as I stand here, in the dew-stricken pasture, affirming that everything is affixed, there lies change — or the potential for change — down the horizon, where none of us can entirely see.

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Week 2

What he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse of mirrors of fear

Week 1

When you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all

Pale Spring

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