The New Genius and The Old Problems by Yonza the Barbarian

No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward – we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

- DFW, Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness

I chose this epigraph not so much for its profundity, but for the fact that it was the shortest DFW quote that I could responsibly crop from the page without doing his thought stream injustice (and I wouldn’t dare to it injustice because then I would be forced to rectify it with footnotes (and maybe even footnotes to those footnotes).). But at least I get a chance to honor the great David Foster Wallace, who, in my meager reading of him, I’ve come to appreciate as a genius. But his genius isn’t the type of genius we normally attribute to writers or artists or musicians. It is a new genius, a genius, which while not identical, is much more closely related to that of great mathematicians or economists or physicists or philosophers. It was Socrates, as attributed to him in Plato’s Apology, who said that the poets don’t even know what their writing means. And he’s got something there: the process of writing, as is true with the major disciplines subsumed under the heading of ‘arts,’ comes more from inspiration than from deduction or calculation, and so the rudimentary machinations of art-creation are hidden under the tarp of the unconscious. It is the same as the graceful contortions of an athlete’s body during a high-pressure play: if you were to ask him how or even what exactly he did, he would not be able to give you a very detailed or satisfactory answer. So many minute movements and unconscious calculations go on in an athletes mind there is no way all of it is within the breadth of awareness. And the same with the geniuses of art: the timeless complexity of great works is too much for an artist to be aware of.

But DFW is a new type of genius. He is a genius not by inspiration, but by overwhelming awareness; awareness of the world, awareness facts, awareness of knowledge, but most important of all, awareness of his own self, his own cognitive mechanisms and buried motivations. He was a car with the hood ripped right off, and he could see inside: the battery, the motor, the pistons, the poppet valves, all revealed to inspect as well as anyone could inspect the road ahead of them. And with the engine revealed, DFW had access to stuff that most of us don’t or only get access to with exhausting introspection. This is why DFW uses so many footnotes; a footnote is a whisper of our unconscious, a tangential thread that is just barely thick enough to register, but which we feel moderately obliged to include in an argument. But DFW did not see threads; he saw webs! He saw each diverging thought and counterargument and where it led to and the responses to all that and so on and so forth. And they didn’t whisper from his unconscious, they spoke with a firm voice. DFW could not ignore them. When we see a red light flash in that glassed off control area above our dashboard as if there might be a problem, we might often ignore it, thinking it is no big deal But if we could see the light AND see that the engine was smoking, then we couldn’t ignore it. DFW always saw the engine, and it was always smoking.

The New Genius of DFW does not make him superhuman, of course. The footnotes, while revealing a certain cognitive perspicuity, can be a burden to read: linearity is good unless the very tangent the footnote tackles happens to be especially revealing to the reader, for example, if the reader notices a hole in DFW’s argument, then looking for a footnote will usually do a fine job of patching it up. For me, the footnotes are not necessary reading. They are optional. And when read that way it makes some of DFW’s writings less of a struggle to read, or at least, it isolates the struggles to looking up words in the dictionary.

Now I must admit, DFW’s suicide last Friday came as a surprise to me. I don’t know why, but I thought of him as a haughty but happy-go-lucky person. So let me do a little DFWing and try to figure out why I thought of him that way: he’s a writer (low pressure), teacher (directly contributes to others well being), he has money (McArthur genius award: $500,000), gets to investigate lots of interesting things (see Big Red Son), good weather (Claremont, California). Seems pretty good. But most of all, what made me envision his temperament this way, was the fact that his writing lacked the despair-factor that makes it so unsurprising when a writer commits suicide or resorts to alcoholism. Write a book about being impotent in the face of true love, and when you off yourself f I’ll say, “sad, but it figures.” But DFW rarely came off as despairing; he came off as a smart-alecky jokester that was against taking anything too seriously. In fact, one of the few things he did seem to take seriously was the lack of seriousness in writing today (see DFW’s essay Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky starting at the quotation from The Idiot). For me, it seemed (and perhaps still seems) like the key to a totally fulfilling and contentful life: being creative and not taking things too seriously. If you have those two abilities in life, I thought/think, you’re golden. But against my conjecture came the cold, impregnable wall of empiricism: he hanged himself. He wasn’t happy. And hanging, by the way, also seemed to me like a very un-DFWish way to off yourself. I feel like he would be the first to criticize how trite and melodramatic hanging is. There are plenty of bridges and tall buildings: if you really hate the world that much why put in the effort to make a neuse? And where did he hang from, anyway? I’m thinking now, and I can’t think of anyplace around my house that would make a nice hangman gallows? Maybe he had a deck?

But when this guy, this New Genius, who I thought was happy-go-lucky, killed himself it made me think about something – all these geniuses, artists, these greats, these idols with whose virtues and ideals and lifestyles so many people try or wish to emulate, whose paths we praise as noble and whose experience we describe as great or fulfilling – that all these people are not happier than we are. How many suicides and alcoholics and drug addicts do we have to see before we realize the mundane life, quality-wise, is not much different from the aggrandized, “noble” life of the artist? We all want to believe that their path is the greatest for some reason, that starving for a passion is somehow more respectable than the dreary alternatives.

Here is the fight song for that ideal -- the poem Roll the Dice by Bukowski:

if you’re going to try,

go all the way.
otherwise,

don’t even start.
if you’re going to try,

go all the way.

this could mean losing girlfriends,

wives, relatives, jobs

andmaybe your mind.

go all the way.

it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.

it could mean freezing on apark bench.

it could mean jail,

it could mean

derision,mockery,isolation.

isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of yourendurance,

of how much you really want to

do it.
and you’ll do it

despite rejection and the worst odds

and it will be better than

anything elseyou can imagine.
if you’re going to try,

go all the way.

there is no other feeling like that.
you will be alone with the gods

and the nights will flame with fire.

do it, do it, do it.do it.
all the way

all the way.

you will ride life straight toperfect laughter,

its the only good fightthere is.

The last line gets me every time: “It’s the only good fight there is.” I want to cheer for it. I want to say ‘yes’ and go out and live the miserly life of an unrecognized poet, and suffer, and “be alone with the gods.” And more than this, is that second order desire: the desire to believe that it is the only good fight. But I don’t believe that, no matter how much I desire to. Or, let me rephrase. It’s not that I don’t believe it, but the way in which I believe it is not straightforward, and it changes from day-to-day and hour-to-hour. Sometimes I become disheartened, and the sense in which I believe it is not-at-all. Take this: the epithet on Bukowski’s gravestone: “Don’t Try.” Of all the ways to throw my mind into a confusion! And on a gravestone, no less: how can you argue with that? So which one is it, Bukowski? And why so serious, DFW? Where do I want to go? Which side of the door am I on?