Poem: In Memory of David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 - September 12, 2008)

MORS FINIS NON EST (WHY WALLACE WROTE SUCH GOOD BOOKS)

"What do you say if you just shouted 'Victory for the Forces
of Democratic Freedom!' right when you came?"
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-David Foster Wallace

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaThat's the first sentence
you remember after hearing the news, of all the things he wrote
that stuck with you, your friend having just called from upstairs
with the headline when (of every question he'd asked
in his sadness and in his jest) you remember it. And you keep it
to yourself, your recollection of that question, as your friend reads
the article, gives you what a man on TV would call the few details
so far to "come out," to "emerge," as though they were felons
(the details) pinned in the woods before spotlights and pistols
and forced to surrender themselves and speak. What you wonder
is what he would do with it, this question coming to you
when it did, right before you understood, "got it," and the deluge
hit, you finally believing the fact you had met with total
disbelief. This paralysis that constricts in paralysis,
he'd see it first: your immobility before the whats and whys
and hows of this loss, and the more petty terror you feel, trapped
in the embarrassment of getting hung up on this one chance
line.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaIn Wallace's poem
the felons would refuse to surrender, submitting
in their silence to oblivion instead. At most
they'd be lovers who puzzled their pursuers
with the sound they made when they made
love, the senseless victory
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaathey cried out for. Your friend
would call down in the end from upstairs. What
do you say?


We want the devil to be right. "Time and place can't change
the brain," is Satan's saying, the mind and self the brain contains
capable of making hell heaven and heaven hell. Wallace's genius
is this: his sentences prove the devil's vision of mind false
and true. This is more than a paradox or a game
or "masturbation." This is our burden. For though the mind possesses
the unclassifiable appendage of its own noisy void (the hand
and mouth and wing-like thing no community can clothe)
it still stretches flat for screening chatter-filled films, for light
cast so seductively through a celluloid-shouted "Enjoy!"
that not a single synapse dares to stray. This is why to speak
of a language is to speak of a way of death. It's why
in each ascent for the apical the ladders of our ideas leave us
stranded on the ledge of what we scaled, formulating plans
in the dirt and grieving scruffy and mad and singed beneath
these season-crushed skies. Many of us decide to climb our palms raw
against the mountain's sheer face, as though the rocks we cling to
are the features of our master's looking, suffocated by a surface
of stone. While those of us who quit the climb turn our eyes
closed instead or open on that final step that falls on nothing
but its fall. We want death to not be the end. And
it isn't. Death comes after. The end is first, within us from the start,
invisible and un-kindled except where it turns to spirals
all the straight lines we limn, the paths we draft in answer to
the "how do" and "how should" of the lives we fill with life.


aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaHe ended like this. Not
another word. No more books. Behold

the man. Where he stood. Then
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadidn't. Where my friend read
his wife found him. I wonder what
he would have done. Which actions would he have decided to remain
undecided on? Hearing the news. This man who ogled endlessly
the infinity of the self, its escapes and cages, the closest he ever came
to saying "No" being a measured rejection of the spectacle's
relief, declining to be a part of it, even
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas a witness, what
would he have said, right now, "Look," or "Look
away"?



To download a PDF version of the poem click here.