I am here.
A hyper-intelligent adolescent whose scientific understanding of the world is betrayed by his lack of life experience. Undercurrents appear overhead, love is something only movies talk about, and whatever things the universe can’t articulate itself our hero can’t even begin to imagine.
I’ve not dedicated much time to David Foster Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, The Pale King and The Broom of the System are the biggies I’ve read.
There’s Infinite Jest, but I got about halfway through and wanted to read some other books. I’ve also listened to him reading his porn essay, Big Red Son, and his commencement speech, This is Water. But I’ve not read the other Lobster essays; nor have I examined Oblivion or The Girl with the Curious Hair.
I like his work broadly speaking, but I think the emotional detail is lacking. I think it prevented him from producing works like Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and pretty much every book Norman Mailer wrote. So Wallace had neither emotional nudity or a kind of progressive misogynism.
For example: When I was in high school I had a neighbour called Melissa whose breasts were so large she had to wear a back-brace whenever she went out. (There’s no evidence she didn’t have to wear it everywhere.) I had a lot of pluralistic ignorance about Melissa’s boobs: I thought everybody was consciously avoiding them when they were actually trying their damnedest to get a peep at them, even her parents. I day by day desexualized the boobs. They were an incumbrance, I knew this. She’d have chronic back problems for the forseeable future if she didn’t get them reduced. Like, a lot. But despite my efforts I was stricken by carnal undercurrents which sought to destroy my world, and hers. But in late March a family bought the house on the other side of Melissa’s parents’ home, and funnily enough their daughter Jackie had the same problem Melissa had. And her boobs were twice as big as Melissa’s and I expected some kind of boob-turf-war to commence but what happened was they bonded over their cleavage (as my Dad said) and became too-big-boob-buddies (as my Mom said). I know this because they always caught the bus together.
The opaque bureaucracy of long-winded sentences and the crushing oncoming boredom of being unconnected. Because it is boring being unconnected; having been to an English boarding school I speak from experience. In other words, the narrator goes to great lengths to sympathize with women whose breasts are galactic. Except the fumes of male chauvinism are strong—and the reader’s quandary is whether he’s being misogynistic or describing naïvely what misogynism is and not wanting to encapsulate it (even if and when he does).
I have a fiction professor called Henrietta Papadimitirou. On the days on which she intimates I might actually have a low IQ and shouldn’t be engaged in any sort of higher education, I show her respect. Except deep down I’d like to brain her with one of her many needless multiple translations of the same French novel.
But on Henrietta’s shelf also is a paperback copy of Infinite Jest with colour-coded notes sticking out from every other page. Looking at this when I should be looking at her during one of our one-on-one tutorials I am the most intimidated by a woman I’ve ever been in my life. Because she’s not only read the entire book and the footnotes but also made notes on the book and on the footnotes to what I assume must be her profit. Then there’s a quasi-erotic part of me which has to do with the connection between my intelligence and my virility which constantly tells me she hasn’t actually read the book and that what she did was just stick notes into random pages because she thought it’d make her look smart.
Any analysis of the narrator’s work, Henrietta maintains, is feckless because postmodern writing is engaged in self-analysis and cannot be analyzed by any third party therefore. So what the fuck am I reading for?
Infinite Jest makes everything worse because it’s a book written by a heterosexual man that makes me want to be gay. Indeed, this is something I haven’t told Henrietta: I had my first gay kiss at a bingo night.
(I haven’t told my girlfriend this, but it’s true.) I used to work for the Happy Bingo company in Camber Sands and would tell whatever hapless octogenarians who wandered into my vicinity how they filmed an old Doctor Who serial nearby and struggled to retrieve a Dalek prop from the beach when an idea put forward by the BBC Effects Department went disastrously wrong. I’d also explain how when I chose each bingo number, I was actually doing an impossible thing. Because the concept of a single random number doesn’t make any sense; not unless you’re discussing at length the methods by which it was chosen. Because even random number generators (which are what the big boys in the bingo business use) can only produce via processes resembling subatomic particles in quantum mechanics pseudo-random numbers, and not actually random numbers because that doesn’t mean anything in the abstract science of mathematics.
As far as the gay kiss is concerned, I read Infinite Jest and thought I was gay so I decided to put it to the test. I flirted with one of the bingo ushers and asked him if he wanted to get off. Which he did. We started making out and within three seconds I’d proven to myself scientifically I wasn’t gay. In recent years I’ve desperately tried to find out what his name was so I can apologize to him. But so far I’ve been unsuccessful.
I repeat: A hyper-intelligent adolescent whose scientific understanding of the world is betrayed by his lack of life experience. In other words, the cogito ergo sum of joyless children I see riding analogue scooters through the city. Their parents behind them, disinterested and glued to a screen which does not love them, but profits from them.
Undercurrents appear overhead, love is something only movies talk about, and whatever things the universe can’t articulate itself our hero can’t even begin to imagine. In other words, foreplay has to be pornographic and visual. I wonder how many kids today know what it’s like to be carnally unsatisfied and yet totally committed to being tender to the extent that all Western hypocrisy melts away.
We watch movies which desperately want us to know that we are all equal—but looking around the cinema, if you can even afford a ticket these days, the disconnect between the movie’s message to your reality and your actual reality is startling and can only point towards creative forces who keep their braincells in bank accounts, extracting a little from an ATM every time they need to communicate with the person making their milkshake.
And something I’ve noticed about religious and/or spiritual people: Buddhists will tell you the Buddha is exemplary, and that one should strive to be like him: a man who rejected his wealth and lived on hemp seeds for well over a decade in a successful attempt to achieve enlightenment. In contrast, I doubt there’re any Christians who’d say openly, “I want what Jesus had.” Because today the mysteries of time and space are more opaque than usual.
Buddhists will tell you there’s nothing in the universe pointing to an asterix at the bottom of the page explaining the real reason you can’t bring yourself to turn off your smartphone. It is completely and utterly unutterable. But if there was anything silent about ten people staring into their phones, they’d be able to hear you if you shouted for help, or started crying because your day had been unbearably awful or because you couldn’t stand the sight of your own two feet anymore. But they cannot hear you. Their imaginations are so preoccupied with noise that not even extraterrestrial messages could break through asking for the best place to land the saucer.
The menstrual cycle is an example of an infradian rhythm: a repeated biological cycle of noteworthy duration. There’re too many of these to describe in detail; but all I will say is Marvel and Disney seem intent on breaking them. Movies of old were the new holy places where silence prevailed. It’s not inaccurate to say there’s a lot of screaming in Hellraiser, but during that 93 minute duration I’m transported because what noise there was hithero surrounding me has vanished and I am in Clive Barker’s world; I am in Alex Cox’s world; I am in Lynne Ramsay’s world. (I am there.)
(But today I am here.) And despite the consistency in length between a film like Lawrence of Arabia (227 minutes) and a film like Zach Snyder’s Justice League (242 minutes), I sincerely doubt the non-secular testicles of modern audiences, and whether they’d have the meekness to submit themselves to the gothic eroticism of The Saragossa Manuscript (182 minutes) or the mystical non-events of Stalker (181 minutes). I say this because there is a difference between the optic mandatory style of today’s popular movies and the submissive-and-totally-stretched-out-time of some of the more avant-garde films of old. Whereas the first can’t take an interest in anything because it’s too busy illustrating a dude in spandex suspended by wires against a green screen transported via the “art” of compositing and weightless animation to that oddly-nameless part of the planet Earth featured in movies where it’s okay to commit genocide on a massive scale, the second is trying so hard to be transcendent without being dictatorial that it ends up swaying crazily between these two poles despite how both poles are equally cold and inhospitable but wholly fascinating in a way that Joe and Anthony Russo (of Avengers fame) are incapable of understanding. In other words there comes a time during every civilization, when the colosseum is filled with battling ships or when people are literally getting turned into soap, when it’s no longer just a matter of taste.
It is boring being unconnected. But the ticking clock and the orgasm are not so detached from one another. Fairground rides persist because of their finitude. They do not last forever and neither would you want them to. Their destinies are as pithy as ours are.
And sunlight shouts between a small quatrain of glass anchored in my front door.
I am here.
