When someone great is gone

So last time I blogged it was to wax effusive about my schoolgirl lit. crush on a certain Mr. David Foster Wallace. It was half in jest, half 100% serious (I seriously would have had a million of his babies if he had asked me to.) A few days ago I was re-reading it. In the passing of a month's time, the embers of my passion for DFW have, needless to say, cooled off a bit , and in retrospect I found the post's sprit to be a bit cloying and, erm, dorky. To employ some Infinite Jest argot, DFW probably would have gotten the howlin' fantods if he stumbled upon my post while Googling himself. I didn't want to give my future husband a case of the howling fantods. I decided to delete the aforementioned post BUT got occupied by something else. I'm glad I did not delete because now my story has some semblance of continuity.

The other night I received a text at about 3 in the morning from my friend Natalie telling me she was sorry about David Foster Wallace (note: he commit suicide this week at the age of 46.) She knew from my blogospheric ramblings that I wanted to not seriously (but seriously) have his babies. Before I even knew the details of what had happened, I had an immediate physiological response. The one where you feel like your stomach is a balloon that has just been sat on hard by a five year old boy. I knew instinctively what had gone down. And felt sick.

We go through life indifferent to about 90% of external stimulae so when a work of art ACTUALLY manages to penetrate it's effect is internal and irrevocable. A catalytic change takes place and we are reminded that (hooray) not everything leaves us feeling cold. We want to see more, hear more, and read more. A personally resonant piece of art can defeat isolation better than many interpersonal relationships can. This is because a work of art just plain old exists and doesn't have the ability to withdraw into itself or hide behind affectation. The resonant work of art touches us on the most naked plane (I feel like this should be read in a loopy Drew Barrymore voice.) It touches the parts of our psyche that defy intellectualiziation because they're so fucking primordial. It stirs up the psychic pulp.

It's a strange and distinct brand of loss -- the mourning of an artist. This is a person who I don't actually know (seperated as we are by a material work with it's very own life/history) yet he (perenially trapped in sad, austere, Times New Roman 11 point text like a fly in amber) has touched me on a more intimate plane than most people I do know in the formal sense. We shared inside jokes. He made me laugh. He made me think. I curled up next to him many a night and listened to him go on and on and on and on about crazy shit as diverse as the philosophy of tennis and avant garde film. I feel abandoned. It's an odd relationship -- that between the artist whose work is disseminated en masse to the public, and the faceless consumer whom said work manages to actually touch on a really important defenseless level. From the artist's perspective the fans must glom together into a nameless faceless cloud. These individual admirers all feel connected to him/her and romanticize the artist to be the messianic "one who knows" -- the eye of the proverbial hurricane.

This must be absolutely daunting and damaging to anyone with even the slightest case of self-awareness/self-doubt (artists are historically hyper self-aware and hyper self-doubting. DFW was hyper hyper hyper both.) Imagine millions of people feeling deeply connected to you. It's beautiful/absolutely terrifying/a total mindfuck. Although chances are I never would have actually met Mr. F Wallace I feel devastated that our dialogue (one-sided as it may have been) had to end on such tragic terms. Sad that he couldn't defeat isolation for himself. Sad that so many people (me included) recognized a uniquely ripe mind and like flies to a juicy peach probably sucked it dry -- overwhelmed it with pressure. Or maybe his mind just exhausted itself. Perhaps the true plight of the artist, after all ,is that making so many people feel as if they are less alone leaves him/her just that -- alone.
---- mar