On the Voice

I love David Foster Wallace. I think of him as a friend, a mentor - he's an agriculturist - plowing new ground, and planting 5 seeds where there used to be only one. This is a hard metaphor to continue, but anyone who's read him knows that his gift was to see in a way that reminded us that we also see, but often don't make a pastiche with our seeing. He was uncensored in ways that could be both unnecessarily mean and unbelievably generous. His graduation address - I hate the word "commencement" as it lets too many shitty speakers point out the word means beginning, not ending - is amazing. If you teach, you have to listen to an exorbitant amount of these things - we used to actually play "Commencement Speech Bingo," in order to both stomach and benefit from the cliches. Anyhow, his speech at Kenyon College is the single best graduation speech I've ever heard - I used to be able to find it on the internet, but since it's been published I've had a harder time.

Anyhow, today I found all this new stuff - apparently there's a wonderful site called dfwaudioproject.org. And I've become very torn while listening to it. I thought I'd literally read every word and listened to every recorded word that had been released. I'm not usually into that kind of thing - I only care about a handful of writers actual lives. But I read Infinite Jest when I was 21-22 and it has been the most meaningful experience of my literary life - what listening to the Concerto De Aranjuez by Jaoquin Rodrigo was to my musical life or reading Heidegger was to my philosophical life. That experience was so powerful that it not only made me care about DFW's art, but it forever complicated all arguments about the distinction between artist and art. In this instance, I could not and did not want to separate the creator from the created. I tried to find everything I could. I listened to every interview on KCRW's show Bookworm by the incomparable interviewer Michael Silverblatt, and I subscribed to both Harper's and the New Yorker because he had recently been published in both.

So even now as I'm typing, I'm listening - pretty much guaranteeing that this post will be a bit incoherent. But hearing his voice is also what pushes this post forward - makes me both incredibly sad and nostalgic and impossibly hopeful - hopeful for that which cannot come, at least not for much longer. In some bizarre way it feels like spending one more night with a girlfriend after breaking up - I'm not sure that is the best analogy or if it really makes much sense.

So the voice - what is it about the voice? Most philosophical writings that have influenced me have spent many pages and multisyllabic words convincing me that it's wrong to assign the voice more metaphysical content (reality) than the written word. But this argument has never felt correct to me, if I'm honest. I can't imagine someone saying that a written score is as "real" as the performance of a musical piece. Okay, so I wish that was fair. But it's clearly not. There's no such thing as a musical score that was not meant to be played. Certainly though lots of written pieces were never intended to be spoken. Okay, so what is it about the voice?

Well, I can say this - I don't have this reaction to every voice. I've often said that DFW is the great example of a genius who I also find brilliant when he discusses his art. The antithesis to this is David Lynch. Lynch is amazing on film - in an interview he's boring, often talking about transcendental meditation and never talking about how the fuck Robert Blake called himself in Lost Highway and why he put that scene in the movie and how he knew it would be so incredibly creepy and basically redeem a movie that I ultimately don't like that much. I think M. Drive is the better version (pardon that terminology) of Lost Highway.

Okay so back to my question - his voice. What I like about it I think is that there is an incredible sincerity and fear - a nervousness brought about by a hyperawareness. And in those moments I feel less alone - I see and hear a fellow traveler - a person that reminds me, like all great artist, that you are not alone. I believe it was Lily Tomlin who said - we are all in this together, by ourselves. Usually the last part is obvious - tonight, listening to these interviews, so is the first part. So I say thanks to a person who will never read this or hear me say anything.