atara
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2010
- Messages
- 2,788
Hell is a place you shouldn't go. You are always introduced to it while it is being explained to you why you shouldn't go there. You have heard it described to you like this: burning, painful, fire, bugs, pain, suffering, boredom, and suicide. In Infinite Jest, you are first shown the perspective of a teenager who does not recognize anything that is good in the people around them. He thinks he understands their formal descriptions while at the same time thinking he is describing a totally boring and lifeless process. And he opens his mouth to try to talk to them and they attack him and hold him down and say he is diseased. And this is the first thing we see, but it is actually the temporally final part of the story. So the truth is that the story is dead when it is given to us. We already know how it ends. But of course we look anyway, because we don't even recognize that.
And after Wallace tricked us into looking he showed us the events that led up to this point. He showed them in a disordered fashion which he thought represented a logical progression, which was sort of ugly, but it made us remember them at the right times, which was helpful. And the first thing we are shown is that we are almost totally represented that the boy whose speech has been rejected is nonetheless very good at speaking, and he in fact defeats a conversationalist in talking many times, but, strangely, unfortunately, it seems like this is what he thinks a conversation represents. And one of the next things we are shown is a man who falls asleep and dies watching a movie.
But at multiple points in the book it seems like the logical progression of the story is being interrupted by a strange man named Marathe. He is a Quebecois rebel whose own awful terrorist friends cut his legs off and made him live in a wheelchair. And he is selling out his friends and running away to the FBI. He is doing it because he once rolled his wheelchair down a hill and saved the life of a woman who was being run into by a train. He declares that he chose it, accepts his choice, respects it and encourages it. In doing so he makes it look beautiful.
We see that Marathe has chosen to love and we recognize that despite the fact that he has sold out his friends, and, as we start to recognize America's multiple destructive failings in the story, that he has sold out his friends to the worst and most awful nation on Earth, he is still made happy by the fact that he has chosen to love. But David Foster Wallace doesn't really show us much of Marathe because he hasn't seen much of him. I've seen plenty of it and I'd like to talk more about it, but I'm not here to do that. Marathe, though, is sort of great, even though he is very much unlike me: I enjoy his positive characteristics and not his negative ones, also by choosing.
And we also see Orin who uses women, and he uses women to get away from the fact that he had hurt one by leaving her when she needed him most, and he ends up in a hell of his own choosing, because he is afraid of insects and gets covered in them. And we might compare the insects to sexually transmitted diseases, and remark on it because it is meaningful to us that we shouldn't run around on our lovers and if we do then we might get bad ones.
And we also see many other people on drugs and in fights and wars and who do stupid things at work and get flung up and down and get hit by a barrel. It's kind of funny. But at the end it seems like everything is starting to fall apart. The people in the story have broken off and gone into different places. We are no longer shown images of people spending time together and we instead see them separated, but Don Gately lays in his bed after having tried to save a friend who ran away from him and he is near-fatally wounded. But he believes in his friends and he believes in the people who loved him and he believes in ghosts and he doesn't at all want the drug. He even rejects it when a brilliant doctor comes into the room and tries to give it to him.
And we can now see that the doctor who fell asleep in his chair and died watching InterLace Entertainment videos looks very much now like the doctor who is trying to give Don Gately a thing which had previously hurt him very severely. He has not properly attended to his patient. But Don Gately loves God, or may I say Brahma, as something higher even though he is rightly and correctly suspicious of the notion of God as a "Father". Because Gately recognizes what his own father has done to him and understands that fathers are not obviously or directly good, but I want to say that they are good when they do good. My father was great and when his greatness appeared it was not because he was only my father, but also it happened also because he did many other things for me. Wallace might, if he had recognized it well, call this coming-about-together logia.
But David Foster Wallace gave us a miracle in the form of Don Gately. Wittgenstein told me that a miracle is a sacred gesture. And it was the best damn thing he could do to save us, was to show us a man, who, abandoned by everyone and unable to see anything holy, nonetheless believes in it. And he endures pain and doesn't go back to his worst moments. He leaves it alone.
Because Wallace gave us a lot of words. And after he gave us a lot of words, at the very end, he gave us a story he himself made up. And we should understand that Wallace has started with the temporal end of the story and given us the logical end of the story, and he is really, honestly, as a 973-page literal goddamned Infinite Jest, asking us which one we like better. And do you know what story he made up? He used all the science and logic he knew and told us the worst most despicable thing he could imagine, because he was sort of joking in a way by saying that he was repeating us. And by calling it an Infinite Jest he asked us to reject it in ourselves.
Because what I know now, that David Foster Wallace did not know when he wrote the book, is this: if you listen to this man too much, you will end up just like him. Irony hates itself. It hates itself and it dies.
Such as my bold pronouncement.
And after Wallace tricked us into looking he showed us the events that led up to this point. He showed them in a disordered fashion which he thought represented a logical progression, which was sort of ugly, but it made us remember them at the right times, which was helpful. And the first thing we are shown is that we are almost totally represented that the boy whose speech has been rejected is nonetheless very good at speaking, and he in fact defeats a conversationalist in talking many times, but, strangely, unfortunately, it seems like this is what he thinks a conversation represents. And one of the next things we are shown is a man who falls asleep and dies watching a movie.
But at multiple points in the book it seems like the logical progression of the story is being interrupted by a strange man named Marathe. He is a Quebecois rebel whose own awful terrorist friends cut his legs off and made him live in a wheelchair. And he is selling out his friends and running away to the FBI. He is doing it because he once rolled his wheelchair down a hill and saved the life of a woman who was being run into by a train. He declares that he chose it, accepts his choice, respects it and encourages it. In doing so he makes it look beautiful.
We see that Marathe has chosen to love and we recognize that despite the fact that he has sold out his friends, and, as we start to recognize America's multiple destructive failings in the story, that he has sold out his friends to the worst and most awful nation on Earth, he is still made happy by the fact that he has chosen to love. But David Foster Wallace doesn't really show us much of Marathe because he hasn't seen much of him. I've seen plenty of it and I'd like to talk more about it, but I'm not here to do that. Marathe, though, is sort of great, even though he is very much unlike me: I enjoy his positive characteristics and not his negative ones, also by choosing.
And we also see Orin who uses women, and he uses women to get away from the fact that he had hurt one by leaving her when she needed him most, and he ends up in a hell of his own choosing, because he is afraid of insects and gets covered in them. And we might compare the insects to sexually transmitted diseases, and remark on it because it is meaningful to us that we shouldn't run around on our lovers and if we do then we might get bad ones.
And we also see many other people on drugs and in fights and wars and who do stupid things at work and get flung up and down and get hit by a barrel. It's kind of funny. But at the end it seems like everything is starting to fall apart. The people in the story have broken off and gone into different places. We are no longer shown images of people spending time together and we instead see them separated, but Don Gately lays in his bed after having tried to save a friend who ran away from him and he is near-fatally wounded. But he believes in his friends and he believes in the people who loved him and he believes in ghosts and he doesn't at all want the drug. He even rejects it when a brilliant doctor comes into the room and tries to give it to him.
And we can now see that the doctor who fell asleep in his chair and died watching InterLace Entertainment videos looks very much now like the doctor who is trying to give Don Gately a thing which had previously hurt him very severely. He has not properly attended to his patient. But Don Gately loves God, or may I say Brahma, as something higher even though he is rightly and correctly suspicious of the notion of God as a "Father". Because Gately recognizes what his own father has done to him and understands that fathers are not obviously or directly good, but I want to say that they are good when they do good. My father was great and when his greatness appeared it was not because he was only my father, but also it happened also because he did many other things for me. Wallace might, if he had recognized it well, call this coming-about-together logia.
But David Foster Wallace gave us a miracle in the form of Don Gately. Wittgenstein told me that a miracle is a sacred gesture. And it was the best damn thing he could do to save us, was to show us a man, who, abandoned by everyone and unable to see anything holy, nonetheless believes in it. And he endures pain and doesn't go back to his worst moments. He leaves it alone.
Because Wallace gave us a lot of words. And after he gave us a lot of words, at the very end, he gave us a story he himself made up. And we should understand that Wallace has started with the temporal end of the story and given us the logical end of the story, and he is really, honestly, as a 973-page literal goddamned Infinite Jest, asking us which one we like better. And do you know what story he made up? He used all the science and logic he knew and told us the worst most despicable thing he could imagine, because he was sort of joking in a way by saying that he was repeating us. And by calling it an Infinite Jest he asked us to reject it in ourselves.
Because what I know now, that David Foster Wallace did not know when he wrote the book, is this: if you listen to this man too much, you will end up just like him. Irony hates itself. It hates itself and it dies.
Such as my bold pronouncement.
