[CC licensed image by darkpatator]
Eighteen months ago– a day after his suicide– I packed up every David Foster Wallace authored book, every journal, magazine, and photocopied piece of ephemera he appeared in, and everything else I could find with his byline and hid it all in a closet.
A few days ago– on what would have been Wallace’s 48th birthday– I told a friend how I still hadn’t been able to re-read anything Wallace had written. “Open that box. Like, now,” she said. And since I trust this friend, I did. I went back to the first words of Wallace’s I ever read, the short story “Everything is Green.” I immediately noticed the coincidence of the narrator’s age:
I say Mayfly my heart has been down the road and back for you but I am forty eight years old. It is time I have got to not let things just carry me by any more. I got to use some time that is still mine to try to make every thing feel right. I got to try to feel how I need to.
But I was struck even more intensely by how succinctly this story represents so many themes that would run through Wallace’s work for the next 20 years. The first time I read the story I felt that hitch in my breath, the “this is it!” feeling when I read something that immediately inhabits me. Reading it this time was heartbreaking… particularly the final paragraphs:
Every thing is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when every thing outside is green like it is.
The window over the sink of my kitchenet is cleaned off from the hard rain last night, and it is a morning with sun, it is still early, and there is a mess of green out. The trees are green and some grass out past the speed bumps is green and slicked down. But every thing is not green. The other trailers are not green, and my card table out with puddles in lines and beer cans and butts floating in the ash trays is not green, or my truck, or the gravel of the lot, or the big wheel toy that is on its side under a clothes line without no clothes on it by the next trailer, where the guy has got him some kids.
Every thing is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.
I chuck my smoke and tum hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my mouth. I tum hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.
She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.
It’s all here: the hopefulness and the decay, the “every thing is green” that painfully parallels the “this is water” of Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech, the particular and careful word choice (not “everything is green” but “every thing is green”), the evocation of a dazed, Faulkner-esque tone, one of thousands of examples of allusion and homage.
But how many of Wallace’s readers would recognize the story as “a David Foster Wallace” story without his byline?
For all his precocity and verbal fireworks, and despite his adoption by a million young readers and writers with intellects grown brittle on the thin milk of irony, Wallace’s writing is, at its core, rather traditional, exploring the dark and light heart, what the narrator of “Everything is Green” calls the “something” in him “that can not close up.”
I began to wonder if it was no coincidence that Wallace killed himself exactly 20 years after the publication of the collection in which “Everything is Green” appeared, when he was 48 years old, an age a 28-year old introvert can imagine but never feel. I began to wonder if, looking back over his incredible and diverse work, Wallace gazed into his own abyss: the realization that every thing would never be green, that there was finally no system in there that could explain what was buoyant and what sunk like stone in all that water, that this reality would always be present in his writing, an that no amount of naming can change that, except temporarily.
That this abyss exists in every other writer is no solace to the one who suffers. Wallace knew better than anyone that rational apprehension and logic mean little to the depressed person who can, ironically, except the paradox that the “sane” and “rational” among us cannot contemplate.
Today I came across a fitting quote by Victor Frankl:
“What is to give light must endure burning”
For what should have been David Foster Wallace’s latest birthday with many more to come, I honor the light his words have given me, a light that helped me ward off many creeping shadows of my own. Selfishly, I miss this man I could never really know. I miss this man who gave so many gifts to me, a stranger. I miss this man who saw through the facade, dipped into the chaos, and drank. I miss this man who burned and burned and burned.
