Despite my previous efforts to move past reflecting on David Foster Wallace’s death, I spent part of my lunch today listening to this reflection on the life and work of the late author. I’ve enjoyed Michael Silverblatt’s show in the past. However, today I found myself (with headphones on) leaning in closer and closer to a speaker that wasn’t there. The closeness and emotional veracity of Silverblatt’s words was striking. Despite being in front of a library, munching on pizza, I was transported next to Silverblatt as he reminisced about the writer.

More importantly, the discussion about Wallace’s essays illustrated that part of the allure for the reader (at least for me) was that Wallace was an expert at making the invisible visible. Through his work a lobster festival is seen from a completely different perspective. Ditto a state fair, a filmmaker, a presidential candidate, tennis players & recovering addicts, and even the mundane such as having to move a car from one side of the road to the other due to municipal codes. I say this having sat through the first four hours of a yearlong sequence on qualitative methods and design. Perhaps the key fact that was expected for the students in this class to take away is the role of the ethnographer to make the invisible visible – Wallace may be better an example at this than many of the case studies we’ll be investigating. His is a route towards illumination I’m interested in treading.

Similarly, Wallace talked about how defining “terms” on Silverblatt’s show would take him about 6 hours. And though Silverblatt asserts that this would be done in a hilarious manner (and he’d probably be right), it cuts to a central frustration with language. Wallace effectively tried writing himself out of a novel while also making the experience so intensely personal that it feels as if he wrote it just for you – yes, this conceit is cribbed from the show. However, he literally becomes trapped within this behemoth of a novel. He probably never really escaped it. [As an aside, looking today on Amazon, Infinite Jest was the #60 top selling product – I think it peaked last week. In any case, I can’t imagine how many people will be trying to read through this thing as a result of his passing.]

In a seminar about language issues, I made an assertion in class about how language primarily limits intentions and communication. That although its primary function is one of communication between two or more people, it literally cuts away at the pure essence of meaning in some sort of abstract way. While it protects it also denies. Lastly, as a result of looking at the Beyond Pedagogy texts, reading Valis for the first time and generally spacing out when I should be taking notes, I’ve been thinking about the aborigine concept of “dreamtime” or a dream world. About how such a place could likely exist both in and out of the modern day world. About how there’s something about Eskimos and words for snow and western limitations with words like “magic” and how that all kind of vacillates between structured thought and language-less ideas like the flickering of a light between “real time” and “dreamtime” until the flickering stops flickering like a strobe-light slow motion kind of thing and it becomes really clear (at least for a second) that both places are the same and it’s us – like “us” in some sort of socio-cultural way – that are leaving some things “invisible” and that the balance between dream and real is one most of us aren’t ever going to really negotiate.

I’m still working this out.