“Less Alone Inside”

David Foster Wallace 1962-2008

“You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space” -Wallace Stevens

The poem, the thing so good, so pure
Can turn with a snap to something ugly and long
As metaphors collapse, and feelings never quite find their stories,
And lines tumble like teletype in non-regular time.

This is not to say I understand at all.

Life, when full, just frustrates. One can scoff
All one wants, reduce the highest intent
To motivations worse than dirt, break down
The alchemy to equations of tawdry mediocrity,
Make it fit or not fit, it's all the same, in the end,
It's only words that never connect, and always seem to.
We cull the details like farmers, fuss over what to include,
Only to cry at what they mean, how we never really know.
The words form loops that keep us out of the circle
Of hands to keep us warm, and voices that speak
Of small things that never need to go anywhere.

The words are never ending, full of meaning.
Maybe life is different. Something we can't say.

What is it like having to explain television?
Or why the tennis courts are painted green?
Or how life empties out of eyes as bottles drain
Or chances end or childhood games one lost keep haunting?
Indefatigable irony, the last bastion of the culpable mind,
When it hurts too much to say anything.

No. I do not want it explained.

If poetry existed, then I could be happy.
But it's all theory,
A breathing not of me,
A volume opened to be closed,
Smoothed of all its syllables.

Is it the residue of life, or life itself?

I was there. I gave you the Japanese screens
To hide in. And I felt the devastation
Of being sleepless and alone, bored, eyes wide open
Trying uselessly to tag the truth
And reduce it to the absurd, to the real.
Writing. Where is the healing in that?
It lifts itself away, and I must wait, again,
Thumbing through life's catalogue for moments under glass.
Then I dislodge the substance that's in everything
To fit some contours that are never mine,
Built on some fever dream of creating meaning from nothing,
A stripped-down phrasing that includes everything
But utters only what some unknown truth might bear.
I shape it. It reshapes itself. The artifice
Becomes real. The characters start speaking
As if they own me, as if their opinions have weight,
A hold on my psyche, like so many people, needing
To philosophize randomly, to chew on their own demise,
To transcend their failed enterprise to story.
And I listen. Til the voices that aren't there
Disappear.

And now we have forever, to express, again, that loss.