I made it to the David Foster Wallace papers. When you walk into the Harry Ransom Center, they have a Gutenberg Bible, which gave me high hopes. Then they have a bunch of bronze busts of writers. One or two busts would be pretty cool. After about two dozen crania, however, I was reminded of that scene from Heart of Darkness where Marlow sees the heads on stakes outside Kurtz’s station.
I looked for it, and sure enough, they had a bust of Hemingway. My sentiments echo Michael Palin’s at the beginning of this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW_1eE88MrU
With only lambent reference to the bad pun about the busts being a bust, let us return to Wallace — I flipped through drafts of “Consider the Lobster,” “This is Water,” a free-write portion of The Pale King, notebooks of annotation in preparation for Everything and More, his vocabulary lists, and some teaching materials.
I took many notes, and I have many thoughts. But I have to wait for permission before I can share them with you. I filled out a Declaration of Intent in order to quote from the materials, and I have not heard back from them. I also emailed the copyright holder of the materials. Given 1) the Ransom Center is closed until January 1st and 2) my pretty good track record of screwing up their protocol, I probably won’t be hearing from them for a while.
Now my knee-jerk reaction is to construe this as inconvenient (I have the materials, I have the thoughts, this post can be made, why can’t I share it??) but it’s also an opportunity to live out one of Wallace’s reminders: awareness. My response to this situation is entirely within my realm of control.
I’ve posted these links once or twice before, but I’m going to do it again, because it’s just so important. If you have not read or listened to Wallace’s 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College, it is twenty-two minutes and thirty-seven seconds that will not be wasted. If you have listened to it, it is time to listen to it again. Think about those binges of Full House you used to watch – if you can waste twenty-two minutes watching John Stamos prance around as a mulleted Henry Winkler, you can listen to this speech.
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Transcending our default setting of universe-center is what it means to know how to think. We can choose our mindset, and that may be the only thing that helps us in adulthood, which is, by and large, boring, banal, and constricted in red tape.
The trick is to see red tape as the blind man would when given sight for the first time. Think about that. You’re blind your whole life and you have heard people talk about colors, and apparently red is a vibrant color, whatever “vibrant” means. And then some miracle happens and suddenly you can see and you see red for the first time and you realize that Andre Gide was correct when you slid your finger across the brail version of La Symphonie Pastorale: the character describes different colors in a painting to the blind man as different instruments playing together in an orchestra. You realize that all along there has been this silent symphony of color and suddenly you become privy to it and seeing bureaucratic red tape is literally as beautiful to you as hearing Chopin, because, let’s face it, if Chopin were a color, he would be a very deep red. You’re so overcome that you begin to weep, and you are so invested that your tears frighten you because the last thing you want to do is compromise the eyes that now function so perfectly as symphony converters.
So, that being said, I appreciate the red tape in holding back my findings. I appreciate maintaining the integrity of Wallace’s work. It’s the least I could do, right? I can’t respect his work as a writer and then not abide by the rules for working with his papers. This red tape is a badge of honor for interacting with an author’s work on a level of intimacy beyond Google and Youtube searches.
Besides, it gives me time to tell you this story:
As I flipped through four or five early drafts of the “This is Water” speech, (I will be stoic enough not to dorkout completely with unnecessary paragraphs that analyze what his hand writing looked like or what it felt like to hold papers that I knew he held, but if you would like to have a dork session with me, just send me an email), an extra, official-looking document interrupted DFW’s flow of thought. It was the form for library staff if you wanted them to make digital copies for you.
The form was filled out neatly by an English professor from Ohio. His name and email address were clearly printed on the page. So was all of his credit card information.
I never would have taken this guy’s info. But my inclination was that his request had not yet been processed – it was something to skip over because it didn’t concern me. It took listening to that speech several times, playing it for a few of my classes, and holding the bloody drafts in my hands to wake me up enough to do something.
My friend who spent most of her life living in New York City once told me that if you had to spend a night on the streets in that town, you’d want it to be in Little Italy. Her rationale was that all the grandmothers with insomnia (Italian sausage, acid reflux)spend the night looking out the window. Nothing bad will happen to you because they will know anybody who comes around and they’ll also know that person’s mother, and the old ladies will make telephone calls and cause trouble, thus removing the anonymity of random violence. That sounds a tad romanticized to me, but similarly, if there was a Special Collections document where you had to leave your credit card information, “This is Water” isn’t a bad choice.
I checked with the librarian and the document was left by mistake; she shredded it on the spot.
I was half-way hoping that another librarian with a party hat would jump from behind the bust of Hemingway (he’d hide behind that one because you’re too busy trying to figure whom that oddly shaped head signifies) and tell me that I passed the David Foster Wallace Empathy Test and that I could now join the club. Then we’d all go out and eat vegetarian and have a bizarrely riveting conversation about our favorite words. That didn’t happen. Instead, I remembered the professor’s name and looked him up and sent him an email to let him know that his information was now safe. Who knows – maybe that could start up a friendship or a correspondence. Nope – he sent a rushed reply that had two misspellings.
So, yeah. Kinda anti-climatic. But that’s 95% of life, isn’t it? Maybe it’s worth spending a little time there. At least enough time until I get through this red tape . . .