Boredom, Death, Royalty, Taxes, and Jews

I have not yet finished "The Pale King", David Foster Wallace's posthumously published final novel.  It is not due to lack of time, as I have achieved a somewhat embarrassing high score on Word Bubbles, but to re-reading the middle section of the book.

As a fast, practiced reader, I rarely return to the same chapter more than twice.  However, "The Pale King" does not reveal its secrets easily.  It is a frustrating, brilliant, and unsettling work that is clearly unfinished yet nearly perfect.  DFW began researching the book in 1997 and writing it in 2000.  When he died in 2008, he left over 1,000 pages for his wife and editor to compile into a novel.

Large sections of "The Pale King" are boring.  This is a novel largely revolving around accounting and the IRS, so this is unsurprising. While the first 20 pages are beautiful and engaging, huge swathes of the next 100 pages are consumed by lengthy, meandering interviews and numbing technical terminology.  There is no central narrative to follow; scenes with no definitive time or place circle around the accounts of various people drawn to work for the IRS.

This is by design.  You, the reader, are supposed to be bored.  Yet if you dig deep, really deep, bones of the Earth deep, and pay attention to these stories, you will be rewarded.  There is a gorgeous, searing chapter in which nameless IRS employees converse during a smoke break.  If you didn't pay attention and simply skimmed the previous chapters, you might skim past portions of this chapter as well.  You might notice the startling prose ("Everything is on fire, slow fire.").  But then you will move on, untouched and oblivious.

You will have failed, both as a reader and as a person.  You will have failed because you will have missed the difficult idea at the center of "The Pale King"; some truth can only be found through boredom, through pain, through careful attention to minute details over long periods.

When my Dad talks to me about the law, he is filled with light.  He is transformed by his love of the cold, technical language that instills dread in law students and everyday citizens alike.  Yet to him, there is poetry in the law.  There is meaning and mercy and problems to be solved.

At some point in his studies, after countless hours of reading, writing, and thinking, a change occurred.  It wasn't a big change, at least in a cosmic sense, but it was an important one for him.  The law was no longer just "the law".  It wasn't a set of statutes to memorize or briefs to analyze.  It was a source of meaning.  It was a way to illuminate the world.

He had achieved expertise beyond expertise, knowledge beyond knowledge.  He had drunk and drunk and drunk until the law seeped into his bones, into his organs, into his soul.  Like the IRS agents in "The Pale King", he had wrestled the great beast of boredom and won.

Attention, real attention, hurts at first.  When I watched the devoted pray at the Kotel or Wailing Wall, I was always amused by the davening of teenage boys.  They rocked back and forth, imitating their elders while shooting furtive glances all around.  They checked on the prayers of their peers; they made sure others could see that they were, indeed, praying.  And when they did try to focus, their pinched expressions betrayed their effort.

I watched young men in their twenties and thirties pray.  They shut their eyes and rocked back and forth with purpose.  They were no longer distracted by their surroundings but by the maelstrom in their heads. Praying wasn't painful, but it was work.  They knew they had to pray but could not find the transcendence they desired. They were, and are, like I am.  Their expressions blank, they scrabbled in the dark for something they could not name.

It was the old men who knew the truth.  They talked to friends, neighbors, and family.  They checked up on past acquaintances and swapped stories about their grandchildren.  When they did turn to face the Wall, they sidled up to it like an old friend.  Here I am, they seemed to say.  It's another day to live by the grace of G-d, to bathe in the light.

"Everything is on fire, slow fire."  That's what DFW's commencement address at Kenyon College is about; it's what "Parokhet" is about too.  We only have so much time to live and love.  What do you love?  Because what you pay attention to is what you love.  So pay attention to what you pay attention to.

You cannot find joy, real joy, in Facebook status updates or talking dogs on Youtube or British tabloids or reality TV or any of the trillion fleeting contrivances of the moment.  Grace is found through hard work.  Grace is found by paying attention to important things even if they're boring, especially if they're boring, until the attention feels like pain, and then it feels like nothing, and then it feels like praying. Because we're all praying to something.

What do you love?  Whom do you love?

Pay attention.

New York, New York

I usually do not write about political events here, but last night's vote to legalize same sex marriage in New York transcends mere politics. On Andrew Sullivan's emotional live-blog of the vote, he says that “what equality really meant [was] the right to marry.” The vote wasn't about petty politics but about deeper values: equality and dignity.

The inclusion of equality is obvious; the state privileged heterosexual relationships over homosexual relationships. Now the law treats both relationships equally so heterosexuals and homosexuals are equal under the law. However, legal equality is intrinsically tied to dignity.

Dignity is derived from Latin (dignitas) through French. In everyday life, it means respect and status. This is what this vote was about, and why it was so important. In New York, along with Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Iowa, gay couples are now afforded the same respect and status as their heterosexual peers. The state and, by extension, the public, views them as full citizens, with all the rights and privileges afforded by such citizenship.

Gov. Cuomo deserves a huge amount of credit for his leadership. During a speech to state Republicans, he supposedly said (reported from someone who heard the speech), “Their love is worth the same as your love. Their partnership is worth the same as your partnership. And they are equal in your eyes to you. That is the driving issue.”

This is about equality. This is about dignity. This is about gays being accepted by their fellow citizens and by their government as complete people, worthy of respect and status. This is about their love being seen as true, their relationships as full and rich.

Now, at least in six states, this is true.

Parokhet

This poem, which you can find under the poetry tab at the top of the page, began where all great poems begin: Wikipedia. Sara and I had spent the morning, as we usually do, talking about anything that pops into our heads. This particular morning, she referenced folic acid deficiencies in passing. Later that day, I had a few free minutes and decided to look into its specific effects.

Some lines of what later became “Parokhet” came from this research. The lines were:

“Folic acid

too little

and we die of rot

too much

and we burn”

They were cut in the second draft because they are awful. However, they led to more interesting places, specifically the section about our in utero heroine.

I couldn't think of a way to start the poem, though. It seemed a bit abrupt to start in media res with the scene about the child, God, and Devil. There had to be a decent beginning, a frame for the trinity.

As the opening lines implies, it started with the sky. Thunder tore me from sleep and I lay awake while a storm wrapped around Sara's small house. It was dark, the profound dark that comes when electricity leaves. It was then, while a storm cried its first, angry breaths, that I realized what the poem was really about.

Sidenote: If you are interested in some of the references in the poem, a good place to start is “The Book of Nightmares” by Galway Kinnell, specifically the poem “Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”. You can find it online here.

Waiting Redux

There is an answer, of sorts: wait-listed. This amounts to rejection, although with the usual “it's not you, it's me!” appended. This is not untrue; the economy has many victims and the arts is among them. Several prominent programs severely cut funding and, in some cases, acceptances. A few suspended their programs for a year, letting the fields lie fallow and hoping for better weather.

I was hurt at first. Well, that's not quite true. I was hurt for a while (thus the delay in posts). If there is a graceful way to handle rejection, I have not mastered it.

For the first few days after receiving the dreaded small envelope, I sulked while insisting to everyone who would listen that I was definitely not sulking. Sara bought me peanut butter M&Ms and patiently listened to my non-complaining complaints. Then, I went through a brief bout of dreams in which the New School took me from the wait list, offered me a scholarship, and bought me a brontosaurus to ride to class.

Unfortunately, none of those dreams came true.

My nascent adult instincts intervened a few weeks ago and shook me from my malaise. I accepted a full-time position with my employer and made plans for the upcoming year. If waiting will happen, then it will happen on my terms.

So far, I have submitted a poem to a literary magazine and have been writing more frequently than usual. It is a good start. This summer, there will be no harvest. There will be the hard work of tilling fields that will only yield when the work is done.

I will post a version of the poem, “Parokhet,” tomorrow. Expect to see more work in the near future.

Waiting

I am still waiting to hear from the New School's admission department, and the lack of communication, the emptiness of not knowing, has manifested in variations.  Sometimes, it is sand in clockwork; the seconds drag one after the next, a weary procession of defeated soldiers.  Last night, it was a needle poised a breath before sleep.  My limbs ached and rain washed the stones.  But just as the last thought sighed its end, lightning slapped the skies.  And then I waited restlessly in the dark.

This morning, I woke late, edited a friend's essay, and tutored.  After the student left, I dawdled at the office because the mailbox sat, Sphinx-like, at journey's end.  Eventually, I gathered the remnants of my nerve and drove home.

The constant chatter of email has done little to lessen the muteness of the unopened mailbox.  When I check Gmail, the sender and subject are first and foremost; there is usually no unwrapping, no mystery to unearth, just the efficient transmission of information.  The New School does not send its decisions over email or phone.  The simplest packet of information, the yes/no on which all computing is based, is in their opinion fit only for the formality of the physical letter.

There is poetry in this decision; after all, writers aspire for their words to live in ink.  Pixels lack romance.  But I desire neither poetry nor romance.  Over these last weeks, I have ached for brutality, for directness, for bleeding in black and white.  1/0.  Win/lose.  Yes/no.

It is night now; there will be no mail until morning.  And so I will wait as the seconds grind one into the next until I face the mailbox once more.