Cope
By J.D. Isip
– for Jeff Albers
Who by aspersions throw a stone
– George Herbert, “Charms and Knots”
At th’ head of others, hit their own.
“Professor Isip,” my student is a little angry, holding up her laptop to me, a wiki for David Foster Wallace, the bandana photo, “You didn’t tell us he killed himself?”
It’s not the first time a student has confronted me about this. I’ve assigned Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon graduation speech, “This Is Water,” for well over a decade. Generally, maybe because these are freshmen who need something to believe in, maybe because it’s just that good, they fall in love. And, as they do, they dive all the way in—want to know everything about him.
“Does that make a difference?” I ask, still curious myself.
She is shocked, “Yes!” She thinks about what to say, “I’m not saying he’s bad for killing himself. I know… I have a friend” she wrote about this friend in her first paper. There’s a lot of them who have a high school friend who committed suicide. A lot of them want to write about it.
When Infinite Jest came out, I didn’t know who David Foster Wallace was or that he was important. I was at a military base in Turkey trying not to be gay. When I went back to get my MA, it was 2008. I was in Dr. Bonca’s class getting ready to talk about postmodernism when he sat down at the front table and cried. He’d met him. Maybe they were friends, I can’t remember. I just know he meant that much to Bonca.
Wallace opens the speech with a story about two fish swimming and an older fish asks them, “How’s the water?” They wait for the older fish to pass and ask one another, “What the hell is water?”
“But if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be,” though this is exactly what Wallace does for the next twenty or so minutes of the speech. I let my students listen to the speech in class. Recently, I’ve picked up on the eeriness of listening to the dead.
A large part of graduate school, for me, was bitching about how postmodernists got it all wrong. What the fuck did all of that deconstruction have to offer any of us after September 11th? Sometimes students ask me about 9-11 like it’s some far off time recorded in a textbook, certainly nothing the living know about firsthand, “How did you get over it?”
These days they mean September 11th, but they also mean what should have been their formative years spent locked inside, spent behind a mask, spent stuck. I think of President Bush saying we needed to go to Walt Disney World to beat the terrorists, so we went. We got back to living. We pantomimed what we remembered about living.
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As It Ought To Be 