i’ve been struggling with the idea of biography. are some ideas so brilliant that they transcend their author? or is the brilliance in how the idea reflects the person who reflects the world?

Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owning jackass whose own life didn’t live even an inch up to the ideas he set down in the Declaration of Independence. Keith Jarrett’s piano floats me into another stratosphere, even though i know cough drops are handed out at his concerts because he is known to walk out at the hint of even involuntary audience noise.

but then there are other artists whose work seems completely dependent on their biographies.

i was reading an article in The New Yorker on David Foster Wallace awhile back. he killed himself on September 12 of last year. his wife found him hanging above their patio.

my writing professor gave me one of Wallace’s books, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, after my junior year, and i’ve tried to read it a few times since, unsuccessfully. too many words and not enough periods. so many complex thoughts stuffed into each neverending paragraph. reading his stuff was like trying to solve the Times’s Sunday puzzle while hungover–absolutely exhausting.

but now that i’ve read about his life–his depression and his failure to maintain the balance between his own intense expectations and real happiness–the “stem-winding” sentences make perfect sense. i need to pick the book up again, just so i can spot the sadness between the lines and study the way he’s trying to navigate the dark maze that he is simultaneously building.

i did the same thing with Elliot Smith. not a day after he shoved a knife through his own chest, i was absorbing every song i could find, trying to find hints to why. it was like listening to the ghost of a child who couldn’t quite remember what it was like to be alive.

from the article about Wallace:

“A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out his final novel’s idea: ‘Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.’”

the man wrote and he wrote well, but i never gave him any patience until he died dramatically. what does that mean?

Wallace once wrote in a letter to a friend, “I will be a fiction writer again or die trying.”

hmmm.

Comments