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    DFW

    Still very sad about David Foster Wallace's suicide; his writing was (and is) a real source of inspiration to me. I read Consider the Lobster in 2006 and bothered everyone I knew by reading great long chunks of it out loud.

    This transcript of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College has been referenced a lot in the obituaries I've looked at, predominantly because there's a passage where he talks explicity about suicide, but the speech is really about the usual big DFW themes, perception, consciousness, and a sincere love for others.

    It culminates in this statement, which is as much of a statement worth embracing as anything I've ever read: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

    This is a difficult thing to try to do, difficult enough that anyone who attempts it is almost certain to fail regularly. I can understand intimately why this kind of failure might weigh hard on a person.

    Related: Simone Weil: "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it."

    Related: Perils of the mystic life (from 2005)

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    Wednesday, September 17, 2008
    5:59 PM
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    perils of the mystic life

    So last month Li-Young Lee apparently had some kind of nervous breakdown onstage while trying to grapple with ideas about God, humanity, sex, and death. Firsthand accounts can be read here and here.

    I post this reluctantly, for I admire Lee as a poet and as a spiritual thinker, and I'm not particularly interested in gawking at a public meltdown just for the sake of gawking. In fact I'm quite sympathetic to everything that Lee says in these accounts: he seems to be trying to puzzle out the basic foundation for a philosophy of spiritual erotics (a project which is both necessary and overdue).

    Lee's larger project, I believe, is to use poetry as a means of attaining a state of gnosis, a difficult process at best. He also seems to have an even larger project, which is to attempt to help all of humanity to attain that state as well, a process which seems to leap the boundary that separates the challenging from the impossible. And yet, if you're a person with an enormous (religious) empathy, as Lee is, it must seem, at times, like the only possible response to this impossibility is grief. You don't want to read poems. You don't want to sign books. You want to grieve.

    "I want to go home. Kathy, I'm done, I need to go home."

    Yeah. Yeah, I think I get it.

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    Monday, May 02, 2005
    2:18 PM
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    what I care about

    A lightly-edited version of something I wrote elsewhere on the Web, in response to the question "what do you care about?":

    At the top and most abstract part of the tower I care about a complex of things that I can only really categorize as "communication." A lot of things I care about intersect there: honesty, interpersonal kindness, empathy, love, conversations, articulacy, sexuality, art, writing, word-of-mouth, democratic media.

    I care about playing and experimenting and improvisation.

    Less abstractly, I care about the Spring Conference, I care about the well-being of the people around me and people in society at large, and I care about my creative projects.

    I care about winning a game while I'm playing it (but not afterwards), I care about the characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I care about Oolong the bunny, who recently died.


    So what do you care about?

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    Thursday, January 23, 2003
    12:17 PM
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