"Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox – the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles’ spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain – is that whether he’s truly "for real" now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake."
- David Foster Wallace from Up, Simba
I ripped this from the boring but always edifying NYTIMEs.
David Foster Wallace, whose darkly ironic novels, essays and short stories garnered him a large following and made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide, the authorities said.
Mr. Wallace, 46, best known for his sprawling 1,079-page novel “Infinite Jest,” was discovered by his wife, Karen Green, who returned home to find that he had hanged himself, a spokesman for the Claremont, Calif., police said Saturday evening.
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Being who I am, and being what this blog is about, I can’t help but bring mention to the fact that in this act, Wallace has symbolically made himself a mytho-resonator of The Hanged Man card from the Tarot.
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How’s the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
- David Foster Wallace, 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Speech
Neptune is the planet of the hanged man and it symbolizes water. This is VERY interesting to me for a couple reasons. The first is that Michael Phelps, the Golden Boy and Watergate Traveler recently became indoctrinated as a Synchro-Avatar when he won his 8th gold medal in the 8/8/8 Olympics. Also because as I’m writing this, there is another Water Traveler – Hurrican IKE – ripping a watery path through the center of the country, AND more water in the unrelated flooding that has put Chicago and the rest of the Midwest under a deluge.
Another major synch of a personal nature, is that yesterday I watched Event Horizon. While gory, and sometimes trite, the movie is none the less part of the Stargate mythology that’s been building for the past decade or two. I bring this up because the movie centers around the world’s first hyper-dimensional (Stargate Travelling) spacecraft and its opening of a watergate/wormhole/stargate out at the planet Neptune (of The Hanged Man).
Before I get too far on topic, I want to point out that the Stargate device in Event Horizon looks EXACTLY like the Stargate device in the movie Contact starring Jodi Forster. Perhaps this is what the Stargate device the US has hidden in the "Bird Sanctuary " in the Arctic actually looks like.
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Stargate Device from Event Horizon
Stargate Device from Contact with Jodi Foster
Neptune is spirituality, dreams, psychic abilities, and the Hanged Man is afloat in these. He is also 12, the opposite of the World card, 21. With the World card you go infinitely out. With the Hanged Man, you go infinitely in.
The Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days [note the parrallels with the Jesus parable]. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.
This card signifies a time of insight so deep that, for a moment, nothing but that insight exists. All Tarot readers have such moments when we see, with absolute clarity, the whole picture, the entire message offered by a spread. The Hanged Man symbolizes such moments of suspension between physical and mystical worlds. Such moments don’t last, and they usually require some kind of sacrifice. Sacrifice of a belief or perspective, a wish, dream, hope, money, time or even selfhood. In order to gain, you must give. Sometimes you need to sacrifice cherished positions, open yourself to other truths, other perspectives in order to find solutions, in order to bring about change. One thing is certain, whether the insight is great or small, spiritual or mundane, once you have been the Hanged Man you never see things quite the same.
The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. This is a time of trial or meditation, selflessness, sacrifice, prophecy. The Querent stops resisting; instead he makes himself vulnerable, sacrifices his position or opposition, and in doing so, gains illumination. Answers that eluded him become clear, solutions to problems are found. He sees the world differently, has almost mystical insights. This card can also imply a time when everything just stands still, a time of rest and reflection before moving on. Things will continue on in a moment, but for now, they float, timeless.
The David Foster Wallace John McCain Connection
You knew there had to be one, right? In 2000 David Foster Wallace rode the campaign bus with presidential hopeful John McCain. He was on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine. The article was called ‘Up, Simba’ with all the golden Disney lion symbolism in tact.
The article portrays McCain as the Rough n’ Tumble candidate against the establishment’s George Bush. McCain was the voice of ‘Hope’ the harbinger of change and the straight talker that so many people see Baraq Obamessiah as today. How the table’s have turned.
I found this on a Blog that reviewed Wallace’s essay on McCain:
"In ‘Up, Simba,’ DFW talks about the difference between ‘believing a candidate and believing in him.’ I believe in Barack Obama, and I’m not sure why. I’m also not sure why I should be afraid of this belief, though I know I would counsel someone else against the slippery slope to messianism, etc."
This guy has bought the slippery slope hook, line and sinker. He has been fished out of the sea of despair induced by 28 years of the Bush Dynasty and thrown into the arms of our new fisher of men, Baraq Obamessiah.
I should write this kid and tell him why he should be afraid of his beliefs. But alas, as Robert Anton Wilson said, Don’t put your trip on other people.
Here’s a relatively recent interview with Wallace on John McCain from the Wall Street Journal. Note that the author invokes the Smiley Face symbol at the end of the article – a symbol that’s recently been perverted in the nu-sphere to become the Smiley Face Killer – which your can read about in the Thuther Thoughts download available on the front page of this blog.
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More from the boring NYTimes
Mr. Wallace was a professor in the English department at Pomona College in Claremont [Pomona is the Goddess of fruit and trees].
“I know a great novelist has left the scene, but we knew him as a great teacher who cared deeply about his students, who treasured him. That’s what we’re going to miss,” said Gary Kates, the dean of Pomona College.
Mr. Wallace had taught at the small liberal arts college since 2002 and held the school’s Roy Edward Disney Chair in Creative Writing. He taught one or two classes each semester of about 12 students each, Mr. Kates said.
Mr. Wallace burst onto the literary scene in the 1990s with a style variously described as “pyrotechnic” and incomprehensible, and it was compared to those of writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
His opus, “Infinite Jest,” published by Little, Brown & Company in 1996, is set in the near future, in a time called the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and is, roughly, about addiction and how the need for pleasure and entertainment can interfere with human connection.
In a New York Times review of the book, Jay McInerney wrote that the novel’s “skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail.”
“The overall effect.” Mr. McInerney continued, “is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola.”
The novel was filled with references to high and low culture alike, and at the end had more than 100 pages of footnotes, which were trademarks of Mr. Wallace’s work.
The blurbs are by contemporary novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody, each of whom was a friend of Mr. Wallace.
Michael Pietsch, who edited “Infinite Jest,” said Saturday night that the literary world had lost one of its great talents.
“He had a mind that was constantly working on more cylinders than most people, but he was amazingly gentle and kind,” Mr. Pietsch said. “He was a writer who other writers looked to with awe.”
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Final Excerpt from DFW’s Kenyon Speech
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. 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.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
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May David Foster Wallace Rest in Peace, Find a Greater Love, and Forever live the Infinite Jest he taught us all about.
Thanks for the great books and Bless you David Foster Wallace. You taught us much.
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Extremely poor article. Nothing at all to do with DFW. What have you said here:
1. DFW hung himself, which is similar to the tarotic Hanged Man as he has also hung himself, followed by a very poor reading of DFW as this Hanged Man.
2. DFW wrote an article about John McCain. This point just stated and goes nowhere.
Mate, you haven’t said anything at all.
Why am I upset about this?
Because at the end, you state: “You taught us much.”
After reading this I can’t help but think “Has he? Has he *really*?”
1. He was found hung. No one actually saw him hang himself. I’m opening possibilities up.
No one saw him hang himself, so I’m saying it’s possible that someone hung him. Is that wrong? Did someone see him hang himself and I missed it, because every report I read said he was found.
I would be happy to address any specific issues with my comparison.
2. Both DFW and John McCain are part of the same occult symbol system. I’m trying to show the connection of symbols between them.
Finally, yes, I do believe David Foster Wallace taught us much.
Thanks for the comment!
Thuth.