As I was re-reading David Foster Wallace online, I received a forwarded email. It was from an aunt whose emails usually contain blinking/singing American flags and/or truisms that would have been cross-stitched on a pillow a generation ago. He would have loved her. The emails implicitly assume that I voted for Bush in both cycles because of his pro-whatever and anti-whatevers. ["he's a good man, you know"] They assume that I am shocked by the same things that apparently shock good people everywhere: gay marriage, skepticism about the literal truth of the Bible, and Those Unpatriotic Ones Who Don't Support the Troops. Unless I am feeling particularly smug, I delete these emails without reading.
But this time I read the email, and learned that the extended family is having a special fast for my cousin's dying baby. A quick introduction for the uninitiated: a fast is a period in which people don't eat or drink. It's done as an offering to God, a offer to transact. I will briefly starve myself, offer my body's primal needs up in return for what I want-need-desire from God. It's generally reserved for something important. I spent much of my youth in a prayer and fasting cycle, trying to wail my [now dead] mother into good health. It's what Mormons do. They talk about the process the way other people might talk about putting money in savings--it's serious, but commonplace. Probably a lot of other fundamentalist-type denominations do the same too. I don't know. Maybe a group fast is just a communal prayer with your whole bodies.
It's not that I don't believe in God, because I think I do. But I just don't think [or hope] that God does trades. After all, my mom did die, in a spectacularly ugly and drawn-out sort of death. As do many people. It happens. Plus, there is Africa. You can't think about asking God for favors without thinking about Africa [as in why would there be mass starvation, war, slavery in Africa if God could intervene]? The standard Mormon answer to this is -- people have to feel the consequences of their choices, it's a fallen world.--these rationales look limp and weak, even on the page. Really, really, what are the chances that any God would change course because of a desperate trade offered by two young parents and their families? But not change course if the trade wasn't offered. Perhaps I am just concerned about the efficiency of this whole process: we stop eating and hope that that the world will stand still, that nature will reverse course, that Superman will fly around the earth fast enough to disrupt time or cause and effect.
Parents have wept over more dead children than there are people alive today. Many of them were pious. Many were evil. Many of them prayed. Many of them cursed God. But what has stopped modern children from dying is not a supernatural force. It's a systemic decision by scientists to stop looking up for relief, and start looking around them. Medical advances stem from scientific techniques established during the Enlightenment [observation over argument, sensual perception over faith and so on]. My asthmatic son is alive because somebody figured out what chemicals would relax his overly tight bronchioles. The men and women who figure these things out were looking around at what was, and not what should have been, surrounding them. The noticed what they smelled, tasted, heard, touched, and saw, not what they yearned to feel.
But when there is no scientific cure, then the senses fail. When what you see is a tiny and frail body whimpering on an oscillator, bleeding out of every orifice, his eyes yellow, his lungs rotting in fungus, you can close your eyes. You don't want to see. You don't want to taste. You want oblivion. The senses are too sharp to bear. And you retreat into a hope that there is something out there, something you haven't tasted or smelled, something out there that will do a little alchemy while your eyes are closed. And that when you open your eyes again, nature will have inexplicably moved in your direction.
And so my family fasts and prays.
DFW was a master recognizing and describing the actual day-in-day-out sights that most of us see, as opposed to the occasional extraordinary experiences that other writers prefer. The creepy plastic bags we carry tasteless soft bagels in, the professional smiles we walk by at the mall, and the vacant eyes of overweight, polyester-clad gamblers in a Motel lobby in Reno. The reds and greens, and the unpleasantly fetid greens. His exquisite mind constantly composed a never-ending footnote to search for some reason to stay, and to keep his eyes open.
And I wonder, if perhaps, maybe, in some cases, it is better to retreat--from our bodies, from what we perceive.
Note: I posted this earlier on The Great Whatsit, under another pseudonym.
No comments:
Post a Comment