the lunatic is on the grass

actually, he ain't. but i'm thinking of the charlie rose interview of david foster wallace which i watched last night. wallace lights up when talking about movies and says he approaches them as a fan rather than a film scholar. i in turn lit up when i heard that for that is exactly the point. why engage in a subject, whatever it be, if it doesn't first give pleasure. dry texts about boring subjects abound like weeds in a vacant lot. as schoolchildren we've all been privy to having our eyeballs hang from their sockets when faced with an explication of what-we-better-know-is-good-for-us. and if it's good for us then it must induce pain or at least have no taste and very little texture.

pleasure is how i try to write, in poems and movie reviews and the miscellany found on this blog. life is a gift, the greatest one i know, and when i read a poem, or watch a movie, or hear a song that gives me great pleasure i am transported to the first degree of intensity. i have hope in our human being again and that art is neither a privilege or luxury. they are necessities in our lives, however we wish to define art.

however, near the end of the interview wallace talks a little about his drug use and his attempted suicide. i'd forgotten about that, i had watched the interview when it was first broadcast in 1997 when i was in the midst of my own recovery from a breakdown in 1996. life is also a hellish experience too. and for some the pain of existence is bearable only thru an act of negation. to simply not be. i know the source of such pain. yet the pain is not a permanent condition. when i told a friend today how affected i was because of wallace's suicide he said [and to be fair to my friend, he is not a reader of wallace and was rather non-plussed by my feelings for the writer, who, in the eyes of my friend, was a stranger to me] rather off-handedly, 'you won't be reading anything new by him anymore'. i know that and knowing that makes that absence more palpable.

i don't want to end this little piece by saying that survival at any cost is the goal. but it might be. tho i have my own illness to deal with and have gone thru a couple of episodes of real doozies, the experience of survival makes my living that much more pleasurable. i sit here at the beginning of fall, my favorite time of year, and halloween, my favorite holiday, is just a few weeks away. the light in northern california at this time of year simply makes you glad to witness it. there are times when survival means just thinking and then planning the next step and that next step for me must be a pleasure, whether it is a simple cup of coffee or reading the newspaper or finding a new poet to fall in love with. i am always learning to de-accelerate and simply try to live, in the phrase i heard recently, in the freshness of the moment. it is a lesson i shall never master.