This past week was a vacation for all four guides at Infinite Summer, so they had some guests in, and I’ll tell you this for free: I like the way these new kids read and think about the book. I mean no discredit to any of the week’s other front-pagers (or any of the regular guides), but three of the posts in particular combine to make a lucid program for the kinds of reading that Infinite Jest demands.

Brittney Gilbert kicked the week off with a great post about, essentially, mindfulness. I love that she quotes Marathe in her post; I know the A.F.R. are terrorists and torturers and murderers, but I’ve been drawn since the first time I read this book to Marathe’s disquisitions to “Helen” Steeply. His philosophy doesn’t leave enough room for individual will, but I think up until a certain point, he’s got the right idea. It’s difficult for me to pinpoint just where it goes off the rails—that is, the disjunction between sensible Marathe and sociopathic Marathe seems to be a fuzzy one. He’s making sense, he’s making sense—you have to consciously choose what to dedicate your life to, it’s most fulfilling to choose something larger than yourself—I’m going along with him, and then somewhere it turns totally totalitarian—that something larger should be the state, which you then allow to make all your further choices. (This is where I mention DFW’s appearance on “Bookworm” again, this time with a link to a transcript. Particularly the part where Schtitt is “really the only one there who to me is saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist.”)

Right, but Brittney’s post. “I have chosen to care about this book,” she writes, “to give it a place in my life.”

In doing so I am rewarded with messages in IJ about the importance of being present. Of just breathing. Themes abound in IJ about focus, about choosing what it is that you pay attention to, and how crucial it is to do that with the utmost care. If only because our whole lives depend on it.

This is many kinds of right on. With regard to how crucial it is to choose what you pay attention to, check DFW’s commencement speech at Kenyon College, conveniently available in hard copy under the title This Is Water. That speech is entirely about how conscious choices of what to pay attention to constitute empathy, and empathy is the basic focus of Infinite Jest all the way through. (Hence all the emphasis on communication, which enables empathy by permitting an understanding of other people’s experiences.) Although Brittney’s approaching this aspect of the book more in terms of mindfulness, what she has hit on here is the very most important thing in IJ: actively choosing, and choosing connectedness. No one in the book knows how to do this properly. Don Gately realizes he has to learn how; Marathe has a twisted idea of how, that leads him into atrocity; Schtitt teaches the kids at E.T.A. the mechanics of choosing, but seems to think the choosing itself is all that matters (“Any something,” he says. “The what: this is more unimportant than that there is something.”). The whole book is a series of answers to the question “So yo then man what’s your story?” that we are invited to choose to pay attention to.

I also love Brittney’s assertion that she has chosen to care about the book, because that’s exactly what it’s like for me. Reading the book is obviously a commitment—1076 pages don’t just read themselves—but more than that, I have made the decision to let this book matter deeply to me. It speaks to issues that are paramount in life as I see it, and may well have helped form that viewpoint in the first place. It is one of the most ethically deliberate pieces of human work I have ever encountered, and the seriousness with which it takes the questions of how to properly be a member of the human race is humbling and uplifting. Engaging with IJ challenges me to examine my notions of how to be a better person, and to become that better person. I choose to make these things important to myself, and therefore to care about this book immensely.

The last point I want to make about Brittney’s post is to second her comments on the book’s continual assertion of its own materiality:

The non-linear (to say the least) structure, the constant change in voice, forced flipping, always flipping, to the back of the book for endnotes are elements that don’t allow you to get lost in a story. “You are reading a book,” you are often reminded.

She is absolutely correct that this is one of IJ’s (I hesitate to say “DFW’s,” because I try not to ascribe motivation, but the inference may be open) strategies for inculcating mindfulness: repeatedly reminding the reader of the present-tense, physical circumstances of their participation in the book. The reading experience is interrupted again and again by a loudspeaker blaring, “YOU ARE READING A BOOK RIGHT NOW,” and the reader is forced each time to decide how to read it.

Which incidentally makes a satisfactory transition (not at all tortured and freewheeling) to Nick Douglas’s post from Tuesday. This one’s all about reading attentively and making cross-connections between bits of the book. (Over and over, in dealing with Infinite Jest, I’m reminded of the great charge of Howards End: “Only connect.”) It’s a beautifully imaginative and engaged post, ending on a note of emotional attachment to the characters that has obviously enlivened Nick’s reading of the book. His focus on attending to repeated clues (“Since most of these thematic moments are so subtle, I’m sure we’re particularly required to remember the ones Wallace mentions twice, just as the Biblical God repeats his most important commands three times”) reminds me very much of some of the colloquy on the Urth List I mentioned in my last post, a mailing list dedicated to the work of Gene Wolfe.

I don’t want to get too much into Wolfe here, because my head is filled with things to say, but he’s a genius writer who is just as challenging in his ways as DFW is. The gauntlets Wolfe throws at the reader are narratorial rather than formal; the participatory reading his work requires involves determining what the narrators aren’t telling you by piecing together scattered clues to figure out the outlines of the holes you have to fill. The greatest difficulty in this is that Wolfe believes strongly in the intelligence of his readership, so he only gives a clue twice if it’s supremely important. That means you have to keep track of clues you’ve seen before, just the way Nick is talking about. (It looks like maybe my discussion of this post is more in the line of a confirmation of Dedalus’s insightful comment that certain books forever alter how we read every other book.)

Then came infinitedetox’s courageous post, which is one of the most powerful blog posts I’ve ever read. Just as a lurker at Infinite Summer, I feel honored that infinitedetox would trust the community enough to publish that post (never mind that detox has a place of their own where they’re just as candid). Not having any personal experience with the process of recovery, I have no idea whether detox’s plan is a viable one, but I sincerely hope it is, and I wish nothing but the best.

I want to tread carefully here, because I recognize that there’s a danger of commodifying detox’s very personal journey, or co-opting it as the keystone of a critical argument rather than respecting it as another human being’s lived experience. With that caveat always in hand, I’d like to look at the mechanism of reading IJ that led, in detox’s telling, to their current sobriety—because it amounts to choosing to read carefully and mindfully, and being open to the fruits of that reading. Infinitedetox writes:

You may not care about junior tennis or Quebecois separatism or avant-garde film or AA cliché-mongering, but if you’re going to make any sense of Infinite Jest you’re probably going to have to start caring, a lot. You’re going to have to accept that proto-fascist tennis instructors and disabled pistol-toting terrorists are capable of delivering frighteningly insightful critiques of U.S. culture. You’re going to have to lay aside your Irony Shields and believe, with all your heart, that clichés can be just as potent as Don Gately says they are. In other words, you’re going to have to surrender to the book.

Be careful not to confuse surrender with passivity. I’m talking about an active surrender here. The actively-surrendered reader will sift through reams of mathematical arcana in order to tease out the implications of an oblique reference, or follow an obscure narrative thread deep into the bowels of Greek mythology to flesh out the author’s hinted-at ideas. Surrendered readers develop an eye for the author’s shortcomings. They share in the author’s failings. They are engaged, but not encaged. It may be instructive to compare active surrender with the drooling, pants-soiling passivity of Substance abuse and Entertainment addiction as portrayed in IJ.

This is exactly the process that Brittney and Nick’s posts, read together, delineate. First you choose to care, and then you choose to read very carefully that which you care about. I love this idea of active surrender, of willfully giving yourself over to inhabiting and making sense of the world of the book.

Where infinitedetox’s post becomes truly impressive is when this method pays off in empathetic identification: “I signed some sort of metaphorical blood-oath committing myself to looking at the world through David Foster Wallace’s eyes. And what happened then was that I saw myself as DFW would have seen me, refracted through the wobbly nystagmic lens of Infinite Jest.” And that’s it right there. That is the entire point of this whole process, the choosing, the caring, the reading, the surrendering, all the work: seeing through someone else’s eyes. Anyone’s. This is empathy, and it is indispensable.

For infinitedetox, it has made sobriety possible (which seems a miracle in itself). For anyone who cultivates it, it is what allows fulfilling human relationships. It is how you comfort a grieving friend. It is how you know what expressions of love will brighten your spouse’s day and lighten their heart. It is how you turn an argument into a positive-sum scenario. It is how you take other people seriously, respect them as independent beings of immeasurable worth equal to yours. In short, it is the sine qua non of being a whole human being, and it is worth every ounce of effort.

Although it’s nearly impossible to recognize as such the first time you get to page 64 of Infinite Jest and find yourself directed to note 24—an 8.3-page filmography of a character who is dead for nearly all the narrated sequences of the book—that note is something of a skeleton key to the entire novel. Like a hologram, this one tiny portion of the book contains all the major concerns that the other 1070 or so pages address. (I take this hologram method of interpretation from one of the very intelligent posters at the Urth List. I’d love to credit the originator, if I could remember or identify who it was.)

To justify that claim, I suppose I have to first lay out the web of what I think IJ’s major concerns are. As I alluded to in my previous post on the book, I think one of its two paramount subjects—and, depending on how subject areas are understood to be enmeshed, more likely its absolute most important concern—is communication. I’m trying to focus in this post on the filmography, so I don’t want to get too deeply into this right now, but I’ve done an awful lot of keyed underlining during my rereads of this book, and the number of times and ways that communication comes up is staggering and hugely revealing. Related to communication are issues of loneliness (and solipsism and depression), entertainment, and spectation (which last two are obviously yoked). And addiction comes in strongly, tied to individualism (which connects again back to solipsism).

(Wow, suddenly I want so bad to do a full S/Z-style breakdown of this endnote. There’s a project for the future.)

Communication is most obviously the subject of Insubstantial Country and It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him. These two come as a kind of one-two punch right toward the end of James Incandenza’s career (and of course the “professional conversationalist” section that begins on page 27 is probably the real-life dress rehearsal for the latter), but issues of communication arise early in the filmography: The first of the Sunstrand documentaries, Annular Fusion Is Our Friend, is “Sign-Interpreted for the Deaf.”

Loneliness seems to me unavoidably implied in The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass, with its character who is “brittle, hollow, and transparent to others,” and the unfinished, unreleased (undescribed) films The Cold Majesty of the Numb and Cage V — Infinite Jim sound heartbreaking, while The Unfortunate Case of Me sounds mostly bathetic.

The relevance of entertainment as a topic should be pretty clear when we’re dealing with a filmography. The films are not all intended as entertainment—there are documentaries, art films, experiments, academic-joke nonfilms—but Himself’s “first attempt at commercial entertainment,” Infinite Jest (I), shows up on the first full page, sharing a title with the book, and recurs throughout the listing. Through nearly his entire career, Incandenza kept trying over and over to make an entertainment he was satisfied with.

Spectation comes up most clearly in Cage III — Free Show (the synopsis is so great: “The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs”), but also in ‘The Medusa v. the Odalisque’ (whose detailed description, beginning on page 396 [spoiler!], reminds me very much of the video to Björk’s “Bachelorette”), The Joke, and even Every Inch of Disney Leith.

Other than the “cocaine-addicted father” in the presumably otherwise mostly autobiographical Widower, Incandenza’s films approach addiction pretty much exclusively in terms of alcoholism. It’s all over the filmography, usually in the form of a drunk father, although there is an intriguingly unfinished “documentary on genesis of reduced-calorie bourbon industry” (Let There Be Lite).

Individualism is the core concern of the book that I think note 24 deals with most obliquely, but I see it in both Homo Duplex, with its focus on what it means to have the same name as a famous person, and The American Century as Seen Through a Brick, which is an examination of history as embodied in the journey of one single brick through the years (almost an O.N.A.N.ite Forrest Gump, in a way).

Some of the films in this endnote are described in more or less detail in the body of the novel, and I’m sure I’ll want to talk about some of them when I catch up to writing about those sections of the Infinite Summer schedule, but for now I’ll leave them alone. I just wanted to point out the degree to which the funny, tedious, interruptive, imaginative note 24 is actually a crucial part of the fractal structure that DFW talked to Michael Silverblatt about.

(Title from Harry Partch’s US Highball.)

I’ll do a post sometime comparing Goodridge, In re Marriage Cases, Kerrigan, and Varnum v. Brien—the four decisions by state supreme courts mandating marriage equality—but for now I just want to note some of the standout features of the Iowa decision (Varnum). (Chris Geidner covered the substance of the ruling in a clear, nontechnical post worth reading.) The primary salience, of course, is that it is the first unanimous decision by any court of final appeal in the country finding that equal protection requires recognition of the right of same-sex couples to marry. It’s the first time an entire supreme court has found me equal to my sister. From the get-go, that’s a powerful statement for a court to make.

More than that, though, it’s a shockingly comprehensive and generous ruling. The opening insists again and again that the plaintiffs in the suit are no different from other Iowans. “Like most Iowans,” it says, “they are responsible, caring, and productive individuals.” “Like many Iowans, some have children and others hope to have children.” “Like all Iowans, they prize their liberties and live within the borders of this state with the expectation that their rights will be maintained and protected—a belief embraced by our state motto.” “Despite the commonality shared with other Iowans, the twelve plaintiffs are different from most in one way.” (They’re gay.) “Each maintains a hope of getting married one day, an aspiration shared by many throughout Iowa.” “As other Iowans have done in the past when faced with the enforcement of a law that prohibits them from engaging in an activity or achieving a status enjoyed by other Iowans, the twelve plaintiffs turned to the courts to challenge the statute.” They are us, it says repeatedly—the original empathic move from which all the rest flows. I’ve never seen a court decision that so warmly embraces a minority group, and so concretely claims that group as part of the whole of society. As a gay man, I don’t just feel vindicated by the ruling; I feel valued.

Then the court situates the ruling in a line of important civil-rights cases it has decided over the past 170 years: the abolition of slavery in Iowa in 1839, cases in 1868 and 1873 that struck down racial discrimination in schooling and public accommodations, and the 1869 admission of the country’s first woman to legal practice. It makes the point that, although sometimes stumbling, the Iowa Supreme Court has consistently aimed to be in the vanguard on equal protection. This decision arrives well ahead of societal consensus on the matter, but when it comes to equality before the law, that has long been the court’s practice.

The fireworks begin when the court takes on the state’s proffered justifications for discriminating against same-sex couples. In arguments, the state gave five reasons for the law: maintaining traditional marriage, promotion of optimal environment to raise children, promotion of procreation, promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships, and conservation of resources (nonparallelism sic). The court slaps every one down like a game of Whac-a-Mole. On maintaining traditional marriage: “The County has simply failed to explain how the traditional institution of civil marriage would suffer if same-sex civil marriage were allowed.” Whac!

On promotion of optimal environment to raise children: “If the statute was truly about the best interest of children, some benefit to children derived from the ban on same-sex civil marriages would be observable.” Whac!

On promotion of procreation: “While heterosexual marriage does lead to procreation, the argument by the County fails to address the real issue in our required analysis of the objective: whether exclusion of gay and lesbian individuals from the institution of civil marriage will result in more procreation?” Whac!

On promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships: “While the institution of civil marriage likely encourages stability in opposite-sex relationships, we must evaluate whether excluding gay and lesbian people from civil marriage encourages stability in opposite-sex relationships. The County offers no reason that it does, and we can find none.” Whac!

On conservation of resources: “The trait of sexual orientation is a poor proxy for regulating aspiring spouses’ usage of state resources.” Whac!

The court then takes the surprising step of addressing an issue not actually raised by the parties to the case: religious opposition to marriage equality. It makes the point that many religious people understand their faith to forbid the solemnization of marriages between two loving, committed people of the same sex—but that many others understand their faith to require it. In any case, though, that’s none of the court’s business, because the law deals strictly with marriage as a civil contract. And with this decision, “civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law.”

In all, it’s a deeply thoughtful, thorough, and fair decision. It could serve as a model for any court facing the same issue. Say, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Dee dee dee dee blessings be upon you…

(Title from Thomas Nashe, via Benjamin Britten.)

This has been quite a spring for marriage equality. The progress has been famously characterized as a gathering storm, but the Nashe quote I’m using for my title here puts a different metaphor in my mind: It’s fun to think of the spring as a giant Green Man romping about the country (after hopping over from Sweden) entraining verdancy, and among the tendrils and blossoms that leap up in his wake is the recognition that love and commitment between two men or two women are just as much to be celebrated and honored as when they arise between a man and a woman.

Sweden was the first place this spring to come to that recognition. On April Fool’s Day the Riksdag had a six-hour debate, and then voted nearly 12 to 1 to recognize marriage equality. It’s funny: They have 349 members in that body (not too very many fewer than the House of Representatives here in the U.S., although we’ve got an extra house in the national legislature), and with six hours of debate, they were able to pass marriage-equality legislation in a landslide. I doubt you could get anything through the House in six hours with a margin like that. (And, oh, Stockholm is a beautiful city. I have some wonderful memories of Ping-Pong in a house on a lake there.)

Then, on the 3rd, the Iowa Supreme Court released its opinion in Varnum v. Brien—as far as I’m concerned, the preeminent marriage-equality decision in the country. (It’s so good, I smile now at the sight of Bookman Old Style.) I got carried away writing up some of the ruling’s remarkable rhetoric, so I’m going to post that separately [Here it is.—Ed.], but the upshot is a unanimous, magnanimous recognition that queer folks are people, and not to be treated as anything less than full, equal citizens.

Four days later, the Green King visited the Green Mountain State and the district of his colleague Columbia. It was a short trip to D.C., just long enough for the city council to take its first vote (12–0) on recognizing same-sex marriages validly enacted elsewhere. (The final vote, this time with Marion Barry present and dissenting, was about a month later.) But Vermont—ooh, that was a story.

April 7 was the exciting conclusion of the process in Vermont; in the previous two weeks or so, Vermont’s Senate had passed a marriage-equality bill 26–4 and sent it to the state House of Representatives, which approved it 95–52. In between those two votes, though, Gov. Jim Douglas had announced that he would veto the law once it was passed—which he did. The very next day, both houses voted to override his veto (the House by the slimmest possible margin), and Vermont became the first state in the country to enact marriage-equality legislation.

Then there were a few weeks that felt a little strange. I and some of the bloggers that I read had been so bowled over by the expansion of marriage equality during the first week of April that we temporarily forgot the normal state of affairs, i.e., not gaining new jurisdictions at a rate of more than one a week. Perhaps King Spring was napping. It was a bit of a letdown, waiting for Maine to get the lead out. But it did, and almost exactly two weeks after a marriage-equality bill was introduced (with more than six times the number of cosponsors usually permitted), Gov. John Baldacci signed it within an hour of receiving it—making him the country’s first governor to sign a marriage-equality bill (a distinction, by the way, that my honored Gov. Hoover twice refused). Now if only the voters of Maine can see their way to rejecting the upcoming people’s veto…

Now comes the still-pending excitement. A marriage-equality bill pushed by Gov. David Paterson scored big in New York’s Assembly, but the tradition in the state Senate is apparently for “leaders” not to bring a bill to a vote unless they already know it will pass. Since there was some maneuvering at the start of this legislative term in New York involving promises not to vote on marriage equality in the Senate, there’s some question whether it will even come up before the session ends next month. Let’s hope the necessary political pressure can be brought to bear.

New Hampshire is working on marriage equality right now, too, in a gripping struggle that has required proponents to overcome possibly fatal resistance at every stage of the process: committees, full-chamber votes, and even the governor’s desk. Right now we’re waiting for a conference committee to iron out the terms of a companion bill that Gov. John Lynch has demanded as a condition for his not vetoing the original bill that finally made it through both houses. (Rep. Jim Splaine ‘splains it all in detail at Blue Hampshire, a great resource for following this whole drama, although that post is not recent enough to cover the Senate’s concurrence in the companion bill and the House’s rejection of that same bill.) The roller-coaster ride continues.

And then there’s California. My adopted home takes the national spotlight tomorrow, when we see whether the year’s pleasant king keeps dancing or he trips over the Sierra Nevada and falls into the sea. Cross fingers.

(Title from W.H. Auden, via Benjamin Britten.)

I’m having a great deal of difficulty lately coming to grips with the fact that I live among brutes and torturers. We are in the middle of a public debate right now in the United States about whether torture is effective enough that we can excuse it. Dick Cheney and his squadron of soulless goons are taking to the television studios to argue that we obtained highly valuable information from the people we tortured, and that that makes it OK. They are lying. This is a monstrous debate, designed to distract us from the fact that torture is ineffective and illegal, and that torture is wrong.

But my heart sinks under the feeling that they are succeeding. I see surveys like the Pew Forum’s and am stunned with anguish that three out of four of my compatriots can imagine circumstances in which they’d approve of torture. It troubles me to look at those graphs and see that support for torture—let’s be direct: sadism and bloodlust—increases with religiosity, but that’s beside my main point, which is that I don’t know how to live among people who can’t understand that torture is wrong.

Perhaps these people are not monsters and ghouls; perhaps they’re simply uninformed and unimaginative. Perhaps they don’t know what has been done.

But then, perhaps the torture advocates do know. As digby has come to realize, we are a torture nation: “The United States of America tortures its own children. It tortures prisoners. It tortures average citizens whom any policeman believes is failing to smartly comply with his orders and it tortures suspected terrorists.” I don’t know how to be a part of that society.

Let me approach the problem from a different path.

Ever since I became consciously aware of my own moral agency (when I learned about the Enlightenment in 10th grade, I’m pretty sure), I’ve made it a point to assume the best of people. I feel a duty of empathy, generosity, and openness to my fellow human beings, and the only way I can do right by them is to take a default attitude of care and optimism. This amounts to a general creed that people are fundamentally good. I know there are caveats to this assertion—I’m the one who brought up Dick Cheney before. But I see him and his kind as freaks, inevitable statistical outliers.

I have built my moral framework on this foundation. The ways that I relate to the people I know and the society I inhabit are rooted in my faith that all human beings are basically decent, under whatever fog of fear or ignorance or distrust may obscure that nature. But faced with a regime of torturers and their cheerleaders in my country, I am losing that faith. I am no longer blithely confident, as I was before, that if during a political discussion I bring up my strenuous objection to torture, I will find agreement. For all I know, the person I’m talking to may find the strappado a perfectly cromulent law-enforcement technique. And I don’t know how to recognize that person as a human being.

This uncertainty hasn’t yet infected all my interpersonal dealings, of course; I know, for instance, that my husband and my friends have moral compasses that don’t point “straight down to hell.” Unfortunately, for fear of what I may hear, I have not brought myself to confirm the same about all of my family.

The disorientation and paranoia I’m describing reminds me somewhat of the aftermath of Prop. 8’s passage. For a couple days, I felt like a character in a World War II movie who had parachuted in behind enemy lines and couldn’t tell the resistance from the secret police. I went to the grocery store and couldn’t help wondering whether the mother I saw digging through the tomatoes with her toddler had voted to revoke my right to marry the man I love, or whether the chef at the sushi counter had a Yes on 8 sign hammered into the ground in front of his house, or whether the high-school seniors sneaking wistful glances toward the liquor aisle had told their classmates to vote yes so that I wouldn’t come after their little brothers. As I said, that only lasted a couple days; it helped to have maps showing vote distribution, and to feel the palpable outrage at the proposition’s passage among everyone who is important to me. It also helped to have official support: Lawsuits to overturn Prop. 8 were filed immediately, and city and county governments from all up and down the state joined in. Both houses of the state legislature passed resolutions condemning the proposition. I felt like I was part of a community that recognized a wrong, and that recognition reached upward into positions of power.

And that’s missing, when it comes to torture. I know I am part of an anti-torture community: digby, Marcy Wheeler, Fred Clark (and his wonderful commenters), Christy Hardin Smith, Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton, Jack Balkin, Marty Lederman, and Brian Tamanaha—these people are not monsters. These people are fundamentally good. These people are decent. But these people only represent about 25 percent of us, and I don’t know how I’m going to get back to trusting the other 75.