Infinite Rest
Monday, September 15th, 2008I’ve listened to Son Volt’s “Medicine Hat” once each day since this past Friday. It’s a song that’s always resonated with me–Jay Farrar doing his best to sound like a rockin’er (though still jangly) Byrds covering ‘65-era Dylan–despite being a typically tough-to-decipher Farrarian attempt at, well, Dylan’s obtuse, image-riddled quasi-prophetic poetry. I hadn’t given the cut a spin in over a year, I’m sure, and I had no real idea why the song suddenly re-asserted itself as a favorite in the last few days.
Today I was sitting in my kitchen, shoveling the final spoonful of cereal from my bowl as the host on National Public Radio introduced a fairly short piece with only “And now a remembrance of David Foster Wallace,” my roommate Andres concurrently asking “Did you hear about this shit?” I had not.
I rocketed out of my seat, cranked up the volume knob, paced away from the radio and stood in the middle of the apartment, completely upended inside.
David Foster Wallace, 46, found by his wife at their Claremont, California home on Friday, apparently a suicide by hanging.
In the past few months I have managed to re-obsess myself with DFW, reading again each essay in Consider The Lobster, preaching his greatness to various people at parties, the conversation either becoming a mutual lovefest between myself and anyone whose ever read a word the man had written, or the other person vowing to read Wallace’s essay “Big Red Son”–easily the most intelligent, unflinching, insightful consideration of the American pornography industry ever put to paper–at the earliest opportunity.
I went with my friend Brett to watch the daytime qualifying rounds of the U.S. Open last month in Queens solely because Wallace had written an essay about tennis player Roger Federer–his take made the game sound so interesting that I, a professed sports avoider, felt I had to see some racket-wielding professionals tread the courts it in person.
This blog even unintentionally lifts a bigtime conceit from the DFW playbook, as I refer to myself in posts not by the far-more-often blogged with “we” or in the at least standard old “I” but instead as “your [Songs About Knives] correspondent,” essentially a minor modification on DFW’s hilariously clever ability to render himself in the third person when detailing his experiences, a move that somehow managed to spectacularly humanize the events portrayed therein.
The play count for “Medicine Hat” on my laptop now stands at four–once a day since Friday, but this last rotation was suffused with an unfortunate meaning that the song will, for me, probably never shake. “Just like that and the deed is done,” Farrar sings in the chorus, closing out the section by adding: “the time is now to be on the run.” I’ve played it each day since Wallace’s suicide, not yet knowing its meaning had been cemented until today.
A lot of it is epic in its lyrically open-endedness–“there will be signposts of indication / semaphore go signs and warnings”–and reads like the Biblically vague stuff that is oft-counterfeited in powerful (if arguably empty) rock songwriting. I’ve never necessarily believed that Dylan songs really mean anything, and that prospect has never troubled me, so I have always given Farrar the same pass, more because when he’s in his rock-poet mode he’s generally indecipherable, though almost certainly never meaningless.
David Foster Wallace was neither, and suddenly it is apparent that “Medicine Hat” is much the same, equal parts predictive and profound. “Departures raised with no masquerading,” Farrar wails in the first verse, “there will be teachers that die by their own hand.”
David Foster Wallace, R.I.P. 1962-2008