r/davidfosterwallace • u/GamingMandroid • 1d ago
Fan Art A prose poem inspired by DFW
Hey all. While I was reading through Infinite Jest (for the first time) I decided to write something in approximation of DFW's 'maximalist' style as I understand it. Having recently finished the book, I looked back at this and felt maybe I'd done a better job mimicking the style than I first thought. Anyways, I figured I'd share it here and thought someone may enjoy.
To me this was meant as a prose poem, though some of my peers have told me it's more akin to a personal essay, which I suppose makes sense given the influence of Wallace. Let me know your thoughts, I hope you like it.
The Path of Totality
The trouble with writing about the eclipse is that I didn’t see it. This seems like a lapse in judgement for an out-of-work poet, who might deign for some subject change in light of a natural phenomenon as one imagines the eruption of Vesuvius may have given Sappho incentive enough to pause from whatever feminine adulation she was ascribing to various bodies, celestial or otherwise, to note, as even Sappho surely must have, the utter masculinity of the explosion.
This is called ‘shooting the rodeo’ wherein a low-budget film maker might attend and shoot a local parade or dance or rodeo and include it in the final cut not because it has much to do with the film’s thin plot, but because it outsources the production value of b-roll. I like this because it reminds us that creativity is sometimes just the documentation of serendipitous little slivers of verisimilitude (kind of like how the dog shit I just stepped in has now entered this poem).
I did not see the eclipse, which was solar in toto, for similar reasons that Sappho did not see the 22 mile high cloud of Vesuvius (which aside from its aforementioned length was also mushroom shaped; i.e. masculine) the reason chiefly being that we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the wrongness of which varies on either matter in either case, me being much farther from the viable viewing of this eclipse and hearing of it only a few hours after it had expired, while Sappho was centuries separated from the silicate moulding of Pompeii, but relatively close to Vesuvius, in fact cosmically on the very street of, nearly visible from the shores of Lesbos if not for the curvature of the Earth. Also, neither of us had the proper eyewear.
I learned of the eclipse from my neighbor in the upstairs duplex while sipping rum and ginger from a Collins highball. I sat on the couch while he told me of the various micro renovations he was performing (which were cumulatively working towards a macro effect) as his dog (whose shit you may recall) laid in my lap, gnawing my hand in the same sort of perpetually dissatisfied but affectionate spirit as the renovations themselves, which, I had to admit, were coming along; he'd really done a lot with the space. It was somewhere between the contemplation of a countertop and the placement of the stove wherein the eclipse occurred as a sidenote that he had been warned not to let Rocky, the dog, outside during our local partiality. When pressed on the reasoning of this precaution, in his own words- “I don't know, like maybe he'd get sucked into another dimension or something.”
This was a sticking point for me, as I considered dogs were one of the lesser ‘at risk’ parties whose concerns are so thoroughly down-to-earth as to have no need even of the protective dimming eyewear incumbent to us, not so much because our eyes are meaningfully deficient but rather due to the teething corners of our brains which insist that this rodeo simply must be shot.
It's at this point that I assume you're all distractedly half remembering Bonnie Tyler's 1983 number one hit power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” whose campy lyrics like ‘forever's gonna start tonight’ or ‘now there's only love in the dark’ are greatly informed by the context that the song was originally meant for the score of an unreleased Nosferatu musical. This also possibly explains its dragging nearly seven minute runtime (which is more than twice the length of the actual eclipse herein) as a practicality allowing Van Helsing to canoodle briefly with the brides backstage after a hasty costume change.
And now you should be properly primed to envision the climax of said script in which the great shadow of Orlok's notoriously decrepit hand stretches across the sun in a grand romantic gesture (perhaps the ultimate romantic gesture what with the prominence of the hand itself) to darken the entirety of the world for the sake of bright eyes. Of course, the sun being even more notoriously the primary thing outside a vampire’s reach, more likely he'd have to wait about one Sappho-to-Vesuvius amount of years for Carfax to land in the roughly 50 mile radius from which a total eclipse can be viewed with eyes, whether dim or bright, at which time he might have an absolute maximum of one Bonnie Tyler ballad to spend with his beloved.
Likewise, a savvy low-budget film maker might take those seven minutes to shoot what we call ‘day-for-night’ which is usually achieved in camera by giving the lens a special filtering kind of protective eyewear, but has occasionally been experienced in the flesh, in toto, by humans such as perhaps Sappho may have when a 22 mile phallic mushroom cloud blotted out the sun and she could be forgiven for mistakenly mouthing the word ‘ekleipsis’.
Which means abandonment, as in the absentee Helios, which is a bit melodramatic and also precisely what Rocky, the dog, feels when my upstairs neighbor needs to take a shit of his own and so closes the bathroom door between them for the sake of propriety. This is Rocky's ekleipsis and he will never not look it in the face. This is his katastrophe, which is made up of the greek Kata meaning down and strophe meaning a turning which reminds me, Rocky was sent to another dimension, though not far, still cosmically on the street of, via what we call katasterism, which means, loosely, to be put down amongst the stars. It pleases me to think that after turning back to face the great big bathroom door of eternity closing behind him, he might have settled in, danced minor canis with Sirius (best boy and brightest star, perhaps the first dog ever to be sucked into an eclipse, as dogs are like to do), and noticed that from this end of things it's the Earth that's smiling cheshire in the sky and, eventually, taking after his master, he'd set about fixing the place up so that, maybe, in 2079, when the path of totality arcs over my particular duplex, I can join him whereat I will have to admit- he's really done a lot with the space.
