The Genius Fish

"Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its entire life believing that it is stupid." 

The words above were spoken by Albert Einstein. They are inspiring and reassuring and utter bullshit. Some fish can climb trees. And those fish are the genius fish.

Lately my reading habits have resembled the trajectory of a tetherball, whipping frantically through dozens of essays then slowly coiling around novels of monstrously epic size before settling in for a spell of complete inactivity. Then it starts again, following much the same pattern. Plate after plate of hors d'ouvres and then a carb-heavy, horse-choking plate of carbonara.

Most of my reading-related energy has been focused on two authors - Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. I've attacked their works with all the creativity of Coldplay's songwriters. Infinite Jest usually got a mention when people discussed the most difficult books they'd ever tried to read so it seemed like a good one to start with. Gravity's Rainbow earned the following paraphrased recommendation from a friend of mine: "It's set in WWII, the guy is trying to find a rocket bomb, then he goes to find some hash, and everyone is doing drugs and getting laid in weird ways the whole time. It was pretty good but I didn't finish it."  Got it.

And on the list it went. Mason & Dixon, Girl with Curious Hair, Broom of the System, Against the Day, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again...bordering on full fledged addiction. Which isn't exactly positive, since one of those authors (Wallace) is dead and the other is roughly six hundred years old. It will be hard to get a fix once the existing stash is gone.

The process of reading these books has been simultaneously one of the most inspiring/horrifically depressing experiences of my life.

Imagine you are a musician. Well, not a real musician...you've never actually performed a live set. Or recorded a single track, for that matter. But when you were in high school you really, really enjoyed playing in the band. And you were pretty good. You secretly enjoyed practicing chords and simple melodies while the others bitched and moaned their way through rehearsal. Bi-yearly concerts could be described with minimal hyperbole as better than sex. You even liked evaluations, because it was a chance to be validated by an objective outsider (sorry, mom - you don't count). And at those moments you really felt like you had a special gift.

Then you went to college, and you never got around to joining a music group. Course work/a job/significant other/stress/enthusiasm for drugs/apathy/_________ meant you never felt like there was any time, you  know? Sometimes you'd see a drum circle on the quad, or half-listen to some duo jamming at a coffee shop, and it would remind you that people of your age and station and socio-economic background were chasing the music dream. But they always sounded so painfully mediocre. From your vantage point as an intelligent and disinterested observer you could easily discern that their efforts currently sucked and were likely to also suck in the future.

Maybe you felt a bit of superiority, witnessing these three-cord abominations and off-key vocals drowning in a sea of percussion. The ego loves a hot mug of smug self-assurance. But really your detachment was about remaining safe. As long as you didn't try and fail, your gift would remain special. It would just be hidden. Nothing could hurt the gift - your diamond would never be exposed as cheap zirconia. Mike Jordan once said you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, but airballed free throws end up on YouTube. Fans watching at home, on the other hand, are seldom publicly humiliated.

In three semi-concise/coherent paragraphs, then, I have described my relationship with writing. I love it, and it makes me feel good. I wish I did it more often. I have always liked to imagine that I am a good writer - it is perhaps the one self-identifying fantasy that has survived all the moods, trends, and complete reorientations that people usually go through between the ages of 5 and 21. Like a cockroach or can of condensed soup, the fantasy is seemingly indestructible.

Then I started reading Wallace and Pynchon, and hey presto! there goes the fantasy. Goodbye self-protective non-involvement, hello realization of mediocrity. It shouldn't be that shocking I guess; most of us will be mediocre at most of the things we do. This isn't a bad thing, in many ways - there needs to be an baseline level of competence (at any activity) to help us distinguish greatness by comparison. Even if the baseline gets higher, some people will always be THAT MUCH better than the baseline, and thus be defined as "great". Two hundred years ago, I bet 99% of the people in my apartment building would have totally kicked ass at literacy - they'd read and write circles around the competition. Today the accomplishment is not as impressive.

David Foster Wallace was great. At this point in history, I have been slightly better than him at not suffering from insurmountable depression and eventually committing suicide, but I can't approach his level at anything else. He was an athletic prodigy - one of the highest ranked junior tennis players in the U.S. at one point. He was a mathematical genius - try reading his explanation of the game Eschaton in Infinite Jest without developing a fierce hatred for calculus. He was also able to understand and express how it feels to be a human being. The Buddha taught that we can know others through our suffering. Few people could do this as well as Wallace. In an essay he wrote while a junior at university, Wallace described how it feels to be really, really sad.  He did it with humor, without self pity, and with heartbreaking honesty. I can't read these words without a clenched jaw and blurry vision.

On the other hand, I can't read his commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 without feeling incredibly hopeful about being alive. I want to applaud him after every paragraph because he's just so goddamned magnificently RIGHT about things...have you ever seen a little kid start to pump his arms and legs and run around like a madman, hollering nonsense at the top of his lungs, jumping on furniture and crashing into more sober-minded adults, spasming and twitching and literally moving every part of his body that he can control simply because he's so flooded with excitement and joy and delight and sugar or whatever? And you know how annoying that kid can be, because he's basically acting like a small noisy tornado in a place where humans are supposed to live and work, except when you remember how great it was to feel like that and then a part of you feels sad that you don't feel like that anymore and wish you could genuinely experience that unfiltered lust for all-encompassing life again. Usually I'm a grown-up, but Wallace's speech makes me feel like that kid. I want to do a thousand amazing things all at once and then dive face-first into a chocolate ice cream cake.

I don't think I'll ever write anything like that. Which is OK - you need to tell kids they can become anything they can imagine, but not everyone grows up to be cosmonauts and linebackers and beatboxers and Nobel Prize-winning chemists. If those were the only career paths to satisfaction the human race would, probably, be entirely fucked in terms of ever being somewhat happy. It's important to learn how to be happy with being "average"; unsubstantiated delusions of self-importane are among the least-attractive delusions out there.

I love reading these books by Wallace and Pynchon, but my ego does not. When in the midst of an especially brilliant paragraph or extended ramble we often have this type of exchange:

Me: Oh my god...yeah. Yeah, that is right. That is so goddamn right and it's beautiful. He is incredible.

Ego: Totally; he's saying what I've been thinking for years! He's saying what I've been thinking!

 *continue reading for a few seconds*

Me: How did he make those connections? How has he managed to tie all these bizarre plot lines and characters and streams of thought into something legible? Where does he get these ideas? Whose mind actually works in these ways - emotions and mathematics and savage low-brow comedy and endearingly shitty poetry? HOW DO HUMANS MAKE THIS?!

Ego: The last part kind of sounds like something I...ah fuck it.

It hurts a little to read these books, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to do so. It's thrilling to witness transcendence from people who (conceivably) could have once walked and slept and ate in the same places as you. And it's humbling to watch the masters play chess.

Maybe it'll make me better at checkers.