the meaning you make

I started reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace in October. I finished it last night. I am not a slow reader. I read it almost every single day. It is a challenging book, is what I am getting at. And long. 981 pages; 1079 with footnotes. And the font isn’t that large and the margins aren’t that big and DFW isn’t much into paragraphs, but really likes abbreviations (without which we’ve speculated it could have doubled in length). I got a new dictionary because of (for) this book. Entire meetings of English Club were devoted to IJ. We were all reading it. It has been nice going through it with others, to share in the confusion and awe of DFW and IJ.

I don’t really know what else to say about it or where I would even begin. When I finished it, I just sat there and stared at the blank space on the lower half of page 981. I had known the end was coming. I’d read the last footnote with eager regret. I had often thumbed to 981 with a twinge of doubt that I would ever reach it (I had started IJ at least 3 times before). I texted Abdul who had finished it the previous week and while waiting for his response, I realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

I closed the book. I reopened it to the first page and started reading it again.

When Abdul responded he suggested I do exactly what I had done and then said the most perfect thing: “I feel like the story is just starting and I’m starving for more of that world.”

Dream Song 29
by John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

John Berryman, Dream Song 29 from The Dream Songs.
Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman

The Country
by Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time -

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

In the short non-fiction piece “Blue”, Mary B. Valencia subtly draws parallels between the alcoholic behavior of her lover that lands him in rehab and the home renovation phenomenon she finds herself entrenched in. The dismantling of two lives, their love and their home and the subsequent attempts at rebuilding (not all successful) is made only more powerful by the fact that it is not fiction.

Valencia has a seemingly effortless way of bringing the reader straight into the story: “I peeled away green painter’s tape from around the light socket and flicked the switch,” (45). Her tactile imagery alongside this everyday action makes me feel the tape under my own fingers. And later on my toes curl at this: “I dried off and walked downstairs without any clothes on. I never did that. I didn’t care that the back window had no curtain, that there were nails and sawdust on the floor, that a snake’s den of cable hugged the walls,” (47). I feel as though I am walking with her on that bare floor,welcoming the idea of physical pain to subside the emotional.

The story flashes between home renovations shows she becomes addicted to, fond and not so fond memories of the boyfriend (though even the fond ones give us glimpses of what is to come: while the two are racing another couple in canoes, “You steered sloppily, holding us back, but I kept counting”), not wanting to rid the house of him and then desperately trying to rid the house of him (46).

In the midst of finding hidden bottles and recalling fights, Valencia details a gentler moment: “I wished you had always been with me. That’s why I hung onto you us for so long, because of that moment when you loved me so perfectly,” (47).

Valencia weaves an undercurrent of change and possibility into each aspect of the story, you can choose not to get sober, you can add more storage space to accommodate the accumulation of your life, or you can start over, clean up. Even then, so concerned with what could be, you forget what is. She reminds us this can be a matter of our perspective: “You hated the chain link fence until I pointed out the visual depth. We weren’t constricted by the six-foot high wooden fences,” (48). We get to choose to see things the way they were or maybe, in a way, still are: “If you stood at the base of our pear tree, you could see an entire row of fruit trees – cherry, peach, apple – a stretched outline, a secret orchard in the city,” (48).

The final passage brings us into the garden, into the melting snow revealing items thought lost, and Valencia considers what she had found, what she could turn it into, and what it truly had been: “What was the yard like before these brick houses, garages and alleys? On the edge of this great lake, was there still a forest of tree roots under my feet?” (50).

And I didn’t even touch on the blue part… read it for yourself: “Blue” appears in the Fall issue of the Canadian journal PRISM international.