🌃 ☭ • 14 January 2023 • 25 Nivôse CCXXXI • 🌗: 🔹On the Overlap between The Mountain Goat's discography and the work of David Foster Wallace🔹
TMG & DFW: On Addiction, theology, and other Chemical Rituals
perhaps because i came across their work at a shared time in my life (freshman year of college) i have strong associations between the works of novelist/essayist David Foster Wallace and John's discography. is this true for others?
i have heard that the chorus of Philippians 3:20-21 was a reference to a quote from Infinite Jest regarding suicide. (https://genius.com/12370018?). they also have overlapping motifes, especially with regards to characters who are addicts, institutionalized, depressed, survivors of religious trauma.
they also have similar philosophic-theological frameworks, including the subject-constitutive act of worship-as-giving -oneself-to-Something, be it God or work or a lover or an idealized version of a lover or an idealized version of God or an idealized version of the self, et cetera. et xeno.
(Wallace lays this out in This is Water, a baccalaureate that has shaped my thinking since i was a high schooler taking community college classes and read it as part of an assignment long before I'd read even Consider the Lobster, much less any of his fiction, to the point that the insights of This is Water are themselves part of my own ideological structuring-space, which is it's own weird thing. i wonder if Zizek has any discussion of Wallace?)
I'm currently reading Infinite Jest (my first attempt since undergrad), about 55 pages in there is a discussion of the drugs of choice of the tennis players at the academy, and how some people can give themselves totally to just one thing (in this case Tennis) but most of the kids need chemical rituals (all rituals are chemical rituals) and of course that makes me think about Riches and Wonders and the lonelyness and inadequacy of giving yourself to someone and being-in-love and but or doing the chemical rituals of love because giving yourself to something strikes me as a precarious sort of ontology, a sort of necessary but not necessarily adequate condition for being, but maybe there isn't any adequate condition of being, because being is impossible and therefore so is death, but the Gods are harsh task masters and so we are obliged to be and to die irregardless (godthatssuchagoodword), Impossibility be Damned.
and also i think about Steal Smoked Fish and Damn these Vampires and how we do and use and make and steal and give away all the things we need to survive, and how survival is never just survival but always implies something more, an expirence of survival.
and maybe and surviving-for or surviving-to-some object, even if that object is the lack of an object, or a deferred object, or a hoped for object, the impression being an implied future or potential or lost object now only meditated to us differently. and or but can surviving also implies someone, someones, who survived to this point, implies your own habits and history of survival, and it's not like those things don't have a memetic inertia to them too.
Subjects: David Foster Wallace, The Mountain Goats, Ontology, Infinite Jest, Zizek, Addiction, Worship, Love
Post Script it was through John Green's early YouTube videos i discovered TMG (starting with the song Love Love Love) and also he was one of several first exposures to Wallace's work, Green being something of a disciple of his in my imagination.