Here's how it happened this time:
I'm nearing the end of reading Don DeLillo's Underworld - a fabulous book given to me by - of course - the Abbot - the man who started me on this Infinite Jest business in the first place.
And I'm captivated by DeLillo's Lenny Bruce stuff - fantastic stuff - so I look up Lenny Bruce online. I read about him, his life as brilliant comic and tortured soul and see in a list of Google results that there's something about him at BobDylan.com.
And who can resist Dylan?
So I click. And the click takes me to > the lyrics to Dylan's "Lenny Bruce" song and I go about reading all the lyrics and one line really hits me: "He's on some other shore, he didn't wanna live anymore."
And then I think immediately about Don Gately because I've never forgotten.
Never forgotten how it all ended.
I recall my theory about the ending.
The Gately ending.
The Gately "death".
My theory about Gately's "death"?
Well my theory is that David Foster Wallace did not have Gately "die" and he certainly didn't have him survive that horrible final scene - but instead put him in some kind of afterlife or at least another dimension - attaching him to some string theory world.
The way Dylan put Lenny Bruce on some other shore because Lenny Bruce didn't want to live anymore?
Dylan seems to me to want to look after Lenny in the song.
So I'm wondering did Wallace want to look after Gately too - in his book?
Which then makes me wonder if this post is me trying to look after someone too.
Like maybe even looking after David Foster Wallace himself. Is this post me putting him on another shore and making him not "dead"?
Or maybe it's about my Mom? No - not "the Moms". My Mom.
I started reading DeLillo's Underworld the day I took my Mom to the hospital for surgery a couple of months ago. They put her under and cut her open to try to fix her heart but she never came to. "Gone." Just like that. A complete surprise to me. And probably a surprise to her too. Went into the operating room and never came back. It was like she vanished. Sure - her body didn't vanish. They let me see her body. But it felt like she kind of "escaped".
That's what I'm thinking - now that I've gone down this path of "investigation".
And I'm wondering: Do DFW and Bob Dylan really want us to believe that like Don Gately and Lenny Bruce, others could be on infinite other shores? Other dimensions? Personal dimensions?
But that sounds almost like, well, almost like g/God and religion and stuff like that.
Come on - everyone who knows me, knows I don't believe in such fiction. Could Wallace have believed in something like that? Like there was something more? After? Or beyond? Beyond this earth, beyond the written page, beyond the one-man show, beyond the lyrics in a Dylan song?
While I agree that it could be argued that like Lenny Bruce and David Foster Wallace, my Mom didn't want to live any more, do Wallace and Dylan really want me to believe that when my Mom came back to, she was flat on her back on a beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out?
You know - I've been determined to finish the rather hefty and long Underworld as a kind of tribute to my Mom and in the hope of possibly finding some kind of comforting message in the book that my Mom might magically have left me but I'm amazed that Underworld has taken me along some crazy paths back to Infinite Jest.
Always Infinite Jest.
It's probably just me. It's probably just me looking for that magic. Magic in a book, magic in life.
Magic doesn't happen, right?
Fiction doesn't happen, right?
