Hey you.
To form, deeply and slowly, a one-on-one message that you know will see only the eyes of the person for whom it is written, such is to beg your audience's attention. To do the same, but less discriminatingly, as with the construction of a hard-hitting essay that both you and your professor understand may see more than just the professor's eyes, is to beg somewhat less of your audience's attention. The impact only lessens the further one expands his horizons. For instance, a blog posted for all to see is actually a message to be internalized by none; no matter how vividly one's point is made, no matter how personable the rhetoric employed, no matter how philosophical or heartrending the author may be, there will always be that diffusion of responsibility on the part of the reader, the result of his omnipresent awareness that he is, in fact, one audience member amid an audience of audience members. The up-close poetics are in how no one wants to share the inspiration he feels that he has earned from a piece, because true inspiration grants him insight on the piece, which in turn allows him to contribute to the piece's further public reception, presumably causing those to whom he preaches to identify him with the great work (i.e., like wanting to be the actor with the most and/or best lines in a great screenplay); this is a truth with consequences oh-so-commonly manifested in the bandwagon-backlash that occurs with the popularization of great indie music or film (i.e., the fundamental reason why no one can outright "like" Pitchfork Media and/or Napoleon Dynamite anymore, at least not until the disliking of these things becomes its own big, bad bandwagon). Someone writing a message with the intention of reaching everyone (for example: a blog) must understand, whether or not he understands, that his words will reach no one, (not in earnest, anyway). The realest benefit of blogging is in assuming the altered perspective one is granted of one's own words upon dispatching them to the web; pretending to be some uninitiated reader is made all the less challenging by the expedient makeover one's writing undergoes when it's "published" to the website (e.g., changes in font, color, text-wrapping, etc.). Masturbatory is the word for this epidemic, if you can will yourself, as a reader, to infer the implications.
All that having been stated: everyone, this is a cry for help.
Though my Argumentation class is full of kids who will not (and/or possibly cannot) struggle with the course's writing-intensive curriculum, theirs is not the kind of confidence I envy. They almost unanimously appreciate my professor's cryptic condemnations of Those Who Do Not Assert Their Opinions, even when she then goes on to explain how--and I cannot but find this confounding--no opinion is righter than another. If you find her partnering of platforms accommodating to your understanding of logic, then bear with me out of sympathy, please, help me through the labyrinth.
My troubles began early with this professor. After class, on day two, she asked me about my style of argument, "So would you call yours a 'philosophical' approach?" Admittedly, I had been contributing quite a bit to in-class discussions, interesting comments, mostly out of frantic defense for all that I have taken to calling Objective Truth (e.g., that questioning any assertion is a healthy practice). However, I didn't know how to answer her inquiry, because I had never heard of "philosophy" being addressed as an "approach" to understanding, or, what I guess I mean is, that there are other approaches. Though I didn't know how to answer, I answered, sort of: "Sure, I guess you could call it that," because I wasn't about to dissatisfy the woman who had, just with that question, evinced how impossible she was going to be to satisfy for the rest of the semester. Let me elucidate this befuddlement by sharing with you the OED entry on "philosophy," which I was (slightly) relieved to find out shares my opinion on the meaning of the word: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, and the basis and limits of human understanding; this considered as an academic discipline. (Now the usual sense.)" Other approaches to understanding include: ...
This not a rant, mind you. This is an explanation of why and how I need guidance. I must take this class, inevitably. And don't get me wrong: I am actually rather eager to take part, if not because we are assigned to ramble passionately about issues of our choosing, then because it gives me an excuse to preach David Foster Wallace to like twenty of my DFW-ignorant peers. (To be fair, actually, one of them knows he wrote Infinite Jest, another owns and has not yet begun to read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men but intends to, and though my professor hasn't read any of his work, she asked me if "[I'd heard] he's dead now." So I'm only almost entirely alone, in that respect.)
The reason I cannot just see myself as immediately correct about my "philosophical approach" is because such an approach does not meet what most could probably agree are the two most basic requirements of any compelling argument, that is, that a compelling argument must be both compelling and argumentative. This is an argumentation class, it's called "Argumentation," and my professor's been teaching it for about forty semesters now, so I have very good reason to comply to the demands of Writing A Compelling Argument. Befuck my philosophical obligation to fundamentals. Unless I can find an exemplar for my cause, an argumentative author with both renown and a tendency to take no side but that of the inquisitor, then I'll finally have to cave.
It's at this point when my mind flees in horror to David Foster Wallace and clings to his thick leg, puling into the fabric of his trousers and only sometimes peeking back at Washington University in St. Louis. You tell em' DFW. You make em' see. Please. I need this.
DFW proffers his portfolio of non-fiction works. Though nearly all of them address an argument at some point or another, the question then arises as to whether he makes an argument at any point. Take "Consider the Lobster," for instance, the title essay of one of his last collections, which saw publication in the August 2004 issue of Gourmet Magazine. It's DFW covering the Maine Lobster Festival on Gourmet's behalf, journalizing, if you will, at least until he begins to feel disturbed by the world-record-sized lobster boiler, that is, by the near un-face-able question of "Is it okay to boil alive a sentient being for our gustatory pleasure?" A responsible journalist surely cannot write about such a touchy conundrum without also asserting some side, either "Yes, it is okay," or "No, it is not." So what does Wallace do with the problem once he reveals that it exists, that it vexes him? I am in no position of authority to judge his actions in this domain, for myriad reasons, not the least of which is because I can't trust my own worshipful opinions of the man to give me an objective answer about his strategy. And I need objectivity, right now.
So I did the excruciating. I dug up a mediocre review of David Foster Wallace's book, Consider The Lobster, an article by Brendan Wolfe of the San Francisco Chronicle entitled "OK, So The Guy Can Write..." and read the whole damn thing. You can't write about this book without writing about its title essay, and Wolfe reserves a couple of paragraphs that I think are worth sharing:
In the title essay, [DFW] travels to coastal Maine for the annual Lobster Festival. What begins as a witty, sometimes snooty point-and-laugh swerves into something altogether more uncomfortable when the author poses the question "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?" "Consider the Lobster" originally appeared in Gourmet magazine, and it was controversial for all the obvious reasons. Few carnivores were amused by what they perceived as an attack on their morality. At least one prominent lobsterman, meanwhile, took issue with Wal-lace's facts. He encountered a similar backlash after "Authority and American Usage" was first published in Harper's. Apparently U.S. lexicography does have a seamy underbelly.In the end, though, and to his credit, Wallace doesn't demand we put faith in his facts; he doesn't even demand we stop eating lobster. He asks of us something more difficult -- that we think about our actions. And like the best of his essays, "Consider the Lobster" invites us to participate in a new and fascinating conversation.
The rest of the review aside, this opinion agrees with just about all the other, more-positive reviews. It also agrees with mine, though I think Wolfe's choosing the words "at least one prominent lobsterman (...) took issue with Wal-lace's facts" make evident his antagonism, and I personally feel a little poisoned by that ill-intentioned hyphenation. What Wolfe and I concur on is Wallace's true intent with his "argument," which is in fact not to argue at all, but to engage readers-of-any-opinion in aporia. The essay does not end up making an opinion too far to either side of the should-we-or-shouldn't-we debate, (he makes compelling cases for both sides, in that lobster are delicious delicious beasts, but their blatant suffering is due some complex thought) and instead serves to enter into a more fundamental debate: can two sides of an argument both be correct?
The boldest thing I do, not just as a result of Wallace's work, is to say no. No argument has two correct sides, but just two (or more) parties that are in an often-very-slow race to find the evidence that will debunk all opposition (which usually entails an unforeseen degree of compromise, the unpleasantness of which will keep the actual compromise's occurrence dragging out for decades afterward in the form of smaller, fractalized arguments). The truest, philosophic-most approach to one's surroundings is to question everything and take note only of the observable patterns, infinitely avoiding interpolation and extrapolation, (i.e., the whole idea is to emulate omni-disciplinary Savantism). The physical universe is far from completely understood. The cognitive universe, also a black-box. Medicine, chock-full of questions. Political science, a science by only the kindest of standards. So to deviate even slightly from this path and assert some opinion in any field is to fail completely, to become a contemptible Sophist, or, in other words, to live a totally normal life. Every single person is programmed to not want to do this, and, really, it's to our evolutionary advantage not to focus on just how many flaming chainsaws we're juggling, so to speak. But the geniuses try. I'm not saying I'm a genius, but I sure would like to be, and I believe, more than I believe in just about anything else, that opinions are a mark of ignorance, or, more accurately, an impasse on the way to understanding.
I don't support collective efforts, because opinions are an inescapably divisive aspect of collectives. But I also believe that opinions are an inescapable aspect of being an individual, that the body is the one fence that can't be torn down, which is why I support collective efforts, (but which, in turn, is why I support individual efforts, because, as anyone who has ever thought more than thought can agree, the mind is a collective effort, but which I then can't support... and so on, ad infinitum). That my professor so cheerily asserts that One Must Earn His Opinion makes me ache and ache and ache. Let me please detail:
When I critiqued a nationalistic article written by Lippmann in 1939 called "The Indispensability of Freedom of Speech," I claimed that his argument for calling freedom of speech "indispensable" is based on the only half-true conclusion that free speech is necessary, that is, that it exists because we needed it to exist and chose to make it exist; I found this argument to be human-centric, almost religiously so, and I say that while his point is valid, he needs to acquiesce to how freedom of opinion is not just "indispensable" but literally quite "not dispensable"; regardless of how strictly freedom of speech has been policed throughout time, individuality (i.e., opinion-having) has always been its own self-governing system. My paper goes into a lot of cool, thoughtful details, too. When she handed it back, however, my professor said that Lippmann was not targeting the audience I wanted him to target (and she's right: I wanted him to target the thinking person, not just the 1930s American in need of a pseudo-philosophical pat on the back). In other words, she did not find my argument compelling. I came near implosion. I wanted only to acknowledge, rather than argue, how (literally) Lippmann's thesis statement was only a half-truth, how he made his point seem inarguable, (in every way the opposite of David Foster Wallace) so that only a madman would disagree; I wanted to address what he neglected to address, to encourage dialog, rather than pacification. I wanted to do what DFW would have done in my shoes. I even used footnotes. But that which I feared came to pass: my philosophical approach was not compelling.
The questions then arise: Can one make a compelling argument against argumentation? What is compelling? How does one compel? Is it possible to compel via philosophical inquiry, when philosophy mandates inconclusiveness (i.e., Socratic aporia)? If it is not possible, then is "compelling" a productive practice? Is answering any of these questions possible without deploying opinions?
I have no answer to these questions, none for any of them, and thusly do I suffer.
Making matters worse is the fact that the likeliest person reading this right now, after you, is me.
Towel, here. You know, I don't even remember which one was Supple and which one was Cuddle. Was Dan Supple? Anyway, I have a real thing to talk about!
Westside High School Chemistry really happened. And at least one of its students--maybe more after this is through, but at least presently one--did not forget Biga's strobelight demonstration, nor specifically the small red contraption, which he set up beside the sink so that it (i.e., the sink) could catch all the water that the thing (i.e., the contraption) was about to send noodling through the air. However, I have forgotten exactly how the strobelight itself was positioned, with respect to the aforementioned apparatus; the part of me that hopes science is bitching enough to have invented a water-noodler-with-built-in-strobelight seems to remember that the bulb was somehow built into the small red contraption. Perhaps you remember better. In fact, let me insist that you try to remember at least as well as I do. For to aid in the recovery of your memory of this particular class period, I proffer "the scene":
A classroom of thirty or so Westside seniors, including some juniors; suffice it to say, thirty (i.e., thirty or so Westside students) is enough to safely assert that at least one of your classmates is consistently and distractingly attractive, particularly in contrast with the banal, banal, banality that is Biga's Chemistry classroom atmosphere; ideally, that special stimulus helps you to summon a face and in so doing grants you a visual foothold in the memory, but if not, it (i.e., the stimulus) at least informs your internal state (e.g., idle and/or unrequited horniness) from said lost hour. In a droning sforzando, Mr. Biga--who may or may not have had an under-flesh gristle-cyst the size of a small potato on the back of his hand, depending on which academic year, pre-autumn 2005 or post, you were enrolled in his class--probably tells a specific someone, whomever it was amid your classmates that he most frequently and/or comically picked on, to turn the classroom lights off, just before or after he (i.e., Biga) summons everybody to the sink at the front of the classroom--the sink that has its own counter against the wall and hides from the daylight behind a bulky supply cabinet so that, when said most-frequent-victim-of-mildly-well-meaning-verbal-abuse turns off the overhead fluorescents, the sink basin is but an empty metal blackness and the apparatus but hard shadows until your eyes adjust to the sudden midday-indoor-half-dark--with something like "Come on, everyone over here," followed by a comment regarding the quality of the impending at-sink demonstration, probably "This is kinda' neat," or a subtle variation (e.g., "This is neat," "This is kinda' cool," "You're going to like this," etc.). The ordering of the rows in the huddle that gathers around Biga at the sink is based predominantly on a consistent three-(ish)-stage system; first, filling the "best spots" (= a three- or four-person wide arc roughly a yard to one side of wherever Mr. Biga is standing at the moment of huddle) are the three or four students from the first two rows of the right-hand column of tables (i.e., the first two rows of Mr. Biga's left-hand column of tables); second, scattering behind the best-spot arc, and causing the best-spot arc to tighten and/or segment, are the students whom then huddle with also-presently-huddling and/or priorly-huddled in-class friends, clusters of whom stand together but loosely so, according to how much room will be needed for any mutual in-class friends who have yet to reach the huddle at the sink; third come those remaining mutual in-class friends unfortunately seated in the back rows and/or toward the left side of the classroom, and these students squeeze in where they can, typically forming a vaguely "third" row; last but sometimes not least, one must mention the few students that are friendlessly alone amidst the huddle (e.g., the savant-like juniors, or the kids with long white socks and weird laughs, or the otherwise regular joes whose friends exist but are for whatever reason absent, etc.), or whose friends neglected to reserve them enough elbow room, or who are too detached from the aforementioned banal, banal, banality to invest the effort required in cluster formation, these are students (i.e., any of the loners above) that either arrive early and set anchor, arms folded, at the awkward-most spots within the huddle or arrive late and sidle into whatever view-offering gaps have been least-slightly left open. Meanwhile, Biga turns on the faucet and activates his small red contraption--which actually might be orange, now that you're up close to it--and then, presuming just for now that my hopeful side of me is right about Biga's contraption's capabilities, a strobelight sets an arching thread of water to blinking, there, by itself, bent and flicker-glistening in the dark above the murmuring metal sink basin. There is a cool part of Biga’s strobelight experiment, so let’s talk about it. It starts when he (i.e., Biga) says, “And if I do,” and then drags out the “oo” in “do” while adjusting the strobelight frequency dial to just the right place before saying “this," and with “this,” the whole huddle goes quiet, and audible from anywhere in the moment there is only the falling water and the gurgling drain gulps and, from watching the strobelight, there is also the fluttering sound of blinking black in the tiny muscles behind your eyes, and it’s in the soundlessness of so many whom always in your nightmares always are noisemaking always, the breathing quiet of thirty or so adolescents that are physiologically programmed to be unquiet, plus the silence of one who is literally paid to make utterances, that the noise-on-mute becomes how you know--or becomes how you come to know--that the thing everyone is looking at is beautiful somehow, like a good new thing, and that you are right now in the type of moment that is afterward its own prototype. Then the swift, personal grunts of “Huh,” popcorn throughout the huddle and give way to chatter and to Biga’s telling everyone to shut up. Go back. Sit down.
The thing he did was very nearly match the strobelight’s base blink frequency to the water’s base helical-ripple frequency, so that your inept human eye could only see the water where light shone on it in segments like tiny knuckles, and because the blinks' and ripples' frequencies were about equal, every time the light blinked, it lit the same-looking ripples at stationary places in space, (i.e., what you knew to be a continuous stream of flowing water actually looked like a motionless dotted line of not-flowing water). And then Biga turned the dial just slightly further, and, yes oh yes oh yes, that dotted line began to retreat, as though the water were suddenly flowing the impossible direction, UP out of the sink, UP through the air, UP and into, rather than out of, the small red contraption. I have for three years prized this vision like a crush on someone who I refuse to see as merely human, and only just now, today, right now, am I opting instead to bring it forward into the light. See the fragility of the thing.
About the bringing of the thing into the light: I once mistook for a shadowy threat a simple sidewalk-guided drunk who caught my sidelong gaze as he passed me on the way to being somewhere behind me. There is a slow slow steady rhythm, now, in my memory, that might have been there in the actual event, with which he caught me seeing him look at me, scuffled past so that I too scuffled past, stopped on the gravel so that I stopped, and with which he turned and I turned. From fifty yards away he half-yelled, “Bring them to the light.” And I asked, “What?” So he repeated, “Bring them to the light,” and then he paused--or I paused--before he said, “Whatever you do in life, whoever you go on to help, the best you can you have to bring them to the light,” and I didn’t have time to think because of the rhythm, because of the rhythm I said, “I will try, I mean I do try, but they don’t want to come, a lot of them.” Then, rather than feed me more homeless-man insight, he just turned and went on walking, so I just turned and went on walking, too, and the rest of the memory can’t be accessed because it can’t be parsed from all the other nights I walked home on that same section of sidewalk thinking about how much better my response should have been. I probably immediately came up with lots I wish I had said in addition to or instead of what I did, something to get the guy to respond with sort of mutual affirmation, and anymore each clause of the piddle I did project is just a back and forth in my verbal memory, a dialog, so to speak:
“I will try," I said.
"I mean I do try," Dana replied.
"But they don’t want to come, a lot of them."
I'm not going for pathos here, Reader, just logos. Though I don’t know the truth, I nonetheless feel like I’m lying to myself in imagining that the man believed and/or wanted to believe that I know what he meant and how he meant it.
I said I would bring out the underlying mystery of the strobelight and put it in "the light," and I do this because all, including myself, need to set aside a paragraph-long moment to praise and/or to pity and/or to ponder it in some other opinion-forming matter. The conundrum lies in the demonstrable and at-this-point-in-our-intellectual-development-not-very-thought-provoking disconnect between what the brain perceives as happening and what is actually happening to the beads of light in the water. That is, the exactly similar problem I have with, say, watching an airplane propeller that is spinning so rapidly clockwise as to appear to be slowly turning counter-clockwise is not that I feel powerless to perceive the true direction of the propeller’s spin, but rather that such a vision reminds me, (i.e., makes me have to use the long-near-dead words “I know,") that I know the universe bristles and bustles at speeds exponentially greater than that of the propeller and so I must question my perception of time itself, (N.B., One of Alfred Einstein's lesser-known mindblowing proofs surmised, correctly, that time flows at the speed of light). In other words, the strobe effect does not bring any new philosophical inquiries to light, but, far worse, presents a beautiful venue for intuiting an inquiry that until now has been--and probably still ought to be--so dull as to repel intuition. Or, in more other words, the strobe effect demonstrates how continuous motion--not necessarily limited to three dimensions--is an illusion, albeit a salient one, arising from the juxtaposition of two or more discordant frequencies. Although the laymen ideation of “frequency” is more or less that of a measure of time, “frequency” can be sternly spatial, that is, not at all temporal, such as the frequency with which sexiness occurs in a random sample of thirty Westside High School students. The finite nature of the speed of light in a vacuum, its inflexible constancy, predicates the rate at which time appears to flow, and that time need not be a continuum, but rather just a consistent frequency with respect to entropy (i.e., cause and effect as a result of fundamental forces acting, or more accurately reacting, at all scales). The frightful result of this light-speed time is that the spatial resolution of matter need not be delimited to the finite and integral (i.e., the quantum), because the “path” in which light travels is a messy waveform (i.e., still a perfectly, mathematically continuous vector, but whereupon light is plotted as discrete points, the interpolative black-box nature of which is due a share of wonderment, not as to the mechanisms at work, but as to the what-the-fuck), and as waves create waves, on down to the infinitesimal, it is entropy rather than time that is continuous. In my opinion. You are welcome to forget this, as long as you ponder it, first.
The implications of this writing experience are: Nothing that will affect my day to day nor let me fight the fire inside my head. There is still no explanation as to why the flexible fuck anything bothers to happen at all, with specific respect to anything I can think of anytime. If I don’t believe in a higher power of some kind and/or another, I should, the fop that I am, particularly since the whatever-it-is pilots my subconscious, too. I am at any given moment only responding to my responses to my responses, and though the control I think I exert is real, it is not whole and cannot be and I thusly just need to learn to share.
The most enjoyable part of this writing experience was: briefly remembering the hot chicks in my Chemistry class and picturing them naked. I didn’t write the remembrance down, explicitly, but it is there, between the lines. ...Man, I’ve been wasting so much time. (Speaking of which [WARNING: This is self-centric babbling, from here on out]: Gina Murante, you are smiley and serene but you will not know you are alive until you’ve had the chance to know and still not known it so many times that the letters of the words of your thoughts reclose into the same abstract corners and holes and habitable nooks they used to be when you understood nothing at all except the universe and you, and you become from head to toe so weightily muddied with nostalgia for the many many lost and uncenterable moments that you cannot clean your way back to normal no matter how wet and naked you get... only then can you rejoin the living. And/or if you remain wet and naked, you are also welcome to come hang out with me and my girlfriend. I have X-Box and only the good flavors of vitamin water. And my bed may be dinky standard-issue dormatory junk, but my comforter is the stuff of legends.)