…Water

September 27, 2022

...Water

Ecosocialism or barbarism: that's the stark choice that is faced to us by the hard lessons of the mid-Sixties. The choice of a better life, or not, is laid out in delineations like that. But, now that Ecosocialism itself is co-opted, properly I might add, by the Powers That Be, the problematic, continuing on to this issue, most broadly described is "how do you explain a simile?"

"This is water", said David Foster Wallace as he read a lecture to Kenyon College for their commencement a long time ago now. What's the point of it, I wonder? Is it a blank? Or, I do wonder, is it, after all, a sort of admonition to excellence by dealing with the now, the stuff that touches your skin it's so close.

You have to admit, all round, that what matters is always, has always been, what gets us to where we want to go, even if there is resistance from it.

DFW's analogy is to fish in water; so what to the fish is water, is not what to us is water. The impetus to think comes not from the concern, what is water, but what, to us, is like what water is to the fish.

The explanation of the explanation disposed of, the real work is to interrogate, if you will, the existence of the almost daily resistance that allows you to push against it, to swim. As it were…but not through water, but through life.

The concern leveled at the graduates of Kenyon College that year by David Foster Wallace was actually: do you have a personal code, that you follow even if it limits you? He, as a novelist, probably stuck to the admonition "don't act, just think" while in public, no matter how hard it was. But, that day he was not a graduate, he was the fish of his own simile, and he was really asking: what do you do?

A friend and I read parts of that speech at a high school baccalaureate, long long ago. For those who might still be wondering what I read to you – what we read to you that day: so it was, so that was.