David Foster Wallace is the second coming of Christ. SRSLY. I don’t mean it in some technical Revelations/Dharma-Wheel/Ten-Plagues sense — not like some grandly coded metaphor involving four horsemen and some magic bread that turns into fishes or anything like that. If I was reading an essay that kicked off with “David Foster Wallace is the second coming of Christ” I expect jokes to follow, and to not have to take that first sentence seriously. Even it’s some crazy Andy Kaufman type shit I should still be somehow net-entertained at the end. But really, srsly. For myself, and for a lot of people in my generation, Wallace was like Jesus cubed, in certain ways.

Yes. Lemme explain. So yeah in terms of contemporary Western mythology, the timeline goes like this: before your Jesus guy came around, the big God entity was typically described as a sort of paternalistic, top-down asshole.¹ I’ll gloss over this point because you’ve heard assholic examples of stuff He has said, like out of some preacher’s mouth or emblazoned on some Tea Party member’s home-made and grammatically suspect protesting sign. We can all cite many examples to demonstrate how God was a incorrigibly domineering fuckface. This is because monotheism keys on an imbalance of power so absolute it is incomprehensible — the God figure wasn’t paternalistic in the robe-bald-bearded Sistine Chapel Hollywood visual sense, but that was the best way at the time of its conception, really, to metaphortically describe God’s totally transcendant station of control over people.

When Jesus was around, language had not evolved a relaxed enough set of integrated control pragma to allow the human race to thrivingly self-manage, as it were. Now, examples illustrating this assertion are probably not as tip-of-the-tongue as the last one, but trust me: I got Bar Mitzvahed and I have read the Torah, a beautiful handmade document in which systems of control are blended seamlessly with the symbols for expressing basic phonemes and the pitches at which they must be sung.

Figure 5. Ketubah, a contemporary Hebrew typeface by Oded Ezer.²

Figure 6. A hebrew type abstraction by Ezer.³ The swashy embellishments call back to Hebrew tropes.⁴

Rationally, if one accepts evolution, one has to look at language as a necessary component for the human species’ survival; otherwise we wouldn’t have evolved to be able to speak in the first place. And language, like other complex subsystems, is itself evolving. And so you have to look at the early monotheistic-era descriptions of God as some sort of über-dad, whose image can be invoked for an easy laugh on late-night T.V., came from a more metaphorical way of communicating.

The reason we can take this hokey Family Guy image of God so literally is because of the way the idea of Jesus humanized the idea of God.⁵ The Jesus notion makes God into a bivalent thing, with two separate sub-entities. Actually three if you count the “holy ghost”, which is like some sort of superego-equals-ego-plus-id “shell god” entity, I don’t really know. Either way, Jesus riding to town meant that ol’ Sherrif God wasn’t the only heat-packing hard-drinking sonofabitch around. That is a horrid metaphor I just used, but it’s accurate in terms of the power-dyanmic shift I’m talking about, and the fact that it is horrible will hopefully serve to illustrate how metaphorical language can shift around on you.⁶

The power shift wasn’t immediate. After Jesus was settled on as the agreed Son of God, we ended up dumping the tyrannical-overlord idea for the picture-perfect image of God as a bivalent, forgiving shepard, one who despite his divinity could feel real human pain, and was therefore a real person who you (yes, you) can fundamentally relate to. He Died For Your Sins, and all that. But so the languages of the time were products of a monotheistic control system, in which the God role was still the über-asshole. That contradiction is why we were left with the literalism of passion plays and their emphasis on Jesus’ pain and suffering throughout his ignoble end as, like, a plus — an idea which is easiest to comprehend when you know firsthand how sadistically, stiflingly restrictive the monotheistic way is in contrast.

David Foster Wallace knew, firsthand, that smart people could feel pain! Smarter people are better at not seeing the simple universal truth in the notion of Jesus’s “pain” — smartypantses like Wallace, who had far more elastic lingustic firepower⁷ than their church-going counterparts, and could use it to easily convince themselves into a life of psychic agony with logical-sounding rationalizations. Smart people can be in terrible pain without knowing it because they out-think their own limbic systems, and that is a fucking problem really.

Really — if some 90-IQ semi-literate janitor guy can stop doing drugs and renounce psychic agony why couldn’t Wallace? You do know that he was a severe addict for quite a while in like his late 20s and early 30s. He was very much a cross between Gately and Hal⁸ in his actual non-fiction life, before going on the worst kind of antidepressants.⁹ Writing Infinite Jest and many other stories let him actively take a role in illustrating that addiction. He provided a very compelling image, for us readers, of AA (and specifically Boston’s brand of AA) as an alternative to the tastelessness doldrums of post-Jesus religious philosophy.

In fact he didn’t just provide it, he sexed it up. His unstoppablie literary powers were brought to bear on a task that sounds impossible: he gave us an AA that is both viscerally and conceptually awesome. Tell me you didn’t read Infinite Jest and it did not make you actually hang out at Don Gately’s table at the post-Reconfiguration Allston diner he’d go to with his sponsor after meetings. Now I have been to enough AA meetings, and sat next to enough varyingly sober characters on Boston public transit, to be averse to that social scenario on the basis of putative ambient smell alone — but Wallace went to many more AA meetings than myself. Reading Infinite Jest gets you into the inscrutable and counterintuitive Zen of AA culture in a very comfortable way. As the narrator of the book, loaded up with relatable implicit characterization, Wallace himself is Virgilesque. His heartfelt peans to AA’s tableaux of pain are constructed with abundant conversational artifice, guiding and protecting his audience to things that are hard to understand.

Figure 7. Infinite Jest demotivator, posing an actually legitimate question. (source)

In Infinite Jest, he repeatedly shows and tells us that intelligent people can fuck themselves up royally by being too smart, which is an irritating postulate for smart people — people’s whose identity is tied to their intelligence¹¹ — to even consider. You might just think this point is but one path through IJ’s dark garden of subtexts. But think about it: admitting the practical fact of the failure of raw intelligence to win out over human pain, in the battlefiend of his mind and what he could see around him, was like the ultimate defeat. He was a nerd of such all-encompassing Biblical proportions¹² that logical prowess and rationality were horribly overvalued, and the extraordinary esteem for these traits was worth his life. Really — he was almost chivalrously devoted to the notion of absolute rationality,¹³ to the point where he had to die by logic if he couldn’t live by it.

He couldn’t think his way out of killing himself and he tried so terribly hard.

His final release, the thought that allowed him to take his own life, must have been something where he realized he had to kill himself to logically prove that logically proving to kill yourself was a bad idea. Like, fiendishly bad in the Christian Devil sense that letting yourself live in pain through rationalization is easy, and sort of in our nature despite the fact that we know better. That Being Clever was a deadly sin, a nasty complement to Despair or or Sloth or Acedia,¹⁴ hiding insidiously in plain sight, disguised as a good character trait to have.

Figure 8. Unattributed photograph of Wallace, possibly circa 1993. (source, uncropped).

I know what you’re thinking. It’s probably something along the lines of “that’s a disgusting thing to say”, or maybe “you’re insane to think it’s funny and/or reasonable to talk about DFW like this”. But I miss the power of old-school religion, and not because I was born in the wrong era. The language is different and the control-structures within it are decentralized, yeah, but the power to move people is still there in the things that we say and write.

So fine, yeah, maybe it is crazy for me to say that when I think of David Foster Wallace — his work and his life, and their endings — as the second coming. But why not really? Jesus was just some blabbermouth some Romans nailed to a tree until his buddies Matthew and Luke deified him on paper, but that totally worked out, we got to humanize God a little. And look, I’m no fan of all the hypocritical killing, suborning, and torment that was subsequently carried out in God’s name thereafter — but it’s not like I’m talking about either Jesus or Wallace having the magical ability to stop people from being assholes. That is impossible. Neither of them ever had that kind of power, but I say that both of them did demonstrate ways that our collective societal assholicism can be less painful to deal with. Like in general.

Figure 9. I am not the first to make this specific comparison.¹⁵

And so yeah. So While I’m interested in the evangelism of my theory here, I’m not that idea of starting a church. I’m sure I’m drinking enough to justify going to AA, though — a fact which I find kind of backwardsly exciting. AA may be non-denominational, but its decentralized¹⁶ nature and emphasis on patience and tolerance could have only evolved in Ano Domini, out of the multivalent language of post-monotheistic culture. I think maybe AA would be a place I might be able to get people talking about what is spiritually important in Wallace’s work. At the very least, it’s worth a try and I’m sure they’re quite inured to nutball stuff like people inventing religions and what have you.

Yeah — maybe if I get enough hardcore AA members to read Wallace, they’ll take care of writing gospels and coming up with rituals and stuff. I don’t need to be in charge, it’d be fulfilling enough to help everyone else get the Language of the Second Coming off the ground; I’ll hang out in the back of the room, making sure the coffee pots are full and the ashtrays are empty, candles are for St. Gately and St. Hal, and there’s always someone around to nonjudgemenally listen to an anonymous recollection of depravity.