What he's saying is...

David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005, and committed suicide in 2008. The latter act has, retrospectively, given the former a significance it would not otherwise have had. Commencement talks are usually as perishable as wedding toasts, and for similar reasons―should they survive―take on ironical color over the years. This particular talk actually went viral, I suppose because of the following:

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Poor DFW! Some Stephen Covey, some Anthony Robbins he is. (Whoops! Was.) Ah, the irony. Or, worse: how pathetic.

But, no, I think not. Irony is found in a―sometimes subtle―disjunction between assumptions and actuality, patheticness (yes, there is such a word) in a patent disjunction between ambition and actuality. If the Upbeat-Speech-and-Later-Suicide were an ironic arc, then DFW would have been, in the speech, an inspirational speaker who, by his suicide, showed he never took his own advice. If the USaLS were simply pathetic, he would have believed that those stretching exercises for a healthy mind could cure his.

But neither color really sticks: in fact DFW knew he was walking in the darkness, and his own case was far more desperate than these freshly-scrubbed grads would know. His advice was pretty much what it seemed to be: how can you enlarge your mind in a world that has made adulthood a series of trivial trials and petty annoyances? But remember:

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

DFW was asking these normal kids to take their perceptions out for a stroll, or even a vacation, once in a while. But he very well knew that at some point his own terrible master might make him climb Mont Blanc in his pajamas. For the moment he let that go, and simply spoke of sanity and kindness in a world that conspires against them.

The bushman treks many a dusty mile
intent upon the spoor of a giraffe.
He does not think about his weary life,
but slowly trots with an expectant smile.
However, should the missionary’s wife
have waiting by the wayside food and drink
he might just stop and munch a spicy roll,
and that subversion of his single goal
might wake him from his trance and make him think
about the empty end of all his strife.
Then all his living ties break link by link
as easily as that. The sun would sink
and throw his shadow as he stood there still;
the moon outline his figure on the hill.

Coughin' Nails

...
They used to smoke in their cars,
rolling the windows down and letting their red nails
hang out, little stoplights:
Stop now, before the green
comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.

(from My Aunts by Meghan O'Rourke)

---

Well, we know you're our niece and all, Mag:
we indulge you your rant on the rag.
But the next time you mus'
primly criticize us,
just think twice, and then light up a fag...

Soil thou art: Composting II

It's the New Frugality: instead of paying someone to haul away your grass clippings and kitchen scraps, compost them and grow your own vegetables. It combines healthy activity, wholesome food, and keeping the Great Biocycle cycling. It may even save a couple of bucks.

I used to seek composting advice, but gave it up years before the Internet. Now, as I troll the Web just to see what they're saying out there, I can't help but notice: Don't compost meat! is what they're saying, just like they've always said. True, there are farmers and slaughterhouses and so on that find themselves with carcasses and parts that they have to compost. Ok, they get to compost meat, but it's best left to the pros. For home composters the word is almost invariably that meat, eggshells, and anything the cat dragged in are no-nos for the compost.

I fretted about this for a number of years, then one day after Sunday dinner said, "What the hell!" and tossed, along with congealing mashed potatoes, coffee grounds, uneaten rolls, and soggy green beans the remains of a chicken—bones and all—into the bin, and waited for the Apocalypse.

It never came. Or, at least it didn't come right away. Oh, sure, perhaps the compost was stinkier than usual on those still summer nights. Critters would nose around more, so I began to bungee down the lid. And perhaps, now that the mix was somewhat richer with the occasional gristly short ribs or deflavored chicken or turkey carcasses after stock-making, once in a while one would see maggots. But, hey, compost-making is not pretty...

(By the way: though I suppose I'm a bit of an outlier with the if-you-can-eat-it-you-can-compost-it attitude, I am certainly not alone...)

I have always done my composting in the context of a yard. First, it was the backyard of my long-suffering roommate Tim, who owned the house we lived in. I appropriated a garden area and—to prepare the ground for planting in the spring—started in the fall collecting kitchen scraps in a bucket, and burying the bucketloads in shallow graves around the plot spot. By winter there was a certain amount of hacking away at the frozen soil (this was southern Wisconsin) to get the stuff underground, but there must have been little enough that I didn't have to do that too often. (I was a single guy: a home-cooked meal was an entire can of Campbell's Manhattan Clam Chowder, a couple pieces of whole-wheat toast with peanut-butter, and a beer. No scraps there, and I'm not sure Tim or Ralph participated much in my scrap-saving scheme...)

How did it work? Well enough: buried treasure by the following year. I worked the new stuff into the soil during the spring digging, keeping it more-or-less in the path. The next year the path became the bed, and the old beds the destination for new buryings. (I realize this elides the question of where the kitchen scraps and so forth went during the gardening season. Heh, heh.)

Clearly, such a method is discrete, produces no odors, and requires minimal equipment. However, since barely-rotted stuff is just under the soil, it better be basically vegetable, or critters will get curious. Also, since the beds are often interlarded with still-composting matter, the growing plants may be in competition with the wannabee compost for soil nitrogen (used by the composting organisms to work their magic). A method best employed, I would think, in a small yard where a compost bin—even more a compost pile—would be intrusive.

After Tim's, except for the occasional apartment stints, I had larger yards of my own to work with, and so eventually arrived at my current system (after the odd concrete-block structure or two), which I described in my previous composting entry. Perhaps this is the point to mention Ruth Stout. Her book, How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, is a fundamental gardening document. I came upon it early, and though I can't get the salt hay she favors, I have been using straw mulch forever (since I can get bales of it at the hardware store). Ruth Stout's method is weed and moisture control combined with continuous surface composting. If your planting beds are permanent, as they should be, then the worms can take care of the mixing. (Oh, all right: you can scrape off the mulch in the spring, maybe add some stuff and rough it all up with a shovel. Gardening is like cooking—lots of ad-libbing.)

One more thing: you need a tiny scrap bin on your kitchen counter—say, 12"w x 6"d x 8"h (very rough dimensions), and rectangular, not round. You want to put it against the back wall or in the corner, and a cylinder or bowl just invites missing as you toss scraps into it. It should be big enough to hold a day's worth of casual scraps: sandwich ends, fruit rinds, coffee filters, vegetable trimmings, cereal remains (with milk!), and—yes!—meat. Of course, if you have a cat or dog you might want to dump the baby bin immediately it gets meat into the big bin, otherwise you can do it last thing at night. Nor will the baby bin get smelly for several days, so there is no urgency about taking it outside if it is only half full.

This kitchen-counter baby bin may seem optional, but it is not. You have to be able to toss scraps somewhere as you generate them; without the bb I guarantee they're going to wind up in the wastebasket and garbage disposal. And thus do little things make a big difference.

Natural Sadness

“Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

(From the essay “Marshland Elegy” in A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold)

---

What shall we do for timber?
 The last of the woods is down.
...
There's no holly nor hazel nor ash there,
 The pasture's rock and stone,
The crown of the forest has withered,
 And the last of the game is gone.
(Anonymous.  Translation by Frank O'Connor)

---

No moa, no moa
In old Ao-tea-roa.
Can't get 'em.
They've et 'em;
They've gone and there ain't no moa!
(New Zealand song)

Is there anything sadder than natural history? To read, to take just a prominant example, E.O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life is delightful until just about the half-way point, when suddenly we plunge into a section titled "The Human Impact". Slowly our smile of wonder turns to a grimace of indefineable, dark urgency as page follows page, chapter chapter, detailing the contemporary catastrophe of a defenseless, precious natural world in competition with roaring, slurping, gobbling humanity.

My words, of course: Wilson is much more polite. Still, you can almost hear the catch in the throat of his writing, but bravely he finishes the book's sad catalog. And soon, weary but driven, he will start a new book...

We ordinary readers, though, don't have the heart to keep hearing this bad news. What can we do about it, after all? So we turn to upbeat stories about the latest marvelous gadgets, or open an historical novel. We try not to dwell on the gloomy fact that our children will never have what we had: a sense of a non-human world, terrible and magnificent.

Now we are rescuing polar bears from ice floes, counting the tigers in the shrinking Bengal forest, and having gathered up the last few California condors, are breeding them for release into the "wild". The few hundred—or thousand or so—blue whales, instead of simply existing as a glorious but inaccessible reality, are way too few, so must be tracked and fussed over.

And let's not even talk about the Amazon.

Three hundred years into the Industrial Revolution the world has become one big zoo, haphazardly run. The wilderness is gone: there is no place, however remote, where one might not find a soda can. And only a handful of spots are far enough from the great glow of civilization to have a night of real darkness—the night of fairy tales, the night of old.

A Read on the Wild Side

Just finished Into the Wild. The driven young man, Chris McCandless, who is the subject, and who died in Alaska after 112 days in the wilderness, is a very modern sort of hero. Superficially Thoreauvian, he actually is neither post-Unitarian transcendentalist, nor Native American on a vision-quest, nor religious mystic of any stripe. In strenuous riskiness, in the harsh wild, he seeks a secular purity that our tainted, bloated, sadly compromised culture cannot provide. Finally, though, he is engaged in an adolescent rite of passage. For a particular sort of young man this will be necessary and messy, and—if he dies—awful and beautiful. But is it worth it? After all, if he lives he'll just come back, get a job, settle down, go soft, and lose his groove. Still, though, is it right that our society's ideal is coming to be a life with no risk?