2026-06-04
I don't think David Foster Wallace (Empty Plenum) or David Markson (Wittgenstein’s Mistress) get [[Wittgenstein]].
I'm pretty sure Witt, though he was too prideful to read Aristotle, was approaching, instinctively and unconsciously, what Aristotle found: "What does it mean when we say that something 'is'"?
That "this chair IS here"?
When we dwell on such fundamental, questions, our perception morphs. This leads us to the psycho-philosophical experience of the Greek philosophers.
Depressed fiction writers (DFW, DM) cannot muster up this force. Their heads are full of pale connections. And they believe Wittgenstein’s facts are these same mundane, hyper-associative, cultural references that rattle in their heads, the kind Kate spews off in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. And so they think facts are lonely and depressing.
But facts are epic. They’re just paying attention to the wrong facts. The right facts are the tangible, solid, physical facts right in front of us.
THIS laptop is ON the TABLE!!! It’s wild when you think about it. But neither DFW or DM do.
"if you're the impotent unlucky sort whose beliefs inform his stomach's daily state" - DFW
eg Nietzsche
The other side of the prenominate 2-bind—the side rendered explicitly by WM's opening and close—involves why people who write need to do as a mode of communication. It's what an abstractor like Laing calls 'ontological insecurity'—why we sign our stuff, impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed. 'I EXIST,' is the impulse that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing. And 'I EXIST' would have been, in my ungraceful editorial hands, the title of Markson's novel
In Sartre’s Nausea, why does Antoine throw up when he sees the tree roots sans concepts?
Isn’t that conceptless state the state Buddhists see as more enlightened, more joyful?
Isn’t it that more enlightened state Heidegger calls present-at-hand?
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
The beauty of this world is Christ’s tender smile coming to us through matter