David Foster Wallace Land
Men are physically stronger than women. Women are emotionally stronger than men. For ages men have troubled themselves with the question of weather or not hey are basically good. The answer seems obvious, does it not?
To me, these are not radical feminist statements. Humans were created in the eye of woman. When God created humans she created them in her own image. Each embryo is female. The penis has a seam. This is because in a human’s most rudimental stage of development, when we are still androgynous lumps, the embryo has a vagina that spits open and the female clitoris grows into a penis. That is a real fact.
If you have a principal amount of money, and you want to save that money for a few years, you will have more dollars than you started with but the same amount of money. This is because the value of money naturally erodes with time. There are two ways to collect interest on your money. Say you have 100 dollars that you invest at a 10% simple interest rate. Each year you keep your money invested, you will get to add 10% of 100, $10, to your principle amount of money. Compound interest, however, is a little different. You still start with 100, and at the end of one year you still have 110 dollars, just like with simple interest. That’s because its only been one year though. In year two, you will take 10% of 110. And so on. Compound interest is a system of re-borrowing, of building on what you’ve already built.
I wish I had 100$ dollars for every guy who has ever told me he’s thought about killing himself. I would be a very rich woman. Just once I would like to be able to say: “Well what are you waiting for?”
This is why I chose to create David Foster Wallace Land as my Proposal for the Midlothian turnpike. The place will be like Las Vegas, but for euthanasia instead of gambling. It is where overeducated white males can go to die peacefully. Like Disney Land but for Dads. It includes lines for standing in, traffic jams for getting stuck in, a lobster restaurant where you can boil your own lobsters, signs that will mislead you to the nearest water source, a chapel for getting a quickie divorce, a roller coaster that just spins around in a circle, one-sided tennis courts, gambling machines that spit out zanex and prosac instead of money, 24-hour televangelism, electroconvulsive shock therapy tanning beds, moving statues of John McCain and masturbation cubicles. There will be a motel building shaped like a cruise ship. For the most part it will stay empty, and instead of bibles in the night-side table drawers, there will be copies of Infinite Jest.
Men commit suicide at higher rate than do women. We don’t know if this has always been the case, because recorded history is still pretty new. The widespread oppression of females, however, is currently, and has been the world’s largest problem for a really, really long time. In the 1980’s there were 30 million girls missing from China’s population alone, and femicide continues blatantly in many other parts, today. Female infanticide, female-selective abortion, and brutality against women are prevalent practices that have contributed to the largest genocide in human history. Many women in today’s developing world are trafficked into brothels and are currently enslaved due to the thriving markets of prostitution in numerous regions of the world. The idea of David Foster Wallace Land would be, in earnest, America’s contribution to the rebalancing of the world’s population.
Money in the hands of women is spent better. Basic educating for a woman is more valuable to the economy of a transitioning country than is basic education for a man.
This is also a real fact. A literate and socially mobile woman in a developing country tends to invest in education, better nutrition and health care for her children. A man in the same situation tends to spend his money on booze.
A lot of people don’t know that David Foster Wallace actually graduated from school with a degree in math. His focus was on “modal logic”. Modals are words that qualify statements. Modals are necessary because, logically, there are no absolute truths. For example, the statement “John is happy” might be qualified by saying that John is usually happy, in which case the term “usually” is functioning as a modal.
A major theme is Wallace’s work is solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that one’s own mind is the only thing that is sure to exist. Knowledge outside of one’s own mind is unsure. The world and other minds do not exist. In his writing, David Foster Wallace describes an “irksome paradox”. Solipsism is both irrefutable and yet indefensible in nature. Irrefutable in that no one is capable of proving the existence of anyone’s mind but her own, and indefensible in that just as she has a mind, so too does everyone else.
I believe men hold up the irrefutable part of the irksome paradox, and women hold up the indefensible part. Everyone has a mind, and together we have one big, transcendental mind. A top-down approach (also known as stepwise design) functions off of the assumption that we all have one mind. It is essentially the breaking down of a system to gain insight into its compositional sub-systems. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Women are emotionally more durable, and logically more flexible, and because we have a less rigid sense of logic, we are able to break down big pictures into smaller pieces.
A bottom-up approach assumes that there are many individual brains. It is the piecing together of systems to give rise to grander systems, thus making the original systems sub-systems of the emergent system. Men are emotionally weaker, but have a sturdier sense of logic. While men have ensured the physical continuation of our species, women have built the human mind.
So back to compound interest, a mother usually has two jobs. Each man has been raised by a mother, but what’s more is, each woman has been too. The “father” in our age, is dead. The Judeo-Christian concept of man is dead. Most monotheistic religions in today’s world worship a central, paternal force. Of the Ahbrahamic religions, the single most patriarchal one has paid centuries of homage to the mother and child, through art. Islamic women completely sheath themselves in some parts of the world, and the Holocaust is but 60 years behind us. Judaism is the one religion out of the three that can be traced back to ancient Vedic religions; religions that existed before recorded history, agriculture, or what we know today as war. There was, a very recent, attempted extermination of this religion. What does this tell us? For Wallace, Keasey, the “Eugenidesian” writers—if I may)—-the decay of society is not the theme, it’s the setting.
I was watching a documentary called Pyramid Code with my roommate Edwin. (He is moving to Idaho next year to study under America’s top Bigfoot official, Jeffery Meldrums) Edwin is really into what he calls “fringe science” and this documentary in particular was about all of the lost technology of the ancient ones. I don’t know if I believe that the Mesopotamians had flying saucers. But there was this one speaker in the Documentary whose words really resonated within me. Abd’el Hakim Awyan was a mystical wisdom keeper who claimed to have inherited the stories of the ancients. He said, in a matriarchy, power is balanced between the two sexes. There is no dominant gender. There is a gender that is closer to God, and a gender that is closer to man, and that the two rule together.
The mother is the foundation on which society is built. Matriarchy is the way of nature.
Women carry a very secret knowledge of love and humanity in them innately.
Women have a kindness wired within their being; that transcends religion, race and even time. We are nature’s teachers.
David Foster Wallace was working on a book when he hung himself. It was just published, this year, in 2012. It took place in a virtual solipsis, a peer-to-peer gaming world. To conclude I offer a definition from wikipedia: Peer-to-peer (abbreviated to P2P) refers to a computer network in which each computer in the network can act as a client or server for the other computers in the network, allowing shared access to files and peripherals without the need for a central server. P2P networks can be set up in the home, a business or over the Internet. Each network type requires all computers in the network to use the same or a compatible program to connect to each other and access files.
