Waiting Continues

As the waiting continues, I have picked up an interesting book from the Octagon library - "Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞" by David Foster Wallace. He is of course the author of "Infinite Jest" who committed suicide in 2008. This book was published in 2003, and is pretty blatantly about how thinking about the concept of infinity, ∞, can drive one crazy. He really explores brilliance and writes like a brilliant person, with references to mathematicians and philosophers overflowing from the introduction, which is all I have gotten through at this point. His writing style is prose, almost stream of consciousness, except it is hard to imagine that anyone's consciousness could contain all of the facts and quotes he spouts, but who knows. His language and self-referential loops of logic remind of times in my life when I have been locked in never ending loops of thought about certain subjects, which for all intents and purposes could be called ∞. He does a great job of explaining the difference between math problems and math theorems, and makes it clear why mathematicians and philosophers are two stereotypically unhinged groups of people.

In my current reflective state, I can't help but feel sad for him that he decided to continue following these thoughts "down the rabbit hole" as you might say. He was obviously an incredibly intelligent person, and he obviously thought that he would be able to follow these thoughts without burning up, despite what he obviously knew about the history of others who attempted this line of thought. I remember making the choice years ago that it is better to live in the world than to go crazy trying to see what everyone else is missing. This was a choice made out of necessity, and out of a knowledge of where I was headed based on the stories of those who came before me. As a musician, (hell, as anything in this world) there are examples of those who sacrificed their normal being in order to obtain a higher goal of pure art, of complete abandonment to the ambiguity which is music as a philosophy. Music can exist to entertain, console, heal, unite, etc, but it can also exist as a never ending mathematical/philosophical problem which one wants to solve. Kind of like trying to understand what the back of your head looks like (without a mirror or camera). You can ask others what the back of your head looks like, you can look at other people's heads, you can experiment to teach yourself, but you will never be able to actually look at the back of your head with your own eyes. This is what it is to be a musician - and to study music.

I guess I am also thinking about my daughter. Now, inside of Nicole as she is, is she already everything she is going to be? Is her future going to change, or her personality, based on everything we do, or is she just continuing from something that already existed, and moving on in the seemingly unending cycle of life? I hope to give her the strength and curiosity to peer at the world and its contradictions, explore the beauty of them, but also know that to peer off the edge is at times the limit of what we can do on this earth. There are things which we will never know and will never understand, and that is the true concept of faith, faith in the world that it is worth leaving the edge even without all questions answered, in order to contribute to the beauty of a shared life in society. I am not glad that David Foster Wallace looked over the edge and jumped, despite the fact that he tried to hold a mirror up for us to see while he fell. I have seen what is there.

And it is ∞.