Lately I've been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace on the commute to and from work, partly out of a lack of familiarity with his work, and partly because Dan owns several of his books, and I somehow haven't walked half a block to get a library card. This morning I was reading one of his essays about David Lynch. The essay makes the point (and here I am sloppily paraphrasing, so bear with me) that Lynch's genius is partly due to his insistence on showing us the brutal duality of human nature -- the sacred and the profane; the kind and the craven; the eager and the fetishistic, in each of us, simultaneously -- in a method completely devoid of irony, and without giving us a cheap and comforting justification in the name of morality1 (say, in the way that Arnold Schwarzenegger's careless manslaugter in Commando was hand-waved away when he rescued of his daughter2). In other words, he makes films which remind us that we can be loving and brutal, empathetic and sociopathic, all of us, all at the same time, even when it is not in the name of a greater good, and leaves us no recourse to rationalize or intellectualize it.
I put a bookmark in this essay at 8:55 and got off the bus, took the elevator up to my office and walked into my cubicle. I was immediately presented with a cascading set of incremental perturbations: My phone wouldn't allow me into my voicemail; I still had no access to the ROLES or COEUS databases, which I need to check the signatures and restrictions on travel advance requests; my phone, it turned out, wasn't working at all. I spent the morning trying to figure out both how to do my job with any success given my accidental restrictions, and also how to do my job in the first place, given that, basically, I still have little sense of exactly what it is I'm doing. After fighting with everything for several hours, I took a brief lunch break. When I came back into the office, clutching a tin of yogurt and an apple, a dead man was suspended on a truss outside of my window after having fallen several stories down an elevator shaft. (Bugmenot required; video here.)
I joined my coworkers at the window, and looked at the man, hanging five stories up, and at his coworkers, and watched a fireman scale the scaffolding without a harness. And then you know what I did? I went back to work, processing forms and yelling at IT to grant me access to my web applets. I did this for four hours, while the police and rescue workers were trying to figure out how to remove the corpse without disfiguring or dropping it, examining the elevator and unbolting windows, and then I got on the bus at 5:15, and then I resumed reading that essay. Without irony; without a sense of justification.
1 This is also, incidentally, why I also love Big Black, although I feel much less like Lynch is just fucking with me.
2 ...and exactly the opposite of the way in which my government murders thousands of people. Ooh, shrill!