“There is nobody at the window in the painting of the house, by the way.”
—Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pp. 54-55
I’ve been reading too much David Foster Wallace again (specifically, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress” from his essay collection Both Flesh and Not), and having some realizations about my relationship to writing via what Wallace terms “loneliness’s relation to language itself”:
Namely (pun intended), I think the reason writing is my most comfortable form of expression is that I grew up having my spoken words ignored, twisted, and thrown back in my face when trying to explain my thoughts & feelings. Writing things down feels safer. I can take my time to say exactly what I mean. The words are there on a page or in a document or on social media: they exist independent of another person’s interpretation of them. No one can change them later to gaslight me.
I know boys & men can have this experience with speaking too, but I think every honest woman (BIWOC even more so) can claim intimate familiarity with what Wallace calls “the feminization of skepticism,” i.e. “radical doubt about not only the existence of objects but of subject, self.” Markson’s narrator Kate, Wallace argues, is “writing a world” to rival “the whole history of intellectual endeavor in the whitely male West.” (Obviously there’s a problematic irony here, in that both Markson & Wallace were white mem. Nevertheless.) Perhaps I started out writing a world to rival the one foisted upon me by covert narcissistic parents, but the project has expanded in its scope along with my lived female experience. I’m thinking, for example, of an instance from college ("time out of mind"), when a frat bro of my covert narcissist boyfriend’s mansplained to me the opening passage of Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, a decidedly feminist novel.
It’s a lonely origin story, and perhaps that means its ending will inevitably be lonely too. Wallace might say that depends paradoxically on...
1) the evolution/response of the external world to women’s never-ending attempts to communicate & transform their “feminine trauma” (*deep sigh*)
&
2) my own resistance or capitulation to the simultaneously appealing & terrifying solipsistic “feeling that one’s head is […] the whole world” (*even deeper sigh*).
I’m hoping there’s a third option: I can choose to surround myself with a smaller, insular world of other people who see & hear me, who acknowledge my reality, and for whom I do the same. “‘Somebod[ies are] living on this beach.’ Pax.”
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