"Roger Federer as Religious Experience" (David Foster Wallace)- My Interpretation

Published in the August 20, 2006 edition of The New York Times, David Foster Wallace's essay "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," proves to hold so much more under the surface than simply your standard run-of-the-mill review of the living tennis legend that is Roger Federer and his predictably excellent performance at Wimbledon, the greatest stage in the tennis landscape. In fact, DFW even states that he isn't writing this piece to simply gush over the magnificent playing ability of Federer, as so many of his contemporaries have already done in rather copious numbers; after all, finding material in this vein is "all just a Google search away. Knock yourself out." ("Roger Federer as Religious Experience," New York Times, David Foster Wallace) Instead, there is a comparison that needs to be drawn here; and a contrast that must be presented

  This comparison ultimately lies in the similarities between the natural grace and impeccable ability stemming from years of intensive training that Federer endured next to the timeless notion of beauty and an almost unconceivable sense of serenity. You don't have to look far to find this emotion radiating off of the man himself; it's everywhere, from the distant smile plastered across his face at the traditional Wimbledon coin toss to the relaxed and carefree way that he conducts his interviews. Federer's fans are just swelling with this unique energy as well: DFW even notes how the Junior Wimbledon tournament held the day before is bursting with players who utilize a calculated, traditional approach to the game eerily similar to the same style of play that was brought back to prominence by Federer himself.
           

What makes this aspect of the essay so powerful is the obvious expertise, passion and love that Foster Wallace harbors for the game of tennis. Whether he is at work breaking down the mechanics of Federer's bitter rival Rafael Nadal's sharp topspin forehand or detailing the precise position that the racquet must be in to hit each specific type of shot and location, it is clear that Foster Wallace has more than just a mere reporter's stake in the contest; he is an avid, lifelong player and fan himself. Competing in the game of tennis at the intermediate level myself for the last six years of my life, I feasted on the essay’s logistic talk and numerous references to game theory and vivid reenactments of the action witnessed at Wimbledon that day. This essay is a tennis player's dream, but don’t’ stop reading yet; it holds even more just below the four cornered cement surface for those not so invested in the sport itself.
      

 Briefly over the course of the work (DFW only mentions him at two points in the entire account), a seven-year-old boy named William Caines is introduced as a "blond and pink-cheeked" cancer survivor who receives the esteemed honor of conducting the coin toss before the final match between Federer and Nadal. At first, you don't really know where DFW is going with this, or why he even mentioned it, other than the fact that it is a sweet moment for a child who has already endured so much bitterness in his short lifetime. It is only until after DFW is finished describing the affection that the tennis world (and those beyond) have for athletes like Federer (and a particular footnote that almost explicitly states the message) that you begin to put the pieces together. In fact, it is really more of a question, a moral debate of sorts. If God was responsible  for creating the Good, Righteous and Powerful figure of Federer that stands a mere several feet away returning volleys almost effortlessly at the net, He then was also the creator of the poor, suffering and weak child that flipped a circle of copper several hours back. This raises a very unnerving question: How could He have allowed this?
   

 It is also interesting to note that DFW doesn't realize this stark contrast between everything Federer is and everything Caines is not until the third set or so of the match, almost as an afterthought. To me, this is an indication of all of the elements we as mainstream citizens neglect in society; thrusting our affections and praise unto those figures placed on such high pedestals and that possess "the stuff,” while in turn brushing aside those like little William Caines who should be on a stage of their own. Also, this forces one to consider religion (tying right in to the title of the essay) and how, if it truly is so Pure and Good, it can permit such tragedies and hardships like this to occur while rewarding some and punishing others for seemingly no particular reason at all.
   

 I find myself recalling the story of Job from the Old Testament, and how sometimes the most innocent, clean and pure of human beings are forced to endure the most wicked, sadistic and sinister of events. Perhaps, however, there is a reward for Caines far greater than a measly coin toss at the beginning of a tennis match waiting down the road for him on his seemingly endless endeavor; just as Job was rewarded with a newfound strength in God’s grace along with all of his possessions/family back after watching them all taken away from him prior. I believe that this is what DFW ultimately wants us to ponder upon the conclusion of his essay, and it is certainly a concept so vast and demanding that one certainly would not expect to find it littered in the pages of a tennis review.
           

The master of the footnote David Foster Wallace is at it again, busting out with an essay tackling the larger questions of life and the universe nestled in the pages of a simple commercial review that we have all become so accustomed to from him. Everyone should give this work a read, regardless of how great or how little you care for the game of tennis, as we all have a strong interest in life and what God has (or doesn’t have) in store for us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

David Foster Wallace, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," New York Times, Aug. 20, 2006

    
      

Evil Angel: A Poem

Evil Angel

Evil angel, up on the hill

Watching from the closet, mirrors, and just outside my windowsill

Sneak in to my room every night, offering temptations screaming action

Whisper in my ear, I can hear you breathing

I won’t fall for you.

Body of a Goddess, skin so smooth,

 lips a lush hot red

 yet blue and cold, so cold.

I don’t need you.

I’ll find another way,

You hand me the blade,

One touch and I feel the rush

Or the barrel of the gun

Aimed straight for the heart

I feel the heat but I won’t run, No

It’s the easy way out, that’s all that you were ever about.

I’ve awoken at last, snapped out of some sick dream

Where I've reached an eternal peace, floating in the calm of the endless sea

And you’re not here, no, not anymore.

All I can see now is a shadow, one bright light

She steps out from the far corner, not alluring but undesirable

Nobody envies me, nor competes for her love

Yet she is the path that I must take,

To remain a player in this game of life, as they speak.

A Perfect Melody

The Individual

I sit sulking in the dim-lit corner of my bedroom, clutching a textbook in one hand and a failed midterm examination in the other. Laughter permeates the room from the children playing outside, but I cannot hear it; they might as well have been worlds away from where I sat. All that mattered to me at this moment was finding a way to pass Physics, a task that seemed all the more daunting each time my eyes caught a glimpse of the 36 engraved in dark red on the top of my test paper. To add even more gasoline to the fire, I had about three papers that were due in two days, a beaten down old Sienna that needed several new (and rather costly) parts and a less than content mother that subsequently released that negativity unto her eldest son. I could feel myself sinking fast, the very ground that I stood on crumbling and thinning to the core with each and every step I took , with no ledge to grab onto in sight.

The Instrument

            The four-stringed instrument resting behind by the bedside casts its shadow along the cold blue wall, threatening to tip its extended neck at any moment to pluck a chord that will shake the foundations of the three-story home. A crucial member of the rhythm section, the Bass guitar wields a pitch one octave lower than that of a standard guitar along the bass clef,

 permitting the tool composed of wood and string to emit a particular deep, bellowing and powerful sound when plugged in to the amplifier. On most days, this Bass laced with a jet black body produces the ideal tone required to properly transpose a song, with its timbre fitting like a glove in hand. On others, however, the tuning just seems out of whack and the strings do not produce a whole sound when plucked; the fret is scuffed and the pitch produced is either way loud or too low. These days have been happening more often than usual, you note, and so you take it to a music shop to have it checked for repairs.

The Individual

            The deadline for the essays has passed, the car sputters like a steamboat and Mom is now relentless. With the walls seemingly closing in me and no balance to find, I become withdrawn from my friends and family, more reserved and generally spiteful towards everyone and everything in my life. My mother, the caring woman that she is, goes ahead and arranges an appointment for me to speak with a psychiatrist on a bitter December afternoon. I am told that it was done with no ill intentions, but instead to provide me with an opportunity to talk with someone who can assist me in arranging my thoughts and dividing up my time “more adequately.” She tells me to be ready to go tomorrow at one o’clock; I cling to the remaining ground and wait for the inevitable.

The Instrument

            An employee with a scowl locked on his face and small scar running up the length of his right cheekbone hands you back the jet black Bass, telling you that the issue has been resolved. Everything should now be back to normal and the sound should produce just as it once did. You race home and hook it up to the amp, turn up the volume and treble, and begin to walk the scale of each chord as you typically do to warm up each time before playing. Sure enough, the strings are firm; the tension seems about right. But you just can’t shake the feeling that something is off as you hit an E and G flat in succession as you have done about a thousand times before. The sound just isn’t as full, not nearly as round, lacking the distinct tone that it had before everything on it began to fall apart. It can still nail a generic pop-punk bass line, but the motivation seems to have been sucked out, as if the Bass is merely going through the musician’s motions without having its heart buried in the song. Still, you play on, play until the blisters appear on your fingertips and the aches infiltrate the rounds of your elbows, play in the hopes that you can recover the sound that is lost…

The Individual with the Instrument

            I am perched in the corner of my bedroom, lights down, with a Coors Light in one hand and my Bass guitar in the other. Tipping the bottle to my mouth, I slurp away the remaining drops and toss the carcass atop a steadily growing pile of its brethren on the bed. I had long since lost track of the time, and I really had no need for it; not on the path I was traveling along, at least. I craved for the life I used to live and the person I used to be, back before I even started college and my mother fell off the deep end. A rewind, if you will, to a scene in which I am comfortably on top of my schoolwork and presenting the best version of myself to those important to me in my life; in the backdrop is my mother, smiling with a glimmer in her eye that has long since been snuffed out, never to be lit again. But that tape is worn out, the picture blurred; the lines are blurred and the actors have lost their bearings.

            It seems as if there is nothing left to do, then, but to play my Bass. It is a memento from those simpler times, a souvenir from my glory a days and a reminder of the past I so long to recover. I pluck a few notes, scale a couple of chords. The weakened, strained tone that emits from the instrument comforts me, provides me with compassion and a place of solace. I am not alone. The stained carpet around my bed is the first to go, cracking and rapidly withering away to nothingness until it is just me and my Bass on the sheets remaining, suspended in a zone of peace and understanding. I am at home, alive again for the first time; the E note sounds rich and powerful as I pluck it with my pointer finger. The walls are closing in and the perfect melody cannot be found, but I don’t care; perhaps we are all searching for that ideal tone, one that we had but failed to hold on to. In this case, we all take to our Bass to remind us.

           

Snow, Fishing, and the Venus of Willendorf

I sat with my arms crossed tightly across my chest inside a dusty old weathered jacket zipped up as high as the track would allow in the back right-hand corner of my Art History 101 lecture hall as the first drop of snow fell from the sky and onto the blacktop. The single bead of frozen water soon gave way to a steady pattern of pale white that now battered the long and narrow school windows against a backdrop of the most sterile gray. I watched this flurry brewing as if staring at it would erase the fact that I had parked my dilapidated 2004 Sienna six blocks away from the desk on the third floor of Boylan Hall of which I now sat, thanks to the wonderful alternate side street parking decree in place along Bedford Avenue.

 The Adjunct Professor in her first year of teaching stood erect at the front of the expansive area, dropping some obscure fact from the Paleolithic Period that I was sure would never be of any use to me in my everyday life and routine. Attempting to tune in to the lesson for a few minutes, I quickly found my mind racing to anything and everything except for art history. Who even takes a three hour class on Fridays? Why are you even taking this course in the first place? It’s not like you need it for your major. Which genius enacted the alternate side street parking, anyway? I am so not looking forward to the inevitable six block trek in that storm. Man, is art history boring.

 Forcing myself to at least take some pride in my education (and my tuition), I dove back into reality just in time to hear the professor finishing up on the Venus of Willendorf, a limestone carving of a woman with no hands or feet and no discernible features to speak of that apparently represented the discounting of women and certain figures in nomadic groups at the time, as well as a reminder of the rapidly changing lives of these people in that as a result of always living on the move, miniature hand carved sculptures such as this had to be enacted so as not to forget the tribe’s heritage and values. Remembering was the key.

 For some strange reason that was just out of my grasp this particular piece of prehistoric art resonated itself in my mind, but I promptly shoved it to the back of my head as the adjunct in the front of the space announced that there would be a midterm examination next class, worth a whole forty percent of our overall grade. Great, I remember thinking. A midterm and a trek in the blizzard. I am one lucky guy. Stepping out of the classroom, I decided to stop off in the bathroom to absorb as much of the artificial heat as I could before embracing the chill permeating the air outside.

 It was then that I had remembered the promise I had made to my grandfather this morning to stop off by his house and drop off some milk, as there was no way he would be able to make it to the store in these conditions. Deciding that putting it off wouldn’t do anything to make it go away, I exited the fowl stench of the lavatory, took the weathered old stairs two at a time, and cracked open the front door of Boylan into the thick and powdery frost of the morning in front of me.

 Forging ahead, my first thought was that perhaps this weather wasn’t as bad as it looked. Well, that certainly didn’t last very long.

 By the time I had walked the first block, I was cursing my very being and wishing that I was back in Florida where the winter season never yielded temperatures below fifty degrees and snow was just an entity that you marveled at from your living room couch as you caught the latest Christmas movie on television.

 My grandfather was on that couch as well on those sunny days down in South Florida. Back then he was almost a completely different figure; where he was now listless and lethargic he was once energetic and spirited, a man devoted to his wife, children, and grandchildren instead of the zombie struggling to shuffle his way to the refrigerator in the kitchen for a can of Coke that occupied the house on twenty fourth street. Perhaps it was the change of weather, or maybe the shift in scenery, but it was as if the Florida grandpa and the New York grandpa shared a name but not an identity. 

Block two down, and my left hand is almost completely numb. I burrow it deep in my coat pocket, wrap it around the tissue floating around the lining in there, but it does little to sooth the burning of the frost against my shivering flesh. I begin to think about my grandfather again, and how we would go fishing every weekend; mostly because I craved for the ninety degree Southern Florida humidity right about now. We would go on over to the pier down Atlantic, my grandpa with the bait and water in tow and I with the hooks and rods in my grasp, ready to do battle with the creatures that swam a mere ten feet below where we stood. Once we set up shop there on the deck, I don’t think that a single word was ever spoken; there was simply nothing that needed to be said. The only sound was that of our lines reeling back in, our sweat dripping on to the wooden surface below, and the cerulean blue waves ever so gently crashing against the pier. Man, could I go for a fishing trip right about now.

 Blocks three and four had gone by in a haze of sheer cold that nipped and bristled against any part of my skin foolish enough to attempt to escape from the confines of my jacket. I could now make out the corner of Avenue L through clenched eyelids, signifying that my car rested a mere fifteen houses from that very spot. I could already feel the warmth of my radiator ripping through my neck and shoulder blades, was practically able to taste the coffee that I had waiting for me in the old gray thermos stored underneath my seat. A pile of snow about two feet deep appeared in my path, but I merely stepped right on through it and plunged ahead to my destination, ignoring the wet slush seeping its way into my shoe and through my pant legs. A patch of ice made an attempt to slow me down, but with a quick gain of balance and slide I was safely across on the other side. Ignoring the unnerving shade of red that my hand now occupied (reminded me a bit of a fire truck in the middle of the summer), I reached ahead and inserted my key into the door, pulled myself inside, and picked up my phone that I only now realized had been ringing since I had first left the school.

 I wonder if intense cold had the power to affect ones brain, as it took me a second or two just to register that the strained voice I was hearing from the other end of the line belonged to my father. That’s probably why I thought that I was hallucinating or hearing things (maybe both) when my dad instructed to me to get down to the hospital as soon as I could, that he had been trying to reach me for the last twenty minutes or so. Things were not looking good.

 I guess I knew then, knew all along as I floated/drove down Bedford to the hospital that something like this would happen sooner or later. It had to have been stored in the deepest corners of all our minds, buried six feet under in the hopes that no gravedigger would conjure up the strength to ever muster up the courage bring it to light. Like an avalanche we heard the rumblings, felt the shakes tear through every fiber of our being, prayed that the mountain would just hold up long enough for the rescue crew to swoop in and save us (from what?). Then, we turned our backs for just a second, and it all came crashing down.

 Enter the lonely gray behemoth of brick to meet the stench of anesthetic and medicine, sickness and death. Machines buzz and whirr and ping as I exit the dull elevator and make my way to room 405, emergency. A nurse tries to usher me in, a doctor brushes past, a patient is carted somewhere off into the distance; the linoleum is stained something not quite violet. Push open the door to find him laying eyes shut and motionless in the corner, at least three tubes running into and around the shell of his body. A monitor displays a green line rising and falling, rising and falling. I glance at a report perched on the table, see the words “severe infection” and “festering for months” blurred red along the top.

 Looking at my grandpa at that place and moment in time, I do not see the figure whom I looked up to and idolized all my life. I search and search but I cannot find the person that took me fishing all those summers in Florida; the rods have been replaced by tubes, the pier with a lump green hospital bed. Flowers and cards and gifts litter his bedside, but I have no idea if my grandfather will ever have the chance to appreciate them. I have a hard time remembering this version of the figure lying two feet in front of me; I leave the room and lose myself in the desolation of the institution.

 I am told at home later that night that my grandfather’s infection could have easily been treated at the onset, that he had been living with this pain and suffering for the last three or four months of his life. The doctor feels that there is a fairly good chance that my grandfather will make it, albeit with an altered lifestyle and immense changes to his routine. I know then that there will be no more fishing trips on the Atlantic, no more trips down to the pier with a tackle box in one hand and rods in the other. The doctor says that we should be proud of how strong my grandfather is, but all I can feel is a seething anger, one that festers and ignites further when I think of the selfishness he had in not telling those who loved him and supported him about the issue until it was too late, instead choosing to bottle up the pain until it was too great.

 I flash back to the morning of that day and how my greatest concern was having to walk six measly blocks in the snow. The Venus of Willendorf floats back in to my conscious, and I can’t help but think of my Grandfather in that he nearly became this very memento, a mere tradition for us to carry around in our hearts and remember for years to come. Like the art itself, my grandfather had lost some of his features and a large chunk of himself from years before, but he was still the headstone and central force of our family, and we would take good care like the weak, miniature figures that they both have become.

 With a shrug I switch off the tv (something about a boating accident off the coast was playing on) and pull out my Art History textbook. After all, I do have a test next week. And I have a pretty good idea that the Venus of Willendorf will be on it.