I cannot tear myself away from the scene in here . . . . Few of the women are under thirty-five, fewer still under 175 pounds. But it is methedrine-paced and exhausting to watch because your own feet move; and it is erotic in a way that makes MTV look lame. The cloggers’ feet are too fast to be seen . . . [t]heir yips and whoops are involuntary, pure exclamation . . . . They hold hands and whirl each other around and in and out tapping like mad, their torsos upright and almost formal, as if only incidentally attached to the blur of legs below. It goes on and on. I’m rooted to my stool.
Of course that bit is massively edited here. Still, the thing to note is that despite the jokes and eye-rolling, despite Wallace’s anxiety about what the fried Twinkies and corpulence and T-shirts with rude slogans mean, he finds himself deeply, deeply moved by the joy and movement of the dancers doing what they love: losing themselves in dance.
It is a moment where Wallace senses intimately how he belongs to the human species — not capital P “People,” but as a small p “person,” one of nearly seven billion living, breathing, loving people. It places him squarely in the human community, while so much self-referential contemporary art does just the opposite. Wallace’s supreme moment was one of connection and empathy, of finding the instance of human beauty within the profanity of quotidian existence.
That moment of ecstatic empathy can be found in nearly every Wallace essay. Whether he was writing about John McCain or the porn industry, he was most affected by that second when a person revealed their humanity, became less personality than person. He was generous to his subjects, and therefore generous to us — letting people be people, loving them as such.
Moments after I found out about his death, I was actually due to play tennis, a sport Wallace adored. The day was sunny, the air crisp. And I thought about Wallace then, his love of tennis, the way he wrote about it — some of his best work in his novel, Infinite Jest, some of his best journalism, is about losing oneself in the purity of the loss of one’s mind, the becoming only body, while chasing tennis balls around a court.
It occurred to me then how when Wallace wrote about tennis players, about feeling connected to and exulting in the physical act — when he wrote about those prairie cloggers, who he said “aroused” him — what he was talking about was what the poet Audre Lorde called “the erotic.” Not something dirty: something resplendent and specifically human. Lorde wrote about how the erotic was actually contained within any act where one lost that inner voice through physical and repetitive motion — painting a fence, gardening, or playing tennis, or clog-dancing — these acts were bodily, were connective, and forced us to lose our ego or narcissism and be, as Wallace so obviously adored, simply human. Losing ourselves in these moments, we become our true selves.
Outside on that tennis court, I thought, Why didn’t he play tennis, instead? And I wanted to weep. Now, today, when I think about those last moments for him, when I think of how he must have been feeling, I despair. For he taught me not to be alone, and yet there he was.
