This Is Water / Capital-G Guts

Excerpts from David Foster Wallace's Keynote Commencement Speech in 2005 as they relate to my post:
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
"The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance..."

"This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger." (a terrible, and probably accidental foreshadowing)

"...awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

And now, this is me (your blogger) speaking:
I should have read this speech a long time ago, but starting college at 25 has put me behind.  You try to read Infinite Jest so you can brag to your English major friends that you get it, that you know what it "means." Then you read anything else that DFW has written so that you can keep up.  And then you hear, you know, that DFW hangs himself 3 years after giving that speech.  The problem with the water is that your awareness of it will NEVER save your life.  I find myself unfortunately resigned to the fact that he knew this as well, but chose to keep it out of the speech for obvious reasons.  Less than an hour after reading this speech I was driving home from work, listening to community radio (which I almost never do) and the song The Great White Ocean by Antony and the Johnstons began to play.
 
"Swim with me my Sister when I die
In the great white ocean we must try
Try to find a way that we can see
See each others faces in the sea"

It seems melodramatic to relate one to the other, song and prose, bla bla bla.  But the only thing I could picture (which is an unfortunate consequence of over exposure to pop culture) was DFW hanging in his bedroom while The Great White Ocean played on repeat on a faded yellow record player a la Susanna Kaysen/James Mangold.

The water is the little things, the big things, the things you forget to remember, the passage of time, the inconsistencies,  the obsessions, the lack, and as DFW puts it - "The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death."

What worries me is that while the water surrounds me, my capital-G Guts inhabit me (variety meats, brain, belly, marrow, etc).  If DFW believes that we all worship something and that there is no such thing as atheism, then he worshiped his Guts.  And now he hangs above the water. 

David Foster Wallace Keynote Commencement Speech 2005 can be viewed in its entirety here:
http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace-kenyon.html