:::: Et cetera et cetera:
The Oblique Derivative Predicament Conclusion
5.1 Nietzsche Throat: You are closest to a friend with your heart when you resist him. . pg. 702
:::: Guy Davenport, O.’s colleague for five years at the University of Kentucky, always struck O. as a courtly platypus. In an essay O. wrote about Da Vinci’s Bicycle, a collection that helped reconfigure his impression of the short story, he called Davenport the last modernist — a writer, painter, and scholar with a European sensibility and a bank of arcane knowledge who, like his friend Hugh Kenner, embodied eloquence and a mode of bracing associative thinking, but who was tremendously awkward in three-dimensional social situations: taciturn, grumpy, removed. He seemed incapable of taking a vacation from his own mind. Like his characters — Musonius Rufus to Walser, Stein, and Pound — he always seemed out of step with his age.
One of O.’s other colleagues there once recounted how, at the end of the meal at a nice restaurant with a visiting writer, Davenport picked up the chunk of steak remaining on his plate with his fingers, delicately wrapped it in a napkin, and slipped it in the pocket of his sports jacket for later consumption.
If the story isn’t true, it should be.
:::: In a fit of unselfconsciousness, you once told a graduate student that when traveling one is either running towards something or away from something.
You then asked which applied in his case.
:::: I don’t know why we are here, Wittgenstein admitted, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
:::: Kafka scribbled this sentence in a notebook: I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.
A phrase that now adorns coffee cups in Prague’s low-concept Kafka Museum.
Right next to Kafka mouse pads, Kafka t-shirts, Kafka beer mats, Kafka metal magnets, and an I heart Kafka baseball cap.
:::: How long is now?
When you first arrived, every day seemed a week, there was so much news coming in. Now you blink, and the cleaning staff is knocking on your door again, and you are sitting in front of your German teacher again, and you’re at the dinner table again.
The replication of moments turning time bleary.
:::: Hugh Kenner’s command of any subject was such that he could lecture without notes or script, Davenport recalled to me once. Kenner had a folder of blank pages, or letters from friends, that he pretended to be reading from, to assure audiences that he’d written out what he was saying.
:::: Because the two-note sirens boiling up out of the Berlin streets are straight from Nazi central.
:::: Or the evening Samuel R. Delany and O. sat over dinner at Casa De Oro in Moscow, Idaho, delighting in their mutual admiration of Davenport’s mind and style as if they had been the first to revel in them.
:::: Exploring the shock of 2711 concrete stellae, each 7’10” long, 3’1” wide, arranged in tidy rows in the anti-park just south of the Brandenburg Gate: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman. When O. descends the slope into its 4.7-acre void he becomes disoriented by the graynesses and heft of the monoliths, some of which tower 10 feet above him, some of which lean in as if about to topple.
Leaving, he passes a young couple sitting on a coffin-sized block, bottle-feeding their baby. A giggling teenage gang of Japanese tourists playing hide-and-seek among the deaths. Two cute Italian women in their early twenties snapping photos of a cute Italian guy in his twenties striking beefcake poses astraddle two upright slabs.
Then O. is history.
Aren’t we all?
:::: Berlin is poor, but sexy.
Klaus Wowereit, Governing Mayor, to a TV interviewer in 2004.
:::: Paris is always Paris and Berlin is never Berlin.
Jack Lang, France’s Minister of Culture, in 2001.
:::: Orson Wells as Harry Lime to Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins in The Third Man in 1949:
Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
:::: Andi and I are wired to be existentially fidgety. We moved from Iowa, where we met, to Virginia, Virginia to Kentucky, Kentucky to northern Idaho, where we lived in a cabin on a rolling countryside 40 minutes from sweet small-town Moscow where I taught. Eleven years later I quit my job there, assuming I’d left the academic net of disappointments and conservative bureaucracies for good, and we moved to a log home among the remote mountains and glacier lakes of central Idaho. The nearest town is 12 miles away, boasts 497 people when everyone’s home, which often puts me in mind of the cramped shabby hut Wittgenstein built in 1914 in the isolated Norwegian mountains, his plan being to walk, read, think, write.
:::: Six years later, the University of Utah approached me in the guise of Karen Brennan as Andi and I sat over lattés at a hotel café at a conference in Austin. She asked if I’d be interested in a position there.
How could I hesitate?
:::: In his novel Nietzsche’s Kisses, O. writes these sentences, pretending they’re fiction:
How, in the course of his life, did he arrive here?
At one time, there seemed to have been so many other places to go.
:::: Outside my window at the Academy, on the snowy hill below, a boy bundled like an arctic astronaut: the child of a fellow fellow sledding giddily.
As I watch, his father, a distinguished anthropologist with prodigious frontal lobes and a cowboy hat, takes the sled from him, steps onto it, bends slightly at the waist and knees, right arm steering a rope tied to his sled’s prow, left pumping a victory fist, and rides down like some wild surfer on a frozen wave.
:::: Over breakfast this morning Andi explains she realized the photographs she’d begun taking from our balcony between 7:40 and 7:50 the day after our arrival aren’t about documenting the transformations of what she couldn’t believe she was seeing.
Instead, implied in each is the presence of the house across Wannsee Lake in which that 85-minute conference took place on 20 January 1942. She plans to link them together to make a fast-forward film of her enterprise because every click of her camera represents an affirmation in the face of what went on in that place.
I’m still alive, each shot says. You’re still dead. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
:::: Which is to say we keep writing, making art, anyway.
:::: Until, of course, we don’t keep writing, making art.
:::: Davenport claimed he lived almost exclusively on fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars. He did so in near privacy on a road at the end of the galaxy — Sayre Avenue in Lexington, Kentucky, a leafy suburban street that sometimes felt farther away from the bustle of things than Wittgenstein’s hut perched on a rocky cliff above the innermost point of Sognefjord.
Andi and I dropped by Davenport’s house one afternoon for a tour. What I remember most was how, at the base of his easel in the bright alcove dedicated to his art, every brush was aligned with every other, every paint tube lay beside the next in a soldier-perfect row. He had meticulously squeezed each tube from the bottom so it wouldn’t form unsightly crinkles.
He still used a manual typewriter.
In his last letter to his sister Gloria Williamson, written on that typewriter just before his death by cancer in 2005, he wrote: I hope you’re as happy as I am.