:::: Muscae volitantes: Latin for flies hovering, the medical metaphor for floaters, that cell debris trapped in the eye’s vitreous humor over time — and so I’m once more reading about skin’s leisurely failure.
Spots. Threads. Cobwebs.
:::: Death is so terrifying, Susan Cheever wrote, because it is so ordinary.
:::: Move from printed page to hypermedial pagelessness, and you move from the primary awareness of temporality to the primary awareness of spatiality.
Time traveler becomes pathfinder.
Because 88 Constellations is an investigation into the ways narrativity can function as desire for patterning, for sense-webbing, created anew by each reader/listener/viewer by means of joining the dots of the data constellation called experience in divergent, contradictory ways.
:::: And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Exclaimed Nietzsche, who, interestingly, could not dance.
:::: There is hope, the writer with a series of baseball caps designed to make money at his expense said, but not for us.
:::: Someone who has given up the idea of living life will surely never be able to embrace death, wrote Guy Debord. Promoters of life insurance merely intimate that it is reprehensible to die without first arranging for the system’s adjustment to the economic loss one’s death will incur; and the promoters of the American way of death dwell solely on how much of the appearance of life can be maintained in the individual’s encounter with dying.
:::: The instant the upper edge of the sun disappeared below the western horizon in Berlin on 3 January 2013:
4:05 p.m.
:::: In Stockholm you rent a car and drive south in search of the farm your grandfather grew up on and described in his progressively sketchier, unmoored memoir scrawled in halting English near the end of his life.
Following the clues, you discover the right parish church, show the gardener weeding among the tombstones the farm’s name, a word that in my grandfather’s hand looks like, perhaps, Hocktorp, although it could be Hackthorp or Hacktorp instead. The gardener shows you the family plot, shakes his head. He can’t help you any further — which is when a mailman peddles by. The gardener flags him down, shows him the name. The mailman recognizes it right away, yet speaks no more English than the gardener, so is reduced to drawing a virtually unreadable map.
Still, a few kilometers and there it is: the phenomenological oddness of red and white cottage, pond my grandfather swam in as a boy over a century ago, cows grazing in the front pasture, pine forest hilling up around us.
:::: For some reason, I decide to Google my dissertation director, Douglas Day, of whom I have always been deeply fond, and discover that, eight months after suffering a debilitating stroke in February 2004, he raised a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.
:::: A farmer with your grandfather’s name is working out front.
You pull up, swing open the door of your rented car, hand extended, smiling the lightly uncomfortable unwelcome-visitor’s smile, attempt to clarify what you’re doing breathing his air.
He has just enough English to understand, at least partially, and, wary of our intrusion from the start, shuts down completely once he figures things out. Dour, he explains that, by abandoning his people and emigrating to the States, my grandfather became the black sheep in the story called this family.
No one talks about him. No one has for decades. No one cares what’s become of him. His past — and, by implication, of course, yours — doesn’t exist anymore.
:::: The whole point is that no one says it, because if one were to say it to oneself, it would become something different.
Guessed Felix Guattari.
:::: In a sense, to open your mouth is to stop traveling.
:::: In a sense, it is to begin.
:::: Depart, wend, advance, cross, dislocate, drive, fly, bike, hike, boat, read, watch, hear.
:::: Last night I was surprised when a visiting former fellow and art historian misquoted Kafka to me over dinner, heartbreakingly: I ate from the tree of knowledge and gave up life.
:::: Or the night in a canoe on the Amazon, rocking gently in a narrow tributary, water sloshing against the hull, jungle screeching.
The mosquito cloud.
The myriad caiman eyes glowing greenwhite among the tangled brush on the shore as our guide swept his flashlight through the darkness.
Let’s just be still for a minute, he said, and listen.
:::: Because you are what you read.
:::: Because the herbal gel I have been using for a year now in an attempt to diminish the ambush of a craggy three-inch scar across my lower back where some suspicious skin was removed doesn’t work.
I stop using it today when the last jar I packed runs out.
:::: Trolling Facebook, which I employ daily as a mode of digital daydreaming, I’m shocked to land on a friend’s page and read she died yesterday afternoon.
She and her husband, who had since divorced, were among our closest friends and comrades while we lived in Kentucky a quarter of a century ago. We were both assistant professors, both barely out of our careers’ gates. We moved on from Lexington at the same time, lost touch. Cancer found and, I had thought, misplaced her. Andi and I bumped into her again in 2004 by chance during an intermission at a play in London. She looked good, happy. We caught up over drinks afterwards and promised to stay in better touch, which we didn’t.
What are the chances?
And what are the chances of stumbling across this without warning:
Dearest friends, for those who do not know, we must sadly share that we lost our dear friend, Patricia Troxel, Sunday afternoon. She was surrounded by an extraordinary amount of love and support during her final hours and transitioned very peacefully with both of her hands being held by dear friends. We will miss her so very much, but are so grateful that she is no longer suffering and can now rest in peace and light.
:::: Here is the sentence all writers write beneath the sentences they seem to be writing:
I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. . aren’t I?
:::: Twelve hours after leaning in to listen to the former fellow’s sad admission, I wake with a reprobate cold. I’ve kept healthy for more than two-and-a-half months, more than half my time in Berlin, yet somewhere in the night’s lethophobic folds I almost imperceptibly passed through the permeable membrane separating feeling-okay from not-feeling-okay, being-at-home in my body from not-being-at-home in it: the faintest sigh of a sore throat, the negligible perception of post-nasal drip, the sense of very literally being someone I wasn’t when I went to sleep.
:::: Identity Tourism: Lisa Nakamura’s term for the process of appropriating another self on the web, especially one involving a gender and/or race other than one’s congenital own, in the interests of nothing beyond the search itself, the pleasure, the increase of experience.
A (pre-)condition of travel — if in a modified sense — in the world or the world of writing, too.
:::: Traveling as a state of finding and losing your selves, encounter-ing/performing others, rejoicing in that which you can never be, those places you can never reach.