:::: Traveling as a way of trying to unconvince time.
:::: A few minutes later, it is May.
:::: Or the bioengineered replicant Roy Batty to his creator, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, in Blade Runner a second before Roy crushes Tyrell’s skull, drives his thumbs into Tyrell’s eyes: I want more life, fucker.
Which is to say: science fiction as cognitive estrangement inviting us to re-view our present through a tissue of metaphor and temporal disruption.
:::: Circumambulate, explore, follow one’s nose, gallivant, globe-trot, hit the road, hit the trail, make a circuit.
Meander.
:::: Barthes wrote The Death of the Author upon his return from a trip to Japan.
:::: On 29 May 2013, the day we’ll leave Berlin (suddenly everything is about imminent departure) so I can deliver a talk at the Pompidou about Debord’s influence on Nabokov (such anachronous involvement impossible, and yet not completely impossible, and yet not not completely impossible), and so Andi and I can start making our slow way back to the States:
4:51 a.m.
:::: A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and comfort.
Drummed Ivan Chtcheglov.
:::: Flâneur: French noun denoting stroller, lounger, loafer, with connotations of the amateur urban detective, the intellectual nomad and parasite, the waster of time — and in the nineteenth century referring to a way of existing in the European city.
The flâneur, Walter Benjamin points out, enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else at the same time.
:::: Good-bye, says the dying man to the mirror they hold in front of him. We won’t be seeing each other anymore.
Imagined Paul Valéry in a line Paul Bowles appropriated 17 years later for an epigraph to his investigation into travel as precarious caesura.
:::: Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.
Wittgenstein’s final words.
He had been reading Black Beauty, of all novels, the autobiography of a horse that taught the simple (and simplistic) lesson: people should be nicer to each other. Anna Sewell wrote it between 1871 and 1877 during the last few years of her life when she was an invalid imprisoned in her own house and her own body, barely able to leave her own bed.
Her only book, Black Beauty was brought out by a local publisher. It went on to become the sixth best seller in English.
:::: In Wittgenstein’s wake: 30,000 pages of incomplete manuscripts.
:::: Ralph Berry, Wittgenstein connoisseur and overseer from 1999 to 2005 of Fiction Collective Two, or FC2 for short, the author-run publisher of experimental fiction, phoned me one evening shortly after 9/11 to ask if I would consider becoming chair of its Board of Directors.
He explained I would be replacing Ronald Sukenick, one of the project’s founders, who was suffering from inclusion body myositis, a disease characterized by the progressive atrophying of one’s muscles. While Ralph explained what would constitute my duties, should I accept, I thought about how much I had loved those books ever since plucking one of Ron’s—98.6—off the new arrivals cart by chance one Friday evening as an undergraduate in Madison, Wisconsin.
I was bored and sifting through just-in novels at the Helen C. White Library to pass time, and then I was opening Ron’s to that part where the pages become a violent documentary collage and I was connected to the world again by disconnecting from it.
I want to say this was 1975. I want to say I was 19.
That would have made Ron 43, 13 years younger than I am today.
:::: Because any new way of reading that goes against the matrix of time, which pulls us toward death, is a futile but honest effort to resist this inexorability of one’s fate, in literature at least, if not in reality.
Hopes Milorad Pavic.
:::: Who is wrong, but in a beautiful, indefatigable, eminently quotable way.
:::: FC2 was born as Fiction Collective in 1974 when Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, Peter Spielberg, Mark Mirsky, Steve Katz, and several others began meeting in Baumbach’s Brooklyn apartment to discuss founding a cooperative fiction-publishing venture by and for innovative authors.
They had become dismayed by editorial and marketing limitations imposed by commercial presses — what Spielberg referred to as literature defined by committee, books designed by cereal packagers, marketed by used-car salesmen. . and ruled or overruled by accountants.
The idea was to create a publishing experiment that would last, all things going well, two or three years.
2014 was FC2’s 40th anniversary.
:::: The last impression you have before reaching out to shut down your computer: the diaphanous clouds against an ash-blue sky.
:::: The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
Believed Christopher Hitchens, after whom the asteroid 57901 Hitchens was named days before he died in 2011, to the bitter end.
:::: Whatever opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of death, we may be sure that it is meaningless and valueless.
Proclaimed Proust.
:::: How, shortly before his death in 1631, John Donne obtained an urn, his own burial shroud, and the services of an artist named Nicholas Stone. The poet wrapped himself in the shroud, posed atop the urn, and had Stone render a charcoal sketch of him, which the poet kept by his bedside throughout his final illness.
He wanted to remind himself there is a little less of us every day.
Seven words, nine syllables, 23 letters: all that is the case, precisely what we know about ourselves, sans irony, wit, desperate belief.
The only significant question is what to do with such preposterous knowledge.
:::: Prowl, ramble, reconnoiter, rove, straggle, stray, stroll, traipse, trek, bum around, knock about, peregrinate, range, vagabond.
Contemplate.
:::: Look up the first definition of present in the O.E.D. and you will find being before, beside, with, or in the same place as the person to whom the word has relation; being in the place considered or mentioned; that is here (or there). Opp. to ABSENT.
:::: [[That is here (or there).]]
:::: Because from 1 December 2012 through 28 February 2013, there were 91.2 hours of sunshine in Berlin.
Total.
:::: Let’s call travel contemplation in motion.
:::: Or Ed Kienholz’s corpulent embalmed body, which, pre-embalmment, divided its time between northern Idaho and Berlin from the early seventies to that June day in 1994 it buckled of a heart attack in the middle of a hike near Hope, was wedged into the front seat of the artist’s brown 1940 Packard, a dollar and deck of cards in its pocket, bottle of 1931 Chianti beside it, ashes of its dog Smash in the trunk.
Bagpipes complaining, the coupe, steered by his widow Nancy, rolled down into a huge hole.
Because Kienholz was Kienholz’s terminal installation.