:::: And then I was visiting Ron for the last time. It was a humid rainy Tuesday afternoon. It was his Battery Park City apartment. From his living room, we could see the Hudson and Jersey City’s skyline on the far shore.
It was 2004. I was 48. Ron was 72, 17 years after I first met him face-to-face when I invited him to read at the University of Kentucky. He showed up with his then girlfriend, Julia Frey, and spent the hours after his reading skinny-dipping with her in the staid hotel’s pool.
Inclusion body myositis eventually makes swallowing impossible, and next breathing. Ron had lost the use of his fingers, so had bought himself voice-recognition gear. He wrote by means of it. First thing he did when I showed up was to lead me into his study to show off his new gadget, with which he was wrapping up Last Fall, his 9/11 novel.
(He didn’t know it would be his 9/11 novel. He’d been writing what he believed was a different book entirely when he looked up that glistening morning and saw the first plane explode into the World Trade Center.)
(The very next sentence he composed reconceived what he was doing and why.)
(His novel changed course in a breath of white space.)
What was utterly uncanny about our meeting was how we both knew it was going to be the last time we would see each other, and how there were no social conventions to cover such a spectral occasion.
:::: Traveling is a condition enabling recognition of the limits of human knowledge and mastery, inviting us to orient and re-orient our selves to an existence that will always exceed our grasp.
:::: Das Umgreifende, that is to say: Jasper’s term, which passes into English as The Encompassing, for the indefinite horizon in which all subjective and objective life is possible, but which can itself never be apprehended rationally.
One only becomes authentically human when one allows one’s identities to confront such un-imaginables as universal contingency and the loss of the human, which is to say the loss of the body, which is to say insert euphemism here.
Everything else amounts to forms of resistance, repression, refusal, reptilian fear.
:::: This is, O. assumes, why Thomas Pynchon wrote the following sentence in the foreword to his short story collection Slow Learner:
When we speak of seriousness in art, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death — how characters act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate.
:::: Because the last words Roy Batty speaks, huddled on a dark rainy L.A. rooftop in 2019, are some of the saddest, most powerful, in the entire film: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. . All those moments will be lost in time. .
:::: Traveling as loss in the making.
:::: Birth, Beckett apprehended, was the death of him.
:::: The morning my cold finally dissolves I check the online news before beginning to write — an act comprising part of my daily hesitation ceremony — and read that at 5 a.m. work crews backed by 250 police removed four sections (each about three-and-a-half feet wide) from what came to be known as the East Side Gallery — i.e., the longest remaining stretch of the Wall, transformed within the months of the rest going down into a colorful homage to nutty invention — in order to make way for an access route to planned high-rise apartments along the River Spree.
:::: Or hiraeth: the Welsh word meaning homesickness for a place to which you cannot return, aporia where presence is always divided.
:::: Dirt nap. Done dancing. Kicked the oxygen habit.
:::: I went to Prague to take part in a private seminar with some dissident Czech philosophers who were banned from the universities, recounts Derrida in a snippet O. locates by accident on YouTube. I was followed by the Czech secret police, who made no secret about it. After the seminar I went for a walk around Kafka’s town as if in pursuit of Kafka’s ghost, who was, in fact, himself pursuing me.
:::: This piece of the Wall is the last memorial to the people who died and to the perseverance of freedom, announced David Hasselhoff to the crowd gathered before him the morning that crew began taking down the 15-foot section of this city’s ingenuity.
How this is the first time in O.’s life he finds himself agreeing with The Hoff, who went on to belt out a couple tuneless lines from Looking for Freedom for the attendant protesters — the same song he sang on stage in front of the Brandenberg Gate while sporting a jacket bedecked with miniature light bulbs on New Year’s Eve 1989, a month after the Wall became agitated memory.
Looking for Freedom, a Schlager about a rich man’s son who wants to make his own way in life, had stayed at the top of the German pop charts for eight weeks after its release a year before. Apparently, though, The Hoff’s followers missed its point: Its argument isn’t about the celebration of freedom, but about how freedom can never really be found, is a perpetually deferred condition.
Matthew Wilkening of AOL Radio philosophized that the song’s presence in the cosmos testifies to nothing less than the power of music — horrible, horrible music — to unite and uplift us all.
Being a brief parable about the Schlagering of U.S. writing practices.
:::: You remain cold-free for a week and then, walking the old Jewish ghetto in Krakow one bleak sleety afternoon, impressed by how there are no signs indicating this is the area where 15,000 were imprisoned in a space meant to be inhabited by 3000, you recognize a fresh scratchiness at the back of your throat.
Ten days later your second cold is inaccessible to your recollection in any detail.
:::: But paradise is locked and bolted. We must make a journey around the world to see if a back door has perhaps been left open.
Prayed Heinrich von Kleist.
:::: My last reading in Berlin is with Donna Stonecipher at St. George’s English Bookshop, an epicenter of ex-pat writing. Donna has just translated a Nietzschean thought-metaphor by the Swiss author Ludwig Hohclass="underline" Ascent. It’s both about a pair of men attempting to climb a mountain and the complications of maneuvering through its own writing processes.
It took Hohl, virtually unknown out of his country (he had to publish a number of his works himself), almost 50 years to compose and recompose.
By way of introduction, Donna shows a video clip of an interview with him. His thick glasses distort his eyes into monsters on the screen. Out of nowhere the interviewer asks if Hohl notices things disappearing from his house. Hohl’s gigantic eyes widen as he begins to ramble on about small objects going AWOL everywhere.
He appears tremendously excited that someone else has finally noticed this phenomenon.
:::: Two minutes ago O. filled out an online questionnaire titled Death Forecast in an attempt to figure out when he will go AWOL in the largest sense.
He answered questions about his gender, date of birth, grandparents’ longevity, exercise regimen, diet, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, propensity to smoke and/or take drugs, history of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and depression.
It is estimated you will die at the age of 89, the results noted.
Initially the number delighted him. It gave him 33 more years, which sounded like a pocket-sized eternity.
Next he went to a time-units conversion calculator which revealed to his horror that 33 years is really only 396 months, which sounded like a lot less — and that 396 months is really only 1,721.85608 weeks, which is really only 12,052.9926 days, which is really only 289,271.822 hours, which is really only 17,356,309.3 minutes, which is really only 1,041,378,558 seconds, which seems like no time at all, none whatsoever, nix, naught, null, the beat of a nervous heart.