Lance Olsen: There

:::: 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.

:::: 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.