Lance Olsen: There

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.

:::: 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.