Lance Olsen - There

Later he tumbles into an asymmetrical sleep.

Next morning he realizes he actually pulled a muscle in his groin from all that evacuation. Otherwise, it feels almost (but not quite) as if he had read about rather than experienced the identity that was his 24 hours earlier.

:::: In that race which daily hastens us towards death, Camus noticed, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

:::: If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.

Kvetched Woody Allen.

:::: Because Tennessee Williams accidentally swallows the cap to his eye drops and suffocates alone in his New York hotel room.

:::: Sherwood Anderson chokes on a toothpick at a party in Panama.

:::: Maupassant tries killing himself by slicing his own throat, fails, is declared insane, spends his last 18 months in an asylum, and dies from the syphilis he contracted in his youth.

:::: As does Manet. As does Gaugin. As does Schubert.

:::: As does Nietzsche. As does Scott Joplin. As does Baudelaire.

:::: Witkin asking his viewers to sympathize with the fragility of our human flesh, our human heart, the act of persistent lessening we call ourselves.

:::: How I was reading to my mother from Eliot’s Four Quartets when she died. Andi was holding her hand. We were at her bedside, talking to her, trying to comfort her, telling her what was occurring was okay, it was okay to stop with the fighting, she had fought plenty already, even though she was already unconscious, even though she had been for more than a day.

She flinched suddenly and then stopped breathing.

:::: My mother was herself and then that changed.

:::: A period of Q&A follows each fellow’s presentation about his or her work. At some point the same fellow’s hand invariably goes up. Earlier in the semester I found her bright questions complex and resonant. Several weeks ago it dawned on me they all boil down to variations on the same one — an inquiry that is less about the subject at hand than the nature of narratology in its broadest conceptualization:

You mean there’s no hope, no resolution, no such thing as a happy ending?

:::: You want to trot over and hug her every time you see her stirring in her seat.

:::: To hope is to contradict the future.

Emphasized Emile Cioran, who in 1933 studied at the University of Berlin and confessed in a newspaper column: There is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler.

:::: To simplify is to contradict the past.

:::: Because, after a little more than an hour, I realized I should take my leave of Ron. I don’t believe I have ever experienced more complication closing a door behind me.

:::: How that door remained both open and shut after I left because the only real closure can come in mimetic fiction and knee-jerk memoir, stories of trauma leading to redemption, triumph over adversity, faux wisdom hardened into commodity for those desperate to buy and believe it.

Like an order of Arby’s Cheesecake Poppers, only with your life.

:::: I think I’ve heard of Lance Olsen. I wonder who he was.

People in 50 years won’t ever say.

:::: If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.

Posited Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of modern pragmatism, who during the last two decades of his life couldn’t afford heat in winter and was forced to subsist on old bread donated by the local baker.

:::: No comment.

Reads the epitaph on Edward Abbey’s memorial stone.

:::: It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived, recounted Joel-Peter Witkin. We were going to church. Walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it, but before I could touch it someone carried me away.

:::: Death is not an event in life, Wittgenstein claimed: we do not live to experience death.

:::: Yes, I want to say, and no.

:::: Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.

Emma Bovary eats arsenic, Eva Braun cyanide, Alan Turing cyanide, Walter Benjamin morphine, Freud morphine, Raymond Roussel barbiturates, Abbie Hoffman barbiturates, Stefan Zweig barbiturates, Frieda Kahlo painkillers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman chloroform.

Attila the Hun, whose empire stretched from the Ural to the Rhine and the Danube to the Baltic, chokes to death at his own wedding feast.

:::: Sculptor Tony Cragg asking the audience during an interview with Ulrich Krempel at the Academy to imagine two dots on a piece of paper.

Now, he says, imagine how you might connect them.

Most of us would draw a straight black line from one to the other. The artist would see a plethora of opportunities, including a colorful filament that circles out and around Jupiter and back again.

:::: The polymorphous flare-up of white asparagus everywhere, each tapering penile stalk more than a foot long, an inch round.

Pan-fried asparagus. Wiener Schnitzel with asparagus. Cheesecake with asparagus. Asparagus lasagna. Asparagus quiche. Asparagus soup. Asparagus salad. Asparagus ice cream.

Asparagus, Proust’s narrator noticed, transforms my chamber pot into a flask of perfume.

:::: Because Virginia Woolf drowns herself in the Ouse, Paul Celan in the Seine, Spalding Gray in the East River, Hart Crane in the Gulf of Mexico.

:::: I think the future has it in for us.

Theorized Noel Gallagher, who may have been intentionally slant-rhyming with Jim Morrison’s not unfamiliar observation: No one here gets out alive.

Niemand hier bekommt lebend raus .

:::: God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don’t feel so well myself.

Fussed Eugène Ionesco.

:::: Because Anne Sexton shrugs on her mother’s old fur coat, removes her rings, pours herself a glass of vodka, strolls into the garage, and starts her car.

:::: Consciousness’s continuous harassment by the flesh.

:::: God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable, felt H. L. Mencken. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

:::: He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

Saw Nietzsche.

:::: Because Patrik Ouredník tells how, during the first months Buchenwald was open for business, those in charge gifted the inmates with postcards saying: Accommodation is wonderful, we are working here, we receive decent treatment and are well looked after. The inmates were made to sign them and address them to relatives, some of whom apparently believed what they read. One Greek prisoner mailed his postcard to his father in Pyrgos. Three months later, the man arrived for a visit.

At the railroad platform, the son leapt upon him, strangling his father to death before the Germans could get their hands on the poor sap.

:::: Three weeks away from the taxi that will take us to Tegel, O. begins imagining what their suitcases will look like waiting next to their apartment door.

:::: That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.

Were Lou Costello’s last words.

:::: Beyond a certain point there is no return. That is the point that has to be reached.