PATAPHYSICS (design/edited Leo Edelstein and Yanni Florence) Pataphysics Questionnaire 1990 from the Blue issue Question: There has been evidence to suggest that objects can lose control when freed from the hold of their owners. What has been your experience of death? BRIAN ALDISS LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI DR EVELYN S. FIRCHOW PETER SCHJELDAHL ROGER ZELAZNY HARRY ZOHN RICHARD KOSTELANETZ ALEX KATZ DANIEL SHAPIRO WITH DAVID SHAPIRO DANIEL LIBESKIND ANGE LECCIA BRIAN ALDISS: Dirge of Objects: A Sonnet (After the manner of William Shakespeare) Objects can lose control when they are freed As tunes can lose their tongue when never played An it was otherwise, no heart would bleed So copiously when love makes it afraid Its owner is astray. Yet who has hold Of permanence? - And what's an object worth Beside an immaterial joy? Be bold, My love, my birth of life lies in your berth… Yet Death! - Each night He sends his sister, Sleep, To warn of what's to come, and cozen us Of all subjective things. Here's cause to weep: We're objects in the universe's truss. Objectively, our lives are never free: To this I do object till Death finds me. back to top of page LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Airplanes, cars, computers, 'artificial intelligence,' people as objects, are all beyond our control in the end… Run for your life! La vida es sueno real. back to top of page DR EVELYN S. FIRCHOW: During the past 2 years I have lost 3 persons close to me: my father, my daughter, my best friend. I have not had ANY experience of objects being freed after the death of their owners - I fear that death is only a horrid experience for the survivors and there is absolutely nothing left of us after we die, except the corpse and memories. back to top of page PETER SCHJELDAHL: My experience of death - of others, obviously - is of falling out of my head into the pit of my stomach, dully sensing the beat of my blood (not-dead, not-dead) as misery scorches through. I experience the stupidity of being alive. back to top of page ROGER ZELAZNY: I have known many people who have died. I sat with my father for a long while after he'd stopped breathing and his heart had stopped beating, holding his right hand. I felt it grow cooler and its muscle tone changed. I do not know exactly what you are asking for. My own reactions to his and to other deaths would require a lengthy document. Some come as a relief, others as a crime against consciousness. back to top of page HARRY ZOHN: Until PATAPHYSICS asked its question, I did not fully realize how much and how long I had been haunted by the title of a Max Brod story, 'Der Tod ist ein vorübergehender Schwächezustand' (Death is a temporary state of weakness), which indicates that the loss of control implied by death is not necessarily permanent and that such control may conceivably be regained at some such future time and in some place. I must admit that my own experience of death is entirely second-hand and eminently literary. If I now yield to the temptation to quote a few highly suggestive statements by some of my literary dii minores, this itself may serve as an indication of my empathic association with these insights, contradictory though some of them may be perceived to be. In his essay 'The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nickolai Lescov,' Walter Benjamin writes that 'dying was once a public process in the life of the individual, and a most exemplary one… In the course of modern times, dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity... It is, however, characteristic that not only a man's knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life…first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death.' While Benjamin bemoans the lack of naturalness and earthiness, the decline of story-telling, and the fact that death no longer seems to be part of life, Elias Canetti avers that nothing has so deeply moved him as the thought of death. He attempts to 'depict death as though it did not exist' and describes it as the goal of his life to achieve immortality for mankind. During World War II he wrote 'the boldest thing about life is that it hates death.' Such an insight is not necessarily inconsistent with what he wrote in 1943, words of breath-taking timeliness today: 'The curse of having to die should be changed into a boon: to be able to die when living is unendurable.' One of the most powerful statements about death may be found in the 'Snow' chapter of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain. It expresses an insight of Hans Castorp, who has for a while escaped the decadent, dissolute, morbid, death-obsessed atmosphere of the tuberculosis sanitarium: 'For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.' I am tempted to keep on quoting, but an aphorism by Karl Kraus that contains a fortuitous term may enable me to make the next edition, as the saying goes: 'A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time.' back to top of page RICHARD KOSTELANETZ: My colleague Bob Black passed the enclosed sheet onto me, I guess including me in your compilation (along with friends, thankfully). One hears lots of things about death, as well as old age, but in my experience, now at a half-century, rumors remain rumors. back to top of page ALEX KATZ: A part of me goes each time someone close dies. Soon I'll be more dead than alive. back to top of page DANIEL SHAPIRO WITH DAVID SHAPIRO: GOD MEETS THE ANGEL Flying with my flying wings Flying in my flying wings I'm flying and I'm going to see God I'm going to see God now I say God is everywhere Angels sleep I know what angels start with A They sleep in a flower Angels are so little God is little like milkweed like little seeds God is like little seeds They're growing God The wings are purple and silver They feel heavy as milkweed heavy with stones back to top of page DANIEL LIBESKIND: The Forty Illusions often receive a number: something perceivable at the bottom is like beautiful water undergoing infestation. Without pain things would be awfully ordered - bread leaves for neurons as a hindsight. Preview the recipients of absence - revered, utterly altered, dreadfully mad. 340 bones, 86,000 pores, 4 utopias for each of the 6 stages of existence: mathematics of Zen brotherhood. On their mantelpiece one can find - without exception - thousands of legends, all ill, a ludicrous buskin, interconnected series of latchhooks, a traitor's tiny dagger disguised as a raffia basket and a tiny yes/no. 1. A coup d'etat tends toward letter writing for those who are discharged early. Some begin life by longing for light, end up napping with Aaron at the performance of Moses. 2. 'This passage is big enough for toys,' i.e. only for the New Man - the one who just learned to march and march in the elevator. 3. Detecting is to new weapons what resounding is to prerecorded tat-tat-tat. Turn Lenin's mausoleum right side up to show that every exhortation to change an economic system has an incredible flaw when it becomes a commentary on parapsychology. (When disenchanted infantrymen are lauded for singing, they pick any adverb which comes to mind, erase the incipient comment, salute the limb in the center as if it were an ordinary stalemate.) Candies are not recommended by dentists because salivation is unimportant when substance such as the nose remains temporarily without volume. Arriving late with a little kitten irritates everyone who attends the funeral. I think again of eating America using earnings as spices, often reminiscing of Tiresia's prophesy in which six stamens rise up from a defect in the ligature. 'Tis possible forever to understand the Mayas' hanging the tall on a double cone, the army of money in the hole. - It can't be seen! Good bye to those who hobnob with beasts only to come into a bardo whose dark illuminates the rays. Rat or hen orders, infraction perceiver? back to top of page ANGE LECCIA: I AM SUPERSTITIOUS I'VE NEVER HAD ANY EXPERIENCE OF DEATH. I'M USING BRAND NEW OBJECTS THAT HAVE NO HISTORY, NO MEMORY, THEREFORE THEY ARE OUTSIDE OF TIME, ETERNAL. back to top of page