“The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy. Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman that causes doubt in us… Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and ‘know’ everything.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Muli, I like this time capsule idea. I think of it, not only as an actual time capsule one buries in the ground for excavation by future generations a la Foucault, but also as a drug capsule, a capsule to swallow, that intoxicates.

I remember Burroughs saying he could stare at the end of his shoe for hours on end when he was high on junk. Time was never a problem – it was kind of buried. This was a fundamental tenet of his “theory” of control and what the metaphor of junk serves for in the life the ugly american leads, the lives we all lead. (I put “theory” in inverted commas because I’m uncertain whether or not I could call his thought put into words anything as “rational” as a theory “to understand and ‘know’ everything – as you say, interpretation is dangerous)

There is no death for the life of the junky – at least as I understand death as opposed to life for I do not call heroin addiction living in the active sense of the word. Only the hourglass of junk, junk time, the “Algebra of Need”: “Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of Time.”

Issues of control, measurement and need, ends and means. “Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in.” Formula for Bergson’s “Creative Evolution. Since the ancient Greeks, authenticity and death have been closely linked – hell, even the ancient Egyptians and probably since the conceotion of the first word-gesture.

Life is an active principle. One has to take a chance, to risk death which means we have to (re-)invent ourselves, to create a memory for ourselves for that is what a culture is, to encapsulate a set of values over time, over generations, beyond any one’s given death.

(And should we make a gift of death? in writing and interpreting there is hazard, a death, the death of the author, as Barthes called it – and what will become of the Word? Will the author make it through the Land of the Dead? Will Baudrillard be remembered in a hundred years? Will Foucault? Will we?).

By the way, thanks for the Burroughs clip. Very cool.