Here and Now and Time and Space

I'm reading a book of essays by Susan Sontag, called Against Interpretation and Other Essays, and I'm watching Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch. Dead Man is a movie about the Old West, created in the mid-90s; Against Interpretation and c. is a book of essays about other books, movies, plays, from the Sixties or the time immediately pre-Sixties, and presumably meant to be read in the Sixties or the time immediately post-Sixties. I'm agnostic I guess as to whether or not Dead Man was meant to be watched specifically in the mid-nineties (as a person who was alive and reading and caring in parts of the nineties, I have trouble thinking of it just yet as a Capitalized Decade; so much so, and is this strange?, that when I think of the capital-N Nineties I imagine the Gay Eighteen Nineties. That probably is strange). Whatever Jarmusch wanted, I am watching his movie and reading Sontag's essays in the very early twenty-tens or the very late twenty-oughts, depending on your numerology. And like you couldn't but do, doing these particular things, I am thinking about time and place.

When I was young and went to school in the mountains, I wrote a sixty-five page English paper about people trying to extend past their own particular time and place. Specifically, it was about the efforts of certain writers to shove the time and place to which they were relevant further into the future. Pale Fire, I wanted to say, did this in a way in which David Copperfield was not, and especially in a way that an essay by Susan Sontag about the lamentable lack of Georg Lukacs's work in English is not. That paper was about success: who had shoved their lives, or their relevances, or whatever, further than anyone else (Nabokov won on a judges' decision). Today I am wondering less about success (who got the most points in forty-eight minutes) and more about reasons (why bother getting nine other guys together and throwing that ball at a net?). Are people really trying to shove outward their time and place, and why do something like that?

Last night I drank a bunch of beer with my brother, and on the subway ride home I did a piece of furious underlining on the Q train: I underlined a sentence from one of those Susan Sontag essays about the then-current state of literature, because it was a claim about the then-current state of literature that I quite liked. And today I got full of nostalgia and compared one of my college friends to the Dude from the Big Lebowski -- he was just the man for his time and place. One of the facile pleasures of reading -- one of the ones easy to observe, I mean -- is that you can check in other times/places, like Sontag as the pulse of the Sixties.

I guess the thing that I'm thinking or worrying about now is: what is so great about now and here, among all the other times and places? In its way, it seems like those are the worst two coordinates to have: it's not as if one could be coherent and claim that someone was the man for his time and place RIGHT NOW. On the other hand, what the fuck other time are people angling toward? When Sontag expresses reservations that her book is a signpost of some mythic thing called the Sixties, surely she what concerns her is that consignment to the Sixties is consignment to irrelevance Right Now. This is probably something like a concern that the only way to make sense out of anything is to do it retrospectively (remember Hegel's Minerva's owl's flying only at dusk), which is I guess an old concern. But why do people push ahead to other right heres and nows?

And more importantly, if that goddamn owl is only flying when it's dark, what are we supposed to do in the daytime?