precisely because i am a desperate reader, i was sucked into the bolañoverse this past june and emerged from the sub-700 pages of the savage detectives with my perceptual field ruptured open and exposed to the absolute chaos of the visceral realists. they offered me literary anarchy, poets with no poetry to read, and the promise of a return to a passionate, convulsive life. leave everything, then leave it all again. what does the desperate reader like me desire in reading a Work like this? perhaps an answer that would cleanse the doors of my perception and, in the act of my lateness, reveal something approaching the infinite.

lateness is the natural circumstance of encountering a Work: we always arrive after the fact. by the time we meet it, the Work has already outlived waves of Readers and Critics. we show up late to the Work's funeral, desecrating and misreading long after. what Work can aspire to any kind of permanence? time will continue to measure itself in its passage; the word, in its motion. at the heart of that matter is entropy and the tendency of everything pulling toward it.

when a single text stages 40+ characters narrating fictionalized accounts revolving around actual people in bolaño's life, the life cycle of the Work itself becomes a question. toss aside the protagonist, i'll take the Work without concrete facts or a true narrator. if “visceral” names an immediacy of affect and sensation, and “real” denotes some kind of factual validity, then the gap between the two persists indefinitely. no degree of representation, no matter how exhaustive, secures access to an art that is absolute, untainted; the Work's transcendence, in practice, eventually slips away into nothingness.

how, then, can one represent the totality of reality (the real) within a Work that lies beyond the limits of singular, sensory perception (the visceral)? we could possibly settle for a provisional unity of opposites...

"For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey towards solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness, And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy." ~iñaki echevarne

maybe you can challenge critics of your Work to duels, ideally a sword fight on an empty beach. make sure you pick a solid second—your trusted ally—to back up your performative defiance until the hyperlucidity kicks in to remind you of your looming mortality. steal the Work from bookstores in devoted desperation. seek oneself, lose oneself. life itself is absurd and the Work is another punchline to the joke of our own existential vanity. we emerged from nothing with no discernment of our origin and will fold back in infinite oblivion under fate’s fingers, as the present devours everything surrounding it. can we drop into the abyss and remain unscathed when every choice feeds the decay?

the Work will die and we will die. when all goes black, maybe the last image the Work sees before it begins its voyage into the Great Vastness, is the countdown to the opening frame of a film about its life...

everything that begins as a Work ends as a dirge in the void, or maybe as a pithy blog post circling the same expired question.