In April 2008, while the persona writing here strawls the poster aisles of a monsterous cognitive neuroscience conference in California, the ghosts in the machine bring you a short update on the miracle of shared lifetime:
I had been under the impression for a long time now that former Californian by choice and WALL OF TIME’s beloved artist, Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared while performing the second part of his trilogy In search of the miraculous, had embarked onto his eternal sailing trip in March 33 years ago, but it was not before July 9th 1975, apparently.
This makes for definite three months of shared Earthly life time between Ader and a neonate in Southern Germany; maybe more, as we will never learn when or if he died. Also, his boat was found on what happened to be my first birthday:
“Ader took off on July 9, 1975; three weeks into the voyage, radio contact failed. His brother, Erik, reported the following: ‘On about April 10 [1976] a Spanish fishing trawler found his boat about 150 nautical miles west-south-west of Ireland. It was two-thirds capsized, with the bows [sic] pointing down. Judging by the degree of fouling, it looked as though the boat had been drifting around in this position for about six months.’”
Ader was born in the Netherlands on April 19, 1942. As quisquilia on the side, Ronald Reagan apparently reported for active duty also on April 19, 1942, to the west of Ader’s birthplace, while to the east, 5,000 Jews were moved to the Majdan-Tatarski ghetto situated between the Lublin ghetto and a Majdanek subcamp, which was established that very day.
Shared lifetime makes me fluster.
Ader would have turned 66 on April 19 this year. As we speak, Bas Jan Ader has now been a ghost of the oceans quite exactly as long as he had inhabited the land before: 33 years on either side of this decisive sailing trip, which he embarked on in 1975.
