RIP...

Martin Lukes, that is.

Parachuting accident.

Of course, given the fact that he was wearing a parachute, that shouldn't have made a difference, just as his purported upbringing gave him a cultural parachute that he also chose to ignore, preferring the head-long destructive path that was his life.

Looking back at his life, it strikes me that the thrownness to death is really what Martin exemplified. This is a primordial banality: we are thrown into the world with no preparation, with zero readiness, thrown towards our final destination, death and the unknown that comes with that. During life we are being-here, a nexus of being, localized and within a lived-world, a life-world that moves and changes according to our perceptions and our being's state in the world.

Much like Martin lived his life.

He is survived by an ex-wife, a son from his first marriage, a wife and twin children from the second marriage. Funeral ceremonies were not mentioned in the press release.

His last communication, by twitter, was "AARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH..."

Seldom was he so eloquent as in his final and departing statement.




After many years of providing head-shaking humor, the editors of the FT (one in particular), has finally, apparently, killed him off.

Of course, consider this (and I doubt the FT had thought of this): the thrownness is translated from the German "Geworfenheit", which could be construed to point to a crime involved in his death, not an accident: he was thrown from the plane, probably by all the women in his life.

He will be missed, but largely because reading his exploits almost invariably induced a visible cringe.