We write because there is some sort of discourse that we seek to belong to. We write out of intense loneliness. This kind of loneliness would not be ameliorated by a phone call, nor would it be ameliorated by Jan's physical presence, but only by the force of an imaginative act. I do not want to say that we become like "God": who's very speech is an act of creation ("fiat lux."), even though this is the promise of our technological age: the union of human desire with the representations we create. We write because something in ourselves seeks to be transformed into a future event. We write because the images are intense, the saturation is content. This is the best way that I yet know of responding to Oppermann's cards: not to write him another post-card, though he might enjoy that, but to take these words and these images and to examine them (to "examine" his words should mean more that I throw the searing, blinding, caustic lights of the "examination" more on myself than on his words, which should remain protected by the shadows of so many other things they may become), but to contest them with my soul, and to expose my soul to some degree, while I still have this power of "examination" and seek to render it as art or music, and not just (as Foucault might whisper) "incarceration," "surveillance," here in this "web-log" predicament.
It is the scorching light of the examination that Bob Dylan faces when he comments in his character in "Masked and Anonymous:" "In my dreams I am walking through fires and intense heat."
Oppermann writes:
12/3/07 8:25 p. I'm hardly in the mood for watery & wet today after
hard rain and extensive flooding (I had to drive my car through a virtual lake in the parking lot to park it safely on "higher ground" - i.e. the super market lot) ultimately a "state of emergency" for the state of Washington... - I've kind of had it with things, son. Reading your nostalgic blog entry last night
not only made me long for that A-R-C-A-D-I-A-N time, it also made me profoundly dissatisfied with what is. It occurs to me that its all over now, baby
blue... (the other night I had a dream that I called "Flood in Blue(s)" and that must have been an eerie premonition of today.)
The post-card is characteristically not signed by Oppermann. I am perforce forced to guess that this is a card from Oppermann because it is in Oppermann's hand, and his hand itself: all of his post-cards are a signature of himself, by now, to me, to the one to whom he has devoted the larger part of his meaning, as I have to him. There is no signature on the post card because the post-card has become a signature of itself. This is Oppermann's hand I transcribe into the sensible letters provided to me by the electronic powers that be: I translate sense, and a sort of scream into these uniform characters: it is Oppermann's scream and it is my scream.
Sometimes these screams are combined, sometimes these screams stand separate.
Oppermann writes about a "state of emergency" but everybody knows that the real emergency is not some God damn flood, but that there are a thousand people talking, and a thousand people who are really screaming- and there is nobody listening... so of course its a hard rain that's going to fall! And of course when the hard rains are falling and its going to go down in the flood... this is what is happening when we all are screaming and nobody's listening: a hard rain's gonna fall!
I might stop screaming, I might start listening. That is what I am trying to do when I write these web-logs on Oppermann: as if I could pin-point and figure-print one man, one "criminal," who's crime has only been in being my best friend! Why does that make you a criminal? Why does that make you at all for any reason condemned? After all isn't it the philosophers and the philosophers' love of a philosophical friendship that ends the indictments of the universe upon the moment in which we stand? It is a writing of a listening. If it is possible we will write further of being impressed of just one piece of this chao-verse, our closest friend.
I hope that these web-logs will make Oppermann restless, that they will start some inner engine, some inner dynamo of transformation for Oppermann, and that that transformation will not lead to the gallows (the place of the criminal, but translated, sublated into the soul who is presented and accused) but of yet another place and yet another book.
The purpose of a post-card of the wetlands is not to simply show the wetness of the flood, but to show the rich and ribald growth that stems out of the flood. The flood washes down, the final Judgment of an ancient "father god of the Old-Testament."
Sugar for sugar
Salt for salt
You going down in the flood
It's gonna be your fault!
But Oh, mama, ain't you gonna miss your best friend now!
You're gonna have to find yourself another best friend some how-w-w-w-w!
But it is the eyes of the sad eye'd lady of the lowlands that we are seeking, the florid colors of the swamp flowers, yes, that is the transformation I am seeking in writing these letters in blogs to Jan P. Oppermann, not merely the civilization that rests beneath these waters, laid low by the grief we are now committed to pay, all those tears... yes, the flood will lay you low. But it is not just the flood, but the burgeoning ever presence of life we seek.
Another image of the lowlands, the dangerous still waters of a swamp at dawn or dusk, when the portal of the sky is opened under a dim and brooding star, still aware of something of a profound newness of the earth in the foreground. In this picture the earth is very new, or else very old or ancient, like some foreign land, some East Indian land with the minarets of its mosques shooting directly skyward like some perfect young woman's nipples. The card reads:
12/1/07 8:30 p. The snow is already in the process of melting, a kind of watering down (like one must do with cask strength laphroaig) - hence you're getting a Canadian water-card, even though this marsh is more like an enlarged version of my mother's pond. I remember sitting by the pond in the summer of 1988, reading your letters & thinking of what a
thinker you are. Enough flattery. You are a conceited bastard and an idiot. - I've actually retired to bed to read an entertaining Dutch novel because I felt tired & cranky earlier. (Now I'm merely sitting here at the dining table waiting for some peppermint tea to steep). There are two rather humorous middle-aged friends in it, both intellectuals... I may have to get you a copy. - Enough steeping, enough.
Yes, indeed enough of the steeping, my friend Oppermann, enough of this going down into the flood, even if two days later you would find yourself still saturated, falling through some impunity of the universe that sought to cast down more hard rain on the city of Seattle. There ain't no finish to the steeping till the steeping is through. Whether I am a thinker or not remains to be seen in the piety of thought.
What is this piety if not as some knowledge of the self that one has been steeping and steeping in, like a hot bath where your fingers emerge all shriveled like a prune: know this is your existence and mine, this mortal pickling of experience in the distilled jars of intellect we leave behind: that's it! That's all we get! -Write well then! - For God's sake, if not for our own predicament, write well. That's all we get.
And that is all anyone will get at any time, no matter how great or vast or permanent a civilization, we can defer the ending but we can still see through to the end of its time: youth, middle age, old age, death. These inevitables of the calendar affect us, human or no, worry not: write then, well, write.
Your mother's pond would be enough if in it you still can see the eyes of the "Sad Eye'd Lady of the Lowlands," if there still is a sparkle in the not too distant lake, a stirring in the flood, of everything laid low. You praise me, even if in the next moment you need to seal and condemn with your judgment: "You are a conceited bastard and an idiot." But that was out of a pact we made with each other a long time ago to address each other with names that might be humbling: names that might promise a form of oblivion. After all, it is all the conceited bastards of the world who wind up screaming ("and nobody listening") and they are the cause of the hard rain that's going to fall. And the idiots, half dumb, idiots, infants, barely capable of speaking, of stammering: "Bah-Bah-Bah!" That's what the idiots do, really. They wind up stammering, or setting off into some region of a park, or getting themselves killed and their lovers killed and eaten by bears.
You have a moment of thought, and you think of a thinker, and then you obliterate this in a single gesture of your present hand: conceited bastard, illegitimate stepchild of existence, doesn't even have the right to scream what it says:
"You're an idiot, babe,
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."
And the words of Lou Reed come by and haunt me every time, every time we speak of idiots and conceited bastards, words about breath, and solving some mystery of life with some shibboleth of our own despair:
I know I like to dream a lot
And think of other worlds that are not
I hate that I need air to breathe
I'd like to leave this body - and be free
You'd like to float like a mystic child
You'd like to kiss an angel on the brow
You'd love to solve the mistery of live
By cutting someone's throat or removing their heart
You'd like to see it beat
You'd like to hold your eyes
And though you know I'm dead
You'd like to hold my thighs
If it's wrong to think on this
To hold the dead past - to hold the dead past in your fist
Why were we - why were we given memories?
Let's lose our minds
Be set free!
You can set me free when I am dead and easy. Until that time I am not up to that. I am up to the bloody mess we have always spoken of. I don't want to be no idiot, set free like Tim Treadwell and his girlfriend by some grizzly bear. Now that was a bloody mess, I'm sure you will agree, but we have to get something somewhat less bloody, say somewhere some time you sat beside a lily pond and sat and contemplated letters, and the letters were always just letters that entered into your hand, because I wanted nothing else to enter into your hand but my thoughts, the thought of my own existence. I wanted this spiritual substance, this holy wafer to enter into your hand, to pass by and to be your consecration, "here is a man of thought!" This light and airey meal that has no bloody sustenance, I am sorry I could not give you that. I am Ayres.
The sustenance we sought, the women who entered our grasp, this temporal and earthly domain that is not that of the "mystic child" of which Lou Reed speaks, is woven of the flesh of women's bodies, whether it is of your own body that you must hold at appropriate distance, or that of a young woman's body, which too you must hold at an appropriate distance, or Erica's body, which you tried to hold so close, that nothing except time and "elective affinities" could ever take away from you: threshold to Goethe: to really know what grief is: read "elective affinities," about how the body of the woman becomes un-solid and in-substantial.
Meanwhile we are outside here, writing and writing these very thin works, post-cards really, and nothing more, only post cards and electronic media: how we make a feast of our flat-thin-ness, like some hunger artist, feasting on his own curiosity at how close he can remain in his flat-thin-ness, as he dwindles deeper into the furthest reaches of memory, carried out of his cage with a heap of offal, a lap of monkey dung, forgotten to be eaten even by the savage beast that enters his cage and is held in his place when human memory fails him, and his feat turns into an infinite grueling persistence: Ted Hughes words: "Trembling in his ceaseless trial of strength."
The final image of this evening is not of a flood at all, but rather it is a privileged image for us of Russian Cyrillic writing, and the chance to view some Soviet cars. It is "privileged" because somehow Oppermann and I decided that behind every Soviet era post-card there is a patina of past-ness, an aura of impossibility that loomed as a great dream behind the totalitarian police state. This past impossibility lends the dream even more emphasis, thus "everything is possible" in the dream, but only in the nightmare of the Soviet state. Here is the equation of Marxism, the equation that needs to be entirely undone:
Reason given whole-ly to production, plus profound human indifference, leads to a nightmare.
There is an opportunity here, speaks Oppermann, do not miss it! Here we are, looking into the midst of a Russian post-card! The writing says:
12/1/07 4:30 p. This post card goes into the category of "post cards showing, or alluding to, Soviet cars." - It stopped snowing & the contours of the whitened branches of the black trees outside are somehow both softened and sharpened. -By contrast, the green spaces of the "center of the city" in Soviet Bukhara seem forlorn and detailed, without either softness or sharpness. On the other hand, in the snowy landscape out my window just now everything seems determined, while in the Bukhara downtown everything seems possible - reminiscent of the Paris suburbs of some of Eric Rohmer's films.
Again, the card is not signed, it is the characteristic hand-writing that must itself be the signature: the post card is the signature of itself. Perhaps this is Jan's bow to medievalism: like Chartres cathedral, not a single signature, yet an overwhelming sense of greatness. I do not think that either this space, or the space Jan describes may be capable of being on the level of Chartres cathedral. The Soviet space serves to isolate and alienate itself from the signature of the personal, but it unfortunately simply ends up producing impersonal complexes of the post-industrial age. The medieval space managed to produce something singular, and in that personal, but it did not bare the signature of a single European intellectual sitting out and looking at the snow on trees like some Japanese Haiku.
And that is really the unbearable beauty of this final image of this evening: the sight of snow on branches of trees: snow enough to soften and to determine this one moment in the indeterminable space of one's life. The branches of the trees contain no trace of any signature, their darkness stands out in the midst of the cold and the ice, black and white, vein of pulsing black sap-filled life confronted by some sap in the window... it could be him or it could be me. But why this angry epithet: bastards, idiots, orphans, brawlers, bawlers, and now... saps. To this we hang one more heavy indictment: indictment in a Zen haiku. This may be something that anyone who appeals to Eastern mysticism in an urge or an appeal to some aesthetic transcendence of the cultural plight of the West: the indictment lays low.
Two saps used to write
About black trees under snow
Weight of foolishness.
The image is beautiful, and thus it deserves a counter image that honors it, the subtle patina that is on a card with the possibility of seeing through to soviet cars: the poor soviet cars, with their headlights in more snow and mud and slush (not pictured here in Bokhara summer, in the dead "center of the city:" Where communism itself becomes as a matter of dialectic "indeterminate," its ruthless wresting of the particular into the hands of the working class, leaves us without a doubt very dubious of any two idiot intellectuals in a Dutch novel. By contrast you have images of late Autumn, 2007, of an European intellectual dealing with his depression that he received less than a hero's welcome in some foreign land, writing to his friend who received less than a hero's welcome in a land that was never his but which his parents claimed may have been their land. (Actually my parents never quite claimed this land: my mother has always been from England, Briton, if you will. My father was nothing but his work and his study of philosophy and religion, and a dim warning that will linger in the back of my mind until the day we die: "Some day we all are going to have to pay.") The great depression of any intellectual, who sought with his intellectual's soul to be part of the foment of some movement toward or away from technology and capitalism: is that in this land of so much "promise and potential" (in fact I utter this cliche about the hellish optimism of "American Promise" precisely in contrast to Oppermann's promise and potential in downtown Bokhara, sort of a joke while profoundly poeticising some strange mechanism of irony about the "possibility" Stalin-age buildings: "Downtown, next stop, the Gulag Archepelago!") In our American "promise" we idiots find out that it is not really our land at all, I know it is phony, but who we are is somehow tied into this, the whole American dream is tied into this one statement: "it's not really our land."
By contrast the Bokharean dream may have been of stable, civil law and order, an impersonal complex that now lags behind the flagships of capitalism: the latest Beemers (make no mistake: Bauerische Motor Werk, the Germans have not demonstrated any "transcendence" on that one) now driven by Russian mafioso ride down the boulevard in this one: "... and so you think
YOU have depression! Take a look at any town in the old Soviet!" Yes, "Back in the USSR, You don't know how lucky you are, boy!"
