Fun

This adorable otter seems to be more sleepy than intent
on having fun, but I added him because otters generally seem to have fun.
Source: http://www.fortrossstatepark.org/seaotter.htm

Oppermann has been bugging me to write some article on the nature of "Fun." I am very concerned that the practice of writing about fun will turn out to be not fun at all.

One of the essential tenants of fun is limitlessness: one does not have a sense of limit or frustration in the practice of whatever it is one is doing. One might be on a plane of consistency, to quote a Deleuzian phrase, but this plane expands and temporarily extends to all corners of experience: fun is all encompassing... for the time being.

Fun cannot be permanent. Nothing in it is fixed. Fun implies foolishness: the limitless and the unbounded capacity of consciousness to be in its own emptiness: it is not constricted around any tight subject: fun is not capable of laceration. Laceration constricts except in the most perverse contexts. laceration releases blood, and perhaps in one sense the blood has fun flowing out of the body and the subsequent decay and dissolution of the blood cells.

But death and decay: entropy do not seem to encompass fun. It is not fun to die because it is not fun to constrict oneself. For example, it is more fun to be a living otter than it is to be a rotting boot in a drainage ditch.

The Exhaustive and All Encompassing Categories Post-Cards and Related Experience

There are quite a number of ways of reading a post card. Vainly I will attempt to present all of them to you. Such an exercise in categorization is one of the favorite games I play with Dr. Oppermann:

1) A post card can be read hurriedly, as one has just tendered the mail.
2) A post card that is between sips of tea, seen obversely, its reverse and adress are permanently forgotten
3) Post cards of adorable Animals
4) Post cards that remind one of the Borgesian Chinese Dictionary
5) Post cards that state directly "I have nothing to say"
6) Post cards that are obliquely Chinese
7) Post cards that are insufficiently Chinese
8) Post cards that are about Seljacks, but incorporate a light-hearted impressionist theme
9) Post cards of images produced by Breugel or Durer
10) Post cards presented with other artistic images
11) Post cards of great philosophers
12) Post cards with sufficient patina
13) Post cards of concentration camps
14) Post cards of the 50 "united states" which lack patina
15) Post cards from the tavern "The Ugly Mug" featuring discourse on "decaying Brits"
16) Post cards of Bears
17) Post cards of Ravensburg
18) Post cards of Hiroshige's prints
19) ...
20) Post cards that make mention of the Bestand
21) Post cards dealing with French philosophers and ex-wives
22) Post cards alluding to a discussion of Goethe or promising a later discussion of Goethe
23) Un-marked post cards
24) Post cards that are from other people but still belong to the category of "Jan Oppermann's post cards." (i.e. Jim Gossett's heretical post cards)
25) Post cards that do not mention "I have nothing to say."
26) Post cards alluding to phrases of Bob Dylan: "the emptiness is endless/ cold as a clay/ you can always come back/ but you can't come back all the way..." for example.
27) Post cards that mention the "Arcadian"
28) Post cards that mention "nubiles" (though I am expressly forbidden to discuss nubiles)
29) Post cards that discuss Sam Beckett in some respect.
30) Post cards with otters on them.
31) "post cards showing, or alluding to, Soviet cars."

The Arcadian Days

Oppermann referred to these as the days of our Scholarly youth at the Colorado College. A place we referred to in great detail in reference to a certain Institut fur Deutsche Romantik: "the Institute for German Romanticism" in a novel, the name of which I constantly am reminded of and forget.

The Wikipedia Article contends:
Arcadia (Greek: Ἀρκαδία) is a modern Greek province dating back to antiquity. As a consequence of its sparsely inhabited mountainous topography it was occupied mainly by pastoralists. Subsequently it has become a poetic byword for an idyllic vision of unspoiled wilderness filled with the bounties of nature and inhabited by shepherds (having more or less the same connotation as Utopia), and as a concept originated in Renaissance mythology. The inhabitants were often regarded as having continued to live after the manner of the Golden Age, without the pride and avarice that corrupted other regions.^[1] It is also sometimes referred to in English poetry as Arcady. The inhabitants of this region bear an obvious connection to the figure of the Noble savage, both being regarded as living close to nature, uncorrupted by civilization, and so virtuous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29

More will need to be said about the Arcadian, including a detailed review of the experimental existentialist photographs we took during that period. In my mind's eye Oppermann has hardly changed.

The essence of the Arcadian image in Oppermann's Imagination was that it was a period of blissful belief in growth and real academic contention and education: at that time we believed that knowing was in some manner possible, that our professors were also in some manner wise, and that we sought after something akin to dwelling close to the truth.

My experience of this time was one of intense satisfaction: the college provided an intense atmosphere of knowledge and the possibility of some vague erotic experience with our then interlocutor, young women companions. Today we might call such erstwhile companions "nubiles" in an attempt to free ourselves of the erotic web of destruction that younger women hold for older men. This I might either reduce to a healthy sense of misogyny, or perhaps itself may become a dangerous calcination: a becoming too brittle. One must love without being seduced. Too bad that the Arcadian vision itself may be little more than a seductive intrigue of the anima, and that we could no more go back there than we ourselves be destroyed. I distinctly remember walking under a bridge one day in 1990, some cypher I discovered there sprayed as grafitti under the Unintah Street bridge: "Fuck you CC college children!" I think that the vandal spelled every word correctly, without idiomatic alteration of the text. And yet this moment served to punctuate the experience in an unforgettable fashion: it was Arcadian for some... and therein it broke its Arcadian innocence for me, for not everyone felt that college could be an effortless expression in the same way.

In the place of Arcady, the pastoral vision, we have "War all the time" and its attendant precept: "Some hostages are being released while still more hostages are being taken." It is unfair to state it thus, and it requires a great deal of examination, but: "So much for the Arcadian!"

Oh my God... I have forgotten all of it!

Among the very rough images that I have of Oppermann, this image of the man with his face turned down reflects the best I have of the current Oppermann. I hope that this image in some way informs the collective "intelligence" of the web. Oppermann would disapprove of this on principle.

Many important things were what I meant to say. But in reality I meant to say none of it. For speaking of Oppermann one must abandon the important things one meant to say. He himself has said it:

"I have nothing to say."

This is an homage to absurdism that extends far back before our time. Perhaps it extends to the court cases in France where the individual "defendant" simply refused to participate in the court process of honoring or acknowledging the indictments leveled against him.

It would be unfortunate to note that the destiny of the web may be the destiny of the "indictment" or the "category": all these accusations drive us up against a wall of our own bare life: "where one has nothing to say."

I could point to the turn of phrase "nothing to say," means that he intends to speak on "no-thing-ness," which indeed is rather something to say on some ontological level.

But what, good sir, is any ontological level at which one chooses to speak? Can ontology be described as a plateau of existence: a discourse with a notable history, various figures (Thales, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, etc.) All this seems to be an obscuration of the ontological level, as Heidegger points out. It is not that there is anything really better or more pleasurable to speak of than a "Thales" or an "Aristotle," but not in an academic sense. They cannot be academic or "symbolic" or "psychological," rather they are preferred in their sense of intimacy.

Oppermann In Praxis

This is an inaugural web log for my still extant friend Oppermann. Still living. Not dying! Another 20 years! And then again maybe yet another and another 20 years!

This twenty years or so gives us a special glimpse at the more than 20 years that Oppermann has been a German Immigrant, for example in this country, yet the discourse on German Immigrants, and the "wish to become a Red Indian." Oppermann rightly criticizes as a kind of American phenomenon that exists in a kind of denial of praxis... perhaps a denial of nearness.

"Near is and difficult to grasp the God" (Friedrich Holderlin)

This does not make Oppermann a god of any sort of the stretch of the imagination, aside from perhaps a "gotliche Geck!" "a godly dude." More on this later.