Oppermann sent me a post card on the 21st of November. It arrived today with an image of an eagle from the Book of Kells. On its back it bore the following inscription addressed to "Dr. Ayres":
11/21/2007 I realize (6:50 p.) that I have written you not enough post-cards lately - that's probably because I have nothing to say. Right now I am simply enthralled by a novella of Tieck's - old-fashioned self-conscious Romantic story telling but refusing to let that become a Bestand. - Note the eagle looking rather sad and forlorn here - he might need shelter from the storm. I was listening to Shostakovich - now I'm listening to Bach (Musikalisches Opfer) which is a calmative. Did I tell you about the dream in which i was overcome by a black dog (depression)?
It is sent from Seattle and it is in Jan's (Oppermann's) particular hand-writing although he did not sign it. I remember Derrida (the reading of whom Oppermann regards as a kind of "chewing gum" ... more on this later) commented on the date of a post card as being another sort of signature or counter-signature. I suppose that any given date written in English could only belong to the hand of a given English speaking person who could send a post-card from Seattle on the 21st of November. So this eliminates a number of individuals from the list. There could be a whole host of improbable scenarios: possible arrangements of atomic structures by apparent happenstance that appear in the semblance of one of Oppermann's hundreds or thousands of post-cards that have descended upon me in recent days and years.
I have been recently in the mood to write Oppermann less post cards-- or not to write him any post cards at all... not in the last couple of months. In a sense this leaves me horribly remiss in terms of writing post cards. I am hoping that this web-log is some small restitution for the dearth of my having anything to say in post-cards... which seemed to delight and enchant Oppermann so much. The problem has become that of simply writing more and more post-cards, such that the value of words becomes exhausted in a given form.
I can hope that by transcribing the words of Oppermann from the Bestandsaufnahme of a post-card to the Bestandsumweg of a web log that there will be some possible chance of a deeper reading. It was just a given post card-- an arbitrary post-card if one can count on anything as arbitrary and not subject to the greater whims and hades-driven laws of chance and fate.
In this fated post-card I read about Oppermann and the black dog. I think that Oppermann would benefit from re-visiting Led Zeppelin, but this, of course, he speaks of as too adolescent and utterly futile, and this leaves me in a sense sad as well. Oppermann has not evented the possibility of speaking to a mother thus: "Hey-hey Mama like the way you move!" Perhaps it is unbecoming ...but that is the point. There is a place where we all go down and visit our own unbecoming "nature" at one point or another, and without this unbecoming nature we become insufferable and intolerant, brittle in our own right. I still love my friend Jan both despite and because of his brittleness, which is his depression: his resistance to his own "un-becoming."
What is un-becoming? Is it merely the obscene? Is it the opposition somehow discovered, a distortion of a turning (Die Kehre) within the Heraclitean (as Oppermann likes to pun in a most adolescent and almost Zeppelin driven manner, "Heraclitean") flux? "A simple twist of the fate..." for the flux?
In terms of our illusions, our wan and wanton adolescence I spent some time negotiating one of my favorite Heraclitean phrases, shared often with Oppermann:
Physis Kryptesthai Philei
This must be lined up in comparison with the shibboleth of a struggling stage magician:
"Illusion reveals what reality conceals."
We will call this "Notes on the bitterness of the ongoing concealment," at least insofar as Oppermann goes. What I can say is that while Oppermann seems to refuse any consolation from the unbecoming embrace of any slimy and slick black dog, and there is plenty of need for the scoundrel dogs in this universe to somehow keep the engine from becoming too perfect and too smoothe, while he may not be able to wrestle with this black dog, like a dog himself he still seeks "shelter from the storm," (an easy allusion to Bob Dylan in faded black) and like a black dog with an ungainly erection and the smell of bad canine flatulence he seeks this concealment of the importunate aspects of his existence lest they overwhelm his soul.
Lust then, for the eagle, the soaring predatory spirit, "bird of prey" or was that "bird of pray?"(in Jim Morrison's words), or perhaps, like Zarathustra, Oppermann with forsake his eagle and snake, and go down once again, into the unbecoming nature of his own human mortality: perhaps insofar as he like Zarathustra is a lover of all things that seek in themselves, and in him, their own "un-becoming."
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