Saturday, December 1, 2007

First Image/Indictment of the Arcadian: The Einstein Coat

Arbitrarily the first of the "existential pictures"

...It was at that time that we were fond of saying to each other and to others (Lisa Lane and Paul Raphelson) the words that reportedly from Jean-Paul Sartre: In order for any event to become an adventure, one has only to tell a story about it.

In this first image/indictment of the Arcadian we see the full portrait of a young man almost in silhouette across a dark room. We are, with the photographer, looking for some object of our senses, which is a man in another room. That silhouette of a man was me. I was indeed younger then, and more naive... but the Lord of Music moans:

"Oh but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now!"

The portrait is taken by Oppermann of me standing in a hallway across the way, probably in Armstrong Hall in the Autumn of 1987. That's when I met Oppermann, for the first time at night, strolling across the Armstrong cold quadrangle. Oppermann lived in Slocum hall at that time, or was just moving into "The German House." It was the last semester that I had to live in Loomis Hall: these student dormitories were as impersonal as building complexes could be. They were in fact as impersonal as psychological complexes could be. Moreover this picture is taken in Armstrong Hall, which was as impersonal as any educational complex could be... save for the stories we could put in that place.

It was night and it was cold, and he had his black coat and some sports shirt on. Or maybe he did not; maybe he had on a white button down European intellectual's shirt, with pointed collar and room for a thin black tie. (it was the late 80's after all and we were all suffering from the anemic thin of a culture hooked on cocaine... not that Oppermann or I ever did such things... we couldn't be bothered with the high profile drug initiated life. We preferred sitting round drinking wine and singing its praises, we had no use for a crystallized plant shoved up one's nose! Actually Oppermann's tie would be more akin to a tie one would imagine Martin Heidegger would wear in the 1960's-- you could say by this that he was in touch with the vogue of the European intellectual style.) We sat round smoking cigarettes (Oppermann preferred Benson and Hedges, and even bought some of these on a trip I will speak of later to Pueblo Colorado; on his better days Oppermann preferred to smoke Benson & Hedges) and talking about Borges and Marxian philosophy. It was the first time we had encountered these things with such an intelligent interlocutor. It was a pleasure and a joy; it was a relief for these young men to sit brooding, as they yet do: brooding into one's coffee, brooding into one's breath as one breathes out in a fierce walking on a chilly Saturday night.... I mean, who has use for parties!

By contrast our women were intelligent and contrary. But it was no easier to get such a type of woman to be interested in philosophy than it would to get her interested in sitting round playing video games. These women were "sensualists" (in the manner of Dimitri, who lives as a "sensualist" in the Brothers Karamazov). Their contrary nature served to ground us in our filthy and obstinate pursuits of philosophy and a life of sheer reflection. I feel concern to mention any names, but suffice it to say, Jan loved a woman who had dark reflections in her eyes and who hid behind her curls. I always thought her kinder and less brutal, and less brittle than my partner of that time: Theresa, who wanted to dunk all of philosophy into a vat of naphtha paint thinner. Theresa was more obstinate and stood as a thorn in the side of Jan's and my philosophical pursuits. It took Theresa and I well over three years for us to be over, and by the time we were I was certain that I was through with being nice to women for a while (so much the worse for me, but what a lesson I had to learn!). Jan, on the contrary had moved on to Boston and was preparing to engage with his then-to-be wife Erika. That was a union that was to last over ten years, and would span the length of my marriage and several relationships beside it.

Jan has left that marriage and he has bummed around a while. Yes, it's true that he had had his flirtations, but he doesn't burn with a desire to be a father, and most women are off reproducing at his age, maybe he will be off till later. Maybe he is pissed with women: or maybe he is not, and so he sits out there, floating in the vacuum of no relationship... no pain of the bloody mess... no constriction of knowing that one has to come home to compromising over something.

This is a photo: it is a portrait of a man who is in silhouette in a doorway, only the vague outline of his father's gray 1920's coat... the coat would also appear in a portrait of his father, Lew Ayres, standing with Albert Einstein.

Say what you would like but this coat has been next to a man who changed nuclear physics: through whose mind was born the atomic bomb: the ultimate unleashing of energy into the modern world: you can get energy from atoms, you do not have to burn wood. The coat that stood next to Einstein, draped over my father's dapper body, his slicked back hair. And Albert Einstein wrote in white ink on the blackboard right behind them, a longish note of salutation. Lew Ayres, the Hollywood good looker, got to meet Albert Einstein in that coat.

And I met Oppermann in that coat.

Oppermann may not have opened up the world of nuclear physics on the plane of this world. I should say he is dreadfully frightened of any nuclear bombs. But Oppermann, like so many current intellectuals sees that the point of knowledge is to open up the mystery of our existence only to the degree that we cultivate care in who we are.

Therefore there is the cold and dark distance of a classroom between us. There is so much distance and so much emptiness in that blackness that it threatens to overwhelm the image entirely: shut the sooden door in the foreground and you will only get the glare of the flash. There are doors and there are door keepers: we are walking along, Oppermann and I, and we are looking at each others through doorways of classrooms wherein in the darkness flows only the abyss. There is no teaching in such a classroom, all the classes are over, the professors are retired, there is just a man looking in in a large, amorphous dark coat (not as dark as Oppermann's).

1) In this room I watched Harvey Rabbin give a lecture on post-modernity. Rabbin said that Seneca and Lucretius were post-modern thinkers... bending time itself before our eyes to fit a specific genera: to say that the outcry of certain philosophers' hearts was more important than any time, any cultural or historical epoch. This much could be said of Harvey Rabbin's philosophy: it was an outcry of the heart.

2) In this room I watched the film presentation given by Marcia Dobbson and her husband ... Dr. Riker. I watched them present the documentary on Carl Jung: A Matter of Heart. The most interesting thing of that time was that the may or may not have held hands... that they may or may not have crossed their legs toward one another: that's what I watched for... after all I had already been shown the movie by my father, and he had met Einstein wearing that long gray coat.

3) In that darkened room I was to audition for the part of a waiter in a one-act play directed by Celia Brooks (Celia being one of the singularly most beautiful women I have ever met)(I was lampooned by my stiff acting techniques that utterly lacked spontaneity while being kissed, to my complete embarrassment), I was to decline a part in a play of Samuel Beckett (that would have been directed by the genius, notorious homosexual professor Herving Madruga, professor of romance languages) where I would have perforce had to cut my hair and trimmed my beard. I would do that eventually, but all that was till later: perhaps only in the last 4 months since I cut my hair am I now capable of playing in an Herving Madruga/ Samuel Beckett play!

4) Finally in this said room, this darkened abyss with chairs both Jan and I were to act in the German plays one autumn. Of these plays I remember Jan reciting a poem concerning the Berlin Wall called "Der Mauer:" I believe it held in it the line: "Der Mauer/ Der Mauer. Der Mauer/ ...der hat mich eingekotzt!"

I had two lines that I remember in a play directed by Horst Richardson, who was an angry fellow and yet who seemed to enjoy being an educator: I felt sorry and scared around Horst Richardson, much as I laugh at his jokes. I still do: "Der Vater ist Meister von eine chemischen Betrieb.... ein komplaetzierter Fall!"

The fabric of the coat was an exceptionally light wool, a fine criss-cross hound's tooth weave. It served as a windbrake and a layer of protection only. In all likelihood I had on a sweater underneath. The great coat that my father met Einstein in was to disintegrate within less than ten years; it was to be thrown away and its story forgotten, the life of this thing is to have ended in the state it was in, given way to the moths' feeding and a subtle corruption: and then the coat of the meeting of Einstein was to be no more. And so was the Oppermann coat.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Professor:

I am unconvinced by your central argument. You met Oppermann in that coat. You cannot see the coat. You imagine Opperman in that coat. Therefore you imagine Oppermann, and by extension you imagine Armstrong Hall. You presume that therefore Opermann imagines you, but in what coat?

Proposition: as you read this now, you are not wearing a coat. So either Oppermann doesn't imagine you at all, or he imagines you in a coat, incorrectly.

How does the weight of this portending fallacy sway the balance of your existence?

Proposition 2: There are two Armstrong Halls, but one coat.

Proposition 3: "Hegelling is a disease ..."

Proposition 4: Ease implies stagnation; an unwillingness to meet, with metemzeitsprachlieben, the Grand Questions. Therefore, dis-ease is the only true state of health.

Proposition 5: Propositions 2 and 4 are specious.

Proposition 6: Proposition 5 is specious.

Discuss.

Ayres said...

I am deeply indebted to Paul Raphelson for having brought to our attention the famous "Liebenstrauss Incident" that happened at Colorado College in the late 1980's. Though I am not at liberty to discuss the exact nature of the aforementioned Liebenstrauss Incident, certain references to this obscure German Philospher may be discovered in Oppermann's dissertation on Heidegger's de-construction of the Political world. It is almost certain that anything he says on this matter is correct

Ayres said...

There is also the question of the species of speciousness.

I cannot fully go down all the lines of falsity, or as beloved Wallace Stevens said, rightly, "I cannot bring the world quite round."

Was falsity ever a matter of importance? Speciousness in some senses is more lovely "fair of appearance" than the "awful truth" and I am all for a few delusions... I seem to recall a woman who was a Vicodin addict for years saying: "Do you know how hard it is to live without a crutch." I looked at her appalled but agreed.

And now there is another crutch, this specious web-log... and yet like all the muses: "we are the muses, we can tell lies that sound like the truth!" The answer is to enjoy the species of speciousness....

Now actually Raphaelson is a bit of an aesthete in his own right, and what I have said may appear to be preachy to someone as emboldened and quick-witted as he. I can only hope to hold out how refreshing it is that he leaves some parabolic mark of his existence on the page! Thank you! I can only pray that the truth, which is not specious, will not lacerate me too vehemently.

Unknown said...

Professor Ayres graciously describes me as quick-witted, but he likely doesn't realize that I've been working out the theories summarized above, bit by bit, since the late 1980s ... since a few weeks after the Liebenstraus incident, in fact.

All of which brings me back to those troubling times. Forgive me if this reveals too much, but in the days and weeks following the incident, I was asked by a certain professor (formerly Adjunct Lecturer on Liebenstraus Studies; since then dismissed from the institution) to help sort through the many boxes of papers Liebenstraus left behind. We were charged with making recommendations on which papers should be returned to Liebesntraus' heirs, which should should be placed in the archives at the Liebenstraus Enlightenment Foundation in Fidazhofen, and which might better serve the academic community by being destroyed and never again mentioned.

There were the usual manuscripts, notes, criticisms, manifestos, retractions of manifestos, and retractions of retractions; there were aphoristic pieces, ironic ones, and others condemning both aphorism and irony. There was even a paper, written in rhymed couplets and including puns in several languages, that seemed to be a glib, if longwinded, condemnation of condemnation. But perhaps the most curious of all was a partially completed translation (and this brings us back to your reply, Professor) of Wallace Stevens' "Description Without Place," into Esperanto.

This appeared to be unique among all the findings, and needless to say, its implications were staggering. After the discovery, Oppermann himself returned to his room without saying a word, where he remained mute, locked inside, for nine days. We knew he was alive only from the steady flow of cigarette smoke emerging in spirals from the keyhole. I have been careful not to mention the translation to him again.

Now I imagine, Professor, that as usual you are a couple of steps ahead of me and so you see where this is going. You already know that Kresswell alluded to the translation (obliquely but unmistakably) in the March edition of Geißel. The cat is out of the bag, as it were. Meanwhile, Oppermann has been asked to speak (of course) at the upcoming Liebenstraus Centennial conference in Seattle. Questions are sure to arise. Oppermann is not a delicate man, but he has limits. And I, for one, do not want to see what happens when those limits are violated.

I owe him a call. But it's meant to be a friendly one, not one where I handle and counsel and coddle him. And how would I? It would be like coddling a grizzly bear. One with a PhD. And I have no idea what else to do. Declaring a topic off limits at a conference is no different from placing it in bright lights on the marquis. I seek your advice, Professor, in this most delicate matter.

Ayres said...

I was not familiar with "Description without Place" indicating my clandestine affiliations with phillistines, however in looking I found this little piece attached to an essay at:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/vangeyzel.html

following
the crisis (at home)
peasant loyalties inspire
the avant-garde . . . .

--William Carlos Williams, "A Place (Any Place) to Transcend All Places," a poem written in reply to Stevens's "Description without Place"