Oppermann has sent me a sunrise oriented post card. He states that surises are too optimistic. Was being born into this mess ever really optimistic? The mess is here, with its parents and its "hope for a brand new future" and all that crap. We know it isn't true, and that by the time you are thirty-nine you have been through a divorce and all that and run through the mill of the education institution, and by that time it's mid-day in your life's existence and you cannot stand to stand and watch the sunrise any more!
There are many sunrises and many existences, and not all existences seem to culminate in this one thing or that, And I would say that you, Oppermann, managed to make the most of your existence, you chose to think the higher thought: that the Good is beyond us, it is beyond being, so ends your fruitless chase to grasp anything let alone the good, and so you sit back, no longer yourself the sunrise, but the one who comes to receive the sun, the one who is awake, the one is reclining as the sun inclines.
klei-
DEFINITION: To lean. Oldest form *lei-, becoming *klei- in centum languages.
Derivatives include decline, lid, climax, climate, and ladder.
I. Full-grade form *klei-. 1. Suffixed form *klei-n-. decline, incline, recline, from Latin -clnre, to lean, bend. 2. Suffixed form *klei-tro-. clitellum, from Latin cltellae, packsaddle, from diminutive of *cltra, litter. 3. Suffixed form *klei-wo-. acclivity, declivity, proclivity, from Latin clvus, a slope. 4. Suffixed form *klei-tor-, “incline, hill.” clitoris, from Greek diminutive kleitoris, clitoris.
II. Zero grade form *kli-. 1. lid, from Old English hlid, cover, from Germanic *hlid-, “that which bends over,” cover. 2. Suffixed form *kli-n-. lean1, from Old English hlinian and hleonian, to lean, from Germanic *hlinn. 3. Suffixed form *kli-ent-. client, from Latin clins, dependent, follower. 4. Suffixed form *kli-to- in compound *aus-klit-- (see ous-). 5. Suffixed form *kli-n-yo-. –clinal, cline, –cline, –clinic, clino-, clisis; aclinic line, anaclisis, clinandrium, enclitic, matriclinous, patroclinous, pericline, proclitic, from Greek klnein, to lean. 6. Suffixed form *kli-m. climate, from Greek klima, sloping surface of the earth. 7. Lengthened zero-grade form *kl-, with lengthening of obscure origin. a. Suffixed form *kl-n--. clinic; diclinous, monoclinous, triclinium, from Greek kln, bed; b. suffixed form *kl-m-. climax, from Greek klmax, ladder.
III. Suffixed o-grade form *kloi-tr-. ladder, from Old English hld(d)er, ladder, from Germanic *hlaidri-. (Pokorny lei- 600.)
I'm sorry, what does this all mean? Have I just vomited up another random association? Have I related it all back to this damn maternal thing? The clitoral, the mound of Venus? But if this definition is what we climb on top of then that's not the main thing.
Sunrise is always attended by the star of the morning.
And sunset is always attended by the star of the night.
The star of these times is not as bright, but is more beautiful than the furnace of the sun
Which is ultimately unseeable, but gives us life, animation, through it's heat.
There was a sun and there was one sun, one source of life for we petty little creatures.
I am still trying to figure out what to do with the Oppermann post-card, with its single incendary statement: "the morning sun is too optimistic!" -Oh for God's sake Oppermann, you cannot go round condemning the sun in the morning! You can condemn the photographs of the sun, that somehow they are too new and taken with an insufficiently ancient lens to give patina and weight to the moment of the waking sun, but this event happens before us. Pictures of the waking sun are optimistic, pictures of death are always much more certain and far less ungrounded, yet they draw us too. The question is if we dare to make fools of ourselves, and dare the lens, the portal of our perception, to believe that it is ancient enough to behold even the emergence of this one sun. Morrison was right:
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.
But the dawn is eternally wasted when we keep taking these teeny snap shots. What's the use then of language or any representation, when the earth rises eternally beautiful and we are trying to sing a song? The song cannot be the morning but it can be a part of the morning.
SONGS OF INNOCENCE
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of peasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he, laughing, said to me:
'Pipe a song about a lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again;'
So I piped: he wept to hear.
'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sang the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
'Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.'
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
----
This only gets us half-way there. The other half is the bloody mess, which if you turn away from this text you will get a sense of once again. This pleasant pastoral ballad from Blake is certainly about the fall from being a part of the morning to the myth of representation of the morning. But this dichotomy between being/ participating/ praxis and representation/ theorizing/ metaphor this too is only half-way there.
The truth of the matter was Jan Oppermann's incindary phrase: "Have I pointed out to you that all these sunrise pictures are optimistic (I do like storks though)." -Well of course they are optimistic! The lens that views them is too technological, but if it were ensconced within an amulet that was, say 10,000 years old, and inscribed in cuneform, then we might be getting to something.
I cannot find the ancient lens that has seen the light transfixing it for that long, and even then 10,000 years is a drop in the bucket, and itself threatens, along with all our myths and psychologizing to be nothing but an optimistic one at that.
I can say that ww.pbase.com/
I can say as well that in the case of the Zabriskie point image the land itself serves in the very same way. The problem with photographic representations of the sun is that this abundance of light is always unrepresentable. We can get to the story of this representation, maybe, but not to the image itself, which would then either be false, or else somehow make us at last servants, slaves to some signifier that we could say is all life and acts on us as the sun. It is not the sun, and no words of Mao or Stalin, or any other despot have themselves been the words of the sun. Upon their words have rested millions of lives, but they were not the sun. We can say that the glyphs of the town in Turkey provide us with the preparation for the vision of the sun, but we cannot point directly yet toward the sun. It is like Hegel or Borges, or myself for that matter: anyone who chose to dive down to look for the essence of all representation and who emerge carrying only a "thought construct:" a waste of time and a waste of the dawn.
Do you remember Oppermann, those stories I wrote when I was writing my dissertation? -I seemed to say: this is what my life is like: another wasted dawn and another: another wasted day or another. We live our lives in that Floydian "Quiet desperation is the English way..." sort of way. Perhaps that is enough for now. I am afraid that everything I will say to you after all will be too flightful, and then you will say again in your Oppermannian sort of way: "Oh yes, you were right about all this and lots of things!" And then once again you are reminding me that while in reality I have won, in parable I have lost all the way.
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