Oppermann In Music: ...of the German Immigrant

Oppermann’s Life: Life of a man gone to music (The Cast of the Dianic Bow)

Oppermann leads his life. Enough said.

What is the life of a man gone to music? What is the status? But a status is a report of how things stand, it is a Bestand, to which I will lend the aufnahme. This much simply said.
I could write about the life of an Oppermann: shall I write after the life of his status as an immigrant? A German immigrant? Shall I say something else? For his cast is as a Dasein, a “being there” thrown out there with the cast of life.

Oppermann is a life, thrown out there… by his own choice? Oppermann is a German immigrant thrown about by the cast of fate and the wish to become music.

Oppermann sits and wishes in the line of a German Immigrant, or a Czech Immigrant:
“The wish to become a Red Indian.” These immigrant-dreams are the dreams of the Romantic European: the noble savage, the Wild West, a place where dreams are as yet to be won by those with enough industrial entrepreneurial scheming. This is the lure of the West: that you can build your own dream here.

Soon enough we come here: English and Scotsmen included: we discover only our own stories: now broken, bent destroyed… after all what is the dream of the frozen mobility of Europe? The noble castes are already set. Movement becomes problematic, far less possible, still to chase the American dream.

…Even though we brought it to you: chains of McDonalds: and mini-marts: wholesale lumber stores. You had them all in the beginning: you had them all: in the beginning of your European dream, before you slammed it into the American continent of cannibals. “Cannibals in the South… not so much in North America,” that’s what they say.

So you come here to be a part of the American dream: only we keep saying over and over, repeating like a magic phrase until you believe it: “strip-malls,” even “convenience-store!” If you wanted to believe you could agree with the American dream, then you would seek it out: finally and resoundingly: in the people we labeled “cannibal,” or “slave,” or “head-hunter.” Yes, let’s see what it is for a black man and a red man to live under the shadow of a freeway overpass in a trailer park.

When we white men first came, with our “union suit” underwear, and our blue and gray uniforms: we still see as through 1960’s movies: Indian chiefs, sitting on chairs made of sticks and leather thongs: sitting on a drum: and they were dreaming the way ahead for their people. What exactly has happened? Have we put them out to pasture, these Red people? Did we put them in trailer parks?

You wanted to know the dream? You came out and spoke to the persons who had been given some power of vision and dream and you got answered. Right now we are in the business of fixing that all: we are bringing water and electricity to every stranded red man in the universe. We are bringing clean and steady roads. Who would have thought that they actually enjoyed living off of twisty dirt roads, but they did and they still do. They block our progress and our advancement. We are only sending the power lines through! But our power lines block their desert with black streaks and stiff metal men held rigid—carrying the lines off into the sunset, and forever and ever. American progress.

In order for there to be progress in America we would have to give up the idea of progress. As it is, America is stuck in an adolescent naïveté, which is painful as it is potent. It is as potent as any teen-ager, and what we need is certainly to age… but not to become the decrepit, corrupt old man in Russia, such a sad mockery of the breath of its own revolution. So sad! Less than a hundred years ago and the Russian dream so quickly faded… And the German dream… let’s not speak of that! Germans as Germany died utterly and completely with the rise of the Third Reich. It killed Germania. There is no possibility of soul, not for another seven-hundred years or so. You are stuck being the perpetrators, and thereby soul-less: doomed to live another man’s dreams: the shadow of the African soul, or the Aztec soul or the Incan soul.

But what I wanted to point out is that Oppermann’s life has become music, slowly and irrevocably. This is a personal matter, outside of his destiny with his nation-state, identified with his mother language, his father language. Oppermann listened to music and he became music. Oppermann listened to Jazz, and if for the moment it was good Jazz, even “moderately good jazz,” as one of his sayings might go, then he would become the Jazz, and for that moment attain the span of the cast of the Dianic bow.

Oppermann preferred the Jazz that was produced by black Jazz musicians, and therefore in that manner became the shadow of a Black man’s dream: he was a German immigrant and therefore did not experience the same force of the impact of American racism: he was always already an alien in this country and therefore was admitted to the company of Black men who are aliens in their own country of America. He participated in part of the soul grounding experience of America: to be an alien soul, away from one’s native land and away from one’s native speech: and in this a profound awkwardness forced him to adapt and to translate: he would never worry about being a second or a third generation immigrant: when the shreds of ethnicity begins to vanish in the Strip-mall-consciousness of American entitlement: and the racism really begins: a race to end all races: an endless technological competition to see who can wear a gray suit better: to see who is boardroom best! Microsoft. IBM. AT&T. It is unfortunately as simple as that. And we are writing on their software. They get an imprint on everything we write and everything that is said. Only the dream is now to dream beyond them: like some idiot on a blog site: like some Timothy Treadwell: the corporate world is only a threshold: those Indians are still out there! Beyond our straight roads there are still winding dirt roads! And behind those dirt roads the Indian chiefs sit still dreaming, and waiting to tell us our dreams, our true dreams, what we came for, and who was sent, and maybe “who” sent us.

The dream is only so rich as the situation is desperate.

This is the golden rule: every time there is a really desperate situation, then it begins, in that moment, that the dream emits: we are just deluding ourselves: I hear some will say, as we see wounded men, lying in a battlefield of World War II (and that is so far away now, vanishing with the wrenching twist of time.). If not this battlefield, then what battlefield, and where and when? Was it the young father, whose body gets riddled with bullets in the midst of the Watt’s riot? We are the dream of that time.

But I digress: Maybe we should speak of Oppermann, or of Oppermann’s dream, for that’s all that is to be counted of a man’s life: was did he know and did he live his dreams… or some other man’s dreams?

Some other man, we could speak of some other Borges, or some other Oppermann: the one given to writing spiritual tractatae, each on a specific dimension of the Germanic spirit: Heidegger and Hegel: that is who he gave himself to. And he wrote about their dreams. And he wrote about the dream of a swiss madman: Robert Walser. He wrote furtively of Kafka, only daring to mention his name in passing, perhaps out of reverence, or out of some unseen thing. He wrote more forcefully of Bob Dylan, ordering the blue denim of Bob Dylan as the tangled blue skein of American destiny somehow ordered over the cloth of his own fate.

There have been a few senses of Oppermann if we refer to Oppermann as Oppermann the writer: there is Oppermann who is the writer of his own life: this will include the various incidents of his life: vacations in Tenerife, visits to the Ravensburg tower, walks in the wooded area from the center of town to his home; marriage to his wife Erika, his subsequent divorce; a history of all his intimate acts, and the intimate acts of all those associated with him: this would quickly become impossible to iterate, but form one network of intimacy and neurosis called "writing one's life." Second there is the writer of scholarly essays. This is a project he takes up in fits: he writes extensively of Heidegger and Hegel: and his essays are a combination of erotic perversity and repression, and pure works of art. Third is the writing of post-cards. The issue of being a "post-card-writer leaves one as a sort of scoundrel and executive cynical professor.

I want to suggest that I will condemn Jan Oppermann's life. Life is condemned to becoming music. Such a condemnation is ultimately the ultimate repeal: for music is free, it cannot be contained in anything: if you see your life becoming eternal, then you run the risk of seeing through to eternal life.

But why more time to waste? Let us get down to this music! Let's first indicate the nature of the shrill scream of what music! And what music!
Richard Thompson: "She twists the knife again!"

We can barely recover from this when we are met by Bob Dylan and all them buckets.