Ethics and Grief: The Difference Between Oppermann and Einstein Coat

"Für den braven Soldaten
Lew Ayres
Albert Einstein"

Before going into any further cosmetic (and cosmic?) parallels that I will discuss on the Oppermann/Ayres phenomenon I stumble on Einstein's words, apparently directed to my own ...dad. "For the good soldier..." is this what Einstein intended his work for? Did we drop the "bomb" on Hiroshima in order to somehow alleviate any more deaths of the "good soldiers?" I do not want to legitimate or denounce the ethical product of one human being's endeavors, and seeing Einstein, I must confess a sense of veneration for someone who is culturally considered the genius of our epoch. Yet nuclear physics, every philosopher will contend, is in itself incomplete: if its products remain thousands of years of horrifyingly toxic waste (in return for the seemingly limitless energy to run our civilization) or worse, the weapon that ends all contention ...and life itself. What is left of any "good soldier" in an age where the limits of human violence cannot be reached without destroying our capacity to conserve and abide the story of our violence. Nuclear weapons have for the time being placed a limit on our capacity to be soldiers, just as the trenches of the First World War reduced even the noblest "soldiers" to the level of vermin.

Perhaps at this juncture I can only offer by means of a shoddy comparison an image of me in what was a coat taken from my father's wardrobe, that until this instant of close examination I presumed to be what my father wore to meet Einstein in... the Einstein coat.

The Gray Oppermann Coat (with noticeably less pronounced lower lapels)

I note in this image of me staring into the lens of the Oppermann camera that my lips seem to be extremely straight-- as though I may be mad or just behind this smirking. It is the kind of face I commonly use to reprove Oppermann of his idiocy. Here I am in the Autumn of my sophomoric year of Colorado College, posing in what vandal may have termed: "a bratty CC college child pose." But it was my intention at the time to represent the most grim visage that I could muster, the absolute timber of my own gravity. I can remember Oppermann egging me on.


This may be the only of two shots of Oppermann and I sitting in my dorm room in Loomis Hall, again, philosophers on the same bed, but clad in protective tweed and heavy wool. It is a matter of protection and propriety. While I am fiercely affectionate toward my friend, this itself encompasses our experience of actually having to share the same bed. We had philosophy to discuss for heaven's sake! We left the issue of disrobing to our women friends, and we were glad to have them take on the burden of dealing with philosophers as naked beings together with them. And this propriety and gravity, that actually seems to be manifest here in its almost jaunty sophomoric manner, that we loved the most.

Behind us are images of the Eurythmics, and Thomas Dolby, they were mediocre New Wave Idols, I am ashamed of them now to a certain extent, but they served... some printed plates of the Hawaiian Islands, looking down the mast of a tall sailing ship, and a portrait of me and Linda, looking back, toward the left, the same way toward the unconscious, looking back toward the "Langer Abschied" that would comprise so much of my knowing her, the long farewell.

I think this might have been in part a creative reaction to the mindless, consumerist hedonism many times expressed by fellow "college children." We did not have to exactly be prudish fundamentalist "Christian children" either, though it was about a sort of faith. Faith is imagination, and this imagination of something more than brute instinct. It was a matter of timing. For my part I wanted to enter into Philosophy as the highest epitome of understanding, I did not want to know the content of sciences, all of which was simple and mindless enough, but the intention to know: why did we want to know at all? To what end was knowledge at all?

Oppermann might have been simply irritated with the paucity of intellect. I still do not know why he fully associated with the Political Science department of Colorado College: perhaps he had aspirations to become some sort of a politician, he certainly became a lawyer after he completed his doctorate in Political Philosophy. But then something happened to Oppermann, he couldn't stand the ... politics ... of lawyering (particularly of "hard-lawyering") and retired from the practice he had engaged in. Oppermann devoted himself fully to the speculative and educational aspects of his enormous background and education. There was something he did not want to "do," even though indeed he could have done it. And this is why I have called this web-log "Oppermann in Praxis" because it is a question of what he might or might not "do."

Phenomenologically there are those who seem capable of dishing out the heartless blows that this world seems to need to deliver to us. It requires a form of blindness akin to sociopathy. This life-form generally occupies the strata of corporate beings (universities included) called "middle management," and it is through this strata that one must clamber if one wants to become a "leader." The unfortunate part of "middle-management" (and to understand this one should read the chapter entitled "the Whipper" from Kafka's Trial) is that in order for one to engage in it successfully one has to be a real ...asshole. Pardon the vulgar terminology, although middle management may actually be disrespecting "assholes" by its comparison to the eliminative portion of our anatomy.

I do not think Oppermann could tolerate this brutal aspect of his life, that his training might have destined him to somehow become. He skirted round this by simply engaging in teaching, and a sense of longing for the "Arcadian" and a longing also for the "Medieval" way of life, which he somehow envisioned as better than the stupefying technological mess of our current society.

Oppermann wanted to study Politics, but he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. In part egged on by my own studies in philosophy Oppermann read on into the great philosophers and the mediocre ones. (particularly the French of whom I am still fond of, and rightfully so compared to the dreary litany of American philosophy after William (as per Oppermann's correction of my error when I wrote "Henry") James... American "thought" amounts to little more than the excrement of a mindless colony of petty bureaucrats mustering better formulas for middle management... oh, that and a bunch of religious fanatics.) I have a vague recollection of purchasing a copy of Levinas' Totality and Infinity for Oppermann... the book itself is an attempt at trying to find the missing response to Einstein's physics, the urge to save the "good soldiers." Levinas (Lingis, 1968) wrote in his preface to Totality and infinity:

"Does not lucidity, the mind's openness on the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?
...
"We do not need the obscure fragments of Heraclitus to prove that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought, that war does not only affect it as the most patent fact, but the very patency, or the truth, of the real. In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like Pleonasm!), harsh object lesson, at the very moment of its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn war is experienced as the pure experience of pure being." (p.21)

This brings up a connection Oppermann mentioned after reading this entry: the connection between "Hard Lawyers," "Hard Sciences," and now to what Levinas calls "Harsh Reality." There are some discrepencies between this trinity which may be drawn out once we have given some weight to each of these terms. We can add to this Bob Dylan's admonition, which is totally appropriate to this essay, "Hard Rain." The term "Hard Lawyer" came up at the time of divorce from my first wife; it came up in contradistinction to an associate who was a rather frustrating "friend:" he called me a "soft lawyer," because I had a manner of both accepting criticism and psychoanalytically overturning or evading it, or turning it into a metaphor, an "issue" which never fully compelled me to act as a "reality." At that time, and soon thereafter, Corinne started hiring what we termed hereafter as a "hard lawyer," a sociopathic type who would have no objection pointing a gun at another person's head and shooting if he could get away with it. Instead he simply pointed his legal "hired gun" at me and exhorted me to capitulate entirely to his demands; when I would not he threatened, "you're going to make this a long, hard road" (it is difficult to include the ghoulish breathing which was used to enunciate his sentence). This idiot was, however, quickly sent packing (because, in part, I had obtained the services of my own hard lawyer woman to block the harassing S.O.B) and within little more than a year of his first contact with me the divorce was finalized. "Hard Sciences" is a common term used to designate those procedures that are "measurable" and "replicable" in terms of indicting (back to the Socratic, Aristotelian, and Kantian "Kategoria") or "investigating" "reality." We know that this form of science in its measuring and exacting nature (what Heidegger calls "calculative thinking") tends to call out things into the Bestand (the "standing reserve") (as opposed to the Bestandsaufnahme, which is a "taking stock" in post-cards, and is the epitome of dudishness), which one must think of as a kind of way in which we torture things to the highest level of production that they are capable of. I do not think that Einstein was merely a "Hard Science" proponent, he knew that something was missing. Finally there is Levinas' "Harsh Reality," which I have always compared to the (please forgive the vulgar term) "shitty reality" that seems to confront "dreamers" who "dream too much." There is a quality to this "Harsh Reality" that really reminds me a great deal of Dylan's "Hard Rain," which indicates for me that the stupidity and thoughtlessness that generally characterizes our condition (filled to the limit of despair with "hard science and hard lawyering") will eventually bring with it a return, a profound return (Widerkunft) that will be a turning, possibly a "restitution" (see Oppermann's Anaximander essay) that will bring us to our knees. Perhaps in that position of grief and humility we may find some way through.

War in this sense is returned to the domain of philosophy and of poetry: to make warfare on language, to invite conflict against the state. The age of Einstein's weapon of war is no longer war, since conflict ceases altogether: we cannot put our conflicts to the ultimate test, or "object lesson," and survive the outcome: technology manifests a limit by which our own attempt to try and exhaust ourselves results in total catastrophe for all involved: the weapon destroys all hope. Perhaps that was Einstein's intent (I am thinking of my father's role in "The Bionic Woman" years later (1977) "Doomsday is Tomorrow" as Dr. Elija Cooper, who invented a "doomsday device" of linked nuclear weapons that threatened to obliterate the planet... the ultimate frustration of the scientist was at last to give to bloodthirsty humanity a weapon that would destroy everything... which really was to say that one must stop destroying everything and thinking in the manner that finds such destruction acceptable... to think as a warlike entity any longer will ensure that we human beings eliminate ourselves promptly from the planet... and there is a certain degree to which humanity is ultimately depraved and deserves its own self destruction except for ... our grief.)

There are profound exceptions to the diarrhea of contemporary American philosophy: perhaps if "grief" points the way to ethics in American thought, beyond the refugee surmise of an Einstein: This exception is in the folk and rock "industry," particularly in Bob Dylan, but I did not discover Dylan in truth until Oppermann made me purchase Time Out of Mind soon after it was published (1997). Through this poetry that makes war upon our common sense we retain a shred of dignity and some aspect of the best part of the American dream. I would say that for Dylan it is no longer an American dream, but Dylan's own "masked anonymity" that prevails beyond any nationality.

I don't want nothing from anyone, ain't that much to take
Wouldn't know the difference between a real blonde and a fake
Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone would come
And push back the clock for me

This ostensive refusal "I don't want nothing from anyone" may be as close to an ethic as I could evoke from Dylan. But to state this means to come close to knowing the senselessness of trying to take anything at all. What do I take of an Oppermann or an Oppermann coat? It is a full length coat, but it is not as "nazi" as the "full length leather coat" that Dylan mentions in the mood of despair that rises through his poem. Maybe "full length leather coats" get worn by "middle management," but I know this is unfair and Dylan would tell me that what I was saying is wrong. Maybe it is enough that at one time I wore a full length woolen coat. Hell, all I had was a worn down second hand gray woolen coat and some thought that it meant something, which it still does.

I would say that for Peter Gabriel (if I am digressing into music and American thought) it is a dream of inter-ethnicity (this may be WAY too optimistic... because the situation is really bad for us as a collective). But maybe for a moment our music is cherished and transformed in an infinite playful war of beauty itself. Then there is grief: from "Signal to Noise"

and in this place, can you reassure me
with a touch, a smile – while the cradle’s burning
all the while the world is turning to noise
oh the more that it’s surrounding us
the more that it destroys
turn up the signal
wipe out the noise

We were not yet philosophers. And now we see that the coat I wore was not the Einstein Coat... but what of that? My own father had the great fortune of playing Paul Bauman in the 1930 Milestone film "All Quiet on the Western Front." This was a role that defined practically his entire life. There he was, presented as handsome as possible, well quaffed and oiled, perfectly "natty" according to the studio standards of the day.

I lived from my father's sizable legacy, thought what I thought in part in debt to the things he did and saw. Oppermann was a story much the same, though he does not deal with the burden of personality in his family in such a "near" manner.

The coat I wore I had taken from my father's wardrobe, it could have been an Einstein coat, it most certainly was an Oppermann coat, by the very virtue that I had some article of clothing that was more sophisticated than a synthetic parka and a pair of jeans in the late 1980's one could say i wore something more distinguished than the run of the mill.

Later in college I took on a beard and let my hair grow out even more fully. I needed a beard to make me sufficiently masculine, at least that is what I felt... that a "philosopher" must have some sort of beard in order for him to be taken seriously... and I was delighted to grow a beard to cover my outward feminine, almost girlish features. "Ah yes, philosophers and their beards!" I comment to my self Oppermannishly. I believe that my subsequent persona change had a good deal to do with an associate of ours, Michael Cresswell, who figures in almost as a lurking Germanic Zarathustra between Oppermann's and my own meanderings. I had no depth, so I made up for it by appearing to have some depth. I loved the vision of Cresswell, the rock solid man capable of sailing with his leather britches and woolen Eisenhower jacket into the coldest Arctic sea for the purpose of fishing, self-subsistence, personal gain, a man's man, true, but he was his own man. I identified with Cresswell, commonly known of as "The Druid," because I had never seen an ethnic European American so fully himself, showing a sort of pride, without being a bigoted idiot. Youth who have family heritage from Mexico can look ethnically Mexican, I turned to looking like a stylized Bavarian peasant, and still do from time to time with a kind of relish mixed with a sense that it might just be a sham. True as well, it is unfair to accuse me of having no depth-- I wrote dreams, consulted a psychoanalyst on a weekly basis, and studied philosophy at every free instant... and yet these were the agitated pretensions of one who had yet to attain anything. Oppermann might disagree with this, averring that I had already attained myself, however confused, inconsistent and wanting to be something else I might have been.

The hair was already bushy and confused, not my father's polished and extremely poised "natty-ness." His angles seem sharp to a kind of limit of appearance, just as the real doctor, Professor Doktor Einstein had sharpened the lens of atomic physics to the level that fission became possible. The Ayres's sharpness was a matter of being a cosmetic of the time, however Einstein meant business.

I have wandered a long time, as sons seem to do, speaking psychologically, living in my father's shadow, and I wonder what might a son do living with the father, who even as a youth received a complementary note of a man who transformed our vision of the physical universe.

I did not want to become a physicist, however, much as my father imparted on me a rudimentary love of astronomy and astrophysics, this inclination remains dormant. I never hear Oppermann speak of matters of the "hard sciences," they only seem like so much of a burden to him it seems to me, simply like "more technology" or "more damn things to remember," because for Oppermann as well as me it is not the quantity of things one seems to attain to but something infinitely more elusive and evasive... some truth that will laugh in the face of our rudimentary physics a thousand years from now, just as we look back and with subtle mockery teach the past formulas or paradigms of knowledge as somehow quaint, antiquated and laughable feeble attempts at knowing.

Only philosophers keep looking back to the most antiquated forms of inquiry asking: How much more did we truly understand then? How much more have we entirely forgotten in this age of blindness?

So it seems to be with our capacity to look into the past, the philosophical past and to allow oneself to be turned into a pillar of salt: to ask: what truly happens when we become encased in our own bitterness, when the forms become crystalline, and we, like the hunger artist, keep fasting: out beyond all levels of social acclaim or reproval, could we for an instant remember a facet of thought that is past that keeps ...bugging us? (I suddenly remember a dream of salt-fleas....) -No, that is not enough! It still remains our destiny to rend ourselves into the future... but not for the sake of middle management... what a nightmare! What then? For what?