Jan Beerstradtan: The Castle of Muiden in Winter.This is "The Castle of Muiden in winter: the winter scene is actually animated by all sorts of cavorting homo sapiens. The men, women and children use their quaint "techne" to skate out into a lake of insuperable ice. It is in fact quaint. But the text of Oppermann behind the image is more devouring. It is a poem about fading into the anonymity of white-ness, the cold whiteness of snow. "Let us, this, and all of humanity fade into the snow, Let the rivers finally run every course to the sea, or else be frozen forever in realms of perpetual night," the final ominous darkness from Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry":
12/1/07 3:55 p. File this under "post cards of Breugel motifs," or something like that. It's still snowing lightly & there is snow out there on trees, cars, buildings, plants. Some children are playing in the dusk; I'm sitting inside after having taken a short sudden walk in the snow. - Gossett was here briefly but felt anxious about the weather and drove back home. - I lit a candle and poured a small Bowmore (12 years only) to sink into an unusually solitary Saturday evening. I think I would now be disinclined to have my evening disturbed, so I probably won't answer the phone when it rings. Nor check my e-mail. Let the snow envelope all techne: τέχνη--
I think that Jan signed this note as "Techne," it is his signature, this time as a singular monster; but why would he want to be techne? Techne is just a doing, it is the equivalent of karma: there is a techne and there is an ethic that stands behind each gesture. Yet "Techne" has become the name for the verymost impersonal face of this "technology": an endless tower of iron and fire, that ascends as a prison for all eternity: this is what has become of the god of Techne, which has enshrouded us in the mechanical poison spill of a thousand oil drums, everywhere and at all time, as we try to blacken the green earth in the face with this shit.
This post-card is about isolation. But, no, it is not about isolation, rather it is about waiting. Oppermann lights a light and waits for it to get dark. "It's not dark yet," and yet all things in this narrative, for this evening at least, move far away. It is about waiting: the fierce, unbearable waiting of the man who sinks into his hole, dug in a hillside of Kiarostami's "A taste of Cherry." "For the night we will let thunder and snow slip into oblivion, just please, check me in the morning to see if I am not dead! ...forget the phone calls, the e-mails, the desperate notes; I can only describe to you the ominous threat of such a moment, immensely tranquil, comfortable, yet this darkness that comes. How shall we tell (by the thunder?) if it is truly dark?" It is about the snow that sends friends scurrying homes, home to bivouac with their nuns, each man has a nun: some are physical, others are more abstract, like just sipping a Bowmore: Bow more to whom? That's what I want to know! -Well, just let it slide, after all it's just a 12-year-old drink.
The card still bears the customary signature of the non-signature, (I know Jan is saying: "how much longer am I going to have to put up with this overly proper Derridean shit!" -"Easy there! Steady now!" Is my response) which is to say that the signature is the writing of all this work: it doesn't need a signature to support it: the signature is the work: no one else could think even this simple Bestandsaufnahme, it is singular, I will give you that, but the singular never amounted to you that much!
Why is that? -Did you never meet the angels in the bells of black holes? A black hole in physics is called a "singularity:" that is to say a place in the universe where the laws of physics do not obey any more known or standard rules: they exist outside of space and time: and that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for narrative!
What was our narrative anyway?
Why the heck were we doing what we were doing in the first place?
Did we think we were philosophers getting rich? No! I think not! Philosophers writing prescient books, copious works of literature, and somehow getting knowledge? -Possibly. Did we set out to change anything? Did we set out to skate to the very edge of the thin ice of modern thought?
An answer begins to form itself from the pessimistic margin of the ARCADIAN -Oppermann suggests that he sought for the Good, but he discovered that the good was just beyond being, and so we were stuck with this failure that amasses and crumbles around us every day.
I told you that the whole beginning of "Blood on the Tracks" is ice skating music? Thus one monitors the affairs of the ice-skaters in Beerstradten's painting. (But Dylan enters into the problem of desire in his ice capades, and into a relation to the feminine that is not quite ready to be here yet: the fierce autobiography of lost love.) Kapital is ice, frozen images, frozen in creative immobility, and these ice-skates of thinking were just what is needed for this "winter scene." "Blood on the tracks" is far more interesting than Pink Floyd's throbbing melancholia ("The Wall": "The thin ice of modern life") any day, I know you would say that, and I would agree. Ah well, just two men who sit at separate desks and dinner tables who write each other and have an understanding about something: Dylan before Pink Floyd, although Pink Floyd will do in a pinch, that's all. I think that Murakami mentions Dylan more often than he mentions Pink Floyd as well, as if to say: "Yeah, Pink Floyd, well they're mentionable!" (Poor Pink Floyd sits slogging in the distance in a pool of ice: he ain't got no ice skates: but Dylan does: There are lines of ice skates in the text of Dylan's verse. He's got his lines all over the place. In all, however, it is not the lines left in the ice by the skaters, but the overwhelming voluminous clouds that win the day. The contentions and parables of humankind and the earth (so well presented in the Breugel painting below) are diminished under a certain leaden volumescence of the clouds. The clouds are capable of sustaining a bad mood, more harsh weather is ahead, and the skaters are merely out for the slightest romp before it all turns frigid again, with icy gales and blinding cold. And yet the truth shines in this way, in a moment when it is under great threat, the skaters and their pleasant antics shine from beneath this curtain of death.
There will always be "another category," just as much as there will always be another indictment of nature, and another way to carve up the universe. I do not think that this post-card fits Breugel's technique. Breugel brought us in closer than this quaint little vignette: the butcher and the baker would be there: somebody might be falling in an oven: better to make the scene agitated with everyday life: even the dogs at a peasant's banquet would be falling in the snow.
Pieter Breugel the Elder: Hunters in the Snow
12/1/07 3:55 p. File this under "post cards of Breugel motifs," or something like that. It's still snowing lightly & there is snow out there on trees, cars, buildings, plants. Some children are playing in the dusk; I'm sitting inside after having taken a short sudden walk in the snow. - Gossett was here briefly but felt anxious about the weather and drove back home. - I lit a candle and poured a small Bowmore (12 years only) to sink into an unusually solitary Saturday evening. I think I would now be disinclined to have my evening disturbed, so I probably won't answer the phone when it rings. Nor check my e-mail. Let the snow envelope all techne: τέχνη--
I think that Jan signed this note as "Techne," it is his signature, this time as a singular monster; but why would he want to be techne? Techne is just a doing, it is the equivalent of karma: there is a techne and there is an ethic that stands behind each gesture. Yet "Techne" has become the name for the verymost impersonal face of this "technology": an endless tower of iron and fire, that ascends as a prison for all eternity: this is what has become of the god of Techne, which has enshrouded us in the mechanical poison spill of a thousand oil drums, everywhere and at all time, as we try to blacken the green earth in the face with this shit.
This post-card is about isolation. But, no, it is not about isolation, rather it is about waiting. Oppermann lights a light and waits for it to get dark. "It's not dark yet," and yet all things in this narrative, for this evening at least, move far away. It is about waiting: the fierce, unbearable waiting of the man who sinks into his hole, dug in a hillside of Kiarostami's "A taste of Cherry." "For the night we will let thunder and snow slip into oblivion, just please, check me in the morning to see if I am not dead! ...forget the phone calls, the e-mails, the desperate notes; I can only describe to you the ominous threat of such a moment, immensely tranquil, comfortable, yet this darkness that comes. How shall we tell (by the thunder?) if it is truly dark?" It is about the snow that sends friends scurrying homes, home to bivouac with their nuns, each man has a nun: some are physical, others are more abstract, like just sipping a Bowmore: Bow more to whom? That's what I want to know! -Well, just let it slide, after all it's just a 12-year-old drink.
The card still bears the customary signature of the non-signature, (I know Jan is saying: "how much longer am I going to have to put up with this overly proper Derridean shit!" -"Easy there! Steady now!" Is my response) which is to say that the signature is the writing of all this work: it doesn't need a signature to support it: the signature is the work: no one else could think even this simple Bestandsaufnahme, it is singular, I will give you that, but the singular never amounted to you that much!
Why is that? -Did you never meet the angels in the bells of black holes? A black hole in physics is called a "singularity:" that is to say a place in the universe where the laws of physics do not obey any more known or standard rules: they exist outside of space and time: and that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for narrative!
What was our narrative anyway?
Why the heck were we doing what we were doing in the first place?
Did we think we were philosophers getting rich? No! I think not! Philosophers writing prescient books, copious works of literature, and somehow getting knowledge? -Possibly. Did we set out to change anything? Did we set out to skate to the very edge of the thin ice of modern thought?
An answer begins to form itself from the pessimistic margin of the ARCADIAN -Oppermann suggests that he sought for the Good, but he discovered that the good was just beyond being, and so we were stuck with this failure that amasses and crumbles around us every day.
I told you that the whole beginning of "Blood on the Tracks" is ice skating music? Thus one monitors the affairs of the ice-skaters in Beerstradten's painting. (But Dylan enters into the problem of desire in his ice capades, and into a relation to the feminine that is not quite ready to be here yet: the fierce autobiography of lost love.) Kapital is ice, frozen images, frozen in creative immobility, and these ice-skates of thinking were just what is needed for this "winter scene." "Blood on the tracks" is far more interesting than Pink Floyd's throbbing melancholia ("The Wall": "The thin ice of modern life") any day, I know you would say that, and I would agree. Ah well, just two men who sit at separate desks and dinner tables who write each other and have an understanding about something: Dylan before Pink Floyd, although Pink Floyd will do in a pinch, that's all. I think that Murakami mentions Dylan more often than he mentions Pink Floyd as well, as if to say: "Yeah, Pink Floyd, well they're mentionable!" (Poor Pink Floyd sits slogging in the distance in a pool of ice: he ain't got no ice skates: but Dylan does: There are lines of ice skates in the text of Dylan's verse. He's got his lines all over the place. In all, however, it is not the lines left in the ice by the skaters, but the overwhelming voluminous clouds that win the day. The contentions and parables of humankind and the earth (so well presented in the Breugel painting below) are diminished under a certain leaden volumescence of the clouds. The clouds are capable of sustaining a bad mood, more harsh weather is ahead, and the skaters are merely out for the slightest romp before it all turns frigid again, with icy gales and blinding cold. And yet the truth shines in this way, in a moment when it is under great threat, the skaters and their pleasant antics shine from beneath this curtain of death.
There will always be "another category," just as much as there will always be another indictment of nature, and another way to carve up the universe. I do not think that this post-card fits Breugel's technique. Breugel brought us in closer than this quaint little vignette: the butcher and the baker would be there: somebody might be falling in an oven: better to make the scene agitated with everyday life: even the dogs at a peasant's banquet would be falling in the snow.
Pieter Breugel the Elder: Hunters in the SnowTo be honest this image has much greater wabi-sabi. It may have even a greater sense of "Wu" or "Mu," but forgive me for resorting to an appeal to escape the problem of transcendence by resorting to "Oriental" aesthetics! You have already sent me Breugel's image, I do not have the post-card to hand but I may try to dig it up. Here it is from the post-mark from the date 20 November, 2002:
You begin with the line with an arrow pointing to the title of this work in German: Jaeger im Schnee; 1565: "The Beauty of this painting is perhaps unequaled." You do not use any more of your own words, perhaps nothing further can be said. Instead you let another author speak entirely for you: the burgeoning of thought into poetry: as if on this card you could only place what is poetic, with a side comment and a shrug and say: "This is the most beautiful." Now why is Breugel so beautiful while Beerstraaten come up as a besmattering of being a lonely fourth. Yes it is a winter scene: yes in both images there are skaters, but in Breugel there are skaters skating round in the distance: in the foreground we feel the heavy trudging of the hunters, we feel their exhaustion and wearyness, and we smell the fires, the dry wood smoke: all this do we see, not some frozen ice-cold epithet: Beerstraaten comes only as a distant second or fifth in comparison to what Breugel has accomplished. Yes, there are figures placed in a gaily comic pose in "the Castle of Muiden." Animation is key here, but it lacks the absolute peasant darkness and salt of the "Hunters in winter." Dark are the branches of trees: you got that right as you sank into your reverie in the last card about snow on black branches. Both of these are poetry. And yet to add one more turn of poetry, this is the poem you quote: sadly not in your own vision of a poem, but someone else's poem, someone I have never known in the depths of his solitude and moments of unbearable loneliness:
"Wolf Eyes
"Before my christening I was given
The name of one of the brothers
That the she-wolf suckled.
"All her life grandma will call me
In the flaxen black tongue
Wolfling.
Secretly she used to give me
Raw meat to eat
So I'd grow to be head-wolf.
I believed
My eyes would begin to shine
In the dark.
My eyes don't shine yet
Probably because the real dark
Hasn't yet begun to fall.
(Vasko Popa)
Who is this interloper, whom I have never heard from before? Who is this stranger who enters into our discourse? (And our discourse has always been about strangers and strange discourses: we have agreed to do one thing: to be true to each other through the communicative word, but not through the celibacy of discourse: and therefore the discourse is ribald: filled with upstarts and new-comers.
Forgive me a moment while I catch up: Vasko Popa was born in 1922, between the great wars, but close enough to be involved in the second European and world conflict profoundly. Imprisoned in a concentration camp during the war. He died in 1991 in his late sixties, hardly young, nor hardly a venerable old man, probably overburdened by his life in the camps he lived and died a full but relatively early life.
Popa wrote a lot of poems about wolves. He was a poet of the human condition, so one can only surmise that he wrote a great deal our condition as predators, hopelessly bound to their predator-hood, and yet somehow in need of some way beyond their predatory nature. It is not certain that such predators can leave their pre-possession for the nature of flesh, bloody meat-- and still remain real. He would speak of the irony of the tenderness and solidarity of wolves, of how they hang together in packs, and pick their prey off by wearing her or him down.
Vasko Popa did not write a philosophy of anything, for that philosophy is for most too far off; but preferred the immediacy of poetry to portray something closest to his own condition.
Oppermann contends that poetry is not "immediate;" he holds that the philosophical aspect of Popa has to do with a certain nostalgia that never is removed from the sense of decay it might carry: I add a quote from Bob Dylan: "Just when I thought I had lost everything, I found out you can always lose a little bit more..." thus, Oppermann replies in Popa's words, "the real dark/ Hasn't yet begun to fall."
A simple association, however: how are wolves different from the hunters we see here? The hunters are hunched down slightly in Pieter Beugel's depiction, seven ravens fly in Pieter Breugel's scene, not hunters but scavengers: one is aflight, the birds are subdued, or cawing in the dead, leafless black branches of the trees, black against a steel blue sky. Yet there are skaters, and so the situation is not desperate, simply despondant: the hunters have not returned with game, and we know that in Kreuff's language: "The game begins after."
The skaters in Beerstraaten's image have no foreground of a heavy set image: no three broken hunters, no black branches of trees, no large collection of dogs in the foreground, you only get with this image "skater's antics" and the emphasis of the picture, which is on a single castle of a single duke or nobleman. Breugel really sets these antics in the background. Moreover he places peasant hunters on foot, not noblemen on horses in the scene. This is truly great, and it's not in the least Marxist! It is not about the sufferings of the working class. It is about the reality that if you are to participate in any meaningful manner with this scene you will have to feel the damp and soaking leather of the hunters.
The genuine cinematic equivalent to this is Tarkowski's Andrei Rubliev. Rubliev too spares us of useless talk of castles, though he does present the problem shadow of the Machiavellian prince or the man of state who seems to be running the show for his own vainglory as well. The important aspect here is to see in Andrei Rubliev as in the "Jaeger im Schnee" that the scene has great deliberation, a drawing out of a specific scene to a great length. As a matter of fact I do not think we can really run our camera too much longer on Beerstraaten's scene: and we must hurry on, back to the cold slime and the mud: "the emptiness is endless... cold as a clay." Nevertheless in Bruegel's scene there is sparking flames of a gathering in the distance: three women, a man and a child tend to a flame, that is a fire going outside the homestead against the cold.
"Jaeger im Schnee" was produced in 1565 at the by Bruegel. That was about 4 years before his death. Bruegel was born in 1525, so that made him about 40 by the time he painted his painting. It is an excellent 40-year-old painting. It is accompanied by five other paintings, one of which is lost, according to modern account, each of which is supposed to represent the main events of each of the seasons. For some reason I feel compelled, and it is probably quite wrongly, that there must have been another unknown painting in this cycle, which should have been a total of seven paintings. Seven paintings, for seven planets, for seven gnostic Archons guarding our planet, maintaining the illusion of our form... I know that this explanation would leave you as rather tepid. But let us follow on just a little pace, and see if we reach our quarry.
The poet Popa utters the following gnostic message: "It's not dark yet." He might as well be saying, "I'm not dead yet," it would amount to the same thing. Nobody has died and lived to tell, the telling of stories is for the land of the living, there are no stories in the realm of the dead, only dust; Odysseus needs to sacrifice and pour blood in order for the stories to speak.
The promise is that these eyes will begin to shine: and the shining will begin with the "over exposure" of the retina to the "true light," a light that will not burn but will shine from the eyes themselves. Again it is the look of Oppermann in the flash of the camera light as his face is over exposed: a mystery and a hint of menace: "What was it you wanted? And who are you anyway?" This really travels from the womb of Isis that bore us aliens into the world: the gnostic conception of us aliens again: and the world is in one sense an obscene waste of ice. The scene however is more basic than some wealthy diversion, for in the background of Bruegel's painting there is the town with its sense of hope and faith, the simple rising steeple of the tallest edifice, still the church, and still beyond this is a forest and further on there rises the impossible steep clefts, both ribald and frozen... of the ice-mountains themselves. Just beyond this scene is impossible coldness that Herzog might speak of as the glaciation of grizzly bear... or perhaps now "wolf"... eyes.
You begin with the line with an arrow pointing to the title of this work in German: Jaeger im Schnee; 1565: "The Beauty of this painting is perhaps unequaled." You do not use any more of your own words, perhaps nothing further can be said. Instead you let another author speak entirely for you: the burgeoning of thought into poetry: as if on this card you could only place what is poetic, with a side comment and a shrug and say: "This is the most beautiful." Now why is Breugel so beautiful while Beerstraaten come up as a besmattering of being a lonely fourth. Yes it is a winter scene: yes in both images there are skaters, but in Breugel there are skaters skating round in the distance: in the foreground we feel the heavy trudging of the hunters, we feel their exhaustion and wearyness, and we smell the fires, the dry wood smoke: all this do we see, not some frozen ice-cold epithet: Beerstraaten comes only as a distant second or fifth in comparison to what Breugel has accomplished. Yes, there are figures placed in a gaily comic pose in "the Castle of Muiden." Animation is key here, but it lacks the absolute peasant darkness and salt of the "Hunters in winter." Dark are the branches of trees: you got that right as you sank into your reverie in the last card about snow on black branches. Both of these are poetry. And yet to add one more turn of poetry, this is the poem you quote: sadly not in your own vision of a poem, but someone else's poem, someone I have never known in the depths of his solitude and moments of unbearable loneliness:
"Wolf Eyes
"Before my christening I was given
The name of one of the brothers
That the she-wolf suckled.
"All her life grandma will call me
In the flaxen black tongue
Wolfling.
Secretly she used to give me
Raw meat to eat
So I'd grow to be head-wolf.
I believed
My eyes would begin to shine
In the dark.
My eyes don't shine yet
Probably because the real dark
Hasn't yet begun to fall.
(Vasko Popa)
Who is this interloper, whom I have never heard from before? Who is this stranger who enters into our discourse? (And our discourse has always been about strangers and strange discourses: we have agreed to do one thing: to be true to each other through the communicative word, but not through the celibacy of discourse: and therefore the discourse is ribald: filled with upstarts and new-comers.
Forgive me a moment while I catch up: Vasko Popa was born in 1922, between the great wars, but close enough to be involved in the second European and world conflict profoundly. Imprisoned in a concentration camp during the war. He died in 1991 in his late sixties, hardly young, nor hardly a venerable old man, probably overburdened by his life in the camps he lived and died a full but relatively early life.
Popa wrote a lot of poems about wolves. He was a poet of the human condition, so one can only surmise that he wrote a great deal our condition as predators, hopelessly bound to their predator-hood, and yet somehow in need of some way beyond their predatory nature. It is not certain that such predators can leave their pre-possession for the nature of flesh, bloody meat-- and still remain real. He would speak of the irony of the tenderness and solidarity of wolves, of how they hang together in packs, and pick their prey off by wearing her or him down.
Vasko Popa did not write a philosophy of anything, for that philosophy is for most too far off; but preferred the immediacy of poetry to portray something closest to his own condition.
Oppermann contends that poetry is not "immediate;" he holds that the philosophical aspect of Popa has to do with a certain nostalgia that never is removed from the sense of decay it might carry: I add a quote from Bob Dylan: "Just when I thought I had lost everything, I found out you can always lose a little bit more..." thus, Oppermann replies in Popa's words, "the real dark/ Hasn't yet begun to fall."
A simple association, however: how are wolves different from the hunters we see here? The hunters are hunched down slightly in Pieter Beugel's depiction, seven ravens fly in Pieter Breugel's scene, not hunters but scavengers: one is aflight, the birds are subdued, or cawing in the dead, leafless black branches of the trees, black against a steel blue sky. Yet there are skaters, and so the situation is not desperate, simply despondant: the hunters have not returned with game, and we know that in Kreuff's language: "The game begins after."
The skaters in Beerstraaten's image have no foreground of a heavy set image: no three broken hunters, no black branches of trees, no large collection of dogs in the foreground, you only get with this image "skater's antics" and the emphasis of the picture, which is on a single castle of a single duke or nobleman. Breugel really sets these antics in the background. Moreover he places peasant hunters on foot, not noblemen on horses in the scene. This is truly great, and it's not in the least Marxist! It is not about the sufferings of the working class. It is about the reality that if you are to participate in any meaningful manner with this scene you will have to feel the damp and soaking leather of the hunters.
The genuine cinematic equivalent to this is Tarkowski's Andrei Rubliev. Rubliev too spares us of useless talk of castles, though he does present the problem shadow of the Machiavellian prince or the man of state who seems to be running the show for his own vainglory as well. The important aspect here is to see in Andrei Rubliev as in the "Jaeger im Schnee" that the scene has great deliberation, a drawing out of a specific scene to a great length. As a matter of fact I do not think we can really run our camera too much longer on Beerstraaten's scene: and we must hurry on, back to the cold slime and the mud: "the emptiness is endless... cold as a clay." Nevertheless in Bruegel's scene there is sparking flames of a gathering in the distance: three women, a man and a child tend to a flame, that is a fire going outside the homestead against the cold.
"Jaeger im Schnee" was produced in 1565 at the by Bruegel. That was about 4 years before his death. Bruegel was born in 1525, so that made him about 40 by the time he painted his painting. It is an excellent 40-year-old painting. It is accompanied by five other paintings, one of which is lost, according to modern account, each of which is supposed to represent the main events of each of the seasons. For some reason I feel compelled, and it is probably quite wrongly, that there must have been another unknown painting in this cycle, which should have been a total of seven paintings. Seven paintings, for seven planets, for seven gnostic Archons guarding our planet, maintaining the illusion of our form... I know that this explanation would leave you as rather tepid. But let us follow on just a little pace, and see if we reach our quarry.
The poet Popa utters the following gnostic message: "It's not dark yet." He might as well be saying, "I'm not dead yet," it would amount to the same thing. Nobody has died and lived to tell, the telling of stories is for the land of the living, there are no stories in the realm of the dead, only dust; Odysseus needs to sacrifice and pour blood in order for the stories to speak.
The promise is that these eyes will begin to shine: and the shining will begin with the "over exposure" of the retina to the "true light," a light that will not burn but will shine from the eyes themselves. Again it is the look of Oppermann in the flash of the camera light as his face is over exposed: a mystery and a hint of menace: "What was it you wanted? And who are you anyway?" This really travels from the womb of Isis that bore us aliens into the world: the gnostic conception of us aliens again: and the world is in one sense an obscene waste of ice. The scene however is more basic than some wealthy diversion, for in the background of Bruegel's painting there is the town with its sense of hope and faith, the simple rising steeple of the tallest edifice, still the church, and still beyond this is a forest and further on there rises the impossible steep clefts, both ribald and frozen... of the ice-mountains themselves. Just beyond this scene is impossible coldness that Herzog might speak of as the glaciation of grizzly bear... or perhaps now "wolf"... eyes.
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