The Truth About Soviet Cars

This is the truth of Soviet Cars: I have nothing to say. Yet Oppermann insists that there must be more discussion of, about and upon soviet cars, so I will try my best to both placate this insatiable need for Soviet cars that he apparently has had since a conversation we had relating to these cars after he sent this card over three years ago.

The Soviet vehicle: a dream machine of the worker who could also produce enough to purchase one of these automobiles. I have heard it said that only members of the Communist Party had enough ...Kapital... (one of the issueBlogger: Oppermann in Praxis - Edit Post "The Truth About Soviet Cars"s in the Soviet Union is that Kapital is still denoted in terms of political status: cultural or political Kapital, as opposed to mere financial capital, indicating that though in a sense it was a noble effort upon the part of the first idealists to obtain a truly egalitarian society, the implicit corruption and "mob/mafia rule" of this nation quickly worked its black magic to suffocate even the smallest cry for the anarchy implicit in the "soviet," "working community.") was capable of maintaining one of these vehicles.

Within this picture we see the auto-de-jour of the USSR: Запоро́жец, Zaporozhets. Older and newer models of the ZAZ-968 stand beside one another. The name comes from a term for a man, a Cossack, a kind of military people, who is from a "fortified encampment" called a "Zaporizhian Sich."

It is not clear if Oppermann actually saw himself driving one of these Soviet vehicles, though I find it incredibly easy to imagine him now in his great black coat and scarf, and his (soon to be stolen) black hat driving around in one of these things. It would make more sense that an existential philosopher of his caliber should drive some car that was suitably European, pessimistic, and yet heymish, to use a Yiddish expression. At home on the road, Oppermann seemed much less at home in his "green-mobile," a green station wagon, which was the first car I remember him having. Oppermann has spoken repeatedly of his experiences driving his father's "Land Rover" with almost nightmarish repugnance. His automobile of current years I feel disinclined to describe, for fear of somehow exposing Oppermann to bomb threats, or the occasional "banana-in-the-exhaust-pipe" routine, save that it truly lacks the proletarian thrust of the Zaporozhet.

It may not be really proletarian: the car represents a kind of dream of anti-Kapital. A machine, which if kept decently would be noted for its decent inoffensiveness, lacking the phallic stupidity of a Porsche or Corvette. Moreover the vehicle, intended for utility rather than for being a status symbol, should be kept more for its capacity to last for years and years, to endure, gain patina, perhaps become a family heirloom, rather than for its infinite consumable, destructibility. It takes a good advertising campaign to level its economic shot-gun barrels on the consumer... or rather, one efficient bullet to the temple of the sophisticated man: no sooner has he purchased his prestigious auto than it has become a useless relic, a piece of junk. The Zaporozhet seems to remain an item of desire that fits the Oppermannian image.

If I were to psychologize, or better, theologize, the automobile, one could suggest that it's name is certainly Artemis. It is a symbol of desire that does not have a literal woman attached to it, rather it is a matter of polishing, working in grease and muck, maintenance, the occasional high speed romp. One could imagine that within the confines of such an automobile there is room for everything from the experience of conveying a family through the snow to an elder parent's home... to a maddened blurry speed, whining and threatening to wrench the engine from the chassis. The former dream is a dream: productive relations: the "Begriff" of the Soviet is contained in a leisurely and safe drive through the snows of a winter scene in a forest to a stately home of elder parents. The latter is a suicidal nightmare, akin to Anthony Perkins playing the role of Hippolitos in Dassin's (1962) Phaedra (he was listening to Bach, by the way, which generally can be listened to anywhere, Dassin's allusion to the prayer to Poseidon). Both may coexist in this brief reverie, though only the former is to be desired. Perhaps there is some other context for the Soviet car: Oppermann solitary, extends himself on a long-ish drive through the city to get to his friend's apartments. They sit outside in the cold weather, chat and drink tea... the city continues with its sodium lights and its ancient European style all round them, somewhat indifferent to the fate of any individual human beings.

Oppermann has termed some of his most significant encounters of recent as most suitably situated in an automobile. "The only safe place," he admits, "is an automobile." All the more suitable then should it be in a slightly "Sneaky-Russian" car. Russians are by their nature rather sneaky. The car even looks like his long since stolen black hat to a certain extent.

Oppermann mailed this card to me on July 14th 2003. There was neither date nor signature, just his own hand, which he had replicated before, a thousand times already, and was in itself unmistakable to me as being his, of his oevre.

"I have had this for 21 years. I find even the cars beautiful. Murakami in an airplane, yes. The Fifth Element, crap, so be it. Dylan, desolation row, it's alright. Thank you for your rantings. Thank you for the CD with all the various music on it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Sweet dreams."

Along about this time Oppermann and I began the rant: "20 years, son! 20 years!" and "It's always another 20 years!" This card does not contain this particular rant, always with the voice of an authoritarian Southern "Judge." It does seem dreamy, it even bestows upon me the blessing or possibly the curse of having "sweet dreams." I remember that it was somewhere along this road in time that we began to say that I was a "dabbler," based on my experience of driving to the Krishnamurti foundation with Corinne and challenging the store keeper there with some questions on "what is the Krishnamurti foundation?" or something of the like. It was soon after this that in addition to being a dabbler that we discovered the work of Richard Thompson:

She said, 'you dream too much!
you're dreaming this while I'm talking to you!"
It's gonna end bad
It's gonna end bad.

We would just shorten this, to become a bizarre mixture of the old crotchety southern judge and the sleek red-dress speaking seductress I always see in Richard Thompson's song: "You dream too much!"

It was a time of holding patterns. We had been dealing with holding patterns since Oppermann was caught trying to return to the United States from Germany back on 9/11/2001. I was just returning from my first trip to Seattle, and had just been introduced to the writing of Murakami if, I am not mistaken... maybe it was the year before. Yet I know that within that year I had begun to insist that Murakami was best read for his intoxicating nature on a long airplane ride. Maybe it was at that time that I managed to write Oppermann a whole book of Hiroshige post-cards (that he gave to me for the express purpose of sending them to him) while sitting on the airplane back to L.A. Perhaps, as I think back on that slew of Hiroshige post cards, I was too hasty in writing Oppermann on them. Perhaps they needed to be faded or tattered just a little-- to betray upon them just a smattering of impermanence, patina, would have made them more beautiful than in their efficiently reproduced form... a form lacking an essential component of "patina" that Oppermann and I will return to again and again. This care-wearing is some essential part of the beauty of the soul, it happens in the breaking and the broken. Perhaps it happens when one sends a sufficiently patina'd card, or an old Soviet post card. Perhaps it is endemic in the essence of a Soviet car as well as a card.

The card was sent on the 14th of July, but I believe I kept visiting Seattle in late April or early May as a rule. What do these months mean? The most vivid thing I seem to recall at this moment of my first visit to Oppermann in Seattle was not of Oppermann at all... at this moment it seemed to be of sharing an image of an upside-down man done in mint-green with my former analyst Lee Roloff. I remember that I wore a black mandarin jacket that my soon to be former wife Corinne had given me from her recent trip to China. And I remember that famous CD of music that Oppermann gave me: Dylan live excerpts: he kept pointing to the distortion of Dylan's voice: "A simple twist of fa-a-ate."

At this point we need to turn to the interior of the automobile and to the workings of Kiarostami: from Soviet cars to the interior of cars. Perhaps it is unfair to make this second turning from the automobile as such to the human being inside the automobile. I simply could not find an adequate image of the exterior of Kiarostami's automobiles, perhaps this is because the phenomonology of our culture prefers the graven image, the icon, the image of subjectivity as a signature of poesis: of "what we do" or "what is made." We have focused only on the portrait of the automobile, and now we are focused on the interior portrait of the drivers and passengers of the automobile.

These Images of Kiarostami automobile Interiors are out of place, but they are needed as a possible trajectory for speaking and thinking of the Soviet car in another space of alterity to the apparent conditions of knowing and seeing in our society, beyond the limits of thinking of the western automobile.

Perhaps from this w

e may arrive at the classic scene from Soviet cinema: the "auto highway scene" from Tarkovsky's (1972) Solaris. This image may in fact be truly great, it is supposed to represent, at least to my recollection, the experience of interstellar space travel in the manner described by Stanislav Lem in his book by the same name:

"Suddenly there was a shrill grating sound, like a steel blade being drawn across a sheet of wet glass. This was it, the descent. If I had not seen the figures racing across the dial, I would not have noticed any change in direction. The stars having vanished long since, my gaze was swallowed up on the pale reddish glow of infinity. I could hear my heart thudding heavily. I could feel the coolness of the air-conditioning on my neck, although my face seemed on fire. I regretted not having caught a glimpse of the Prometheus, but the ship must have been out of sight by the time the automatic controls had raised the shutter of my porthole."

From this vantage point, speed and the Soviet car speeds dizzyingly into the future, a sense of profound compression and constriction as the Zaporozhet of the future glances into the alien. The line between the Greek titan, who gave fire as an attempt at restitution for a lack of skill, a notion of "forethought" to naked "humanity," extends through the Cossack "dwellers in fortified encampments" through to a vehicle that encounters the limits of consciousness, the alien, in the form most familiar, a difficult love of the feminine that offers no redemption.

A dream that may be a sweet dream is a dream that we may "dream too much" (those are her words)! The twist of fate seems to come as a jolt and twisting of our destination, whatever we thought we were or were going to be is gone. Gone is the "Arcadian" but gone also is the sense that we might end in a certain kind of hell or rage that we presumed from those days. Gone is the Good, for the Good is beyond being. What we wrestle with in the fire and the intense heat of this time cannot be spoken of till "now" has become sufficiently patina'd, the heart sufficiently broken in the essence of time.