The Ongoing Story: The Presentiments of Vulnerability

This particular post is informed with a singular request from Oppermann: "Please, write more blogs!" -I am happy to oblige him. The request was genuine enough. It was in fact open and vulnerable in a profound way, and that is what drew me to it: the presentiments of vulnerability.

I wonder why I have taken some time to be silent?

At first I will try to reduce my silence to a family psychological interpretation about creativity in the Ayres family: passages in the rythm of my creative fury followed by silence, gestation, absence. And the gestation and absence, like in Kleist's "Story of 'O'" is all too important. My father used to work in creative paroxysms or spurts. The language is partially sexualized, and distasteful to me to think about, nonetheless I will write it: "he worked in creative spurts." Does this mean that he had at moments mad love affairs with his anima, which subsequently left her abandoned, or perhaps completed, with some figment or fragment of a "completed work."

My father achieved a fairly high degree of accomplishment as an artist. In fact he produced a film "Altars of the East" and then later edited it from its enormous length (six or eight hours) to a more condensed version of itself: "Altars of the World." I believe that his longer work, which to my knowledge is now lost, "Altars of the East" would have offered me a more interesting vision, were it available to this day. "More interesting," that is to say, than "Altars of the World," which, while retaining some incredible montage and general footage, still somehow seems too hurried: vignettes of great master teachers are reduced to less than 20 to 30 seconds. I would hope that instead of my father's voice giving an eternal "gloss" of what went on in a specific religion that it would be more interesting to spend time with the spiritual teachers and actually hear what they said to a much greater depth. But I digress: the point was that he had enough of a "spurt" of creative energy to make two motion pictures, the latter of which gained serious critical acclaim.

My father also made paintings and carvings. One of the carvings is depicted here of an "armored bird," as my father used to call it. Birds bones are hollow to conserve energy while flying: birds are highly refined adaptations in order to attain the ability of flight: but in one sense terribly fragile. I remember a comment from a historian concerning ancient suits of armor: that they were quite suprisingly comfortable to be worn. Nevertheless a bird (and my father always was guarded when he talked to me of "birds," meaning "women"), covering it's wings in im-pregnable (immune to creative spurting of any kind) armor renders the bird in all likelihood flightless.

Two nights ago I had a dream that I shot a man in armor. His armor could not withstand my point-blank shot. I thought for a while about Jung's dream of shooting Siegfried in the company of a savage. The man in the armor was in my dream a "betrayer," and there was no blood: the treacherous, defended complex was bloodless, just an assemblage of an empty suit of steel. I figure it may be like this: defenses, armored posturings are always treacherous, presentiments of treason.

But again I will write to Oppermann because of his pre-sentiments of vulnerability. Somehow we become able to deal with the fact that we are... pregnable (and this is the case with Kleist's Marquise of "O" as well). The painted bird, a beautiful title I have always thought, but one that is connected to a book I have not read ...and the armored bird: flapping about helpless or suspended in outer space: radiant, but somehow an entity that can only happen in a symbolic universe that does not obey the rules of... gravity.

My father's relation to women was always highly guarded. He put them behind armor or behind bars. Part of the result was that he died, in a sense, broken, profoundly broken. And I mean by "broken" in the midst of a kind of loneliness that was inconsolable to any attempt to break through.

My friend Professor (the name he is called is "Professor" or "Professor Marvin") has a way of speaking about the children we work with saying "kids don't know what love is," and in a sense that is what I felt my father finally struggled with, maybe till the very end: he somehow lost, forgot, did not know that he was loveable, that he was loved. He ceased to know what love is.

Of recent while speculating about becoming a Jungian Analyst I had to deal with bringing in this "Armored Bird" which my analyst dubbed "crazy anima figure" into the process of becoming a Jungian analyst. This has to do with the idea that I would actually bring the indictments of one woman who has judged me very harshly and unfairly into the process of my application for training as an analyst. I do not think I want to bring the armored bird in. I don't want to bring in my "crazy anima" either. I would rather leave her out here for the crazed experiements with my friend Oppermann, where we find ourselves wrapt for several weeks in terms of creative energy producing the phallic columns of the textual presentation, then pregnant, presentiment and silent, and then beginning again from out of some desert. The Desert, says Jodorowsky in "El Topo," "The Desert is a circle who's center and circumphrence is everywhere and who's center is nowhere. The way out of this desert is a spiral."

That is to say that the desert is a place that is no place. We have been burrowing in our "Wohnung" in some subterranean passage for some time now. Perhaps we will emerge some kind of silver gilded bird: a bird in a cage that is no cage: that has become an armour with its attendant impossible weight, so that once again we will be only found in a symbolic space, a space that is no place. Na koja abad.

An Effort to Enter into the Conception of Silence

This essay is based on the previous discussion of the "Silences of Dr. Oppermann." However the purvey of this essay is much broader and more facing into a general and ultimately "speculative" or "Theoretical" dimension of experience. As such this essay threatens to break with the particular, and with it's capacity for singularity.

Thus silence may be said to be the first confrontation with the particular, and with singularity. And this is the first thing that may be said about silence. That in it's essence it represents non-particularity.

Is silence the terrible love of communion? The terrible love of annihilation?

This essay is also pursuant to a dream I experienced last night with Bob Dylan, a man with seemingly endless capacity to speak, and not keep silent, but with a capacity in his speaking to break one's heart endlessly.

Bob Dylan is Oppermann's and my favorite of thinkers, and above all what has ever been best in American thinking (since thinking like this is currently not possible in circles of American academia, we have at least our lone and singular bard who sings outside the institution's walls - and his singularity is his song, far beyond the common outcry of "everyday man" to be "unique," as the Americans fashion and utterly commodify "uniqueness").

Murakami is right to place Dylan's "hard rain is going to fall" at the end of his essay on the split: exemplum fictivum. Murakami writes by exampling fiction: his writing is not an actual novel, it is a representation of a novel.

But the science of Murakami: since he represents is one that represents an ontological aesthetic, an ultimate act of literature: is the conception of a Japanese man of letters: a single cut under the crescent moon: shomen-uchi.

There are two kinds of silence: there is the silence of abuse and there is the silence of meditation. The silence of abuse is the silence of evil: it is the silencing of the cries of reproach and pain and grief. The silence of meditation is the silence of hope: it is the capacity to see the face of Love in the hands and faces of those men or women who are bent into cruelty and rage at seeing their salvation in our destruction.

The silence of hope is the silence before thought: and thought goes to the differing of the originary cry of reproach or assertion. Thought is the aesthetic of art as it stands against utility (which is the blind assertion of the will to power); it is ornament and difference.

In silence we are one; in silence God and mortal beings become one; in silence.

The obvious pain of the silence of abuse lends itself to it's evidence of suffering, and to gravity. But the silence of hope must come as an equal second. It must provide awareness when our situation always shows that we are thrown into suffering and in some way have been made to keep silent. This silence is drawn from the facticity that we, out of trickery, or stupidity, or out of something unspeakable (since all explanations are ever laughable)... survive. This survival in the face of all doubt, the doubt that states that precisely if we were fully aware of the situation we would in fact kill ourselves: this is a hope that is at the limits of language, and harshly rebukes the belief in the pessimism that goes into the words of ultimate negativity: the desire to die. (Levinas comments on this most horrible thought at the beginning of "totality and infinity" as "the grim possibility of suicide.") But this essay is an effort to speak, and say why it is so important to survive, this is the effort at the root of the "beyond" of the will to power of: if thought is in words... then... words are something else. If no thought is in words, then words remain lifeless, without the touch of the soul, unanimated, words remain the same: they signify only what they are intended to, in some ultimate cry of despair the Habermasians might call "communicative action." "Communicative action" is effective philosophic lobotomy (or, equally, vasectomy, ): refusing to face the most horrible question: it is a contention that ontological thinking is a kind of sickness (Wittgenstein's contention). Any form of philosophic "therapy" to somehow re-anesthetize is precisely that: anti-art: anti-aesthesis.

Thinking knows already that every postulation is a painful travesty: but out of some care (to reach out and connect) asserts itself just the same through writing: the need to reach out and connect is pre-critical; it has to be if we validate the possibility that civilization actually is born out under the sign of hope (Constantine believed this to be the Chrismon, but this was a false literalization of "compassion").

In the dream with Dylan I wept at first, I mean what else is there to do with the poet of the broken heart? "A hard rain's a gonna fall." The man has a great deal to say. But I told him in the end that I had searched very near and very far: I had looked in so many places: I had tried to become a "doctor" as though this could somehow make a statement of some sort of greatness of search. But now I stand at the other end of any accomplishment of "doctoring" and I don't know what to do. I simply stand, bare, weeping, grief-stricken.

I told Dylan that he should read Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund; he told me that I should listen to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." At this time I cannot listen to George Gershwin, because his blue is too light, too light for me, and it has not come to a critical mass of negativity that would present an outcry of the soul (Coletrane's music for example). I cannot take the Gershwinian approach to capitalism, even if through the Bohemian elegance of New York City. By comparison Coletrane's "A Love Supreme" is a pure paean to hope.

Hesse is one of Oppermann's favorites. I have even said once, jokingly, that Oppermann wants to one day become a Hesse. (I also attempted to repair this statement with the added comment that I hope one day that Oppermann will become an image of himself: not merely the image of someone else, nor the mere emptiness of subjective "uniqueness" incipient in American capitalism).

On Why I am Such a Humble Man

"But is Ayres a Geck? He is often a Dude, no question about that (in a way in which Raphaelson is not, I believe), but to be a Geck, well, there is an added element there, well, no, two really. One is vanity. This requirement Ayres meets. He is one of the vainest men I have ever met. I mean, here is a guy who is so cruelly in shape that it makes his best friend (who is twenty pounds overweight and is losing his hair) cringe, and then Ayres has the gumption to complain about his own double-chin. This is like Steffi Graf who used to wipe the tennis court with her hapless opponents along the lines of 6-0, 6-1, and then complained about how bad her forehand had been during the match. Ayres is profoundly vain as a man (maybe not so much as a thinker). But is he a Geck? We shall see some other time."

I will say in response to Oppermann that I find it embarassing to indict myself so fully on this web-log, to appear naked or shirtless as it were. I do not think I have ever, nor will I ever pose in this manner again. I will however ask that we stretch and walk.

I also chose this title because of the style Nietzsche's "Ecce Homo" (I pray that 120 or so years later I will not go insane shortly after publishing this).

The following image is strictly arcadian stupidity: It can only follow that there is a middle aged vanity that ingratiously follows.

Images Work

A comment I made to my friend Oppermann in a telephone call last night: "Yes, but you realize that we have in fact worked on something together." And this makes a moment of a shared weekend of experiences all the more important: we have worked on our images. We have worked on images, yes indeed with an aspect of nostalgia and incest, in the images of Arcadia. We have also worked on what was compelling in those images: the sulphrous element of compulsion that might be identified in the way adolescence smoldered. Of course such an element is now a warming fire, now a raging inferno, and one ought to be careful playing with such an element.

But we were not merely playing, this is not play that has no intent or meaning: the effort here is to attempt to bring some closure to the discussion of 20 years, and to open up the next 20 years of discourse. As we know "20 years" is often our expression for a condemnation, a sentencing: but all sentences have their finitude and their singularity, even if there is no singularity that can withstand the tug and pull of eternity, that same eternity that turn's anyone's voice as cold as ice, because it is the chemical rending in the furnace.

But somehow the playing with images here has blackened me in a pleasing manner, patina'd, deepened, charred. For what is there that is worth writing about if it is not the real immediate quality of this friend and I: I don't know if there is any other reason to go out at all into the world except to survive and make friends. The rest is all bullshit: manure and cannon fodder that we have to build on to make a better world.

I feel in a sense older with my friend, and in a meaningful way closer to him. I know we could say that we were "so much older then," that we are "younger than that now," to quote the words of our prophet, Bob Dylan. But I would say that we are both older and younger: we may be growing younger towards our images: younger, increasingly open. We may be older if older means that the threshold of consciousness has grown worn with age and the passage and tread of so many feet, that our lives are not some stark bare newness, but places where many have dwellt and many will continue to dwell: large women and screaming babes, steppenwolves, yes, and many others, wanderers, vagrants, immigrants, medicine men, accountants, saints, promoters, academics even.... the list goes on with the expansiveness of the dwelling in time not in mere physical space. The dwelling abides.

I may even more carefully say that we are growing "younger towards death," as the poet David Whyte might say, knowing such words are precarious without real circumspection, knowing that they are words of courage, telling us to be not afraid of fear or age. So for all we can say about the, yes, indeed, hopeless technological condition of the web log, the images thank us for this intensive dialogical work. I believe they thank us, I believe they really do, by virtue of a certain sense of gladness in my soul.

I kept thinking on my morning walk about the idea of opening a kitchen. I wanted to open a "soul kitchen" underneath which I would write the words "If you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen!" I was thinking of a man I regard as being a really stupid fellow, who had said that he was once a psychotherapist, but then he switched careers because all that is required is definitely easy to burn out on; he told Deborah to be prepared if I needed to switch careers. I took umbridge at his smugness. I kept thinking, "Get out of the kitchen if you don't like the heat!"

In this reverie of a dream kitchen we (Deborah and I) would sell both soul food and vegitarian, and we would have a front counter where we would sell small golden birds and hearts. I dream to myself that Oppermann would visit this kitchen: and he would sit in a rustic wooden chair on the Northern California coast and look out at the sunlight on the not too distant oaks or pine trees, and we would pass yet another day in conversation.

The meaning of singularity: a useless piece of ephemera

What I am about to publish can be rescinded at least in part if there is any violation of personal integrity or copyright.



Its getting dark so early
We'll be gone so soon
But pretty one more time
Before we're down the line
Pretty one more time.
(Greg Brown)

Now cresswell has assigned to us a particular cleft. That he was being a bit of an inquisitive teenager and was investigating the rather pleasant situation afforded by R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat. Fritz is a bit of a lady's man. And while it is infinitely comfortable sticking one's hand into the sports bra of some familiar co-ed while one is in college, the situation becomes tedious, boorish, or even pathetic for we older men advancing on the age of 40. This is not to disrespect the feminine, nor the time that one takes in college to be a rollicking young cat frisking among such feminine affection. It is just that at our age the point and the place of this becomes increasingly absurd: there is still the same desire... though hopefully, and perhaps reprovingly we are asked to mature by the parts of ourselves that look on this matter with a rather reproving intent.

It will remain uncertain:

1. If Cresswell got laid [and if there is any truth to "Fritz the Cat" it should be that "someone got laid" (lucky) - or in Dylan's words "Or maybe it was an accident"] some time round watching Fritz the Cat on magnetic VHS video tape that was on loan from the Tutt Library during the time of his rental.
2. Whether Cresswell got the movie back in time, or whether he was forced to pay harsh and draconian late fees that might be attached to such an object when it is found to be delinquent.
3. What Cresswell thought of Fritz the cat.
   

Only later would Oppermann and Ayres both secretly and individually confirm the intent of Dylan's words to ring truer than the epithets of Fritz the Cat, that getting laid is rarely anything to do with getting lucky (saving the question of the "accident" for later is always a good thing to do). In all likelihood Oppermann already knew all that. Though this does not mean we cast aspersions on the ladies who favored us with even a single moment of their graces: we thank them all. The greatness of the music goes beyond that, and the (at times turgid and fetid) idiot winds of sentimentality of this (e.g. "Visions of Johanna") will carry us indeed a very long way into the long, long farewell.

On the obverse/reverse of this page these words of Oppermann appear:

Lieber Herr Doktor,

I am writing you this note at 2:15 in the morning of February 23, 1988, in the hope that Cresswell has returned Fritz die Katze and that thusly this little piece of paper has lost it's official value. I have had a rather nauseating day (in Europe it generally rains on such days; here it doesn't even do that which makes it all the more nauseating) but I got done with my paper yesterday and today I indeed finished my last reading for the class (now I'm actually sitting here, reading Dostoevsky's "The Possessed"). Day after tomorrow (or actually today) tomorrow then that is I shall be going forth to Susi's house - the thought of which is both slightly nauseating and, at the same time, pleasant. I would prefer spending the block break by myself though. Soon Diotima will be coming back; I dreamed of waves last night and I simply don't know what's going to happen
1.) If it hasn't happened already
or
2.) if it isn't too late to happen
3.) If it isn't both

(circle one of the above)

A very pleasant day to you, my friend
(and if our existences aren't going to meet before wednesday afternoon, Susi's phone is
6...

your friend,

Dr. Dr. h.o. J.P. Oppermann

PS: I got an "A" on a paper back today - I'm beginning to think that Blasenheim might be the Übermensch

To be honest it will forever remain uncertain if Oppermann was just a kiss ass for Blasenheim, as if these grades really mattered to him (but they did, I mean he was a straight "A" student), or whether there was a creative synthesis between Oppermann's waking thought and Blasenheim's exuberance. And this itself was a fleeting symbol of the Übermensch. This then was a shining forth, a brilliant moment for Oppermann, when academic excellence meant something: that was the full force of the Arcadian. As if a letter grade made any difference! -Well it did indicate a gratifying moment when an esteemed professor poured down his appreciation toward you: that was golden, and that was Übermenschlich, because it was a matter of joy that spanned beyond the boundaries of academia per-se and entered really into the realm of the eschaton. In such an experience we could say that it is radically futural: as from Corinthians it seemed in that moment of Arcadia that we were so much older then: "For now we know in part, but then we shall know, even as we are known."

I would like to ask, for the record, why wasn't this actually called in German: "Fritz der Kater" -?

Friedrich Nietzsche: Genius and Definitive Precursor to "The Dude"

Now Cresswell was a Nietzschean first and foremost. He seemed to mention more than once that he had a Nietzschean chess board from Roecken. Cresswell was interested in the Overman, and Oppermann was interested in the Overman, der Übermensch. But the experience of "Fritz the Cat" was profoundly banal, there really was no hope for transcendence from this Art Crumb kind of nauseating banality: behind it was something getting ready to really make you sick. San Francisco in the 60's and early 70's is the very essence and definition of the smell of decaying eucalyptus leaves. Is this all America could really offer: we could say in the late eighties, a decade and a half easily since Hunter S. Thompson had pronounced that we had seen the high water mark of the consciousness revolution break: twenty years after the summer of love in 68. We were there too late. We could feel some of the feeling, the vaguest traces of it all, before we got embroiled in the political world of the Eighties, and the Nineties: where we got to business and went to work as a Nation, and we were wearing all of us these blue wool suits. And everyone was going to hell. We were too late. But the same damn party continued on into the wee hours of 2:30 in the morning anyhow.

And what was Oppermann doing at 2:30 in the morning? Somehow at 2:30 everyone becomes a figment of their own existential play: "No exit:" I could no more escape myself and who I was going to be than could he, a man born after the brief juncture of the 60's revolution. We were men born too late, and the dream had faltered. Nevertheless we continued to exist.


Nowadays we pass grades back and forth, little spidery black letters: "This one gets a C+, Ayres, you're barely passing!" And we seem to jeer and taunt each other with all these failed black letters, all these ledger notes that sink into debts and obligations: there is no longer an "A," rather there are complications and serious setbacks in the work: if your case is interesting then it is likely to extend the experience to a longer trial, that is all! In the end the letter grade is for the condemned man: the Homo sacer, who is in essence unsacrificeable because he is already condemned as not being sacred before the law, having fallen from sacrosanct, the truth of the finest vision of singularity is its capacity to become a sacrifice, to turn against the infinite stretch of eternity with the singular act that marks a depth of soul that is as unfathomable as eternity is broad.

Now let us take another step, before this hanging judge, before we get to the ballad of the drifter before another hanging judge, we have the Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest:

Judas pointed down the road
And said, "Eternity!"
"Eternity?" said Frankie Lee,
With a voice as cold as ice.
"That's right," said Judas Priest, "Eternity,
Though you might call it 'Paradise.'"

"I don't call it anything,"
Said Frankie Lee with a smile.
"All right," said Judas Priest,
"I'll see you after a while.

I said before that Eternity is rather broad. And we all show our cliche'd conceit in the end, and that is where our "existence" grows thin, "nothing is revealed."

Now Oppermann has a good deal to speak on nausea and rain, there is a certain fine drizzle that means nothing, that simply sprays and soaks everything, and every damn thing just gets wet, and it is not even a HARD rain that's going to fall, its just a nauseating rain, and Oppermann is saying that here, in his barely figured 19 year old consciousness, in Colorado in 1988 he is saying that in the United States there is not even rain. I'm sorry, Oppermann, there is not even any rain, and I don't know if anything ever even got wet aside from your own soul, and that may have only been a sign of something, a false-wetness of the United States, that never got wet enough for you to actually settle down, because now you are leaving it. It has never been wet enough for you here. It is not even wet enough for you to feel appropriately nauseated: and this was your destiny: I am not here being nauseated nearly enough!

Maybe if Oppermann had gone into the East: into the fall of the Soviet Block, or the rise of the Mafia Empire in Russia, and the infinitely more controlled mafia empire in the United States... maybe you could have gone into Kafka's mafia empire like in Der Prozeß: where betrayed in the end by your own warders they could have taken you out and stabbed you with a knife, and like a dog you would have possibly cried from the depth of your singular soul. As it is there is barely enough rain in America, and you are complaining about that. Oppermann, there is admittedly this bare, and soul-less place that for the time being we live in called America. Later after this you will cease to participate in "America" and the "West Coast" and what is "American" half way round the world it seems from your native Germany. You will become once more, again, a German. You will have avoided, in all likelihood any mandatory military service, and so you will have avoided the potentially abusive hardening of a young man sent out on maneuvers. You will become a German and you will have to make an accounting for all those years you've spent with all those soul-less Americans, who drove Nausea to its furthest pitch: there no longer was anything in America but one colossal sports stadium with glaring daylight lights.

It should also be highlighted that this was Oppermann's arcadian usage of his spare time: reading from Dostoevsky's "The Possessed," which could be translated also to mean: those not in possession of their own destiny. And indeed this was the case at this very moment. After all you and I both know to sneer and make a mockery of the notions of "innocent free will." Rather we will term this that there is possession.

Maybe you were possessed by an anima figure whom you renamed Diotima (forcing me to think endlessly of Robert Musil's absolutely bitter, twisted irony round his naming one of the main characters relentlessly "Diotima" in such a way that it is an ultimate indictment of her pretensions. NO. Rather I believe that your "Diotima" had a certain softness to her, and maybe a little more grace, at least insofar as I remember her, and I do remember her sending me a post card of a white tiger crossing a green river from India... at least I think I did. This image is lost to anyone but me now. It is just a memory and thus means nothing, it has already grown thin, thin to the point of obsolesence, so forgive me please, Oppermann!).

There remain for me two questions:
1) What is the existential figure of Oppermann's adolescent ambivalence concerning Susi Willett and Diotima (and ultimately, post-Arcadia: ex-wife as wife to ex wife as X.-)? - that is that he was neurotically torn between two women: one who always seemed a bit of a gentle, less pronounced, form of femininity: Susi; and the other other is the one whom you never saw after Colorado College: someone whom time has simply swept away.
2) Why did Oppermann feel he have to write on the back of this Cresswellian Fritz the Cat receipt?

Once Again, the Dude... Definitively

"The dude abides": the collision of Oppermann's consciousness with a tribute to a lack of success. The paralyzing humor of abandoning all cliche: the confrontation with meaning.

"Smokey, you mark that frame in 8, you're entering a world of pain!!"

Oppermann even had a dream where he was speaking with this other German fellow about the Dude in German: der Geck! There is hope for some region of translation here across the atlantic. Maybe there is some possible export of American culture possible in the image of a man... well, sometimes there is this man. And this is how I must begin with Sam Elliot's monologue:


"Now this here story I'm about to unfold took place in the early '90s - just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the I-raqis. I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? Sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here - the Dude from Los Angeles. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude. The Dude, from Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man - and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide. Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough."

Nothing could be more patently "busted" than the first Iraqui war. We came out it with images of American G.I.'s looting Iraqi bunkers full of Kuwaiti loot. And this is where we get the first voiceover of the first version of George bush, the wimp who would push the pencils or the pens but would just as soon drop the bomb on you as stare at you cross-eyed another moment. And he wouldn't think nothin' on it. It was just business.

"This aggression will not stand!"

Famous words, perhaps the most famous words of president George Bush the first of our country. A single term. Looking back on the rather ugly play of Clinton into Bush the II I would be tempted to wonder if it would not have been better to have given him a successful guy, a second term would have really given us a taste of exactly what sort of a fellow this first Bush was. I could only hope that that would have meant we would not have had the second installment of Bush.

Now I apologize for this commentary into the contemporary political realm of the United States. But it is part of this political commentary that has driven Oppermann of the last 16 to 20 years, from the days immediately Post-Arcadia all the way until the present.

The situation of The Big Lebowski takes place during the reign of the first George Bush during the first Iraqi expedition. Oppermann was in Harvard dealing with idiots that actually believe in what Leo Strauss said. These are not the friendly sort of idiots, no, these were the heart of the neo-conservative strand of ideology for the current machine of the American Empire. These idiots were not nice idiots. We could say that Oppermann had the opportunity during this period to watch the really dangerous people who bought the neo-conservative ideology to actually ascend to the first stages of power. By the time they have reached our age they are the young but mature administrators of the power in the executive branch of government (a legitimate candidate for major public office is about 10 to 15 years ahead of Oppermann and myself).

Jeff Lebowski, the Dude, is a forty-something. This is an important comment because both Oppermann and I are not yet forty. The Dude's mythos happens to a fully mature middle aged man, not quite at the threshold of late middle age, nor at the level of Bush the first who was probably entering into late age in his presidency (just as Regan before him had always been in the late age of his life, and even into senility). Well all this happens to the Dude, who is middle aged, and it is not certain if he is the age of Joel and Ethan Cohen or not.

The Dude stands at the current Zenith of a man's power, and very much like Ulrich from Robert Musil's "Man Without Qualities," he has little or nothing to show for it. He made a couple of screenplays with about six other guys: he actually tries to impress Maude Lebowski with his history of being some kind of a "writer!" Now that is really the height of the pathetic, man.

The Dude's range of affect is very important here: the Dude operates by stealth as a kind of mood ninja who travels the entire galaxy of emotion, almost with a single word: "Fuck."

The mood of the Dude is never indifferent: even when he says to "The Stranger," "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!" It is coming from his rebellious teenager side, lashed out in full force at the one man who seems to actually "get" the Dude in the entire movie, at least Sam Elliot is in his corner, and that is everything a good old cowboy could be: right down to the song of the coyotes in Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man." Did you notice the striking resemblance between Sam Elliot and the gentleman who is the airplane pilot in Alaska: the one who sings the song about:

"The only darn thing that's left
Is those darned old cay-yotes and me." (Bob McDill/Richard Thompson)

Well this little wimp of a man was the head of the CIA and God knows what else. Whatever you do, you don't fuck with George Bush, older or younger, because in his wry way he will get you and have your nads.

One could say that these humorless U.S. presidents can be known best for their lack of humor.

Oppermann and Ayres Diffidently

I wanted to say that there is an importance to Oppermann's leaning in this picture: (this web log was erased with a sudden electronic error which makes one speculate about everything being incredibly impermanent). Oppermann leans on me because I am shorter and because his forearm can easily rest on my shoulder. I have had always a bit of a short-man-complex around being shorter. It is not an extreme or insane level of this complex to my knowledge, however it is good to relate this "being shorter" as somehow profound.

In this image I stare with the eyes I describe as being like the dylan song "what was it you wanted?" with "vague menace" (Oppermann's terms for this song). I said in the previous log that was accidentally erased that Oppermann used his height to become like a black figure from one of Kafka's drawings: he would walk around in a long black coat and black hat, discussed elsewhere.

This is an image of Oppermann and Ayres in real proximity, or perhaps only in parabolic proximity.

(... ...)

This is a note to say that this post originally had absolutely nothing on it.

Theresa, Once and For All, in Arcadia (hopefully a final review)

By this posting I hope to lay the question of Theresa largely to rest. I can at least present a picture of Oppermann, Theresa (I think I still remember her hot breath in my ear from that moment) and Ayres looking into the blinding brightness of the flash photograph. I think I had a relatively insipid or entranced look on my face. Oppermann was by contrast ecstatic. Once again the image is from Bemis Hall at Colorado College.

January 1988 was when I met Theresa. I had had a girlfriend previous to this but no one who was willing to really meet me with the desire that Theresa had in that moment. This was an important relationship for me. Definitely not the last, but in many senses definitely the first. I have discussed that Theresa confronted me on several issues that were important: she would not let Oppermann and I rest in our Artemesian love of the beauty of philosophy. And in this point she provided an abrasive but singularly important independence of the feminine counterpoint to my philosophic position. I thank her for being someone who fought with me well. And she and Oppermann did not get along. Oppermann regarded Theresa as a phillistine. Theresa was definitely at her most beautiful that I remember at this time of first meeting her. I think that she introduced me to Joni Mitchell's Blue album: and to this day this album for me stands for her. It must be said that the last time I met Theresa in Los Angeles in the mid 1990's she was wearing pastel and engaged to be married to an attorney. There was something about her that was "in recovery" - she had been through some nasty spots with drinking, I hope it can just be written off as the folly of youth. We all walk so close to that possibility: once again: "there but for the grace of God..." and so on... My last conversation with Theresa by telephone broke off any hope of communication: she said I sounded too crazy (and indeed, to be fair, reflecting I might have been acting like an over affectionate idiot on the phone, not respecting boundaries): I told her that she was too "sane," conveying how hurt I was at her condemnation. That was that. That was the end of that. I still prefer to see Theresa peeking out from some trees in the Colorado winter snow. It is enough to remember and to forget her for that.

.

.

Oppermann and the Raphaelson Factor

Here are a couple of offerings of Oppermann and Raphaelson probably in January through May of 1988: again the faces are over-exposed and we are left to fill in the tiny pieces of remembrence and memory.

Because this is the best image I have remaining of Raphaelson I include it here. We can only surmise that the issue of Lisa Lane literally floating above his head speaks to the problem developing in the arena of Liebenstrauss to come the following winter.

The Cresswell Consciousness Dilemma

Still back publishing images from the Arcadian Moment, still back in the hall of Lisa Lane and Theresa Buffo at a time sitting with Oppermann and Cresswell 20 years ago or more.

Cresswell is a seminal figure in the Arcadian: he was brilliant, as close to an embodiment of Nietzschean philosophy as I have ever seen a person represent: he would spend his summers in Alaska on a fishing boat.

Later we would compare Cresswell to Treadwell. I am speaking of Michael Cresswell and Timothy Treadwell, the man who appears in Grizzly man: another blonde idiot in a Werner Herzog film: there certainly was room for Cresswell to be insane: at moments verging on a macho chauvenism that was quite possibly unkind. Nonetheless he remained a figure for me of a man in whom I placed a great deal of veneration. A senior, an upperclassman at this time. The seniors definitely had actually had the exposure I yearned for desperately. Cresswell went on to write a senior thesis on Horkheimer, Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

I saw Cresswell a few times when I lived in Colorado Springs post-arcadia. He then vanished out of sight.

This last image of Cresswell somehow strikes pain into my heart. I feel glad that it actually is now uploaded into a relatively stable continuum of the internet. Which reminds me really that all this attempt to place these images and thoughts online is for the sake of the fact that we as friends keep forgetting and misplacing so much about each other as we look off into the infinite distance of the night.

Da-Besoffen-Sein

This post was originally entitled Dabesaeuft but my German was corrected and I actually prefer the alternative offered by Oppermann. In gratitude.

I have already stated that the actual act of imbibing is entirely exhausting to me. Nonetheless a libation is offered to the divinities. Beneath our feet a bouncing impish toy from Lisa Lane. I salute you. I salute you all.

Commentary on Oppermannian Greatness in Arcadia

Ostian Head of Mithras Pictured above

I see this image and think of a quote from Jung that I have perhaps over-used. I will deliver it here concerning the sense of melancholy in the Oppermannian face:

"The head from Ostia (fontispiece of Symbols of Transformation) supposed by Cumont to be that of Mithras Tauroctonos [possibly also as Attis], wears an expression which we know all too well... as one of sentimental resignation. It is in fact worth noting that the spiritual transformation that took place in the first centuries of Christianity was accompanied by an extraordinary release of feeling, which expressed itself not only in the lofty form of charity and love of God, but also in sentimentality and infantilism. The lamb allegories of early Christian artn fallinto this category.

"Since sentimentality is sister to brutality, and the two are never very far apart, they must be somehow typical of the period between the first and third centuries of our era. The morbid facial expression points to the disunity and split mindedness of the sacrificer: he wants to and yet he doesn't want to. This conflict tells us that the hero is both the sacrificer and the sacrificed. (Paragraphs 667-668, Symbols of Transformation)

Oppermann represented the best of the heroic genius in the act of sacrificing and being sacrificed: this kind of ambivalence plays about on his own face: but it is profoundly more healthy to witness this physiognomy of split-ness than discovering resolute Straussian and Neo-Conservitive anti-thinking that Oppermann was about to do battle with in the ensuing years completing his dissertation at Harvard. At least Oppermann is capable of suffering, and has not let his capacity to suffer go... ever... even in the face of those Masters of War who encourage bland indifference to the shattered limbs of "the lamb": the fragments of a child's body whose legs have been blown to pieces in the most recent American incursion in the Iraq war.

Oppermannian Greatness in Arcadia

I just found this photo on a contact sheet from times that were directly arcadian. An evening where we were all drinking wine with Lisa Lane, Paul Raphaelson, Cresswell, Theresa, and myself. This image I think is great. Almost as great as Wolfgang Ambrose who is fucking great. There is something of the young Dylan also to this image.

This is Oppermann in Praxis: and praxis intends a presence or intimacy of self. I have to start this series with this image of Oppermann in true praxis, with the true Dionysian wine: there we see the European Intellectual Aristocracy, still in the unknowing stage, nevertheless suprisingly Chic for now what ammounts to a middle aged Dude. I think that Oppermann is truely

"drinking Nietzschean wine from Kantian vessels"

for the first time: he was probably beginning to read into Heidegger at this time. I attribute this saying to Harvey Rabbin: Oppermann tells me to stop attributing great sayings to Harvey Rabbin, but that will be another 20 years... I am just glad I can still remember a fragment of where all these potentially great things came from.

There is an issue of metonymy here: all these images are largely "Over Exposed": what we have left are the fragments, the tessera of images from which to construct the whole. I would not wish at all to return to the Arcadian: I was too impoverished to fully appreciate these times. However I would say that the fragmentary re-constellation of these shattered images is part of the intense great tapestry of the terrifying "negative" turning and turning of the present moment.

An extremely brief commentary on Adalbert Stifter through the story of Abdias

Some years ago Oppermann gave me an English translation of Adalbert Stifter's writings entitled "Brigatta and Other Stories" or something like that. I will look and see if there is an inscription and possibly include it here.

About two weeks ago I became obcessed with the idea that I had to re-read a short story in that book entitled "Abdias." Once again I waded into Stifter's prose. --It actually took me a while to find the book, because, one must know, and I believe Oppermann does, that books are very mischievous and can hide themselves quite well when they do not want to be found. I have not yet finished reading Abdias, though I continue to read a page or two every night with great intent.

The story is of the sufferings of a Jewish man by the name of Abdias, who's home in North Africa is eventually discovered and raided, his wife killed and so forth. I know that Stifter goes through pains with his exceedingly polite prose to render a realistic portrait of the sufferings and joys of Abdias. There is even a "stroke of lightning" in the story where Abdias' daughter, who, according to the misfortunes of the book is blind, but is given vision, thus by a sort of Deus ex Machina is allowed sight.

Please review the following digressions or forget them as you would like:

1. Keuranos Kubernatai: the saying of Heraclitus: "thunderbolt steers all things."
2. Thunderbolts are commonly known to be sacred to the god of Thunder: Zeus (I do not want to focus as much on Thor, Odin, or Indra, but I would also include imagery around the tantric object known of as the "dorje" or thunderbolt) (Oppermann has never even alluded to tantra in his writings, probably rejecting it as completely foreign, I may claim it through my father's studies of Eastern Religion and his film "Altars of the East")
3. Thunderbolts are symbols of metaphor: connection of two places
4. Thunderbolts reflect the synaptic junctures of the brain and brain functioning.

I will compare some other books that Oppermann sent to Adalbert Stifter's writings:

1. James's (Henry) "Spoils of Poynton" I could never get through, Oppermann sent it to me and it suffers as unreadable by my estimate, though appreciated as being so only because of my status as a phillistine. "Poynton" was sent to me because of some disputes I was having over my father's estate, in part spurred by my ex-wife... and it points to a real nadir in my own personal life. Still I find James less agreeable than Stifter.
2. Robert Walser: anything by Walser I regard as superior. I have not read all the way through any of his books. It is not necessary. I keep reading and enjoying Walser: his fresh cheekyness makes him superior.
3. Max Frisch: Man in the Holocene: there is a quality of Frisch that is fresh just like Walser: it is contemporary writing that continually questions its margins. I also love that Frisch puts numeration to his literature, it cracks me up.
4. Gert Hoffmann: Auf Dem Turm: really reflecting another preference: everything in this book is terrible, everything goes to hell: people are really awful to one another: Oppermann once gave a copy of this book to a man who was flirting with his ex-wife, I believe: touche: that is panache. I love books where everyone is miserable: but:
5. not in the manner that they are miserable like "The Gulag Archipelago:" I do not like to read about unwilling victims of atrocity. Rather their misery comes from a willing scream inside a soul.
6. Thomas Bernhardt: Beton. ditto Hoffmann: still more introverted. An extremely profound commentary I completely identify with: exceedingly impolite
7. Walser, Frisch, Hoffmann, and Bernhardt were all introduced to me by Oppermann, I could say that this points to the fact that a major portion of my education I can easily attribute to Oppermann
8. There are other deserving books that Oppermann has sent to me that I adore but I cannot include them here because they would repeat the point (Pavic's Landscape Painted with Tea, The Second Book, Words are Something Else, Stories and Texts for Nothing, etc etc etc!!!)
9. The problem with Stifter and James is that they are too polite. I deplore polite prose, sanitized too much. I will keep reading both of them because something inside me tells me I must particularly conclude reading Stifter's story of Abdias at least.
10. This particular web-log entry/literary essay is finished BEFORE I have even completely read the story of Abdias: I do this in part because I abhor the kind of "correct" academics who would actually state it is more scholarly to finish a text before writing about it. To them I say nonsense, rubbish, quatsch. I am on the way to Abdias. That is all I had to say; and so I will say what ammounts to an impolite, but heartfelt word of gratitude to Oppermann: thank you.

Wolfgang Ambros: Fucking Great

Since Oppermann will not be coming out to San Pedro to visit me. And since it is largely conjectured from theoria into praxis that I will be visiting him instead in Seattle this coming month... I can only offer him some telephone snap-shots of a journey I had wanted very much to take with him while listening to Wolfgang Ambrose.

The industry round the Los Angeles Harbor is profound. We cross over two bridges along the road of the 47 freeway: in this instance heading westward this evening past Terminal Island (used to be a Japanese fishing colony, now it's a low security prison). Something about Ambrose goes so well with this particular scary topography: passing over two bridges from East to West: the first blurry one is the Desmond Bridge:

These images are indeed to me extremely resonant with Ambrose: somewhat morose, industrial, profoundly poetic and sad. I will repeat to make this clear: these images for me are listening to these songs. The images are the songs, more inextricably woven into the meaning of driving there and listening to them than I could say. There is a barren landscape but the ineluctable greatness of the sky that glows im abendrot. (I wonder if it is possible to say that this instance is of abendblaue?)


Note the enclosed image of the car dashboard: this speaks to the remnants of Kiarostami: the enclosed space of an automobile that I had hoped to share with Oppermann: two subjectivities enclosed in a tight space and yet looking out at the industrial complexes willfully strewn as far as the eye can imagine. Something about this experience I wanted very much to share with Oppermann as a critical part of our friendship: it is a "driving there together": Dafahrenmitsein, wonderning, speculating about the world from a place of cultivation, at times a little scary, manic, even paranoid, but capable of dealing with the road, sacred to Hermes, yes, but strangely the mother of our modern age, Oppermann and I have agreed on this formula: that just as Hermes replaced Hestia in the Greek Pantheon, so in Western discourse did the very destiny of civilization did we experience a paradox: the road has become the mother (perhaps the inversion of the Boogey man who is the mother of all nightmares, and yes both Hermes and the Boogey man are easily accessible in such a place as highway 47).

We have to realize that the Port of Los Angeles is the center of the "Bestand" that Heidegger commented on as the factor that was probably crucifying human beings in "Der Frage Nach dem Technik." The Bestand, or "Standing Reserve" is the stockpile of potential energy that is constantly being replenished: the feeling of driving through the middle of this is exhillarating and terrifying: like feeling a piece of the force of a jet plane exhaust plume: probably toxic if there too long: but safe enough to pass by in a car. Later Oppermann came to call the post-cards we sent each other "Bestandsaufnahmen": that is a form of "taking stock" or "inventory" of the current predicament. The title was enchanting and I used it in various places, even, I think, in my dissertation: these were notations from the edge of an abyss: this is a Bestandsaufnahme: this is why I wanted to drive with Oppermann into the heart of the Bestand.

First clear image below of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, lit up by blue. A couple of years ago I had a significant dream about being unable to cross this bridge, that the flow of the life force was blocked from this direction. I made it across fine tonight.






This is the end of the Vincent Thomas overview. The text of Oppermann's commentary on the two songs that inspired me to call him immediately and announce that these two songs were great runs as follows:

1. "Selbstbewusst" by Wolfgang Ambros (1981). Ayres has requested more Ambros.



2. "Samstag Nacht" by Wolfgang Ambros (2000). More Ambros, this one a German version of "Heart of Saturday Night". Ayres has already pre-approved Ambros' Waits-covers which he heard during his last visit to Seattle two years ago.

The rough tonality fo Ambros voice that pierces through these two great songs, along with a very solid, no-nonsense rock band behind him make these songs everything I would want out of such music. When compared to Niel Young, well as bob Dylan sings "As great as you are you can't be greater than yourself." Ambrose is probably an Austrian legend, but to me he is a very recent revelation comparatively speaking. Everyone knows that Niel Young defines rock music in a profound manner. Ambrose gives it soul, soul, soul. Thank you Oppermann, you score big points on this one.


I cannot say I found you to be as excited about any one of the musical offerings I left you, Oppermann. What I am saying here should chide you without being taken too seriously, it is the sort of discussion we could still have while driving there together in a car: That is attributable to my lack of taste in musical matters, and barring that de gustibus non disputandum the problem you face of being haunted by a stiffness with regard to new musical things. Your taste is undisputably great, but if it focuses only on greatness it sometimes may leave out mediocrity: an indictment that you have accused me of from time to time: there can be greatness that is soul-less... and there can be mediocrity that is soulful... a chonundrum for yet another web log (already discussed in my discussion of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, a book that Oppermann gave to me for my reading during my dissertation), the web log that will discuss the problem of greatness, and mediocrity, and soul.

Nothing to Say: War Recollections

Winfried Sebald: a curious comical sort of fellow by the smile on the right corner of his mouth. Altogether a likeable chap with indeed something to say and not nearly as much paranoia as Thomas Bernhard who refused to have anything published in his native Austria during his lifetime. Oppermann sent me the Sebald novel "Vertigo" for the holidays in 2007, but honorable mention should be made that Sebald evidently has some literary work (Logis in einem Landhaus) concerning our hero Robert Walser.

(This evidently is a tiny image of Robert Walser that I left tiny in order to celebrate his micro-script)

Oppermann frequently complains about having nothing to say. I too may complain today that I have nothing to say. Car alarms go off in the distance, and I note that Oppermann has outstripped my capacity to produce web-logs... in merely a month his total output excedes my own contribution by a significant amount. But this is a sign of Oppermann, maybe it is his zealous love of friendship, and indeed he has so much to articulate, as do I, but I must admit that in the dubious race to produce a capacity of words, Oppermann has excelled, and he would agree that it is impossible to judge the Ayres to Oppermann ratio except in saying that it will take another twenty years to sort out the restitution between the two.

I had a thought today that suggested that Oppermann and Ayres were undergoing some kind of "analytical" friendship: various postings on play were being issued at each corner: maybe we were playing "generals" in our own complex marshalling of libido for this feeling of not being totally alone in this universe (my own hours of play with plastic soldiers, participating in the fantasy of a brigade or a platoon as a child should not be excepted from this: now it is a brigade of words that rallies round me, but I do not feel so profoundly alone).

I will continue to enjoy and comment on the Oppermann web-log called "Ayres in Theoria" by which he in fact honors me with the use of my name in the title of his work, all of which may one day be considered "major literature" by somebody or other.

I think of Henry Darger's endless fantasy of warfare in his "In the Realms of the Unreal:"

Equally I think of the first story of Sebald's in the book he sent me for the holidays this year: concerning the sickness and experiences of the gentleman in the story "Beyle, or love's madness is most discreet" who participates in various manoevers may be said to belong to this rank. All of this is invented to stave off a fundamental lack of the "Other": or perhaps like Milton's "Paradise Lost", there is some knowledge that the terrible battle of the angels will place no peace in heaven.

Dore's image of the restlessness of the heavens themselves: this is not the image of the divine perfection of Dante's Paradiso: and in a sense so much the better: that there is "War all the time" in heaven itself points to a deeper paradox.

This is Sebald's image of a battle in "Baille or Love's Madness is Most Discrete" I keep thinking of Baille as a translator of Hegel:

G. W. F. HEGEL
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND (1807)
Translated by J. B. Baillie

This Baille however fought on the side of Napoleon: he may be reasonably assumed to be the double of J.B. Baille who translated the Phaenomenologie des Geistes into English.

The Truth on (... ...) (elision)

(This image which was removed  presumably was taken in an off-handed manner by the somewhat blithering but still brilliant photographic skills of Oppermann on a handheld cell phone camera. It was of poor quality, but it conveys something that one is compelled to find friendly. I believe that it shows (... ...) in his native environment: (... ...) own home)

A few pointers on the road to an analysis of (... ...):
1. Oppermann believes that (... ...) believes a mystical truth.
2. I think in looking at this (... ...) would have to be named as "becoming Walser"
3. At least one Robert Walser short work should be transcribed to this web log to help describe (... ...): possibly the one on "professions" (it can be a verwindung of labor and work)
4. (... ...) prefers to be called (... ...)
5. Gossett preferred to be called "... ..." when he was a student at (... ...)
6. All previous entries about Oppermann and I getting together to set the heretofore "naughty" (... ...) straight are hereby abandoned.
7. (... ...) occasionally writes on this web log and on Oppermann's web-log and on others but I wonder if he wrote his own web log who it would be about?
8. It is impossible to set  (... ...) straight about anything.
9.  (... ...) and I have sat in the morning watching the sunlight pour into a room converted from a former Catholic seminary.
10.  (... ...) always listens with remarkable patience.
11. It is unknown if  (... ...) has ever been mad at me: if he simply abandons situations he gets irritated at or if he endures and expresses his anger at them directly...
12.  (... ...) libido makes him impish.
13.  (... ...) is said to be more of a musical snob than Oppermann.
14.  (... ...) has some ulterior motive behind the questions of Oppermann as drinker, smoker and an avid enthusiast of television sports shows that has yet to be deciphered. Such a motive makes me consider the issue of the heiroglyphs I believe are represented by the shore of the ocean at dawn.

The Crow-and-Black-Eagle Flame

Two birds in the dream. One assisted the other. One crawled pulling the other along with his beak. These were two friends. One a crow and one a black eagle. One steps into the flame: the black crow is burned blacker. And in the midst of the flame the crow becomes momentarily the phoenix, the source of all healing. The other is healed by virtue of the flame burning and turning blacker.

When I mentioned this to a teacher he recalled the story of the salamander in Benvenuto Cellini: when the young man was called by his father to see the brilliant beautiful salamander dancing in the flames. Suddenly his father slaps him brutally across the face saying: "this is so you will never forget this!"

What I can say is that it seems that the very act of writing: web log or otherwise: involves stepping into the fire. We could say that it is going to hell, possibly that it is a matter of paying one's dues: but there is another place where stepping into the line of writing is "placing oneself on the line." It is on the line, not the plummeting line of Deleuzian descent, but something like that, only not involving auto-defenestration unless absolutely necessary. On it goes. Yet beyond the technological nihilism of writing a web log at all is this stepping into the fire which was the great promise of writing from the first place: as a medicament its results remain dubious to say the very least.

When I look out at my life, and I look out at the life of my friends: the act of writing still holds within it the finest thread: the thread of the psyche itself, upon which the fate of our "earthly civilization," our humanity, holds: that is that we have the choice to bring consciousness into the world, or to despair. Optimism does not hold the ultimate human value because it winds up being deluded, sold a bag of goods, upstream without a paddle. Pessimism does not hold because it ends only in despair, and a despair of writing itself, nothing does any good at all. But looking upon this, were I even to be dead, I would say that I would want an opportunity to live in this world a moment longer, to be here in order to find the affirmative, impossibly, in the situation, no matter how bright or dim the ostensible light seems to be. I would want to participate, to affirm that it is possible to affect the world to some fragment of a degree toward the good, toward consciousness, bearing in mind that each act bears a terrible burden of its own shadow, of what it does not include, that it included only itself as just one small thing. It was not only the best I or anyone could do with this "opportunity" this "being alive in the world" ...this dancing salamander, at times writhing sinews, threads, sutures of pain and opportunity at the same time, the dash of the father's hand that says "don't go back to sleep! -Not at this moment, this brief wakefulness is yours insofar as with the world it is shared."

Mike & Sally

Mike and Sally are coming to town. I have no image of them. One is Austrian, one is African American. Both are Oppermann's friends. They are coming to regale him because both are his friends, and both were with him at law school at the University of Washington, where Oppermann had to learn once again that education in academia is not the way to anything but a pain in the head and possibly later a divorce from your soon-to-be-ex american wife.

Oppermann showed me his law school once, I believe in the first visit that I made to him in 1999 or thereabouts. He showed me a rather mean gray concrete (Beton) place where he and Mike and Sally (whose name is Anatole in reality, but Oppermann insists on calling him "Sally") would stand outside (there was no place for sitting) and every now and then talk and smoke cigarettes (I am not certain if Oppermann smoked during law school).

Law school for Oppermann seemed like merely a necessary contingency, sort of like a bowel movement. It had very little to do with his paideia, which at that time he took well into his hand, and in a sense at this time I am taking in hand here in this web log.

Oppermann did meet Lou Wolcher to my understanding in law school. Wolcher, like Fuller before him, was impressed with Oppermann's status as being a member of the "European Intellectual Aristocracy." And Oppermann did write an excellent essay on Anaximander, Heidegger, Rhythm and Restitution, which probably will be the most thoughtful essay that Wolcher will ever encounter from a law school student... except maybe an essay from someone who is not too self-righteous but somehow has survived the effect of genocide and wishes to do everything in their power to halt the effects of the unconscious genocidal instinct of our American culture.... something like that might exceed Oppermann's question of justice, but not by very far, because in point of fact as an intellectual Oppermann is appalled by this sort of thing, as indeed every self-respecting German intellectual has to be after the catastrophe that happened in Germany in the form of National Socialism.

Mike and Sally are coming to visit Oppermann because shortly Oppermann will be disappearing from the United States to seriously take up his Dasein in Germany. At that point Oppermann will open himself to a language (German) which in its stranger moments feels fully alien to me. Oppermann shares German with the Austrian German of Anatole, and Oppermann likes to make fun of Sally for this. Nevertheless I would have to say that the likes of the Austrian singer Wolfgang Ambrose is rarely discovered in any condition: I took a liking to him immediately after Oppermann sent me a cassette tape of his music in 2000 or so. Oppermann has promised some digital Ambrose to me but is yet to be forthcoming.

Both Mike and Sally have their own shadows: principally round the small animal of the body. This makes them at times pityful, and at times kinder, and possibly more understanding of their fellow human's stupidities than the likes of the harshly puritanical Ayres. They may collectively enjoin Oppermann to have lots of "FUN" despite himself. This fun will unfortunately not involve otters (see the previous web-posting on fun and otters) or tapirs (Hah! I have finally responded to Tapirs, who are fun, but whom require an intimacy with a given woman that Oppermann will not obtain in the forseeable future). I hope that Oppermann will actually concede to his friends and allow himself to be abashed by his own small animality: and I hope this same small animality will not tear him apart (as so likely it does in Ayres's instance).

Anatole (Sally) in my imagination occupies the same place as Donald Theodore Kerebotsos in "The Big Lebowski." I imagine Mike and Oppermann telling him frequently, "Shut the fuck up, Sally." If Sally does not understand this reference, they must, as they probably will, drink beer and/or other sorts of barley water and watch this film repeatedly, and flush if necessary, until it all comes clear. I just heard of their upcoming plans this weekend... Oppermann told me with a kind of tenseness, because he is having to sew up a lot of loose ends before setting off home to Ravensburg. He may have a few unruly nights to go before he gets there. I can only wish him well from a distance, and know that at least in those moments he will not be a ghost, he will take on some substance of his own life, even in its wan recognition that he cannot write, as he goes with the wisdom, and the wisdom says, suddenly, "Shut the fuck up, Sally!"

(With apologies to Anatole)

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: Chapter X (fin)

(Ayres photographed by his partner Deborah May 3rd 2008 at the studio of S. Brown discussing the issue of light in painting)


As a matter of (or perhaps "in light of") dealing with the fact that we are going to hell for writing this sort of thing: each for our own interest, I thought that this little passage from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus would be excellent: I will remind you that you sent this book during a period of writing a dissertation on research, where I stated that the best thing you could hope for research is that you are in some manner going to hell (the example of Dimitri from Brothers Karamazov, the example of Dante from La Commedia Divina, and the example of anyone from Robert Musil's "Mensch ohne Eigenshaften"):

We kept looking for additional references and found them everywhere: Murakami's wind up bird, constituted a whole unpublished chapter, and my phenomenological comparison of Augustine and Rousseau (please remember that you Oppermann are very much like Augustine: you "set them idiots straight!" and so does Augustine stand in his dream on a "rule" with his mother Monica. But I have already spoken about the problem of walking with your mother and having the insight about that woman you see approaching: "I knew that very moment she meant to do me harm:" This is the Tom Paine formula as the Lord of Music would say. The question with this woman who means to do you harm and the formula of the small animal of your body is another mephistophelean question that I am asking here: in other words you are screwed either way, it's another 20 years for you):

"Aescetic, Kretschmar would say," he answered, "the ascetic cooling off. In that Father Beissel was very genuine. Music always does penance in advance for her retreat into the sensual. The old Dutchmen make her do the rummest sort of tricks, to the glory of God; and it went harder and harder on her from all one hears, with no sense appeal, excogitated by pure calculation. But then they had these penitential practices sung, delivered over the sounding breath of the human voice, which is certainly the most stable-warm imaginable thing in the world of sound..."
"You think so?"
"Why not? No unorganic instrumental sound can be compared with it. Abstract it may be, the human voice - the abstract human being, if you like. But that is a kind of abstraction more like that of the naked body - it is after all more a pudendum." I was silent, confounded. My thoughts took me far back in our, in his past.
"There you have it," said he, "your music." I was annoyed at the way he put it, it sounded like shoving music off on me. as though it were more my affair than his. "There you have the whole thing, she was always like that. Her strictness, or whatever you liek to call the moralism of her form. must stand for an excuse for the ravishments of her actual sounds."
For a moment I felt myself the older, more mature.
"A gift of life like music," I responded, "not to say a gift of God, one ought not to explain by mocking antinomies, which only bear witness to the fullness of her nature. One must love her."
"Do you consider love the strongest emotion?" he asked.
"Do you know a stronger?"
"Yes, interest."
"By which you presumably mean a love from which the animal warmth has been withdrawn."
"Let us agree on the definition!" he laughed. "Good night!"
We had got back to the Leverkühn house, and he opened his door.

(Dore's Black Prussian Eagle is perhaps a little too heavy handed in this context: the black eagle may be seen however as a precursor of the phoenix itself: the blackening being an important counterpoint: its dire solicitation without succor makes the dangerous moment when the bird enters the flames and nears death, or death's lack of mystery: the phoenix behind the black eagle presumably is the universal medicine, but again Hölderlin warns correctly in Patmos: "Wo aber Gefahr ist das Rettende auch." And perhaps this line is too easily spoken, so that it forgets its own danger. I will wait a little longer, that is all)

(An irritating national symbol, predatory nationalism is its gross threat, my own patina added to some degree of success, however it's blackness is not to be under-rated)

You should accept this as your rebuke for lavishing only interest in the music of Bach. You may be right though: I believe that Bach leaves place for the fragile animal fragments of the human soul, as well as marching in the direction of the spiritual. But these barely passable pop songs: you might do well to review the first meeting between Hermine and Harry Haller in Steppenwolf: at the "Black Eagle:" Here we see the blackened eagle as opposed to the golden music of Bach or perhaps its transparent luminosity... the black eagle still soars heavenward, seeking out of its poor substance something: perhaps a place where it bursts into blood and feathers in the midst of a turbulent cloud filled evening sky.

(This image came from the 26th of January or thereabouts.)

I believe that the substance of any attempt to create a great work is that one is going to hell. We might also point to Thomas Bernhard's "Beton/Concrete" as bringing up the issue of "concrete relationship" (as well as Hegel, Marx and the history of western philosophy, and then we would really be going to hell). The problem here, with this kind of text, which to me is tremendously compelling, the one I am forced to write here: that it always takes the Faustian initiative and does the deed with the devil. One can only hope that this form of text writing is some manner more conscious of the devil in the text than say George Bush and Tony Blair signing some stupid arms accord. There they are signing a treaty so that everyone can go to the devil, and the devil is glad because --- he never gets talked about.)

Now I do not know which one of us, Oppermann or I, would best qualify as a Leverkühn, or which of us qualifies as his feeverishly writing friend: who is implicated by his own feeverish fascination to document and contemplate the whole affair: everyone gets to go to the devil, and it is only the frailest refrain of the soul that somehow still begs for the redemptions (and there must be many of them) from the kindness of God.

Or... perhaps an Oppermann or just an Ayres?

Listening to Variation XV Canone Alla Quinta: Andante A 1 Clavi from the 1955 Goldberg Variations by Bach as interpreted by Glenn Gould....