Jorge Luis Borges: Conductor Extraordinaire

This portion of the web journal dedicated to discussing my friend Dr. Oppermann will be focused mainly on a dream I had last night.

In the dream I was driving on the 405 freeway heading South. Oppermann was speaking to me, a disembodied voice on the telephone. He informed me that he had just seen the famous Argentine poet/magician Jorge Luis Borges conducting a symphony orchestra. Oppermann said distinctly: "Well, in comparison to Borges, Barrenbaum, Salonen, Karajan and even Bernstein looked adipose." Within the dream itself I suddenly remember that I had just had a dream of Borges alluding to "The Secret Miracle": I kept on alluding to the comparison of how Borges and Marxists needed to keep giving each other a good kick in the pants to wake up to their insufficiencies. I wanted to tell Oppermann that a friend of mine had helped me connect the moment when we bring Borges to our working class work, our exposure to poverty and deprivation... is like bringing Enrico Caruso to the Amazon... I wake thinking of Herzog's Fitzcaraldo as a courageous act of individuation.

After I wake and think of the dream I feel remorse that I had such ambivalence to respond to Oppermann's journey to London and his discussion of "Injustice and ..." with the simple and cruel phrase "So what on it?" Such a phrase shows nothing but my own insecurity and insufficiency. It was a fine dream Oppermann had that day in London. It pisses me off to hell that I couldn't be there to celebrate it as well. I love showing my own stupidity at times, my shortsightedness in front of another man's genuine moments of genius. I hope that that passage in "the Travels of Dr. Oppermann" is read for just such a form of stupidity, guilt and cheekyness... although Oppermann would frown on the guilt. It is what had to be said. I cannot re-write that passage, for fear that it would only sanitize the bloody ambivalence that I as a human being feel for my dear friend: I love him and sometimes I hate him. And once again it is the place of literature if it is to write of a sense of it's own being that it should write somehow to it's own despair... the view is that somehow life will escape and make it through the tempest of ideas and the guardianship of pessimism and cynicism we have around every hopeless aspect of the whole bloody affair. Hopelessness stands to reason, and reason stands to sense. We cannot even write that "Hope stands to life" because this somehow is still writing, but at the same time a view to the very limit of writing itself...

Borges is a conductor. But he is a conductor of what? I think of him as a very fine metal lightning rod, able to channel the fierce torrents of eletro-static vertiginous energy through itself without the slightest moment of "impedence." The Borges conductor is very pure.

Fat belongs to the bourgeoise, a result of too much leisure and avarice. The lean belongs to the working class as well. The lean days are here: get out your Borges and read, and maybe you will be wide awake when this thing gets through

The Oppermann Dragon Tree

This tree image apparently came from Tennerife in the Canary Islands. It was given to Dr. Oppermann by his mother, who knew that he had played around this tree as a young child. We do not know what this means.

The Journeys of Dr. Oppermann

All Web-logs I have written about Dr. Oppermann are incomplete, and in this sense at least, this log is no exception. The foregoing web-log is merely an assembly of notes and sketches which is largely unfinished, but may serve either as an "architectural" template, or as a fragment within a larger essay of the same: (that essay will not be completed either):

Ever since he was a young man Dr. Oppermann has liked to travel. And during these travels I have heard him speak often of traveling with his father.

In London he spent time with his father. Oppermann himself was to present his paper at a philosophical congress. There he may have had the honor of meeting with his friend Lou Wolcher, and also with his father. Perhaps in this manner Oppermann allowed himself to be enunciated in his own speeches:

In this manner we will proceed with a single passage of his words:

INJUSTICE’S MEASURE IN THE ENDARKENMENT OF THE SOUL (WITH CONSTANT REFERENCE TO HEINRICH VON KLEIST’S “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS”)

I wanted to say, "well what on it?" But that is not fair to the profound vulnerability that was witnessed in my friend's admission of his "holding forth" in a conference on justice in London. It is that vulnerability that I will seek to speak to, as well as the "holding forth" in the adumbration of his "johnson" which surely can be left to him. It is a holding forth of an indictment of all we have come to despair, of sorrow and loss wandering, yes, in Jim Morisson's words:

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god
Wandering, wandering in hopeless night.

More or less this is what Oppermann may be seeking to hold forth on. And this was apparently the sum of his travels, the transcendent god really was transcendent, so it is only right that we should lose such a god from the start.

I wanted to discuss all the other countries Dr. Jan Oppermann has been to: He has visited the city of Istanbul (presumably with his father) and to the cities of Europe, and to the Cities of the New World. I wanted to discuss this, but the other places that he went to must be bracketed against the place he went to in this very short paragraph.

A paragraph is a world away, I have heard some will say. Still let us return to the sentiment and presentiment of Oppermann's title, if it be its own synopsis. Who is to say what is just or unjust? Injustice happens, and men suffer a great deal in consequence to it. But where is it's measure?

"Gibt es auf Erd ein Maß?" -asks Friedrich Hölderlin. No there is no measure on earth for human kind! The measure of good or bad belongs always to the eschaton in Christian judgment. Non-Christian, or "Marxist" ideologies believe that there may be justice on earth, however these tend to be rather short and brutal regimes that we are talking about. Any place that seeks to vehemently to exact justice in the present ends up killing the thing it seeks to serve: this must get us to our first postulate: Justice must be deferred!

The deferral belongs to the brand of rootless cosmopolitanism that seems to prevail amongst French intellectuals and Alphonso Lingis, but this all makes it intensely like chewing gum: you chew and chew but there is no substance to the thing.

Heidegger wants to speak of truth, not of facts, but of the truth itself, which evidently is more digestible than chewing gum, and certainly more nourishing, but may itself be more complicated and ultimately toxic for the human Dasein to come in contact with than just fact, which creates norms, not truth.

The end of Kleist's story I believe has Michael Kohlhaas sold fairly well up the river, we will never know if restitution came.

Note the story of the Pasadena Land Development (this idea must be developed, like blowing up Amazonian trees)

But note the way Oppermann spoke in his essay not of justice but of injustice, justice's negative. We may presume that injustice in its simple gramatical form is somehow the opposite of justice, however looked at existentially we can only say that each thing has its injustice insofar as it shines forth above all other things for a moment: be that good or bad. Be it just or unjust it still will be unjust, because something is sacrificed, no matter how good the deed, and injustice will then be paid for in some manner, with money, with value, or with time. Now this may be looked upon as exceedingly pessimistic: no good deed shall go unpunished, that sort of thing; however it points to the ontological unjustice of being over nothingness. Even then a case could be made that if nothingness were allowed to be present or triumphant in its return from repression within the psyche, or submersion in the strata of the history of philosophy as it developed into modern technological consciousness... even then nothingness itself would run the gamit of its own injustice and in turn have to be punished, repealed and rescinded again. Consciousness, as it is apt to do, can pick out a pattern, a rythm of annihilation and presence in each one of these moments, but that is just consciousness, which is split by virtue of being somewhere midway in between.

As I continue to consider this entry it remains incomplete.

For example there is the story of Oppermann's journey to the "Holy Land" when he was 12 or 13 years of age. He reports that he continually had difficulties believing that he was really in those places. Such incredulity, this "not believing that one is completely there," reflects the abundance of sense that young Dr. Oppermann must have felt in such journeys. Oppermann went on to name a few names of places he had been to with his parents (which included his father who was sometimes light-heartedly reported to be a "seljack"). The list included Masada (and I think I remember him mentioning the story of the mass suicide), I believe, but I cannot remember any other names. I must simply speculate that Oppermann stood in Jerusalem and on the hills round Jerusalem enjoying the olive trees that I can only imagine were there somewhere round the time of 1980.

Oppermann travels as little as possible these days, preferring the safety and quiet of his own home. He hurries to assure me of his tremendous anxiety at airports, which makes Oppermann, a German immigrant, safe from becoming some jet-set jackass (which is much worse than the "sentimental jackass" he professes to be). We have written a number of post-cards that have focused on airports and air travel. Each one of them has a kind of tension. I have even written post-cards to Oppermann while sitting with him at airports waiting for my own airplane flight, and even this makes him agitated.

I cannot say that Oppermann has been a great traveler to my knowledge. He has not trekked across the Kalahari Desert, nor has he scaled any mountains without the help of a mechanical device. And yet these images of "travel" seem in themselves to be a sort of cliche, a point of the exhaustion of language, which leaves one tremendously restless throughout any travel at all. Herein we have the useless mire of technological travelers and adventure books that become quite tedious if somehow lacking a condition of self-conscious disintegration/integration. The best "travel" film that might express this could be "The Sheltering Sky," however Oppermann might not like this film and so I hesitate to mention it. There is something however of a quality to this sort of traveling, like Friedrich Holderlin walking all over Europe, or Lao Tzu taking a walk outside the Great Wall: someone has the dignity to finally go to the road where one has only one's experience, and then beyond that experience there is nothing, only death: no New York Times book review, no citations in scholarly publications, just nothing, just taking a walk.

Oppermann and I have discussed all this probably several times over, though not perhaps in quite such an uncanny way.

Oppermann does have a way of taking a "sudden walk," named after Kafka's short story I believe: "a sudden walk." In all these walks...

Three Oppermann Dreams from November 2007

The following is an attachment of my commentary to Oppermann’s dreams in a correspondence between November 7th and 9th 2007:


would you please take a look at the three dreams below which you may find of interest (particularly the last one as it concerns cresswell who is always of interest as he may be another "Idiot")

enjoying your day at the office?

I respond to the Dreams as follows:

Dr. Oppermann,

I will begin a discourse on your dreams as I read them.I will bring your attention to be mindful of the precept concerningLot's wife in Genesis: she was turned into a pillar of salt whenlooking back at the ruination of her life. I have seen recently,women who have been abused and abandoned, women who have turned intopillars of salt, because they refused to turn away from this turning to look back.

01:019:025 And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

01:019:026 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

Crystallized bitterness, dissolves in a sea of tears. Now you may be bitter, and you look back in dismay at all the mendying of their heart-attacks... somewhere where the heart just could no longer stand. These are great men, and they are great men in you, and they are dying, and part of you is dying too.There are of course two things, turning to look back and turning tolook toward the future. The second ripps one away from the first. Togive up the past, to rip ourselves toward the future it, the past, memory, must be sacrificed, but we must know what is sacrifice inorder for it to be any sort of a sacrifice whatsoever, so we must turnback to know what it meant. To ask to know memory is like seeking to get to the next village, onceone enters into the labyrinth of the text, the interplay is endless and exhausting until one becomes exhausted with the phenomenology ofthe past and gives up and lives into the phenomenology of the present. What is present is informed by the pleroma of the past, except forthe ripping where one gives up the past as well, and seeks to gainentrance into the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of presence, in whatis present.What is the value of such an array of experience? What is the valueof what is said here? They are diamonds of experience, this is as good as experience can get, which is, naturally, a great deal to say if one can say anything at all. "For those who look back, the whole world, even the starry heavens, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides" (a paraphrase of Jung's Symbols of Transformation: paragraph 646).

So the task is not to look back, but to rip one's attention to what is just ahead. And this ripping, and the rending of hearts in great heart attacks is thefeeling of one's looking ahead, one is looking ahead at death.Death is not even the bloody mess of entanglements, the bloody mess ofthe suffocating fornication of the "particular" is a present thatstill claims its bloody roots in the past (think of the maggots swarming in the boy's leg in Kafka's "Landartzt"). Death is a silencing and a pre-figuring of some kind of redemption or resurrection that we all secretly long for (Grünewald's risen Christ).

Is Resurrection also a "salvation" --- no because salvation issalting, it remains, it preserves the past, it dries and crystallizesthe bloody mass into a horror of frozen meat.

Nov 7, 2007 10:31 AM

What happens when you teach from the heart

I am in the front yard in Torkenweiler. There is a party of some kind going on, and more guests are still arriving. I have an official function at this party, and keep coordinating something with my mother. The mood is good, and everything seems fine. Then someone talks about a little girl who has just had a heart attack. Someone else says that the Greek second husband of Gertrud Unsöld has also just had a heart attack. A third person runs up to my mother and me and says that Peter Blasenheim has also suffered a heart attack just now. I am scared. I walk down the stairs, and see Suse Unsöld pulling up in a car. A fellow is with her who looks like one of my students. He has curly hair and seems young. There is an empty expression on his face. I ignore him, and ask Suse if she has heard about the heart attacks. It appears that she has, and that she is not overly concerned about them. I accompany her up the stairs and then hand her over to my mother. I walk towards the Grohmann property, and this now suddenly reveals sight of the EZO. By the cash registers, there is a commotion of some kind. I see Peter lying there, panting. He curses at something. For some reason I cannot get through to him, and Suse calls me back to the party. I hesitate, and then some woman tells me that Peter has died. I sit around with my parents and talk about what Peter has meant to me. I tell them how Peter was supposed to have died soon in the 1980s but that he has lingered on for so long.

A patient's wallet (before the path to the right)

I am visiting a city I have never been to before. It has the feel of a large European city, and reminds me a bit of Berlin, but it is built on hills. I am there with my mother and one other person, staying in a hotel. I leave the hotel to explore the town. I walk along a long street, and enter a few stores. Then I go back to the hotel to rest. I leave my wallet and all my other stuff there, and go out again, dressed only in sandals, shorts, and a short-sleeved shirt in a rust brown color. I walk along the same street again, but now come to a newsstand-like bookstore which I explore a little bit. There are glossy new books in various languages, and for a moment I get the sense I am in an airport. I see a few t-shirts for sale. They have prints of faces of people on them. I do not recognize any of these people but have the sense that they are television comedians. In the very back of the store I see some older books lying on a table. There is an Indian or Pakistani woman browsing through them. I see a book of postcards that has an image of a face lying on a bed on them, in black and white. It says "Hospital Patients." I am intrigued by this concept, and decide to buy this to send the post cards to Justin. I leave the store to walk back to the hotel to get my wallet and my brown linen coat. Now I am somehow in the company of a youngish man with dark hair who seems to follow me. We walk across a large square which has a castle or a large church on its left side. I remember that I have originally come to this town to explore its many famous sites. I see a tall slender woman with long hair rushing by in the square. She is wearing hippyish clothes, and accidentally drops a small leather wallet. It falls to the ground and then rolls around. I shout: "Hey, lady!" but she does not hear me. Then a swarthy, unshaven middle-aged fat man walks towards the leather wallet and picks it up. He is accompanied by a big woman in late middle-age wearing all red clothing. This couple then walks up to me. The fellow with me has turned into Max now. We veer away from the main street onto a small path that leads to the right. Behind some houses there are woods, and we walk into the woods. The couple is following us. It now seems to me that I am in rural Virginia somewhere, and I point this out to Max. At this moment we see a few hikers who have a large black dog with them. The dog comes up to me and starts playing with me. I enjoy this, but then the dog crawls up my back and sits on top of my head.

I hurriedly re-frame Oppermann's account as follows:

Story of a man who is left with a dog on his head (the valiseincident): here we have the depiction of an educated man in his latethirties, he lays down his wallet and takes up his indescretion. Butif only you could grab hold of your indiscretion, you would suddenly be alive, and walking swifty with the tall woman who has picked upyour valise. "I hope you'll get your money's worth" I heard her say.I cannot be responsible for what I heard said. Here is my friend,again, taken for another wild ride, by a wild eyed yogi... a yokel and a yogi at the same time: for he is also the fat man, bespectacled andunshaven, worn clothes, maybe he is the sheep-man: Baah, Baah, Baah. That translates into any language as a formal hesitation: Bah! Idon't want what was said! "I hope you get your money's worth" is whatshe said. And this brings us to the question: into what have youinvested my dear friend? Into what is your dirty pocketbook invested? You are invested to become a man with a dog curled arround your head,like some Kossack with a fine flur hat, ignorant: guarding the door toyour very own truth, the door to the law, which is, if it is the truelaw, never to be spoken, for the law that can be spoken of is neverthe true law! A Cossack hat is always better than a leopard skin pillbox hat anyday, except in the eyes of Bob Dylan (see enclosed fashion details)."What was the purpose of the law?" I heard the young man said. Andyou were traveling for so long with your young man, who kept askingand asking this question, hoping for an answer. After all the law andall of its attendant civilization seemed to bring forth suffering. Perhaps you may have thought that it is better to become a bear, withthose pre-legal burning bruin eyes: the eyes of the adolescent, who remains before the law, uncomprehending: who never asked the question of the law which is always: "what is the law to me?" There is law even in your medieval towns, where you and the young man were crossing, and without great effort in you sojoun into the natureof the law
I will take the liberty of calling the third dream:

The Cresswell solution

(I enjoin it to be subtitled "Tears")

I am in Tokyo, at a busy corner where there is a restaurant that I have been to before. I have gone there to meet my parents and also to re-connect with some other people I have not seen in a while. One of them is a shy young woman. I look forward to this, but just as I am about to enter the restaurant, I hear a voice of someone talking. The voice sounds familiar, and I realize it is Cresswell. I am stunned to find him here. We talk, and he rolls a cigarette and begins to smoke it. I suggest that he join our meal, and we go inside. He connects well with my father, and the two of them talk a lot. We all sit on a large table, and I keep observing Cresswell out of the corner of my eye while I make small talk with the young woman. There is something uncertain about the food. At some point we all get up and stand around for a while, then sit down again but in different combinations. I now have Cresswell next to me, and we talk. He tells me he is on his way to Canada, somewhere in Saskatchewan or Manitoba to attend a wedding. Then he adds that it is his wedding. I ask him whom he is marrying. He laughs and asks me if I really do not know this. I do not, and he says something about the obvious woman. This makes me laugh in turn. I then suggest that we call Justin from my cell-phone, and see how he reacts to getting a call from Cresswell and me, from Japan. This does not happen, however, and before I know it, I find myself in a beautiful Japanese hotel, standing in the lobby, together with the other people. We are assigned rooms, and in a complicated arrangement, I am supposed to share my room with Cresswell. This pleases me as I have the feeling that I can learn a lot from him. When I am shown to the room by some hotel employee, however, I am actually with a young woman. The hotel guy says it is the best room they have. It turns out to be an extremely narrow, long room which has two ornamented coffin-like beds at its end. I am not sure whether to be irritated or intrigued by this. There is a door to the left, and this opens to a plain library that has all kinds of books. Just as I want to explore this, I find myself in an airport lounge that has a mall-like aura to it. The young woman is now Lauren, who tells me something about her and me. It is incomprehensible, but I am not surprised at this. I look forward to seeing Cresswell again.

Rembember that any solution, provided that it is not overly saturated(with ideas, meaning or significance) is capable of dissolving salt (which can be read as bitterness, but "bitterness" means nothing untilit becomes equated or distilled: "your bitterness." It is a part of you yourself in your ownmost: "Your Bitterness."Remember that Cresswell sailed on the ocean with a bunch of old salts. He always spoke of going away to the cold frozen north (where thecreek used to rise) and there in the ice and sunshine of an eternal arctic summer he would fish for salmon and god knows what other kindof fish). He would brag of being a man who could always earn himselfa sure living, doing something both hearty and back-breaking. He could literally go out there and fish. We stay behind and count the statistics: how many more years until the world is fished out? How many more years before we cannot produce livestock any more? How manymore years can we go on like this?

Cresswell earned a good deal of cash. There is money in your wallet,blood on your hands and on the tracks, I never could figure out whatmade Cresswell tick! Was it that his father was part of the American military? Was it some way in which he envisioned himself, the intellectual product of his father's worth, but someone who found hisown father's worth and work tasteless. Cresswell never spoke of his father. He was his own father from the start. He imbibed of all thecruelty and indifference of the father who shreds us from our past andsays we have to move on. And that he earned a good deal of cash forhis catch from the sea. And you could say you would like to earn somecash too, if you caught hold of something more than priveleged andentitled teens, there might be something, and something to look ahead,but as it is its only ashes, ashes and pot-sherds. I would, however,be wrong to leave you with just this image, just this piss-pot that isoverturned and broken. You have partaken of some share of your ownglory. You are a man of great discipline and you have obtained a double D: D stands for Doctorate, not bra cup size.

Herzog as found on:
http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2007/11/22/vice-interviews-werner-herzog/

Japan: from where, in a film by Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog complains of the aenemia of images in the civilized world, indeed within Tokyo itself: Tokyo-Ga. Tokyo-Ga has the advantage of having an image of Herzog, and an epiphany that the waste of time that one has playing pachinko was the only manner one could survive the horror of the Second World War: How we waste our time in these idle speculations, web-blogs, spider-solitaire (my own waste preferences) or perhaps in Oppermann's sense reading himself silly... Tokyo, where at one time in order to escape profound depression and shoddy workmanship the only route was through metalic silver balls being pressed round a senseless machine: The Pachinko Machine:

What inthe hell are you doing in Japan? Have you come on nothing but theimage of a jewish american princess? (well, Salome is not bad for astart.)What are you doing? In the arms of the Dauphin Hotel? Something ismissing! Yes, a clue of how you got there, yes, straight into theheart of a Murakami novel. That being said I would have to say thatyou are one very lucky fellow. You carved out a piece for yourselffrom existence, you and this exotic woman... or if she is not herself exotic the hotel is at the very least. So there you have it: from Cresswell to Cossack is indeed a very short journey. And from the cossack to the Soviet car: the Zaporoshet (that would yet be spoken of, and that has now already been spoken of, and indeed was spoken of in an even more distant past). Zaporoshet: one who dwells in fortified encampments. All that is missing is the stringy black tartar beard, butbehold, by Jove, Cresswell had such a moustache and goatee, a veritable Colonel Sanders: the Colonel, who was son of a Colonel. (I believe that Cresswell even referred to himself as a child of a military man).

So the question remains for you what is colonel? Does it matter this kernel of knowledge? Is it just some fried chicken, "greasy kids stuff," to paraphrase the Freewheelin Bob Dylan? What kernal have you gleaned from this. The Colonel was always a stuffy, stodgy old man, but i will leave this meditation upto you, if you have the strength or the resource to observe it. More on this later, because there is always time for what is later,rather than the suffocating excressence of what is past,Your call has been heard, whether you dialed it or not, or sent bytelegraph (now no longer existent) or by telepathy. Ayres

Aesthetic Judgments in the Eschaton and the existence of God

The Philials of Reason have been following me. I just rated this "Web Log" online and came up with a scant rating as "high school" in its sophomoric efforts to achieve itself in some sort of past. Well, so be it, it can only reflect on Oppermann to some extent that his friend who endeavors to render his life in some version of a text should be reduced to a high school vocabulary. Today I have little strength to write. I feel fantastically exhausted. I should not be writing, and there probably should be a law against me coming round.

Of this post Card Oppermann has the following things to say:

"12/25/07 8:50 p. It wouldn't be a real Christmas without a post card of a cute animal! Also it ocurrs to me that your 39th birthday is just around the corner - and that you might profit from a musk rat image more than I could. -The other night I lay awake for a few hours when it seemed like the world had disappeared. I felt no anxiety - realized that I felt no anxiety - then the world returned and I was back in Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology. The best remedy against anxiety is a combination of prayer and exhaustion, so that one can safely go to sleep (or back to sleep) and transfer the anxiety to dreams about airports or exams in the old Gymnasium (a result of an ontological determination)."

When I first read this card I understood the pun and the pleroma of metaphors stemming from Oppermann's last line "(a result of an ontological determination.)" But I have since forgotten all the insights that I had into this. Maybe it was into the void that seemed to be in the absence of the world. Maybe the ontological question is really "sein zum Tode" which would then include one's death and judgment in the eschaton, the means of judging one's life ("gibt es auf Erde ein Mass?" -and all that!), and that life would only be measured precisely by its self: the measure of a life is exactly one life, and so on, and so on... well I understood all that, I understood that Jean Luc Nancy had effectively damned us to the realm of the apparently purely ontic, reduced us to the level of the everyday everywhere, and taken away our capacity to raise anything up as a "sacrifice" to any "exterior"--- all of which does not make sense--- as in the example of greeting the man who said to me at the end of the year (December 31st 2007) one man said to me:

"What if we live in a world where no one believes in God anymore!"

My response was:

"Well then God bless you!"

I might add that from Jean-Luc Nancy's cool and calm position he may appear to be the dean of intellectuals, in complete control of himself. But what if he speaks really with the despair of the Seljack who looks out at the child-demons who are pestering him and his home, they killed his dog and sprayed grafitti on his walls, and he says to me: "but these demons do not believe in God! I could kill one but then I would wind up in jail! What world is this that ends up being such a sad, miserable godless world!" Is this really what Jean-Luc Nancy is saying? Is he just being so smug and intellectual, not merely a conceited bastard, but one who really under his cool, calm and collected skin is screaming because he is more alone than he could ever tolerate? This is the fate of modern academia in its polite condemnation: "the exterior is fake; there is no "beyond being;" there is no "good;" there is no God!"

God will comfort us if we need comfort. During the rest of the time we choose to live in a world with a vague recollection of the immense power of the spiritual realm... and if possible to forget it. Only when one lies in the void, at times when one is no longer able to write anything at all, when one is ripped away from the computer keyboard, the stenographer's pad and pen, the easy notebooks, the check-books, the balance books (ah, but those last two are truly in hell) can one begin to live the real life that is beyond this book. It's not fair, as if the book (or it's electronic equivalent) in this estimate were only representations of the true life, and that the true life comes after. But a book or words or writing has as much to do with reality as it seems we are capable of speaking or writing about a reality beyond this reality.

If this reality itself is not a metaphor for some other reality that we have only begun to know as "the outside" (something to which we might sacrifice, which Nancy criticizes in his article "The Unsacrificeable")... but then equally it comes to show that writing cannot be aught but metaphor for itself: writing itself can change no one, for these are just marks in a book or on an electronic tablet: and the goal becomes an illusion, the goal that has always been: that you will be a different person after you have read these words: that these words themselves will change, not just outer reality, as if to say "Apple" will not also change you:

Oppermann probably sent me a post card with Cezanne's apple painting like this

I have always had difficulties with Cezanne.

Who changes? What changes? When we evoke the apple it appears on the web, not just any apple but a Cezanne apple, capable of storing a certain repleteness within its own vision, a better poetic rendering of an apple than a photograph, if the word better means what it does: somehow catching the soul. An apple is not represented here? And what of the lush exteriority of the apple, exterior to the text?

Well, you get the message, the sense of what I mean. Or maybe you do not, like you are paralyzed suddenly or you have forgotten how to read. Or maybe it is more like Samuel Beckett's "Calmative" where the man apparently is dead and so he says to himself "I will try once again to tell myself a story" (that is, to bring the world quite round into being believable once again.)



This image should be included because it is beautiful. (The moral "should" the last sentence belongs to the capacity of the father to judge, and may be aligned between Kant's second and third Critiques.) It is a geometrical representatioin of a condition that according to some contemporary thought is "antiquated but beautiful." It is thereby relegated from the realm of science to the realm of aesthetics.

Bear in mind the Epithet from one of the final, concluding paragraphs from "A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" when reading the following passage: "Make maps not histories," when Oppermann writes:

"12/26/07 11:20 p. Your birthday is almost over and I havent even written you a post card yet! Presumably Deleuze and Guattari would consider maps simply "artificial re-territorializations" or at least sham representations thereof."

This appears to be incorrect Oppermann, though not exactly incorrect: "reality" as opposed to whatever the "artificial" is - is a series of flows and continuua. Desire can evidently be screwed up into a map as well as any other place. It is not necessary to make the mistake of "representing" (which in this moment sounds like some valence described from Foucault's "Order of things"), which would be an error from the start, but the map sets out on the road to becoming just as the orchid sets out on the road to becoming a wasp etc.... we are on the road to becoming music, and that, once again is an intersection with the Third Critique: becoming sublime. This may be a passage away from "the unsacrificeable" the gesture in the face of this whistling wheezing grimace of a face of a man in despair, after all what does it mean when we face a man who denies that there is a healing magic in everything and say "God bless you!" but that "You will become the music; and the map will become your music and your music will become a map by which to seek the road you sought again."

But I digress. Oppermann goes on to say:

"But I'd be hesitant to say much about what is produced in 1660, a time that is not revealed to the discourse of the early 1970's"

(Actually I think Jung had already had a dream where he had a dream where he was stuck in the 16th century, the 1500's I presume, doomed to having to study the course of alchemy throughout his life. Still I think it perhaps a bit snapped off on my part to make this comment. I have already spoken of Harvey Rabbin who regarded Seneca as a contemporary philosopher. Just how much do we have to make ourselves revealed to anything? After all Deleuze and Guattari considered dates merely as a kind of signature of an intensity: a specific valence of flow. The intensity is not reducible to any other intensity, but one may find it possible, credible, that in order for one to conceive of it at all [I think this is the Anselmian (1033-1109) ontological argument for the existence of God: God must exist as some sort of non-contradictory reasonable condition: "that than which nothing greater can exist" otherwise it will not be God; however Anselm irritates me because he was taught to me by an irritating Jesuit priest, Fr. Leo Sweeney at Loyola in 1991]: in order for anything to exist we must in some manner conceive of it. But that is all that is required in the same breath. Perhaps Jean-Luc Nancy would have a fit with that one, but then again, exteriority to "being" was not one of the aspects Anselm was trying to attribute. Deleuze and Guattari in "Anti Oedipus" refer to God, I believe, while discussing the "Body without Organs" as "Only as the god of the disjunctive sylogism," I am still trying to wrap my mind around that.

"... I'm trying to say: what is in your memory, re-collecting or even de-collecting, of your own childhood (and perhaps your 9th birthday for example)? Is the re-territorialization of imaginal memory "artificial?"

Things are remembered according to desire, which is not at all the same as individual's or ego's desire, but rather is the desire of some terrible mechanism of the "self" (sorry to use that Jungian term, it will truly condemn me to another 20 years for not being Jung, but rather some sort of Jungian- Bah!): after all, you were the one laying there when the world ceased to exist back on the 25th of December. That was real, and that was a more concrete expression of desire than we generally are capable of receiving. If I need to remember my 9th birthday, then I will, but not just because it is somehow commanded: we can never command memory according to desire any more than we could command love or real desire to ever manifest without its own will or way.

"What are the criteria here? And who is enough of a madman here to declare this question "fascist?"

This last passage strikes me as slippery: at first I would easily jump to question any criteria but that of a certain voluptuous enjoyment of desire: pleasure itself, but not necessarily pleasure for the human Dasein is involved. I like to think of some green tentically thing having pleasure here, or Thomas Hobbes' version of society as some great ocean squid, a Leviathan or the vision of Job, the Behemoth, "Behold now the Behemoth, which I made with thee!" Or the immense and extremely smelly eagle named Zazz or something like that is having pleasure. We most of the time simply lie down and take it, or get plucked up and eaten by it, or write web logs about it, or delude ourselves about it, or something. It doesn't matter if the question is fascist if you are being eaten by a hundred-thousand-story bird.

"The discourse of Anti-Oedipus, a book I know you treasure, is strangely dated, and that is not a criticism."

I think that is beautiful. This datedness to me has to do with the sense we have that time itself and reality itself is changing. Enough said.