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...