Of Note: the Siegfried Incident

I am promising to write more on the death of the hero, the catastrophe of having died in a profound sense while still remaining alive. But in my characteristic Ayresian fashion I will point to an etymology to sort of save the day.

This is the mystery of "segh," and as a matter of segway I would like to add that the hero and the snake are brothers. Both serve the mother. (All this is discussed in Jung's "Symbols of Transformation," and I owe a debt to my analyst Gordon Nelson for discussing it with me today, although something is not necessarily right in including this in a web-log on Oppermann, I will include it in the words of Kafka, "so that I may feel that I have left nothing out) If the hero is killed (by the snake), the option is not to serve the snake, but to wait, perhaps to grieve.

segh- DEFINITION: To hold. Oldest form *seh-, becoming *segh- in centum languages. Derivatives include hectic, eunuch, scheme, and scholar. 1. Suffixed form *segh-es-. Siegfried, from Old High German sigu, sigo, victory, from Germanic *sigiz-, victory (< “a holding or conquest in battle”). 2. hectic; cachexia, cathexis, entelechy, eunuch, Ophiuchus, from Greek ekhein, to hold, possess, be in a certain condition, and hexis, habit, condition. 3. Possible suffixed (abstract noun) form *segh-wr, toughness, steadfastness, with derivative *segh-wr-o-, tough, stern. severe; asseverate, persevere, from Latin sevrus, stern; b. sthenia; asthenia, calisthenics, hypersthene, hyposthenia, thrombosthenin, from Greek sthenos, physical strength, from a possible related abstract noun form *sgh-wen-es- (with zero-grade of the root). 4. O-grade form *sogh-. epoch, from Greek epokh, “a holding back,” pause, cessation, position in time (epi-, on, at; see epi). 5. Zero-grade form *sgh-. a. scheme, from Greek skhma, “a holding,” form, figure; b. scholar, scholastic, scholium, school1, from Greek skhol, “a holding back,” stop, rest, leisure, employment of leisure in disputation, school. 6. Reduplicated form *si-sgh-. ischemia, from Greek iskhein, to keep back. (Pokorny seh- 888.)

The Oppermann Book

Oppermann gave me a book in a dream last night. It was clearly the right book. It was an Oppermann book. The book was in Spanish, which made it more difficult to read. It had strange figures: a monster, a tree and some mountains all printed in blue-green ink. I will try to explain further...

A Moment of Brief but Intense Anxiety (Blog-Interrogative)

Oppermann, are you there? Can you read me? And if you can, do you? And if you do, then how are you?

A list of things to do

1. Relate the issue of Friendship to its shadow: afraid
2. discuss C.G. Jung's Memories Dreams and Reflections: "Shooting Siegfried" dream as it relates to the Pri- root of friendship
3. Discuss a passage from Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynnical Reason" concerning the exhaustion of Robert Musil's "Young Törleß" while trying to read Kant's "Critique of Pure reason" and relate it to the article I wrote on "Der Critiker" also to the issue of "critical mass" in nuclear physics
4. Uncertain
5. Discuss Oppermann's card where he describes his father as a "Seljack" while in London Ca. 2002 (which had been kept stored in the back of "Jung's Memories Dreams and Reflections")

Friendship: an Etymological Unsettling

pri-
To love. Contracted from *pri- (becoming *priy- before vowels).Derivatives include filibuster, friend, and Friday. 1. Suffixed form *priy-o-. a. free, from Old English freo, free, and fron, freogan, to love, set free; b. filibuster, freebooter, from Dutch vrij, free. Both a and b from Germanic *frijaz, beloved, belonging to the loved ones, not in bondage, free, and *frijn, to love. 2. Suffixed (participial) form *priy-ont-, loving. friend, from Old English frond, frond, friend, from Germanic *frijand-, lover, friend. 3. Suffixed shortened form *pri-tu-. a. Siegfried, from Old High German fridu, peace; b. affray, afraid, from Old French esfreer, to disturb, from Vulgar Latin *exfredre, to break the peace, from ex-, out, away (see eghs) + *fridre, to make peace, from Germanic *frithu-, peace; c. Germanic *frij-, peace, safety, in compound *berg-frij- (see bhergh-2). a–c all from Germanic *frithuz, peace. 4. Suffixed feminine form *priy--, beloved. a. Frigg, from Old Norse Frigg, goddess of the heavens, wife of Odin; b. Friday, from Old English Frgedæg, Friday, from Germanic compound *frije-dagaz, “day of Frigg” (translation of Latin Veneris dis, “Venus's day”). Both a and b from Germanic *frijj, beloved, wife. (Pokorny pri- 844.)

Robert Walser Signpost

I am leaving this Robert Walser Signpost in case anyone gets lost along the way and is further in need of excessive confusion in order to set things straight. I will reccommend Walser to anyone who reads him already. For those who do not read him I will not reccommend reading him. Nevertheless I should say that everyone should ALREADY be reading Walser.

Hector Berlioz and the Bears

This image was posted rather humorously at: http://timothyfox.blogspot.com/2007/12/classical-music-and-rock-music.html

I do not know if Hector Berlioz would be added to the list of composers and symphonies that I expect to hear when I am dead. When I die I expect to hear several works of music:

1. "Donnez du Rum a ton Homme" sung by Georges Moustaki



2. "Raghupati" performed by Bhagvan Das



3. Most all of Johan Sebastian Bach's music for unaccompanied instruments (Oppermann will say that I have redeemed myself there)



4. Chanting of the Gyuto Monks



5. Most all music that I have heard that is not irritating, grating or overly repetative.

One may logically add that one should not really expect to hear anything when one is dead, mainly because of the frightful issue of musical and corporeal de-composition.

What is "useful," and I use the term "useful" only in an unconscious and off-handed manner that does no justice to the terms of beauty.... what is useful in Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique is a certain dilectation of men sitting in each other's company, listening to a recorded performance in an hour of leisure. Most importantly the element of the first movement of Symphonie is La Rêverie, or Les Rêveries plural feminine. This has to do with the feminine soul, not with the masculine Le Reve.... and so on. I am afraid this portion has become excessively theoretical and pedantic. The pragmatics of the text have to do with the use of luxury, of excess which is pointed back at the body once again.

Now I am pasting (or one could say "re-posting", cut-and-pasting) in the entry I left on Oppermann's Ayres-in-Theoria web page: http://ayrestheoria.blogspot.com/

The article came concerning the lapsus of reasoning behind my indictment that Oppermann was Hoffmann.

The key connection here is not merely E.T.A. Hoffmann but Hector Berlioz: who's "Symphony Fantastique" bears a lasting relationship to the "Erzhaelung" at least in my imagination.

When I consider the tales and their content: I do not remember a "March aux Supplice" or whatever Berlioz named it. However there is a strong suggestion that Oppermann's status as Hoffmann is as unequivocal as Ayres to Berlioz or Oppermann to Berlioz for that matter. The issue may be adjurred in the ministry of records, or in the ministry (and ministering) of recorded information. Also in the ministration of meta-information.

The real truth of Hector Berlioz will UNDOUBTEDLY carry us once again back to that entirely beloved and execrable (and that is another association to Camus: "Howls of execration") ARCADIAN moment of listening to Berlioz and discussing all manner of Romantic thinking with Oppermann back at Colorado College.This leaves us at best sentimental jackasses, or at worst sentimentally crippled children in the incestuous embrace of the arcadian mother.The point of all this posturing and discussing of German, French, and English Romanticism is that we definitely were feeling screwed over by the enlightenment: "ridden hard and put away wet," by all that technological claptrap (and that is exactly what technology is a "clap-trap"): Romanticism when it came into being: in the 1780's or the 1980's was simply saying we have more than certainly had enough of being sold--- SOLD ---- another bag of goods by "reason."

Romanticism in its own naivete and idiocy at least has the courage not to be either:

a) hopelessly depressed Wichtigteueren, future occupiers of the seats of middle management, with their oppressive mortgages and their obcessive optimistic despair: real "go getters" who have harnessed the cliche of the American Dream to their chariot and are about to be thrown into an abyss.

b) Involved in the denial of this in some manner or other.

Please note the following categories of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique:There are five movements (indictments?), instead of the four movements which were conventional for symphonies at the time:

1. Rêveries - Passions (Dreams - Passions)



2. Un bal (A ball)



3. Scène aux champs (Scene in the country)



4. Marche au supplice (March to the scaffold)



5. Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (Dream of a witches' Sabbath)

It is not exactly ending as a choral mass. This music ends with more or less the orchestration of a black mass... ...well, whatever.I do not think that Oppermann or I were ever seriously Satanists: such Huismanic extremes (La Bas) were entirely too exhausting, and banal, took themselves too literally. Oppermann is too laughing and too strong either to be too much of a "good" christian or (most certainly) to be a good satanist either.

But we did like the revolt. We did like black coffee and imagining such things as a dance of witches. One could say we rather adored the dance of witches. We could not be witches ourselves; this was not our fate or destiny to be this. But delight, well there was much of this: let the things that are "wickedly-wicked" as the wicked witch of the west reign.

Oppermann was no Copellius: I do not ever remember him being the Hoffmannesque twisted dark man who took away father's soul. Rather Oppermann strove at each instant to instill as much soul as his somewhat "brittle" germanic exterior could muster.Of course it is Offenbach who wrote the most commonly observed opera of the "Tales" which is an account of numerous seductions and trickeries by the anima and by one diabolical form or another. It is rather itself a tale of the infernal comedy of being tortured from one set of events to the next. To what effect?The indictment of Oppermann as Hoffmann was hasty and indeed whimsical. However it is because of these fanciful, fitful, and unscientific conditions that the charges remain impugned more deeply in the grain of his soul.

For future reference the opus of which I speak is called: Nachtstücke The contents of which reads:

1. Der Sandmann



2. Ignaz Denner



3. Die Jesuitenkirche in G.



4. Das Sanctus



5. Das öde Haus



6. Das Majorat



7. Das Gelübde



8. Das steinerne Herz

The book can be found at:http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6341Further research must be performed before we can either fully clear or confirm this indictment according to scientific rigor and dependability.

http://www.janbrett.com/newsnotes/berlioz_newsnotes2.htm

This is entirely pathetic but because Oppermann is a lover of bears from the correct distance I thought I would add a tale of nauseating convivial marital nothingness. I can only add the term "joyous despair" to the unfortunately cute information offered here.

Please also visit:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/aw

The Case of Oppermann

The case of Oppermann is admittedly complex, there are lots of in's and outs and many complications. Oppermann himself is on the way to becoming an Oppermann, and from there always, perhaps eternally he is becoming something else.

Oppermann and Gossett have taken time to discuss my case (with limited success, Max, after all is constantly diverting his keenest analysis, impish as this undoubtedly seems to the uninitiated), they may indict me on the matter of my approach or non-approach to the feminine, at times they may adjust my sentence, murmuring something about my naive attachments to the "feminine" which may or may not have anything to do with the actual women with whom I have co-habited and fought with these hand-fulls of years that I have existed on this planet.

Oppermann's case has been laid out in several conditions:

1. Oppermann as a sort of bachelor-machine
2. Oppermann as a dude
3. Oppermann as a thinker
4. Oppermann as an author
5. Oppermann as a practical explanation of genius
6. Oppermann as a lover of bears (from the right distance)
7. Oppermann as an academic
8. Oppermann as a sort of critic
9. Oppermann as a writer of Post-Cards (notations from the brink of some other topos or non-topos)
10. Oppermann as an inhabitant of Seattle
11. Oppermann as a commentator on the post-psychological epoch
12. Oppermann as a German (Swabian)
    
13. Oppermann as an inhabitant of the United States (Colorado Springs, Arlington Massachusetts, Seattle, and temporarily in other locations, possibly on an autobus to Texas or another state in his Freshman year of college or some such thing)
    
14. Oppermann as a writer, now, of English web-logs
15. Oppermann as a driver of foreign automobiles (sub categories on how I intensely dislike when he drives too closely to the car in front of him)
16. Oppermann as control freak (with features of panic attacks when I have visited my former analyst Lee Roloff on light hearted business)
    
17. Oppermann as an attendant of Bob Dylan, Greg Brown and Richard Thompson concerts (with sub categories of with or without Gossett or other fellow attendants)
    
18. Oppermann as a walker
19. Oppermann as a commentator on Ayres (sub categories relate to his own presenting persona: Arthur Holzgold, Falkenburger, etc.)
    
20. Oppermann as an occasionally intoxicated writer (sub-categories of Tea, Bowmore, and Boddingtons)
21. Oppermann as an observer of analytical psychologists
22. Oppermann as one of the best informed literary thinkers of our time
23. Oppermann as a leading authority on Robert Walser in the United States
24. Oppermann as a sleeper
25. Oppermann as a commentator on "Jeder fuer sich und Gott gegen Alles"
26. etc.
27. Oppermann as defined in a category of finite singularity
28. Oppermann as defined by the totality of his human and non-human personal experience
29. Oppermann as a world traveler
30. Oppermann as not contained in the categories of this or any other essay
31. Oppermann as one who has inhaled my second hand cigarette smoke
32. Oppermann as a drinker of black coffee (I believe this is a religious conviction)
33. Oppermann as expelled from the Institute of German Romanticism
34. Oppermann as a reader of Franz Kafka (which is not the same as being a literary thinker)
35. Oppermann as educator (in the manner of Schopenhauer)
36. Oppermann as Kleist
37. Oppermann as Hoffmann
38. Oppermann as inhabitant of Ravensburg
39. Oppermann as divorcee of his former American wife (whom I may not be able to name out of respect though he is free to discuss at any length my relation to Corinne, my own foreign ex-wife)
40. Oppermann as procrastinator
41. Oppermann as masturbator (in the image of Peter Handke's Kuerze Brief zum langer Abscheid)
42. Oppermann as idiot (sub-category as fellow-idiot)
    
43. Oppermann as friend
44. Oppermann as one of those fucking sages
45. Oppermann as used book salesman
46. Oppermann as consumer
47. Oppermann as nose-picker
48. Oppermann as poet
    
49. Oppermann as a botanical incompetent
50. Oppermann as tennis player
51. Oppermann as grand-son
52. Oppermann as ....
53. and so on.
54. Oppermann as exhausted
55. Oppermann as shot
56. Oppermann as revived
57. 
    
58. Oppermann as shot again
    
59. Oppermann as retrieved
    
60. Oppermann as gelassen
61. 
    

You will note that so far I have left numbers 57 and 61 blank. That is entirely just for spite. Perhaps it will increase Oppermann's anxiety just a little, a moment of wavering indecipherability and Oppermann will say: "damn that Ayres, he is pretending to be indecipherable again, but we know it is all a sham, a bad ploy at attempting to open up the ontological in these moments: what a confused and shameful little man Ayres is, (and so on...)! Oppermann will deny this, speaking of his superior stoic equanimity, this will also be a form of spitefulness, indicating that quite rapidly I have slipped into a form of paranoid delusion (please see numbers 455. and 399. respectively for an all-encompassing refutation of this). I will add that numbers 66. through 77. are also blank, I leave a few more comments on Oppermann and then I leave a few more spaces blank again. In those spaces it is fairly certain that the case of Oppermann is left off for something else: I do this for the sake of incompleteness. Oppermann may or may not appreciate this form of sloppy categorization, but at this moment I am feeling extremely spiteful and will hold off on introducing numbers 237. and 412. until later.

The key aspect here is to note that the Borgesian categories of Oppermann: perhaps these categories are driven by his intense, hysterical, but always somehow hilarious genius for anxiety, perhaps his Dasein in these web-pages is driven by his curious naughtyness, a Walserian reversal that always threatens to leap out into the text, and scrub the whole thing with an indictment [62. Oppermann as plaintiff; 63. Oppermann as professor of sentimental jackassery; 64. Oppermann as accusitor: "you're an asshole" 65. and so on (again)].

The Case of Oppermann is not by any means completed. In fact by beginning to render a formal or informal exposition of the various modalities and sub-categories of Oppermann's existence here it quickly becomes apparent that only I will be exhausted, needing desperately to go to bed after a long week of directing myself and others to act in accordance with the principles of psychoanalysis, needless to say of which comprise countless other ordinances, sub-categories, rejoinders and epithets. In the meantime it becomes increasingly certain that Oppermann simply has gone to bed. He may wake in an hour, or perhaps in many hours in a state of intense anxiety, that I may or may not later enjoy poking fun at.

Hesse A-letheia: Invocation of the Muses

Invocation of the Muses

.

O Muses!

Guardians of awful truth!

We ask for the most dangerous epic of peace--

When such stillness of peace

threatens to kill all animation

When the skies, birds, trees

...and ALL the transformations of water grow silent

May we remember

Friendship is Gelassenheit

The Dawn will continue to grow

The dusk and night

Will shroud us

Where we surrendur

.

O Muse!

Help us to remember

And not forget

"We are the muses who can tell lies that sometimes sound like the truth..."

...That fleeting shred of wakefulness

Be the sail to carry us to the most distant shore

Before the dim and terrible maws

Of endless Night

.

Muses,

Help us to remember:

We ex-ist between

Tenderness and annihilation

That we lift our glass to the awful truth

That we drank the draught of peace

And shared it with others

On your holy mountain

Muses, therefore help us

Hear our cry,

Help us to remember:

Terrible and difficult is the peace of friendship

But it is the fabric of which all the future is wrought

...

It is time to write a web log on Herman Hesse. This is the most difficult and important thing. This is a clue to Oppermann's existence. This Herman Hesse, NOT psychologist, but willing to be analyzed by one: not philosopher, but his fiction itself has become our metaphysic.

Ja-ja, aber... what do I know of Herman Hesse? I know that Jan passed over a lake once, to get to the other side, the homestead of Herman Hesse.

I have the full image of Oppermann's own hand-writing on the post-card, but this he has asked for the time being should not be shared publicly. He definitely does not want his writing samples on the web... I mean what would people think? How they would analyze him, just on the basis of his vulnerable writing, the writing of his bare hand... with a pen, of course, we cannot show that direct line to Oppermann's soul through a line of black ink. Instead I can only show you the stamps that were placed on the "written side" of the image which depicts Herman Hesse's home in Kohlgarten.

One-hundred. Twice.

This was enough to get things across, from Germany directly to the United States, and thus this particular card is a cypher of sorts from across the Atlantic of some distant sign of Oppermann's life. It came directly across: and it was the attempt he made from his home in Germany to send a message to the far flung and infinitely preposterous city of Los Angeles, wherein resided his friend: Ayres, Justin Ayres. This is as far spread out that the Psyche of Oppermann has tried to communicate in a single missive. Well, at least there was some friend almost half-way round the world.

Oppermann writes (and I keep the cadence and the lines, because we are hinting at as many facets of this riddle as we possibly can here): and we wonder (in a whisper!) ... has there been any life under closer scrutiny than that of Oppermann by me? Oppermann scrutinizes his own life, and that is enough for him: he draws separate conclusions. What does it mean to scrutinize a life down to its most intimate detail, the cadence of pen upon a post-card, the quality of the day on which the post-card was sent... the books being read at the time (possibly even Goethe) and then discarded for other works by other men... all this can be noted: but are we attempting to produce a homunculus of the Oppermann life? The infinite internet reproduction of the "high fidelity" reality? Such an effort is vain and useless, there can only be one thing that it can do, express a certain wincing tenderness and respect that a friend gives a friend.

8-23-01
Herr Doktor,
this is the place where Hesse lived
Ca. 1901-1913. The extreme remoteness
of the "town" (they had to row across
the lake for groceries) allowed him
"weld" - I believe. This is a
cliche when one sits in L.A. or
Boston or Seattle or Paris - but
when one is actually there, the
a-letheia emerges. Completely
by itself, as per MAT(T)ER.
Be well, my fellow Steppenwolf.

The last line is a sort of brotherhood, according to Oppermann we are on the same level, even though he in fact has visited Herman Hesse's home, and I have not. It is difficult, nigh impossible to compare lives: what is one life devoted to dealing with the insanity of Los Angeles compared to the life of an academic and a skeptic, who visits the home of his sage, who was born and died before he even reached the scene. And I know that Oppermann will say "I hate those fucking sages": and the question is "Why?" and the answer is because most all those fucking sages have sold us up a river: either the river of spirituality, renunciation or the river of capitalist corruption, or, more likely both at the same time: we keep reviling the fact that we have to buy another fucking book from another one of those fucking sages. The relationship of books to money is at least at this time much closer than the relationship of internet publication to money.... relatively speaking the internet production is a production of light, a matter without matter. I am not incurring direct charges by virtue of publishing this on the web: Books are matter, and this form of energy and information is --- directly --- expensive. The web-log formation of energy does not incur immediate expense other than the energy it takes to power the computer and the internet of information and the connection between the two. One can then capitulate the modality of the information in two modes: it is moving toward the goal of immediate "free" information. It is the continual denial and deferral of the expense associated with the movement of information.

Oppermann sent me a post-card. This was a publication that was sent at his expense and in his own hand. It was intended in its initial sending only for me to peruse. I would then presumably take the card and poke my nose at it and then shove it in a drawer and forget about it for a long while: As Robert Walser says of "The Last Prose Piece":

At that point, my receipt of the letter, here in Los Angeles, entitled me to nothing more than being the only extant librarian of Oppermannalia or holder of some of the prime articles of the Oppermann archives, if they should ever come to exist and his name not be washed away in history as some profound and tragic shadow of intense genius that would be forgotten:

"And what did these esteemed librarians do with the sketches, studies, and essays with which I have swamped them? They read them, stuck their noses at them, eyeballed them, considered them and then laid them neatly in their drawers or cupboards, where they lay waiting for the right moment"

I have been nothing more than an "esteemed librarian," let me assure you, at least in my smaller and meaner moments, simply recording and reproducing the information. In my better moments I have stolen from Oppermann, because art is a fire that has to be stolen, wrested from the individual gods of each man: therein I became a "Robber," which, as we know, is Walser's next turn of frame.

To Oppermann Hesse is actually quite an authority. Hesse is a sage that Oppermann will not deny, or even if he is not a "sage" then here is an example of a life: a man who lived a life exactly as Oppermann would have lived his own life. Oppermann could not think to do better. And yet it may be Oppermann's life that in some manner will be defined in that in some manner he will become a "Hesse." Knowing that as great as Hesse is (greater than "allzu Menschlichis") he can't be "greater than himself", to paraphrase from Bob Dylan (The Lord of Music) ...I might say that Oppermann is destined to become an Oppermann, were it not that he is also destined to steal something vital, essential for the very basic facticity of living itself from Hesse. He will become a Hesse-Oppermann before he becomes on the road to something else.... (and somewhere in the future I see Oppermann laughing and wearing an absurd but colorfully embroidered Tibetan hat... Off into brilliant morning light!)

Oppermann addressed me with a particular term of endearment: "Herr Doktor." Wir sind Doctoren in einen Dom. Doctors of what church? The church of the disenfranchised? The church of a modern contended reality, begging God for some shred of the "sharing" to grace us, because the rest of the time the world is wrapping up tighter and tighter in such a profound cynicism that it twists the guts out of everything we can possibly experience or comprehend.

The "doctoring" has been and always will be a kind of gallows humor: yes we are doctors, but, yes, indeed of what? Not this filthy "Zwecksoptimismus" of our society, the kind of optimism that says, "Now there's a good boy, sit up, eat it! Take it!" Fuck no, fuck that, so instead we have Zwei Idioten sitting on the ledge of a precipice wondering what the hell will happen next! That is what "doctoring" is like with the likes of a Jan Oppermann, he is sick of your (and my) palliative answers, and he is so sick of "your" fucking sages that he could puke his guts out, sitting right out here, he could puke his guts out to "you," and that is what it is like being a fellow doctor with Doctor Oppermann

There is a line of music by a group called "The Killers" - and it is not at all certain if Oppermann would even find this music palatable, depending of course on his mood. The song is called "All these things that I have done." It may not mean anything, referring to the Sartrean moment when one defines one's life by virtue of one's acts and accomplishments. It is a matter of living one's life anyway, knowing that doctoring is vainglory, and all the human accolades are vainglory, and everything turns to shit in the end. It is a matter of having attempted and reached one of the finest crescents of our collective suffering... a filigree of clouds, vapors, that is all, this "doctoring" before we even presume a universal medicine. It is a matter that one can do things anyway, like going to Herman Hesse's home and suddenly being astonished "THIS IS THE HOME OF HERMAN HESSE!!" and who is Hesse? We'll never know, I don't even know if it will matter! What mattered was that there was a single punctuation at this moment of human psyche, and that is all.

While everyone's lost, the battle is won
With all these things that I've done
All these things that I've done

And again:

Muses,

Hear our cry

And help me to remember this song

Which is the song of peace

Danger lies in these words:

"I've got soul

..."

Peace! Danger!

May the tenderness of friendship

Gather before the great distant black sky of annihilation

Gather before suffocating oblivion:

May we remember.

.

.

...

"We are in my magic theater," he said with a smile, "and if you wish at any time to learn the Tango or to be a general, or to have a talk with Alexander the Great, it is always at your service. But I'm bound to say Harry, you have disappointed me a little. You forgot yourself badly. You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality. That was not pretty of you. I hope, at least, you did it from jealousy when you saw Hermine and me lying there. Unfortunately you did not know what to do with this figure. I thought you had learned the game better. Well, you will do better next time."

He took Hermine who shrank in his fingers to the dimensions of a toy figure and put her in the very same waistcoat pocket from which he had taken his cigarette.

Its sweet and heavy smoke diffused a pleasant aroma. I felt hollow, exhausted, ready to sleep for a whole year.

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred-thousand pieces of life's game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more but often, the hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me and Mozart too.

Blue Guitar Variations and Oppermanalia of all Sorts

I am afraid that Oppermann will find this image overburdened, however I attribute most all of my understanding of Wallace Stevens (with the exception of the 13 poems for a blackbird, which Lee Roloff read to me during a frenzy to understand the crow icon). It was Oppermann who read the Blue Guitar poems to me while I visited his home in Seattle in 2000 or therabouts. I remember the light from the window was a kind of blinding gray bleary drenched with a sunlight that was unable to make it through the gray absolute of the clouds.

True appreciation of Jean Luc Nancy in the bottom right corner came also through Oppermann, though I brought the essay "The Unsacrificeable" to his attention first based on my reading of Yale French Studies journal back in 1991 or so. It was Oppermann who had the dream of Jean Luc Nancy's disembodied head that I recorded earlier in this journal, floating thought seems to me still to lack corporeality, very much like Oppermann's return to his "originary" Swabian-European-ness. It is no less than a pain, this man who has shown me a great deal of the blues, who introduced me to the blues poems of the elegant and refined Wallace Stevens and Charles Bukowski's crass Zen tempo to the elixir he held in his whiskey glass: broken bottles and broken pails, girls are stepping on broken trails: broken violets never meant to be a token... everything is broken (a free variation of Bob Dylan's "Everything isBroken" ---and Oppermann continues elsewhere to quote from "Senior" about "disconnecting the cables/overthrow these tables" ...welcome to Amerika. It's run by the Bush Administration and brought to you by the Enron Corporation... and just what the hell did you have in your 50-year-plan other than that a bunch of you fat cats getting rich?)

Oppermann and Speaking from the totality of the Margins

I began with emailing a web link to Oppermann in a conversation like this:

http://goldenrulejones.com/walser/?page_id=44
this I thought had some significant play with imagining about Robert Walser... I kept thinking of Sebald's account of his cousin in Vertigo. I thought to leave a Walserian message, but there was no room for such hysterical lyricism... Walser is the literary form = Scriabin's musical form?

best,

Ayres.

Oppermann responded to me:

well, ayres, this place dont make sense to me no more. before too long i will be overturning tables and disconnecting cables, but not quite yet, which is also what causes me anxiety, and brings the totality of beings (die Allheit des Seienden) into view as an indeterminate mass. all cows are black. the lord of music is black, too, blackened by the schickung of the american destitution. there is no comfort there. and certainly not in the american institution, arcadian or "spiritual" or otherwise.

i looked through the excerpt from the translation of carl seelig's book on his walks with walser. thank you for the reference. i think i will have to buy seelig's book when i am back in swabia. one of my first existential projects will be to walk around herisau, and revisit some old haunts of mine there as well.

my year in boarding-school there was spent unaware of walser, but the landscape and even the cityscape of st. gall left a certain image imprinted on whatever screen of the nichts there is to bring the swiss allheit des schweizerisch seienden into the ocean of memory itself. as far as herisau is concerned, i specifically recall taking the train there, making out - in the train, to the disapprobation of various staid swiss burghers - with my american girlfriend cynthia. herisau itself a blur in the attunement of the presence of the dasein of the beloved. the temporarily beloved, and yet another hint at our finitude, or the finitude of Sein within us.

as far as scriabin is concerned, that particular nostalgia is of our senior year in college. a day spent with kira at "benjamins" in the worner center (benjamin not to be confused with the walserian servant institute of jakob van gunten) talking about this and that, without any anxiety or constraint...interrupted a few times only first by fuller, then by you, and eventually by christy clarkson with whom i began a conversation about scriabin. but now scriabin has receded in the absencing of Sein, of course, and this place really doesnt make sense to me no more, this college place.

i write this as i am being jarred by an irritating colleague who shares my office space, as if we were workers in the versicherungsanstalt, or the irrenanstalt of walser's retreat from the world that just keeps on worlding itself, and then another story begins, and the fucking telephone rings again, and that irritating colleague keeps munching his pizza, and acting like he is important. and i am asking myself what exactly it is that i am waiting for?

senor.

i hope this message is not too hysterical or too ungelassen. but walser occasionally calls forth a sort of pissiness that becomes the shadow (as gossett would say) material of the naivete of rambling. why is it so goddamn hard for me to remember my greatness as a thinker in the midst of the blob of greyish everyday steel shittiness?

more later,

dr. oppermann

I responded over-enthusiastically:

Oppermann, this is a great email--- entirely frustrated but great--- may I post it or would that too become too much of a bestand????

I mean what the fuck isnt there a place where one can ramble on without the public view? Somehow one must ramble in a sense that is useless, and even though email is the ultimately utilitarian, useful form of dialogue, still there are sentences left from Marakech that should go untranslated for days or even years, there is the harsh, impenetrable sunlight of summer in North Africa, and there is nothing, nothing nothing. somewhere a confession grows that becomes too obscene or too intimate that we do not want to profess its obscenity any longer.

Thus the American "dream" of free speech (and you may read this, in fact MUST read this as cynically as possible) becomes overburdened: either too much is said and therefore die Rede becomes lost, infinitessimal, an irrelevance among so many other relevancies: like the price of wheat, ethanol, or gasoline: these are the only things that really matter! Hopefully, when your pityful cry has fully dwindled to insignificance, hysterical insignificance, I might add, just like the Hungerkunstler... then at last you will be free (gelassen) to say whatever you would like to say without being exposed to the appalling abuse of the media, "media coverage," you may keep your obscenity to yourself, the fragmented and vulnerable turning point of bare life into its own obscene shadow... without turning into some kind of black-within-blackness (unless that is what you want in which case, indeed lose yourself even further, please, I enjoin you) which is the cypher of this information age. Lost within the cypher what will we find, when we become the signs themselves will we be rid of this distinction...but only in reality...

And who is to say anyway? Maybe this technological endarkenment - this piece of the political hegemony's 50 year plan (forget 20) - maybe all this is for the better, this apparent unfreedom, which is only the belonging to the media spectacle of Amerika. Somewhere in the turning of the butcher's blades in Washington DC there still is a flash of the remarkable light reflected from that metal. Light from dark and dark from light, somewhere we must learn to see through all this, but maybe there is nothing to see through when it comes to profound opacity.

Everybody knows, Oppermann
What everybody knows,

Ayres

(The previous comment was borrowed from Leonard Cohen for those voyeurs on this conversation: These are the bitterest lines I can imagine:
"everybody knows the deal is rotten
Ol' black joe's still picking cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows."
--- if there are voyeurs in this age of continual technological information and consent-- after all I am publishing the damn thing on this web log... and maybe we all ARE voyeurs.... but there is an artful play, a willingness to somehow listen through the intense technological static of clarity itself... as in the film version of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf where Pablo in the end is listening to a radio performance of Mozart --- and we know that Mozart is great, not just some idle rambling on a web log, the very embodiment of insignificance itself! But Mozart, you must understand--- and in Steppenwolf Harry Haller complains that this technological media ... excrement is only just that-- a perversion and profanation of greatness with technology.... Pablo responds that Harry must hear the music through this blinding white noise of the technological world.)

In any sense Oppermann responds:

yes, feel free to post it, and if you do not do so, i might post it on the ayres-in-theoria blog as yet another imitation. as far as the substance of your note is concerned, this is exactly the question: how does one speak from the totality of the margins, as walser did in his bleistiftgebiet? i have the feeling i need more calm - german calm, for some time anyway - to reflect on this properly.

more later,

j

Oppermann and the poem

Today Oppermann read me a poem of Czeslaw Milosz.
He also made certain comments via e-mail that I will include here:

"i was reading from milosz' little poem "at a certain age" to my students today; but what can ... [youth]... glean from reflections on self-realization as an ugly toad. now this is not wholly unrelated to the tarkovsky images of the mud, because what the .... and young fellows do not realize is that the mud - like dylan's emptiness - is endless, and even infinite, before it actually turns into clay and cold."

I commented that the last image of the toad was reminiscent of Hecate's sacred totem animal, then immediately I recanted my smug psychologizing.
"At a Certain Age":

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not to be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom. It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: “That’s me.”

I mentioned seeing myself in the mirror recently as my eighty-year old father: I recognized the profound confusion, the lack of clarity that I had hoped age would clarify... all this had not left me: there was only the recognition that all of this was as it was: I greeted myself: "Hello pop!" I said in a gentle tone of recognition for this man, gentle and yet appealing, that seemed to take me on a raft away from myself. Ah that is me, and that is nothing at all.

...the physiognomy of nothing, of cold clay, which after all is the clay of Adam, the clay we build our houses with. Water seeks its own level and so does mud, and I am thinking of an Ursula LeGuinn short story called "The Day Before the Revolution."

(listening to "Greeting Cards: Tonadilla (on the Name of Andrés Segovia)")

Symphony No. 5 Second Movement

It is really the irony of the softer passages of the second movement that seem to get me. But what use is the praise of art with just another phrase of irony? A turn, a turn again.

Symphony number five of Beethoven is loaded. Everyone knows it, it is cliche and itself beyond reproach when played well, and with the right sentiment, and when the mood is right, especially the second movement, exhausted from one's day. There is something to the exhaustion itself which is sumptuous and true if one can allow one's mood to unfold into this.

I think of Oppermann frequently in the context of this musical passage. The fustian (and the Justian?) of the first movement is drained away and one retires to the drawing room for some humor, but also some complexity, the value of a single post-card showing a map of the known world: and a phrase: what will be said of this earthly civilization? The contentions of opinion are garnered back and forth, but it is not merely the opinion, rather the phrase of tension and play between the members of the discussion, the passage between instruments, the appropriate aging, the appropriate and sufficiently elegant intoxicants serve to amplify the images of a moment.

We can complain that all this talk of "kultur" somehow is rankling. The height of bourgeois sentimentality, an arcadian image of young scholars at school, behind which the cynical operations of power are at play: knowledge is power in the seemingly lost and purposeless abuse that manifests as meaningless corpulent information in the information age... pure self-indulgence and nothing more.

But the phrases! May we say that in one moment there is room for kind "gentlemen" to teach us something of their humor, their dry wit in the face of an impossible, intolerable and painful existence? Is there something to be said of "Being" outside of the crudities of all our corporate hidden agendas? Can we speak with those string passages? -even as we face the brutal regimen of our technological everyday, a sudden gelassenheit that prefigures the physiognomy of human existence?

now is enough
now is enough.