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.
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