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?)
2 comments:
concerning nancy and corporeality, consider both his book on "corpus" and derrida's book on it. the derrida is slightly irritating, of course, and it needles me. here is a dream to that effect (from the night before last)
Derridean discomforts I am on the roof of the house in Torkenweiler, right next to the skylight of my room. I am experiencing some vertigo up there as I am trying to read Derrida’s book on Jean-Luc Nancy. Someone pricks me on the left side of my chest, with a needle. Possibly the point of this is to take some of my blood. I expect some pain at the removal of the needle but there is none.
But I get irritated by this comment page.
I have determined that Derrida is a writer of ashes, and therefore a writer first and foremost of the heart.
Jean Luc Nancy may also have profound heart issues that speak for both philosophers: go beyond French intellectualism into their own tragic-tragectory that has been and always will be a the contestation of authority: questioning it to it's ultimate grounds, till all we can do is humbly turn to sharing once again.
Remember that the sting (of death or the needle) is one of the key components that you can now trace from Franz Rosenzweig's "Stern der Eloezung" through to Levinas' "Totalitie et L'infinie" and now through to Derrida via your very own thought, and your very own dream, the sting of conscience itself... you can say, perhaps that the removal of this "stimulus" or "impedement," depending on how you look at it, leaves very little pain. Consciousness itself is pain. When you take distance from the simple bare struggle of consciousness... sometimes it becomes less painful. The question will be where you can experience this singular Derridean "Straffkolonie" at the right moment, beyond masochism: but perhaps out of tenderness for the world, and all who live in it.
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