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