Once Again, the Dude... Definitively

"The dude abides": the collision of Oppermann's consciousness with a tribute to a lack of success. The paralyzing humor of abandoning all cliche: the confrontation with meaning.

"Smokey, you mark that frame in 8, you're entering a world of pain!!"

Oppermann even had a dream where he was speaking with this other German fellow about the Dude in German: der Geck! There is hope for some region of translation here across the atlantic. Maybe there is some possible export of American culture possible in the image of a man... well, sometimes there is this man. And this is how I must begin with Sam Elliot's monologue:


"Now this here story I'm about to unfold took place in the early '90s - just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the I-raqis. I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? Sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here - the Dude from Los Angeles. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude. The Dude, from Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man - and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide. Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough."

Nothing could be more patently "busted" than the first Iraqui war. We came out it with images of American G.I.'s looting Iraqi bunkers full of Kuwaiti loot. And this is where we get the first voiceover of the first version of George bush, the wimp who would push the pencils or the pens but would just as soon drop the bomb on you as stare at you cross-eyed another moment. And he wouldn't think nothin' on it. It was just business.

"This aggression will not stand!"

Famous words, perhaps the most famous words of president George Bush the first of our country. A single term. Looking back on the rather ugly play of Clinton into Bush the II I would be tempted to wonder if it would not have been better to have given him a successful guy, a second term would have really given us a taste of exactly what sort of a fellow this first Bush was. I could only hope that that would have meant we would not have had the second installment of Bush.

Now I apologize for this commentary into the contemporary political realm of the United States. But it is part of this political commentary that has driven Oppermann of the last 16 to 20 years, from the days immediately Post-Arcadia all the way until the present.

The situation of The Big Lebowski takes place during the reign of the first George Bush during the first Iraqi expedition. Oppermann was in Harvard dealing with idiots that actually believe in what Leo Strauss said. These are not the friendly sort of idiots, no, these were the heart of the neo-conservative strand of ideology for the current machine of the American Empire. These idiots were not nice idiots. We could say that Oppermann had the opportunity during this period to watch the really dangerous people who bought the neo-conservative ideology to actually ascend to the first stages of power. By the time they have reached our age they are the young but mature administrators of the power in the executive branch of government (a legitimate candidate for major public office is about 10 to 15 years ahead of Oppermann and myself).

Jeff Lebowski, the Dude, is a forty-something. This is an important comment because both Oppermann and I are not yet forty. The Dude's mythos happens to a fully mature middle aged man, not quite at the threshold of late middle age, nor at the level of Bush the first who was probably entering into late age in his presidency (just as Regan before him had always been in the late age of his life, and even into senility). Well all this happens to the Dude, who is middle aged, and it is not certain if he is the age of Joel and Ethan Cohen or not.

The Dude stands at the current Zenith of a man's power, and very much like Ulrich from Robert Musil's "Man Without Qualities," he has little or nothing to show for it. He made a couple of screenplays with about six other guys: he actually tries to impress Maude Lebowski with his history of being some kind of a "writer!" Now that is really the height of the pathetic, man.

The Dude's range of affect is very important here: the Dude operates by stealth as a kind of mood ninja who travels the entire galaxy of emotion, almost with a single word: "Fuck."

The mood of the Dude is never indifferent: even when he says to "The Stranger," "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!" It is coming from his rebellious teenager side, lashed out in full force at the one man who seems to actually "get" the Dude in the entire movie, at least Sam Elliot is in his corner, and that is everything a good old cowboy could be: right down to the song of the coyotes in Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man." Did you notice the striking resemblance between Sam Elliot and the gentleman who is the airplane pilot in Alaska: the one who sings the song about:

"The only darn thing that's left
Is those darned old cay-yotes and me." (Bob McDill/Richard Thompson)

Well this little wimp of a man was the head of the CIA and God knows what else. Whatever you do, you don't fuck with George Bush, older or younger, because in his wry way he will get you and have your nads.

One could say that these humorless U.S. presidents can be known best for their lack of humor.

Oppermann and Ayres Diffidently

I wanted to say that there is an importance to Oppermann's leaning in this picture: (this web log was erased with a sudden electronic error which makes one speculate about everything being incredibly impermanent). Oppermann leans on me because I am shorter and because his forearm can easily rest on my shoulder. I have had always a bit of a short-man-complex around being shorter. It is not an extreme or insane level of this complex to my knowledge, however it is good to relate this "being shorter" as somehow profound.

In this image I stare with the eyes I describe as being like the dylan song "what was it you wanted?" with "vague menace" (Oppermann's terms for this song). I said in the previous log that was accidentally erased that Oppermann used his height to become like a black figure from one of Kafka's drawings: he would walk around in a long black coat and black hat, discussed elsewhere.

This is an image of Oppermann and Ayres in real proximity, or perhaps only in parabolic proximity.

(... ...)

This is a note to say that this post originally had absolutely nothing on it.

Theresa, Once and For All, in Arcadia (hopefully a final review)

By this posting I hope to lay the question of Theresa largely to rest. I can at least present a picture of Oppermann, Theresa (I think I still remember her hot breath in my ear from that moment) and Ayres looking into the blinding brightness of the flash photograph. I think I had a relatively insipid or entranced look on my face. Oppermann was by contrast ecstatic. Once again the image is from Bemis Hall at Colorado College.

January 1988 was when I met Theresa. I had had a girlfriend previous to this but no one who was willing to really meet me with the desire that Theresa had in that moment. This was an important relationship for me. Definitely not the last, but in many senses definitely the first. I have discussed that Theresa confronted me on several issues that were important: she would not let Oppermann and I rest in our Artemesian love of the beauty of philosophy. And in this point she provided an abrasive but singularly important independence of the feminine counterpoint to my philosophic position. I thank her for being someone who fought with me well. And she and Oppermann did not get along. Oppermann regarded Theresa as a phillistine. Theresa was definitely at her most beautiful that I remember at this time of first meeting her. I think that she introduced me to Joni Mitchell's Blue album: and to this day this album for me stands for her. It must be said that the last time I met Theresa in Los Angeles in the mid 1990's she was wearing pastel and engaged to be married to an attorney. There was something about her that was "in recovery" - she had been through some nasty spots with drinking, I hope it can just be written off as the folly of youth. We all walk so close to that possibility: once again: "there but for the grace of God..." and so on... My last conversation with Theresa by telephone broke off any hope of communication: she said I sounded too crazy (and indeed, to be fair, reflecting I might have been acting like an over affectionate idiot on the phone, not respecting boundaries): I told her that she was too "sane," conveying how hurt I was at her condemnation. That was that. That was the end of that. I still prefer to see Theresa peeking out from some trees in the Colorado winter snow. It is enough to remember and to forget her for that.

.

.

Oppermann and the Raphaelson Factor

Here are a couple of offerings of Oppermann and Raphaelson probably in January through May of 1988: again the faces are over-exposed and we are left to fill in the tiny pieces of remembrence and memory.

Because this is the best image I have remaining of Raphaelson I include it here. We can only surmise that the issue of Lisa Lane literally floating above his head speaks to the problem developing in the arena of Liebenstrauss to come the following winter.

The Cresswell Consciousness Dilemma

Still back publishing images from the Arcadian Moment, still back in the hall of Lisa Lane and Theresa Buffo at a time sitting with Oppermann and Cresswell 20 years ago or more.

Cresswell is a seminal figure in the Arcadian: he was brilliant, as close to an embodiment of Nietzschean philosophy as I have ever seen a person represent: he would spend his summers in Alaska on a fishing boat.

Later we would compare Cresswell to Treadwell. I am speaking of Michael Cresswell and Timothy Treadwell, the man who appears in Grizzly man: another blonde idiot in a Werner Herzog film: there certainly was room for Cresswell to be insane: at moments verging on a macho chauvenism that was quite possibly unkind. Nonetheless he remained a figure for me of a man in whom I placed a great deal of veneration. A senior, an upperclassman at this time. The seniors definitely had actually had the exposure I yearned for desperately. Cresswell went on to write a senior thesis on Horkheimer, Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

I saw Cresswell a few times when I lived in Colorado Springs post-arcadia. He then vanished out of sight.

This last image of Cresswell somehow strikes pain into my heart. I feel glad that it actually is now uploaded into a relatively stable continuum of the internet. Which reminds me really that all this attempt to place these images and thoughts online is for the sake of the fact that we as friends keep forgetting and misplacing so much about each other as we look off into the infinite distance of the night.

Da-Besoffen-Sein

This post was originally entitled Dabesaeuft but my German was corrected and I actually prefer the alternative offered by Oppermann. In gratitude.

I have already stated that the actual act of imbibing is entirely exhausting to me. Nonetheless a libation is offered to the divinities. Beneath our feet a bouncing impish toy from Lisa Lane. I salute you. I salute you all.

Commentary on Oppermannian Greatness in Arcadia

Ostian Head of Mithras Pictured above

I see this image and think of a quote from Jung that I have perhaps over-used. I will deliver it here concerning the sense of melancholy in the Oppermannian face:

"The head from Ostia (fontispiece of Symbols of Transformation) supposed by Cumont to be that of Mithras Tauroctonos [possibly also as Attis], wears an expression which we know all too well... as one of sentimental resignation. It is in fact worth noting that the spiritual transformation that took place in the first centuries of Christianity was accompanied by an extraordinary release of feeling, which expressed itself not only in the lofty form of charity and love of God, but also in sentimentality and infantilism. The lamb allegories of early Christian artn fallinto this category.

"Since sentimentality is sister to brutality, and the two are never very far apart, they must be somehow typical of the period between the first and third centuries of our era. The morbid facial expression points to the disunity and split mindedness of the sacrificer: he wants to and yet he doesn't want to. This conflict tells us that the hero is both the sacrificer and the sacrificed. (Paragraphs 667-668, Symbols of Transformation)

Oppermann represented the best of the heroic genius in the act of sacrificing and being sacrificed: this kind of ambivalence plays about on his own face: but it is profoundly more healthy to witness this physiognomy of split-ness than discovering resolute Straussian and Neo-Conservitive anti-thinking that Oppermann was about to do battle with in the ensuing years completing his dissertation at Harvard. At least Oppermann is capable of suffering, and has not let his capacity to suffer go... ever... even in the face of those Masters of War who encourage bland indifference to the shattered limbs of "the lamb": the fragments of a child's body whose legs have been blown to pieces in the most recent American incursion in the Iraq war.

Oppermannian Greatness in Arcadia

I just found this photo on a contact sheet from times that were directly arcadian. An evening where we were all drinking wine with Lisa Lane, Paul Raphaelson, Cresswell, Theresa, and myself. This image I think is great. Almost as great as Wolfgang Ambrose who is fucking great. There is something of the young Dylan also to this image.

This is Oppermann in Praxis: and praxis intends a presence or intimacy of self. I have to start this series with this image of Oppermann in true praxis, with the true Dionysian wine: there we see the European Intellectual Aristocracy, still in the unknowing stage, nevertheless suprisingly Chic for now what ammounts to a middle aged Dude. I think that Oppermann is truely

"drinking Nietzschean wine from Kantian vessels"

for the first time: he was probably beginning to read into Heidegger at this time. I attribute this saying to Harvey Rabbin: Oppermann tells me to stop attributing great sayings to Harvey Rabbin, but that will be another 20 years... I am just glad I can still remember a fragment of where all these potentially great things came from.

There is an issue of metonymy here: all these images are largely "Over Exposed": what we have left are the fragments, the tessera of images from which to construct the whole. I would not wish at all to return to the Arcadian: I was too impoverished to fully appreciate these times. However I would say that the fragmentary re-constellation of these shattered images is part of the intense great tapestry of the terrifying "negative" turning and turning of the present moment.

An extremely brief commentary on Adalbert Stifter through the story of Abdias

Some years ago Oppermann gave me an English translation of Adalbert Stifter's writings entitled "Brigatta and Other Stories" or something like that. I will look and see if there is an inscription and possibly include it here.

About two weeks ago I became obcessed with the idea that I had to re-read a short story in that book entitled "Abdias." Once again I waded into Stifter's prose. --It actually took me a while to find the book, because, one must know, and I believe Oppermann does, that books are very mischievous and can hide themselves quite well when they do not want to be found. I have not yet finished reading Abdias, though I continue to read a page or two every night with great intent.

The story is of the sufferings of a Jewish man by the name of Abdias, who's home in North Africa is eventually discovered and raided, his wife killed and so forth. I know that Stifter goes through pains with his exceedingly polite prose to render a realistic portrait of the sufferings and joys of Abdias. There is even a "stroke of lightning" in the story where Abdias' daughter, who, according to the misfortunes of the book is blind, but is given vision, thus by a sort of Deus ex Machina is allowed sight.

Please review the following digressions or forget them as you would like:

1. Keuranos Kubernatai: the saying of Heraclitus: "thunderbolt steers all things."
2. Thunderbolts are commonly known to be sacred to the god of Thunder: Zeus (I do not want to focus as much on Thor, Odin, or Indra, but I would also include imagery around the tantric object known of as the "dorje" or thunderbolt) (Oppermann has never even alluded to tantra in his writings, probably rejecting it as completely foreign, I may claim it through my father's studies of Eastern Religion and his film "Altars of the East")
3. Thunderbolts are symbols of metaphor: connection of two places
4. Thunderbolts reflect the synaptic junctures of the brain and brain functioning.

I will compare some other books that Oppermann sent to Adalbert Stifter's writings:

1. James's (Henry) "Spoils of Poynton" I could never get through, Oppermann sent it to me and it suffers as unreadable by my estimate, though appreciated as being so only because of my status as a phillistine. "Poynton" was sent to me because of some disputes I was having over my father's estate, in part spurred by my ex-wife... and it points to a real nadir in my own personal life. Still I find James less agreeable than Stifter.
2. Robert Walser: anything by Walser I regard as superior. I have not read all the way through any of his books. It is not necessary. I keep reading and enjoying Walser: his fresh cheekyness makes him superior.
3. Max Frisch: Man in the Holocene: there is a quality of Frisch that is fresh just like Walser: it is contemporary writing that continually questions its margins. I also love that Frisch puts numeration to his literature, it cracks me up.
4. Gert Hoffmann: Auf Dem Turm: really reflecting another preference: everything in this book is terrible, everything goes to hell: people are really awful to one another: Oppermann once gave a copy of this book to a man who was flirting with his ex-wife, I believe: touche: that is panache. I love books where everyone is miserable: but:
5. not in the manner that they are miserable like "The Gulag Archipelago:" I do not like to read about unwilling victims of atrocity. Rather their misery comes from a willing scream inside a soul.
6. Thomas Bernhardt: Beton. ditto Hoffmann: still more introverted. An extremely profound commentary I completely identify with: exceedingly impolite
7. Walser, Frisch, Hoffmann, and Bernhardt were all introduced to me by Oppermann, I could say that this points to the fact that a major portion of my education I can easily attribute to Oppermann
8. There are other deserving books that Oppermann has sent to me that I adore but I cannot include them here because they would repeat the point (Pavic's Landscape Painted with Tea, The Second Book, Words are Something Else, Stories and Texts for Nothing, etc etc etc!!!)
9. The problem with Stifter and James is that they are too polite. I deplore polite prose, sanitized too much. I will keep reading both of them because something inside me tells me I must particularly conclude reading Stifter's story of Abdias at least.
10. This particular web-log entry/literary essay is finished BEFORE I have even completely read the story of Abdias: I do this in part because I abhor the kind of "correct" academics who would actually state it is more scholarly to finish a text before writing about it. To them I say nonsense, rubbish, quatsch. I am on the way to Abdias. That is all I had to say; and so I will say what ammounts to an impolite, but heartfelt word of gratitude to Oppermann: thank you.

Wolfgang Ambros: Fucking Great

Since Oppermann will not be coming out to San Pedro to visit me. And since it is largely conjectured from theoria into praxis that I will be visiting him instead in Seattle this coming month... I can only offer him some telephone snap-shots of a journey I had wanted very much to take with him while listening to Wolfgang Ambrose.

The industry round the Los Angeles Harbor is profound. We cross over two bridges along the road of the 47 freeway: in this instance heading westward this evening past Terminal Island (used to be a Japanese fishing colony, now it's a low security prison). Something about Ambrose goes so well with this particular scary topography: passing over two bridges from East to West: the first blurry one is the Desmond Bridge:

These images are indeed to me extremely resonant with Ambrose: somewhat morose, industrial, profoundly poetic and sad. I will repeat to make this clear: these images for me are listening to these songs. The images are the songs, more inextricably woven into the meaning of driving there and listening to them than I could say. There is a barren landscape but the ineluctable greatness of the sky that glows im abendrot. (I wonder if it is possible to say that this instance is of abendblaue?)


Note the enclosed image of the car dashboard: this speaks to the remnants of Kiarostami: the enclosed space of an automobile that I had hoped to share with Oppermann: two subjectivities enclosed in a tight space and yet looking out at the industrial complexes willfully strewn as far as the eye can imagine. Something about this experience I wanted very much to share with Oppermann as a critical part of our friendship: it is a "driving there together": Dafahrenmitsein, wonderning, speculating about the world from a place of cultivation, at times a little scary, manic, even paranoid, but capable of dealing with the road, sacred to Hermes, yes, but strangely the mother of our modern age, Oppermann and I have agreed on this formula: that just as Hermes replaced Hestia in the Greek Pantheon, so in Western discourse did the very destiny of civilization did we experience a paradox: the road has become the mother (perhaps the inversion of the Boogey man who is the mother of all nightmares, and yes both Hermes and the Boogey man are easily accessible in such a place as highway 47).

We have to realize that the Port of Los Angeles is the center of the "Bestand" that Heidegger commented on as the factor that was probably crucifying human beings in "Der Frage Nach dem Technik." The Bestand, or "Standing Reserve" is the stockpile of potential energy that is constantly being replenished: the feeling of driving through the middle of this is exhillarating and terrifying: like feeling a piece of the force of a jet plane exhaust plume: probably toxic if there too long: but safe enough to pass by in a car. Later Oppermann came to call the post-cards we sent each other "Bestandsaufnahmen": that is a form of "taking stock" or "inventory" of the current predicament. The title was enchanting and I used it in various places, even, I think, in my dissertation: these were notations from the edge of an abyss: this is a Bestandsaufnahme: this is why I wanted to drive with Oppermann into the heart of the Bestand.

First clear image below of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, lit up by blue. A couple of years ago I had a significant dream about being unable to cross this bridge, that the flow of the life force was blocked from this direction. I made it across fine tonight.






This is the end of the Vincent Thomas overview. The text of Oppermann's commentary on the two songs that inspired me to call him immediately and announce that these two songs were great runs as follows:

1. "Selbstbewusst" by Wolfgang Ambros (1981). Ayres has requested more Ambros.



2. "Samstag Nacht" by Wolfgang Ambros (2000). More Ambros, this one a German version of "Heart of Saturday Night". Ayres has already pre-approved Ambros' Waits-covers which he heard during his last visit to Seattle two years ago.

The rough tonality fo Ambros voice that pierces through these two great songs, along with a very solid, no-nonsense rock band behind him make these songs everything I would want out of such music. When compared to Niel Young, well as bob Dylan sings "As great as you are you can't be greater than yourself." Ambrose is probably an Austrian legend, but to me he is a very recent revelation comparatively speaking. Everyone knows that Niel Young defines rock music in a profound manner. Ambrose gives it soul, soul, soul. Thank you Oppermann, you score big points on this one.


I cannot say I found you to be as excited about any one of the musical offerings I left you, Oppermann. What I am saying here should chide you without being taken too seriously, it is the sort of discussion we could still have while driving there together in a car: That is attributable to my lack of taste in musical matters, and barring that de gustibus non disputandum the problem you face of being haunted by a stiffness with regard to new musical things. Your taste is undisputably great, but if it focuses only on greatness it sometimes may leave out mediocrity: an indictment that you have accused me of from time to time: there can be greatness that is soul-less... and there can be mediocrity that is soulful... a chonundrum for yet another web log (already discussed in my discussion of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, a book that Oppermann gave to me for my reading during my dissertation), the web log that will discuss the problem of greatness, and mediocrity, and soul.

Nothing to Say: War Recollections

Winfried Sebald: a curious comical sort of fellow by the smile on the right corner of his mouth. Altogether a likeable chap with indeed something to say and not nearly as much paranoia as Thomas Bernhard who refused to have anything published in his native Austria during his lifetime. Oppermann sent me the Sebald novel "Vertigo" for the holidays in 2007, but honorable mention should be made that Sebald evidently has some literary work (Logis in einem Landhaus) concerning our hero Robert Walser.

(This evidently is a tiny image of Robert Walser that I left tiny in order to celebrate his micro-script)

Oppermann frequently complains about having nothing to say. I too may complain today that I have nothing to say. Car alarms go off in the distance, and I note that Oppermann has outstripped my capacity to produce web-logs... in merely a month his total output excedes my own contribution by a significant amount. But this is a sign of Oppermann, maybe it is his zealous love of friendship, and indeed he has so much to articulate, as do I, but I must admit that in the dubious race to produce a capacity of words, Oppermann has excelled, and he would agree that it is impossible to judge the Ayres to Oppermann ratio except in saying that it will take another twenty years to sort out the restitution between the two.

I had a thought today that suggested that Oppermann and Ayres were undergoing some kind of "analytical" friendship: various postings on play were being issued at each corner: maybe we were playing "generals" in our own complex marshalling of libido for this feeling of not being totally alone in this universe (my own hours of play with plastic soldiers, participating in the fantasy of a brigade or a platoon as a child should not be excepted from this: now it is a brigade of words that rallies round me, but I do not feel so profoundly alone).

I will continue to enjoy and comment on the Oppermann web-log called "Ayres in Theoria" by which he in fact honors me with the use of my name in the title of his work, all of which may one day be considered "major literature" by somebody or other.

I think of Henry Darger's endless fantasy of warfare in his "In the Realms of the Unreal:"

Equally I think of the first story of Sebald's in the book he sent me for the holidays this year: concerning the sickness and experiences of the gentleman in the story "Beyle, or love's madness is most discreet" who participates in various manoevers may be said to belong to this rank. All of this is invented to stave off a fundamental lack of the "Other": or perhaps like Milton's "Paradise Lost", there is some knowledge that the terrible battle of the angels will place no peace in heaven.

Dore's image of the restlessness of the heavens themselves: this is not the image of the divine perfection of Dante's Paradiso: and in a sense so much the better: that there is "War all the time" in heaven itself points to a deeper paradox.

This is Sebald's image of a battle in "Baille or Love's Madness is Most Discrete" I keep thinking of Baille as a translator of Hegel:

G. W. F. HEGEL
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND (1807)
Translated by J. B. Baillie

This Baille however fought on the side of Napoleon: he may be reasonably assumed to be the double of J.B. Baille who translated the Phaenomenologie des Geistes into English.

The Truth on (... ...) (elision)

(This image which was removed  presumably was taken in an off-handed manner by the somewhat blithering but still brilliant photographic skills of Oppermann on a handheld cell phone camera. It was of poor quality, but it conveys something that one is compelled to find friendly. I believe that it shows (... ...) in his native environment: (... ...) own home)

A few pointers on the road to an analysis of (... ...):
1. Oppermann believes that (... ...) believes a mystical truth.
2. I think in looking at this (... ...) would have to be named as "becoming Walser"
3. At least one Robert Walser short work should be transcribed to this web log to help describe (... ...): possibly the one on "professions" (it can be a verwindung of labor and work)
4. (... ...) prefers to be called (... ...)
5. Gossett preferred to be called "... ..." when he was a student at (... ...)
6. All previous entries about Oppermann and I getting together to set the heretofore "naughty" (... ...) straight are hereby abandoned.
7. (... ...) occasionally writes on this web log and on Oppermann's web-log and on others but I wonder if he wrote his own web log who it would be about?
8. It is impossible to set  (... ...) straight about anything.
9.  (... ...) and I have sat in the morning watching the sunlight pour into a room converted from a former Catholic seminary.
10.  (... ...) always listens with remarkable patience.
11. It is unknown if  (... ...) has ever been mad at me: if he simply abandons situations he gets irritated at or if he endures and expresses his anger at them directly...
12.  (... ...) libido makes him impish.
13.  (... ...) is said to be more of a musical snob than Oppermann.
14.  (... ...) has some ulterior motive behind the questions of Oppermann as drinker, smoker and an avid enthusiast of television sports shows that has yet to be deciphered. Such a motive makes me consider the issue of the heiroglyphs I believe are represented by the shore of the ocean at dawn.

The Crow-and-Black-Eagle Flame

Two birds in the dream. One assisted the other. One crawled pulling the other along with his beak. These were two friends. One a crow and one a black eagle. One steps into the flame: the black crow is burned blacker. And in the midst of the flame the crow becomes momentarily the phoenix, the source of all healing. The other is healed by virtue of the flame burning and turning blacker.

When I mentioned this to a teacher he recalled the story of the salamander in Benvenuto Cellini: when the young man was called by his father to see the brilliant beautiful salamander dancing in the flames. Suddenly his father slaps him brutally across the face saying: "this is so you will never forget this!"

What I can say is that it seems that the very act of writing: web log or otherwise: involves stepping into the fire. We could say that it is going to hell, possibly that it is a matter of paying one's dues: but there is another place where stepping into the line of writing is "placing oneself on the line." It is on the line, not the plummeting line of Deleuzian descent, but something like that, only not involving auto-defenestration unless absolutely necessary. On it goes. Yet beyond the technological nihilism of writing a web log at all is this stepping into the fire which was the great promise of writing from the first place: as a medicament its results remain dubious to say the very least.

When I look out at my life, and I look out at the life of my friends: the act of writing still holds within it the finest thread: the thread of the psyche itself, upon which the fate of our "earthly civilization," our humanity, holds: that is that we have the choice to bring consciousness into the world, or to despair. Optimism does not hold the ultimate human value because it winds up being deluded, sold a bag of goods, upstream without a paddle. Pessimism does not hold because it ends only in despair, and a despair of writing itself, nothing does any good at all. But looking upon this, were I even to be dead, I would say that I would want an opportunity to live in this world a moment longer, to be here in order to find the affirmative, impossibly, in the situation, no matter how bright or dim the ostensible light seems to be. I would want to participate, to affirm that it is possible to affect the world to some fragment of a degree toward the good, toward consciousness, bearing in mind that each act bears a terrible burden of its own shadow, of what it does not include, that it included only itself as just one small thing. It was not only the best I or anyone could do with this "opportunity" this "being alive in the world" ...this dancing salamander, at times writhing sinews, threads, sutures of pain and opportunity at the same time, the dash of the father's hand that says "don't go back to sleep! -Not at this moment, this brief wakefulness is yours insofar as with the world it is shared."

Mike & Sally

Mike and Sally are coming to town. I have no image of them. One is Austrian, one is African American. Both are Oppermann's friends. They are coming to regale him because both are his friends, and both were with him at law school at the University of Washington, where Oppermann had to learn once again that education in academia is not the way to anything but a pain in the head and possibly later a divorce from your soon-to-be-ex american wife.

Oppermann showed me his law school once, I believe in the first visit that I made to him in 1999 or thereabouts. He showed me a rather mean gray concrete (Beton) place where he and Mike and Sally (whose name is Anatole in reality, but Oppermann insists on calling him "Sally") would stand outside (there was no place for sitting) and every now and then talk and smoke cigarettes (I am not certain if Oppermann smoked during law school).

Law school for Oppermann seemed like merely a necessary contingency, sort of like a bowel movement. It had very little to do with his paideia, which at that time he took well into his hand, and in a sense at this time I am taking in hand here in this web log.

Oppermann did meet Lou Wolcher to my understanding in law school. Wolcher, like Fuller before him, was impressed with Oppermann's status as being a member of the "European Intellectual Aristocracy." And Oppermann did write an excellent essay on Anaximander, Heidegger, Rhythm and Restitution, which probably will be the most thoughtful essay that Wolcher will ever encounter from a law school student... except maybe an essay from someone who is not too self-righteous but somehow has survived the effect of genocide and wishes to do everything in their power to halt the effects of the unconscious genocidal instinct of our American culture.... something like that might exceed Oppermann's question of justice, but not by very far, because in point of fact as an intellectual Oppermann is appalled by this sort of thing, as indeed every self-respecting German intellectual has to be after the catastrophe that happened in Germany in the form of National Socialism.

Mike and Sally are coming to visit Oppermann because shortly Oppermann will be disappearing from the United States to seriously take up his Dasein in Germany. At that point Oppermann will open himself to a language (German) which in its stranger moments feels fully alien to me. Oppermann shares German with the Austrian German of Anatole, and Oppermann likes to make fun of Sally for this. Nevertheless I would have to say that the likes of the Austrian singer Wolfgang Ambrose is rarely discovered in any condition: I took a liking to him immediately after Oppermann sent me a cassette tape of his music in 2000 or so. Oppermann has promised some digital Ambrose to me but is yet to be forthcoming.

Both Mike and Sally have their own shadows: principally round the small animal of the body. This makes them at times pityful, and at times kinder, and possibly more understanding of their fellow human's stupidities than the likes of the harshly puritanical Ayres. They may collectively enjoin Oppermann to have lots of "FUN" despite himself. This fun will unfortunately not involve otters (see the previous web-posting on fun and otters) or tapirs (Hah! I have finally responded to Tapirs, who are fun, but whom require an intimacy with a given woman that Oppermann will not obtain in the forseeable future). I hope that Oppermann will actually concede to his friends and allow himself to be abashed by his own small animality: and I hope this same small animality will not tear him apart (as so likely it does in Ayres's instance).

Anatole (Sally) in my imagination occupies the same place as Donald Theodore Kerebotsos in "The Big Lebowski." I imagine Mike and Oppermann telling him frequently, "Shut the fuck up, Sally." If Sally does not understand this reference, they must, as they probably will, drink beer and/or other sorts of barley water and watch this film repeatedly, and flush if necessary, until it all comes clear. I just heard of their upcoming plans this weekend... Oppermann told me with a kind of tenseness, because he is having to sew up a lot of loose ends before setting off home to Ravensburg. He may have a few unruly nights to go before he gets there. I can only wish him well from a distance, and know that at least in those moments he will not be a ghost, he will take on some substance of his own life, even in its wan recognition that he cannot write, as he goes with the wisdom, and the wisdom says, suddenly, "Shut the fuck up, Sally!"

(With apologies to Anatole)

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: Chapter X (fin)

(Ayres photographed by his partner Deborah May 3rd 2008 at the studio of S. Brown discussing the issue of light in painting)


As a matter of (or perhaps "in light of") dealing with the fact that we are going to hell for writing this sort of thing: each for our own interest, I thought that this little passage from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus would be excellent: I will remind you that you sent this book during a period of writing a dissertation on research, where I stated that the best thing you could hope for research is that you are in some manner going to hell (the example of Dimitri from Brothers Karamazov, the example of Dante from La Commedia Divina, and the example of anyone from Robert Musil's "Mensch ohne Eigenshaften"):

We kept looking for additional references and found them everywhere: Murakami's wind up bird, constituted a whole unpublished chapter, and my phenomenological comparison of Augustine and Rousseau (please remember that you Oppermann are very much like Augustine: you "set them idiots straight!" and so does Augustine stand in his dream on a "rule" with his mother Monica. But I have already spoken about the problem of walking with your mother and having the insight about that woman you see approaching: "I knew that very moment she meant to do me harm:" This is the Tom Paine formula as the Lord of Music would say. The question with this woman who means to do you harm and the formula of the small animal of your body is another mephistophelean question that I am asking here: in other words you are screwed either way, it's another 20 years for you):

"Aescetic, Kretschmar would say," he answered, "the ascetic cooling off. In that Father Beissel was very genuine. Music always does penance in advance for her retreat into the sensual. The old Dutchmen make her do the rummest sort of tricks, to the glory of God; and it went harder and harder on her from all one hears, with no sense appeal, excogitated by pure calculation. But then they had these penitential practices sung, delivered over the sounding breath of the human voice, which is certainly the most stable-warm imaginable thing in the world of sound..."
"You think so?"
"Why not? No unorganic instrumental sound can be compared with it. Abstract it may be, the human voice - the abstract human being, if you like. But that is a kind of abstraction more like that of the naked body - it is after all more a pudendum." I was silent, confounded. My thoughts took me far back in our, in his past.
"There you have it," said he, "your music." I was annoyed at the way he put it, it sounded like shoving music off on me. as though it were more my affair than his. "There you have the whole thing, she was always like that. Her strictness, or whatever you liek to call the moralism of her form. must stand for an excuse for the ravishments of her actual sounds."
For a moment I felt myself the older, more mature.
"A gift of life like music," I responded, "not to say a gift of God, one ought not to explain by mocking antinomies, which only bear witness to the fullness of her nature. One must love her."
"Do you consider love the strongest emotion?" he asked.
"Do you know a stronger?"
"Yes, interest."
"By which you presumably mean a love from which the animal warmth has been withdrawn."
"Let us agree on the definition!" he laughed. "Good night!"
We had got back to the Leverkühn house, and he opened his door.

(Dore's Black Prussian Eagle is perhaps a little too heavy handed in this context: the black eagle may be seen however as a precursor of the phoenix itself: the blackening being an important counterpoint: its dire solicitation without succor makes the dangerous moment when the bird enters the flames and nears death, or death's lack of mystery: the phoenix behind the black eagle presumably is the universal medicine, but again Hölderlin warns correctly in Patmos: "Wo aber Gefahr ist das Rettende auch." And perhaps this line is too easily spoken, so that it forgets its own danger. I will wait a little longer, that is all)

(An irritating national symbol, predatory nationalism is its gross threat, my own patina added to some degree of success, however it's blackness is not to be under-rated)

You should accept this as your rebuke for lavishing only interest in the music of Bach. You may be right though: I believe that Bach leaves place for the fragile animal fragments of the human soul, as well as marching in the direction of the spiritual. But these barely passable pop songs: you might do well to review the first meeting between Hermine and Harry Haller in Steppenwolf: at the "Black Eagle:" Here we see the blackened eagle as opposed to the golden music of Bach or perhaps its transparent luminosity... the black eagle still soars heavenward, seeking out of its poor substance something: perhaps a place where it bursts into blood and feathers in the midst of a turbulent cloud filled evening sky.

(This image came from the 26th of January or thereabouts.)

I believe that the substance of any attempt to create a great work is that one is going to hell. We might also point to Thomas Bernhard's "Beton/Concrete" as bringing up the issue of "concrete relationship" (as well as Hegel, Marx and the history of western philosophy, and then we would really be going to hell). The problem here, with this kind of text, which to me is tremendously compelling, the one I am forced to write here: that it always takes the Faustian initiative and does the deed with the devil. One can only hope that this form of text writing is some manner more conscious of the devil in the text than say George Bush and Tony Blair signing some stupid arms accord. There they are signing a treaty so that everyone can go to the devil, and the devil is glad because --- he never gets talked about.)

Now I do not know which one of us, Oppermann or I, would best qualify as a Leverkühn, or which of us qualifies as his feeverishly writing friend: who is implicated by his own feeverish fascination to document and contemplate the whole affair: everyone gets to go to the devil, and it is only the frailest refrain of the soul that somehow still begs for the redemptions (and there must be many of them) from the kindness of God.

Or... perhaps an Oppermann or just an Ayres?

Listening to Variation XV Canone Alla Quinta: Andante A 1 Clavi from the 1955 Goldberg Variations by Bach as interpreted by Glenn Gould....

There is always this

Confronted of course with the option of abandoning the small animal of the body, and thus one's soul and prospects for any redemption. I consider these endless web-logs as a potentially mephistophelean exchange: I will give up my best friend so that I may write about him in a web log, and make of this relationship a perfect work of art. He may have made the same bargain on his side: but what is this not but another setting forth? Well we all have to set forth for another 20 years or so, and then take another 20 years or so getting back. And when we get back there, wherever it is, we found of course that life has changed us, that we are something else, and that is no big news in some way: but this is what 20 years does: it changes us.

So I go on writing web-logs. In part because it is the only thing I can do. And with each keystroke I lose the animal of my old friend, and perhaps I gain some fragment of a spirit that will last forever, but what is a spirit, my friend, but a ghost, and what are ghosts for the living. Live well my friend, and don't be a ghost whatever you do.

At this very moment Oppermann could be writing another Web Log!

I am tempted to publish this web log with nothing to say. But i had some things to say, unfortunately. I was captivated by this title as absolutely cataleptic, possibly apoplectic. Such an immediacy and insistence, just like "a moment of intense anxiety" in a previous entry: is a kind of sick immediacy. It takes the notion of friendship one step closer to psychosis: immersion in the corrosive water of the solution (etc. etc, sorry Oppermann). There is an intense, screaming, borderline personality disorder level of dysfunction in this web log that I find entertaining. Perhaps I can let it out here without being too much of a nuissance or a pest to anyone. I simply had to have a moment to articulate a borderline or manic sentiment from a thousand miles away. I hope Oppermann is having a good day, whether he is writing a web log or not at this time. There is a certain perverse comradery writing a web log at the same time. It is as though one could say that this activity is not only permissable and particible by one person: an act of sometimes pathetic technological raking of dead leaves: but also a kind of communal searching for enough warmth through the dead leaves. Perhaps there is something beyond this little pittance of warmth that always threatens (sulfur) to become a raging bon-fire. There is some manner in which the search for warmth is inscribed in some baroque manual: at once an indictment written on the walls of death: the attorney walls of the law: cold death: and it is also a story requiring the laughter and genius of the cultivated human soul to get laughingly through.

My Lautbild for Oppermann Discussed at Length

Here is the Oppermann Playlist:

1 "The beast in me" is played by a singer whom I do not know the name of. The twang of his voice is middle America, possibly a slight southern drawl. He is not Johnny Cash, he is a little gentler, and not as famous. "The beast in me" should be self explanatory: Oppermann is a Steppenwolf. Maybe he does not like the beast in him pointed out in this way, but I had to do that, as a musical symbol.

2. "April Fool's Day Morn" brings up Louden Wainwright's words "My Mom is here." And with this we can feel a trembling, something taking us down that we feel in the pit of our stomach. Something that the people laugh at, some of the callous ones laugh at the increasingly brutal imagery: till we get to the woman on the bathroom floor: "I threw her out, screaming bitch and whore!" This got only one laugh, and that was the saddest laugh I have ever heard. I do not know if Wainwright's song could be called Nostalgic, because the brutality is so keen to this music I think that the sentimental is actually washed away in an unbelievable medium of un-differentiated grief.

3. "Love is Blind" is a little bit of rock and roll from Annie Lennox: it is crisp and clean, but it shouts, momma poppa it shouts all to the heaven: "oh sugar, when you gonna come?" I suppose the line is sung because the whole damn thing is getting so fucking bitter: "I spend my days getting colder, I still want you all the time," this points to the ice of Isis, that I keep pointing to and that Oppermann is entitled to take issue with. But the question is of whether the turning away: the Abschied of Tarkovsky/Handke's work: whether the turning in some way can endure this:

Tired of being down on luck
Tired of being beaten up
Tired of being so screwed up
Tired of all this desperation
Tired of all this mad frustration
Tired of all the aggravation
Sick and tired of devastation
Give it some consideration

Tired of being so screwed up…

4. Then we have Apocalyptica. A group of Norweigan musicians playing Metallica: "Nothing Else Matters," this sentiment is itself funny to the likes of Oppermann and Ayres: it is too much sentimental jackassery, and as I have said all this sentimental jackassery is "a kicker." I still really like all the extremely earnest cello strokes in this one: and you can say that this earnestness is great for the nubiles in us all.

5. Patti Smith, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is even more of a risk with Oppermann because I have a feeling he loathes Nirvanna. But I think that Patti Smith actually does a beautiful number, and renders poetic what Kurt Cobain simply rendered pathetic by virtue of his ego's concerted effort to cease to exist: the really optimistic bastard thought he could get out of all this burning boredom that is in this bath: everything changes, and nothing changes. I think that Patti Smith actually evokes for us the boogie man: the mother of all nightmares is this bogeyman. The mother is a man, now that is a terrible equation to work out, and it really sometimes fucks with me. Me I am trying just to keep it together, picking through the rubble, keeping it just enough of being a metaphor, "not all of this has to be real." And... "not all of this happens to be a just a bad dream either."

6. "Indiscipline" I believe is something every self-respecting angst filled idiot should have at his free disposal. This is Adrian Belew at his absolute quirky weirdest that he can possibly be: and the matter keeps getting wrapped tighter and tighter and tighter until you just cannot take it any more! The lyrics describe the quintessential object. And one could say that with the words:

I do remember one thing...it took hours and hours,
And by the time I was done with it
I was so involved I didn't know what to think...
I carried it around with me for days and days,
Playing little games,
Like not looking at it for a whole day and then...
Looking at it to see if I still liked it...
I did!

One can say for certain:

"Put it there pal!"

Richard Thompson may himself be a more sublime, and a better poet, less caged in by some kind of thin pale of new wave electronica that Belew tends to reckon with in his song. Nonetheless the full force of this song is simply not to be missed. Nothing is right in this one: the madman is let out of his cage: its a matter of blood in the bath and about teen-thousand electric volts pouring through your veins: in this manner we have no time to ask about animal warmth: and with the final words:

"I like it"

It doesn't matter how cold you get: the colder you are the better electric conductor you can be.

Then there is

7. Frank. We cannot say Frank Sinatra without thinking simultaneously about tinkling ice cubes and a bottle of whiskey, somewhere in Murakami's terrible hotel in "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." Frank should really send you there: standing in the elevator, listening to fucking elevator music. "I get a kick out of you" is an acknowledgment of the total sentimental jackass. It was like Frank sang these words as they dropped napalm on the natives in Vietnam with b-52's. I mean heavy man.

8. Rachid Taha: "Barra Barra." I think that I subjected you to this song before: the blood will rise. That is the message of this song to me: the blood will rise. After we have seen the full weight of this capitalist filth dropping cluster-smart-bombs in Iraq: after we have gotten sick on over 100,000 dead in Iraqui blood: can we start to wonder if we have really lost it: really lost any control of our ability to fight this cold that invades us: the external "solutio" is psychoid, cold as the coldest freon, psychotic material that goes beyond any animal warmth. The song "Barra Barra" I believe means "outside." I do not know much about the outside except that it is outside of any shelter: it is in a place where business is business: and one day the shadow, the Vandal, the Visigoth will get us and cut our throat, speaking at once the paralyzing, petrifying, terrifying words: words that turn blood to ice: "I ain't mad!!"

9. Christopher O'Riley: "Karma Police" by Radiohead interpreted for piano. I think you probably don't care too much for this piece. For me this piece glides and holds an unforeseeable delicacy to lament. I think that within the unsung lyrics to this piece is the same searing brutality, the same searching as you might find in Louden Wainwright's confession: "My mom is here."

Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, hes like a detuned radio
Karma police, arrest this girl, her hitler hairdo, is making me feel ill
And we have crashed her party
This is what you get, this is what you get
This is what you get, when you mess with us

Karma police, Ive given all I can, its not enough
Ive given all I can, but were still on the payroll
This is what you get, this is what you get
This is what you get, when you mess with us
And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself
And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself

For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself

Radiohead always plays chill: mathematical "interest" that occludes the survival that we seek in turning away from the iron monkey of civilization toward some bare life calling it "love" an interest that still holds the vestiges of animal warmth.

For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself

10. Bohuslav Martinu's 1942 quartet III (allegro) is played at the introduction to Jim Sjveda's musical program here in Los Angeles, from KUSC. I think it may be the tenderest, sweetest voice that I have ever heard in the opening two minutes of the piece. The music itself then tends to flit and fly away into birdlike fountaining away: the spirit ascends. And this ascent actually takes itself to a sweet complication, contradiction, exhaustion that descends into a rather ... optimistic conclusion. Life is possible. I figure that at least one of the pieces should not be so deeply evocative of the negative. Radiohead, whatever it is, throws not a single line of recourse. In a sense we could say that the resolution of Martinu's 1942 quartet III allegro is very much like the clamber of students at one of these college halls at the conclusion of a concert. It may be a bit naive, and that is rather an unusual thing to say of Sjveda, who tends to prefer his own bitter twist of being a connoisseur and a cognizant. I think that the book I sent Oppermann of Sjveda's comments on music is probably one of Oppermann's favorites. It is for the sake of this incredibly wry, and incredibly funny and incredibly tasteful man that I entrust the tenth track of my small musical compilation to Sjveda's choice. My hope is that despite its optimism and naivete there is still room for a dizzy, brilliant, profound walk in the snow, our ability to show our steaming breath in order to keep warm.

11. "Cold Song" by Purcell is appropriate to this collection. I first heard Klaus Nomi sing this song and I was utterly entranced by his rendition. I found the collection in Oppermann's compilation bore out Nomi's sense of this song excellently. Cold brings the temperature back down a great deal.

12. "Seeman" by Ute Hagen and Apocalyptica may be too much for Oppermann, I know he has a high tolerance for Purcell. I really enjoyed a CD called "Welcome to all the pleasures" which Oppermann described as some sort of rich and decadent banquet. However in all likelyhood Oppermann finds Hagen kitsch. I think that the song is beautiful, moreover Deborah and I discovered the song when our cat "Stimpson" was dying. And this particular viking burial kind of song is the perfect thing for a dead kitty. It is both something that provokes chuckles for its grandiose metalic theater, combined with our silly cat, whom I miss very much. Maybe it is important to simply say that this song reminds me of how much I miss my cat, badly, and that hopefully this is "equitable enough" regardless if the song is listenable to any one else!

13. "All these things that I have done" by "The Killers" is a song that appeared on "Southland Tales" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbzZDGOgJSc
with no less than Justin Timberlake providing a profound comment. I got the song because of the line

"Ive got soul but Im not a soldier
Ive got soul but im not a soldier
Ive got soul but Im not a soldier
Ive got soul but Im not a soldier
..."

Which to me says enough of George Bush's fucking foreign war of pouring coldness and hate into the hearts of our fellow men. That is all that our "fearless leader" has done. I ain't a soldier in this fucking guy's army. I still have soul. I am not that soldier.

14. Mouserocket "Alone again or," I know that Oppermann will probably skip over this as trivial. But I thought that this group offered an equal or better rendition of the song than the Damned: which on 30th or 40th listening in my case has become a tad bit whiny. Oppermann will not like it. "Fuck it dude, let's go bowling." And in this you could probably go bowling to this song and it would contain the situation. Nuff said.

15. Lo and Beholden: Patti Smith again. These two pieces earn Smith enough respect from me to put her on the level of Richard Thompson. That as we know is saying a lot. And maybe if Oppermann finds this song distasteful, somehow superficial, then we can simply acknowledge that we have a different sense of taste. OK I will admit that given a choice between Thompson's "Season of the Witch" (10 minute version) and "Lo and Beholden" I might have to choose Thompson. However this song is brilliantly bitter: "the naked truth..." in Leonard Cohen's fated and ultimately great word: "....which we can't reveal to the innocent youth, except to say it isn't worth a dime." Here is the deal, as you deal with your life dropping her veils: you can tell everyone that it isn't worth a dime: but it's your bloody life, and it's your naked truth, and if you have gotten this far then I guess that no one can take your truth from you: they can kill you but they cannot take this truth away.

16. "Water of Love" Dire Straights: introduced with a kind of drawl that makes me wonder if the lead singer of Dire Straights might have been a little drunk or intoxicated when he sang this song. Water of love is about warmth, animal warmth, added to the solution. Even if this poor bastard, like you, and in some ways like me, is dying of thirst, caught looking, "crying out for some scenery," some vestage of animal warmth in the midst of all this spiritual exhortation. Well that is all we can hope for, maybe just a little shelter, a little friendship... before the heat or cold extinguishes us for certain.

Water of love
Deep in the ground
But there ain't no water of love here to be found
Someday baby when that river runs free
Gonna carry that water of love to me.

At exactly 11:51 Today

At exactly 11:51 AM today, in the midst of a meeting, which was set in the middle of the soul of the suffering about Los Angeles, we were discussing administrative decisions: the need to hire some college senior to monitor a place we were working from. Transportation was alright, we were thinking of handing out bus tokens. And why not with the cost of gas, and so on! Aflak™ was failing to cover business needs. Everything about the American dream was failing. Good news: one of the white boys finally figured out that the power line is the color line is the poverty line. Well that's good, but, like the war is almost over with man, I mean Darth fucking Vader won man! Meanwhile George Bush sends out America's not so best and brightest out there to the front line to get shot at, maimed, or killed.

The thing about the not-so-best-and-brightest is that there will still lie the quirk and creative spark. The best and brightest all got snapped up by West Point. They will maintain decent military careers. Meanwhile the not so "best and brightest" goes out to maim, kill or be killed by unknown slanty-eyed terrorists carrying bombs strapped to their bellies: It's absurd to say the least! It's pathetic, I mean I've had smaller dreams but, this one sure has some negative messages in it.

"Put it there pal!"

Isn't that the American motto? It's a step-back for your country! Another anglo voice is heard, well it's angry, even if it isn't Anglo anyway. There we have Aguirre Zorn Gottes rolling down the river: it's an anglo, alright! A blond haired Cherub or 43 years of age screaming: "It's all mine! It's all mine!" (Mine and the King of the Spainiards, that is).

"Put it there pal!"

I believe that Oppermann will like this. He likes crying, part screaming: "Put it there!" And I have a hard time controlling my own laughter as he points out that we have all been betrayed by those who have asked us to put it there!

Put it there? Well I am just about half a mind in me to just put the whole damn thing away for a while! You can put it there, you can put it here, we are still only doing the Pawnee Ghost Dance on our web-logs, desperately searching, intoxicated, for an answer through dancing in the fucking dust!

And all our technical ability... all our web logs, might still only wind us up alone, intolerably alone, one day in a giant city that has been hinged on the eternal destruction of everything all round it. Is this all we belong to? A city that keeps building and pretending it is a city, meanwhile the world continues to go on decaying and decaying outside. There is the outside, and then there is the inside. All that is simple enough, but then there is an inside to the inside. What happened was that there was a need for shelter (from the storm)(because it was "too fucking cold" outside) then we had tents and bivouacs and caves. And then we had an inside. We have an interior, and this interiority is called "consciousness," the thing is that we discovered a cave back behind that: where consciousness behind that nice neat geometric opening is a vast and amorphous black labyrinth, a cave that is 13.5 billion years old and we are looking for the entrance of this cave because we are bored with our fucking banal reality already.

It was exactly at this moment, of exactly this insight that Ayres wrote in a Walserian and impish fashion:

"First there was the unknown, however it is irrelevant, forget this! Then there was the known, only it was dreadfully boring, and everyone knew what that was about already. Trapped between the irrelevance of the unknown and the assumptions of the known, humanity was threatened by death by suffocation. In such a moment can we see the voluptuousness of indecision is essential."

Ayres may be quite right in this one, this one thought. Here we are, traveling at the very edge of boredom, after all it is boredom that pursues us so viciously right to the very limits of language where it meets a certain excess.... or where it meets a sharing, or a singing.

I was going to write today about one of my favorite and unwritten themes: the personification of nature. I absolutely stand for the personification, the wind blushed with a certain rosy certainty, but I do not think the clouds, nor the starry heavens, have ever bowed to me, they are too silent and too eternal. Why not personify? If you discover in this that we never were what we had set out to be in the beginning: we were never what we had set out to be! Why not personify the wind and the bushes! Why not personify the night wind and the darkness.

Author's note: Compare Personification to the work of Xenophanes criticizing the personification of the Greek gods, to Calvino who spoke of the criticism of personification in his "Uses of Literature," and to James Hillman's "Re-visioning Psychotherapy." I think that in "Re-visioning" Hillman somehow objects to "presonification" or "humanization" of the field of experience: take away from the anthropocentric qualities of therapy and so forth. But if you look at the thing from the psychoid level, then there is nothing better than the personification of the opposites: just look at the Rosarium pictures, they trump Hillman any day.
This is the personification of the opposites. This is getting into the bloody bathtub of all the fucking images. The problem with getting into the bathtub is that you dissolve in there. I can only hope that this web-log of Oppermann and Ayres somehow finds a means for us to dissolve in a manner that is kind. Well we can either dissolve on a web-log or death will find us and dissolve us certainly. I would rather keep clicking out keys, trying my odds against the horrible prospects of fate: we all die, the roulette ball always falls.

Oh, well, we'll dissolve anyway, we will cease to remember, we will forget. We will putrify, the whole thing will begin to rot away, memory will cease, there will be no blinding white flash of light saying, "this is memory," instead there will be blackness and dust. I mean for crying out loud! For Pete's sake! (And I am referring to St. Peter at the bloody pearly gates: blood on the pearly gates! Now there is an image to revive 2400 years of a vision of heaven, but what is 2400 years in the scheme of things? What is 2400 years in the scheme of 13-billion! Nothing! Absolutely nothing, a minute fleck! But what shall we make of this? -Time is infinitely divisable, meaning that an infinite number of universes can come and cease to be in a single instant (we just don't notice them). The point is that this thing is just continuously coming and going: what we will have to do is come up with a conjecture of space (spheres).

Ah well, Sloterdijk, OK: spheres, "The world is round: and not only is it round, it is enclosed in all directions: there is no plane to it that can be given priority. We can give priority to time, given that the world is round, hence finite: we can actually encompass the world in consciousness to a certain degree. OK now web-logging. Possibly all that is left of thinking or philosophy after the end of history, of us considering ourselves as historical beings and all that particular epoch: is a kind of space-man joke: either we are spelunkers in the cavern of 13.5 billion years (digging the pit of Babel) or we are space men, and that's not quite comforting either, since I do not want to just be stuck wearing some kind of fucking helmet to go off and look at the milky way. Put me on a sphere where I can breathe the air, and i don't have to wear some kind of a fucking helmet, and just for a moment I can look up to the heavens and suspend my disbelief that I have to wear some kind of a fucking helmet. I can breathe the fresh night air, and stand at the edge of a lake, taking in the abundance of the Milky Way.

We have various architectures and economies of space: we have city-states and we have the throbbing metropolis: pumping belly and bowels of some great throbbing monster with immense glass lit towers, sucking the magic and the energy from the world around it. We have empires: those petty forms of space that somehow carve up the empty space of the sphere into a land mass, a river, a territory. There is nothing wrong about territories if they are used in a kind of "will to power as art" kind of self-destructive flame of brilliant art (everything works out in the end notes the Aristotelian rhythmatist). But Aristotle is a man of state: he marks out the territories of the world conquered by Alexander: the first visionary of the world state. At this time the world state runs from an antinomy between Russia and the United States: Russia is a deformed post-marx-via-Lennin world, where the conception of forcing the revolution and deciding the moment for the change of consciousness fell into human hands: millions dead. Millions and millions dead. That is all that Russian communism fed us. On the other hand we have George Bush and Cheney and their cronies on the one hand, and the French are a bunch of faggits on the other side. George Bush and Cheney were in this thing to get rich quick, and to slap the backs of a number of good-ol-boys. That is all they were about doing. They are fucking losers in the biggest degree. Fucking losers.

Over in Russia we have Putin armed to the fucking teeth with blades. On all sides of him he has men in black coats, big and heavy men, Russian Mafia. He is extremely powerful. He enjoys bating Bush. They evidently have a very cordial social life together: Bush drinks to getting rich with his oil buddies. Putin drinks to getting rich out of packaging and selling Siberian cold. I mean fucking cold. I mean selling us all into the fucking cold... these fellas are selling us into the fucking cold. So we are back again searching for shelter: as these personified divinities make men who are fucking cold.

Fire through Water through Fire

This image can be linked to at http://staticfix.blogspot.com/ however I feel that there must be a better version of this image that I must find and expand greatly, and to an even more profound depth, only because it is perhaps ultimately beautiful


Tarkowski's images are always seen for a conjunction of fire through water through fire. Most notably Tarkowsky sets fire on the water, held aloft from trembling warm youthful bodies: the May festival. The "summer vacation" in Andrei Rubliev is contrasted to the fires in the end of Solaris, on the island in the midst of the living and waking water of Solaris. Finally compare water through fire: the image of the barn burnt in Mirror/Zierkala.

Please note the image that Oppermann and I have chosen is an image of a woman. This nesting of web-logs, well this is all we got, so far, in cities distant from one another, and yet cherishing a dream of this something.

Was it a woman in a frame which was about a woman in a frame?

It is not Pink Floyd's legendary cover:

It is something else, no it is not these two men staring back at us, not this Oppermann and Ayres... it is not staring back at us. It is staring at her: the Langer Abschied: as she stares out at some incomprehensible beauty.

Note that our friends in Floyd also have a background of absolute beauty that you could go out and look at. You might look at that or you may get caught up looking into one of these cats. However Pink Floyd is irrelevant after a while when you want to stare directly into the scenery, and when you want her, when you want her so deeply not to look into you but into the very depth and the very essence of the scenery, and for that scenery to open up, beautifully, impossibly, crushingly.


I have tried to intimate that the greater image was the Abschied of the feminine: her taking leave of us and looking out at this almost overwhelming beauty. Elsewhere I have spoken of the undifferentiated ocean: that it dissolves almost everything that tries to step into it. And yet it is amazing to step foot at the edge of it there: Tarkovsky's Solaris presents a formula: animal love on an island of animation upon an endless ocean of unfathomable unconscious material. Is she staring into this? The thing that is touching is that she sits on that rickety threshold, and eventually some man comes along in the movie and breaks the fence, and laughs (and inwardly cries and laughs about it all again) on how beautiful it is to break a fence with a woman. This is not the last we will see of her. And toward the end of the film she will grow older. This is also a sense in Tarkowsky itself: if you pull away from the sphere enough in sublimatio: you will see the curvature of the earth: it's finiteness.

Here is the thing: The sin of Adrian Leverkuhn is ... "Interest," that is to say in Mann's words: "Love without the animal warmth." The sin is the sin of sublimatio: where it is more interesting to be a far-shooter, an Apollonian god and so forth. Ah well, objectivity. This means finally devoid of the institutional will to power, we become once again space men in their fucking helmets. Tarkowsky points to the fact that we have to cling to this animal warmth, it is all we have, and even though Oppermann and I write web logs from fabulous distances, we still cling, each, to our animal warmth, because it IS all we have.

The essence is subtracted from the medium. And the medium is cooled so that the "product" congeals out of it. And in Tarkovsky we are the essence, the camera has to sail out ever further, till it reaches toward the curvature of the sphere, a glimpse of its finiteness: where the horizon itself is dissolved into the void of emptiness, and the ground somehow shivers into a faint disk and then becomes nothing at all. Welcome to the void of Tarkovsky. In point of fact we do not get to the point where we can see the curvature of the sphere: we never get to a place where genuine complete sublimation takes place.

The essence escapes from the work of art before it is fully congealed, otherwise death will capture everything, and we have already stated that death and forgetfulness and dust will come. And that the web log is just an effort of this heaving city at some form of self rememberance, but it is pitiful and terrible at the same time. Here we are, these little monkeys clinging to web-logs for some vestage of pathetic warmth... at least the semblance of warmth. But was there ever really that warmth? Was that warmth somehow some other thing? More primitive, yes, as if to say you could not have it there being nothing more than a little greasy worm clinging to your mother's belly.