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.