Whereas Handke spoke about the "Farewell" or "Abschied" of a (fictional?) relationship between a man and his spouse in
Short Letter, Long Farewell (a text he discovered and shared with me at Colorado College)..... Oppermann has taken his Departure from this continent, and from the continental intimacy of our relationship. Our friendship was not a marriage of two men or a man and a woman... but then what was it?
Things progress onwards. I know that he is well and that he is struggling toward something. But it is the mother and something other than the mother, that is why his Departure is for his spirit, his animus into an unknown, and therefore unconscious, sense of the future. It is not the mother, for whom there is farewell, and for whom I myself must experience the drift and ebb.
I myself attempt to make my life resonant enough, turn into a symbol (which is something different than a parable).
I have mentioned before, though it is always worth mentioning the comment of Jung about the crossing of three roads, the Tri-Via in Wandlung der Symbole... symbols of transformation, and it is worth picking up again, but this thread bears a wear on its filaments of sense, and I hesitate for a moment once again.
Instead it is worthy to report that Oppermann has produced a volume on the Imaginary Possibles. It is a jewel of insight, though for the time being it may appear to be impossible for me to fully read and comment on. I believe that it holds an enduring relation to Oppermann's love of reading philosophy, and so his imagination lingers there. There is some significance to the notion that part of the philosophic novel takes place as a dialog in a Stadia-- a Stadium. Thus the religious festival offered for the maximum of human inspection and introspection.
It may be that this book cannot be read now but must be read in the future. As Oppermann, and now also my friend Nelson Gary writes "More Later." (yes, always more later).
The majestic monolog of great invention makes one the emperor of all things in the monolythic text. This I have ascertained in reading Mencius: in a later chapter of Mencius there is a description of the order of control of land: the Emperor (Son of Heaven) owns a 1000 square mile area of land all the way to the farmer, who owns barely 100 acres.
Oppermann's text covers thousands and thousands of square miles, and so he like others who make great volumes becomes a "Son of Heaven" an emperor of a vast domain ...even if only "in reality"... as Kafka's edict in the smallest parabolic sense proves greatest of all.
I for myself tend the small plots.
Mencius writes that a farmer who does his best with 100 acres can feed 8 people. (To be honest I do not know if I am yet able to do that.)
I have a feeling that Oppermann needs to find a place in order for him to discover suddenly, one day, absent mindedly that he too in his life has slipped into a mystery and become a symbol. What remains is that there is so much left to come, even all this, and the sense of all this will be changed utterly, into something else. We have so much to learn.
