Oppermann in Praxis

A Letter to Oppermann

2009-09-25T23:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Dr. Oppermann,

It seems that there have always been two kinds of letters that have been written. There are letters that have been written because one was passionately on a path to write a letter. There are letters that are written because with an immense astonishment one discovers that one must write a letter. This falls into more of the latter category.

I write as Ayreses have always had to write: when the terrible urge overcame them and not a second before or after. Unpredictable, undedicated dilettantism is all this has ever earned me.

I write you because I believe that I have somehow changed between the last posting on the "Oppermann in Praxis" web-log and the current one. How much longer will the change last? How much longer will this inspiration last before once again it is dormant? stand-off-ish? Unpredictable? Say, another twenty years?

Be that as it may, I have resigned myself over the last year to reading and occasionally writing on your weblog as somehow more Ayresian than the Ayres weblog of Oppermann: if such distinctions can be maintained with any reasonable cerebration.

How then has Ayres changed? He has grown a little older, that is all. He still has put off harboring any thoughts of going into a monastery. (Good, good, we know all that.) Ayres has begun to let his hair grow out again (but that is all old stuff, Oppermann has endured these things before).

So Ayres has not changed much then? When we think of it, old habits die hard, particularly the habit of being oneself, as finite, limited and uncreative as that might seem.

So what is this motivation to write, more of the same? I have changed only as a Walser has changed, which again would be, not much at all: still thee same damned bowler hat and the pinstripe slacks and walking cane, or dudeish equivalent. No news there.

Perhaps I found a cache of humor in Walser, that is all, and that would be a sign of Ayres' changing. (I am so sick and tired of myself among so many friends who all wish to be seen by their friends as changing: we aren't changing at all, it's so pathetic!) Change only happens from without: and then when one is changed, truly, it means in it's essence: one can't have the same friends any more.

So then I am writing this out of obligation? Heck no!

I do not have the pretense to claim I have the arduous spiritual discipline of, say, an Oppermann, to devote the last year of his life to an extremely consistent web-log (Come on Ayres! Where's your backbone! Where's your spine!) I am not a spiritual web-log persuer: I am a televangelist johnny-come-lately to the scene: that is all, that is really all I can stand!

Rather, Oppermann writes because Oppermann is Oppermann. Ayres writes because Ayres is Ayres. That much we will get straight, though a document on friendship: "The Road Goes Even Further" is something we will have to continue to write together whenever possible.

Oppermann is breaking off to write a writing: The writing is not his writing when he was faced each day with the cackle of six or seven dozen college kids. (We were once those, and we called the days "Arcadian," but Oppermann looks at the dither of all that late teen-age sonambula with disgust). (You'll correct me quite vehemently, I hope, if I'm wrong).

Maybe I am writing this letter because I simply Owed Oppermann the time. That is a frank admission of a debt of soul, not an obligation to my own pointless spiritual rubric to nothing (and I really mean "nothing"): but an empty lament. I haven't changed. I'm still the same. (which is actually quite boring!) I Owed Oppermann because I love so much of what he is, and I just needed to spend a part of an evening in thought, hopefully laughing with him at my own dithering turn-around-speeches in this letter. It should look almost like Sebald, except I didn't go anywhere, I stayed home: ergo it's more like Walser.

Oppermann should be the man to go around with international speeches! First he is here, and then there. Damn well should be, or will be, everywhere. I know, enough, enough.

Anyway, there is so much more I would have liked to say. I would still say that my chapter on Hölderlin will have to contain extensive documentation around the Oppermann post-cards from the Hölderlin museum. My book, however is still to be published at a far-off date.

Oppermann seems nascent: like a leopard about to give birth: about to be published and punished! About to be sent to the "pen." About to be discovered by his own return ...just as he is set to depart! Pure astonishment!

With heartfelt friendship,

Ayres

The Ongoing Story: The Presentiments of Vulnerability

2008-09-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

This particular post is informed with a singular request from Oppermann: "Please, write more blogs!" -I am happy to oblige him. The request was genuine enough. It was in fact open and vulnerable in a profound way, and that is what drew me to it: the presentiments of vulnerability.

I wonder why I have taken some time to be silent?

At first I will try to reduce my silence to a family psychological interpretation about creativity in the Ayres family: passages in the rythm of my creative fury followed by silence, gestation, absence. And the gestation and absence, like in Kleist's "Story of 'O'" is all too important. My father used to work in creative paroxysms or spurts. The language is partially sexualized, and distasteful to me to think about, nonetheless I will write it: "he worked in creative spurts." Does this mean that he had at moments mad love affairs with his anima, which subsequently left her abandoned, or perhaps completed, with some figment or fragment of a "completed work."

My father achieved a fairly high degree of accomplishment as an artist. In fact he produced a film "Altars of the East" and then later edited it from its enormous length (six or eight hours) to a more condensed version of itself: "Altars of the World." I believe that his longer work, which to my knowledge is now lost, "Altars of the East" would have offered me a more interesting vision, were it available to this day. "More interesting," that is to say, than "Altars of the World," which, while retaining some incredible montage and general footage, still somehow seems too hurried: vignettes of great master teachers are reduced to less than 20 to 30 seconds. I would hope that instead of my father's voice giving an eternal "gloss" of what went on in a specific religion that it would be more interesting to spend time with the spiritual teachers and actually hear what they said to a much greater depth. But I digress: the point was that he had enough of a "spurt" of creative energy to make two motion pictures, the latter of which gained serious critical acclaim.

My father also made paintings and carvings. One of the carvings is depicted here of an "armored bird," as my father used to call it. Birds bones are hollow to conserve energy while flying: birds are highly refined adaptations in order to attain the ability of flight: but in one sense terribly fragile. I remember a comment from a historian concerning ancient suits of armor: that they were quite suprisingly comfortable to be worn. Nevertheless a bird (and my father always was guarded when he talked to me of "birds," meaning "women"), covering it's wings in im-pregnable (immune to creative spurting of any kind) armor renders the bird in all likelihood flightless.

Two nights ago I had a dream that I shot a man in armor. His armor could not withstand my point-blank shot. I thought for a while about Jung's dream of shooting Siegfried in the company of a savage. The man in the armor was in my dream a "betrayer," and there was no blood: the treacherous, defended complex was bloodless, just an assemblage of an empty suit of steel. I figure it may be like this: defenses, armored posturings are always treacherous, presentiments of treason.

But again I will write to Oppermann because of his pre-sentiments of vulnerability. Somehow we become able to deal with the fact that we are... pregnable (and this is the case with Kleist's Marquise of "O" as well). The painted bird, a beautiful title I have always thought, but one that is connected to a book I have not read ...and the armored bird: flapping about helpless or suspended in outer space: radiant, but somehow an entity that can only happen in a symbolic universe that does not obey the rules of... gravity.

My father's relation to women was always highly guarded. He put them behind armor or behind bars. Part of the result was that he died, in a sense, broken, profoundly broken. And I mean by "broken" in the midst of a kind of loneliness that was inconsolable to any attempt to break through.

My friend Professor (the name he is called is "Professor" or "Professor Marvin") has a way of speaking about the children we work with saying "kids don't know what love is," and in a sense that is what I felt my father finally struggled with, maybe till the very end: he somehow lost, forgot, did not know that he was loveable, that he was loved. He ceased to know what love is.

Of recent while speculating about becoming a Jungian Analyst I had to deal with bringing in this "Armored Bird" which my analyst dubbed "crazy anima figure" into the process of becoming a Jungian analyst. This has to do with the idea that I would actually bring the indictments of one woman who has judged me very harshly and unfairly into the process of my application for training as an analyst. I do not think I want to bring the armored bird in. I don't want to bring in my "crazy anima" either. I would rather leave her out here for the crazed experiements with my friend Oppermann, where we find ourselves wrapt for several weeks in terms of creative energy producing the phallic columns of the textual presentation, then pregnant, presentiment and silent, and then beginning again from out of some desert. The Desert, says Jodorowsky in "El Topo," "The Desert is a circle who's center and circumphrence is everywhere and who's center is nowhere. The way out of this desert is a spiral."

That is to say that the desert is a place that is no place. We have been burrowing in our "Wohnung" in some subterranean passage for some time now. Perhaps we will emerge some kind of silver gilded bird: a bird in a cage that is no cage: that has become an armour with its attendant impossible weight, so that once again we will be only found in a symbolic space, a space that is no place. Na koja abad.

An Effort to Enter into the Conception of Silence

2008-07-08T21:08:00.001-07:00

This essay is based on the previous discussion of the "Silences of Dr. Oppermann." However the purvey of this essay is much broader and more facing into a general and ultimately "speculative" or "Theoretical" dimension of experience. As such this essay threatens to break with the particular, and with it's capacity for singularity.

Thus silence may be said to be the first confrontation with the particular, and with singularity. And this is the first thing that may be said about silence. That in it's essence it represents non-particularity.

Is silence the terrible love of communion? The terrible love of annihilation?

This essay is also pursuant to a dream I experienced last night with Bob Dylan, a man with seemingly endless capacity to speak, and not keep silent, but with a capacity in his speaking to break one's heart endlessly.

Bob Dylan is Oppermann's and my favorite of thinkers, and above all what has ever been best in American thinking (since thinking like this is currently not possible in circles of American academia, we have at least our lone and singular bard who sings outside the institution's walls - and his singularity is his song, far beyond the common outcry of "everyday man" to be "unique," as the Americans fashion and utterly commodify "uniqueness").

Murakami is right to place Dylan's "hard rain is going to fall" at the end of his essay on the split: exemplum fictivum. Murakami writes by exampling fiction: his writing is not an actual novel, it is a representation of a novel.

But the science of Murakami: since he represents is one that represents an ontological aesthetic, an ultimate act of literature: is the conception of a Japanese man of letters: a single cut under the crescent moon: shomen-uchi.

There are two kinds of silence: there is the silence of abuse and there is the silence of meditation. The silence of abuse is the silence of evil: it is the silencing of the cries of reproach and pain and grief. The silence of meditation is the silence of hope: it is the capacity to see the face of Love in the hands and faces of those men or women who are bent into cruelty and rage at seeing their salvation in our destruction.

The silence of hope is the silence before thought: and thought goes to the differing of the originary cry of reproach or assertion. Thought is the aesthetic of art as it stands against utility (which is the blind assertion of the will to power); it is ornament and difference.

In silence we are one; in silence God and mortal beings become one; in silence.

The obvious pain of the silence of abuse lends itself to it's evidence of suffering, and to gravity. But the silence of hope must come as an equal second. It must provide awareness when our situation always shows that we are thrown into suffering and in some way have been made to keep silent. This silence is drawn from the facticity that we, out of trickery, or stupidity, or out of something unspeakable (since all explanations are ever laughable)... survive. This survival in the face of all doubt, the doubt that states that precisely if we were fully aware of the situation we would in fact kill ourselves: this is a hope that is at the limits of language, and harshly rebukes the belief in the pessimism that goes into the words of ultimate negativity: the desire to die. (Levinas comments on this most horrible thought at the beginning of "totality and infinity" as "the grim possibility of suicide.") But this essay is an effort to speak, and say why it is so important to survive, this is the effort at the root of the "beyond" of the will to power of: if thought is in words... then... words are something else. If no thought is in words, then words remain lifeless, without the touch of the soul, unanimated, words remain the same: they signify only what they are intended to, in some ultimate cry of despair the Habermasians might call "communicative action." "Communicative action" is effective philosophic lobotomy (or, equally, vasectomy, ): refusing to face the most horrible question: it is a contention that ontological thinking is a kind of sickness (Wittgenstein's contention). Any form of philosophic "therapy" to somehow re-anesthetize is precisely that: anti-art: anti-aesthesis.

Thinking knows already that every postulation is a painful travesty: but out of some care (to reach out and connect) asserts itself just the same through writing: the need to reach out and connect is pre-critical; it has to be if we validate the possibility that civilization actually is born out under the sign of hope (Constantine believed this to be the Chrismon, but this was a false literalization of "compassion").

In the dream with Dylan I wept at first, I mean what else is there to do with the poet of the broken heart? "A hard rain's a gonna fall." The man has a great deal to say. But I told him in the end that I had searched very near and very far: I had looked in so many places: I had tried to become a "doctor" as though this could somehow make a statement of some sort of greatness of search. But now I stand at the other end of any accomplishment of "doctoring" and I don't know what to do. I simply stand, bare, weeping, grief-stricken.

I told Dylan that he should read Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund; he told me that I should listen to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." At this time I cannot listen to George Gershwin, because his blue is too light, too light for me, and it has not come to a critical mass of negativity that would present an outcry of the soul (Coletrane's music for example). I cannot take the Gershwinian approach to capitalism, even if through the Bohemian elegance of New York City. By comparison Coletrane's "A Love Supreme" is a pure paean to hope.

Hesse is one of Oppermann's favorites. I have even said once, jokingly, that Oppermann wants to one day become a Hesse. (I also attempted to repair this statement with the added comment that I hope one day that Oppermann will become an image of himself: not merely the image of someone else, nor the mere emptiness of subjective "uniqueness" incipient in American capitalism).

On Why I am Such a Humble Man

2008-06-03T15:02:00.000-07:00

"But is Ayres a Geck? He is often a Dude, no question about that (in a way in which Raphaelson is not, I believe), but to be a Geck, well, there is an added element there, well, no, two really. One is vanity. This requirement Ayres meets. He is one of the vainest men I have ever met. I mean, here is a guy who is so cruelly in shape that it makes his best friend (who is twenty pounds overweight and is losing his hair) cringe, and then Ayres has the gumption to complain about his own double-chin. This is like Steffi Graf who used to wipe the tennis court with her hapless opponents along the lines of 6-0, 6-1, and then complained about how bad her forehand had been during the match. Ayres is profoundly vain as a man (maybe not so much as a thinker). But is he a Geck? We shall see some other time."

I will say in response to Oppermann that I find it embarassing to indict myself so fully on this web-log, to appear naked or shirtless as it were. I do not think I have ever, nor will I ever pose in this manner again. I will however ask that we stretch and walk.

I also chose this title because of the style Nietzsche's "Ecce Homo" (I pray that 120 or so years later I will not go insane shortly after publishing this).

The following image is strictly arcadian stupidity: It can only follow that there is a middle aged vanity that ingratiously follows.

Images Work

2008-06-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

A comment I made to my friend Oppermann in a telephone call last night: "Yes, but you realize that we have in fact worked on something together." And this makes a moment of a shared weekend of experiences all the more important: we have worked on our images. We have worked on images, yes indeed with an aspect of nostalgia and incest, in the images of Arcadia. We have also worked on what was compelling in those images: the sulphrous element of compulsion that might be identified in the way adolescence smoldered. Of course such an element is now a warming fire, now a raging inferno, and one ought to be careful playing with such an element.

But we were not merely playing, this is not play that has no intent or meaning: the effort here is to attempt to bring some closure to the discussion of 20 years, and to open up the next 20 years of discourse. As we know "20 years" is often our expression for a condemnation, a sentencing: but all sentences have their finitude and their singularity, even if there is no singularity that can withstand the tug and pull of eternity, that same eternity that turn's anyone's voice as cold as ice, because it is the chemical rending in the furnace.

But somehow the playing with images here has blackened me in a pleasing manner, patina'd, deepened, charred. For what is there that is worth writing about if it is not the real immediate quality of this friend and I: I don't know if there is any other reason to go out at all into the world except to survive and make friends. The rest is all bullshit: manure and cannon fodder that we have to build on to make a better world.

I feel in a sense older with my friend, and in a meaningful way closer to him. I know we could say that we were "so much older then," that we are "younger than that now," to quote the words of our prophet, Bob Dylan. But I would say that we are both older and younger: we may be growing younger towards our images: younger, increasingly open. We may be older if older means that the threshold of consciousness has grown worn with age and the passage and tread of so many feet, that our lives are not some stark bare newness, but places where many have dwellt and many will continue to dwell: large women and screaming babes, steppenwolves, yes, and many others, wanderers, vagrants, immigrants, medicine men, accountants, saints, promoters, academics even.... the list goes on with the expansiveness of the dwelling in time not in mere physical space. The dwelling abides.

I may even more carefully say that we are growing "younger towards death," as the poet David Whyte might say, knowing such words are precarious without real circumspection, knowing that they are words of courage, telling us to be not afraid of fear or age. So for all we can say about the, yes, indeed, hopeless technological condition of the web log, the images thank us for this intensive dialogical work. I believe they thank us, I believe they really do, by virtue of a certain sense of gladness in my soul.

I kept thinking on my morning walk about the idea of opening a kitchen. I wanted to open a "soul kitchen" underneath which I would write the words "If you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen!" I was thinking of a man I regard as being a really stupid fellow, who had said that he was once a psychotherapist, but then he switched careers because all that is required is definitely easy to burn out on; he told Deborah to be prepared if I needed to switch careers. I took umbridge at his smugness. I kept thinking, "Get out of the kitchen if you don't like the heat!"

In this reverie of a dream kitchen we (Deborah and I) would sell both soul food and vegitarian, and we would have a front counter where we would sell small golden birds and hearts. I dream to myself that Oppermann would visit this kitchen: and he would sit in a rustic wooden chair on the Northern California coast and look out at the sunlight on the not too distant oaks or pine trees, and we would pass yet another day in conversation.

The meaning of singularity: a useless piece of ephemera

2008-06-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

What I am about to publish can be rescinded at least in part if there is any violation of personal integrity or copyright.

Its getting dark so early
We'll be gone so soon
But pretty one more time
Before we're down the line
Pretty one more time.
(Greg Brown)

Now cresswell has assigned to us a particular cleft. That he was being a bit of an inquisitive teenager and was investigating the rather pleasant situation afforded by R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat. Fritz is a bit of a lady's man. And while it is infinitely comfortable sticking one's hand into the sports bra of some familiar co-ed while one is in college, the situation becomes tedious, boorish, or even pathetic for we older men advancing on the age of 40. This is not to disrespect the feminine, nor the time that one takes in college to be a rollicking young cat frisking among such feminine affection. It is just that at our age the point and the place of this becomes increasingly absurd: there is still the same desire... though hopefully, and perhaps reprovingly we are asked to mature by the parts of ourselves that look on this matter with a rather reproving intent.

It will remain uncertain:

If Cresswell got laid [and if there is any truth to "Fritz the Cat" it should be that "someone got laid" (lucky) - or in Dylan's words "Or maybe it was an accident"] some time round watching Fritz the Cat on magnetic VHS video tape that was on loan from the Tutt Library during the time of his rental.
Whether Cresswell got the movie back in time, or whether he was forced to pay harsh and draconian late fees that might be attached to such an object when it is found to be delinquent.
What Cresswell thought of Fritz the cat.

Only later would Oppermann and Ayres both secretly and individually confirm the intent of Dylan's words to ring truer than the epithets of Fritz the Cat, that getting laid is rarely anything to do with getting lucky (saving the question of the "accident" for later is always a good thing to do). In all likelihood Oppermann already knew all that. Though this does not mean we cast aspersions on the ladies who favored us with even a single moment of their graces: we thank them all. The greatness of the music goes beyond that, and the (at times turgid and fetid) idiot winds of sentimentality of this (e.g. "Visions of Johanna") will carry us indeed a very long way into the long, long farewell.

On the obverse/reverse of this page these words of Oppermann appear:

Lieber Herr Doktor,

I am writing you this note at 2:15 in the morning of February 23, 1988, in the hope that Cresswell has returned Fritz die Katze and that thusly this little piece of paper has lost it's official value. I have had a rather nauseating day (in Europe it generally rains on such days; here it doesn't even do that which makes it all the more nauseating) but I got done with my paper yesterday and today I indeed finished my last reading for the class (now I'm actually sitting here, reading Dostoevsky's "The Possessed"). Day after tomorrow (or actually today) tomorrow then that is I shall be going forth to Susi's house - the thought of which is both slightly nauseating and, at the same time, pleasant. I would prefer spending the block break by myself though. Soon Diotima will be coming back; I dreamed of waves last night and I simply don't know what's going to happen
1.) If it hasn't happened already
or
2.) if it isn't too late to happen
3.) If it isn't both

(circle one of the above)

A very pleasant day to you, my friend
(and if our existences aren't going to meet before wednesday afternoon, Susi's phone is
6...

your friend,

Dr. Dr. h.o. J.P. Oppermann

PS: I got an "A" on a paper back today - I'm beginning to think that Blasenheim might be the Übermensch

To be honest it will forever remain uncertain if Oppermann was just a kiss ass for Blasenheim, as if these grades really mattered to him (but they did, I mean he was a straight "A" student), or whether there was a creative synthesis between Oppermann's waking thought and Blasenheim's exuberance. And this itself was a fleeting symbol of the Übermensch. This then was a shining forth, a brilliant moment for Oppermann, when academic excellence meant something: that was the full force of the Arcadian. As if a letter grade made any difference! -Well it did indicate a gratifying moment when an esteemed professor poured down his appreciation toward you: that was golden, and that was Übermenschlich, because it was a matter of joy that spanned beyond the boundaries of academia per-se and entered really into the realm of the eschaton. In such an experience we could say that it is radically futural: as from Corinthians it seemed in that moment of Arcadia that we were so much older then: "For now we know in part, but then we shall know, even as we are known."

I would like to ask, for the record, why wasn't this actually called in German: "Fritz der Kater" -?

Friedrich Nietzsche: Genius and Definitive Precursor to "The Dude"

Now Cresswell was a Nietzschean first and foremost. He seemed to mention more than once that he had a Nietzschean chess board from Roecken. Cresswell was interested in the Overman, and Oppermann was interested in the Overman, der Übermensch. But the experience of "Fritz the Cat" was profoundly banal, there really was no hope for transcendence from this Art Crumb kind of nauseating banality: behind it was something getting ready to really make you sick. San Francisco in the 60's and early 70's is the very essence and definition of the smell of decaying eucalyptus leaves. Is this all America could really offer: we could say in the late eighties, a decade and a half easily since Hunter S. Thompson had pronounced that we had seen the high water mark of the consciousness revolution break: twenty years after the summer of love in 68. We were there too late. We could feel some of the feeling, the vaguest traces of it all, before we got embroiled in the political world of the Eighties, and the Nineties: where we got to business and went to work as a Nation, and we were wearing all of us these blue wool suits. And everyone was going to hell. We were too late. But the same damn party continued on into the wee hours of 2:30 in the morning anyhow.

And what was Oppermann doing at 2:30 in the morning? Somehow at 2:30 everyone becomes a figment of their own existential play: "No exit:" I could no more escape myself and who I was going to be than could he, a man born after the brief juncture of the 60's revolution. We were men born too late, and the dream had faltered. Nevertheless we continued to exist.

Nowadays we pass grades back and forth, little spidery black letters: "This one gets a C+, Ayres, you're barely passing!" And we seem to jeer and taunt each other with all these failed black letters, all these ledger notes that sink into debts and obligations: there is no longer an "A," rather there are complications and serious setbacks in the work: if your case is interesting then it is likely to extend the experience to a longer trial, that is all! In the end the letter grade is for the condemned man: the Homo sacer, who is in essence unsacrificeable because he is already condemned as not being sacred before the law, having fallen from sacrosanct, the truth of the finest vision of singularity is its capacity to become a sacrifice, to turn against the infinite stretch of eternity with the singular act that marks a depth of soul that is as unfathomable as eternity is broad.

Now let us take another step, before this hanging judge, before we get to the ballad of the drifter before another hanging judge, we have the Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest:

Judas pointed down the road
And said, "Eternity!"
"Eternity?" said Frankie Lee,
With a voice as cold as ice.
"That's right," said Judas Priest, "Eternity,
Though you might call it 'Paradise.'"

"I don't call it anything,"
Said Frankie Lee with a smile.
"All right," said Judas Priest,
"I'll see you after a while.

I said before that Eternity is rather broad. And we all show our cliche'd conceit in the end, and that is where our "existence" grows thin, "nothing is revealed."

Now Oppermann has a good deal to speak on nausea and rain, there is a certain fine drizzle that means nothing, that simply sprays and soaks everything, and every damn thing just gets wet, and it is not even a HARD rain that's going to fall, its just a nauseating rain, and Oppermann is saying that here, in his barely figured 19 year old consciousness, in Colorado in 1988 he is saying that in the United States there is not even rain. I'm sorry, Oppermann, there is not even any rain, and I don't know if anything ever even got wet aside from your own soul, and that may have only been a sign of something, a false-wetness of the United States, that never got wet enough for you to actually settle down, because now you are leaving it. It has never been wet enough for you here. It is not even wet enough for you to feel appropriately nauseated: and this was your destiny: I am not here being nauseated nearly enough!

Maybe if Oppermann had gone into the East: into the fall of the Soviet Block, or the rise of the Mafia Empire in Russia, and the infinitely more controlled mafia empire in the United States... maybe you could have gone into Kafka's mafia empire like in Der Prozeß: where betrayed in the end by your own warders they could have taken you out and stabbed you with a knife, and like a dog you would have possibly cried from the depth of your singular soul. As it is there is barely enough rain in America, and you are complaining about that. Oppermann, there is admittedly this bare, and soul-less place that for the time being we live in called America. Later after this you will cease to participate in "America" and the "West Coast" and what is "American" half way round the world it seems from your native Germany. You will become once more, again, a German. You will have avoided, in all likelihood any mandatory military service, and so you will have avoided the potentially abusive hardening of a young man sent out on maneuvers. You will become a German and you will have to make an accounting for all those years you've spent with all those soul-less Americans, who drove Nausea to its furthest pitch: there no longer was anything in America but one colossal sports stadium with glaring daylight lights.

It should also be highlighted that this was Oppermann's arcadian usage of his spare time: reading from Dostoevsky's "The Possessed," which could be translated also to mean: those not in possession of their own destiny. And indeed this was the case at this very moment. After all you and I both know to sneer and make a mockery of the notions of "innocent free will." Rather we will term this that there is possession.

Maybe you were possessed by an anima figure whom you renamed Diotima (forcing me to think endlessly of Robert Musil's absolutely bitter, twisted irony round his naming one of the main characters relentlessly "Diotima" in such a way that it is an ultimate indictment of her pretensions. NO. Rather I believe that your "Diotima" had a certain softness to her, and maybe a little more grace, at least insofar as I remember her, and I do remember her sending me a post card of a white tiger crossing a green river from India... at least I think I did. This image is lost to anyone but me now. It is just a memory and thus means nothing, it has already grown thin, thin to the point of obsolesence, so forgive me please, Oppermann!).

There remain for me two questions:
1) What is the existential figure of Oppermann's adolescent ambivalence concerning Susi Willett and Diotima (and ultimately, post-Arcadia: ex-wife as wife to ex wife as X.-)? - that is that he was neurotically torn between two women: one who always seemed a bit of a gentle, less pronounced, form of femininity: Susi; and the other other is the one whom you never saw after Colorado College: someone whom time has simply swept away.
2) Why did Oppermann feel he have to write on the back of this Cresswellian Fritz the Cat receipt?

Once Again, the Dude... Definitively

2008-05-26T17:05:00.001-07:00

"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

2008-05-22T15:06:00.002-07:00

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.

2008-05-22T15:06:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-22T12:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-22T11:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

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:

Keuranos Kubernatai: the saying of Heraclitus: "thunderbolt steers all things."
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")
Thunderbolts are symbols of metaphor: connection of two places
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:

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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Thomas Bernhardt: Beton. ditto Hoffmann: still more introverted. An extremely profound commentary I completely identify with: exceedingly impolite
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
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!!!)
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.
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

2008-05-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

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:

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

"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

2008-05-12T18:59:00.000-07:00

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 James Gossett

2008-05-08T23:37:00.001-07:00

(This image 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 is of poor quality, but it conveys something that one is compelled to find friendly. I believe that it shows Gossett in his native environment: Gossett's own home)

A few pointers on the road to an analysis of Gossett:
1. Oppermann believes that Gossett is in some manner at times too much of a naive believer in some kind of a mystical truth.
2. I think in looking at this Gossett 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 Gossett: possibly the one on "professions" (it can be a verwindung of labor and work)
4. Gossett prefers to be called Max
5. Gossett preferred to be called "Jim" when he was a student at Pacifica
6. All previous entries about Oppermann and I getting together to set the heretofore "naughty" Gossett straight are hereby abandoned.
7. Gossett 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 Jim Gossett straight about anything.
9. Gossett and I have sat in the morning watching the sunlight pour into a room converted from a former Catholic seminary.
10. Gossett always listens with remarkable patience.
11. It is unknown if Gossett 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. Gossett's libido makes him impish.
13. Gossett is said to be more of a musical snob than Oppermann.
14. Gossett has some ulterior motive behind the questions of Oppermann as drinker, smoker and addict to 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

2008-05-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-05T09:25:00.001-07:00

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)

2008-05-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

(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

2008-05-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-03T11:44:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Please Disregard the Following Posting

2008-05-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

It has happened again, really it is a mere technological leap toward the absurd, a hall of mirrors, a "schlechtes Unendigkeit." Where we see a representation of a representation of a representation, (oder ein Gleichnis von ein Gleichnis...) which Oppermann will find funny or disturbing or entirely irrelevant at any given moment. Plato made this comic problem present in "the Parmenides," the problem of the "third form" I think it is called, where "toi eidoi" "the forms" are problematized: each form or ideal must be related to the fallen or "real" presentation of the idea by virtue of the form of relating the ideal to the mere shadow of appearance that we perceive.

The Oppermann Posting: Ayres in Oppermannalia

2008-05-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

This image threatens to become overly technological: it is an image of a web-log entitled ayres-in-theoria. But it is set against the backdrop of my own computer screen. What is more enticing about the image is the reduplication of an image from Tarkowski's Zierkala: "Mirror." It is a mirroring of mirror, and it is a mirror of these web logs as well. I must go to an administrative meeting now, however it is important to note this mirroring as the factual literary contextualization of the Oppermann Posting (under the name "Falkenburger") of "Ayres in Theoria" at least in reality, if not in parable.

Oppermann contends that if I am publishing images of his web log on my web log, then I must really have nothing to say. I would argue that it is a matter of stepping out of the gaze, which in its specular, spectator form I find nauseating.... And stepping into the landscape.

Of Note: the Siegfried Incident

2008-04-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

I am promising to write more on the death of the hero, the catastrophe of having died in a profound sense while still remaining alive. But in my characteristic Ayresian fashion I will point to an etymology to sort of save the day.

This is the mystery of "segh," and as a matter of segway I would like to add that the hero and the snake are brothers. Both serve the mother. (All this is discussed in Jung's "Symbols of Transformation," and I owe a debt to my analyst Gordon Nelson for discussing it with me today, although something is not necessarily right in including this in a web-log on Oppermann, I will include it in the words of Kafka, "so that I may feel that I have left nothing out) If the hero is killed (by the snake), the option is not to serve the snake, but to wait, perhaps to grieve.

segh- DEFINITION: To hold. Oldest form *seh-, becoming *segh- in centum languages. Derivatives include hectic, eunuch, scheme, and scholar. 1. Suffixed form *segh-es-. Siegfried, from Old High German sigu, sigo, victory, from Germanic *sigiz-, victory (< “a holding or conquest in battle”). 2. hectic; cachexia, cathexis, entelechy, eunuch, Ophiuchus, from Greek ekhein, to hold, possess, be in a certain condition, and hexis, habit, condition. 3. Possible suffixed (abstract noun) form *segh-wr, toughness, steadfastness, with derivative *segh-wr-o-, tough, stern. severe; asseverate, persevere, from Latin sevrus, stern; b. sthenia; asthenia, calisthenics, hypersthene, hyposthenia, thrombosthenin, from Greek sthenos, physical strength, from a possible related abstract noun form *sgh-wen-es- (with zero-grade of the root). 4. O-grade form *sogh-. epoch, from Greek epokh, “a holding back,” pause, cessation, position in time (epi-, on, at; see epi). 5. Zero-grade form *sgh-. a. scheme, from Greek skhma, “a holding,” form, figure; b. scholar, scholastic, scholium, school1, from Greek skhol, “a holding back,” stop, rest, leisure, employment of leisure in disputation, school. 6. Reduplicated form *si-sgh-. ischemia, from Greek iskhein, to keep back. (Pokorny seh- 888.)

The Oppermann Book

2008-04-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

Oppermann gave me a book in a dream last night. It was clearly the right book. It was an Oppermann book. The book was in Spanish, which made it more difficult to read. It had strange figures: a monster, a tree and some mountains all printed in blue-green ink. I will try to explain further...

A Moment of Brief but Intense Anxiety (Blog-Interrogative)

2008-04-24T12:38:00.001-07:00

Oppermann, are you there? Can you read me? And if you can, do you? And if you do, then how are you?

A list of things to do

2008-04-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

Relate the issue of Friendship to its shadow: afraid
discuss C.G. Jung's Memories Dreams and Reflections: "Shooting Siegfried" dream as it relates to the Pri- root of friendship
Discuss a passage from Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynnical Reason" concerning the exhaustion of Robert Musil's "Young Törleß" while trying to read Kant's "Critique of Pure reason" and relate it to the article I wrote on "Der Critiker" also to the issue of "critical mass" in nuclear physics
Uncertain
Discuss Oppermann's card where he describes his father as a "Seljack" while in London Ca. 2002 (which had been kept stored in the back of "Jung's Memories Dreams and Reflections")

Friendship: an Etymological Unsettling

2008-04-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

pri-
To love. Contracted from *pri- (becoming *priy- before vowels).Derivatives include filibuster, friend, and Friday. 1. Suffixed form *priy-o-. a. free, from Old English freo, free, and fron, freogan, to love, set free; b. filibuster, freebooter, from Dutch vrij, free. Both a and b from Germanic *frijaz, beloved, belonging to the loved ones, not in bondage, free, and *frijn, to love. 2. Suffixed (participial) form *priy-ont-, loving. friend, from Old English frond, frond, friend, from Germanic *frijand-, lover, friend. 3. Suffixed shortened form *pri-tu-. a. Siegfried, from Old High German fridu, peace; b. affray, afraid, from Old French esfreer, to disturb, from Vulgar Latin *exfredre, to break the peace, from ex-, out, away (see eghs) + *fridre, to make peace, from Germanic *frithu-, peace; c. Germanic *frij-, peace, safety, in compound *berg-frij- (see bhergh-2). a–c all from Germanic *frithuz, peace. 4. Suffixed feminine form *priy--, beloved. a. Frigg, from Old Norse Frigg, goddess of the heavens, wife of Odin; b. Friday, from Old English Frgedæg, Friday, from Germanic compound *frije-dagaz, “day of Frigg” (translation of Latin Veneris dis, “Venus's day”). Both a and b from Germanic *frijj, beloved, wife. (Pokorny pri- 844.)

Robert Walser Signpost

2008-04-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

I am leaving this Robert Walser Signpost in case anyone gets lost along the way and is further in need of excessive confusion in order to set things straight. I will reccommend Walser to anyone who reads him already. For those who do not read him I will not reccommend reading him. Nevertheless I should say that everyone should ALREADY be reading Walser.

Hector Berlioz and the Bears

2008-04-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

This image was posted rather humorously at: http://timothyfox.blogspot.com/2007/12/classical-music-and-rock-music.html

I do not know if Hector Berlioz would be added to the list of composers and symphonies that I expect to hear when I am dead. When I die I expect to hear several works of music:

"Donnez du Rum a ton Homme" sung by Georges Moustaki

"Raghupati" performed by Bhagvan Das

Most all of Johan Sebastian Bach's music for unaccompanied instruments (Oppermann will say that I have redeemed myself there)

Chanting of the Gyuto Monks

Most all music that I have heard that is not irritating, grating or overly repetative.

One may logically add that one should not really expect to hear anything when one is dead, mainly because of the frightful issue of musical and corporeal de-composition.

What is "useful," and I use the term "useful" only in an unconscious and off-handed manner that does no justice to the terms of beauty.... what is useful in Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique is a certain dilectation of men sitting in each other's company, listening to a recorded performance in an hour of leisure. Most importantly the element of the first movement of Symphonie is La Rêverie, or Les Rêveries plural feminine. This has to do with the feminine soul, not with the masculine Le Reve.... and so on. I am afraid this portion has become excessively theoretical and pedantic. The pragmatics of the text have to do with the use of luxury, of excess which is pointed back at the body once again.

Now I am pasting (or one could say "re-posting", cut-and-pasting) in the entry I left on Oppermann's Ayres-in-Theoria web page: http://ayrestheoria.blogspot.com/

The article came concerning the lapsus of reasoning behind my indictment that Oppermann was Hoffmann.

The key connection here is not merely E.T.A. Hoffmann but Hector Berlioz: who's "Symphony Fantastique" bears a lasting relationship to the "Erzhaelung" at least in my imagination.

When I consider the tales and their content: I do not remember a "March aux Supplice" or whatever Berlioz named it. However there is a strong suggestion that Oppermann's status as Hoffmann is as unequivocal as Ayres to Berlioz or Oppermann to Berlioz for that matter. The issue may be adjurred in the ministry of records, or in the ministry (and ministering) of recorded information. Also in the ministration of meta-information.

The real truth of Hector Berlioz will UNDOUBTEDLY carry us once again back to that entirely beloved and execrable (and that is another association to Camus: "Howls of execration") ARCADIAN moment of listening to Berlioz and discussing all manner of Romantic thinking with Oppermann back at Colorado College.This leaves us at best sentimental jackasses, or at worst sentimentally crippled children in the incestuous embrace of the arcadian mother.The point of all this posturing and discussing of German, French, and English Romanticism is that we definitely were feeling screwed over by the enlightenment: "ridden hard and put away wet," by all that technological claptrap (and that is exactly what technology is a "clap-trap"): Romanticism when it came into being: in the 1780's or the 1980's was simply saying we have more than certainly had enough of being sold--- SOLD ---- another bag of goods by "reason."

Romanticism in its own naivete and idiocy at least has the courage not to be either:

a) hopelessly depressed Wichtigteueren, future occupiers of the seats of middle management, with their oppressive mortgages and their obcessive optimistic despair: real "go getters" who have harnessed the cliche of the American Dream to their chariot and are about to be thrown into an abyss.

b) Involved in the denial of this in some manner or other.

Please note the following categories of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique:There are five movements (indictments?), instead of the four movements which were conventional for symphonies at the time:

Rêveries - Passions (Dreams - Passions)

Un bal (A ball)

Scène aux champs (Scene in the country)

Marche au supplice (March to the scaffold)

Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (Dream of a witches' Sabbath)

It is not exactly ending as a choral mass. This music ends with more or less the orchestration of a black mass... ...well, whatever.I do not think that Oppermann or I were ever seriously Satanists: such Huismanic extremes (La Bas) were entirely too exhausting, and banal, took themselves too literally. Oppermann is too laughing and too strong either to be too much of a "good" christian or (most certainly) to be a good satanist either.

But we did like the revolt. We did like black coffee and imagining such things as a dance of witches. One could say we rather adored the dance of witches. We could not be witches ourselves; this was not our fate or destiny to be this. But delight, well there was much of this: let the things that are "wickedly-wicked" as the wicked witch of the west reign.

Oppermann was no Copellius: I do not ever remember him being the Hoffmannesque twisted dark man who took away father's soul. Rather Oppermann strove at each instant to instill as much soul as his somewhat "brittle" germanic exterior could muster.Of course it is Offenbach who wrote the most commonly observed opera of the "Tales" which is an account of numerous seductions and trickeries by the anima and by one diabolical form or another. It is rather itself a tale of the infernal comedy of being tortured from one set of events to the next. To what effect?The indictment of Oppermann as Hoffmann was hasty and indeed whimsical. However it is because of these fanciful, fitful, and unscientific conditions that the charges remain impugned more deeply in the grain of his soul.

For future reference the opus of which I speak is called: Nachtstücke The contents of which reads:

Der Sandmann

Ignaz Denner

Die Jesuitenkirche in G.

Das Sanctus

Das öde Haus

Das Majorat

Das Gelübde

Das steinerne Herz

The book can be found at:http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6341Further research must be performed before we can either fully clear or confirm this indictment according to scientific rigor and dependability.

http://www.janbrett.com/newsnotes/berlioz_newsnotes2.htm

This is entirely pathetic but because Oppermann is a lover of bears from the correct distance I thought I would add a tale of nauseating convivial marital nothingness. I can only add the term "joyous despair" to the unfortunately cute information offered here.

Please also visit:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/aw

The Case of Oppermann

2008-04-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

The case of Oppermann is admittedly complex, there are lots of in's and outs and many complications. Oppermann himself is on the way to becoming an Oppermann, and from there always, perhaps eternally he is becoming something else.

Oppermann and Gossett have taken time to discuss my case (with limited success, Max, after all is constantly diverting his keenest analysis, impish as this undoubtedly seems to the uninitiated), they may indict me on the matter of my approach or non-approach to the feminine, at times they may adjust my sentence, murmuring something about my naive attachments to the "feminine" which may or may not have anything to do with the actual women with whom I have co-habited and fought with these hand-fulls of years that I have existed on this planet.

Oppermann's case has been laid out in several conditions:

Oppermann as a sort of bachelor-machine
Oppermann as a dude
Oppermann as a thinker
Oppermann as an author
Oppermann as a practical explanation of genius
Oppermann as a lover of bears (from the right distance)
Oppermann as an academic
Oppermann as a sort of critic
Oppermann as a writer of Post-Cards (notations from the brink of some other topos or non-topos)
Oppermann as an inhabitant of Seattle
Oppermann as a commentator on the post-psychological epoch
Oppermann as a German (Swabian)
Oppermann as an inhabitant of the United States (Colorado Springs, Arlington Massachusetts, Seattle, and temporarily in other locations, possibly on an autobus to Texas or another state in his Freshman year of college or some such thing)
Oppermann as a writer, now, of English web-logs
Oppermann as a driver of foreign automobiles (sub categories on how I intensely dislike when he drives too closely to the car in front of him)
Oppermann as control freak (with features of panic attacks when I have visited my former analyst Lee Roloff on light hearted business)
Oppermann as an attendant of Bob Dylan, Greg Brown and Richard Thompson concerts (with sub categories of with or without Gossett or other fellow attendants)
Oppermann as a walker
Oppermann as a commentator on Ayres (sub categories relate to his own presenting persona: Arthur Holzgold, Falkenburger, etc.)
Oppermann as an occasionally intoxicated writer (sub-categories of Tea, Bowmore, and Boddingtons)
Oppermann as an observer of analytical psychologists
Oppermann as one of the best informed literary thinkers of our time
Oppermann as a leading authority on Robert Walser in the United States
Oppermann as a sleeper
Oppermann as a commentator on "Jeder fuer sich und Gott gegen Alles"
etc.
Oppermann as defined in a category of finite singularity
Oppermann as defined by the totality of his human and non-human personal experience
Oppermann as a world traveler
Oppermann as not contained in the categories of this or any other essay
Oppermann as one who has inhaled my second hand cigarette smoke
Oppermann as a drinker of black coffee (I believe this is a religious conviction)
Oppermann as expelled from the Institute of German Romanticism
Oppermann as a reader of Franz Kafka (which is not the same as being a literary thinker)
Oppermann as educator (in the manner of Schopenhauer)
Oppermann as Kleist
Oppermann as Hoffmann
Oppermann as inhabitant of Ravensburg
Oppermann as divorcee of his former American wife (whom I may not be able to name out of respect though he is free to discuss at any length my relation to Corinne, my own foreign ex-wife)
Oppermann as procrastinator
Oppermann as masturbator (in the image of Peter Handke's Kuerze Brief zum langer Abscheid)
Oppermann as idiot (sub-category as fellow-idiot)
Oppermann as friend
Oppermann as one of those fucking sages
Oppermann as used book salesman
Oppermann as consumer
Oppermann as nose-picker
Oppermann as poet
Oppermann as a botanical incompetent
Oppermann as tennis player
Oppermann as grand-son
Oppermann as ....
and so on.
Oppermann as exhausted
Oppermann as shot
Oppermann as revived
Oppermann as shot again
Oppermann as retrieved
Oppermann as gelassen

You will note that so far I have left numbers 57 and 61 blank. That is entirely just for spite. Perhaps it will increase Oppermann's anxiety just a little, a moment of wavering indecipherability and Oppermann will say: "damn that Ayres, he is pretending to be indecipherable again, but we know it is all a sham, a bad ploy at attempting to open up the ontological in these moments: what a confused and shameful little man Ayres is, (and so on...)! Oppermann will deny this, speaking of his superior stoic equanimity, this will also be a form of spitefulness, indicating that quite rapidly I have slipped into a form of paranoid delusion (please see numbers 455. and 399. respectively for an all-encompassing refutation of this). I will add that numbers 66. through 77. are also blank, I leave a few more comments on Oppermann and then I leave a few more spaces blank again. In those spaces it is fairly certain that the case of Oppermann is left off for something else: I do this for the sake of incompleteness. Oppermann may or may not appreciate this form of sloppy categorization, but at this moment I am feeling extremely spiteful and will hold off on introducing numbers 237. and 412. until later.

The key aspect here is to note that the Borgesian categories of Oppermann: perhaps these categories are driven by his intense, hysterical, but always somehow hilarious genius for anxiety, perhaps his Dasein in these web-pages is driven by his curious naughtyness, a Walserian reversal that always threatens to leap out into the text, and scrub the whole thing with an indictment [62. Oppermann as plaintiff; 63. Oppermann as professor of sentimental jackassery; 64. Oppermann as accusitor: "you're an asshole" 65. and so on (again)].

The Case of Oppermann is not by any means completed. In fact by beginning to render a formal or informal exposition of the various modalities and sub-categories of Oppermann's existence here it quickly becomes apparent that only I will be exhausted, needing desperately to go to bed after a long week of directing myself and others to act in accordance with the principles of psychoanalysis, needless to say of which comprise countless other ordinances, sub-categories, rejoinders and epithets. In the meantime it becomes increasingly certain that Oppermann simply has gone to bed. He may wake in an hour, or perhaps in many hours in a state of intense anxiety, that I may or may not later enjoy poking fun at.

Hesse A-letheia: Invocation of the Muses

2008-04-13T18:41:00.000-07:00

Invocation of the Muses

O Muses!

Guardians of awful truth!

We ask for the most dangerous epic of peace--

When such stillness of peace

threatens to kill all animation

When the skies, birds, trees

...and ALL the transformations of water grow silent

May we remember

Friendship is Gelassenheit

The Dawn will continue to grow

The dusk and night

Will shroud us

Where we surrendur

O Muse!

Help us to remember

And not forget

"We are the muses who can tell lies that sometimes sound like the truth..."

...That fleeting shred of wakefulness

Be the sail to carry us to the most distant shore

Before the dim and terrible maws

Of endless Night

Muses,

Help us to remember:

We ex-ist between

Tenderness and annihilation

That we lift our glass to the awful truth

That we drank the draught of peace

And shared it with others

On your holy mountain

Muses, therefore help us

Hear our cry,

Help us to remember:

Terrible and difficult is the peace of friendship

But it is the fabric of which all the future is wrought

...

It is time to write a web log on Herman Hesse. This is the most difficult and important thing. This is a clue to Oppermann's existence. This Herman Hesse, NOT psychologist, but willing to be analyzed by one: not philosopher, but his fiction itself has become our metaphysic.

Ja-ja, aber... what do I know of Herman Hesse? I know that Jan passed over a lake once, to get to the other side, the homestead of Herman Hesse.

I have the full image of Oppermann's own hand-writing on the post-card, but this he has asked for the time being should not be shared publicly. He definitely does not want his writing samples on the web... I mean what would people think? How they would analyze him, just on the basis of his vulnerable writing, the writing of his bare hand... with a pen, of course, we cannot show that direct line to Oppermann's soul through a line of black ink. Instead I can only show you the stamps that were placed on the "written side" of the image which depicts Herman Hesse's home in Kohlgarten.

One-hundred. Twice.

This was enough to get things across, from Germany directly to the United States, and thus this particular card is a cypher of sorts from across the Atlantic of some distant sign of Oppermann's life. It came directly across: and it was the attempt he made from his home in Germany to send a message to the far flung and infinitely preposterous city of Los Angeles, wherein resided his friend: Ayres, Justin Ayres. This is as far spread out that the Psyche of Oppermann has tried to communicate in a single missive. Well, at least there was some friend almost half-way round the world.

Oppermann writes (and I keep the cadence and the lines, because we are hinting at as many facets of this riddle as we possibly can here): and we wonder (in a whisper!) ... has there been any life under closer scrutiny than that of Oppermann by me? Oppermann scrutinizes his own life, and that is enough for him: he draws separate conclusions. What does it mean to scrutinize a life down to its most intimate detail, the cadence of pen upon a post-card, the quality of the day on which the post-card was sent... the books being read at the time (possibly even Goethe) and then discarded for other works by other men... all this can be noted: but are we attempting to produce a homunculus of the Oppermann life? The infinite internet reproduction of the "high fidelity" reality? Such an effort is vain and useless, there can only be one thing that it can do, express a certain wincing tenderness and respect that a friend gives a friend.

8-23-01
Herr Doktor,
this is the place where Hesse lived
Ca. 1901-1913. The extreme remoteness
of the "town" (they had to row across
the lake for groceries) allowed him
"weld" - I believe. This is a
cliche when one sits in L.A. or
Boston or Seattle or Paris - but
when one is actually there, the
a-letheia emerges. Completely
by itself, as per MAT(T)ER.
Be well, my fellow Steppenwolf.

The last line is a sort of brotherhood, according to Oppermann we are on the same level, even though he in fact has visited Herman Hesse's home, and I have not. It is difficult, nigh impossible to compare lives: what is one life devoted to dealing with the insanity of Los Angeles compared to the life of an academic and a skeptic, who visits the home of his sage, who was born and died before he even reached the scene. And I know that Oppermann will say "I hate those fucking sages": and the question is "Why?" and the answer is because most all those fucking sages have sold us up a river: either the river of spirituality, renunciation or the river of capitalist corruption, or, more likely both at the same time: we keep reviling the fact that we have to buy another fucking book from another one of those fucking sages. The relationship of books to money is at least at this time much closer than the relationship of internet publication to money.... relatively speaking the internet production is a production of light, a matter without matter. I am not incurring direct charges by virtue of publishing this on the web: Books are matter, and this form of energy and information is --- directly --- expensive. The web-log formation of energy does not incur immediate expense other than the energy it takes to power the computer and the internet of information and the connection between the two. One can then capitulate the modality of the information in two modes: it is moving toward the goal of immediate "free" information. It is the continual denial and deferral of the expense associated with the movement of information.

Oppermann sent me a post-card. This was a publication that was sent at his expense and in his own hand. It was intended in its initial sending only for me to peruse. I would then presumably take the card and poke my nose at it and then shove it in a drawer and forget about it for a long while: As Robert Walser says of "The Last Prose Piece":

At that point, my receipt of the letter, here in Los Angeles, entitled me to nothing more than being the only extant librarian of Oppermannalia or holder of some of the prime articles of the Oppermann archives, if they should ever come to exist and his name not be washed away in history as some profound and tragic shadow of intense genius that would be forgotten:

"And what did these esteemed librarians do with the sketches, studies, and essays with which I have swamped them? They read them, stuck their noses at them, eyeballed them, considered them and then laid them neatly in their drawers or cupboards, where they lay waiting for the right moment"

I have been nothing more than an "esteemed librarian," let me assure you, at least in my smaller and meaner moments, simply recording and reproducing the information. In my better moments I have stolen from Oppermann, because art is a fire that has to be stolen, wrested from the individual gods of each man: therein I became a "Robber," which, as we know, is Walser's next turn of frame.

To Oppermann Hesse is actually quite an authority. Hesse is a sage that Oppermann will not deny, or even if he is not a "sage" then here is an example of a life: a man who lived a life exactly as Oppermann would have lived his own life. Oppermann could not think to do better. And yet it may be Oppermann's life that in some manner will be defined in that in some manner he will become a "Hesse." Knowing that as great as Hesse is (greater than "allzu Menschlichis") he can't be "greater than himself", to paraphrase from Bob Dylan (The Lord of Music) ...I might say that Oppermann is destined to become an Oppermann, were it not that he is also destined to steal something vital, essential for the very basic facticity of living itself from Hesse. He will become a Hesse-Oppermann before he becomes on the road to something else.... (and somewhere in the future I see Oppermann laughing and wearing an absurd but colorfully embroidered Tibetan hat... Off into brilliant morning light!)

Oppermann addressed me with a particular term of endearment: "Herr Doktor." Wir sind Doctoren in einen Dom. Doctors of what church? The church of the disenfranchised? The church of a modern contended reality, begging God for some shred of the "sharing" to grace us, because the rest of the time the world is wrapping up tighter and tighter in such a profound cynicism that it twists the guts out of everything we can possibly experience or comprehend.

The "doctoring" has been and always will be a kind of gallows humor: yes we are doctors, but, yes, indeed of what? Not this filthy "Zwecksoptimismus" of our society, the kind of optimism that says, "Now there's a good boy, sit up, eat it! Take it!" Fuck no, fuck that, so instead we have Zwei Idioten sitting on the ledge of a precipice wondering what the hell will happen next! That is what "doctoring" is like with the likes of a Jan Oppermann, he is sick of your (and my) palliative answers, and he is so sick of "your" fucking sages that he could puke his guts out, sitting right out here, he could puke his guts out to "you," and that is what it is like being a fellow doctor with Doctor Oppermann

There is a line of music by a group called "The Killers" - and it is not at all certain if Oppermann would even find this music palatable, depending of course on his mood. The song is called "All these things that I have done." It may not mean anything, referring to the Sartrean moment when one defines one's life by virtue of one's acts and accomplishments. It is a matter of living one's life anyway, knowing that doctoring is vainglory, and all the human accolades are vainglory, and everything turns to shit in the end. It is a matter of having attempted and reached one of the finest crescents of our collective suffering... a filigree of clouds, vapors, that is all, this "doctoring" before we even presume a universal medicine. It is a matter that one can do things anyway, like going to Herman Hesse's home and suddenly being astonished "THIS IS THE HOME OF HERMAN HESSE!!" and who is Hesse? We'll never know, I don't even know if it will matter! What mattered was that there was a single punctuation at this moment of human psyche, and that is all.

While everyone's lost, the battle is won
With all these things that I've done
All these things that I've done

And again:

Muses,

Hear our cry

And help me to remember this song

Which is the song of peace

Danger lies in these words:

"I've got soul

..."

Peace! Danger!

May the tenderness of friendship

Gather before the great distant black sky of annihilation

Gather before suffocating oblivion:

May we remember.

...

"We are in my magic theater," he said with a smile, "and if you wish at any time to learn the Tango or to be a general, or to have a talk with Alexander the Great, it is always at your service. But I'm bound to say Harry, you have disappointed me a little. You forgot yourself badly. You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality. That was not pretty of you. I hope, at least, you did it from jealousy when you saw Hermine and me lying there. Unfortunately you did not know what to do with this figure. I thought you had learned the game better. Well, you will do better next time."

He took Hermine who shrank in his fingers to the dimensions of a toy figure and put her in the very same waistcoat pocket from which he had taken his cigarette.

Its sweet and heavy smoke diffused a pleasant aroma. I felt hollow, exhausted, ready to sleep for a whole year.

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred-thousand pieces of life's game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more but often, the hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me and Mozart too.

Blue Guitar Variations and Oppermanalia of all Sorts

2008-04-11T15:38:00.000-07:00

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?)

Oppermann and Speaking from the totality of the Margins

2008-04-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

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

Oppermann and the poem

2008-04-03T22:11:00.000-07:00

Today Oppermann read me a poem of Czeslaw Milosz.
He also made certain comments via e-mail that I will include here:

"i was reading from milosz' little poem "at a certain age" to my students today; but what can ... [youth]... glean from reflections on self-realization as an ugly toad. now this is not wholly unrelated to the tarkovsky images of the mud, because what the .... and young fellows do not realize is that the mud - like dylan's emptiness - is endless, and even infinite, before it actually turns into clay and cold."

I commented that the last image of the toad was reminiscent of Hecate's sacred totem animal, then immediately I recanted my smug psychologizing.
"At a Certain Age":

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not to be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom. It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: “That’s me.”

I mentioned seeing myself in the mirror recently as my eighty-year old father: I recognized the profound confusion, the lack of clarity that I had hoped age would clarify... all this had not left me: there was only the recognition that all of this was as it was: I greeted myself: "Hello pop!" I said in a gentle tone of recognition for this man, gentle and yet appealing, that seemed to take me on a raft away from myself. Ah that is me, and that is nothing at all.

...the physiognomy of nothing, of cold clay, which after all is the clay of Adam, the clay we build our houses with. Water seeks its own level and so does mud, and I am thinking of an Ursula LeGuinn short story called "The Day Before the Revolution."

(listening to "Greeting Cards: Tonadilla (on the Name of Andrés Segovia)")

Symphony No. 5 Second Movement

2008-04-03T21:28:00.000-07:00

It is really the irony of the softer passages of the second movement that seem to get me. But what use is the praise of art with just another phrase of irony? A turn, a turn again.

Symphony number five of Beethoven is loaded. Everyone knows it, it is cliche and itself beyond reproach when played well, and with the right sentiment, and when the mood is right, especially the second movement, exhausted from one's day. There is something to the exhaustion itself which is sumptuous and true if one can allow one's mood to unfold into this.

I think of Oppermann frequently in the context of this musical passage. The fustian (and the Justian?) of the first movement is drained away and one retires to the drawing room for some humor, but also some complexity, the value of a single post-card showing a map of the known world: and a phrase: what will be said of this earthly civilization? The contentions of opinion are garnered back and forth, but it is not merely the opinion, rather the phrase of tension and play between the members of the discussion, the passage between instruments, the appropriate aging, the appropriate and sufficiently elegant intoxicants serve to amplify the images of a moment.

We can complain that all this talk of "kultur" somehow is rankling. The height of bourgeois sentimentality, an arcadian image of young scholars at school, behind which the cynical operations of power are at play: knowledge is power in the seemingly lost and purposeless abuse that manifests as meaningless corpulent information in the information age... pure self-indulgence and nothing more.

But the phrases! May we say that in one moment there is room for kind "gentlemen" to teach us something of their humor, their dry wit in the face of an impossible, intolerable and painful existence? Is there something to be said of "Being" outside of the crudities of all our corporate hidden agendas? Can we speak with those string passages? -even as we face the brutal regimen of our technological everyday, a sudden gelassenheit that prefigures the physiognomy of human existence?

now is enough
now is enough.

Der Kritiker... (Friendship, Critique and Obscenity in the time of the Atom Bomb)

2008-03-26T20:52:00.000-07:00

The image comes from my childhood home, an image close to my own dreams.

"countless numbers of people are no longer prepared to believe that one has to 'learn something' so that things will be better later. In these people, I believe, a suspicion is growing that was a certainty in ancient cynicism (Kynismus): that things must first be better before you can learn anything sensible [and I note here the discussion of Jean Luc-Nancy and the issue of "sense"]. Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction, after which scarcely any learning offers a prospect that things sometime or other will improve. The inversion of the relation between life and learning is in the air: the end of the belief in education, the end of European Scholasticism. That is what conservatives as well as pragmatists, voyeurs of the decline as well as well-meaning individuals alike find so eerie. Basically, no one believes anymore that today's learning solves tomorrow's 'problems': it is almost certain rather that it causes them. (Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. xxix)

Der Kritiker smile and not wearing gray trousers and coats, bobbing like penguins, like the birds that we see bobbing, a balance with a weight at the bottom, bouncing from this perspective to that. There is not much to say of Der Kritiker: they live boring judge lives, living in brick tenements under black sky, their lighting is always a very stark and literal light (with clean well lit cookie cut snow men shaped like cut out collage of Matisse color).

The wise live elsewhere, in some other place from Der Kritiker:
The wise live behind waterfalls with golden sunlit fountains, the last and golden sun from behind radiant black branches:
This is the place of wisdom, explains the Oppermann,
He says this wearing his inimicable reading glasses, as he will have to read everything over at least once again.

krei-
DEFINITION: To sieve, discriminate, distinguish.
Derivatives include garble, crime, certain, excrement, crisis, and hypocrisy.
1. Basic form with variant instrumental suffixes. a. Suffixed form *krei-tro-. riddle1, from Old English hridder, hriddel, sieve, from Germanic *hridra-; b. suffixed form *krei-dhro-. cribriform, garble, from Latin crbrum, sieve. 2. Suffixed form *krei-men-. a. crime, criminal; recriminate, from Latin crmen, judgment, crime; b. discriminate, from Latin discrmen, distinction (dis-, apart). 3. Suffixed zero-grade form *kri-no-. certain; ascertain, concern, concert, decree, discern, disconcert, excrement, excrete, incertitude, recrement, secern, secret, secretary, from Latin cernere (past participle crtus), to sift, separate, decide. 4. Suffixed zero-grade form *kri-n-yo-. crisis, critic, criterion; apocrine, diacritic, eccrine, endocrine, epicritic, exocrine, hematocrit, hypocrisy, from Greek krnein, to separate, decide, judge, and krnesthai, to explain. (Pokorny 4. sker-, Section II. 945.)

You may have known this already, and Oppermann tends to become irritated by too much word-play ("too Derridean, too much like chewing gum!").

We must get out from under the crisis in order to extend beyond the critique. Things have got to get better before we can learn anything more. (cynicism and education in a nutshell): but we fancy ourselves as "Der Kritiker." We stand and take preposterous positions, locations and co-locations: executing ourselves and our decisions: "I will read this, and then I will write a formal critique of your position, and then get back to you later." How many times have I heard Oppermann say this to me? How many times have I laughed? - As if writing could ever criticise writing! Writing only produces more writing. We can make notations and obliterate pieces of the text, but it is only for emphasis. We can burn the whole lot of things, but this then is just a matter of insistence, a certain vehemence that we had to impute to a moment or an argument.

Our identification with "Der Kritiker" may have begun in college, when an associate of ours R.- came up with the faux identitat known to us as "Gunther Liebenstrauss." This fictional character was R.-'s manner of dismissing philosophy with an even more preposterous philosopher character, really it was a concatenation of dislike, sardonic wit from which he was invented. Liebenstrauss was said to have written several books, the first of which had to do with the fictional concept of "Ausneig." "Ausneig" is a word that sounds sufficiently German for English speaking individuals to believe it to be a genuine article, a concept of German existential philosophy, vaguely modeled after Nietzsche and Heidegger. "Ausneig" (or perhaps better in this instance as "out-snide") had some relation to existence, perhaps a call to existence itself:
"the mountain is Ausneig."

Again the fictional character of Liebenstrauss wrote several books, each of which was thousands of pages long of indecipherable philosophic prose: again hyperbole on top of the somewhat excruciating reality of the German philosophic tradition. Liebenstrauss wrote his first major work (which never was memorable to me in it's title) and then his subsequent writings were: "The Critique of Ausneig," and "The Third All-Encompassing Critique of Ausneig" and so forth. From this position a fictional "philosopher" both wrote and then theoretically annihilated his own philosophical discourse. This was not an insignificant thought for R.- and Oppermann in 1989. I participated in the discussion only half-heartedly: perhaps I lacked imagination, or perhaps I just felt very identified, and quite naively, with this philosopher type. Perhaps there was some "truth" that I was looking for, even if it eventually became Leonard Cohen's "awful truth" as I was to discover only later on....

"How Western Civilization has worn out its Christian costume."

"Once more it becomes clear how Western civilization has worn out its Christian costume. After decades of reconstruction and the decade of utopias and 'alternatives,' it is as if the naive elan had suddenly been lost. Catastrophes are conjured up, new values find ready markets, like all analgesics. However, the times are cynical and know: New values have short lives." (Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynnical Reason, p. xxvii)

The time is up, and the players and the educators simply have to tip their top-hats to this awful truth that things have got to get better before we can learn any more. I mean we have built the neutron bomb, for heaven sake: things have got to be better before we can learn any more: we learned how to obliterate the planet: things have got to get better before we can learn any more!
What is the purpose of entering this complaint about our collective insanity? Why all this ranting and raving, when it is not like Oppermann or I could do anything about it? What is more, to speak on this matter seems obscene. It seems as though people most of the time simply ignore this condition that sits in our cultural realm of possibility. Yet Oppermann and I have discussed these things, perhaps lightly, irrelevantly: as if entering into a discussion anywhere would be anything more than irrelevant. And he has sent me post-cards that depict the concentration camps, and the memorials to the victims of the first use of nuclear war at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Confronted by a power in the atom bomb: a rune of our own ending, extinction, all life as a project as we know it, a deafening explosion of all of heaven on the surface of the earth: a seismic display of this "catastrophe," which is a crisis not only insofar as human life is concerned (and "human life," insofar as it is a cliche about all of us, is relatively irrelevant) but also for a great many other living species on this planet.

It's always this bad, and I am sorry: Here we enter into the threshold between cynicism and obscenity:

you cannot learn any more till somehow something gets better: you cannot learn any more till you have found some way to grieve over the billion, billion souls you could in the realm of possibility vaporize in any given moment.

(Movement from mere ranting to terrifying psychopathy and obscenity of our current civilization, if you think my language is obscene, then please consider the matter of which I speak, and I apologize for the obscenity, it is after all nothing more than a ranting at another obscenity, which I cannot seem to fathom):
Who holds the keys to this worlds biggest shot gun yet imagined, that we as a collective have aimed at our own head? Who holds the decision making process that we should sit for the next 50 or 100 or 500 years with a shot gun muzzle nuzzled in to our dental work? Who the fuck has decided to do this, thinking it would be a great idea: who the fuck keeps their finger on the trigger?

We could say its the good old boys now in office at the head of the United States? We of course say that the devil made us do it: protecting us from all those devil Nazi boys, protecting us from the fanatical loyalists ready to defend the Japanese home islands to the death.

You ask me to be realistic in what I say, to somehow be sober about the whole thing, but I ask you: Help me persuade this god who holds our hands over the trigger, making us believe that this is the right thing to do, to keep the muzzle pointed directly into our mouths, shooting out teeth, roof of mouth, septum, brain and brain stem, back of skull, and lest we not forget scalp, hair follicles, six month's growth of hair. Tired of crisis, tired of critique: but what is there left?

Will there be no more beautiful races of stallions across the sand under blue sky, crying: "ALI!" "-ALI!" "-ALI!" as the thunder of the horses each time passes near?

Crisis and Critique: Der Kritiker.
No more of any oil crisis, or any other crisis.

The image of critique came from my earliest days of youth, when I heard from my father that "The Critique of Pure Reason" was the most difficult book of all to read, and I resolved that my mind would be lucid enough to read and trample in bare feet through the flower beds of that garden, I resolved to read the Critique of Pure Reason, as absolute and in a sense indisputable, insuperable as the real light of truth.

But the Critique of Pure Reason turned out to be mostly boring, after all it was kind of a poor feast of literary merit, not that everything is literary, I suppose that Spinoza's proof is wondrous in its single substantiality, like some homogeneous flake of being. Like cake mix thrown into this life in the form of a bread pan. Flop!

The question remains as to why at this moment I bring up the issue of the "bomb" in relation to my friend Oppermann. The only answer I can imagine relates to the notion that the friendship has reached a critical mass.

At this juncture of critical mass, the weight or matter of the relationship begins to glow: Enough attention has been paid to the relationship in order for it to radiate it's own energy. Had this been done before? Does the relationship itself take on its own autonomy at a certain point? Does it become it's own life-form?

What is the meaning of relationships in the age when we have isolated the isotope? Is there an atomic physics of friendship and thought?

The implications for thought in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy is that we are limited by finite singularity. The infinite remains ungraspable, and the infinity of the other (Levinas) is withdrawn.

But in the age of the isotope, thinking itself can obtain a critical mass: as verified in matter itself: we can refine thinking to the point that it produces a highly toxic, but high energy producing material. The cost to society, and to thinking, is the production of terrible waste by-products. Moreover thinking is called upon to stand in reserve constantly under our endless energy of technological industrial light: thinking is forced.

Friendship is forced as well by virtue of the technologies of analysis, to refine certain isotopes, highly unstable emotional matter is condensed and placed in "reactors" where the energy is set to be released back into the collective once again. I suppose that a "web-log" acts as a "reactor" of sorts.

The threat is that the energy exchange will get botched: collectively this ammounts to the horror of nuclear suicide. And as for suicide of the friendship? -So far, thankfully, Oppermann has stolidly approved of the insanity of writing a web-log devoted to relating to him, even if there is a place in the web-log where I am capable of category (indictment of the problem of evil, according to Kant, in each human soul) and of the categorical imperative: an "imperative" because of our imperative to deal with the terrifying capacity we have for evil. So far Oppermann and I, in Kantian fashion, maintained a protestant, calvinist (calvino-esque?) manner managed to enervate the instinctual, literal forces of our lives. And Sloterdijk himself points to Kant as the "enervator:"

I presume that this violent "Aging process" is in place in order to find a place of solace (an alembic is the pre-technological form of a "reactor", and represents a quintessential "safe and contained place" for volatile reactions.

So has the friendship obtained a critical mass?

Oppermann mentioned the film "The Quiet Earth," which he thought of as being somewhat mediocre, but he went on to imagine an idiot, pontificating, and in Greg Brown's voice:
"I walk around ancient cities
scribbling little notes in my notebook"

In Ursula Leguinn's "Lathe of Heaven," a last man, dying at the end of the catastrophe, dreams his slack and wimpy existence in the future, he meets a power-hungry "Doctor Haber." But the dream becomes stranger still: as the Haber alter-ego implodes by virtue of obtaining his own desire, another reality begins to inform the predicament...

Several Web Post Cards: On the Tales of Idiots

2008-03-22T02:15:00.000-07:00

"It is a tale told by an idiot," that is what I heard the Bard say as he pronounced those words from his own play on modern human futility. Idiots occupy a special place in Oppermann's and my own mythologies: generally they are scoundrels, robbers (Walserian), or like Lenz himself, or Timothy Treadwell. Post cards are sent by idiots to idiots. It is the only defense we can have in the political world, in the cynical world: where liars call liars liars.

There is still friendship in the abyss. In the abyss of time: and in the course of time since my last entry I wrote Oppermann a book on friendship. That was an almost desperate act, and yet words came easy because we have endured so much of each others stories, we have, as it were, hung round in the same boat, hauled by the same terrible shroud-sail, pressed forth by the breath of Artemis: the fair innocent goddess, to the land of Troy, to fight the good citizens there, the land of perdition. But do not think too long on it. Even the liars who call liars liars must sometimes stop and fall asleep and dream of innocence, and in the corner of some dream in the midst of this great obscene fornication, there is some innocence, a breath of fresh wind to stir the sails of our shrouds.

Part One: the Kafka/Oppermann Card

Part Two: Borges and Artaud (Oppermann believes that Artaud's posture and attitude reflect his own ecstatic posture when he was embroiled in the circles of Arcadian... I will have to look for a suitable photograph, this is a delicate matter, but Oppermann did have this slouching brilliance of Artaud in college, unquestionably).

Part Three: Deleuze, Chuang Tzu, and Spinoza

Part Four: Two Cannova Nudes and Robert Musil

Part Five: Dream of Klaus Kinski

I leave you my unfinished Kinski post-card, because Oppermann suggested that the latter portion, where I rail on the Hawaiian Modern house that I grew up in as being an Un-dwelling. I also added the faces of the Pastors (Lenz's pastor and Werner Herzog, and my own "pastor"), which I believe Oppermann rejected as being "overburdened"... but nonetheless furthered the relation between the idiot and his expression in a significant body of work.

Jorge Luis Borges: Conductor Extraordinaire

2008-01-25T18:24:00.000-08:00

This portion of the web journal dedicated to discussing my friend Dr. Oppermann will be focused mainly on a dream I had last night.

In the dream I was driving on the 405 freeway heading South. Oppermann was speaking to me, a disembodied voice on the telephone. He informed me that he had just seen the famous Argentine poet/magician Jorge Luis Borges conducting a symphony orchestra. Oppermann said distinctly: "Well, in comparison to Borges, Barrenbaum, Salonen, Karajan and even Bernstein looked adipose." Within the dream itself I suddenly remember that I had just had a dream of Borges alluding to "The Secret Miracle": I kept on alluding to the comparison of how Borges and Marxists needed to keep giving each other a good kick in the pants to wake up to their insufficiencies. I wanted to tell Oppermann that a friend of mine had helped me connect the moment when we bring Borges to our working class work, our exposure to poverty and deprivation... is like bringing Enrico Caruso to the Amazon... I wake thinking of Herzog's Fitzcaraldo as a courageous act of individuation.

After I wake and think of the dream I feel remorse that I had such ambivalence to respond to Oppermann's journey to London and his discussion of "Injustice and ..." with the simple and cruel phrase "So what on it?" Such a phrase shows nothing but my own insecurity and insufficiency. It was a fine dream Oppermann had that day in London. It pisses me off to hell that I couldn't be there to celebrate it as well. I love showing my own stupidity at times, my shortsightedness in front of another man's genuine moments of genius. I hope that that passage in "the Travels of Dr. Oppermann" is read for just such a form of stupidity, guilt and cheekyness... although Oppermann would frown on the guilt. It is what had to be said. I cannot re-write that passage, for fear that it would only sanitize the bloody ambivalence that I as a human being feel for my dear friend: I love him and sometimes I hate him. And once again it is the place of literature if it is to write of a sense of it's own being that it should write somehow to it's own despair... the view is that somehow life will escape and make it through the tempest of ideas and the guardianship of pessimism and cynicism we have around every hopeless aspect of the whole bloody affair. Hopelessness stands to reason, and reason stands to sense. We cannot even write that "Hope stands to life" because this somehow is still writing, but at the same time a view to the very limit of writing itself...

Borges is a conductor. But he is a conductor of what? I think of him as a very fine metal lightning rod, able to channel the fierce torrents of eletro-static vertiginous energy through itself without the slightest moment of "impedence." The Borges conductor is very pure.

Fat belongs to the bourgeoise, a result of too much leisure and avarice. The lean belongs to the working class as well. The lean days are here: get out your Borges and read, and maybe you will be wide awake when this thing gets through

The Oppermann Dragon Tree

2008-01-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

This tree image apparently came from Tennerife in the Canary Islands. It was given to Dr. Oppermann by his mother, who knew that he had played around this tree as a young child. We do not know what this means.

The Journeys of Dr. Oppermann

2008-01-12T20:56:00.000-08:00

All Web-logs I have written about Dr. Oppermann are incomplete, and in this sense at least, this log is no exception. The foregoing web-log is merely an assembly of notes and sketches which is largely unfinished, but may serve either as an "architectural" template, or as a fragment within a larger essay of the same: (that essay will not be completed either):

Ever since he was a young man Dr. Oppermann has liked to travel. And during these travels I have heard him speak often of traveling with his father.

In London he spent time with his father. Oppermann himself was to present his paper at a philosophical congress. There he may have had the honor of meeting with his friend Lou Wolcher, and also with his father. Perhaps in this manner Oppermann allowed himself to be enunciated in his own speeches:

In this manner we will proceed with a single passage of his words:

INJUSTICE’S MEASURE IN THE ENDARKENMENT OF THE SOUL (WITH CONSTANT REFERENCE TO HEINRICH VON KLEIST’S “MICHAEL KOHLHAAS”)

I wanted to say, "well what on it?" But that is not fair to the profound vulnerability that was witnessed in my friend's admission of his "holding forth" in a conference on justice in London. It is that vulnerability that I will seek to speak to, as well as the "holding forth" in the adumbration of his "johnson" which surely can be left to him. It is a holding forth of an indictment of all we have come to despair, of sorrow and loss wandering, yes, in Jim Morisson's words:

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god
Wandering, wandering in hopeless night.

More or less this is what Oppermann may be seeking to hold forth on. And this was apparently the sum of his travels, the transcendent god really was transcendent, so it is only right that we should lose such a god from the start.

I wanted to discuss all the other countries Dr. Jan Oppermann has been to: He has visited the city of Istanbul (presumably with his father) and to the cities of Europe, and to the Cities of the New World. I wanted to discuss this, but the other places that he went to must be bracketed against the place he went to in this very short paragraph.

A paragraph is a world away, I have heard some will say. Still let us return to the sentiment and presentiment of Oppermann's title, if it be its own synopsis. Who is to say what is just or unjust? Injustice happens, and men suffer a great deal in consequence to it. But where is it's measure?

"Gibt es auf Erd ein Maß?" -asks Friedrich Hölderlin. No there is no measure on earth for human kind! The measure of good or bad belongs always to the eschaton in Christian judgment. Non-Christian, or "Marxist" ideologies believe that there may be justice on earth, however these tend to be rather short and brutal regimes that we are talking about. Any place that seeks to vehemently to exact justice in the present ends up killing the thing it seeks to serve: this must get us to our first postulate: Justice must be deferred!

The deferral belongs to the brand of rootless cosmopolitanism that seems to prevail amongst French intellectuals and Alphonso Lingis, but this all makes it intensely like chewing gum: you chew and chew but there is no substance to the thing.

Heidegger wants to speak of truth, not of facts, but of the truth itself, which evidently is more digestible than chewing gum, and certainly more nourishing, but may itself be more complicated and ultimately toxic for the human Dasein to come in contact with than just fact, which creates norms, not truth.

The end of Kleist's story I believe has Michael Kohlhaas sold fairly well up the river, we will never know if restitution came.

Note the story of the Pasadena Land Development (this idea must be developed, like blowing up Amazonian trees)

But note the way Oppermann spoke in his essay not of justice but of injustice, justice's negative. We may presume that injustice in its simple gramatical form is somehow the opposite of justice, however looked at existentially we can only say that each thing has its injustice insofar as it shines forth above all other things for a moment: be that good or bad. Be it just or unjust it still will be unjust, because something is sacrificed, no matter how good the deed, and injustice will then be paid for in some manner, with money, with value, or with time. Now this may be looked upon as exceedingly pessimistic: no good deed shall go unpunished, that sort of thing; however it points to the ontological unjustice of being over nothingness. Even then a case could be made that if nothingness were allowed to be present or triumphant in its return from repression within the psyche, or submersion in the strata of the history of philosophy as it developed into modern technological consciousness... even then nothingness itself would run the gamit of its own injustice and in turn have to be punished, repealed and rescinded again. Consciousness, as it is apt to do, can pick out a pattern, a rythm of annihilation and presence in each one of these moments, but that is just consciousness, which is split by virtue of being somewhere midway in between.

As I continue to consider this entry it remains incomplete.

For example there is the story of Oppermann's journey to the "Holy Land" when he was 12 or 13 years of age. He reports that he continually had difficulties believing that he was really in those places. Such incredulity, this "not believing that one is completely there," reflects the abundance of sense that young Dr. Oppermann must have felt in such journeys. Oppermann went on to name a few names of places he had been to with his parents (which included his father who was sometimes light-heartedly reported to be a "seljack"). The list included Masada (and I think I remember him mentioning the story of the mass suicide), I believe, but I cannot remember any other names. I must simply speculate that Oppermann stood in Jerusalem and on the hills round Jerusalem enjoying the olive trees that I can only imagine were there somewhere round the time of 1980.

Oppermann travels as little as possible these days, preferring the safety and quiet of his own home. He hurries to assure me of his tremendous anxiety at airports, which makes Oppermann, a German immigrant, safe from becoming some jet-set jackass (which is much worse than the "sentimental jackass" he professes to be). We have written a number of post-cards that have focused on airports and air travel. Each one of them has a kind of tension. I have even written post-cards to Oppermann while sitting with him at airports waiting for my own airplane flight, and even this makes him agitated.

I cannot say that Oppermann has been a great traveler to my knowledge. He has not trekked across the Kalahari Desert, nor has he scaled any mountains without the help of a mechanical device. And yet these images of "travel" seem in themselves to be a sort of cliche, a point of the exhaustion of language, which leaves one tremendously restless throughout any travel at all. Herein we have the useless mire of technological travelers and adventure books that become quite tedious if somehow lacking a condition of self-conscious disintegration/integration. The best "travel" film that might express this could be "The Sheltering Sky," however Oppermann might not like this film and so I hesitate to mention it. There is something however of a quality to this sort of traveling, like Friedrich Holderlin walking all over Europe, or Lao Tzu taking a walk outside the Great Wall: someone has the dignity to finally go to the road where one has only one's experience, and then beyond that experience there is nothing, only death: no New York Times book review, no citations in scholarly publications, just nothing, just taking a walk.

Oppermann and I have discussed all this probably several times over, though not perhaps in quite such an uncanny way.

Oppermann does have a way of taking a "sudden walk," named after Kafka's short story I believe: "a sudden walk." In all these walks...

Three Oppermann Dreams from November 2007

2008-01-09T16:04:00.000-08:00

The following is an attachment of my commentary to Oppermann’s dreams in a correspondence between November 7th and 9th 2007:

would you please take a look at the three dreams below which you may find of interest (particularly the last one as it concerns cresswell who is always of interest as he may be another "Idiot")

enjoying your day at the office?

I respond to the Dreams as follows:

Dr. Oppermann,

I will begin a discourse on your dreams as I read them.I will bring your attention to be mindful of the precept concerningLot's wife in Genesis: she was turned into a pillar of salt whenlooking back at the ruination of her life. I have seen recently,women who have been abused and abandoned, women who have turned intopillars of salt, because they refused to turn away from this turning to look back.

01:019:025 And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

01:019:026 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

Crystallized bitterness, dissolves in a sea of tears. Now you may be bitter, and you look back in dismay at all the mendying of their heart-attacks... somewhere where the heart just could no longer stand. These are great men, and they are great men in you, and they are dying, and part of you is dying too.There are of course two things, turning to look back and turning tolook toward the future. The second ripps one away from the first. Togive up the past, to rip ourselves toward the future it, the past, memory, must be sacrificed, but we must know what is sacrifice inorder for it to be any sort of a sacrifice whatsoever, so we must turnback to know what it meant. To ask to know memory is like seeking to get to the next village, onceone enters into the labyrinth of the text, the interplay is endless and exhausting until one becomes exhausted with the phenomenology ofthe past and gives up and lives into the phenomenology of the present. What is present is informed by the pleroma of the past, except forthe ripping where one gives up the past as well, and seeks to gainentrance into the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of presence, in whatis present.What is the value of such an array of experience? What is the valueof what is said here? They are diamonds of experience, this is as good as experience can get, which is, naturally, a great deal to say if one can say anything at all. "For those who look back, the whole world, even the starry heavens, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides" (a paraphrase of Jung's Symbols of Transformation: paragraph 646).

So the task is not to look back, but to rip one's attention to what is just ahead. And this ripping, and the rending of hearts in great heart attacks is thefeeling of one's looking ahead, one is looking ahead at death.Death is not even the bloody mess of entanglements, the bloody mess ofthe suffocating fornication of the "particular" is a present thatstill claims its bloody roots in the past (think of the maggots swarming in the boy's leg in Kafka's "Landartzt"). Death is a silencing and a pre-figuring of some kind of redemption or resurrection that we all secretly long for (Grünewald's risen Christ).

Is Resurrection also a "salvation" --- no because salvation issalting, it remains, it preserves the past, it dries and crystallizesthe bloody mass into a horror of frozen meat.

Nov 7, 2007 10:31 AM

What happens when you teach from the heart

I am in the front yard in Torkenweiler. There is a party of some kind going on, and more guests are still arriving. I have an official function at this party, and keep coordinating something with my mother. The mood is good, and everything seems fine. Then someone talks about a little girl who has just had a heart attack. Someone else says that the Greek second husband of Gertrud Unsöld has also just had a heart attack. A third person runs up to my mother and me and says that Peter Blasenheim has also suffered a heart attack just now. I am scared. I walk down the stairs, and see Suse Unsöld pulling up in a car. A fellow is with her who looks like one of my students. He has curly hair and seems young. There is an empty expression on his face. I ignore him, and ask Suse if she has heard about the heart attacks. It appears that she has, and that she is not overly concerned about them. I accompany her up the stairs and then hand her over to my mother. I walk towards the Grohmann property, and this now suddenly reveals sight of the EZO. By the cash registers, there is a commotion of some kind. I see Peter lying there, panting. He curses at something. For some reason I cannot get through to him, and Suse calls me back to the party. I hesitate, and then some woman tells me that Peter has died. I sit around with my parents and talk about what Peter has meant to me. I tell them how Peter was supposed to have died soon in the 1980s but that he has lingered on for so long.

A patient's wallet (before the path to the right)

I am visiting a city I have never been to before. It has the feel of a large European city, and reminds me a bit of Berlin, but it is built on hills. I am there with my mother and one other person, staying in a hotel. I leave the hotel to explore the town. I walk along a long street, and enter a few stores. Then I go back to the hotel to rest. I leave my wallet and all my other stuff there, and go out again, dressed only in sandals, shorts, and a short-sleeved shirt in a rust brown color. I walk along the same street again, but now come to a newsstand-like bookstore which I explore a little bit. There are glossy new books in various languages, and for a moment I get the sense I am in an airport. I see a few t-shirts for sale. They have prints of faces of people on them. I do not recognize any of these people but have the sense that they are television comedians. In the very back of the store I see some older books lying on a table. There is an Indian or Pakistani woman browsing through them. I see a book of postcards that has an image of a face lying on a bed on them, in black and white. It says "Hospital Patients." I am intrigued by this concept, and decide to buy this to send the post cards to Justin. I leave the store to walk back to the hotel to get my wallet and my brown linen coat. Now I am somehow in the company of a youngish man with dark hair who seems to follow me. We walk across a large square which has a castle or a large church on its left side. I remember that I have originally come to this town to explore its many famous sites. I see a tall slender woman with long hair rushing by in the square. She is wearing hippyish clothes, and accidentally drops a small leather wallet. It falls to the ground and then rolls around. I shout: "Hey, lady!" but she does not hear me. Then a swarthy, unshaven middle-aged fat man walks towards the leather wallet and picks it up. He is accompanied by a big woman in late middle-age wearing all red clothing. This couple then walks up to me. The fellow with me has turned into Max now. We veer away from the main street onto a small path that leads to the right. Behind some houses there are woods, and we walk into the woods. The couple is following us. It now seems to me that I am in rural Virginia somewhere, and I point this out to Max. At this moment we see a few hikers who have a large black dog with them. The dog comes up to me and starts playing with me. I enjoy this, but then the dog crawls up my back and sits on top of my head.

I hurriedly re-frame Oppermann's account as follows:

Story of a man who is left with a dog on his head (the valiseincident): here we have the depiction of an educated man in his latethirties, he lays down his wallet and takes up his indescretion. Butif only you could grab hold of your indiscretion, you would suddenly be alive, and walking swifty with the tall woman who has picked upyour valise. "I hope you'll get your money's worth" I heard her say.I cannot be responsible for what I heard said. Here is my friend,again, taken for another wild ride, by a wild eyed yogi... a yokel and a yogi at the same time: for he is also the fat man, bespectacled andunshaven, worn clothes, maybe he is the sheep-man: Baah, Baah, Baah. That translates into any language as a formal hesitation: Bah! Idon't want what was said! "I hope you get your money's worth" is whatshe said. And this brings us to the question: into what have youinvested my dear friend? Into what is your dirty pocketbook invested? You are invested to become a man with a dog curled arround your head,like some Kossack with a fine flur hat, ignorant: guarding the door toyour very own truth, the door to the law, which is, if it is the truelaw, never to be spoken, for the law that can be spoken of is neverthe true law! A Cossack hat is always better than a leopard skin pillbox hat anyday, except in the eyes of Bob Dylan (see enclosed fashion details)."What was the purpose of the law?" I heard the young man said. Andyou were traveling for so long with your young man, who kept askingand asking this question, hoping for an answer. After all the law andall of its attendant civilization seemed to bring forth suffering. Perhaps you may have thought that it is better to become a bear, withthose pre-legal burning bruin eyes: the eyes of the adolescent, who remains before the law, uncomprehending: who never asked the question of the law which is always: "what is the law to me?" There is law even in your medieval towns, where you and the young man were crossing, and without great effort in you sojoun into the natureof the law
I will take the liberty of calling the third dream:

The Cresswell solution

(I enjoin it to be subtitled "Tears")

I am in Tokyo, at a busy corner where there is a restaurant that I have been to before. I have gone there to meet my parents and also to re-connect with some other people I have not seen in a while. One of them is a shy young woman. I look forward to this, but just as I am about to enter the restaurant, I hear a voice of someone talking. The voice sounds familiar, and I realize it is Cresswell. I am stunned to find him here. We talk, and he rolls a cigarette and begins to smoke it. I suggest that he join our meal, and we go inside. He connects well with my father, and the two of them talk a lot. We all sit on a large table, and I keep observing Cresswell out of the corner of my eye while I make small talk with the young woman. There is something uncertain about the food. At some point we all get up and stand around for a while, then sit down again but in different combinations. I now have Cresswell next to me, and we talk. He tells me he is on his way to Canada, somewhere in Saskatchewan or Manitoba to attend a wedding. Then he adds that it is his wedding. I ask him whom he is marrying. He laughs and asks me if I really do not know this. I do not, and he says something about the obvious woman. This makes me laugh in turn. I then suggest that we call Justin from my cell-phone, and see how he reacts to getting a call from Cresswell and me, from Japan. This does not happen, however, and before I know it, I find myself in a beautiful Japanese hotel, standing in the lobby, together with the other people. We are assigned rooms, and in a complicated arrangement, I am supposed to share my room with Cresswell. This pleases me as I have the feeling that I can learn a lot from him. When I am shown to the room by some hotel employee, however, I am actually with a young woman. The hotel guy says it is the best room they have. It turns out to be an extremely narrow, long room which has two ornamented coffin-like beds at its end. I am not sure whether to be irritated or intrigued by this. There is a door to the left, and this opens to a plain library that has all kinds of books. Just as I want to explore this, I find myself in an airport lounge that has a mall-like aura to it. The young woman is now Lauren, who tells me something about her and me. It is incomprehensible, but I am not surprised at this. I look forward to seeing Cresswell again.

Rembember that any solution, provided that it is not overly saturated(with ideas, meaning or significance) is capable of dissolving salt (which can be read as bitterness, but "bitterness" means nothing untilit becomes equated or distilled: "your bitterness." It is a part of you yourself in your ownmost: "Your Bitterness."Remember that Cresswell sailed on the ocean with a bunch of old salts. He always spoke of going away to the cold frozen north (where thecreek used to rise) and there in the ice and sunshine of an eternal arctic summer he would fish for salmon and god knows what other kindof fish). He would brag of being a man who could always earn himselfa sure living, doing something both hearty and back-breaking. He could literally go out there and fish. We stay behind and count the statistics: how many more years until the world is fished out? How many more years before we cannot produce livestock any more? How manymore years can we go on like this?

Cresswell earned a good deal of cash. There is money in your wallet,blood on your hands and on the tracks, I never could figure out whatmade Cresswell tick! Was it that his father was part of the American military? Was it some way in which he envisioned himself, the intellectual product of his father's worth, but someone who found hisown father's worth and work tasteless. Cresswell never spoke of his father. He was his own father from the start. He imbibed of all thecruelty and indifference of the father who shreds us from our past andsays we have to move on. And that he earned a good deal of cash forhis catch from the sea. And you could say you would like to earn somecash too, if you caught hold of something more than priveleged andentitled teens, there might be something, and something to look ahead,but as it is its only ashes, ashes and pot-sherds. I would, however,be wrong to leave you with just this image, just this piss-pot that isoverturned and broken. You have partaken of some share of your ownglory. You are a man of great discipline and you have obtained a double D: D stands for Doctorate, not bra cup size.

Herzog as found on:
http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2007/11/22/vice-interviews-werner-herzog/

Japan: from where, in a film by Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog complains of the aenemia of images in the civilized world, indeed within Tokyo itself: Tokyo-Ga. Tokyo-Ga has the advantage of having an image of Herzog, and an epiphany that the waste of time that one has playing pachinko was the only manner one could survive the horror of the Second World War: How we waste our time in these idle speculations, web-blogs, spider-solitaire (my own waste preferences) or perhaps in Oppermann's sense reading himself silly... Tokyo, where at one time in order to escape profound depression and shoddy workmanship the only route was through metalic silver balls being pressed round a senseless machine: The Pachinko Machine:

What inthe hell are you doing in Japan? Have you come on nothing but theimage of a jewish american princess? (well, Salome is not bad for astart.)What are you doing? In the arms of the Dauphin Hotel? Something ismissing! Yes, a clue of how you got there, yes, straight into theheart of a Murakami novel. That being said I would have to say thatyou are one very lucky fellow. You carved out a piece for yourselffrom existence, you and this exotic woman... or if she is not herself exotic the hotel is at the very least. So there you have it: from Cresswell to Cossack is indeed a very short journey. And from the cossack to the Soviet car: the Zaporoshet (that would yet be spoken of, and that has now already been spoken of, and indeed was spoken of in an even more distant past). Zaporoshet: one who dwells in fortified encampments. All that is missing is the stringy black tartar beard, butbehold, by Jove, Cresswell had such a moustache and goatee, a veritable Colonel Sanders: the Colonel, who was son of a Colonel. (I believe that Cresswell even referred to himself as a child of a military man).

So the question remains for you what is colonel? Does it matter this kernel of knowledge? Is it just some fried chicken, "greasy kids stuff," to paraphrase the Freewheelin Bob Dylan? What kernal have you gleaned from this. The Colonel was always a stuffy, stodgy old man, but i will leave this meditation upto you, if you have the strength or the resource to observe it. More on this later, because there is always time for what is later,rather than the suffocating excressence of what is past,Your call has been heard, whether you dialed it or not, or sent bytelegraph (now no longer existent) or by telepathy. Ayres

Aesthetic Judgments in the Eschaton and the existence of God

2008-01-04T14:11:00.000-08:00

The Philials of Reason have been following me. I just rated this "Web Log" online and came up with a scant rating as "high school" in its sophomoric efforts to achieve itself in some sort of past. Well, so be it, it can only reflect on Oppermann to some extent that his friend who endeavors to render his life in some version of a text should be reduced to a high school vocabulary. Today I have little strength to write. I feel fantastically exhausted. I should not be writing, and there probably should be a law against me coming round.

Of this post Card Oppermann has the following things to say:

"12/25/07 8:50 p. It wouldn't be a real Christmas without a post card of a cute animal! Also it ocurrs to me that your 39th birthday is just around the corner - and that you might profit from a musk rat image more than I could. -The other night I lay awake for a few hours when it seemed like the world had disappeared. I felt no anxiety - realized that I felt no anxiety - then the world returned and I was back in Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology. The best remedy against anxiety is a combination of prayer and exhaustion, so that one can safely go to sleep (or back to sleep) and transfer the anxiety to dreams about airports or exams in the old Gymnasium (a result of an ontological determination)."

When I first read this card I understood the pun and the pleroma of metaphors stemming from Oppermann's last line "(a result of an ontological determination.)" But I have since forgotten all the insights that I had into this. Maybe it was into the void that seemed to be in the absence of the world. Maybe the ontological question is really "sein zum Tode" which would then include one's death and judgment in the eschaton, the means of judging one's life ("gibt es auf Erde ein Mass?" -and all that!), and that life would only be measured precisely by its self: the measure of a life is exactly one life, and so on, and so on... well I understood all that, I understood that Jean Luc Nancy had effectively damned us to the realm of the apparently purely ontic, reduced us to the level of the everyday everywhere, and taken away our capacity to raise anything up as a "sacrifice" to any "exterior"--- all of which does not make sense--- as in the example of greeting the man who said to me at the end of the year (December 31st 2007) one man said to me:

"What if we live in a world where no one believes in God anymore!"

My response was:

"Well then God bless you!"

I might add that from Jean-Luc Nancy's cool and calm position he may appear to be the dean of intellectuals, in complete control of himself. But what if he speaks really with the despair of the Seljack who looks out at the child-demons who are pestering him and his home, they killed his dog and sprayed grafitti on his walls, and he says to me: "but these demons do not believe in God! I could kill one but then I would wind up in jail! What world is this that ends up being such a sad, miserable godless world!" Is this really what Jean-Luc Nancy is saying? Is he just being so smug and intellectual, not merely a conceited bastard, but one who really under his cool, calm and collected skin is screaming because he is more alone than he could ever tolerate? This is the fate of modern academia in its polite condemnation: "the exterior is fake; there is no "beyond being;" there is no "good;" there is no God!"

God will comfort us if we need comfort. During the rest of the time we choose to live in a world with a vague recollection of the immense power of the spiritual realm... and if possible to forget it. Only when one lies in the void, at times when one is no longer able to write anything at all, when one is ripped away from the computer keyboard, the stenographer's pad and pen, the easy notebooks, the check-books, the balance books (ah, but those last two are truly in hell) can one begin to live the real life that is beyond this book. It's not fair, as if the book (or it's electronic equivalent) in this estimate were only representations of the true life, and that the true life comes after. But a book or words or writing has as much to do with reality as it seems we are capable of speaking or writing about a reality beyond this reality.

If this reality itself is not a metaphor for some other reality that we have only begun to know as "the outside" (something to which we might sacrifice, which Nancy criticizes in his article "The Unsacrificeable")... but then equally it comes to show that writing cannot be aught but metaphor for itself: writing itself can change no one, for these are just marks in a book or on an electronic tablet: and the goal becomes an illusion, the goal that has always been: that you will be a different person after you have read these words: that these words themselves will change, not just outer reality, as if to say "Apple" will not also change you:

Oppermann probably sent me a post card with Cezanne's apple painting like this

I have always had difficulties with Cezanne.

Who changes? What changes? When we evoke the apple it appears on the web, not just any apple but a Cezanne apple, capable of storing a certain repleteness within its own vision, a better poetic rendering of an apple than a photograph, if the word better means what it does: somehow catching the soul. An apple is not represented here? And what of the lush exteriority of the apple, exterior to the text?

Well, you get the message, the sense of what I mean. Or maybe you do not, like you are paralyzed suddenly or you have forgotten how to read. Or maybe it is more like Samuel Beckett's "Calmative" where the man apparently is dead and so he says to himself "I will try once again to tell myself a story" (that is, to bring the world quite round into being believable once again.)

This image should be included because it is beautiful. (The moral "should" the last sentence belongs to the capacity of the father to judge, and may be aligned between Kant's second and third Critiques.) It is a geometrical representatioin of a condition that according to some contemporary thought is "antiquated but beautiful." It is thereby relegated from the realm of science to the realm of aesthetics.

Bear in mind the Epithet from one of the final, concluding paragraphs from "A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" when reading the following passage: "Make maps not histories," when Oppermann writes:

"12/26/07 11:20 p. Your birthday is almost over and I havent even written you a post card yet! Presumably Deleuze and Guattari would consider maps simply "artificial re-territorializations" or at least sham representations thereof."

This appears to be incorrect Oppermann, though not exactly incorrect: "reality" as opposed to whatever the "artificial" is - is a series of flows and continuua. Desire can evidently be screwed up into a map as well as any other place. It is not necessary to make the mistake of "representing" (which in this moment sounds like some valence described from Foucault's "Order of things"), which would be an error from the start, but the map sets out on the road to becoming just as the orchid sets out on the road to becoming a wasp etc.... we are on the road to becoming music, and that, once again is an intersection with the Third Critique: becoming sublime. This may be a passage away from "the unsacrificeable" the gesture in the face of this whistling wheezing grimace of a face of a man in despair, after all what does it mean when we face a man who denies that there is a healing magic in everything and say "God bless you!" but that "You will become the music; and the map will become your music and your music will become a map by which to seek the road you sought again."

But I digress. Oppermann goes on to say:

"But I'd be hesitant to say much about what is produced in 1660, a time that is not revealed to the discourse of the early 1970's"

(Actually I think Jung had already had a dream where he had a dream where he was stuck in the 16th century, the 1500's I presume, doomed to having to study the course of alchemy throughout his life. Still I think it perhaps a bit snapped off on my part to make this comment. I have already spoken of Harvey Rabbin who regarded Seneca as a contemporary philosopher. Just how much do we have to make ourselves revealed to anything? After all Deleuze and Guattari considered dates merely as a kind of signature of an intensity: a specific valence of flow. The intensity is not reducible to any other intensity, but one may find it possible, credible, that in order for one to conceive of it at all [I think this is the Anselmian (1033-1109) ontological argument for the existence of God: God must exist as some sort of non-contradictory reasonable condition: "that than which nothing greater can exist" otherwise it will not be God; however Anselm irritates me because he was taught to me by an irritating Jesuit priest, Fr. Leo Sweeney at Loyola in 1991]: in order for anything to exist we must in some manner conceive of it. But that is all that is required in the same breath. Perhaps Jean-Luc Nancy would have a fit with that one, but then again, exteriority to "being" was not one of the aspects Anselm was trying to attribute. Deleuze and Guattari in "Anti Oedipus" refer to God, I believe, while discussing the "Body without Organs" as "Only as the god of the disjunctive sylogism," I am still trying to wrap my mind around that.

"... I'm trying to say: what is in your memory, re-collecting or even de-collecting, of your own childhood (and perhaps your 9th birthday for example)? Is the re-territorialization of imaginal memory "artificial?"

Things are remembered according to desire, which is not at all the same as individual's or ego's desire, but rather is the desire of some terrible mechanism of the "self" (sorry to use that Jungian term, it will truly condemn me to another 20 years for not being Jung, but rather some sort of Jungian- Bah!): after all, you were the one laying there when the world ceased to exist back on the 25th of December. That was real, and that was a more concrete expression of desire than we generally are capable of receiving. If I need to remember my 9th birthday, then I will, but not just because it is somehow commanded: we can never command memory according to desire any more than we could command love or real desire to ever manifest without its own will or way.

"What are the criteria here? And who is enough of a madman here to declare this question "fascist?"

This last passage strikes me as slippery: at first I would easily jump to question any criteria but that of a certain voluptuous enjoyment of desire: pleasure itself, but not necessarily pleasure for the human Dasein is involved. I like to think of some green tentically thing having pleasure here, or Thomas Hobbes' version of society as some great ocean squid, a Leviathan or the vision of Job, the Behemoth, "Behold now the Behemoth, which I made with thee!" Or the immense and extremely smelly eagle named Zazz or something like that is having pleasure. We most of the time simply lie down and take it, or get plucked up and eaten by it, or write web logs about it, or delude ourselves about it, or something. It doesn't matter if the question is fascist if you are being eaten by a hundred-thousand-story bird.

"The discourse of Anti-Oedipus, a book I know you treasure, is strangely dated, and that is not a criticism."

I think that is beautiful. This datedness to me has to do with the sense we have that time itself and reality itself is changing. Enough said.

Of one and many sunrises and the terrible waste of the dawn

2007-12-29T15:34:00.000-08:00

Oppermann has sent me a sunrise oriented post card. He states that surises are too optimistic. Was being born into this mess ever really optimistic? The mess is here, with its parents and its "hope for a brand new future" and all that crap. We know it isn't true, and that by the time you are thirty-nine you have been through a divorce and all that and run through the mill of the education institution, and by that time it's mid-day in your life's existence and you cannot stand to stand and watch the sunrise any more!

There are many sunrises and many existences, and not all existences seem to culminate in this one thing or that, And I would say that you, Oppermann, managed to make the most of your existence, you chose to think the higher thought: that the Good is beyond us, it is beyond being, so ends your fruitless chase to grasp anything let alone the good, and so you sit back, no longer yourself the sunrise, but the one who comes to receive the sun, the one who is awake, the one is reclining as the sun inclines.

klei-

DEFINITION: To lean. Oldest form *lei-, becoming *klei- in centum languages.
Derivatives include decline, lid, climax, climate, and ladder.
I. Full-grade form *klei-. 1. Suffixed form *klei-n-. decline, incline, recline, from Latin -clnre, to lean, bend. 2. Suffixed form *klei-tro-. clitellum, from Latin cltellae, packsaddle, from diminutive of *cltra, litter. 3. Suffixed form *klei-wo-. acclivity, declivity, proclivity, from Latin clvus, a slope. 4. Suffixed form *klei-tor-, “incline, hill.” clitoris, from Greek diminutive kleitoris, clitoris.
II. Zero grade form *kli-. 1. lid, from Old English hlid, cover, from Germanic *hlid-, “that which bends over,” cover. 2. Suffixed form *kli-n-. lean1, from Old English hlinian and hleonian, to lean, from Germanic *hlinn. 3. Suffixed form *kli-ent-. client, from Latin clins, dependent, follower. 4. Suffixed form *kli-to- in compound *aus-klit-- (see ous-). 5. Suffixed form *kli-n-yo-. –clinal, cline, –cline, –clinic, clino-, clisis; aclinic line, anaclisis, clinandrium, enclitic, matriclinous, patroclinous, pericline, proclitic, from Greek klnein, to lean. 6. Suffixed form *kli-m. climate, from Greek klima, sloping surface of the earth. 7. Lengthened zero-grade form *kl-, with lengthening of obscure origin. a. Suffixed form *kl-n--. clinic; diclinous, monoclinous, triclinium, from Greek kln, bed; b. suffixed form *kl-m-. climax, from Greek klmax, ladder.
III. Suffixed o-grade form *kloi-tr-. ladder, from Old English hld(d)er, ladder, from Germanic *hlaidri-. (Pokorny lei- 600.)

I'm sorry, what does this all mean? Have I just vomited up another random association? Have I related it all back to this damn maternal thing? The clitoral, the mound of Venus? But if this definition is what we climb on top of then that's not the main thing.

Sunrise is always attended by the star of the morning.
And sunset is always attended by the star of the night.
The star of these times is not as bright, but is more beautiful than the furnace of the sun
Which is ultimately unseeable, but gives us life, animation, through it's heat.
There was a sun and there was one sun, one source of life for we petty little creatures.

I am still trying to figure out what to do with the Oppermann post-card, with its single incendary statement: "the morning sun is too optimistic!" -Oh for God's sake Oppermann, you cannot go round condemning the sun in the morning! You can condemn the photographs of the sun, that somehow they are too new and taken with an insufficiently ancient lens to give patina and weight to the moment of the waking sun, but this event happens before us. Pictures of the waking sun are optimistic, pictures of death are always much more certain and far less ungrounded, yet they draw us too. The question is if we dare to make fools of ourselves, and dare the lens, the portal of our perception, to believe that it is ancient enough to behold even the emergence of this one sun. Morrison was right:

No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

But the dawn is eternally wasted when we keep taking these teeny snap shots. What's the use then of language or any representation, when the earth rises eternally beautiful and we are trying to sing a song? The song cannot be the morning but it can be a part of the morning.

SONGS OF INNOCENCE

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of peasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he, laughing, said to me:

'Pipe a song about a lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again;'
So I piped: he wept to hear.

'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sang the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

'Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.'
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
----

This only gets us half-way there. The other half is the bloody mess, which if you turn away from this text you will get a sense of once again. This pleasant pastoral ballad from Blake is certainly about the fall from being a part of the morning to the myth of representation of the morning. But this dichotomy between being/ participating/ praxis and representation/ theorizing/ metaphor this too is only half-way there.

The truth of the matter was Jan Oppermann's incindary phrase: "Have I pointed out to you that all these sunrise pictures are optimistic (I do like storks though)." -Well of course they are optimistic! The lens that views them is too technological, but if it were ensconced within an amulet that was, say 10,000 years old, and inscribed in cuneform, then we might be getting to something.

I cannot find the ancient lens that has seen the light transfixing it for that long, and even then 10,000 years is a drop in the bucket, and itself threatens, along with all our myths and psychologizing to be nothing but an optimistic one at that.

I can say that ww.pbase.com/sethlazar/sunrise does seem to be an effort to create some of the necessary patina, the saw-tooth edges of our optics through which it is necessary to glimpse the sun. The buildings themselves become the glyphs and runes of our most ancient memories, little markings like broken teeth arranged in a circle for divination, like rendering whole again the fragments of a tablet written in Cuneform. The city itself becomes the scrawl of the Cuneform. But what of this wantonly placed architecture? Even the spell or enchantment round our 10,000 year old occulus -- we know it is not enough.

I can say as well that in the case of the Zabriskie point image the land itself serves in the very same way. The problem with photographic representations of the sun is that this abundance of light is always unrepresentable. We can get to the story of this representation, maybe, but not to the image itself, which would then either be false, or else somehow make us at last servants, slaves to some signifier that we could say is all life and acts on us as the sun. It is not the sun, and no words of Mao or Stalin, or any other despot have themselves been the words of the sun. Upon their words have rested millions of lives, but they were not the sun. We can say that the glyphs of the town in Turkey provide us with the preparation for the vision of the sun, but we cannot point directly yet toward the sun. It is like Hegel or Borges, or myself for that matter: anyone who chose to dive down to look for the essence of all representation and who emerge carrying only a "thought construct:" a waste of time and a waste of the dawn.

Do you remember Oppermann, those stories I wrote when I was writing my dissertation? -I seemed to say: this is what my life is like: another wasted dawn and another: another wasted day or another. We live our lives in that Floydian "Quiet desperation is the English way..." sort of way. Perhaps that is enough for now. I am afraid that everything I will say to you after all will be too flightful, and then you will say again in your Oppermannian sort of way: "Oh yes, you were right about all this and lots of things!" And then once again you are reminding me that while in reality I have won, in parable I have lost all the way.

12 28 2007 2:42 pm 1 minute and 48 seconds

2007-12-28T16:39:00.000-08:00

Yes, Ayres I hope you got your avuncular matters sorted out
I am in receipt of your gift, the gift of death
So unfortunately this of course means that
We can no longer talk because I am dead
Thank you very much; I will take a look at it.
My Opinion of Derrida has become even lower than it has been
Which makes this doubly interesting
As for the Persian dictionary
Now I want to point out that the gifts are sort of bizarre
So I cannot give it a better grade than B- or B for "Bizarre"
Oh well I will make it a B+ because after all you are my best friend
I wanted to add that my friend (...) who was a severe paranoid schizophrenic
Whenever he had one of his episodes he would send me these bizarre gift
With this strange sort of gift giving you perform a kind of schizo-analysis on the Deleuzian mode with me or with yourself or with both of us
You can put this on your blog
No actually don't put this on your blog
Or if you do put this on your blog omit the reference to (...)
I hope things are alright with you, We'll talk soon.

A Post Card I Might Send to Oppermann but so far have not

2007-12-21T21:27:00.001-08:00

Addressed to Dr. Oppermann in Seattle, Washington.
Not a great deal to say - 18 Dec 2007
I suppose if nothing else then at least this Christmas card is timely and patina'd. I am trying to think of how to send you one part of your holiday season gift without it being removed immediately from the post and considered some sort of potentially hazardous item. (It was a small stainless steel container that I put various "survival" tools into when I was 10 or 11 years old; that is to say before I became a young philosopher I was embarked on a career to be come a young soldier: "Fur den braven Soldaten" - the words of a genius. "War all the time." Einstein should have probably stuck to physics and left soldiering out of it.)

Wednesday December 19th 2007 at 1:07 PM 1 minute and 15 seconds

2007-12-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

Yes, Herr Direktor Doctor Ayres, (...)
I was thinking, (...), just now about your "blog," (...)-entry
That, (...), Well first of all you are getting an "A+" about being negative about your own (...) sophomoric (...) existence;
That's profound, but it's still...in some way too psychological... (...) ...And so
What I think what you should do if you have, (...), if you have the inclination to do this is to
Re-Introduce the negative in relation to some characters...
That we keep, (...), re-working in Our own re-working of the ARCADIAN experience
I'm thinking Of course thinking of Cresswell
But also in fact of Aldrige
(In fact it may be a good idea to have a whole essay on Aldrige) [laughter]
Precisely because he is so boring.
(...) Anyway why don't we have a talk about this some more maybe tonight or something,
(...) If you are up to it and I if am up to it
It's about One-O-Clock now,
I will probably have some lunch and go for a walk
Thinking about Aldritch!
You have a good afternoon!

[Please note that all linguistic hesitations "um" or "uh," while being critical to the understanding of the cadence or rythm of Oppermann's thinking, have been removed and replaced with an ellipsis "(...)" at his request.]

To this entry there were these further messages:

Yes Ayres
Rhymes with Bears
I am leaving you a message
I have just read on the
blog...The
Transcribed message with all the um's and uh's
Which I would recommend that you remove
because that makes me appear or sound rather vague and philistine
And I have a reputation as a major thinker to uphold
I have nothing to say except that you have asked me to leave a message and here it is.
I hope that you are getting a good gray flannel suit
With a 1930's flavor to it
That will make you appear more like your father
Who in the 1930's was one of the best dressed men in America
This is what you once told me
This will have to of course be the occasion of analysis of the question of what it

means To become one's father
With all the Dostoevsky and Kafka etcetera etcetera
reverberations and resonances attached to this particular discussion
Which you can provide at some point
At your leisure on the blog or a postcard or elsewhere
Other than that
it is no longer raining
There is no longer a hard rain
Instead there is just a bit of a
drizzle after a rain
Which is in its own way is "profound"

12 22 2007 1:12 PM 2 minutes

Yes, a disembodied philistine technological women's voice
cut me off
Women always cut you off they cut off... well we wont get into this
Castration anxiety
On a more serious note
Well there is no serious note
I merely meant to
Wish you a pleasant Saturday
I am expecting Gossett and his various issues
He will be here soon
And I will talk to you later
Whenever that will be
Bye

12 22 2007 Saturday, 1:14 PM
44 seconds

Ethics and Grief: The Difference Between Oppermann and Einstein Coat

2007-12-17T21:39:00.000-08:00

"Für den braven Soldaten
Lew Ayres
Albert Einstein"

Before going into any further cosmetic (and cosmic?) parallels that I will discuss on the Oppermann/Ayres phenomenon I stumble on Einstein's words, apparently directed to my own ...dad. "For the good soldier..." is this what Einstein intended his work for? Did we drop the "bomb" on Hiroshima in order to somehow alleviate any more deaths of the "good soldiers?" I do not want to legitimate or denounce the ethical product of one human being's endeavors, and seeing Einstein, I must confess a sense of veneration for someone who is culturally considered the genius of our epoch. Yet nuclear physics, every philosopher will contend, is in itself incomplete: if its products remain thousands of years of horrifyingly toxic waste (in return for the seemingly limitless energy to run our civilization) or worse, the weapon that ends all contention ...and life itself. What is left of any "good soldier" in an age where the limits of human violence cannot be reached without destroying our capacity to conserve and abide the story of our violence. Nuclear weapons have for the time being placed a limit on our capacity to be soldiers, just as the trenches of the First World War reduced even the noblest "soldiers" to the level of vermin.

Perhaps at this juncture I can only offer by means of a shoddy comparison an image of me in what was a coat taken from my father's wardrobe, that until this instant of close examination I presumed to be what my father wore to meet Einstein in... the Einstein coat.

The Gray Oppermann Coat (with noticeably less pronounced lower lapels)

I note in this image of me staring into the lens of the Oppermann camera that my lips seem to be extremely straight-- as though I may be mad or just behind this smirking. It is the kind of face I commonly use to reprove Oppermann of his idiocy. Here I am in the Autumn of my sophomoric year of Colorado College, posing in what vandal may have termed: "a bratty CC college child pose." But it was my intention at the time to represent the most grim visage that I could muster, the absolute timber of my own gravity. I can remember Oppermann egging me on.

This may be the only of two shots of Oppermann and I sitting in my dorm room in Loomis Hall, again, philosophers on the same bed, but clad in protective tweed and heavy wool. It is a matter of protection and propriety. While I am fiercely affectionate toward my friend, this itself encompasses our experience of actually having to share the same bed. We had philosophy to discuss for heaven's sake! We left the issue of disrobing to our women friends, and we were glad to have them take on the burden of dealing with philosophers as naked beings together with them. And this propriety and gravity, that actually seems to be manifest here in its almost jaunty sophomoric manner, that we loved the most.

Behind us are images of the Eurythmics, and Thomas Dolby, they were mediocre New Wave Idols, I am ashamed of them now to a certain extent, but they served... some printed plates of the Hawaiian Islands, looking down the mast of a tall sailing ship, and a portrait of me and Linda, looking back, toward the left, the same way toward the unconscious, looking back toward the "Langer Abschied" that would comprise so much of my knowing her, the long farewell.

I think this might have been in part a creative reaction to the mindless, consumerist hedonism many times expressed by fellow "college children." We did not have to exactly be prudish fundamentalist "Christian children" either, though it was about a sort of faith. Faith is imagination, and this imagination of something more than brute instinct. It was a matter of timing. For my part I wanted to enter into Philosophy as the highest epitome of understanding, I did not want to know the content of sciences, all of which was simple and mindless enough, but the intention to know: why did we want to know at all? To what end was knowledge at all?

Oppermann might have been simply irritated with the paucity of intellect. I still do not know why he fully associated with the Political Science department of Colorado College: perhaps he had aspirations to become some sort of a politician, he certainly became a lawyer after he completed his doctorate in Political Philosophy. But then something happened to Oppermann, he couldn't stand the ... politics ... of lawyering (particularly of "hard-lawyering") and retired from the practice he had engaged in. Oppermann devoted himself fully to the speculative and educational aspects of his enormous background and education. There was something he did not want to "do," even though indeed he could have done it. And this is why I have called this web-log "Oppermann in Praxis" because it is a question of what he might or might not "do."

Phenomenologically there are those who seem capable of dishing out the heartless blows that this world seems to need to deliver to us. It requires a form of blindness akin to sociopathy. This life-form generally occupies the strata of corporate beings (universities included) called "middle management," and it is through this strata that one must clamber if one wants to become a "leader." The unfortunate part of "middle-management" (and to understand this one should read the chapter entitled "the Whipper" from Kafka's Trial) is that in order for one to engage in it successfully one has to be a real ...asshole. Pardon the vulgar terminology, although middle management may actually be disrespecting "assholes" by its comparison to the eliminative portion of our anatomy.

I do not think Oppermann could tolerate this brutal aspect of his life, that his training might have destined him to somehow become. He skirted round this by simply engaging in teaching, and a sense of longing for the "Arcadian" and a longing also for the "Medieval" way of life, which he somehow envisioned as better than the stupefying technological mess of our current society.

Oppermann wanted to study Politics, but he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. In part egged on by my own studies in philosophy Oppermann read on into the great philosophers and the mediocre ones. (particularly the French of whom I am still fond of, and rightfully so compared to the dreary litany of American philosophy after William (as per Oppermann's correction of my error when I wrote "Henry") James... American "thought" amounts to little more than the excrement of a mindless colony of petty bureaucrats mustering better formulas for middle management... oh, that and a bunch of religious fanatics.) I have a vague recollection of purchasing a copy of Levinas' Totality and Infinity for Oppermann... the book itself is an attempt at trying to find the missing response to Einstein's physics, the urge to save the "good soldiers." Levinas (Lingis, 1968) wrote in his preface to Totality and infinity:

"Does not lucidity, the mind's openness on the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?
...
"We do not need the obscure fragments of Heraclitus to prove that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought, that war does not only affect it as the most patent fact, but the very patency, or the truth, of the real. In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like Pleonasm!), harsh object lesson, at the very moment of its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn war is experienced as the pure experience of pure being." (p.21)

This brings up a connection Oppermann mentioned after reading this entry: the connection between "Hard Lawyers," "Hard Sciences," and now to what Levinas calls "Harsh Reality." There are some discrepencies between this trinity which may be drawn out once we have given some weight to each of these terms. We can add to this Bob Dylan's admonition, which is totally appropriate to this essay, "Hard Rain." The term "Hard Lawyer" came up at the time of divorce from my first wife; it came up in contradistinction to an associate who was a rather frustrating "friend:" he called me a "soft lawyer," because I had a manner of both accepting criticism and psychoanalytically overturning or evading it, or turning it into a metaphor, an "issue" which never fully compelled me to act as a "reality." At that time, and soon thereafter, Corinne started hiring what we termed hereafter as a "hard lawyer," a sociopathic type who would have no objection pointing a gun at another person's head and shooting if he could get away with it. Instead he simply pointed his legal "hired gun" at me and exhorted me to capitulate entirely to his demands; when I would not he threatened, "you're going to make this a long, hard road" (it is difficult to include the ghoulish breathing which was used to enunciate his sentence). This idiot was, however, quickly sent packing (because, in part, I had obtained the services of my own hard lawyer woman to block the harassing S.O.B) and within little more than a year of his first contact with me the divorce was finalized. "Hard Sciences" is a common term used to designate those procedures that are "measurable" and "replicable" in terms of indicting (back to the Socratic, Aristotelian, and Kantian "Kategoria") or "investigating" "reality." We know that this form of science in its measuring and exacting nature (what Heidegger calls "calculative thinking") tends to call out things into the Bestand (the "standing reserve") (as opposed to the Bestandsaufnahme, which is a "taking stock" in post-cards, and is the epitome of dudishness), which one must think of as a kind of way in which we torture things to the highest level of production that they are capable of. I do not think that Einstein was merely a "Hard Science" proponent, he knew that something was missing. Finally there is Levinas' "Harsh Reality," which I have always compared to the (please forgive the vulgar term) "shitty reality" that seems to confront "dreamers" who "dream too much." There is a quality to this "Harsh Reality" that really reminds me a great deal of Dylan's "Hard Rain," which indicates for me that the stupidity and thoughtlessness that generally characterizes our condition (filled to the limit of despair with "hard science and hard lawyering") will eventually bring with it a return, a profound return (Widerkunft) that will be a turning, possibly a "restitution" (see Oppermann's Anaximander essay) that will bring us to our knees. Perhaps in that position of grief and humility we may find some way through.

War in this sense is returned to the domain of philosophy and of poetry: to make warfare on language, to invite conflict against the state. The age of Einstein's weapon of war is no longer war, since conflict ceases altogether: we cannot put our conflicts to the ultimate test, or "object lesson," and survive the outcome: technology manifests a limit by which our own attempt to try and exhaust ourselves results in total catastrophe for all involved: the weapon destroys all hope. Perhaps that was Einstein's intent (I am thinking of my father's role in "The Bionic Woman" years later (1977) "Doomsday is Tomorrow" as Dr. Elija Cooper, who invented a "doomsday device" of linked nuclear weapons that threatened to obliterate the planet... the ultimate frustration of the scientist was at last to give to bloodthirsty humanity a weapon that would destroy everything... which really was to say that one must stop destroying everything and thinking in the manner that finds such destruction acceptable... to think as a warlike entity any longer will ensure that we human beings eliminate ourselves promptly from the planet... and there is a certain degree to which humanity is ultimately depraved and deserves its own self destruction except for ... our grief.)

There are profound exceptions to the diarrhea of contemporary American philosophy: perhaps if "grief" points the way to ethics in American thought, beyond the refugee surmise of an Einstein: This exception is in the folk and rock "industry," particularly in Bob Dylan, but I did not discover Dylan in truth until Oppermann made me purchase Time Out of Mind soon after it was published (1997). Through this poetry that makes war upon our common sense we retain a shred of dignity and some aspect of the best part of the American dream. I would say that for Dylan it is no longer an American dream, but Dylan's own "masked anonymity" that prevails beyond any nationality.

I don't want nothing from anyone, ain't that much to take
Wouldn't know the difference between a real blonde and a fake
Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone would come
And push back the clock for me

This ostensive refusal "I don't want nothing from anyone" may be as close to an ethic as I could evoke from Dylan. But to state this means to come close to knowing the senselessness of trying to take anything at all. What do I take of an Oppermann or an Oppermann coat? It is a full length coat, but it is not as "nazi" as the "full length leather coat" that Dylan mentions in the mood of despair that rises through his poem. Maybe "full length leather coats" get worn by "middle management," but I know this is unfair and Dylan would tell me that what I was saying is wrong. Maybe it is enough that at one time I wore a full length woolen coat. Hell, all I had was a worn down second hand gray woolen coat and some thought that it meant something, which it still does.

I would say that for Peter Gabriel (if I am digressing into music and American thought) it is a dream of inter-ethnicity (this may be WAY too optimistic... because the situation is really bad for us as a collective). But maybe for a moment our music is cherished and transformed in an infinite playful war of beauty itself. Then there is grief: from "Signal to Noise"

and in this place, can you reassure me
with a touch, a smile – while the cradle’s burning
all the while the world is turning to noise
oh the more that it’s surrounding us
the more that it destroys
turn up the signal
wipe out the noise

We were not yet philosophers. And now we see that the coat I wore was not the Einstein Coat... but what of that? My own father had the great fortune of playing Paul Bauman in the 1930 Milestone film "All Quiet on the Western Front." This was a role that defined practically his entire life. There he was, presented as handsome as possible, well quaffed and oiled, perfectly "natty" according to the studio standards of the day.

I lived from my father's sizable legacy, thought what I thought in part in debt to the things he did and saw. Oppermann was a story much the same, though he does not deal with the burden of personality in his family in such a "near" manner.

The coat I wore I had taken from my father's wardrobe, it could have been an Einstein coat, it most certainly was an Oppermann coat, by the very virtue that I had some article of clothing that was more sophisticated than a synthetic parka and a pair of jeans in the late 1980's one could say i wore something more distinguished than the run of the mill.

Later in college I took on a beard and let my hair grow out even more fully. I needed a beard to make me sufficiently masculine, at least that is what I felt... that a "philosopher" must have some sort of beard in order for him to be taken seriously... and I was delighted to grow a beard to cover my outward feminine, almost girlish features. "Ah yes, philosophers and their beards!" I comment to my self Oppermannishly. I believe that my subsequent persona change had a good deal to do with an associate of ours, Michael Cresswell, who figures in almost as a lurking Germanic Zarathustra between Oppermann's and my own meanderings. I had no depth, so I made up for it by appearing to have some depth. I loved the vision of Cresswell, the rock solid man capable of sailing with his leather britches and woolen Eisenhower jacket into the coldest Arctic sea for the purpose of fishing, self-subsistence, personal gain, a man's man, true, but he was his own man. I identified with Cresswell, commonly known of as "The Druid," because I had never seen an ethnic European American so fully himself, showing a sort of pride, without being a bigoted idiot. Youth who have family heritage from Mexico can look ethnically Mexican, I turned to looking like a stylized Bavarian peasant, and still do from time to time with a kind of relish mixed with a sense that it might just be a sham. True as well, it is unfair to accuse me of having no depth-- I wrote dreams, consulted a psychoanalyst on a weekly basis, and studied philosophy at every free instant... and yet these were the agitated pretensions of one who had yet to attain anything. Oppermann might disagree with this, averring that I had already attained myself, however confused, inconsistent and wanting to be something else I might have been.

The hair was already bushy and confused, not my father's polished and extremely poised "natty-ness." His angles seem sharp to a kind of limit of appearance, just as the real doctor, Professor Doktor Einstein had sharpened the lens of atomic physics to the level that fission became possible. The Ayres's sharpness was a matter of being a cosmetic of the time, however Einstein meant business.

I have wandered a long time, as sons seem to do, speaking psychologically, living in my father's shadow, and I wonder what might a son do living with the father, who even as a youth received a complementary note of a man who transformed our vision of the physical universe.

I did not want to become a physicist, however, much as my father imparted on me a rudimentary love of astronomy and astrophysics, this inclination remains dormant. I never hear Oppermann speak of matters of the "hard sciences," they only seem like so much of a burden to him it seems to me, simply like "more technology" or "more damn things to remember," because for Oppermann as well as me it is not the quantity of things one seems to attain to but something infinitely more elusive and evasive... some truth that will laugh in the face of our rudimentary physics a thousand years from now, just as we look back and with subtle mockery teach the past formulas or paradigms of knowledge as somehow quaint, antiquated and laughable feeble attempts at knowing.

Only philosophers keep looking back to the most antiquated forms of inquiry asking: How much more did we truly understand then? How much more have we entirely forgotten in this age of blindness?

So it seems to be with our capacity to look into the past, the philosophical past and to allow oneself to be turned into a pillar of salt: to ask: what truly happens when we become encased in our own bitterness, when the forms become crystalline, and we, like the hunger artist, keep fasting: out beyond all levels of social acclaim or reproval, could we for an instant remember a facet of thought that is past that keeps ...bugging us? (I suddenly remember a dream of salt-fleas....) -No, that is not enough! It still remains our destiny to rend ourselves into the future... but not for the sake of middle management... what a nightmare! What then? For what?

On "Yellow-and-black Birds" (A Formal Ontological Compliment/Complaint)

2007-12-14T06:48:00.000-08:00

Like in Murakami: a real Wind-up Bird!

It is quite unfair that Oppermann has sent me three post-cards today. In addition to my flagging directorial duties, the issues and contentions that abound around post cards has sent me into a flurry of activity.

Creating a journal round a post card is not as facile as it seems. A post card comes in like a dream: relatively effortless for the dream to do, save for the action of buying a post card of some description, a stamp, writing the letters and walking to the post-box, opening the lid and shutting it.

The problem for those who seek to be writers of the conditions of post cards is magnified many fold: did the bird in the picture of this post-card have enough sunshine this morning? Was there sufficient exposure to the correct intensity of temperature in the North-Western winds for the grasses (or reeds) in the picture? Had the writer consumed only a quarter of his cup or tea or single malt? Did the plants feel imposed upon by the photographer's solicitation of this obviously "brassy" bird having a twitter on their stems. Was the weight of the bird on the branch, or perhaps the bending of the twig itself, algorithmically related to the fluctuation of wheat share prices in Panama? Contentions, contentions, contentions. All we can do is the best we are able to do, which in the end we must admit is not really that much: after all the post-cards keep coming in, with a kind of bizarre nonchalance, and the parameters of post-card taking and making must be attended to!

Did Oppermann attend to the slight cough he had subsequent to the sending of this post card? Were there any factors of sudden post card transmission that should have been attended to other than jotting a simple note on a post card? In short, were the proper forms filled out and submitted in triplicate?

I know it may be a terrible world, which requires a certificate for one of humanity's last free acts: the sending of a post card: but it is not the adherence to any specification or regimine that concerns me as much as measuring the precise degree of adherence, and if there were any behavioral characteristics that somehow affected the production of the post card along the way. Moreover, there is concern for the ethicality of yellow and black birds... not merely if they followed institutional precepts of what yellow and black birds should do, but the ontological implications of what should happen were yellow-and-black birds to take wing in an improper manner: would the world as we know it cease to be? Entire cecession and elimination of a species because of a 33 degree turn on a tail in a certain portion of the forest, a swoop on the wing that might have happened at the precise moment before landing on this twig that might have condemned whole portions of the universe to profound black oblivion, not knowing, and not knowing that anything had happened: thus the profound ontological reaches of yellow and black birds.

Oppermann writes on this post card:

"12-7-07 9:40 p. Well, is he yellow or is he black? [this is a trick, I know Oppermann is leading me into an ethical dilemma that has confused some of even the best of philosophers] What's his deal? [Again, another cruel play of language, one knows that yellow-and-black birds do not play card games as a rule, but prefer literary consortation with raspberries] Is he a C.C. Tiger, barking in the Arcadian nostalgia such as certain bloggers and their blogee victims tend to do? [Oppermann's allusion is too obscure here and threatens to be unintelligible.] Or maybe he's just getting ready for a sudden walk (a new blog entry: Oppermann goes on a sudden walk! reflections on Walser and Kafka) [again, unfair, he knows I will be compelled to consult with certain mystical texts, along with a current telephone directory and a copy of the Seattle Sun Times to confirm if such a walk indeed even is possible without the consenting swoop of a yellow-and-black bird's wings] ... actually I just got back from a sudden walk. [again: incorrect!] It's been a long day grading mediocre papers on Nietzsche who went for a lot of walks himself. ["Grading Papers"... the activity itself constitutes a "C-" -Really Oppermann!]
I have nothing to say but had to write you a post card. [Excellent!] In your discussion of my black dog you forgot to discuss its covering and enveloping qualites - and its yellow ones.... [this is incorrect: black dogs always already consult with yellow-and-black birds whenever they do their black dog things. In addition the yellow qualities of a black dog are considered Geheimnis and will have to be discussed later]

The card is entitled "Wild Wetlands" with a subtitle in smaller script: "Yellow-headed blackbird." This too is incorrect, it is really a "Black-tailed yellowbird" but really one should only refer to it as a "yellow-and-black bird."

At this moment there is an infinite number of psychiatric reports that need to be filled in... that I must somehow attend to being their author, just as I am the presumed "author" of the words written here (we know that this too is not only uncertain, it is untrue) .... just as some endless stream of traffic began to cross the bridge, freshly created by the swooping tails of yellow-and-black birds...

It is said that the true being is not knowable by the categories of reason or absurdity, and yet it is manifestly the only real one we have; yet I say it is created through yellow-and-black birds.

The Truth About Soviet Cars

2007-12-12T20:33:00.000-08:00

This is the truth of Soviet Cars: I have nothing to say. Yet Oppermann insists that there must be more discussion of, about and upon soviet cars, so I will try my best to both placate this insatiable need for Soviet cars that he apparently has had since a conversation we had relating to these cars after he sent this card over three years ago.

The Soviet vehicle: a dream machine of the worker who could also produce enough to purchase one of these automobiles. I have heard it said that only members of the Communist Party had enough ...Kapital... (one of the issueBlogger: Oppermann in Praxis - Edit Post "The Truth About Soviet Cars"s in the Soviet Union is that Kapital is still denoted in terms of political status: cultural or political Kapital, as opposed to mere financial capital, indicating that though in a sense it was a noble effort upon the part of the first idealists to obtain a truly egalitarian society, the implicit corruption and "mob/mafia rule" of this nation quickly worked its black magic to suffocate even the smallest cry for the anarchy implicit in the "soviet," "working community.") was capable of maintaining one of these vehicles.

Within this picture we see the auto-de-jour of the USSR: Запоро́жец, Zaporozhets. Older and newer models of the ZAZ-968 stand beside one another. The name comes from a term for a man, a Cossack, a kind of military people, who is from a "fortified encampment" called a "Zaporizhian Sich."

It is not clear if Oppermann actually saw himself driving one of these Soviet vehicles, though I find it incredibly easy to imagine him now in his great black coat and scarf, and his (soon to be stolen) black hat driving around in one of these things. It would make more sense that an existential philosopher of his caliber should drive some car that was suitably European, pessimistic, and yet heymish, to use a Yiddish expression. At home on the road, Oppermann seemed much less at home in his "green-mobile," a green station wagon, which was the first car I remember him having. Oppermann has spoken repeatedly of his experiences driving his father's "Land Rover" with almost nightmarish repugnance. His automobile of current years I feel disinclined to describe, for fear of somehow exposing Oppermann to bomb threats, or the occasional "banana-in-the-exhaust-pipe" routine, save that it truly lacks the proletarian thrust of the Zaporozhet.

It may not be really proletarian: the car represents a kind of dream of anti-Kapital. A machine, which if kept decently would be noted for its decent inoffensiveness, lacking the phallic stupidity of a Porsche or Corvette. Moreover the vehicle, intended for utility rather than for being a status symbol, should be kept more for its capacity to last for years and years, to endure, gain patina, perhaps become a family heirloom, rather than for its infinite consumable, destructibility. It takes a good advertising campaign to level its economic shot-gun barrels on the consumer... or rather, one efficient bullet to the temple of the sophisticated man: no sooner has he purchased his prestigious auto than it has become a useless relic, a piece of junk. The Zaporozhet seems to remain an item of desire that fits the Oppermannian image.

If I were to psychologize, or better, theologize, the automobile, one could suggest that it's name is certainly Artemis. It is a symbol of desire that does not have a literal woman attached to it, rather it is a matter of polishing, working in grease and muck, maintenance, the occasional high speed romp. One could imagine that within the confines of such an automobile there is room for everything from the experience of conveying a family through the snow to an elder parent's home... to a maddened blurry speed, whining and threatening to wrench the engine from the chassis. The former dream is a dream: productive relations: the "Begriff" of the Soviet is contained in a leisurely and safe drive through the snows of a winter scene in a forest to a stately home of elder parents. The latter is a suicidal nightmare, akin to Anthony Perkins playing the role of Hippolitos in Dassin's (1962) Phaedra (he was listening to Bach, by the way, which generally can be listened to anywhere, Dassin's allusion to the prayer to Poseidon). Both may coexist in this brief reverie, though only the former is to be desired. Perhaps there is some other context for the Soviet car: Oppermann solitary, extends himself on a long-ish drive through the city to get to his friend's apartments. They sit outside in the cold weather, chat and drink tea... the city continues with its sodium lights and its ancient European style all round them, somewhat indifferent to the fate of any individual human beings.

Oppermann has termed some of his most significant encounters of recent as most suitably situated in an automobile. "The only safe place," he admits, "is an automobile." All the more suitable then should it be in a slightly "Sneaky-Russian" car. Russians are by their nature rather sneaky. The car even looks like his long since stolen black hat to a certain extent.

Oppermann mailed this card to me on July 14th 2003. There was neither date nor signature, just his own hand, which he had replicated before, a thousand times already, and was in itself unmistakable to me as being his, of his oevre.

"I have had this for 21 years. I find even the cars beautiful. Murakami in an airplane, yes. The Fifth Element, crap, so be it. Dylan, desolation row, it's alright. Thank you for your rantings. Thank you for the CD with all the various music on it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Sweet dreams."

Along about this time Oppermann and I began the rant: "20 years, son! 20 years!" and "It's always another 20 years!" This card does not contain this particular rant, always with the voice of an authoritarian Southern "Judge." It does seem dreamy, it even bestows upon me the blessing or possibly the curse of having "sweet dreams." I remember that it was somewhere along this road in time that we began to say that I was a "dabbler," based on my experience of driving to the Krishnamurti foundation with Corinne and challenging the store keeper there with some questions on "what is the Krishnamurti foundation?" or something of the like. It was soon after this that in addition to being a dabbler that we discovered the work of Richard Thompson:

She said, 'you dream too much!
you're dreaming this while I'm talking to you!"
It's gonna end bad
It's gonna end bad.

We would just shorten this, to become a bizarre mixture of the old crotchety southern judge and the sleek red-dress speaking seductress I always see in Richard Thompson's song: "You dream too much!"

It was a time of holding patterns. We had been dealing with holding patterns since Oppermann was caught trying to return to the United States from Germany back on 9/11/2001. I was just returning from my first trip to Seattle, and had just been introduced to the writing of Murakami if, I am not mistaken... maybe it was the year before. Yet I know that within that year I had begun to insist that Murakami was best read for his intoxicating nature on a long airplane ride. Maybe it was at that time that I managed to write Oppermann a whole book of Hiroshige post-cards (that he gave to me for the express purpose of sending them to him) while sitting on the airplane back to L.A. Perhaps, as I think back on that slew of Hiroshige post cards, I was too hasty in writing Oppermann on them. Perhaps they needed to be faded or tattered just a little-- to betray upon them just a smattering of impermanence, patina, would have made them more beautiful than in their efficiently reproduced form... a form lacking an essential component of "patina" that Oppermann and I will return to again and again. This care-wearing is some essential part of the beauty of the soul, it happens in the breaking and the broken. Perhaps it happens when one sends a sufficiently patina'd card, or an old Soviet post card. Perhaps it is endemic in the essence of a Soviet car as well as a card.

The card was sent on the 14th of July, but I believe I kept visiting Seattle in late April or early May as a rule. What do these months mean? The most vivid thing I seem to recall at this moment of my first visit to Oppermann in Seattle was not of Oppermann at all... at this moment it seemed to be of sharing an image of an upside-down man done in mint-green with my former analyst Lee Roloff. I remember that I wore a black mandarin jacket that my soon to be former wife Corinne had given me from her recent trip to China. And I remember that famous CD of music that Oppermann gave me: Dylan live excerpts: he kept pointing to the distortion of Dylan's voice: "A simple twist of fa-a-ate."

At this point we need to turn to the interior of the automobile and to the workings of Kiarostami: from Soviet cars to the interior of cars. Perhaps it is unfair to make this second turning from the automobile as such to the human being inside the automobile. I simply could not find an adequate image of the exterior of Kiarostami's automobiles, perhaps this is because the phenomonology of our culture prefers the graven image, the icon, the image of subjectivity as a signature of poesis: of "what we do" or "what is made." We have focused only on the portrait of the automobile, and now we are focused on the interior portrait of the drivers and passengers of the automobile.

These Images of Kiarostami automobile Interiors are out of place, but they are needed as a possible trajectory for speaking and thinking of the Soviet car in another space of alterity to the apparent conditions of knowing and seeing in our society, beyond the limits of thinking of the western automobile.

Perhaps from this w

e may arrive at the classic scene from Soviet cinema: the "auto highway scene" from Tarkovsky's (1972) Solaris. This image may in fact be truly great, it is supposed to represent, at least to my recollection, the experience of interstellar space travel in the manner described by Stanislav Lem in his book by the same name:

"Suddenly there was a shrill grating sound, like a steel blade being drawn across a sheet of wet glass. This was it, the descent. If I had not seen the figures racing across the dial, I would not have noticed any change in direction. The stars having vanished long since, my gaze was swallowed up on the pale reddish glow of infinity. I could hear my heart thudding heavily. I could feel the coolness of the air-conditioning on my neck, although my face seemed on fire. I regretted not having caught a glimpse of the Prometheus, but the ship must have been out of sight by the time the automatic controls had raised the shutter of my porthole."

From this vantage point, speed and the Soviet car speeds dizzyingly into the future, a sense of profound compression and constriction as the Zaporozhet of the future glances into the alien. The line between the Greek titan, who gave fire as an attempt at restitution for a lack of skill, a notion of "forethought" to naked "humanity," extends through the Cossack "dwellers in fortified encampments" through to a vehicle that encounters the limits of consciousness, the alien, in the form most familiar, a difficult love of the feminine that offers no redemption.

A dream that may be a sweet dream is a dream that we may "dream too much" (those are her words)! The twist of fate seems to come as a jolt and twisting of our destination, whatever we thought we were or were going to be is gone. Gone is the "Arcadian" but gone also is the sense that we might end in a certain kind of hell or rage that we presumed from those days. Gone is the Good, for the Good is beyond being. What we wrestle with in the fire and the intense heat of this time cannot be spoken of till "now" has become sufficiently patina'd, the heart sufficiently broken in the essence of time.

First Excursus on Soviet Cars, Capital and the Future.

2007-12-10T20:51:00.000-08:00

The Line from Leonard Cohen keeps moving through my mind: "I have seen the future and it is murder" The question is of how to deal with it all with some kind of willingness to love. The following image was taken from the web at
http://www.internetvibes.net/gallery/old-soviet-cars-cemetery/
The image has a certain portion of it that is too "lanky"
And involves too much of the bloody mess
But the essence is really in the comparison of the female
And the tremendous patina on the soviet "junkyard" of cars

The following is an electronic correspondence of a conversation between Oppermann and me:

Thank you Oppermann. I added some additional lines to the most recent web log about Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry": I was thinking about the ominous quality of the lines:
"I think I would now be disinclined to have my evening disturbed, so I probably won't answer the phone when it rings. Nor check my e-mail. Let the snow envelope all techne: τέχνη--

What you have responded to in words here is fairly complex:
your sense of the american dream of possibility seems denied by time itself, and by what patina adds to time and its event (and thus what no-longer is, in america, which has not been allowed to grow old). this is lost in the american consideration of the capitalist avantgarde and its bulging productivity.
The question of time I feel taken aback by, and rather unprepared for? What is time?
The thought is complex here:
1) has america in some manner been denied the possibility of becomming older by some sord of "bigger, faster, stronger, newer," fascist mentality that sweeps "oldness" away?
2) Would becomming older mean that one actually has dreams?
3) Does Europe have any dreams/"possibility" in its old-ness? Or is culture and society very rigid: does it take a great deal to ascend through the eschelons of status and power: most find themselves living in the same old rut of a dream, prevented from ascending or liberating from that dream...? People speak of the social structure of Europe as rigid/strangling... but maybe they are just social "climbers" and don't know how to just sit and allow/let/be on a single rung..,.
4) Is there part of a patina that actually would have more "possibility" than newer, flashier, and more optimistic? As a rule yes. But one could either hurtle into the future and see if "high fidelity" ultimately must unite with the "patina": this is the hope of technology and representation: that it will be capable of being both new and allowing the patina as well in its elegant and perfect decay: "Wabi-sabi" is a condition that acknowledges not only impermanence but imperfection: things must be patina'd to become complete, not just technically perfect. The example of the cracked cup that has had its fissure lined with gold becomes exquisite. Anyway, technology and representation are working toward wabi-sabi. It is the only way something can become truly beautiful.
5) would it be acceptable to you if I include this discussion in a web log: (without email addresses)?
6) no questions about paideia: your terms seem to all check out.
Gracias,
Ayres

Oppermann's response proceeds as follows:

well, as for time, please refer to ayres' essay on time. he (ayres) is, after all, the second-greatest living thinker.
one can always infer kiarostami's presence in this discourse, whatever the discourse may be. i still want more soviet cars!
concerning your questions, my first impulse is to defer them, and perhaps work through some of them in a future discussion of goethe. i feel inclined to defer everything profound to 2009 or so, not because george bush may be out of office then (my fear is that even then, things will get worse, because - as vasko popa says, the real dark has not come yet) but because i might no longer be so enmeshed in this weird decay of american discourse and reality that i felt so strongly once again this afternoon while spending an hour on some errands in the university district.
i will say, in relation to your questions, that america must be understood in terms of its addiction to Kapital only. thus the american decay is itself a kind of decay of Kapital into itself, its rendering as plastic world. this is neither a new thought, nor particularly interesting in itself. it has nothing to do with fascism which is foreign to the american experience. it must be emphasized that the problem with america is not political, or not primarily political (i remain fundamentally heideggerian there). one's response to american Kapitalism cannot be emotional (which is the case when the word "fascism" is even mentioned) because Kapital has already absorbed the emotion. there is no response to Kapital, other than refusal. but in refusing, the refuse itself becomes accumulated, and that is the problem. for more on this, simply read the poems of bukowski who understood this extremely well.
becoming older is what Kapital fears. this is because Kapital promises the eternally new. we can rebel with patina, but we must be aware that patina is also refuse, and we will thus become more depressed. not to be depressed is to be beholden to the terror, and being a terrorist on top of it. optimism is terrorism. i am saying nothing new here.
my fear is that kiarostami has not yet worked through the problem of a certain kind of optimism, as an alternative to "hollywood" (which is Kapital). i do not share the technological image of the future, but on that we must defer the discussion as well. if we must choose between technological freedom and sentimentalist enslavement to history, i personally choose the latter. this must itself be understood in terms of one's own patina, just as it must be understood in terms of one's own dreams. "freedom" as it exists in the context of Kapitalist discourse is itself a black dog.
you can take this as a post card and put it on your blog.
please understand that i am still in the middle of an enormous workload, and will be for the rest of the week.
more later,

J

The Shining

2007-12-08T23:55:00.001-08:00

There is said to be a shining, a "phainesthai," ("It shines") an appearance which shines through appearances. What shines draws us on, the glimmering of something just ahead, and sometimes we remember this earliest wonder. There is the horror novel of Stephen King, the frozen rigidity of the images, because the cold crystalizes and spreads light, but it also threatens to immobilize us with a kind of fear, we warm bodies tremble and then fade on the cold earth. Snow and Ice in Bob Dylan are said to be of Isis: "We came to the pyramids all embedded in ice." The problem of ice is that threatened creative immobility seen in the frozen images in the bottom of Dante's hell. No anger animates souls in such torment. This is just the threat. What we have is in fact a lovely Flemish image:

Jan Beerstradtan: The Castle of Muiden in Winter.

This is "The Castle of Muiden in winter: the winter scene is actually animated by all sorts of cavorting homo sapiens. The men, women and children use their quaint "techne" to skate out into a lake of insuperable ice. It is in fact quaint. But the text of Oppermann behind the image is more devouring. It is a poem about fading into the anonymity of white-ness, the cold whiteness of snow. "Let us, this, and all of humanity fade into the snow, Let the rivers finally run every course to the sea, or else be frozen forever in realms of perpetual night," the final ominous darkness from Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry":

12/1/07 3:55 p. File this under "post cards of Breugel motifs," or something like that. It's still snowing lightly & there is snow out there on trees, cars, buildings, plants. Some children are playing in the dusk; I'm sitting inside after having taken a short sudden walk in the snow. - Gossett was here briefly but felt anxious about the weather and drove back home. - I lit a candle and poured a small Bowmore (12 years only) to sink into an unusually solitary Saturday evening. I think I would now be disinclined to have my evening disturbed, so I probably won't answer the phone when it rings. Nor check my e-mail. Let the snow envelope all techne: τέχνη--

I think that Jan signed this note as "Techne," it is his signature, this time as a singular monster; but why would he want to be techne? Techne is just a doing, it is the equivalent of karma: there is a techne and there is an ethic that stands behind each gesture. Yet "Techne" has become the name for the verymost impersonal face of this "technology": an endless tower of iron and fire, that ascends as a prison for all eternity: this is what has become of the god of Techne, which has enshrouded us in the mechanical poison spill of a thousand oil drums, everywhere and at all time, as we try to blacken the green earth in the face with this shit.

This post-card is about isolation. But, no, it is not about isolation, rather it is about waiting. Oppermann lights a light and waits for it to get dark. "It's not dark yet," and yet all things in this narrative, for this evening at least, move far away. It is about waiting: the fierce, unbearable waiting of the man who sinks into his hole, dug in a hillside of Kiarostami's "A taste of Cherry." "For the night we will let thunder and snow slip into oblivion, just please, check me in the morning to see if I am not dead! ...forget the phone calls, the e-mails, the desperate notes; I can only describe to you the ominous threat of such a moment, immensely tranquil, comfortable, yet this darkness that comes. How shall we tell (by the thunder?) if it is truly dark?" It is about the snow that sends friends scurrying homes, home to bivouac with their nuns, each man has a nun: some are physical, others are more abstract, like just sipping a Bowmore: Bow more to whom? That's what I want to know! -Well, just let it slide, after all it's just a 12-year-old drink.

The card still bears the customary signature of the non-signature, (I know Jan is saying: "how much longer am I going to have to put up with this overly proper Derridean shit!" -"Easy there! Steady now!" Is my response) which is to say that the signature is the writing of all this work: it doesn't need a signature to support it: the signature is the work: no one else could think even this simple Bestandsaufnahme, it is singular, I will give you that, but the singular never amounted to you that much!

Why is that? -Did you never meet the angels in the bells of black holes? A black hole in physics is called a "singularity:" that is to say a place in the universe where the laws of physics do not obey any more known or standard rules: they exist outside of space and time: and that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for narrative!

What was our narrative anyway?
Why the heck were we doing what we were doing in the first place?

Did we think we were philosophers getting rich? No! I think not! Philosophers writing prescient books, copious works of literature, and somehow getting knowledge? -Possibly. Did we set out to change anything? Did we set out to skate to the very edge of the thin ice of modern thought?

An answer begins to form itself from the pessimistic margin of the ARCADIAN -Oppermann suggests that he sought for the Good, but he discovered that the good was just beyond being, and so we were stuck with this failure that amasses and crumbles around us every day.

I told you that the whole beginning of "Blood on the Tracks" is ice skating music? Thus one monitors the affairs of the ice-skaters in Beerstradten's painting. (But Dylan enters into the problem of desire in his ice capades, and into a relation to the feminine that is not quite ready to be here yet: the fierce autobiography of lost love.) Kapital is ice, frozen images, frozen in creative immobility, and these ice-skates of thinking were just what is needed for this "winter scene." "Blood on the tracks" is far more interesting than Pink Floyd's throbbing melancholia ("The Wall": "The thin ice of modern life") any day, I know you would say that, and I would agree. Ah well, just two men who sit at separate desks and dinner tables who write each other and have an understanding about something: Dylan before Pink Floyd, although Pink Floyd will do in a pinch, that's all. I think that Murakami mentions Dylan more often than he mentions Pink Floyd as well, as if to say: "Yeah, Pink Floyd, well they're mentionable!" (Poor Pink Floyd sits slogging in the distance in a pool of ice: he ain't got no ice skates: but Dylan does: There are lines of ice skates in the text of Dylan's verse. He's got his lines all over the place. In all, however, it is not the lines left in the ice by the skaters, but the overwhelming voluminous clouds that win the day. The contentions and parables of humankind and the earth (so well presented in the Breugel painting below) are diminished under a certain leaden volumescence of the clouds. The clouds are capable of sustaining a bad mood, more harsh weather is ahead, and the skaters are merely out for the slightest romp before it all turns frigid again, with icy gales and blinding cold. And yet the truth shines in this way, in a moment when it is under great threat, the skaters and their pleasant antics shine from beneath this curtain of death.

There will always be "another category," just as much as there will always be another indictment of nature, and another way to carve up the universe. I do not think that this post-card fits Breugel's technique. Breugel brought us in closer than this quaint little vignette: the butcher and the baker would be there: somebody might be falling in an oven: better to make the scene agitated with everyday life: even the dogs at a peasant's banquet would be falling in the snow.

Pieter Breugel the Elder: Hunters in the Snow

To be honest this image has much greater wabi-sabi. It may have even a greater sense of "Wu" or "Mu," but forgive me for resorting to an appeal to escape the problem of transcendence by resorting to "Oriental" aesthetics! You have already sent me Breugel's image, I do not have the post-card to hand but I may try to dig it up. Here it is from the post-mark from the date 20 November, 2002:

You begin with the line with an arrow pointing to the title of this work in German: Jaeger im Schnee; 1565: "The Beauty of this painting is perhaps unequaled." You do not use any more of your own words, perhaps nothing further can be said. Instead you let another author speak entirely for you: the burgeoning of thought into poetry: as if on this card you could only place what is poetic, with a side comment and a shrug and say: "This is the most beautiful." Now why is Breugel so beautiful while Beerstraaten come up as a besmattering of being a lonely fourth. Yes it is a winter scene: yes in both images there are skaters, but in Breugel there are skaters skating round in the distance: in the foreground we feel the heavy trudging of the hunters, we feel their exhaustion and wearyness, and we smell the fires, the dry wood smoke: all this do we see, not some frozen ice-cold epithet: Beerstraaten comes only as a distant second or fifth in comparison to what Breugel has accomplished. Yes, there are figures placed in a gaily comic pose in "the Castle of Muiden." Animation is key here, but it lacks the absolute peasant darkness and salt of the "Hunters in winter." Dark are the branches of trees: you got that right as you sank into your reverie in the last card about snow on black branches. Both of these are poetry. And yet to add one more turn of poetry, this is the poem you quote: sadly not in your own vision of a poem, but someone else's poem, someone I have never known in the depths of his solitude and moments of unbearable loneliness:

"Wolf Eyes

"Before my christening I was given
The name of one of the brothers
That the she-wolf suckled.

"All her life grandma will call me
In the flaxen black tongue
Wolfling.

Secretly she used to give me
Raw meat to eat
So I'd grow to be head-wolf.

I believed
My eyes would begin to shine
In the dark.

My eyes don't shine yet
Probably because the real dark
Hasn't yet begun to fall.

(Vasko Popa)

Who is this interloper, whom I have never heard from before? Who is this stranger who enters into our discourse? (And our discourse has always been about strangers and strange discourses: we have agreed to do one thing: to be true to each other through the communicative word, but not through the celibacy of discourse: and therefore the discourse is ribald: filled with upstarts and new-comers.

Forgive me a moment while I catch up: Vasko Popa was born in 1922, between the great wars, but close enough to be involved in the second European and world conflict profoundly. Imprisoned in a concentration camp during the war. He died in 1991 in his late sixties, hardly young, nor hardly a venerable old man, probably overburdened by his life in the camps he lived and died a full but relatively early life.

Popa wrote a lot of poems about wolves. He was a poet of the human condition, so one can only surmise that he wrote a great deal our condition as predators, hopelessly bound to their predator-hood, and yet somehow in need of some way beyond their predatory nature. It is not certain that such predators can leave their pre-possession for the nature of flesh, bloody meat-- and still remain real. He would speak of the irony of the tenderness and solidarity of wolves, of how they hang together in packs, and pick their prey off by wearing her or him down.

Vasko Popa did not write a philosophy of anything, for that philosophy is for most too far off; but preferred the immediacy of poetry to portray something closest to his own condition.

Oppermann contends that poetry is not "immediate;" he holds that the philosophical aspect of Popa has to do with a certain nostalgia that never is removed from the sense of decay it might carry: I add a quote from Bob Dylan: "Just when I thought I had lost everything, I found out you can always lose a little bit more..." thus, Oppermann replies in Popa's words, "the real dark/ Hasn't yet begun to fall."

A simple association, however: how are wolves different from the hunters we see here? The hunters are hunched down slightly in Pieter Beugel's depiction, seven ravens fly in Pieter Breugel's scene, not hunters but scavengers: one is aflight, the birds are subdued, or cawing in the dead, leafless black branches of the trees, black against a steel blue sky. Yet there are skaters, and so the situation is not desperate, simply despondant: the hunters have not returned with game, and we know that in Kreuff's language: "The game begins after."

The skaters in Beerstraaten's image have no foreground of a heavy set image: no three broken hunters, no black branches of trees, no large collection of dogs in the foreground, you only get with this image "skater's antics" and the emphasis of the picture, which is on a single castle of a single duke or nobleman. Breugel really sets these antics in the background. Moreover he places peasant hunters on foot, not noblemen on horses in the scene. This is truly great, and it's not in the least Marxist! It is not about the sufferings of the working class. It is about the reality that if you are to participate in any meaningful manner with this scene you will have to feel the damp and soaking leather of the hunters.

The genuine cinematic equivalent to this is Tarkowski's Andrei Rubliev. Rubliev too spares us of useless talk of castles, though he does present the problem shadow of the Machiavellian prince or the man of state who seems to be running the show for his own vainglory as well. The important aspect here is to see in Andrei Rubliev as in the "Jaeger im Schnee" that the scene has great deliberation, a drawing out of a specific scene to a great length. As a matter of fact I do not think we can really run our camera too much longer on Beerstraaten's scene: and we must hurry on, back to the cold slime and the mud: "the emptiness is endless... cold as a clay." Nevertheless in Bruegel's scene there is sparking flames of a gathering in the distance: three women, a man and a child tend to a flame, that is a fire going outside the homestead against the cold.

"Jaeger im Schnee" was produced in 1565 at the by Bruegel. That was about 4 years before his death. Bruegel was born in 1525, so that made him about 40 by the time he painted his painting. It is an excellent 40-year-old painting. It is accompanied by five other paintings, one of which is lost, according to modern account, each of which is supposed to represent the main events of each of the seasons. For some reason I feel compelled, and it is probably quite wrongly, that there must have been another unknown painting in this cycle, which should have been a total of seven paintings. Seven paintings, for seven planets, for seven gnostic Archons guarding our planet, maintaining the illusion of our form... I know that this explanation would leave you as rather tepid. But let us follow on just a little pace, and see if we reach our quarry.

The poet Popa utters the following gnostic message: "It's not dark yet." He might as well be saying, "I'm not dead yet," it would amount to the same thing. Nobody has died and lived to tell, the telling of stories is for the land of the living, there are no stories in the realm of the dead, only dust; Odysseus needs to sacrifice and pour blood in order for the stories to speak.

The promise is that these eyes will begin to shine: and the shining will begin with the "over exposure" of the retina to the "true light," a light that will not burn but will shine from the eyes themselves. Again it is the look of Oppermann in the flash of the camera light as his face is over exposed: a mystery and a hint of menace: "What was it you wanted? And who are you anyway?" This really travels from the womb of Isis that bore us aliens into the world: the gnostic conception of us aliens again: and the world is in one sense an obscene waste of ice. The scene however is more basic than some wealthy diversion, for in the background of Bruegel's painting there is the town with its sense of hope and faith, the simple rising steeple of the tallest edifice, still the church, and still beyond this is a forest and further on there rises the impossible steep clefts, both ribald and frozen... of the ice-mountains themselves. Just beyond this scene is impossible coldness that Herzog might speak of as the glaciation of grizzly bear... or perhaps now "wolf"... eyes.

Of Oppermann and one and several post cards

2007-12-07T20:30:00.001-08:00

We write because there is some sort of discourse that we seek to belong to. We write out of intense loneliness. This kind of loneliness would not be ameliorated by a phone call, nor would it be ameliorated by Jan's physical presence, but only by the force of an imaginative act. I do not want to say that we become like "God": who's very speech is an act of creation ("fiat lux."), even though this is the promise of our technological age: the union of human desire with the representations we create. We write because something in ourselves seeks to be transformed into a future event. We write because the images are intense, the saturation is content. This is the best way that I yet know of responding to Oppermann's cards: not to write him another post-card, though he might enjoy that, but to take these words and these images and to examine them (to "examine" his words should mean more that I throw the searing, blinding, caustic lights of the "examination" more on myself than on his words, which should remain protected by the shadows of so many other things they may become), but to contest them with my soul, and to expose my soul to some degree, while I still have this power of "examination" and seek to render it as art or music, and not just (as Foucault might whisper) "incarceration," "surveillance," here in this "web-log" predicament.

It is the scorching light of the examination that Bob Dylan faces when he comments in his character in "Masked and Anonymous:" "In my dreams I am walking through fires and intense heat."

Oppermann writes:

12/3/07 8:25 p. I'm hardly in the mood for watery & wet today after hard rain and extensive flooding (I had to drive my car through a virtual lake in the parking lot to park it safely on "higher ground" - i.e. the super market lot) ultimately a "state of emergency" for the state of Washington... - I've kind of had it with things, son. Reading your nostalgic blog entry last night not only made me long for that A-R-C-A-D-I-A-N time, it also made me profoundly dissatisfied with what is. It occurs to me that its all over now, baby blue... (the other night I had a dream that I called "Flood in Blue(s)" and that must have been an eerie premonition of today.)

The post-card is characteristically not signed by Oppermann. I am perforce forced to guess that this is a card from Oppermann because it is in Oppermann's hand, and his hand itself: all of his post-cards are a signature of himself, by now, to me, to the one to whom he has devoted the larger part of his meaning, as I have to him. There is no signature on the post card because the post-card has become a signature of itself. This is Oppermann's hand I transcribe into the sensible letters provided to me by the electronic powers that be: I translate sense, and a sort of scream into these uniform characters: it is Oppermann's scream and it is my scream.

Sometimes these screams are combined, sometimes these screams stand separate.

Oppermann writes about a "state of emergency" but everybody knows that the real emergency is not some God damn flood, but that there are a thousand people talking, and a thousand people who are really screaming- and there is nobody listening... so of course its a hard rain that's going to fall! And of course when the hard rains are falling and its going to go down in the flood... this is what is happening when we all are screaming and nobody's listening: a hard rain's gonna fall!

I might stop screaming, I might start listening. That is what I am trying to do when I write these web-logs on Oppermann: as if I could pin-point and figure-print one man, one "criminal," who's crime has only been in being my best friend! Why does that make you a criminal? Why does that make you at all for any reason condemned? After all isn't it the philosophers and the philosophers' love of a philosophical friendship that ends the indictments of the universe upon the moment in which we stand? It is a writing of a listening. If it is possible we will write further of being impressed of just one piece of this chao-verse, our closest friend.

I hope that these web-logs will make Oppermann restless, that they will start some inner engine, some inner dynamo of transformation for Oppermann, and that that transformation will not lead to the gallows (the place of the criminal, but translated, sublated into the soul who is presented and accused) but of yet another place and yet another book.

The purpose of a post-card of the wetlands is not to simply show the wetness of the flood, but to show the rich and ribald growth that stems out of the flood. The flood washes down, the final Judgment of an ancient "father god of the Old-Testament."

Sugar for sugar
Salt for salt
You going down in the flood
It's gonna be your fault!

But Oh, mama, ain't you gonna miss your best friend now!
You're gonna have to find yourself another best friend some how-w-w-w-w!

But it is the eyes of the sad eye'd lady of the lowlands that we are seeking, the florid colors of the swamp flowers, yes, that is the transformation I am seeking in writing these letters in blogs to Jan P. Oppermann, not merely the civilization that rests beneath these waters, laid low by the grief we are now committed to pay, all those tears... yes, the flood will lay you low. But it is not just the flood, but the burgeoning ever presence of life we seek.

Another image of the lowlands, the dangerous still waters of a swamp at dawn or dusk, when the portal of the sky is opened under a dim and brooding star, still aware of something of a profound newness of the earth in the foreground. In this picture the earth is very new, or else very old or ancient, like some foreign land, some East Indian land with the minarets of its mosques shooting directly skyward like some perfect young woman's nipples. The card reads:

12/1/07 8:30 p. The snow is already in the process of melting, a kind of watering down (like one must do with cask strength laphroaig) - hence you're getting a Canadian water-card, even though this marsh is more like an enlarged version of my mother's pond. I remember sitting by the pond in the summer of 1988, reading your letters & thinking of what a thinker you are. Enough flattery. You are a conceited bastard and an idiot. - I've actually retired to bed to read an entertaining Dutch novel because I felt tired & cranky earlier. (Now I'm merely sitting here at the dining table waiting for some peppermint tea to steep). There are two rather humorous middle-aged friends in it, both intellectuals... I may have to get you a copy. - Enough steeping, enough.

Yes, indeed enough of the steeping, my friend Oppermann, enough of this going down into the flood, even if two days later you would find yourself still saturated, falling through some impunity of the universe that sought to cast down more hard rain on the city of Seattle. There ain't no finish to the steeping till the steeping is through. Whether I am a thinker or not remains to be seen in the piety of thought.

What is this piety if not as some knowledge of the self that one has been steeping and steeping in, like a hot bath where your fingers emerge all shriveled like a prune: know this is your existence and mine, this mortal pickling of experience in the distilled jars of intellect we leave behind: that's it! That's all we get! -Write well then! - For God's sake, if not for our own predicament, write well. That's all we get.

And that is all anyone will get at any time, no matter how great or vast or permanent a civilization, we can defer the ending but we can still see through to the end of its time: youth, middle age, old age, death. These inevitables of the calendar affect us, human or no, worry not: write then, well, write.

Your mother's pond would be enough if in it you still can see the eyes of the "Sad Eye'd Lady of the Lowlands," if there still is a sparkle in the not too distant lake, a stirring in the flood, of everything laid low. You praise me, even if in the next moment you need to seal and condemn with your judgment: "You are a conceited bastard and an idiot." But that was out of a pact we made with each other a long time ago to address each other with names that might be humbling: names that might promise a form of oblivion. After all, it is all the conceited bastards of the world who wind up screaming ("and nobody listening") and they are the cause of the hard rain that's going to fall. And the idiots, half dumb, idiots, infants, barely capable of speaking, of stammering: "Bah-Bah-Bah!" That's what the idiots do, really. They wind up stammering, or setting off into some region of a park, or getting themselves killed and their lovers killed and eaten by bears.

You have a moment of thought, and you think of a thinker, and then you obliterate this in a single gesture of your present hand: conceited bastard, illegitimate stepchild of existence, doesn't even have the right to scream what it says:

"You're an idiot, babe,
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."

And the words of Lou Reed come by and haunt me every time, every time we speak of idiots and conceited bastards, words about breath, and solving some mystery of life with some shibboleth of our own despair:

I know I like to dream a lot
And think of other worlds that are not
I hate that I need air to breathe
I'd like to leave this body - and be free

You'd like to float like a mystic child
You'd like to kiss an angel on the brow
You'd love to solve the mistery of live
By cutting someone's throat or removing their heart
You'd like to see it beat
You'd like to hold your eyes
And though you know I'm dead
You'd like to hold my thighs

If it's wrong to think on this
To hold the dead past - to hold the dead past in your fist
Why were we - why were we given memories?
Let's lose our minds
Be set free!

You can set me free when I am dead and easy. Until that time I am not up to that. I am up to the bloody mess we have always spoken of. I don't want to be no idiot, set free like Tim Treadwell and his girlfriend by some grizzly bear. Now that was a bloody mess, I'm sure you will agree, but we have to get something somewhat less bloody, say somewhere some time you sat beside a lily pond and sat and contemplated letters, and the letters were always just letters that entered into your hand, because I wanted nothing else to enter into your hand but my thoughts, the thought of my own existence. I wanted this spiritual substance, this holy wafer to enter into your hand, to pass by and to be your consecration, "here is a man of thought!" This light and airey meal that has no bloody sustenance, I am sorry I could not give you that. I am Ayres.

The sustenance we sought, the women who entered our grasp, this temporal and earthly domain that is not that of the "mystic child" of which Lou Reed speaks, is woven of the flesh of women's bodies, whether it is of your own body that you must hold at appropriate distance, or that of a young woman's body, which too you must hold at an appropriate distance, or Erica's body, which you tried to hold so close, that nothing except time and "elective affinities" could ever take away from you: threshold to Goethe: to really know what grief is: read "elective affinities," about how the body of the woman becomes un-solid and in-substantial.

Meanwhile we are outside here, writing and writing these very thin works, post-cards really, and nothing more, only post cards and electronic media: how we make a feast of our flat-thin-ness, like some hunger artist, feasting on his own curiosity at how close he can remain in his flat-thin-ness, as he dwindles deeper into the furthest reaches of memory, carried out of his cage with a heap of offal, a lap of monkey dung, forgotten to be eaten even by the savage beast that enters his cage and is held in his place when human memory fails him, and his feat turns into an infinite grueling persistence: Ted Hughes words: "Trembling in his ceaseless trial of strength."

The final image of this evening is not of a flood at all, but rather it is a privileged image for us of Russian Cyrillic writing, and the chance to view some Soviet cars. It is "privileged" because somehow Oppermann and I decided that behind every Soviet era post-card there is a patina of past-ness, an aura of impossibility that loomed as a great dream behind the totalitarian police state. This past impossibility lends the dream even more emphasis, thus "everything is possible" in the dream, but only in the nightmare of the Soviet state. Here is the equation of Marxism, the equation that needs to be entirely undone:

Reason given whole-ly to production, plus profound human indifference, leads to a nightmare.

There is an opportunity here, speaks Oppermann, do not miss it! Here we are, looking into the midst of a Russian post-card! The writing says:

12/1/07 4:30 p. This post card goes into the category of "post cards showing, or alluding to, Soviet cars." - It stopped snowing & the contours of the whitened branches of the black trees outside are somehow both softened and sharpened. -By contrast, the green spaces of the "center of the city" in Soviet Bukhara seem forlorn and detailed, without either softness or sharpness. On the other hand, in the snowy landscape out my window just now everything seems determined, while in the Bukhara downtown everything seems possible - reminiscent of the Paris suburbs of some of Eric Rohmer's films.

Again, the card is not signed, it is the characteristic hand-writing that must itself be the signature: the post card is the signature of itself. Perhaps this is Jan's bow to medievalism: like Chartres cathedral, not a single signature, yet an overwhelming sense of greatness. I do not think that either this space, or the space Jan describes may be capable of being on the level of Chartres cathedral. The Soviet space serves to isolate and alienate itself from the signature of the personal, but it unfortunately simply ends up producing impersonal complexes of the post-industrial age. The medieval space managed to produce something singular, and in that personal, but it did not bare the signature of a single European intellectual sitting out and looking at the snow on trees like some Japanese Haiku.

And that is really the unbearable beauty of this final image of this evening: the sight of snow on branches of trees: snow enough to soften and to determine this one moment in the indeterminable space of one's life. The branches of the trees contain no trace of any signature, their darkness stands out in the midst of the cold and the ice, black and white, vein of pulsing black sap-filled life confronted by some sap in the window... it could be him or it could be me. But why this angry epithet: bastards, idiots, orphans, brawlers, bawlers, and now... saps. To this we hang one more heavy indictment: indictment in a Zen haiku. This may be something that anyone who appeals to Eastern mysticism in an urge or an appeal to some aesthetic transcendence of the cultural plight of the West: the indictment lays low.

Two saps used to write
About black trees under snow
Weight of foolishness.

The image is beautiful, and thus it deserves a counter image that honors it, the subtle patina that is on a card with the possibility of seeing through to soviet cars: the poor soviet cars, with their headlights in more snow and mud and slush (not pictured here in Bokhara summer, in the dead "center of the city:" Where communism itself becomes as a matter of dialectic "indeterminate," its ruthless wresting of the particular into the hands of the working class, leaves us without a doubt very dubious of any two idiot intellectuals in a Dutch novel. By contrast you have images of late Autumn, 2007, of an European intellectual dealing with his depression that he received less than a hero's welcome in some foreign land, writing to his friend who received less than a hero's welcome in a land that was never his but which his parents claimed may have been their land. (Actually my parents never quite claimed this land: my mother has always been from England, Briton, if you will. My father was nothing but his work and his study of philosophy and religion, and a dim warning that will linger in the back of my mind until the day we die: "Some day we all are going to have to pay.") The great depression of any intellectual, who sought with his intellectual's soul to be part of the foment of some movement toward or away from technology and capitalism: is that in this land of so much "promise and potential" (in fact I utter this cliche about the hellish optimism of "American Promise" precisely in contrast to Oppermann's promise and potential in downtown Bokhara, sort of a joke while profoundly poeticising some strange mechanism of irony about the "possibility" Stalin-age buildings: "Downtown, next stop, the Gulag Archepelago!") In our American "promise" we idiots find out that it is not really our land at all, I know it is phony, but who we are is somehow tied into this, the whole American dream is tied into this one statement: "it's not really our land."

By contrast the Bokharean dream may have been of stable, civil law and order, an impersonal complex that now lags behind the flagships of capitalism: the latest Beemers (make no mistake: Bauerische Motor Werk, the Germans have not demonstrated any "transcendence" on that one) now driven by Russian mafioso ride down the boulevard in this one: "... and so you think YOU have depression! Take a look at any town in the old Soviet!" Yes, "Back in the USSR, You don't know how lucky you are, boy!"

Bestandsumweg... The Eagle Post Card and the Un-Becoming

2007-12-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

Oppermann sent me a post card on the 21st of November. It arrived today with an image of an eagle from the Book of Kells. On its back it bore the following inscription addressed to "Dr. Ayres":

11/21/2007 I realize (6:50 p.) that I have written you not enough post-cards lately - that's probably because I have nothing to say. Right now I am simply enthralled by a novella of Tieck's - old-fashioned self-conscious Romantic story telling but refusing to let that become a Bestand. - Note the eagle looking rather sad and forlorn here - he might need shelter from the storm. I was listening to Shostakovich - now I'm listening to Bach (Musikalisches Opfer) which is a calmative. Did I tell you about the dream in which i was overcome by a black dog (depression)?

It is sent from Seattle and it is in Jan's (Oppermann's) particular hand-writing although he did not sign it. I remember Derrida (the reading of whom Oppermann regards as a kind of "chewing gum" ... more on this later) commented on the date of a post card as being another sort of signature or counter-signature. I suppose that any given date written in English could only belong to the hand of a given English speaking person who could send a post-card from Seattle on the 21st of November. So this eliminates a number of individuals from the list. There could be a whole host of improbable scenarios: possible arrangements of atomic structures by apparent happenstance that appear in the semblance of one of Oppermann's hundreds or thousands of post-cards that have descended upon me in recent days and years.

I have been recently in the mood to write Oppermann less post cards-- or not to write him any post cards at all... not in the last couple of months. In a sense this leaves me horribly remiss in terms of writing post cards. I am hoping that this web-log is some small restitution for the dearth of my having anything to say in post-cards... which seemed to delight and enchant Oppermann so much. The problem has become that of simply writing more and more post-cards, such that the value of words becomes exhausted in a given form.

I can hope that by transcribing the words of Oppermann from the Bestandsaufnahme of a post-card to the Bestandsumweg of a web log that there will be some possible chance of a deeper reading. It was just a given post card-- an arbitrary post-card if one can count on anything as arbitrary and not subject to the greater whims and hades-driven laws of chance and fate.

In this fated post-card I read about Oppermann and the black dog. I think that Oppermann would benefit from re-visiting Led Zeppelin, but this, of course, he speaks of as too adolescent and utterly futile, and this leaves me in a sense sad as well. Oppermann has not evented the possibility of speaking to a mother thus: "Hey-hey Mama like the way you move!" Perhaps it is unbecoming ...but that is the point. There is a place where we all go down and visit our own unbecoming "nature" at one point or another, and without this unbecoming nature we become insufferable and intolerant, brittle in our own right. I still love my friend Jan both despite and because of his brittleness, which is his depression: his resistance to his own "un-becoming."

What is un-becoming? Is it merely the obscene? Is it the opposition somehow discovered, a distortion of a turning (Die Kehre) within the Heraclitean (as Oppermann likes to pun in a most adolescent and almost Zeppelin driven manner, "Heraclitean") flux? "A simple twist of the fate..." for the flux?

In terms of our illusions, our wan and wanton adolescence I spent some time negotiating one of my favorite Heraclitean phrases, shared often with Oppermann:

Physis Kryptesthai Philei

This must be lined up in comparison with the shibboleth of a struggling stage magician:

"Illusion reveals what reality conceals."

We will call this "Notes on the bitterness of the ongoing concealment," at least insofar as Oppermann goes. What I can say is that while Oppermann seems to refuse any consolation from the unbecoming embrace of any slimy and slick black dog, and there is plenty of need for the scoundrel dogs in this universe to somehow keep the engine from becoming too perfect and too smoothe, while he may not be able to wrestle with this black dog, like a dog himself he still seeks "shelter from the storm," (an easy allusion to Bob Dylan in faded black) and like a black dog with an ungainly erection and the smell of bad canine flatulence he seeks this concealment of the importunate aspects of his existence lest they overwhelm his soul.

Lust then, for the eagle, the soaring predatory spirit, "bird of prey" or was that "bird of pray?"(in Jim Morrison's words), or perhaps, like Zarathustra, Oppermann with forsake his eagle and snake, and go down once again, into the unbecoming nature of his own human mortality: perhaps insofar as he like Zarathustra is a lover of all things that seek in themselves, and in him, their own "un-becoming."