Hesse A-letheia: Invocation of the Muses

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

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

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

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

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)

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

"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.