The Oppermann Book

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)

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

1. Relate the issue of Friendship to its shadow: afraid
2. discuss C.G. Jung's Memories Dreams and Reflections: "Shooting Siegfried" dream as it relates to the Pri- root of friendship
3. 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
4. Uncertain
5. 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

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

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

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:

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



2. "Raghupati" performed by Bhagvan Das



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



4. Chanting of the Gyuto Monks



5. 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:

1. Rêveries - Passions (Dreams - Passions)



2. Un bal (A ball)



3. Scène aux champs (Scene in the country)



4. Marche au supplice (March to the scaffold)



5. 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:

1. Der Sandmann



2. Ignaz Denner



3. Die Jesuitenkirche in G.



4. Das Sanctus



5. Das öde Haus



6. Das Majorat



7. Das Gelübde



8. 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

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:

1. Oppermann as a sort of bachelor-machine
2. Oppermann as a dude
3. Oppermann as a thinker
4. Oppermann as an author
5. Oppermann as a practical explanation of genius
6. Oppermann as a lover of bears (from the right distance)
7. Oppermann as an academic
8. Oppermann as a sort of critic
9. Oppermann as a writer of Post-Cards (notations from the brink of some other topos or non-topos)
10. Oppermann as an inhabitant of Seattle
11. Oppermann as a commentator on the post-psychological epoch
12. Oppermann as a German (Swabian)
    
13. 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)
    
14. Oppermann as a writer, now, of English web-logs
15. 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)
16. Oppermann as control freak (with features of panic attacks when I have visited my former analyst Lee Roloff on light hearted business)
    
17. 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)
    
18. Oppermann as a walker
19. Oppermann as a commentator on Ayres (sub categories relate to his own presenting persona: Arthur Holzgold, Falkenburger, etc.)
    
20. Oppermann as an occasionally intoxicated writer (sub-categories of Tea, Bowmore, and Boddingtons)
21. Oppermann as an observer of analytical psychologists
22. Oppermann as one of the best informed literary thinkers of our time
23. Oppermann as a leading authority on Robert Walser in the United States
24. Oppermann as a sleeper
25. Oppermann as a commentator on "Jeder fuer sich und Gott gegen Alles"
26. etc.
27. Oppermann as defined in a category of finite singularity
28. Oppermann as defined by the totality of his human and non-human personal experience
29. Oppermann as a world traveler
30. Oppermann as not contained in the categories of this or any other essay
31. Oppermann as one who has inhaled my second hand cigarette smoke
32. Oppermann as a drinker of black coffee (I believe this is a religious conviction)
33. Oppermann as expelled from the Institute of German Romanticism
34. Oppermann as a reader of Franz Kafka (which is not the same as being a literary thinker)
35. Oppermann as educator (in the manner of Schopenhauer)
36. Oppermann as Kleist
37. Oppermann as Hoffmann
38. Oppermann as inhabitant of Ravensburg
39. 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)
40. Oppermann as procrastinator
41. Oppermann as masturbator (in the image of Peter Handke's Kuerze Brief zum langer Abscheid)
42. Oppermann as idiot (sub-category as fellow-idiot)
    
43. Oppermann as friend
44. Oppermann as one of those fucking sages
45. Oppermann as used book salesman
46. Oppermann as consumer
47. Oppermann as nose-picker
48. Oppermann as poet
    
49. Oppermann as a botanical incompetent
50. Oppermann as tennis player
51. Oppermann as grand-son
52. Oppermann as ....
53. and so on.
54. Oppermann as exhausted
55. Oppermann as shot
56. Oppermann as revived
57. 
    
58. Oppermann as shot again
    
59. Oppermann as retrieved
    
60. Oppermann as gelassen
61. 
    

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.