At this very moment Oppermann could be writing another Web Log!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)