Post from a Dream of Oppermann Posting

The image above should be set in the black background of the Oppermann in Praxis Web-Log Space.  In the dream I saw the email of images of Oppermann living his life, and in the company of beautiful and loving friends as I had received such a file recently.  I had responded in the following manner:

1. Oppermann is alive, and in being alive there is goodness.
2. Oppermann is around children, and this makes him wiser and kinder.
3. Oppermann looks happy.
4. Love you, Oppermann.

It is worth adding (though it has been added elsewhere that the Magritte image of the Lovers appeared in the Colorado College Symposium on Intimacy in 1987 or 88.  I plastered the image on my door a little after I had met the difficult love of Theresa.

The Disquieting Muse (de Chirico) seems just the right touch. I wanted to do a more elaborate piece that might explore this theme as a complete image in itself, but the conjunction, and my hasty placing of abstract planes of bold color are the broad strokes... in the dream all the brush strokes and patina are there, but cannot be afforded except in the de Chirico and Magritte Vignettes in the image. 

Further into the Substance of Departure

Whereas Handke spoke about the "Farewell" or "Abschied" of a (fictional?) relationship between a man and his spouse in Short Letter, Long Farewell (a text he discovered and shared with me at Colorado College)..... Oppermann has taken his Departure from this continent, and from the continental intimacy of our relationship. Our friendship was not a marriage of two men or a man and a woman... but then what was it?

Things progress onwards.  I know that he is well and that he is struggling toward something.  But it is the mother and something other than the mother, that is why his Departure is for his spirit, his animus into an unknown, and therefore unconscious, sense of the future.  It is not the mother, for whom there is farewell, and for whom I myself must experience the drift and ebb.

I myself attempt to make my life resonant enough, turn into a symbol (which is something different than a parable).

I have mentioned before, though it is always worth mentioning the comment of Jung about the crossing of three roads, the Tri-Via in Wandlung der Symbole... symbols of transformation, and it is worth picking up again, but this thread bears a wear on its filaments of sense, and I hesitate for a moment once again.

Instead it is worthy to report that Oppermann has produced a volume on the Imaginary Possibles.  It is a jewel of insight, though for the time being it may appear to be impossible for me to fully read and comment on.  I believe that it holds an enduring relation to Oppermann's love of reading philosophy, and so his imagination lingers there.  There is some significance to the notion that part of the philosophic novel takes place as a dialog in a Stadia-- a Stadium. Thus the religious festival offered for the maximum of human inspection and introspection.

It may be that this book cannot be read now but must be read in the future.  As Oppermann, and now also my friend Nelson Gary writes "More Later." (yes, always more later).

The majestic monolog of great invention makes one the emperor of all things in the monolythic text.  This I have ascertained in reading Mencius: in a later chapter of Mencius there is a description of the order of control of land: the Emperor (Son of Heaven) owns a 1000 square mile area of land all the way to the farmer, who owns barely 100 acres.

Oppermann's text covers thousands and thousands of square miles, and so he like others who make great volumes becomes a "Son of Heaven" an emperor of a vast domain ...even if only "in reality"... as Kafka's edict in the smallest parabolic sense proves greatest of all.

I for myself tend the small plots.

Mencius writes that a farmer who does his best with 100 acres can feed 8 people.  (To be honest I do not know if I am yet able to do that.)

I have a feeling that Oppermann needs to find a place in order for him to discover suddenly, one day, absent mindedly that he too in his life has slipped into a mystery and become a symbol.  What remains is that there is so much left to come, even all this, and the sense of all this will be changed utterly, into something else.  We have so much to learn.

A Letter to Oppermann

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

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

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

"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

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.