(Arguably the Second of the Existential Pictures)
The picture is over-exposed, and yet in the autumn of 1987 this was an apparently fine photographic exposure. The picture was taken by me of Oppermann himself. How did we get into the habit of taking these pictures, even if it wasn't for more than one evening...? There really are no other records of Oppermann and I in such a condition, practicing, philosophizing, and existentializing our condition as students.
Oppermann sits at the top of a field. His eyes seem wide open behind the round rims of his glasses. He wears his round-rimmed glasses and his eyes seem large, and round like some primitive Sumerian votive idol.
(Teracotta image of a man from Tell Es-Sawwan 6000 BCE)
It may be unfair to compare a man with an image over 8000 years old, such an effort dwarfs and contorts memory, such that it may efface the first image... twenty years ago, which is so much like today. The wide eyes of Oppermann reflect a sense of potential terror, something unspeakable is at work, this wide eyed wonder that has also turned to menace is easily 8000 years old, though it stems back to something earlier... even if it is simply in the anticipated flash of Oppermann's then elegant camera, the oncoming headlights of an approaching force of massive and possibly destructive power is figured in this depiction.
I have said before that it is over-exposed. We can reduce this simply to my and our poor craftsmanship with the camera lens, but I rather appreciate the face that fades into white, over-exposed in a kind of Colorado cold whiteness that is almost overwhelming. It was then that we stated that things were cold, and became in the habit of stating that things were "fucking cold" if you, gentle reader will pardon the crassness of such expression. This coldness was hardly arcadian.
The abyss of the classroom in the arbitrarily "first" of the existential photographs is now displaced to the background, but it is an overpowering background. Behind this man, the picture wishes foremost to convey, there is a void. Between Oppermann and myself is now a pool of searing heat, and white light, white as in the presence of a blistering winter cold that is to follow... but this is still Autumn, Oppermann still wears his "Penny Loafer" shoes, vestiges of his prep-school pretensions, yet Oppermann never would abide the pastel of 1980's "Prep" image; in fact pastel was anathema. The shoes were regarded as civilized and adult, and a part of his presentation that immediately aligned Oppermann with the academics, rather than the students of the school. Oppermann held friendly relations with many of the professors, to my envy, largely out of his sophistication, his European style, his irritation and indifference with sophomoric neurosis (despite his and my status in this picture as second year "sophomore" students, even if only in name). I will not say that Oppermann was above neurosis. I believe that his stay in the United States, and particularly his marriage, has tended to leave him somewhat more neurotic than his more Steppenwolf-like years in college.
Oppermann sits perched at the top of the bleachers overlooking the Colorado College football field. The condition behind him is of athletics: competition, goal, glory and gain are the keys to the experience of the field. We assiduously avoided all forms of sports entertainment as somehow crass and evolutionarily beneath us. But we did not avoid the night. And these images were all taken at night, reminiscent of "film noir," yet somehow incapable of finding enough energy to enter into the hysteria of the "noir" genera. Suffice it to say, these photos were taken at night. And this night was reminiscent of the course I was studying, or soon to study at that time with Professor Harvey Rabbin on Romanticism. I am thinking of Novalis' "Hymn to the Night."
Welcher Lebendige, Sinnbegabte, liebt nicht vor allen Wundererscheinungen des verbreiteten Raums um ihn, das allerfreuliche Licht – mit seinen Farben, seinen Stralen und Wogen; seiner milden Allgegenwart, als weckender Tag. Wie des Lebens innerste Seele athmet es der rastlosen Gestirne Riesenwelt, und schwimmt tanzend in seiner blauen Flut – athmet es der funkelnde, ewigruhende Stein, die sinnige, saugende Pflanze, und das wilde, brennende, vielgestaltete Thier – vor allen aber der herrliche Fremdling mit den sinnvollen Augen, dem schwebenden Gange, und den zartgeschlossenen, tonreichen Lippen. Wie ein König der irdischen Natur ruft es jede Kraft zu zahllosen Verwandlungen, knüpft und löst unendliche Bündnisse, hängt sein himmlisches Bild jedem irdischen Wesen um. – Seine Gegenwart allein offenbart die Wunderherrlichkeit der Reiche der Welt.
Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood -- the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it -- but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. -- Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.
Novalis is said to have written this work in overwhelming nostalgia and sentimentality for his lost love or wife. To this Oppermann spoke recently of sentimentality, and the sentimentality of these reveries... that they were not overly sentimental, though he, like these reveries, had a profound sentimentality. Oppermann stated that none of this would qualify for the level of sentimentality that would count on the level where one could "Pull a Deleuze." Oppermann was referring to his term for the death of one of the truly great philosophers who influences our work: Gilles Deleuze.
(Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995, who ended his life by auto-defenestration)
This portrait of the late Deleuze has a much greater degree of repose than our current "existential image" of the young philosopher in his black coat, scarf and hat. Deleuze, by comparison is somewhat pathetically leaning to the left in our view of him. The wide open terror and possible menace ("what was it you wanted?" asks Bob Dylan) of Oppermann's face is a salutary counter to the listing image of Deleuze, overburdened by sickness and possible exhaustion with even having to bother with the incomprehension of the incomprehensible.
I will add the comment from a post card Oppermann sent me from 2004, shortly before my former wife left the house, shortly after I had returned from visiting Oppermann in Seattle. The card reads precisely as follows, written as usual only in Oppermann's hand, which for the purpose of this card is the only signature he leaves, aside from the legacy of his own thought which I transcribe into digital media:
4/21 - I was briefly tempted to use this post card to babble meaningless stuff in Deleuzian French - but then realized that this would nauseate both you and Corinne. -If you want to, you can put this card into your copy of Difference and Repetition, and then look at it over and over again. - I'm about to head out for some Starbucks coffee, and I might write you another post card from there. So if you get a Pre-Raphaelite card in the same mail with this one, that is exactly what happened. "Difference"
Once again, or perhaps "once before," it was as though Oppermann signed the card as "Difference" itself, still later he appears as "Techne" (see card from 12/1/2007). I might be tempted to make comment on the unicity of the two through time and coincidence, but this would be pushing the point. Suffice it to say that the condition discussed on the back of this card is a "Schlechtes Unendigkeit," a "bad infinity" from which one is only right to in Jan's words "Pull a Deleuze," especially in the light of the disintegration of the relations with our wives, which was alluded to here, in this example, where bad news simply rained like hammer blows. What kept us sane? What kept us sane were probably all the bad jokes hidden in all those post-cards!
Our discussion would be incomplete if we were to neglect the drapery of the Oppermann coat. The coat is a drapery, which perhaps should not be mentioned insofar as even mentioning it will cause us, in the manner of Sebald, to forget the true nature of Oppermann's coat, which he wore with the menace of a shroud over his figure as it loomed over me in the Colorado night. Oppermann was sufficiently dark. Oppermann had achieved, even by that young age, a sufficiency of darkness, which even as my friend and former analyst Lee Roloff commented has turned into a "brittleness" of the present day... it is a black brittleness, the blackness of black, brittle ice (and the ice is of Dylan's Summerian Isis in the black brittle night: "we chopped through the night and we chopped through the dawn.") I did not want to be closer to that image: I did not want the warmth of that coat, it was the brittleness which inspired me from the first. Oppermann said recently in agreement with the Einstein coat: there will never be another Einstein, nor another Oppermann coat.
We were friends at that time. We still are. Oppermann's iciness has never killed me. It never put a chill on a friendship that for twenty years and more has burned intense and true; it has been a searching and a finding of sufficient blackness and even brittleness to deal with the condition of our existence without finding fault in others, without finding judgment or blame: if one has to "lie down and take it" then one indeed has to be brittle as ice: pulverized by existence through sufficient beating, still waiting for the light of the return of spring in a realm of darkness.
Shortly after we completed these photos, the semester ended and we continued to write and read to each other the stories that inspired us, principally of the grim expanse of the "Philosopher in Hell" (one of Oppermann's earliest stories written in Autumn of the next year in the warmth of Mexico, where he spent the semester as an "exchange guest student." It remained a shibboleth: again in Bob Dylan's words, reaching back 8000 years and to the ends of time "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." There was a savor and a relish of a place which had almost burnt out and exhausted every possible caprice... yes and what then? What then? Do we wait and see what happens next? Can we gain some perspective from our grim Sartrean vision of "what is Hell, and why are we compelled to be there?" Such a hell had dispensed with the hell of human aggression (the senselessness of our despair in the current political situation as "war all the time" the endless spillage of human blood under the hot sun of Iraqi mid day, a bloody abomination of Nietzsche's "noontide") and took itself only to the night which stood in contrast to the shroud of Oppermann, his black hat, scarf and coat.
Oppermann states that the hat was lost: stolen sometime later during a lecture in Palmer Hall with Professor Tim Fuller (who may historically be reduced to being an irritant). The coat has disappeared. The scarf remains, an optimistic relic, hopefully not too optimistic, of this moment in time.
These images are indeed to me extremely resonant with Ambrose: somewhat morose, industrial, profoundly poetic and sad. I will repeat to make this clear: these images for me are listening to these songs. The images are the songs, more inextricably woven into the meaning of driving there and listening to them than I could say. There is a barren landscape but the ineluctable greatness of the sky that glows im abendrot. (I wonder if it is possible to say that this instance is of abendblaue?)
First clear image below of the Vincent Thomas Bridge, lit up by blue. A couple of years ago I had a significant dream about being unable to cross this bridge, that the flow of the life force was blocked from this direction. I made it across fine tonight.
