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.

The meaning of singularity: a useless piece of ephemera

What I am about to publish can be rescinded at least in part if there is any violation of personal integrity or copyright.



Its getting dark so early
We'll be gone so soon
But pretty one more time
Before we're down the line
Pretty one more time.
(Greg Brown)

Now cresswell has assigned to us a particular cleft. That he was being a bit of an inquisitive teenager and was investigating the rather pleasant situation afforded by R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat. Fritz is a bit of a lady's man. And while it is infinitely comfortable sticking one's hand into the sports bra of some familiar co-ed while one is in college, the situation becomes tedious, boorish, or even pathetic for we older men advancing on the age of 40. This is not to disrespect the feminine, nor the time that one takes in college to be a rollicking young cat frisking among such feminine affection. It is just that at our age the point and the place of this becomes increasingly absurd: there is still the same desire... though hopefully, and perhaps reprovingly we are asked to mature by the parts of ourselves that look on this matter with a rather reproving intent.

It will remain uncertain:

1. If Cresswell got laid [and if there is any truth to "Fritz the Cat" it should be that "someone got laid" (lucky) - or in Dylan's words "Or maybe it was an accident"] some time round watching Fritz the Cat on magnetic VHS video tape that was on loan from the Tutt Library during the time of his rental.
2. Whether Cresswell got the movie back in time, or whether he was forced to pay harsh and draconian late fees that might be attached to such an object when it is found to be delinquent.
3. What Cresswell thought of Fritz the cat.
   

Only later would Oppermann and Ayres both secretly and individually confirm the intent of Dylan's words to ring truer than the epithets of Fritz the Cat, that getting laid is rarely anything to do with getting lucky (saving the question of the "accident" for later is always a good thing to do). In all likelihood Oppermann already knew all that. Though this does not mean we cast aspersions on the ladies who favored us with even a single moment of their graces: we thank them all. The greatness of the music goes beyond that, and the (at times turgid and fetid) idiot winds of sentimentality of this (e.g. "Visions of Johanna") will carry us indeed a very long way into the long, long farewell.

On the obverse/reverse of this page these words of Oppermann appear:

Lieber Herr Doktor,

I am writing you this note at 2:15 in the morning of February 23, 1988, in the hope that Cresswell has returned Fritz die Katze and that thusly this little piece of paper has lost it's official value. I have had a rather nauseating day (in Europe it generally rains on such days; here it doesn't even do that which makes it all the more nauseating) but I got done with my paper yesterday and today I indeed finished my last reading for the class (now I'm actually sitting here, reading Dostoevsky's "The Possessed"). Day after tomorrow (or actually today) tomorrow then that is I shall be going forth to Susi's house - the thought of which is both slightly nauseating and, at the same time, pleasant. I would prefer spending the block break by myself though. Soon Diotima will be coming back; I dreamed of waves last night and I simply don't know what's going to happen
1.) If it hasn't happened already
or
2.) if it isn't too late to happen
3.) If it isn't both

(circle one of the above)

A very pleasant day to you, my friend
(and if our existences aren't going to meet before wednesday afternoon, Susi's phone is
6...

your friend,

Dr. Dr. h.o. J.P. Oppermann

PS: I got an "A" on a paper back today - I'm beginning to think that Blasenheim might be the Übermensch

To be honest it will forever remain uncertain if Oppermann was just a kiss ass for Blasenheim, as if these grades really mattered to him (but they did, I mean he was a straight "A" student), or whether there was a creative synthesis between Oppermann's waking thought and Blasenheim's exuberance. And this itself was a fleeting symbol of the Übermensch. This then was a shining forth, a brilliant moment for Oppermann, when academic excellence meant something: that was the full force of the Arcadian. As if a letter grade made any difference! -Well it did indicate a gratifying moment when an esteemed professor poured down his appreciation toward you: that was golden, and that was Übermenschlich, because it was a matter of joy that spanned beyond the boundaries of academia per-se and entered really into the realm of the eschaton. In such an experience we could say that it is radically futural: as from Corinthians it seemed in that moment of Arcadia that we were so much older then: "For now we know in part, but then we shall know, even as we are known."

I would like to ask, for the record, why wasn't this actually called in German: "Fritz der Kater" -?

Friedrich Nietzsche: Genius and Definitive Precursor to "The Dude"

Now Cresswell was a Nietzschean first and foremost. He seemed to mention more than once that he had a Nietzschean chess board from Roecken. Cresswell was interested in the Overman, and Oppermann was interested in the Overman, der Übermensch. But the experience of "Fritz the Cat" was profoundly banal, there really was no hope for transcendence from this Art Crumb kind of nauseating banality: behind it was something getting ready to really make you sick. San Francisco in the 60's and early 70's is the very essence and definition of the smell of decaying eucalyptus leaves. Is this all America could really offer: we could say in the late eighties, a decade and a half easily since Hunter S. Thompson had pronounced that we had seen the high water mark of the consciousness revolution break: twenty years after the summer of love in 68. We were there too late. We could feel some of the feeling, the vaguest traces of it all, before we got embroiled in the political world of the Eighties, and the Nineties: where we got to business and went to work as a Nation, and we were wearing all of us these blue wool suits. And everyone was going to hell. We were too late. But the same damn party continued on into the wee hours of 2:30 in the morning anyhow.

And what was Oppermann doing at 2:30 in the morning? Somehow at 2:30 everyone becomes a figment of their own existential play: "No exit:" I could no more escape myself and who I was going to be than could he, a man born after the brief juncture of the 60's revolution. We were men born too late, and the dream had faltered. Nevertheless we continued to exist.


Nowadays we pass grades back and forth, little spidery black letters: "This one gets a C+, Ayres, you're barely passing!" And we seem to jeer and taunt each other with all these failed black letters, all these ledger notes that sink into debts and obligations: there is no longer an "A," rather there are complications and serious setbacks in the work: if your case is interesting then it is likely to extend the experience to a longer trial, that is all! In the end the letter grade is for the condemned man: the Homo sacer, who is in essence unsacrificeable because he is already condemned as not being sacred before the law, having fallen from sacrosanct, the truth of the finest vision of singularity is its capacity to become a sacrifice, to turn against the infinite stretch of eternity with the singular act that marks a depth of soul that is as unfathomable as eternity is broad.

Now let us take another step, before this hanging judge, before we get to the ballad of the drifter before another hanging judge, we have the Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest:

Judas pointed down the road
And said, "Eternity!"
"Eternity?" said Frankie Lee,
With a voice as cold as ice.
"That's right," said Judas Priest, "Eternity,
Though you might call it 'Paradise.'"

"I don't call it anything,"
Said Frankie Lee with a smile.
"All right," said Judas Priest,
"I'll see you after a while.

I said before that Eternity is rather broad. And we all show our cliche'd conceit in the end, and that is where our "existence" grows thin, "nothing is revealed."

Now Oppermann has a good deal to speak on nausea and rain, there is a certain fine drizzle that means nothing, that simply sprays and soaks everything, and every damn thing just gets wet, and it is not even a HARD rain that's going to fall, its just a nauseating rain, and Oppermann is saying that here, in his barely figured 19 year old consciousness, in Colorado in 1988 he is saying that in the United States there is not even rain. I'm sorry, Oppermann, there is not even any rain, and I don't know if anything ever even got wet aside from your own soul, and that may have only been a sign of something, a false-wetness of the United States, that never got wet enough for you to actually settle down, because now you are leaving it. It has never been wet enough for you here. It is not even wet enough for you to feel appropriately nauseated: and this was your destiny: I am not here being nauseated nearly enough!

Maybe if Oppermann had gone into the East: into the fall of the Soviet Block, or the rise of the Mafia Empire in Russia, and the infinitely more controlled mafia empire in the United States... maybe you could have gone into Kafka's mafia empire like in Der Prozeß: where betrayed in the end by your own warders they could have taken you out and stabbed you with a knife, and like a dog you would have possibly cried from the depth of your singular soul. As it is there is barely enough rain in America, and you are complaining about that. Oppermann, there is admittedly this bare, and soul-less place that for the time being we live in called America. Later after this you will cease to participate in "America" and the "West Coast" and what is "American" half way round the world it seems from your native Germany. You will become once more, again, a German. You will have avoided, in all likelihood any mandatory military service, and so you will have avoided the potentially abusive hardening of a young man sent out on maneuvers. You will become a German and you will have to make an accounting for all those years you've spent with all those soul-less Americans, who drove Nausea to its furthest pitch: there no longer was anything in America but one colossal sports stadium with glaring daylight lights.

It should also be highlighted that this was Oppermann's arcadian usage of his spare time: reading from Dostoevsky's "The Possessed," which could be translated also to mean: those not in possession of their own destiny. And indeed this was the case at this very moment. After all you and I both know to sneer and make a mockery of the notions of "innocent free will." Rather we will term this that there is possession.

Maybe you were possessed by an anima figure whom you renamed Diotima (forcing me to think endlessly of Robert Musil's absolutely bitter, twisted irony round his naming one of the main characters relentlessly "Diotima" in such a way that it is an ultimate indictment of her pretensions. NO. Rather I believe that your "Diotima" had a certain softness to her, and maybe a little more grace, at least insofar as I remember her, and I do remember her sending me a post card of a white tiger crossing a green river from India... at least I think I did. This image is lost to anyone but me now. It is just a memory and thus means nothing, it has already grown thin, thin to the point of obsolesence, so forgive me please, Oppermann!).

There remain for me two questions:
1) What is the existential figure of Oppermann's adolescent ambivalence concerning Susi Willett and Diotima (and ultimately, post-Arcadia: ex-wife as wife to ex wife as X.-)? - that is that he was neurotically torn between two women: one who always seemed a bit of a gentle, less pronounced, form of femininity: Susi; and the other other is the one whom you never saw after Colorado College: someone whom time has simply swept away.
2) Why did Oppermann feel he have to write on the back of this Cresswellian Fritz the Cat receipt?

Once Again, the Dude... Definitively

"The dude abides": the collision of Oppermann's consciousness with a tribute to a lack of success. The paralyzing humor of abandoning all cliche: the confrontation with meaning.

"Smokey, you mark that frame in 8, you're entering a world of pain!!"

Oppermann even had a dream where he was speaking with this other German fellow about the Dude in German: der Geck! There is hope for some region of translation here across the atlantic. Maybe there is some possible export of American culture possible in the image of a man... well, sometimes there is this man. And this is how I must begin with Sam Elliot's monologue:


"Now this here story I'm about to unfold took place in the early '90s - just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the I-raqis. I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? Sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here - the Dude from Los Angeles. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude. The Dude, from Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man - and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide. Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough."

Nothing could be more patently "busted" than the first Iraqui war. We came out it with images of American G.I.'s looting Iraqi bunkers full of Kuwaiti loot. And this is where we get the first voiceover of the first version of George bush, the wimp who would push the pencils or the pens but would just as soon drop the bomb on you as stare at you cross-eyed another moment. And he wouldn't think nothin' on it. It was just business.

"This aggression will not stand!"

Famous words, perhaps the most famous words of president George Bush the first of our country. A single term. Looking back on the rather ugly play of Clinton into Bush the II I would be tempted to wonder if it would not have been better to have given him a successful guy, a second term would have really given us a taste of exactly what sort of a fellow this first Bush was. I could only hope that that would have meant we would not have had the second installment of Bush.

Now I apologize for this commentary into the contemporary political realm of the United States. But it is part of this political commentary that has driven Oppermann of the last 16 to 20 years, from the days immediately Post-Arcadia all the way until the present.

The situation of The Big Lebowski takes place during the reign of the first George Bush during the first Iraqi expedition. Oppermann was in Harvard dealing with idiots that actually believe in what Leo Strauss said. These are not the friendly sort of idiots, no, these were the heart of the neo-conservative strand of ideology for the current machine of the American Empire. These idiots were not nice idiots. We could say that Oppermann had the opportunity during this period to watch the really dangerous people who bought the neo-conservative ideology to actually ascend to the first stages of power. By the time they have reached our age they are the young but mature administrators of the power in the executive branch of government (a legitimate candidate for major public office is about 10 to 15 years ahead of Oppermann and myself).

Jeff Lebowski, the Dude, is a forty-something. This is an important comment because both Oppermann and I are not yet forty. The Dude's mythos happens to a fully mature middle aged man, not quite at the threshold of late middle age, nor at the level of Bush the first who was probably entering into late age in his presidency (just as Regan before him had always been in the late age of his life, and even into senility). Well all this happens to the Dude, who is middle aged, and it is not certain if he is the age of Joel and Ethan Cohen or not.

The Dude stands at the current Zenith of a man's power, and very much like Ulrich from Robert Musil's "Man Without Qualities," he has little or nothing to show for it. He made a couple of screenplays with about six other guys: he actually tries to impress Maude Lebowski with his history of being some kind of a "writer!" Now that is really the height of the pathetic, man.

The Dude's range of affect is very important here: the Dude operates by stealth as a kind of mood ninja who travels the entire galaxy of emotion, almost with a single word: "Fuck."

The mood of the Dude is never indifferent: even when he says to "The Stranger," "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!" It is coming from his rebellious teenager side, lashed out in full force at the one man who seems to actually "get" the Dude in the entire movie, at least Sam Elliot is in his corner, and that is everything a good old cowboy could be: right down to the song of the coyotes in Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man." Did you notice the striking resemblance between Sam Elliot and the gentleman who is the airplane pilot in Alaska: the one who sings the song about:

"The only darn thing that's left
Is those darned old cay-yotes and me." (Bob McDill/Richard Thompson)

Well this little wimp of a man was the head of the CIA and God knows what else. Whatever you do, you don't fuck with George Bush, older or younger, because in his wry way he will get you and have your nads.

One could say that these humorless U.S. presidents can be known best for their lack of humor.

Oppermann and Ayres Diffidently

I wanted to say that there is an importance to Oppermann's leaning in this picture: (this web log was erased with a sudden electronic error which makes one speculate about everything being incredibly impermanent). Oppermann leans on me because I am shorter and because his forearm can easily rest on my shoulder. I have had always a bit of a short-man-complex around being shorter. It is not an extreme or insane level of this complex to my knowledge, however it is good to relate this "being shorter" as somehow profound.

In this image I stare with the eyes I describe as being like the dylan song "what was it you wanted?" with "vague menace" (Oppermann's terms for this song). I said in the previous log that was accidentally erased that Oppermann used his height to become like a black figure from one of Kafka's drawings: he would walk around in a long black coat and black hat, discussed elsewhere.

This is an image of Oppermann and Ayres in real proximity, or perhaps only in parabolic proximity.

(... ...)

This is a note to say that this post originally had absolutely nothing on it.

Theresa, Once and For All, in Arcadia (hopefully a final review)

By this posting I hope to lay the question of Theresa largely to rest. I can at least present a picture of Oppermann, Theresa (I think I still remember her hot breath in my ear from that moment) and Ayres looking into the blinding brightness of the flash photograph. I think I had a relatively insipid or entranced look on my face. Oppermann was by contrast ecstatic. Once again the image is from Bemis Hall at Colorado College.

January 1988 was when I met Theresa. I had had a girlfriend previous to this but no one who was willing to really meet me with the desire that Theresa had in that moment. This was an important relationship for me. Definitely not the last, but in many senses definitely the first. I have discussed that Theresa confronted me on several issues that were important: she would not let Oppermann and I rest in our Artemesian love of the beauty of philosophy. And in this point she provided an abrasive but singularly important independence of the feminine counterpoint to my philosophic position. I thank her for being someone who fought with me well. And she and Oppermann did not get along. Oppermann regarded Theresa as a phillistine. Theresa was definitely at her most beautiful that I remember at this time of first meeting her. I think that she introduced me to Joni Mitchell's Blue album: and to this day this album for me stands for her. It must be said that the last time I met Theresa in Los Angeles in the mid 1990's she was wearing pastel and engaged to be married to an attorney. There was something about her that was "in recovery" - she had been through some nasty spots with drinking, I hope it can just be written off as the folly of youth. We all walk so close to that possibility: once again: "there but for the grace of God..." and so on... My last conversation with Theresa by telephone broke off any hope of communication: she said I sounded too crazy (and indeed, to be fair, reflecting I might have been acting like an over affectionate idiot on the phone, not respecting boundaries): I told her that she was too "sane," conveying how hurt I was at her condemnation. That was that. That was the end of that. I still prefer to see Theresa peeking out from some trees in the Colorado winter snow. It is enough to remember and to forget her for that.

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