Bestandsaufnahme from the Oppermannian Praxis

it is sunday. Oppermann does not use his computer on Sunday[.] This was a test to use my telephone which failed to a large degree. I have edited the web log. I took some intense pictures of trees in Oppermann's parking lot either that day or the day before. I have taken less photos since I came back from that visit.

Notations on Various Conditions

While ordering the beginning of the day I was forced to think on various topics while reading Deleuze and Guattari's "War Machine":

1. Relationship does not belong to the order of the state: it is not observable. Relationship is always imperceptible, a form of magic outside of the surveillance of the state.
2. Desire cannot be forced: desire cannot be regulated. This is the fundamental element where desire and relationship are not obtainable through the state apparatus.
3. Deleuze and Guattari have yet to (and never will in this form) comprehend the relationship to the feminine, Isis and Asherah. There is something about their psychology that remains dry, spirited, but somehow unwilling to deal with all the anima attachments that tend to drag us backward--- it is too big a question for Deleuze and Guattari, and for Foucault, who tended to work on the issues of the shadows of relationship through power: they did not understand that the desire behind this is painfully part of the state organization itself: that the state is not uniformly counter to desire... even though they admitted to micro-fasciscular forms of power and organization... the argument was not developed enough. I do not want to call the missing element "the Feminine" because that definitely rings wrong in this instance. I can call it soul. They lack soul.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah
5. Bob Dylan's "Isis" is about as close to a non-Oedipal description of desire. If it is Oedipal, then it is a matter of passing through Oedipus, not of being reducible to a psychoanalytic model by any stretch of the imagination.
6. I am thinking of "Snow Crash" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson is rather blind when it comes to politics, but his theory is that the cult of Ashera spread a sort of venerial virus that blocked out thinking.
7. Isis is associated with the development of the city state: at least as is discussed in Jung (who may be a psychologist of the state, but nevertheless is a heavy influence in terms of his capacity for developing relationship in the most profound sense between various conditions: incarcerated, small, captured and also large, kowledgeable, infinite and so on... and his use of dreams): Jung discusses the "Mural Crown" of Isis representing the city walls.
8. The City walls represent order and regulation of flows (of desire, commerce, etc.): various means of police/polis. When a city is stormed by nomadic forces of desire it is said to be raped, violated as a woman is violated.
9. The State apparatus sets in and defines and controls, orders and reifies only so long as there is soul.
10. Love labors, "alienated labor" (Marx) ("Arbeit") represents the point where the demands of love reach a crisis: work ("Werga," "Werk") and desire, which are freely given turn restlessly at the point of becoming alienated from desire.
11. I am working in a modality where I stand as a "man of state" with his letters and authority (It is the set up of "middle management"), and yet I understand that the interface is through relationship and connection. I bring my employees together: and yet desire cannot be forced. The employees are resistant to the idea of forced relating. The result is that the war machine slips out of my dominion....

Given The Circumstance

I am driving on my way to work. I am driving as I have been driving all these years. I am making minute travels across a sphere whose circumphrence I have never seen with my own eye, enclosed with gravity, I still seem to be driving across a plane. I am driving to work.

A similar voyage, be it the cooler blue alien fields of psychedelic hallucinogen colors produced in "2001 A Space Odyssey," or into the golden Rubedo of "The Fountain." The point of each journey is to reach the end of all stories, and stories about stories and achieve renewal through annihilation in an abundance of energy (the closest earthly equivalent would be putting oneself into an active volcano). The problem is that this event has been expressed from many different angles already to say the least.

But there are many many stories. And each story and the finest articulations of each story must be thought out, and thought through. This is where it apparently seems that the stories are endless, possibly a bad infinity of repetition: this is the definition of "Nausea" at it's worst: continual redundance that one is forced to live out over and over. One has enough "sense" to understand that one is forced to a cruel repetition.

The longest travel yet imagined is a 12-hundred light year journey as imagined in Arnofsky's "Fountain" (oh yes, we know that the universe is a lot larger, but we have not imagined this as a journey in any significant manner). We could say that it lasts only as many thoughts and stories take for it to get there, for what else to we really measure time by in the absolute sense, but the prevailance of certain images and the time it takes to digest them. What was the purpose of such a lengthy trip? Renewal and Annihilation? Easily stated, but hardly meant. It certainly was a significantly greater distance than my entire trip to and from my banal place of work (working as I am within a sphere or structure whose intent I am unable to perceive in any significant manner--- so I report on minutia of the day and call these reports "Bestandsaufnahmen" concerning films I have seen or particularly satisfying experiences of various colors and flavors of desire...

The Fountain, Metonymy and the Life of Images, The Pace of Film, I'm Not Mad

" The Mercurial Fountain" (C.G. Jung, Psychology of the Transference)
We are the metals' first nature and only source
The highest tincture of the art is made through us
No fountain and no water has my like
I make both rich and poor both whole and sick
For healthful can I be and Poisonous
(From the Rosarium prints, the first of which is pictured above)

1.) The Fountain is an ancient image of an animated spring. The fountain exists as a place fundamentally relating to water, which seeks ever its own deepest depth, and thereby it is a matter of the soul that is reached through descent: but the fountain "wells" upwards.

2.) Metonymy is the process of the transfer of images, springing from one isolated context and being transfered to the next. The process of this springing produces as much energy as it takes for us to imagine the connection through the metaphorical/metonymic rift. The image of the fountain is profound and worth spending time with. The fountain springs. Pegasus (Greek, "Springer") springs (pegazei) with a leap of poetic imagination. And we unblock blocked springs, and dry wells, where we rested so long awaiting our images.

3.) The film by Darren Arnofsky entitled "The Fountain" lacks an essential element of pacing in order for it to be considered great. The pacing is frantic, consumer Hollywood pacing. Thus the film capitulates to capital, surrenders its poetic reverie to the manic pacing of the ...Conquistadors in Hollywood all too soon. The point is that the film is a wash if we consider it runs through its Conquistador element like some quick remake of an action film like "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It is a film about a real voyage, so it has to travel beyond the comfort of "adventure" into something much more uncanny.

4.) I may apologize for some of my previous posts, though as yet I will not remove them. I was so incredibly mad.

1.) Wel-2 from the dictionary of Indo-European roots:

To turn, roll; with derivatives referring to curved, enclosing objects.Derivatives include waltz, willow, wallow, revolve, valley, and helix. 1a. waltz, from Old High German walzan, to roll, waltz; b. welter, from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch welteren, to roll. Both a and b from Germanic *walt-. 2. whelk1, from Old English weoluc, weoloc, mollusk (having a spiral shell), whelk, from Germanic *weluka-. 3. Perhaps Germanic *wel-. willow, from Old English welig, willow (with flexible twigs).


4. Perhaps Germanic *welk-. walk, from Old English wealcan, to roll, toss, and wealcian, to muffle up. 5. O-grade form *wol-. a. well1, from Old English wiella, wælla, welle, a well (< “rolling or bubbling water,” “spring”); b. gaberdine, from Old High German walln, to roam; c. wallet, possibly from Old North French *walet, roll, knapsack. a–c all from Germanic *wall-. 6. Perhaps suffixed o-grade form *wol--. a. wale, from Old English walu, streak on the skin, weal, welt; b. Old High German *-walu, a roll, round stem, in compound *wurzwalu (see wrd-). Both a and b from Germanic *wal. 7. Extended form *welw-. a. wallow, from Old English wealwian, to roll (in mud), from Germanic *walwn; b. vault1, vault2, volt2, voluble, volume, volute, volutin, volvox, voussoir; archivolt, circumvolve, convolve, devolve, evolve, involucrum, involve, multivoltine, revolve, from Latin volvere, to roll; c. suffixed o-grade form *wolw--. volva, vulva, from Latin vulva, volva, covering, womb; d. suffixed zero-grade form *ww--. valve, valvule, from Latin valva, leaf of a door (< “that which turns”); e. suffixed zero-grade form *wu-ti-. Alyce clover, from Greek halusis, chain; f. suffixed form *welu-tro-. elytron, from Greek elutron, sheath, cover. 8. Suffixed form wel-n-. ileus; neurilemma, from Greek eilein (< *welnein), to turn, squeeze. 9. Perhaps variant *wall-. vail1, vale1, valley, from Latin valls, vallis, valley (< “that which is surrounded by hills”). 10. Possibly suffixed form *wel-en-. Helen; elecampane, inulin, from the Greek name Helen (oldest form Welen), Helen. 11. Suffixed form *wel-ik-. helicon, helix; helicopter, from Greek helix, spiral object. 12. Suffixed form *wel-mi-nth-. helminth; anthelmintic, platyhelminth, from Greek helmis, helmins (stem helminth-), parasitic worm. (Pokorny 7. el- 1140.)

2.) The energetic Mechanism of "The Fountain" by Arnofsky works by metonymic leaps: each event becomes a symbol of, and should enfold, the other elements of the film. Thus the journey of the "Astronaut" (I admit these are my favorite sequences) is a symbol of the quest of the Conquistador and the scientist, and so on. There is no one reality that should be considered major or minor in this film if it is to be appreciated: each reality symbolizes the other.

4.) One can Botch the film if one is mad, shallow, or unimaginative, or a combination of these three. The attempt to reduce the film to a plot about the scientist's quest for a cure for his wife's cancer misses some operating elements.

3.) Pacing in Herzog's other Amazon stories is far preferable. Pacing is preferable in any of Herzog's or Tarkovsky's films: precisely because the pacing goes beyond hackneyed suspense. Suspense is not over-used, rather a series of velocities of time is used that is profound. Herzog and Tarkovsky might put the viewer to sleep (I become exhausted by their films, but incredibly full of their energy and profundity as well, satisfied by some element that any attempt to hurry the pace will not satisfy). It was as though Arnofsky's film was insufficiently Amazonian. Arnofsky needs to consult a great deal more with films like "Mirror" or "Aguirre Wrath of God" or "Fitzcarraldo" (Even "Fata Morgana," set in North Africa) before his own work may be considered great.

2.) The lives of images and symbols take a great deal of living out in order to be accomplished. Cinema/film-making has to do with the degree one can accomplish an intensification of space to convey the symbol or image in a brief period of time. One has to understand what it actually might be like to travel one-hundred, five-hundred, or a thousand years in an alembic with a tree. This kind of relationship is barely played out, it's boredom, it's nothingness, its blissful "being." 1) The image directly of a star-voyager is one of the most direct translations of the imagery of the Egyptian Book of the Dead ("Going Forth By Day") that I can imagine: a bark is fabricated of one's own images --- to navigate the stars. It is the images themselves that, given that they are woven with care... are capable of navigating the void.

1.) Void and Gal-lactose. I do think it is appropriate that the Tree of Life bleeds milk. The Pharo sets off into the milky star dreaminess of a nebula within the milky-way galaxy. The imagery is all here it is almost lock-step. But what keeps it from being a cliche? The tree bleeds a milk that turns everything into its living blossoming self: the Conquistador's greed meets with complete assimilation in the milk: Gabricus is atomized and immersed into the body of Beya in the moment of their confabulation.

2.) In order to be aware of the possible pitfalls of the tree symbolism, and the tree's relation to the ultimate vessel to travel through space and time... (as inescapably beautiful as these images are to me)... I add this commentary from Jung in order to be another threshold for intensification, not to reduce the repleteness of the image: "Symbols of Transformation" paragraphs 367-68:

"The Bundahish symbolizes the first human beings, Mashya and Mashyoi, as the tree Rivas. According to a Nordic myth, God created human beings by breathing life into a substance called "tre" (tree, wood). Gr. "hyle" also means "wood." In the wood of the world-ash Yggdrasill a human pair hide themselves at the end of the world, from them will spring a new race of human beings. At the moment of universal destruction the world-ash becomes the guardian mother, the tree pregnant with death and life. The regenerative function of the world-ash helps explain the image in the chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead called "The Gate of Knowledge of the Souls of the East":

'I am the pilot in the holy keel, I am the steersman who allows himself no rest in the ship of Ra. I know the tree of emerald green from whose midst Ra rises to the height of the clouds.'

"Ship and tree (i.e., the ship of death and the tree of death) are closely related here. The idea that the sun rises up, born from the tree."

4.) The human interest angle of the story is where the story threatens most to go astray into the cliche of being a soap opera. The most elegant transition through the personal relations of familial human dasein can Tarkovsky's version of "Solaris." (The more recent, 2002 version of Soderbergh's Solaris falls into an even less profound Hollywood-ized version of human familiarity, and it includes a soap-opera star, you guessed it, George Clooney from ER.) The problem is that I feel a certain sense of fury and revulsion at these voyeuristic "reality" shows that venture into the realm of situational dilemmas: "COPS" and "ER" are such examples of where this ilk drained itself off to. One has to handle the medical-aesthetic component of the film very delicately: Tarkovsky has this beautiful, lilting Russian version of the interaction between the main character and his family in a forest dacha before being hurled into space. I will say however that the Tarkovsky element of "voyage" is not nearly as beautiful or evocative as the alchemical alembic hurtling through eternity... Such an alembic must be held doing nothing for seeming aeons: it must be held in a kind of symbolic stasis, Fermentatio akin to the falling of the fruits from the tree inside the alembic in "The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz."

1.)Fragments from "The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuts" translated by Adam Maclean: "The Fifth Day

"This sepulchre was triangular, and had in the middle of it a vessel of polished copper; the rest was of pure gold and precious stones. In the vessel stood an angel, who held in his arms an unknown tree, which continually dropped fruit into the vessel; and as often as the fruit fell into the vessel, it turned into water, and ran out from there into three small golden vessels standing by. This little altar was supported by these three animals, an eagle, an ox and a lion, which stood on an exceedingly costly base. I asked my page what this might signify."

Here," he said, "lies buried Lady Venus, that beauty which has undone many a great man, both in fortune, honour, blessing and prosperity." After which he showed me a copper door on the pavement. "Here," he said, "if you please, we may go further down." "I still follow you," I replied. So I went down the steps, where it was exceedingly dark, but the page immediately opened a little chest, in which stood a small ever-burning taper, at which he kindled one of the torches which lay by. I was greatly terrified, and seriously asked how he dared do this? He said by way of answer "As long as the Royal Persons are still at rest, we have nothing to fear." Then I saw a rich bed ready made, hung about with curious curtains, one of which he drew aside, where I saw the Lady Venus..."

4.) [I am omitting as much as possible the description of Venus because she is too beautiful]

1.) Last Fragment of Adam Maclean's translation of "The Chemical Wedding":

But I soon saw behind the bed a tablet on which it was written as follows: (When the fruit of my tree shall be quite melted down then I shall awake and be the mother of a King.)

2.) The tree bears fruits, and the fruits of the imagination continue on and on to be burned or boiled, in any sense consumed until the system finally comes to an end. Even the infinitely productive tree of immortality must undergo an even greater octave (a denarius? 1-10-100 etc) of transformation. At the end of the tree's life, Venus awakes and becomes mother of a King. The very incarnation of beauty on earth... More terrible than we can imagine is that beauty! (This easily sounds like Isis who gives birth to the new god Horus but to me at least quite a relevant question: whether images, the gods themselves really, have to go through a death and a rebirth.) Just as the image of that yogi and his tree traveling through the endless volumes of space (One-thousand, two-hundred and seventy light years... give or take 76 light years... sounds like it would take MORE than five-hundred years according to conventional physics...) itself presents in the end that the images and the story, and the energy of the story are exhausted. I think that this is the most elegant space-craft yet imagined.

4.) In fact it is the most elegant space-ship imagined, and by this the most elegant bark to sail through the journey of the soul "Going forth by Day". There is something to the intentional skeletal nature of our current technology: the space ships from Kubrick's "2001 a Space Odyssey" through to the absolutely hellish, but effective "Event Horizon" (Paul Anderson 1997) have a brittle, skeletal nature. This is by intent. But a sphere of energy, a self sustaining garden is itself a sort of epiphany of elegance: much more capable of holding an "Astronaut" in a conscious continuum than the rather repulsive "Orion" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28spacecraft%29) spacecraft we are fabricating at this time.

2.) what is the connection between Xibalba and Orion?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula