The reading of PPM8 offers up a hermeneutical response to the fragment from Heidegger that was highlighted in PPM7, "the relation is called hermeneutical because it brings the tidings of that message." In PPM8 I make a play on 'tidings' and thereby introduce a trope that becomes a central symbol throughout the experiment: the Tide of Being. I write "the tidings of Being draw us into the Tide. 'Tide' means Time, season, hour, a regular period of time. But is also designates the rise and fall of the sea due to the attraction of the sun and moon....Tide also means 'the course of tendency of events.' All these signify the condition we find ourselves in...Regularity coupled with unpredictably powerful surges which exceed our expectations and make strange what we have anticipated." The Tide signifies our encounter with Being's presencing, specifically what I call the 'excess' of Being, which gives or offers us thinking, i.e., the 'tidings' bring us into a hermeneutical relation; a phenomenology of interpretation, which I will much later in the experiment denote as the enactment of freedom.
February 13, 2014 was the 10th anniversary of the original experiment that produced 363 phenomenological mediations, published as 'Being and Learning' (Brill: 2012). Each day between Feb 2014-15, I returned to the original meditations, and my commentary is documented here. And then, again, on February 15, 2024, on the 20th anniversary of the first days of the original experiment, I revisit and comment on a daily basis, once again.
Reading both the original meditation from 20 years ago and the commentary from 10 years ago, I'm struck already --- only 6 days into this project of recollection -- by the intensity of the writing, but more importantly, by the risk. The experiment was a risk, for sure, and the project of poetic praxis to this day walks a line between the audacious and the outrageous. On this day 20 years ago I made the decision to capitalize this formal categories. Moreover, the Tide is anticipating the Taoist inclination that becomes an increasing important inspiration for the project.
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