OPM 84 is read just outside studio A at Aardvark Studio, Stubenville, Ohio, where I have travelled to 'witness' the production of my colleague, collaboration and good friend Sam Rocha's album 'Late to Love,' which has been documented in two session of Musings. I read OPM 84 while Sam and the members of his trio listen to the track of the song 'In the Self's Place,' which is taken from the title of Jean Luc Marion's book. This is a nod to the Augustinian spirit of Sam's album.
As I note in my post-reading commentary, Augustin is the source of Arendt's concept of natality, which I have appropriated as the keystone for this project, insisting that learning is possible because of natality, which is the pure potentiality, and what is disclosed in the originary experience with Being's presencing, when we encounter our freedom. Learning is the taking up of our freedom when we begin or initiate something. The recording happening here in Aardvark Studio is a exemplar of learning in the existential sense that I am naming it. Put differently, moving into this studio is akin to crossing over the threshold into Heracltus' dwelling.
For this reason, OPM 84 makes a shift in the account of the Heraclitus story and picks up the link Heidegger makes between dwelling and poiesis. In OPM 84 we read: "The poetic is the 'basic character of human existence' is the originary claim of this work. It has been embedded in the exploration we have been making of the relation between Learning and Being, which we initially identified as unfolding through teaching, identified at the onset as a poetic performance." But this performance is never singular, and this is emphasized in the deconstruction of the 'ego' and the construction of the learning community, the gathering of friends, the congregation of thinking. In turn, I write, "What we have discovered is that to become teachable is to become part of joint creative effort. And this effort is organized by one who does not implant but rather cultivates what is always already at the core of human existence: natality, initiative, creativity, freedom, the poetic....If we embrace the poet's claim that the basic character of human existence is poetic, then we are compelled to gather the meaning of the poetic and, thereby, grasp the kind of mythopoiesis that captures the poetic dwelling the Sage. We have said that the work of the Sage is one of cultivation...In the first sense, cultivation is a kind of preparation, a making ready through sowing and tilling. To 'till' is both to prepare and direct, this takes us to the second meaning of 'cultivation' as 'refining' or 'completing'."
NOW, with the Augustinian inspired lyrics and music bleeding in from Studio A, "I miss myself, you were there before. Lost on the shore..." it's necessary to emphasize the primordial, pre-subjective force of Being as the originary, and not a person qua Sage. Sage is thus a name for the force draws together, which 'builds' and through which we make something, or where we make something. The recording studio is an concrete or 'ontic' example of the force of the Sage, because it is here, reading and waiting for the musicians to arrive. Indeed, it calls them and directs them, inspires them to initiate something new, to make music.
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.
3.0 - A swell of mixed feelings wash over me as I read these 2.0 commentaries, as well as encounter the two preceding blog posts, both videos of my time out in Ohio with Sam when he was recording "Late To Love." It was a unique experience, for sure, but I'm left feeling sad because it was a reminder of being away from the family for more time. This has always been the unfortunate fallout from the project: the time and energy spent away from home and the family. And it's no small irony that I am writing this 3.0 post from the gate arrival at PWM as I wait to board the final flight of this academic year! If only I didn't have to return next week to campus for those candidate interviews! Being present at home, both physically and spiritually, is a priority and has to be a priority. It's also a coincidence that on the 10 year anniversary of the recording of "Late to Love," I received Rocha's latest book that features a few pages on the Preface to "Being and Learning," and the encounter with the stranger. The "strange" and the "stranger" and "estrangement" are central themes in this project, with the emphasis being put on periagogē as an encounter with the other than oneself, the other self or self's other, the modality of learner as the modality of openness that emerges when the self is turned away from itself, freed from the ego. Being estranged from one's self occurs when one is captivated by the significant object, by the work of art. And this culminates with the production of something new, with the exercise of one's natality, the enactment of poetic praxis. That was what made the recording of "Late to Love" so exciting: being in the midst of poetic praxis, and bearing witness to it. The result was the writing of the "Palabras Entre Nosotros," that are inserted in between the song lyrics. They were my Borgesian experiment in writing, something new and singular for me. Never wrote anything like that before nor since. Here it's worth reciting a fragment from the OPM 84 that is cited in 2.0: "The poetic is the 'basic character of human existence' is the originary claim of this work. It has been embedded in the exploration we have been making of the relation between Learning and Being, which we initially identified as unfolding through teaching, identified at the onset as a poetic performance." If "the essence of truth is freedom," than that truth is the authenticity of the work of art. Freedom is enacted through the making of the new. And what is made as well as the act of making are the "singular." There is some confusion above in 2.0 where I describe the "ego" as the singular. That is a messy equivocation of one of the key categories and needs to be clarified. What is described as the singular above is the individual, the ego as the location of loneliness. This modality is contrasted with solitude, where, as Arendt describes, we still experience the plurality of the 2-in-1, the dialogue with myself, the "intenral" plurality as it were. The dynamic relational process that is the dialectic of a philosophical education is always a situation of plurality.
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