A blog that proclaims to be documenting experimental writing which claims to be an example of 'poetic phenomenology' has to begin today with a eulogy to Maya Angelou, who passed away today. Resonating powerfully for me is her celebrated poem "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," which writes of the impossible tension arising from the twofold actuality/potentiality, specifically, the hardship of the present co-arising with the hope of the future. This is the essence of the blues, and, in the end of the day, Maya Angelou was a personification of the blues.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I too know why the caged bird sings! Indeed, it's impossible for me to avoid making a comparison to the music-making Socrates, writing philosophical poetry/poetic philosophy, lyrics, while sitting in his jail cell awaiting execution, and, as Plato recounts for us, cheerfully embracing the moment, declaring that a grand feast awaits him! I'd like to imagine that when we undertake music-making philosophy we are partaking in that feast, a kind of eulogizing, a eulogium in the medieval Latin sense of 'singing praise'.
Maybe this eulogium, singing praise, is a response to the call to thinking we hear when we listen to the sage? But what does it mean to 'listen to the sage,' if the sage remains silent and communicates (non-verbally), pointing to the ineffable (the boundary of language/spoken word)? Can listening to the sage indicate meditation in the sense of hearing the action of the sage? The specific action I am referring to is the 'waiting' I write about in these mediations, specifically, in OPM 104: "We call this practice 'meditation' or 'meditative thinking,' and describe it as the practice of waiting. We identify this practice as a 'waiting' in order to make the necessary link between the conditioning that this practice represents and the steadfast openness that emerges as its outcome. To practice waiting is meditative because it is the practice of silence. To practice silence is to place oneself in the modality of hearing. Thus, meditation is the practice of silence that conditions one for the difficult and challenging work of painstaking listening. The sage prepares herself through meditation."
'Practice' in this sense is akin to a daily exercise that strengthens, prepares, etc. It is a form of conditioning, but not in the Skinnerian sense of behavior modification because the practice is a preparation for action, for the reception and production of singularity.
A final comment notes that in OPM 104 I talk of the sage's practice as an exercise of 'emptying' that prepares him to be like an empty cup that can be filled again and again. This sets up the conclusion of OPM 104, when I trace the roots of communication back to communion, writing: "...the most original form of communication that we call 'communion.' We say most original form of communication because it takes us toe the root of communication as the modality of being-with, as the root of relationality, as a communing. To 'commune' is to 'converse or talk together, usually with profound intensity, intimacy...interchange of thoughts or feelings."
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I too know why the caged bird sings! Indeed, it's impossible for me to avoid making a comparison to the music-making Socrates, writing philosophical poetry/poetic philosophy, lyrics, while sitting in his jail cell awaiting execution, and, as Plato recounts for us, cheerfully embracing the moment, declaring that a grand feast awaits him! I'd like to imagine that when we undertake music-making philosophy we are partaking in that feast, a kind of eulogizing, a eulogium in the medieval Latin sense of 'singing praise'.
Maybe this eulogium, singing praise, is a response to the call to thinking we hear when we listen to the sage? But what does it mean to 'listen to the sage,' if the sage remains silent and communicates (non-verbally), pointing to the ineffable (the boundary of language/spoken word)? Can listening to the sage indicate meditation in the sense of hearing the action of the sage? The specific action I am referring to is the 'waiting' I write about in these mediations, specifically, in OPM 104: "We call this practice 'meditation' or 'meditative thinking,' and describe it as the practice of waiting. We identify this practice as a 'waiting' in order to make the necessary link between the conditioning that this practice represents and the steadfast openness that emerges as its outcome. To practice waiting is meditative because it is the practice of silence. To practice silence is to place oneself in the modality of hearing. Thus, meditation is the practice of silence that conditions one for the difficult and challenging work of painstaking listening. The sage prepares herself through meditation."
'Practice' in this sense is akin to a daily exercise that strengthens, prepares, etc. It is a form of conditioning, but not in the Skinnerian sense of behavior modification because the practice is a preparation for action, for the reception and production of singularity.
A final comment notes that in OPM 104 I talk of the sage's practice as an exercise of 'emptying' that prepares him to be like an empty cup that can be filled again and again. This sets up the conclusion of OPM 104, when I trace the roots of communication back to communion, writing: "...the most original form of communication that we call 'communion.' We say most original form of communication because it takes us toe the root of communication as the modality of being-with, as the root of relationality, as a communing. To 'commune' is to 'converse or talk together, usually with profound intensity, intimacy...interchange of thoughts or feelings."
3.0a - 10 years ago today as I honored Maya Angelou I was comparing Socrates writing of lyrics in his jail cell as akin to eulogizing, "singing praise." And on this day the news just arrives that one of all-time great sages, Bill Walton, a poet-athlete, literally and figuratively one of the biggest deadheads of all time, has passed!
ReplyDeleteThis news arrives before I could compare the eulogy and the elegy. How are they different? Quite simply, the elegy is a type of poem, a funeral poem or song, a lament, dirge, song/chant. Whereas the eulogy is the prosaic form of the same memorial. Ten years ago I didn't acknowledge that distinction. But the I did in the paper I wrote for and presented at the Nancy panel in Utah: "And like Socrates, Nancy is writing an elegy to the philosopher who cannot hear outside of his own voice, a requiem for the teacher, who Heidegger describes as the 'authoritative know-it-all'....If we listen attentively we learn from Nancy that even a writing that attempts to “make music” can barely approximate the sensuality of music; writing, words will always remain outside the unique “sonic presence” where music circulates. In turn, the music that the post-metaphysical, pre-rationalist philosopher will make will always be the blues, elegies expressing the limits of language, a requiem for the teacher who says too much, and sings too little, or not at all. In turn, if the teacher wants to learn listening and become “all ears,” so that they might be capable of hearing their students’ voices, and value their presence, Nancy seems to be suggesting that the teacher might open themselves to music as their guide, as their exemplar. Music might best be able to teach the teacher how to become 'all ears.'
3.0b - Socrates' was inspired by the muse to write lyrics because he was 'all ears,' he was listening. As I wrote this day 20 years ago in OPM 104, "To practice waiting is meditative because it is the practice of silence. To practice silence is to place oneself in the modality of hearing. Thus, meditation is the practice of silence that conditions one for the difficult and challenging work of painstaking listening." I won't rehearse Nancy emphasizes the distinction between hearing and listening: hearing (l'entendre) and listening (écouter). It's quite helpful to emphasize why listening is truly how learning begins. The French for hearing underlines how the act is related to recognition, or understanding. Whereas listening (écouter) emphasizes the reception and resonance of the sound, the sonic experiencing that is pre-cognitive, before understanding. Listening is 'painstaking' or difficult for many because it demands that we bracket or put aside our faculty of understanding, our will to know. If learning begins with listening then it is a challenge to begin. And this is something that we learn both from the story of Socrates writing his lyrics and from Plato's Allegory. The latter is obvious: the freed cave-dweller must endure a painful, disorienting ascent out of the cave in order to have an encounter with the truth of things. With Socrates it is the difficulty of having to begin again, to totally rethink the approach he has been taking, the practice of philosophy as dialogue, speaking with others. Perhaps the moral of the story is that before one can speak with others one must have something to say, especially if one is the teacher. The muse was not insisting on a distinction between writing and speaking. Rather, she was insisting on writing as the necessary complement to speaking. Here Heidegger has to be corrected. Socrates wasn't the "purest thinker in the West" because he did not write anything. Rather, all the others were fugitives from thinking, as he puts it, because they ran and hid from the dialogic practice, because they only ever wrote but did not speak with others, or have those dialogues documented. Ironically, the very same "What is Called Thinking?" where Heidegger makes that assertion about Socrates is a collection of lectures. And in that writing he is speaking directly to his students! So, indeed, writing and speaking complement one another, and this is especially true for the sage, for the teacher of philosophy.
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