OPM begins with a pivot on 'waiting,' which has been the modality that grabbed my attention for the past few meditations. The pivot happens with 'delay,' as I say that my "revisiting of Socrates in his jail cell has been delayed by the exploration of meditative thinking, the modality of intense listening, the practice of waiting." Reading this I'm puzzled and slightly amused that I perceived the focus on 'waiting' and meditation as a 'delay' in revisiting Socrates time in jail (the caged bird!), when, in fact, that is exactly what is happening! Here is another example of the power of the dominant expectations influence my sense of how things are unfolding with the meditations. Sadly, the nuance is missed, and I don't recognize how the 'delay' is precisely what is happening in the 'waiting' that Socrates experienced in jail!!! Indeed, the music-making Socrates is still alive at the beginning of the Phaedo and able to write his poetic philosophy/philosophical poetry because there has been a delay in the return of a ship that makes an annual trip to the island of Delos, and during that ritual time no executions can occur [strange justice of the ancients!] In sum, the very 'waiting' that has captured my attention only happens because there is a 'delay' in the normal of events, made by an extension of the sacred time. I do note, however, that the reason I have not returned to the jail cell is because "Like Socrates who was seized and thereby compelled to make a delayed entry into the home of Agathon, we are seized and delayed in our exploration." But then for some odd reason I write, "We continue." In what sense 'continue'? There is no 'continuity' in these meditations??!! That is the very essence of the experiment! It is a disruption of the logic of progression, the argumentative, and calculative. The mediations arise out of a time that interrupts the 'usual' flow of academic time, which, despite its being a kind of oddity vis-a-vis commercial time, demands of us that we arrive and are present at very specific times, not to mention in very specific ways. These daily meditations were disruptive of that because they happened everyday, for a minimum of one hour, whenever that hour opened up -- like Camus' Sisyphus ('That hour of consciousness' he experienced as he returned down the hill after his boulder had rolled down). But, thinking back to the legendary Sisyphus, I did experience a kind of non-progressive/teleological 'continuity' in the sense that each day, like him, the writing of the meditations -- no unlike this process of revisiting them each day ten years later! -- I would push my boulder of words up the rugged ascent, only to repeat the same action the next day (hence, the sometimes painful repetition of phrases!). Again, like Camus' version, however, I believe that I experienced each day a 'time' of consciousness with poetic flourishes, those 'solos' of sentences that sounded like something new was being said because an insight was perceived.
One does sense those moments, and today I experienced that when I walked down to the USM library. I'm truly grateful that the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine is only two blocks from my house. The walk to the library is relaxing and meanders through the lush campus that slopes downward, so that one feels like ascending into a village from a hilltop home. (I'm anticipating the forthcoming writing that makes up ch. 8, Zarathustra's Descent!) Anyway, today was a glorious sunny spring day, and the first we've had in Portland in well over a week. I walked slowly, in part because the very recent injury to my shoulder (torn rotator cuff) has slowed my pace considerably. All that to say that when I finally made my way into the Glickman Family Library, my pace compelled me to stop and examine the new books shelf. And here is where the old maxim about 'slow and steady' meets this commentary's highlighting of 'delaying' and 'waiting'. For on the new books shelf was The Untranslatable Image by Alessandra Russo (Austin: 2014), which one would guess immediately caught my attention, but not simply because it resonates with the many meditations that have taken up 'the ineffable.' No, there was something uncanny about the title that almost felt like deja vu. Sure enough, when I opened the book, I discovered the subtitle to be: The Mestizo History of The Arts in New Spain 1500-1600. BOOM! -- wait, did I already know about that book? Nope! or, if I had come across it, I hadn't saved it in my growing Zotero file [if you are working on a research project, open a Zotero account!!!] No, it was just one of those...uncanny, unexplainable 'offerings' that we experience, the kind that energizes us almost to the point where we start to take up the fantasy that are projects are destined, and that we were fated to undertake them. (I should have learned by now...especially if I've read my Camus...to see all of that as absurd! But, alas, I'm a hopeless romantic in the classic sense, of course!)
The uncanny experience only gets more intense when I sit down to read the book, and encounter the epigraph to the first chapter: "From a philological perspective, we find ourselves before the most difficult object imaginable." (Aby Warburg, 'Memories of a Journey through the Pueblo Region' 1923) I sent this immediately to my colleague Tyson Lewis, who has appeared in a video in this commemorative blog (back in March in New Mexico), because Aby Warburg is one of Tyson's heroes -- the Warburg library being what I would describe as a theater for the performance of what Tyson calls 'study' -- AND because it was in conversation with Tyson, the week before I presented my LAPES paper -- the one that got this latest 'destined' project underway -- that I was able to nail down the project's cartographical emphasis, that is, identify the question that originates the project as: Donde Estamos? (Where are we?) NOW what is really funky about the Warburg quotation isn't just that it appears as the epigraph to a book that is right in the wheelhouse of my project, BUT that it is from a book of notes and images, a phenomenology of the Pueblo Indian artefacts (petroglyphs!!) book by Aby Warburg himself. In other words, a month after Tyson asked me "What will you study as you attempt to collect the 'writing' of indigenous philosophy?" Warburg appears (from New Mexico, of course) with an example of how this might be done. His library is truly a house of wonders!
This anecdote serves to demonstrate all that can happen in the span of 60mins or less, actually, if and only if one has slowed and flowed. 'Go slow and flow' seems to be the perfect bumper sticker for Being and Learning! And this is just a version of that description of the meditative thinking from Cato, which I borrow from Arendt, which appears prominently in OPM 105: "Never is he more active than when he is doing nothing, never is he less alone than when is his by himself."
One does sense those moments, and today I experienced that when I walked down to the USM library. I'm truly grateful that the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine is only two blocks from my house. The walk to the library is relaxing and meanders through the lush campus that slopes downward, so that one feels like ascending into a village from a hilltop home. (I'm anticipating the forthcoming writing that makes up ch. 8, Zarathustra's Descent!) Anyway, today was a glorious sunny spring day, and the first we've had in Portland in well over a week. I walked slowly, in part because the very recent injury to my shoulder (torn rotator cuff) has slowed my pace considerably. All that to say that when I finally made my way into the Glickman Family Library, my pace compelled me to stop and examine the new books shelf. And here is where the old maxim about 'slow and steady' meets this commentary's highlighting of 'delaying' and 'waiting'. For on the new books shelf was The Untranslatable Image by Alessandra Russo (Austin: 2014), which one would guess immediately caught my attention, but not simply because it resonates with the many meditations that have taken up 'the ineffable.' No, there was something uncanny about the title that almost felt like deja vu. Sure enough, when I opened the book, I discovered the subtitle to be: The Mestizo History of The Arts in New Spain 1500-1600. BOOM! -- wait, did I already know about that book? Nope! or, if I had come across it, I hadn't saved it in my growing Zotero file [if you are working on a research project, open a Zotero account!!!] No, it was just one of those...uncanny, unexplainable 'offerings' that we experience, the kind that energizes us almost to the point where we start to take up the fantasy that are projects are destined, and that we were fated to undertake them. (I should have learned by now...especially if I've read my Camus...to see all of that as absurd! But, alas, I'm a hopeless romantic in the classic sense, of course!)
The uncanny experience only gets more intense when I sit down to read the book, and encounter the epigraph to the first chapter: "From a philological perspective, we find ourselves before the most difficult object imaginable." (Aby Warburg, 'Memories of a Journey through the Pueblo Region' 1923) I sent this immediately to my colleague Tyson Lewis, who has appeared in a video in this commemorative blog (back in March in New Mexico), because Aby Warburg is one of Tyson's heroes -- the Warburg library being what I would describe as a theater for the performance of what Tyson calls 'study' -- AND because it was in conversation with Tyson, the week before I presented my LAPES paper -- the one that got this latest 'destined' project underway -- that I was able to nail down the project's cartographical emphasis, that is, identify the question that originates the project as: Donde Estamos? (Where are we?) NOW what is really funky about the Warburg quotation isn't just that it appears as the epigraph to a book that is right in the wheelhouse of my project, BUT that it is from a book of notes and images, a phenomenology of the Pueblo Indian artefacts (petroglyphs!!) book by Aby Warburg himself. In other words, a month after Tyson asked me "What will you study as you attempt to collect the 'writing' of indigenous philosophy?" Warburg appears (from New Mexico, of course) with an example of how this might be done. His library is truly a house of wonders!
This anecdote serves to demonstrate all that can happen in the span of 60mins or less, actually, if and only if one has slowed and flowed. 'Go slow and flow' seems to be the perfect bumper sticker for Being and Learning! And this is just a version of that description of the meditative thinking from Cato, which I borrow from Arendt, which appears prominently in OPM 105: "Never is he more active than when he is doing nothing, never is he less alone than when is his by himself."
3.0 - Wow, the 2.0 commentary is all over the place, and causes me to wonder if the 29th day of May is one that is traditionally an "off" day for me. I say that because i'm up on the early side, even for me these days, because I had a fairly intense anxiety dream, not quite a nightmare, but an extended dream that was angst ridden. The setting of the dream was Hofstra, and I was working in an office and was being harassed by others in adjacent offices who were angrily calling me out for being incompetent. I've never had any kind of dream of that kind before so I'm not sure what triggered it. I share that bit of autobiography because the 2.0 commentary seems a bit out of sorts, so much that I feel it best to ignore it and go back to OPM 105 as it is published in "Being and Learning." After reading OPM 105 the above 2.0 commentary is kind of bizarre, actually, and seems to have ignored the meditation v. contemplation distinction that is being described, a distinction that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Here the distinction emphasizes the relationship between contemplation and listening. Yesterday I wrote why learning begins with listening because in listening we are turned away from the will to know. And I underlined this point by turning to Nancy's distinction between hearing and listening, where the emphasis is placed on listening as a pre-cognitive experience. The one who listens is the resonant subject who is a pre-intentional subject. This subject is positioned before knowing, and is not even seeking knowledge. What they are is receptive. What they are is phenomenological. And that's why the fragment I cite from Heidegger in OPM 105 to describe contemplation is so important: "releasement toward things (die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen)." As I wrote two days ago, gelessanheit denotes re-placement away from the ego and toward things. And this is why listening is the modality of phenomenological description. And why learning begins with listening, a philosophical education that is phenomenological. The re-placement of the ego describes the readiness to learn. Re-placement is synonymous with releasement, and OPM 105 reminds me of that. I think I prefer releasement, especially because it links so well with the Allegory.
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