OPM 107 May 31st Meditation, Being and Learning ch 7, pp. 179-181

OPM 107, final day of May,  a glorious spring day in Portland!  The skeleton theme continues today as I make my way through A. Russo's The Untranslatable Image, a book that continues to inspire me because it operates under the very same presumptions that organize my LAPES project. (see image below)   Russo pointed me to the definitive Florentine Codex Historia Generale de las Cosas de la Nueva Espana (1576-1577), which she describes as "the encyclopedic summa of the pre-Hispanic world...edited by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun (1499-1590), assisted by several teams of indigenous scholars."  As I glimpsed at images from la Historia I'm more and more convinced that the originary thinking of this hemisphere, specifically, what originates after 1492, which is the epoch when the ladino (mestizaje culture) emerges, is a poetics that reaches beyond the boundary of language that is presumed when I write of this boundary.  Indeed, the 'threshold' of this boundary shifts when we encounter the pictographical writing of the codex, and then trace it back to the petroglyphs I have cited in previous blog posts.  What are the implications for these meditations?  There are many, some that allow me to see continuity with the poetic writing, and others that give me a kind of license to imagine the future 'music-making philosophy' as found, to use a phrase of the early Heidegger, by running ahead to the past.  And then there's the consistent narrative quality of these meditations, the story telling that is happening throughout the writing, such that growing litany of the flourishes and insights can all be reduced to a specific figure in  a specific 'scene' or context:  Heraclitus at the fire, Socrates in the jail cell,  Socrates at Agathon's, Socrates with Diotima, Heidegger with his visitor, etc.  The story telling anchors the abstract; gives flesh and bones to the conceptual and speculative.   It enables me to visualize and picture an event and only then can I listen to and hear what is happening.  I'm tempted to characterize this approach as 'cinemagraphic.'
Indeed, I'm experiencing many temptations with regard to the writing that happened ten years ago, and today I'm wondering, in an almost far fetched way, if the journey with the sage is indeed what Tyson Lewis described as the epic quality of the writing, specifically, a journey 'back' to a forgotten 'home'?  Perhaps.
What's happening today is that I am trying to square the writing of ten years ago with the project happening today, and if I'm going to retain anything from Being and Learning it would be that any preparatory work that happened ten years ago is under the radar of my perception, and it best to recall here what I write in OPM 107 when I recall the name of Heraclitus: "The Obscure One".  For certain the meditations can be understood as a existential shedding of the skin of academia's 'professional philosophy' so that I could place myself in close proximity to the first questions of the first philosophers.  And what is also certain is that I was very much focused on the day to day, on trying to be present in the moment when I was writing, which is what I am doing with these blog posts perhaps distracted to the point of ignoring what I wrote ten years ago!  All that to say that the question concerning the long term implications of the writing is an compelling question, especially given that meditative thinking is an interruption of the dominant logic of the 'calculative' and 'outcomes'.  Citing Heidegger in OPM 107: Calculative thinking seeks "definitive results...Such thinking remains calculation even it it neither works with numbers nor uses adding machine or computer.  Calculative thinking computes...Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself.  Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is."
The question I'm faced with at this moment in the process of commemoration is: Beyond the video documentation of reading the meditation, how should a stop and collect  these repeated fragments and occasional flourishes?  (By asking this question I am confessing that Being and Learning did not take it up!)

I wrote the above before reading OPM 107, and after reading the meditation I felt the need to write an addendum, which would call attention to this meditation.  OPM 107 really stands out as one of the exemplary meditations, and I would almost say that it is one of a handful that completely captures the entire project.  Moving from the opening line that cites Heraclitus, and then weaves together some important quotations from Heidegger, specifically the one on meditative thinking, where he says the human is "a meditating  being...Thus meditative thinking need by no means be 'high flown.'  It is enough if we dwell on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now...anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits."  This is a game changing quotation, because it suggests that the thinking/learning I am pointing to and trying to describe, if not conjure up, may come from the first philosophers taking up the first questions, but is not a matter of 'philosophers' if by that we mean a select group.  Rather, it is all about the intensity of focus on what is happening to us in our lives.   Its about mindfulness, attentiveness, and, above all, perception and thus listening to and hearing, paying attention to the world, and to others.  This is what 'learning' is all about: dwelling on what lies close and meditating on what is closest.