Read OPM 97 at home in Portland, but writing my blog from a cafe in Cornell's College Town. Here to pick up my daughter, Kat. I'm feeling a bit fragmented after the almost 8 hr drive, followed by the move out and car packing, but I'm committed to this daily commemoration, and I'll try to lock in and focus. (At moments like this I'm astounded by the memory that I was able to find an hour each day to write!)
I begin the video that documents the writing from this day by situating the fragment (from Heidegger) that is moving this set of meditations along: the poet's renunciation. Renouncing speaking and announcing Hearing, this is how teaching gets under, and how we cultivate the conditions for learning. The sage, the ideal type, prioritizes modality of listening, and shows us that the listening is the originary (beginning and initiating) practice of teaching because it is in this receptive modality that we encounter pure possibility, the offering of Being. This offering is made through our students. We recognize our own possibility in them. What is this possibility? Community.
As I read these meditations and place them into the context of the reading I have been doing for my LAPES research, but also in light of a conversation I had with my colleague Stacy Smith on Monday, it has become clear to me that the resounding theme of this writing is community, and not simply in the generic sense of gathering together, but in the sense of being an alternative, a possibility of gathering together in freedom and peace. If some of my earlier posts identified the State and the Family as spheres of legitimate violence, then this was meant to indicate the arriving learning community that emerges in-between and/or outside of these two. This is why in OPM 97 I write: "Language's appeal is received in the gathering of the many into a unity, a manifold field of related voices. To renounce the conventional is to announce the communal, which is another way of identifying the reception of the other."
While it is crucial to identify peace and freedom as non-convention, the description of the communal offered here does not capture the sense in which the learning community emerges from friendship. Or, to put the critique in the form of question, I wonder in reading the just cited end of the OPM 97 how we can receive our friends as 'others' (strangers?). Irigaray, who I only discovered after completing this writing experiment, would say that we must maintain and respect the difference that exists and persists between each and every one of us, especially the differences between our beloved, and so too our closest friends. This is probably consistent with Arendt's idea of singularity, which is the basis of plurality. But I'm not entirely sure my dialogic and intersubjective learning community emerges by way of the force of difference. It seems, rather, that the community, built on friendship, emerges with profound feelings of inter-subjectively. Perhaps this is why OPM 97 concludes with a fragment from Heraclitus where he equates wisdom with the knowledge "that all is one" (frag 2). Recalling my conversation with Stacy, this seems to echo what Krishna says in the Gita 10:32 "I am the beginning and the middle and the end of all that is. Of all knowledge I am the knowledge of the Soul." Translation: the wise perceive that all is one, unified. This does not of difference an illusion, but, rather, hears from the play of difference what Heraclitus calls 'the hidden harmony.'
I begin the video that documents the writing from this day by situating the fragment (from Heidegger) that is moving this set of meditations along: the poet's renunciation. Renouncing speaking and announcing Hearing, this is how teaching gets under, and how we cultivate the conditions for learning. The sage, the ideal type, prioritizes modality of listening, and shows us that the listening is the originary (beginning and initiating) practice of teaching because it is in this receptive modality that we encounter pure possibility, the offering of Being. This offering is made through our students. We recognize our own possibility in them. What is this possibility? Community.
As I read these meditations and place them into the context of the reading I have been doing for my LAPES research, but also in light of a conversation I had with my colleague Stacy Smith on Monday, it has become clear to me that the resounding theme of this writing is community, and not simply in the generic sense of gathering together, but in the sense of being an alternative, a possibility of gathering together in freedom and peace. If some of my earlier posts identified the State and the Family as spheres of legitimate violence, then this was meant to indicate the arriving learning community that emerges in-between and/or outside of these two. This is why in OPM 97 I write: "Language's appeal is received in the gathering of the many into a unity, a manifold field of related voices. To renounce the conventional is to announce the communal, which is another way of identifying the reception of the other."
While it is crucial to identify peace and freedom as non-convention, the description of the communal offered here does not capture the sense in which the learning community emerges from friendship. Or, to put the critique in the form of question, I wonder in reading the just cited end of the OPM 97 how we can receive our friends as 'others' (strangers?). Irigaray, who I only discovered after completing this writing experiment, would say that we must maintain and respect the difference that exists and persists between each and every one of us, especially the differences between our beloved, and so too our closest friends. This is probably consistent with Arendt's idea of singularity, which is the basis of plurality. But I'm not entirely sure my dialogic and intersubjective learning community emerges by way of the force of difference. It seems, rather, that the community, built on friendship, emerges with profound feelings of inter-subjectively. Perhaps this is why OPM 97 concludes with a fragment from Heraclitus where he equates wisdom with the knowledge "that all is one" (frag 2). Recalling my conversation with Stacy, this seems to echo what Krishna says in the Gita 10:32 "I am the beginning and the middle and the end of all that is. Of all knowledge I am the knowledge of the Soul." Translation: the wise perceive that all is one, unified. This does not of difference an illusion, but, rather, hears from the play of difference what Heraclitus calls 'the hidden harmony.'
3.0 - Happy Birthday Kat! 30 years ago on this day in Los Angeles!! 10 years ago I was picking up Kat at Cornell. I'm grateful that I documented my locations during 2.0. Today, second full day of sabbatical 2024, I'm up on the early side, getting in this writing before early morning yoga.
ReplyDeleteYesterday I had one of those moments of coincidence that might count as a flash of illumination, or better a moment of synchronicity. I was writing about listening: learning begins with listening. And I was describing listening as the modality that is experienced with the relocation of the self beyond the ego. I've haven't yet made that distinction, which existential phenomenology seems to grant: a "ego-less" self. But "self" seems to imply some recognition, a sense of identity, which is more refined and particular than singularity. But does the self require and ego? Isn't the "ego" that sense of self that gets inflated towards the will to power? We might say an "ego-less" self is the intersubjective self, the relational self, the self emerging in the poetics of relation. The subject without ego is the dialogic self, the thinking self in conversation, what Arendt describes as the two-in-one (eme emauto). This is why the Sage is not didactic but dialogic, and begins the process of learning by pointing to the significant object, by indicating meaning through evocation, by evoking the possibility of making meaning, which is the third moment of the process. "The sage, the ideal type, prioritizes modality of listening, and shows us that the listening is the originary (beginning and initiating) practice of teaching because it is in this receptive modality that we encounter pure possibility, the offering of Being." The coincidence that occurred yesterday was a purely educational one: I was writing about the evocation that emerges from evacuation: the calling forth of listening that replaces the student into the modality of listening. Learning begins with listening. And listening that is educational emerges in the Open region, from openness, from emptiness. Yesterday I made a move I have made many times before with persona and persono (the mask), and when I followed up with persono discovered an article by two Greek theater professionals who described the mask of the ancient tragedy as an "acoustical resonance mask." I will have to take this up in the project that I will be working on after the sabbatical book project when I resume my study of the aesthetic education offered by music. But the coincidence is noted here and now when that same article described the mask as "the face radiates great intensity and presence. The face is expressionless, in a state of total presence, a state of emptiness. The tragic mask represents this state of mind and this is the state of mind the actor has to assume on stage. We define this state of body/mind as a state of kenosis (emptying, depletion) and the tragic mask as the mask of kenosis." Kenosis, emptying. Only the one who is empty of ego, of intentionality, of the will to power, can truly listen. And so this seems to imply that the turning around of the student is an acoustic and sonic event. They are called. This description is fundamental to the project. The figure of the Sage emerges as the one who is able to call, to evoke, to indicate meaning by evocative saying. This saying, speaking is poetic, and so it is a kind of "singing." It is the call to learning.