In commemorating OPM99, I'll take up the spirit that moved the original experiment, and begin with two fragments that I picked up this morning. The second, which I'll share first, because it offers the context, was an email I received from Jason Wozniak, co-founder of LAPES, whose presentation at PES Albuquerque I recorded and posted on this blog. An exchange we had this morning culminated in his citing of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: "Song is Existence." While, at the moment, I can't find the meditation where this exact quotation appears, it is quite close to the Holderlin line that is cited in OPM 94 from May 18th: "Soon we shall be song"! Indeed, but in what sense 'song'? In what sense is this 'being of song' what arrives after the poet's renunciation, which renounces speaking (the verbal), and announces listening (the non-verbal, 'silence')? In what sense is such 'silence' the 'sound' of instrumental music, non-verbal communication?
This leads me to the first fragment, which I read today in the May 26th newyorker.com, where I encountered an announcement for an upcoming show at the Knitting Factory, which is now in Brooklyn, featuring the trio Nazoranai. The a late forming group is organized around the avante garde electric guitarist Keiji Haino, who the other two (drummer Oren Ambarchi and bassist Stephen O'Malley) refer to as 'the maestro.' I was inspired to include the trio's music-making in today's blog post for a number of reasons, all of them related to the meditations that have been unfolding since the writing on Heraclitus, the 'mysterious one' who exemplifies the Sage, or the one who gathers together the learning community into a dialogic improvisational educational experience. Keiji Haino strikes me as a likely candidate in my ongoing identification of 'real life' representations of the sage figure, specifically in light of yesterday's meditation (OPM 98), which had 'silence' as its focus, and was framed around a dialogue between Heidegger and a visitor from Japan. (Haino is Japanese). The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones writes of Haino: "alone or in collaboration, [he] moves through peaks or rebarbative guitar sounds, which are followed by equal amounts of silence and unexpectedly quiet vocal invocations."(p.18) Vocal invocations!!! The invocation evocation of the sage?
The name of the trio also caught my attention: Nazoranai. Nazoranai "relates to traditional Japanese calligraphy, meaning 'not to follow the exact movement of the teacher or master, to not follow the line, but to develop some sort of individuality.'" Again, this seems to me to capture the educational experience flowing from the 'teaching' of the sage, or the one who points to the disclosure offered by Being aka the offering of possibility.
Finally, it seems not to be a coincidence that one of the tracks by Nazoranai is titled "Feel the Ultimate Joy Towards the Resolve of Pillar Being Shattered within You again and again and again."
After listening to the track, it seems not far from the un-ordinary writing that appears in these meditations, and perhaps something of a sound-track, especially when I listen to it when reading in OPM 99: "The poet's renunciation releases her into the ek-static questioning stand. This ekstasis signifies the estrangement carried forward with the renunciation. The emergence of the Sage as the one who announces comes about when the poet is carried outside of herself. To stand outside (ekstasis) is to be released by the beckoning of language into the open mysterious region of enchantment, the region of the unforseen, the ineffable. The one who is released into this domain is free to convey the dwelling that emerges in this abode."
This leads me to the first fragment, which I read today in the May 26th newyorker.com, where I encountered an announcement for an upcoming show at the Knitting Factory, which is now in Brooklyn, featuring the trio Nazoranai. The a late forming group is organized around the avante garde electric guitarist Keiji Haino, who the other two (drummer Oren Ambarchi and bassist Stephen O'Malley) refer to as 'the maestro.' I was inspired to include the trio's music-making in today's blog post for a number of reasons, all of them related to the meditations that have been unfolding since the writing on Heraclitus, the 'mysterious one' who exemplifies the Sage, or the one who gathers together the learning community into a dialogic improvisational educational experience. Keiji Haino strikes me as a likely candidate in my ongoing identification of 'real life' representations of the sage figure, specifically in light of yesterday's meditation (OPM 98), which had 'silence' as its focus, and was framed around a dialogue between Heidegger and a visitor from Japan. (Haino is Japanese). The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones writes of Haino: "alone or in collaboration, [he] moves through peaks or rebarbative guitar sounds, which are followed by equal amounts of silence and unexpectedly quiet vocal invocations."(p.18) Vocal invocations!!! The invocation evocation of the sage?
The name of the trio also caught my attention: Nazoranai. Nazoranai "relates to traditional Japanese calligraphy, meaning 'not to follow the exact movement of the teacher or master, to not follow the line, but to develop some sort of individuality.'" Again, this seems to me to capture the educational experience flowing from the 'teaching' of the sage, or the one who points to the disclosure offered by Being aka the offering of possibility.
Finally, it seems not to be a coincidence that one of the tracks by Nazoranai is titled "Feel the Ultimate Joy Towards the Resolve of Pillar Being Shattered within You again and again and again."
3.0 - Re-placement. Being with the Nothing. Turned around and moved into the Open. Released into the silence that beckons listening. These are all different ways of describing the initial moment when the student is moved into the place of learning. This movement is the first moment in the dialectic of learning. In OPM 99 from this day 20 years ago: "To stand outside (ekstasis) is to be released by the beckoning of language into the open mysterious region of enchantment, the region of the unforeseen, the ineffable. The one who is released into this domain is free to convey the dwelling that emerges in this abode." 99 days into the original experiment and I had already developed a core lexicon and had become free (I almost wrote unhinged ;-) in my writing. It's worth remembering that the original experiment was a challenge for myself but there was no plan other than to write every day. I completed the project in 2005 and it wasn't until 2010 that I got serious about editing the writing and publishing it as a monograph, which happened in 2012. So by day 99 I felt committed to the project and that commitment entailed an audacious embrace of what some might call automatic writing. I prefer improvisational because it better describes a writing that builds on previously written material and tries to combine that writing in new ways. There's an intentionality to the writing that is not compatible with the Andre Breton's protocol of automatic writing. While I appreciate the Surrealist project, and had the occasion to go deeply into it when I was a student in Madrid and studied Luis Buñuel's films with his production assistant Sanz de Soto, I am not committed to the psychoanalytic framework. I'm not at all interested in the so-called subconscious, which, for me, is the internalization of that which moves us without our understanding it or willing it. Taking my cue from Nietzsche, I say that going within is a dangerous matter. Rather, we should climb ten thousand feet beyond ourselves. The point is transcendence and self-overcoming. That is what re-location and re-placement of the self 'outside' the ego entails. The turning away from the ego and towards the other/Other. In both cases it is the turning around and the movement into the Open region that most interests me because without that move learning in the philosophical way I am describing it will not happen. And more important, we can only experience the freedom of learning when we are turned away from the ego. Why? Because the ego stands for the 'who' that we take ourselves to be, and while that sense of identity is essential, we can only become learners when we suspend that identity and turn our attention away from ourselves. This is key. If we don't turn around an focus on the significant object of study we are not encountering the new. Transcendence, both horizontal and vertical, happen when we are turned away. This is important: we are not turning but are turned away from the ego. The will is suspended and we are moved by the significant object, the call to study.
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