"To 'come-into-the-nearness of distance'" is repeated, almost mantra like, in OPM 110.
Yesterday's blog commentary on OPM 109 identified one of the major challenges of this writing project to be that of 'mapping' the ontological 'space' that allows for or grants meditative thinking. 'Ontological' denotes the specificity of a place; that is, the particular characteristics the permit specific things to happen. For example, high altitude mountains 'permit' lots of snow and ice to gather. They also 'permit' humans to breath in particular ways, and to perceive in particular ways. These are very generic examples that help to push forward the point I am trying to make: how do we describe ('map') the location that permits meditative thinking? OPM 110 repeats the poetic 'names' given for this location, which are hardly consistent nor consonant with one another: 'en-chanted region,' 'abyss,' 'Openness.' What is consistent, and has been from the onset of this experiment, is that each of these names denotes the location of meditative thinking, and also them modality that it permits. For example, OPM 110 cites Lao Tzu: "Abstaining from speech marks him who is obeying the spontaneity of his nature."(I:23;1) And with this citation we understand the how the improvisational movement of learning, happens when we follow the sage and take up and move along improvisational Tao (Way of Being). The path 'permits' us to be in a specific way: improvisational (which I describe as being-with 'freedom' or 'being free' -- insofar as this 'being' is not associated with the will. Recall: we don't 'possess' but are 'possessed' by freedom) And to get on this path we must 'renounce' language and proceed via silence, prioritizing hearing and listening.
So I am consistently writing about this special, unique location and the modalities it permits and grants us, modalities that represent what I call the practice and experience of learning, with most of the emphasis being placed on the experiential, because, first and foremost, we experience the location as meditative thinking. Our experience of this location is meditative thinking. But once we have this experience we can practice meditative thinking, which is what I call a 're-collection' (memory/gathering again) with the place: OPM 110: "Meditative thinking is the waiting that releases the learner into the openness that is Being's processural unfolding. To wait, to meditate, is to prepare for the Leap into Learning, the purposeful wandering carried forward by poetic dialogue that carries us the boundless boundary of Being's sheltering. Being's sheltering is the Openness that conserves revolutionary possibility, that spares/frees the actuality of natality, of building, making, constructing, creating. To wait, to meditate, is carried into the profound and unfathomable depth of this revolutionary possibility and to emerge capable of conveying the existence of this abyss, this gap that preserves the actuality of the manifold, and conserves the space of mutual exchanges, the distance that differentiates the many and yet enjoins them as a one."
The question concerning the mapping of the location of meditative thinking, which was raised in OPM 109, and which I have been exploring in a roundabout way for the past month or so through petrogylphs, ceques, and other existentialia that has been emerging from my LAPES research. Yesterday, another relevant source for this work appeared in the immediate wake of the writing of the blog commentary on OPM 109 -- specifically, in the wake of announcing: "the challenge that arises is one of 'saying' something significant (meaningful, impactful) without words. Or, perhaps, its better to avoid the value laden, and put it as follows: the challenge is to 'map' this 'ground' (and it is, of course more than that!), this location of meditative thinking."
The source came from Juan Mascaro's translation of The Bhagavad Gita, ch. 13: "This body, Arjuna, is called the field. He who knows this is called the knower of the field. Know that I am the knower in all fields of my creation; and that the wisdom which sees the field and the knower of the field is true wisdom." Without writing an extended interpretation, I want to merely share this citation, and indicate the relationship between the perception of the field the body called the field. 'This body' is the body of Krishna, but Krishna is the personification of Existence per se, the one who says: "Know that with one single fraction of my Being I pervade and support the Universe, and know that I AM."(10:42) The knower of the field is true wisdom...not 'wise' but 'wisdom'. Denoting Existence (Being) as a field is significant for me, for it suggests we need to turn to the resources of cartography.
And that brings me to the resource that appeared today: Barbara E. Mundy's The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas. First, Mundy's elegant description of 'the map': "The map, by definition, arises out of a particular culture's understanding of space, which in turn is presaged on a culture's own construction of reality..."(p. xiii) I am struck by her use of the term 'presaged' as I don't recall ever encountering it before: pre-saged: • archaic (of a person) predict: lands he could measure, terms and tides presage. ORIGIN late Middle English (as a noun): via French from Latin praesagium, from praesagire ‘forebode,’ from prae ‘before’ + sagire ‘perceive keenly.’
Is the sage now properly one who presages? Is the sage the mapmaker, the one who is able to scribe (pictographically) a culture's particular understanding of space, which is to say, 'write' a fundamental or originary philosophy (the culture's construction of reality) via map making? Is the question I have been raising regarding the post-linguistic writing of originary philosophy now indicating the early map makers as exemplars? Perhaps, and Bundy, along with Russo (cited in OPM 107) are indicating an important path for understanding philosophical writing 'without words'. Bundy: "In using visual images to reconstruct the realities of indigenes in colonial Mexico, I am returning to the methods of the first historians of the New World, be they Spanish, mestizo, or native, who drew on, as their primary sources, the 'picture-books' and painted manuscripts of the pre-Hispanic world. For unlike texts, wherein the indigenous voice is muffled and distorted in its translation into Spanish or its conversion into Spanish genres of alphabetic writing, maps, along with other images, give us the viewpoint of sixteenth-century Amerindians who were using a familiar indigenous idiom. This being the case, the map image has a value without compare."(p. xix)
Yesterday's blog commentary on OPM 109 identified one of the major challenges of this writing project to be that of 'mapping' the ontological 'space' that allows for or grants meditative thinking. 'Ontological' denotes the specificity of a place; that is, the particular characteristics the permit specific things to happen. For example, high altitude mountains 'permit' lots of snow and ice to gather. They also 'permit' humans to breath in particular ways, and to perceive in particular ways. These are very generic examples that help to push forward the point I am trying to make: how do we describe ('map') the location that permits meditative thinking? OPM 110 repeats the poetic 'names' given for this location, which are hardly consistent nor consonant with one another: 'en-chanted region,' 'abyss,' 'Openness.' What is consistent, and has been from the onset of this experiment, is that each of these names denotes the location of meditative thinking, and also them modality that it permits. For example, OPM 110 cites Lao Tzu: "Abstaining from speech marks him who is obeying the spontaneity of his nature."(I:23;1) And with this citation we understand the how the improvisational movement of learning, happens when we follow the sage and take up and move along improvisational Tao (Way of Being). The path 'permits' us to be in a specific way: improvisational (which I describe as being-with 'freedom' or 'being free' -- insofar as this 'being' is not associated with the will. Recall: we don't 'possess' but are 'possessed' by freedom) And to get on this path we must 'renounce' language and proceed via silence, prioritizing hearing and listening.
So I am consistently writing about this special, unique location and the modalities it permits and grants us, modalities that represent what I call the practice and experience of learning, with most of the emphasis being placed on the experiential, because, first and foremost, we experience the location as meditative thinking. Our experience of this location is meditative thinking. But once we have this experience we can practice meditative thinking, which is what I call a 're-collection' (memory/gathering again) with the place: OPM 110: "Meditative thinking is the waiting that releases the learner into the openness that is Being's processural unfolding. To wait, to meditate, is to prepare for the Leap into Learning, the purposeful wandering carried forward by poetic dialogue that carries us the boundless boundary of Being's sheltering. Being's sheltering is the Openness that conserves revolutionary possibility, that spares/frees the actuality of natality, of building, making, constructing, creating. To wait, to meditate, is carried into the profound and unfathomable depth of this revolutionary possibility and to emerge capable of conveying the existence of this abyss, this gap that preserves the actuality of the manifold, and conserves the space of mutual exchanges, the distance that differentiates the many and yet enjoins them as a one."
The question concerning the mapping of the location of meditative thinking, which was raised in OPM 109, and which I have been exploring in a roundabout way for the past month or so through petrogylphs, ceques, and other existentialia that has been emerging from my LAPES research. Yesterday, another relevant source for this work appeared in the immediate wake of the writing of the blog commentary on OPM 109 -- specifically, in the wake of announcing: "the challenge that arises is one of 'saying' something significant (meaningful, impactful) without words. Or, perhaps, its better to avoid the value laden, and put it as follows: the challenge is to 'map' this 'ground' (and it is, of course more than that!), this location of meditative thinking."
The source came from Juan Mascaro's translation of The Bhagavad Gita, ch. 13: "This body, Arjuna, is called the field. He who knows this is called the knower of the field. Know that I am the knower in all fields of my creation; and that the wisdom which sees the field and the knower of the field is true wisdom." Without writing an extended interpretation, I want to merely share this citation, and indicate the relationship between the perception of the field the body called the field. 'This body' is the body of Krishna, but Krishna is the personification of Existence per se, the one who says: "Know that with one single fraction of my Being I pervade and support the Universe, and know that I AM."(10:42) The knower of the field is true wisdom...not 'wise' but 'wisdom'. Denoting Existence (Being) as a field is significant for me, for it suggests we need to turn to the resources of cartography.
And that brings me to the resource that appeared today: Barbara E. Mundy's The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas. First, Mundy's elegant description of 'the map': "The map, by definition, arises out of a particular culture's understanding of space, which in turn is presaged on a culture's own construction of reality..."(p. xiii) I am struck by her use of the term 'presaged' as I don't recall ever encountering it before: pre-saged: • archaic (of a person) predict: lands he could measure, terms and tides presage. ORIGIN late Middle English (as a noun): via French from Latin praesagium, from praesagire ‘forebode,’ from prae ‘before’ + sagire ‘perceive keenly.’
Is the sage now properly one who presages? Is the sage the mapmaker, the one who is able to scribe (pictographically) a culture's particular understanding of space, which is to say, 'write' a fundamental or originary philosophy (the culture's construction of reality) via map making? Is the question I have been raising regarding the post-linguistic writing of originary philosophy now indicating the early map makers as exemplars? Perhaps, and Bundy, along with Russo (cited in OPM 107) are indicating an important path for understanding philosophical writing 'without words'. Bundy: "In using visual images to reconstruct the realities of indigenes in colonial Mexico, I am returning to the methods of the first historians of the New World, be they Spanish, mestizo, or native, who drew on, as their primary sources, the 'picture-books' and painted manuscripts of the pre-Hispanic world. For unlike texts, wherein the indigenous voice is muffled and distorted in its translation into Spanish or its conversion into Spanish genres of alphabetic writing, maps, along with other images, give us the viewpoint of sixteenth-century Amerindians who were using a familiar indigenous idiom. This being the case, the map image has a value without compare."(p. xix)
3.0 - I'm quite far from the exploration of Latin American philosophy, which was tentative. I was called to participate in the project of LAPES and contributed to the first publication of their journal "Lapiz." And I supported that project and even tried to work my contribution, first, in a course on Latin American philosophy, and then in a paper I wrote and shared at the Latinx philosophy conference at Rutgers. That was the conference where a colleague described me as a "poet," a title I embraced despite understand that he didn't necessarily mean it as a compliment although I suspect he intended it as a description. I was so overwhelmed by the presence of so many analytic philosophers that I was unable to take up his invitation to explore the distinction he had in mind between "philosophy" and "poetry." But that was my last foray into Latin American philosophy. I was naive when I went to that conference, but I learned something that I continue to think about to this day: a Latinx philosophy conference may or may not include questions that explore Latin American philosophy, but it will certainly be populated by Latinx philosophers. I made the naive error of bringing a paper that was trying to map out what a Latin American philosophy might sound like. But while I don't disown that paper, I did learn that this whole business of practicing Latin American philosophy is, for me anyway, a bit of a contrivance. I was invited to do it by non-Latinx philosophers who were appropriating Latin American philosophy for their own reasons, some of which I believe was motivated by a desire to find a cultural context for their work. The other reason has to do with the lure of identity politics and the claim that thinking is an embodied cultural practice. In a post-humanist mood, philosophers want to write from their lived experience. The problem for me is that my lived experience is cosmopolitan and humanist, but also infused with the mystical that is also leaning towards the denounced universalist perspective. My name and the way I appear physically announce my Dominican heritage, the history of my parents, grandparents, etc. So it would appear that I should be producing a version of Latin American philosophy. But appearances can be deceiving to others and to oneself. And I've been thinking about this problem as I wrestle with "conservative" feeling of the sabbatical book I started writing last week. From one perspective I'm writing like someone who is "colonized." But from another perspective it would appear to be "radical" for a Latinx philosopher to be writing a book that is inspired by Socrates, and guided by continental philosophers. In the end, if the moment calls for us to be "authentic" and "real" then I will write this book from the same perspective that I teach: as a cosmopolitan humanist. And this is the spirit of this project: to include voices, mostly ancient philosophers, from any tradition that speaks to the matter at hand. For example, OPM 110 cites Lao Tzu: "Abstaining from speech marks him who is obeying the spontaneity of his nature."(I:23;1). It is a cosmopolitan humanist move to embrace Lao Tzu as speaking across time and across cultures. Is the Tao specific to China? I think not. It is another name for what Heraclitus calls Logos. And the cited fragment from Lao Tzu expresses what follows from the silence that initiates learning. Learning begins with listening, yes, and the response that this silence and listening initiates is improvisation. Silence begets a kind of listening that is attentive to the appearance of what is truly new. Learning can only happen when we experience something new, or something familiar in new ways. Silence is not just the absence of speaking, it is the putting aside of the familiar ways of speaking-about things. Listening thus initiates a response that is equally new, and this kind of response is improvisational, marked by spontaneity.
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