OPM 127 June 20th Meditation, Being and Learning, chap 8 p. 209 - chap 6 pp. 129-130

Only Derrida could 'make sense' (describe phenomenologically) the dash '-' that appears in the title of this blog post, the symbol that is indicating 'through' or 'from here to there'.  Who else could show how the movement of a book of philosophy could go from the end chapter 8 to the beginning of chapter 6?

Commemorating OPM 127 forces me to say something about the contrast between the original experiment  of writing each day and the publication of these meditations as Being and Learning seven years after the experiment was completed.   I’m forced to say something on this contrast because the published material from OPM 127 is divided, and not evenly, which only adds to the character of the non-linear logic that organizes this writing.   Indeed, the first third of the writing that happens in the longish 127 makes up the last paragraph of chapter 8, while the remaining two thirds are the first three paragraphs of chapter 6, titled “Aristotle’s Critique.”   The only clue I have regarding my editorial decision is a sticky note that I placed half-way into the meditation that says: “Break on to a discussion of Aristotle on wonder.” Here’s a photo of the note:

The note is a sign that points to the break that happened at that moment in the writing.   Although I don’t recollect the details --  again, no log or diary was kept during the writing experiment – I have a feeling that at that time I was re-reading  Thinking, the first volume of Arendt’s Life of the Mind.    OPM 126, as I noted in my commentary, is organized around two quotations from that volume, so it’s likely that I’d read her bit on Aristotle and wonder, where he says it is the origin of all thinking.   That, anyway, is probably how the turn toward Aristotle came about. 

            But that’s not saying much about the break, and, what’s more, how the meditations that happened in the second half of June should end up be published before the ones that were written between April and May?   Here is where I recall what I have often said about reading Being and Learning: “pick up and read any page, any paragraph, and then decide to read what comes immediately before it or after; the writing is non-linear, which is to say it is both intensely repetitive and circular.”  I’m not sure if I’ve said this as a way of ‘defending’ the writing; again feeling the force of the norms of academic writing? (This is a recurring question I have been raising and exploring throughout the commemoration). 

The recurring question of the form of the writing vis-à-vis the expectations of a reader who picks up a book reminds me that there will remain an unresolvable tension, one that only emerged when I made the decision to take the dusty binders off my office bookshelf and make a go at preparing the writing for publication.  As I write this I’m prompted to follow-up on yesterday’s post, which included memories of attending PES in San Francisco and receiving little to no support from my colleagues who, as I recall it, were rather nonplussed by the experiment and its ‘data’.    They were, indeed, somewhat surprised and a bit confused and unsure how to react to the binder I was carrying.   But that wasn’t the only disappointing reaction.   The other came from one of my hosts.  I was staying with my friend Liz Smith and her family in Pacifica.  Liz’s husband, Brian, had encouraged me to submit a proposal to his brother who had a connection at Shambala press, known for publishing eastern philosophy.   I’d done so before I’d completed the yearlong experiment, with the hopes that I could meet with Brian’s brother when I was in San Francisco.  I’d sent him a long letter and selections from the writing, specifically the somewhat traditional sounding/looking ‘Introduction’ – the paper that had gotten things going.    By the time I arrived to San Francisco with binder number one, weeks after completing the experiment, I hadn’t heard back from the brother.   And when I raised this to Brian, he was almost surprised to hear that I’d actually sent him anything.  Or, rather, he acted surprised by the whole narrative, as if his brother was not in a position to do anything, actually.   I remember feeling numb and somewhat shocked and embarrassed and then angry that I’d shared anything with this shadow figure, someone I’d never met before, and, to this day, never acknowledged receiving my proposal.    I’m almost certain that happened the day I arrived to California, so that my mood was already a bit funky when PES got underway.  And that would give some indication of the rather alienated look I have in the photo that Audrey included in her PES 2005 web chronicle:

            I certainly have the look of someone who is far from being present.  I appear distant and far from the proceedings.  Pensive and pre-occupied.    All that to say that the confidence that had propelled the experiment had all but vanished, and the veracity of  meditative thinking’s event-like character was all too intensely real.  This is was Arendt described in the first of the two quotations cited in 126:    ‘Thinking is out of order because the quest for meaning produces no end result that will survive the activity, that will make sense after the activity has come to an end.’”  Indeed, thinking is out of order and the thinker out of order when he moves in the location outside of thinking.   To make this claim is not at all to disparage my hosts because, like them, my own day to day family life is not a location of thinking. (And I've already made some commentary on the family (cf. no. 48, April 1)  But the photo is taken at PES, the annual gathering of members of my professional community.  What does that say about PES?  That’s a rhetorical question, and one begs the criticism of professional conferences that only ever become spaces of thinking when I’m meeting with my closest friends, usually sharing a meal.  And so I am back, again, to yet another ‘fact’ disclosed in the experiment:  that thinking is an intensely intimate and one might even say ‘private’ affair, one, as Socrates said in the company of friends, is both a source and expression of love.  What is crucial is the intimacy, and, what’s more, the trust one had for one’s friends, as well as the shared memories.   This is why the conversation with Brian threw me!  Where was the shared memory?  Had I misunderstood the conversation  we had during the Christmas holidays in Summit?  Was my memory at fault, or was he feigning ignorance? 

            Ten years later I am forced to remember that the yearlong experiment of writing a daily meditation was just that: an experiment.  I didn’t write with the intention of publishing the material.  On the contrary I was motivated to write each day because I had a powerful desire to break the cycle of writing for.  Writing for conferences, writing for journals,  etc.  The experiment was a writing from the location of meditative thinking.  But the truth of that location is that it can not be faithfully described in a language suited for a general audience.  Like poetry and like art, the writing that is made from the location of meditative thinking is an affair of the heart, which, as Arendt describes it, is the most mysterious because it is the darkest part of a person.   The heart can not appear in the light of the public, and is completely absent in the that sphere of anonymity, the social.   This leaves the thinker mostly alone with himself, waiting for the moment when the company of friends with gather.