OPM 136, June 29th Meditation, Being and Learning, ch 6, pp. 141-142

OPM 136 Writing this during the Dead Zone, when I usually record the video of reading the meditation.   But the trip to Mt. Desert Island interrupted that part of the process, and I’m not sure that I’ll be returning to the video recording.  Indeed, so long as I properly cite the pages in Being and Learning that correspond to the meditation, what’s the need to record myself reading the meditation?   Originally the plan was to only record myself reading the meditation, and making commentary, and then posting that on my blog.  Then I decided to write commentary along with the video, as it seemed appropriate to document writing with writing in addition to reading the meditation.  And now I’ve come to a point where I’ve moved a bit from the meditations themselves, and I’m writing what feels at times like a documentation of the present state of my affairs, where I am and how what that place is causing me to think.  Have I moved too far from the original meditations?  Perhaps, but it would be unfair to be too critical of the commemorative blog posts, as they are indeed, in the spirit of the original meditation, emerging from my present experience.  The crucial difference being while the writing in these days is more experiential, and less experimental,  that the original meditations were exegetical and hermeneutical pieces, responding to philosophical texts, mostly ancient. 

So how might these two approaches overlap? The conclusion of OPM 135 and the beginning of OPM 136 offer citations of Heraclitus’ fragments, and, coincidentally (with the playing of the Dead Zone) the fragments are organized around the mysterious ‘harmony past knowing.’  I focus a lot of attention on receptivity of difference and the letting be of learning, which I reduce to the fundamental phenomenological position of hearing.  In turn, I equate the hearing of this mysterious harmony as the receptivity that lets learning happen and thereby gathers together the learning community, a community that is formed around difference, or what Arendt calls plurality.  Learning is thus the ‘play’ or dynamic interaction of plurality, of difference.  This is captured in Heraclitus’ fragments 46-47, cited at the end of OPM 135: “From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony…The harmony past knowing sounds more deeply than the known.”

At the beginning of OPM 136 I misread the fragment and pull out the ‘harmony past knowing sounds.’   It is simply the ‘harmony past knowing,’ and this harmony sounds more deeply than the known.   It’s not an egregious error, because the point remains the same:  there is a harmony that is more profound that what we can perceive through our ‘normally’ trained hearing.  Now, there is certainly a way to interpret this metaphorically, and render this harmony as a non-sonic based perception of the grand order of this, an epiphany with the cosmos.   But as someone who is very much interested in sound and hearing, I’d like to imagine Heraclitus was referring to a collection of sounds, making a harmony that can be heard if and when we find ourselves in the location of meditative thinking.   Of course, this would be in keeping with the older tradition of philosophy that goes back through Pythagoras into the temples of Egypt.  As I write this I have fresh in mind the book on black bears that teaches us that bears can hear sounds on a much higher register than humans.  Translation: there are lots of sounds that are ‘out there’ and perhaps it’s a matter of training our ears to hear them? 

Inspired by Heraclitus’ claim about a this harmony past knowing I cite, in OPM 136, Lao Tzu who describes our perception of the Tao in similar terms: “We listen to it, and we do not hear it, and we name it ‘the Inaudible.’”  But is this the same sounding that Heraclitus is referring to?  As I re-read the meditation and take up this material again my sense is that they are actually parting company, especially if we read them in an ordinary language way, which, I realize, seems absurd.  However, if we take up what they are saying in this straight forward way then Heraclitus is referring to a harmony that is sounding more deeply than the known, but is not, like Lao Tzu, saying we do not hear it when we listen to it.  For Lao Tzu, the Tao doesn’t make a sound, and here he is emphasizing the openness it offers us, the clearing that opens along the Way.  For Heraclitus, the invitation is to hear more deeply, and I take this in a very literal sense that we need to become more attuned to higher and lower registers, that we need to train our hearing to become more complex in its ability to gather sounds.   I don’t see the two as being mutually exclusive, and, on the contrary, they seem to be complementary, because it seems that in order for us to retrain our hearing we must try to unlearn our habits of hearing what we know, of listening to familiar sounds, and this may also require us to move in places that are full of new sounds, as well as places that have a minimal amount of familiar sounds.   I can’t help to use the example of being on Hodgon pond last week and hearing the croaking frogs and the moose call across the way in the forest.  In fact, the first night of our stay was so quite in the forest that my ears felt as if they had cotton in them.  All this to say that this deeper harmony may in fact have much to do with Heraclitus invitation to us that we remove ourselves from the busyness of the fast moving city life and take up residence on the mountains and in the forests.