OPM 137, June 30th Meditation, Being and Learning, ch 6, pp. 142-143

Since this morning I’ve been in the mood to write a parable, of sorts, and experiment with what I have been calling my writing to come. Coincidentally the urge seems to be forecasted by the meditation that I wrote this day ten years ago, which begins “We might call the writing that conveys the arrival of the ineffable ‘evocative writing,’ for it points the reader towards the questioning stand of interpretation.  Evocative writing is an expression of poetic phenomenology, what might be a writing that bears the gift of teachability.”  The meditation, which is the last of chapter 6 “Aristotle’s Critique,” then goes on to take up Lao Tzu  -- further indication that this is an oddly placed and organized chapter, that only momentarily engages Aristotle and his implied critique of meditative thinking.  That being said, what interested me then is what interests me today: experimentation with writing, in a very practical sense of working out new techniques for writing philosophy.   The desire to experiment with writing is one that has captured my attention since the experiment I am commemorating with this blog.   It became the focused project of originary thinking in 2011 as I was completing the final copy-edits for Being and Learning alongside writing and presenting what came to be the lyrical preface to the book, and the review essay that announced the maxim of the project to be ‘more poetry, less prose.’  The denotation of poetry was rooted in the ancient concept of poiein  aka making and forming ideas through writing in a matter akin to making an object of art.   This was linked, initially, to a liberatory project, and in this sense was a continuation of the existential politics that I’d been doing for at least two decades.   I made two attempts to organize a working group, first with what was called the Downtown Philosophy of Education Studio (DPES), and then with the Orr’s Island Collective (OIC).  DPES made a few presentations, met regularly, but couldn’t get off the ground when our serious plan of publishing a journal for alternative theory crashed and burned in the research and development stage.  OIC met for a week exactly one year ago, and while the experience made lasting memories for all who attended, the momentum to continue as a working group dissipated as so many earnest and interesting project do.  In both cases, with DPES and the OIC, there was a way but not enough will.

I continued throughout all of that time to work on experimental forms of writing philosophy, convinced  wholeheartedly by the veracity of what was originally a Kierkegaardian inspired theory of the authority of the author, the one who is able to take hold of their God granted freedom full force by forming their God given singularity.  Of course,  there was a lot of Nietzsche in this theory that was put into practice, and in the past two years I have returned to that figure of the music making Socrates that appears early on in these meditations (OPM    ).    I made a few presentations around that figure, suggesting that this ‘last’ Socrates is the prophet of a future philosophical writing.  The paper where I worked that out happened to also be the last full blown paper I wrote, namely “Feeling the Funk:  Taking Up Nietzsche’s Prophecy of a Music-Making Philosophy,” which I presented in February at the Society for the Philosophical Study of Education meeting in Chicago, happening during the APA Central annual meeting.   I need to return to that paper, which is perhaps the clearest and most intense theoretical articulation of what ten years ago I called ‘evocative writing,’ and today would place under the general banner of originary thinking and music-making philosophy. 

As I return to the meditations I recognize that most of what I was doing was a mapping of that location, the boundary where ordinary language, and ordinary reasoning, gives way to what today I want to call literary and novelistic language, a kind of poetics that isn’t lyrical in the usual way we understand poetry.   This boundary gives way to an open region, and clearing, that is not simply a domain of meditative thinking if by this we mean contemplation that stops short of writing. 

The question of contemplative education came up in the Autumn of 2013, when I was a guest in my colleague’s graduate seminar.  That question gave rise to the questions concerning contemplative reading, study, and, now, contemplative writing.   But today ‘evocative writing’ returns as the most succinct way to describe a writing that calls forth thinking of different kind: a different form of thinking, and a thinking of difference.   Thinking differently and thinking difference is precisely what the writing to come will evoke, and it will do so because it arises from the place marked by difference, the threshold of that aforementioned boundary, which is its own place…paradoxically of but not yet in the open.  To say it is of the open region is to say that it is defined by the open – having the modality of openness, this threshold is an opening.  The writing happening on this threshold is the writing of the threshold scholar…and much has been written on that figure (in the Spring of 2012), not to mention the very  first video, which I will post below. 

All that to say that the writing to come, inspired by the imaginative historical and philosophical fragments of Borges, will be evocative writing but not contemplative because the writing will not be speculative but the writing of flesh and bones, historicized and culturally rooted writing.