Now, what to make of the 'forced' writing? There's something about the commitment to write each day for a minimum of one hour, and making a kind of leap of faith into that hour, when it arrives, that something will arrive, something worthy of being written. That was, anyway, how I approached each day.
From time to time, and this is one of those times, when I encounter a meditation where nothing rather than something seems to be documented, I am pushed into a place where I am compelled to make a commentary on this nothing, or, rather, on the nothingness of what appears in the meditation.
Of course, this nothing is something, and what I really intend by this qualification is to say that nothing new is being conveyed in the meditation. Put otherwise, there is a lot of repetition of phrases that have been written before. NOW, here I return, again, to this recurring question of 'originality'.
I've written a lot on and about what I have been calling since 2011: the project of originary thinking. The category of 'originary thinking' is one I more or less borrowed and then made my own. I borrowed it from my New School grad philosophy professor and doctoral advisor (until his untimely death in August of 1993) Reiner Schurmann.
Like Cousins, whom I wrote about in my commentary on OPM 117 (June 10), Schurmann had a lasting influence on me. He was the most rigorous teacher I've ever had, and his standards for us felt, at the time, too high in the sense that we could never possibly match his unequalled mix of high scholarship and almost avante garde theory. Schurmann's humility also made a deep impression on me. He never sought the spotlight, nor did he seek to form a clique or posse of students. On the contrary, he made every effort to remain aloof but neither arrogant nor snobbish. An example is his calling me in California (where I had moved) from his hospital room (where he would remain until his passing) to encourage me to continue with my project, which, he said, showed much potential.
Schurmann's book on Heidegger lead me to the category of 'originary thinking,' although I would only discover much later the connection between Schurmann's category and what I was calling 'originary' in the writing that I am returning to and documenting here. And the link is precisely what I am struggling with when I read meditations like OPM 119, because it points me to my own confusion about the originality of the originary.
Indeed, as I have written before, there is a way to understand the originary as originating, initiating, and an expression of what Arendt calls 'natality.' This is the poetics of the poetic phenomenology. Of course the writing should sound like it was originating something each day! Given that the experiment got underway during the two-week Coltrane festival on WKCR, and, what's more, that I was producing the weekly Dead Zone radio show, I was committed to the writing expressing the philosophical equivalent of Trane and Jerry solos! (see above quotation from Coltrane, which would, could, and should have been a prompt for one of my meditations!!) Each meditation should sound like a jam session! And it often felt like I was in the modality of the soloist. But often, the sound was less than original, and what I was writing felt more like the performance of ballads, or even standards. Reading meditations like OPM 119, especially when they conclude as this one does with an interesting quotation, I'm struck by what seems to be a kind of error in my approach, especially on those days when the writing sounds flat. Why conclude with a quotation? Well, the answer is obvious: because each day had to begin anew, and wait for something original to come around. Starting with a quotation would be 'cheating' or so it seemed. But that's where I believe I made an error, or suffered from a moment of amnesia. I seem to have forgotten something about the originality of the originary, which Schurman is clear about in his description, which found its way on the back cover of Being and Learning: originary thinking: "recalls the ancient beginnings, and it anticipate a new beginning, the possible rise of a new economy among things, words, and actions."
Reading this again, in light of the nothing that is offered in OPM 119, and with the memory of the Coltrane celebration that inspired me in the first days of the experiment, I am forced to now fully understand the first part of the formula: the recollection of the ancient beginnings. Of course, I am consistently returning to these ancient beginnings, specifically the greeks and Lao Tzu. But 'ancient beginnings' is not only these historical first philosophers, but, on a more metaphorical level, it indicates the time of the past, and, in this case, the preceding work of philosophy as a 'song book' that one can and should return to again and again. So, Yes!, one should, on occasion, return to this song book and play an arrangement of one of those tunes, and in recalling these beginnings, (re)arrange a song so that shows a new possibility, a new beginning. And that new beginning is precisely where a different kind of originality can emerge. This is the novelty that is revealed in the exegetical reading and hermeneutical interpretation of a text, specifically, an excerpt, or fragment. IN OTHER words, what I can today declare that I fully understand is the importance and legitimacy of beginning a meditation with a quotation that open up the space for something rather than nothing to arrive.
3.0 - We're still more or less in the beginning of summer. Technically it's still spring. The Summer Solstice is next week, and the local yoga studio announced a special event, which I might attend. I moved up here to Maine because it was much more in alignment with my lifestyle, not to mention the land/tree to human ratio. Maine is by definition the most rural state in the U.S. My family lives in Portland, in the oldest neighborhood that was originally a colonial town that was independent of Portland, which was itself then part of Falmouth. Stroudwater is defined by the confluence of the Stroudwater and Fore rivers. The area, where there are still standing homes from the 18th century, emerged as the leading making of sailboat masts for the British navy. In the forest behind my home we have a grove of massive white pine trees, nicknamed King Pine, because they were used for masts for the Royal Navy. In addition to the rivers, which are perfect for kayaking, there is a network of trails for hiking and biking, as well as the local yoga studio Creating Space. It's kind of idyllic, if you go for that sort of thing. That's the context for the writing these days, which begins in the early morning hours, the best time for writing!
ReplyDeleteAnd writing is the theme of the 2.0 commentary, which found OPM 119 less than inspired. Part of the issue is the tension I started to feel with the original writing, and the strategy I maintained throughout, which was to pick up where I left off the day before, and not to follow a general outline. The only parameters I had with the original project was: write at least one hour each day for an entire year. It was epic writing, and as soon as the figure of the Sage emerged, this embodiment of the philosophical educator became the hero of the epic. And at some point during the summer of 2004, when I was camping with the family at Cedar Pt in East Hampton, Nietzsche's Zarathustra found his way into the story. It was completely random, and a lot of fun! The story was a prelude to the beginning of Nietzsche's book, which begins with Zarathustra awakening to find himself bored with his mountaintop cave and his friends the eagle and serpent. So he descends, looking for friends. I offered a take on how Zarathustra found his way to the mountaintop cave. It started with him sleeping in the desert, discovered by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. That story came out of nowhere and I went with it. That was the spirit of the original project. The problem I encountered happened when the project actually felt like an epic story, rather than an "epic" experience. I remember feeling that tension when I was writing it, and the 2.0 commentary above is tapping into that tension. Was I just writing each day, or was I writing a book over the course of a year? The original intention was only the daily experiment. The idea or form of a book only emerged...later? If I were to do that experiment again, and in a way I am doing it with the approach I am taking with this sabbatical book, I would have outlined a set of questions or themes that wanted to tackle. I would have identified a word limit, say 500 min per day. And I would have also limited the amount of time I was spending on a particular section, say 2 months. That's more or less the strategy I'm following with my sabbatical, hoping to draft much of the 45k words of the small book by the end of August, so that I can be a real sabbatical bum during the fall semester! :-).
3.0b - I want to acknowledge both Ewert Cousins and Reiner Schürmann, who I mention in the 2.0 commentary above. Both were two of the most influential professors I had. Both were brilliant and inspiring. And both were extremely kind people with generous spirits. I was fortunate to have studied with them, and can only hope that in some small ways I carry on the examples they offered to me and my fellow students. Schürmann's descriptio of originary thinking will be the epigraph of my sabbatical book!
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