OPM122 June 15th Meditation, Being and Learning, ch 8, pp.202-203

OPM 122 marks the beginning of the second third of this year long commemoration of the original daily writing experiment that I completed ten years ago.   I do recall the summer of 2004 as one that was defined by lots of traveling.  We took a few camping trips to our favorite spot on the east end of Long Island, NY, Cedar Point, where I recall writing lots of Zarathustra inspired meditations.  That summer I also took 'on the road' the original paper that I had initiated the experiment, and read it at the International Network of Philosophers of Education conference in Madrid.  In between that trip and the camping, I also made my annual trek up to what is now my home state of Maine!  I recall when writing in Madrid, from the second floor of the Starbucks (sad but true story), a particular focus on nosostros ('us') and nos otros, which, with the stretching of grammatical rules that is part of the experiment, I 'translated' as 'our others' or better 'us/others.'  Those meditations are forthcoming!
I'm also looking ahead and forward to the writing that will continue to unfold with the LAPES project.  Specifically, I've more or less envisioned this project as a long overdue realization of a kind of writing that I have been wanting to do for a very long time, and that arises from that part of the originary thinking project that is prompted by the slogan I first articulated in a book review essay in 2011: "More poetry, less prose."   As I am envisioning it, or, rather, as it is appearing to me, the writing to come will be a form of philosophical literature, specifically short fragmentary pieces that are based in 'actual' historical events and/or personal experiences.   The final 'breakthrough' happened when I was composing my contribution to the insert for Rocha's Late to Love album.   As I described it to Sam, when I was writing what he called the 'palabras entre nosotros' (modelled after the daily prayer book his father and grandfather read La Palabra, which, coincidentally -- or not! -- means 'The Word') I felt a wave of power move through me,  and described the result as my having found my inner 'Borges/Frost'!   This happened when I was writing the following fragment:

Eulogy for Monica

 [PALABRAS ENTRE NOSOTROS: ]

In the early morning, I was awakened by the shrill call of a jay responding to the caw of a raven.  Black and blue, back and forth, theirs is a quarrel for time and space. 

Their quarrel was organized by the hefty branch of a massive oak tree.   The jay, and her mate, had, this particular Spring, nested in the oak.    Returning to the branch one evening they found a nascent crow far too close to their home.   The raven child was quickly dispatched, but much too soon.  From its perch it glided awkwardly to the ground below.    The raven’s mother was unnerved by the dearth of hospitality, and registered her displeasure until the sun had finally set beyond the peak of the Agiocochook.

The quarrel resumed the next morning at sunrise.

I’m not one to pick sides between the blue jays and black crows, but I have to admit to feeling for the young raven a great deal of sympathy and even empathy, if that’s possible between a man and a bird.  He happened to be perched on my writing chair when I went outside this morning.  And he moved not an inch as I approached with coffee cup in one hand, writing gear in the other.   I believe he would have remained perched on my chair if I had sat down.

Without knowing it, the child searches for a dwelling, a place to be himself, away from quarrelling old-timers.  Another time, another place, the child turns away from his mother’s face, and the entire cosmos stretches wide and sings a song of welcome.  Another time, and still another place, the child will see his mother’s face looking far away, and he will hear, again, that song of welcome.  And in those moments, mother and child are at peace together and apart.

The thesis behind the composition of such pieces is a response to what I understand to be the fundament existential and originary question of the Americas:  Donde Estamos? (Where are we?)   The entirely new existential situation that arises post cultural collision between the two previously co-existing old worlds necessitates a new kind of philosophical writing; one that expresses the fundamental uncertainty of this situation, an uncertainty that is full of possibility.  Now, most of what I say in Being and Learning offers a kind of metaphysics for that fundamental uncertainty that is full of possibility.  But very little of what I actually do in the book (aka the edited collection of these meditations) is that form of writing for which Borges is my model and primary inspiration.  Louis Menand expresses the 'deconstructive' sensibility of this writing when he wrote in a recent New Yorker essay that the deconstructionists approach to reading presumes that "literature is the only kind of writing that is aware of the instability of the distinction between the literal and the figurative, between grammatical and rhetorical modes of meaning."  For me, the very existential condition of what Rodolfo Kusch calls 'American profundo,' demands a philosophical writing that is not only an acute expression of the awareness of the unstable distinction between the literal and the figurative, but, as philosophy draws the reader into a relation to that awareness, which is a drawing them into a thinking or consciousness of  that condition, which is felt most intensely by the 'American' condition.

  There is much more to be written on this writing, but I don't want to distract from the matter at hand.   However, I was compelled  today to say something about this forthcoming project because today, as an important milestone in this commemorative year; a day to be guided by the spirit of aspiration, or, as I write in OPM 122: "The ineffable appears as the appeal of language, which addresses us as mortals, each of us as particular, as one of the many...enjoined in a complex horizon.  To authentically receive this appeal is to become devoted to learning, and thereby to submit oneself...to what is already always beyond 'us'.  To submit oneself to what is always already beyond us is to be transported into the openness itself, to become poetic, and thus free, 'open and ready for the unforeseen.'"