OPM 145 July 9th Meditation (commemoration)

There are three prompts that get me underway today as I commemorate the meditation written this day, July 9th, ten years ago.  (The Stoic styled fragment from today's writing is offered below.  I was about to qualify the distilled fragment as the 'Stoic/Nietzschean styled fragment/aphorism' but, for the moment, I hesitate to characterize them as Nietzschean insofar as they lack the requisite sardonic humor, and biting cultural criticism)

The first prompt is one that I encountered yesterday just after completing the post for OPM 144.  It comes from Aby Warburg's Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America.   I don't recall how I came across this title, but I do recall being astonished when I did, and immediately shared my finding with my colleague and good friend Tyson Lewis who has a keen interest in Warburg, specifically, the famous Warburg library, which he often cites as an exemplary location for 'study'.  Tyson is also one of the few of my friends with whom I've a had a long and detailed conversation about my LAPES project, and who appreciated the implications of the project's cartographical move (especially for those of us in philosophy of education who are working on Heidegger.)    All that to say that when I finally opened the Warburg book (another on my summer reading list), I was jolted by Warburg's epigram, which reads: "It is a lesson from an old book: the kinship of Athens and Oraibi."   

Given the title of Warburg's book, I had my suspicions about the location of Oraibi, and, sure enough, those suspicions were confirmed when I learned that Oraibi is where the Hopi nation is located.   I also learned that there is very significant petroglyph there, one that is called the Prophecy Rock.  Petroglyphs have been an important subject of this yearlong commemorative writing, especially as this project points to the writing to come.  And I've written four posts on the subject (OPM 92, 105, 107, 109).   Warburg includes a photograph of Hopi dancers at Oraibi,  but no image of the Prophecy Rock glyph.  I posted one posted one above.     All this to say that Warburg's epigraph has inspired some questions, ones that I will need time to think about, especially when I return in earnest to my LAPES project, and only after I have read Warburg's short book.   First question:  what could be meant here by the 'kinship' between Athens and Oraibi?  Is Warburg speculating some kind of common ancestry between what I call the previously co-existing old worlds?  If Warburg is correct, then there is some kind of 'familial' bond between these two old worlds. And this begs questions concerning the 'lesson' about this connection, which we learn from an 'old book'.    What is this 'old book' that Warburg is referring to?  And how does it teach us?  The latter question comes from my assumption that such a book does not exist in time and space in the way we understand a codex.   Rather, I'm assuming, we should drop the 'x' and think in terms of a 'code' (cipher), or a system of meaning that connects Athens and Oraibi.   And given his training and practice as an art historian my sense is that Warburg understands this code to be available in the visual arts, which is why he immediately turns to a Hopi drawing of serpents as lightning descending from the sky. Here I am curious to the point of wanting to offer the conjecture that this 'kinship' can be found in the symbolic representation of lightning.  And at this moment I am already envisioning including some speculation on this conjecture in my HUHC lecture on Heraclitus via Heidegger.

The second prompt for today's post was encountered this morning when I was reading Foucault's The Hermeneutics of the Subject, specifically the lecture from January 13, 1982 (first hour).   I was really intrigued by what Foucault says about a gap that exists between  'learning' (in the usual sense of the term aka by way of didactic instruction) and  'care of the self,' which has to do with self-formation in the sense of making a self.   Now aside from the fact that I've been focussing in the past week on the gathering of the self and community, I'm intrigued by Foucault's suggestion that this gap between instruction and self-education is an interplay, "the whole interplay between philosophy and spirituality in the ancient world." (p. 46)  To appreciate what Foucault means here one must be acquainted with this contrast, which he introduced in his very first lecture (Jan. 6th), where philosophy is said to be "the form of thought that asks what it is that enables a subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject's access to the truth" and spirituality, which is "the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth...Spirituality postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right...The truth is only given to the subject at a price...."  If truth is understood here in the ancient discourse that (aside from Protagoras) always presumes 'the truth' to be something that can be thought by humans as opposed to something that is constructed by us, then the interplay between philosophy and spirituality seems to me to be the same interplay between the self and the gathering force that I have been exploring this week.    'Philosophy' in this case represents the thinking (metaphysics) that asks about and describes the a priori conditions of gathering, understanding this gathering to be the dynamic unfolding of Being.  In turn, 'spirituality' is gathering of self by way of making (art), via poiein.   The 'price' that is paid is the relinquishment of the self as given, a sacrifice toward an unknown but hoped for future; the fulfillment of the prophetic.  As for the gap in between these two, it seems to me that this is precisely where the meditations were written, for they are an odd mix of metaphysics and poetics.

The third and final prompt was encountered last night when I was reading Marcus' Meditations.  First and foremost,  Marcus example reminded me to exercise restraint when distilling the fragments.  After reading a series of succinct pieces, a few that were only a single sentence long, I once again came to the realization that the original experiment was in some ways flawed by my bad habit of verbosity.  It's a bad habit that got me into much trouble when I was a kid in grade school, and into more trouble as a young adult when I simply didn't know when to 'say' when!  If the capacity to express oneself easily is a gift, it is one best used sparingly, or wisely.  Is the culture norm of frugality, which is so powerful here in Maine, starting to grab a hold of me, so much that my deeper cultural roots are being challenged?    Maybe.  Whatever the case, Marcus has made think, again, about this unshakable habit! He also offered a poignant meditation on what I have been calling the force of gathering, which, following Lao Tzu, I understand to be disclosed through the power of Nature (what Nietzsche called the will to power).  Marcus Aurelius: 
"All that you now see will be changed in no time at all by nature that governs the whole, and from its material she will make new things, and from their material new things again, to keep the universe forever young."

Here, then, inspired by Marcus' brevity, is fragment I have distilled from OPM 145:

Meditative thinking is a practice that reminds us we are part of a greater whole; not simply a world that we are born into, that is much older than we are and that will persist after we are gone, but also a human community that has the very same characteristics as the world.  When we thinking meditatively we are carried beyond ourselves and into a communion with world and community.   In sum, meditative thinking is a retreat from the self.