OPM 152, July 16th Meditation (commemoration)

The prompt for today’s commemorative commentary comes from yet another one of the books on my summer reading list, Jose De Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590).  I was reading it yesterday in the afternoon, sitting in my back yard as the weather was shifting dramatically.  What was at one point a classic July day (sunny and humid), quickly shifted with the gathering of a pale then gray then slate sky, which filled with multiple layers of clouds, some whisking overheard looked to be no higher than 500 ft.   I could hear thunder rolling in the west, and the fast moving sea gulls and cormorants swiftly coasting east confirmed the coming storm.   While I was observing all this seemingly chaotic yet coordinated movement in the sky I also watched the dance of bushes and tree limbs happening close to the ground where I sat.  Suddenly I envisioned the kind of writing that could aptly describe the whole scene.  And just as suddenly I realized that I was envisioning the very phenomenology I’d had written about a day earlier (or two days prior to this day), and was filled with a mix of inspiration and anxiety; for while the call to describe the scene was inspiring, I immediately felt I was not capable of such writing; a gaping lack of confidence opened up before me.   Paradoxically, this only focused my attention on what was unfolding around me in the sky and on the earth, and reflecting now on yesterday’s experience it doesn’t seem to be a stretch to identify this attunement brought on by a momentary crisis of confidence as that very same restraint the Stoics call apatheia.  In light of all this I want to make the following conjecture:  the detail and accuracy of a phenomenological account is always correlated to the intensity of the receptive attunement; the broadcast is only ever as clear as the reception of the signal is powerful.

Now, this conjecture leads me to what was, in fact, the prompt from De Acosta’s book.  Given what I’ve just written, I could claim that the place I want to begin was inspired by the first chapters I read from Natural and Moral History of the Indies.  Indeed, I experienced something oddly coincidental as the very moment when I was reading De Acosta’s musings on the movement and character of wind the aforementioned drama in the sky moved onto to a much more spectacular scene, which included bolts of lightening and explosive claps of thunder, not to mention ten minutes of torrential rain.   I noted to myself the coincidence in the same way I noted to myself the coincidence of writing on the blues yesterday at the exact moment the Dead started playing Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” Grateful Dead, July 15, 1989. (I wrote yesterday's commentary while sitting at the Coffee By Design cafe on Diamond Street. Normally I don't listen to music when writing, but I needed the headphones and tunes to keep me from being distracted by the lively conversations around me.)   At any rate, the coincidence of reading De Acosta’s musings on the wind during the afternoon summer storm is not the prompt for today's writing, although perhaps it was?!

Actually, the prompt was offered by Walter Mignolo in his introduction to De Acosta’s book.   Without trying to construct a complicated Borgesian multi-referential network,  the prompt I am referring to was offered by Mignolo when he shared his reading of a competing introduction to De Acosta’s History,  written by Edmundo O’Gorman for the Mexican edition of 1940.  (I’d recently read O’ Gorman’s The Invention of America: an inquiry into the historical nature of the New World and the meaning of its history, discovering the volume after my colleague and good friend Frank Margonis had recommended Enrique Dussel’s book that has the same title.  I wasn’t impressed by either book, but that’s for another day!)  What prompted my thinking for today, which has already produced a conjecture [above], was Mignolo’s description of O’Gorman’s introduction, which, to further complicate matters, Mignolo labels ‘prologue.’ (Can a prologue be written by another ‘secondary party’* that has no direct relation to the author?  I have my doubts about that, especially when it is written 350 years later! *nb: I wanted to write ‘second party,’ but found the definition incompatible with my design.  I then considered ‘secondary party,’ and think that works because it refers to those who “have a vested interest in or may be affected directly…but for some reason…are not directly involved.”  In this case, someone who introduces a book he did not write is a secondary party because he has a vested interest in the book without being directly responsible for its content, and this secondary status is what precisely what validates the externus contribution to the book!  And the fact that such a contribution can be made without the primary party aka the author's knowledge indicates the very prompt I have yet to disclose!) 

And, so, putting aside my debate with Mignolo on the appropriate label for O’Gorman’s contribution to the 1940 edition of De Acosta’s History, what prompted me today was the following from Mignolo: “The prologue, eighty pages long, is a detailed exercise in textual interpretation.  Unusual at the time – though being unusual was one of O’Gorman’s trademarks – he blatantly stated a position that has a family resemblance to British New Criticism.  However, O’Gorman was defending a position contrary to one of its main principles, the “intentional fallacy.”  While the intentional fallacy discredited textual interpretation based on the intention of the author as a romantic legacy in literary criticism, O’Gorman was addressing the field of historiography.”

What prompted me into thinking today was this elegant yet blunt instrument of literary theory: “intentional fallacy.”  Intentional fallacy!  Of course!  (The stream of consciousness I experienced when I stopped reading and started thinking about the "intentional fallacy" ended with the specter of Foucault smirking, as if saying, Didn’t I teach you that?  --  I won’t let my imagination take me into delusion by drawing any significance form the totally arbitrary coincidence of someone at the gym this morning wearing a t-shirt that had Foucault’s  grinning face plastered on the front.) 

"The intentional fallacy." Let me restate the conjecture [above]: the detail and accuracy of a phenomenological account is always correlated to the intensity of the receptive attunement; the broadcast is only ever as clear as the reception of the signal is powerful.  And let me cite from OPM 148, which cites 147: “Picking up on the ongoing musings on ereignis (the event of appropriation), OPM 147 goes straightaway at the 'strange ownership' that was introduced with via Heidegger … At the end of the fragment I distilled from OPM 147 I wrote: everything is lost in translation.  Until we recognize the radicality of the asymetrical relationship we have with Being.  Translation:  Being owns us.”

Let me add the fragment from OPM 149: All writing is preceded by reading.    But this is not to say that writing is simply a translation of what has been read.    Yet there is no question that all writing is, ultimately, mimetic.   The challenge, then, is to make a copy that combines such disparate elements so as to disclose originality.

  

Here then I would add the following fragment, which echoes a paper I presented at the Philosophy of Education Conference 2013, Portland, OR "Writing, Teaching: Making An Offering", which is a response to Sam Rocha's  "Incarnate Reading":

The so-called 'death of the author' is a sleight of hand, but no mere party trick.   It is a sacrifice followed by a resurrection: the return of the reader.  After the reader has risen, a writer comes along: one who is first and foremost an interpreter, a translator, an exegete.   In turn, with the arrival of the writer completes a reversal:  the author’s authority is returned to the book and the reader.

I’ll conclude with two excerpts from the writing from this day ten years ago, which offers further context:

When he asks, Do we now know what the ‘poetic’ is?, Heidegger responds, “Yes, because we receive an intimation about how poetry is to be thought of: namely, it is to be conceived as a distinctive kind of measuring.  No, because poetry, as the gauging of that strange measure, becomes ever more mysterious.  And so it must doubtless remain, if we are really prepared to make our stay in the domain of poetry’s being.”  If the poetic is identified as the letting-be into freedom, the releasement into openness itself, where the learner is open and ready for the unforeseen, then poetic is the “letting come of what has been dealt out.”