OPM 153, July 17th Meditation (commemorative)

The writing that was made ten years ago, which is part of what was weeks of writing that was not published in Being and Learning, returns to ‘compassion’ and is organized around a quotation from the influential Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: “Compassionate listening brings about healing.”   The citation of this assertion was preceded by relatively significant declaration that “ ‘Compassionate’ can now replace ‘painstaking,’ which captures the sacrifice entailed in the renouncement of the authorial voice but falls short of conveying the creative and productive character of this modality.”(7/17/04)  It should not go unnoticed that ‘compassionate’ replaced ‘painstaking’ half-way through the yearlong experiment. 

A comparison of the terms reveals the significance of making the shift, but only after some work.  Turning, first, to the dictionary, the distinction is necessarily revealing and may actually suggest the shift is counter-intuitive:  ‘painstaking’ is defined as “done with or employing great care and thoroughness”;  ‘compassion’ is defined as “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.”  Reading these two definitions it’s not immediately clear why ‘compassion’ replaced ‘painstaking’, especially if the reason given is the ability of the former to be convey the creative and productive character of the listening that initiates meditative thinking?  If we dig a bit deeper we learn that the roots of compassion are ecclesiastical, and thus make it an important part of catechism, which is always formative, and an example of the practice of spirituality that was discussed earlier this week (OPM 150, July 14^th).  It is worth returning to that moment in  OPM 150 when I connect the practice of spirituality with compassion:

“Spirituality is a term borrowed from Foucault who defines [cf. OPM 145, July 9th] it as the necessary work undertaken by the thinker to experience an encounter with the truth.  Spirituality is what I call the anticipatory, and preparatory work; the work that conditions us to become adept at the turnings, such as the turn from the mind to the heart.   In this way, spirituality prepares us for the experience of compassion.   In turn, compassion is an example of the event of appropriation, when we are gathered into an experience of the totality, which has a host of names, and one of them is Spirit.” 

It seems, then, that to understand the replacement of ‘painstaking’ by ‘compassionate’ we need to recognize the implications for the self/person that is revealed by the semantic shift.  And for this recognition we can look at OPM 148 (July 12^th) where compassion is identified as the important turn from the mind to the heart that is prepared by the anticipatory and preparatory work of spirituality:

“Compassion is the shift to the heart, a transcendent moment when the suffering of the present (the passion) gives way to a kinship with the totality, when we find ourselves in communion with the seemingly infinite fecundity of life.”

What is key here is the occurrence of what Heidegger calls the event of appropriation where the ‘strange ownership’ of the self by Being is revealed.  Today, in light of the citation of Thich Nhat Hanh, the turn from the mind to the heart (as the ‘center’ for meditative thinking) is a moment of ‘healing.’   Now what is quite interesting is that the definition, which also show the roots, of the word  ‘healing’ qualify the action as ‘becoming sound’, which is, of course, the derivation of the primary meaning of sound as sonic.   As an adjective, ‘sound’ indicates the state of being whole, or good aka being healthy.  And this is why I said that compassion is the experience of kinship with the totality, “when we find ourselves in communion with the seemingly infinite fecundity of life.”  This is precisely the experience that Nietzsche called the Eternal Recurrence, the experience that leaves one saying “Yes!” to Life.  (That Nietzsche derived this from his reading of Emerson, who I had in mind when I was writing that part of OPM 148, will remain an open question for the moment.) 

 Nietzsche’s cameo appearance helps me understand the shift from ‘painstaking’ to ‘compassion’, and why the former remains too close to the positive will.    Here I have to cite a moment in my paper “Feeling the Funk: Taking Up Nietzsche’s Prophecy of Music-Making Philosophy,” which is based on a reading of his Birth of Tragedy:

“…[no event] is as important as the sacrifice and resurrection instantiated by the immanent presence of the Being as becoming, or what I call ceaseless nativity.  This is precisely what Nietzsche is heralding with the writing of his book:  the sacrifice of the subject, the individual, the common, “the annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence,”(BT23) and the subsequent birth or resurrection of the Dionysian artist: the artist as artwork, the individual human subject as subjected to the totality of Being, the Primal Unity.”  

And all this brings me to the fragment distilled from the writing made this day ten years ago:

If ‘compassionate listening brings about healing,’ such ‘healing’ is a transcendental union with the totality, Being, a return to the Primal Unity.  This return gives birth to the artist as artwork, which is another way of understanding the ‘healing’  happening with compassion; the reconfigured power of the author as the empowerment of the exegetical writer.