OPM 157, July 21st Meditation (commemoration)

There are three prompts that get me underway this morning with the writing that commemorates the meditation written this day ten years ago.  I’ll list them in the order they appeared: Hemingway/Kerouac, night heron, sound.

There is an old adage that says, Write what you know. And while I’d heard it said many times before, I didn’t really get it until I was forced to admit that my overtly resentful critique of Junot Diaz made no sense on its own terms.  Putting aside the fallacy of ressentiment, which I commit each time I dismiss Diaz (nb: against the norm, I deliberately refer to him only using his surname, and always saying it with a slight bit of sarcasm, a habit that started the moment in the spring of 2008 when I saw in posted in a Cambridge bookstore that he’d won the Pulitzer prize for fiction!), my critique, which I always deliver with the confidence of a two seam moving fastball, is that Diaz was a one-trick pony, writing only from his limited experience as a Dominicano (I refuse to use the label Dominican-American, which is horribly redundant).   The ressentiment I feel is rooted in the ruse that this one-trick pony is playing on the elite Manhattan based gringo literati:  Diaz’s Dominicano experience is celebrated as the Dominicano experience. Why? Because no one else has written an alternative.  None of us Dominicano’s have done the story telling work.  If my first strike pitch was the one-trick pony line, followed by strike two with the nasty off-speed curve of a line that he was feeding into the gringo literati elite’s desire to celebrate the voice of the ‘subaltern’ (aka the short stories and novels written by the children of the elite’s nannies and landscapers), then my strike out pitch was the nasty cutter that Diaz was no Hemingway, a dispassionate reporter, a true phenomenologist who described and chronicled what he saw, not necessarily what he lived.   Diaz punchado!  Not so fast…that last pitch might have been outside, or even fouled off.  Diaz steps back into the box.  How so?   

‘Write what you know.’  The adage is not only good counsel but also a prompt for thinking:  what is the ‘what’ that I know and should write about?  This isn’t an epistemological question, because it’s not asking how I know what I know, but ‘what’ is worth writing about.  I’m sure Diaz knows and could write about his experience with the gringo literati.  And I’m sure he knows better than to write one his sardonic tales about his experience with those folks.  Too many awards still out there for the taking.   Hemingway was first and foremost a journalist, and the first half of the first prompt (Hemingway/Kerouac) came from my reading this early morning the collection of his reporting for the The Toronto Daily Star from Paris in the early 1920’s.  He wrote what he was experiencing in Paris: the cafes, the music, the art, the literature, the drink, the food, etc.  And it is compelling to read these short pieces, especially if you’ve read his novels and short stories.   In the end, what Hemingway knew was how to write compelling descriptions of what he experienced.  I put down Hemingway and read a bit of Kerouac’s Big Sur, which I found last night in the attic library in Stacy’s house where I have been doing my writing.   I’ve only really known Kerouac’s writing vicariously, ‘living’ it, so to speak, when I was much younger, believing I was a dharma bum when I was hitchhiking from The Bronx to Virginia and back, and then backpacking in Ecuador.   Finally reading Kerouac was like being hit by the proverbial lightning bolt.  It’s not simply the stream of consciousness narrative organized with some improvisational grammar and spelling, which is totally inspiring!  Rather, it’s discovering him to be something of an Augustinian existentialist, offering the most vivid details of his every movement (from motel to bus to Monterey highway) all the while confessing his desire to shed the heavy and worn skin of drunken debauchery.   Kerouac wrote what he knew, but his genius is located in his letting the experience do the writing!  

And that brings me back to question: ‘what’ is worth writing about?  Perhaps the adage, ‘write what you know,’ doesn’t apply to philosophers.  If that is the case, then my whole project is a bust!  ‘What’ I know is what I’ve read, first and foremost.  And ‘what’ I read are, first and foremost, are books and essays that come from the hands of men and women, or, in the case of ancient philosophy, the mouths of men and women, because the oral tradition is much older than the written.  As for the ‘book’ of Nature, which in the past few weeks has become a leitmotif in this blog, I also read this quite intensely, and have been wondering if my experiences with this book is ‘what’ is worth writing about? But how to write about what I’ve read from the ‘book’ of Nature?  Here, then, is yet another philosophical question, one that I’m constantly wrestling with: the question of form.    

 High tide happened at 7:30 am, so after finishing my morning chores, and my morning coffee, I went down to the steep Town Landing Rd., and launched the kayak into Casco Bay.  If solitude is the experience of being apart from the company of other humans, and if that experience is the condition for the possibility of ‘overcoming’ the self and becoming part of the congregation where earth, water, and sky converge, then I certainly entered that place this morning for the better part of the hour and a half I was paddling.   The whole experience came together when I was reached a point of stillness, floating on the still water, watching single slow drops of water fall from the blade of my paddle into the bay.   And it occurred to me later, when I read the meditation written this day ten years ago, that my intuition a decade ago was exactly right when I wrote against the Vedic category of Parusa, the ‘true self’ that was contrasted with the ‘illusory’ world of change.  I wrote instead in favor of the Buddhist anatman (nonself), which is not a rejection of this world but, rather, a horizontal transcendence and descendence into this world.  Citing John Koller’s essay “Humankind and Nature in Indian Philosophy,” [in A Companion to World Philosophies], I wrote: “the bearing of anatman (‘nonself’) is the Leap…the actualization of the ‘person seen as a field of interacting energies of different kinds and intensities, a field which is simultaneously interacting with innumerable other fields, integrating the human and natural fields.’”    There must be a way to write about the experience that mediates such a perception of human person, one that does not write from above or below but from within it? 

And that question brings me to my second and third prompts: the night heron, sound.  When I was paddling back to shore I say a graceful bird sitting on one of the large rocks that lay close to the beach.  As I got closer I could tell by his beak and by his standing on one leg that he must be a heron, but much smaller than any I had seen before.  The heron is probably my favorite of the birds I see quite often.  I admire the way they fly, and in my own version of folk phenomenology I believe that on the days when I encounter them I’ll have a very productive writing session. (This belief goes back to the day in 2012 when I was working on a presentation on Socrates and was writing on Plato’s Phaedrus, and came across the section when the tale of was told of the god Thoth who offered humankind the gift of writing.  Thoth, pictured above, looks very much like a heron, and on that day when I driving home and made my way through the roads that pass along the marshes of the Great South Bay, I saw a great white heron and allowed myself to believe it was Thoth himself who had appeared to me!)  As I was pulling my kayak onto the beach I woman in a Yankees cap who was walking her dog said to me, ‘You were greeted back by that night heron.’   ‘I thought that was a heron,’ I responded, ‘but I’ve never seen that kind of bird.’  ‘I saw him a lot last summer, on the other side of the cove, but today is the first day this summer I’ve seen him.  Someone told me he was a night heron.’   She and her dog left the beach, and the heron and I stared at each other for a few minutes.  I knew I would have a long and productive writing session later this morning.

The deep sound of the wind chime, ringing exactly as it did when my son and I walked up the hill yesterday.  That is to say,  we only hear it on the way up the hill.   That is the third prompt, that almost reads like a fragment!

But here, then, is a fragment distilled from the writing made ten years ago today and the just completed commentary:

If metaphysics hopes to explain what is ‘beyond’ the surface of things, and promises to tell us of yet another order of things that orders the surface, then I declare we must avoid breaking that shell made hard by the deep and cold and heavy water.