OPM 159, July 23rd Meditation (commemoration)

I encountered a fragment in Thoreau’s  “Ktaadn” essay, which was the first of the essays he published, and the first in the volume of said essays that were published together under the title The Maine Woods.   Yesterday I raised what I call the selection question, which is an awkward way of labeling the question regarding the problem of choosing which events to write about.  To summarize:  if the adage ‘write what you know’ is taken seriously is begs lots of questions about the ‘what’, such as: from all that I ‘know’ (and for me this knowing always comes through experience), how I select amongst the competing ‘whats’?   An answer I conjectured, which is a fairly standard phenomenological one,  suggests that we wait for ‘what’ jumps out at us and demands our attention.     This precisely what the ‘event of appropriation’ is all about, and precisely what meditative thinking as anticipatory and preparatory is all about.  Meditative thinking anticipates and prepares us for the event of appropriation (the experience of that ‘strange ownership’ that Being has over us), and when we are gathered into that event it happens by way of disclosure aka something grabs our faculties of perception and demands our attention. 

All the speculation came together into concrete reality this morning when I was reading “Ktaadn.”

Now I have to pause and step back for a moment and at least acknowledge that, above all else, Thoreau was a writer.  He wrote and wrote and wrote, most of the time in a journal, and then later he composed essays and a few books  that only became well known and then classics after his untimely death at the age of 44 in 1862.  I pause to make mention of this fact because I don’t for a minute doubt that the fragment that grabbed my attention this morning was anything but that:  a rhetorical move on Thoreau’s part purposely designed and deployed so as to interrupt the flow of his detailed chronicle and force his reader to stop and think!  It works!  And it works so well, in fact, that I hesitate to take it out of its natural setting and display it in the manner of a piece of gallery art.  But that analogy shouldn’t be taken too metaphorically, because the fragment is best complemented by one of Edwin Church’s landscape paintings, which were, it should be noted, inspired by the very same “Ktaadn” essay.  Without any further prefatory commentary, here, then, is the fragment that appears just after Thoreau has reached the summit of the greatest mountain in Maine, solo,  and is descending down with the small group he has travelled with in the famous trek they made via rivers and lakes (only the fourth group of gringos to have hiked the mountain).  Thoreau is in full-throttle endorphin and adrenaline rush when he writes of his time on the summit, which he describes as “among the unfinished parts of the globe…[for the indigenous people the mountain] tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them.  Pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of Ktaadn””

“There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man…I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me.  I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, -- that my body might, -- but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them.  What is Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!  Think of our life in nature, -- daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, -- rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth!  the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” (p. 95, Penguin Nature Classic1988 edition)

I don’t doubt that Thoreau took a moment to record some kind of notes in his journal, even though he never mentions having his journal with him, nor does he ever include note taking or writing of any kind in his detailed chronicle.  But I am dubious of his or anyone’s ability to remember so many precise details, such as the size of a whole made by bears in a barrel of smoked pork they discovered shortly before reaching their base camp on Katahdin.   On the other hand, I suppose such details are exactly what one remembers when they sit down later to write a chronicle.  And here then is an example of how such phenomenological writing happens after one has experienced the event of appropriation, or, in the case of Thoreau, events of appropriation.  Indeed, if one is to write what one knows, that the ‘what’ one write about will always be what one has experienced via the event of appropriation.   Yet, I’m still convinced he had his journal, and like Church, and his mentor Cole before him, Thoreau only composed his writing after he had made very quick and rough sketches.  (Granted: this is ultimately an empirical question that can be answered by the slightest bit of research!  But, these days, as I write outside the wifi grid and am posting my daily commentaries on those days when I return to the grid, I can delay that research that is normally only a few key strokes away!)

As for the content of Thoreau’s fragment, which I described to myself (later in the morning when I was biking from Portland to Falmouth) as the epigram to any future exegetical writing on the proverbial book of Nature, it is one of the best examples of Transcendentalist writing, especially because it is documenting an ecstatic event in the midst of Nature, and doing so without the overly saturated poetics of a Romantic.   Thoreau is first a naturalist and ethnographer, and second a philosopher whose thinking is gathered by and emerges from the details he collects when he is working in the guise of the former.   His philosophical moments burst forward from the transcendental experiences that only happen when he has been taken into that awesome congregation with Nature, and, as in the just cited example, literally peaked!   Indeed, the concrete and literal, the embodied (all fundamental for phenomenologists), this is what distinguishes Thoreau from the Romantics with whom he is mistakenly identified with.   Indeed: “Think of our life in nature…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth!  the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!”  Solid > actual > common sense: Contact! 

When he asks, Who are we? where are we?, the question is always partially rhetorical in the sense that the ‘who’ is always defined by the where!  And imagine my jaw dropping surprise, shock, and even delight, when reading at those two questions at the end of this fragment that had already swept me up and taken hold of me!  Where are we?! INDEED!  Donde Estamos?  MY QUESTION…be humble, please!...THE QUESTION!! Here, I am completely obligated to cite the key moment in from my recently completely and soon to be published Lapiz paper:

The question arises with the formation of the uma pacha (original time and place), an ontological ground thrown up as a new range of thinking when the cultural tectonic plates of previously co-existing ‘old worlds’ crashed into one another.  At the summits formed by this cultural collision zone appears the unresolvable, perennial existential question of the ones thrown into existence from that eruption… What we discover through the reduction I am proposing is a phenomenology of originary thinking  arising from the originating huacaslogical question: ¿Dónde Estamos? (Where are we?). [‘Huacaslogical’ is a neologism that combines the Incan word huacas (sacred place) with the Greek word logos (philosophical account, wisdom)[‘Huacaslogical’ is a neologism I have constructed for this project.  The category combines the Incan word huacas (sacred place) with the Greek word logos (philosophical account, wisdom.] 

I will leave it there…for now, but not before making a connection with the writing that was made this date ten years ago.  The meditation, one that is brief and, highlights a concept I derived from the Buddhist Wondrous Sound, but also from all the sonic references that have been in play, especially Heraclitus counsel that we listen to Logos, and the ‘hidden harmony’ both he and Lao Tzu identify as logic of the totality, Being.  The concept I derived names learning as a ‘vibrational event,’ and is a play on Heidegger’s ‘event of appropriation.’  Vibrational event is meant to convey the embodied experience of ‘hearing’ the totality, or transcending into the totality.  And here, today, revisiting this material in the wake of reading Thoreau, I want to re-emphasize why, for me, the anticipatory and preparatory work that gets us ready is rooted in our ability to perceive the animated life of Nature, to feel the force of so-called ‘inanimate objects’; this ‘force’ is succinctly named by Thoreau: Contact! Contact!   We hear it, yes, but ‘vibrations’ are not simply sonic, but always physical, the felt movement of phenomenon.  This is why we say informally but quite seriously that we feel ‘vibes’ from people, places and things. 

Here, then, a fragment:

To remain on the surface is not simply to forego metaphysics but to return to physics.  How does one both ‘remain’ and ‘return’?  In this case through lasting contact with the world, especially earth, water and sky.