OPM 160, July 24th Meditation (commemoration)

There are few themes (I’d rather not use that term, and almost deleted it, but I’ll let it stand…for now) I want to take up, a few that are prompted by that cross road where today my speculative writing from ten years ago, the books I’m reading these days, and my daily routine this same week and for most of my summer in Maine.

The first doesn’t require a whole lot of writing, so I’ll cut to the chase.  I wrote twice in the past month or more about my ecumenical attitude, which is another way of describing the general spirit that inhabits my thinking, then and now.  This general spirit, I take it, is just the way I was raised and was then formed.  A lot of it has to do with the times when I growing up, the late 60’s and then the crazy hazy decade of the 70’s.   Although I’m not one to reduce a time and place to one idea or event (event though I sometimes try to do that, but always on a deeper ontological level…see below), when I think of the times when I grew up I remember lots of protest, turmoil, change, change, and more change to the point that the result was not so stable set of social and cultural institutions, or a bit more horizontal freedom mixed in with some cynicism.   It was also a time when lots of the teachers and adults who seemed earnestly interested in us kids wanted us to become more ecological, more tolerant, and generally more loving and peaceful in our relations with one another and the world.   I lapped it up like a thirsty dog, all that acoustic music, and cartoons with ethics and goofy humor rolled into one, Roots, and that famous ad with the Cherokee sitting on his horse looking down on the littered highway, a long single tear drop falling down his sullen face.   And then there was Ms. Zanders – the first teacher I had that had ‘Ms.’ before her surname.  She was the most dignified and interesting teacher I’d ever had, and a world traveller, and the one who turned me on to ancient philosophy when I was eleven years old in her sixth grade class.   I was all over Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, immediately feeling a deep affinity for those sages [yes, that is where I first learned about this most important figure, the Sage!].  

Now, if truth be told, my affinity for those ancient Eastern philosophies happened because I was already negotiating between cultures: the everyday Dominicano family life, and the mostly WASP world of my hometown of Summit, NJ.    For me it wasn’t about ‘becoming’ tolerant and open, but about already being that way and just expecting others to be that way too.  For me, intolerance, bigotry, etc., were not just moral failures or sins, but more fundamentally they felt unnatural to me.  (Later I would find good company in Rousseau who also felt these were indeed ‘unnatural’ attitudes).  

So when I read the meditations such as the set from July 2004 that has been focusing so much on Buddhism, I can’t help but think that the ecumenical attitude I discussed a few weeks ago as being taught to me by Ewert Cousins at Fordham was already a basic trait of my character, and what Cousins did was offer a formal training in the comparative exegetical work that reads these ancient traditions alongside Western philosophy and spiritual writings.   But for the past few days, as I’ve been reading, among other things, Kerouac’s Big Sur I’ve come to this realization that my comfort level with Eastern philosophy was also made possible by another set of cultural events that happened just as I was making my entry into this world:  the beatniks, and post-bop jazz, specifically, Kerouac and his gang, and Coltrane.   How so?  Well, Coltrane was a direct influence on the project, beginning with the non-stop two week celebration of his music on WKCR in February when I was just getting going on the experiment.  Coltrane’s genius is the high water mark of any and all ecumenicalism, which is to say, his music remains for me the highest standard for an attempt to attain a universal horizontal embrace of culture, and to do so through the integrity of one’s own singular voice.   As for Kerouac, he is a new discovery, although as I read my meditations from ten years ago I can’t help but think I was carrying on the spirit of his work without knowing it, especially when I was writing on the learning community.  Kerouac and his gang, as I’ve just learned in the past days, were something like a band of Taoist and Buddhist monks insofar as they read and talked with great fluency the writings of those traditions, and seemed to have understood their beatnikism as, in large part, an application of their studies, and their ultimate failure to carry it through all the way.   I gather as much from reading Kerouac, especially when he has flashes of his mortality and is thrown into an intense moment of angst.   That is to say,  when he is in the Taoist flow and living spontaneously with his gang, all is well.  But when he is alone and has to confront himself, and shadows of death cast down upon him, he returns to his roots, calls out to the spirit of his deceased father in the family’s native language of French, and most certainly writes in the unmistakable language of a Catholic existentialist.  That is, death is real, and it is always imminent.  Kerouac doesn’t face it with Buddha’s detachment, but appears to me to be writing with the heavy hand of St. Jerome in his study.

And it is that place, where Kerouac confronted himself and the awful truth of his singularity, which was the true source of his genius as a writer, that I has prompted me back to this question I’ve been wrestling with the past month, this tension between  subjectivity and intersubjectivity, between solitude and community.   I’m feeling this tension because I can’t help but perceive what appears to be some kind of contradiction between the time and space I need to write, and the ‘what’ that I was writing about ten years ago aka the ideal that illuminating my thinking.  To put the matter in concrete terms I relate my morning of reading for a few hours, then walking Bodhi the dog, then paddling my kayak for a solid hour and some, all the while out on the bay communing with osprey, loons, herons, gulls, plovers and seals.  Indeed, it was during this morning’s paddle session that I had the realization:  this is my fourth morning out here and aside from the day I was paddling with my daughter and we encountered two other kayakers, I’ve been the only boatman moving  in this section of the bay!   And there’s something fantastic about this solitude, which I deem to be a form of grace, actually.   And the feeling of grace, of being granted the health and strength to paddle and the time and good weather to do it, is something that inspires gratitude and humility but is also an experience of attunement.   But none of this could be experienced if I was paddling with a group!  It has to be experience solo! 

So what do to make of the opening lines from the meditation written this day ten years ago: “Learning, understood as a communal event, a gathering of a many as a one, is a polyphonic performance…each voice speaking ‘together’ in his or her own language.”  My instinct is to read this through the eyes of an Transcendentalist (under the influence of Thoreau, no doubt) and reason that this ‘communal event’ and ‘the many’ should not be limited to human community.   Read in this way ‘learning’ is something like a state of consciousness experienced, say, when we feel grace, which is to say feel the plentitude of life and a connection with the totality, not to mention a feeling of that totality as organized and guided by power or force, what I call the ceaseless nativity of Being.   But this is a ‘backward’ reading, which is to say, a reading that comes from today, when I am this week experiencing the time and space of solitude.   Ten years ago I was illuminated by and contemplated an communitarian ideal, and, as a result, my writing was dismissive of “the reifying gaze of the ‘I’,” and “the solitary ‘I’ [who] is addressed by the ‘other’…and becomes enjoined in the event that compels compassionate listening.”   Today this ‘other’ does not appear as  an other because I don’t recognize the so-called solitary ‘I’ as one perceiving with a reifying gaze.  Indeed, the tension I am feeling between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, solitude and community is arising because today I don’t recognize the distinction as motivating my thinking.   Methodologically the use of the distinction ten years ago seems to have been an unconscious deployment of Hegelian dialectics; unconscious, I say, because when I was writing ten years ago I was very far from my commitment to Hegel and Marx that started at in the second half of my time at Fordham through most of my graduate studies at the New School.   Apparently, dialectics had a lasting hold on my thinking!

Perhaps in moving ‘beyond’ this distinction I have actually moved into the location that I wrote about ten years ago today: “To be gathered by the vibrational event is to be appropriated by the regioning of openness itself.  With this appropriation the learner is released in the ‘final’ destination that is the ultimate field of interacting energies.” It sure felt that way when I was paddling on the bay this morning!

Here, then, is a fragment distilled at the above-mentioned cross road:

When ‘I’ confront ‘myself’ there is an awful, screeching stoppage brought on by the clarion call of mortality.  But when ‘I’ am restrained from ‘myself’ there is tonal, flowing movement conducted by the rhythm of grace.