OPM 161, July 25th Meditation (commemoration)

Those tiniest of biting bugs, ‘noseeums’ (as Thoreau calls them), are hungriest in the early morning, just after dawn.  I know this from the experience of being the breakfast buffet this morning as I sat out on the brick terrace drinking Columbian and reading Kerouac.   Talk about the ‘event of appropriation’!  

This brings me to the musings on phyusis, phenomenology and experiential learning.  Last autumn, which seems like a long time ago now, I wrote a paper I almost didn’t write at all and wouldn’t have written if not for Tyson’s quite confidence in me.  I’ll never forget driving over to the Asian fusion place in New Providence the night after I hit the wall one final time on a paper that I’d dreamed up, wrote and actually presented (in parts) to an international conference of philosophers of music education.  (That is a story in-and-for-itself, to borrow one of my favorites phrases from Hegel.  A story of the turn I took two summers ago, in 2012, from the studio [metaphorically speaking but somehow related to my radio work at WRHU] to philosophy as music-making.  It all happened through DuBois, and that famous episode of his John Jones at the New York City opera house being swept up by Wagner, and my desire to make something from that moment, from that story!   So there I was later in the autumn of 2012 looking here and there and discovered this international society of philosophers of music education; and in that discovery I discovered they were meeting at Teachers College, Columbia U – my ‘refuge’ from time to time – in August of 2013; and in that further discovery and discovered further that my friend and colleague Megan Laverty was one of the keynote speakers!  Of course, that’s when the sardonic smile came across my face, because I knew Megan wasn’t doing much of anything on philosophy of music education, or philosophy and music, or music and philosophy.  So I was more than ready to tease her, and tease her I did by showing her my discoveries the next time we met, which had to have been only a week or so later.  Anyway, her mix of embarrassment and relief lead her to concoct a plan to have me co-present with her at the keynote!   I said ‘yes’ and that’s when my desire to make something with DuBois’ story ended up with me dreaming up a paper and presenting it last August.   It actually went really well, and even better the night before when I did a workshop with my friend Randall Allsup who was one of the conference organizers and teaches in the music department at TC.  Randall is a supremely kind soul, and I couldn’t be happier that one of my very own Hofstra grads, Mitchell the tuba playing philosopher, is starting his grad studies under Randall’s guidance this September!)  Well, that brings me back to last October, when the days are already getting way too short but the air isn’t cold, just crisp, and there’s lots of brilliant yellow, good, orange, and fire red leaves in all the trees, Nature’s big party decorations that are meant to send us into the sleeping dead of winter with dreams of the colors of spring, I suppose.   So that Wednesday evening in October was the end of a day of starts and stops, and flaccid caffeine drinks, and then writing of the obituary to the dream that never came into reality.    I had the whole piece carefully written (in my head, of course) and ready to read it to Tyson (after we’d eaten, of course), and I did so with all the sincerity in the world.  “I’m done, this one got away from me.  I’m sorry, but it’s true.”  “No, no, no, no, we can’t have that. No,” Tyson said, shaking his head.   I was astonished and only slightly annoyed, as I don’t like to hear anyone tell me ‘no,’ but this was a ‘yes’ kind of ‘no,’ as in ‘yes, you can, and yes, you will.’  Strange double-speak, but, in the end, it worked!  Tyson was right, and the paper I wrote wasn’t the one I dreamed of, but, actually, one that I’m excited about to this very day.  Here’s the link to the paper.

Now, I’ve been thinking a lot about that paper this past week as I’ve been writing my commemorative commentaries for this blog.  Specifically, the paper has been coming up with my thinking about the question related to the felt tension between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, solitude and community, which I tried to ‘resolve’ yesterday.  The paper takes a very strong view that is totally consistent with Being and Learning on the matter of learning being fulfilled in the learning community.  On the other hand, however, there is this unexplored assumption regarding the figure of the teacher, the one I call Sage, or, in the paper, a charismatic leader who leads the congregational experience that in the paper I describe as Pentecostal!  What I apparently left un-thought in the paper is the so-called ‘prep’ time of that teacher persona.   How does he get himself ready to lead the congregation?  The answer isn’t all that complicated, especially since the example I offer in the paper (actually, where the paper begins!) is the same John Coltrane I wrote about yesterday as one of my exemplars.   So if we ask the question about the sage’s preparation, and we turn to Coltrane as our example, the answer is simple and straightforward: practice.  The sage practices and practices.  He falls asleep practicing and wakes himself up when the horn returns to his lips and he blows a note while still sound asleep.   Such are the hagiographical stories of Trane, and they are totally effective in making the point about the discipline and dogged commitment to practice.

So where is this going?  The resolved question of the sage’s preparation is importantly related back to the subjectivity/intersubjectivity, solitude/community question insofar as it redeems solitude as the necessary time away from the community, away from the congregation, which is not simply a time of preparing for and anticipating the return, but also a time defined mostly as being apart from the community.  The time of solitude is just that: a time of being solo, of being alone but not lonely (as Arendt puts it).  It is that time that Thoreau describes when he reached the summit of Katahdin, which, it turns out, he accomplished as a solo hike but all the while feeling a wholly different kind of community, a congregation with Nature, and, what’s more, by his own words that I cited earlier this week he experienced the ‘strange ownership’ Heidegger describes as happening with the ‘event of appropriation’: “There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man… What is Titan that has possession of me?” 

The point is that hearing the totality  --  what the Buddhist call the ‘Wondrous Sound,’ and Heraclitus the ‘Hidden Harmony’ – and experiencing the ‘event of appropriation,’ is that originary moment that gets originary thinking underway.  Here I am repeating what I have written many times before in this blog, but it is worth repeating if only as a reminder that the important shift from ‘ego’ driven calculative cognition to meditative thinking is one that happens when we seized in the manner described by Thoreau by the titanic force of Being, disclosed to us through what yesterday I felt inclined to call Grace.   Of course, to call it Grace is to apparently name this force something other than what Thoreau is describing when he says he “felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man…”  But it only apparently so, because, in fact, Grace is only ever the way this force that is, precisely, not bound to be kind is in fact being kind to us.   It could be otherwise.  Just ask Job, or, for that matter, Jesus.   Remember His passion?  “Father, why have you forsaken me?”   That question asked in the state of total anguish and despair, and the doubt that emerges from the feeling that, in the end, perhaps God is not bound to be kind to us?!   But…then…there’s Grace, and the answer to that doubt in a moment we feel ourselves chosen, for just that moment, and offered, then, some peace and some freedom.

All this seems to have taken me far from the intended musing on experiential learning, which is where I had planned to go this morning, but, perhaps, in the end, that’s precisely where I went insofar as I remained close to the ground, and the examples I gave are full bodied ones: Coltrane practicing, Thoreau on the summit of Katahdin, Jesus on the Cross.   However, in the end, without yet taking up the writing from this day ten years ago, it seems I’ve returned to the blues, to yet another insight into that art form that is unequalled in its capacity to convey that point of departure, that first moment of disclosure.

And what then is to be taken up from the writing that happened this day a decade ago?  Perhaps the recognition of the titanic power is one way of understanding what is implied by the claim that “singularity” of the self is “cancelled”.   It’s difficult to know how this remains consistent with most of what has been written, and how it is not simply a contradiction but an error.  For in no way can singularity be ‘cancelled’.  There may be a context that is more fully disclosing of singularity, and, likewise, one that is less hospitable.  But only death can brings closure to singularity.  Life, on the contrary, is a seemingly endless possibility of opportunities for the disclosure of singularity.  The other moment that stands out from today’s writing is the use of the term ‘spirit,’ which is infrequently appearing in the meditations.  ‘Spirit’ is introduced what is cared for by the ‘devotional modality.’   It turns out that the ‘cancellation’ written of at the beginning of the meditation is referring to the turn toward listening and receptivity and thus away from the ‘self-enclosed ego.’  “Cancellation is the silence of compassionate listening…the devotional modality of the learner…[that] takes care for the spirit.”  And “spirit is the creative energeia unfolding as the dynamism” of the work unfolding after meditative thinking, what I earlier (in my March commentaries) described as making of art, or doing something with freedom.  Today, in light of the reflections on Grace, I would add that the work of the human spirit is always a secondary act that follows the primary act of the Holy Spirit.

Here, then, a fragment from today’s writing:

We humans have the habit and tendency to animate places based on the perceived power inherent in them.   This habit and tendency comes mostly from our fear of these places; but this fear is not generated by them, for they do not threaten us.  Rather, they unwittingly mediate an effacement with mortality.  Without an invitation, we go to them and they show us our finitude: the ocean can drown us; the mountain can fall on us, or we from it; etc.  But the same is true when we feel at home, safe and at peace in these places, when they seem to embrace and care for us.  Then too we animate them with the same power, but feel gratitude, and humility, and even communion there.