OPM 163, July 27th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

Today I am back in Portland, having finished my week of watching Bodhi (the dog) and his house while his family (my good friend and colleague Stacy Smith and co.) were away.   This past week was certainly the peak of my summer thinking/writing, as I had more hours in the day than I needed for reading, reflection, and, of course, for lengthy commemorative commentary writing.  Today, being Sunday, is a transition day, with only a limited amount of time for reading and writing, but, rather, a day of family and friends, which included visiting a nearby farm to purchase the produce and meat for a big Sunday dinner. 

Now, picking up where I left off yesterday I want to compare the fragment I distilled with the opening moments of the meditation written this day ten years ago.  In the fragment I write of the primal ground (Urgrund ), which I take to be the common ground that Thoreau writes of when he is descending the summit of Katahdin and in a epiphanic Transcedentalist moment (event) feels he is moving in unity with all living beings, especially all humans past, present and future who share this solid earth.  What is certain is this solid earth.  But what remains a mystery are those who have walked it when this primal ground was more primary.  Here, following Thoreau, I wonder if those who walked on that ground when it was still young experienced a different kind of relation to it?  And if they did – an undoubtedly they did – what kind of feelings did they experience and what were the thoughts inspired by those feelings?  Indeed, what were the philosophical questions that they asked?  My sense is that the shift from the mind to the heart that I wrote about last week is in fact a way of describing the desire to experience the primal ground in its primacy, which is another way of understanding the response to the call of originary thinking. 

In the writing made on 7/27/04 there is a allusion to the reception of the originary as the “beginning” of learning.  Ten years ago I wrote that Learning (which, it should be clear by now, is euphemism for meditative thinking, and generally signifies the way of understanding ‘education’ from an existential and ontological perspective) begins “with a crossing over into the abiding with the sage…his poetic dwelling…ek-static dwelling…”  All this sounds reasonably metaphysical in the tradition that includes Heidegger, Heraclitus and Lao Tzu (three of my principal interlocutors), but not Thoreau, who has joined the conversation this summer.   Unlike the just mentioned trio, Thoreau is making a chronicle of his hiking and paddling trips deep into the forests of Maine by way of rivers and lakes.  And when he has what I described as epiphanic Transcendentalist moments they are, of course, kairological events that break the flow of ‘normal’ time and the writing that documents them is noteworthy for the sudden and unexpected break in the chronicle that offers a philosophical flourish.  And, what’s more, when he writes of those dimly perceived figures who move on the primal ground (he describes them as coming down the river in canoes) he recognizes that only one form of writing is capable of describing such an event, but that “no poet” has yet described it.  Does he mean to say that no poet will ever be able to describe it because our perception will grow dimmer the farther we move away from the primacy of that primal ground?  Or is it possible at some time that we will re-discover a way to move ‘back’ unto that primal ground?   I have placed my hopes in what Heidegger calls ‘running ahead to the past,’  which, to me, indicates the possibility of  working through to a modality that, at the very least, inspires us to think the thought that Thoreau shared with us when he wrote of these figures from the ancient past.

I’m aware that this all sounds like so much neo-Romanticism, but I would protest that label because I don’t at all read Thoreau as a Romantic but, rather, as a naturalist, an ethnographer, and what today we would call an outdoorsman.  He did not 'retreat' to the wilderness to flee the contrived social norms of city life.  No one would confuse everyday life in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid 1800's with London, or Paris, let alone New York or Boston.  Sure, Concord was full of contrivances, of 'picket fences' made from the very wood he was encountering in his travels, and far, very far, from that source of the boundaries his neighbors have built up between one another. But when he notes their lack of knowledge he does so with a sadness that so few have ventured to know the sources of things, to walk the ground where they grew.   He went to the Maine woods because he could, and he was under no delusions about his travels gaining him some special knowledge of himself.  He documented what he experienced with much humility and some humor,  and in the most acute details and vivid colors, in the manner of his contemporary, the artist Frederic Church. 

We are called to take such trips into the wilderness, and I can not write this without applauding Bates College for beginning the education of its first year students by offering them the opportunity to undertake a Thoreauean trip into these same Maine (and New Hampshire) mountains, lakes and rivers.  (I mention this because my daughter just this evening received confirmation that she will begin her education at Bates with a group of ten students who will be taking a 23 mile hiking trip through the Pemigewasset Wilderness. This news is timely, but not at all coincidental.  This is the daughter who, after all, is currently reading Thich Nhat Hanh, and also one half of the duo who ‘suffered’ through the original experiment when she was 8 years old and was directed, along with her older sister, to ‘let dad be alone’ when he is writing.  “Every day this summer?”  -- “Yes, every day!”   Perhaps the experience of living through the experiment had a lasting effect on my kids?  If so, I hope it was a positive one!

In the writing from 7/27/04 I return back to a quotation from Lao Tzu: “This returning to their root is what we call the state of stillness; and that stillness may be called a reporting that they have fulfilled their appointed end.”  I then go on to play with the word ‘reporting,’ describing it at one point as “another name for the experiential nature of meditative thinking…”  Ten years later, in light of the commentary on Thoreau alongside reflecting on the connection between the experiment and my daughter’s ‘education’ then and now, I can’t help but make two observations.  The first is that Thoreau’s travels were, in fact, a kind of experiment in originary thinking, an experiment that enabled him to ‘return to the roots’ of human experience in the wilderness.  Second, that his thick documentation of his experiment were in fact ‘reports’ and he was writing in what today we would call ‘reporting.’   Perhaps this is a stretch, but it is one that I am willing to make if only to underline my strongly held conviction that Thoreau’s project was something entirely different than those inspired by Romanticism, and, on the contrary, was one that was ‘home grown’ (pun intended) full-bodied experiential philosophy that had the tendency to take him into epiphanic moments.  In this sense, it was preparatory and anticipatory of transcendental moments that were revelatory, although not necessarily 'transformative'.  

Here a fragment distilled from the July 27^th writing, both today and a decade ago:

If the primacy of the primal ground is something we desire then we have to prepare ourselves for the rigorous challenge of crossing over and into that experience.   For it is not something we can experience while squatting at our desks.   On the contrary, it demands that we run to it!