OPM 165, July 29th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

I want to begin today’s commentary by returning to an idea that connects the meditation written on 7/28/04 with the one written on this day ten years ago.  The idea is a ‘practical’ one insofar as it describes a manner in which we might respond to the aphorism from Heraclitus “Nature loves to hide.”  The idea is ‘chase’ aka chasing Nature in its hiding, and is meant to conjure up the challenge of playing with Nature.  ‘Chasing’ is an implication of the Contact!, what happens after the event of appropriation, when we are drawn into the flow.   The implications for understanding learning as a kind of art, or music-making (in both a very general metaphoric as well as a specific literal sense) are obvious.   Learning as poiein, fabrication in an originary sense: making something new.  “This ‘chase’ unfolds as the spontaneity of responding, the improvisation…”(7/28/04)  And before that: “The reception of the mysterious other as the invocation to create, to build the poetic dwelling is always a disruption of the creeping entropy which seeks to put a stranglehold on the heart whose rhythm provides the cadence the polyphonic performance…the improvisational give and take of poetic dialogue.” What is meant here by the ‘mysterious other’ is, of course, the intuited totality, Being: “This is the mystery of Life itself, and thus to ‘chase’ is to participate in that creative and dynamic process.”

If meditative thinking prepares for and anticipates the effacement with Life itself, and if the culmination of this thinking is the ‘high point’ (as Nietzsche phrased it) where Being and Becoming are perceived in closest proximity (for this primal ground and primal flow remain ‘distinct’), then the ‘aftermath’ of this experience is akin to that of the surfer after an epic ride: the desire for another aka paddling back out into the swell.  Here then we can connect the ‘chase’ to the desire to catch another wave, or to find the groove (to use a musical metaphor).   In both cases we are searching to reconnect with something that has shown itself and is now, apparently, in hiding.  

The 7/29/04 musings on the chase after Nature take me back to the ‘healing’, which I took up in my commentary on OPM 153 (July 17^th).  Chasing Nature leads to the discovery that ‘hiding’ is linked to ‘healing’: “To ‘heal’ is to ‘make sound or whole: to restore to health,’ but it also denotes ‘to cover (as in seeds) with earth.’  The latter is derived from the Middle English Helen which says ‘to hide, conceal, cover.’”(7/29/04)   Chasing is thus further preparation and anticipation: the attempt to re-connect so as to re-cover – become whole, sound.   All this relates to both desire for Contact! with the primal, which is not necessarily what Thoreau was referring to, but plausibly so.  And I want to read the aftermath of his epiphany (described in my commentaries on OPM 163 & 164) as expressing a desire for a clearer perception of what appears “dim and misty” to him, “obscured by the aeons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau.”  

Today, as I worked in the Glickman library (USM Portland) I encountered some material that revealed to me the longer history of the thinking/writing I am drawn to, so much that today I am paused to wonder about the very starting point of the experiment (published as chapter one in Being and Learning), which is the question inspired by Plato.  Paraphrasing the starting point:  “The question is not whether or not we are capable of contemplating (perceiving) Being.  Rather, it is one of being turned around to do it.  In turn, the question is a pedagogical one: of how we are turned around to contemplate (perceive) Being?”   Today, then, the force of the question arises with the periagoge (turning around…of the soul) [no pun intended!], and does so in the following way:  in the sense that the ‘turn’ or the ‘turning around’ or the ‘returning’ is historicized…insofar as we can call an imagined or mythic time ‘historical.’ Here I don’t even mean, exclusively, something like the time of Eden, which seems quite imagined and mythical, but also something like the time of Exodus aka the time between Egypt and Jerusalem.   (And, indeed, it could be the kairological time in-between, only if such time can be historicized in some way…and this I’ve yet to consider…until now)  The point is that the periagoge to historicized Being is the re-turn to a primal ground and flow, that is, the re-turn to the time when humans had contact with the primacy of the primal.  The periagoge  to historicized Being begins with an initial perception of what appears “dim and misty” to us, “obscured by the aeons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau,” a perception of an imagined or mythic time.  Is this desire an expression of what Lovejoy and Boas (1973) called ‘cultural primitivism’?: “the belief of men living in relatively highly evolved and complex cultural condition that a life far more simpler and less sophisticated in some or in all respects is a more desirable life.”(p.7)  In a jocular moment they say such sentiments have probably been felt by humans since we first took shelter (in caves!), some one of the group romanticizing the simpler days of free, nomadic roaming.  But in a serious moment they show the ‘primitivist’ impulse in Plato himself, showing that the Republic is built on that impulse to re-cover (heal) the ‘sick city’ by re-turning (periagoge) to a healthy one aka ‘re-building’.   I certainly don’t want at this point to become totally side-tracked by a concept that is deeply historicized but does not at all figure in my work: bildung.  (so far as I know, neither Heidegger nor Nietzsche – the most vocal of my German interlocutors – makes mention of bildung).  

I want to end with another prompt from today (and there were many, but I’m only selecting a few), which I encountered during my reading of Emerson.  A secondary source (Stiles’ Emerson’s Contemporaries and Kerouac’s Crowd) which I found ‘by chance’ in the stacks, pointed me to Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836), which was read by many, and, specifically,  by the 19 year old Thoreau.  Aside from being a foundational text for the New England Transcendentalist school, what caught me attention today was the proposal made by Emerson at the start of the essay, which is very much in synch by the non-Romantic and non-Primitivist designs of my project of originary thinking.   That is to say, I read it as calling for a periagoge that is originary in the sense of re-turning to the primacy of the primal, which is not the primitive.   A re-turn to the primacy of the primal initiates and originates original thinking;  in the re-turn to the primacy of the primal we make a philosophy of the present via a phenomenology of presencing: an account of Life’s present unfolding aka Being Becoming.  Here is how Emerson begins his Introduction to “Nature”:

“Our age is retrospective.  It builds the sepulchers of the fathers.  It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.  The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face-to-face; we through their eyes.  Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts.  Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

Here is an aphorism/fragment distilled from the July 29th writing (04 & 14):

"Running ahead to the past" can also be thought as "returning to the present."