OPM 167, July 31st Meditation (2004 & 2014)

As I might or should have anticipated or even predicted (or as I like to say in other contexts, prognosticated!), no sooner had I listed the number of times the Leap appears in the experiment (1.0 & 2.0), and no sooner did I shift away from it to the more recently forged Chase…when Leap should, of course, return in the meditation written this day ten years ago today. 

The sentence reads: “…this Leap is the crossing over into the ekstatic stand that is initiated by the reception of the evocative saying of the other.  This reception reveals the depth and profoundity of the ‘not yet’ and in this way is a reception that is simultaneously an offering, an offering offered with an interpretation, a re-telling of the saying that is received.”(7/31/04)  [Below I share an example of what we might understand by ‘an offering offered with an interpretation, a re-telling of the saying that is received’ when I post, as this day’s fragment, the set of lyrics sent to me by my ‘little brother’ and colleague, Sam Rocha, written in response to yesterday’s commentary.]  

The meditation from 7/31/04 goes back to the originary disclosure of that encounter with what Heidegger calls Being’s ‘strange ownership’ of us.  “The strangeness of the strange ownership and appropriation that prevails as Being’s processural unfolding is the originary offering…the initial initiative that seizes the learning into evocative wondering and purposeful wandering.”  Our response to the originary offering, to the disclosure of Being’s ‘strange ownership’ is what I call ‘learning’ but with better emphasis in this experiment 2.0 have been calling ‘meditative thinking.’  

There are lots of directions I want to go in with this commentary, but I’m feeling today the need and desire to stay focused, which is another way of saying I want to get this down without meandering.  “Purposeful wandering’ can be, as Thoreau showed us in his chronicles, hours of hiking or paddling, or a shorter stroll to the banks of a river.    

The first place I want to go is to return to yesterday’s commentary, specifically, the end of it when I was taken up (again) that moment when Thoreau was descending from the summit of Katahdin.   I described that moment as “the writing that relays [a] vision…a poetic infused interruption of his naturalist’s chronicle.   Nothing is explained in that moment.  But much thinking is originated, thinking that becomes historical and yet full of future.   Like the rows of beans he planted outside his cabin along Walden pond, Thoreau’s writing is not so much dry bones as seeds that have long since taken deep roots and are now not unlike the towering pine trees he encountered in his multiple trips to the Maine woods.”    In light of what was written this day ten year’s ago, I want today to suggest that what Thoreau experienced represents a Leap: a crossing-over into the ekstatic stand.   Recall from yesterday Heidegger’s description of the Leap as the movement into inceptual (originary) thinking, the first beginning: “the only recourse

the leap of recollection...”

Re-collection is precisely how Thoreau experiences his ‘dim and misty’ vision of the ancient paddlers moving on the primacy of the primal flow.  But ‘dim and misty’ is also not, as I may have suggested in some of my commentaries on this event, a condition that we should seek to overcome.  This is why Heidegger insists that we avoid explanatory reading.  

This brings me to the strangeness of the strange ownership as it relates to the distinction I made yesterday between the ‘dry bones’ that Emerson is turning us away from and the seeds planted by Thoreau’s writing that are now deeply rooted.   Today I was brought back to thinking about the rootedness of these roots when I was reading an article by Walter Brogan “Heraclitus, Philosopher of the Sign,” [published in my dear old New School grad school comrade David Jacob’s book The Presocratics After Heidegger]  I’m reading in preparation for my HUHC October lecture on Heraclitus, and Brogan’s piece is especially helpful  [so too Charles Scott’s piece on Heraclitus in the same volume, which I may take up tomorrow].    Brogan leaves φύσις untranslated, and I can understand why he is doing this, given his concern for how we read Heraclitus, and his insistence that we leave him ‘strange’ and ‘obscure,’ a philosophyer of the sign.  φύσις is more than a word that can be translated as ‘origin,’ ‘birth,’ or ‘nature’ or ‘Nature’ (as I have used it).  The transliteration of φύσις is phyusis, which is comes from phuo (grow).  So one way of ‘reading’ (hearing is the preferential way that we should approach Heraclitus’ fragments, according to Brogan)  the fragment “Nature loves to hide” is “growing begins with sprouting.”   When I say ‘reading’ the fragment the emphasis is on ‘hearing’ what it might be saying [again, we are not reading here to arrive at an explain the meaning of the fragment].   Now, am I ‘hearing’ what I want to hear? (on this problem of hearing, see my commentary from last week, OPM 158, July 22^nd)  Perhaps.  Or perhaps what I am hearing is what is arriving from a the primacy of the primal ground (pun very much intended, but respectfully so, because I am acutely aware of writing at this moment from the threshold, the boundary where the poetic and prosaic are meeting).    That is, what is heard with the reading of φύσις is φύω the ‘root’: grow.   To say “Nature loves to hide” is to respond to the disclosure of growth as grounded, literally, rooted.  Here then the roots, the ground, that we aren’t meant to ‘take up’ (as philosophy types say when they are describing their way of responding to a question), but, rather, the hermeneutic challenge is, again, one of encountering via letting-be. 

The phenomenological implication seems obvious, but no less powerful:  we ‘know’ the roots are there (and sometimes they remind us by showing themselves by emerging from the ground), but our perception of them is ‘dim and misty,’ which is not to say ‘unclear’ but ‘recalled’ or ‘heard’.   Recollection is hearing, listening, and the emphasis is on the receptivity and passivity, and thus on the phenomenological attitude that is revealed by the originary offering.   With meditative thinking  ‘interpretation’ and ‘explanation’ is put on hold.  What is inspired is a writing that, first and foremost, is a poetic response, a mimetic re-telling of what has been offered.   And an example of this is the following set of lyrics composed by Sam Rocha:

seed not bone, sowed not thrown

hidden to eye, gazing from sky

heavens open wide, unfolding suicide

for seed must always die, to yield its hidden lie

that truth is but a name, cannot speak nor explain

verse takes its place, endures, reveals the Face

                 all face, all eye