OPM 172, August 5th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

First of all I want to begin by just taking a step back and acknowledging the success of this experiment 2.0.   I have several ways of assessing the project (and, please, don’t for a second believe there isn’t any irony in that claim).   The first is a very straightforward measure:  the daily commentary.   Although I haven’t hit the official halfway mark (that will happen next week), I will nevertheless today acknowledge that I have for 171 consecutive days written and, for the greater part of the first third of 2.0, documented via video my return to the meditations written a decade ago.  The second measure is related to the originary thinking project, and assesses the experiment 2.0 relative to the new forms of writing it has attempted.  On this measure I would say generally that the blog platform has offered any number of ways to experiment with originary forms, from the recording of video, to the use of images.  However, in terms of the quantity and quality of experimental writing, I would have to give myself a passing mark, because it wasn’t until this month of July that I found myself doing something different with my writing, something that felt more natural and also seem to depart from the 'traditional' didactic form I found myself trapped in with the commentary writing (but not the video commentary).  The shift happened in July because I was under the positive influence of Thoreau and Kerouac, and to a lesser degree, Hemingway, all of whom wrote with a kind of documentary style that mixed in philosophical flourishes.  

The months of June and July provided me with almost unlimited time and space to focus on this project, and for this reason I was able to meet and exceed my expectations for  the third and final measure, which assesses new insights into the questions and concepts that were taken up in what was a decade called 363 (daily meditative writing experiment 1.0).    Yesterday when I was reading Robinson’s edition of Heraclitus’ fragments I couldn’t help but wonder about the strange and somewhat audacious (if not highly vain) objective of this project, which is one of revisiting and commenting on my own writing?!   The tradition of exegesis/commentary is not one that includes self-commentary.   One can not be one’s own authority, or so the logic of exegesis goes.  Right?  So I find it somewhat comical, actually.  Yet I am totally motivated by the new insights that have been revealed to me in 2.0, and understand the more significant point of revisiting my work is that it is, in the end of the day, a work of phenomenology, which is to say, a work that is documenting my experience with the force of concepts that have taken hold of me, and even taken root in me, so much that I'm not actually commenting on my work, as I am revisiting and re-collecting myself with that which is working on me then and now.  And it seems that in the material I have been revisiting for exactly one month, which was not published in Being and Learning, has evolved from irritating repetition to timely inspiration, so that I am find myself these days to be totally in synch with the writing/thinking that happened a decade ago!  Again, the turn happened when I was staying up at Falmouth Foreside for the week, reading Thoreau and Kerouac, and taking morning kayak excursions on the bay.   This coincided with meditations that were focused on Heidegger’s ‘event of appropriation’ alongside Lao Tzu and Heraclitus, with the later become a central figure then and now (as I begin to prep for my HUHC lecture).   If the third and most important measure of 2.0 is the bringing together of past and present meditative thinking in an originary way, then I would grade the project, especially the work that has been accomplished this summer, as excellent, if not exceptional.  

The culmination of what feels at one and the same time to be an upward and downward breakthrough occurred yesterday when I was directed to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which I cited in support of what I am calling the force of Nature’s law.  It is this force that discloses what we can call, borrowing from Heidegger, the ‘strange ownership’ of Being over us.  The disclosure happens by way of what he also calls the ‘event of appropriation,’ an event unlike any event insofar as it is an originary (re)turn of the self to the source of existence.   The event is revelatory, and in its aftermath, as I have shown with the examples of Thoreau and Nietzsche,  not to mention Heraclitus and Lao Tzu, each and every thinker who has experienced this event will attempt to describe what has been disclosed to them in the  moment of revelation.   Whether or not this documentation can only be shared in a fragmentary and aphoristic form of writing is not something I want to weigh in on today; but having mentioned it, I would share my intuition that, in fact, this seems to be the only way to write about the event of appropriation, which, for me happens most powerfully, and, as of yesterday I can say with conviction (but not with certainty, for who can write of these matters with the kind of empirically verifiable ‘certainty’ demanded today!?) happens exclusively in-and-through Nature, far from the trappings and busy-ness of humans, in the wilderness forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, streams, and even oceans.   The exclusivity is with Nature’s law, yes, but does it follow that such exclusivity is also with the wilderness?   Here I have much less conviction, because it seems I felt, with low volume, for sure, the sublime encounter with Nature’s law (the primal flow) just this week when I witnessed the fog lifting from the Back Cove, which appeared to me as if the sky and earth’s water were decoupling…for the first time…again.   There was something primal in that moment, and it happened in the unique body of water that flows into a residential and commercial area.  Not the wilderness, for sure, but something ‘wild’ (extraordinary) nonetheless.

Back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and then to Thoreau.  But, first, I want to revisit the fragment I distilled yesterday after re-reading the mediation from ten years ago in light of the ongoing commentary that produced the following reduction:  the event of appropriation renders the peace from which comes the dwelling called ‘poetic’.    Hence the fragment:

Peace is the name we give to abiding with Life itself.

This day, ‘Life’ can be given the alternative name ‘Nature,’ which is more accurately the name for Life in its organized and purposeful form aka gathered through the primal flow and onto the primal ground. 

The meditation from this day ten years ago begins: “Creation is thus the actualization of freedom, the poetic dwelling that coincides with peace.  The learning community is the result of the coincidence of peace and freedom, the latter abiding in the former. This coincidence is the vestige of Being’s twofold play.”(8/5/04)  

Commentary/editorial response ten years later:  Improvisation is the mimetic poiesis that imitates Creation.  Humans don’t create.  We make.  (nb: for more details and context on this assertion, which will most likely be the fragment distilled today, find and speak with Troy Richardson or Sam Rocha, and ask them about the epic conversation/philosophy jam session we had at PES Portland, OR, in 2013) 

A ‘vestige’ is a fragment (of course!), a remnant, relic, echo, sign, trace, mark, legacy and a reminder.   Take anyone of these words and place them in the following sentence, and you will understand what I mean by learning:

 Learning is a poiesis (poetic work) that is a [     ] of Nature’s law aka Creation.

“φύσις (Nature) loves to hide”.

Back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, where I learned that an originary source for my writing, in terms of the hermeneutic starting point from Warburg’s old book, is the voice of Antigone:

 Not of to-day or yesterday it is,

                  But lives eternal: none can date its birth.

Not today, but, perhaps, tomorrow, I will explore the connections between Antigone’s pronouncement and the ecstatic wilderness visions of Thoreau and Nietzsche. 

Back to the beginning of the Rhetoric, where the connection between the ‘hiding’ of Nature  --  φύσις comes from  φύω: grow – in the ‘roots’ (where growth begins and happens first)  and Aristotle teaches us that the art (techne) of rhetoric, the counterpart of dialectic, is the argumentative mode of persuasion. 

From the overview of his translation W. Rhys Roberts writes: “Argumentative persuasion is a sort of demonstration; and the rhetorical form of demonstration is the enthymeme.”(bk 1, ch 1)  Rhetoric is a demonstration defined by an argument in which one of the premises is not explicitly stated. Enthymeme: en (within) thumos (mind).   “The premises from which enthymemes are formed are ‘probabilities’ and ‘signs’…”  

My commentary, which offers insights in the writing after  the event of appropriation, post meditative thinking: in a rhetorical demonstration the writer (or speaker) communicates his persuasion [persuades] using primary terms that remain signs, and retain probable but not yet certain meaning; such is character of  concepts that have taken root in the thinker but are not capable of being fully articulated via  spoken or written language.   Meditative thinking remains silent.  The writing and speaking that follows is ‘rhetoric.’  

Coda:  a prompt read today that will transition into tomorrow.  From Thoreau’s journal, July 26, 1852: “By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man.  My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.”