OPM 178, August 11th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

First things first, I want to write in response to this book I’ve been reading by the late Joel Porte, who was a faculty member at Cornell (where my daughter is currently a student!).   Coincidentally in the month I was born, February, 1966, Porte published his Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict, and it is by far the most readable and interesting academic book I’ve read this summer. It’s of a time, for sure, totally free of theoretical jargon, and, thus, from the time before lit crit, or so it seems.   It’s also heavy servings of lengthy quotations, and reminds of the way I wrote papers, as well as my MA thesis and PhD dissertation, in grad school.  In other words, he lets the excerpts do the talking, with only minimal commentary, which is not to say he’s not an expert in curating the right citations and arrange them in a way that makes a larger point.  It’s a compelling book written by someone who I sense was totally committed to teaching.

Because the book is so well written and informative, I was uncharacteristically drawn into reading for a good bit of our time at Crescent Beach yesterday.  (I like to stay really active on the beach, or crash.  One or the other.  Reading, when I do it on the beach, is usually done for its soporific effect.) What caught my attention and energized me was the category Porte used to describe the third and final stage of natural experience: the epiphanic moment (157).  I must have re-read the passage three times, and even shared it with Kelly, later back at the house, first reading my own use of the term ‘epiphanic’ in relation to Thoreau and then Porte’s.  For the sake of documenting my own use of the term here are the excerpts from the blog where it appears:

“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.” (OPM 163, July 27^th)

“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.” (OPM 163, July 27^th)

“Actually, I’m brought back to an position I have found myself in for much of this summer’s revisiting of the original meditations, and that is to the conjecture that the ‘original’ or ‘first’ encounter with Being happens when we have an effacement in Nature with the Life spirit that moves through and gathers all living beings.  Under the influence of Thoreau I would, today, call this experience an epiphanic transcendental contact with the totality, and one that is a deeply embodied and felt experience.  Nietzsche, who was also a student of Thoreau’s mentor Emerson (reading him from afar), called discovered his Eternal Recurrence of the Same.  From Nietzsche I gather the experience as disclosing to us a positive and undeniable affirmation, what he say is the saying Yes! to life.”  (OPM 164, July 27^th)

“All this to say that a (re)turn to the actual world positions us to raise the fundamental questions, and it is thus a move one needs to make as kind of preparatory and anticipatory one.   That is, if the event of appropriation is something like the epiphanic event that happens to us, then we can anticipate this event by keeping our sensibilities close to the ground where the contact is made.   Close proximity to the solid and actual entails something like the recognition that Nature (in the way Thoreau is referring to it) is neither inanimate, nor symbolic.”  (OPM 174, August 7, 2014)

“What Heidegger identifies as the “startling force” seems to me precisely what I have been calling the epiphanic event that happens when, like Thoreau, we find ourselves in a sublime moment with the powerful force revealed in the substantial concreteness of the natural world, even when that concrete is revealed in its fluid form:  the rising fog, the claps of thunder, the rising and setting of the sun, the rising and lowering of the tide.” (OPM 174, August 7, 2014)

“I encountered the passage this morning, and immediately recognized it as yet another example of what I call his epiphanic fragments, moments when his detail chronicle and phenomenological description are interrupted by a sudden moment of speculation, usually happening by way of a kind of transcendence into the archaic and, I would call it, originary past.” (OPM 174, August 7, 2014)

“Jazz, I am contending, arrives epiphanically like a force through the music that is made by musicians and witnessed by others.” (OPM 177, August 10^th)

  

I take it that Porte is an authority on Emerson and Thoreau, while my expertise, if I can call it that, is in a very select genealogy of first philosophy that begins with the ancients, continues with some medieval, then leaps ahead to the writers of late 18^th, then 19^th and 20^th centuries.  And in the past few months I’ve begun to focus on the works of ‘new world’ authors in Latin American, which is dovetailing the one track of work with the other in order to move forward on the huacaslogical direction of the originary thinking project.   All that to say that the ‘discovery’ of Thoreau this summer took my project in an entirely new direction, specifically with respect with my (re)turn to Nature that has turned out to be a slow turn back to the place based ontology that I was working on in 2006-2007 before getting a bit side-tracked by personal stuff.    With Thoreau I see a more local thinking (in terms of being a writer and thinker from New England who made some important trip into Maine), an originary one, and also a bit of political activist and ‘dissident’ (if that word can be used here).    I don’t want to go too long on the relevance of Thoreau for my project, yet I did want to call attention to something that I learned from Porte regarding Thoreau with respect to Emerson and the New England Transcendentalists:  Thoreau was not one of them! [nb: after learning this I was tempted to edit the posts where I wrote 'epiphanic Transcendentalist event,' but decided against that because when I wrote I knew nothing of the break and assumed from great distance, as I'm sure others have, that Thoreau was one of them!...as Emerson had wanted us to believe, perhaps?]    The ‘falling out’ that Emerson and Thoreau experienced was, from what I can gather, based on a fundamental disagreement about the human/Nature relationship.  Emerson and the Transcendentalists believed Nature was intended to be experienced and read for the moral lessons it offered us (this is very much how the Stoics viewed the relationship), while Thoreau derived no direct moral lessons from ‘reading’ Nature, but, rather believed in total immersion with it, so that rather than ‘reading’ Nature, he would be ‘translated,’ or as I would put it, written or inscribed upon. 

   But the possible ethical or even existential implications are secondary and not primary concerns.    Both are based upon more fundamental epistemological and metaphysical assumptions, with the latter being the significant ones, especially if we want to understand where Emerson and Thoreau part company.   And here I am only at the beginning of my understanding of this difference, which seems to be a difference that makes a lot of difference for my work, especially with the emphasis I place pace Nietzsche on ‘Force’, which sometimes seems to happen at the expense of ‘matter’ or phyusis.  (of course, it could be that with Aristotle – so far as I understand him --  phyusis is always ‘moved’ and/or ‘organized’ aka existing in relation to a ‘force’ (motion) that can be traced back or reduced to the Prime or Unmoved Mover that originates and sustains Being’s Becoming).  Now,  there is a way to read Emerson and his Transcendentalist perspective, as taking over the Vedantic and Buddist teachings of ‘nothingness’ and declaring the material/natural world to be only appearance, and, for us, the stuff of/for symbols.   What Nature shows us, then, are higher principles, specifically ethical ones, that are not in Nature.   Transcendentalism entails a transcendence from this apparent world to the actually existing world that we only know through abstract reasoning.   What is actually is we can not say.   Now, for Thoreau, the move was not from but into Nature, thus immersion into what I have been calling the primal ground and primal flow, going under to the roots of the ground or submerged in the flow.   The word ‘imminent’ is appropriate insofar as it denotes the quality of something that is ‘on the horizon,’ or ‘in the air.’   That is, authenticity is imminent for us so long as we anticipate the epiphanic event by immersing ourselves in Nature.   Again, as I have written in the past week, if there is a normative (ethical or political) implication to this event, and if authenticity forms one into a ‘good’ human neighbor or ‘good’ citizen then so be it.  But this is a secondary concern, one that can be derived…but one that was not outside the frame of Thoreau’s perspective, certainly not the Thoreau of Walden nor “Civil Disobedience.”   But Nature, always first, for Thoreau, but not so for Emerson…indeed, it was not even a close second…it wasn’t at all (metaphysically speaking).    

Towards the end of the chapter “Thoreau’s Aesthetic: A Purely Sensuous Life,” which details Thoreau’s ‘sensualism’ (in contrast to Emerson’s transcendentalism), Porte offers some examples to support Thoreau’s attempted descriptions of the ecstatic temporality of the epiphanic event.  I’ll need to return to this, as it is totally relevant to the temporal dimension of the event of appropriation and the kairological time of originary thinking.  Here I share two examples, both from Thoreau’s journals:

“I must live above all in the present.”

“My life as essential belongs to the present as that of a willow tree in the spring.” 

The commentary via Porte was not only a documentation of a confirmation of my use of epiphanic in relation to Thoreau, but, in relation to the meditations, his detailing of the divergence of Emerson and Thoreau have revealed to me what appear to be some inconsistencies within the meditations.  Because the meditations were written in the spirit of experimentation, the inconsistency is better described as variation in perspective.  Yet, a decade later, I have the desire to ‘settle down’ to a fundamental position that allows me to address the secondary questions more coherently.    And it seems to me that the (re)turn to (a kind of) naturalism is already happening with my articulation of the huacaslogical in my LAPES paper.  And the BIG moment happened on July 23^rd when I was reading the “Ktaadn” essay and encountered the question Where are we?  And, further, it seems to me that the move to “more poetry, less prose” is about a poiesis (making) that is embodied and physical, or, as I have put it, a mimetic re-presentation of Nature’s creative force.  All that to say that Buddhist tems like anatman (nonself) are symbolic of the loss of self that happens with immersion, but no longer used [if they ever were] in their metaphysical denotation.   So, for example, when I write on this day ten years ago that freedom is “a collaborative poeisis, a building that names worldliness…” I am describing ‘making’ in the most literal and concrete way it  can be understood.  But when I describe the learning community as bearing “the mark of anitya, of impermanence, the repose within the flux that is the destiny of human belonging,” I am writing symbolically of the condition for the possibility of freedom qua poeisis.   The learning community is actual, and what they build is real, but the building is never complete, nor the community closed or fully formed.   It remains open, and for this reason, ‘impermanent’.  But it seems that moving forward it would be best to use terms that are not appropriated from their metaphysical systems.