Jazz must be free. So says Ornette Coleman, and I have no reason
to debate this point with the man who invented free jazz. I’m big time aficionado of Ornette and free
jazz and the experimental projects it has inspired. And I’d like to believe that philosophy, when
it appears through dialogue and conversation, is at its best when it feels like
free jazz. Indeed, whenever I talk of
‘music-making philosophy’ I am denoting a form of thinking that appears
intersubjectively, sonically, with rhythm and with feeling, and, overall,
organized by the logic improvisation and spontaneity, the way Ornette,
Coltrane, and others make music.
I’ve returned to Ornette’s maxim
for two reasons: the first has to do with a question that came up yesterday
afternoon during my conversation with Stacy Smith; the second with the writing
that happened this day ten years ago.
Coincidentally, the question and the writing are in synch!
The question came up yesterday
when I offering some wider context for yesterday’s blog post, which I had sent
to Stacy in anticipation of our planned meeting. She’s teaching a course this fall at Bates
(where my younger daughter will begin her studies in a few short weeks!) on the
roots of non-violence, and one the take off themes for the course is Thoreau’s
reading of the Gita during his Walden
pond experiment. As I’ve documented in
this blog recently, and in a fairly detailed way yesterday, my close reading of
Thoreau lead me to understand how his naturalism, or what Porte calls his
sensualism, is a departure from Emerson’s transcendentalism. And all this lead me to wonder what Thoreau
was getting from reading the Gita,
which Stacy and I had read and discussed together during the first half of this
year. Of course, no sooner had I
completed my post yesterday and sent it to Stacy when I encountered the
following in Porte, which more or less offered a plausible direction for taking
up the question concerning Thoreau’s reading of the Gita:
“Thoreau declares himself
thoroughly committed to…an ecstasy which (unlike the shared rapture that John
Donne describes in ‘The Ecstasy’) is for him a solitary occupation. He had confided his preference to his journal
in 1851: ‘My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune
with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call
it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights
unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.’
Thoreau tried to give a description of this experience – by his own
admission, a constant preoccupation – to the largest audience he ever reached,
the readers of Walden, but those who
have studied the journal can only pronounce this ‘revery’ a considerable
toned-down public exhibition of yoga: ‘Sometimes, in a summer morning, having
taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon,
rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumach, in undisturbed
solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless
through the house, until the sun falling in my west window, or the noise of
some traveller’s wagon on a distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of
time.’” [nb: as for coincidences…as I
was typing this the sun came out and lit up my desk, victorious over the dense
fog that had been shrouding Portland for half of this day.]
Should it have been part of my
writing from this day a decade ago, I would certainly have used this excerpt
from Thoreau’s journals, and Porte’s commentary, as an example of the dwelling
of the Sage. Because it certainly is
just that! But today’s writing has more
to do with the question concerning the apparent incommensurability between the
naturalist’s wilderness and the cosmopolitan’s city. The question came up as I was insisting up
what I understood to be the a priori
condition for the possibility of the naturalist’s epiphanic experience. One had to be in a place where one could
experience an effacement with the force of Nature. Probability increased the further away one
was from the anthropocene. Wilderness
presented a high probability, but sitting in the sunny doorway - a threshold! – of one’s cabin in the woods
would do. Less probability then to have
an epiphanic experience with Nature when strolling through a city park Not impossible, but less probable.
But as I was making this point I
had to concede that the project I was revisiting this year was not an
exclusively naturalist one. Nor was it
one that privileged the solitary to the social, the subjective to the
intersubjective, the singular to the communal.
In fact, the emphasis is the other way around, which has caused some
doubts for me, especially during the summer months when I’ve focused on
Thoreau, Kerouac and experienced the serenity of solitude on many days. In fact, the entirety of Being and
learning is organized around a relational ontology, which is not to say that
the naturalist, like Thoreau, aren’t themselves committed to a relational
ontology. Of course they are! They just privilege the relation between the
singular and solitary human being with
Nature, an experience unmediated by fellow humans. And this is not how my project of a decade
ago, nor the writing I completed in December and February of this past winter
on the congregation (learning community) that together performs music-making
philosophy. And for exactly this
reason I had to concede, yesterday when talking with Stacy, that the
naturalist’s epiphanic experience was a exceptional but not exclusive one; that
is, there was an equally powerful one that could be experienced in the wilds of
the city, indeed, under the ground of those streets, specifically, in the clubs
and venues where the freedom of jazz was happening. For every Thoreau in the wilderness, there
is a Coltrane in the city. And both in
their proper setting are covered over and immersed in a deeply sensualist event
that takes them into an ecstatic moment where they fulfill a “desire to commune
with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call
it, the divine nectar…” [Here I borrow
from OPM 119, June 12th, the following quotation from Coltrane:
“My goal
is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there’s no
problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what
I am – my faith, my knowledge, my being.”]
And so
conceding that the naturalist and the cosmopolitan can both experience the
epiphanic event with the spirit of the universe, one by via reception dwelling
close to the primal ground, the other via expression moving close to the primal
flow. This day ten years I wrote:
“Learning is the improvisational performance unfolding as the samutpada [co-arising] of peace and
freedom, which is exemplified in the inter-dependence of riff and solo. Riff
is ‘a short rhythmic jazz figure repeated without melodic development and often
serving as a background of a solo improvisation.’” It’s not a stretch to say that both Thoreau
and Coltrane soloed, one through the power of his quill, the other through the
power of his sax. Both experienced the
epiphanic event with a peace and freedom that is before and beyond yet only
experienced as a human. Their hands had
very much to do with the work that accounted for and described that experience.
Breathing, and listening too.
Return to this on the passing of Ornette today!
ReplyDelete3.0 (Monday, Portland, ME). The fragment from this day 20 years ago is spot on! Today, as I will share in a moment, I wouldn't use the term samutpada (the co-arising of peace and freedom), but the term samsara (rebirth, the dynamic process of). But I would definitely, and will as I continue to write this third part on Discussion, emphasize the learning happening intersubjectively with others as having occasions when the each student can solo against the riff, which might constitute the stability of the reading they are taking up together. Here's what I wrote just now, this morning:
ReplyDelete3.0b - The teacher negotiates the dialectic between students and the world, which is their world not in the sense of their own or “owning” it, but, rather, in the sense of sharing it with one another, but also with their teacher (the adult presence in the room). The significant object, the text, is part of the larger world. But insofar as education is a preparation for their entry into the “real” world, the book is at the same time the centerpiece of the microcosmic “world” that emerges between the students and their teacher. (The legacy of Bologna lives on in the gathering of smaller units within a larger organization devoted to the study of a particular book.) A small and intimate world emerges in each learning community, one that takes on the character of natality because it is new and has never been formed before. Each learning community is its own universitas, a unique universitas magistrorum et scholarium, “community of teachers and scholars.” This is a virtual world in the sense that it is emerging within the conservatory that is the educational realm. “Schooling” is negated by the idea of the “conservatory,” which is realized and comes into being through the principle of conservatism “in the sense of conservation.” (CE, 188) This principle of preservation, as Arendt describes it, “is the essence of the educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something.” (CE, 188) The conservatory is the location where their natality is being conserved while at the same time they encounter the power of worldliness, the power of the significant object that has been “created by mortal hands”(CE, 189) But, for Arendt, there is a dialectic at work in the conservatory, because it is not only natality but worldliness that is cherished and protected. The dialectic of learning emerges in the conservatory as the cherishing and protecting of “the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new.”(CE, 188) The mediation of this dialectic, but not its resolution, is the relever that is a rejuvenation of the “old” world. A “new” world emerges in the renewal of the book/text when it is discussed. When Arendt insists that “exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world,” (CE, 189) she is indicating a dialectical process through which the “old” is rejuvenated and the “young” matures. The “conservative” education she depicts is one of dynamic construction, where something new is not only initiated but organized. The renewal of the significant object, which occurs in the solitude of study, continues with the gathering of the learning community, and in this gathering there is an ongoing renewal as each annotation that has been shared circulates. New meaning emerges from that circulation, a movement that is an expression of that “revolutionary” natality in each student.
ReplyDelete3.0c - The renewal of the book and the formation of the learning community is an interruption of the expectations of schooling. The predominance of the self-certain cogito (the rule of cognitive science and behaviorism) produces fatalism and resignation with respect to possibility, what Roberto Unger calls the “dictatorship of no alternatives.” And it is precisely this dictatorship endemic to schooling that is interrupted by learning, so much that Arendt would describe it as constituting a “miracle.” Learning, the solitude of study and the formation of the learning community, which each time brings about a renewal of the book/text, is a process of saṃsāra, a rebirth or “new beginning [that] is by nature a miracle when seen and experienced from the standpoint of the processes it necessarily interrupts.”(IP, 112) Learning is the dialectic of new beginnings, the dynamic of human initiative. Against the predictability of automation and the artificial intelligence -- that ruse and artifice of thinking -- learning happens as the improbable “miracle of freedom [that] is inherent in this ability to make a beginning, which is itself inherent in the fact that every human being, simply by being born into a world that was there before him and will be there after him, is himself a new beginning.”(IP, 113) What is unique and perhaps truly miraculous is that the saṃsāra of learning creates a new world from the dialectic meeting of the old and new, from the birth of presence, the shared rejuvenation of the book. There is a jubilee character to this education. The disruption of fatalism is a restoration of human initiative. The rejuvenation of the book is a reclamation of the originary writing, the spontaneity that was recorded in words that could be heard again and resonate anew in the discussion where they circulate.
ReplyDelete