Today marks the first day of the
transition toward the fall semester and thus the end of the relatively open
time of thinking/writing, which peaked in July during the week I was caring for
Bodhi the dog and thereby working from Stacy’s attic in her house in
Falmouth. The transition began with the
arrival last night of my daughter, Kat, who will leaving at the end of the
month for a semester in Milan. Her
younger sister Sofie goes off for her first semester of college at the
beginning of the week when Kat leaves for Italy. All that to say I am now becoming preoccupied
with the forthcoming fall semester, which includes, of course, my return to
Hofstra. And it is not simply a matter
of preoccupation, of course, but one of
time. Indeed, the arrival of the fall
semester will coincide with decreased opportunity to concentrate on this blog
such that my commentaries take on the form of new meditations. When I
can I’ll go to that place I’ve often moved this summer when I had the
opportunity to write for up to three hours.
But, alas, it’s never just a matter of the quantity of time, but, also
the quality. And once the fall semester
and the new academic year get underway it will be filled with the highs and
lows and the distractions that remain absent during the summer months!
So today I focus on the writing
that happened on this day ten years ago.
Two concepts are taken up in the meditation: comportment and
edification, and for the first time the symbol of the ‘horn of plenty’ is used
to describe the fecundity of the open field of learning. The horn ‘endowed with
the virtue of becoming filled with whatever its possessor wished.’ This ‘horn’ of the nymph Amalthea might also
have been linked symbolically to the horn of jazz, the horn played by Trane or Ornette, which is not simply the tenors
or alto saxophones they took up, but the universal poiesis they took up to make their music. And given yesterday’s
comparative reading of Thoreau’s and Trane’s distinct yet complementary forms
of meditative thinking, I am inclined to write with less inhibition about the
universal that is tapped into at the local level when the kairological breaks
the chronological. In this sense the
force that moves the event of appropriation is the same ‘universal
spirit’.
Comportment is a manner of
dwelling, but a posture. It is a
modality that arises from the event of appropriation. The Latin root of comportment, comportare, identifies the specificity
of this modality as it pertains to the relation between Being and learning: comportare ‘to bring together.’ The event of appropriation manifests through
the gathering of the learning community, which, as I wrote yesterday, can be
understood as the community formed with any congregation gathered in the time
and place of the epiphanic event. “The
comportment of learning is the comportare
of poetic dialogue, that improvisational polyphonic performance where the
plurality of voices perform together,
receiving and responding each to the other.”(8/13/04)
The epiphanic event of
appropriation gathers us into Being’s Becoming, the presencing Now, but we can
not abide there. Ontologically, yes, we
always remain in this location, and
the challenge is to maintain an acute perception of being-there, or being-here.
To speak of a challenge is thus to speak of the impossibility of the
perception of this ‘moving now’ (as Aristotle describes it in another context);
impossible because it manifest from and thus represents the kairological break
from the incessant unfolding of the chronological.
Meeting the challenge of
maintaining a perception of being-here
happens with the poiesis of learning,
the making that mimetically expresses the event of appropriation. This poiesis
is called “the production of
culture” and learning is joined with education in the form of edification. “’Education’ is thus importantly linked to edificio (building) understood as the
process of edification. ‘Edification’ is the construction or building
up of the spirit, ‘faith’ or ‘character’, ‘intellectual, moral, or spiritual
improvement.”(813/04) Today I would
retain the link between learning and education via making and building, with
the emphasis on production of an account of the epiphanic event, a
phenomenological archiving. In this
sense there is a material documentation of the sensualist event. What I would relinquish today is any and all
talk of ‘improvement’. Today I would
speak of proximity, as in the location relative to epiphanic event. But this leads to the potentially
problematic suggestion of constructing a building upon a ‘sacred
place’, and such temple building is not at all what I have in mind when I write
of edification. The recording of the experience is enough to
offer a signpost to the place where the event unfolded, and in this way
edification is a kind of signposting, or what I have called huacaslogical phenomenology: the
documentation or account of the ‘sacred place’ that does not so much describe
the place itself, but the experience mediated by that place. In this sense there is no guarantee in
advance that a place is sacred, and, as the Incas taught us, a sacred place is
only understood as such after it has been ‘sanctified’ by, for example, the
bolt of lightning.
The meditation from 8/13/04
concludes: “The edificio of the
learning community’s edification is
the comportment offered in the comportare of poetic dialogue, the ‘horn
of plenty’ that is ready to be filled, ready to be blown.”
3.0 (Tuesday, Portland, ME) The fragment from today is a classic representation from the original project. Today I'm still using the method of tracing words, studying the dictionary and thesaurus, but not quite writing with the same playfulness or jouissance. Horn of plenty! That makes me chuckle! Coincidentally, I just received a photo of the above-mentioned daughters, Kat and Sofie, atop a ferris wheel in Vienna. I remember taking them the Nassau County fair and putting them on a huge ferris wheel and watching their little bodies going up and down, and then feeling terrified when it stopped at the top! "Please don't get up and look out!" I prayed. Back the fragment from this day. As if I didn't already suspect that I was on an existential ferris wheel, here, appropriately, is what I wrote this morning, which, "coincidentally," is taking up the learning community.
ReplyDelete3.0b: Preparation for repair and renewal of a common world, this, for Arendt, is what education is doing. The process of affirming the meaningfulness of worldliness, which is not only the meaning offered by the significant object, the work of art, the book/text, but also the gravitas of the world, its power to gather us together while at the same time distinguishing each in their singularity. The “objectivity” of the world is saturated with the subjectivity of those who have made it. Students come to recognize their own humanity, specifically, their power to initiate and begin. Although Arendt does not say it in so many words, repair and renewal of the world is at the same time repair and renewal of humanity, of the human community. Education, as the cultivation of amor mundi, is also a cultivation of amor fati, which is not the fatalism rendered by the dictatorship of no alternatives, but the radical openness that is demanded of the listening that leads to learning. Amor fati is the acceptance of differánce, of the irreducible mystery of the other who is, like me, distinct and singular, but at the same time, like me, a member of the same human community. Amor fati is the love of what exists, what presents itself, what is arriving and calling out; the reception of this call without judgment. Amor fati is the attitude of what Nancy calls “resonant subjectivity,” that post-intentional modality of receptivity that receives the gravitas of being, existence. Listening, Nancy insists, is the way of receiving what is “coming to presence.”(BP, 2) When this is happening the student has entered into the modality of learning when they “make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to [them] at a given time.”(WCT, 14) The time is the present, the now, the Moment, and the response is “Yes!” In his Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explains “Why I am So Clever” in the following way: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.” (EC, sec. 10) And in a similar way Gloria Anzaldua describes the modality of la mestiza, as the receptivity of a “pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad, and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she returns the ambivalence into something else.” (BF, 101) Nietzsche emphasizes this modality as not a mere toleration but a full-bodied affirmation of all that is ceaselessly coming to presence, the saying of “YES!” to the Moment: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”(GS, sec. 276)
ReplyDelete3.0c - Here we recognize again what we acknowledge in part 1: Reading: the fata of the book is inevitably linked to the pro captus lectoris, the capabilities of the reader. The fata of the book is joined with the fate of the reader. That is to say, the autonomy of the book, its openness, is always linked with the autonomy and openness of the reader. Learning begins and continues with listening. “What we can do in our present case, or any can learn, is to listen closely.”(WCT, 25) When the fata of the book is affirmed by the amor fati of the student the result is an amor mundi, love of the world; an affirmation of the world as the work of human hands. Thus the picking of the book is an embrace of the “object” that is saturated with subjectivity; an espousal of the “subject” as unknowable, ambivalent, mysterious and provocative, as sustaining wonder. As the book remains illegible, so too does the human who authored it, who studied it, and who arrives into the presence of others who have shared in the study of the same work. If listening-to is a total embrace without reservation, the maieutic reception of the birth to presence, then looking-at is a critical, analytic and judgmental measuring of value. This is why Nietzsche is “looking away” when he wants to negate, which a periagôgé : a turning around and away from certainty, from the self-certain subject’s will to knowledge. Amor fati is the letting be that happens after the letting go of the will, or what Heidegger describes with the term gelassenheit: willing non-willing.
ReplyDeleteEducation for the love of the world (amor mundi) co-arises with an a discussion that is organized through amor fati. Albert Camus’ description of his embrace of amor fati -- “a will to live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor most in this world” -- is offered as a matter of education: “What else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking-point?” (Return to Tipasa) Discussion is a weaving together of the learning community.