Big, huge storm passed through
Portland last night. A deluge that
included thunder and lightning. I went
out to my deck to watch and listen to the driving rain and wind. No sooner did I go out onto my deck when a
sudden bright flash of lightning
appeared above my neighbor’s house, so intense and, to my eye, no bigger than
8ft! Less the classic bolt across the
sky, and more of a flash in the manner of a camera…a very large and powerful
camera! The crash of thunder that
followed instantaneously was nothing short of an explosion that nearly sent me
diving back into my house! The entire
house shook! Despite experience an
intense moment of fear I stood my ground and stared at the spot where the event
had occurred, wondering about the Incan cosmology and how they came to identify
sacred spaces in the mountains of the Andes.
I couldn’t allow myself the license to do the same…I don’t have that license, so it’s a moot point, and for that
reason, in fact, I wondered about the move I was making yesterday, claiming
that the epiphanic event could happen just about anywhere, so long as we were
open and ready to experience it. Today
I’m back to my earlier premise that insists on the specificity of place, which
is to say, there are some places that are special and lend themselves to the
event of appropriation, which is to say these are places that draw us toward
them, so that we might say the event of appropriation has a longer duration
than the epiphanic flash it is usually presumed to be. Mountains, specifically the ridges and
summits, are not simply prone to be hit by lightning, but call us. There is much truth to the old answer to the
question, Why climb the mountain?
“Because it’s there.”
The supposed a priori exceptionality of place named ‘sacred’ after the
experience with it as such is consistent with the cartographical or huacaslogical phenomenology of
place. But in light of the emphasis
placed in the writing this day ten years ago on the sonic, I wonder if I’m
falling back into that trap of privileging sight? The move to music-making philosophy was
emphatic about listening and the sonic. And following Schurmann I made the turn
to a phenomenology of sound, or a perception that was based on listening in
contrast to seeing. Taking this
approach the flash of light was
preparatory and in its effect announced the coming explosion, the thunder clap
that reminded me at once of my mortality, my place in the scheme of things.
Yes, the event of appropriation
happening via the sonic, the explosion of sound! “The announcement of the presencing of the
ineffable occurs with the improvisational performance of freedom that is heard
as the Wondrous Sound of many enjoined together…And this announcement – through
which the silence of the hidden harmony is ‘heard’…this sounding of the
Wondrous Sound is blown through the horn of Amalthea, the ‘horn of plenty’ that
identifies the fertility and fecundity of peace as offering the most radical
possibility and revolutionary ‘not yet’.”(8/14/04)
The not yet today is read with the comical voice of the Monty Python
character in The Holy Grail: “I’m not
dead!” I’m not yet dead! The negative
phrasing of the existentialist’s tempus
fugit, carpe diem. But it is also
the blues phrasing that happens in the stepping back via poeisis and making music today, in a moment that is not held by the facticity of this day.
The ‘horn of plenty’ is denoted as peace, and said to be “taken up in
the ‘strange appropriation’ that is freedom’s performance…the performance that
announces the arrival of this mysterious other.” Freedom, again, is a state of possession, of
being possessed. By what? Life?!
In the way Thoreau was ‘translated’ – written upon – I am…played? No, not played, because I am not the horn…but
the one who receives the sound…but it is more than ‘reception’ because the sound
moves through me and grabs me...I’m immersed in the sound…engulfed by it. More needed on this…but what I would say,
today, is that all this reiterates the priority of listening, and underlines
the power of sound, first and foremost, to convey the force of Life.
Force of Life.
Nature’s law.
As this summer of writing/thinking
draws to a conclusion, I identify these two categories as what has been
distilled. This morning, in fact, I was
left wondering if ‘Life’ should replace ‘Being’ which, for the first time,
appeared to me too abstract and almost void of the facticity of
experience! Perhaps.
3.0 (Wednesday, Portland, ME). Another excellent day of working in the forest. I've almost completed the entire perimeter, border to border. Just a few limbs to cut back on the east side! I wrote this yesterday but was so locked in during my session that I entirely forgot about this project!! That's actually a good sign, I would say. But I also had to jump on a call with my fantastic student, Georgia, who is an outstanding musician and excellent theorist. Unfortunately, because of lack of support from the Music Dept., she won't be completing her honors thesis, not mounting the fringe music show that was designed to accompany the annual Hofstra Shakespeare festival. But that's ok. As I mentored her I explained that sometimes you have to trim your sails and navigate rough seas in order to get through to a calmer place. This upcoming semester is her last at Hofstra, and she deserves to enjoy it! Also, I'm on sabbatical and my colleague who was assigned to take over the advisement is a bit of a wild card. Is a talented composer, but can be a bit of a tight ass when it comes to student writing. As my student, Georgia was producing a continental philosophy piece of writing, and I doubt my colleague was up to the challenge of truly appreciating what she had written. Speaking of writing, here's what I wrote during yesterday's session (so the streak of daily writing is not broken, just the streak of daily posting...but in the spirit of the advise I gave Georgia, there's never a good reason to add an extra layer of pressure!)
ReplyDelete3.0b - Blanchot helps us describe the coming together of the learning community that follows from the spontaneous making of the world. The gathering of students emerges into a learning community as if on its own. The teacher invites them to share what they have collected from the text and thereby solicits from them the possibility of becoming a commonality, a community organized around a common work - both the thing (book/text) and the study (reading/writing). This invitation is a solicitation in the sense that Derrida denotes the “shaking” of a totality. In his translator’s introduction, Alan Bass reminds us that Derrida deployed this term of deconstruction by recalling “the Latin sollicitare, meaning to shake the totality (from sollus, ‘all,’ and ciere, ‘to move, to shake’). Every totality, he shows, can be totally shaken, that is, can be shown to be founded on that which it excludes…”(WD, xvi) With her invitation the teacher shakes the totality of “schooling,” its dictatorship of no alternatives, deconstructing its alignments, such as the library. The invitation to gather into a commonality is first issued in the dérangement (disturbance, unpacking) of the library as an arrangement or placing of each book in a fixed point. The solicitation continues with the derangement of the seminar room, where the non-linear permutation and circularity of the scene of learning does not designate any fixed point of authority. The students enter a scene that has no fixed points, and that prevents them from returning to their “original” position. The scene sets up a “performance” of discussion that will be improvisation and spontaneous. Blanchot describes the commonality emerging from this derangement “an innocent presence, a ‘common presence’ (René Char), ignoring its limits…because of its refusal to exclude anything…with the impossible as its only challenge.”(UC, 31) Blanchot calls this commonality the “unavowable community,” and with this name he helps us to describe what can not be declared as once-and-for-all. The learning community is a commonality of action, it is a performance of freedom and in this sense does not found or establish anything permanent. Its existence is never guaranteed, nor it is ever sustained beyond the Moment in which it arrives. And the sharing of the annotations and the circulation of ideas and emotions (sentipensar) does not produce or make anything. The learning community is “without project,” without a goal it was organized to achieve, without an outcome that can be measured and assessed.(UA, 30) It emerges in the Moment as the “presence of the ‘people’ in their limitless power which, in order not to limit itself, accepts doing nothing.”(UC, 32) “Doing nothing” denotes a learning for learning’s sake, the performance of discussion that happens but does not make anything. The “outcome” or “result” is the memory of experience of commonality: “Everything as accepted…(Nietzsche could be said to be its inspiration).”(UA, 30) The learning community is thus an “organized disorganization,” an experience of “friendship (camaraderie without preliminaries) vehiculated by the requirement of being there, not as a person or subject,” (UC, 32), but as a student.
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