Spent a good part of today on Echo
lake up in Readfield, kayaking. Echo is
the lake where my old summer camp, Skoglund, is situated. The camp is no longer a children’s summer camp,
and now only a place for family’s to vacation.
At Skoglund I learned all the boating skills I know and use up to this
very day, and all of them were first honed on Echo lake. Skoglund was also the place where I fell in
love with this land called the state of Maine, and when people ask me why I
moved here I often tell them that I feel like my spirit has always been of this
place, and certainly since I was eleven years old.
While it is certainly the place where it all
came together for me as an nascent naturalist philosopher, Maine is not the
place where I discovered that the wild woods and waters provided me with the
only location where I could truly think, which is to say, the place where I was
no longer surrounded by what I later understood to be distractions, the place
where I was not caught up in my world. I discovered that space in the forest and
the creek that were in located behind the house where I was raised. I spent many hours by myself in a relatively
small area of the woods, and along the creek that ran through it. But I was small so the area didn’t seem small
to me. And, anyway, we are mislead when
we measure an area by acres. It is
quality of a place that offers the true measure, and when we make that move we
are challenged to identify the how and the why a particular place is ‘large’ or
‘small’, etc. For me the woods and the
creek behind my childhood home were larger than any ball field, or any library,
and certainly bigger than any school I had experienced up to that point.
And as I reflect back on that place, I recall
feelings of security, as if the woods and creek were offering me comfort. I also recall perceiving the necessity of
remaining in the area where I explored because I had not knowledge of where the
creek was coming from, nor where it was going, and so too the forest. I sensed that they both connected with others
like them, and that if I should walk the bank of the creek I should ultimately
find myself in an entirely new forest, and on the bank of another creek that
perhaps is more like a river, or even along the banks of a lake?! In other words I had the intuition that the
forest where I was exploring was connected with all the forests that existed
everywhere. Of course, if we apply
that intuition to the test using geological surveys, it will won’t stand
up. But, for me, when I find myself on
Echo lake, which is surrounded by thick forests of majestic pines, and birch,
maple, etc., I feel at home.
Perhaps the sense of connectivity
with the wilderness emerges from the intuition of interconnectivity. This day ten years ago the writing session,
which continued the to explore the sonic quality of meditative thinking - Wondrous Sound, horn of Amalthea, vibrational
event – included a quotation from Heidegger that I believe was cited
earlier. The quotation offers us an
example of Heidegger’s post-humanism, which, he tells us is a thinking “less
bound up with man conceived from subjectivity.” When we make this move we discover “Man is
not the lord of beings. Man is the
shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in
this ‘less’; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the
shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being into the preservation
of Being’s truth.” I respond by likening
the shepherd’s staff to the horn of Amalthea, which the day before I described
as the instrument through which the ‘hidden harmony’ of the event of
appropriation is sounded. Here the
shepherd’s staff represents an instrument that reminds us that poiesis is about the art of making, with
the first art being cultivation. To be
the ‘shepherd of Being’ is to mimetically re-present the event of appropriation
by gathering together. But where is the
flock that is gathered when we are shepherding Being?
Here is where replacing the term Being with
Life is helpful, especially as I read Heidegger, this day, as a
naturalist. The poverty of the shepherd
is the ‘poverty’ of the one who finds
himself in solitude. And the ‘preservation of Being’s truth’ is
the conservation of that place of poverty, where nothing is possessed or
owned. For me, this is precisely the wild of the wilderness that we must let
be, and in so doing conserve it from development, and, from ownership. I felt this strongly today when a lead Kelly
and Jaime across the lake to Turtle island, where I had once lead an overnight
with a group of younger campers. Our
plan was to picnic on the island, but we could only explore the trails that
skirted the small island. “Private
Property, No Trespassing” signs where pervasive and thwarted our luncheon on
the island. I was demoralized by the
privatization of what had for years been a shared space, a forest island on the
lake where anyone could spend some time.
It seems quite obvious to me that the ‘poverty’ that Heidegger is
referring to is a reference to space that is shared because it is space that
can not be owned. It may be
disrespectful and insensitive to use the term poverty, but the tradition that
Heidegger is drawing on is certainly the Christian, with its naming of Jesus as
‘the good shepherd’. In that tradition
‘poverty’ represents the practice of communal life where nothing is owned. The best example of this is St. Francis and
the communities he organized.
3.0 (Friday, Portland, ME) - I'm glad that I made an autobiographical turn with the 2.0 commentary, because it brings me back to where I was at and what I was up to. I remember going back up to Echo Lake, but didn't remember when it happened. 10 years ago today! I'm planning to get back up there in September. Echo Lake is a special place for me. So formative, so impactful. I wouldn't be sitting here at my desk in Portland if not for Echo Lake! This morning I wrote from Forage cafe, where one will find the best vegan breakfast sandwich. I prefer mine on the salt bagel! Here's what I wrote during when I was working from Forage:
ReplyDelete3.0b - Discussion is a form of action, and the dialogic learning happening in the learning community enacts multiple principles: insufficiency, incompleteness, preservation, spontaneity, improvisation, openness, and hospitality, among others. Like the articulated voices that produce the discussion and are inspired by them, these principles are actualized and dynamically related to one another polyphonically. Again, we have learned from Arendt that principles are enacted. She tells us, “principles do not operate within the self as motives do…but inspire, as it were, from without.”(WF, 150-151) Principles call and direct action, they direct action and at the same time arrive with them. Like the invitations that have turned the student away from self-certainty, called them to study, to pick up and then put down the book, and then return to gathering with others, principles can almost be described as “unreal” until they come into being with action. “The inspiring principle becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself.”(WF, 151) Action is a negation of the abstract and empty universal state of the principle as an Idea or Concept. Action is the realization of the principle in the Moment of learning. The dialectical negation of the empty Idea is an affirmation of embodiment, that the commonality is a gathering of bodies, flesh and bones, heart and soul, which are figurative and literal holistic descriptions of the students who are present in the discussion. They embody the principles through the action of discussion. And because the discussion is an enactment of principles it is a demonstration of freedom, both the negative freedom from the intellect and the will, and the positive freedom to perform with others. “Action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under the dictate of the will…but springs from…a principle.”(WF, 150)
ReplyDelete3.0c - The learning community is gathered by and around the work, the book/text, the reading, the worldly significant object. The discussion is about the work, the highlights that each student brings to the seminar and shares. Discussion is a performance, and the commonality of the learning community is a sharing in a demonstration of dialogic saying and listening, of being heard and hearing, the incessant arrival of natality and plurality. Recall how Blanchot describes the gathering commonality: the “presence of the ‘people’ in their limitless power which, in order not to limit itself, accepts doing nothing.”(UC, 32) Arendt’s description of action resonates with the learning community's acceptance that their dialogue is in effect “doing nothing.” In this they are guided by the “real teacher,” who as Heidegger suggests, lets nothing else be learning than -- learning. “His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by “learning” we now suddenly understand the mere procurement of useful information.”(WCT, 15) The teacher is the conductor of this polyphonic dialogue, but her conducting is one of allowing the improvisational circulation of what is said and heard. This letting-be of learning through free and open discussion offers students what Zygmunt Bauman (1997) called a “true emancipatory chance.” When they accept this chance they embrace the discussion as “doing nothing.” What is this learning that does nothing? It is the appearance of a non-linear, non-teleological event, a performance that could not be scripted nor planned in advance, and can not be repeated. The performance is not doing anything if by doing we understand producing something tangible, something that endures beyond the discussion. What they are doing, however, is realizing freedom, which “appears in the world whenever such principles are actualized; the appearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coincides with the performing act.”(WF, 151) Thus, what Bauman calls the true emancipatory chance, the possibility of experiencing freedom, which is the provecho de estar con otros. Being-with others the students “are free…as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.”(WF, 151)
ReplyDeleteIs learning begins and continues through listening, then the learning community is gathered by a call, and the response to that invitation is what Arendt describes through Machiavelli as virtù: “the excellence which [a person] answers the opportunities the world opens up before [them] in the guise of fortuna.”(WF, 151) With virtù we encounter the kairological character discussion, which suggests that the realization of the principles and the enactment of freedom is not guaranteed and only happens at the opportune moment, when the discussion abides in the Moment untethered from past and future, from intentionality and outcome. Virtù also denotes virtuosity, which expresses both the quality of the discussion and its occurrence in Moment. Virtù as virtuosity “an excellent we attribute to the performing arts (as distinguished from the creative arts of making), where accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end product which outlasts the activity that brought it into existence and becomes independent of it.”(WF, 151) The book/text is the work around which the community is gathered, it is what the students share in common, what forms their commonality. It brings them together but also conserves their differences, providing the opportunity for each to share how this common work has appeared to them. The work, which brings forth “something tangible” reifies “human thought to such an extent that the produced thing possesses an existence of its own.”(WF, 152) The work endures, but the performance occurs.