OPM 194, August 27th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

Like the meditation I wrote when I was in the Madrid, I have a fairly vivid memory of composing the one I wrote this day ten years ago and those that follow in the coming days.   I was camping on the east end of Long Island at Cedar Point, a campground area on a bluff over the Northwest Harbor across from Sag Harbor.  A beautiful place, and in the summer of 2004 I took my kids out there for a month of camping.   And it was during the last week of camping that I got myself into a literary frame of mind and started writing in a hybrid form that had some Borgesian qualities to it insofar as I was writing a tale using well established characters.   Of course the genius of Borges writing is that he relies on obscure historical and legendary figures, which only a librarian of his stature could possible have known about. 

As with all the meditations I wrote, the legend I wrote came about unexpectedly, and I let it unfold in that matter as I write commentaries in response to it.  And because this material is stylistically so far outside of what I had been writing up to this point, it will deserve some careful attention.   Even more so because this material is amongst the writing that did not make the final cut when the meditations were published as Being and Learning. 

I’m intrigued by how it came to be that suddenly, at the end of the meditation from 8/27/04 I would write: “The learner is the seeker, who says with Don Quixote, ‘Here, brother Sancho Panza, we may dip our hands up to the elbows in what they call adventures.” The end of this last line from 8/27/04 is a direct citation from Cervantes’ book, so there’s no mystery there.  (For a moment I was worried that I would never find the quotation…but, thankfully, I carefully documented all of my citations, especially the direct quotations, and dutifully noted them.   And, in turn, I printed out the entire list of 593 endnotes and kept it with the original printed material in the maroon and green three ring binders!)   I have every reason to suppose that I was reading Don Quixote, or leafing through it, perhaps looking for new inspiration outside of the philosophical terrain where I was moving.   There’s no question I had the book with me at Cedar Point.   But why suddenly make that citation?

Backing up just a bit in the meditation and there is a clue to the mystery of the Cervantes citation, and the naming of Don Quixote as an exemplary learner qua seeker.    The penultimate sentence is interesting on its own account, especially because it is one of the earliest example of cartographical thinking in my work. (The cartographical that has been prominent throughout this summer’s writing was kick started in the spring with the writing of the Lapiz paper, and the announcement of the huacaslogical turn.   The fate of this turn was sealed when I encountered Thoreau epiphanic moment on Katahdin, and his questions: Where are we? Who are we?)  The sentence before the last sentence reads: “The learner is a reader of the relief map, the one who is a seeker of adventure, who looks to be taken-up and gathered by the ‘distinctness of contour, clearness, vividness’ of Nature, to be swept up and taken-away by the spontaneity unfolding in being-with the situation as a dynamic unfolding.”(8/27/04)  I want to express my astonishment that I would have written such a sentence ten years ago, especially when there was not much indication that I was in a full-blown naturalist modality.  But I’m not astonished.  I’m actually quite relieved to see the continuity between then and now, specifically with the recognition that the event of appropriation happens via Nature.   Relief does not quite cover the sentiments I’m feeling, because the final three sentences of the meditation from this day really do stand out from anything I’d written in the preceding 193 days.  And what makes them more striking is that they stand alone in standing out insofar as the represent a threshold from the content and form of the writing before and after.   And there’s no explaining that kind of distinction, representing as it does the full intense fact of spontaneity, a moment that was completely unforeseen and unpredictable and unrepeatable.  Are these three sentences expressions of the epiphanic?

The third of the of the last three sentences from 8/27/04, which is actually the first in the series, offers the clue to the quotation of Don Quixote, but does not solve the mystery, unless, of course, I have a faulty memory and I was not at Cedar Point on this day ten years ago, and I did not have Don Quixote with me.   But the following sentence seems to suggest that I the quotation of Quixote was found and deployed in the meditation immediately after the sentence was written: “The situation is the project that projects itself as the matter-at-hand, the challenge that rises up like so many hills appearing as ‘giants.’”(8/27/04)   (‘Situation’ in this sentence refers to the “cultural situation into which mortal beings are thrown.”8/27/04)   My conjecture [again, I don’t have notes on these meditations…that would have been an all consuming project…and I now regret that I didn’t take it all the way!  How valuable it would have ten years later to consult a daily log book that recorded the time and place I was when writing  the meditation.  When I was recording videos of reading the meditations between February and June, I was able to document where I was each day during this commemorative work.  Perhaps, tomorrow, I’ll start recording again…for this very reason!  Let me say here that I have been for the past week or more, writing from my home in Portland.]….back to the conjecture!....my conjecture is the following:  I had a paused for a moment and was taking in the scene that I found myself in, and from that followed the simile of the hills as giants.   And then immediately after writing that sentence, I thought of Quixote and his delusions of grandeur and felt a kindred spirit.  It is not that the hills appeared as giants, but that the cultural situation is not unlike the mountain that rises up and challenges us to ascend to its summit.   Of course, there is a complete and utter breakdown happening between the moment of articulating the simile and the moment of describing the event of appropriation via Nature.   The latter breaks the confines of the literary and metaphoric and poetic, and hence bursts from the confines of the cultural situation, “the ‘confines’ of the past-present.”(8/27/04)   The middle sentence is totally incompatible with the first and third, and is truly the one that represents the threshold, and, I dare say, the moving present, or the present that continues to move in my work.