OPM 204, September 6th Mediation (2004 & 2014)

I’m back on the Drew campus, making my return to academia (or what I sometimes refer to as ‘gringodemia’ but only when I’m feeling a bit edgy, or sardonic) official.  I mentioned Drew in yesterday’s commentary, in part because I was anticipating my return to the campus – which is my ‘home’ campus when I am in New Jersey on the days when I am not at Hofstra – and in part because I was discussing the Moleskine notebook that I retrieved yesterday from my teaching folder.  I last jotted notes in the Moleskine back in May, and before it became a general notebook I was using it as a place to collect the titles I was finding on the shelves here in the Drew library.   So I’m back on campus ostensibly to do some prep work for next week’s teaching, and the Oct 2 Heraclitus lecture.   I’ll get to the latter after I’ve completed my revisit to the writing from this day ten years ago, which continues the legend of Zarathustra. 

One of the most gratifying, yet sometimes frustrating, moments of this experiment 2.0 is when I encounter material that I haven’t read since it was written ten years ago.  While the Zarathustra legend was a span of writing I recall quite vividly, I didn’t recall many of the details of the legend.  In fact, if I had been asked, I would have amplified the section describing the wasteland, as I recall it having a more prominent place in the story than it actually does.  And by that I only mean that it is one of the details that I remember quite well, but thought I had written more on the wasteland.   And while I recalled the wasteland, the place where Zarathustra was ‘found’ by Quixote, I did not recall the river Gracia by name, and, for that matter, as existing at all in the legend.  Nor did I recall that I had citied directly from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which happened as soon as my ‘Zarathustra’ was about to depart on his journey from the forest, across the river, and up the mountain to his cave.  

It feels timely to revisit this legend at the start of a new academic year.  It has eased the transition from summer break, because I am retyping this unpublished material and offering a limited amount of commentary.  And the experimental spirit of the writing, its literary form, has jumpstarted me into this new academic year.  Revisiting it reminds me of the audacity of the entire year long project, and all that came with it, including the apparent risk-taking happening with the kind of writing that I took up when composing the legend.  I say ‘apparent risk-taking’ because this material, and all the came before and after, was never shared with anyone at the time when it was written, so the only risk taken was vis-à-vis the hegemonic academic norms I had internalized. And  I’m not entirely clear what entails, but I’m sure there is a some term in psychology for the transgression of an internalized norm. (This is all sounding to me like Augustinian ruminations).   At any rate, it feels right to be revisiting this audacious material at the beginning of new academic year, a time when we ought to be doing something a little bit, or perhaps, a lot differently, have feelings of anticipation and a certain excitement about the year that is about to unfold.   (As I wrote this I happened to turn to look out onto the campus and spot a ground hog hunting for grubs in the Drew Forest.  I can see the entrance to his home under the great old oak.  Like this ground hog, we need to leave our subterranean places of dwelling and seek our daily sustenance.) Too often, as I experienced yesterday during my brief time at the full faculty meeting of the diminished School of Education, faculty return to a new academic year with the old baggage, and carry with them the stultifying energy of the previous year’s quarrels and struggles, most having little or nothing to do with scholarly projects.   The beginning of the academic year is a time of renewal, a time to move forward and beyond the previous year.  

And on that note of moving forward into the future, I return to the legend…

“The roar of the falling waters crashing upon the rocks pounded Zarathustra’s ears.  He had reached the falls as the curtain of night fell upon the day of his departure.  He would camp alongside this clamor for the night.  The next day he would make the steep trek to the peak, the cross the jagged rim.  There, beyond the peak, on the Eastern side of the range, he would find the cave where he would be exalted and inspired by the majesty of Nature, where he would be carried away, and lifted by the unity of the world. 

“Zarathustra had already travelled far, and was a long way from the rock and sand that made up the lonely dwelling of isolation: the wasteland.  He had been awakened from the long nightmare of self-delusion, released from the enclosure where he had been hiding.  But his hiding had been hidden from him, and would always remain concealed. The darkness that held the mystery of this awakening, the arrival of Quixote – the ‘Great Awakener’ – also retained the possibility of his relapsing into the cynicism of despair.

“ ‘We are limited!’  A voice erupted though the roar.  Suddenly a dried, lifeless limb of an oak crashed upon a boulder above Zarathustra’s campsite.  Pieces of wood flew apart in a random flight, as the dismembered, spent and exhausted branch was gathered by the falling waters.  As Zarathustra watched the waters carry the remnants of the limb away he felt a sharp sting on his face below his left eye.  Wincing, he felt the ooze of blood drip down his cheek. 

‘We are limited!’ The voice erupted again. ‘Blind are those who sit beside the falls and hear not the roar.  But see how you, who hear attentively, are spared your sight.  The blood dries upon your face, like the tears of the child who sobs in her sleep.  You awaken, like the child, to greet the star which rises in the East, to whom we owe our being. Open your arms and close your eyes, and let us stand with you, behind you.  Let us follow you as you rise above the plain.’

“Zarathustra pressed a cold, damp cloth against the injury he had received from the flight of the liberated and reckless chip. ‘Join me, my shadows, and let us rise together.  Be not my followers, but my companions.  I seek not to rise above the plain, but to be plain-hearted, ˜sincere, and free from hypocrisy.˜ Straightforward is my ascent.  I follow the ways of my brothers and sisters, guided by the vision of hope that awoke me from my restless slumber. My sight has been spared in the darkness that holds and conceals me from the day of my arrogant confidence. Too much did I overlook in looking over  all who came my way, with the manner of the judge who rests upon the confidence of unquestioned tradition.  Here, in the mystery of the un-seen, the shroud of mystery, I am enjoined in the hearing of the plant-chant.  Let us, then, my shadows, sing along with this plain-song, and be gathered into the unity of the chanting in unison.  Together, side-by-side, let us make our ascent through the mist, the cloud of unknowing, and let us, yes, greet the rising beacon, that signal-fire in the East to which we are drawn and from which we draw our sustenance, our purpose.’

“Embracing his shadow, Zarathustra fell into a calm, deep sleep, and was carried away by the dissonant din of the rushing water.’ (9/6/04, with some minor changes made in during the retyping on this day ten years later)

The fragment ‘lifted by the unity of the world’ is close to the thinking I have been doing in preparation for my Heraclitus lecture, specifically with the reading of Heidegger and Fink’s seminar, which is mostly organized around the enigmatic ‘panta’.  I have used that term in my writing as ‘many’, or as a denotation of ‘plurality,’ but Heidegger and Fink read it as denoting ‘everything’ and as the disclosure of the unity of all.

The fragment ‘his hiding had been hidden from him, and would always remain concealed’ is also expressing a Heraclitean theme, specifically what, from Heidegger, I have come to understand as the ‘forgetting of forgetting,’ or the lack of memory about the mystery of thinking.  Heidegger himself called attention to this state of forgetting with his repeated phrase in What is Called Thinking?: ‘most thought provoking is that we are not yet thinking.’   What is ‘hidden from him, and would always remain concealed’ is the thought of all prior thinkers, especially those who, like Heraclitus, were thinkers of the hidden, thinkers who experienced the full force of nature’s presencing and withdrawal.  All prior thought remais present yet absent or hidden.  This is the mystery of the hermeneutic circle that we are compelled to move in.  When we embrace this circular movement, which is one way of describing our experience of the ‘moving present’ (cf. OPM 185, August 18^th), we are spared, like Zarathustra who says:  My sight has been spared in the darkness that holds and conceals me from the day of my arrogant confidence.

You awaken, like the child, to greet the star which rises in the East, to whom we owe our being. Open your arms and close your eyes, and let us stand with you, behind you.  Let us follow you as you rise above the plain.  Here there is an indexical reference to the ‘Three Parables’ in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.  And there is also a play on the star rising in the East as a symbol of Zarathustra, the prophet, arriving from the east.

…let us make our ascent through the mist, the cloud of unknowing…This is an indexical reference to the anonymously written medieval spiritual work The Cloud of Unknowing, introduced to me at Fordham by Ewert Cousins.   This reference offers some context to the recurring ‘mist’ that is appearing and disappearing in the legend.