OPM 206, September 8th Mediation (2004 & 2014)

Back in the Drew U library today.   I’ve been feeling quite pedestrian the past two weeks, and I mean this in the most literal sense of that word, which denotes, for me, the walking person.   Translation, I’m really into walking, which is a big change for me.   I’ve never ever been one to enjoy taking a walk.   Running or jogging for exercise, and biking has been my preferred mode of transportation since I was in elementary school.  But after hiking up Mt. Jackson and then returning to Crawford Notch a week later, I’m hooked on hiking, which sounds like a corny bumper sticker, but so be it.  I’ve been into hiking for a very long time, since I was introduced to it at Skoglund and we hiked Katahdin.  But hiking and walking are not necessarily the same.  In fact, they are quite different, unless, of course, one can see them as not simply complementary, but two forms of the same experience.  When is almost always walking when on a hike, but one is not always hiking when on a walk.  Or walking to and fro doesn’t necessarily entail hiking.  For example, when I walk to the restroom, or to the drinking fountain, I’m not hiking.   But one can feel as though one were hiking when walking to the train station, or to the farmers market.   And, in fact, I felt very much as if I were hiking when I first arrived to Hofstra last week and walked across campus.   (And if memory serves me, I wrote about that in my blog commentary).   At the moment the common denominator that is determining a walk to be a hike are the trees!  I can’t quite put language to it…and perhaps I never will…although I haven’t  actually put forth much effort to do so…but I’m experiencing a lasting and deepening affinity [I think that’s the right word] for trees, specifically when they are gathered together in the community we call ‘forest’.  And this is not in any way a contrived way to connect my mood and modality with the Legend of Zarathustra, which is now going on its 9^th consecutive day.  It’s not surprising that the Legend, that is the stuff of a naturalist’s imagination, would be written in the weeks coinciding with the end of summer break, a summer, like the one I’ve just experienced, that was defined by outdoor experiences, most of it camping.   But the mood/modality of affinity I’ve been experiencing the past two weeks is different, if only because I have an acute awareness of the…feeling?  [I’ve just now an exchange with a librarian that raised an interesting question for me on this matter.  As she passed through the doorway that leads into the Cornell Room --  a stacks and study area – she stopped and turned as the door shut slowly.  I presumed she was wondering if the door was making louder than library appropriate sound, but then she looked at me and then pointed at a 2 inch hole in the ceiling of the threshold above the doorway.  ‘Hmmm…I wonder what that is from…leaking?’  She then knelt down, felt the carpet, then stood on a chair and examined the hole.  I shrugged and smiled.  ‘No clue,’ I said.  ‘Well, I suppose it was there all along I just never noticed it.’  She smiled and left.  And I thought, ‘Exactly!!  That hole, like the connection I’m feeling with the trees, has been there all along and I just didn’t notice it!’  Now this is yet another moment when the leitmotif of the week is surfacing: the hermeneutic circle.  Ever since I read this in the Fink/Heidegger Heraclitus seminar, I’ve been referring to it when communicating with my philosophy friends and colleagues.]

Affinity a spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something: he has an affinity for the music of Berlioz.

• a similarity of characteristics suggesting a relationship, esp. a resemblance in structure between animals, plants, or languages: a building with no affinity to contemporary architectural styles.

• relationship, esp. by marriage as opposed to blood ties.

• chiefly Biochemistry the degree to which a substance tends to combine with another: the affinity of hemoglobin for oxygen.

ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘relationship by marriage’): via Old French from Latin affinitas, from affinis ‘related’ (literally ‘bordering on’), from ad- ‘to’ + finis ‘border.’

I find this dictionary definition of affinity is useful, especially the first line of the entry:  ‘a spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something.’   Sympathy can be misunderstood in the same way that Rousseau’s ‘pity’ is misconstrued.  In both cases  we immediately project sentimentality, when something much more impactful and profound is happening.   Indeed, with the experience of affinity, we sense a connection that is happening by way of an exchange, a communication that remains almost hidden, in the way that electrical wires are tucked away behind walls, or, perhaps even more appropriate analogy, the way radio waves are invisibly moving all around us, full of content.    Here the last entry, the one from biochemistry, is also evocative and relevant:  affinity as a substantial combination.  This gets me closer in a way that the sentimental takes me further from the experience I am having.

All this to say that I ventured to the Drew campus today by walking to the train station in Summit, taking the Morris & Essex line two stops to Madison, and walking up to campus.  The total distance is 6.6 miles, which is .5 miles closer than the trip from my house in Portland to Stacy’s house in Falmouth Foreside, which I rode a few times on my bike in July. (As opposed to the bucolic and relatively flat water view ride from Portland to Falmouth, 29 Sunset Drive to Drew involves many hill, some quite steep.)   But I opted to walk and train and walk because it seemed to me not only an excellent way to get some exercise, but also one that is more eco-friendly, both in terms of the use of fossil fuels and in terms of communing with the trees, who seem to be ‘communicating’ something important!

Now with that suggestion on the table, I want to share an excerpt from a Heidegger book I happened upon here in the library, a relatively short (fewer than 100 pages) book, The End of Philosophy, edited and translated by Joan Stambaugh.  It was originally published  in 1961 as volume II of Nietzsche.   I don’t recall seeing this material before, and when I took it from the shelf I had anticipated finding the essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.”   But it’s four essays/lectures, all organized around Nietzsche and overcoming metaphysics.   I came across the following excerpt, which is reminds me of the writing I did on Nature’s law, and the force of Nature, writing that happened during and just after I was working from the aforementioned house in Falmouth Foreside, which is captured in the following in OPM 169/August 2^nd: “If the writing ultimately produced the book titled Being and Learning, that is because Being (and not the human being) is prior and principal.  In turn, what is so obvious to me today (a decade later), and that became very clear to me in the week I was 8 miles north of my house and perched on the shore of Casco Bay at the top of Town Landing Road in Falmouth Foreside, is the fundamental relationship of Being and Learning presumes the reduction of Learning to ‘meditative thinking’ that is itself reduced to the modality of the solitary thinker, specifically the thinker who is moving ‘alone’ on the primal ground in concord with the primal flow.  Again, my exemplars are Nietzsche’s and Thoreau’s ecstatic experiences while hiking in mountain forests.  They were ‘alone’ but hardly ‘lonely,’ yet solitary subjects in the sense of being subjected to the profound force of Nature: Life!”

All this writing [on affinity, invisibility, Nature, etc., …prelude to sharing today’s writing from a decade ago…] leads to the excerpt from Heidegger’s “Overcoming Metaphysics” essay/lecture, the last of the four in the volume:

“XXVII

Shepherds live invisibly and outside of the desert of the desolated earth, which is only supposed to be of use for the guarantee of the dominance of man whose effects are limited to judging whether something is important or unimportant for life.  As the will to will, this life demands in advance that all knowledge move in the manner of guaranteeing calculation and valuation.

The unnoticeable law of the earth preserves the earth in the sufficiency of the emerging and perishing of all things in the allotted sphere of the possible which everything follows, and yet nothing knows.  The birch tree never oversteps its possibility.  The colony of bees dwells in its possibility…

…

It is one thing just to use the earth, another to receive the blessing of the earth and to become at home in the law of this reception in order to shepherd the mystery of Being and watch over the inviolability of the possible.”(p.109)

JUST NOW, when I retrieved the material from the file where I carry the daily writing meditation material I was completely thrown by what I encountered: the date from ‘today’s’ writing is 09/12…WHAT?!??!  WAIT just a moment…there is a note in the margins:  “here’s the ‘break’…this is when ‘The Shadow on the Porch’ was completed.   That would be the ‘myth’ I wrote based on  Plato’s Symposium, specifically, imagining what occurred in the time when Socrates drifted off before entering Agathon’s house.   I originally engaged with this scene way back on March 12^th, less than a month into the yearlong experiment.   Here’s what I wrote in my commentary on that day a few months ago, when I was reading and recording the daily meditations: “PPM28 is read from the verranda (the threshold?!) at the Hotel Albuquerque, in New Mexico, where I have come for the annual Philosophy of Education (PES) conference.  In my post-reading commentary I note that it is deeply coincidental that I should find myself on this porch (stoa) when reading the following lines from the Symposium, which I cite in this meditation:  I write "when they finally arrived at the party Socrates, much to Agathon's surprise, remained outside where 'he retreated in the next door neighbor's porch...This is very odd, said Agathon.  You must speak to him again, and insist.  But here I broke in [recalled Aristodemos].  I shouldn't do that, I said.  You'd much better leave him to himself.  It's quite a habit of his, you know; off he goes and there he stands, no matter where it is.  I've no doubt he'll be with us before long, so I really don't think you need to worry him."(Symposium, 175b)  This is the end of my meditation, which picked from the prior day's jam on Socrates' pathos by returning to Plato's  Symposium, but only just the beginning.”

“The Shadow on the Porch” was written in Edinburgh, Scotland, for a conference.  Here are the details as the appear on my CV: Duarte, Eduardo Manuel,  "Allegory, Meaning and Philosophical Education: Learning

to Think Poetically through the Legends of Socrates." Paper presented at the conference REASONS OF THE HEART: Myth, Meaning and Education,  University of Edinburgh, Scotland, September 9-12,  2004.

Today is September 7^th, and I’m presuming that I was on my way to Scotland, arriving on the 8^th, a day before the conference.  I’m also presuming that I broke from the writing of the Zarathustra legend in order to focus on writing the Socrates story, which I would read at the conference alongside my colleague, the analytic philosopher Harvey Siegel.  (It was thought to be something of a joke to place Duarte and Siegel during the same slot, but the joke was on them, because Harvey and I had a long standing mutual respect for one another.)  At any rate, I was caught by surprise today and don’t have the material I wrote ten years ago today to revisit.  I’m glad I was caught by surprise, because it means I’m approaching this commemoration in earnest.  Having said that, I’m glad that today was one of those days that I was drawn into the place of thinking and wrote something before I encountered ‘break’ in the writing.   So tomorrow, when I return to campus, I’m determined to find that myth, which, if memory serves me, was written out by hand into a notebook.  I’ll find the notebook, and perhaps a copy of the version I typed up. And  while I don’t have the notebook in front of me, I have a very vivid recollection of writing part of the material on a very famous landmark in Edinburgh, Arthur’s seat.   

 Before going to Edinburgh I had no idea that this amazing landscape monument existed. And to discover it when I arrived,  given that I was in the midst of writing the Zarathustra legend, was uncanny to say the least.  I hiked up and down Arthur’s Seat no fewer than twenty times when I was there, several times in the dark of night.   It was magical!