OPM 213, September 15th (2004 & 2014) Meditation

For anyone who has experienced it, getting ‘lost’ in the unique time and space of a college campus is one of the most energizing endorphin rushes available.  I suspect I’m addicted to that rush in the way I’m addicted to the endorphin rush that happens with exercise.   I was thinking about this addiction as I was walking back from the café in the Brothers College building.   The café was built into the already existing reading room, which has three walls of built in book cases stacked with an ‘open library’.  Anyone is free to ‘borrow’ a book from the reading room, and I selected A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by  David Foster Wallace (one of those most well known authors of the past thirty years that I’ve never read before…and  

who uses all three of his given names – which, in classic Anglo-American form could be interchanged without any notice: Wallace David Foster, Foster David Wallace, D.W. Foster, Foster Wallace David, etc.)  I suppose I’m at the point where I’m ‘ready’ to read him, perhaps now that he’s dead…and that was in no way meant to be snarky, nor insensitive, and, on the contrary, is an expression of self-criticism, and my habit of reading ‘dead’ authors, and mostly authors who have been ‘dead’ for hundreds and even thousands of years.   The more ‘dead’ the author, the more alive they become to me…for whatever reason, but probably something having to do with my childhood experiences with ancient religion and philosophy, which lead me to feel that the magic happens when we encounter the words from the past, and step into another world.  Something like that…

So I got ‘lost’ a bit during my break, and this continued when I returned to the library, and walked through the open stacks – I read the Drew library policy earlier today, because I was feeling a built like an interloper and wanted to confirm I was, in fact, ‘welcome’ to work in the library…and I can, so long as I understand the policy, and qualify as a ‘visitor’, whatever that means…the policy identifies the library as having ‘open stacks’ that are ‘open’ to any ‘visitor’…and I appreciated that, because there are many libraries that have ‘closed’ stacks…and exist behind guarded doors, such as the Bodleian in Oxford --  and as I was walking through the stacks I came across a book on the philosophy in literature, which caught my attention.  No surprise, the book included two chapters on Sartre, with one taking up No Exit, which I referred to yesterday in my blog commentary when I was bemoaning the presence of other people who were intruding upon my solitude in the wilderness.  So much for solitude and wilderness!  Truth is that I had ample solitude alongside the other people who happened to share the spot in Dunnfield Creek falls, a perfect spot to experience the phenomenology of the forest!  Reading a few paragraphs from the piece on No Exit, I thought of Frank’s talk from last Thursday at TC, with its critique of the discourse of responsibility, and my reticence to respond via Sartre, opting instead for the safe and more diplomatic internal critique: posing his use of Merleu-Ponty’s phenomenology against his use of Maldonado-Torres’ militant decolonial theory.   I’ll have to bring up Sartre when I reconvene with Frank in Memphis in a few weeks.

Talk of getting ‘lost’ on the campus – and this is a more general way of describing what Tyson calls ‘study’…more or less – leads me to some words I’d like to write in response to a public art installation on the Drew campus.  New Growth

I’d noticed these…small…billboards?...when I returned to campus last week for the first time since May.  My first impression of the billboards…signs?...was to understand them as part of a Welcome Back ritual, a whimsical greeting for new and returning students, prompting them to...???...not sure exactly…in fact, I recall thinking that it was part of a game, a scavenger hunt perhaps, for the first year students. (My daughter Sofia had experienced something like that on her first night at Bates, so I was projecting, no doubt)  I hardly noticed the…signs…game pieces???....when I returned to campus.  The regal oaks that make up the ‘forest’ on this campus, those I continue to admire in a reverentially way.  But the…game pieces…those faded into the background.  Until I returned to the library, and happened to look at a table with the latest notices, campus papers, etc.  What caught my eyes, at first, was a notice from Passaic Community College announcing the Allen Ginsburg poetry contest, which will award $1000 to the first place winner!  A hefty sum for a work of poetry, I would say.  My eyes moved to the postcard of Anne Percoco’s New Growth installation, and those…game pieces, signs, billboards…suddenly came back into my field of perception…as works of art!    But of course they should be works of art!  And of course they should re-appear in my field of perception the day after I wrote what felt like a breath-through bit on the phenomenology of the forest; a breath-through for me, as I was quick to point out yesterday, because I’m sure everyone who I’ve spoken to in the past week about my struggle to describe the pine tree, specifically those who know anything about phenomenology, were already hip to the post-humanist turn around that has to happen with a phenomenology of the forest:  es gibt (it gives).  ‘It’ the forest, la selva.  And la selva gives in more ways than one, that’s for sure!  (We don’t breathe if la selva doesn’t give us the air)   So it gives, and it discloses, and it offers, and in doing to we are translated…and here my dictionaries second denotation of ‘translation’, as well as the etymology it presents, do some work for me: 

Translation formal or technical the process of moving something from one place to another: the translation of the relics of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

• Mathematics movement of a body from one point of space to another such that every point of the body moves in the same direction and over the same distance, without any rotation, reflection, or change in size.

ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin translatio(n-), from translat- ‘carried across’. 

To be continued…what we might make of ‘translation’ in the sense that Thoreau might mean it when talks of being ‘translated’ by Nature.  I suspect the roots of the word are helpful, and, what’s more, might connect well with my interest in the ‘threshold’ and may be a way to describe the work of the ‘threshold scholar,’ the one who is ‘carried across’ by the force of the phenomenology of the forest?  That would make a lot of change to the work I’ve already done, which has been based in cultural temporalities.  What’s more, my threshold scholar has been depicted as one who ‘dwells’ in-between the clash of temporalities.  Were he now to be denoted as such by his being ‘carried over’ a threshold…that would mark a big shift…but one that would resonate with the post-humanist move.

The post-card for Anne Percoco’s installation describes the artist as being “interested in the intersection of nature and culture, including the way humans represent plant life in illustrations, advertisements and logos.”  [I’ll confess that I had to read the last word three times before I understood is was not referring to Logos!]  Her artworks are enlarged images Percoco selected from advertisements printed in New York and New Jersey Yellow Pages phone books.  An ingenious move by Percoco, given the anachronistic status of Yellow books.  Perhaps the general illiteracy of the wilderness is analogous to the demise of the Yellow book?  But illiteracy is not the same as being un-read.   The deficit is of a different kind.

“Percoco enlarged these images and digitally printed them onto plywood.  Although these sculptures look trees, function like trees (providing shade and aesthetic appeal), and are made of trees, they are not trees.”  Really?  Really? REALLY?!??!???!!!!!!  Ok, I’ll be polite…that’s what’s expected of us on the college campus, this farmers market of ideas, where we trade in polite and diplomatic criticism; an expectation that is even higher for the ‘guest’ and the ‘visitor’, which is why I almost started this commentary with something along the lines of ‘There’s an old adage about not biting the hand that feeds you…’ – yet register my critique at the risk performing  reductio ad absurdum:  ‘They’ are not trees, first of all, because ‘they’ are the result of human processing of said trees we are conjuring up; second, because ‘they’ are not trees whatever it is that ‘they’ do (e.g.., providing shade and aesthetic appeal) is so general an analogy to what trees ‘do’ that there’s no reason to compare them to trees; third, to assign a function to trees is the grossest of all errors, and one that I myself am probably most guilty of each and every time I write of a ‘phenomenology of the forest’ and of being ‘translated’, etc.   But there is an important difference in my transgression, as opposed to the one committed by the author of the postcard summary of Percoco’s installation, and, perhaps, by Percoco herself:  I’m not assigning a function to trees for us (humans), but, rather assigning a function to us from trees.   (Here’s where the reductio ad absurdum might be happening!)  The difference is in the reversal happening with the claim that we can learn from trees, which turns around the claim that trees do something for us.  It’s all a matter of power:  with the former we are subjected to, and with the latter we are subjecting our will over, which is precisely the will to dominate that Heidegger writes about in the excerpt I cited a week ago in my commentary. 

“…they are not trees.  In fact, the use of chemically-treated wood for a sculpture of a tree is clearly ironic, evoking the complexity of the relationship between nature and culture and using public art to create dialogue about environment concerns.”  Really?  Really? REALLY?!??!???!!!!!!  Again…being polite…Percoco’s installation would be demonstrate or express irony if she had placed alongside her pieces a can of the chemicals used for the wood treatment.  That would be especially effective if the piece, along with the can of chemicals, was placed alongside one of the oaks.   Unfortunately I’ll miss the panel discussion scheduled for next Monday that Anne Percoco is going to moderate!  Now that’s ironic, although, given my ‘visitors’ status, probably best for all concerned parties.

The penultimate day of the legend of Zarathustra…

“Rabbits bounded upon the rolling mounds of turf that Zarathustra walked over as the serpentine trail that wound north then south then north again taking him slowly up the west side of the range. The din of the river receded into a steady murmur as he climbed higher.  Steadily the mist rose and drifted south with lazy resignation.  The dread and abandonment he had felt from the clouds of unknowing in the earliest hours of the day of his departure gave way to the detachment  of one who has been assigned an uncommon, bold and even desperate enterprise.  Like the mist, he was resigned to his fate, and maintained the bearing of humility.  Eyes lowered, he felt the sun’s heat upon his shoulders.  ‘Rise brother, rise.  Much will be revealed to you when the hours of this day become few.  Gone to the west will I be when you reach this abode, but in the swell of my wake you will be carried to the dwelling of the highest vision.’  Zarathustra opened his arms and sang to the sun:

                          ‘Am I going to disappear,

                          Like the withered flowers?

                          How will my heart do it?

                          Nothing will remain of me?

                          At least poetry: flower and song.’

“By mid-morning he had ascended to a height where he could no longer hear the river.  The peaks appeared close enough to touch with an extended reach.  The expanse of the forest rolled out and over and over the valley below.  His vision of his past became increasingly clearer with every new height reached.  He rested and looked back.

“Memory, daughter of Heaven and Earth, sister of the Sun, made her appeal to the climber.  Memory rose and made her epiphanic appeal as one in the company of stars that remains hidden in the heavens, concealed by the glamorous glare of her brother.  ‘You sing of peace and pleasure, and the friendships forged here, in this now, in this present.  Zarathustra already has the vision of the East, of that enchanted region of mystery where he will descend in the evening of his departure.  My brother has offered you the gift of hope, the grace received by those who are cradled and lifted above the dark and foreboding abyss.  The unfolding event of the future, the not yet, is borne upon those who receive this gift of hope as the ‘time to know our faces.’  You have sun the song that sings of the fellowship forged upon the peace of friendship.  In the time you know your faces, you receive one another with the proper reception of those who receive the gift of hope. 

“Compassionate is the listening that receives the voice of the other, the face of the stranger.  Together, then, in this knowledge do you create a community that flourishes upon this earth, seeding her with the songs of freedom that will be heard and sung again in the morning after the day of your departure, in the day when you reap the harvest of peace.  But forget not, Zarathustra, the paths you have walked, nor the dwellings where you have abided.  Remember your awakening, the opening of your heart, the diminishment of your ego.  Hold close to you the recollections of your releasement from that remote island of discontent.  Remember each step you have taken in this return from your solipsistic exile.  These recollections appear in these songs you sing, the stories you will convey in your speaking.

“Much will you speak, much evocative  saying will you offer, Zarathustra, on the day, long after tomorrow’s tomorrow, when you make your descent from that cave awaiting you on the eastern side of this range.  So long as you cling to this ‘I’ that dreads the withering of blossoms and the burning of buds, you will keep close to that island from which you have been released.  Sail forth upon this lake, and far from that home where you have dwelled.  Carry not the fear of withering, but be carried by the cycle of life, this wheel upon which you ride.  Your songs, like the nectar and pollen of the flowers, is carried away by others.  The songs you have sun, shall indeed remain real, and sustain This house of poetic dwelling.  Within This house you will dwell, always, so long as you keep me close to your heart, remaining steadfast with the thoughts and dreams of the passing days and nights.” (And so ends the teaching of Memory, daughter of Heaven and Earth, to Zarathustra, as written ten years ago this day, 09/15/04)

“Rabbits bounded upon the rolling mounds of turf that Zarathustra walked over…”  this is a reference to the rabbits that abound on the Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh.  Amongst the lasting memories I returned with after my trip to Scotland, one of the most memorable was the hiking up and down Arthur’s Seat.  When I did that in the dark of night, which was never completely dark because there are no trees on the Seat, I was greeted by the surreal scene of rabbits, rabbits and more rabbits bouncing here and there and everywhere!  These rabbits found their way into the legend.

It appears to be an indexical reference to Nietzsche, but I don’t know the source of the fragment ‘time to know our faces.’  Evocative!

This house is an indexical reference to the song ‘The Thought of the Sages’ from the Native Mesoamerican Spirituality.  In an endnote I wrote: “There is an important  editorial move made with [my] borrowing of the spiritual song ‘Let Us Enjoy Ourselves in the Here and Now.’  In order to emphasize the full force of the temporal theme of the song, the word ‘His’ has been replaced with ‘This’… ‘His house’ replaced for ‘This house.’