OPM 219(20), September 21st (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 215-216

...cawww, cawww  of the raven shattered the stillness.  Zarathustra raised his arm above his head, as if to protect himself from the limb he believed was destined to crash upon him.  He saw the crow perched above him.  'You startled me, friend, with your alarming greeting,' he said with relief. 'You travel too easily from night to day and day to night, Dreamer, and remain open to the unexpected.  You wait upon the unforeseen and have given yourself over to the mysterious and enchanted.  Awoken you have been, to the countless paths that await those who travel along this range that we call the Boundless Boundary.  This range binds Earth, Sky, and Sun, and this unity ful-fills this world with the Spirit of Life.  Within this binding you will encounter six hundred thousand trails, some well trodden, others barely visible. Which one will you take? One that is slow, but rather safe, one that gives you the time to gather in the green of the grass, to smell the wild flowers and eat from bushes ripe with berries, both sour and sweet? Will you take a path that rises quickly alongside the impatient rush of a stream seeking to be reconciled with the river below?  Will you take one of the steep and stony paths, one that puts you to work with the mountains, ascending, rising, determined to greet the star as it arrives upon the peaks?  How shall you proceed cousin?  Will you remain here, resposed, calm, awaiting the clearing of these clouds of unknowing that settle here and gather us, now, into sullen uncertainty?  Do you not feel the anxiety emanating from this forlorn mist, the dread of the hunted?'  At that moment the black bird released a coarse and clamorous Cawww! Cawww!  Cawww! and leaped from its perch, a marrow-spent sapped limb, which fell down down upon Zarathustra, tumbling him into the circled stones where he singed his feet upon the coaled remnants of the camp fire.  He howled at the blistering burning, and the raven called back as it soared away above the flow of the river.  Zarathustra leaped into the icy waters.

"Misty smoke rose up from embers, now doused and properly extinguished.  'Our desires of climbing fast are dampered, my friends.  Today we walk with the small steps of a child, embraced by the hidden beauty that will rise to greet us as we wind our way slowly along the soft ground of the grassy grooves.' The voice of the choir, hidden in the glades, replied, 'What shall we go?  Where shall we go?'  'Our destiny is now destined with the direction of the one who has conveyed the news of the six hundred thousand trails.  Today we take the paths that unfold with the countenance of grace.'  In the unfolding of the...

Above, the missing fragment from September 15^th, p. 375 from the original manuscript that was left in Portland, and was promised to be inserted when I returned.  I just typed it up and placed it in its proper location…and I have included it in this commentary as a way of documenting the fact that I revisited the material today, but also because the ‘six hundred thousand trails’ that Zarathustra will walk are precisely the ‘innumerable paths’ described in yesterday’s meditation.  So there is a crucial connection here, but also an important indexical reference to an singular Nietzschean moment, which was taught to me by Reiner Schürmann (cf. OPM119 June 12^th) aka Nietzsche’s epiphanic moment, which I have taken up (OPM 164 & 168) and likened to Thoreau’s.   Nietzsche’s description of that moment finds its way into the legend of Zarathustra (cited above): ‘Now I shall relate the history of my Zarathustra.  The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned underneath: ‘Six thousand feet beyond man and time.’  That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped.  It was then that this ide came to me.’ [note: simultaneity of my writing this commentary while listening to the Dead Zone and a far-reaching ‘Dark Star’ from 9.16.72]  Schürmann writes, and underlines my indexing of Nietzsche: “Six thousand feet beyond man, ‘it’ came to Nietzsche…From the self-assertion of the subject it is necessary to climb ‘six thousand feet beyond man.’”  Or if one can not climb six thousand feet beyond man and time – which happens to be the height of our very own Mt. Washington/Agiocochook (6288ft) one must walk ‘six hundred thousand trails’…

Mt. Washington/Agiocochook 

Yesterday I wrote: What I would emphasize today, on this day when I revisit the meditation from this day in 2004, is the ongoing learning of close listening.   And this would imply a reticence, yes, the reticent of silence, a silence about the intentionality of listening.  A listening that prepares us for thinking, is always already preceded by a listening that is being learned.   And then I went on to describe Zarathustra as the exemplar of the evocative speaker, the teacher of close listening.  A day later I write of this teacher having learned to speak evocatively through resignation, and build on Heidegger “no one is to be blamed, then, if he is not yet capable of listening.  But by the same token you must concede that the teacher’s attempt may go wrong, he must often resign himself to the fact that he can not lay before you in each instance all that should be stated.” Resignation  is the silence that indicates the place of learning close listening.   This silence, I write this day ten years ago, is the “gap that opens up amidst dialogic interplay.”  It is a gap that have, for the past three years or more called the ‘threshold’ because it is a gap that both brings us together and separates us, one from the other.  As a principle or fundamental place in the geography I am mapping, the threshold remains the ‘not yet’ encountered ‘path’ of thinking, or one of the ‘six hundred thousand paths’ not yet encountered.   “The teacher’s resignation conveys the most profound possibility of the ‘not yet’ spoken: the in-effable,”(9/21/04) or what can not be spoken.  The teacher of close listening resigns speaking…he can not lay before the students all that should be stated…he remains silent.  

The meditation from 9/21/04 takes an abrupt turn with a citation of Holderlin from Heidegger, which shifts from listening and speaking to seeing.  Resignation is renunciation of speaking, and the emergence of seeing: Holderlin “So I renounced and sadly see: where word breaks off no thing may be,” and Heidegger responds, “the poet has learned renunciation.  To learn means: to become knowing. In Latin, knowing is qui vidit, one who has seen, has caught sight of something, and who never again loses sight of what he has caught sight of.  To learn means: to attain to such seeing. To this belongs our reaching it; namely on the way, on a journey. To put oneself on a journey, to experience, means to learn.”

Ten years later I see this moment of the meditation as the most significant, and regret that I didn’t focus on connecting resignation>renunciation>silence>seeing> sojourn, journey, pathbreaking/walking>thinking> learning.  

To climb six thousand feet above the human and time>to experience the epiphanic moment/eternal recurrence>THEN to return to the hman and time>to take the journey along six hundred thousand paths: learning.