Reading the set of meditations while preparing for next week’s
Heraclitus lecture is revealing in both directions, insofar as the Heraclitean
influence on the writing is apparent, both in form and content. Yesterday I
described the series of meditations as examples of ones that are amped up and
full of the audacious swagger that propelled so much of the writing. But with that is also the threat of a
reckless writing, an overflow that is not what is indicated in the first
sentence of the meditation from this day that describes the backward flowing water
as “the sustenance of the poetic that spills over with the evocative.” If anything, what the prep work for the
Heraclitus lecture has reminded me is that there is an economy working through
philosophy, and one that is organized by the measuring principle of Ockham’s
razor. As applied to this project, the
principle insists upon the frugality of Heraclitus, and demands the reduction
to the essential without compromising on the novel. The application the principle would actually invoke is one of my project’s maxims: more poetry,
less prose. The poetic, in this
case, is not simply a euphemism for symbolic or metaphor filled writing, but
also a sign for rhythm and thrift. It
was under the influence of Ockham’s razor that I challenged myself a few months
ago in this blog to distill a fragment from each revisited meditation. That challenge has returned this week with
the study of Heraclitus.
Of course, there is a presumption that the fragments of his
thinking are in fact the form of Heraclitus' writing. What has been handed down to us are
attributions – the 130 or so fragments all are taken from secondary sources who
have themselves taken them (without citation) from another source. The content of the fragments leads us to
surmise he wrote aphorisms, and there is every reason to imagine he was writing
prosaic lyrics, or something like philosophical poetry in a free verse lyrical
form. There is also the conjecture that
the aphorism is the only way to convey the epiphanic moments where his thinking
was illuminated. Again, the content
indicates that thinking happens in a flash, like the lightning that steers all
things. “Lightning rules all.” It follows that the writing expressing
thinking must convey this rule.
If the form meditations transgress the economy of minimalism, the
content has a deep fidelity towards Heraclitus, if only unwittingly. The ‘sustenance’ of the poetic, which
accompanies the return of Mother Memory, is described as springing “forth from
a source hidden deep with the ground,” a ground that is called “peace”. The source is described “deep…hidden
deep…Still deeper that the roots, the stillness and silence…deeper than the
destiny of learning…the openness of the open region where the community of
learners…is gathered together as a many.”
The source provides for the “emptiness of the Tao that conserves the
‘not yet’” and “the truth of concealment.”
Citing Lao Tzu, the deep place as “having no name, it is the
Originator of heaven and earth; having a name, it is the Mother of all
things.” Here the meditation attempts to
sustain the thought of the primal sound and the primal silence that is recalled
in the hearing of the heartbeat: is this Mother of all things, the name of
Memory when she returns from her exile with her daughters? Is the Mother of the Muses the mother of
anthropoeticus, the human as maker of arts?
And if so, is this the incarnation of the Mother of all things? [Here I am borrowing from and offering a
radically feminine alternative to the
Trinitarian discourse, where the Godhead Father arrives incarnate as the Son
who brings the Good News of Peace, Love and Redemption.]
What follows from the return from exile? “The sage, and, in time, the apprentices of
learning too, know her, but know not to speak her name. To be with her is to remain silent, still and
dwelling in peace.”
3.0 (Wednesday, Portland, ME) Not much to say in response to the OPM from this day and the 2.0 commentary. I suppose I could make the critical remark that it more or less sounds repetitive, which is something I hadn't fully appreciated when I was writing it. I suppose that's the flip side of writing phenomenologically or in a non-argumentative way. I'm a little concerned that "LEARN" is a bit repetitive. Yet, when I read back what I've now edited, it doesn't necessarily sound repetitive. The ideas emerge slowly, and there is a good deal of repetition, but I'd like to think I'm following a style of musical composition. I'll have to wait and see what the 2nd draft offers. On that note, I finished editing part 1 Reading this morning, eliminating what really did need to be eliminated, and that was the PES paper on apathetic reading. That category more or less morphed into the category I'm now using, phenomenological reading. And because I didn't arrive to that until I had completed the first draft of part 2 Writing, lots of what I say in that PES paper is no longer relevant. It was a clunky piece, but I won't reject it because the crux of that paper resonates with my description of phenomenological reading. All that to say, tomorrow I'll begin editing part 2. In the meantime, here is a selection from the just completed part 1:
ReplyDeleteThe solitude of the book/text ‘teaches’ the student about the modality of autonomy, the freedom from the authoritative instructor that happens when the teacher ‘lets them learn.’ The book ‘replaces’ (negates) the teacher as a figure of authority. And this is a repetition of the negation that is essential to the fata of the book: the negation that frees the book from its author. The essential solitude of the book/text emerges from this negation. As Blanchot puts it: “He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed.”(SL, 21) This negation of the author as the one who has ‘authority’ over the book/text mirrors the periagôgé of the student. In both cases there is a turning away from a ‘certainty’ of the self that is reinforced by schooling and its instruction in the manner of obtaining and controlling information. Schooling reproduces the narrative of mastery, which is nothing short of ‘artificial’ intelligence: learning as gathering and reiterating. Reproduction does not stand in opposition to production (poiesis). And gathering is not collecting. Neither reproduction nor gathering honors the solitude of the work. Rather, both are organized by the logic of schooling that systematizes into ‘sameness.’ Autonomy, or ‘standing out,’ is negated by monotony. Schooling is the gathering together that eliminates singularity, the gathering of the herd via the reproduction of the herd mentality. A ‘school’ of children is akin to a school of fish, where every student is perceived to be the ‘same’ and is expected to behave in an identical manner. This is how the principle of ‘certainty’ is enacted, and how mastery, or ‘control over,’ is taught. Schooling is the everyday recurrence of the same. Schooling, the pastoral gathering of each and every learner under the general category of ‘pupil,’ claims to value ‘identity’ while reproducing the ‘identical.’ On the contrary, the productive circularity of liberal arts learning cultivates autonomy and guides students towards solitude. And this is why Blanchot describes the negation of the author, which mirrors the periagôgé of the student, as happening without the writer’s knowing it is occurring. The writer is dismissed but “doesn’t know it. This ignorance preserves him.” (SL, 21)