OPM 245(246), October 17th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 242-243

Day two of the PES Memphis 2015 recon.  Back in the most excellent Café Keough, 12 Main Street.   On my way back from this café yesterday I walked down Beale Street, which is around the corner from the hotel where the conference will be happening.  Beale was on and happening, with so much live music making that it sounded like the proverbial Pentecostal disclosure of the Spirit to the gathering crowds: “We hear them declaring the wonders of the Holy Spirit in our own tongues!” (Acts 2:11). I tried to capture one of those logoi with the following short video:

As I wrote yesterday, the experience of coming into Memphis was one of an immediate connection with the flow of this city, which I suggest is being mostly gathered by the flow of the Mississippi river.  There’s no metaphor in that assertion, because this city would not exist if not for the Mississippi.  What’s more, the life of this river town, and the culture of music that it makes, is all the result of the Mississippi and its powerful dynamic ceaseless flow.  And yesterday I borrowed Heraclitus fragments to recall the river’s flow as the source for his thinking on the ontology of the flow ῥεῖ (rhei) that gathers and moves the many panta:  

Frag 41: Into the same river you could not step twice, for other <and still other> waters are flowing.

Frag 42: To those entering the same river, other and still other waters flow.

And I moved to a conclusion of my commentary yesterday by recalling that ‘hardest apprenticeship’ identified by Schürmann through which the learning community undertakes its dialogic work of making and formation, what I have elsewhere called ‘learning by jamming’: “Poiein is a making of the learning community through dialogue, ‘acting kata phusin: following the coming-about’ of the essential sway.   Again, it is a mimetic making, a copying and imitation of what is happening, flowing ῥεῖ (rhei).”(10/16/14)

The meditation from this day ten years ago has all the qualities of prophetic writing as it wholly anticipates my being here in Memphis a decade later.  The meditation begins by reiterating the movement past the preparatory threshold and into the Open “as learning’s purposeful wandering into Being’s precinct.” (10/17/04  BL 242)  [Recall: “Precinct denotes a space designated by particular confines, the ‘boundaries of a place.’…a ‘precinct’ also identifies a particular location or environs, an areas that surrounds, extends round, encompasses so as to protect.  Understood as encompassing, a precinct indicates a location within a location, and points to a dwelling, or abode, within a protective sphere that surrounds or encircles it.”(10/11/04 BL 233)]  However, immediately, a sudden and significant shift to the musical poiein of learning, announced in a manner that echoes Acts 2:11.  The wandering into Being’s precinct is “a particular orientation and performance of language…the learning community enacts the ongoing building of poetic dwelling that is the extension of the Open.  This extension of the openness of the open region where the dynamic and vibrant play of plurality is cultivated…” (10/17/04 BL 242) 

How is this ongoing building of poetic dwelling musical?  The dialogic work is described as “improvised singing.  The singing we refer to here is the saying of the learners who have become enjoined in poetic dialogue.” (10/17/04 BL 242) The source for the thinking on the musicality of the learning as ‘singing’ is Rilke’s aphorism/fragment “Song is existence.”  Song is existence!   The mimetic making, a copying of the essential flow…music making, improvisational music making.  Music is existence, the existence of human legein the saying that imitates the flow ῥεῖ (rhei) of Logos.   But this musical existence needs to be learned, it is the hardest apprenticeship.  Learned first and foremost through listening, which is what is emphasized in the preparatory work of apathetic reading, where the phenomenology of reception is practiced.  When the receptivity of close listening is learned via practice then the novitiate is primed and ready to join the gathered learning community, and to take up the hardest apprenticeship.  “Learners are those who have been seized and thrown into ek-static silence…” (10/17/04 BL 242) 

Why are the learners described as being ‘seized and thrown into ek-static silence?’ This silence is the original and fundamental phenomenological modality, but this existential situation occurs in ‘stepping into’ the flow.  There is no seizure nor throwing, but entering and stepping.   Ten years later, today, a confrontation with Heidegger’s thuggish language.  There is no violent capture here.  Rather, the welcoming of the newcomer into the learning community, the very extension of the Open, is an expression of xenia (hospitality).  The learning community is a “care-taking building of the world as an abode that remains hospitable to the songs of the future ones.” (10/17/04 BL 242)  Like an Arendtian conservative education, poetic building is a careful cultivation that sustains our capacity to make new things: techne phusis.  It is always mindful of the coming community, the community to come, the arrival of the anticipated yet unknown newcomers.   The learning community remains, like the bountiful field, in an almost eternal fecundity (like the Earth), ready and waiting, but only insofar as it is taken care of, that it is constantly repaired and renewed.  “Sustain is rooted in tenere, to hold.  To sustain is ‘to bear weight of, to hold up, to keep from falling; to bear up against.’ The labor of poetic dwelling…is thus an en-action of sustaining, the work of support and maintenance of worldly existence of humankind through the cultivation of that space where plentitude, the abundance of human voice can flourish in the promise of its cornucopia…This promise is ful-filled in the improvisational singing, in the poesis, the poetic and creative making of the world when humankind responds to that ‘space’ [place] reserved for it within the Open.” (10/17/04 BL 242)