It
seems so fitting that the deadline for PES Memphis 2015 “The Blues/Soul Music”
is the threshold (3am EST/midnight PST) that takes us into the feast of all
souls!
At
the beginning of this month when I gave my Heraclitus lecture I was excited by
one of the moves I made in the first part of the lecture with fragment 47:
The hidden attunement
(harmony) is better than the open (known).”(frag. 47)
The meditation from this day
seems to push back against fragment 47, turning to Vedic poet’s hymn “The
Hidden Agni” and identifying this singer who “offers a chant to the realm of
the Open.” But what I suggest does not necessarily contra-dict (speak against Heraclitus) but, rather, respond
to and think the ‘hiddenness’ of the ‘hidden harmony’ as the depth (profundity)
of the Open, which describes it cartographically in relation to the mountain
range from which Zarathustra (the sage) has descended: “Here…we hear ever more
profoundly the depth of learning’s musicality…with hearing that receives each
voice in the essence of it sounding as an echo of the essential sway, as a
‘part’ withing a complex symphonic orchestration.”(10/31/04 BL 258)
Ten years later I want to make a
critique of the symphony metaphor, which is one I had been using to support my
phenomenological work on dialogue as polyphony since the writing of my
dissertation between 1995-96. The
critique is offered in all the work since then that thinks dialogue through
improvisation, through jazz and through jamming, and more recently through the
blues. Now, today, at the end of a week
of reading DuBois, the tension between the symphony and the jam has been thrown
into sharp relief as my students (mostly musicians who are aspiring educators)
and I explored the role of Wagner in a chapter that spills over into the
ultimate one on “The Sorrow Songs.” I explored
this tension in the paper I presented at the International Philosophy of Music
Education conference in June, 2013, and here I am only putting down a marker
with the intention of returning to this in a year during sabbatical.
And the marker is that part of
the Heraclitus lecture from 10/2/14 that suggests a connection between learning
to hear hidden harmony, the Open, and the formation of the learning community:
We’ll talk a bit more about the common (koinon) and what it means to
participate (think) what is common to all.
That is, experience koinonia. I place it here, at the beginning, as way of
indicating that while it may be the case that not everyone is inclined to think
(aka listen to Logos), Heraclitus is claiming that it is a fact of the human
condition:
We are, all of us, always already
listening to Logos. Wise are those who learn to listen closely,
who become attuned to the harmony, who turn off and tune in…
And what might we hear, and,
likewise, what might we write (or, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, what kind
of music-making philosophy might we produce?)
…Our wisdom is the wisdom of the
blues, an effacement with the reality of our imperfection and, despite that, a
hope and faith in the possibility of overcoming that condition.
The song of Sophon, Sophia is the
blues.
We are The Blues Exception: neither fully
animal nor fully spiritual, we are the mismatch, of sorts: the dissonant third
that is unique and unsettled from other two;
aware of our mortality, aware of our animality, our place in Nature; and aware of eternity, the universal, the
global. Our perception (intellectual,
physical, emotion, spiritual) places us this strange and unsettling third
position.”
On the writing from 10/31/04
there are ruminations of this move to describe the hidden harmony as the blues
heard by the ones who occupy “this strange and unsettling third position.” And in the writing the tension between the
symphonic and jam is felt: “Learning as the polyphonic togetherness of
being-in-the-world is that flourishing displayed in the essential sway of the
spectral arbor, dynamic movement of those limbs extended in the autumnal air of
the third season.”(BL 258)
The dialogic tension (polemos) plays out between Heraclitus
and the Vedic singer. But what is
strange and unsettling is the third that presides over this music-making, the
Open that grants the place for their singing. “This world, this ‘third,’ arises
as the strange abode that unifies and differentiates.”(BL 258) Heidegger, in
hearing the jam of the poets, recognizes this granting third that organizes the
ontology [quality of the sound: “The poets hide the path of Truth…”(cited on BL 258)
On
10/31/04 the Open is identified with the Arendtian ‘world’, and today I would
go further and via Arendt call it ‘the political’ (public realm). On 10/31/04 it is “the encompassing of the
Open….the sound wholeness of the Open that makes room within itself for the
human spirit through an investiture that spares the performance space of
freedom…the acoustically ‘sound’ Open…the world is the third space arising within and thereby maintaining the dignity of
each pitch, each chanting voice.”(BL 258) Arendt,
again, figures prominently in the move that draws on her appropriation of
Augustine and Paul. The hidden harmony
and depth of the Open is said to reside in the human heart, which is also the
source of poiein, the ever present
potentiality of natality. The heart,
that dark and mysterious place, is the source for the work of repairing,
rebuilding and renewing the world, and the reserve from whence arises the force
(energia) of that work “…this work
arises out of the acoustically sound sphere from the depths of the human
heart…The harmony remains ‘hidden’ because it is the mysterious source of the
re-connection that dwells within the unfathomable depths of the heart where
Being dwells. But what is this re-connection if not the
re-collection of the unity of the gathering of ta panta (all things) in general, and the learning community, in
particular? And if we travel all the way back in this re-collection
to the originary question for this
project, we encounter the teaching/learning question regarding the ‘turning
around of the soul’ to thinking. On
10/31/04 this question is re-called and the response is to name the turning
around as a conversion: “the inner recalling of conversion, [when humanity]
turns toward the space of the heart.”(BL
258, Heidegger ‘What are Poets For?’)
Conversion in the sense of turning around in the sense of re-calling in
the sense of prophetic memory in the sense of hearing and responding to songs
of the heart, the spirituals. “This
con-version is the ‘exchange’ of the ‘old’ dissembling discourse, for the ‘new’
language of the ‘assembly’, the en-chanted saying of dialogue. Such is the way of the turning, the
con-version toward the other that is en-dured with the learning of close
listening, with compassionate listening…Herein is the essence of learning as
the spontaneous and improvisational, a performance that unfolds within the
sphere of hiding.”(BL 258)
3.0 (Thursday, Portland, ME). It seems as if so much of the above is resonating in the current project, but nothing more than the description of "conversion" or "con-version." Circularity and repetition are two of the central tropes I continue to work with. And "conversion" is related. Here's a fragment from "LEARN" that expresses the resonance of the writing/thinking from 20 years ago:
ReplyDelete"The first moment of study begins after the periagôgé, after the student is turned away from themself. They are turned away from their private self and toward the text. To be turned away from one’s “self” is to be turned around and turned away, which is what the root word convers denotes. A phenomenological form of reading requires an attentiveness that requires a suspension or interruption of a student’s internal dialogue. This kind of reading is receptive, a welcoming of what is new. The language of dialectics calls the interruption that turns the student towards a receptive modality “negation.” As Jean-Paul Sartre describes it, negation is the moment within the dialectic when we are turned around toward Being in the form of Nothingness, which we experience as the negation or suspension of what we have taken for granted. From an educational perspective, “nothingness” appears as a possibility, as what is new and “not yet” studied. Nothingness denotes the open-endedness of the object of study, e.g., the “unfinished” character of the book that allows it to be read again and again. And because the book remains “open-ended” this negation is experienced each time the student enters into the place of study, each time they pick up and read the text. The negation is thus also a suspension of what the student has taken for granted about the text from prior study. The open-endedness of the text, which is a quality of its enduring significance, enables the student to encounter an old and familiar object of study in new and unfamiliar ways. The negation reveals nothingness in the open-ended, unfinished character of the book, which I will describe below as the solitude of the work of art. When the student accepts the invitation to take up phenomenological reading they enter into that existential location where the significant object resides and waits to be picked up and read: the solitude of study."