Back
in the first months of this commemorative blog I used to film myself reading
the meditation and making an oral commentary in response. After awhile I grew tired of that process,
and mostly of seeing myself on film. At any rate, one part of the process I
enjoyed was making the film simultaneous to the airing of the Dead Zone (the radio show I host and produce on WRHU.ORG Sundays, 6-8pmEST), which
is happening now as I write this evening.
Keeping up with the DZ on a weekly basis has energized my
writing/thinking, especially with respect the learning community as a
congregation of music-making philosophy.
Listening
to the jam from “Playing in the Band” (from 11.4.85) overlapping and then
flowing into the “Dark Star” jam (from 11.7.69) I can’t help but hear the
excerpt included in yesterday’s commentary that describes “the novel conveyed
through the improvisational…this novel offering…is the ‘breaking-through’ of
the eternal into the temporal, the appearance of Being’s dynamic processural
unfolding as the ongoing investiture of being-in-the-world.”(BL 273)
Dead Zone… “Dark star crashes, turning its light into ashes…mirror
shatters, in formless reflections of matter, glass hand dissolving to ice petal
flowers revolving…shall we go, you and I while we can…through the transitive
nightfall of diamonds,” and then
straight into “Terrapin Station”: “let
my inspiration flow…” Indeed, reader,
if you want another perspective, one that will offer you the opportunity of
moving on the landscape where so much of the aesthetic sensibility that informs and guides my phenomenological descriptions the, please, listen to my show, The Dead Zone, where I share my mapping of said
landscape every week from 6-8pm EST.
“His
job is to shed light, and not to master…”
This line from ‘Terrapin Station’ might express the credo of the sage,
specifically the one they call The Dark, and The Obscure: Heraclitus. Throwing his light on the Open, Heraclitus
seems to have lit the stage for Socrates.
“Inspiration, move me brightly…more than this I will not ask, filled
with mysteries dark and vast; statements just seem vain at last…and the whistle
is screaming TERRAPIN!!!”
Gathered
into the light, gathered into the sound, re-called into the meditation: “the
every deepening roots of the learning community,” where I am born anew, into
thinking, turned around to receive the power of the heart, and that awful
awesome power of the spirit flowing. Heart, heartbeat, drums, dreams.
11/16/04
returns to sage Socrates via Arendt, and I find it timely, important and
revealing that the excerpt highlights the origin of the practice of dialogue as
a τέχνη
(technē):
“What Plato later called dialegesthai,
Socrates himself called maieutic, the
art of midwifery…”(Arendt, BL 274) The apparently inherent conflict between
philosophy and politics that Arendt describes is reconciled in under the same
logic that reconciled the categorical opposition between free-action freedom
and the art-work τέχνη.
What’s more, Socrates’ art is essentially teaching by way of phenomenology, and
Arendt describes it: “every man has his doxa,
his own opening to the world, and Socrates must therefore always begin with
questions; he cannot know beforehand what kind of dokei moi, of it-appears-to-me, the other possesses. He must make sure of the other’s position in
the common world.”(Arendt, BL 274) The necessity and binding happening with the
learning community, the force of this gathering in the common world (koinonia), happens with the confirmation of each
learner’s phenomenological position. The
sage ‘must make sure’ by way of a particular kind of τέχνη,
questioning, that each one is brought into a unity by revealing what is
distinct and particular in their phenomenological perception, their ‘opening’
to the world. “This art of maieutic is the practice of admitting
the new by way of showing…the excess of every saying…the spilling over that
exceeds the dokei moi. When Heidegger says the ‘Open admits,’ this
admitting is as a drawing, a drafting. [He says]: ‘to admit means to draw in.’
[And then I write] What is drawn in is the world as a commonly shared
phenomenon…Each saying is a shaping of this common world insofar as the sayer
ventures into the realm where they relinquish their hold upon their
possession…let-go of the hold upon the saying. In this letting-go the
venturesome sayer, the learner, becomes estranged from their own opening to the
world, and it is with estrangement that they are drafted into the Open, the
shared openness.”(BL 274)
My
understanding of Socrates’ work places emphasis on his practice of maieutic as one that delivers something new.
If we follow Arendt to Socrates’ own identification of his work then
what we are describing is an art that enables his interlocutor to give birth to
something that becomes part of the world; helps them make an offering of
something new into the world. In this
sense it is not a confirmation of what is already given, but a delivery of
something new into what is already present.
The art practiced by Socrates delivers or meditates presencing of the
new into the present; practices an art that renews the world, renews the
community, reconciling each opening to the world with the Open. “This gives rise to an understanding of the
openness of the learning community as the reconciliation of the opening to the
world…For the learners, all openings, doxai,
pathways, lead to the learning community.
Only in this abode can they give rise ‘birth to the new’ that is held
(pregnant) in their ownmost-potentiality.”(BL
275)
For
me what is crucially important is the constant repair and renewal of the
learning community, which I have discussed in the past two weeks in this blog
constitutes the world insofar as it is the place where humans don’t simply
survive as humans but thrive as people
(both in the sense of being someone as opposed to something – a person, and in the sense of being a people – pueblicito). Here is the ‘small is beautiful’ aesthetic of
economist E.F. Schumacher. “This is the
essence of the community of learning forged in the common-ness of a commonly
built and shared world, the essence of the dialogic community of a ‘common
world, built on the understanding of friendship, in which no ruler is needed.’[Arendt]”
(BL 275)
3.0 (Saturday, Portland, ME) A moment of resonance, from this day 10/20 years ago and today with "LEARN". Here is the fragment from above: "What’s more, Socrates’ art is essentially teaching by way of phenomenology, and Arendt describes it: “every man has his doxa, his own opening to the world, and Socrates must therefore always begin with questions; he cannot know beforehand what kind of dokei moi, of it-appears-to-me, the other possesses." AND from "LEARN": "A work can be studied philosophically because there always remains something hidden, concealed, a significant saying that remains silent. And every study session ends with the book saying, “to be continued.” Blanchot: “The work is solitary…whoever reads it enters into the affirmation of the work’s solitude, just as he who writes it belongs to the risk of this solitude.”(SL, 22) The writing that documents the significance of the work is an example of writing that Blanchot is referring to. That writing, which happens after reading, produces a précis, a collection of fragments that have broken through from the text and called out to the student. A précis is a phenomenological account of what Arendt describes as the reception of the world. And the book is a representation of the world, which Arendt describes as in need of renewal. Philosophical study, as that care and love of the world (amor mundi), offers an account of the dokei moi (the way the world appears or opens up to me). But each encounter with the text is an event, it cannot be repeated because the book is neither “finished or unfinished.”(SL, 22) Study, along with the discussion that follows, is an act of renewal, which is to say, a conservation both of the book’s enduring significance and it’s openness, and affirmation of the fata of the libelli, a recognition of the book’s freedom.
ReplyDeleteThe moments of phenomenological reading and writing happen in that unique space of solitude. The student enters into the essential solitude with the work when they pick up and read the book/text. When they produce a précis they remain in that location, which Blanchot describes as the “space” (l’espace) of the work. Production, here, describes the almost mimetic way the précis comes into being via the reception of the incessant fecundity of the text. Lyotard’s description of poetics amplifies this point: “Poiein, c’est faire” (poiein [poetics] means to make).(SR, 41) The précis, which can also be called a digest, is written after some fragments of poetics of the book have been received and digested as aphorisms, and thus after the kind of reading that Nietzsche described as rumination: “To be sure, one thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art…something that has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays -- and therefore it will be some time before my writings are ‘readable’ -- something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a ‘modern man’: rumination.”(GM, 459)"