OPM 275(276), November 18th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 276-277

Before revisiting the writing from this day ten years ago --…in what sense ‘return’, really?   Yes, of course returning to the words written on 11/18/04 that were printed and placed within the second of two binders where I dutifully placed each day the writing I’d completed.  Yes, returning to those words…but those words, as Augustine, who has been my principal interlocutor the past two weeks, would say, have always already been there in some way, and have most certainly remained with me, in memory, every moment since 11/18/04 when I composed them.   To recognize – yes recognize -- the somewhat veiled presence of scribed ideas from the past in the present is to acknowledge that the vast and seemingly infinite place that is memory is a location  where chronological time is bent and perhaps even broken.   Past exists in present, and present is made real by past, and nowhere is this more evident than when I am returning to material I have been teaching for years while revisiting writing/thinking that happened a decade ago.  Suddenly what has been written appears to be a moment, in some cases at the beginning and some cases along the way, in a span of moments that bridge the thinking/writing, teaching and learning of this day with all that has happened before.  And this is not to say all that has happened before has lead up to this day, but rather that on this day, in the time when I am revisiting what has happened before I recognize the before as as it were being disclosed to me for the first time on this day.  As the song says, “I had one of those flashes I’d been there before” – although the same song says, “It seldom turns out the way it does in the song”!

The prompt for the preceding is the discussion today of my Palabras Entre Nosotros in my HUHC C&E sections.  These discussion marked the final day in the Late to Love pedagogical experiment, the first ever attempt to study the album (music and lyrics) along with the Palabras I wrote that appear in between the song lyrics and/or song titles.  There was certainly something exciting in the novelty and dare I say natality of this attempt that I suspect will be the first of many to come.  Today’s attempt prompted me to meditate about memory and the presence of past thinking/writing/teaching/learning.  My students responses to the Palabras disclosed to me the presence of thinking in that writing that I had been unaware of when I wrote those pieces.  And in doing this they enacted the very technē that Rocha called them to when he described in his film (and via his film) his strange way of not responding, or his indirect way of responding, to the questions they had posed in response to the music and lyrics of Late to Love.  It was that he was relinquishing his responsibility, but, rather, calling them to their ability to respond, to their response-ability.   Unbeknownst to my students they enacted their response-ability with the questions they raised after reading and discussing in groups my Palabras.  That is, they took up the unique τέχνη (technē) of learning that I’ve been describing in this blog, the one that insists that learning is always about making something with that which exceeds the given.   If, as I wrote a month ago in response to Frank Margonis’ question to me in Memphis, the soul stands for what is always in excess, then the τέχνη (technē) of learning is soulful work, it is spiritual work of the learning community, the actualization of koinonia. 

An example of the soulful and spiritual work that happened in my classes today is the following response to one of my Palabras. (first the question Palabras  then the question is elicited:

5.    Genesis Time

[PALABRAS ENTRE NOSOTROS: ]

All is given.

What’s up?  What’s going down?  What’s going on?  What gives?

It gives. “Es gibt.”

“Es gibt” is German.  “Es gibt” can be said equally applicably of anything and everything.  Estar is Spanish. Being?  Existence?  Anything?  Everything?  Perhaps, if we think of the “es” (the “It” which gives).

All is given.  All is present.  All is presence.

If All is present, is All presented?

What gives continues to give, and is a ceaseless nativity, an eternally recurring beginning.  To further denote ceaseless nativity we can play with the word ‘giving’ and ‘gift’ and say ‘presenting.’  But this doesn’t capture the offering made with the given, with the Giving.

     All is given for us and to us and we still decide what to do with it, with the Giving. 

     All is not given per se.   We can arrive later than too late.   Or we can never arrive at all.  We can get lost in the labyrinth of choices, and exhaust ourselves at one too many dead ends.  Or we can receive the offering, and pass it along.  We can re-present the Giver in the time of music-making. We can say Yes! (Si, se puede!)

Genesis Time Palabras Entre Nosotros

In this Palabras you wrote that "All" being present and that "It" is always present. If "All" is always present how can one possibly be late or never arrive to "It" if "All" is always present?"

-Chris, Becca and Jim

Upon first glance it may appear as if my students were raising a relatively straightforward question, but this is description is only accurate to the extent that it could only have emerged from the context of our ongoing engagement with fundamental ontological questions.   While it’s reasonable to suspect a careful reader could articulate such a question, it’s not unreasonable to suspect they would not have ready to hand the philosophical sensibilities, temperament, and driving concerns of the author of the Palabras, who also happens to be the professor who assigned them.    Does this discount the claim made by one student that the Palabras are an attempt to communicate globally the localized roots of the music?  Perhaps, and most likely, especially if the principle that inspires the Palabras is the one that is captured in the aesthetic of Schumacher’s “small is beautiful.”   This principle is expressed in the Palabras as el pueblecito, which is already the largest possible iteration of the learning community.   The question concerning arriving late is thus only ever a question that can be raised when we come to a work after its completion, which happens when we pick up and read ‘It’ (as the voice instructed Augustine to do), or we listen to music that has been recorded, or confront a work of art, or, as all meditative thinkers have done, contemplate ourselves and Being.   And with any and all of these belated encounters what allows for the disclosure of truth is the fact of our immediate local situation.   The effacement with the real happens here and now, which is why the questions raised by my students could only be raised by them, and could only disclose the truth because they were taken up by us together, today. 

Let me be clear: the preceding is emphasizing that the reality (the truth) of any thing that is taken up by thinking is disclosed in the facticity of the present.  All is given insists that when we take up Augustine’s Confessions we are not taking up an artifact or a fossil but the confessions of Augustine, which, because of their form and content, do more than most to teach us about the ontology of excess and what is always already offering itself up for learning. 

[…--during dinner at the Grey Dog Café, my usual spot on 16^th and 7^th Avenue, Chelsea  // join me for me for a meal, drinks and dialogue most Tuesdays 5:45pm \\   Matt Hastings says, “I can’t imagine talking about education other than as the local, or in terms of immediacy, of community, it’s happening here and now!  -- mind you, this was totally unprompted, spontaneous….what it? Consider the above from today’s commentary…and, full disclosure, my response to the introduction of ‘democracy’ to our conversation by Matt…and my response about…well, the above…the immediate localization of the learning community…and, now, here, in this moment, the recognition and affirmation that philosophy is always happening in the travelling or what Aristotle calls the moving Now! --…]

By the end of this day, now concluding on the packed to the rafters NJT train, post GD feast (food, drink and soulful words) the meditation from 11/19/04 needs little commentary beyond what I have already written.  The writing has a kind of retrospective quality to it, making an attempt to make some sweeping and even synthetic descriptions of the learning community and the dialogic work that forms it, brings it into being.  “We have offered the name ‘learning community’ for that forge-ing of the common world through poetic dialogue. This dialogue, which forges community, arises from the prior commitment to friendship that is itself the outward appearance of the original dispensation appearing with the implicit supplication.  The learning community can thus be understood as co-arising with the dialogic event, so that ‘learning’ and ‘community’  identify a compound term that denotes the quality of the dialogic.  Our point here is to reiterate the learning event as arising from the ground of the originary dispensation.  The learning community arises as the appearance of that well spring, that original source…Learning appears, ultimately, as the re-issuing of the originary dispensation.”(BL   )

The preceding is a demonstration of a session of writing/thinking that is nothing more nor less than a retrieval of what I have come to understand this semester as one of the oldest conventions of writing: didactic repetition.   But I need to be clear that here I am attempting to move into what Schürmann describes as the ‘retrospective’ modality of originary thinking: a retrieval of the ancient source of didactic repetition, didaktikos, from didaskein ‘teach’.   And what is also important to remind myself, first, and my reader, second, is that this teaching is an instruction to myself, the τέχνη (technē) of the autodidact, which is not unlike a practicing of scales, or rudiments, that is, working out my chops in anticipation and preparation for the next thinking/teaching/learning event.   The writing is only ever reflections on and descriptions of actual occurrences of the work of the learning community.   If the writing/thinking here is a return to the original meditations it also at the same time a return to the original source of those meditations, which is to say, a returning of that original source.    The koinonia that gathered me together with students in 2004 remains the same koinonia  that gathers me in 2014.  This is one way of describing the didactic repetition, and if that is the case then the repetition happening in the original meditations is a mimetic repetition of that ongoing return of koinonia.   But, curiously, 2.0, has been an attempt to break from the logic of the eternal recurrence and, as much as possible, has resisted that peculiar force, which I sense is a deep internalization of the dominant norms of academia, to be ‘progressing’ towards some telos, whether or not that end is understood in advance or not.   2.0 has been an attempt to exorcize those demons and, as much as possible, correct the error of proceeding as if moving towards an end, and thereby to avoid the trap of the thema probandum.