“Or are we a nation that finds a way to welcome her in?
Scripture tells us, we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a
stranger. We were strangers once, too.” President Barack Obama, 11.20.14
Yesterday, in the late
afternoon, when I started writing my commentary I suspected that the mystery of
the absent day of writing might not be so mysterious after all, and today my
suspicion was confirmed when I pulled from the bookcase in my study in
Portland the maroon binder, which is the second of the two where all the
original printed meditations from the Feb 04- Feb 05 daily writing experiment
are collected. The maroon binder has the
second six months of writing. And when
I’m away from Portland teaching or conferencing or whatever I take with me the originals
that correspond to the exact days I’ll be away. In turn, I was not at all surprised when I
‘discovered’ that the second meditation from 11/21/04. Translation, the ‘absent’ 11/20/04 was
mislabeled 11/21/04. Of course,
yesterday when I was at Hofstra I didn’t know for sure that this was a false
11/21/04, and that the material was actually written on 11/20/04. But that’s ok by me, because I had much I
wanted to record in response to Jane Huber’s lecture on Bernard, and the class
discussions we had in response to Bernard, Cousins, etc., etc. The course moves on to Hildegard on Tuesday,
and when I received Lauren Kozol’s email with her preparatory study prompts for
her lecture, I was reminded of the contemplative listening experiment I did
with last fall’s C&E sections when we studied Hildegard. I shared that experiment with year’s
sections, and hope they will perceive what is unfolding before them via soul,
spiritual and sacred music.
So now to return to the
meditations from “11/21/04” and 11/21/04!
“11/21” [11/20/04] picks
up on the discussion of Nature that is introduced by Kant on 11/19 with his claim, “Humans want concord, but
Nature will discord,” a claim that I criticized (cf. BL 278-279). Ten years
later, especially in light of the Heraclitus polemos fragments but also as a result of the dynamic that has
played out in my seminars this semester, I have reversed course on the reality
of discord, and the creative tension it generates, the sort that dialogic
learning depends upon. [This week’s Newark Star Ledger included a photo of
an intense moment in the Rutgers women’s basketball game that showed four
players grappling for a loose ball. The
one player who seemed most determined was horizontal on the court. I told my students that this photo displayed
perfectly the passion play that is happening when real learning is happening!]
Suddenly, however, the
writing/thinking on 11/20/04 quickly moves away from “our care and concerning
for this region, our regard for ‘the Mother of all things,’” (BL 279) and back to the preparatory learning happening
before the newcomer (the stranger) enters the learning community. Indeed, it returns to the beginning, to “the
learning occurring with the turning around and the releasement of the ‘I’ from
self-interest to the interest of others…this moment…the en-openning of the
openness and the outward appearance of the heart as the comport of compassion
that is offered to gather the excess.” (BL
279) Interesting: the original (originary?) moment of learning
happens with the outward appearance of the heart? – [cf. the thorn encircled
flaming heart in the Pentecostal iconography that is presented in the Howlin
Wolf portrait! A portrait that has become one of the two principal icons of PES
Memphis] -- The move is the following: learning begins with silence, with the
silencing of the juridical ‘I’; to begin with silence is to begin with
listening; but this isn’t just
listening but hearing of singularity,
natality and difference, or what Irigaray calls the otherness of the other; so
learning begins with compassionate
listening. And in this sense learning
begins as an offering, and offering of openness, of an open heart. But how does this beginning begin? How does one move from juridical speaking to
compassionate listening? Or, better, how
does one move others to such listening?
By the call to learn, of course!
Not surprising, then, that 11/20/04 returns to Plato (the one who got me
underway with a version of the preceding questions that I appropriated and made
my own, arranging them so as to capture the sonic dimension that I prioritize
in contrast to his visual), and then to Socrates and Diotima, teacher of
Socrates, the one who called him by conveying
the call to climb the ladder of love.
Diotima shows us that the one who
calls learning is a messenger, and thus learning via dialogue is fundamentally hermeneutical in the sense that it is put underway by one who ‘delivers a
message from the gods.’ This is the
sage as mediator and messenger who, “like Zarathustra [is] full, ‘like the bee
that has gathered too much honey.’ He is
the cup that wants to overflow with wisdom.
But what is this wisdom if not the love of agape and philia…”? (BL 280)
11/20/04 makes a double
return: a return to the project’s beginning and a return to the project’s
foundational myths: Plato’s cave allegory, and legend of the teaching Socrates
received from Diotima. The other
prinicipal narrative is the descent of Zarathustra, around which the very long
9th chapter is organized. And
it is to Nietzsche’s prophetic writing that I returned on 11/21/04 as a way of
amplifying the analogy of the outward appearing heart. On 11/20 this heart as open supports the
description of compassionate listening.
But on 11/21 this heart as overflowing supports the description of the
sage as the one whose initial calling is like the overflowing cup. Today, and especially since the conversation
I had with Frank Margonis in Memphis, I can emphasize how this overflowing heart
describes the originary appearance of the soul and the spiritual work of the
learning community.
11/21/04 begins with an
important citation from Nietzsche that is meant to bring us back to the calling
of the sage: “I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must
learn to be a sponge if one wants to be loved by hearts that overflow. I teach you the friend in whom the world
stands completed, a bowl of goodness – the creating friend who always has a
completed world to give away.”(Nietzsche cited on BL 280) I might have anticipated a push back here on
the claim that the offering made is a ‘completed world.’ It is precisely the incompleteness that is
identified in the excess, no? When we
have too much to say we end up overflowing, and this is precisely where others
come in to gather what we have spilled. As the song says, “one man gathers what
another man spills.” I hear overflowing
as spilling over.
And this move is the move that is implied when we liken the silencing of the juridical ‘I’ with the re-location into the learning community from “the confines of the familiar…the security of the identical, the predictable…the neighborhood is the negation of the learning community.”(BL 280) But here then is yet another disclosure of the necessary polemos that persists and motivates learning: the struggle between the ceaseless movement that is moved by the excessive flow of the soul and the “conformism [that] produces the ‘comfort zone’ of the neighborhood whose boundaries are clearly defined and monitored…Zarathustra recommends a ‘flight from the neighbor and love of the farthest.’”(BL 280-281) Here is not the place to take up Zarathustra as destroyer of what Nietzsche called ‘slave morality.’ One can hear that in the citation “you flee to your neighbor from yourselves and would like to make a virtue out of that: but I see through your ‘selflessness.’”(cited BL 281) One can easily hear the critique of the very Pauline discourse that has been studied in the past month. But I read those early communities organized by Paul as part of a tradition of counter-hegemonic and counter-culture experiments. And I see Zarathustra’s ‘gathering of friends’ as emerging from the same spirit of critique that leads an impatient Paul to organize communities of those who have an unshakable desire to move into a new future. Paul’s communities were organized around the very untimeliness where Nietzsche found himself. But there is an undeniable fundamental chasm between the love of self in Nietzsche and the love of God in Paul, between the incarnated will to power in the self-overcoming Nietzsche, and the incarnated will to love in the self-diminished Paul. Yet I suspect that there is an analogous scolding to be found in one of Paul’s epistles that resounds with the following from Zarathustra: “You cannot endure yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: now you want to seduce your neighbor to love, and then gild yourselves with his error.”(BL 281)
And perhaps we can hear Zarathustra's speech as offering the following, which is not so far from Paul: you lack faith, which is not a faith in yourself, but a faith your capacity to say something, to do something, and, what’s more, lack faith to do too much, to say too much. True faith is shown in the strength of the one who is capable of gathering too much honey, and of overflowing, and of spilling over, and of believing that his friends are there to receive his mess, and to pick up what he has spilled. False faith, or bad faith [as Nietzsche and then Sartre put it], is one that presumes friends are there save you from yourself, to keep you within the fold so that you don’t go astray, overflow. I say not only should you overflow, but you should flow over into your friends and they into you and the whole community should be flooded over with the flood of excessive love such that one does not remember if one is the sponge that is receiving or wringing.
And this move is the move that is implied when we liken the silencing of the juridical ‘I’ with the re-location into the learning community from “the confines of the familiar…the security of the identical, the predictable…the neighborhood is the negation of the learning community.”(BL 280) But here then is yet another disclosure of the necessary polemos that persists and motivates learning: the struggle between the ceaseless movement that is moved by the excessive flow of the soul and the “conformism [that] produces the ‘comfort zone’ of the neighborhood whose boundaries are clearly defined and monitored…Zarathustra recommends a ‘flight from the neighbor and love of the farthest.’”(BL 280-281) Here is not the place to take up Zarathustra as destroyer of what Nietzsche called ‘slave morality.’ One can hear that in the citation “you flee to your neighbor from yourselves and would like to make a virtue out of that: but I see through your ‘selflessness.’”(cited BL 281) One can easily hear the critique of the very Pauline discourse that has been studied in the past month. But I read those early communities organized by Paul as part of a tradition of counter-hegemonic and counter-culture experiments. And I see Zarathustra’s ‘gathering of friends’ as emerging from the same spirit of critique that leads an impatient Paul to organize communities of those who have an unshakable desire to move into a new future. Paul’s communities were organized around the very untimeliness where Nietzsche found himself. But there is an undeniable fundamental chasm between the love of self in Nietzsche and the love of God in Paul, between the incarnated will to power in the self-overcoming Nietzsche, and the incarnated will to love in the self-diminished Paul. Yet I suspect that there is an analogous scolding to be found in one of Paul’s epistles that resounds with the following from Zarathustra: “You cannot endure yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: now you want to seduce your neighbor to love, and then gild yourselves with his error.”(BL 281)
And perhaps we can hear Zarathustra's speech as offering the following, which is not so far from Paul: you lack faith, which is not a faith in yourself, but a faith your capacity to say something, to do something, and, what’s more, lack faith to do too much, to say too much. True faith is shown in the strength of the one who is capable of gathering too much honey, and of overflowing, and of spilling over, and of believing that his friends are there to receive his mess, and to pick up what he has spilled. False faith, or bad faith [as Nietzsche and then Sartre put it], is one that presumes friends are there save you from yourself, to keep you within the fold so that you don’t go astray, overflow. I say not only should you overflow, but you should flow over into your friends and they into you and the whole community should be flooded over with the flood of excessive love such that one does not remember if one is the sponge that is receiving or wringing.
I suspect Kierkegaard’s
musings on Paul and Socrates might be helpful in resolving this matter of ‘learning
to be a sponge if one wants to be loved by hearts that overflow.’
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