The meditation from
today is the last to be included in the 9th chapter “Zarathustra’s
Descent.” The first of the meditations
included in the ninth chapter was commemorated on OPM 215(6), September 17th,
so just about three months of daily writing.
I revisit the meditation
from 12/5/04, which is already a transition into the set of meditations
collected under the chapter “The Improvisational Art of Teaching/Learning,” by
reminding myself that I have dropped ‘friendship’ for ‘fellowship’ in large
part because the learning community is not a gathering of friendship, not a
community of friends, but a congregation
made up of those who share a common faith in the project of
learning. The learning community is
faith based, and their faith is expressed in the project of repair and renewal
of the world they have been born into.
It is a love of the world that joins them together, and a spiritual love
that suffuses their work together, that is actualized in and through their work
together. In sum, while I can not
describe my students as ‘friends,’ I must describe them as fellow
learners, colleagues in the project of repair and renewal. The work is poetic, it is poiein and originary. “More poetry, less prose” is our credo.
I revisit the meditation
from 12/5/04 by recalling the conclusion of the commentary from 12/04/14 when
the move to drop friend and friendship was made via a critique of Arendt’s
‘plurality,’ which I conjecture is deficient with respect to attending to the
Schoenbergian ‘higher harmony’ that is inclusive of both concord and discord:
“… fact of plurality is better denoted by difference (difference), by this other name, which
is to say, the category that can name the fact
of a ‘higher’ harmony that can be either
one of discord or concord. Difference does the work of denoting the
relationality that grants a ‘higher’ harmony.”(12/04/14)
On
12/05/04 I attempt to read Arendt through Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the
critique of the hermit, the modality of self-study. The meditation begins by citing Arendt: “Only
someone who has the experience of talking with himself is capable of being a
friend, of acquiring another self.”(cited BL
296) This is read alongside Zarathustra
who says, “There are too many depths for all hermits, therefore they long so
for a friend and his height.” (cited BL 296)
We need to read ‘height’ as the great distance one must achieve via
self-overcoming, a theme I addressed in these pages when I was describing
Thoreau’s epiphanic moments in the wilderness, specifically the moment immediately following his reaching the summit of Katahdin.
I turned to Nietzsche on July 28th (OPM 164):
“Now I shall related the history of my Zarathustra. The
fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this
highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August
1881: it was penned underneath: ‘Six thousand feet beyond man and
time’. That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of
Silvaplana: at a powerful pyramidal rock not from from Surlei I
stopped. It was then that this idea came to me…it invaded me…That
everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a
world of being – high point of meditation.” Schurmann adds: “In the
discovery of the eternal recurrence, described here as the convergence between
becoming and being, between flux and form, “meditation” – not theoria but thinking –
culminates.” (pp. 48-49 RS: 1987)
It is appropriate to
return to this citation at the conclusion of chapter the in Being and Learning that is organized around Zarathustra. It is appropriate to recall Nietzsche’s
discovery of the eternal recurrence, “this highest formula of affirmation that
is attainable...six thousand feet beyond man and time…the closest approximation
of a world of becoming to a world of being – high point of meditation.” Schürmann discloses to me the signature
of my project: the discovery of the eternal recurrence, what I call ceaseless nativity, is the convergence
between becoming (learning) and being
(Being)…and the project itself, here and now in this moment of writing is
‘meditation’ – not theoria but thinking.
Another important
citation, a closing benediction, from the young untimely Nietzsche who writes
of the need to ascend to the great height of self-overcoming, and thereby
transcend to the place where one can hear the higher harmony. It is from that Summit that I first discovered what I decades later announced in my Lapiz
paper as the huacaslogical,
that thinking/writing happening in those heights where we encounter the sacred
places abiding beyond ourselves, and where we draw from the wellspring of originary thinking. Nietzsche tells us: “Your true nature lies not concealed deep
within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you
usually take yourself to be…Your true educators can only be your liberators.”
There are too many
depths for all hermits. But who are
these hermits? Where do they abide and
what work do they do in academia? I say
the hermit is identified not entirely by his resentment, but by something that
is hidden by his resentment, which turns out to be a mask, a horrible, awful
mask that has the power of rendering others impotent. The hermit dwells in fear behind his awful
mask of resentment. What is the source
of his fear? “The fear of contradiction
comes from the fact that each of us, ‘being one,’ can at the same time talk
with himself (eme emauto) as though
he were two.”(Arendt cited BL 297)
This fear is overcome when this ‘self’ realizes his other is not actually an
other who will contra-dict him, but, in fact, another just like him! Another hermit with whom he can share his
fear of contradiction, his xenophobia, his fear of difference. And why does he
fear this difference? This is difficult,
complex, and daunting question, but it seems to rest in the uncertainty and
unpredictability that is disclosed by what is always exceeding the grasp of veritas.
Would that he could ascend to the heights of the higher harmony via
meditation! Oh, but theory prevents
him. Or does it? Is it rather that he prevents theory from
granting him the strength to practice meditative thinking? Indeed!
So it is the fear of experimentation, of the necessity of practice, of
humility and of accepting in advance his project is always flawed and
partial. He perceives not the beauty
of fallibility, nor the freedom granted by ineffable. “ ‘Truth’ overwhelms ‘Beauty’ when the
self-certainty of [the] juridical voice emerges from the anxiety of the self
who fears the ‘chaotic’ uncertainty and unpredictability that unfolds
as…difference. Against the ‘other’ as otro the ‘self’ asserts the ‘unity’ of
the ‘mind’ and the ‘agreement’ of ‘I’ and ‘me’. (BL 297)
Difference. The
play of the πάντα, which denotes ‘all’, ‘the whole’, and ‘each, every’. When Heraclitus describes the hidden harmony
he speaks of the higher harmony that is inclusive of the concordant and
discordant, and thus is steered by a logic that can gather together via the contradiction. The hidden and higher harmony is the one made
by the coincidence of the concordance and discordant, by agreement and
disagreement, consensus and dissensus, which ultimately means the logic is
reduced to the contradiction, to
difference (polemos). To think this is to arrive at what Hegel
called the rose at the center of the cross, and which I call the redemptive
moment in the tragic, the faith that is infused in the spirituals, the blues,
the flaming heart encircled by thorns.
The fearless are those who have made the turn from the mind to the heart
and through the agapē of the
community to amor mundi. They are not friends, but, nevertheless, as
the song says, “They love each other.
Lord you can see that its true.
Lord you can see that its true. Lord you can see that its true.”
3.0 (Thursday, Portland, ME) - Today I Finished the final edits of "LEARN" 2: Writing. Two days before leaving for the big mountain in Montana, the mountain state, Big Sky 11, 166. It's my Silvaplana.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche SO central to the project. 2: Writing concludes by citing Nietzsche, recalling the tale of Zarathustra's ascent that expresses mystical experience at the pyramidal rock, and Flipping the script describes the troupe who performs the discussion as "friends": "Finally, we should remember that the “riddle” is encountered by Zarathustra when he arrives at the summit of a mountain. He ascends alone, and his solitude calls out to Heidegger, who notes that Nietzsche describes Zarathustra’s encounter with the Moment as “‘the vision of the loneliest one.’” Heidegger adds that “the riddle becomes visible only ‘in our loneliest loneliness.’” Put otherwise, Zarathustra’s epiphany happens when he has reached that location that Kafka’s “He” could only dream of: that summit above past and future reached through an ascent into the “loneliest loneliness” where one encounters the essential solitude. The “loneliest loneliness” describes the solitary modality of philosophical learning, when the student is alone with the significant object of study, which can now be described as an instance of the “riddle” of the Moment, when the presence of the present is felt and perceived intensely with the originality of the book. “It is a matter of that particular riddle with which Zarathustra comes face to face.” The essential solitude of the book mediates an encounter with the “riddle” of the Moment, an experience that offers the provecho de estar solo with the conservation of the student’s natality, their revolutionary potential to undertake something new, something unforeseen. The “loneliest loneliness is not the dejection of being alone, but an effacement with solitude, with singularity. But like Zarathustra who sought the company of others, friendship, the insufficiency of solitude is dialectically negated when the student is gathered into the dialogic learning community."