OPM 300(301), December 16th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 313-314

The entire balcony of the UNE Portland library to myself during this afternoon of writing/thinking!

First, in answer to yesterday’s commentary, I did indeed find the original p. 513 in the three ring binder, which I mention only as a matter of accounting.

Second, I have to cite a piece that fellow deadhead and writer Scott Beauchamp (who recently moved to Portland, Maine) posted today that begins under the heading “Healing Your Brain with the Grateful Dead.”  [nb: had it been up to me, I would have written “Healing Your Head with the Grateful Dead”]  Scott’s piece can be read here http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/if-you-get-confused-just-listen-to-the-music-play-grateful-dead-96499/

I’m citing it because each day when I writing these commentaries I am listening to the GD, often the show of the day, such as the one I listening to at the moment from this date in 1986 (Oakland) https://archive.org/details/gd1986-12-16.sbd.miller.77409.flac16

I’ve written about my need to listen to the GD, or to Coltrane, when I am writing these commentaries.  Often I listen for practical reasons: to block out distracting noise of other people (usually when I writing during a train, bus, plane trip), and I mean this in the very literal sense, not in the existential Sartrean sense of other people.  But first and foremost I listen for inspiration in the literal sense of experiencing that unequalled energeia of the live performance that galvanizes my spirit;  the live performance breathes the very force of koinōnina into my heart, mind, my soul.   There it is…I’ve said it…and I’ve felt it at minute 7 of ‘Estimated Prophet’ of course!!  “Don’t worry about me, don’t worry about me now, those voices tell me where to go, don’t worry about me now, no, no, no, noooooooooo.” 

[nb: for full disclosure on process…when I lock in to a jam I’ll repeat the piece again and again until the writing is completed.  I should probably have kept notes on that!  Oh well….well, moving forward, I’ll do that]

Two fragments get me underway today: one from Borges, who I think might be my hero (in terms of being the heavyweight champion of writers), and the other from the meditation from this day ten years ago.

I begin with Borges, el Campeón del Mundo!  And it’s a tweet that flashed onto my @PES2015Memphis twitter account from the @BorgesJorgeL account.  It appeared earlier today, a second after I had tweeted about having reached the crossroads where the submissions to PES 2015 Memphis meet the reviews of said papers.  And along with my tweet I included Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues.”

Here is the tweet/fragment from Borges:

Mientras dure esta musica,

seremos dignos de las cosas communes,

que ahora no lo son.

And here is my translation/reading:

While this music is happening,

we take pride in the communal work,

which for the moment are not.

I’m not a translator, but I’ve lived my entire life translating.  My parents were both born in the Dominican Republic, and Spanish was the language of the home where I was raised…and where I return on those days when I am away from my home in Portland and teaching at Hofstra.  For me Spanish is my first language, although I speak most often and write almost exclusively in English.  This is the life lived in translation!   I say this to offer context for my off the top of my head, or, better, off the tip of my tongue translation of the Borges fragment, which is probably ‘wrong’.

There any number of reasons this fragment captures my attention.  First of all, because it is Borges, whose writing I copied (by way of mimetic veneration) when writing my Palabras for Rocha’s Late to Love. Second, because of the intensity of the coincidence of what it is singing (saying) and when I heard it; because it dropped into my lap the moment I publicized my movement into the threshold (crossroads) where I will dwell for the next three weeks and build the program for the much anticipated PES Memphis gathering.  To dwell in the threshold is to dwell in the time in-between past and future, which is also a time that remains, the messianic time I described yesterday. [There’s that 7min mark of ‘Estimated Prophet’ again right on time…]  Mientras dure esta musica… all the music that has been offered to us, for Memphis.  Mientras dure esta musica in this threshold, seremos dignos de las cosas communes.  

Las cosas communes…the communal things…the common. KOINŌNINA.  The ‘duration’ (a Bergsonianism appropriated by Freire, actually) of the music, of the music-making philosophy; this is how I hear it, Borges and the offering (papers) and GD 12/16/86.   The ‘duration’ of this music; in that time we take pride, we admire, we celebrate the common things, the things we make together and offer one another. Mientras dure esta musica we are gathered together….[applause ‘Crazy Fingers’ concludes, and “Estimated Prophet’ begins again:  “My time coming, any day, don’t worry about me, no.  Been so long I’ve felt this way, I ain’t in no hurry, no.”].  Mientras dure esta musica…we are dignified, distinguished, ennobled by what we have made, together.  What have we made?  Perhaps it is we who have been made?  Perhaps it is the learning community that is our work and not simply where we work?  Perhaps we are las cosas communes?  Koinōnia?

The second fragment is the very loud heading – it’s written in ALL CAPS – that appears in-between the conclusion of the meditation from 12/15/04 [mislabeled 12/14!] and the one from 12/16/04:

THE ENCONTER WITH PLURALITY: LEARNING, POETIC DIALOGUE AND THE IMPROVISATIONAL CREATION OF MEANING

I have a vague recollection of writing this heading, which does not appear in Being and Learning.  In fact the material from 12/16 is the continuation of the material that appears on p. 313.  [And this disconnect between the original and the publication returns me to that question that won’t go away: why I forced these meditations into the generic academic structure of chapters!?!?]   Anyway, I vaguely recall the need to break from the path of inquiry I was on when 12/16 arrived, in part because I was experiencing too much reverberation – this was materializing with pages being printed twice [nb:  each day after concluding my daily writing I would print the pages, punch three holes on the margins, and pop them into the binder, and slam the binder shut!].   Too much reverberation – [now skip to ‘Drums’ after 4 or 5 ‘Estimated Prophets’] – with Arendt’s ‘harmonious Socrates.’  I also vaguely recall and/or I’m speculating that 12/16 was the beginning of the home stretch: two more months of writing.  And on 12/16 then and now I reach the 300^th day of consecutive writing.  300 is the first of the final numerical designations.  The next will be 60.  And the final will be 3.   [nb: the original title of this project was 363]

Today, I would replace at least two of the words in the heading, possibly three:  THE [EFFACEMENT] WITH [DIFF’RENCE]: LEARNING, POETIC DIALOGUE AND THE IMPROVISATIONAL [MAKING] OF [EDUCATION].

CREATION is definitely out, because it is entirely misleading, and I’ve rehearsed that point so many times in these commentaries and elsewhere that I needn’t say another word.   In fact, I only need to say single words to remind [myself] of the replacement of CREATION: technē, mimesis, meditation.   EFFACEMENT is a word I learned from Clemént Rosset  -- [in the parlance of deadheads…this ‘Drums’ is sick!  With Willie Green from the Meters/Neville Bros > ‘Willie and the Handjive’ with Art Neville – koinōnia – gathering of the spirit through the trio of drummers!!!].   His book turned me on to an entirely new way of reading Nietzsche.  EFFACEMENT with the original/originary, with the disclosure of Being that is revealed to us as excess, in excess //  LEARNING gets underway after that EFFACEMENT.  LEARNING is POETIC DIALOGUE, which is to say, THE IMPROVISATIONAL MAKING OF EDUCATION.

Hence, the meditation after the break with the reverberating ‘harmonious Socrates’ begins: “To learn, to be with learning, is to dwell with the ex-cessive and to abide with the ecstatic; to remain attuned to the mystery of the essential sway, and re-collected with the original dispensation.”(BL 313 – 12/16/86 ‘Drums’ at 10:45…I wonder if I was asleep in Madrid at that moment?)  The EFFACEMENT WITH DIFF’RENCE:  “the event of estrangement”.  “Learning is thus always grounded in the event of estrangement.  The event of estrangement reveals the full force of [diff’rence] and the impossibility of ‘reasoning’ as the anchor of learning.” (BL 310)

Passion, redemptive suffering, this disclosed with the EFFACEMENT.  The excessive reveals “the ‘burden’ of freedom. To learn is to endure this burden, to [make].”(BL 310) 

The burden of the calling; the inescapable necessity of suffering; the call as promise, a covenant, learning as redemptive: “every philosophy of education, is grounded in a response to the First Question, ‘How is it with Being?’”(BL 310)  How is it with Being?  The ‘how’ conveys the making, the technē, the poetic.  It is not a metaphysical question, but a calling in the form of a command, a direction, a demand and a promise.  The question that is propelling this project….my project…is not and has never been the question of Being.  Frankly, that’s a nonsensical question, because we simply can not question Being.   Rather, the question that propels my project has always been the question that the xenos in Plato’s Sophist asks, the one that stands as the epigram to Heidegger’s Being and Time: ‘Why is it that we are no longer confused by the question of Being?’   translation:  Why have we organized education around the presumption that we already know what Being is?  Why have we forgotten the mystery that is always granted to us in the offering disclosed with Being?  After all, Being is always only appearing to us as a mystery because what is revealed to us is always only a perspective, an incompletion, a present that is presencing by virtue of a withdrawal an absencing.   Contemplation, the mystic state…perhaps in that modality we transcend into the fullness of Being.  But not so in the plebian everyday work of learning where we making art because we are burdened with the freedom granted by the offering that is at one and the same time a holding back, a withdrawal.   The promise of the return is the granting of the time in-between then and now. 

The learner is no mystic; he is the man of experience; the maker the doer, the performer; the distinguished commoner.  “To ‘know’ the ‘truth’ of Being is to build the world, to [make].  Learning is the ongoing liberation of the creative, the releasement carried  forth in the performance of the poetic.  Learning is the expression of the essential freedom of the human that unfolds in the authentic relation to Being; that is, in the relation to the fact of [diff’rence].  The learner is the one ‘awakened’ to this ‘fact’ of difference.  To be ‘awakened’ is to be released into the relation with difference, [diff’rence] and ex-cess, to dwell with freedom itself.”(BL 313)