"[Professor Duarte] I took a piece from Bach's St. John Passion taken from the Gospel of
John:
Befördre den Lauf
Selbst an mir zu
ziehen,
Und höre nicht
auf,
zu schieben,
zu bitten.
Bring me on my way
And do not cease
to pull,
to push,
to urge me on.
“Although
it refers to a relationship with God I am inspired from an educational
perspective. I am relating this passage to Irigaray's idea of the path as
well as our discussions about the self, other, and space between (which I have
labeled "flow.") I created a picture/diagram to show the three
different paths, and they all merge into one path from the viewer's
perspective. In education, we see the self, other and all discourse
(teacher facilitation?) as being separate, yet they must all be present and
interrelated for learning to occur.” Deanna G., Hofstra U Music Ed, 12/17/14
[Masaaki Suzuki conducts the
Bach Collegium Japan in a performance of Bach's St. John Passion BWV 245 at the
Suntory Hall in Tokyo on July 28, 2000.
Today, inspired by my student Deanna’s proposal I stream this
performance while writing my commentary.]
The epigram for today’s
commentary is a proposal for a final project that I received from Deanna, a
student in my undergraduate philosophy of education course. She is a music education major, and her
proposal reflects the groundbreaking place we’ve moved into together as a
group, which, as I have written about in the pages of this blog, is made up
almost entirely of juniors and senior music education majors. This group has taken quite seriously the
claims I have made about music-making philosophy, and together we have enacted
much of what I have been describing here in this blog, in Being and Learning, and in the papers I have written this past
academic year. Deanna’s proposal is an
example of the interdisciplinary work we’ve been doing all semester, which is
to say, the work that demonstrates in spirit and letter experiments in what
today I am tempted to call originary learning,
a poetic philosophy of education that combines music, the visual arts, and now
a spiritually infused thinking.
I was struck by the visual
representation, which reminds me in its style of Edvard Munch, whose paintings were
deeply spiritual*. Indeed, despite the
qualification of its focus, her project
is offering a wider and perhaps more inclusive way of thinking the passion (‘the relationship with God’) as an ‘educational perspective.’ Any close reader of Irigaray understands
that this exact move is part of her genius.
Irigaray’s is a horizontal transcendence to the other, and that movement
(a kind of self-overcoming) happens along what she calls the bridge that links
‘me’ to ‘you’. This bridge is a ‘third’,
and this third, which she often describes as ‘the invisible,’ can only be
perceived and described when we move into a spiritual discourse. And part of her genius is to compel us to
imagine a ‘new logic’ while experimenting with one herself; which is to say,
she is experimenting with a new language of philosophy that is paying its
debt to theology through a phenomenology laden with spiritual inflections. For me these inflections are by their nature
arriving unconsciously in our work. The
spiritual is revealed in the work.
Befördre den Lauf
Selbst an mir zu
ziehen,
Und höre nicht
auf,
zu schieben,
zu bitten.
Bring me on my way
And do not cease
to pull,
to push,
to urge me on
[Listen to this music!! What can one
possibly say about Bach’s St. John’s Passion?]
I want to conclude by noting the coincidence between the fragment Deanna sent me (the German, English lyrics) and the one from Borges that I wrote about yesterday. It is a coincidence, for sure, because yesterday was the first and only day I have included a bi-lingual poetic fragment. I don’t need to add that the Borges fragment sung of a musica, and reminded us that
Mientras
dure esta musica,
seremos
dignos de las cosas communes,
que
ahora no lo son.
Before moving on commemorate the writing that
happened this day a decade ago, I want cite an excerpt from the writing that
happened a month ago when offered a description of the work that was happening
in the aforementioned undergraduate philosophy of education class:
OPM
271(272), November 13th (2004 & 2014)
“Next
Tuesday we will focus on my threshold meditations that appear in between the
song lyrics and/or titles, my Palabras
Entre Nosotros. But first my paper
that I wrote for and presented in February in Chicago for Rocha’s Society for
the Philosophical Study of Education, which was meeting at the Midwest meeting
of the American Philosophical Association.
The train is arriving now to Mineola Station, and now time to grab the
taxi to campus. I will return later
today, in the afternoon, with a reflection of what happened in class, and also
to document the connections between my “Feeling the Funk” paper, Late to Love, and the meditations and
commentaries…
I’m
not sure I’m ready to offer a description that will capture the unique energy
that was moving through all three sections today as we moved through ‘my stuff’
aka the article I shared with my philo of ed class, and part two of the Late to Love experiment.
I can only offer fragments of what was said and felt: the announcement that in my writing I am
inspired by symphonic composition, or any composition that is made up of
multiple, parallel running thematic lines…how to re-present this form of
thinking [take a standard 8 x 11 paper, turn it on its side and arrange the
parallel lines of thought…]; DuBois’
story of Jones shows us a vertical transcendence that is analogous to the one
in Plato’s cave allegory; but what of
the re-turn? What moves Jones and the
emancipated cave-dweller to return?...If there is one and only one allowed in a
school it would have to be an acoustic piano [this in the wake of thinking
about Nietzsche’s ‘hammer’]; music is
hope…\\...Arabian Nights was a
favorite of Borges, and some have said one cannot understand Borges without
having read and studied and enjoyed Thousand
and One Nights…\\...because I wrote Los Palabras Entre Nosotros under the
direct influence of Borges, our study of Augustine through Late to Love extends into the next work, and we should read the Palabras alongside Nights…the dark night of the soul; the twilight of reason; the
shattering of expectations the moment Rocha begins his video; the adrenaline rush compounded by the anxiety
over the students’ ‘getting it’…and then they do!!!...the rush of pride and
then gratitude. YES!”
“Learning
expresses the ongoing understanding of the existential situation of human
be-ing. What is understood in learning
is the poetic nature of this situation.”(BL
314) That’s how the meditation from
12/17/04 begins.
Two
terms jump out at me: ‘expression’ and ‘understanding’. They are almost synonyms, because the
understanding happening with learning is itself an expression, a poetic
expression. Thus, what I am describing
as learning is music-making philosophy, which is further qualified as a “the
en-active realization of human be-ing as poetic.”(BL 314) ‘human be-ing’
replaces ‘the human being’ and emphasizes the essence of the human to be a
process of poetic existence, one that is re-presented visually in Deanna’s
rendering of Irigaray. ‘En-active’
denotes enactment; and here I re-call Heidegger’s “The enactment of life is
decisive.” (cf. OPM 296(297), December 12th) Enactment of life is decisive; what we do and what we make discloses who we are.
This disclosure is the realization of some one as opposed to some
thing. Decisively, it matters, what we do.
On
12/17/04 I describe learning as the realization of the human be-ing as
poetic. And today I have to reiterate
that learning is not an all inclusive existential category. It is an enactment of the poetic possibility
that remains just that, a potentiality, until it is actualized. This claim begs the question that discloses
the passive origin of learning.
Learning, as actualization, is put underway. This is why I insist on describing a point of
departure, a starting point, and insist on describing that point as originary,
that is, as generative. Learning is “an
actualization of human potency…that is not
generated by the human…but unfolds as a reception and response to the movement
of Being. (BL 314)
Befördre den Lauf
Selbst an mir zu
ziehen,
Und höre nicht
auf,
zu schieben,
zu bitten.
Bring me on my way
And do not cease
to pull,
to push,
to urge me on
The passion of learning is experienced as a ‘seizure’ of person, a
“dis-location from the ‘ordinary’ and a seizure into the ‘extra-ordinary.’”(BL 314)
Here is where I would begin my own phenomenology of transcendence, and
describe learning as an event, a movement from without. [And at the writing
of that, the performance of Bach’s music comes to a conclusion.] Indeed, the formation of the learning
community via koinōnia is a gathering into a ‘third’,
but there is a force or power that gathers, a gathering force. My phenomenology of transcendence follows
Nietzsche’s description of the artistic state as the self-overcoming that is a proper
overcoming of the ‘self’, specifically, the will. “Learning is a de-struktion of the anthropocentric…the seizure of the ‘self’ away
from ‘it-self,’ from the ‘certainty’ of its unilateral projection…This initial
and originary state of the aesthetic is called rapture (Rausch).(BL 315)
And so from Bach’s St. John’s Passion I am lead to Luke:
“if You are willing, remove this
cup from me; let not my will, but Yours be done.” (22:42)
*Here is Edvard Munch's portrait of Nietzsche:
*Here is Edvard Munch's portrait of Nietzsche:
3.0 (Tuesday, Portland, ME). WOW! That's how I feel after reading the 2.0 commemoration. I was definitely feeling it ten years ago today. And as I'm in the final week of my sabbatical (finals week down at Hofstra), I'm feeling inspired to get back into the classroom. Coincidences have been something I've been interested in for some time, and an open-ended curiosity about Jung and synchronicity has been with me since my undergrad days at Fordham, specifically, since the day I delivered a book for prof Cousins to the Jung Center in Manhattan, a townhouse somewhere on the Eastside, if memory serves me. But there's too much for me to respond to in the above, and so I'll let it be on its own, and note it as one of the real highlights of this blog project!
ReplyDeleteAs for the resonances, Nietzsche is central, and there's so much in "LEARN" on Nietzsche that I've already shared. But here is the OPM/B&L fragment that jumped out at me: “Learning expresses the ongoing understanding of the existential situation of human be-ing. What is understood in learning is the poetic nature of this situation.”(BL 314) That’s how the meditation from 12/17/04 begins." Here is a robust fragment from "LEARN" that resonates: "The poetics of the discussion resound that thereby replay and remix the poetics of the aphorisms collected from the précis. The learning community’s discussion is poetic, and “nothing” is produced. It is a repetition of the original writing, but not a repetition of the text that is shared in fragments and which, as a whole, remains illegible. Rather, it is a recitation in the sense of being a recitare, a reading out. The fragments are read aloud, and with that reading the poetics of the text resound in the discussion. This is how the gathering and formative power of poesy arrives as the presence of the force of learning. Philosophical learning is the antithesis and dialectical negation of the prosaic “instruction” offered by schooling. To learn is to think poetically, inspired by the power of the book/text as if it were a work of art. “Forces are manifested in poems that do not pass through circuits of knowledge.”
Bachelard describes a “phenomenology of the soul” that happens in “poetic revery.” Poetic revery denotes the reception of enduring significance that first happens in the solitude of study and then again in the commonality of discussion. He calls “the soul” that which receives and is inspired by “the poetic image.” Poetic revery happens with that reception. The outcome oriented cogito cannot experience poetic revery because it cannot remain in the Moment. The soul dwells with the text, receiving its fecundity, the arrival of its presence. By contrast, the cogito is restless, and wants to extract a definitive “truth” from the book. “In poetic revery the soul keeps watch, with no tension, calmed and active” when reading and then again during the discussion that happens by way of listening to the recitare. By contrast, “the mind is obliged to make projects that prefigure” the reading. “But for a simple poetic image, there is no project; a flicker of the soul is all that is needed.” Philosophical learning is initiated by and sustained by that flicker, the inspiration received through listening."