OPM 306(307), December 24th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 322-323

Thinking/Writing in the stream of

https://archive.org/details/gd1982-12-26.sbd.miller.81602.sbeok.flac16

                         [beginning with “Minglewood Blues”:

            “Doctor man call me crazy,

            some say I am, some say I ain’t”

                           and repeating “Althea” 2-3 times.]

CEASELESS NATIVITY is imminent!

            The announcement of its arrival had anew with my student Deanna’s citation last week of Bach, when she wrote me:  “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

Do not cease to pull, to push. 

And then yesterday, 12/23, with the beginning of its arrival: “The artwork appears as the (re)presentation of Being’s offering, the giving of existence and the preservation of peace.  The artistic performance conveys and points to Be-ing as dis-persing and dis-pensing. The artistic performance is a re-collection with this dispersal, this originary and ceaseless dis-pensation of difference.”(BL 321)

And on this day, 12/24/04, in the concluding moments of the meditation, “the ceaseless arrival of [an] invitation…the beckoning of the essential sway.”(BL 323)  The essential sway?  What is this swinging, this fundamental groove?   Let’s recall OPM 262(263): “This is why on 11/3/04, I reiterate with a Bonaventurian voice that the heart is the place where we encounter the vestige of “Being’s originary dispensation…originary ‘gift’.” (BL 260)  Because the thinking that re-calls this offering is dialogic, I describe it in sonic terms.  The dialogue of the learning community, as a gathering of this originary dispensation via recollection – and embodied  re-membering – is “an echo of Being’s essential sway…saying…is the singing that resounds with this echo, sounding in the emptiness of the heart where the truth of concealment dwells.” (BL 260)   The heart is thus the center rosette – the thorn encircled heart --  where the originary leaves its presence as a vestige.  A vestige is an echo, the living presence of the original sound.  ‘”The echo re-sounds the originary saying, the singing that dispenses, distributes, through an arranging that preserves and designates the ‘inner space’ of the improvisational.” (BL 260)

On 12/24/04 the originary is disclosed as a presencing and as an offering: as a present (both the temporality of the nunc stans, and materiality of the gift).   The present is disclosed as an invitation, which is a further descrption of the call or calling, the vocare that draws the learner into the vocation of learning. 

Being’s Becoming appears with the present.  The present disclosed this excess, which is the offering made to learning, for learning, in learning.   In yesterday’s (12/23/14) commentary I described the Kierkegaardian Leap, that transformation that on 12/24/04 recollects the very first moments of the writing experiment and is described as the “gathering into learning [that] happens with the turning around that, from the onset, we have identified with the evocation conveyed with the news, the tidings of the relation with Being’s essential sway.”(BL 322)  The Leap is the originary turning, or conversion (e.g., when Saul become Paul), and thus this (re)turning it has been described as a revolutionary  moment, especially when we think it under the category of the ceaseless [nativity].   On 12/24/04 the meditation takes up the occurrence of the Leap via “the evocative speech that invokes the attunement to Being and thereby turns around to the existential situation of learning.”(BL 322)   And this turn happening by way of the “evocative tidings” (“the reception of the First Question”) is discovered to be a return to the originary, “the reception of the essential relation, the relatedness to what is most evocative…[the] dialogic relation with Being.”(BL 322)  And on 12/24/14 there is no pause to consider the need to make a replacement, because the phrasing of the description of the ‘dialogue with Being’ as propelling the artwork that is learning is on point: “The mimetic (re)presentation happening with the poetic, with the artistic performance of improvisational expression, is thus an en-actment of the dialogic relation with Being that unfolds in the reception of the most evocative tidings…Art is the re-sponse to the close listening that hears the hidden harmony of Being’s essential sway.”(BL 322)

-- [“I come in from Memphis, where I learned to talk the jive…] --

[Repeat] Being’s Becoming appears with the present.  The present disclosed this excess, which is the offering made to learning, for learning, in learning.  

The present is disclosed sonically, hence the reception of the present via painstaking (compassionate) listening, and “Art” is the response, and follows the hearing of the hidden harmony.   Let’s  here recall the commentary from 12/5/14:

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 that is 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.” 

-- [“Hand me my old guitar, pass the whiskey around, won’t you tell everyone that the candyman is in town...look out, look out, the candyman is in town!”] --

On 12/24/04 the hidden harmony is described as excess, as the possibility granted with natality, as the ceaseless invitation:  “The ‘hidden harmony’ is the songs of songs that are ‘not yet’ sung but [are] always already waiting to be performed.  Here is the gift of freedom, of possibility, the condition of spontaneity…that is offered by the essential sway of Being.  The gift of Being is natality…”(BL 322) 

But, first, before the reception of this gift, the call of the offering that draws the learning into the place of learning, not yet the gathering of the learning community, but still more originary, what today I would describe as the place where the learning community with gather, where they will build the studio of learning, “the gap, the third space, en-openning as the threshold between past-present and future… the ‘distance’ that is preserved by the Open…”(BL 322)  Without this place and the space it offers, no learning, no making, no music-making philosophy.    With this place and the space it offers, the movement of sound is possible.  What is offered, then, via the Open, is the possibility of music-making: fecund Silence.   This is why the First Question is announced as “How is it with the Nothing?”(BL 322)   The Nothing is the fecund Silence.  Using Kantian styled language for the description we might call it the a priori condition for the possibility of music-making philosophy.   The First Question’s calling is received as “the ceaseless arrival of  [the] invitation…the call to create [make music]…”(BL 323)  Originary thinking is initiated by listening, by the reception of the resounding call of fecund Silence, the breath before the arrival of Logos.

Fecund because “the learning receives…the ex-cess of Being’s presencing, spilling over beyond her grasp and responds with the un-certainty of the artistic creation, with the performance unfolding as the Leap of [the] artistic…offered in the improvisational, with the submission to ‘painstaking’ listening.  Here, then, is the essential way of artistic (re)presentation, as the ‘letting go’ of the ‘unified’ en-closed/self in/to the dispersal of the dialogic relation, where the learner as performer, as artist, submits ‘her-self’ as a work of art, expressing her attunement, her dwelling in/with the aesthetic state, her rapture with the Being of beings.”(BL 323)