Thinking/Writing in the stream of
[This “Stranger” in the
first set of this show is on my all-time top 10 list. In turn, I’ll just keep repeating until I’m
moved to listen to the Etta James moments in the show and/or move on to another
12/30 show, probably ’83…we’ll see. nb: for the first time since March 30, 2007, when they were
absorbed the impact of the Oxford bus on the corner of Rose Lane and High
Street, I’m using my life saving headphones.]
“Crazy, crazy
night! That’s right. Feel like a stranger.”
So I need to back up to
the end of 12/29/04 before taking up the writing/thinking from 12/30/04,
because I overlooked the culminating moments that underline the heteronomy that
organizes the relationship between Being and Learning. An email from Jason Wozniak this morning, the latest in our exchanges, which Jason described in the following way: "When I write to you I'm really writing in an informal way in which I am trying to think what you are thinking, think what you haven't thought, rehearsing (in a musical sense) ideas with you. In a way, maybe we can say that we are "essaying" together in our correspondences.... :"
12/30/14: Hi Eduardo,
Just a quick note....undergoing my literature review of discussions
of temporality in education I've found myself deeply involved with your work as
well as Tyson's. Both of you are having very nice impacts on my thinking and
study. And though I see some clear differences in your approaches and concepts,
I was thinking the other day that there might be a relation between Tyson's
interpretations of Agambem's "whatever being" and some of your
notions, following Heidegger, of gelassenheit.
Very briefly stated (and I can guess at how each of you would
respond), at some point I'd like to ask the two of you: What do we need to
become whatever being? Or are we always already whatever being, and what we
really need is inaction....a letting be...we need to let ourselves and others
be whatever....this letting-of-whatever-come would involve a "willing of
non-willing." No pressure to respond to this, but maybe someday we all
talk.
Man, the deeper I go the more convinced I am that Orpheus, an Orphic
turn, is needed....
J
(12/30/14) For sure, an Orphic turn! YES!!
I'm more or less trying to make that turn and have
documented the experimental phenomenological descriptions happening between
12/17 & 12/24
Responding to your question: What is absolutely crucial for me, and
this is underlined as recently as yesterday*, is the diminishment of the will,
which is necessary for any thinking/learning to get underway
(meditative, contemplative, dialogic). We are called (sonically) into
the time of thinking/learning and our proper response is music/music-making
philosophy. And that call arrives and draws us into the nunc stand
(kairological standing-now), the time/space = place of thinking/learning.
Eduardo
Orphic
turn indeed!!! This is precisely why the project of originary thinking/learning
has been categorized as music-making philosophy. But, as I tried to emphasize in my email to
Jason, and as I’ve repeating again and again in the pages of this blog, the
crux of the matter is the (re)turn to Being.
Then and only then can thinking/learning get underway. And it seems promising to experiment
musically with (re)turn, or to make an Orphic turn.
¬ I
just searched ‘Orpheus’ in the BL2.0
archives and this is what I discovered: OPM
99 May 23:
“In commemorating OPM99, I'll take up the spirit
that moved the original experiment, and begin with two fragments that I picked
up this morning. The second, which I'll share first, because it offers
the context, was an email I received from Jason Wozniak, co-founder of LAPES,
whose presentation at PES Albuquerque I recorded and posted on this blog.
An exchange we had this morning culminated in his citing of Rilke's Sonnets
to Orpheus: "Song is Existence." While, at the moment,
I can't find the meditation where this exact quotation appears, it is
quite close to the Holderlin line that is cited in OPM 94 from May 18th:
"Soon we shall be song"! Indeed, but in what sense
'song'? In what sense is this 'being of song' what arrives after the
poet's renunciation, which renounces speaking (the verbal), and announces
listening (the non-verbal, 'silence')? In what sense is such 'silence'
the 'sound' of instrumental music, non-verbal communication?”
And next
from OPM 248(249), October 21st:
The meditation written this day ten years ago reminds me that The
Orpheum theater where Wide Spread Panic was playing this past weekend in
Memphis is named for the god Orpheus, who makes a sudden cameo appearance as I
try to extend myself further on the thinking inspired by Rilke’s fragment
“Music is existence.” Orpheus
is a figure who, like Zarathustra, ‘goes under’. Orpheus’ descent to Hades, who holds
his beloved Eurydice, happens via music. Heidegger insists that “for the god
Orpheus, who lives infinitely in the Open, song is an easy matter, but not for
man.”(cited on 10/21/04 BL 247) But this is not at all the case that
the god lives ‘infinitely in the Open,’ and his descent to retrieve his beloved
is a precisely one that takes him from the Open and into the primal ground. His is a tragic tale, one that insures
that all music he will make when he ascends back to the ground will qualify as
the blues. “…his movement
was tragic....Orpheus…returns to the Earth, to the ‘Open,’ alone…poet and
musician, in search of welcoming out-stretched arms, wandering and
nomadic…”(10/21/04 BL 247)
The legend of
Orpheus reminds us that when we think “music is existence” we enter a place
where we experience our fate to live with the tragic dimension of the human
condition: the incompleteness of our relation to the present moment. We can not sustain our presence;
the present moment withdraws. We
learn from the legend because even the god struggles in his attempt to achieve
reconciliation; he is unable to retrieve his beloved. If song is not easy for the god it is
because, like us, he moves in and out of the Open, which withdraws from him in
the same manner it withdraws from us. This
is koinon (common) we share with him. Song is never easy, neither for god
nor human, and it is difficult on both sides, but especially for the one who is
making music, for the one who is singing, who are saying something new. ¬
To call the originary
(re) to Being an Orphic turn would be
to think “music is existence” and thereby enter the attunement that Blake calls the “‘Eternally Embodied
Imagination.’…the attunement with Being’s essential sway…a ceaseless creative
activity.”(BL 329 12/29) I’m not convinced at this moment that
attunement is an enactment, the term that has been deployed as a way of
denoting the performative character of the art work happening with
learning. But the dictionary convinces
me that attunement is the highest enactment:
first, enactment is the process of making law; second, the process of
acting something out. Enactment as the
expression of learning as the attunement with Being discloses thinking as
always propelled by a ‘higher power’ or a force; enactment discloses the
heteronomy; the learner and the learning community are made via the movement of Spirit (koinōnia): “art expresses the attunement with Being’s essential
sway…”
On 12/29 the law under
which learning is happening – the law that is enacted in learning – is
described as process organized by “the ‘anarchy principle’….The dialectic of
Being’s processural unfolding is ceaseless; the third moment is not a synthesis but [diff’rence] (difference, dispersal).”(BL 329) Dynamis replaces synthesis as the third moment of the dialectic.
-- [nb: I’m recalling the Dionysian frenzy, the mania of Nietzsche’s
artist who is made the work of art when drawn into the Primal Unity; where are
these meditative thinking and poetic phenomenological descriptions happening? “Crazy, crazy night. I feel like a stranger. Are you a stranger
too?”]
This excursus to the end
of 12/29/04 via the exchange with Wozniak that (re)calls the songs of Orpheus
brings me then to the opening of the meditation from 12/30/04 that begins with
a description of the mimetic expression of the Being and Learning: “the
(re)presentation of the attunement to this dynamic unfolding, moving
in-and-through the be-ing of human, is expressed as the musicality of
[diff’rence].”(BL 329)
Musicality of diff’rence. Where does that description of the expression
of Being and Learning arrive from? From
a hermeneutical reading of Heidegger on attunement.
The musicality of
diff’rence is an ontological description; it describes the modality of
learning; it is a description of what we hear
when we listen to learning.
Existentially, then, the description expresses “the music of
diff’rence,” otherwise known as the blues exception, the “encounter with the
self as stranger…the estranging attunement to the withering hold of identity…”(BL 329)
One feels like a stranger in
thinking/learning; the locomotive power of the autonomous self is displaced and
replaced by the force of “Being’s essential sway” and the power of the will is
dispersed. Gelassenheit. The letting-be
of learning. Attunement as enactment of
a force that insists on creating: Being. Actualization of creative power via
the human as artist, as music maker
“Attunement lays open Dasein as an enhancing, conducts it into the
plentitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another and foster
enhancement.”(Heidegger cited on 12/30, BL
329)
Attunement is
actualization. Attunement ‘conducts’ into
the plentitude of human capacities.
Plentitude denotes the excessive that spills over from potentiality into
actuality, which always indicates an historical making: culture. One
might read the plentitude of capacities as potentialities; and this is most
certainly how my colleagues who are invested in the study discourse would read
this citation of Heidegger. But I suspect that by stressing attunement as an
‘enhancing’ Heidegger is indicating the earlier sense of enhancement as elevation. And for me elevation indicates learning as
‘self-overcoming,’ Nietzsche’s “six
thousand feet above…” Recall
OPM 164, July 28th
Meditation:
“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.” Schürmann
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)
Attunement as elevation
to the high point of meditation, the nexus where Being and Becoming converge:
self is invaded; self is deconstructed; self is dispersed; “carried away by the
encounter with Being’s presencing…called upon to create, spontaneously, and
bear the novel…”(BL 329)
Attunement thinks the
Eternal Recurrence as the Eternally Embodied Imagination. This is not a ‘representational’ thinking but
a re-presentational thinking, a
mimetic expression: meditation,
thinking, art (music) making.
12/30/04 concludes by
emphasizing the excessive as the potentiality that remains absent in “the
mysterious hiding place of the futural.
The potential of be-ing human, freedom expressed in the poetic and
arriving improvisationally…as the work of art, remains, sheltered, as
plentitude, as the ‘not yet’ ful-filled, and the impossibility of finality…eternally
emergent…”(BL 330)
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