Back at Crema Café, and the 12/12/14 Soulive show is on some kind of loop that I set on 1/1/15, so I’ll be Thinking/Writing in the stream of the repeated “Alladin,” “Hat Trick,” and “El Ron”.
Sometimes I leap into the commentary before reading the meditation. Sometimes I read the meditation, and then begin the commentary. Today I’m doing the latter, and after reading the meditation from 1/3/05 I am immediately reminded of my commentary from 12/25/14, where I described the realization that my writing was rhythmic, and this was in no way meant to be a figural description, but, on the contrary, a quite literal description of the way I am relating to my keyboard…on my laptop. Kinesthesia is the word that comes to mind when I recall the commentary that ends with the reduction that distills rhythmic thinking:
The sentence written at the conclusion of the meditation on 12/24 is meant to express a transcendence via the suspension of thinking. Contemplation? Prayer? A return to the originary, the beginning, to the fecund Silence via listening. The sentence bursts from 12/24 and remains suspended on 12/25; and on 12/26 the flow of writing -- which feels more and more like drumming…. – [Why am I reminded at this moment that the typing on my keyboard is not unlike the feeling I have when I am drumming?!] -- hence the flow is rhythmic, and so when I describe music-making philosophy these descriptions, this phenomenological work, this writing, is properly a rhythmic thinking, or writing as drumming, typing as a form of percussion! Perhaps I should call the form of my work: ῥυθμός, rhythmos [rhythm: origin mid 16th cent. – also originally in the sense of ‘rhyme’): from French rhythme, or via Lain from Greek rhythmos (related to rhein ‘to flow’).
n [nb: Flow thinking, rhythmic thinking; writing via drumming (typing); rhythmic typing?] –
Writing via drumming, think via rhythms, phenomenology via percussion, the keyboard as keyboard; Nietzschean hammers!
The figure of Nietzsche’s hammer is usually imagined as something like a weapon of incomparable destruction, like the hammer of Thor. This is not at all far fetched. Nietzsche did refer to himself as ‘the great destroyer.’ But I prefer to read the hammer as referring to the piano hammer that strikes the strings in order to create the sound, the music. We when think of Nietzsche’s hammer in this way we are reminded not only that he laid waste to inertia, and prophetical announced the beginning of the return to tragedy. A year ago I completed my “Feeling the Funk” paper where I described this prophetic moment in Nietzsche:
For his part, Nietzsche offered us only a prognostication of the music making Socrates to come. Unlike the death of the young Socrates, which feels like an accident, or perhaps a murder, the birth Socrates 3.0 is a slow transfiguration, a transformation of philosophy from science to art, propelled on by the desire for a music that can express the perceived and experienced totality. And as a witness to this transfiguration, Nietzsche understood and embraced his role as herald, messenger, and prophet of this transfiguration. But it demanded an iron spirit one capable of struggle, and a hammer. “Here then, in a mood of agitation,” he writes, “we knock at the gates of the present and the future: will that ‘transforming’ lead to ever-new configurations of genius, and especially the music-practicing Socrates?” (BT 55) [I read this the famous ‘hammer’ wielded by Nietzsche as the pen in the form of a piano hammer.]
The
writing on 1/3/05 prompts the memory of practicing rudiments on drum pad. Repetitions of so many descriptions, working
out my chops.
The meditation on 1/3/05
picks up where the critique of Plato concluded on 1/2/05, but then moves on to
a rehearsal of the description of the sphere of thinking where Socrates moved
and from where Plato fled with his “purging of those (‘psuedo’) arts…”(BL 333) But there is a kind of reversal
on 1/3/05 that is moved by a fidelity towards Socrates. The originary modality of listening isn’t so
much displaced, nor replaced, but described from its obverse side. This renders listening an action or part of
the praxis that is made with
questioning, or as it is called on 1/3/05 ‘disquiet questioning.’ “When we say ‘questioning’ we indicate the
modality of openness that welcomes the strange, the uncanny, the paradoxical,
the contradictory, letting this arrival of the ‘not yet’ be in the alterity it
bestows. This bestowal is the gift of natality, the offering of possibility
with the en-opening of the futural.”(BL
334) Listening and questioning co-arise
in the unity of art work, and have to be thought together as the two
fundamental parts of the same action, the praxis
of dialogue through which thinking is actualized via learning.
The meditation on 1/3/05
describes the coincidence between Being and learning as happening in the
“encompassing space of the Open that admits.”(BL 334)
‘Encompassing space’ denotes the place where the twofold play
(presencing/absencing) of Being happens. Being occurs in the Open, and this occurrence
is described as an offering that welcomes.
In this way the “truth of Being happens with this admittance” that is a
granting or sparing of freedom. (BL
334) ‘Truth’ in this case denotes the
granted space qualified by kairological temporality. Admittance signifies the process or fact of
being allowed to enter a place. Learning
is thus what occurs upon admittance into the Open. But this admittance is both fact and
process: we are always already admitted
into the Open; but we must always be (re)turned to this place. Learning is thus always a response to a call
to (re)turn to the Open, the place of freedom.
“In this way, the Open admits and preserves the actuality of freedom’s
appearance…”(BL 334)
The (re)turning call to
learning is made by what can issue the disquiet of questioning, the one who can
mediate and deliver “the beckoning call of the initiative initiated by the
First Questions…”(BL 334) These questions break through the static and
white noise of what Heidegger called ‘idle chatter.’ And they reveal the ground upon which all
idle chatter is moving. The originary
questions admit into the Open where the fecund
Silence abides. In this sense the
First Questions and the fecund Silence
co-exist, the one revealing the other.
The conclusion of the meditation on 1/3/05 focuses on the artwork of the
poetic (the technē and praxis) that reveals the originary
questions by conveying “the attunement to the uncanniness of Being’s
incompleteness. Artwork preserves this
incompleteness and…represents the un-ease, the dis-quiet, of learning….The aporetic
is expressed with the artwork of the poetic, with the initiative that appears
as a radical questioning of the familiar, as a dis-ruption of the same, as an
evocation of the ‘not yet’ said.
Learners, as poets, are seized by the saying of the new…the performance
of freedom…the Leaps into the un-known.”(BL
334)
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