A prayer, an offering sent to me
yesterday:
I DECLARE TODAY TO BE YOUR FEAST.
Epiphany, an Eastern feast, born of John mysticism and neoplatonism
Into the darkness there came a great light
Nativity twelfth day, ceaseless cycle of Being
A toast to the adoptive father of the philosophia educationis
My brother
Today, Thinking/Writing in the stream of
[--this is show I’ve played on The Dead Zone [WRHU.ORG, Sundays 6-8pm EST],
one of the last with Donna and Keith, and one of the truly great GD at MSG
shows. Anyone who saw the GD at MSG
remembers the special energy in the ‘old’ Garden. MSG is a very special congregational place
for me. I’ve seen more shows GD and
beyond at the Garden and it’s small basement theater, once upon a time called
the Felt Forum, where I first saw Garcia playing live with his band JGB. So it’s apropos to listen to this show as I
write from my ole stomping grounds, 29 Sunset Drive, where I’ve returned now
that the holiday break is over and the time of teaching has returned. “Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart,
just gotta poke around!”]
I happened to glance back at
yesterday’s commentary after receiving an email from DH Scott. I the following jumped out at me:
Can
this ‘turning’ be separated from the ‘on’?....If the ‘Tune in’ is a euphemism
for ‘attunement’ and ‘Let Learning Happen’ is a stand in for the pedagogy of gelassenheit, then certainly the ‘Turn’
doesn’t make sense without the ‘on’.
Can this ‘turning’ be separated from the ‘on’?....
Reading the question
this morning, a day later, I’m immediately struck by the almost absurd sound of
the question. Especially because after posing the question I prompted back to the
Preface of Being and Learning,
specifically, back to Parmenides who, along with Heraclitus, are the primary
sources for the project of originary thinking. [--nb: yesterday when I was
back on campus and preparing for the afternoon grad seminar that was scheduled
to focus on Irigaray, I was reading a piece where she asks with unconcealed
irritation and frustration, ‘Why must we always return to the Greeks?’ After reading this I took a long pause away
from the page of the book, and made a note to myself, which I am documenting
here, to return to Irigaray and respond to her question. I can’t answer this question from the first
person plural; I can’t speak from the ‘we,’ or certainly not from the universal
or abstract ‘we’ – and I’m not suggesting Irigaray is doing that, although I am
a bit confused and also inspired by her talk of our ‘becoming human’, which
echoes – or so it seems to me – my appropriation of the lines from Gilgamesh in the aforementioned Preface. And here it is, presented in its proper
context:
BEGINNING
It, begins with
Parmenides’ Poem.
It beings with
Parmenides ‘Way of Truth’
This ‘it’ being the
immortal
Conversation of
philosophy.
This conversation
that is the
Journey of our
‘becoming
Human together,’
to paraphrase the
timeless message
we hear from Gilgamesh, that
oldest of epic tales.
Philosophy, the
immortal conversation,
which recounts, like
a
grand epic pilgrim’s
tale,
the story of our
becoming human
together.
This story, in which
we all partake in,
has a beginning, or
beginnings,
and one of these
beginnings occurs in
6th century BCE
Greece, at Elea, with
Parmenides.
Irigaray’s irritation
and frustration about the necessary
return to Greece is understandable so long as the ‘we’ is exclusive, and that is by no means necessary. I try to write
with an inclusive ‘we’ by referring to ‘beginnings’ rather than ‘beginning’;
but, nevertheless, I use the ‘we’ to
insist, with Irigaray who writes of the ‘becoming
of humanity', that thinking happens in a place, the Open, where all are already
called. All are already called. “This
story, in which we all partake in”.--] >
‘In which’ and
‘partake in’.
Can this ‘turning’ be separated from the ‘on’?....
The ‘in’ and the ‘on’ disclose
Being, which is always said, heard and thought with becoming. Becoming is the
‘and’ of Being ‘and’ learning, the force that gathers learning with Being, the
excess. Re-call, in the wake of the
prayer, the offering, the song of the feast of Epiphany, the writing from
7/28/14:
“For Heraclitus the coupling of
the same with difference discloses the dynamism of Being aka the Becoming of
being. This does not
reduce Being to Becoming or render Becoming a quality of Being. The challenge is to
thinking Being and Becoming together.
The writing from this day, July
28, 2004, makes an attempt to think the togetherness of Being and Becoming by
describing the phenomenal disclosure of it as the “strange appearance” of
Nature. The key
citation is taken from Heraclitus who offers an aphorism that complements the
river fragment: “Nature
loves to hide.” On 7/28/14
I read this aphorism as indicating the “processural unfolding of Nature’s
creative dynamism.” But
more important is the existential and ontological implication, which takes us
back to the past few days’ discussion of the ‘primal ground’ (Urgrund)
and our Contact! Contact! with it. Actually, I’m brought back to an
position I have found myself in for much of this summer’s revisiting of the
original meditations, and that is to the conjecture that the ‘original’ or
‘first’ encounter with Being happens when we have an effacement in Nature with
the Life spirit that moves through and gathers all living beings. Under the influence of Thoreau I
would, today, call this experience an epiphanic
transcendental contact with the totality, and one that is a deeply embodied
and felt experience. Nietzsche, who was also a student of
Thoreau’s mentor Emerson (reading him from afar), discovered his Eternal
Recurrence of the Same [in that same epiphanic place]. From
Nietzsche I gather the experience as disclosing to us a positive and undeniable
affirmation, what he say is the saying Yes! to life.”
‘In which’ and
‘partake in’.
Can this ‘turning’ be separated from the ‘on’?....
NO!
Why?
Because the ‘on’ is the on, Being of beings. When Aristotle asks
ti to on?, he is asking What is
Being? Parmenides and before him
Heraclitus already offered the response: Being and thinking arise for us as the Same. And this puts into motion the entire history
of philosophy, which is propelled not so much by the question of Being, but by
the response to the question of Being, which Heidegger recalls in his lectures
under the title, What is Called Thinking? For me, the project of originary thinking is the project that
returns to the original question What is Being?, understanding that response to
that question to always be concerned with experiments in thinking. When Heidegger asks about what is ‘called’
thinking, he is referring us both to the call of thinking, but also how we
respond to that call aka how we make philosophy, the technē of
thinking.
Schürmann:
“The original mode of appearing are
countless; they are as numerous as the disjunctive moments in history. The originary
mode of appearing, on the other hand, has no history. With the originary concept of ontology and
the ontological concept of the originary we leave the phenomenology of reversals…Rather,
presencing itself is to be understood as originary…as pure coming-about.”(140)
Presencing
understood (thought) as orignary, as
pure coming-about, demands a thinking of becoming,
that is, of actualization, realization.
To
remember that there are multiple beginnings is to remember that there is a
history of philosophy, a history of experiments that continues because it
remains what it has always been: a call into becoming. On 1/7/05 the
response to this call, learning, is described as “the poetic (re)presentation of Being through the concrete expressionism of
improvisational artwork.”
And on 1/7/05 I continue to
describe the technē of
learning indirectly via the critique of Plato’s purging of poetics in his Republic. For Plato it is a problem of education, that
is to say, the challenge of avoiding
mis-education. And the key is to insure
the proper formation of the young soul, specifically the one who shows talent
in art making. For Plato, the concern is
the proper education of the artist.
“For, in the end, the artist, like the artisan, must perform a specific
function, one that participates in the building of the moral order, a project
that always begins with the ‘proper training’ of the young.”(BL 339)
What does this entail for music, and, by extension, music-making
philosophy? Instruction in a music that
is a reflection of the ‘good moral order’ of the State. One can suppose this is not the stuff of
Schoenberg’s ‘higher harmony’. And what
of the instruments that will make the solemn music of the well-ordered
State? Incapable of complexity, of course!
“Our songs and airs, then, will not need
instruments of large compass capable of modulation into all the modes, and we shall not maintain the craftsman to
make them, in particular the flute, which had the largest compass of all. That leave the lyre and the cithara for use
in the town; and in the country the herdsmen may have some sort of pipe.”(Republic 399c-d cited BL 339)
[recall:
all of the preceding are
(re)presentations, metaphors, euphemisms for the ‘education’ of the soul of
each citizen, and of the State. ‘Our’ songs…who sings such songs? What title do we given them? Law-abiding, citizen? Perhaps, ‘law-enforcing’ citizens? Here one might describe these ‘well educated
souls’ using what Arendt calls the banality of evil: thoughtlessness. “I was
merely following my orders; what I was trained to do.” What sort of ‘songs’ are these?]
What’s that? The haunting prophetic second half of
‘Estimated Prophet’ from 1/7/79. Listen!
“Afternoons, streets turn
grey….now time sure pass me slow;
still,
I know I lead the way
Cause I know where to go.
Don’t worry about me, no no,
Don’t worry about me,
no.
I ain’t in no hurry, no, cause I
know where to go.”
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