Thinking/writing in the stream of
[from the ‘home court’ of the
Dead Zone, just a stoner’s throw away from the studios of WRHU on the campus of
Hofstra University! Repeat “Music Never
Stops 2x > “Shakedown”2x> “Dark Star”> “St. Stephen”]
“The music never stopped…”
This early Saturday morning
writing is one that almost approaches the feeling of completing a daily chore
in the best sense; daily work, work-out, practice. Again I’m reminded of those Jesuit brothers
at Fordham walking the slow meditative walk around Edwards Parade a miniature
Scripture in hand. Today I drive Kat
back to Cornell, and so the need to wake early and get to the writing table
first thing before the 7 hour drive west.
I want to begin with an
unfinished reflection from the seminar from 1/8/15 and connect that to the last
two paragraphs from the writing 1/9/05.
During Thursday’s seminar the group was wrestling with a the second
section from Irigaray’s “Listening, Thinking, Teaching,” where she describes
thinking as akin to returning to ‘our home,’ a ‘home’ we must build each and
every day. There was some confusion,
and some tension with regard to this business of building a home; indeed of the
dwelling of thinking as a home. If the place of thinking was indeed the
place of thinking difference, as I conjectured at the onset of the seminar,
then didn’t that place exist outside or beyond the ‘home’, beyond ‘us’? Another kind of thinking, perhaps? What Irigaray is describing is a relatively
traditional almost Stoic kind of meditative thinking, not unlike what I am
describing when I am describing the position of the phenomenologist. But in the seminar we were focused on the
particular case of the thinking happening with learning in the midst of others,
in relation to the other that Irigaray says is the only one who can question
us. The seminar is organized around that event, the occasion of questioning,
the situation when ‘self’ encounters ‘other’ in questioning. The event is the moment I have described in
the pages of this blog as ‘self-overcoming,’ the event of Being and learning
when the self is ‘seized’ into the flow of becoming. Irigaray is in accordance that learning is
all about the movement into becoming, and so it was that my students read back
from the third section ‘Teaching’ into the second section on ‘Thinking.’ The question then arose, directed to me,
about the teacher who remains steadfast in the flow of becoming, and who is
able to hear (Listen) each and every student thinking differently. If the charge of the teacher is to gather
the learning community into the place of thinking difference, where does s/he
stand? The response brought home (pun
intended) the thesis that the place of learning was not a home, was not a
domestic place. Indeed, this is why we
say that students go off to college,
and go to school. The place of learning is somewhere in
between the home and the public realm, as I’ve written about in many places,
specifically through Arendt in my pieces “The Time of Thinking Differently” and
“Conserving the Revolutionary”.
And so the response I gave to the
student, who was pushing me on describing the position of the teacher who is
gathering the learning community, sounded something like conclusion of the
meditation on 1/9/05, with the fundamental ontology remaining implied, present,
but withdrawn and seemingly absent. My
response was to insist that the teacher who (meditates) the formation of the
learning community is hearing, yes, of course, but in that listening s/he is in
fact drawing the students into the question of Being, that is, into the flow of
becoming, the place of learning. In this
sense he is offering a question-bearing listening and thereby disclosing
through his modality of teaching the place of learning; he is, as Heidegger would
put it, a ‘pointer’, and I would say, a ‘turner’ – and in the wake of the fall
semester’s work with my undergrads, I can not help but draw the analogy between
the turning of student toward learning and the turning of the vinyl record:
this is the ‘revolutionary’ movement of learning as music-making philosophy,
with the teacher being the DJ, sometimes scratching, of course, and the student
being the record stylus: remaining steadfast in the place yet moving slowly but
surely toward the center!
“To take
up the question of Being is thus to up
the first of the First Questions of philosophy.
But this question, when authentically taken up, spills over into the
questions that draw the learner ever closer to Being, because they draw her
ever further from the certainty of her ‘self’. The learner is re-posed and
further turned away from her ‘self’ when she is asked, ‘How is it with the
No-thing?’ The reception of this
question confronts the learner with what remains closest to her, nearest and
yet intimate, and furthest in distance.
That which remains furthest lingers beyond the space of the intimate,
for it does not arise from the inmost
self. The ownmost potential remains ‘not yet’ part of the self, remains in
the distance, across the gap that is preserved by the Open, by the special
spatiality. The ownmost potential
remains with Being, as the truth of the hidden, mysterious, concealed, the
in-effable ‘not yet’ said. That which remains
always ‘not yet’ said, that remains un-said, is offered with the poetic saying,
with the songs that are performed on those ‘instruments’ with the largest
compass, and capable of modulation into all possible modes. The sage’s questioning, like the baton of the
conductor, arranges the encounter with this strange, ownmost possibility,
beckoning the exploration of and the movement upon this special
spatiality. The sages’s pointing
indicates the profound and unfathomable possibility that abides in/with the
mysterious ‘holding back’ of the Open.”(BL
340-341)
And that brings me, in the time
that remains for me this morning at my desk, to the place of learning. On 1/10/05 I describe this place as “the
space cleared with Being’s unfolding, specifically with the withdrawal which
disperses through re-pulsion…that ream where the learning community moves in
its purposeful, poetic performance.”(BL
341) [Since 2005 I have slowly but
surely moved from ‘space’ to ‘place’ because the is able to designate more
inclusively the location of learning both spatially and temporally.] The ‘withdrawal which disperses through
re-pulsion’ is a description via negation of Being’s ceaseless nativity. Being’s withdrawal en-opens, and clear the
place of learning, the Open. And the
force of this withdrawal, not unlike a powerful undertow or rip tide, is the
same force that draws the learners into the place of learning, draws each and
every one from his or her ‘self’ and gathers together the learning
community. Powerful force!
The place cleared by Being’s
withdrawal is called the ‘special spatiality’ on 1/10/05, “the dwelling of the
aesthetic state, the attunement towards Being’s unfolding, and the offering
made with this creative activity. To
move purposely in/with the realm of the Open is to receive and respond to
Being’s offering, and thereby, enter into the dialogic event with Being, to
be-with, or attuded to, Being’s processural unfolding.”(BL 341). ‘Being-with’
Being’s processural unfolding is the enactment of learning that happens with
the movement into becoming. The
movement into becoming is the purposeful movement in/with the Open. “This attunement marks the essence of the
existence of the learning modality as a creative performance, an artwork, which
em-bodies Being’s creative happening.
Nietzsche’s description of the aesthetic state as a rapture captures well the dwelling in/with Being that identifies
the philosophical modality we are identifying as learning.”(BL 341)
“Shall
we go?
You
and I?
While
we can?
To
the
transitive nightfall of diamonds.”
The mediation on 1/10/05 is a return
back to the place of originary thinking, to the fundamental ontological
description, to the meditative encounter…Dark Star crashes, pouring its light
into ashes; Sunrise in Portland, streaming its light into my study, onto my
desk; seized into the nunc stans, the
natality of this day.
“We follow
the tradition of philosophy established by the ancients when we affirm the
‘truth’ of be-ing human, its authentic happening, to be ‘grasped’ in the
‘proper’ relation to Being, existence it-self.
We, as learners, affirm Being with the affirmative (de)-constructive even, in/with the be-ing of poeisis that unfolds from
creation. De, the preposition possesion
(of) and origen, distancia (from),
designates the dialogic be-ing of human as ‘of’ and ‘from’ Being. The be-ing of human is both ‘possessed’ and
‘dispersed’ by Being. This is the
creative dispensation, the (re)pulsion that releases the new. To be with Being is thus to mimic or (re)present the releasement of
the new by re-collecting the originary dispensation and re-leasing the new with
the poetic saying.”(BL 341)
“Talk about your troubles, talk about your ills.
One man gathers what another man spills”
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