Thinking/writing in the stream of
[OLD school GD. Repeating “Viola Lee Blues,” which easily my
favorite of all of the GD jams. This show is happening just a week after the
acid test at the Fillmore West (at that time just called the Fillmore), which I
was supposed to air on the Dead Zone this past Sunday, but, alas, a technically
difficulty prevented the second hour from making it on the air. So this show,
that I’m listening to this morning, will have to represent the spirit of ’67 in
the next DZ]
Now in the home
stretch. The first post in this blog
was on 1/18/14, and I’m closing in on the one year anniversary of that. But the first day of the B&L 2.0 was, naturally, the first day of B&L 1.0 – at the time it was happening under the title of 363, which denoted the number of days I
was intended to write: every day for one year, minus 2 days, following the
directions of Leonardo, who I once heard say about his La Scala, “I purposely
added a window where no window was necessary, and thereby placed it ‘out of proportion’ to show respect for God, who alone can make something perfect.” I remember hearing this during a tour at some
point, and it may have been when 'we' were at UCLA ('92-'96), where they claim, or so I recall,
that Royce Hall is inspired by DaVinci’s architecture.
At any rate, this day is the beginning of
the last month of daily commentary writing.
And, appropriately it is happening in the same place where I completed day
one, my old stomping grounds of 29 Sunset Drive. Equally apropos is the return to the originary
question that happens on 1/14/05.
Following the form of the daily meditations, it begins in media res: “To take up this question
of Being, of existence itself, is to produce philosophical artwork and thereby
to be engaged in the ongoing poetic dialogue of philosophy that was initiated
by the ancients who saw a necessary link between philosophical ‘thinking’ and
the be-ing of human.”(BL 346) ‘Thinking’ is described as an act of
reception and one could even say gratitude.
Thinking as thanking, or what
on 12/6/14 I described as grateful thinking:
Revisiting the writing from 12/06/14 demands more
revising than has been implied in this process of commenting each day on the
original meditations. Today revisiting
involves a re-vision of what was originally written, and thus a writing that
arrives from the new perceptions of the ‘same’ phenomena described then and
now. This morning I read in Schürmann
how the latter Heidegger’s turn toward thinking was a turn away from Dasein, and with that from a
phenomenology of the modalities that are epochally determined to phenomenology
of the reception of the way things are presenting themselves. With the latter
we can identify thinking as thanking,
which is to say, thinking as gratitude toward that which is being offered. Thinking as thanking is perception as
reception, and from this follows a phenomenology of the offering [as Rocha
might put it with his folk phenomenology that is never simply an apodictic
description but a revelatory enactment, or perhaps reenactment]. Es
gibt (it is given) is disclosed with grateful thinking as the offering that
is received as novel or new. Grateful thinking receives Being in the
excessive form, as a donation. I’m
using donation because this word denotes the offering as the giving of what is
needed. And the roots also denote the
offering as the giving of something new, something infused with natality. Grateful
thinking is a phenomenology of the advent of Being’s ceaseless nativity. And such thinking as hermeneutics grants us
the license to revisit again and again any and all writing, including and
perhaps especially our own, and to do so with the gratitude that we will
encounter something that remains unsaid, or needs to be said again in a new
way. (emphasis 1/14/15)
On
1/14/05 grateful thinking – thinking as gratitude – is a response to the call
of Being received as excess. Today, in
the wake of the past week’s commentaries, I want to describe the taking up of
excess, the reception of the donation, as the movement into becoming. Es gibt
happens or appears as presencing
(‘pure coming about’) [nb: e.g.,
mimetically disclosed in the “Viola Lee Blues” jam beginning at 4:20 with
Weir’s proclamation ‘Testing!’] The
donation or offering when understood and described as an event propelling the becoming of humanity is given the name
Grace. The Spanish word for expressing
gratitude is phonetically closer to the original. We say Gracias
when we undertake grateful thinking.
“This ‘thinking’ expresses the response to the question of Being, a
response to [the] call of existence that beckons a response.”(BL 346)
[after
5 “Viola Lee Blues” moving on to the 7-8 repetitions of “Estimated Prophet”
from https://archive.org/details/gd1978-01-14.mtx.holwein.motb-0121.105811.flac16]
The
writing on 1/14/05 is an recollection of the project’s intention, and it is
both a description and a kind of confessional writing, a demonstration of
self-disclosure. It steps away from the
question and turns back on the experiment itself: “This project has attempted
to en-act an aesthetic philosophy as a way of presenting the kind of ‘thinking’
that unfolds from a recognition of its own possibility, trying, along the way,
to take up the excess of meaning that spills over from each phenomenological
encounter, and, thereby, to remain attuned to the condition of be-ing human
that presents itself (de)construccion. This project has unfolded from a seizing,
from the state of captivity where the discourses of philosophy (re)present a
vision of the poetic dialogic event of learning. This work, then, is an enactment, an artwork
intended to (re)present the manner of a philosophy of education that abides
within the aesthetic state, attuned to the musicality of be-ing.”(BL 346)
It’s
important to note that ‘aesthetic’ is the category for the existential modality
arising with the work of art. The
learner inhabits the aesthetic with the artistic technē of artwork. And ‘artwork’ is the making of art happening
in the dialogic process. This is how
the dialogic learning community enters into becoming. And the only form capable of disclosing this
work is music. Hence, the artwork of the
learning community is described as music-making philosophy. “The poetic dwelling of learning abiding
in/with Being’s essential sway is expressed musically. ‘Music’ is the name for [the] artwork of
poetic dialogue that (re)presents the dynamic presencing of Being.”(BL 346)
I’m
empowered with the re-turn to these descriptions of the project. The consistency between then and now is
empowering. One wanders and one wonders
but the project is sustained. Indeed,
exactly one year ago I was writing a paper for the February meeting of Rocha’s Society for the Philosophical Study of Education, and started that paper in the
following way:
Insofar as
this paper is now returning to Nietzsche’s prophecy of a music-making
philosophy, I am, in a sense, with Hegel as my exemplar, working out the
preface or preliminaries of Being and
Learning after its completion. All
work after Being and Learning
is a working out of its genre, which is variously called ‘poetic
phenomenology,’ or ‘hermeneutic phenomenology,’
which are all experiments in originary thinking. In this paper I am drawing on Nietzsche as a
herald of this genre, and offering a piece of the prolegomenon of ‘music-making
philosophy.’
The SPSE
meeting was in late February, but I wrote “Feeling the Funk: Taking Up Nietzsche’s Prophecy of a
Music-Making Philosophy” in between the end of the January term and the
beginning of the spring semester. So
almost exactly one year ago. And so it
is without exaggeration that I can say that the the so-called ‘working out’ of
the preliminaries after the
completion of Being and Learning got
underway with the above cited paragraph from “Feeling the Funk”. To write and think in a ‘prefatory’ way is
to situate oneself in the originary place, which is to say, to return to place
of reception, the place where one receives Grace and one says Gracias!
This is place is sacred, hence grateful thinking unfolds as huacaslogical writing: a phenomenology
of sacred place. Yet in some sense such
writing is also, strangely, prophetic.
It is preparatory and anticipatory; waiting upon the disclosure of
Grace, the arrival of the epiphanic moment, the return of the inspiration. “All work after Being and Learning is a working out of its genre…a piece of the
prolegomenon of ‘music-making philosophy.’”
These commentaries, the writing
happening via meditative thinking -- happening in the time and space in-between
the seminar, the conversations with colleagues (fellows), the dialogues – are
originary in the sense that Schürmann has described it: retrospective and
prospective. And it is the prospective
that is prophetic, that unfolds as prolegomenon: prolegein ‘say beforehand,’ from pro ‘before’ + legein
‘say’. Of course, much has been written
in these pages on legein as original
‘saying’ but thus as ‘gathering’, specifically the gathering of the learning
community. Here are few examples of the
writing on legein:
From 11/4/14: The writing form 11/4/04 returns to Heidegger’s
musings on Rilke’s “song is existence”.
On 10/17/14 while in Memphis I wrote on the fragment: Rilke’s
aphorism/fragment “Song is existence.”
Song is existence! The mimetic
making, a copying of the essential flow…music making, improvisational music
making. Music is existence, the
existence of human legein the saying that imitates the flow ῥεῖ (rhei) of Logos.
But this musical existence needs to be learned, it is the hardest
apprenticeship. Learned first and
foremost through listening, which is what is emphasized in the preparatory work
of apathetic reading, where the
phenomenology of reception is practiced.” (OPM 245(246) On 11/4/04
“song is existence” expresses the article of faith in the human poetic
response to Being’s Becoming that is experienced as an offering. The reception of the offering in its full
force gathers the learning community.
Put otherwise, the learner is the one who receives the call (klēsis, calling or vocation). Here
is not the place to return to the relation between calling and saying something
via vocare. (cf.PPM10 2/22/14, OPM 218(9), 09/20/14)
From 11/28/14: Perhaps friendship is a demonstration of the
mystery of faith we risk each and every time we undertake work with
others? Does faith precede grace? Or is
faith the recognition of the mystery of grace that we witness in friendship,
specifically, in the work done via friendship?
Perhaps what I am describing is a particular case of friendship that we
call ‘colleague’? Is the learning
community the smallest unit of what we denote by the term ‘college’? College, collega,
colleagues, collective, communal, common, community. The fellowship of the
fellows. Fellows denotes ‘a person in the same position, involved in the same
activity, or otherwise associated with another,’ and ‘a member of a learned
society.’ Fellow origin: Old English fēolaga ‘a partner or colleague’ from
Old Norse félagi, from félag ‘partnership.’ [phonetically,
these roots harken back to logos as legein
as ‘gathering’ (cf. OPM 242(43), October 14th)]
From 12/10/14: La Fenomenología del Originario is first and foremost a
project initiated by a rigorous recalling of the existential condition arising
from the collision zone, and so we can call it a project of re-membering; hence
a project of gathering legein by describing via logos (saying). But insofar as the gathering is a recalling,
a remembering, it is the work of memory that disrupts “the logic that imposes
itself upon the horizon of being with a forgetfulness of Being’s essential sway
and the twofold play, specifically the truth of concealment that always
with-holds and with-draws from the appearance of the unified whole. Forgetting
this with-drawal is a strategic response to the fear of contradiction. Recalling this withdrawal is the response to
the un-certain yet imminent futural unfolding with the play of difference…”(BL 306)
Learning,
the entering into becoming is thus:
mimetic
making, a copying of the essential flow…music making, improvisational music
making. Music is existence, the
existence of human legein the saying that imitates the flow ῥεῖ (rhei) of Logos. (OPM 245(246)
It
is thus not surprising that on 1/14/05 I return, first to Parmenides, and next
to Heraclitus who, for my project, is the
original thinker. Socrates is the
exemplar of music-making philosophy as an enacted and practiced form of
communal learning. But Heraclitus is the
herald. “When Heraclitus privileged
‘hearing,’ and named wisdom the encounter with the ‘hidden harmony,’ he
affirmed the love of learning as the aesthetic state of rapture that is
expressed in the musicality of be-ing attuned to becoming, to the dynamic flux
of Being. “ (BL 346-347)
The
return to Heraclitus yields the description of the artwork of learning as the modality
or existential state of musicality. This
is Neitzsche’s (re)birth of tragedy, the artist becoming the work of art.
This work of art receives “the title of ‘musicality’…name for [the]
artwork that arises from the aesthetic state, from the attunement of be-ing
with/in Being’s dynamic dispersal, the creative unfolding of Being as
becoming.”(BL 347)
The
writing/thinking on 1/14/05 yields the following Sentences on Musicality:
1.
“Musicality
identifies the modality of the heightened awareness or sensibility that
collapses the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘life’.(BL 347)
2.
“Musicality
represents the poetic response to the hearing of Being as becoming, the
creative expression of being in/with Being.”(BL 347)
3.
“In
turn, learning is a modality of musicality, because the situation of learning
is always situated in/with the becoming of be-ing human, the open-endedness and
incompleteness of the be-ing of human.”(BL
347)
4.
“Musicality
enables us to explore what we might call the poetics of learning, the poesy of attunement to be-ing in/with
becoming.”(BL 347)
5.
“Learning,
as an expression of musicality, is the engagement with the ex-cessive
open-endedness of the be-ing of human, a poetic response that acknowledges and
affirms the be-ing of human to exceed the limit of any and every finite being.” (BL
347)
6.
“To
learn is to be seized by Being, by the dynamic movement of becoming that takes ‘one’
beyond one’s ‘own’ intentionality.”(BL 347)
With Heraclitus present, writing/thinking ends with
the “Lazy Lightning” > “Supplication” from https://archive.org/details/gd79-01-14.nak300.wiley-miller.18460.sbeok.shnf
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