Thinking/writing in the stream of
5/14/83
from the Greek Theater, UC Berkeley.
Repeating the “Stranger” opener.
[first
time in over a month that I’m early trains from Summit NJ to Hofstra, so
pulling from the laptop archives].
First
off I have to note the publication yesterday of what I announced as the Final
Set List for PES Memphis. The list
produced quite a buzz, to say the least.
No question the announcement can be understood as the culmination of
years of work, especially when PES Memphis is placed within the context of the
originary thinking project. Not to
mention that it was circulating hours after I published in these pages my
Sentences on Musicality.
That
leads to the writing from this day ten years ago, which picks up on the
previous day’s meditation on musicality.
The writing on 1/15/05 is quite consciously aware that the year long
experiment is coming to a conclusion, and begins “With these, our concluding
reflections, we make summative and tentatively synthetic remarks.”(BL 347)
[Ten years later I am less inclined to use the first person plural,
which seems both somewhat awkward and at the same time a distraction. Today I use the first person singular, but I
suppose that is a result of the work completed in the original experiment,
which bolstered my confidence to move from the plural to the singular. Of course, the use of the plural was
intentionally anachronistic, and also an attempt to be inclusive. It smacks of an older convention in
philosophical writing when the author presumed what he was writing was by
necessity inclusive of all ‘rational’ beings.
That’s true even of Augustine, whose genius rests, in part, with his
rhetorical move from ‘I’ to God, from ‘self’ to Spirit, and in that move
carries along his readers, his listeners.
Of course, all along the way he consistently uses the first person and
has the audacity to directly address God; the audacity of prayer, I suppose. At any rate, as he moves through himself to
God, and discovers that vast place of memory, time, and then eternity, he is
never far from himself, never completely loses himself, but carries us along
with him. Augustine’s Confessions offer up the example for…B&L 3.0! And that might not wait until 2024.]
Although
Socrates is the one who offers the example, the description of the learner
offered on 1/15/05 sounds Augustinian insofar as the modality of learning is
existential situation when the ‘self’ becomes a question. Here a variation of self-overcoming is
offered, and the very ‘overcoming’ is
identified as not simply the beginning of the process, but integral to the
process itself. And this is why it
reminds me of Augustine: the ‘self’
becomes a question in the moment of overcoming, in the movement into becoming. In this sense ‘overcoming’ is the condition
of becoming. “For the one who is seized into his
heightened state of Being’s becoming…the ‘self’ appears as a stranger, as a
question.”(BL 347)
“Feel like a stranger,
feel like a stranger.
Gonna be a long, long, crazy, crazy
night.
Feel like a stranger.
Gonna be a long, long, crazy, crazy
night.”
--[off the bus and onto campus and into the
studio WRHU; recording second Jan DZ, starting the show with 1.14.67 Polo
Field, Golden Gate Park: “Morning Dew”>”Viola Lee Blues”, then some music
from last week’s Phish show in Miami, then back to 1.14.67, which was billed as
The Great Human Be-in!] –
On
1/15/05 learning is definitively the performance
art expressing “the musicality of be-ing human…the modalities that unfold from
the attunement to the becoming of Being.”(BL
347) Today I would write ‘modality’
rather than ‘modalities’ because the musicality denotes the existential state
of being of learning per se. The plurality arises from the distinct
performances of learning. In other
words, there are many performances of learning, each one distinct although at
times similar to the point of appearing like a repetition. Each one remains a particular, unique and
distinct demonstration of learning; and yet each performance happens from
within the modality of ‘musicality’. If
the performance is one of music-making philosophy, then it is an expression of
musicality. Echoes of the problem of the
one and the many, perhaps? Not exactly,
because the one – musicality – is the same human condition of learning. So too the place where this is happening, the
Open. So too the flow of becoming that learning is moving in,
that moves learning. Being gathers all
and at the same time disperses via ceaseless natality (becoming).
The
sage – the one who Heidegger describes
as the teacher who has more to learn than the students because he has to learn
how to let them learn – is empowered by what today I want to call Socratic
strength. Again, it is Heidegger, in
that same first lecture from What is
Called Thinking? who describes Socrates as the ‘pure thinker in the West’
and then suggested this ‘purity’ is a matter of strength; the strength of
endurance, of being able to endure the draft of Being’s presencing, what on 1/15/05 I describes as the “an-archic
sway of Being.” An-archic denoting the
processural quality of Being as becoming,
the essential sway, ceaseless nativity.
“As Socrates showed us, to be seized into this sway is to ‘stand’ in the
draft of questioning, to become the question, the be-ing of questioning, and,
thereby, to make music with others.”(BL
347)
Of
course, the matter of making-music is itself a matter of questioning, or better
described, is the modality of questioning such that learning remains in the
place of questioning, which is to say, thinking. If music-making is an expression of this
modality then, in fact, it remains always something under construction: (de)construccion. Hence it is the technē and praxis of thinking as poetic in the
sense of being improvisational, experimental, even if one experiment (jam
session) appears or sound like another; resembles in terms of what is being
played, and how it is being played.
I’ve returned with my students to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” for the
past 22 years that I have been teaching courses in philosophy. And while some of the seminars might sound
alike, each one is a unique event.
What’s more, the call to music-making, while remaining the same summons
-- “Socrates, make music!” – always entailed variations. And, as we know from Plato’s account in the Phaedo, the summons was, until the very
end of his life, the very call that placed Socrates into the modality of
questioning.
The summons from the
gods via the muse called Socrates into thinking and directed him to make
music. On 1/15/05 this state of affairs
is recalled: “the musicality of Socrates’ teaching was the result of the
inspiration he received from the tidings of the gods.”(BL 347)
Today this description
prompts me to wonder how far I want to take the Socratic example. Or, put otherwise, how might I today
describe the spiritual initiative of learning, the reception of the summons
from the gods to make music? The fact
is that I’m exploring this question throughout Being and Learning, from the onset when the project is identified
as one of making an account of teaching as the art of turning on the desire to
contemplate Being. And as recently as
yesterday’s commentary, with the riff on Grace, gratitude, grateful thinking, Gracias:
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!’ – ** a day
later on 1/15/15 this jam is featured on the DZ recording**] 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)
So I would begin the
description of the spiritual initiative of learning as Grace, and describe the
response to this as the thinking that is a thanking: grateful thinking. With Socrates “his musicality was a response
to the en-chanting message from the oracle, ‘Socrates, you are wisest,’ which,
it turns out, was a variation on a message he had received throughout his life,
revealed to him by a figure who appeared in his dreams say, ‘Socrates, practice
and cultivate the arts.’”(BL 348)
Of course, the
historicity of our experience is revelatory.
Socrates receives his call in dreams, from muses, and from the Oracle in
the temple of Delphi. Grace, upon first
glance, appears disembodied and mysterious, until I hear it in the voices of my
students, friends, and, of course, family.
The stranger too, of course, conveys Grace. So too the ice covered tree limb that
reflects the light of dawn.
“Inspiration, move me brightly, like the song of sense and color,
holding away despair….Statements just seem vain at last.” Recall: the fecund
Silence. This is where the description
of Grace begins; from that place of fecund, pregnant silence. Listening, thinking, learning: this is the
progression that produces the performance of philosophy, “the practice of
questioning, a practice, then, that [is] an ongoing encounter with the veiled
presence of a teacher – the spectre of the spectator – whose confounding
silence…[places us] in a condition of estrangement where [we remain] ‘un-known’
to [ourselves]…”(BL 348) I’ve edited this excerpt in order to extend
from Socrates to me, to us aka the ‘we’ I’m always assuming when I undertake
this work. Having said that, I’ll back
away until another day, perhaps tomorrow, from assigning to Socrates’ gods,
oracles, muses and dream figures the Grace I am experiencing. I will insist, however, on our sharing the
same becoming, and as working out the
same human project of music-making philosophy, attempting to cultivate and
practice the arts of thinking.
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