Random
(or not) was the discovery (reminder?) that Christian life can be described
under the category of the Way, as it
is in the translation of the Catholic study Bible I happen to be glancing at
this morning over toast and coffee. I
was casually reading Acts, picking up a section I’d been studying some weeks
ago when I writing on Paul’s conversion, and this morning it jumped out at me
that those Saul was ‘persecuting’ are described as men and women who were
following the Way. And then he is famously
put off his way when travelling to Damascus, and put on the Way. I wrote about this event on 12/25/14.
The
writing on 1/19/15 is ambitious, and I’ll try today to revisit it with the same
level of energy. The meditation offer a
syncretic reworking of previous materials, bringing together the principal
elements of what yesterday I called original
confrontation. The meditation also
reaches back to a citation from Heidegger that is the source for the category
of the Open, and in doing so re-calls the connection between the Open and the
maxim “song is existence”. On this
aphorism I want to reiterate the commentary writing that has engaged it,
starting with the writing from May, which I recalled the other day:
From 5/23/14: “In commemorating OPM99, I'll take up
the spirit that moved the original experiment, and begin with two fragments
that I picked up this morning. The second, which I'll share first,
because it offers the context, was an email I received from Jason Wozniak,
co-founder of LAPES, whose presentation at PES Albuquerque I recorded and
posted on this blog. An exchange we had this morning culminated in his
citing of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: "Song
is Existence." While, at the moment, I can't find the
meditation where this exact quotation appears, it is quite close to the
Holderlin line that is cited in OPM 94 from May 18th: "Soon we shall
be song"! Indeed, but in what sense 'song'? In what sense is
this 'being of song' what arrives after the poet's renunciation, which
renounces speaking (the verbal), and announces listening (the non-verbal,
'silence')? In what sense is such 'silence' the 'sound' of instrumental
music, non-verbal communication?”
FROM 12/31/14: In the spirit of this day, which is an occasion to reflect on the
past year and point to some its highlight, I want only to share without
commentar two moments from this past year’s commentary writing. The first is the result of the search I did
this morning when I combed the commentaries for the phrase “song is existence.” Here is what I wrote on November 4th
OPM 263(264):
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) It is the place to note the importance of
the gathering call as having such a force that the one who receives it is
totally turned around, such that the original (and originary) question raised
in Being and Learning regarding the
turning around of the soul to contemplate Being (ie., to begin learning) is
here ‘answered’ again via the force of the call (klēsis)
that is uncompromising and we might even say total if not totalizing of the
subject. This is the other side of
Kierkegaard’s muscular subject: he is radically subjected by his faith. But
if we follow the Pauline congregational we end up with the learning community
that is gathered together by muscular subjects, a powerful chorus, the
proverbial Fisk University singers whose faith is actualized in the
congregation they form and that forms them.
Heidegger is cited on 11/04/04 to express this: “The more venturesome
are those who say in a greater degree, in the manner of the singer. Their singing is turned away from all
purposeful self-assertion. It is not a
willing in the sense of desire. Their song does not solicit anything to be
produced.”(‘What are Poets For?’)
Musicality
describes the fundamental ontological situation of attunement, the realization
‘ownmost potentiality.’ “…’musicality’
names the manner of the expression that reflects the attunement of being
in/with the dynamic dispersal. This
attunement is the heightened awareness…”(BL
330) Yesterday ‘heightened
awareness’ was thought through Nietzsche’s ‘six thousand feet’. Today the altitude reveals the air that
Irigaray insists that Heidegger has forgotten. What air?
The cool, crisp air of the earliest morning, where the light first
touches this land, the summit of Katahdin.
At that altitude we remember the silent beckoning of the air.
Attunement
is the heightened awareness, the breathing of the air moving at that altitude
(‘six thousand feet beyond us’) the memory of a mutual dependence between Being
and Learning, described on 12/31/04 as the “an-archc interdependency”. We
listen, we hear the call, and we remember to breath that air, and inhale,
deeply. And then we exhale, we sing holy
songs and we are wholly human. Song
is existence. Musicality, the mimetic re-presentation and expression of
the interdependency between Being and human, gathered and propelled by Spirit,
making holy time and space; abiding in sacred place. “Musicality is the name [of] the poetic…the
excess…the ex-cessive open-endedness of the poetic…”(BL 330)
Song is existence!
If ‘Being’ is existence, then the aphorism discloses both the call to
learning and learning itself (specifically, the mimetic re-presentation of becoming). Song is existence denotes: Being and becoming, and virtually collapses
the distinction between Being and learning, showing what Nietzsche calls “the closest approximation of a world of
becoming to a world of being – high point of meditation.”
The
context for the beginning my commentary on the writing that happened ten years
ago today is the conclusion of said writing, the citation of Heidegger that
helps me to map the place of learning and at the same show why this place is
properly understood as a ‘holy land,’ which is to say, ‘sacred place,’ because
it is where we encounter the originary disclosure of Being, and thus where the
event of learning happens. [nb: much more needs to be
written/thought on the use of ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’, which were deployed in
exploratory ways in the past year, both in the pages of this commemorative blog
and in other writing, specifically my Lapiz
publication.] Here then is the excerpt
from Heidegger that concludes the meditation on 1/19/05:
“The learners are the ones gathered into ‘the sound
wholeness of the Open…The more venturesome are those who say in a greater
degree, in the manner of the singer.
Their singing is turned away from all purposeful self-assertion. It is not willing in the sense of desire. Their song does not solicit anything to be
produced…The song of these singers is neither solicitation nor trade. The saying of the more venturesome which is
more fully saying is song. But, Song is
existence…’”(BL 353, Heidegger
citation from ‘What Are Poets For?’)
My
first response in re-typing this is to exclaim: Song is existence! Memphis,
Memphis PES, Memphis PES 2015!!!
Is it not that gathering one that is organized in the Open? Is it not a gathering of ‘the more
venturesome’ [at least insofar as those who are coming to and ‘singing’ at PES
Memphis have more or less agree to venture from the usual course]?
And
thinking back to this excerpt today, I am confident that the call to Memphis
has asked all who are coming to ‘turn away from all purposeful self-assertion,’
in the sense of bracketing their desire to see their name in lights, and to
measure, one against the other, author again author. The Masked Philosophers Ball, which is well
under way, has bracketed the will to power, the desire for self-assertion,
solicitation, and trade. What’s more,
and to this I can attest, the Ball that is taking us into the gathering, has
exercised the power of what on this day ten years ago was taken up via Nietzsche
as the empowering No! That is to say, we have said No! to resentiment, and NO! to the presumed privileges assigned
to self-proclaimed mandarins of the field.
‘The saying of the more venturesome which is
more fully saying is song’
More fully saying…is song.
Song is existence.
Being is song.
Learning is singing.
Singing is music-making philosophy.
Being and learning is realized in ‘the
sound wholeness of the Open’.
The Open: sound wholeness
The more venturesome: fully saying
song.
The movement into the Open
happens on the via negativa (akin to
what is sometimes called ‘negative theology’).
This via negativa is shown by the enactment of one who is
described as the first learner because, as Heidegger puts it, he is ahead in
that he has more to learn than the students: he has to learn how to let them
learning. This via negativa takes one to
the origin, to the place of the Open through a listening that is described as
compassionate. This via negativa is taken “with the
diminishment of the teacher, her renunciation of the authorial voice…”(BL 351)
The via negativa offers a disclosure of the Open, and is thus a
path that is taken insofar as it is enacted.
The Open is thus place that conveys the way of learning as the path of
becoming. “This space cleared en-opens the ‘essential’ ground, the encounter
with the originary dispensation, the (re)collection with what always remains, un-said, in-effable.”(BL 351)
The Open as path offers fecund Silence. The teacher enacts this with her listening;
but it is a provocative and evocative listening, and active listening that
prompts saying, prompts singing. It is
a listening that hears in what is said what
is not yet sung, and it responds
by calling out for the singing of the songs that have not yet been sung. This is the technē of music-making philosophy.
Paradoxically (perhaps)
the active forceful listening that prompts and promotes learning is so far from
passivity that it is described as a confrontation. The commentary from 10/11/14 is worth
reiterating here:
Another
beginning by way of a critical engagement, a confrontation with the first
beginning by what of ‘force’ [Gewalt],
the force of reading, the exegetical force that unveils what has be left
‘unsaid’ by the first thinkers. Auseinandersetzung denotes too the
exegetical ‘discussion’ with what is remains unsaid. Close listening enables us to hear the
unsaid, and our disclosure of it is precisely what prepares the new beginning
of a ‘future thinking.’
On 1/19/05 the meditation turns
through Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s will
to power as the ‘empowering no,’ and in this way attempts to describe what
I am today aiming to disclose as confrontational
listening; the fundamental technē of teaching that yields the praxis of learning as a making of
something via transformation. If song is
existence, and Being is disclosed to us
as becoming, then learning is the ongoing transformation of the ‘self’ that is
happening in community, through the force of koinōnia. And, finally,
this force, the one that makes of the artist a work of art, is the force of
Being unfolding as becoming. Here’s how Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche
offers context to that description:
Will
to power is never the willing of a particular entity. It involves the Being and essence of beings;
it is this itself….Otherwise we could not understand what [Nietzsche] always
refers to in connection with his emphasis on the character of enhancement of
will, of the ‘increase of power,’ namely, the fact that will to power is
something creative. That designation too
remains deceptive; it often seems to suggest that in and through will to power
something is to be produced. What is
decisive is not production in the sense of manufacturing but taking up and
transforming, making something other than…other than in an essential way. For that reason the need to destroy belongs
essentially to creation. In destruction,
the contrary, the ugly, and the evil are posited; they are of necessity proper
to creation, i.e., will to power, and thus to Being itself. To the essence of Being nullity belongs, not
as sheer vacuous nothingness, but as the empowering no.(BL 351-352, from Heidegger’s Nietzsche seminars)
Here are some Sentences
that follow this most revealing of excerpts:
1.
The
‘empowering no’ is the destructive positing, a showing of the ‘ugly,’ and
‘evil’ positionality of the oppressive, binding authorial gaze…(BL 352)
2.
…the
conmpasionate affirmation…this ‘yes’ that confirms the natality of the student,
which recognizes her originality as a be-ing in the process of becoming, her
learning as a creation, an artwork in
progress, arises from and [moves in] the space cleared by negation; the
diminishment of the teacher, the destruction that preserves freedom…(BL 352)
3.
Lao
Tzu (Tao II:48:1-2) identifies the
link between the diminishment of doing and the devotion to learning, he calls
our attention to the willing of non-willing that destroys and affirms, that
clears the way for the arrival of the new with the destruction of the old and,
thereby, places both teacher and learner in the midst of Being’s becoming. (BL 352)
4.
The
diminishment of the teacher, her going
under, is the destruktion that
deconstructs or dismantles (Abbau)
the reifying gaze that seizes the student away from her ownmost possibility.(BL 352)
5.
The
renouncement of this authorial positionality is the welcoming of that ownmost
possibility that is enacted in the creative actualization of the student as a
be-ing in the process of becoming.(BL
352)
6.
Learning
is thus the actualization of the creative force of freedom that Nietzsche calls
‘will to power’… (BL 352)
7.
Thus
the learner abides (de)construccion, of/from the creative force
unleashed by the with-holding silence that compels the saying of that which has
not yet been said, the saying of something new, the poetic playing of the
improvisational song. (BL 352)
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