Thinking/Writing in the
stream of
[it has to be the second night from the Avalon Ballroom, and
another Charlie Miller gem! This set of
music has a running time of 91:27, which ought to be more than enough to take
me through this session. I’m a bit sore
from morning lax, although the family folk service lightened my edge considerably.
All that to say, I’m feeling myself to be in synch with the vibe of ’69
GD: a mix of edge and lightness. nb: morning folk service today was all
about the Light, and I couldn’t help but think about the dual denotations of melos, which I discussed in yesterday’s
commentary. I was reminded of this when
I saw that the “Lovelight” from 1/25/69 is a lengthy 20mins.]
A
few promissory notes before taking up the writing from 1/24/05:
First,
to explore the writings of the 4th CE spiritual writings of Cassian,
whose Conferences was a favorites of
Dominic. I was directed to this by DH
Scott, who tweeted out the link to a post on the Dominicana blog http://www.dominicanablog.com/2015/01/20/st-john-cassian-and-the-spirituality-of-st-dominic/
My
attention was grabbed by Cassian’s conversation with desert saints of Egypt on
the matter of renunciation, which has been a central topic of focus in the
pages of this blog, and, before that, in Being
and Learning.
Second,
to remember on the final day of this year long experiment of daily
phenomenological writing redux to explore the ‘quotations’ of Coltrane by the
GD. DH brother Pepe sent me a link to
blog titled “Grateful Dead Guide” that posts on songs and performances of the
early GD. The post Pepe sent me is from
7/10/11, and takes up Coltrane’s influence on the GD, specifically on Lesh,
Kreutzmann, and Garcia. http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2011/07/dead-quote-coltrane.html?m=1
In
yesterday’s commentary I made a parenthetical comment in response to the show I
was streaming during my writing session (1/24/69); the comment was inspired by
a particular moment in “New Potato Caboose” when Lesh leads the band into a far
reaching jam. It turns out that much of
Lesh’s signature ‘lead’ bass lines were influenced by Coltrane’s Africa/Brass album. At any rate, I’ll have to remember to
something on 2/13/15 about the relationship between Coltrane, the GD, and, of
course, the musings of Professor Iguana.
[--the
levels on the keyboard…TC playing?...is unbearable! I have to leave 1/25/69 and leap ahead 24
years to 1/25/93—so much for the 20min “Lovelight”]
Last
night I jumped right into the intro Greek book that arrived yesterday
morning. Class begins this week, and
because I’ll be missing the Monday meetings, I need to do a lot of independent
work so that when I join the group on Wednesdays I’m able to keep up. I mention this because after spending two
hours working through the first chapter I had learned enough to be able to make
my way through the dictionary entry that serves as the cover art for C.W.
Shelmerdine’s textbook. The book is an
‘introduction’ so, naturally, they designer of the cover selected the word
’APXH’, ń
as the word; APXH’
(arché) a beginning, origin; kat àpxñç
in the beginning; etc., etc. Here, on
the first night of study, I learn to read the signs that first disclosed
originary thinking.
Many
commentaries have taken up the descriptions of learning as an-archic, and more
have attempted to work out the project as a phenomenology of the
originary. But the an-archic character of
the originary has received little attention, although it has been implied with
each and every description of becoming,
and, as recently as yesterday, with the identification of a not yet named ‘new
logic’ (borrowing from Irigaray) of co-existence in difference. The originary can be described as
‘an-archic’ in the sense that APXH’ (arché) is a beginning, and perhaps even a
first cause, which strikes me as precisely the kind of anachronism the project
is calling for as it pushes back through fashionable cultural studies and, in
the retrospective moment, returns to first philosophy. The originary is an-archic because the
learning project, the work, demands thinking Being as becoming. Such thinking is already thinking Being
otherwise than Aristotle’s ‘Unmoved Mover.’
"APXW…of Time, to begin…to make a beginning of a thing…to
begin to build"
Originary
names the quality of Being appearing as becoming; originary names the
temporality of Being appearing as becoming; originary names the appearance of
becoming as a poetic making.
Learning is the poetical
actuality of Being.
Originary thinking is the
phenomenological account of that event.
[--I’m
having some kind of existential allergic reaction to overmodulating
keyboards! Now I’m finding VW’s playing
unbearable! Perhaps today’s writing was
meant to be sans musique? I’ll stay
the course with 1/25/93!--]
Only
an origin that is denoted in a verbal form can be described as an-archic. Being remains concealed, so that all
descriptions of Being offer an account of becoming;
and all work with Being, the actualization of Being aka learning is always a
working out of becoming. Being remains
hidden; although the fecund Silence
of the Open gestures towards the place of hiding (Urgrund), reënacted by the teacher’s renunciation, his reception,
his hearing before it leaps into active listening. This brings me to the writing from 1/25/05
that begins: “The renouncement of [the] juridical is an announcement offered as
the silence of the welcoming that en-opens the ground for the appearance of the
new.”(BL 358)
In
these commentaries I have introduced the category of active listening as a way
to describe what I take to be the necessary prompting happening in the teaching
that is ‘conducting’ and ‘arranging’ the poetic dialogic event of
learning. This category appeared as
soon as I revisited the meditations that were redescribing the call to learn
(the evocative invocation, evocative questioning, etc.) as down-beating. The recent category of active listening is
attempt to account for the presence (resonance) of the teacher post renuniciation
of the ‘magisterial voice’ of the know-it-all.
The pedagogy of gelassenheit –
letting learning be learned, learning to let learning be learned – is active,
it is an activity that is present in a manner that exceeds the conductor’s
baton movement. Unlike the conductor,
the teacher is directly involved in the music-making and not simply directing
it. If the traditional conductor directs
the performance, the teacher as music-making philosopher is involved in the
performance. The new category is meant
to draw out the meaning of the contra-diction happening with the renunciation
of the authorial of the juridical voice.
On
1/25/05 the renouncement of the juridical is an announcement; “this
‘announcement’ is offered as the contra-diction, the ‘not saying’ of the
silence that delivers the tidings of Being’s becoming…”(BL 358) There is a way to
read this ‘communication’ as something like a pastoral gesture, but to do that
is to ignore the renunciation as a denouncement, as an expression of the
empowering no. It is a proclamation of
a ‘good news’ that is at the same time a rejection of the old order on the
grounds that it is incapable of delivering such news; ‘news’ being a euphemism
for the working out of natality through learning. The announcement that is also a denunciation
shows “the future irrupting upon the past-present. The renunciation announces the readiness
for…the revolutionary new, the creation that ‘never was before and will never
come to be again.’”(BL 358, with
a paraphrase of Arendt’s conservative
education that preserves the natality, or revolutionary power, of each student)
1/25/05
is a reminder that the learning described through the meditations is the one
happening offered through a particular kind of philosophical education. This is not so much a philosophical account
of education, but a phenomenological account of a philosophical education,
specifically, the education happening via first philosophy. [Here is where I most certainly part company
with the majority of those who cohabitate my professional field of work. My concern is to describe the education
offered by first philosophy, specifically, the learning happening in the Open,
which has in the past year been denoted as ‘sacred place.’ What kind of learning is happening in the
Open? What kind of learning is enacting becoming? These are amongst the fundamental questions I
am taking up in my project that seems to be very far indeed from what goes
under the names of ‘non-ideal’ or ‘policy’ or ‘schooling’ what I understand to
be secondary and tertiary level projects]
1/25/05 is a reminder that when I write of ‘teaching’ I am referring to
the thinking that “welcomes the radical alterity of the event of learning;
radical insofar as it is a (re)presentation of Being’s presencing: an
unpredictable and unrepeatable spontaneous and improvisational performance of
creation.”(BL 358)
The teacher is described as the
one who “has renounced the claim upon words, and remains open to receive the
excess of meaning that is always already spilling over.” (BL 358) The emphasis is
placed on the renunciation of the claim upon words, and here my commentary
from 1/23/15 needs to be reiterated:
We are
placed under writing.
We are placed under writing.
We are
placed under writing.
However
you write it, the fragment insists that the death of the writer doesn’t happen
by way of the reader; there is no murder happening here, but a capture, a
seizure. The presumed authority of the
author does not rest in the presumed author.
The author is placed under
writing, which is to say: the ‘subject’ (self) is re-placed by the
‘author’. This is another way of
describing self-overcoming, the turning of the artist into the artwork: the
self is placed under writing; the
self becomes the subject of writing; the self is subjected to the force of
writing.
The self is subjected to
the force of writing.
All descriptions of the teacher’s
silence must be read within the context of self-overcoming and the force of
writing, which is to say, the force of becoming. The teacher’s delegation of “the force of her
authority to learning and the learning” (BL
359) is already a sign that he has been placed under the force of learning,
which is to say, placed under the force of the actualization of Being via
becoming. If first philosophy places a
demand on us, it is the demand that we relinquish the will to power as the will
to control the movement of thinking, and thus to relinquish the will to
determine the production of meaning. All
writing must in this sense be ‘automatic’.
And here is where the risk-taking Leap arises, which shows us that the
Leap is not a ‘forward jump’ but a turn, a conversion to a faith in the power
of thinking untethered from the will.
Here Arendt was brilliant in reminding us that the faculty (power) of
thinking was distinct from the faculty (power) of willing. It strikes me that thinking more often than
not exerted much of its energy attempting to free itself from the faculty of
the will.
The identified ‘force of writing’
is thus the actualization of the untethered force of free thinking, which is
identified as that poetical realization of Being. Writing that displays free thinking is
automatic, spontaneous, and improvisational.
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