OPM 344(354) February 1st , 2015 Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 367-368

Today is the first day of February, and so with the turning of the calendar I arrive at the final month of 2.0.   The experiment of writing/thinking each day through the commemoration of the original mediations written a decade ago got underway in February, 2014, and here I arrive at February, 2015. 

Today is the birthday of Langston Hughes, and I want to celebrate his work by sharing one of his pieces, a poem titled “Life I Fine”:

I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been
so cold I might've sunk and died.

But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!
I took the elevator Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby

And thought I would jump down.
I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn't a-been so high
I might've jumped and died.
But it was High up there!
It was high!

So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love--
But for livin' I was born
Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry--
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.
Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!

 Langston Hughes

When 2.0 was in the conception/pre-production phase, in the fall of 2013, I remember meeting with Stacy Smith, and talking with her about my plan to commemorate the original experiment and, in the process, revisit the entirety of Being and Learning with a slow careful daily reading of the entire book.   She suggested that I record myself reading the original meditations, and I took to her suggestion with enthusiasm.  Indeed, in its initial design, 2.0 was going to consist of a daily reading of the original experiment of daily writing, and the reading was going to be streaming live.  As if I had an audience for the project!  I explored the variety of options for live streaming, and was moving ahead, when Ockham’s razor descended upon me like the voice of an oracle.  Keep things simple, which is the journeyman’s equivalent of packing light for the long strange trip that is about to unfold.   So I settled on the familiar and less complicated Googlesphere, which allowed me to publicize the project on the low-fi blogger that interfaced easily with YouTube.  So I settled into recording a daily reading and commentary and then posting those on the blog with some commentary.  That worked well for the first four months, and was an excellent way for me to document that time when I was travelling quite a bit between Portland, Hempstead and Summit, but also to Chicago, Albuquerque, Philadelphia, Steubenville and Ithaca.   I made much of the context and setting, making certain to document the place, and, on occasion, including one of my colleagues in the video, such as when Rocha made a cameo in the very early moments of 2.0, last February in Chicago.  

The video recording was halted in June during the family trip to Mount Desert Island and Aacadia National Park.  There was no wifi in our cabin, which did have electricity.  And so began the period of writing more detailed commentaries that has brought me to the final calendar month and last two weeks of 2.0.  The turning of the calendar prompted not only a  memory of the beginning of 2.0 but also a recollection with the initial process, and thus came the impulse to record a reading of the meditation from 2/1/05, which I have just done, and that is posted below.

In terms of the benefits of reading aloud, there is too much there for me to take up in the time allotted to me on this day of commemorative writing.  But two observations can be shared:  the first one is the connection to the oral tradition; the second the connection to the material.   Reading aloud establishes a kind of intimacy with the work itself, but also with the tradition that is speaking (singing) through the work.  Reading aloud reminds me that this is a work that is happening through me and to me; that I am being worked on by the work, by the very force I am describing; this is the essence of the relationship between Being and learning; the relationship that can only be described via poetic phenomenology because it is an event of becoming.  Learning is the poetical actuality of Being. 

I come from an oral tradition, and from one that is musical, and full of pathos.  I am a child of the Caribbean, who has come of age and arrived as a man of the mountains, rocky coast and waters of Maine.    And much has happened in between.   But first and foremost, I come from an oral tradition, and thus philosophy is also my native language: a first tongue arriving from alma mater.   I first heard this voice spoken aloud in Mass, although I hardly knew it at the time.  Yet, before that, the voice of philosophy arrived to me as the empty, awful and overwhelming form of the concept of Eternity, flooding over me when I was four years old.   This was my first and perhaps only effacement with Being, because it was completely unmediated, a true and dare I say pure effacement.   It was indeed awful, horrifying, and not because of the immense weight I felt.  Rather, I was overwhelmed by the intensity of the reality of what was revealing itself.   At that moment I arrived at the realization of myself as a part of Being; a participant in what has always been and will always be: Being.    Here then is the source of my working out the question of Being as the one and only project of philosophy of education, which is only ever the working out of this original epiphanic moment…for me.  Philosophy is only ever the thinking back, the re-collection with that kairological moment, that original encounter with the originary, Being.   And this thinking back, which Heidegger describes as ‘running ahead to the past,’ is at the same time an unfolding, a movement with becoming, which is to say, the only possible existential temporality that is offered to us when one has the desire to think back to Being, when we have the desire to contemplate Being; after we have been compelled to behold Being.

Recall, the first line of Being and Learning:  “In what follows I offer an account of teaching as the turning on of the desire to behold Being.”(BL 1)

‘Behold’ is distinct from ‘contemplation.’   Contemplation is for me something rare and unique, an almost mystical experience, and one that, like the toothache, is an experience that actualizes our singularity, the fact of our singular existence.  To ‘behold’ is to affirm, to witness, and at the same time to recognize.  It is to be on the receiving end of the act of disclosing or showing, revealing.  In this sense, the one who shows or discloses aka the teacher is the one who is compelling others (learners) to behold.   Here I am recalling Heidegger’s description of pointing, and want to use that description as a way of thinking the work of the teacher: the one who teaches is pointing, saying ‘behold.’   There’s also no question that this gesture is part of a prophetic discourse, the writings, for example, of Jeremiah, Ezekial and Isaiah.  And Paul, too, in second Corinthians, refers to the voice of the Holy Spirit who makes the gesture to the time of Grace and Salvation, who says

"AT THE ACCEPTABLE TIME I LISTENED TO YOU, AND ON THE DAY OF SALVATION I HELPED YOU." Behold, now is "THE ACCEPTABLE TIME," behold, now is "THE DAY OF SALVATION"

There is then a temporality of beholding.  It is the time of thinking, the time of what I have described as grateful thinking:

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’)…. 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)  

In sum, if teaching is the art of turning on the desire to behold Being, then we have to think this art as arriving from the prophetic tradition, one the hand, and the evangelical, on the other (if by evangelical we mean the congregation cultivating and koinonia generating that is happening with Paul’s ministry).  And with that prompt we are also offered any number of form(s) of writing (the epistle, the catechism, not to mention the art forms of hymns, spirituals, icons, etc); perhaps the most inspiring example in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.  In fact, most if not all of Nietzsche’s writing is a syncretic form of prophetic and evangelical, again, stretching these categories almost to the point of rupturing them.   But to understand the categorization one needs only compare it to, say, Kierkegaard, whose writing expresses an apostolic form.   It is not clear to me at this moment if the project of originary thinking is reduced to any specific existential modality, although it tends to appear as if it were written behind the mask of the ‘teacher’.

The preceding needs to be kept close at hand when reading the meditation on 2/1/05, which picks up from the preceding day’s focus on the teacher’s work.  The description of this work on 2/1/05 emphasizes the position of the teacher vis-à-vis the students, and in doing so highlights the temporality of teaching.   The teacher is described as ‘facing’ the students, but this facing is a gesturing to what is beyond them, that is, to what is arriving.   Paradoxically, it is they who are arriving, which is to say each is being gathered into a community of learning.   The teacher’s gesture indicates the actualization of the learning community: ‘behold, now is the time of thinking.’    

1.    “Forward facing, the teacher projects beyond whatever has been and welcomes what is always bursting forth from that groove she has opened with her attentiveness to the nativity of the learner.”(BL 368)

2.    “The teacher’s art is a practice that enacts the forward facing going under into the futural.”(BL 368)

3.    “The forward facing one…is sacrificed to the future.”(BL 368)

4.    “The teacher…stands at the threshold between past-present and future….she remains a learner herself.”(BL 368)

5.    Thus “Heidegger says, ‘the teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices…’.”(BL 368)

6.    “The teacher is the one who maintains the groove, the en-opening rhythm that clears and preserves the space into which the novelty arises and appears.”(BL 368)

7.    “The teacher, as arranger…maintains her forward looking gaze, the constancy of emptiness of the one who constantly questions.”(BL 368)

8.    “Receiving the nativity of be-ing, the freedom of humanity, the teacher…receives what arrives from beyond, from the hidden and mysterious future that remains concealed.”(BL 368)

9.    “The teacher [practices] of the art of…the messenger [of the] news of the relationship between Being the be-ing of human…[pointing to where they] are ‘delivered over to each other’ in that event of appropriation…learning.”(BL 368)