The marginal notes from the editing that happened in April, 2007 compel me write/think in the stream of good ole March 3, 1981 from the Cleveland Music Hall, which must have something about it? It arrived to me in the Summer of 1984 in Maine as my first ever cassette bootleg, and hasn’t stopped returning since then!
At one point I had considered published a short book that
focused exclusively on the stranger, the perennial theme of existentialism, and
even considered borrowing from the late Maxine Greene’s catalog of titles and
calling my small book «Teacher as Stranger».
Even «Feel Like a Stranger» or «Feeling Like a Stranger» as a way to
begin the phenomenlogical description of teaching first philosophy. BUT the reader would have to listen to 3.3.81! ha
ha!
The threshold scholar, a figure who came on the scene
quickly at the St. Louis PES (2011?) with the presentation of a paper I made
alongside Troy, returned a year later and became the subject of much writing in
the spring of 2012. And I’ve already
shared the video I recorded that describes the threshold scholar. Here is it is again: Threshold Scholar
I’m thinking of this threshold scholar this bright crisp
morning at 29 Sunset Drive, and not
simply because I am repeating the «Stranger» from 3.3.81 during this writing
session. ‘You know it’s gonna get
stranger, so let’s get on with the show!’
Now that should be the way I
begin each and everyone of my seminars! That line should my version of counting
off ‘And a 1, 2, 3, 4...’ Anyway, on
this day, ten years after writing the original meditation on 2/11/05, I return
to the writing and I’m greeting by a squally of marginal notes that I make on
4.10.07, when I was at the Highland Center in Crawford Notch, New Hampshire,
snow shoeing, hiking and skiing in the Presidential mountain range. That context places the marginal notes that
read:
«The Wind in
the notch, Crawford Notch, is this the sound,
the keynote of Being’s becoming?»
«the Notch! the wild!»
«finding faults > opening grooves»
«getting lost in the language...that’s the fun stuff!!»
I remember vividly
that April featured two massive snow
falls when I retreated to Crawford Notch for a week of editorial work that was
the first attempt, some two years after completing the original experiment, at
editing, which entailed going back and making notes in a very unsystematic way,
such that it appears that I started with the last week of meditations! But such was the unsystematic process that is
expressed in the aphorism that begins the writing on 2/11/05:
«A writer once said,
‘chaos breeds life, order breed conformity.»(BL 386)
That citation holds much, but it is ‘life’( Life!) that apprehends the reader, and like the vanishing point in
visual arts, draws the meaning of the aphorism together. This prompted me to search the past two
months of commentaries, gathered together in this file that holds OPM 301
onward. ‘Life’ appears...81 times [I refuse to be drawn in to numerology!]
and there are simply too many citations from the past two months of writing
that are worthy of sharing. So I
selected from a span of about ten days of writing, between 12/17 and 12/29, and
share them here:
‘En-active’ denotes enactment; and
here I re-call Heidegger’s “The enactment of life is decisive.” (cf. OPM
296(297), December 12th)
Enactment of life is decisive; what we do and what we make
discloses who we are. This disclosure is the
realization of some one as opposed to
some thing. Decisively, it matters, what we do.”(12/17/14)
Repetition and reiteration – [“coming, coming, coming around,
forming a circle”] -- I’m reminded of
the koinōnina moment with my students
when we held class on and around the Chartes labyrinth; and I’m further
reminded of Bernard of Clairvaux, and the holy time and the repetition of
prayer, service and celebration in spiritual communal life. All this is enactment of learning: “The
enactment of life is decisive.”
(12/21/14)
“The enactment of life is decisive” can be heard as “decisive is
the enactment of life,” which is to say that we en-act life; and we must hear the performative that is
expressed by that reduction. Put
differently, the life en-acted is the mimetic repetition of the creative act,
what yesterday Gutierrez reminded us of when we cited him on the unity of
salvation and creation. Here I am
reminded of an etymological moment in Schürmann, when he reminds us of the
roots of ‘decision,’ saying something like “from French décider, from Latin decidere
‘determine,’ from de- ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut.’” When we reach caedere we can appreciate why the the encounter with Being’s
‘originary dispensation’ is described as ‘estranging.’(12/21/14)
“The
Pauline decisive decision is to enact life by saying Yes! to the calling.” (12/25/14)
Friends we've been, brothers became, blood of spirit life
Life sustained, words poured out, melody and dance
[Rocha lyrics
received on 12/15/15]
“From
Nietzsche I gather the experience as disclosing to us a positive and undeniable
affirmation, what he say is the saying Yes! to life.”” (from 7/28/14 cited on
12/28/14)
“Life: “Art expresses the attunement to Life itself, understood as the dialogic
event of concealment/unconcealment, hiding/appearing, peace/freedom,
reception/response.”(BL 327) Moreover, Learning is described as unfolding “from the attunement to the call
of Life itself…”(BL 327) The
call…”(12/28/14)
“On 12/28/04 Life is coupled with Learning, and it also used to qualify Way of Nature. “Learning
is the affirmation of Learning
itself, and art is the expression of this affirmation.”(BL 327)”
On 12/29/04 the
heteronomy experienced via learning is described as working under the force of
Life (and with the description of Life the category of ceaseless nativity appears nascent): “Life signifies not simply the
ceaseless creative activity of Nature, but the eternally creative spirit of
art, embodied and enacted in the work-of-art, in artwork. And learning is the
existential abiding expressing the attunement with Life. The learner is to learning as Nature is to
Life. But the former is not simply an
‘imitation’ but its essential expression, its (re)presentation.” (BL 328)
“The learner is to
learning as Nature is to Life.” A syllogism?!
Not exactly, or, exactly in
the strange logic that organizes Being
and Learning; the strange logic that allows the first part of a syllogism
to (re)present the second half. But
what of this re-presentation? The presentation, first and foremost, of the
relation of Nature and Life. Here’s a
qualification: “When we say ‘Nature’ and
refer to the ongoing creation of Life, we do not separate ‘Nature’ and ‘Life’
in the same way that we do not separate the artistic performance and the
artist, nor the learner from learning.”(BL
328)
“To learn is to be with Being, to emerge as a created be-ing. To
learn is to dwell as artwork, to abide existentially (in/with Life) as
creation.”(BL 328, emphasis placed on
12/28/14) Less mimetic imitation, more originary
mediation.”(12/29/14)
Chaos breeds life, order breed conformity.
Feel like a stranger, stranger.
Here and now, it seems to me that the Life Principle is
the best way to translated the category I borrowed from Marcuse, that first
appeared 2/7/05, BL 377, the
so-called ‘Reality Principle. I do
recall in February of 2005 picking up a copy of Marcuse’s Aesthetic Dimension, and finding in it much to appreciate, and
wrote on 2/7/05: «Thus with Marcuse we affirm the learning community as that
enchanted ‘world of art,’ which is ‘that of another Reality Principle, of
estrangement’...»(BL 377) I then went on to collapse Marcuse’s
category into what Heidegger calls the primordial intuition, which arrives from
the phenomenological atttitude. Recall, the primoridial intuition is “the
‘principles of principles pertaining to the phenomenological attitude:
everything given in primordial intuition is to be accepted just as it gives
itself….it expresses the fundamental life-stance of phenomenology: the sympathy
of experience with life! This is the basic intention. It has nothing to do with irrationalism or
the philosophy of feeling. Rather, this
fundamental stance is itself clear, like life itself at it basic
level.’”[Heidegger cited BL 375, from
2/5/05]
It
is not so much a ‘collapsing’ of the Reality Principle, but a disclosure of the
category via the primordial intuition. The
‘principles of principles pertaining to the phenomenological attitude:
everything given in primordial intuition is to be accepted just as it gives
itself.’ I read this ‘principles of
principles’ as principium, which is
the Latin denotation of the originary. Principium
denotes ‘a beginning, an origin,’ and the example offered is one that takes us
back to the Kineo Greek of John’s Gospel, so that the principium (‘principle of principles’) given to the primordial
intuition’ is λογος (logos or Logos): ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν
ὀ Λογοσ or λογος
[it seems to me it must be Λογοσ
if I’m going to insist on writing Being…and I insist!] And it follows that the revelation of the
Reality Principle constitutes the
teaching of first philosophy insofar as what is happening in learning is
showing of life itself. This is the
mimetic of becoming as the making of art qua music-making philosophy.
And
it must be immediately noted that ‘sympathy of experience with life itself’
maps onto the original reception happening with ‘compassionate listening’ that
is immediately enacted as evocative questioning; the questioning that prompts
the process and keeps it underway. Here
too it is important to note that ‘sympathy’ as ‘compassion’ denotes the
affirmative (positive determination) happening via the gathering spirit of κονονἰα
(koinonia) that moves the work
learning community: rapport, fellow feeling, affinity, harmony, association,
affiliation, and fellowship.
So something like the following fragments:
·
the primordial intuition
demonstrates the faculty (power,
force) of thinking mediating the Reality Principle…
·
‘it expresses the fundamental
life-stance of phenomenology: the sympathy of experience with life! This is the
basic intention.’[Heidegger]
[the
fragment that is not yet a Sentence, nor Thesis, does not have a numerical
citation, and must be ended with Ellipsis*: …]
*Ellipsis
(plural ellipses; from the Ancient Greek: ἔλλειψις,
élleipsis, "omission" or "falling short")
[--nb: at this moment with the 7th
or 8th 3.3.81 “STRANGER” playing I was reminded of the film I saw
last night on the ongoing subway art project http://www.wliw.org/21pressroom/t/treasures-of-new-york-art-underground/893/
which inspired me for all sorts of reasons, but most inspiring was (a) the way
the artists talked about the process of making the art that included (b)
collaborations with those who would translated their visions into mountable
public art (mosaics, etc.), and, of course, (c) the koinonia of the work once placed in the subway stations. Today, with what feels like an abundance of
time and space to work, I am inspired by the way artists work at their craft,
returning again and again and again to their projects. They
know what’s what, and if these Meditations, Commentaries and Sentences are
anything at all, they are my own attempt at working out thinking in a process
that is not unlike the way the artists are
working out their crafts.]
working out their crafts.]
All
of the preceding was required in order to have context for all references to
the Reality Principle in the
meditation on 2/11/05, and to understand the Sentences distilled from the
writing that happened on this day ten years ago, especially the connection
between the primordial intuition (revealed first and foremost and perhaps
exclusively to the sage…the process would have
to unfold in this manner) and the appearance of the Reality Principle in
learning, which is to say, the appearance of the Spirit, Life itself, in the
work, such that the work is not the teleological ‘mechanical reproduction’ but
the poetic μουσική (mousike) of soul
crafting first philosophy. [-- it’s gonna
be a long, long, crazy, crazy night! --]
Before presenting the
distilled Sentences from 2/11 or 2.11 I want to return to the quotation that
prompts the meditation: ‘chaos breeds life, order breeds conformity.’ What’s important to note here is the relation
between the arrival of life and the improvisational that expresses the
spontaneity of thinking. If the faculty
(power, force) of thinking shows itself (is given, es gibt) via spontaneity, then this is to say that the primordial
intuition reveals life itself, becoming, to happen via improvisation and
spontaneity. Further, ‘breeding’
entails the important sense in which learning is a making, a making of life, a
formation of human being, a working out of humanity. Still further it must be noted that
primordial intuition takes us to the originary, becoming as ceaseless nativity,
and thus to the understanding that ‘chaos’ denotes the spontaneity happening
via nativity, or in human terms, natality.
Again, we are makers because we are made, and learning is the most
powerful demonstration of the occurrence of that making. All this to say that when I appropriated ‘chaos’
on 2/11/05 I was attempting to translate the category of ceaseless nativity
through Chaos Theory, which Edward
Lorenz summarized in a way that, I suspect, makes evident what I was going for
on 2/11/05 when I started with “A writer once said, ‘chaos breeds life…’”:
“Chaos: When the
present determines the future, but the approximate present does not
approximately determine the future.”(Edward Lorenz)
2.11.a. “’chaos’ appears as the life-giving dynamic
of the Reality Principle…the
unveiling/liberation, coming-forth of the novel, difference, the production of the artwork of learning unfolding
from the (re)turning [to] ownmost possibility, freedom.”(BL 386)
2.11.b. “Chaos is the affirmative force affirmed by
the work of art as the realization of
the ‘Life Instincts,’ the creative force of…ceaseless natality [nativity]
unfolding in the poetic dialogic event that ‘communicates truth not
communicable in any other language, it
contradicts.’”(BL 386)
[--nb: there’s no proper citation of the
fragment that is quoted in the preceding, but I suspect it is from
Marcuse. The book is in my Portland
study…so I can’t confirm until I return early Friday morning--]
2.11.c. “learning is…always moved by Being’s
becoming…the ‘enemy’ of conformity…the force behind the de-stuktion of the familiar.”(BL
386)
2.11.d. “the difference making of learning, the contra-diction, counter-saying of the
poetic expresses its (re)presentation as a work of art, as standing out from the familiar, as ‘unrepeatable,’ and thus
spontaneously/improvisationally created.”(BL
386)
2.11.c. The contra-diction begins with the enactment
of compassionate listening, the original questioning offered by the sage
[teacher of first philosophy]
2.11.d. In the beginning there is listening, and with
listening there is questioning, “a disquiet questioning that delivers through
interpretation, through the hermeneutic phenomenology that en-opens by finding
‘faults’; not errors, but openings, fissures, the fault lines of grooves.’”(BL 387)
· disquiet questioning
is the setting of the grooves that prompt and keep the time (temporality) of
learning…
2.11.e “Teaching is the constancy of the estranging
welcoming that affirms learning as a (re)presentation of the Reality Principle…with this affirmation
conveys the contra-dictory saying of
the poetic.”(BL 387)
2.11.f “If learning is the bringing forth of the
new, then this chaotic, spontaneous and improvisational performance (re)presenting
the force of Being’s becoming is
affirmed as an artistic performance
by the reception that…acknowledges the difference
that is made [in] the making of…
difference.”(BL 387-388)
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