Wednesday, March 5, 2014

PPM21 March 5, 2014 6:...

Today was a very special day, as I visited with the family of the great artist Jan Sawka www.jansawka.com, whose wife and daughter welcomed me into their home and showed me the genius of Jan's art, and the studio where he made it.  I am most grateful and look forward to the project that is unfolding with them!  In turn, I read today's meditation in a spirit of elation.   The meditation itself was an example of what I have been calling in my commentaries 'compression,' because there is so much that is being repeated from previous mediations.  This was not intended, and what happened was very much a matter of habit and routine: as the experiment unfolded some of the writing was akin to a warm-up exercise  or routine that I would complete before getting into the zone of making something new.  In some sense it was what the medieval philosophers and theologians called 'excitation' of the spirit via prayer that would take them into contemplation.   Again, this wasn't so much by design and was just what happened.  What is quite new in this mediation are two very key quotations from Heidegger, which I spend some time talking about in my commentary.   Alterity is described as the showing of beings, and I emphasize why the perception of alterity, the strangeness of beings, is not anomie or alienation, which remains an experience of the subject.   The perception of alterity takes us into the phenomenological relationship because the focus is on beings, and 'the nothing' is described as that space (gap) or absence that allows for the presencing of beings.  The nothing, then, as the excess of Being's presencing can now be understood as absence, or space, which is also the possibility of freedom.  Hence, I cite Heidegger:  "without the original revelation of the nothing -- no selfhood, no freedom."  And, further, "In the clear night of the nothing...the original openness of being as such arises:  that they are beings -- and not nothing."






1 comment:

  1. (20/10 yrs later) - 3.0: first I have to note the visit to Jan Sawka's home. What brought me there was a piece in a New School blog by one of my old grad school profs, Jeff Goldfarb, who did a profile on Sawka and mentioned that he'd designed the set for the summer tour of 1989, the 25th anniversary. I followed up with Sawka's wife Hanna, and was able to spend the day with her and her daughter. They took me to visit his studio, and I was also able to examine his design sketch book for the GD set! That as a unique experience, and I'll have to recount that in an upcoming Dead Zone. Here are links to the Sawka set design:
    https://jansawka.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jan-Sawka-Grateful-Dead-set-daytime-view.jpg. https://www.jansawka.com/multimedia/dead.html.

    What struck me about that visit was the visual artist's claim via his wife, that Jerry had wanted to create a GD show as a "total visual experience." I was somewhat taken aback by that, and would be even more so today. While the visual, specifically the lighting, has always been an integral part of a GD show, the performance all revolves around, is origanized and motivated by the music. It is a total sonic experience enhanced by visual aids

    Reading back to the 2.0 (10 yrs later) commentary, I appreciate what I described as the compressed form of writing. But the heart of the original meditation are these two quotations from Heidegger: "without the original revelation of the nothing -- no selfhood, no freedom." And, further, "In the clear night of the nothing...the original openness of being as such arises: that they are beings -- and not nothing." I recall spending a good deal of time and focus on the first of the quotations, making it a primary fragment when I was teaching that spring semester in 2004, focusing on "selfhood" and "freedom." Reading this today, in the midst of the the current state of the project, I'm struck by "selfhood," which is a category I hadn't thought much about in some time. The "original revelation of the nothing" is at one time indicating the project of poetic praxis as "originary thinking." But, especially today, it more closely denotes what is occurring in the aesthetic experience, especially with music, when that experience is an event of the subject's displacement. And this suggest that "selfhood" is perhaps the condition of the freed subject. As for the other fragment, this now can be read as suggesting that "selfhood" is the condition of the freed subject, but also subjectivity as meaningful and significant, lasting and in some sense "durable," or having duration in memory. "In the clear night of the nothing...the original openness of being as such arises: that they are beings -- and not nothing." The original openness seems to denote the (w)hole through which music is circulating, and the "clear night of the nothing" seems to denote the silence enabling the listening that receives music.

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