OPM 209, September 11th Mediation (2004 & 2014)

The question concerning the ‘off’ day, or the day off won’t be settled, but what will come to closure today is the end of the break in the narrative unfolding with the daily writing, and tomorrow the legend of Zarathustra picks up again, which I have mixed feelings about.   On the one hand, I’m looking forward to the rejoining the daily writing which is taking me slowly but sure back to the material that was published in Being and Learning.   Indeed, if I calculated correctly, the writing that makes up the legend concludes in a few days, and at that point begins the material published as the chapter ‘Zarathustra’s Descent’.   And that chapter only really makes sense in light of the legend that was not published in the book, which renders that material somewhat cryptic.  On the other hand, I’ve been enjoying the freedom afforded by the gap that has opened up in these past few days in the vacuum created by the absence of material to be revisited.  Of course, I have been revisiting the writing that happened during those days, and so the commentaries these past few days have been somewhat Augustinian in the sense that the force of memory has been guiding and propelling the writing.   And because memory, as Augustine showed up, is something like an infinite library, I felt empowered by a freedom to both describe the memories of those days in Scotland and the textual context for the writing I took up, but also the freedom to venture back into the phenomenology of the forest, if I can describe the turn I made with Thoreau this summer.  Yesterday’s description of the pine tree, along with an account of the common ground we share with the trees, represents an example of the audacious writing I am doing with a sense of gratitude. 

At this late hour, as I take a train back to Summit after a very long day that included teaching a full day at Hofstra and then attending my colleague and good friend Frank Margonis’ colloquium presentation at Teachers College.   The dinner afterwards let out around ten and I am now…AT THAT moment, when I was typing I realized the train was going to Newark Penn Station, and not Newark Broad Street station, and so I was on the wrong train, and my plan of making the connection was quickly dashed.  I found a conductor and explained to him my situation.  He told me that I could take the light rail from Newark Penn to Newark Broad Street.    For a moment hope for making a connection returned.  Alas, the ‘downstairs’ light rail station location that he spoke of was far enough away that I was exactly 30 seconds too late to catch the light rail that was departing the minute I stepped down onto the platform  I didn’t have a ticket, so it was more or less moot because I would have been charged a penalty fee that would have could three times the fare.  So here I am, now, sitting waiting for the next light rail train that doesn’t depart for another twenty minutes, which, at this late hour that is approaching midnight, feels much longer. 

And here then the opportunity to muse on the relativity of time, the weight of time that is felt when the body approaches exhaustion.  So too the opportunity to muse on the virtue of selfishness, which is to say, to depart in time to insure one’s comfortable return to one’s home.   But where is the virtue is putting oneself as a singular person before oneself in the company of ones friends with whom one rarely spends time.   Of course, the issue I’m confronting as I sit here in a strange place enduring what will become a story to be told is the decision to leap onto the train in Penn Station,  as opposed to waiting for the train that was scheduled to depart directly towards Summit.  That is the matter on the proverbial table!

Where is the common ground I had wanted to wrote about? (I had, moments before realizing my error, collected the fragments from previous meditations, where I translated  Thoreau’s ‘common sense’ as common ground...but the sudden shift of my circumstances caused me toss those aside in favor of a documentation of the unfolding experience of moving down the wrong track)  I see no ground anywhere around me.  Cement, steel, wood and ceramic.   The ground gave, in some distant past, the materials that were processed to make the platform, stairs and the railing, the tracks and rails.  I look to my left and to my right, and above me and below me, and there is not one scintilla of plant life, nothing organic, nothing natural.  I am, on this day that marks the day ten years ago when the daily writing experiment was interrupted, totally enframed by things  made by human hands and the machines we have built to make the things that make the other machines we have rely on to move us from one place to another.

Here finally arrives the light rail, and in that moment is disclosed to me is my unfailing and indefatigable faith in the novelty delivered by the experience of riding this train!   Could this be what this turn of events is intended to show me?  In the face of exhaustion and the predictable error in judgment that lead me to leap on the wrong train I do not lose my composure, and not only find the conductor who can direct me, but also find the humor in the situation, sharing laughter with the conductor who understand well how I would have been mistaken.    

And, in the end, I arrive back at 29 Sunset Drive at 12:36, the end of 19 hour day, welcomed home by the song of crickets and cicadas, and on the way up the hill I wonder if what has been disclosed to me isn’t something approximating a kind of misanthropy, and if not that, a strong disdain for engaging philosophically with human problems.  Ethics has never been of any interest to me as a philosophical question, and I’ve run my course with political theory.   While I respect Frank and his project, I’m just not compelled to participate in a project that appears to me governed by rage.   I’m compelled, rather, to move as far from human problems as possible.    This is the necessary implication of the anti/post-humanist turn.