OPM 211, September 13th (2004 & 2014) Meditation

My good friend, little brother (Manito), and colleague, Sam Rocha, member of the new classic quartet, read through the commentaries I wrote this past week, and posted a one word response: contact!  

Sam called attention to last moment of yesterday’s commentary, when I wrote: “a writing that is coming from a natural attitude, and offering the descriptions of everyday life, the practical.   This seems to be where the philosophy is happening for me, where the Contact! is occurring and the common ground is being experienced.  The question is whether or not this common ground is also the primal ground?”

Sam’s single word post – no doubt an indexical reference to what he he calls the reduction to the one beat, the rhythmic origin of music from the beating of the human heart – prompted me to trace back and locate the places where I wrote of Contact!, which I first encountered when reading Thoreau when perched in the attic of Stacy’s house in Falmouth Foreside, with the view to Casco Bay and the islands.   Contact!  appears from Thoreau’s epiphanic moment, the one he experiences moments after completing ascent of Katahdin, and, in turn, it is within that passage that turned me around this summer.   Contact!  has become more than a technical term for me.  It is a powerful symbol, and has gravitas; the kind that actualizes the very phenomenon it expresses and represents.  In this sense it is hardly a ‘symbol’ nor even a sign, but a kind of tool capable of phenomenological disclosure.  The closest analogy I can make is to the icon, the spiritually fecund image.  For me, then, Contact! is iconic, and while it demands a kind of reverential, as opposed to referential, attitude from us, it is also, like the sacred scriptures, something that is put-into-use, a tool.  There is more work to be done here in describing Contact!.  In particular, I feel there is a very important connection to be made between my use of this term, or the place of this ‘word’ in my phenomenological project, and the ‘ready-to-hand’ attitude I borrowed from Heidegger.  For now, as a reminded, I share  excerpts from the commentaries where it was first used, where the connection between Contact! and the common ground, and the question concerning the common and the primal, are first articulated:

OPM 159, July 23^rd

“Think of our life in nature, -- daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, -- rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth!  the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”(Thoreau)

Solid > actual > common sense: Contact! 

…for me, the anticipatory and preparatory work that gets us ready is rooted in our ability to perceive the animated life of Nature, to feel the force of so-called ‘inanimate objects’; this ‘force’ is succinctly named by Thoreau: Contact! Contact!   We hear it, yes, but ‘vibrations’ are not simply sonic, but always physical, the felt movement of phenomenon.  This is why we say informally but quite seriously that we feel ‘vibes’ from people, places and things. 

OPM 162, July 26^th

Of the three ‘grunds’ Heidegger lists, the one that names the solid and actual, with which we have Contact! Contact!, is Urgrund ‘primal ground.’  I say this because originary thinking is originated (initiated) by the Contact! Contact! with this ‘primal ground’.    But here is where I find myself facing question that requires a decision, not a final one, of course, but one that expresses the taking of a position.  And the decision takes the form of a response to the following question:  if the Urgrund is the common sense (sensus communis) we all share aka the solid earth! the actual world!, then how does it follow that us philosophy types are perceiving an exceptional modality moving on that primal ground?

OPM 166 July 30^th

In this sense ‘history’ is the facticity of the world that we need to move along in order for us to perceive (dimly through mist) the primacy of the primal ground.  And that perception is indeed not the ‘heir’ of myth because it is not ‘myth’ but Contact! that offers it to us.  But the thinking that proceeds from that factual Contact!, which becomes part of the historical,  has to call upon the same faculty of imagination if only to process what has been disclosed.  Thoreau, for example, imagines the paddlers when he is, in fact, descending from the summit of Katahdin.   And the writing that relays that vision is a poetic infused interruption of his naturalist’s chronicle.   Nothing is explained in that moment.  But much thinking is originated, thinking that becomes historical and yet full of future.  

The ‘ready-to-hand’ attitude, as one of the modalities of phenomenology, coupled with Contact! and the example of Thoreau’s thick descriptions of his sojourns into the forests of Maine, has put me into a deep reflection on the ‘poetic’ as the key qualifier for the project I undertook ten years ago.  While I have certainly not disowned or divorced myself from the maxim more poetry, less prose, I am wondering about the aimed for balance between the poetic and prosaic, with the latter apparently playing the role of the supplicant, recognize a deal must be cut now, while the tide of the Poetic is ebbing.   But if a deal that will guarantee a lasting recognition of the prosaic is going to be made, then it will happen within an adjudication mediated by Contact!  And before that can happen, more thinking the ontology of Contact!, which appears to emerge in the nexus of the poetic and prosaic.   

And this deep reflection emerged, in large part, in anticipation of rejoining the legend of Zarathustra, a piece of writing whose omission from Being and Learning is already an indication of my ambivalence towards the poetic qua philosophical fiction, an ambivalence I am only now, on this day and at this moment, recognizing and articulating! 

Nevertheless, to that legend I now return…following the same path of presentation I was taking prior to the ‘interruption’ that occurred when the writing broke off on 09/07/04.

“Zarathustra sat up and listened attentively to the harmonic rhythm, this new song arising from the rush of the river and the down beating of the rain upon the forest canopy.  He gathered dried brush brush and sticks, and threw them upon the coals that glowed within the small circles of stones he found at this site beneath the falls.  As the flames rose, shadows danced in the glade, and upon the trunks of oaks, maples, fir, pine and elm.  ‘See how you dance now, my companions.  Rejoice in this gathering we have formed within this lighting that liberates you form darkness of your despair.  Let us, in gratitude, sing praises to our parents, Sky and Earth, who ‘guard us from the monstrous abyss.’ 

“He watched the dancing shadows, and was warmed by the rising flames.  Like a child, he felt a nurturing embrace and was comforted.  So much change, so much transition, so much not yet announced, not yet received.

“Winds from the North began rising, slowly at first, then building, and the rains subsided, pushed away like a curtain rising before the climatic final act.  Zarathustra, the quick learner who the caretakers had called at first The Dreamer, then finally The Alert, remembered the teachings he had received in the forest, and fed the fire from the pile of sticks and branches he had gathered from the primal ground, the one that gives what is needed, but no more, and no less.  ‘Fast and hot burn the small and dry.’  The flames were stoked by the winds, which whispered deep secrets in the canopy above.  The shadows danced and sang a song of Anguished Doubts to Zarathustra:

                          Where do we go, oh! Where do we go?

                          Are we dead beyond, or do we yet live?

                          Will there be existence again?

                          Will the joy of the Giver of Life be there again?

                          Do flower go to the region of the dead?

                          In the Beyond, are we dead, or do we still live?

                          Where is the source of light, since that which gives

                                    Life hides itself?*

“The voices of the shadows faded into the whispering of the winds.  Zarathustra stood and moved into the company of the dancing phantoms.  ‘Much have we yet to see, and more we still have to hear in the morning of our departure.  In this evening festival, let us be together in this moment where we are lifted by the memories of the fellowship we have forged.  Carried here, we have been, by the compassion and love of our friends, our teachers.  We learned to care, and cared.  Let us dwell upon these memories, let us recall these teachings, and let us be released from our anticipation of the Beyond, and wait patiently upon its arrival in the morning of our departure.  On that morning your questions will be re-posed.  On this evening let us remain, still and silent, in the shelter where we abide.’  Zarathustra then dampered the fire.”

With only some minor editions, the preceding was the total unabridged writing from this day ten years ago today.

*These lyrics from the “Thought of the Sages,” are taken from Native American Mesoamerican Spirituality (pp. 181-187), a volume in the monumental collection spirituality edited by Ewert Cousins, my Fordham profession that I have written about in this blog.