OPM 236(37), October 8th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 232-233

“La voz del pueblecito was interrupted one day, on Fourth Street, by a troubadour who sauntered into town with a gait not seen in the hamlet since the time before the elders were children.”  This Borgesian meditation – an example of originary thinking that I wrote for and published as one of Palabras Entre Nosotros in the libretto for Sam Rocha’s album Late to Love – is moved by the gait of the troubadour who is leading his trio into the pueblecito.   The gait has not been seen in the pueblecito for at least four generations.  It is of a time before the time of the present, and in no way part of any tradition held by the hamlet.  The arrival of the troubadour announces the coming of the new and the strange for the current residents of the pueblecito. But does his gait, his manner of walking, make this announcement?  Of course, but it is not only the announcement of the new and strange that the gait is showing.  It is disclosing the swing of the bluesman.  But we need to perceive carefully his movement if we are not to be fixated on its novelty and strangeness.

His gait is an enactment of the walking blues, and must be perceived as not quite a limp, because there is only the slightest aspect of stiffness.  It is, rather, the rhythm of his stride that distinguishes his stride.  There is an unevenness to the movement that appears if and when we watch the stride of his feet.  But when we take in the flow of his entire body we understand the apparent unevenness is just that, an apparent hesitation.   Take in the dip of his left shoulder, and the counter tilt of his head, the wrist action, and you shall recognize the unity of rhythm and movement.   Indeed, it is familiar all too familiar, and already close to us.  In fact, it is the rhythm that we feel, when we feel it, of our beating heart: bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump.  Isn’t that second beat slightly more emphatic than the first? 

The emphatic beat is the syncopation of the rhythmic ceaseless flow of that river Heraclitus identifies as the one that is never the same.  Those called by the river are moved by its syncopation, its flow.  And this is only to say that those who are called to the river are those who hear deeply that hidden harmony they always already carry with them.   On this day ten years ago I identified the stride of the troubadour in the descent of Zarathustra.   His “going under is the essential swaying of the ones, learners, who have diminished into the futural. ‘Essential swaying is that into which we must advance.  That means here: ‘experience’ in the sense of advancing-into and abiding in and sustaining essential-swaying – and this happens as Da-sein and its grounding.’”(10/8/04, BL 232)  What is Heidegger indicating with ‘experience’ as ‘advancing-into’ and ‘abiding in’ and ‘sustaining essential-swaying’?  

First and foremost Heidegger is pointing to the ground, the open region, the location of our being, place as the manner of our being.  We are insofar as we are somewhere in time and space: in a place.  Da-sein (being-there); the being gathered by the place.   ‘Advancing-into’ and ‘abiding-in’ as descriptions of ‘experience’ indicate the practice of Heidegger’s practical philosophy – detailed by Schürmann as “the hardest apprenticeship” of “learning” to listen to Logos, which is a hearing of the here-and-now, the call of the place.  When we remember that Logos is a sonic phenomenon that is received and translated into symbols, we have a sense of descent on to the ground of the open region as a learning to listen that is documented via a kind of writing.  But in this case the reception is not documented by phenomenological description but by ontological translation.  The reception of Logos – the gathering force of Being that arises from the specificity of a place – is what Thoreau calls a ‘translation’ of the self by place.   What we have here is the topographia (topography) of the huacaslogical: the ‘writing’ (graphia) of the place (topos).     That is, the graphia of the topos.   This is what Thoreau indicates with the ‘translation’ of the self by place.

A pedagogy of place follows from this translation, and if Thoreau’s epiphanic moment at the summit of Katahdin yielded him a vision of the past, then the experiential movement of this practical philosophy affords us a hearing of the future: “echoes of these distant voices of the future are barely audible, and the saying is cryptic.”(10/8/04, BL 233)  The hardest apprenticeship is thus not simply to hear the appeal of Logos in the here-and-now, but to hear the future appeal, the appeal of the future.  This is another case of the learning of close listening: the preparatory work of conservation; keeping open the open region in the manner of our abiding, abiding in the essential-swaying. “Here we focus on being-toward-death as the preparatory work of the ones diminished in their sacrifice to the futural.  Futural appears as the horos that binds the inevitable yet unpredictable epoch of possibility.  The preparatory work is the sustaining of openness that always anticipates the arrival of the newcomer, and in this anticipation conserves the threshold of welcoming through which the newcomer will pass.”(10/8/04, BL 232)   Here is the ‘conservatism’ of Arendt’s conservative education in its post-humanist form, for it is not a ‘world’ (the work of human hands) that is being conserved, but the possibility of being translated, and even before that, the preservation of the tradition of the hardest apprenticeship.  What is being conserved is the techne of that apprenticeship which remains always a preparation for the topographical encounter.  The threshold scholar is thus the one whose dwelling sustains the tradition of phenomenological reception.  “And this waiting upon is properly understood as the work of maintenance and conservation, the work of care-taking identified in the ongoing building of poetic dwelling.”(10/8/04, BL 232)