OPM 244(245), October 16th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 239-240

Finally in Memphis!   Here for a few days to do some reconnaissance for the PES 2015 conference.  Took much too long to get here yesterday from Portland.  Left my house at 11am and arrived at the hotel at 9:30pm EST.  Southwest Airline is certainly amongst the least favorable, and very very low on my customer satisfaction list!  How can they sell a ticket for travel between Portland and Chicago and then take me through Baltimore?  Lesson learned, and a worth learning in October as opposed to March.    But everything was forgotten this morning with the rising of the glorious sun over the Mississippi river.  It took me all of a half hour of walking to get into the Memphis groove,  which is not something I take for granted.  Indeed, in all the years I’ve attended academic conferences it has been rare that I have immediately connected with the host city.   It happened awith New Orleans (LA), Oxford (UK), Vancouver (BC), and with Albuquerque (NM).  The fact that the hotel is right on Beale Street, and across from the Gibson Guitar factory made it so that I couldn’t avoid the immediate connection.  The location exceeded my expectations!  And then there the river, the glorious Mississippi, which I felt before I encountered it with my eyes.   As I was walking first thing this morning I experienced a momentary dizzy spell and thought to myself, “the river, the flow of the river…I can feel it.” So I walked down Main Street and over to the Mud Island pedestrian bridge

 and walked, alone, across the span that offers an unspoiled view of the river below. 

Patrick’s translation of Heraclitus fragments 41 & 42 demand to be cited as the transition to the commemorative commentary:

Frag 41: Into the same river you could not step twice, for other <and still other> waters are flowing.

Frag 42: To those entering the same river, other and still other waters flow.

The force of the Mississippi gathers these fragments, of course.  But in gathering them it forces upon me a question concerning the place of the ‘going-under’, aka both where the going under is going, and where one is arriving when one passes through the threshold (the porch) and moves onto the Open? 

Just over two months ago, on August 5^th, in the powerful wake of what I would now call my Thoreauean meditations happening in July I identified the coincidence of the primal ground and primal flow:  “This day, ‘Life’ can be given the alternative name ‘Nature,’ which is more accurately the name for Life in its organized and purposeful form aka gathered through the primal flow and onto the primal ground.”(OPM 172)   That day I also wrote of “the sublime encounter with Nature’s law (the primal flow)”.   If we think the primal flow and the Open (the place where the learning community is gathered into koinonia) through Heraclitus’ fragments we have the beginning of an understanding of how the river’s flow is something we enter into.  “Into the river” and “entering the river” in Heraclitus indicate the flow.   The threshold we pass through into this thinking is the part of the fragment that says:  Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) "everything flows".  

The question, then, of the ‘going’ of the ‘going-under’ is thought properly through the fragment’s fragment: Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) "everything flows".  And better still with the fragment’s fragment’s fragment: ῥεῖ (rhei).  The ‘going’ is ῥεῖ (rhei) ‘the flow’.  This is why I can write “the bearing of the sage is the comportment of the one going-under who offers the gift of teachability…The pointing that is offered in the disquiet questioning  of evocative speech…is a guiding that shows the Way of the crossing-over into this enchanted realm of openness.”(10/16/04 BL 241)

On this day ten years ago ‘going-under’ shifts to ‘crossing-over’, which denotes the crucial movement through the threshold into the Open, but also captures the movement across the span of the flow, where the expanse can be taken in.  Here ‘span’ is not the transcendent ‘bridge across’ the Open, but the temporal and spatial character of the place: the reach, distant and duration.   To move into the span of the Open is to move existentially into this place…and become a learner.  “the crossing-over into the un-known, indefinite, and indeterminate is not a leisurely saunter, but a risk-taking movement…This is the Leap into the future unfolding with the going-under.  And this going-under is a slow, careful movement…the movement of the letting-go that carries into Being’s essential sway.” (10/16/04 BL 241)

The essential sway is ῥεῖ (rhei) ‘the flow’, and the most challenging apprenticeship is to move into this flow.   Here, then, I recall Schürmann:  “The hardest apprenticeship is that by which man learns how to hear and heed no imperative other than that relation.  There is, then, a practical wisdom that consists in speaking and acting (human legein) by attending solely to the layout of presencing (economic Logos).  Acting as homologizing is nothing other than acting kata phusin: following the coming-about of phenomena, giving oneself over to the movement of presencing-absencing…Indeed, ‘human legein is in itself at the same time poiein, ‘leading forth’.”   The sage leads the way in this movement of ‘leading forth’.   Poiein is a making of the learning community through dialogue, ‘acting kata phusin: following the coming-about’ of the essential sway.   Again, it is a mimetic making, a copying and imitation of what is happening, flowing ῥεῖ (rhei).   To copy and imitate the flow is what we normally call ‘creativity’ or ‘action’, putting something into motion that has never been put into motion before and has no definite nor certain implication; forming (gathering together) something that has never been put together before and no definite nor certain meaning.  To copy or imitate is to enter the flow and we can call this ‘freedom’ and we can call this ‘thinking.’