OPM 259(260), November 1st (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 259-260

The GD often sing of reckoning, and today the coincidence of expressing gratitude to the Dead and the arrival of the day of reckoning for PES Memphis 2015 happening on the middle day of the three day feast.  But, as I noted yesterday, the day of reckoning extends from the end of the feast for All Saints into the feast for All Souls, which is how it must be for a conference organized under the banner of “The Blues/Soul Music.”  With that as the context, it is not surprise that the meditation from this day ten years ago writes of ‘gathering’ and ‘cornucopia.’  Indeed, as I wrote to one of my colleagues yesterday, today is the final day of the autumn harvest, the gathering of the cornucopia.  For the next two months I will, with the help of my committee of 23 reviewers, carefully select the best of what we have gathered in the harvest and then bring that bounty together with selected complementary ingredients.   Then a five day feast will be offered!

That the writing on 11/01/04 should make a swing with the identification of the Open, calling it “the cornucopia of learning,” is no coincidence for me.  I’ve become increasingly aware of a kind prophetic logic at work in the original meditations.   In what sense can that place identified as the political (public realm) be described as “that sphere of hiding, the fecund ground that is the source and root of bounty…cultivated by the learning community’s work”? In the sense that it is “the abundant source that offers sustenance for the human spirit.  The Open…nourishes and sustains freedom.”(BL 259) 

The concept is multidimensional:  the Open is the granting place that offers the realm for the learning community to gather.  But this offering is always already made with each human person who appears in the community.  The community is after all the gathering place of plurality, “the fact that men [people, difference] and not Man exist.”(Arendt)   And this plurality is the appearance of singularity, the manifestation of natality in the world, a disclosure of the person that is only ever made real when they are received/perceived by others.  The learning community is that event when people can “see and be seen, hear and be heard.”(Arendt)  The offering of the Open is thus an offering made by world to each and everyone of us who is born into it, and, again, by each and everyone of us toward one another insofar as we are gathered together in koinonia, the fellowship of the community of learning.  As an offering made by the community, the Open is granted as openness, “the learning community’s openness, its risk-taking welcoming, offers the gift of hospitality to the newcomer, the stranger…”(11/1/04 BL 259)

Granting is gathering in the sense of re-collection.  Memory, mother of the Muses, brings together the community gathered for learning, understood as music-making philosophy.   The dialogic jam session gets underway with the memory of “the originary dispensation from Being…the re-collection unfolding in the gathering of community…the re-membering memory of the originary gift.”(11/1/04 BL 259)  [I can’t emphasize enough that what is happening here is a gathering, a collection via re-collection, and in no sense is the learning’s community poiein an act of ‘creation’, which, anyway is beyond the power of human hands.  The learning community properly receives/perceives the arrival of the new in the actualization of natality.  To make something original is not to create something.  So when Arendt borrows from Augustine and says, “we can originate because we are original,” this denotes the original is the new way an [already existing] many is gathered together.   The originary grants the force of the original, the power to bring things together.  And the thinking that gathers via the force of the originary is learning, the making (forming) of something new.] “…the gathering of community…the re-membering memory of the originary gift.”

Gathering, today, ten years later on this day of reckoning, is sounded and called by a horn, “the ‘horn of Amalthea,’” where the cornucopia is placed.  The call of the horn gathers the many.  First, the originary welcoming call.  Next the gathering, into the place granted in the welcoming silence following the call.  This silence of the Open is filled, “overflowing with the abundance of harvest…”(11/1/04 BL 259)

The re-membering memory is the full bodied incarnation of the originary dispensation offered in the beating heart, that ceaseless rhythm that maintains the time and tempo of the dialogic jam.   This is another way of describing the originary granting of receiving/perceiving as an act of compassion, and the beating of the human heart as enacting the originary granting “This is the appearance of agape, the profound love of the other that co-arises with the affirmation originary dispensation.  Agape signifies the appearance of the realm of openness that is preserved with the community because it is preserved with each as the spirit of humanity…Agape is the investiture that dignifies each being with the investment of Being (existence).  Agape affirmed in the recognition of the other as other, as exceeding the limits of status quo…”(11/01/04 BL 259)

ἀγάπη, agape carries the sense of the originary wonder from whence the thinking I am describing as learning gets underway.  Learning begins with ἀγάπη, agape.  And this originary is also expressed in ἀγάπη, agape as ‘Love: esp. fellowship love, charity; the love of Divine (Holy Spirit) for person and of person for Divine (Holy Spirit).’   In this sense the origin of learning is koinonia, or the gathering of the community via the force of shared fellowship aka a love that is not simply ‘charitable’ in the sense of hospitality, but a deeper and more powerful sense of kinship and fidelity, compassion, a shared faith and hope amidst a shared suffering.