Sunday, November 2, 2014

OPM 260(261), November 2nd (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 259-260

Back in Saints Café (State College), of course*, on this Feast of All Souls, the third and final of the Days of the Dead festival, and the morning after the Day of Reckoning for PES Memphis 2015.   In truth, it’s only just later in the morning of the Day of Reckoning, with the final bell tolling only 7 hours ago!    So now we have the harvest of many fine paper submissions that have answered the call that was announced under the banner “The Blues/Soul Music.”  It’s entirely possible that the entire program, including papers, alternative sessions, and studio sessions will be gathered by the koinonia of the Call.   If that were to happen we would experience a truly historic moment, a rupturing event.  

*of course, because this is the place where I completed Being and Learning!!!

Yesterday’s commentary concluding with revelations on ἀγάπη (agape), which is that originary word that works in direct relation to the Open in the sense that agape and gap are closely connected.  I wrote that “learning begins with ἀγάπη, agape.”(11/1/14)  Agape appears in the experience of awe and wonder (thaumazein) that Aristotle says is the starting point of philosophy; hence the love that is at the center of the experience of philosophy is sparked by wonder.  First and foremost this spark happens in the originary gathering experience when the learner appears from the effacement with Being’s Becoming, the disclosed presencing that offers the possibility of thinking aka making, forming poiein.  The second moment of that originary wonder appears with the natality received/perceived as the estrangment of the stranger, the newcomer.  The connection of ἀγάπη (agape) and thaumazein is crucial, and needs further exploration.  Suffice it here to note that both appears always as doubled, or folded: the learner with Being, and the learner with other learners.  And, in this way, the doubling happens as the folding of the ontological and political “ἀγάπη, agape as ‘Love: esp. fellowship love, charity; the love of Divine (Holy Spirit) for person and of person for Divine (Holy Spirit).’”(11/1/14)  Learning is an event of koinonia: the gathering of the community via the force of shared love that is always already a primordial love, the ceaseless offering of life.

The ceaseless offering is described in political terms on 11/2/04 (BL 260) as “the world rising up within this Open, irrupting from the mysterious darkness of profound emptiness…” The received offering is the formative work of learning, and the work is the making of history, the concretization of the world: repair and renewal.    I stretch Arendt’s category by “worldliness as the dynamic unfolding of the learning community whose ‘product’ and ‘harvest’ is the openness appearing as mindfulness.” (11/2/04 BL 260)  This is the world as en expression of human action, “the ‘outward’ appearance of [the] originary giving offered in the gift of birth, the gift of Life itself.”   And this is doubling effect of the originary offering:  the recurrence of the advent (the play of originary as birth/rebirth).  “The reception of the ‘newcomer’ into the learning community is the spiritual re-birth of the human be-ing from the ontical status of its historical situation. This ‘re-birth’ is the un-binding of the human spirit as the creative, dynamic and improvisational performer of freedom.  The capacity to perform freedom is the original gift…offered to all creative beings bearing the vestige of Being’s creative unfolding.” (11/2/04 BL 260)  [I need to reiterate that ‘creative’ does not denote ‘creation’ but the appearance and disclosure of the originary qua natality in the work of human hands (and the words of human saying and hearing).   When we bring things together via the force of the originary, we are acting ‘creatively’ or enacting ‘creativity’.  But we are not creating! “As created we are creative.  Creativity is the fundamental vestige of our be-ing as beings-in-the-world…properly written as ‘being-with-the-emergent-world.”(11/2/04 BL 260)]


If the force of Memory, mother of the Muses, is the present in the gathering this is because the second moment that constitutes the doubling is not simply a coming together but a re-collection, a coming together again.   This play of the recurring advent is “affirmed in the re-collection of the originary offering…undertaken with poetic dialogue.  Dialogue affirms the dynamic ‘re-incarnations’ of the original offering in the production and reception of the new…the improvisational that spill over in the excess of meaning that is borne with every communicative activity, with every…intersubjective experience…with every embodied action.” (11/2/04 BL 260)

3 comments:

  1. 3.0 (Saturday, Portland, ME) Yesterday, when I was editing "LEARN" part 3: Discussion, I connected the description of the chaos of the 'deconstructed library' with the circularity of the seminar that moves around the hub that is the book (the significant object of study), which has been studied in the deconstructed library. The connection was made through the openness of the text. In making this move, which is a continuation of the trope of the '(w)hole' (articulated in the 2023 Nancy paper), it seems I am also expressing a description of the open region that was written this day in 2004: “the world rising up within this Open, irrupting from the mysterious darkness of profound emptiness…”. I take "chaos" from Benjamin, and run with it in "LEARN": “Unpacking” is a euphemism for “liberating” the book, freeing it from the catalog regime. What’s more, when he admires his books in the state of being unpacked, Benjamin is describing the deconstructed “library” as a place of disorder, and thereby a place of philosophical study. While this may appear counter-intuitive, “disorder” denotes the original meaning of chaos as “void.” To describe the place of philosophical study as a “disorder” is to identify it as fissure or break in the “order” that reproduces the monotony of schooling." And: "the studio of learning is that location where the student encounters the chaos of the deconstructed library. It is important to recall that “chaos” originally denoted a gaping void or chasm, and has arrived via French and Latin from Greek khaos ‘vast chasm, void.’ It is this original denotation of “chaos” that I am working with. This ‘being-with’ in solitude is the dialectic de estar solo, the dialectic of being alone with the significant object occurs in this chaos of the studio of learning. Recall Martín-Estudillo’s description of Goya’s drawing Más provecho saco de estar solo that “depicts a reader wearing heavy clothes standing in a void.”

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  2. 3.0b - (from the 2023 Nancy paper) - "(w)Hole. Abyss. Threshold. Cracks, fissures, openings. Through ways, free-ways. Ports. Portals. Passages to worlds Other than our own." And: "Music circulates as a sonic force without extraneous signification, moving through the abyss, the hole, the opening, negative space, void, place of Other, hidden reserve where silence is preserved." And: "Another is a riff on Pablo Picasso’s sculpture Guitar, and his use of negative space as both a literal and figurative engagement with the ‘hole’ or threshold through which music moves, circulates and gathers the listener.' And: "Resonance: music listening to itself, the circulation (retour) of music back to the place where it originated (sound hole, abyss, in-between), without why." And: "By amplifying the negative space of the instrument’s hole with a cardboard cylinder Picasso reverses the usual order of the instrument’s composition: the interior – the resonant chamber – detonates above and beyond the chamber. His guitar composes a reversal: the interior, the space held inside the instrument, placed outside; the hidden unhidden, absence presented, and in doing so Picasso’s guitar takes us into the threshold through which the sound of music moves, circulates. This unconcealment of the hidden (the re-sounding of silence) forces us to recognize the presence of what seems to be mistakenly registered as absent."

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  3. 3.0c (More from the 2023 Nancy paper) - " Inspired, we may feel ourselves in and with music, and sense the tocar of music as originary coexistence, as a poiēsis that remixes ‘our’ subjectivity through the acoustic aperture, gap, or hole where music circulates." And: " Music’s encompassing circularity, turning like the vinyl record album, indeed, as the turning vinyl, takes us around and towards an ‘empty’ center (the revelatory ‘sounding’ hole in the middle of the vinyl). Music arrives, circulates, moves, and takes the listener into that ‘sounding’ hole (void, abyss, place of Other) With listening we are taken away from mastery and towards mystery, towards what is irregularly revealed or not revealed at all." And: "His descent into music is prestaged by the dwelling where the Invisible Man lives, “a hole in the ground, as you will.” With this staging Ellison reverses the Platonic order whereby ‘enlightenment’ occurs through an arduous climb that takes one out from a dark cave of ‘ignorance.’ Whereas Plato’s liberated cave dweller ultimately ‘sees’ true reality in the world outside of the cave, Ellison’s invisible man perceives it in the “hole in the ground” where he lives. And in contrast to the shadowy darkness of Plato’s cave where people are kept shackled, the Invisible Man’s “hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light.”

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