OPM 268(269), November 10th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, p. 269

[Although I’m writing tonight from my study in Portland, most of the commentaries most of the writing over the past month has been written while I’ve been riding on planes, trains, and buses, and places in between: airports, cafes, train platforms, etc.  And I’ve been able to keep my focus in those places where there is a cacophony of background noise by listening to the Grateful Dead, especially the early performances.  And because this has become a ‘habit’ I continue even on this relative quiet of a cool November evening in Maine to listen to these early shows while writing my commentaries, such as now when I am listening to the following show that happens to be from this day in 1967 https://archive.org/details/gd67-11-10.sbd.sacks.1612.sbeok.shnf]

Two weeks ago I returned to Agamben’s book on Paul The Time That Remains as a way of enlarging the context of study for my sections of HUHC when we read the “Letter to the Galatians.”   Among the lines of analysis that caught my attention was Agamben’s riff on κλῆσις klésis (‘calling’), largely because ‘calling’ (vocare) was one of the central leitmotifs of Being and Learning.   Indeed, for me the relationship between Being and learning is one that always initiated by a ‘calling’, whether this is happening at the primary/ontological level, or at the secondary political/existential level (intersubjectively).   The essential sway, that fundamental rhythm that rocks us and that sets the groove for the  movement of our freedom, liberation and emancipation, is received first and foremost as a calling, and offering to move.   And the beckoning of the sage is a calling, an invocation, an evocative invocation.  Also the song of the singer, the music-making philosophy of the learner who is saying something.  His song is an offering made to the learning community that calls them to compassionate listening.  The same Paul that has been very much at the center of things in this blog that past two weeks uses  κλῆσις klésis (‘calling’) in several of his letters, e.g., “irrevocable are the gifts an the calling of God,” Romans 11:29;  “consider the calling of you, brothers, that not many wise according to flesh [were], not many powerful, not many of noble birth,” Corinthians 1:26; “Each in the calling in which he has been called, in this let him abide.” Corinthians 7:20; “being enlightened the eyes of the heart of you, in order to know you, what is the hope of the calling,” Ephesians 1:18; “exhort therefore you, I the prisoner* in [the]  Lord, worthily to walk, of the calling to which you were called,” Ephesians 1:4; “[There is] one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called into one hope, of the calling of you,” Ephesians 4:4.

*δέσμιος désmios (prisoner, captive, detainee) is distinct from δοῦλος doûlos (slave), the two work in tandem to deliver the same message: those who are called into the one body and spirit and hope, that it, those who do works of faith, are, like Paul, total subjects, or totally subjected.  

I offer all of that as context because the meditation from this day proceeds from talk of providence and Rilke’s Open [“those first moments of love when the human being sees his own vastness in another…and in man’s elevation toward God”] back to thinking about the reception of the providential as the call to care.  It begins “The call to care is conveyed through the evocative saying heard by the venturesome who abide in the learning community and move with the essential sway.  This movement is the…staying together of friends who are enjoined in dialogue.  The call to care in an implicit supplication co-arising with the novelty of the freely performed, unbound improvisation.  The call is not offered then received…the openness…is already a movement that is ready and waiting…This is why the learning community is properly identified as a community of compassion…gathering within the encompassing Open.”(11/10/04 BL 269)

Again, the graphic artistic rendering of Howlin’ Wolf is the exemplary representation of the writing/thinking happening here as the connection is being made between the call (as an offering and supplication) and the heart (as both receiver and donator).   The specificity of the music being made is asserted on 11/10/04 as “the question concerning the conditions for the actuality of compassion…” Like the blues singer thorn encircled flaming heart, the learning community is making the music that is making an offering in the form of a question, a critique, and a demand:  are we today capable of compassion? “This question arises with the implicit supplication of all who abide in the learning community.  The implicit supplication denotes the ‘outward’ appearance of the originary dispensation that rests in the stillness of the heart.”(11/10/04 BL 269)   In raising this question, however, the learning community that I am describing, the one that is pastiche I have gathered in my philosophical imagination from the historical examples of counter-cultural and emancipatory congregational movements, is not offering anything that it is not itself attempting to work out.   That is to say, it first and foremost raising this question for itself, and making experiments with compassion: “this mutual exchange is the essence of poetic dialogue as the actualization of Being’s dynamic presencing.”(11/10/04 BL 269)