Thinking/Writing [again!] in the streams of
Beginning
with the “Playing in the Band” from 12/27/86 (repeating several times) and then
seeing where the flow takes me! These
four 80’s shows from 12/27 are all spectacular in their own way. Something about the spirit of December 27th!
On 12/27/04 the
spatiality of the huacaslogical – the
phenomenology of sacred space – gives way to the complementary temporality of
the learning community’s work, described with language that resonates with
Badiou (who I was not reading in
2004). The work is described as “the
dialogic event, where and when the poetics of artistic expression
unfolds…”(BL 325) And “through the
artistic performance of poetic dialogue, the futural is welcomed.”(BL 325)
With the work of art – the poetic making – “we experience the letting go
into the futural…”(BL 325) The temporality of the space renders it place
of learning, where things are in constant motion (flux, ceaseless…); the place
of motion, a dynamic place, a receding horizon, and so the work of the learning
community is a “movement along the boundless boundary.”(BL 325). The description is
right to capture the place of learning as dynamic, but I’m ambivalent today
about ‘boundless boundary’. And it may
be the ‘boundary’ that I am ambivalent about, or ‘boundless.’
The ambivalence is
probably rooted in a misreading of ‘boundless.’ Again, it strikes me that ‘boundary’ is too
visual a metaphor, and too close to ‘border’.
In other words, the misreading neglects to think ‘boundless’ as denoting
the force of the dynamic movement. A
place of learning has ‘boundless’ energy; the art work of learning takes up the
excess; the dynamic movement is propelled by the reception of Being’s
Becoming. ‘Boundless’ must be thought
as force, the force of learning. Power.
Power. A non-negotiable power is a force. And a force demands compliance. This is the sense in which Paul speaks of the
Law as tutor. The force of Being’s
Becoming received as an offering puts into motion art making, specifically, the
performance of music-making philosophy.
This can be the dynamic dialogue of the exegetical seminar; it can be
the dynamic production of music in the recording studio; can it be the live
performance, the show?
‘Artwork’ denotes
inter-subjective making, rather than
the ‘object’ that remains as a vestigial archive of the making. Of course, that only begs the question concerning the ‘objectivity’ of the
object. Things, objects, what be these
for the phenomenologist? The so-called
vestigial archive of the making, does it not remain propelled by the originary
force? Maybe the question demands that
we return to that place where the artwork is made. And when we return to that place we
encounter a temporality, the nunc stans
(standing now), where all artwork
co-exists, simultaneously, unbounded by historicity (e.g., the coincidence of
the shows performed and recorded on December 27th) I have to confess here that I am now thinking
under Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Recurrence,’ an idea that came to me one day when I
was listening to a GD performance and time between then and now, between the
moment of the performance and the moment I was listening to it, collapsed. “With the artwork we experience the letting
go into the futural…the diminishment of the ‘certainty’ of the self, who stands
alone and apart.”(BL 325)
‘Letting go’ is a form
of ‘letting’: e.g., ‘letting learning be learned,’ ‘letting be beings,’
etc. But ‘letting go’ is also primary in
the sense of a first and last action: last
act of the will, the first act of thinking.
‘Letting go’ is primary because it denotes the reception of originary
force of Becoming. ‘Futural’ denotes the
experienced relation of the chronological to the kairological. Thinking arises in the nunc stans, the standing now, but learning persists in what
Aristotle calls the ‘moving now’. [nb: Aristotle’s ‘Unmoved Mover’ demands
attention; it is the Hellenic source for all productive portraits of God] ‘Futural’ is the temporal quality
(temporality) of learning described as an event. Learning is a ‘happening,’ and doesn’t simply
‘happen.’ “Learning is the crossing-over
into the futural, and every step across the threshold into the boundless
boundary where the learning community abides is a gathering, seizing Leap into
the futural and away from the familiar past-present.”(BL 325) To think learning as something that ‘happens’ is to reduce
it to a degenerate form of didactic instruction, to behavior modification. ‘Futural’ describes the temporality of
learning as the mimetic repetition of the “twofold play” of Being/Becoming
[Unmoved Movement]. “To be caught by the
Eternal Imagination is to be-come a ‘transmission’ of the essential sway, to be
moved by the tidings of the relationality of Being’s twofold processural
unfolding. To ‘transmit’ is to (re)present
Being’s dynamic…”(BL 325)
A (re)turn to the East
happens on 12/27/04 by recalling a meditation from the second week of the
experiment, when, on 2/22/04 a reading of the Taoist hsu was installed as a description of the Nothing: “we stress,
again, that hsu denotes vacuity, an emptiness, unfilled, a
void…the encounter with ownmost possibility.”(BL 326) Meditating on the
‘futural’ evokes a re-collection with the originary Open, a re-collection that
receives again the call of fecund Silence. On 12/27 learning is described as the mimetic
artwork, “the (re)calling (vocare) of
Being’s essential sway which enjoins us in the emptiness of the futural…”(BL 325)
The Taoist hsu is enlisted
then to underline the ontological event of learning: the reception of the originary call ‘empties’
the self. Letting turns out to be an act
of compliance. “In heading the saying of
‘Nothing’ the ‘en-closedness’ of the ‘self-enclosure’ is made vacant (vacare)…The [originary] call (vocare)…enjoins us in hsu (vacare).”(BL 326)
The originary call
arrives as an invitation. Re-call: “And
on this day, 12/24/04, in the concluding moments of the meditation, “the ceaseless arrival of [an] invitation…the
beckoning of the essential sway.”(BL 323) The invitation conveyed by the sage, expressed
as ‘tidings,’ ‘Good News,’ etc. “The learning community unfolds from the reception of the tidings…Heidegger
indicates these tidings arrive ‘in the manner of a mutual challenge [that]
drives home to us with startling force that and how man is delivered over to
the ownership of Being and Being is appropriate to the essence of man.’”(BL 326) The sage gathers, arranges, and conducts the
work of learning. And does this by
letting be the compliance to the force that alone allows us to enact freedom,
to make justice. That is, the sage
compels the event of appropriation by
mediating that force that moves us into the experience of the “owning in which
man and Being are delivered over to each other…”(Heidegger cited BL 326)
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