Thinking/Writing
[again!] in the streams of
[beginning with the “Aiko Aiko” from 12/28/88 > “Stranger”
12/28/83> [to] “Bird Song” and “Estimated” from 88 [2x] >
“Bird Song” [4x]> “China>Rider”
> “Playing in the Band” from 83 into The Dead Zone (wrhu.org) 6-8pm EST.
My training in philosophy – can one use such an anachronistic
expression anymore? – lead me to understand that the Capitalization of words,
usually nouns, sometimes verbs, and even sometimes verbal nouns [a moving
thing, a thing that moves?], is the single most important way to signify
significance. A word seems to denote something important, like a Concept, Idea,
Principle, etc., when capitalized. The
German language and German philosophy has much to do with that syntactical rule,
at least in my case. This is how
‘training’ in philosophy happens; we pick up things here and there, and over
time we developing a syncretized discourse of ‘our own’ in the company of
others. I say this because the writing
on 12/28/04 seems to be organized around a litany of capitalized terms, and my
first inclination in this commentary is to list them in the order they appear:
Leap, Open, Being,
Life, Nature, Way of Nature, Learning, Culture
I want to take up each of these, individually, as they appear on
12/28/04, and also pair them with a sentence from a commentary chosen at random*.
Leap: “Such is the liberatory
Leap into the futural that unbinds the bondage of the marketplace ‘logic,’ and
the ‘exchange’ of commodities, from the reduction of be-ing to ‘having,’ and
thinking to ‘choosing.’(BL 327)
Leap: selected from exactly 9 months ago, 2/28/14, when the blog posts
were no more than a one paragraph overview of a video commentary:
“B&L 2.0 on the road in Chicago,
day two, the reading of PPM16 that includes a cameo appearance by Sam Rocha
during the commentary segment. Rocha is called on to offer some thoughts
on his folk phenomenology vis-a-vis what I call the break from tradition with
the Leap into the unforeseen.
Most of the focus in PPM16 is on the arrival of the unforeseen in the
form of the other (autre). The turning of the
self is a turning from the self. Being's presencing
arrives as a force that turns us away from introspection, towards
perception. This is the phenomenological turn, where the
'certainty' of judgment is dropped or put aside with the 'uncertainty' of
reception or what we might call 'welcoming the strange.' Emphasis is
placed in the meditation of the necessity of a 'break' or Destruktion of
the 'certainty' of the juridical subject, and why the encounter with the
alterity of autre achieves this dismantling.”
The Leap described on 2/28/14
as the phenomenological turn that situates us in learning is on 12/28/04 described, first, as
the enactment of an interruption. What’s
more, “unforeseen” and “futural” are categorically equivalent. Recall: from 12/22/14:
6. “Learning, the dwelling in the aesthetic state, is the releasement
into the freedom of the in-complete, the futural
that is preserved by the eternal movement of Being”. (BL 320)
Open: “Estranged, the learner is gathered into the Open.”(BL 327)
This is how Open first
appears on 12/28/04, as the originary place of learning; originary because it
is where the learner is gathered;
gathered estranged. Learning is
initiated from the modality of estrangement.
‘Estrangement’ is a category I took over from Brecht and his verfremdungseffekt, and prior to the
2004 I was developing what I was calling a pedagogy of estrangement. ‘Estrangement’ as I understood it then and
now denotes the ‘effect’ (aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, physical) produced
by a ‘performance’. The estrangement
effect distances the self from self
and draws one into a relation with the ‘not self,’ and is thus an effect that mediates
self-overcoming, that propels gelassenheit. It is the force that compels the letting-go of
the will. As such, it turns the self away from (it)self and in
that turn the learner appears, the modality of learning is disclosed. Estrangement is the effect of the call of learning.
*[A pattern for this commentary has developed for locating a commentary
where the Word under examination appears:
I am not choosing commentaries at ‘random’ but selecting from those
commentaries written on the 28th day of a previous month.]
From
OPM 226(27), September 28th, the Open appears (with lowercase ‘o’!) as a huacaslogical description of the place of learning:
“The
question Where are we? (Donde Estamos?)
is a question that arises when we are gathered onto the holy and sacred
location.
The
gathering of the learning community happens when we are gathered onto the open
region. “To dwell within this region is to be the learner, the hero of peace
and freedom…”(BL 222) To be gathered onto this holy and
sacred place is described as in-dwelling,
which is a way of emphasizing the force of place over those who are gathered. Gathering is always a happening to, an event of interpellation
where the subject is called into a new set of relations (natural, spiritual,
social, etc.). In turn, the
learning community is gathered into being by an in-dwelling where “we find ‘the
real nature of the spontaneity of thinking.” (BL 222)
The
description of the Open as a holy
and sacred place is consistent with the description of learning as an event
that gets underway via estranging calling (vocare). What’s more, the recollection of the
commentary from 9/28/14 reiterates the originary call as an event: the subject is called into a new
set of relations.
Being: “The response of the learner, her ‘answer’ to the call of Being
is the creative act.” (BL 327) Would
that I could leave it at that! But this
description demands to be paired with
any and all thinking of ceaseless
nativity, the principal description of Being’s ontological disclosure
(presencing, Becoming). Also, it is important to reiterate that the description
of the response or ‘answer’ as ‘the creative act’ has been given extensive
treatment during 2.0 as techne, and,
thus, any time ‘creative’ appears it must be thought as a mimetic act, and a work.
The
month of July was an especially ‘high’ point for B&L 2.0, so I’ve
selected the commentary from 7/28/14, where Being appears four times
in two sentences, and alongside Becoming. Given the unmatched centrality of Being
for my project, I have decided to include an extended excerpt from
7/28/14, in large part because it offers a demonstration of my phenomenological
style [I hesitate to say ‘method’]:
“For
Heraclitus the coupling of the same with difference discloses the dynamism of
Being aka the Becoming of being. This
does not reduce Being to Becoming or render Becoming a quality of Being. The challenge is to
thinking Being and Becoming together.
The
writing from this day, July 28, 2004, makes an attempt to think the
togetherness of Being and Becoming by describing the phenomenal disclosure of
it as the “strange appearance” of Nature. The key citation is taken from
Heraclitus who offers an aphorism that complements the river fragment: “Nature loves to hide.” On 7/28/14 I read this aphorism as
indicating the “processural unfolding of Nature’s creative dynamism.” But more important is the existential
and ontological implication, which takes us back to the past few days’
discussion of the ‘primal ground’ (Urgrund) and our Contact! Contact! with it. Actually, I’m brought back to an
position I have found myself in for much of this summer’s revisiting of the
original meditations, and that is to the conjecture that the ‘original’ or
‘first’ encounter with Being happens when we have an effacement in Nature with
the Life spirit that moves through and gathers all living beings. Under the influence of Thoreau I
would, today, call this experience an epiphanic transcendental contact with the
totality, and one that is a deeply embodied and felt experience. Nietzsche, who was also a student of
Thoreau’s mentor Emerson (reading him from afar), called discovered his Eternal
Recurrence of the Same. From
Nietzsche I gather the experience as disclosing to us a positive and undeniable
affirmation, what he say is the saying Yes! to life.”
In light of the commentary I am writing on this day, it seems
noteworthy that the originary encounter with Being is described as
occurring with the ‘strange appearance’ of Nature. This needs to be thought through the
assertion that ‘estrangement is the effect of the call of learning.’
Life: “Art expresses the attunement to Life itself, understood as the dialogic event of
concealment/unconcealment, hiding/appearing, peace/freedom,
reception/response.”(BL 327) Moreover, Learning is described as unfolding “from the attunement to the call
of Life itself…”(BL 327) The
call (vocare) happens via the
‘strange appearance’ of Nature as an
offering; an offering in the form of excess; excess as a sacrifice. The sacrificial offering is made in the holy
and sacred place and the reception of that offering initiates music-making
philosophy. -- [6:00pm EST…Dead Zone time, of course!...as the “Playing in the
Band” reaches12:44, and I write ‘music-making philosophy’… ‘Althea’] --
On 12/28/04 Life is
coupled with Learning, and it also
used to qualify Way of Nature. “Learning
is the affirmation of Learning
itself, and art is the expression of this affirmation.”(BL 327)
I searched and found the following
commentary where Life, Life, life appears. It is from 6/28/14, and demonstrates a
confessional style, which, on rare occasion, appeared:
OPM 135 Back in Portland after a truly
remarkable week on Mt. Desert Island.
I
am very fortunate to have some very good friends. When I borrow from Arendt and write about philosophy arising from a
conversation between friends I have many examples in mind to support that
claim. I have always
treasured my friendships, and gone into some deep depressions when I’ve felt
isolated and disconnected from my friends. For the past two years, however, I
have made some deep connections that I know will last a lifetime, and I have
also reconnected with old friends, and sustained others. There is no question that something
significant happened in the move to Maine, for in the past two years the bonds
of friendship have strengthened my soul.
I’m
prompted to write this because of the coincidence between the opening citation
in OPM 135, and an epistle I received from one of my dearest friends, which I
received today when I returned to Portland. I use the word ‘epistle’ because my
friend and I share a bond that is virtually familial, and he seems very much to
be the younger brother I never had growing up. This bond, which links our common
interest and approach to philosophy and even music, is a Latino inflected
Catholicism, one that is an expression of community, family, justice, art, and
above all else, is made and remade each day through the unyielding ever giving
Holy Spirit of Love. Thus,
I use the word ‘epistle’ to describe the letter my friend sent me, which he
categorized as a memo [written during his slow move with his wife and three
children from the
Midwestern Plains to the Pacific Northwest]. Like Paul, the letter was a plea from
his heart written to a friend about their friendship and the ways to sustain
it. There is always a fear
that a dear friend, like a family member, will suddenly be gone from our
lives. Of course, we are
all aware of mortality, but equally painful can be the sudden breaking off of
communication, the loss of trust, the sudden change in the way we perceive or
are perceived. And as we
grow older we understand ourselves well enough to know just how vital and
fragile our friendships are and how easily we can forget to care for them, to
tend to them, and to make sure that we allow ourselves to be cared for in the
process of caring for the relationship. For me, the joys of friendship are
always rooted in the mutual trust I share with my friends, which allows us to
share moments of intense life
together, laughing, sometimes arguing, but also keeping it real. And for this reason I don’t fear being
vulnerable and being totally present with my friends, although I do fear being
abandoned by my friends. That
is to say, it is always painful when I realize that someone I believed was a
friend turned out to be just another person I may have spent some significant
time with, but, in the end, did not place a high value or priority on being a
member of a shared community. I
write all of this because I was deeply moved by the honesty and sincerity with
which my dear friend, my younger brother, addressed me when he confessed his
fear that he had somehow abandoned our friendship, or, that he would at some
point in the future do just that. I
know of no other friend who would take the time to write such a letter, to
write an epistle, and to repeat back to me the very core values of my own
spirituality and faith in humanity.
Nature: on 12/28/04 appears first as a what is imitated by the ‘creative’
artwork of learning: “Artwork, as the cathartic liberation from the repetition
of the same, is the mimetic (re)presentation and expression of Nature’s spontaneity.”(BL 327)
What is imitated is the Way of Nature,
Life
itself. This is a description
happening under the influence of Taoism, the principal source for the category
of the sage. In turn, the learning
community follows the demonstration of the sage whose “hallmark…is
spontaneity…the improvisational performance of artwork expresses the human
being-with Being as an imitation of Nature.”(BL 327)
I select the appearance of Nature
from 8/28/10 because it offers a demonstration of yet another kind of writing that has been made in this project, both in
2004 and ten years later. The excerpt
from the commentary includes the end of a long passage from the legend of
Zarathustra, which was not included in Being
and Learning and remains
unpublished. In the excerpted section
Don Quixote is making his farewell address to Zarathustra. [nb: this is the most far reaching of all
of the material I wrote in 2004, making an attempt at writing under the
cocktail of Borges, Heidegger, and Nietzsche].
On 8/28/14 I wrote:
Don Quixote’s response is decisive, and shifts the
conversation, or debate, because for him it has become a contest of will and
perception, back to the place where they are located: the
wasteland. I borrowed ‘wasteland’ from Nietzsche, but I
encountered it in Heidegger, in What is Called Thinking? (one
of the five most important sources for the project…and beyond). To
have Don Quixote name the ‘place’ as a wasteland is ironic in the manner of
Cervantes, but only when we read the entire quotation “The wasteland
grows. Woe to him who hides the wastelands within.” The second half
is where the contest between these two epic figures is
happening: Who is it that is ‘growing’ (cultivating) the
wastelands? And where are these wastelands? What
are they? One can not accuse Don Quixote of hiding within
himself. His mania is a full blown projection, an outward raging
subjectivity. What of this other, lonely figure, soon to be named Zarathustra?
He is alone, and cries out in despair about human
limitations. It is this figure who is guilty of cultivating
the wasteland, and so Don Quixote responds: “You do not recognize it, but you
are lost in the desert of discontent, in the land uncultivated by the freedom
of imagination and improvisation. You have become blinded by your
fate as a mortal, which you see as a tragic torment, and cruel
hoax. But who are ‘you’ upon whom this hoax has been
pulled? And who are the merry pranksters who are playing this
game? And knowing not who they are, why do you remain under their
spell? Stand up and turn around, and look at the barren land you
have left uncultivated! While you sit here the wasteland
grows! I leave you now, for I am called to seek adventure, but
beseech you to make haste, and seek to regain the paths that lead to moist and
cool air, and the company of others who will challenge, test, and encourage
you. Wander and seek the highest peak from which you will gain the perspective
that will enable you to see far into the past-present, and deep into the
profound ‘not yet,’ the possibility sheltered by this future. By
ye seized by the sublimity of that vista…Seek the cave high in the mountains,
where you will be exalted and inspired by the majesty of Nature…and find yourself mystified and then grounded…”
Learning and Culture appear
together in the penultimate sentence of the meditation from 12/28/04: “As we
said above (4701.05.08) if Nature is
the ongoing creation of Life itself, then Learning is the ongoing creation of Culture.”(BL 328) I suspect that this is the first time that
work of the learning community is described as Culture: “the creation of Culture
[is] the artwork of the learning community…”(BL 328) -- [second hour of Dead Zone – at 7:19pm EST
“Bird Song” from 12/9/90!!] –
Because Learning and Culture appear together on 12/28 I
searched the appearance of them together, and the archive of commentaries
revealed nothing for the 28th day of any of the previous ten
months. So I decided to excerpt from the
first time they appear together, which happened on March 7th in the 23rd
commentary:
“In my [video] commentary, I speak of the gods
being 'replaced' by the Platonic Ideas. The gods may have flown away, to
paraphrase Heidegger, but they haven't gone very far. Indeed, they have
been elevated to a higher status. If all this is metaphor it is meant,
again, to enlarge the conversation on Being and learning and to recognize its relationship to culture, which is, in a sense, the concrete manifestation of the
relationship, especially if we are emphasizing the material or made quality of
philosophy. Philosophy is the concrete realization of learning as a
taking up of Being's gift (possibility/excess) and making something unique with
it, which can be understood as the making of a person (forming and inhabiting
an ethos), and/or the expression of
that ethos (forming works of art).”
In the end what matters most is that we have forgotten
convention. Perhaps this is what the
ongoing experiment in originary thinking/learning is demonstrating?
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