OPM 342(352), January 30th (2015) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 365-366

In terms of the accounting, which is an important aspect of this project that is calling for a daily meditation, I know for sure that the date of the meditation and the corresponding page numbers in Being and Learning are accurate, although I suspect that on occasion even the latter is off by a page.  For example within the past few days there was at least one day when the original mediation went a page further in Being and Learning than what is recorded on the commentary post banner.  But the dates are accurate.  I say all of this for at least two reasons:  first, as a matter of public recording of my own attempt to document the daily writing, and, second, because yesterday afternoon, when I had some down time, I went back through the entire year of post and discovered no fewer than eight accounting errors, all of the same kind: the repetition of the same OPM #.  Here’s what I uncovered, beginning with OPM 85: 85 (2x), 137 (2x), 247 (2x), 271(2x), 294 (4x), 305 (2x), 306 (2x), 319 (2x).   This explains how the current number is OPM 342, when, in fact, this is day 353.  The numbers still don’t quite add up, because the repetitions total 18, and that would put today’s meditation at 360.   So, from an accounting perspective, something is off, but I relish the opportunity to go through the entire year’s worth of material with due diligence and care.   In fact, I was surprised to find so much supplementary material, much of it video material I’d forgotten about.  Such as from April 25^th, 2014, the post, which includes a video, titled “Darkness, Emptiness and the Disclosure of Possibility at Drew University” http://duartebeinglearning.blogspot.com/2014/04/darkness-emptiness-and-disclosure-of.html

There are supplementary videos from PES Albuquerque, from Aardvark Studios, the Dead Zone, etc.   The experience of going through all of that material also inspired me to consider what I might do on the final day of this project, which, it turns out, is 2/14/15, not 2/13/15, as I had supposed. Indeed, I recall back in 2004 operating under the assumption that I had started on St. Valentine’s Day, when in fact I had started the day before.  And, for the record, I recall there being an ice storm that prevented our attending a concert at Carnegie Hall on 2/14/04!   At any rate, looking ahead to the conclusion of the project, I have the desire to spend some additional hours on 2/15/15, which happens to be a Sunday, going through and selecting one sentence from each of the commentaries and completing the project with what I am guestimating will be 368 Sentences.

As I mentioned the other day, at the very least 2.0 will have revealed to me the form of writing that, as much as possible, I will be using going forward: Sentences [capitalized for emphasis and to distinguish from ‘ordinary’ sentences; where here ‘ordinary’ might have a weak analogy to the liturgical calendar’s ‘ordinary time,’ but I won’t distract myself by unpacking that…for now).    I’ve mentioned before the desire to distill the original meditations to fragments, and wrote about this during the summer months.  And in some ways the distilled Sentences are only just ‘fragments’ or pieces, or even remnants of the larger commentaries.  Yet for that very reason the ‘fragment’ is also referring back to the context from whence it came, and like the arms of the Venus Di Milo might not even offer anything of substance.  Imagine for a moment if in some shop or café  in a small town in Greece, the proprietor claimed to have hanging there on the wall one of the arms of the Venus Di Milo.   I suspect it would be the basis of a lecture, then book by Derrida (RIP), but, otherwise, the arm would only ever hold (pun intended) significance as a reference back to the whole body of the statue (or what remains of it).  In fact, it’s an obvious statement to say that when we think ‘Venus Di Milo’ we are encountering an armless topless figure of a woman.   All this to make the point that the fragment as a piece that is ‘broken off’ from the meditation may, in fact, have been severed to the point where it can not offer anything to the one who is reading and meditating on it.  Of course, this is only the case when taken on its own.  Let’s imagine the aforementioned arm of the Venus Di Milo now prominently displayed along side other pieces of severed pieces of classic sculpture:  noses, arms, torsos, heads, etc.   Together these fragments offer a narrative, most likely one that is inspiring us to think the degeneration of the classical period under the curatorial hands of the northern tribes, but, again, this is a matter I can’t unpack…for now.

Aside from the ‘fragment’ as a category, the other competitor is ‘thesis,’ which is a bit more intentional, and designed to prompt writing.   In the spring of 2012, upon returning from PES Pittsburgh, I was working through the the form of the thesis, and produced somewhere along the lines of 50.   Luther and Marx were my exemplars, although Ranciere provided me with the general style of articulating a thesis and then unpacking it.  Here’s a thesis that I wrote back then:

THESIS 5.16: Originary questioning arises from the original ambiguity, from the strange way the truth unfolds as presencing/absencing.

If we take Thesis 5.16 as an example, it seems obvious to me that the Thesis complements and supplements the Sentence, or vice versa.  And both work together to make what is described in Being and Learning as the invocation to learning (the call) via evocative questioning.  The Thesis and the Sentence are, in effect, the pedagogical tools (curricula?) of originary thinking, which is to say, they prompt the learning of First Philosophy.   One could very easily design a small book, something like Luther’s Small Catechism, that is a collection of Theses and Sentences from the history of philosophy that come along with commentary.   This seems to be what I have in mind when I describe so-called ‘apathetic reading,’ or the reading that is preparing a student for First Philosophy.   Or perhaps it is the first step in First Philosophy?  (Here is yet another question that needs to be delayed for another day.)   All this to say that Thesis 5.16 offers an example of a stand alone piece of philosophical writing that complements or is complemented by a Sentence(s), and the two together are the form I will be working with insofar as it will be possible to use that form; which is to say, whenever I am using that form I am attempting to document thinking; I am attempting to make first philosophy. 

One final comment before distilling Sentences from 1/30/05, which is prompted by the back cover of my intro to ancient Greek textbook.  In the two weeks since I have been studying it, I’ve arrived at the place where I can ‘de-cipher’ single words and simple sentence; indeed, I can write simple sentences, like ‘she does not guard, but flees.’  Anyway, last night I happened to look at the back cover.  Earlier this week (1/25/15) I wrote about the front cover:

… I learned enough to be able to make my way through the dictionary entry that serves as the cover art for C.W. Shelmerdine’s textbook.  The book is an ‘introduction’ so, naturally, they designer of the cover selected the word ’APXH’, ń as the word;  APXH’ (arché) a beginning, origin; kat àpxñç in the beginning; etc., etc.  Here, on the first night of study, I learn to read the signs that first disclosed originary thinking.

Many commentaries have taken up the descriptions of learning as an-archic, and more have attempted to work out the project as a phenomenology of the originary.   But an-archic character of the originary has received little attention, although it has been implied with each and every description of becoming, and, as recently as yesterday, with the identification of a not yet named ‘new logic’ (borrowing from Irigaray) of co-existence in difference.   The originary can be described as ‘an-archic’ in the sense that APXH’ (arché) is a beginning, and perhaps even a first cause, which strikes me as precisely the kind of anachronism the project is calling for as it pushes back through fashionable cultural studies and, in the retrospective moment, returns to first philosophy.   The originary is an-archic because the learning project, the work, demands thinking Being as becoming.  Such thinking is already thinking Being otherwise than Aristotle’s ‘Unmoved Mover.’  

“APXW…of Time, to begin…to make a beginning of a thing…to begin to build

Originary names the quality of Being appearing as becoming; originary names the temporality of Being appearing as becoming; originary names the appearance of becoming as a poetic making.  

Learning is the poetical actuality of Being.

Originary thinking is the phenomenological account of that event.

I want to share this because the back cover features Logos, and what caught my attention is the distinction between logoi and poiesis, that is, the distinction between ‘prose writing’ and ‘the writing of poetry’.   This is the classic distinction, of course, that I am pushing against with this project, which operates under the maxim: “more poetry, less prose.”    The question, among others, is whether or not the prosaic can handle the poetical [not to be confused with the poetic]?   ‘Poetical’ is placed together with ‘actuality’ to express the aimed balance between ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’, which, I am contending, is held together by Logos, without the need to include mythos, as Heidegger seems to be suggesting.  It may be the case that mythos is to Logos what the severed arms are to the Venus Di Milo as we have her today.  In the statue we have the poetical actuality of the form of the goddess, and and expression of divine and sacred love, an work that evokes eros in representing agapē.  Logos offers the same force for thinking; further, the ‘poetical’ denotes the working out of Logos via logoi, the working out of becoming through learning.  And because the ‘actor’ remains a hidden presence, all writing/thinking is happening via the force of a concealed ‘author’.   The work is ‘actual’ (real) but happening by way of performance, or by way of a mediation that we have to describe as ‘poetics’ because, for us, the writing/thinking is happening through us.   [nb:  this is why, in response to an email from Frank, who claimed to subscribe to Hegel’s ‘Reason in History’, I responded: “I too am a bit of a Hegelian…but only to the extent that ‘Reason’ is understood as ‘Grace’.  Here I have to acknowledge the lasting influence of Quentin Lauer, S.J., under whom I studied Hegel at Fordham]

Sentence 1.a: Learning is the poetical actuality of Being.

Sentence 1.b: Becoming is disclosed through thinking/writing.

Thesis 1.30.15: Being is actualized through Grace.

Here then, are the Sentences from 01/30/05, distilled from a meditation that focuses on teaching as the life-supporting, care-taking work that cultivates the space of learning “the clearing, the groove[s].”(BL 365)

1.    “Learning is…that specific performance that is happening within the specific location established by the one who lets learning be learned, who lets be the creative happening of be-ing.”(BL 365)

2.    “Learning is the situation of nativity, and teaching is…the work that ‘preserves’ space for the happening of this situation.” (BL 365)

3.    “Thus to call learning artwork, is to affirm learning as the situation that is situated in/with the Open as the aesthetic state, the rapture of the heightened ‘awareness’ or attunement, an enacted embodiment (enactment) of the becoming of Being, the performance that (re)presents the Eternal Imagination of Being and thereby (re)collects the primordial relationality of the Mysterious Agreement, the originary poetic dialogue between Being and beings, the reciprocity that is (re)called in the heeding of the Word (Logos) as pointing each being beyond itself and into the possibility that is the (empty, cleared) ground of the actuality of freedom, the realization of the be-ing of human.(BL 366)

4.    “If  “‘poiesis’  as ‘poesy’ becomes the special name for the art of the word, poetic creation”[Heidegger] then the poetic…be-ing of human is en-livened (comes alive in its fullest force, and thus is…realized) in the dialogic event of learning…”(BL 366)

5.    “If, as Heidegger says, “by ‘art’ we mean what is brought forward in process of bringing-forth, what is produced in production, and the producing itself,” then learning is the name for the situation where the be-ing of human is realized as the practice of art, as the realization, the production and creation of freedom, the unveiling and unconcealment of difference.”(BL 366)

 Although, the memory of the Pittsburgh 2012 dialogue with Richardson and Rocha  tempts me to make an apologia for the appearance of the word ‘creation’ in the preceding, I won’t launch into a defense.  Rather, at this point in the process I’ll let it stand, especially with the articulation of the category of ‘poetical actuality’ that has today been paired with and thereby qualified by Grace.