The one and only regret
I have about the our mail order falling through -- and it has to be noted that is the first that
ever happened to me in all the years
I did mail order! – is that we won’t be camping at the Kankakee, Illinois
campground we reserved for the week in July.
After we spent an afternoon putting the mail order together, Pepe and I
were looking for campgrounds near Chicago.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when the closest one listed was the KOA in
Kankakee. It couldn’t be. Kankakee? That’s the town I was born in! Now that
is a coincidenc! At that point the
whole adventure was starting to have that inevitability vibe about it, and the
destiny of the Chicago shows was becoming destinal. But fate would have it otherwise, and, no
camping in the town I was born this day 49 years ago! No returning to my birthplace with deadhead
Fordham bud. So be it! Pepe had a brilliant idea: use the money that would have been used for
the tix to buy the still as yet purchased hardware for the drum kit I earned
for my contribution to Late to Love. Brilliant idea Pepe. As he said, We’ll make our own music! Just like we did back at Rose Hill will our
band of merry pranksters.
As I’ve written in this
pages before, I’m not into numerology, but I can’t help but notice when numbers
are acting funny, although my recent experience with the mail order has now
convinced me to look the other way when numbers are acting funny! But today, on my 49th birthday I
can’t help but note that today is OPM 349 by the original count, which last
week I discovered was off by at least 10.
When I wrote on 2/6/05,
it was my 39th birthday, and when I write that the ten years between
the original project and 2.0 takes on some girth. I’ve posted this pic before, one that was
taken by Audrey Thompson at PES 2005, and I’ll do so again before we convene at
Memphis, but here’s a photo of me from ten years ago, just a month after
completing the original project. Classic Duarte! [check out the gaze...el matador!]
A marginal note at the
bottom of p. 599 of the original manuscript, next to the quotation from
Heidegger cited yesterday on the primordial intuition, reads: “early Heidegger! 1919” He wrote that about 30 years after
Nietzsche, in the words of Walter Kaufmann, went insane and silent. That span of time doesn’t seem all that long
when I recall that it was exactly 30 years ago that I was in the midst of my
first year at Fordham. So much for
remembrances of times gone by. Or
rather, time to focus on the writing from 2/6/05.
The note on p. 599 is
important, especially because I tend to read around Being and Time, preferring the young and old Heidegger, and then
finding the lectures more interesting than his failed attempt at writing a big
German book, which isn’t quite a systemic work, but more of a catalog of
existential modalities. This is where
my own work is most un-German: the
project of originary thinking is wholly un-systematic,
although, for sure, 2.0 has revealed a consistency I had not perceived
before. But consistency and systematic
are entirely different. One can write
consistently, regularly, and rigorously without necessarily following or making
a system. Now, having said that, it has
become clear to me that there some kind of system at work with originary
thinking. But it is precisely the
originary that resists system, which is why Hegel had to conclude his Phenomenology with Absolute Thinking, which,
despite all claims to the contrary, is a description of the highest state
achieved by the idealist, namely, Hegel himself, and is a version of the eudaimonia Aristotle identified when he
describes thinking as the highest state of happiness, which is to say, the most
complete moment of human existence.
[Philosophers are unique in describing what they do as necessarily the
highest state of human existence. Can’t
we just be extremely high without insisting that thinking is the best dope
anywhere, ever? But, you see, this is
the evangelical character of philosophy!
Philosophers, beginning with Heraclitus and Parmenides, don’t just want
to document thinking, they want spread the glorious news of its existence! Behold, thinking! Listen to Logos,
and spread the Word! Now, in this
digression some important has just now
been revealed to me: it seems that this whole business about the teacher
delivering the news, and of first philosophy offering an education, this is all
about my own latent evangelical approach
to philosophy! This is about my own
syncretic mixing of the liturgical and
the pedagogical, the mystical, philosophical and theological. I’m feeling a sudden need to make a trip back
to Rose Hill! Perhaps next week, a detour to Fordham? A walk down old Fordham Road? The order of things happened in this
way: the epiphanic revelation of
eternity/infinity when I was 4, the daily discussions of dreams at the
breakfast table, coupled with Sunday Mass, and CCD, onto the reading of
literature, film, and music, music, music, playing and listening, and finally
the formal study of philosophy, first with Kaplow in the last year at Summit
HS, and then with the Jesuits at Fordham: Gerald McCool, Quentin Lauer, Vincent
Potter, James Marsh (ex.), Ewert Cousins (ex.), and Norris Clarke (I won’t rehearse the details of the
curriculum at Rose Hill, but I will mention the important semester I spent in
Madrid, working mostly in the Prado, and studying the films of Bunuel with Sanz
De Soto. The power of the strange, the
surreal, was confirmed to me in the Prado and the seminar room where we studied
Bunuel) All that to say that, in the end,
and on this day at this moment what is revealing itself to me is that
the project of originary thinking can and should be placed within a
genealogy…no, that’s putting the matter too far a distance. Here’s what I want to write: this work, finally, is my attempt to place
learning, specifically, the learning that happens via the education offered by
first philosophy, within the tradition of Lectio Divina. Consider what I wrote in yesterday’s
commentary -- after writing on the NJT & LIRR then teaching then returning
to the LIRR -- about the circularity of the temporality of learning: meditation, dialogue, meditation, dialogue,
meditation… And then place this
alongside the cycle of the Lectio Divina: the fourt movements, clockwise (yes,
moving in a circle!) from top to left: Lectio
(read), Meditatio (meditate), Oratio (pray), Contemplatio (contemplate).
What is also importantly
revealed to me is the reminder that what truly distinguishes the systemic work
of, say, Hegel, and the poetic work of, say, Kierkegaard, is not simply the
latter’s determinate negation of the former by design, but, as I have written
before, the difference between the evangelical and apostolic approaches to
philosophy. Paul, again, figures in the
midst of this, because he is both. But that is not the matter at hand. What is the matter at hand is the placing of
the project of originary thinking within the apostolic, which is to say, to
understand it as a demonstration of the practice of daily writing that is not
unlike the cycle of Lectio Divina, with the important caveat: the dialogical moment in the cycle is congregational,
as it involves the gathering of the learning community. Here is where there is an important
difference, perhaps, insofar as the Lectio Divina is designed exclusively for
individual spiritual practice. And
clearly it is not. Granted, Meditatio and Contemplatio are singular experiences (like the toothache), but
these are complemented by Lectio and
even Oratio, which is precisely where
koinonia gathers together and
sustains the singular and the communal.
It seems what started as
a digression burst through and returned to the writing from this day ten years
ago, where they preceding description of koinonia
as sustaining the singular and communal seems to be precisely what is also
happening on 2/6/05:
1.
“the
poeisis of freedom [is] the
initiative of creativity that (re)presents the realization of the originary dispensation that is bourne upon each
and every unique and distinct being who participates in the becoming of
plurality…”(BL 376)
2.
Teaching
initiates this initiative by offering
the gesture through the sharing of the primordial intuition: the affirmation of
Life with the saying if Yes!
3.
Teaching
is a sharing of the primordial intuition “because it remains steadfast in the
receptivity of everything as it appears and arrives as distinct…is caught up in
the production of the new, learning, and thereby [moves]…in the becoming of
be-ing (freedom)…[and] affirms…learning as the ‘capacity to extend beyond
oneself.’”(BL 376)
4.
To
extend beyond oneself is to be caught by the movement of becoming, seized into
thinking, and is thus learning as self-overcoming.
5.
Learning
as the poetical actuality of Being occurs in this extension of the self.
6.
“This
ex-tension reveals itself as the actualization, or presencing, of be-ing as the
ex-cessive that irrupts the stasis of the circulating same, that estranges the
familiar, and enjoins the ‘self’ in the dialogic becoming of inter-subjectivity…arising
in the company of others, as the collaborative artwork of a community…dispensed,
unveiled, and disseminated by Being’s becoming.
7.
“Learning
is the actualization of the life force (the power released in
becoming/presencing), the (re)presentation of Being with the improvisational
bringing forth of the new.”(BL 376)
8.
“Learning
is the manifestation of the ceaseless nativity of humankind happening as the collective
pluralization of the many (poets, painters, musicians, singers, dancers,
writers, readers, and all workers of art) whose co-laboration produces a ‘body’
of work, history, the embodiment of
the Eternal Body, and the realization
of the Imagination, Being itself.”(BL
376)
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