What Can Wisdom Mean?

Part 1: Heraclitus, Blanchot, & a Night in the Desert

Summer ends. Teaching resumes. Fall is near. I will be doing some shorter occasional writing series’s. I promise they will actually be shorter. Today’s post will inaugurate a series on Pedagogy/Wisdom. (Other will be on Spaces/Places; Horror/Uncanny; and others on collisions between Mysticism & Anarchism. I foresee some related printed matter too. Discussion groups.)

I debated about what to call this new occasional series: What is wisdom? What might wisdom be? What does wisdom sound like? Perhaps no title is adequate until we figure out a little more about what we mean.

My questionable premises: Wisdom means putting into regular practice thought that has been lived and tested. Thinking that’s gotten bloody and muddy and bruised in service to visions or principles. Wisdom means putting the rightest words into the most beautiful actions. Wisdom is concerned with lighting up the latent magic in any experience. New thoughts, seeded by wisdom, can impel new actions or correct old ones. Wisdom also means grasping that what often feels new might actually be something so old we don’t recognize it. So it keeps returning in emphasis, asking for reinvention, nuance, rupture, redirection. Not all new things though. So far though, we haven’t said much about wisdom, and that’s the point.

When I began teaching in 2013 in Las Vegas as an adjunct instructor of English composition, I received no real training. I knew what grades I had to give, I knew what assignments I had to assign. I knew that the students didn’t understand why they were there, except that it was required for graduation. A requirement though is never a valid rationale. After facing down several disgruntled student faces, I realized I had to convince my class of something sublimely ridiculous: that the artful engagement with language through reading, writing, and rhetoric had something to do with acquiring and honing wisdom in the academic world, yes, and in the “real world,” too. And in the world, just as real, that will always accompany them, especially when all else is gone: their spiritual-aesthetic-imaginary world(s).

I also had to encourage them to believe, at the same time, that wisdom was something immeasurably valuable — perhaps worth more than any status or possessions, fame or power.

So I want to start this occasional series looking at two thinkers who accompanied me into my first classroom as a teacher. Besides connecting wisdom to the language arts, it was also in those early teaching days when I first realized that the paradigm of the student/learner must be embodied in each and every of life’s contexts, no matter who we are. But first there was the night, where we learned to begin.

Meteors

When I moved into my first real one bedroom apartment in my first actual apartment complex in Las Vegas, I was scared and uncertain. I had landed in wildly unknown territory. Las Vegas didn’t look like any kind of city that I would call a city. Nor was it exactly a suburb or a town either. I had to drive everywhere and it was oppressively hot and the buildings were not pretty: these were my first impressions. Plus people smoked everywhere! But I was there because of an immense privilege: studying with writers in a Masters of Fine Arts program at UNLV, having time to work on poetry, to study it, to read, to travel, to commune with other creators and writers, and to learn how to teach. Yet I remained overwhelmed by all the differences. In my unease, friends helped. Two new companions, fellow writers in the program that I barely knew, came to pick me up in a car well after midnight in mid August. We were driving out to the higher, more unpopulated desert outside of Vegas so we could see the sky more clearly. It was two in the morning when we got there. The dry, crystalline evening had finally cooled down to the high 70s. In an empty road, the three of us lay on the warm asphalt, cracked some beers, and stared at the pulsing arc of stars above. Then, after a long hush, from the sky’s left, a sparkling, Roman Candle plunge, and to the right, another: the Perseid meteors had come and were descending in quick sputters and flashes as was foretold.

I was shocked by the actual, indisputable “red tails” that cut through the sky. In that wild starlit blackness, we watched the cosmic shower of meteors while talking about our lives, framed by the infinite suggestiveness of celestial life and inhaling the ancient stone breath of the Mojave. A night in the desert with a dramatic sky of tumbling visitors. Conversation that could only happen in those conditions. Words that were infused with the galactic drama playing out above us. A feeling of that night as a new quest’s origin — and persisting as a source I’d return to in memory. It was nothing that I had expected. And it was nothing I would have done on my own if my friends had not insisted that we go at such a late hour. Truths we shared under the meteors would not be said exactly that way again.

I’ve written a lot about the “unexpected” and “surprises” at Companion Moon. My mid-late 40s are being lived as a seeker trying to listen to life’s deeper insinuations. I try to envision the unfolding of my years as involving the lives of mysterious others, human and nonhuman, many unknown to me now. With mysterious others come unforeseen adventures and responsibilities. Some I can prepare for only obliquely. Some I realize entail tremendous risks. So much of this unfolding feels surprising, bewildering, confounding. Until it’s not anymore. Until it changes into the most beautiful sense and even adds some mystery to what has always made the most boring kind of sense.

The night of the Perseid meteor shower I remembered a famous Pre-Socratic fragment by the obscure man from Ephesus often regarded as one of the original philosophers of the West: Heraclitus.

Ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηαι, ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει, ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον

"Unless you expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is hidden and thickly tangled."

or "He who does not expect the unexpected will not find it, since it is trackless and unexplored."

Even though I lack the ancient Greek, this aphorism is a great way to start the morning or a new semester. “Expect the Unexpected,” as my college students told me, has become a cliché, along the lines of “Think Outside The Box” and “Just Be Yourself.” But some cliches, more than others, contain a kernel of enduring truth. Some cliches are redeemable if you trace them back to their sources. Heraclitus’s pronouncement about the “unexpected,” at least in the translations I’ve read, is provocative because it evokes “surprise” as something or somewhere hidden, like how a path lies hidden beneath overgrown foliage. This concealed aspect is akin to his other saying about how a “hidden” harmony is more beautiful than an obvious or apparent harmony. If something is hidden it is always there, and doesn’t arbitrarily burst into being out of nothing. This might mean that every situation, every context, and every occasion includes, by design, hidden elements that can (possibly) be beautiful. For it is in the nature of events to occasionally seize us unawares. In those seizings or ruptures, how do we change, or how do we welcome or interpret change?

How do we respond to what shows itself as possible?

This seems to be a question that this fragment is posing.

A visit to Ephesus a couple summers ago, the birthplace of Heraclitus the Obscure.

I think this idea or question rhymes, in spirit, with a couple other quotes I like to put it next to, including Novalis: "Philosophy is homesickness: the urge to be at home everywhere" & Paul Celan: "Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won." These quotes can be used anytime you feel like you might learn something or when you suddenly see something in a different way. They are threshold aphorisms.

Through the lenses of these quotes, perception becomes an expeditionary undertaking, and a salvaging mission. Seeing and listening, even in the most apparently banal of contexts, becomes metaphysical detective work. I’m exaggerating, of course, as hyperbole can be persuasive. Such big, poetic words demand we throw our thinking in the dirt. That ask us to salvage among these half-livable ruins.

Salvage what? Some intuitive knowledge that our aliveness is pulsating with and through the aliveness of others. That the stars and the trees and the lakes and the parking lots suggest intricate communion with an imperishable source. And that the arts of love, language, imagination, nourishment, and care make life more bearable and more real. Salvaging, too, an older, less diluted mode of awareness. You learn to listen with your eyes; to see with arms and legs; to think with the heart and the gut. What the trees show us, we embody. What the stars reflect, we imbibe.

These ancient thinkers like Heraclitus make me dream about a sense of wonder and a mode of perceiving that is generally lost to us. This mode maybe survives in fragments and in some art and music and in rare, heart-shaking moments; it is occasionally reclaimed and embodied in our creations and relations. Love knows it. Dreams, too. Spiritual work reaches for it. Often a natural and wild expanse, far from cities, sparks this older apprehension. Perhaps I’m romanticizing something that was never lost because it was always absent in the first place. In the night, I think, we mourn its absence most of all.

The Absent Thinker or: How To Live At Night

I think of the spiritual children of Heraclitus, sometimes counting myself among them. When I think of them, it is the night time where they live. It is the night within the day that they seek. In darkness, subtler knowledge rests. During that first year of teaching college English Composition, while writing and studying poetry and poetics, I tried to condense and distill my creative visions. To get to essentials. To reawaken neglected wildness. To confront only what is archaic and cosmic. Most of these adjectives I could probably only really experience in language and so I returned, often, to a true heir of Heraclitus and writer of the Night: Maurice Blanchot.

Behind the stage of the thinkers, critics, and theorists that were most pressed upon me in college, I heard about and sensed this presence of a brooding, solitary, relentless thinker: Blanchot. Other more famous theorists like Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, were often referring to him with deference. Derrida claimed that Blanchot had made greater strides in thought than anyone else. The implication was that Blanchot had pushed thinking nearly as far as it could go. My introduction to him was by constantly seeing a massive book in the Barnes and Noble philosophy section, a book that is part of a University of Minnesota series that has to comprise some of the most blandly designed critical theory books ever published. A mauve cover. Simple black font. Hefty, nearing 500 pages. The lovely and consoling title: The Infinite Conversation.

Infinity is a concept that has haunted me since I was a child. Conversation has always conveyed a pleasurable couple hours in which two or more hearts are aligned. Real conversation has always seemed an act of defiance, too. Defiance of productivity and rivalry; defiance of business and distraction and division. A conversation might be a small attempt of aspiring to timelessness (a kind of infinity).

This vision of an infinite conversation was with me that first day of teaching. A young, provocative man from Texas — he kept wanting me to know he was from the “real” Texas — had already said something quite inappropriate and I didn’t know how to address it. Another young woman asked caustically about the legitimacy of the class. I coughed, I laughed, and didn’t know how to answer. Which is when we began talking about paradox. Paradox and Contradiction: that is how I began the first class I ever taught and, in most ways, it’s how I continue to start most classes. And most mornings, when I remember to.

These are the very ancient things we can keep talking about, I thought.

We can keep returning to them and they won’t get old. We aren’t trying to solve them, we are dancing with them. They are asking us to dance.

Later, after teaching got slightly easier, which means when students and I began having conversations, I remembered the conversations I had had with friends that in many ways had propelled me into my first classroom. Whatever pedagogy I professed or any knowledge about language I could claim had come from books and teachers and also from the lives and souls of all sorts of others. The conversations with Neeli, with Nico, with Margaretha, with Seth, with Joseph, with Visa, with Jeremy, with Brigid, with Emily, with David, with Jamie, with Kasey, etc., etc. My memories of talking with them among soft breezes or on grassy dunes; in garden patios and on rocky bluffs; sometimes by bicycle down beautifully painted alleyways. Coffee or beer or snacks close at hand. Mostly just the perennial flowery winds and rolling sidewalks of San Francisco. So many serene hours of talking idly and dreamily. And in that mutual gift giving of stories and observations and elaborations and responses and jokes, nobody was trying to win. Philosophizing and wisdom-making were happening, maybe unconsciously. Or retroactively. We may suddenly remember a vivid conversation from the past and a point someone had made in it, now felt in a new and revealing light. Nobody was asserting dominance or attempting to eliminate complexity or to obscure nuance.

We may imagine a body of conversations that is mapped onto our physical bodies. This could be a book, too. It might be the truest book ever written about our lives.

In Blanchot’s book, page after intellectually dizzying page, the writer is in conversation with writers and thinkers in modern literary and philosophical traditions. There is Nietzsche, Pascal, Camus, Kafka, Bachelard, Brecht. And Simone Weil, who he first introduced me to in this very book. He is also speaking to unnamed figures and voices who emerge within these dialogues. While he’s attempting to be as precise as possible about the most complex and unthinkable ideas, he is never trying to proclaim truth at the expense of the other’s experience. For to do that is to obscure and hinder whatever truth might have been there at all.

Blanchot’s big mauve book has been with me for years, but it seems always too abstract to finish. The writing of it must have been laborious and painstaking. Like his friend Bataille, the thinking is complex and highly philosophical and seems lacking in humor. For his big difficult book concerns itself with thinking that wrestles with thinking and then tries to surpass thinking. Language that bends and stutters and breaks in its efforts to reveal something or some non-thing that cannot be directly beheld or spoken about, only dimly acknowledged. But whatever it is, it’s urgent.

Blanchot doesn’t seem to speak too much about desire and libido and the body like so many of his contemporaries do (Deleuze, Kristeva, Lacan, Lyotard, Irigarary, Foucault). Instead, he keeps turning back to speech and thought in fraught relationship with darkness, death, the other, the unknown. Blanchot’s theorizing strikes me as not very hip or sexy. (Although it is possibly quite goth). And maybe this is why he’s always the thinker behind the curtain. However, as I reread some pages, like the ones about how it is impossible to write about the “everyday,” I realize that while he’s certainly not funny in any obvious ways, he’s being playful and even antic in his insistence on grappling with what perpetually eludes us. I imagine the figure of Blanchot, forever absent, always elsewhere, it seems, living in deliberate physical solitude in small, rural villages and communicating with his friends almost exclusively through letters. Did he have a radio? A television? A phone? The writer in his cozy provincial home surrounded by the shaking trees, the owls and foxes, and the humming constellations, writing obsessively about the Night and the Other; living a posthumous life, as he liked to call it, writing about being alone with the hidden god and his atheism as a paradoxical mode of faith. What was his relationship with plants and animals and coastlines? I haven’t read any biographies of him yet, so I don’t know.

What about this choice to abandon worldly and active pursuits in favor of solitary writing, thinking, and philosophizing? And in Blanchot’s case writing about such unwritable and unthinkable things. What a waste of time, we might say. What a squandering of energy! How painful! A neurosis? A pathology? I read in one short summary that he is plagued with bad health, one reason perhaps for his perpetual aloofness; in spite of this, he dies at 95.

Along with Blanchot’s concepts of the Other and the Outside, there is the Disaster. This is the event that destroys everything while leaving everything there, still. The ordinary, perpetual traumas of history. What we are witnessing now, of course. That life can go on as normal even when barbarity is inscribed as a norm. Blanchot experiences this disaster first hand when he’s almost executed by a Nazi firing squad and saved by an unexpected turn of events. A strange, alienated long life of literature and philosophy on a foundation of constantly encroaching/circling death. In his physical solitude, he still conceives of a deep, transnational, multiethnic “Friendship” based on language and literature. An infinite conversation, requiring many visits to the post office. Blanchot’s kind of solitude would have fascinated me as a teenager as I began to wonder about a persistent feeling of being out-of-step or somehow misaligned with the world. A cliché experience and yet, perhaps, the beginning of learning to listen to Wisdom. With Blanchot accompanying me into the desert as a first-time teacher, I also imagined him in a similarly denuded, abandoned landscape, at least metaphorically. I imagined him as a figure of vigil and reconnaissance, a lantern bearer, a night watchman, a presence both nocturnal and spectral.

From this wonderful review of a translated biography about Blanchot, a lovely excerpt: “Writing was “my true life,” he later claimed; it “estranged me from every other exigency, all the while changing my identity and orienting it towards an ungraspable and anguishing unknown.” It was writing that detached Blanchot from any former adherence to French nationalism, turning him, at least to some extent, into an internally displaced exile.”

Some dizzying quotes from The Infinite Conversation had been on my mind that summer before I started teaching. They are on my mind again, a decade plus into my years of teaching. Endlessly Blanchot grapples with speech and error – what can be said, who is addressed, what is behind speech, and what speech excludes. The excluded parts of speech are what he wants us to tarry with. Particularly, interruptions become significant when considering the limits of discourse. It is in the interruption, perhaps, that truth itself finds us, makes us Other. Typical of Blanchot are sentences like this, ones that to me could usher in an entire afternoon conversation:

“We sense as well that if pain (fatigue or affliction) hollows out an infinite gap between beings, this gap is perhaps what would be most important to bring to expression, all the while leaving it empty, so that to speak out of fatigue, out of pain or affliction (malheur) could be to speak according to the infinite dimension of language.”

These kinds of sentences occur, often multiple times, on every single page which can make the book particularly hard to engage with. But in small, meditative doses, reread with attention and even a kind of poetic suspension of meaning, as I discovered, it induces subtle inspirations that informed my own writing, teaching, and conversational practices. Our waking, sensible, law-abiding lives can be entered into because of regimens of repression and suppression. These limits allow us certain privileges, of course, certain pleasures. For Blanchot, it is necessary to think about what these limits curtail and contain. Language, itself, is a limit. What is beyond it? It is enough, now, to turn to certain sentences that make us wonder deeply about what we are doing:

“There is language because there is nothing in ‘common’ between those who express themselves: a separation that is presupposed — not surmounted, but confirmed — in all true speech.”

“Such then, would be my task: to respond to this speech that surpasses my hearing, to respond to it without having really understood it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak (…) To name the possible, to respond to the impossible (…) Speak without power, speak without power to.”

Above all in Blanchot there is an Unknown, an Other, and Outside that all our attempts at speaking and writing are addressing:

“We must try to think the Other, try to speak in referring to the Other without reference to the One and without reference to the Same (…) We will try to come to a sense of another form of speech and another kind of relation wherein the Other, the presence of the other, would return us neither to ourselves nor to the One.”

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A shrine near my home I like to visit on long runs.

Another school year starts Monday. Other timelines, too, of the heart and soul have left me reflecting and pensive. How long does brokenness speak? A sense of the world’s sickness is vivid. From Heraclitus I want to consider how I might look differently at what shows up around and before me; at how the art of perceiving is what creates real ways and means. And with Blanchot, there is the insistence that when we truly speak and communicate we are tying to become different.

With both thinkers, too, I like to think about how the night and solitude are refuges that each of us might have recourse to on our own but that we can also paradoxically share in our adventures together. A room full of collaborative solitudes. A collective night in the achingly bright day. Returning to the Others who each of us are, both to ourselves and to other people. To start again, with these difficulties, these paradoxes, with where we began, and with how we can keep beginning.