Heidegger

I changed the title of my thread now its more literary and more romantic. I
can’t stand the fact that I restrain myself from speaking off the top of the
head but I am getting it. I don’t need to say anything or be in a rush to
make some brilliant remark. It is enough to go on and see what happens as I
follow the tracks like a bloodhound and continously rewrite on the spur of
the moment changing what needs to be changed not worrying that somehow this
has to be the final word. There is none as there is always something
outstanding that will remain to be unsaid and returned to the silence of a
period. It’s the self-reflection involved in the writing that is interesting
because it is a form of hospitality as it is “mise en abyme” which is French
for a mirror in a text that reflects its own coming to be. This way how it
was brought into being is built in as the main protagonist of the story.
This is what makes the text participatory. It passes on the tools that allow
the survivors to add more… through an intertexual network or a mosaic that
can be decribed as the hood’s “altar cloth”. It is what Leo Strauss
describes as an “exoteric text”.

“An exoteric work contains a popular or edifying teaching that is accessible
to all, and a secret or esoteric teaching that reveals itself only after
careful and thoughtful study - study that to begin with is at least as
concerned with literary questions as philosophic problems. An exoteric work
is written with the utmost precision. It may come in a variety of forms -
dialogue, commentary, and treatise, among others. Its author has at his
disposal countless literary devices in order simultaneously to conceal and
to reveal his true teaching. These “obtrusively enigmatic features,” Strauss
notes, include “obscurity of the plan, contradictions, pseudonyms, inexact
repetitions of earlier statements, strange expressions, etc.” To understand
an exoteric writing properly, one must connect the literary details with the
explicit arguments, a process that often yields unexpected turns to the
argument as a whole.”

Steven Lenzner & William Kristol  http://home.cfl.rr.com/mpresley1/leo_str…

***

What could be called contemplative expression is something we literaly fall
in love with. It’s a romantic story how across time through distant
communications we write to each other and show how one becomes engaged and
married to wisdom in a spiritual manner. It’s not a wishful fantasy that is
at work in the Christian classics and certain allied texts. What is being
described is an effective operation and story of passion that breaks our
hearts.

Nyssa in his “On Virginity” describes Paul as the “fair escort of the
bride”. The contemplative hood becomes married to wisdom whose dowry are the
“fruits of the spirit”. In prov. 4.8 we find the exortation “Esteem her, and
she will exalt you; embrace her, and she will honor you.” The hood guards
the honor of the heart, is a sentry on the perimeter using all kinds of
“devices” to do the work but above all the hood is attentive and extremely
watchful for any move of the enemy, of the I and its natural appetite. It’s
the enemy that obscures the image of Jesus. It is the old adam that darkens
the bridegroom and separates him from the love of his wisdom in the
spiritual marriage preventing the reception of gifts and the growing
movement of the holy spirit.

***

Set theory as network theory is a useful metaphorical tool for emergent
living communities. For a small group of contemplative Christian hoods it
can define a place within a larger context of changing relations. A good
book on this is Mark C. Taylor’s “The Moment Of Complexity: Emerging Network
Culture”. He writes “whereas walls divide and seclude in an effort to
impose order and control, webs link and release, entangling everyone in
multiple, mutating, and mutually defining connections in which nobody is
really in control. As connections proliferate, change accelerates, bringing
everything to the edge of chaos. This is the moment of complexity.” This is
also the moment in which a network culture emerges but for our purposes this
means that we as small cells or nodes committed to remaining small and not
drawing a crowd get a sense of being related to a vast network without a
center. This is what makes new living communities of the spirit acephalic or
ungrounded by centralizing forces. Taylor points out in the book that an
important element of emergent networks or living phantom communities is
*noise*, disruptive monotonous chanting, barricades against the encroaching
of the enemy, etc. In terms of the negative labour of a Christian hood this
means that what is being undone and disturbed is the “linear propositional
thinking” of the I. This noise is not unlike the “buzz” of swarms (bees,
colonies of ants, flocks of birds, urban hoods) that is setting off
“non-linear dynamics”.

Posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 3:10 am
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