Day: March 2, 2012

Goods for all

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment

Virginia Woolf:  “What is the phrase for the moon?  And the phrase for love?  By what name are we to call death?  I do not know.  I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up the scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz.  I need a howl; a cry.”

Jean-Luc Godard:  “Put another way, it seems to me that we have to rediscover everything about everything…There have been periods of organization and imitation and periods of rupture.  We are now in a period of rupture.  We must turn to life again.  We must move into life with a virgin eye.”

Carole Maso:  “Precious words, contoured by silence.  Informed by the pressure of the end.

Words are the lines vibrating in the forest or in the painting.  Pressures that enter us – bisect us, disorder us, unite us, free us, help us, hurt us, cause anxiety, pleasure, pain.

There is no substitute for the language I love.

I close my eyes and hear the intricate chamber music of the world.  An intimate, complicated, beautiful conversation in every language, in every tense, in every possible medium and form – incandescent.”

Jacques Derrida:  “Shall I just listen?  Or observe?  Both…reading proceeds in no other way.  It listens in watching.

Writing…coordinates the possibilities of seeing, touching, and moving.  And of hearing and understanding…Writing…gives itself over to anticipation…associated with the hands, not the eyes, it must recognize before it cognizes, apprehend leading toward comprehension”

 

and….no fears

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings1 Comment

Joy : Learning

At a certain point one experiences knowledge acquisition (is it a “thing” to have, or an activity to do? or both?), learning, like expanding repertoire for a professional musician.

A day of research, study and reading feels like an increasing conversation for all the voices in one’s head.

It seems endless, for one thing, and like an ultimate “wonder of the world” – an intricate gargantuan and beautiful or awe-inspiring architecture – on another.

I attain these sorts of cumulative swells where each thing I ingest, no matter how remote in time, place, genre, subject, voice or style, seems to recall another voice, argument, demonstration, idea or style and synthetically weaves larger and larger universes of facts, names, concepts, rhythms and perspectives.

It is breathtaking and elating. As if boundaryless and eternal and full of an infinity of details, each their own delight. The impossibility of boredom, exhaustion, comprehension. For the insatiable, or those who go at eliminating the hole by trying to cut it out, the edges just grow wider, more enormous.

Which can also give one the sense of void and vortex. The spiraling braid of information and interpretation fraying abysmally in all directions. A sort of ennui of overwhelm. A stunned gluttony.

But, incapable of finishing prior to death and its elimination, the loom of mind keeps on whirring, constructing colors and patterns I’d never dreamed, yet, inevitably, others have, or did in the thinking, and it grows again.

The age-old cliché that the more you know the more you know that you do not know…absolutely and bewilderingly true. As you increase vocabularies of disciplines, the areas enabled just keep opening up or tangling in to new vistas. Talk about addictive and satisfaction in the endless pursuit! What an ecstatic paradox!

Your capacities, muscles for engaging, increase, and you just keep on exercising them on an inexhaustible supply – the compendium of human and world and all that is stitching them together!

Work it!!!

Writing(s)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment

“Electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds.

Print writing will remind us of our love for the physical, for the sensual world.

Electronic writing shall inspire magic.  Print writing shall inspire magic.  Ways to heal.”

-Carole Maso, Break Every Rule-

Afterwords…more words : up with word(s)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, JournallingsLeave a comment

After Words…More Words

UP WITH WORD(S)

“and any art, after all the other things if may be about, is fundamentally about its medium”

-Ronald Sukenick-

In conclusion?

Perhaps this entire exercise, this simplistic simplification of what I think I might know about the medium of languaging (a mystery to me) has been undertaken and written for myself alone. Perhaps it is comprised of the sounds of sobbing in a dark little attic, me searching to find a “speech fellowship” in this world, in my life experience. I can guarantee to you that it is an experiment in assaulting frontiers, unknowns, and deep abiding fears of mine: that I don’t know what I’m doing, that my languagings aren’t effective, that I don’t relate/co-relate to others well, that my writings are woefully inadequate to experience and the world, that my life doesn’t mean anything, that I and my words don’t matter.

I have hopes beyond these things though.

My hopes, I believe, in part have been to raise or renew an awareness of the mysterious tangle of being languaging engages us in – our realities. And in part to encourage creativity in our usage of language(s), and an openness to its using us, in order for the medium itself to become, and for us to be aware of our languaging as an experiencing, itself. Not necessarily “about” experiences (though it often accomplishes this as well), nor inherently “about” anything “else” – but languaging as activity of being human.

That a compulsion to use language as art, is a movement toward relation and intimacy…to utilize what language(s) open to us, get funky with it (exercise agency), constructing new common places, possible fields, toward more completeness of overlapping or shared experiencing. That our use and experience of languaging is our shared experience – where we meet – without a necessity of sharing referrals or signifieds behind or beyond the words themselves. Meetings in/at/through the artifacts of languaging.

It is my opinion that this is what works of art have always done, regardless of medium, content or imagery: taken available matter, identifiable to us all and humanly acted in and with it, composing it in a manner that becomes its own unique place of experiencing and being.

This often requires undoing habitual ways of using the mediums of living in order that we perceive the human and the medium again, afresh, and are thereby enabled to engage all matters/persons participant directly as experiencing. This may help explain why art is often confounding or unsettling at first…becoming new and unique experiences…as we always fear the unknown swarm of reality until we risk our personalities against/toward/with it.

I want to encourage you, in both expression and encounter, to take more into account, to open against your fears, to begin to engage the materials of experience, the ubiquity of our borderlands, frames and “frontiers” with courage, existing at the thresholds that you always necessarily are, but not only craving the safety that comes from seeking what you know, are accustomed to, have familiarity or agreement with, nor for what it might “mean” or what might lie “behind” it or that it might be “about,” but learning and challenging yourself to meet it directly – to look at it, to relate openly and expectantly.

Moving you to construct in your own surrounds places unique to yourself and available to your world – welcoming or offering others opportunities and possibilities to join. To become.

To continually recommence and expand…our being.

Closure is misanthropic

-Lyn Hejinian-