“Feeding the Reach”

 

Yesterday evening, I sat down in an early dusky chill, on the back steps of my home, for an after-dinner coffee and cigarette, watching with delight my two youngest bounding as penguins on our trampoline.

The sky was clear with an odd bright-but-sunken diffusion of sun, above the roof of the garage thin branches from three separate trees converging and tangling, criss-crossing and enmeshed, forming intricate thick silhouettes of scribblings in the even-ing air.

As I gazed and traced with my eyes and deep breaths, it struck me that after nearly two years of freedom to devote my days and hours to words, reading-writing-reading, a scene, an image like this incredibly marked and tangly night sky, almost immediately, spontaneously metaphored two references in me:

– a sentence

– the connections between ourselves and our world, the ganglia of mind and body enmeshed with “other”

I retraced my day to a half-an-hour I’d snuck to myself to read, while feigning a chore, from J.R. Firth’s later essays on linguistics. In one paper, Linguistic Analysis as a Study of Meaning, Firth very patently set out some fundamental assumptions he believed crucial for understanding the functions, processes, “meaning” of human languaging. I would like to copy entirely these three brief points and then add a touch of commentary, what my mind riffed as I pondered the trees (the tangles and lines, nerves and events conspiring to make a single utterance, a phrase, a sentence), a body and mind (my own) inundated, saturate, with language, and the squawks and giggles of my penguin-children.

First then, from J.R. Firth: (let’s call it “presuppositions crucial to reflecting on words”):

“The meaning of any particular instance of everyday speech is intimately interlocked not only with an environment of particular sights and sounds, but deeply embedded in the living processes of persons maintaining themselves in society”

“1. The human being is a field of experience in which the life process is being maintained in the social process. The human being in society is endowed with an urge to ‘diffuse’ and ‘communicate’ his experience by voice and gesture.

2. All language text in modern languages has therefore:

(a) the implication of utterance, and must be referred to

(b) participants in (all language presupposes ‘other’ – events linguistic and non- linguistic)

(c) some generalized context of situation.

These categories must also cover ‘talking to oneself’.

3. The participants in such contexts are social persons in terms of the speech community of which they are members. The key notion is one of personality, the essentials of which are:

(a) Continuity and the maintenance of the life process, the social process. In this

connection the concepts of context of culture and context of experience (continuity of pattern and process) are necessary abstractions in stating the continuity as well as the change of meanings.

(b) The creative effort and effect of speech, including talking to oneself. The preservation of the essentials of life in society from the point of view of the participants in the situation forms a large part of the meaning of language as creative activity.

(c) Personal responsibility for one’s words.

(d) The organization of personality and of social life depends on the built-in potentialities of language in the nature of the human beings and on what is learned in nurture.

“In the most general terms, the basic principle is the unity, identity and continuity of the human personality, bearing constantly in mind that ‘we are in the world and the world in us’…The contextual theory of meaning employs abstractions which enable us to handle language in the interrelated processes of personal and social life in the flux of events.”

 

For starters. Then Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sukenick and Blanchot, Beckett, Maso, Nancy and Stevens, Cixous, Kafka, Calvino, Derrida and Austin, Wimsatt, Peirce, Jakobson, Malinowski, Thirlwell, Shakespeare, Homer and Celan and more and more and more came flooding in like the chatter of branches, and I listened with my eyes, and felt deeply in my ears the scramble and magic of our glittering alphabets and strings of letters, colors and symbols and my mind murmuring over and over “feeding the reach, feeding the reach, feeding the reach…”

And I begged patience to add – from what I know of this elegant, flexible, complicated medium – WORDS – their implementing our humanness implementing them – that their primary glorious recklessly beautiful use is just this:

feeding the reach of our humanness

its depth, breadth, height and scope and volume

languaging is the vocation of feeding the reach

N Filbert, March 2012

“the whole world – luminous, luminous.  We were lucky to be here.  Even in pain and uncertainty and rage and fear –

some fear“

-Carole Maso-

Shedding Light

(on fears and forties)

What is it they say about one’s 40s?

When I was in my 20s I think we imagined the fourth decade as a time when one ought to be graduating from the ever-post-grad program school of hard knocks, perhaps the 20s were a fortification and stretching of the self, the 30s a learning and establishing of its bounds and borders, 40s and 50s some growing truce or enjoyment of it all. At my birthday this year my stepdaughter pronounced me “forty-fun” years old. Is that so?

Walking down the stairs from our working studio to procure cream for my coffee, something else strikes me. I see a rectangle of light protrude from an uncovered window in a room I cannot see, falling across another room, two away from the kitchen where I stand and view it through three doorways. My 40s I would characterize (a year-and-a-half in) as the facing and unpacking, or recognition of and inquiry into, my prominent, almost mythical, and apparently irrational, fears.

Among these, the fear of abandonment (a paranoia that has eaten at all of my marriages – luckily my current spouse won’t have it…thus these therapeutic investigations); another, that I’m inherently disappointing or insufficient: my talents, appearance, relationality, aptitudes for sympathy/empathy/emotion, and abilities all suffer some fatal lack, that I am unable to be “enough” of anything or anyone to be of lasting value. Also, that people are threatening and harmful – strangers, intimates, friends, acquaintances – other humans – inherently self-preserving by nature and therefore untrustworthy, at the point one no longer serves their preserving one will be discarded or destroyed (accentuating abandonment and insufficiency fears as you might imagine); and light. Yes, light. Particularly sunlight, but any form of bright light unsettles me profoundly.

Seeing the sunlight cut through a clearly unprotected opening in our home had the effect of an intruder on me – my esophagus tensed up, skin tingled, breath foreshortened and nerves wrenched the muscles of my shoulders and neck – someone had left us exposed – at mercy – at risk.

In the night, feeling my way to the restroom, there’s a glow from my daughter’s room. It suggests presence, but I know (I think) that she is sleeping at her mother’s tonight. Startled and alarmed, I nudge the door – glow sticks, attached in a large circle, lay in the room like an electric eel spiriting by in the ocean’s depths.

I can sit with ease, even sprawl on our lovely porch, enjoy a cigarette, watch branches and pavement, listen to critters at night or in storm, but in daylight I keep moving or stand at the door. Like a doe in a clearing, I feel surrounded, defenseless – everyone (anyone) could see me, take a shot, direct speech my way, ask for things – interrupt, intrude, violate, voyeur.

Our maniacal sun has always struck me as an enormous and torturous spotlight under which we had better perform or disband (scurry) ‘cause everyone (potentially) is judging us; or some atomic or nuclear exposure-radiator, aching to burn and shrivel us, flare us to a crisp, turn us to ash, dehydrate us.

Rain and dark moistness encourages growth, protection, concealment, shelter. Like robing for the stage, fogs and mists mask us, preserve our individuality, turn us into basic shapes, generalize and equalize us, but light, well light “brings to light” – highlighting flaws, differences, disfigurements, scars, limps, pimples, features, you name it – you’re stripped bare before the blazing eye.

Lunar reflection, on the other hand, is like a nightlight – an orb, an aura, a frosted bulb – gently assisting without dominance, our perceptive necessities, like cloudcover or shade.

Perhaps this psycho-physiological trigger comes from years of being scared shitless (literally, I endured diarrhea before each of my performances as a child) or some early programming of scrutiny and judgment; or science labs and hospitals versus woods, basements and photo-development darkrooms or blacklit jazz rooms that were my safe places in my youth. I don’t know, but I can’t remember a time I didn’t prefer the night to the day, rain to shine, cathedral to mega-church theatrics, concert hall to club, museum to mall and so on.

Anyway, the 40s. One survives this far creating and instinctively obeying these fears…perhaps deconstructing them implies one is “over-the-hill,” preparations for death, dismantling the armor that got one this far?

Wanting to be known before one dies? “Exposed” to another? Coming-to-terms with something closer to “reality”? Like mortality? I don’t’ know. It doesn’t make much sense, to grow fearless as one approaches the fearsome end, but what do I know? I’ve only been around for four decades. Cut me some slack.

Please