Month: March 2012

Scripting the Photographer, part 2

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

The Photographer Poses a Nude

 

I proceed to enact a daguerreotype, a portrait, of a nude human body. I desire the body, the nude, for its pliable form. Shapable still-life, form requiring will. I will need to place my hands on you, move you, to sculpt your body into lights and shadows. I choose you because you are beautiful to me, interesting, unique. You consent, or choose, “for art,” you say, “for art I will remove all my clothing and exist only in my skin and bones,” “for art I will be naked.”

And I agree. Regardless of artifice or style, mechanisms or techniques, art reveals us naked, as we are in our skins, our fragile, porous borders. I must touch you. Art cannot occur in solitude. Always there must be “other.” Always there must be “form,” a here and a there, an inside / outside, a marking and memory.

I do not know how it feels for you to have my hands upon your body. You lie still. You are naked, are beautiful. I place my palm underneath of your knees and pull them up toward your chest. Your calves I press firmly along your thighs to the point where your heels cleave buttock. Sharp angles, slow curves, deep shadow. My fingers trace around your bottom and up the small of your back, learning your spine, your lines. I whisper.

Firmly, quietly, I shove your shoulder up over your knee and push your blade firmly, flattening a slope with a vertebrate edge, cupping the folds of your legs and creating shades of muscle and rib along the contortion of your back. Turning your face to the floor, I stress the creases of the tendons securing your neck. I use your hair like a pencil. Sketching and tracing the shape of your skull like thick charcoal, then drawing out strands for fine points, contour every which way of scapula and horizon, blade-rib-spine for highlight, sweet water of flesh as it pours your body and bends.

This takes time and concentration, you must hold still while your figure trembles. The arms? The hands? I flatten one out between my own, straining the fingers as widely as I’m able, squashing it against the surface where your face ought to be, now hidden beneath the likeness of your hair, pivoted on your nose and your crown. The other I stretch along your back to your bottom as a mirror, a reflected wave providing border and frame to the curling fetus of your twisting torso.

Hold there. Adjusting your digits to the swerve of your buttock, I tap them to the turn of your thigh. You are beautiful, pliable, soft. I stare. I close my eyes and gently feel my way over every shape of you in the dark. A blind man finding my way along the rocks of a beach, underwater. I imagine work onto paper, in wet clay or cool marble, correcting some angles of compromised gradients, pools of stasis, until you exist only as flow and obstruction. Yes there, yes there. How do you feel? Do not answer, you cannot afford to breathe, you are art, an object, an artifact.

Stay as I fix my devices, reform your surround, and manipulate tools. Stay.

We begin. I shape you, you will. I twist you, you choose. We wait, we wait, attendant to the sky.

Scripting the Photographer, entry 1

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The Photographer Discusses Poor Vision

 

Indeed there are days I’m uncertain. Unsure if I’m able to see. Since youth I’ve been blind, very nearly, “legally”? – yes, in my left, but spectacles account for that, I mean “vision.” Shapes, soft and blotted, everything variations of strangely spotted, fuzzy ovals. My natural eyesight is that I see what you see examining blood cells through a microscope. It’s a hell of a guess to proclaim something “tree,” or “car,” “human,” “house.”

My glasses restore what is known as “normal vision,” in other words, I’m enabled to distinguish walls and streets, eyes from mouths, blades of grass, shadows, pebbles, feathers even.

What I’m attempting to signify here is not accuracy, but that dread of poor vision, its undoing – where my eyes open out and register lines and fields, patches and frames, sketches and grounds, and I feel certain, uneasily assured, that what my brain is recording is itself. That these forms I “see” and “recognize” – sharp angles of a roof, scribbles on sky-canvas of a great bare cottonwood, spillages and squee-gee’s smears of walking figures – that these forms feel, in fact, to be formed. Forms formed by me. That rather than seek and capture I en-vision and create.

That the world is all dim-grey and full of shadows, and I mark it using light. Light is all – a motion, a shudder and click – and somehow I’ve reordered what might be there. My point of view, my stance. Decrepit old man with still the use of his fingers, albeit shaking, shooting willy-nilly, random violence, chopping up what is and nailing it in fragments.

At first I sought, I really sought. I ached a way to know what’s real. I hungered, craved, and wanted – to get out there, in there, attach – somehow seal myself to my surround – to objects. I thought: I’ll see something – something really there – and then I’ll, I’ll, well, I’ll prove it to myself – make a little monument, a document, an artifact that might bless me, secure me – I WAS HERE I SAW THIS – see? I indeed exist and was present – at least at that moment. That I might hold it, a thing, an object, something with matter, that matters.

But doesn’t repeat – you see? What I did with the light and the shapes, the forms and the shutter – my “settings” – that is what I look at again and again – it’s “developed” on me. What I saw develops as I see, and then again with each viewing, but is not, I repeat, is NOT what I took the picture of. Which was a moment. My prints, my negatives, are next moments, and next. New situations, new contexts – new sights: with the requisite distortion of my vision.

In the museum, the gallery, the box in my closet, laid out on my desk, with a friend on my couch – new forms, new shapes, new visions surround. Points of view.

Poor vision, you see? Inaccurate. Not the world or the subject, but me. Not my eyes (“corrected” by lenses), but what directs them to look, what selects their focus, blurs the contexts – my settings – what chooses. Responds.

My poor vision.

Equilibrium’s Joy

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings4 Comments
foto by Filbert

“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

Shedding Light

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“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

Imago – a theory

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figure - Holly Suzanne mixed media on canvas 2012

Imago

 

We all have it somewhere, a figure ill-informed and compositely made.

 

Mine begins like this: part-womb and part-breast, and hair of dark stars. There are wrinkles, faces mostly turned away or altogether absent, save on the specialist of days. It is not rounded. Mostly I study the back. I remain.

Fine-featured then, since I’m left to my own, hips holding rooms and breasts short by half. A particular’d elegance and a voice that soothes, all things I add to what’s missing.

I can smell her or him, scented of pollen and silt. I remain on the lookout, shaping the notes as lines on a canvas, rain over sky.

I believe it appears, here and there, a savior, a teacher, an object to adore. When faced with a mountain or storm I learn more. A natural wonder. There’s awe in the outline.

And passion. Words on a page, notes on a scale, a scintillant stirring.

It comes to light and it sings. In its movements, its promise, its sounds. I embrace and the figure is blurred. My dark shadow. It walks away, or I retreat and recoil.

It looks like this: fluid and sturdy, lithe and filled with quiet fuel. Eternal source (a womb, a breast) and distant constellation (object of desire) otherwise function of the Muse, symbol and seed woven together.

To follow after, and derive. Layered with impossible nourishment, what infinity breeds.

 

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

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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)

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“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)

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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-

 

instants of i…

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“i” for instance

(iota)

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQURSTUVWXYZ

And how was it I acquired this alphabet among so many others? Broken and crossed-out from the start, I adapted myself, twisted and stretched, contorted and shaped to become something more, something other than my single digit of a mark. Stumbling about all through the letters I reached, bowing this way and that, even circling round on myself exposing the emptiness inside, the only thing noteworthy surrounding me or attached to me from outside, where reality lies. Pleading and spreading my arms, split apart, right up to my crucified and zig-zagged zero-I-ng end.