another one – why not keep ’em together?
I, for Instants, You
Where is the ode to distance?
How it tendrils to desire?
Oh yellow light expanding,
clear from here to there,
beyond mountains.
And both are in it.
There’s the rub.
Month: April 2012
instants of yous
I, for Instants, You
I activate the mechanism
by opening.
All there.
Which happens to be here,
between
eye and this book.
I, for Instants, You
I, for Instants, You
“Simply to name it is to con-
fuse it, altogether:
here now you
is a form you will not fill”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
“artists very often forget that their work holds the secret of true time:
not empty eternity but the life of the instant”
-Octavio Paz-
The children are reading Basho.
It was raining.
There’s a bright diamond
there where the legs in your jeans
come joined together
Is there a name for that small absence?
Where nothing blocks the light?
Between
Where your flesh fuses together
Con-fused, seamlessly?
In this case, I am eye
For instants, and then you move.
The children still reading Basho.
(they “get” it)
Rain coming again
this time not from cloudy skies
but wind shaking trees
PRESS ON – Thank You
“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted,
nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”
-Sir Francis Bacon-
“One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change…
ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”
-Harold Bloom-
“everything directly accessible to us (in reading) – except for the perceived characters (letters and symbols and space) – would be only our ideas, thoughts, or, possibly, emotional states”
-Roman Ingarden-
RUSH
I’m thinking storm-wind and flood.
The press and surge of words and images.
I’m thinking adrenalin and frenzy.
WORD:PRESS
It dawns on me today that blogging incites and anxiety to produce. A pressing to keep up and create.
There’s a radiance to that.
On the one hand, to feel it. That, even just here, at WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of creative human beings thinking, expressing, making…exponentially increasing my already over-saturated reading list.
RUSH
And I mean it, it’s downright EXCITING to view and ingest the enormous, surprising, sincere and ever-expanding activity of humans! (There’s a thank-you in that to all of you I’ve found so far!) WHOOSH! RUSH!
On the other…frenetic. If “all human beings are the same, but everyone is human in their own way” (Adler on Franz Kafka), then you all are as limited as I by time and space and finitude…i.e. face the anguish of not being able to give the people and things in your immediate surround let alone verbal and visual artifacts from around the world what seems to be their due attention. To weigh and consider, to respond.
I spend a lot of time studying semiotics and theories of communication – how we, as humans, might “put in common,” “share” – “thoughts, information and opinions through speech, writing, images or signs” – “crafting passages between places and persons.”
Hundreds of thousands (actually many more) – passages made sensible, visible, right here with every click on WordPress, vimeo, Weebly, etc…
So long to fears re: death of reading, of art, culture, any such ‘thing.’
And there’s the ‘rub.’ Visiting “philosophy” pages today, I was significantly encouraged by so much sustained argumentation going on. Persons thinking hard and working it out with signs and gestures. Photographer’s sharing their eyes and the difficult work of seeing. Artists shaping the world through the world’s materials and all their minds and bodies process into it. Our poets, our healers, each of us shaping one another’s days/minds/experiences.
So thank you ALL for this thunderous RUSH. For the challenge to take care, to work and enjoy, to weigh and consider who we are, who I am, what I do, what I intend to create, present and offer…
Press on…read in…find value.
“What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible?…
I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear…
what is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning”
-Anne Carson-
“Behind, always behind the things in a hurry to be, you must search for what is”
-Edmond Jabes-
Stumbling Man
“This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief opportunities”
-Michel Serres-
What I really want to ask, is where I am? Implying already the question of an “I” to locate, whether or not there’s a who that could be. I really DO wake into questions.
Pop over to my “currently reading” page/list. It hasn’t changed a lot, perhaps gained a few pounds. I set in this tribal circle, stacks of books like temple pillars, and feel like I’m made of shavings and fragments. Some strange conglomeration of paper-thin shreds, filled with phrases and songs, floating in air. Like using dust as a puzzle.
What sits in that center, bathed in blaring desk-light, really?
“a slapdash piece of [sometimes very hard] work, subject to the vagaries of time [its growth and its wear] and the [sometimes brilliant] blunders of brief opportunities”
That feels pretty accurate. My parents, my sister, my Kansas. My musical training. Education, educators, friends. Marriages and children, travel and work. These words, this blogsite. How “I” originates and am formed. And thousands upon thousands of books, hours and hours of movies and song.
Then the dust and the shavings keep collecting: mountain climbs and ocean views, orchestras and art museums, foreign countries and people. Slapdash, subject to vagaries, blunders of opportunities.
I’ve an urge to look closer (a terminal “illness” of mine). For “slapdash” I find ‘things done hastily, carelessly,’ but I’ve often taken great pains over much time with fervent investment – yet, yes, the results have definitely been ‘roughcast’ and ‘haphazard.’
And “vagaries” – ‘erratic, extravagant, or outlandish’ occurrences, ‘unexpected and inexplicable change.’ Admitted, time works this way, as (the dictionary suggests) the ‘variations of weather’ – a ‘wandering’ ‘fluctuation.’ I accept.
And what of ‘blunders,’ of blundering? ‘Mistakes, usually serious, caused by ignorance and confusion.’ ‘Clumsily or blindly’ mannering forth. However else could I proceed with this limited mind and body, space and shape, this miniscule duration (recalling ‘hastily’ – how much time, relatively, do we really have in a larger scheme?). Yes, I am always walking into an unknown next, ‘blindly’ as it were, piecing together a ‘haphazard’ and ‘erratic’ assemblage of imagined/remembered experiences, ‘clumsily’ hauling them forward breath-by-breath. Fair enough, ‘extravagant’ or ‘serious mistakes,’ I blunder.
Remains the “opportunities” to set it all aright. These are described as ‘favorable or advantageous circumstances, or combinations of circumstances.’ ‘Suitable chances for progress or advancement.’ Possibles. And this scattered smattered hollow or vortex, opens out again.
So – I’m here, and this – a clumsy blind wanderer stumbling through unexpected and inexplicable changes to haphazard and outlandish results; a con-fused combination of circumstances ever entering favorable and advantageous, suitable chances to progress and keep going…into the ever-possibles…
Voila.
I breathe and gaze.
I stumble on.
N Filbert 2012
Choose. Why choose?
“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting? Choose, why choose?”
-J.M.G. LeClezio-
“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”
-Michel Serres-
Choose. Why choose?
Deep in love
the sight, the thought, the feel.
Look around.
Over here a line comes singing, her misting whispers, behind the ear.
Bold graffiti in the midst: the faces, the lettering.
Trilling of a baby’s babble.
Choose. Why choose?
I build my shelter, I fashion my tent of language.
I might hide here. I might scribble the wall.
Curving words, like celanic, like ocean.
I choose.
Why choose?
To shelter, to bloom.
I build a barn of story, the structure to hold it in.
This body, its experiences.
This wife, and hers.
Seven starling children, darting out and in.
And things: stuff, books, ideas, smells.
Dreams and hopes; fears and memory.
Do words burn?
I make a sprinkler, and a hose. I fill them with water.
There is a fire there. For warmth.
To build a well.
I am speaking tools.
Choose. Why choose?
To erase disease-words, and plight.
She says color and I leave it on the walls.
Call and response, they’re in, through the windows.
I sing a night with rain.
I sculpt a bed of vowels.
We cry out in the form of wings:
Take shelter.
And choose.
Why choose?
“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know.’”
-Robert Creeley-
The Open
“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?
Choose, why choose?”
-J.M.G. LeClezio-
“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know'”
-Robert Creeley-
“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”
-Michel Serres-
Incidental Courage in the Crevices
I’ve taken someone’s advice and picked up David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary – what a potent little delight! Immediately slid into place with Alain de Botton’s On Love and Macedonio Fernandez’ The Museum of Eterna’s Novel; Jesse Ball’s The Curfew and The Way Through Doors. Also moved me back to Daniel Handler’s Adverbs and (so-far) wonderful Why We Broke Up. In the process, feeling forever stunted as a “writer,” I cracked A. Alvarez’ The Writer’s Voice yesterday to these jewels:
“For freelance writers like myself who belong to an endangered species which, as long ago as 1949 Cyril Connolly was already calling ‘the last known herd in existence of that mysterious animal the man of letters,’ writing is less a compulsion than a misfortune, like a doomed love affair. We write because we fell in love with language when we were young and impressionable, just as musicians fall in love with sound, and thereafter are doomed to explore this fatal attraction in as many ways as we can…fifty years of writing for a living have taught me that there is only one thing the four disciplines have in common: in order to write well you must first learn how to listen. And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers. Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false. It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire.”
All my Words are Silent 