The Bewildered Bewildering (attempts toward clear thinking)

Searching for truth(s)

As one attempts to come nearer to one’s existence as a human – its systems, structures and functions – from mental imaginative realms down to cellular genetic levels – the complexity and confluences involved can be bewildering.

Are bewildering.

It is easy to get one’s self “lost” as a human being.  On literally billions of levels we participate in constant (and I mean unceasing) input and output of information, movement, form, energy and so on.  It’s more than we can individually handle.  Yet we are made to.

In other words, it is we as individual humans – our bodies, our minds and experiencesdoing the bewildering we find bewildering.  Perhaps this is my first noble truth: consciousness means being aware of and bewildered by our bewilderment.

How to proceed?  There are a bewildering amount of possibilities and processes for us bewildered humans to bewilder our way into.  We can study, forge purposeful relationships, work, play, think, dream, parent, fight or flee our bewilderment.  Opened up, we do not know the options or capabilities, the extent our bewilderment can reach.

Everything is strange.  If this were my second noble suggestion, it would imply that with each moment of our existence we are encountering the unknown.  We recognize our existence by dissimilarity, non-identity, difference.  This makes all things new.  We literally have never been where we are in space, time or living at any instant, before.  We do not re-live, we are ever living-into.  The contents of the past can become part of our structuring and processing, but nothing repeats, everything “enters.”  Each no-time now is brand new experience of unknown reality, experienced, imagined, interpreted, perceived and felt by us in incalculable ways through a vortex of communications and processes we have very little control over.

We, the producing products.  Perhaps this is noble human notation number 3.  What happens in our bewilderment of presentness is that our individuality opened out ubiquitously functions to produce experiences which are products of our experiencing.  In other words we are unceasing experimentors producing experiences as our products.  It all applies; it all exports.  There are no deletions, erasures or extractions – only new experiences, new dissimilar moments of ongoing processing.

There is no exit from this process.  Form 4: NO EXIT.  Imagined observation, fabricated explanation, hypothetical objectivity, invented theories, meanings, interpretations of sense – none of these removes us from our experiencing or transfers us to any other point-of-view from our individual field.  Bewildering in our bewildering surround.  Semblances, “insights,” knowledge and so on are just pieces of the ongoing differentiation in bewilderment.  How we exist, perhaps not the ant or paramecium or tree cell.  But, then again, perhaps so!

If a lion spoke we wouldn’t understand them, Wittgenstein proffered.  Another way of saying we’re us, bewildered and bewildering beasts, forging into the unknown.  Our access limiting in its unlimitedness (i.e. finitude); systematically mind-blowing and ecstatically depressing in an awe-full or awe-some(?) way.

Be human.  Be glad for it.  Be wilder.

N Filbert 2012

Fathers Voices

With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach

By William Stafford

 

We would climb the highest dune,

from there to gaze and come down:

the ocean was performing;

we contributed our climb.

 

Waves leapfrogged and came

straight out of the storm.

What should our gaze mean?

Kit waited for me to decide.

 

Standing on such a hill,

what would you tell your child?

That was an absolute vista.

Those waves raced far, and cold.

 

“How far could you swim, Daddy,

in such a storm?”

“As far as was needed,” I said,

and as I talked, I swam.

 

see also, Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares

 

 

 

The Howl and The Whisper

Howling is a buried feat

epigenetic

leaking everywhere

Howling is done with the body

in terror

 a raging fear

imagine the reddened and purpling frame

a six-month-old baby left

naked on a hardwood floor

arching back

jerking tremors

piercing wail

flailing, throttling, choking at air

it will not stop

it is vulnerable.

Say the father rushes it

say he scoops it into his arms

whispers and cradles

The infant fits in the fathers’ large hands

held close to his cheek

ear-brushed lips

the father coos

infant trembling revolts

feeling its death

the father rocks it gently

kisses its skin

sniffing the child

while the infant howls.

He says “leave it to me.  Everything will be alright”

on repeat

says “I know we are vulnerable”

as the shuddering

comes to cease.

Let the infant howl

raise it up

bring it near

hold it close

that is all.

I, an infant’s father.

note:

I have had many incidents of late in which I howl at the dreaded prospect of losing my wife (to others, to distance, to death, to herself).  These have come out slantwise:  as anger or jealousy, criticism and challenge.  It is physiological.

A therapist recently suggested some alternate meanings.  When my body convulses in paranoia and terror, what might its messaging be?  Might it be saying that something or someone is terribly important to me, as significant as my own life and that I might well feel utterly helpless at that vulnerability?  He suggested that my body is indeed feeling real-life threat…and that the left side of my brain whooshes in hoping to rescue (“SuperMeaningMan”) to concoct a story to match, to account for the tremors and heartbeat and anxious breaths.  Things like: “I must not be good enough for her.  She must be cheating.  See how she dresses?  See how she is tired when she looks at me?  See how she keeps leaving the house?” and so on, or any number of scenarios…

When in possible fact I’m a flailing infant desperate for assurance and comfort, for a tender voice near.  Which made a world of sense.

He said:  supply it.

This is part of that work.

N Filbert

ALL MIXED UP

Mark Kozelek

I am Looking for Words

I Am Looking for Words

(click above for full text)

Baffling Wisdom (really a long roundabout babble aimed towards my wife)

Going back through the writings that have been piling up on, around and near my desk over the past few days working out the hoped-for verbalization of whatever it is that’s been stirring around in my brain I ran across a few more pages that seemed interesting / to the purpose…

“I am looking for words….”

Baffling Wisdom

i.e. thinking things through

Noteworthy (not noteworthy – “omniscient observing” – worthy!!)

I continually conclude that these two are up to something unique and astounding in American letters:

BEN MARCUS

and….

JESSE BALL

i advise you fervently…be aware

Remarking Mark Remarking

Greetings readers.  I’ve been in a bit of a swirl or “swarm” of information, activity, relation and language of late, nothing wrong with it really, but its producings have seemed a bit ephemeral, inchoate, more wisps than winds.  Yesterday as I sat to work, a new character introduced himself to my scribbling hand…here’s a sort of mock-up or intro to that relation.  I’d love to hear what you think?  Is he interesting?  Are his thoughts?  Should he live?  🙂

Thank you SO much, each viewer and reader for taking time out of your lives which must be as busy as the rest of us, to listen and look at my blog and my work.  This community has significantly grown my courage.

Remarking Mark Remarking

(please click on title for full text – thanks!)

Borrowed, but WOW! BAM! (and I’ll regale you no more!)…

“‘The omniscient observer,’ Dala said continuing for them out of another day, ‘reads from the first word to the last with great care for the spaces between them so they are unframed by enthusiasts or detractors”

-Louis Zukovsky, from Little

MAY WE ALL READ THIS WAY!

Needing Advice!?I

Greetings WordPressers….

I don’t want to come off unappreciative or paranoid…but the past week or so I have had a marked increase in viewings from one location…like hundreds a day…and posts hit are ranging throughout everything I’ve posted…so either there’s a wonderful reality where someone is actually compelled by all I’ve written and want to work there way through its whole history…or…perhaps things are being copied?  Should I be concerned?  Should I just rejoice that someone’s finally reading it all?  I’d love advice from some of you that have been here awhile and have a multitude of followers/readers?

Thanks  so much…

N Filbert

New Arrivals…New Invaluables

“meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we’d become from the language toxin…

The know-it-alls are always the last to know.  Everyone’s a diagnostician, and everyone’s wrong…”

-Ben Marcus-

“As is usual with me I would not go on with the rest of the story and come back to the difficult sentence later.  With others it may be different – but when I am that far in a work the story must exist in each word or I cannot go on…”

-Louis Zukofsky-

-Lukas Felzmann-

I know….there’s a LOT of envy fuming out of you readers eyes!

(use your local library!)