Month: May 2012
Unknown and Unnamed, cropping up everywhere: Imagine Me
To all concerned, or the least bit interested, I am no one on the road to nowhere. It’s taken me a long time to set out, but I have begun! My path has been wily. Many joys and celebrations, discoveries and inventions mark the past. Wounds bored of enormous riggings and bits; injuries, damage and crime barbwire the road. Imprints of loss – great and unexpected gains pock my surface. Years of input and adventure, learning and error track me.
Now I am no one. Purposively, conscientiously and chaotically venturing into the everywhere that is nowhere. Now here.
Sure you can read the past’s path – identifying me, mind and body cropping up here and there, in and out of people’s lives – particular places, practicings and performings. Believe me – that’s not the point.
The point, or series of points, or scattered suggestions of borders, like shot smattering air…is where everything meets, interacts. A porous place, undefined, ever-defining. Unknowns cropping up everywhere.
I’m talking about the enormous field wherein which forms mingle, shaping and providing contents, ever on the verge of in-forming. This inchoate and omnidirectional process we name “becoming,” “coming-to-be,” we know so little about but strive so constantly for a sense of.
Image me then, if it helps. Outline a human, male, having endured four decades existing, of average height and weight, nondescript. (It doesn’t “matter” – the matter is shared commonly, specifics will rise in and out of clarity through encounters).
Here I am, essentially:
Pocket into this figure, wherever you like – an education in classics, advanced studies in music, theology and philosophy. Twenty years of retail labor in bookish culture; three wives, seven children. Smear that around with geographies – their weathers and landscapes, flora and fauna and politics – of the American Midwest, big-city Northeast, farmlands and Great Lakes, Germany, UK, Pacific NW and Israeli-controlled Palestine.
Inject strains of passions: fine arts, literature, music. Linguistics, semiology and phenomenology. Parenting, intimacy and artistic creativity. Psychology, biology, mythology.
Take and run an eraser randomly across, leaving trails for griefs, abandonments and disillusions. Separations, misunderstandings and woundings, coming and going both ways.
Scribble. I mean doodle maniacally in pencil or pen, any color or width. Scratch, wobble, circle, until the figure looks like an indecipherable tangle, a rough frenetic sketch, something built up and crossed out –
that represents the meld. The interlacing and cross-currents of all the things within, without; nurtured or native; learned or instinctual; native or chosen; perpetrated or inflicted.
Voila:
Alberto Giacometti
there is no one (or every)
moving nowhere (or every)
save this monumental caveat: that bungled mass of human has a goal. In keeping with appearances…he (I) purposes now/here…
I hear the feedback
“get on with it already!”
Here goes
(again)
An aside, centered
constancy in compelling
tellings synonymous with what I envision
recommended, terrifically
A New Character approaches…
Homo Scribus Attonbitus
For this foray I need, as they say, a “blank slate,” “carte blanche,” a banded void.
In other words, I know what I’m doing this time, not relying on the “shoulders of giants,” resting on no other’s laurels, or catapulting off some foreign quotation. No grand metaphors from the dead or established.
I’ve come of age.
I view the spines of those lying around me – oh they’ve had their say and sung it quite loudly if you ask me! – now mouldered and whispering like ghost-chatter or chains rattling in a cellar wind. No, those pregnant freight-train loads have departed this station and become imperceptible tremors, thunder-rumbles echoing to far dissipation.
I’m setting out my own trail. No trail. Expedition – yes, that’s it! Packed with only myself and whatever remains undigested in my system, I’ll set out, set in; implore and explore.
My eyes, my hands, my legs and feet. My lanky arms, my ears and my snoot – my particular mindbody complex and whatever might come to surround me!
No more reading! No more imitating masters! No more interludes and origins – referential abysses! Nay, only this human specimen armed with senses and gestural capacities – engaging this world!
Sounds heroic, adventurous, creative and crafty – as a Ulysses hoisting his sail – a voyage and a journey, an epic assay of discovery! (Forget the “Ulysses” slip – no more of that, believe me, I’m on my own here, now). I’ll delete out the crutches and mentors, all competitors now on the lyrical battlefield of verbalizing existence! Stand back! Give way! Fall silent! (please???) – it should be my turn now!
I’m ready, able and willing – this is my moment.
Cutting ties, spreading wings, taking the stage, the road untraveled, for I’ll be building it as I go – my road. My way. My path. My vision.
You’re probably wondering to yourself how you’ll identify something so unique, unprecedented and individually differentiated – yes? Probably brimming up with anticipation and excitement – as if attending some grand unveiling, or approaching the mysterious goal of a lifetime’s pilgrimage? Quite right to be ecstatic, verklempt and even a good deal afraid, perhaps intimidated – we can never know when awe and glory might undo us!
Prepare yourselves.
From this point forward you’ll be engaging this writer’s voice. Texts, language and letters funneled and revealed via this being’s mediums and convergences. As I invade and am invaded by my existence/existents; subjects, objects; realities, fancies and facts…you, dear lucky readers, shall be privileged and forced into a kind of secret society, veritable coterie and gnostic initiation into
the unknown of the unnamed one
For indeed, perforce and assuredly instigating, nay, creating (as if ex nihilo, pro nihilo)… beginning such an enterprise as this requires all become fresh and new –
nothing answering to nothing
absolutely! A virginal venture for all – an only! Circumstance in the making of being made – the copulation of a human complexity encountering and being-countered-by ALL (within/without).
Oh, I’ve come of age. Proven my ability to survive, alive, and to endure all the many centrifugal/centripetal formulating methods of provenance and progeny, culture and biology, genetics and genius,
have undone, erased, reformed or assimilated
and set forth as if naked, stripped bare,
into a fantastic actuality (“reality”!) likewise deposed and evolved.
To the marks!
On your marks (well, mine, actually) –
get set –
and here/now GOES!!
[drat! here/now went!]
Again…
“in response, you make a gesture filled with uncertainties…”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
Another Rejected (albeit kindly!) fiction…
WHO THEN IS SPEAKING?
“the preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character – the author of the work… the author’s name and the various ‘I’s’ that go to make up the ‘I’ who is writing”
“’I’ can only be identified by the instance of speech which contains it, and by that alone”
“Who, then, is speaking?”
who is speaking:
I am the one, come to tell the story, the code of information and words, with letters and gestures and some touches of inflection, but I mean to tell it straight and impartially, save the parts I must needs factor in.
who is writing:
And I am the one, come to present the speech in images – to sketch, doodle, scrawl and scribble – marks and letters and symbolic dashes and curves, points and curls in order that you might decode, perceive and interpret the messages of speaker, silent though you both may be, with all of us reading what we each are choosing to see.
who is reading:
we, all of us, some before the text is made, some almost simultaneous with it, others far along and away, ingesting quite similar physical marks and gestures, each in our own way through our various individual-minds, group-minds, cultures, vocabularies, languages and eras. In other words, nothing stays the same, and everything is alike in this. We read, re-marking the text.
who is not-writing:
I am capable of inscribing in my mind and body, the world. As if an invisible typing-machine, a reordering recorder, some receptive-creator-genius, as it were, a super-computer which you are incapable of judging for yourself, as each to our own mechanisms, susceptibilities, senses and necessary wiring. Humana/inhumana – therein lies the distinctives, do not doubt it. I am known by my knowing.
who is not-speaking:
Therefore I do not tell, have no voice of my own but merely exist to compile and report, as if I were a memory file tabbed for all occasions. I absorb, alchemize and purify. I add solvents and neutralize, catalyze, in effect I am a scientist or theorist, objectively observant as I play in my private lab. Whereof I do not know I cannot speak, and results are eternally forth-coming, each instant a universe of new, each moment a rearrangement of all the parts in an ever-altering and incomplete whole…my lips are sealed.
who is not-reading:
[the non-readers, alas, are unable to report or tell. Our theories include the “supernova” and “black holes;” however, some have suggested to add in this category “blind faith practitioners,” “idealists,” “atheists,” – actually all –isms and –ologies, but given their abilities to say and to write and/or gesture their positions, “non-reader” would have to be distorted to incorporate “those who read in only one way”] –editors note
who is speaking:
“and like I said, ‘it began,’ he said, ‘this way: she turned the corner in a frenzy of hurry, skirt twirling this way and that, clop-clop of pumps, some windy vibration to her flesh,’ which corresponds very neatly to the moment I heard him exclaim, (he who I’m speaking of), and forthwith interviewed concerning the commotion, sitting (as he was), on the bench in the park, with such a beautiful female, I had thought, at the time I approached him, given the apparent accident of noise fomenting beneath my window”
who is writing:
wrote
who is reading:
is a little confused by the pronouns. The speaker apparently involved in the he-she story that he tells, but is the she also the beautiful female or some other rushing one? He being the same as exclaimed and sweated on the bench? Am I reading this right?
who is writing:
I write it as I hear it, with the proviso of necessary adjustments, corrections and expansions to concoct a sensible array of language, given current grammatical and syntactic preferences of the culture at large and my own personal tastes. Not that I actually “hear” it, as it were, more as if I see it occurring on the page where my hand is making marks, deriving setting, speech, movement and character from the silent leak of pen, like reading perhaps, a proto-reading of sorts, replete with imaged-in (image-ined?) activity, not physical, of course, save insofar as my hand and parts of my arm make a sort of jittery movement in utilizing the pen, but, well, is that any clearer? Helpful in any way?
who is reading:
am I supposed to know all that? I picked this up engage a story, a motion-picture-in-words type of thing, not a movie with commentary and special-effects how-tos; I’m very uncertain as to what’s actually going on here – am I to believe I’m encountering a work of someone’s imagination that I might while away some hours of my life participating in, thereby stimulating my own? Or is this some sort of step-by-step author-diary phenomenological-literary inquiry, with which I have no concern or interest whatsoever?
who is writing:
Where does the reader fit in? (a marginal note)
who is speaking:
“so he says to me, I mean, I’m just sitting here enjoying a beautiful Spring day on my favorite perch in the local park with this incredible girl I finagled to my side with brilliant hubris and aesthetic chatter, just sensing the verdant nearness of her, knowing that just beneath that thin satiny-cotton her flesh continued – from her arms and knees to her chest and crotch, those virile thighs, I’m dizzy almost here – my intellect on autopilot while my senses imbibe, and this guy, this frantic frazzled business dude scurries up asking ‘What!? Is everything – ?’ ‘What’s happened? Is everyone okay?!’ and ‘What the hell is going on?!’ I bristle of course, no one likes shit instead of rain on parade day hoping for a carnival ride, and I cinch up, scowl, and I tell him, I tell this guy: ‘Sir! What are you talking about? Step back! Calm down! Breathe…then begin again, but slow it down – try to make sense!’ demonstrating my world-wizened calm and strong fearless demeanor to the steaming body right there up next to me – I’d picked the half-bench with a patch of sun so we’d necessarily be close and she’d need remove her sweater-shawl thingy – I wanted the curve of her shoulder, slight swell of the breast, and neck and jawline all around, the way her hair chose so many intricate ways to secretly touch her skin”
who is reading:
Wait. So the guy telling the story isn’t the observer of the action? Or did you forget to switch scenes or something? I mean, I guess we are in the park now on a bench reeking with sensuality, you’ve brought me closer to the lady, but truly – who then, is speaking?
who is writing:
(seems readers have so much to say) [that, in parenthesis further along the side of the page, ed. note]. I’d like to involve the reader(s) here, to take them into account. Who should I ask? Or should I simply re-read what I’ve written, perhaps aloud, pretend I’m someone else – not the spider’s butt spinning the web, but the focused chameleon on the next branch?
who is speaking:
“Honestly, I don’t really feel that he ‘gets it,’ most of the time? I’m not really here for the talking, you know? As if I’m a silage pile feeding the hogs of his emotions or desires, or simply raw fuel for his machines. I often feel like some objectified character or like I’m playing a role, you know? Sometimes even as flimsy and see-through as an idea! As if I’m here simply to be used. A tool, like his cock or his pen. I usually don’t let on because otherwise I’ve no way to be seen or heard, it would be like I don’t even exist if it weren’t for him. He does pay attention to me, as far as that goes, a careful kind of threatening interest, truth be told, but it’s cheapened because he only cares insofar as he wants (or, as he might put it – ‘needs’). I don’t know, all his ‘he saids, she saids, I say, you say,’ – it gets old, I get lost, and often become confused about who or what I am – this is sort of a caveat here, unscripted, I think, I’m just saying…”
who is reading:
[writer notes: is speaking too]
who is reading:
I do get a “feel,” in my body, as to what’s going on here. I’m hearing a lot of voices on a lot of levels and I’m trying to piece them all together – as if all the parts, in fact, are part of a whole – and the whole is this limited pulped object filled with typescripts that I’m holding in my hands and reading. Representational then, I guess? I reiterate: I didn’t purchase this for a mirror to life, or struggles of making sense. I wasn’t itching to go back to my school-days – science, philosophies – I should have ordered a film, but now I feel stuck – what with the time spent and cursory effort – I got comfortable…I almost feel duped…and yet…
who is writing:
how can you drown a baby, right? I mean, it’s begun its life, it has promise and as many possibilities as the next child – rebellious, colicky, all the spit-up and shit it throws back at you – I can’t just discard it, leave it to itself, it needs me, I think. I brought it into this world, am I also responsible to take it out when it runs amok? How the hell do you control a living thing like language? Am I the man? Wanting the girl? Questioning confusion? Discovering a traumatic event? Exclaiming?
2 Sources
Breathlessly discovering these treasure troves of inspiration and encouragement (and great thinking!):
M/E/A/N/I/N/G (particularly examine the essay by Lucio Pozzi – 12 Questions of Art – amazing!)
“Art, to me, is nothing but a testimony of a flow where order and disorder are interchangeable
and where the darkness of inspiration and desire fulfill unknown purposes within the appearance of space and time”
-Lucio Pozzi-
ideal ekphrastic graphotos experimenctes!!
I, the infinite? instants…
I, Gelaftimus
A jumble of words. A spasm, a syndrome. The spraying of a passing fancy, designation.
You don’t know where I got these words, nor do I, or only rarely. A voided origin, a lifetime suffering verbs and the masks of nouns.
Experience: feels like something moving forward, somethings breaking and tumbling about it. “Feels like.”
A kind of perceptual first instance, shaped by everything before, altered by everything after.
At the limit then, boundary-lip, threshold. Moving, and that ceaselessly. Colliding.
A poet, after committing suicide in his youth, now festering under the ground, is found to have remarked that “a tree grows upward…the path of least resistance.” So most of us.
Whatever “us” might mean, a jumble of words, perhaps a spasm, unconscious and involuntary instinct, so carefully and meticulously learned: to say.
Gelaftimus is what I feel today, this moment, my wife sitting and stewing on her couch, me (whatever “me” might mean) crabbing over my desk, this white paper, with a ball-point pen, scribbling – “a jumble of words, a spasm. A syndrome.” Perhaps. But it is gelaftimus, I tell you that.
Early on I was assigned this particular label: “Nathan,” only later coming to find that “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context. In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.” (V.N. Volosinov, et. al.) “Feels like” experience.
Needless to say, “I” have struggled with defining the cluster of words “I,” “Nathan,” “man,” “boy,” “me,” “son,” “husband,” “father” and so on in their perpetually altered contexts, circumstances and situations, ever re-de-term-in-ing their possible meanings.
A jumble of words. A spasm and syndrome. Instinct and accomplishment (accomplice-ment?)
My wife, last night on the swing, beside me, in the dark, on the porch, spoke of “not being allowed to say” as a child – so very many experiences “not to talk about” – frozen (perhaps) in their places or processed without knowledge dementedly deep underground (out of sight, out of mind, and so forth).
Contextually, she was addressing the decades-old infancy of “figuring out the world around me and my relation in and to it.”
“Reality works in overt mystery”
which I found (what she said) to feel like truth (as in actuality) – the jumble of words, the spasms and syndromes of “making words fit.” The odd difficulty we sometimes name “maturity,” i.e. beginning and growth.
I would confuse myself in this (were I to find me).
Alas it floats on the crest of the wave, breaks and spreads on the shore, regathers in a reflective pool, drifts away and starts again in fragments and particles.
Poised on a threshold, hardly poised. Rather in the breeze, a metaphor passing hands.
This jumble of words. Syndromes and spasms. Accumulated masterfully and haphazardly over ages and accidents. Feels like, experience.
Gelaftimus, today.
“A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; [or making it fit with prefabricated words? –N.F.] and in writing [that babble at the crest of the wave –N.F.] one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) [?! –N.F.] and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, [ever creating more waves – N.F.] it makes words to fit it [or fits it to words which recognize? – N.F.]”
All my Words are Silent 