Red Spark

“it is necessary to aspire to elevate spontaneity to consciousness”

-V.I. Lenin-

Red Spark

 

Asking yourself the question, what was it I intended to do?  Conceiving balance, proportion, invention, response.  Went about it like this: first, then second, then third, revise.  The choosing keeps changing each thing.  Yet you’re insisting on it.

You had started to bleed, just there, not bothering to stanch it.  Caught chunk of knuckle, leaving a fleshy gaping to pool.  Dab, pool, dab, pool.  Redundancy of wounds.  They had said let it flow to your paper.  Gives you a feel for the work.  Of getting your life out.  Opening a vein.

It’s not really all that.  There’s no pure letting the inside out.  It’s traveled a billion conduits, picked up and fought off zillions of miniscule aids and oppositions.  Polluted, infused.  You may be a “type,” but whatever your genre, its inextricably bound to all your surround.  In-filtrated, even as you are infecting.

The world is viral, and you – parasitic.

Whatever you’re intending – this is the outcome.

This is known by various names: “life-process,” “being,” “creativity,” just to name a few.  Some prefer “system” or “symbiotic machine.”  We’re handling synonyms and points-of-view.  The “intentions.”

All to mention your moves, as your choice and selection, as made in (by/with) the world.  Learning the language(s).  What is foreign in-heres.  You in-hear.  There are echoes.  Tracings in the blood.  You see it in typescript like this, a trans-literation, a bastard cross-current: sobytiinyi (as “evental”) brain placing “Soviet,” so be it, so-bytie, so- so close to co- (i.e. a “withness”) bytie (“existence or being”) implying that any event, that is, what happens, is always, always only conjunctive, collision, with-someone or something, you and other.

There’s Russian in your blood, after all, dripping off the thumb, some epigenetic repercussions of unknowing, the certainty of solitude failing.

Or, without which not.

And so on, as your intuition announces itself through inscription, a writing impossible alone – having need of some tools and an alphabet and ages of learning and co-being that uni-cates, some understood calling and shared, might occur.  What is – “to share.”

In other words, we all have a share in the stock, but no share counts for much without value in the stock, as it is shared.

I.e. your intention.  Sharing your share in the co-event (experience) of being (existence)…ancient mingling of bloods, as if there were origins to get to.

“Original Reproductions” then, co-mpliments of you.

Aimed from some desire toward co-mpletion; that perhaps this stock of shares shared increasingly might expand the value of each.  A Soviet dream.  And so be it.

So be us.  Only insofar as you provide your share in part with ours.  Our ares.  Ars.

Suggesting direction for the arts as an arc, shaping production of individual shares in the whole or evolving, an assemblage of expression, incremental co-habitus, -ation, drive or desire for some rhapsodic (raph-a seam; raphtein-to stitch; oide-song) symphony (a sounding together), the outmoded truism of “medley.”

The intent was to lift up in part.  Your part or your share, instrumental voice toward the theme you’re discovering to be in the join.

Our arts as the arc forming the theater…And why we urge you sing out –

so be it

so-viet

sobytie

 

Recommending Brilliance

Today I am thinking of that particular mysterious and mind-blowing talent that a very few writers have done well throughout history, beginning perhaps with Cervantes or Sterne? perhaps Ovid…that amazing capacity to seamlessly, compellingly involve myriad levels of reality in each paragraph.  The containment and development of Reader, Writer and Character or Language without distracting or abstracting any of us from the propulsion and enchantment of the written work!  I strive toward this – that the reality that an experience of art is – is fully presented in each work of art – its requirement of relationship – of a maker, a recipient and a form – to give all of it its due – but so few succeed in this masterfully.  Here are those I am recommending today:

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) by Macedonio Fernandez

On the cover of this book rests the self-reflexively ironic blurb “The best novel since both it and the world began – Macedonio Fernandez)

Fun as that is…as my life goes on and my bodies acquisition of literature expands…I am honestly compelled to agree with that!

 

the works of Cees Nooteboom – and there are many others –

again, brilliant incorporation of story/character/reader/writer/event seamlessly woven for our engagement

Raymond Federman – works and writings…these are my favorites, but many others also accomplish this reality-making-presenting that literature makes possible on so many levels.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

I could throw in Fernando Pessoa, Ronald Sukenick, Lance Olsen, Lynne Tillman, Homer, Shakespeare, Alejandro Zambra and many others…such a wonderful experience to read…but for today – seek these!!!!

The Blank Page

or, it matters what you do with it.

The following are papers made by my children for me for Fathers Day 2012 –

they knew what to do with it!

(hopefully I will learn!)

What Once Was Here…Again

A couple of days ago I reblogged Searching to See‘s incredible posting “What Once Was Here.”   Their pictures lived on and wriggled their way into my psyche, so I asked if they would be open to me composing some paragraphs responding to the images.  What follows is the result of that…

What Once Was Here
images – Emily and Alex Hughes
texts – N Filbert
  1. What’s left hanging, a dangling or loosened shadow, often ends determining.  A note you left with simple instruction opened on unprepared mystery.  Unable to handle and afraid of the dark, tiny conduits tunneling everywhere.  The twine wobbly and knotted, but the lines of the threshold so clear.  When things are left hanging, though exciting and ominous, possibilities frighten.  The key to what once was here is risk.

 Read More…..

WHAT ONCE WAS HERE

Time to Revisit

What is fiction, what isn’t?  William Gass…and self-apparent words…

“that words and sentences should refer less to an outside, signified reality, and more to themselves – whether in their individual physical sounds, or in the train of associations they build within the sentence or paragraph…In this case fiction is the lovely woman Babs (the text), who is made love to (shaped into a novel) by a series of clumsy unappreciative lovers (writers who fail to realize the richly self-apparent potential of language in their hands)…the earlier philosophical work (Blue) is more qualitatively fictional than the second…in each case, the meandering associations are conceptual, triggered by words of course which are first of all there for their self-apparent sense…but which for action depend upon intellectual content, which takes us back (and forth) from fictional self-apparency into philosophical debate…Gass’ theory…is his fiction itself…” -Jerome Klinkowitz

and Gass himself:  “well, it’s really what I’m running into all my inks about, so I had better mention it: the use of language like a lover…not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.” (Wm Gass, On Being Blue)

Untitled Prose

It wouldn’t be that way, not now, not conventional.  It would start itself, become, begone.  It would be something words couldn’t take aim for.

But it would not be absence, or if there was no escaping it, it would pressurize presence in such a way.  The idea of presence.  Feeling of it.  The desire for presence.

Where all the answers are the instant, but without trauma or utopia.  Not to exist, but to insist.  There’d be no describing it, it would lack presentation.

Knowing this is how it must be, fervently believing so, of course the questions come – doubt, the presence of absence.  Mortality.  The limitations of finitude.  These are not to rule.  Not to matter in the moment.

It would be no place to go, neither flight nor pursuit, homing nor escape.  It might scramble the senses, melt the categories.  Be without difference.

Not like that.  Not resemble.  Not the satisfaction of unknown longing.  Not quite immersion nor awareness exactly.  Not singular.

It might resemble flight, for a bird, without metaphor, without referent.  It will not resemble flight, for a bird.

Imagines a cloud.  It would not be various layers of sky, a gathering of imperceptible boundaries, no erasure or revision.  Or vision, as opposed to sight.  Sensorium replete without overwhelm, this sort of thing, perhaps.

Not identifiable but actual.  Not understood but occurring.  Without fear or hesitancy or remove.  Without expectation or excitement or joy.  It would not be saturation, then, nor separate.

It might be that it will be just what it is, yet without concept.  Without spectrum or speculation.  Unscaled, unmeasured.

What would be written after?

It would not be relief or knowledge.  Not revelatory, not banal.  Unnarrativized.  Without distinction, yet not indistinct.  Not like a circle of a circle or the warmth of sunlight.

It would not be written, informed inscription, not verbalized or sung.  Space, shape (time would lack duration?) would be difficult to reckon.  It would not “occur” then, without plottable end.  Unrecollected.

Not quite expressive, possibly impressive minus attention exactly.  Not like color fields or blankets.

There it would be without “it.”  And not “there” as another.  The questions would be undone without conclusion or solution.  Not like water as a solvent for dead things.  Repeat: unlike without unique.  Not vague or opaque: no into, out of, within.  No almost or already.  Not fulfillment or exclusion.

Neither all, every, nor of, nothing.  Not between.  Not point line or plane.  Not subject.  Without object.  Without lack, gap, distance.  Cognized without recognition maybe.  No reflection.  Embodied.  Not the same, though, without difference.

“one constantly attempts to say something that does not, and can never, touch the essence of the matter…But the tendency, the running up against, points to something”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

N Filbert

A Serial Struggle

Apropos Jean Fautrier (1898-1964)

I have filled my head with images, almost.  Substances evolving, fossilized.  Suggested.

“Everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all” Jean Fautrier

                         Not difficult to find.  More difficult to gaze.

                         Remember, great pleasure builds.

                         Canvas – paper – plaster – oils.

                         Pen swoop, pencil curve, scattered dusts of inks.

                        Essential layering and beauty, simple mysterious complexities – the female form

                      To mix the media, the processing, to express and discover the sculpture of painting, the painting of clay, the drawing of oil and etchings in sketch.  To flurry the senses.

                       I hear with my eyes the wail of the hostage

                       I smell with my fingers the verdancy of fruit

                       I see with my mouth the movement of women

                             Conflation.  “Original reproductions” – pattern and design redone yet never the same

                            If ‘everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all,” I have tried.  His is substantial suggestion; though relatively small in size, like geometric theorems or graphing physics they structure abyssals and infinities.  The body wants to know what lies beneath, or through, out, or in.

                                  Capturing the vibratory stillness of monuments and remembered events – the meditativeness of gazing and time – with the erratics of movement and frenzy of action.  Stay stare; move make; know seek.

“Everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all”

Weekly Photo Challenge: Close

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/weekly-photo-challenge-close/

An Alter-Ars-Poetica

Alter-Ars-Poetica

It comes down to this – a “long walk in the dark” – all smeared in bear’s blood.  A hunger, a thirst, and a desperate exhaustion.  I grasp.  I hang on.  I plead.  I am breathing, I think.

And there in the blood is the soil.  The bitter, the oils and the ash.  I start to chew my breath.

It is then I begin with the dreams.  To hallucinate, I shout words and weep mumbles, which shape image, erupt forms, and I enter.  Kaleidoscopic hallways, enormous caverns and seas.  I refract and am drawn.  I am fragments.  I ray.

The world begins, or begins again, estranged and available.  Shattered thus and malformed, it readies.  A me.  I swoon, I step forth, I mutter and trace.  I become colors and fluids and I flow and I fill.  The world recedes in its changing – I give chase, and start seeing again.

Evoking desire of indifference-foes.

I stand up with a body, a medium (as if it mattered), and approach, thus affecting its molding of me.  I content.

Here is where the story goes, splotched along this trail.  Caught in weeds and nettles, drinking mud and rain.  Clay that shapes the tablets, work inscribed by bones.

The labor of erosion that brings the doubting truths to light.  The heaving lung and shriveled spleen, muscle scored by mind’s lightning.

The moment that the moment keeps occurring.

 

(this piece inspired by the following: Larry Levis’”Coda: A Word to the Wicked”; Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” and Phil Levine’s “They Feed They Lion”)