Month: June 2012

Day Dreamer Award!

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Traces, Uncategorized5 Comments

Day Dreamer Award

I’m back from my five minute, coffee-laden, brain-reprieve.

Thanks to Lotus Ohms for awarding me this badge/honor/advice?

It is an honor to be read, thought of, and chosen.

Award works like this:

Upon receipt of this award, you are to take a mental vacation for 5 minutes. (Gaze off into space, look out of the window, have yourself a wonderful daydream….)

When you have returned from you daydream, you are required to take another one tomorrow.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Award this to 3 other people. You can only pass this award on to three (3) people.

And me own nominees for this self-loving reprieve include:

the Self Appointed Life Counselor at http://unwantedadvice.wordpress.com/

lots of thought and reading go into these blogs

Jean-Paul Galibert and his “philosophy of non-existence”

(philosophizing can always use some aimless gazing for fuel)

and

Careful for Isa

some hefty poetry-writing happening there

You guys take five and refuel…dive in…do it again…dive in.

Thanks for working!

manoftheword

Blurt

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

Blurt

 

We have to hold still.  To take care.  To look at each other.  To remember what we’ve never quite understood: the value of one another.  Which we’ve never really comprehended, nor, finally, are we quite able to.

I suggest the exercise:  Pretend-Everything-Depends-On-It, that is, on The Other, i.e. even within yourself.  See how far it goes, if it chances to keep you alive, or defends the rights of another, imaginary or not.

Luckily, the always perhaps.  Perhaps, to a point.  To the point – what is possible – tell me who might be the one deciding that?  (or the many?).  I’m listening.  This is where God lies.  The possible.  Irreducible without end, fortunately.  And how.

Go on then, practice, live, throw yourself into it – see what becomes.  At least you will.  Forget about it!  There’s always until.  What has that to do with us?  Very little, finally, it’s something we will never experience, we cannot process or reflect upon.  So get to it now, then.  That’s all I’m saying.  Pretend, provoke, prevent and process.  There’s nothing to it.

Defend the other with your life.

 

On By NW FilbertIn WritingLeave a comment

early experimenting…can’t exactly praise the quality – but our hearts are in it!

Writing: the Apparatus

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

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Writing: the Apparatus

“one can think of the work (of writing) as a dialogue between the two distinct demands bearing on it (the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible).  Or between its two poles (measured form, measureless disintegration) or between the embodiments of these two ‘centers of gravity,’ if you will: reader and writer…two come together in a place where neither can be found…One of them keeps dragging it into the light of day as a completed oeuvre, a realized whole, something that has actually taken form and come to be (read, that is, or, you could say, heard), while the other pulls it back into the dark whence nothing ever springs (but where there is a chance that, coming to pieces, something might come to be written or said)”

– Anne Smock, What is There to Say? –

-the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible-

            The tools the writer possesses.

That there must be something to say…that it is impossible to completely say.  Finally, definitively, to have done with, saying experience.

What does one make of this?  With this?  Paradoxical demand, desire, exigency – imperative, self-generating, uncaused and ineffectual, drive?

Our tools:  awareness.  Attention.  Passion.  We observe and take note, feel-with, and seek to spell it out (for ourselves, for world).

Our tools:  available language, sound, gesture.  Entering the woven barrier and thoroughfare of what is shared, common, constitutive, we act, operate, select, arrange, choose, rearrange from this quilted information of the world, our saying of it.  Or singing, or stating, shouting or whispering and mumbles.

It seeks into fact.  We construct an object, made up of nothing, of airwaves, scratch-marks, designs.  Barely effable cues, hints, notions and signs.  We begin again with that.  With what it fails to say, to communicate or reveal.  We tinker with and tamper, excise and expand.  Ever the remainder.  Inexact invention.  Something there, some things not.

We pursue what is not.  What fell aside or seeped away.  The evaporate.  The unknown (here I adore the French: je ne sais quoi – that feeling that one knows it, and knows it so well and so deeply, and yet is unable to say what it is that one knows!).

Endless anticipation, expectation, a lusted desiring…

Endless frustration, falling short or to the side, inevitable (inherent even?) failing, shortcoming, irresolution.

These are the tools of the trade.  The writer’s apparatus.

 

A caveat:  from time to time I’ll wager to say we all of us take in some language or sound, vision or world that seems “just,” feels ripe, adequate, full and exact to the perception of our experience.  This is wondrous, thrilling, satiating, “ecstatic,” a moment’s completion, wholeness, perhaps.

Yet is it?  What does the masterful painting, the pregnant poem, the echoing song or fulfilling experience result toward?  Yes, toward, not “in.”  Not arrival but generation, bursts of multiplications of words, sounds, sights and movements now invigoratingly fueled and stimulated – fecund to go on…for more…fuller…richer…or even repeat!?

“Such then, would be my task, to respond to…speech that passes my understanding, to respond to it without having really heard it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak…To name the possible, to respond to the impossible.  I remember that we had designated in this way the two centers of gravity of all language…Why two to say one thing?  – Because the one who says it is always the other…”

– Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation –

So Rich and Rewarding in their Own Unique Ways!

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading3 Comments

Favorite sourcings of mine

and pleasures

both INTENSELY recommended for readers and thinkers alike

(are those one and the same?)

Experiential Ekphrasis

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Traces, WritingLeave a comment
Figures Seated in Mid-Air
by Holly Suzanne

Experiential Ekphrasis.

Hello dear followers – I can hardly thank you enough for taking time out of your lives to look at, read and engage things I am involved in the making of.  Your support and attention is a constant encouragement.  THANK YOU!  (and thank you for offering and creating your own!)…  I wanted to invite you (if you are interested) to visit/follow a couple of other blogsites I also create in/with –

www.ekphrastixarts.com and

www.spoondeep.wordpress.com

THANKS AGAIN!

Mark Marking Marks

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, WritingLeave a comment
Cy Twombly

Mark Marking Marks

“oh it’s working, it’s magic, each word lifts me up, takes me away from here,

from this nothing; I feel…I am…speak always, Maybegenius.”

–Macedonio Fernandez–

Writing as the ‘Talking Cure’

As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, – ?

WHAT IS REAL?

            As long as I keep talking to myself, even better the inscribing, using matter somewhat foreign to myself, like this plastic pen, this sheet of paper, this blue ink…I am providing myself with evidence.  A humming continuity, a series of marks, a silent sounding breathed into air.

But when unable?

As long as I keep telling myself these stories, Mark thinks, – ?  then what – ?  why – ?

There is evidence that I am here, he says to himself, marking it down.  Marks make Marks, he supposes, I am, at least as far as the reach of this pen, and I stay, at least longer than my thoughts, he thinks.

Mark got tattoo’d.  He did so for evidence, a permanence.  They said it could not be undone.  So he had them spit into his skin the names of those who had changed him, affected.  As if to say, to go on and on saying, these, these existed for me, in and on me, these folks made impressions that made impressions on me, therefore I must, yes, it logically follows, here – you can see them can you not – ?, it logically follows that I must exist – to have these names, these titled and organized and permanent woundings of names, of those who existed (it’s attested by many), so it follows, it must, with them pierced in my arms, that I, too…

If it all keeps on talking, these whispering names, the sound of my voice, the terms in my head, and if I work to make it real, as an object, if I chisel or stencil or ink it to the world, then surely it must testify on my behalf – I was here!  I am here!  I’ve left my Mark!  Mark marking Mark – a declare!

Or so he is thinking through his days, through his life or lives, through his odd and self-imposing tormenting sort of fear, of worry.

Am I?

To no effect?  he wonders – ?

Mark often fears he’s interchangeable.  Or worse.  Perhaps another boy would have been a better son, left a fuller name, a more remarkable mark than – ?.  Another man a truer spouse and more sensitive or empathetic, more evolved or more mature than his straggly droopy heavy brain of a – ?.  A more substantial father with clearer love and direction, firmer hands, readier tears – ?.  Mark was aware they were out there.  They’d been fellow students, inhabited stories and novels and other people’s lives.  Why were his people stuck with the – ?.  His nagging mark, so often read right over as innocuously as a comma or period.  Weren’t they looking for content not a pause or an absence?  A man marked by inquiry?

But if I leave here some trail strewn round my desk, this floor all these cupboards, perhaps at some point they will see I was here!  I am!  And I was watching and listening, loving and feeling them all.  Spending myself and my worries in this strange attempting to trace and to hold, to keep and remember their details, their effects, my responding.

Someday shuffling through or perhaps clearing out, maybe they’ll stop, pause, question and wonder.  Who was this man?  Where was he?  When?  How?  Why?

What did he do think make say?  And perhaps they’ll find these markings.  Perhaps they won’t have burned or mouldered away, and all these messaging reports, all these processings and accounts will come to mean, to have significance, these bird-routes of scratches and marks, dashes dots lines, this pouring forth of constructing an identity against with the world…

As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, possibly –

– ? –

Home

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Home.

Inscribing a Now

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing7 Comments

Inscribing a Now

 

Today I just feel like writing.  I don’t have anything in particular to say, no specific emotion I am needing to express (that I know; or am aware of), simply a kind of quiet delight in our capacity to make language.  To fit words together, to knit our lives, to be.

Enormously unusual (I cannot stress that enough!) it is around 50 degrees and solidly overcast in Kansas this June 1st.  Not humid even, but sprinkling now and again, the kind of precipitation you could enter and be refreshed, but a long time in getting wet.  As if the sky is asking us to take it easy, to relax, be reprieved, just enjoy.

My children are reading and practicing stringed instruments; my wife is making sounds that are delicious as she struggles with a painting; my room is dark.  These are moments of peace, are unexpected, a relief, a protection, a comforted grief.

Language is a beautiful necessity, unnecessarily.  Like bodies and voices, flowers and food.  Like mountains.  Oh, necessity can be argued for each, but what’s the point?  The world is, and that’s enough, that’s what’s important.  It seems.  And what a hinge-word!  It means we’ll never know, and that’s not the point.  Is must be different from certainty.

Perhaps I’m engaging a kingdom of “trust”?

An as-if-ness that isn’t afraid?

How little I know.

 

So the ambling to no purpose again.  “Angling” is how I heard it in my mind.  Seems it must be so.  To language in leisure must be near to the impulse of finding to-do for a bored adolescent.  Dropping a line.  Seeing what bites.  Or even just nibbles.

Sprinkling rain.  Haphazard, unpatternable, occasions.  Delight.

No expectation, desire (that’s pressing).  Just a wandering way.

It evokes a wishing-well torso for me.  So many words in the world used in anxiety, in need.  So much language and gesture, expression and sign, mobilized to “get” or “secure;” “ensure” or “relieve.”

Not that, not right now, not need.  Just rest, an in-pleasuring, a reprieve.  Just an hello or a thanks.  A “notice that?” or an “indeed.”  An agreement of person and term, an almost “natural” weave.

Sounds and sense, tones and rhythms, raindrops tickling shingles and birds.  Tires whispering snare-drum waters, puddles triangle-tinkling away.

Hello.  These are words.  It feels good to shape them – a cursive-recursive flow.  To be real (enough), here (enough), to know (enough) to inscribe.  What a pleasure, a leisure, a joy.

Thank you, world, for that hour.

Content’s Dream

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

“The essential aspect of writing centered on its language is its possibilities for relationship, viz, it is the body of ‘us’ness, in which we are, the ground of our commonness, 

Language is commonness in being, through which we see & make sense of  & value.  Its exploration is the exploration of the human common ground.  The move from purely descriptive, outward directive, writing toward writing centered on it wordness, its physicality, its haecceity (thisness) is, in its impulse, an investigation of human self-sameness, of the place of our connection: in the world, in the word, in ourselves.”

-Charles Bernstein-