On July 9, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Writing2 Comments

On the Anniversary of Our Wedding

On July 9, 2012July 9, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Graphotos, Journallings6 Comments

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The Forest of Marriage

(Happy Anniversary Holly Suzanne!)

I’ve never felt sexy or young, my memory is chained like an old growth forest accumulating decay. Remains tough to destroy. Why would I want to? Perhaps for you – so lovely to me – youthful, vital, your non-submissive and consistent new growth. Your winding ways, nubile bends – how do you regenerate yourself?

I’ve no doubt my dying fertilizes and enriches, our scent expands. Some wreckage crumbles beautifully, overgrown and softened by corruption. But it’s not the same as planting seeds, a puppy’s not a dog.

Steep. A word for danger and infusion. Calamity filters through.

Seed. It is not uncommon for your resources to sprout fresh things in me. Renewal, come in. I am fertile in layers.

Steep.

I’ve aged tall and long and twisted, hoary with moss and tangled by vine. Formidable, while spongy in places. Your green shoots pierce me, exposing my slowness and rot, my muffling stance. You crack me open, engender new soil. I collapse and give way, I adapt. It’s a marriage.

I wouldn’t say “handsome,” thought at times picturesque – in a rugged way, and worn – tendriled with you growing green. The occasional strength to bloom: I mushroom, you flower. I fungus, you shine. Together we develop our wonder. Some stop and look, others stay awhile, everyone traveling through. The coupling is not unfortunate – providing nourishment and shelter. There’s always damage. Having endured, still I am fragile, and you, with your gentle, tenacious roots, ever purposeful and true, yet transplanted and remaking, storms can threaten with uprooting.

We are called by one name and belong – a vast generality for incalculable kinds. We don’t mind. Old or new it’s still growth; what dies and what’s born construct a joined density. I lean on you while providing shade, you straighten me as you fight for necessary light. We are one seething thing, steamy if un-sexy, cross-generative and moist.

When the fire burns, it destroys and begins. Gaining as much as we lose. It takes time – symbiotic – establishing roots we combine and recover, shed and absorb, co-create and depend. Relying on the same in our differencing.

Reaching again in each instant’s climate.

(I love you beloved wife – happy anniversary – and here’s to continual renewal and the sustenance of old growth)

Character Sketches, cont’d…”The Jealous Husband”

On July 8, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

A Series of Stories of Love, by a Husband

Searching for subjects, I began writing the stories of my wife and each of her lovers, as I imagine them, having all dissipated before I was truly “on the scene.” Still they are here. Current as histories are. Not mine (of course), or only when I want it to be.

The stories go like this: with exotic names and muscular bodies; wealth and infectious intellects; and of course style…whatever things I lack I desire…they all possess in spades. Like spontaneity. Torture and foreknowledge = learning from the past. I’m no gardener.

By which I mean to say I lack certain skills possessed by each lover, each “other” – from youth to culture and their quality of independence coupled to vocation (so I tell it). Spontaneity (I feel like I’ve written that before, being a creature of habit and repetition, of comfort, of fear).

The stories play out like this in my head and I’m hoping to inscribe them here – thus trapping them outside, cutting off munitions and supply – exorcising them like literature, something benign and contained. Easily misplaced, forgotten or overlooked. A measure of control and indifference – not the “these are flesh of her flesh, she has ridden their bones” instead a collection by Grimm or some sacred treasury – a set of frights and fairy tales to engage as horrid dreams and improbable possibilities. Child’s play.

Which bothers me. For if I’ve learned anything from writing, it’s the profligacy of error. The obsessive-compulsive drive to adjust, rearrange, endlessly edit and correct. And never end. Stuck in a locking swirl, just so, very like unto a toilet – to revise and submit, revise and submit, then regret. The opening of doors. An idea expressed becomes thing, and a thing is let loose in the world (the real one).

The stories are like this – embodiments of emotions and fears in an effort to be real, meaning actual, which is usually banal, like she says, but not enshrined. Words work as predictive preservers. Untamed and so tangled. I’m unable to let them go. Thus they spawn compendiums – thousands upon thousands of hallucinatory nights (in shining armors) – perpetrating my bride, but not against her will, which sets in motion. Multiplying false realities, now true (being actual). Histories – open to view, corroborations or denials, like the facts.

So I keep on writing these stories, like this, with the yearn to expunge, to transform doubt into trust by its emptying. But keep finding it full, to the brim, and still filling. In the absence of reliable witnesses, (they all being human and involved in the tales – inherently duplicitous), like words. Serving double purposes, like bridges made for both coming and going, and never knowing which.

Life is like this, which is why I write these stories, in this way, feebly uncertain and wildly provoked. If it didn’t go down like I say, how was it really, then? Oh I see! So the stories keep changing, suited to their purposes! Revision, submit; revision, submit; then regrets.

If more persons knew, would the truths wriggle out like perspectives? My idea in writing these tales – make something concrete to chisel and sculpt. Together, perhaps. As a team, like this, retelling the stories according to need – like lying – so we’ll never be sure. And then I’m also causing effects. This is what happens in writing these stories, the truth, with all of its possible endings.

I digress. The stories are like that – my wife and her loves – digressions, diversions and facts. I’ll get to their bottoms and be done with them all! (I hope, if they don’t get to her bottom first!). My stories of anger and loving, my stories of panic and lack.

On July 7, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Writing5 Comments

keeps going and… going and…

Spoondeep

II.

“Each syllable an instance

of ourselves bodied forth in the

dimness…

—

…the voice which occurs all the time

while everything else is happening”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

Here I am drawing on Zukofsky

on Wittgenstein, Blanchot

all the others too

because language

is that pre-fab tool

that we fabricate

for ourselves

as it manufactures us

Help outside

no help

coming through, as it does

inside, after all,

helping to shape

and discover,

lending forms

and definition

to experiences

otherwise improbable

ineffable

unknown

remaining still

outside words’ purview

but almost communicative

almost expressed

anyway, all ways

that come down to

into, as possibles.

Rearrange.

Bakhtin, semiotic Ecos,

Sebeok, Halliday, Firth and Peirce

not forgetting Uexkull

nor leaving him aside

in his thousands of worlds

circling our own

so Susan Howe and Lyn

Hejinian, Arakawa and Gins

add…

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SnapShotting Summer

On July 7, 2012July 6, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography2 Comments

I lived for awhile in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attending graduate school and being regenerated and grown in-vitro like a culture into the family, religion and industry of literature. I’ve recently stumbled across a photographer’s blog who shoots many subjects in and around that West Michigan area. If you browse her photos over the past week or two it will provide you a feel for snapshotting summer…and here are some verbal renditions…

STRASSENFOTOJOURNAL

“Dozing in the Heat: Grand Haven”
by Cornelia Lohs

Snap-shotting Summer

Ever the distortion of mind. With emotion, contortion.

At times, a necessary snap.

A young woman peddling her bicycle, unclothed for summer. Body moving like taffy on its paddles. Just as pliant, just as tight, and just as supple. As salty, as mouth-watering, as sweet.

Tumbles in the machinery like loose screws, clanking and rattling around.

A clicker, a habit, desire.

Sun sears glares upon moments, lasering trains of thought. Dis integration. You stumble, you wobble, you very nearly fall. Erasing inspiration with foul mood. You adjust.

Scars like the outside, on the surface of the brain.

Called memory, called dreaming, called thought.

Or so you imagine.

Pool or sprinkler, sweat and breeze, you forgot. Moment’s season’s change, and you were happy. Somewhere in mountains, or North by the sea. Without belongings.

It emerges like a wire, a monster’s bite.

You’ll call it “me” or “I” and it’ll stand for something. Continuity.

An inventor’s dream.

Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

“I” continues to sit and walk, lie and stand. To eat. To breathe.

On July 6, 2012 By NW FilbertIn WritingLeave a comment

Spoondeep

The following is the first section of an extensive poem-making that I’ve been working at for some time now. I will release some of its sections over the following weeks. I would love commentary, critique, this pseudo-confessional area is not one that I feel confident in, and is difficult work for me. An attempt to be open to tunneled and tunneling desires and dreams, presuppositions and perspectives that I’ve formed and have been formed in me…in shaping this particular way of being in/toward/with the world. Thank you for caring enough to read, and in advance to the generosity that would involve your commenting/responses.

The Engineer of Himself: A Poem

“Thinking is willing you are wild

to the weave not to material itself”

Susan Howe

“a new music of verse stretching out into the future…”

William Carlos Williams on Louis Zukofsky

I have tried to tell this story time…

View original post 268 more words

Friday Fictioneers – July 6, 2012

On July 6, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes23 Comments

landscape

I labor steady, slowly, surely. Block after block, hewn from my ruin. This hapless task at hand. Construct a habitation of words. I use whatever I come by, wherever I happen to be. With an eye for the concrete and a feeling for sky. I’m a weedy terrain, dried up from AA and a searing of spurn. No smoke, no rain. I’ve been looking for signs or instructions: there are none. Or far too many. So I set out simply to make. A noun, a verb, an adjective; pasting with participles and pronouns. Tedious, thankless, alone. I build, it crumbles. It cracks, I evolve. Not much of a shelter, but it holds. And remains, opening up to the night.

Thanks for Madison Woods et.al. and the continuous production of prompts for this weekly challenge and exercise: Friday Fictioneers

The Underlying Theory

On July 6, 2012July 5, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

The Underlying Theory

What we found on his desk was a drawing. A very lightly penciled sketch of a woman from stomach to throat, as if seen from above to the side, one arm flung out in the viewer’s direction and her breasts provocatively displayed. Underneath were the words “underlying theory.”

Our work was to plunder his study. An author, famed for fiction and poems and writings on art, had died suddenly, and his wife had contacted us to go through his things, evaluate its worth and preserve for posterity. There were boxes of manuscript pages, notebooks and loose-leaf, letters and typescripts, recipe cards full of quotations. The library was extensive, each book filled with scribbles and markings, a signifying system of importance and reference for use in his various projects. His mind was displayed like a trail left in woods. Here the path to food, here the one to water, here the building nest, here the safety hideout. It overwhelmed us.

I had written numerous critical studies on this man and reviewed professionally most of his books. He’d written extensively in philosophy and aesthetics, with compendiums of writings on particular artists and particular works. He’d produced over a dozen literary novels and twenty or more books of poetry. He was prolific and known for the depth and acumen of his thought, the cavalier ways he used language, and the breadth of his interests and knowledge. No one knew he made visual art. None would have tagged him “erotic.”

I wondered what this drawing might “mean.” What did it refer to? Was it drawn from a picture? An image from memory? Was the subject herself the underlying theory, or was it something about representation? Desire? And what theories did this mean to evoke or give rise to? His wife did not recognize the sketch – not the body, nor an artist her husband might have copied – and it was interestingly tucked beneath blank open sheets, at the middle of the desk – the ones always ready when he came to compose. It was worn, wrinkled, as if indeed, it underlay everything inscribed above it and served as inspiration or focus, an impetus to his work.

I’ll note that the form seems composed, not a doodle. It appears to be representative. No one knows of him having a model or lover, in fact no other drawings exist from his hand. Perhaps he had need of a form to describe, an image to imagine, some desire to propel. The figure is finely proportioned, both busty and lithe, fleshy yet thin and shaped like the currents of rivers.

I’m not certain what draws me to this. In an office literally stuffed with fine books and odd trinkets, paraphernalia of printing, and stacks of diaries and drafts. Among paintings and stones and figurines of the Buddha, historical writing utensils, family photos and legal documents dating throughout his life. There is so much to uncover and know. But “underlying theory”? That grabs me.

As I’ve mentioned before, this author was a reader of depth. Fiction, philosophy, poetry, science; criticism, essays and cultural studies. There are tall shelves of monographs of particular artists, but nothing gives hint to this sketch. I am struck by this rendering – baffled by image and text. An erotic drawing is always of interest, all other concerns of this man are abstract. It beggars the biographers “who/what/when/where” yet the text writ along the arch of her back stirs me in a different direction. “Underlying theory.” What the hell? What’s it for?

A theory is made for a function, something “underlying” proposes a cause. This drawing, these words must explain something, but what?

Is it cosmic? Like what drives human vocation is desire? Or epistemological? Ethical? Aesthetical? Metaphorical for apprehension of form? I can only guess at this point but am open to ideas – I’d love to find some consensus for the book I’m contracted to write.

I ask you – how would you piece this together? I’ll share a scan of the drawing and request that you submit your hypotheses below as comments. I thank you so much for your thoughts.

Sincerely –