Month: July 2012

Leonhardt Conspiguous

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

Leonhardt Conspiguous

 

Leonhardt Conspiguous would have known the difference.  Between, say, BWV 161 and BWV 173; or a trunk or tail if he’d been born a blind mouse.  LC always knew the differences.  But he found similarities difficult to trace.

In conversation Leonhardt once encountered a man who’d read the entirety of his library, (the titles so resembling his own as to appear indistinguishable), drawing the same conclusions as LC in the shared vocabulary.  LC was unable to devise a category or designation for this phenomenon.  It was like looking in Leona’s eyes.

A concave lens forms a sphere of reflection, and hers – of grey of green of blue – mimicked Leonhardt’s so completely both in color and tone, that he’d instantly felt something farther back, back behind, any place he’d ever felt before.  In himself or another.  As time went on and her desire gained in details – their fancies so colluded he could not decipher whose were which – not in content nor expression.  The similarities baffled him.  And frightened.

But Hunter Green from Forest?  LC would know even the percentages and numbers.  Like every kind of sparrow, every human’s skin.

Leonhardt believed that what we come to know is inherently unique, but that same is imperceptible.  What startles us in those with whom we feel alike, is not the magnitude of what we hold in common, but how specifically each possesses it.  “To see eye to eye,” in Leona’s case, made visceral sense to him, but could not be understood.  “To see in or around” is what he labeled “comprehension.”

LC could see no further “in” to his cherished love Leona, than he could see within himself.  Which to some seemed deftly nuanced and unusually deep, but that was due to fierce attention and lots of time and mass filigrees of distinctions, not, Leonhardt insisted, to understanding.  “To analyze parts and fragments, was not to know a whole,” he was fond of telling himself, “and our lives are composed of fragments.”  Like arranging jigsaw pieces, separating by color and cut and number, and believing that they might fit, still never solved a puzzle, where new pieces are added all the while.

LC believed there was no whole, as far as humans perceived, just incalculable myriads of pieces arranged, rearranged, created/forgotten, damaged or lost in their fires.

He could never explain Leona.  Or synchronicity.  “Terms such as these synonym mystery,” he would say, “and should be kept in careful silence.”

LC despised religion.  The compulsion of the concocting of names, he called it.  A disease, an impatience, an anxiety of what is unknown.  Shuffling a hat full of vowels and consonants we look for what sounds as strange as our experience and assign it that – that which is odd to our senses, things we describe can’t explain.  A crapshoot or fancy, an oracle of chance.  Presuppositions he heartily derided.

 

We were left with description, he thought.  Of Leonard (his friend of shared library and thought) LC reported the odd sensation of someone other speaking words that more nearly matched one’s own ideas than the terms oneself could find.  And Leona, well, Leona.  Leonhardt preferred to call her by her body parts or textures, her language or beliefs, “Leona” ringing to him of the mystically unexplained, uncomfortable talisman, as if he were mumbling “YHWH” or “Zeus,” “Santa” or “Satan” or “Venus.”

(to be continued?  you decide…)

The “Right” Word

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

            What are we waiting for?  And why?  It’ll never get any easier, and this is remedial.

I had thought we were awaiting the word.  The right one.  Any one, but right all the same.

I had thought that.  But I didn’t know why.

Since any old word would do.  Being all we had.

Still we waited, not quite believing.

How many words do you suppose there are? we wondered.  Given multiple spellings and various languages all – how many?  And their requisite alphabetical sourcings.  I reckon we could figure it out in an equation, don’t you?  Only so many letters rearranged so many ways with up to twenty-six (or however many) letters equals = ?  For every tongue?  There are limited options.  It’s certainly not infinite, this isn’t rocket science here, or religion, so to speak.

Still, we waited.  Because, well, because we didn’t know.  Know which of the any was “right.”  By which we meant, well, by which we meant “worked” for whatever it was we desired.  Which, again, we did not know.  Leastwise I certainly did not.

I had a feeling for how it might, or that I’d like it to, feel, but wouldn’t be able to tell you how that was until I found the right words, any words, but, you know, the right one(s).  I could kind of hear the sound, how it would wrinkle into the ear and swoosh down their canals, troubling the waters.  Or what textures the air would take as it blew up out of the lungs trembling the throat and over the tapping tongue.  Some idea or sense of it, but nothing particular, not knowing the word, only the anticipation and desire.

That’s what waiting is, after all.  A hunch without a reason or cause or an outcome.  Guesswork with some directed hope.  A running of options, but unable to identify.

So we waited, not knowing what we were waiting for or on, exactly, but also because we didn’t know.

And waited.

I could imagine its shape, the work of the muscles, the grip and the tracing of lines, but I couldn’t know how to begin, not knowing what or which curve happened first.  And was it dotted or crossed or simply angles and loops?  I had no way of telling, without the word, the one I’d keep waiting for, any word, the right one.

So I kept still.  Well, actually we paced.  Walked to and fro and back and forth, ahead and around, and sometimes sat down, sort of listening I guess, looking and listening for an outline or scrawl, whisper or code, some rhythm or sound that might bring on the term, any word, but not the ones we were using, no, the next one, the “just” or “proper” or appropriate word to our intake, our output, a resonance you know, what we were waiting on.  The “correct” as it were, word, sound shape texture intonation field of references emotive trail and so forth…that one.

The discreet utterance or image that would hear us out, carry us on, would solve us.

I’m waiting.

Crushing

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading6 Comments

This is the kind of writing that demolishes me.

From Lynne Tillman’s This Is Not It

Writers Resources

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

“Chekhov in his letters to his brother wrote: ‘Start writing from the second page.'”

“He was more blunt in conversations: ‘Tear out the first half of your story; you’ll only have to change a few things in the beginning of the second half and the story will be perfectly clear.'”

“The unity of a composition is not based on whether it has a beginning, a middle and an end, but whether it creates a unique interrelation between its parts.”

“The concept of unity (the whole) is historically changing.”

“Aristotle wrote in Poetics (Chapter 8):

‘Unity of plot does not, as some people think, consist in the unity of the hero.  For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.'”

[all quotations from Bowstring by Viktor Shklovsky]

Jim

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

Jim

Jim is unable to utter a lie.  He simply cannot believe them.

 

Jim, sitting with friends around a hotel pool, once said: “I think every word says something about its author.”

After overhearing a tasteless joke, Jim no longer spoke with Darrell.

 

Jim disbelieved everyone.  His boss and his pastor, his spouse and his children; in fact, he found it impossible to trust humans (including himself) to know what they were talking about.  And yet he believed what they actually said.  The words they used.

Every statement or exclamation, every question, harrumph or faux-pas, he deciphered.  Jim doubted each “slip of the tongue.”  He said he believed in our languages.

 

Jim’s work was in “managing waste,” a lie that he knew they believed.  He spent most of his time in the noisy outdoors.  Chaotic, due to the mind-grinding sounds of the vehicular beasts they crept the city streets in, feeding them trashy fuel and guarding their grueling mastication.  Loud and smelly as well.  Rotten food, molded carpets, all manner of grotesque and disfigured things.  Jim saw what was hidden, discarded.  What most of us keep covered up.

 

His coworkers primarily proffered profanity.  He believed them.  But branching to politics or domestic intricacies, Jim only trusted their language.  It didn’t really matter what content spilled forth (he would say), the words that they chose and the ways they were delivered provided the confessions they “meant.”  “I’m afraid my wife no longer loves me” often intended its opposite, for instance, and nearly always equaled “I’m unhappy.”  Words worked like that, held Jim, worked all around one another.  “Assume the people are lying and the words will speak for themselves.”

Jim’s wife called this the “double bind,” or his “contra-contra-diction.”  And “paranoia” in worser moods.  “If you don’t believe in people,” she’d say, “and always think they lie, particularly to themselves…then say you believe their ‘language,’ but never what they actually say – really Jim – what have you?!”  “You’ve got nothing!” she’d complain, “no substance, no content, no motive – just a jumble of words that you (one of them!) reassemble…what else can that be but the rattling workings of your garbage-compactor of a mind, Jim?”  And Jim heard: “I don’t like the way you think.  It’s not practicable.  It’s egomaniacal and unfair.”  How Jim reads an utterance, with faith in the language, between all the lines, “it’s relation,” he’d say.

 

“I can’t speak for somebody else, dear,” Jim replied, “I just translate what I hear, or apprehend.”  “You say tomahtuh, I say tomaytoe, sort of a thing.  That’s paying attention.”  How words wrestle around and decompose, what parts go first, or crumble, get smashed.  What words stick out, slide easy, remain.  “And watch out for the oily and slime,” Jim would say, “that’s the trickiest danger to ‘manage.’”

 

“You’re not dealing with garbage here,” his boss declared, “I’m giving you straightforward instructions.  There’s nothing to sift through or weed out, Jim.  I need you to perform this task,” and on he would speak, accustomed to Jim’s sorting appraisal of words.

For Jim it was all the same.

 

Words were some overused and available aggregate, he thought.  People picked them out according to habits and taste, “nature and nurture,” he’d cliché, and then bandy them about until they felt understood, or relieved, or just plain empty.  But the resemblance was rarely precise.  Jim believed that most people simply grabbed at terms and sounds, gestures and winces without much a thought for precision.  “Think what all could be covered in silence,” he’d say, holding a field guide to transportational signage, or fingering the moves of sign language.

Most people just want to make contact, he’d hold forth, to be heard or effect something – a playing of power, a quest to convey – but not given much thought or concern.  “I basically rummage through all their crap,” Jim continued, “with an eye out for volatile substances, wounded heirlooms or inadvertent mistakes they rid themselves of, and put a pretty clear picture together.  Of their values and style, relations and status, family, religion and work.”

Joan (Jim’s wife) often speaks of what she deems Jim’s “arrogance.”  “How can he suppose to know,” she’d decry, “a person’s life story or intentions, education or political beliefs from a talk about weather or baseball or drinks?”  “It’s hypocritically bigoted, as if truth were the eye of beholding, each person’s puzzle to piece.  Unaware of themselves, Jim presents some ‘true meaning’ – its Gnostic, religious, a myth,” she’d complain.

Yet Jim was resoundingly insightful and most often correct, which simply buggered them more.  It seemed people really were giving something away when they opened their mouths, no matter what language they used.

“Words are functions,” Jim stated, “where text and image collide in a complex silence or sound.”  “Nothing escapes, really, just gets alternatively pressured and squeezed, mangled and reformed, mashed into a mushed conversation.”  “Every talker a monologue, every listener too, for the most part,” he said,  “a dialogue running oneself, a wrecked chorus, I listen for pauses and patterns, I try to decipher the breathing of noise.”

“These are just Jim’s thoughts,” snarled Joan, “things he puts into words like nonsense.”

 

(to be continued?  you decide…)

“You Must Revise Your Life”, and, Kudos to You Excellent and Hard-Working Bloggers All

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing7 Comments

I’ve been sort of swirling in a kind of malconfident funk of late…performing exercises and blatherings just to keep the language flowing…today felt like a threshold…one of those – “if the flow don’t show – i’m constipated” sorts of things… many of my favorite bloggers have been moving toward a very free and open bursting of expression/language/image this summer and it’s really been fueling me, but i haven’t been able to open my own valves for some reason.  I want to say – wow – there are a bunch of really talented creative persons making stuff on WordPress – and the virtual company means more than I think (I think).  So thanks to all of you for working so hard to MAKE and BECOME – it’s inspiring – believe me…and whether you knew it or not – today you all conspired to inject or confront me with the Archaic Torso of Apollo – a magnificent accomplishment – and Rilke’s “you must revise your life” – a fine firm foot to me arse…

Instigating Change

And then things simply have to change.  Some blogger posted (today) that “this is a little silly” and “let the world tell you what you need to do” – but the world hasn’t said anything, and still it made felt sense.  Someone else (somewhere in the world) decided to go home for the very tawdry reasons that make anything profound, while another (clearly from another section of the globe) has been taken by the moon.

What does that tell you?

Things have got to change.  It’s not working.  You’re not working (but of course you are, (I am) which isn’t what I meant, what I mean being of very little effect).

There are the readings…

Plus all over the world (that is telling you nothing) there are people traveling and taking photographs – but those show, they don’t tell.

A friend did email to say ‘don’t give up’ from a far different location on the earth, but perhaps the “earth” is not the “world,” perhaps world is an elsewhere?  Or simply a voice I cannot hear, something divine.

I keep calling myself “you” as if that might make me other, but even I know you can’t escape yourself.

So I don’t.

I’m intrigued by folks who can write about themselves as if they were themselves and a part of world or simply made it so by writing.  That stuff moves me, true or not.

I spent my day designing characters.  Jim could never lie because he didn’t believe in language (or was it people?).  Leonhardt could always tell the difference but is unable to comprehend the same.  An author left an erotic drawing on his desk upon his death, causing great anxiety for his biographer, utterly incapable of fitting it into his knowledge of said subject.

Those aren’t me.  So something needs to change, you tell yourself.  You’re lost in language, but the labyrinth is becoming a pattern.

There’s a trove of “prompts” out there to help you find your way (is that the “world”?) but inspiration keeps feeling artificial.

You think it might just be the heat, a metaphorical dehydration, you read about a wife who tells her husband he should find someone else with whom to talk about nothing, and you heard echoes of the voices in your home.  Like the world saying things that almost register but you simply can’t believe.  It’s nothing, like that.

You challenged yourself this past year to ‘get personal’, if you wrote real near what hurts others might hurt too, and people like that – empathy, identity, a pingback from the world – but it never became interesting, the personal, you kept sounding like yourself.

And wrote these letters you called journals, out of some idea (I guess) that a world might be within you that could tell you what you need.  Or like Laurie Sheck said (she’s really in the world); that “skin has no choice but to converse with the world” – but does yours listen?

I guess what I am saying is that today brought clouds and wind (a welcome change) and those were world, and I heard something.

Blurting : what WAS this?

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

Found this in my files…probably isn’t even worth posting, but something kinda fascinates me about it…I’ve never been a drug-user, but something had surely opened the gates of the dam on the day this came forth.  Sometimes writings (by others) do this to me – I read and sort of get “drunk” I guess, with language and then somehow that stirs and stimulates whatever words fill up my cranium and then… well, for what it MIGHT be worth… here is What It IS

What it IS

 

 

is all of these things, trying to explain,

the trees, the flowers (dying), the grass (needing mown),

in line at the store, filling with gas, last nights’ remnant of dream (also the dreams from before, books read, voices heard/overheard/never heard), a multitude of feelings, the way she draws a heart, a star, what guilt feels like (now, then), the difficult struggle in parenting of love and direction, how language comes (or gesture, vocabulary or intonation), how silence, what we do with it, our decisions, who to love, where to live, how to say, what to smoke, when to fight, where to run, what to eat, why at all, what floating in a pool feels like (or a pond, a lake, the ocean), which music when, where, what we mean into it, the grades we make and receive, how we work, squirrels sounds and behaviours, what friendship is (might be), what is learned, absorbed, observed, what we touch, scents in closets (in bathrooms, at relatives, of genders or nationalities), associations, childhood, ambiguities, paintings and sculptures, religions or symphonies, taxes, liking to dance (or not), with people or alone, the postal service, how often, how much, your mother, who said so, aging,

trying to explain,

divorce, vocations, contradiction, philosophy, hunting, mountains, arrogance, wounds, broken bones (or hairline fractures), colors, fashion, changing the oil in the car (the mower, the boat), politics of oil of belief of emotions and opinions and genetics, diseases (like pleurisy and cancer and rust and decay), who family is, how you come by, sexuality, remorse, pleasure and pain and fences and institutions, architecture, advertising, electricity and electronics, pi, mohair, virtual and visual, palpable and “real,” poetry, names you can’t remember (but what is it you remember), can’t forget, incense, train rails, Marcia’s hair (shimmer and idealized clarity), meat, diapers, rain and humidity, historical “accounting,” memory theory money, mythology, facts and things like rocks and apples, pears science, bronze, doorways, “home” or houses, dead presidents, Casio, intuition, astrology, newspapers, rotations, reciprocation and differences, if anything is the same, what repeat might mean, definitions, experience, gasoline, yogurt, how fast you run, if you have arms or legs or are able to see or hear, clouds,

to try to explain this,

there is more here….

much more,

let’s see, hear, touch, smell, feel

wonder….

and death too…

to explain, include, describe

imagine

Writing: the Spaces. its Atmosphere.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

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Writing: the Spaces.  its Atmosphere.

 

Write first, the epigraphs assemble.  Post-prompting.  Or become the impetus the references gather around.

One idea.

With blackberry brambles and the wish (or revulsion) at owning a dog.

“A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece” (Lyn Hejinian)

Like that.  It doesn’t take long.

The brain a compendium of quotes.

“The head is a very hard case.”  (L.H.)

I try to crack it.  I’m thankful it’s hard.  A safe for the precious things.

I can’t just do it “everywhere.”

In order to write, I discover I need to expand.  Once to the point I’m as large as my skin, it still needs a force-shield, a sense-field – a hard case like a desk and locked room, “controlled environment” or “padded cell” – that license to work without fear.

Or hurting oneself or one’s others.

The head is a hard case.  The body is supple.

Salmonberries all along the way.  A juicy burst, almost sweet, almost sickening – the risk involved.

My globe is filled with the words of others.  Like my skull, no bit of language is our own.  But inexhaustible, so unashamed, I eat them here, I forage food.  I harvest, glean and process in this tiny shed, concocting meal I hope will serve.  That process in yet another realm.

My space is angular.  Is low and dark.  A cross of cave and womb.  I need to know it’s all in there, I need to know I do not know.  I bring a lantern and a few spare tools.  I take notes, observations in my bunker-scriptorium, my hand and my brain.

“A paragraph is a time and place, not a syntactic unit” (L.H.)

I scramble your body.  Unravel.  Dissect and reassemble.  Never known in its entirety.  My own.  “some desire powers generously” (L.H.).  Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.

“Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there…”

“…Reason looks for two, then arranges it from three: number, stutter and curvature” (L.H.)

The writing space is “freedom then, liberation later” (L.H.) when rejoindered to the attaching world…

“a person seated on an iceberg and melting through it” (L.H.)

“the mind is a thing deeply marked.  I have bound myself to this damage” (Laurie Sheck)

“we are so rawly made, / so carried into the harsh and almost-dark” (L.S.)

My cave-womb almost-dark.  A lantern lights this page.  It is noon.  Vertebrates in the walls.  Fossily spines.

Number, stutter, curvature.

In the space, safely solitary, saturate with sense, my own…what assembles sensible only similar, and that’s okay…what obtains or remains can be observed as an object.  To be encountered, not understood.  Even me.

“Art is inseparable from the search for reality…

…Realism, if it addresses the real, is inexhaustible” (L.H.)

            Like looking at painting.  House or museum.  Everything both.   Various watching.

Mulberries litter the landing and stairs with an acquired taste.  Leaving stains, like everything we grow to love.

“A fragment is not a fraction….”

            Safe to search reality, where it has died, where it seems so.  “Seeming is believing” (L.H.).

Number, stutter, curvature.

Some berries you must not ingest but can still get caught by their thorns.  Or the illness pukes out.  A pulping.

Searching is not always distinguished.

Your space should form a shelter (within/without) bound to damage, rawly made.  Secure but repercussive.

Epidemic depends on the exit.

Nettles and fireweed.  The search for the fruits can be harsh.

It is almost dark.  I must emerge.

N Filbert 2012