Hey creative writer types!
Longest Salmon Call for Submissions.
Longest Salmon Call for Submissions
Hey creative writer types!
Month: September 2012
Qualia…an introduction of sorts
Qualia
“Most of each lobe is employed in the grand human saga of making associations among events, ideas, personal experiences, strategies and people. It seems absurd to lump all that tempest together, but we do: thought. The word even sounds like a thick knot. Endless raveling and unraveling, thought combines colorful yarns to clothe each moment”
-Diane Ackerman-
“This is why we create: to keep our demons down without banishing them entirely”
-Marie Palermo-
“It is hard to seize what is”
-Laurie Scheck-
“Raw feel, a name for the peculiar quale of experience”
-E.C. Tolman-
“It is possible to hold that certain properties of certain mental states, namely those I’ve called qualia, are such that their possession or absence makes no difference to the physical world”
-Philosophical Quarterly 32/133-
“an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us”
-Daniel Dennett-
“[Qualia are] the whole ensemble of consciousness or experiences”
-Gerald Edelman-
“When I do not know the ‘quid’ of anything how can I know the ‘quale’?”
-Plato, The Dialogues-
“The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective”
-C.I. Lewis-
“’what kind,’ ‘that sort,’ unobservable in others and unquantifiable in us”
-Wikipedia-
“…a proposition flaunts every logical scratch that follows from it…
Then I saw you were trying to lean against the weight of missing words, a wall at the end of the world”
-Rosmarie Waldrop-
Inescapable Intersubjectivity
Ineffaceable Tentativeness
“No self is thus separate from the total venture of language”
(Wikipedia entry – “Qualia”)
“Inside the workings of language clear vision is impossible”
-Rosmarie Waldrop-
“The brain is embodied and the body is embedded” (Gerald Edelman, 2006). A phrase like that implies mysteries. As if something might be explained or described. At least. Scribbling maps at random: entailment, entangled.
She said, “memory – a mirror with ambition,” I questioned the memory and the mirror both. A quail quickly turns tail, coveys away, Blanchot’s ever-ultimate (as in final), question: questioning itself.
That is, what is unquestionable?
Or, everything unfinished.
I’ve introduced this all before, and now I’m building with logical scratches. Sketching plans.
I meant to address this before, but someone’s former second grade teacher (actually only a substitute), assigned his class a writing as a way to pass the time. “Write about the process of choosing.”
Entailment, entanglement, words with activity in me, like haunting. The concept of selection. What must be going on.
I must be moving on.
Earlier and consistently, the lusting of language toward the intrinsic, the ineffable. What is private and immediate. What cancels out in signs or symbols. Gordian knot of tricker, Ouroborous. So much so as to seem identified. Inherent.
What is not possible.
My wife’s eyes swell large in a blue as yet reproduced. This elicits in me what science designates “raw feels.” By the time I’ve gazed enough to start cooking them, they’re a meal in themselves. Or, “knowledge as illusion (delusion).” At any instant, process.
Accepting awards from strangers one strangely respects. Not profound enough for tears, significant enough to change.
I can’t explain it.
(Meaning: it doesn’t accord my theories, or, “what’s wired together, fires…”)
Entanglement. Arbitrary associations. Blips and bits. Intention.
You (can’t) get the picture.
What we mean is like this.
When I first stood in the grandeur of Il Duomo, Milan. First naked body different from mine own. Learning differance. Similarity. Metaphor versus analogue. Random maps of light and entropy.
In ambiguity lies possibilities.
Where we’ve doubted.
Those final questions.
All those books I’ve written, published under others’ names.
N Filbert 2012
The Graces
as in “unexpected blessing,” or surprising gifts.
has nominated me for another Lovely Blog award!
Surprising, I suspect, because I oft don’t find my own voice “lovely.”
I am very thankful some find it so, or something about the overall content here.
THANK YOU!
(rules of the game attached to the logo)
1. My real name is not Nathaniel.
2. My favorite authors/artists are embedded in my flesh.
3. I am pursuing a vocation in Information Sciences.
4. I am drawn to large white rectangles.
5. I don’t believe in “spiritual.”
6. I enjoy laughter.
7. I deeply desire to travel in Russia, Nepal and Portugal.
For the nominees I’d like to pass the award along to (bon chance!) I will post the list that proved exorbitantly long for the rules last week, as follows:
in the library with a lead pipe
Words that Flow Like Water
The Language we Speak
art unraveling
Appropriately Frayed
Ute Schatzmuller
Madison Woods (for keeping us all busy and honest)
A Philosopher’s Take
Careful for Isa
The Artsy Forager
Writing with Water
Anton Jarrod
Photography of Nia
and, of course, my beloved (even if time doesn’t allow, I read whatever arrives :))
Life in Relation to Art
Three Vigorous Recommendations
from this weeks reading…
3 wholistic recordings of the lived experience
and its entagled entailments
“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else”
-Emilry Dickinson-
ca. 1843
from the Journals of the Claxton Brothers, ca. 1843.
After experiencing what we’d come to call “the Plunge,” we traveled the familiar creekbed back toward our cabin. On departing for the hunt the water flowed strong, securing our wagon deep in its tow. It was dry now, the entire wagon missing. And our homestead, hewn of stone, carefully plugged and plastered, now displayed gaps and cracks, with dust and moulder monitoring its decay. Having left just hours ago at the tail-end of night, how could things have altered so? As if ages and drought, plunder and wear all visited here meanwhiles. Window given over to darkness, the entrance as open and vague as a ghost.
Thankfulness
Given the shiftings and obstacles and reappointments of time and priorities that have effected me over the past month or two, I am very grateful to receive news, messages, word that what work I am able to do is being read, is given attention. Thank you!
Yesterday I received a message from Michele D’Acosta that she had nominated me for the “One Lovely Blog” award, I was surprised and ever so grateful.
Receiving this award asks that the recipient tell readers seven things that they may not know about the creator of the blog:
1. I’m a parent to seven children.
2. I’m a new graduate student in library and information sciences.
3. I adore theory.
4. I’m a classically trained vocalist and pianist.
5. I love all things peanut butter.
6. I have very few friends.
7. I long to be a published author.
Then the recipient is asked to recommend to the readers 10-15 other blogs that he or she finds compelling or necessary:
I’ve recently found it necessary to pare down the blogs I follow due to the time constraints my life imposes and a feeling of overload in providing each blog its due attention. So I’ve had to think hard about what blogs seriously enhance my existence that I engage. I will pass a few of them along here.
Adventures in American Writing
We Need More Time to Stand and Stare
that’ll have to do…as I go over my list of blogs I follow I realize there are SO SO SO many whose news/thoughts/artifacts/messages are meaningful to me. But to list them all! So follow the leads and find the good stuff!
A sincere thank you to all who take time to engage my thoughts and stuff.
Nathan
Grammaring Perseverance
Grammaring Perseverance
“A grammar is an on-going system of relationships…a system which is always in the process of articulating itself – not simply changing, but actually making itself up as it goes along”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
My hand trembles when I move to write. Time changes. What is called perseverance, equals age.
As beautiful to me now, she. More.
I refuse her loss on any terms. In any context.
I investigate the language of inquiry. Always a difference of relation.
Never expect to be heard. Nor heeded.
Language makes itself up…and it goes along…articulating itself…again.
With this hand, along the incalculable curve of her hip, my palm records cellularly, but never repeats.
Lef hand entangled, her thick head of hair, tomorrow otherwise, should it work its way out. Or ever want to.
The side of my knee prepositions her thigh, slides into a phrase, shaping a passage, not as if the surface is ever the same, yet no doubt it belongs, only, to her.
My ankled feet, like bony whips, eager to explore, inadvertently pain – the slope of the pedal, bolt of the swivel and up the liquid skin and calf.
It will leave its bruise, its passioned impression.
Everything becomes an aching to know. Everything is on-going process.
Systems of relations.
When perseverance oppresses. Again, again, not emptying the land, but altering it. To cause the seeking, redundancy, both the wanted and the wanting wear. Tools whittling down, different structures, various nerves, must learn again, of course the surfaces having changed.
My thigh registers her buttocks, elbow in her neck held by shoulder. For lips to memorize her ear, only that moment. I rely on her contours similarity hour to hour, so that details are not lost, just renewed.
An eroding resource, yet we are layered, and wrinkled through the timing. What preserves? Naught but the process itself, for which our charts are made. Remade.
The motion does not cease.
As the curves to the apple, subjective object of measurement. Objecting a subject to a sensual scrutiny. Not unlike remembering, or illusion. Information, an obvious verb. Whether coming undone or accruing.
That began in the perseverance of my quivering hand. Once connected, steadied by context, the grid of associations and leaps. The world is a boundary to trace, to follow along, diverting the dots and the dashes, the lines and the colors, reenacting the tracks.
A stumble is anything but halting, more like surge and accident and a reaching out to stay. My fingers tend to fumble through the filaments – those once vocabulary now a tangling stitching of signs.
To be decoded, recoded, as it were, what hollow mouth or aural labyrinth does not effect? We know of no recipients, no audience, only sometimes, luckily, co-conspirators, co-creators of a co-event, called (sometimes) knowing, (sometimes) conversation, (sometimes) simultaneity.
I’ll reach out, my hand tremored right down to its core, its code, its quarks or its atoms,
and find a steadying or pattern, metaphors of richer entanglements that may not be explained
my qualia, slight blue lines on pallid vacant surfaces, directing possibilities.
In-formation – that everything that is, in its multiplied becomings, as discrete as my flesh traversing yours.
A continuous severing enabling us knowing – our grammaring, our ongoing, its enclosure.
“At the ‘inmost heart of each thing’ is an ongoing process, an unfolding which is its identity”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
“Communication”
“Communication”
We, in our world, have a theory, a process really, that we call “communication.” In various states of profundity it might also be referred to by “love.”
“Communication” is the process of signaling/decoding; saying/listening; writing/translating; touching/feeling by which we become aware of one another, about one another, of one another.
All things considered, “communication” is pretty important for us, though not necessarily to us. While appearing more complex and refined than single cells or parts of cells vibrating under a microscope; more elaborate and extensive than a swarm of birds or school of fish, it hardly works as well. As if certain sharp things and certain dull things cancel one another out.
Pitch, tone, palate and respiration. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax. Associations occurring in the brain, the glands, the organs, the body. I’ve always thought of our existence as “fraught” and it never ceases to amaze me!
Amaze and astound, in no particular order. As if “stound” were past-tense for “stand.” Stopped-in-tracks-reeling-backwards.
There’s nothing to it really, we all do it, all of the time, innately, it would seem, given we could not survive without it. And yet. “Innate” wouldn’t be the right word. Maybe “potential” as if capacities and possibilities surround every cell toward response. And then. What becomes. Responsibility. Of that interstellar stuff moving and extra-anatomical stuff too. Kind of equals.
So we’re not necessarily “good” at it, and hardly possess a measure, everyone on equal footing at some point, depending on the context, depending on construction (of the possibles) and so forth. It’s often accurately called “fuzzy” or “messy” – an entanglement of sorts in no sense negative.
I always liked William James – the jumble-up of him. “Rich thicket of reality” he called it, a passage to get caught up in, sometimes snared, sometimes struggling, but ever in its midst, I suppose.
Lyn Hejinian once pronounced it “inexhaustible.”
I just wanted to mention…
“The argument would go something like this: reality exists; it is independent of what we think though it is the only thing we can think; we are a part of reality but at the same time consciousness of this fact makes us separate from it; we have a point of reentry (a ‘centrique happinesse’), which is language, but our reentry is hesitant, provisional, and awkward”
-Lyn Hejinian-
All my Words are Silent 