Month: November 2012

Among the Leaves

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography1 Comment

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Suddenly I found myself among the leaves, diffuse as light, but darker.  Almost a shadow, if I’d found myself at all.

For it came of a simple moment in-between.  Between responding to this or fetching that.  Perhaps waiting for coffee to brew, or just breathing.  In cold sunlight.  In kitchen.  It had something to do with my daughter.  Or she was the first one I told.

“I’ve found myself,” I burst upstairs and explained, holding out my phone which had captured the image like communication.  “I’ve found myself, see?”

But no one quite did.  I was thereby forced to point it out.  Which is a lot more like making something up rather than discovering.  More like envisioning than recognition or taking notice.

Yet I can tell you I saw right through it in that gap.  Made out my identity in that fluster of sunrays and blockage.

An insubstantial sort of silhouette designated by a drove of other things – that “it” – that ephemeral, vacuous “me.”

In fact, the way I remember it, I was harried by flickering thoughts, responsibilities, and a mantled dose of tired, and it was only morning.  I’d backed up against the steely sink and weighted my palms, hoping my neck might loosen by letting it drop.  The floor there.

Something alerted me – a “honey?” or a child’s announcement from some other room – and so I swung and hoisted toward action.  My roving eyes sniffed at calendar and began steadying toward a list comprising my future, but instead.

Instead, a patterning of leaves translating immediately to a scatter-shot messaging of light, exposing some presence in its midst that was absorbing or otherwise deflecting.  Signifying, nonetheless.  A kind of tracing of a head, a photo-graph I guess, a contour drawing by our prominent star.  And if light could trace it, could scribble a quick sketch out of me, well then,

I’d guess I’d found myself among the leaves,

which went something like these pages.

N Filbert 2012

Due Emulation

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

open now.  on my desk.

feeding from it like a leech.

truly a living master.

if ever there was one.

see also…The Big Other

David Foster Wallace – “both a quantum of information AND a vector of meaning”

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing3 Comments

ah how I relish in his mind and language…

Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report

from

2 Exhibitions

On By NW FilbertIn Art, ExperimenctesLeave a comment

I’m excited about 2 exhibitions occurring this month with which I am involved one way or another…

ReMades will bring multiple local artists together, hauling sundry objects and materials  to their homes and studios to begin remaking, recombining and incorporating these items into lasting objects and artifacts, which will then be exhibited throughout the Fall and Winter at Fisch Haus Studios’ tremendous gallery space, thus preserving their potential to enliven and enlighten our communities.

Opening Reception on Final Friday, November 30, from 7-10pm

Fisch Haus, 524 S. Commerce, Wichita

An exhibition of work by local artists using materials fromThe LUX renovation process that would have otherwise been lost.

                                                    

And also my lovely amazing wife’s exhibition currently available at Mead’s Corner in Wichita KS

Friday evening, November 23, 6-9 pm there will be an artist’s reception with an artist’s talk by Holly Suzanne at 7:30!

Hope to see you there!

Address: 430 E. Douglas
Wichita,KS 67202
Hours: 8am-11pm Sun
7am-11pm Mon-Thu
7am-1am Fri
7am-1am Sat

HOPE TO SEE YOU HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE!

(and support art and artists! – BUY IT!)

Masterful Hejinian on Language

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing6 Comments

“Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.  

We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children.  Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects – balls and rivers.  Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes.  

They discover the words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them – a displacement producing a gap.

Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world.

Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions.

Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition.

This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it – 

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes.

It makes us restless.

As Francis Ponge puts it, ‘Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.’

Instead that center of gravity seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.

Language itself is never in a state of rest.

Its syntax can be as complex as thought.  And the experience of using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active – both intellectually and emotionally.

The ‘rage to know’ is one expression of the restlessness engendered by language.  ‘As long as man keeps hearing words / He’s sure that there’s a meaning somewhere,’ as Mephistopheles points out in Goethe’s Faust…”

–Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry–

Today’s Delights – and salivatory anticipations

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading1 Comment

Myopia

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes18 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers, November 9, 2012.

 

How to describe it?  The grief is heavy, distinctly.  Regret, fear, and misgivings.  The experience is prominent, yet so difficult to explain.  Actuality gives way to traces, as if patterned into nature, something that should have been known all along, but not possible to identify.  This mix of things – complexity – the oversight of choices.  Myopia, like scales, and the fracturing, the cloud.  Peering and peering, inside and out, straining for meaning, for reasons.  Dimly opaque, only powerful suggestion, like lace over frost.

N Filbert 2012

Chaos Pieces : Election Day

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

Election Day

The way things that seem to need doing impose mayhem on those things we were wanting to do (vice-versa).

A sort of ratcheting of oddly shaped pieces tumbling down towards one another on an inclined plane.  Necessary bits and fragments of desire rattling against, around and into one another, oppositely directed, apparently, and all with force or momentum (time, change, survival).  They clatter.  They clatter and clutter, like there’s a microcosm of chaos in us, the spillage of some enormous container of Legos.

Is this unfamiliar?

Something, always, functioning as noise in the wavering systems of our message(s)?

I want.  I  need to….  A hunch, an intuition.  A concrete demand.  An idea spawns.  And tasks arise.

That kind of oscillation is what I’m talking about.  And it goes both ways.  All ways.

I set about a chore and am derailed by an idea.  I dream and the over timer intrudes.  I breath and it hitches to a cough.

Not that it’s always that way.  Sometimes the texts come right on time, just when I was getting up anyway.  Sometimes the activities that need the doing, also fuel the dreams.  Think of such a time.

No wonder it’s called “flow.”

Yet it hardly seems “reality,” or “daily life.”  Perhaps that’s only me, that the pieces that construct me are preiteratively cross-purposed?  Maybe my fragments’ forces are centripetal (or centrifugal), either way multi-directional and simultaneous?  ADD?  ADHD?  “Life?”  Speaking animal?

Like Election Day.

N Filbert 2012

Preserving Blogs, ebooks, interactive and hypertext files….lots being done here!

On By NW FilbertIn Writing3 Comments

http://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html

In love with language

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces6 Comments

Ah, “the perpetually changing, muddied, maid-of-all-work, our common language…a public instrument, a collection of traditional and irrational terms and rules, fantastically created and transformed, fantastically codified, heard and uttered in many different ways”

-Paul Valery-

Summarization often feels inherently erroneous.  Much as I have an insatiable passion for “figuring things out,” for the observable “hows” and “whats” of scientific inquiries and theory, much as it evokes a delight of fascination and sense of knowledge or understanding to learn of the makeup and behaviors of neurons or cells, cerebellums or furry beasts, none of it ever feels comprehensive or resolving.  The human, to me, is some paradoxical wonder of natural capacities and probabilities and dynamics and flexibility that can endlessly occupy and consume us.  Like any part of the cosmic system, from quarks (or smaller?) to global social and environmental systems.  Language has long served as a place of experiment and observation for me of just such probability- and convention-governed behavior coupled with a kind of infinite openness and flexibility.  I believe this is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to working in words as a medium.  But listening to other artists it is easy to see that oils, wax, clay, plastic, etc. also have these inherent qualities.  Dance.  Music.  Craft.  Parenting.  Romantic loves.  Friendships.  Relations.  Essentially, relations.

A primary personal pleasure for me is delving into theories.  Semiotics, linguistics, neurobiology, aesthetics, philosophy, information systems, communications, psychology and the like – all provide  me rich excitement and spell-bound, breathless appetites and anticipations.  The process of learning and becoming – interacting with world, others, ideas, stuff – it is what makes me tick in realms of gladness.  This past week I’ve burrowed down into the work of Max Black and related source documents, particularly Wittgenstein.  I wanted to share some of Black’s “summarizations” because they retain the mess and complexity of what he is observing in a way that feels authentic.  For those of you who share the interests…the following derive from Max Black’s The Labyrinth of Language.

“The extraordinarily ramified network of skills, habits, actions, conventions, understandings, which we bundle together under the label of ‘language’ is too complex to admit of any simple summary…”

“For all its fixity of structure at any given time, a living language has an inherent plasticity and capacity for growth and adaptation (it is more like a developing organism than an inflexible machine).”

so instead of definition, Black offers what he calls a “landing stage” for directing our attention to certain features of language…including the following:

Language is rooted in speech

Language is directed, reversible and self-regulating

Language is an institution (always part of a speech-community, a participatory action)

Language is a particulate system (“a finite repertoire of elements and arrangements generating infinite diversity and novelty”)

Language is meaningful (expressive and evocative)

Language is plastic (of the most rigid and most malleable of human institutions)

so I offer these reflections today as a celebration of the magnificent medium we all of us are using to some extent throughout all of our lives and activities – ah language – ah “open systems” – ah humans – ah world!