Possible Fictions: Fragments from the Book of the Living
Month: January 2013
RE-GIFTING PRESENTS, part two: SHARED EXPERIENCE (art)
Roughly speaking, I understand “art” to be something created through human interaction with the world. Whether perceptually noticed or purposively constructed, that which we experience in what we might call “aesthetic ranges” are always results of interactivity and, as far as we know, only occur for human organisms.
In light of my previous post attempting to address the function, variability and necessity of language or sign-types for human perception, survival and being-in-the-world, I want to address something fresh for me that arose in that inquiry.
Previously, I lamented the inevitable distance that occurs in living organisms between originary experience in and with an environment and the organism’s perceptual experience of it. No matter how miniscule, there is always a gap between our encountering (for instance, of scent and our recognition of smelling; or of light toward eye and our “seeing” of colors; touching flame and reacting retracting) and our awareness of the encounter. Neurons and nerves pass time in their messaging. By the time we’re aware, our present is past.
But awareness and perception, cognition and sensation are themselves happening presently, occurring in a process continuously and simultaneously to ongoing encountering. In other words, it is always the present, and we are always present, doing many different things. Being presently and what we’re aware of presently are widely variant items, but always both and all, simultaneous with (indeed identical to); the present.
The present is the only reality occurring.
Who and what, where and how are all only ever present concerns. When is always already answered: NOW.
If the human organism has adapted and developed the creation and usage of sign-systems to more efficiently navigate processes of survival, I want to look a little bit into what the purposive involvement in, engagement with, those sign-usage capabilities might accomplish for us.
If our survival process, as I remarked before, is one of perceiving and predicting our individual organism’s likelihood and opportunities for existing in any given environment (context, situation), then our perceptive processes are amazingly collaborative toward quickly organizing and evaluating a chaos of inputs and outputs into maneuverable assessments and survivable actions.
Language is our principle medium of signs, used by humans to select, describe and choose what is going on at any moment both inside of us and around us. Something like water is for jellyfish, perhaps, the medium that both constructs their world and enables them.
But language become, becomes its own experience to become again and again. In other words, the processing of perception, awareness, consciousness, is also experience in itself.
This is where it struck me that sign-mediums are a kind of gifting again and again of present experiences. As we interact with mediums, forming and formulating them into semiotic artifacts (whether spoken phrases, bodily movements, plastic figures or oil-smeared canvases) we are both utilizing those media to organize and process (become aware of and perceive) select elements of our encounter/experience, but also concocting new experiences as well as future presents. Artifacts delineating our presents will be perceived, signed, comprehended again and again newly, each moment various and ever-present.
In other words, inhabiting our mediums purposively, experimentally, exploratorily, reflectively, creatively, we are both organizing, discovering and determining our own present(s) while simultaneously being new presents and gifting present experiences to become (for ourselves and others via artifacts, writings, sounds and movements).
This seems simple to me and I’m sure the wriggly seams of it, the liminal, necessarily RELATIONAL actualities of it have been sussed out much more eloquently and adequately (made present, re-presented) than this cursory blurt of mine, but it has flooded me recently like an a-ha (fresh awareness of the present?) in answering questions about “wrestling with everything inhabiting my medium.”
So thanks to all of you – writers and artists, filmmakers and philosophers – for plumbing the mediums that give you your present(s) again and again, and then offering them onward to us – a community continually re-gifting our present(s) by consciously inhabiting what our media inhabit. The What Where How Who it moves us within and between.
Passages
quick quip for Friday Fictioneers…
Not as if we’ve much choice. Forward? Back? If we could see a little further, higher, or what might be underneath. There’s a reason we’re heading this direction, away from what’s behind, but still. We needed water, we’re given sand. Needing shelter, we find a beach. It won’t do to stop here, but where do we go? Carrying on is unknowing, all the same to me, and yet. Something’s bound to open up, if we could locate a horizon. You go on ahead, I’m surely unfit to lead. Why does it always seem like this?
N Filbert 2013
RE-GIFTING PRESENTS, part 1: Inhabiting the Medium We Inhabit
This post is an attempt at exploring and hopefully explicating (at least a little) a dialogue that began in a series of comments between the excellent thinker/writer Tocksin and myself. The comment thread can be read in full here (if you wish), but I will highlight two sections for purposes of this post:
tocksin says: I am noticing we two like to wax philosophical at the expense of letting our characters speak. We are mere babes in the woods being raised by wolves. Tooth and nail we will fight to have our day. Write we must.
N Filbert says: I find that to be true – what you say about being babes in the woods. Wrestling with everything else inhabiting our medium.
tocksin says: Let me feel you more with what you mean by wrestling with everything else inhabiting our medium.
At which point I made some bumbling effort toward it, seemingly tangling into more confusion. And was set thinking – how would I verbalize what I mean by the wrestling that using language is? The next two (or more) posts will be my preliminary attempt to language into it.
I interpreted Tocksin’s first message (above) to concern our propensity as writers to be unable to “leave ourselves out of it” (e.g. to let plot and characters, narrative and action be), rather than to voice-in, reflect, trouble and scrutinize our place in the mix of it, the ourness in the howness of any languagings aboutness. “Tooth and nail we will fight to have our day. Write we must.”
All of this started rattling about in my old noggin with what darts around in there from Wittgenstein, William James, Gertrude Stein, Bakhtin, M.A.K. Halliday, J.R. Firth, Benjamin Whorf, C.S. Peirce, Edward Sapir, Peter Berger, and thousands of other voices and ideas regarding LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, BEING, PERCEPTION, etc…
As far as I can tell, these relations have concerned humans since humans have experienced concern. Who are we? What are we? How are we? When are we? even from time to time expeditioning toward Why?
A few posts ago I quoted Judith Butler from her Excitable Speech to the tune of:
“language is not a tool that merely allows meaning to happen. Rather, the relation between language and its users represents a complex ‘matrix of intelligibility’ that makes us readable to one another. Language, in other words, represents a framework that constitutes both the ‘doing’ and the ‘doer’ alike: the subject always exists in a condition of relation to language that implicates the person using it, as much as the addressee – ‘we do things with language…produce effects with language, and…do things to language’ because ‘language is the thing that we do.’ (from Christina Milletti).
Much greater minds than mine have attempted to tackle this – in language, with language, to language, as well as in painting and music, film and image and architecture and dance: Who are we? What are we? How are we? When? What is? Happening? Basic problems of being as faced by our particular type of organism’s means of awareness: senses, perceptive apparatus, and largish brain – all inputting and outputting, inter- intra- extra- extro-putting simultaneously.
Due to our conditions, one of the stickiest problems seems insurmountable – the ability to experience (consciously) BEING. Or NOW. The Present. IS-ness.
In our splendiferous operations of surviving/existing, the mechanisms and processes of doing so (predictive, inductive, deductive, collaborative, receptive, perceptive, oscillatory, responsive, reactive, self-generated, externally infringed, incited, and so on – AMAZING processes!) TAKE TIME, if only nanoseconds…all to say that our perception and/or sensation of being and existing NECESSARILY are not simultaneous to its occurrence, and yet also ARE, because the organizing and perceiving of our activity also constitutes our experiences AS they occur.
This is one of the reasons William James insists on the metaphor of “stream” for our being.
Here he writes on introspection (self-reflection, becoming conscious of consciousness, or perceiving perception – what language and symbols, signs allow, enable, concoct):
“introspecting the contents of that stream, more precisely, a particular item floating along it, interrupts the streaming, arrests the item (or objectifies), detaches and isolates it. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is…As a snow-flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.”
And is also experience, experience becoming.
As I am considering language, that is – assigning description, value, reality using symbol/sign/or index to something in human experiences – I am presenting a coming-to-terms (languaging) for myself of what I attempted (languaging) to “mean” (communicate, share, RELATE) in my off-handed comment to Tocksin regarding “wrestling with everything inhabiting our medium,” as well as an hypothesis that has been haunting me since.
“Wrestling with our medium/habitat – language” means for me in this way: As I conceive (language) the being or existence of the human organism, I interpret an organism of proactive and retroactive complex processes organizing and imputing value to its environment, selectively perceiving and constructing a context or situation in which it can get what it needs to survive. In the scheme of things (or, its organismal specificities IN RELATION TO other organisms and contexts) the human has developed metaphoric and metonymic signification capacities for purposes of more efficient and productive navigation / survival.
Language, (or humans as semiotic beings) then is a medium in the sense of a manipulator of gaps, or a “thing” insofar as it operates between, RELATIONALLY. Signs are always IN RELATION TO. Inner experience, outer experience, communication, description, definition, etc…a SHARED HABITAT, an activity, indeed a primary thinking process – signing experience is a composition, exploration, examination and organizing (improvisational and purposive) of our world and our perceptual relations within experience of it.
Signing – languaging world – is for us our activity of finding out, making sense, interpreting, composing and exploring being/existing.
So when we go with purpose to the page to write language – all of this is inherent to the medium – we make our world (as we experience it) inhabit language so that we can experience it and also we inhabit language in order to experience (perceive our perceiving, become conscious of our awareness). Language is the “stuff”(?) – the medium – the lubricant of passage between ourselves and our senses and perceptions; and everything beyond those individual sensings and perceptions. Thinking organizes and determines experience.
So self-consciously involving ourselves in language opens up all our experience (known and unknown, much like dreams) to be wrestled with in attempting to make a poem, a story, a report, or a conversation, or, even, a thought.
That is part of what I was trying to say, Tocksin. Part two will be the idea that has haunted me since…
Immediate sources referenced:
Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry. U. of California Press, 2000.
R.M. Berry & Jeffrey Di Leo, editors. Fiction’s Present:Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. SUNY Press, 2008.
Gyorgy Buzsaki. Rhythms of the Brain. Oxford, 2011.
Rudolfo Llinas. I of the vortex. MIT Press, 2002.
William James. Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, 1981.
The Family of Fiction – 6
The story to now…
and part the sixth…
6
“I propose description as a method of invention and of composition. Description…is phenomenal rather than epiphenomenal, original, with a marked tendency toward effecting isolation and displacement, that is toward objectifying all that’s described and making it strange…Description then is apprehension, ‘the act or power of perceiving or comprehending’ and a motivating anticipatory anxiety, expectant knowledge…the very writing down seems to constitute the act of discovering it…but also and problematically an act of interpreting it.”
-Lyn Hejinian-
Hybrids.
What is “normal” or “traditional,” what forms remain (for long) in a universe of chaos ever emerging and expending? Convergences, then. Bloodline here, bloodline there, cross it through and pull it taut. Cultural collage.
The parents lead the way, though not as masters, more experiments – of brother linked to sister linked to brother step toward brothers veined by half with sister same as brother. Not personal or by choice until fixed in the same installation. Could be called art, called family.
Other halves and steps by three with partners of their own yet bleeding half their blood. Where are they? A sitcom cast of lesbians and addicts, the wealthy and the poor, the liberal, constrained. Kaleidoscoping styles and beliefs – “it takes a village” – and they’ve settled one.
Working well enough – a jalopy needing constant tinkers. It most assuredly breaks down. Imagine society. Or the size of it, extended. How many grandparents can a child acquire? Its fine for rituals like births and holidays – multiplying spoils – but where does one belong? With whom? Family-by-affinity? Reunions become a game of pick-up-sticks or jacks and marbles (except with persons). Arbitrary circles depending on usable space.
The family tree she drew for therapy’s a forest. Cottonwoods and pines, baobab, bonsai. An oak thrown in for measure, and barely identified shrubs. What base is there to touch?
Parliament versus monarchy, troubling the court of appeals. With manager-types and generals, gurus, debaters and clowns. Stir in deconstruction and some faith for emotive stew. It’s a kinky chain of command, yet all are bound by it. Children vying a vote.
And if infected by the peacemaker-pleaser-gene, the torsion becomes a complicated interpretive dance. A surplus of baggage with all the due fees. A lot to saddle on young.
They’re resilient. Navigating democracy and other octagonal squares -awkward parallelograms – never quite losing site of Atlantis. Lost kingdom, utopian, buried deep under vast emotional sea, at times nearly glimpsing a spire. At least some strange stirring. Dreams of a large enough house. Solving nonsymmetrical fusion equations. These children are smart.
If an artist paints the picture she performs mixed-media collage with inks and clay and dozens of paints, incorporates cloth and wire and found objects with hopes enough resin or wax will contain it. Hold it all fast. And still let everything – everyone – be seen. The composer creates an erratic symphony – arrhythmic with regular dissonance, whelming moments dramatic with harmony and occasional measures of quiet resolutions. The scientist keeps figuring on emergent chaos, open-ended systems like weather and complexly variable algorithms. Author writes it down and edits, erases as much as inscribes, constantly losing track.
Each makes their own scribbled lines, overlaid. Its sketchy and messy and thick. Kids jumping ropes, fingering string figures, string theory, Spiderman-webs. It gets made.
Possible Presents of Fiction
If you click on this cover you will open a brief essay regarding fiction, presently. I find it interesting, challenging, and compact. If you have an interest in writing as discovery, as research, as emergence, as investigation and creativity, I encourage you to read it…
Mirrors & Shadows
“Ten times a day you must overcome yourself. You must want to burn yourself up in your own flame.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
“the lesson is clear: one is multiple, the same is different, the representation is the negative of the person…both original and copy, identical and different, they are the same and the other, interchangeable and monumental…In the dark room of his studio, Warhol develops himself. In so doing he ‘unmakes’ himself.”
-Victor Stoichita-
“Death follows artists around like their shadow and I think that’s one of the reasons artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and nothingness of life.”
-Francis Bacon-
Children singing choruses. Joyous chants and rhymes. Distant. Repetition forming memory.
Chasing shadows, or running from. Self-same body blocking sun. To be sought, to be feared. Identical and strange.
Known alone in traces and reflections.
I say that “I” was young once. That it’s only patterns of light, only the passing of time, only angles of vision.
I repeat myself.
Each day reassembling, developing, dissembling, to reassemble again. My body a gathering post.
Mirroring image has gone from the closest thing to self-awareness we might uncover to a flat reflective surface full of nothing. Ephemeral and changing by the second, dependent on the looker, a vacant mirage.
Shadow has proceeded from a designator of real presences to an outline of actual vacuity. From a measurable symbol of substance to a vague hint of objects passing.
Voices like a bag of small bells and grass. Something shaking and stirred. Snippets of a tune, the catchy parts.
What I can tell I read, observe, attend and consider, opening a dialogue of days. But I only get to see in glimpses and portions. A hand moving, holding an instrument here; flat feet from crossed legs there; a shoulder, some hair of a beard, the frames of glasses. I don’t see myself seeing, nor see myself as seen.
There’s the mirror and the shadow – intangible, eminently interpretable and malleable “things” – emphases of the transitory. Receptacles like language – merely signs or indices – pointing back at absence.
Moment, moment, moment…now then now then now…endless fantasies of dissection moving round the room, faster than shuttling clips of film. A self presenting / representing itself after again, appearances only, shimmering skein mingling veils of light…
While they sing like breezes dreaming – “Who sees?” and “What is seen?”
He who has ears let him hear,
bypassing illusion,
in marks and gestures
Waters I’m Swimming Today
feel free to join – the water’s fine!
Family: A Fiction the Fifth
to browse the gist of things…a little where-its-coming-from-where-its-going, start here:
otherwise, here’s the newest particles:
5
There being always more sides to the stories.
Building blocks of broken bones.
Families at bone-splintering nearness. Whether abusive or conditional; assertive, supportive, overindulgent or neglectful. The pressures in an atom wiggle and hum, each entity squeezed and redirected into another, without foregoing elemental ingredients.
Why drawing so close hurts so much, compounding all the bruisings.
Take seven shattered anatomies and circle them into a hug. Ouch, oof, shrieks and tears. Sounding like sport or war. Ahem. The game is designed to figure out where it’s safe to rest and heal. Together. Every press accentuates wound, but may also set the fracture.
The littered trail. Fragments, chips, and joints. Ankles, ribcage, skulls. The longer held together, dwindles the percentage unharmed. Increases deformation, reformation, and strength in the bindings. History makes the call. Families get made this way.
Alpha male’s left-side stress-fractures filigree – he brings them in close to the mama. Pain ensues globally, harder gripping cuts and tears her. Dislodging hip and rib, she wails back, threatening to come undone, wrapping and withholding fragile loins. Glass-cracked between the eyes evincing wince, he lumbers to the bottle – an anesthetic, fog-inducing ICU.
Boys pummel and cling on trampoline. Superheroes blasting at their foes, setting right the world. Divine ninja tricksters, eluding all blows, fending sacred space from viral intrusion. Morphing Jekyll into Hyde. Two-against-one turns to three-on-three, searing yelps and hollered rage compound the fractures and spread the lesions until a fuming heap of shame remains.
Emotion rivers throughout a system. Elaborate table-game of chance, every draw altering rules. And conditions. One discretion cheats them all.
Resistance (fear) and just revenge. Creating hypotheses – infinite dis-ease.
Tuck them in with tender warmth. Dabbing sores with salve. Reconnoitre, reassemble, holding court, calling assembly. The luxury is not repeating childhood, home is not a corridor of labs. Parent positioned now as doctor; infected all the same.
Blood is issue, possible transfusion, tearing tissues. Don’t ignore, curing is a share. having invented them in this inventive world, they must also be wriggled through. Calls for help, from any corner, equate a demand.
The family as quarantine.
To serve and protect.
Seek. Assist.
Quarantine.
Sanctuary.
Sanitarium.
Touch base.
Proceed.
All my Words are Silent 