Month: February 2013

Charting Change

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings5 Comments

“the rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.”

-Szolem Mandelbrot-

After 12 nomadic years of self-study, retail labor, marriages and parenting, I am now in my second semester of graduate studies in Library & Information Sciences.  As my coursework progresses and evolves toward more specified researching, the organization of my passions and values, interests and desires do as well.  Over the past year my blog manoftheword and the other blogs I participate in have primarily been creative instigations and outlets.  Places where my ongoing work in art and literature can find some audience and I can process and work through ideas and conceptions as they fumble their way toward something more finished, hopefully one day publishable, perhaps useful to others.  Most of my poetic efforts I have exposed through Spoondeep along with the work of a dear friend of mine.  The works my wife and I set out to do and continue (not nearly as often as we desire) can be witnessed at Combinatory Art in Motion, where we attempt a contemporary and relational ekphrasis as an open and intimate artistic endeavor.  

As the demands of schooling, parenting and marriage bundle and thicken, my focuses also need to sharpen and grow more efficient.  In accord with this, I have changed the title and some of the goals of keeping this blog active and vital.  The discipline of Library & Information Sciences is proving to be a wonderful practical theoretical grounding of the majority of those aspects I love most about our world:  language, art, relationships and learning, and I am focusing my investigative work in the program on semiotics, human-information-behavior, Information Retrieval systems and tools and design, and the function of language in our acquisition of knowledge and interpretation of the world and its data.  This is nothing new for me, and I have attempted and practiced many of these same methods throughout my life – reading, writing, and communicating with others.

All this to say that The Whole Hurly Burly will become a place for me to work out my creative life in language and symbols (or images) as it has been, but will probably have fewer posts and hopefully entries that are more fully developed.  Research takes time, and so many hours of reading and interpretation, and as elements arise that I can only work out for myself poetically or in imaginative prose, if they seem to have some merit or I need feedback I will post them here.  There may also be more theoretical hypotheses as I struggle to make sense of the many lines of thought rubber-band-balling my brain.  I will keep up with Friday Fictioneers so that there will be at least one fiction exercise a week and will continue to pass on crucial inspirational quotes/music/arts/ideas as they flood my desk.

It has become very clear to me that I want whatever I do to be drawn up from the whole messy complex background texture and tangle of being a living human being among other humans and the larger matrices of the world – it is this untangleable complex and network of social and natural, individual and corporate, intimate and estranged, abstracted and imaginative realities that I take Wittgenstein to be referring to when he refers to it as “the whole hurly-burly” of our goings-on.  And the sinewy, grueling and challenging process of attempting to refer to our experience semantically, in language, in symbols, in sounds and shapes is the most rewarding activity I experience – and when we come close to our desire it feels in me to be what David Foster Wallace signifies “making the head throb heart-like.”  

These, then are the goals of this blog moving forward.  To engage and investigate the “whole hurly burly” and to offer it to you  in hopes it might cause your “heads to throb heart-like.”  I cannot thank you enough for whatever time you give my process and work, your kindness in engaging and insightful comments.  Here’s to development and change —

and what is currently infusing me:  Currently Reading

Processing Change

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, TracesLeave a comment

‘How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action’

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel –

“CERTAIN NOVELS NOT ONLY cry out for critical interpretations but actually try to direct them . This is probably analogous to a piece of music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements , say like a waltz. Frequently, too, those novels that direct their own critical reading concern themselves thematically with what we might consider high brow or intellectual issues — stuff proper to art, engineering, antique lit., philosophy, etc. These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef. When they fail, as my own first long thing did, they’re pretty dreadful. But when they succeed, as I claim David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does , they serve the vital & vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach & grasp, for making heads throb heartlike , & for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life , transcendent truth -seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion & entertainment-marketing seem increasing consummatable only in the imagination”

-David Foster Wallace, The Empty Plenum-

IN THE PROCESS OF CHANGE

more soon….

Yearn Vulnerable – Friday Fictioneers 2/15/2013

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes12 Comments

Such a powerful prompt this week – yowza!  Thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields and her continuous work at Friday Fictioneers for providing us with such fare to engage and reflect.  Please join us if you have an urge to translate experience into words.

The prompt:

copyright-David Stewart

(this prompt was so good I’ve included 3 responses in the manner of brainsnorts)

1.

She grasps while he flees.  The horror of everything offered.  He’s reaching all the same.  She clings, and thus submerged, loss becomes attachment.  He yearns.  They’re vulnerable.  Their hold and flight are balance.  A panicking fail like this can require only one thing – somebody’s everything – which she offers, and which frightens him to terror.  She lays it at his feet and pursues – without her he would fall – traumatizing him, for there will come a day.

copyright-David Stewart

2.

Everything depends on it.  Seems to.

This risk, this reach, this grasp.

All has been let go, ripped away for this advance.

She’s nothing left but hope and fear.

Submerged in this suspension.

And he in silent trauma – terrorized.

What would be the gain – of grasping or clasping; a yearn or a vortex; great loss or its threat?

A possible life?  An wholistic vitality?  The “whole hurly-burly”*?

What?

We leave it here.  NOW.   In the reaching.

*Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phrase for the complex background, context of human life

copyright-David Stewart

Alternate 2.

“Do you not get it?” she stressed, “can you seriously not see what I’ve done?”

“EVERYTHING!” she cried, “EVERYTHING I’ve left and abandoned, deserted, let go, in order to offer myself up to you! – to come for, reach out to – YOU!”

“This is unbelievable!” she, exasperated. “I really and truly cannot!” she, bewildered.

And he – silently terrorized, traumatized, afraid.

Trapped in this suspension – the grasping or clasping; the yearn or submersion; the loss or its threat.

And what of the gain –  a possible life?  An wholistic vitality?  What – ?

We leave it here.  NOW.  Reaching.

N Filbert 2013

Continuities – for my wife and children

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings9 Comments

Another day filled with the thickness of love

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings5 Comments

for my wife on Valentine’s

IMG_3479

The Way It Is

 

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread

–William Stafford

PROTEUS MAG

On By NW FilbertIn Art1 Comment

PROTEUS MAG

 

PROTEUS MAG.

happy to find (ever-so-tardily) – and kansas-bred-proud

Conjoined Semiosis – A Valentine

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Traces3 Comments

HERE:

Conjoined Semiosis – A Valentine for my wife

Amassing contexts and histories barely constitute beginnings.  Relations between entities are potentially infinite and full of traces.  Somehow, occasionally, they equal: an identity – identities – by what’s between.  Continuous dynamic variables.

By chance each of our indefinite immensities meshed boundaries.  Bodies permeable as minds, and vice-versa.  Reciprocity – reality and dream.  Kisses channeling deep into veins, correspondence shipped and received – held gently in the hands while splicing ripples through craniums.  Made of margins we, venturing portals and hallways one of another.  Each an entourage, an army, and its festival.

Bound by genuine threads.  Wrapping rocks and trading rings, patchworking children toward tapestry.  Our eyes – microscoping telescopes, telescoping memories.  We are wheres and whens, whos and whats – and how!  No wonder why receives no answers, only possible descriptions.

We search for language with our bodies.  Attempting to define the terms and parse the verbs together: love, trust, respect and honesty.  We have said “you are my person,” communication requiring the whole shebang – dismembered pasts and potential futures – all we do not know mustered toward a truth, collaborating is.

If we were to withhold what we cannot show, “whereof which we cannot speak” (as Ludwig tells) avoiding formal pseudo-propositions, we would only telegraph senses, dropping our abstracting frames and their symbol’d referents.

But we are artists – metaphors ourselves – infusing nonsense into world, creating kinds of sense, some of it illuminative.  Morphing forms and casting doubts to converge in content.

I love you.  I am so glad

WE ARE HERE

We / Holly Suzanne

Going on from there…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy4 Comments

“For that I blame the craven desire to speak, to write, to be heard.”

-Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet–

Nerve Language by Daniel Schreber
Nerve Language by Daniel Schreber

Semantic Animals

It goes on.  Seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, I read.  I write.  In dilettante-like forays into advanced mathematics, physics, cognitive sciences and biology,  I learn:

“The first message is that there is disorder”

(-James Yorke, attributed with naming the science known as Chaos)

            So back to first principles (they have a habit of coming in threes, and splitting into fragments).  I take out a blank sheet of paper, filled with lines.  A patterned absence.  Boundarying void.  I write “seduced” because I’m thinking about language.  Thinking instinct and survival and desperate need.  Thinking overload, “more than you could possibly imagine.”  Semantic animals.

When I last saw the snow fall, it was raining, offering an impression of “wet.”

She is far from me in two dimensions.  Only two, of multiples of three.  I count by the “trick of the nines.”

If only there were a way to collect accurate data.  Then adequately calculate and organize.  Unfortunately, life is mostly made of problems existing on continuums of countless dynamic variables, most of which – unsolvable.  They call these “differential,” or Derrida’s Infinitude of Differance.  Professionals finally agreeing: “regularity is aberration.”

We search for patterns.  Even in chaos we find them (or create).  Seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, we “read.”  There are so many oscillating signals that even the few we don’t inherently tune out we call “noise.”

Philosophically, on the other hand, where I feel more like an amateur or novice, I understand the problem/hypothesis/theory equation to be: EVERYTHING goes into EVERYTHING, that we’re only ever engaging possibilities.  That probables are fleeting, and certainties are few:  You are limited, peculiar, and definitely will die.

In other words, “the very process of cutting up and cutting off, opens up and opens out,” or some of us are developing “a belief in the musicality of creative disjunction” (Lance Olsen), because, seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, we select and collage our own inspection.

It’s easy to forget the first things that we find, i.e. that all positive statements and beliefs are built on “that there is disorder,”

and seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols,

we go on from there.

The Life of the Mind (or, Reading World)

On By NW FilbertIn Graphotos, Poetry10 Comments

Perambulating

 

Sickened and soothed by symbols, I set out.

Signals come and I perceive, I respond.

The I forms to the action.

 

With enough exercise, tissues tighten:

there are knots and strains and sprains

that need unraveling, massage.

 

I turn to music

buried deep within the signs

a way to loosen and undo

the stressing strands.

 

I unalign

and gain relief

spread out through many pathways,

any selves

allowed to wander their own ways

 

beginning at the edges of their ends,

filling margins,

taking borders,

easing outward

to become.

 N Filbert 2012

Perambulating

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading6 Comments

This morning she said she was “taking a walk for mental health.”

I decided to set out/in too…

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