It’s Language – Must be a story of something

for Friday Fictioneers during cacophony – July 5, 2013

Copyright - David Stewart

Scales, rituals, angles and lines.  Struggling to make sense, instead of staying on the ground.  Design, construct, infer, deduce.  Climb that ladder.  Circle that ring.  Aching for a view.  We’re earthed here.  But we keep on grasping.  Incessantly.  Invent equations, theorems, rules and laws.  Apply to sensation and perceive.  Revise.  Repeat.  Try numbers, letters, words.  Try gesture.  Communicate.  Calibrate.  Be social.  Get everyone to make the hike.  We make sense by making abstractions.  Distractions.  Bastardizing metaphor.  Some things go deeper, some things go out.

N Filbert 2013

 

Birthday Wishes!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY INCREDIBLE SPOUSE

AND HER TWIN!

twins-birthday

To my dearest and most beloved : Holly Suzanne – I confess, profess, announce, sing, display, proclaim that my life is altered, changed, extended, enhanced, enriched and “reciprocally molded” by yours!  Thank you!  I love you!  Words really do not do justice to what I yearn to express in this matter.  So – Happy Birthday!

And what joy to have your lifelong twin, your originary “reciprocal molder” with us on this day!  Happy Birthday (of course!) to you too – Heidi!  Thank you so much for journeying to be with us in Kansas this year – and to both of you for allowing the nation to celebrate your wonderful existences with such pomp and blast!

Twinning.  It boggles my mind to consider an Other with whom all one’s existing moments have been shared in some genetic and psycho-somatic physio-biological manner.  We all arise from “families of origin” – known or unknown.  Sets of DNA/RNA, environments, contexts, socio-political realities all conjoin to formulate and tweak, morph and develop us along our passing journeys of existence.  With that come difficulties and joys.  Traumas and opportunities.  Constraints and affordances.  Over decades so much of our environment embeds in us it can be hard to discover/uncover/observe/revise the functions and effects of it all.  But this is also a great freedom we have.  The difficult work of digging and awareness, discovery and revision – “unworking” patterns and pains, “automatic” responses and flinches to the world that have been threaded into us from our own “time immemorials.”

Not having composed this song, all the words surely don’t belong – but the tone, and sister-sentiment – “the story goes…” – and the urging to excise and unpack the “demons,” afflictions, griefs, traumas and so forth – that you two have shared from fertilization and beyond – is my wish for you – together and individually (is that possible with twinning?) …

HERE’S TO YOUR LIVES!!!

how glad I am that they entwine with mine!

Summertime

In our realm, Summer busies – schedules, rituals and rhythms deconstruct and a verve of freedom and compulsion arises in our children.  And there are vacations and visitors and spontaneous events.  The weather withers me, people are drawn to the outside, in all – Summer discomforts me.

And yet…this week expect the visits of my wife’s twin, her aunt, and a long-time friend and his family, AND we’ll celebrate these dear twins birthday with wild national hoopla (July 4 – precious to me because she entered the world, but I’m happy to have help in the celebrating at this level!).

What gathers and whispers…or shouts and plays…runs and claps…talks and snuggles…HOME…those precious to us, invaluable, incalculable,

Yesterday eve we were enjoying a particularly (abnormal) gentle, cool Kansas Summer eve on our porch and listening to the music of Keith Kenniff – placed here as a celebration of Summer’s affordances – dislocated time, gatherings, visitations and travels – favorites – family, friends, nests…

Keith Kenniff - Branches

Keith Kenniff – Branches

Experience, anyway. Empty, the space of life. (page 3)

“To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I…

…A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds…

…There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made…

…A book exists only through the outside and on the outside.”

gilles deleuze & felix guattari –

3

“My relation to others is staggered all the way to the infinite;

from the bottom up, never horizontally, the distance from here to there…

…what you call ‘distance’ is but the time of breathing in, of breathing out.

All the oxygen man needs is in his lungs.

Empty, the space of life.”

-Edmond Jabes-

            Passage to and fro.  Fore and aft.  Passing through.  So many streams of signs and symbols, sounds, referents – in some pores and out from others.  A long and endless middle.

If photons, neither particles or waves (or both) – packs of energized events.  Here, then there, everything on its way.  As if life (the verb) is journey.  Booking passage in a network of traces.  Slug-lines.  Marking, evaporate, recombinant maps.

Convergences – sense/perception/neurons and quanta.  Convergences – weather and molecules and thises and thats (write “I” and “you”) and light and air, ground and other conjoining disjunctive matters.  Convergences – roving planets in orbital trajectories, distances sustained by what is near, all the kinds and classifications.

Descriptions and errors.  Adapt, adjust, revise.  And err.  Trial err trial err, survive.  For now.  Temporarily.  This way.  The always-conditioning clause: Now.  If.

A stone Buddha, or just its head, being drawn by an artist.  A trace, remark, a transcription – transformation – another form.  For now.  And then…

Tracing convergences – our qualia – as events describe – the meeting and meshwork of lines, of motions, of pathways and bendings in travel, of stars and their dust.  Refraction, reflection, sharing directions, constraints.  Opportunities for pulse, for pattern, for wave.

To journey then, to map.  Now, if.  The long and ever-ending middle always already begun.  Trajectories and knots, unravel.

Experience, anyway.  Breathe in, breathe out, the trace.  The empty plenitude, the pregnant space, and timing’s distance.  We join.

When I speak of “Relations” – this is what I have in mind

the scales, the leaps, the constraints, affordances, limitations and opportunities of being alive…

…the modes and formats, forms and patterns, processes and movements…

the interdependencies

Jay Lemke
Jay Lemke

I can’t really add anything (currently) to this man’s work – without a doubt a hero of mine – thinking, being, creating…

if you have the interest and time…

I attest that this is brilliant…

and opens and opens and opens….

Feeling and Meaning – Jay Lemke

 

 

Collaboration

Photographer, Jennifer Koe and myself have a collaborative set in this volume – glad to see it join reality!

Experience, anyway. diverted toward Empty, the space of life.

Experience, anyway.

(click above if you missed the start)

2 pages in…the new fiction meets a message….

Empty, the space of life

“My relation to others is staggered all the way to the infinite;

from the bottom up, never horizontally, the distance from here to there…

…What you call ‘distance’ is but the time of breathing in, of breathing out.

All the oxygen man needs is in his lungs.

Empty, the space of life.”

-Edmond Jabes, from A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book

perhaps a title change, but certainly a deepening of the layers…

anyway, Experience, anyway. goes on into the encounters…

Synchronous Display – Serendipity

The books I first encountered today – and in such intriguing titular order….

and when is additional engagement with Olafur Arnald’s work not welcome

Needing Complexity, Craving Simplicity

from Donald Norman’s immensely readable Living with Complexity (2011)

Norman - Complexity

 

(click pic for chapter 1)