Month: August 2013

Please Stand By. Restructuring. Thank You

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces18 Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEq-Y8-vZF4

Thank you.  And I mean that.

The years of blogging, developing manoftheword/The Whole Hurly Burly have been life-changing.  Blogging has enabled me to learn to share my work, to discover what resonates in my work with whom and what sorts of interests.  Blogging has given me courage, most definitely helped me discover my voice, and linked me to an amazing community of creators and thinkers.  In that way it has given me hope.

I appreciate everyone who has visited (or will visit) these pages, who has taken the time to interact, comment, critique, challenge and question my process, my content, my style.

Thank You

It has been a significant mode of expression in which I have felt that I mattered, have been heard, seen, can contribute something to a large and complex world.

I am unsure of my intentions with a caesura, apart from feeling profoundly that the time and energy I put toward this is needed in other areas of my life right now.  The Whole Hurly Burly of life has its ways and effects.

As in brief breaks before (beginning grad school again, starting a business with spouse, children home for summer and the like) – should something worthy come forth I will share it, but for a time will be unable to consistently interact in this medium.

It has been a great pleasure – both “followers” (I hope not!) and those I “follow” – to become acquainted with your works, your gifts and talents, your ideas and artefacts – and truly – to have been offered a context that feels safe for experimencting mine.  THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

I cannot predict the time I will need for this restructuring, but I can assure you this experience and network and relation has been profound and meaningful in my life.

Here’s to WordPress

Wordpress

and to all of YOU who make it worth pressing.

TO LIFE!

Nathan W Filbert

8th segment

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

’cause I don’t have to stop.  ’cause it doesn’t.

experience anyway cover

8

            And now “I” am different, again.  Change.  Is how I would “put it.”  What with the whip of atoms calling “I” ever-coupling to the Itself that the “I” calls “world,” really, when one gets down to it, in it (always), the distance is elusive (is “illusion”).  And so “I” changes at the rate of the wind “I” is sharing; of the sea “I” is seeing; of the matter (volatile shivering).

It is Here.  We are.  Since we cannot claim a territory, we strain for modes to re-fer (de-fer?).  Differ.  We’re attuned to it.  The rhythm of our tune is differance.  There is no reason that suffices.  We are in it.  It.

A live.

In vocalizing, movement sounds (for humans).  Or in gesture – perceptible matter (always suited to the version capable).  It is always a matter of moving around, shuffling space with time.  I cry, there is movement.  The air and the chemical sea.  I look – things displace, replace, are placed by my gaze – an interactive mechanism – part of a NEVER discontinuous train.

We touch, because sound, because cell, because particles and waves (as both) – because movement.  Because “separate” is an aberrant traction (abs-traction).  A practical folly.

I love you – re-cognition that borders are empty, margins erased.  That “you” and “I” intersperse (wind, sea, light) molecules.  Movement.  Alive.  I love a live.

Because live doesn’t noun an “f.”  Life.  Life is a period, an arbitrary stop.  Imposed.  But a “v” simply vibrates.  We are a-live.  We are the living.  Even the “the” can’t contain it.  It rushes the punctual, overcomes it.  We are us and I love you (us).

Perhaps we need little realms to find out.  To discover.  Acting networks to re-member (to sew, to put back together) what’s dismembered convention.  “The way it is” – what we’re impressed to “get by” (“survive”).

This, It, is NOT the survival of fittest, a live is the fittest and cannot be dismembered, “I’s” just being particled Lifes – and those not really – except in that most human of ways (itself a “not really” invented by us).  It is more complex than that (call it “what’s live” or Enaction), and can’t be reduced to its “parts.”

Nor combined in a “whole” (another punctuated word).  It’s not final, complete, but just changing (rates of wind, of sea of weather; of stones and planets, emotions and plants) – if we could dissect it (and we try) the variation of paces “seem” astounding…but It’s chock full of seams like two sides of paper – not different but same save the semes that are perceptible.

These semes are intended for motion:  I love you.  My so-called chapters and segments to “say” – we are us, there’s no other, and we’ve little idea of that.

“I” lean back, am exhausted, and rest (always moving).  “I” don’t see the difference in sleep.

Arriving today + Reflections

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Reflections, Writing8 Comments

Jakobson - On Language

…and wonderings about language as a tool and an abstract medium.  Wondering if in the endless bewilderment of experience – of living – rife with woundings and joys – we move to shared media, providing communally devised realms in which to re-vision, simultaneously creating new life, wherewith and wherein to investigate and inquire, to dig and dig and…

Language as constructed or agreed-upon and functional (tool) medium.

Then there’s this full of resonances and also contributing to the reflections – required text of a current course:

Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles

…and I quote:

“As the reader gropes the stacks – lifting books and testing their heft, appraising the fall of letterforms on the title page, scrutinizing marks left by other readers – the more elusive knowledge itself becomes.  All that remains unknown seems to beckon from among the covers, between the lines.  In the library, the reader is wakened from the dream of communion with a single book, startled into a recognition of the word’s materiality by the sheer number of bound volumes; by the sound of pages turning, covers rubbing; by the rank smell of books gathered together in vast numbers…the physicality of the book is strongest in libraries, where the accumulated weight of written words seems to exert a gravity all its own.”

“So the library is a body, too, the pages of books pressed together like organs in the darkness…[in libraries] I can fool myself that the universe is composed of infinite variations of a single element – the book – that I, too, am made of books, like the person in Giuseppe Arcimboldo‘s painting The Librarian“

Archimboldo - the Librarian

“…a person made of books; his is not a single book but a whole library”

“I have the distinct impression that the millions of volumes may indeed contain the entirety of human experience: that they make not a model for but a model of the universe.”

“…texts, fabrics to be shredded and woven together in new combinations and patterns…”

“everything in the world exists to end up in a book” (Stephane Mallarme)

“With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words – books are an amalgam of [Roger Bacon‘s] three classes of substance capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal”

“For any question, the library offers no hope of a definitive answer…unlimited and cyclical”

“Together they tell us stories that they could not tell alone”

library pic

“In many places, the volumes are thick with dust, pocked with the holes left by insects,

which are almost as hungry for books as I“

-all quotes except where noted – Matthew Battles Library: An Unquiet History

And somehow I can’t help but think the interface and interstice of languaging matter in this way – a way that provides comfort and the slightest skin of distance from the raw inside of skin – inseparable recursions – but mediated immediately – kind of like magic; a LOT like alchemy; always experience – but less abrasive or intrusive than “direct.”  Perhaps paint, light, cameras and brushes, clay, etc – any art that borrows matter outside the body – similarly provides a soluble, gentled, media through which to live forward…

…in other words…are our preferences for embodiment a part of what define us as artists in the societal mesh?  The media through which we most naturally express or experience or embody indicative?  Textuality as embodiment for the writer; clay, stone, marble, etc. for the sculptor; movement for the dancer; oil, pigment, brush, etc. for the painter; lines for the draughtsman and so on…

 

Experience, anyway. (parts 6 and 7 are new)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

This work is a slow-grower.  I think it wants to be read that way as well.  Slow accretions of interaction and recursively referent.  Not sure where it will continue.  Click the title page to investigate.  Comments are welcome.

experience anyway cover

Sunday: 3 new things (to me) as gift recommendations (to you)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Music4 Comments

I have never engaged “graphic novels” much in a kind of snobbery for text and misunderstanding of modes of expression.  This weekend, visiting the library with my children, I snatched out titles that looked interesting and have truly been gifted by them.  I have needed a weekend for rest and refreshment, I am thankful it has come.  Here are my recommendations:

Picture This by Lynda Barry
What it Is by Lynda Barry
Trouble Will Find Me by The National
Trouble Will Find Me by The National

Trouble Will Find Me by The National

Harvey - Bouchard
Harvey by Herve Bouchard / Janice Nadeau

De-Presses

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

“What a joke it is to read or hear—as I have read or heard more times than I can count—that writers ‘see more clearly’ or ‘feel more deeply’ than non-writers. The truth of the matter is that writers hardly ‘see’ or ‘feel’ at all. The disparity between a writer’s works and the world per se is so great as to beggar comment. Writers who arrange their lives so as to ‘have experiences’ in order to reduce them to contemptible linguistic recordings of these experiences are beneath contempt.”

—Something Said, by Gilbert Sorrentino

Dalkey Archive

Via strange twists of events, connections that could only be re-constructed through fantastic imagination, I have been moved back into perusing publishers for work that inspires, raises and extends one’s ideas of what “art,” “literature,” “human” are.

While most publishers must infuse their catalogs with books that will sell, there are still a few presses that are simply committed to grandeur – to works that express and challenge what humans are capable of making, thinking, expressing, creating – works that assess and challenge our condition of being.

Two presses I’d like to promote – that continually provide works that surprise and engage (fully) and elastically foment my boundaries of concept and possibilities – with bewildering form and content – in other words, publishers from whom you might randomly purchase titles and ALWAYS be made richer, better, exponentially more humane – (THIS IS A REMARKABLE THING):

 

http://www.openletterbooks.org/
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/

please visit them and order…ANYTHING…

your life will be BETTER.

 

 

Excerpts of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry3 Comments

Ideal
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
1

I did not know beforehand what would count for me as a new color. Its beauty is an analysis
of things I believe in or experience, but seems to alter events very little. The significance of a bird
flying out of grapes in a store relates to the beauty of the color of the translucency of grapes.
There is a space among some objects on a table that reminded her of a person, the way the bird reminded her,
a sense of the ideal of the space she would be able to see. Beauty can look like this around objects.
A plastic bag on a bush, moving slightly, makes an alcove, a glove or mist, holding the hill.
Time can look like this. The plane of yourself separates from the plane of spaces between objects,
an ordered succession a person apprehends, in order to be reminded.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Red Quiet, Section 3
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Our conversation is a wing below my consciousness, like organization in blowing cloth, eddies of water, its order of light on film with no lens.

A higher resonance of story finds its way to higher organization: data swirl into group dreams.

Then story surfaces, as if recognized; flies buzzing in your room suddenly translate to “Oh! You’re crying!”

So, here I hug the old person, who’s not “light” until I embrace him.

My happiness at seeing him, my French suit constitute at the interface of wing and occasion.

Postulate whether the friendship is fulfilling.

Reduce by small increments your worry about the nature of compassion or the chill of emotional identification among girlfriends, your wish to be held in the consciousness of another, like a person waiting for you to wake.

Postulate the wave nature of wanting him to wait (white space) and the quanta of fractal conflict, point to point, along the outline of a petal, shore from a small boat.

Words spoken with force create particles.

He calls the location of accidents a morphic field; their recurrence is resonance, as of an archetype with the vibration of a seed.

My last thoughts were bitter and helpless.

Friends witnessing grief enter your consciousness, illuminating your form, so quiet comes.

berssenbrugge red quiet

A Reading of Red Quiet