Month: September 2013
New Arrivals, with poetry and music
Submerged in due dates.
Here’s what’s arrived in the center of (my) radar:
and then, from Roberto Bolano
DON’T WRITE POEMS BUT SENTENCES
Write prayers that you will whisper
before writing those poems
you will think you never wrote
Strange gratuitous occupation To go losing your hair
and your teeth The ancient ways of being educated
Odd complacency (The poet doesn’t wish to be greater
than others) Not wealth or fame or even just
poetry Maybe this is the only way
to avoid fear Settle into fear
like one inhabiting slowness
Ghosts we all possess Simply
waiting for someone or something in the ruins
and finally,
MY LITERARY CAREER
Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also
from Alfaguara,
Mondadori. A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino… All
the publishers… All the readers
All the sales managers…
Under the bridge, while it rains, a golden opportunity
to take a look at myself:
like a snake in the North Pole, but writing.
Writing poetry in the land of idiots.
Writing with my son on my knee.
Writing until night falls
with the thunder of a thousand demons.
The demons who will carry me to hell,
but writing.
all poem like creatures – Roberto Bolano
What Follows
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the notebook I grabbed in case of moments of free creative scribbling contained prior forgotten reflections that carried me into further reflections…recorded below:
The wonderful thing…
The wonderful thing about writing…
The wonderful thing about writing is that you can always begin. You always face opportunity. BEGIN.
In addition to that…”in other words”…
In other words, you can always start over.
Begin. Start over. Begin. Start over.
It’s a wonderful thing.
Language. like moving your body, there’s a kind of body to inhabit. A world. A way of being. You wake. You move. You remember…by dis-membering.
In other words.
You sleep. As you cease to sleep, you remember. You remember by feeling your limbs, your breath, by seeing, by feeling things (Dismembering). As you dismember (stuffy nose, neck-ache, coffee smell, pain behind the eyes, the need to potty, and so on…) – you also re-member (stitch together, sew, seam, canvas, invent) and become (again). Writing is like this.
Language. A body dismembered – waiting for membering (memory, membership) – invention, use. Beginning. Again.
In other words, like organs instructured in-skinned, awaiting awareness, the fabric of socio-cultural symbology (languaging) lies: in wait: to be animated, enlivened, embodied: woke up.
The substance, the atoms and organs – await. Circulation, enervation, emergence – to live – animate –
to be possible
And become.
In other words, to create, to move, to motivate.
There is no such thing as starting from scratch.
But a scratch is a beginning.
In our bodies, within matter,
in the world – moving gauze, filling quilts,
sensing flesh, donning clothes, filling whispers…
I’m alive. I begin.
The wonderful thing about writing…
…to awake into a way of being.
p.s… i’m thinking that each begin includes a hope to mean
Found Thoughts
As I snatched books and items to head to a weekend class I grabbed an old partially used notebook just in case I’d sneak a moment or two to scribble my thoughts. I did, but I also found the following past set of jottings that I catapulted off of for what I wrote next…
They felt like found thoughts that found me again…so I thought I’d share…
From Old Notebooks
I get a little weary of philosophy. It fascinates and intrigues, has its spectacular, glittering moments – like architecture, hard sciences, and fiction – but with each human activity there can be too much of a good thing. Perhaps it’s the fantasies involved in abstraction, in the “feeling” of figuring things out, or of “making sense” (instead of sensing) – our human super-additives to experience that are also experience themselves – that I, at times, weary of. That eminently falsifiable intuition that everything is made up.
It can be hard work to keep a worldview active. They involve such complexities and details, layer upon layer of biological and logical, illogical and irrational, intuitive – ologies and descriptions, manipulated perceptions and interpretations re-interpreted re-interpreted without ceasing, that a being grows tired. Can grow tired.
Those same realities, capacities, activities are also exponentially inspiring, enervating, exciting – those behaviors of creativity, imagination, and survival – and our weird confounding capacity to think we can observe our perceptions make for a very strange frenzy of energy and productivity…
…our infinitely (perhaps?!) webbed interdependence with our surround provides for mysterious and copious possibilities of activity (material)…all bewildering. Chaos can be so generative. Chaos – so stultifying.
What might we know?
That we are organisms within systems? How would we know that, from within systems?
That we are dynamic organism enmeshed with other dynamic forms of matter and energy, waves and particles, movements? Seems to be our sense of it.
So what?
Alongside and within – in order to be – there is NO way to exist detached or without: to imagine distance, objectivity without imagination capacity of fantasy, illusion, for purposes like logic, mathematics, narratives and codes – DElusion in order to play the games with delusional sincerity – effectively. The delusions are effective, often pragmatic, evolving, so they must also be part of being with/in a myriad of dynamics…
One would hypothesize. Or suppose. Infer, as in fantasize.
All enabled by immersion in symbols, languages, stipulated relations…
…which is what I had set out to consider – immersion in symbols –
the wonder of it
the delusion…
…to follow…
Surround
recent posts and discussions with brilliant co-bloggers (e.g. multi-sense realism, Anacephalaeosis, unwanted advice, tocksin and others) have reminded me how woven, interactive and co-constructed we are with our environment… which sounds something like this (the awareness and attention and presence of it) to me:
“In short – who will archive cultures in the future – the state, corporations, or the public?”
This article both combines and extends some of my favorite things to mull….
Archiving cultures – Mike Featherstone
coupled to concepts found in such texts as these:
“The archive fever is to attempt to return to the lived origin, the everyday experience, which is the source of the imperfect and distorted memories which are our archives and whose transience and forgetting makes us uncomfortable”
-Jacques derrida-
A Kind of Credo : Intertextuality : “Art is Difficult” : Manifesto?
“perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point”
-Anne McConnell, Approaching Disappearance–
But then there is a reality to writing – the unexpected, the making-up, emergence and invention. I believe in it, in spite of my theories, in spite of acquired knowledge. Something like the terms of paradox. Little matter, much substance (not really).
For fun, let’s say (in the manner of a credo):
- “I believe…
that language is a socially constructed resource recursively constituting and innovating meaning potential
- “I believe…
‘the notion of meaning potential can be characterized as a heterogeneous totality of knowledge of conventionalized patterns of normatively correct situated verbal behavior which manifests itself and emerges from social practices of a given social community’ (-Mika Lahteenmaki)
- “We believe…
that actual meanings are emergent from meaning potentials – are jointly created – recursively and interactively dependent – in their situatedness and perspectivity, unique and irreducible
- “We believe…
‘reality works in overt mystery’ (-Macedonio Fernandez, via JL Borges)
- “We believe…
that to live ‘is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed’ (-Gilles Deleuze)
- “We believe…
that living occurs via the ‘conservation of autopoiesis and the conservation of adaptation – a constant and mutual structural coupling of continuous transformations betwixt organisms and environments (envorganisms)’ (-Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Paul Kockelman)
- “We believe…
in complexity and meaning, difference and repetition, redundancy and novelty, structures and contingencies, openness and change
Measures of reality (situated and perspectival…partial and relative to) – our As-if-oscope and Toxic spoon-deep. A hurly-burly and chaotic entanglement – intertwingled – adjoined in movements (writing of writing) to use an outdated metaphor: textuality and trace.
- “We could believe…
that ‘texts record the meanings we make: in words, pictures and deeds…shaping and shaped by our social relationships, politically, as individuals as members of social groups’ (-Jay Lemke)
That no effect is not mutual, recursive, intermingled and intertwined. Life is ambient, writing of writing.
In other words.
- “We believe…
that ‘Art is difficult’ (-Viktor Shklovsky) and meanings dialogic/multilogic / multimodal/multivalent (-Mikhail Bakhtin, Gunther Kress, Bruno Latour, semiosis)
Empiricism regarding ourselves is impossible (the situation and perspective necessary are not available) so we rely. i.e. we need one another and beyond. Envorganisms, we. We believe (we could say. I might).
“When we leave each other, we leave.”
A text composed is intertexuality – an Irish monk illuminating a copy; a modern blogger mashing-up – bricolage, meaning – I write, WITH.
To say I instantiate a social practice. It becomes.
Thank you. And welcome.
-a glyph is a hunt for optimism-
Slideshow of works cited:
Troubling Identities, cont’d: Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow”
-please click image for textual content-
Troubling Identity in Writing – What Scribbling Does
As an addendum and prequel to writing anything/everything I wanted to share a couple of terrific essays on the strange elimination (or difficulty of perceiving) a “self” or “personality” or “identity” or any of those socially constructed concepts relating to human individuals. Prompted by the scribbling exercise of last week (see previous post) – the conundrum has long fascinated me and seems to be so well presented in texts like Jorge Luis Borges‘ The Nothingness of Personality (also perhaps available here) and this tremendous first essay – relating to Maurice Blanchot‘s writings – in Anne McConnell’s Approaching Disappearance – (click image to read)
all help me to understand better why it often seems hard for writerlies to formulate or maintain “strong senses of self” – as the practice of entering language in such a way seems to dissolve the separations that might preserve that artificial construction.
Related…
“Yet if language gives no words for what happens…it nevertheless gives itself”
-Christopher Fynsk-
“Not to discover – not to be able to discover – the solution, is the general tragedy of all writing”
“To try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life are one and the same thing”
-Jorge Luis Borges-
“Reality works in overt mystery”
-Macedonio Fernandez-
Creatively Connecting In Movement and Painting
some things we do
Polysemic Stupor 