Month: November 2014

Coming Bare

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, meaning, Writing5 Comments

head-silhouette-with-question-mark

In the interests of authenticity…

  • The fact or quality of being true or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness. Also (overlapping with sense) accurate reflection of real life, verisimilitude.  
  • Genuineness;
  • The quality of truthful correspondence between inner feelings and their outward expression; unaffectedness, sincerity.
  • A mode of existence arising from self-awareness, critical reflection on one’s goals and values, and responsibility for one’s own actions; the condition of being true to oneself.
  • The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014.)

Unveiling.  The action of reveal.  Is the “condition of being true to oneself” a possibility?

Recently my partner and love wrote me a revealing, unveiling, letter that blunted me with authenticity – a quality of herself that she was questioning in that very message.

Self-awareness.  Sincerity.  Something corresponding to actuality, reality.  Genuineness.

How often do we present or re-present ourselves authentically?  Do we all wish to?  What would it look like?  Sound like?  Would we lose friends?  Lovers?  Jobs?  If our outward expressions matched our inner feelings?

WHO AM I?

The complaint was compromise.  Pretense.  The wriggling falsities of “fitting in” or “being useful” or “surviving” in the world of humans.  In social groups and situations.  In life.  The feeling that what “works” or garners respect, interest, desire in the commerce of human beings is not authentic to who I actually am.  That what I am “liked” for is a misrepresentation, a partial product, a fabrication, a mixed message, does NOT “correspond to actuality, reality.”  And is it possible to undo that?  To live authentically in the variegated, unpredictable, situational and relative world of humans?  And is authenticity of an individual even a potential actuality / reality?

This has prompted me days of thought.  In effect it was relieving, releasing – my lover is exhausted of the “play of living” – the work of “fitting in,” “surviving with others,” “belonging” in ways that feel partial, inexact, false even, untrue, ALWAYS incomplete, inaccurate, inauthentic.

I felt freed to say my honesty.  When I father, I pretend to be a father.  I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what I should be doing.  I don’t know what it means to father children.  I love them, I care about them, I am frightened by them, I am exhausted by the responsibility, I gauge my activities based on parenting behaviors I DON’T feel comfortable with, or that I wished for…I act, I pretend I’m a man who knows how to love, instruct, “raise” children!  I do not know what I’m doing.  I feel inauthentic.  Like I’m reaching, practicing, experimenting, trying to be what I think a good “father” might be.

For years and years and years and years I have “feigned” being a writer, a musician, a scholar, an artist (it feels like).  Yes, I’ve read a lot. Yes, I’ve studied, I’ve practiced, I’ve performed.  Yes I think I “get” some things about the world and our human experience of it.  Yes I LOVE writing words, mixing them up, crafting phrases and sentences with them, attempting to mate them to my internal experiences, ideas, emotions… but I almost ALWAYS feel an impostor not an expert, like I’m trying out voices, expressions, characters, compilations to FIND OUT if that’s how I think, feel, imagine?!  So if ever I’m desired, complimented, responded to – I think it is an accident, a gratuitous kindness, a pitying.  That I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m simply trying, groping in language in a thorough darkness.

As a lover, a partner, I have simply tried to please.  To find out what is wanted and do, be, perform that.  How does an intimate relationship “work”?  I don’t know.  Everyone is different.  Nothing I learn to enact, behave, communicate, engage – is successfully effective in the next relationship (or, obviously, in the relationships ended before that!).  Could I BE whatever mucky morphing “self” “living human organism” I am (at any given moment) and be loved?  It seems so unlikely!  I don’t even know what that is (the mucky morphing living individual human organism) to express or represent to the Other one… – do they?  Does ANYone?

So do we ALL feel like we’re FAKING our way through being human?  Adapting “roles” and “styles” and “opinions” and behaviors in order to survive?  To be liked?  To fit in?  To feel good about ourselves?  To feel useful?  To BE?

Over decades, I have found that there are some things that steadily characterize me.  I like to drink and smoke and read and write.  I love to love and desire and be loved and desired.  All of those things share the “actuality” and “reality” of being activities that I don’t understand.  Things that seem to steady, nourish and keep me vital…and yet also damage, wound, hurt and make me vulnerable.  That wobble.  That trembling.

Identity

To my lover I responded theoretically.  That my understanding of a living organism is that its “identity” in fact is created and activated in every moment’s situation and surround.  That ALL of being a human is identifying oneself in relation to circumstance – a moment-to-moment relation and response to THOSE and THAT which constitutes its happening.  That “living” involves trying style, voice, behavior, activity, vocation, perception, interpretation, thought after another after another – quickly realizing that in EVERY instance the “fit” is partial, inauthentic, somewhat true (what feels good) and somewhat false (what is uncomfortable) – that BEING ALIVE is a wandering experimental trial of sorts.  That if we CHOSE or locked ourselves into an IDENTITY and attempted to be consistent in it – we would in fact deteriorate, become bitter – that the wisdom is NOT “I AM THAT” but “THAT IS PARTIALLY ME” for now, in this instance, at present…

????

The questions keep coming.  We bemoan that when we take a job, a position, a role, responsibilities… we tire of them as we feel the constraint of structured, required, or expected behaviors and activities.  When I compose a writing work – within pages I tire of its direction, its characters, its ethos – I can feel where a thing is going and whether it’s interesting to me or not, I tire of it – feel constrained by what’s created, feel fake in pushing it in another direction…even innovation and inventiveness feel PRETEND.

Perhaps LIVING = the tension of partiality.  Striving to “fit” to “belong” to “match” (be safe in, acknowledged, understood, allowed) means adaptation, alteration, invention, reciprocal construction, which would seem to inherently demand compromise, partiality, veiling and highlighting – what will seem / feel to be INAUTHENTIC, misrepresentation, “FAKE.”

And yet – it is through this wriggling tango that we also come to discover what “fits” us – what we enjoy, what our perspectives are, who/how/with whom we like to be, what feels “good” to us and what makes us afraid/uncomfortable/ and so on…

Cynical view: we’re ever pretending and untrue.  Hopeful view: we’re navigating and discovering, becoming.  And it seems that both are “real” and “actual.”  Authenticity (maybe?) equals partiality and pretense for humans?  Equals morphing and becoming?  Equals uncertainty and acting (adapting)?  Equals attempting to be?

Thanksgiving

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, Language, meaning, Music1 Comment

Thanks

Thanks to all of you I have become aware of – for creating, expressing and sharing your thoughts, ideas and works – giving me the opportunity to engage.

Thanks

And thanks to those of you who take the time and consideration to engage my thoughts, ideas and works – giving things a life beyond my small circumference.

The Costume

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, fiction, Writing1 Comment

Bill Jacobsen - Untitled 1999

The Costume

            When there is dialogue, or perception.  When he’s awake.  But what to name it?  How describe?  Perhaps even while sleeping.

The lag.

At checkout counter, clerk addresses: to absorption, numbness, mumble.  Other.

Strikes Alfonse as he’s driving toward home:  there are trees bending, being present in their way.  Cars, pedestrians, small animals scurrying.  A school bus.  Neighborhoods – definite yards and homes.  A mail-delivery-person.  A filmy mist.  A fall-behind in his perception.  Gap.  Perhaps.

He initially considered it a veil.  A tremulous fog.  A curious “vagueness to things.”  Like long, cold Winter.  Haphazard inceptions:  tree, bus, children; cat, dog, car.  No attachment.  A muffling and delay.  A foreigner.  Driver inside steel mechanism, separate by seconds, very nearly removed – a skein, a skin, a veil.  An organism with apparatus.  The slow calculator.

The smeary light when she speaks:  lover, mother, friend.  Overlaps, palimpsests, a smudging feedback, a decay.  The children crying.  Vocalization evokes.  Indicates.  Needs.  Response.  Remembers he is human.  Particular understandings, expectations.  Affirmations and acknowledgments.  Times for saying yes.  Attentional assent.

Alfonse disbursed.  Pernicious regress.  As if he’d be immediate.  As if the others were.  As if it all were touching, interspersed and in exchange.  This thing and another.  He is embodied.  The body seems slow, or surprisingly fast, almost anticipatory (unbeckoned, unmeditated erections).  He can’t make sense from it.  Body makes sense he knows not of.  Who knows not of?  Of what?  Even how might be accurate here.  Alfonse cannot seem to know, this is his costume, a glassy shroud, the sluggishness between the here and now.  Without a zipper or a tag.

Inside a bottle within distorted frame, but without an image described so clearly.  Costumes are alive – expose the motions of the wearer.  Notions.  Reveal, conceal, but variant things.  Who dressed him this occasion?  This dismantled undoing and random erasure, perpetual hiatuses of interpretation?  His hesitant reality – a retardation, sensational slag, both slow-soaking sponge and absorbency-abdicator.

“I got nothing,” he murmurs, “didn’t catch a word you said…” as if in some other language of different rhythm and tune.  Not understood.  Multiple things unrelated, cannot tell, cannot smell, is uncertain where he is in his motions.  Not quick enough, just out of joint, who what where why when never equals now for him, nor how.  He is Alfonse and he seems costumed.

Making love – a metaphor for intimacy – those direct invasive actions – and yet he’s steps away, slow to the uptake, uncertain who is doing where and when.  That comes later and looks like smudges that he estimates with guessing.

Is this uncommon? – is what he wonders.  Am I the only one who cannot tell?  Does she know what she is doing, feeling it as it happens?  He’s asking something far away he cannot measure.  He wakes each morning, to himself, inside this costume, and dons the heavy cloak of it for sleep.  Asynchronous, distant, accidental and traumatic, but postponed – perpetual flush of shut-down, shock, bewilder.

He thinks “flamingo” inside a jar of unfocused space in alternate materials in artificial frame and anesthetic wall in analagesic scheme, so far, far, far, far… the clock is slipping.  The span from here from now, from him from there, from this to happening, happens.

And so it goes.  Costume he can’t remember wearing that encases and engulfs.  Awareness too long after to affect.  A lostness in the makeup or makeover, the becoming and become.  Too late.  Ineffective.  Ever after and begone.

Echoes.  Surely something must be said, something addressed to him, something interjected, interacted and applied – only ever now arriving quite beyond a sensibility toward response – apposite, inappropriate, out of line and time and sense.  Unsettled and uncouth.  A threatening out-of-sorts, off-color and unfelt.  Feeling suffocated, unrelating.

Alfonse swimming being, non-concurrent, unawares.  Ineffably indistinct.  Imperceptibly misinterpreted.  Not.  Never.  Was. But.  Here.  Where.  No.  Not.  Now.  It slides away.  He heard something (her mouth, lips, the child-in-walkway, bird, tree bent to breeze) – no, not yet, before, never always, when?  How?

Soughing in a muddy river, ice overhead shifting, yesterday.  Forever.  There is no today in the mix, the undertow, a disconnected untoward, who where when – not he – can’t remember, a caesura of consequence – plugging, plunging him far from present, dark and drear.

So far between the now and when – not-knowing.

Invisible costume.  Alfonse’s weight.  Indistinguishably unable – uncommonly common, this viscous opaque coating – no known axis or location – simply not.  Not.  Not.

Knots of not…not-knowing, not-quite-hearing, not-feeling, not-tasting, ever too late.  Undone for undoing.

Alfonse within costume, a muzzling muffle of indigestive guzzle, of life.  A weather and reprove, a restrictive deconstruction, a not-quite-absence in the presence of the everywhereabouts and everywhen of… of… everything.

Flamingo Robert Frank

Left to Say

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, relationships, Writing8 Comments

felzmann-swarm

What she said was.

And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.

What she said was

I…

To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.

Even I’d be overwhelmed.  Why with the even?

What she said was

It is too much.

I…

But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.

Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…

I cannot.

.

Think of where that leads!

She said

She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.

I cannot.

Is what she said.

She says.

I listen like a camera.

I record.

Her stillness moves too much.

Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.

I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.

.

She says it is too much, I will not try.

But I am trying.

Which does not change.

Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.

She can’t decipher.

What it is.

She will not say.  Says I cannot.

I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.

(Depress, record).

She will not can.

I take a picture.

It does not hear.

.

And what she says is

There’s too much for me to wager on a word

Even in flocks

Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,

Even in swarms.

I blink.

I snap the shutters.

She has said nothing

She will not say

I hold the stillness, how it flutters.

Silence seems.

Seems only.

But what she says is

She cannot.

.

The birds swoop past

And there is nothing

Left to say.

Compositional Caveat

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Journallings, Reflections, Writing7 Comments

Greetings any readers.  I wanted to let you know that I am quite aware of the imperfections of my recent series of draft blogs.  These are first draft typings that I am doing mostly to convince myself that I am not ONE thing (a graduate student) and to have an outlet for unrestrained creative work outside of my studies.  I apologize that I currently do not have the time, attention or energy to perfect them prior to posting – and beg your latitude and generosity in browsing them.  Being that they are first occurrences of these words and this strange little trail, I more than welcome any and all feedback as to what might capture your attention or what is off-putting about their style, content or formal appearance.  I thank you for your graciousness – perhaps more time will open for more careful production by the first of the year….

N W Filbert

Interstice – 6: the coupling

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, Language, meaning, relationships1 Comment

System Environment Coupling

– 6 –

And then the narrative runs away.  Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds.  We yield them occurrence in time.  Over time.  Across locations.  We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so.  Their occurrence is now.  The moment of happen.  And the telling is here just as well.  The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember.  The moment of happen, and never “again.”  “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.

Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles.  We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have.  Construct forms to obey.  She stumbled, or stuttered.  Appeared in a robe.  When it opened, she stayed.  For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.

Not undone.  No undoing – just fall shy.  Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.  An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change.  She (you) and he (I), it (us).  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.

See the couple coupling.  A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle.  Huffs and spurts and clawing.  The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure.  Bodies in command.  It’s grotesque.  Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal.  She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting.  He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake.  They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.

From inches of distance the movements are grueling.  A repetitive taking advantage.  These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need.  The fish flaps on dry ground.  In a terror.  A panic afraid that relief will not come.  Release.  In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.”  But there is an other.  He/she senses the lover’s retreat.  The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction.  They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor.  Asynchrony.  What needs, needs its doing, is done.  Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…

From one angle.

See the couple coupling as animals.  The dog, the bear, the wolf.  The bird or bee or dragonfly.  The distance.  The unawares.  What if the lion leaned into the neck?  What if the squirrel caressed?  If the snakes lay entangled.  The cats licking flanks.  The stories would pour into morphing.  What have we seen?  During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received.  Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving.  His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine.  Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again.  In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else.  Animals humping and huffing,  not by instinct alone, something more.  Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.

In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be.  From the feline receiving her guest.  There is more taking place through the need.  The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond.  Bodies converging in dialogue.  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.  Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create.  The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace.  What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.

We muster.  We glyph.  We resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.

The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.

Interstices…continuing…

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, relationships, Writing2 Comments

earlier portions of this can be found HERE

– 5 –

Narrative seeming regurgitant, redundant, and indulged…yet as it occurred it was quite dramatic.  A vibrant life of tragic deaths and violent love.  The kind of loving one imagines as a lion gutting prey.  That ferocity and devouring.

Language always there, most assuredly, in circularity and dismay, its hesitant encumberance.  Its dance of waltz with tango, its distance from its cause.  We were ravenous for life, steeled in healing, shriveling seeds immersed in waters.  An obsessive metaphor.

She came.

From where?  Like lamps at sea.  Inside of windows, inside of houses, nonexistent.  The sea is no foundation in its turbulence, its depths.  I never charted.  But there she shone.  And there I strove, even while she drifted toward me.

The sky is murky.  A sound of panting.  My memories faint.  I grabbed her collar and held her still, bent down, like that, spread open (in my dreams).  They feed, they lion.  The forms reverse.

Talking a mean streak.  Accidental – no, – unavoidable or some inevitable undoing that I do.  I won’t stop speaking, but go on.  When I shouldn’t, when I can’t, when I do.  I am.

What I say (I said) goes like this, or would have, but the force, the draw, consumption – I speak in digits, speak in code, I squeeze pronouncing.  I will not say.  What I am saying, if I would not, would have been as it were love.  Instead I feed.

And she retracts and she releases, she relents but won’t rely.  We’re frightened beings, gorging beasts, so here it is – the valiant story, the fragile lines, the treacherous risk.

I engulf her.  Still she comes.

She feasts and I retreat.

The battles rage, my hair grows wild (she makes it so), her full of bruising, fully of greed – my want, my spunk.  Our torsos open.  We choose withdrawal along with weapons for attack.  I bare my teeth and force her hand while she recoils, she hits, she sneaks.

We die away.  I have remorse, and so I speak: again, again.  Say “what I meant” I do not mean.  Say wonder why.  She will not speak.

There’s never truce but we find trust, a glyph we muster, when we must, because we want (for something), want (for edges), want (for love).

She says my name.  Says “you remember!”  And I don’t.  Says work from there.  My body rotted, her blackened breasts, her flesh unwilling, still we progress.  We feed and lion.

A torturous joy.  An adumbration..  Spiraled mind and twisting body.  And there we are beneath a flow I cannot cease, my acrid words, my oily blunder.  Why should I think, and what?  While she moves thunder.

With firm resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Then here screes the story wrenched of life – away and from – she drains a bank I cannot fill, I rob her purchase.  We are one.

The scene begins.

Interstices – continuing in between

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

more sections arriving from the Beginnings and the Second

– 3 –

Message being – she looked at me, incredulously.

– “What and/or Who – are you?” she requests.

I don’t know.  No one knows, I said, half-joking, persisting, prolonging, staying alive.

Longing = staying alive.  Longing = I’m still alive.  And I look at her, longer.  Which means: if only I knew.  The interstice (according to me).  We converge.  A gaze.  I must go.

That’s what I wanted.  The choice.  The decision.  A godlike thing for a fragile, finite boy.  The both of them: god – a fragile, finite boy.

No one owns.

When I returned, I could have said “My love, I am not present with you now.  I am in a future predicted by a possible past.  I am afraid.  I am not here.”

She might have responded: “I see and hear and understand that you are not here with me.  I too will retreat, remove, go away, until you return to me – here, to here.”

I babble on.

But I don’t say “Hello, my love.  I am not present.”  No, what I speak instead is a muddled report of my feelings and fears, my ideas – my present experiencing – a gummy wad of future and past, uninformed by where I am (with you) or who I am with (you) or when (now).  Constructed instead by where I believe I have been (past), where I think we are heading (future), and how I feel about that (afraid).

She recoils.

“I’m going away now” she says.  Which is not where I am.  Not with me.

But I meant.  I meant to say (once I figure out where I actually am): “Hello love.  I am afraid.  I am past and future.  I am absent.”

To which she replies: “Good to know.  Tell me when you arrive, here.  With me.”

Here now.  Or, Nietzschean-ly now/here, is that, and “exactly” : unlocatable.  Nowhere.  NOW + HERE…present.  It can only be lived, not thought.  Thought is too slow.  Lags ahead, leaps behind.

Oh you, I might have said.  And she may have recognized me.  Perhaps.  Now.  Here.  Presently – in the nowhere – the between – the “Interstice.”  Where what occurs, occurs.

“Hello.  I love you.”

– 4 –

Finite, fragile boy.  The fragility and finitude are true, I suppose, but not unquestioned.  However they withstand (the questioning).  They withstand the questioning.  Because I don’t know, and it is not wisdom, this cloud of unknowing, it is finitude, and I am fragile, not only because it’s true.

I am fragile because not all the branches hold.  When climbing.

– “What is it we are speaking of?” she asks (she – the you – asks me – the I).

Past and future, I might have answered.  The unknowing.  But did not.  Instead said – “unreliable.”  Rises, passes away.  Novel-to-familiar.  First one thing then another, desire fades.  I am not stimulus.  Enough.  For no reason.

I, illogical.

You, burdened.  And thus you sigh.  (She sighs her burden, a question).

And I retort.  “No.”  Or, “don’t go.”  But you might, because I have gone (or didn’t arrive, not HERE, not NOW, but somewhere else made of cobbled up pasts and unpredictable aheads).

“I love you.”

But how can that be?

It can’t.  Yet it is.

Perhaps.

I don’t know.  But it is not wisdom.

Interstitial

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

part two of a rambling….

visual fields

– 2 –

            Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone.  Suspect I can’t believe them.

I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that.  Won’t even attempt “within reason.”  Suggest.

There’s no “let me explain” to this.

– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly?”

The point, I would say, exactly, or nearly precise – that there isn’t.  I don’t know.  But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) – we’re dis-missed.  Or not missed – how to say it?  There’s a meeting.  It seems.  In a margin, or more.

Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap?  I don’t know.  I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer.  Longer.  It’s a fight against death, that small word.  Simply, longer.  With you.

Am I clear?  Making sense?  I don’t know.

– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying” she says, “near ‘exactly’.”

I don’t know.  It’s unwise.

And I hum when the words sound just so.

– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.

Interaction.  Locution.  Between.  (I am thinking).

“Interstitial,” I say.  Interstitially?  I wonder.  How could I know.  It’s all susceptible to the mark.  The mark of the question.  I think about changing my name.  Did before.  I like titles.  It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music.  I would be Mark, Remarking.  The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved to a point, on everything : ?   “My point, exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark.  (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind…anything).

It’s okay.  I’m familiar.  Not that you’re worried.  There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction.  It’s just so (so it seems).  “Just-So Stories,” he wrote, long ago, relatively – they’re alike and akin, episodic.  We describe.

Neither here and/nor there.  Interstitial.  In-between.  What I wanted to tell her, to say.  And I would have, had I known.

– “Known what, exactly?” she’d once said, and I’d stopped, for the meanings were lost, non-existent.  Just so.

“That’s just how it is” I had said.  And don’t know, was surmising.  The world hypothetical and inspired (I’d thought, at the time) – simply possible.  I was wrong (perhaps).  But she stayed (temporarily).  The words lose their meanings.

I hum.  To myself.

I write: “This is what I wanted to do.”

All that’s required is a ‘trigger’…a rule.

We

NANOWRIMO Reminds: Any Excuse to Write

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, Writing2 Comments

THE INTERSTICE

I told her that I would have told her, had I known.

-“Known what, exactly?” she said, “Really!?” she said.

Yes, I said, yes, I would have explained what I felt to be true – about the “interstice” – what I felt I understood, I would have said.

As usual, the sighs, the diverted glances, the “I-don’t-knows.”

It’s okay.  I’m pretty used to it, not that it still doesn’t hurt, or squash some deep part of me – annihilate, erase – but familiarity breeds, and it’s not contempt, at least not for me.  More like resolve, or, well, accustom, I don’t know.

Still I would have conversed about the interstice.  Or its plural.  No one can know what we’re talking about (in my opinion) – that’s why we talk (in my opinion).  But I like to look at her.  Very much.  So sometimes I keep talking so that I can look at her longer.

Thus I would have explained – tried to – about the Interstice…had I known, I tell her.

-“Known what, exactly?” she asks, “Really?!”

It’s okay.  I’m used to it – exasperation.  It’s a sort of fatigue that settles on my interlocutors – my family, my friends, my lovers – as I triple/quadruple/unendingly (exponentially?) second-(meaningless term in this accounting)-guess whatever it is (emotion, idea, memory, event) I attempt to convey.

I don’t trust a thing as long as it’s questionable, and I’ve yet to discover something unquestionable.  I like inventing titles though.

She’s looking at me – softly, sadly, gently and quiet.  Sometimes she strokes my hair with her hands and lets me rest my head (the physical part) in her lap.  It kind of helps.  But the rest doesn’t rest.

It’s okay, for the most part, I’m used to it.  It’s “me” as they say, as it were – what I’m used to.  It doesn’t matter, or does in unquantifiable ways, but I keep at it.  Anyway.  I can’t seem to help it.  Well, some things do – like vodka, sex, sleep – but only temporarily.

Things are only temporarily.

That’s the sort of idea that keeps me alive.  Temporarily.  And second-(exponentially)-guessing.

She’s still there.  Here.  Though.  Hence the interstice.

I try to explain.

As if “interstice” possessed meaning – definition beyond the moment activated or utilized.  As if it indicated.  “Meant” – a convergence-point (limitless above and below and abroad) of conventions of time and of space – a realm that felt (seemed) shared.  Held in common.  Nothing is “held” – or that temporarily.  It seems.  I don’t know.  It’s certainly questionable – is it – “certainly”?

I don’t know.  Which I thought, or I think, is the entry to wisdom, but even that – I don’t know.

She’s still here.  And I question – who is it?  Who is still here?  And what for and/or why?  And where is this trembling “here”?  I can wonder, after all.

-“Wonder what, exactly?” she queries.

I don’t know.  I’m a human.  Some odd conundrum of pieces and parts that cohere, correspond or reciprocate in hold-together activities for awhile…call it “organism,” there’s that, it would seem, but seem only, digging in it is hard to convince – a location, identity, consistency, avocation or being.  It’s just so – apparently – temporarily.

Exasperating.  You see?  You dig?  What I mean?  That’s what we’re after (I think) – what it means.  But what that means is uncertain, I think or surmise.  We don’t know, it would seem, we’re uncertain.

We ask.

Let me describe this – the interstice…