Month: January 2015

To 2015, then

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Image, life, motion, Poetry, wisdom2 Comments

“Great changes in life are always a help…”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky-

A STEP AT A TIME

Now one eye daylight

and one not

there was a lifetime

before they flew

their true colors

but I must have known

the moment I was born

the pans of the balance

swinging along with me

always two poles

with the seasons rocking

between them

.

and the familiar the unexplored

the city the country

abroad almost at home

and home never quite there

just the way it was before

.

left foot right foot

on the same way

my own way

of finding and losing

and in my own time

coming to one

love one place

day and night

as they came to me

.

but the knowing and the rain

the dream and the morning

the wind the pain

the love the burning

.

it seems you must let them come

so you can let them go

you must let them go

so you let them come

– W. S. Merwin

OFFLINE

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experience, Experimenctes, family, Journey, Photography, Travel3 Comments

for a necessary while

(Parenthesis) : Swarm – Becomings

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, human, Language, meaning, Poetry1 Comment

Reflection swarmIntelligence_swarm_1

(Parenthesis) : Swarm

developing concept, ideas, form

Confession:  for me the process involving humans crafting and innovating artifacts is (perhaps, nearly) as pleasurable and fascinating as the delight and enjoyment of the “accomplished” creation / artifact / best-of-my-ability result.

Today I plunged into a work I project for my future – a collection of poetic writings with a provisional cohesion designated by the titular nomenclature (Parenthesis) : Swarm.  I am offering the beginnings, inchoate guesswork, anticipatory effort, languaging hoping to find some concretion or sense – in case others too are fascinated by the ways in which we humans find forms, structures, outlets, mediums for the expression of our experience.

Poetry depends on its realization to activate and actualize its purposes.  I think that form and structure, metaphor and language rudiments all occur as potencies – possibilities, options, offerings – to both direct and elicit, open and enclose, what we are moved, determined, or curious to communicate.

Here lies (or rises) the inception of one of this year’s projects for me… for better or worse, I hope it provides instigation or inspiration in you concerning the prospects of concocting, explaining, depicting, describing, or mediating some forms of human experiencings of our living, our worlds.

(Parenthesis) : Swarm

assaying beginnings

(The blue was an empty sector of sky) :

before the ascending clamor of birds,

blackbirds, maybe.  Or wrens, sparrows, the murther of crows

at which point : (monochrome)

(Soundless activities = black / white) : an argument of colors.

–

(White page.  Blank.  Emptiness.  A void) : A chaos.

Sounds, ideas, emotions bum-rushing, flood-filling, desire-aching to mark up, cross out, cross-hatch, scribble-claim, create/destroy the unwanting, unwanted : (Blank page.  White.  Unlined.  Refusing).

–

(White noise.  A chaos.  A filler) : (A Parenthesis) : A Swarm.

–

Rising up or rising down?  Its violence, this freedom (this emptiness, bereavement) : this horde.

(If parenthesis sounds aside reflective calm) the lettered patterns are closing in, are pressing, encroaching (an erasured calm).

–

There are (Breath-gaps, Awareness) : while we survive.

Endure infinity, perception, experience : ALIVE (reflect. dream. prepare to become).

(Sleep-freedom) : surreality of anxious dreams.

(The “little deaths”) : vigorous and belabored, exhaustively lusted , our desires.

Like fires, like (Ash).  (A remains, an inchoate.

A beginning) : an actuality.

–

If triggering happens – within swarm – directions will alter towards (flow)

An isolation (becomes compatible).  (We thrive) or are disjointed.

Differentiation (in accord).

(This is how it ends) : in its beginnings.

–

You arrive – a great undoing – traumatic archive.  I retreat

(or receive, select the join).  Independence (community).

The surge : (the Swell).  We swarm – the two, no six, no twelve

(of Us).  The (love) : and discord.  (Arrangements) interrupted.

(Habitude) : and nuance.  (The Parenthesis) : The Swarm.

 

The bum-rush of living

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, human, identity, meaning1 Comment

entanglement

There are places we “escape to,” i.e. repair to for very specific reasons and purposes.  Maybe an acquaintance’s pad for hurried or feverish orgasms.  A park or patch of woods for perspective, silence or briefly encounters with “natural nature.”  A carrel in a library to prompt and focus our studies.  A basement stairwell for sustaining shots of liquor, bathroom window or fire escape for a stealthy cigarette.  Favored chair and lighting for reading, drawing, reverie…

Repair.

A therapist’s office wherein to be oblivious for a moment, anonymously honest, saved from (and toward) pressing responsibilities.  A café, a waiting room, a stoplight, a store.  Our furtive thievery of solitude.  Self-care.  Secrets.

A human is a strange animal indeed.  Tantalized by taboo.  Somehow more fully owner when the product is taken for oneself.  Somehow more strenuously truthful when maintaining a lie.  Somehow better at self-care when stealthy and artfully dodging.

Perhaps not all of us.

Who claims directly to know what they want?  What feels good to them?  What they obsessively desire?

“Pre-emptive strikes.”  We are wary.  We negotiate rather than demand or direct (what separates the “neurotic” from the “psychopath”?).

The time goes by.  Incrementally, unceasingly, dependably.  In leaps.  Life, again, moment after moment, wends and charges, plows and slips its certain way into death.

We hesitate, we detour, we “pit stop.”  We navigate, wander and avoid.  We indulge and punish, set out and swerve, ashame and repent.  Sort of.  Sneaking pleasures, performing roles and rites, detracting, desisting, compulsing, rewarding…

Remarkable at tricking and deceiving ourselves.

We are interesting characters, sincerely.

Operative on many contradictory planes.  Ridiculous, incredible, foolish, amazing…complex.

Woven into surrounds we continually seek to distinguish ourselves from, in, for.  Tremendously unstable, uncertain, tormented, delighted and undone.

Just try to piece it apart: what you WANT, and what you WANT.  What you DO and what you WISH.  Where you GO and where you ARE.  Who you APPEAR and why you BE.

What you want and what you want.  What you desire and what you mean.  What you do and what you say.  How.  How.  Why.  and What.

It is all quite twisted.  Very weird and strange and unusually usual for us, to BE.  The “high” and the “low.”  “Good” and “bad.”  “Productive” and “lazy.”  Health and unhealthy, partial and whole, fragment and phrase.

Complicated beings in intricate surrounds.  The regularity is what’s irregular, the constancy is changing, that which we’d love to consider paradox or mystery.  The off-putting put on.  The performance unmasked.

“How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?”

-Ben Lerner, 10:04–

Deceptive dialogues giving so much away.  Proper behaviors exposing our lies.

My son recently said he was a “walking contradiction” and I thought is that not the nature of humanity?

Confusion and contrast, contractions and deconstruct.

Wilder beasts – fearful and proud, generously scrooged, clinging as it slips our grasps.

Odd, misnomered things.  Smart here, dull there, sexy and unkind, popularly rejected, abnormally similar.  Attempts to be truthful mire us in espionage.

The bum rush of living – death’s inescapable quicksand