Month: June 2017

The Last Wolf: or, “I showed you the darkness in the beginning”

On By NW FilbertIn Confusion, depression, desire, Experience, fragments, Journal, Literature, Loss, Melancholy, Perception, Poetry, Reflections, survival, Writing4 Comments

I remember that I am falling

That I am the reason

And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be

Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

– W.S. Merwin, “When You Go Away”

Time keeps accumulating on my inability to write, to find time to write, to process living with language.  Simply to keep this space alive, I am posting a journal-like entry so as not to give up.

Recent weeks have been dominated by readings of Doug Rice, Laurie Sheck, Jon Fosse, Georges Bataille, Larry Levis, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Franco Berardi, Robert Bringhurst, Jeremy Fernando, Elfriede Jelinek and others…

What a traversal, passage, the past couple of months have been…

…like following the draw of the moon through dire straits

in dark, tumultuous seas…

…a feeling that everything is at its limit (Bataille, l’extreme) – EXPERIENCE.

  • pressured work projects, needs, deadlines, demands
  • endless and constant family logistics, accidents, needs
  • relentless parenting, relating, service to others
  • throngs of people and groups
  • lack of friends, lovers, supportive presences
  • fear, health, danger, exhaustion
  • failure
  • loss of partner
  • inexistence of calm or solitude
  • imposed travels
  • absence of sleep and rest
  • indulgence in desire and harm
  • minimal process
  • poor eating or nourishment
  • tension, strain
  • depression
  • lack (wellness) & excess (pressure)

…a teetering balance…

Mind you, this is how it feels in me, not how it is.

I miss everything that is/was good

…fail better…

There is a certain uncertain sorrow to things

(presence of melancholia, moon-draw)

Georges Bataille’s certainties:

  • WE ARE NOT EVERYTHING
  • WE WILL DIE

THE UNKNOWN                   THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE

darkness                                              levity

Lynda Barry & the “Underground Skateboard” – how we draw from others work what we need to survive

Lemony Snicket & the autographing instruction that I should “read something else”

FAMILY

immersion (doom, closure)                                 held in levity

conscious moderation

– 1st Tarot reading –

(processual journey mythical)

Jacob recommends Homer – The Odyssey

doubling                                letting go – holding together                    The Devil/The Chariot

dark surfaces / surfaces of darkness (The Fool)

The Moon (dark journey) crossed by the Queen of Swords (wounding love)

THE UNKNOWN                       THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE 

-Summer

Temperance

The King of Wands – leaders, pole vaulters, utilizing tension toward propulsion

leap over?  through?  on?

The Fool

Pas sage – not wisdom                                                      FRAUGHT JOURNEY

– Odyssey –

BATAILLE: “nothing is final…”

– “what is not there, which, once it is seen, often in literature, tells us what is” (Fosse)

Inner Experience

“the suffering of the disintoxicated” (Bataille)

The Human:

  • challenging everything (of putting everything into question) – Bataille
  • always a breakdown of systems that will not be restored – Sheck

“Experience reveals nothing and cannot found belief nor set out from it” – Bataille

“The hand moves forward, the tragedy begins” – Bataille

“no one grieves with you for what you are unable to say”

“life itself…always swerves away from my mouth”

– Elfriede Jelinek –

“how I’m owned by that which will not answer” – Sheck

“What you are will be spelled by whatever

lies trapped in your hand” – Robert Bringhurst

– emptiness is also empty –

“what is the part of us… feels…unnamed…

…i must live at some distance from convinced” – Sheck

 

“When I say you to what isn’t there – I mean me” (Larry Levis)

“you won’t find me in me” (Jelinek)

Experience eludes understanding ( Bataille)

– nor can I compute the possible (Sheck)

This too

is just one

more opinion

to move through

(Bringhurst)

FIRST AND FOREMOST YOU WRITE (Fosse)

“From an abandoned myth

(I write to you)” (D. Rice)

– wanting them to mean nothing –

– and suggest everything (L Levis)

 

INTENTION:

  • hold open the imagination of possibility
  • “do not go gentle into that good night”
  • Moderation.  Extreme limit.
  • Contra-digitalia.  First and foremost write.
  • Be-Read

 

 

“Internal Monologue” (Virno)

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, Language, meaning, Perception, Semiotics, Writing5 Comments

“Thoughts constituted by non-uttered words…This monologue always – ‘I speak’”

Paolo Virno – Word Became Flesh

“its thisness, then, cannot be fully articulable since any such articulation would require the articulation of a complete context, which in all cases is the world…often the experience includes an awareness of not being able to give an account of the this”

Jan Zwicky – Wisdom & Metaphor

“457. Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone”

Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations

“…I wept up to a great age, never having really evolved in the fields of affection and passion, in spite of my experiences”

Samuel Beckett – Malone Dies

“to frame the unsayable, & mute the sayable… he was the singing and the no one there…”

Larry Levis – The Darkening Trapeze

“All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel – or rather by several characters”

Roland Barthes – Roland Barthes

*****************

– I believe I told them that “all language was like a metaphor” in several characters.

I heard nothing, I said to myself, as if nothing were something that might be heard.

Still I stroked her ankle, index-finger-pad to delicate-bird-bone.  And lip.  Finding textures and surfaces with lips and tongue.  Precarious…it never lasts.  Taste and touch are like that [metaphor] immediate.

Am I speaking when I write?  What is happening now?

Several characters.

– “often the experience…includes an awareness of not being able…” (J. Zwicky)

She tasted of…

“…to give an account of the this…” (Zwicky)

…coffee grounds, sandalwood, humidity, and turquoise…

I left off my exploring.

What is it like [metaphor] to…?

I told them that ‘I speak’ is a metaphor…as is indeed all the rest having to do with language.

(consolations of philosophy)

I hear nothing when I talk with myself. [metaphors].

The sounds of flying a kite.

It’s rare that I am naked.  But “yes: meaning is like going up to someone” (L.W.)…some sort of connection is made (some convergent affect) and a resolution leaks open…resonance…endlessly (perhaps).

“I wept up to a great age”…by which we always mean the aggregate…which seems quite less than my ‘great age’, if ever there was one.

What is ‘great’ like? [metaphor]

Once I was younger…

– Always wished you’d known –

Are photographs metaphors?

I said that ‘nothing made is like.’

(“in spite of my experience”)

“Did I say I only say a small proportion of the things that come into my head?” (ontology of perception) (Samuel Beckett)

I intended to quote: “It is a pretty little object, like a – no, it is like nothing” (Samuel Beckett)

But what is ‘nothing’ like?  A “pretty little object”?

We know what he means (“like going up to someone”) … I was naked, I tasted.

You know the story… “I wept up to a great age.”  I touched, I tried, I felt.

What do you see?

Hardly ever the point.  Perception + Reflection = Imagination (perhaps) I told them – it’s a metaphor – a “crossing-over,” some traversal.  The trace of sweat behind her knee just above the calf.

Once I was alive.

I crossed over.

Several characters: ‘I speak.’

“Affection.  Passion.” I said.  (what I had thought it was ‘to learn’ [metaphor]).

– “in spite of my experience” –

Perhaps language wasn’t made for speaking.

Someone.  Somewhere.  Maybe.  Here.  Now.

That thing that words do [metaphor].

The “experience of this”…”non-uttered words.”  Non-utterable?  Perhaps, this.  (I traced the swerve of her, its curvature, hair-smell and sounding…’I speak,’ non-uttering…)

What is writing?

I believe I was speaking of metaphor…

Something crossed-over.

Nothing.

“Yes,” I said, “yes…” “it’s always alright to weep.”