Category: absence

The Songs I Do Not Know (1)

On By NW FilbertIn absence, awareness, being, change, creative writing, Experimenctes, Language, mystery, Poetry, Writing2 Comments

“Tell me the songs you don’t know.”

Dan Beachy-Quick, Of Silence and Song

“–knowledge is made by oblivion.”

Sir Thomas Browne, in B-Q, Silence & Song

clips, or snippets,

the known as partial

notes

signifying

the experienced

gesturing

hymning (nearly celebrating)

its reverse –

everything

unknown

i didn’t know

the sounds of

as they were

always changing –

ever never

.

so i made noise

my shapes

transparently novel (novice)

windows

framing, marking, visibling

all i do not know –

every word an icon

view-finding

all it’s not

.

Image

Sound

Landscape

Intention

Meaning

Clarity of

.

definition

None

.

thus every song i sing

i sing of what i do not know

or hear or dream or feel

i think

but do i tell of songs

i do not know

or sing not knowing?

.

would i recognize

unknown

song?

do i?

sing?

.

it’s hard to tell

meaningful questions

from questioned

meanings,

meaning

tones

notion

her eyes

the water

sky

adroit

wonder

or passion

.

not known

i sing.

Some Kind of Elegy

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Language, longing, Loss, love, Poetry5 Comments

Great grandeur of light

Your laughter tinkling its tent

A poet has died

Like a raven

We watch him pass

Rivers and trees

There’s probably more

Words

Are like that

– suspended –

Over silence

You’ve heard her

Read the dictionary…

Everyone disbelieves

Only I drink it in

 – sufficiently –

Everyone’s doubt

Grand Canyons

are like

the unknown

we feel

of any other

(or each)

–

I put clothes on

have hairs trimmed

appear

and once again

guess at meanings

In other words

I “care”

insofar as an organism

hopes to live

Which I continue

to exhibit

because I think

I love

you

–

And no one knows

Not-knowing (yet)

What “love” is

“Yet” such an

Empire-ical promise

(some day our greed

will pull through) –

you hear it:

“I love you”:

that evil

devoted

inspired

and diabolical

urge, disturbed

and ravishing

–

As long as

we win something

we’re almost happy

Deconstructing Definitions

On By NW FilbertIn absence, being, Confusion, desire, Experience, Language, meaning, Poetry4 Comments

Perhaps “work” means something must be done, regardless of desire,

and signifies felt effort.

If “to love’s” “unassailable affirmation,”

something verbal, and not only.

“Education” as “familiarity with thoughts of others” (K. O. Knausgaard),

entails “experience” as “familiarity with itself”?

And what of “wisdom”?

I wonder if “deaf” implies “not-listening,” or/and, “our forgetting of the body.”

and who defines “republic”?

Or “nowhere” and “now here” in all their differance?

Frere Jacques (yes, go and sing it)

suggests impossibility fuels valuation –

negation requiring its positive with –

terms all ways relative in their contexts,

indeterminate and groundless,

yet term-in-able, undecided, written-in.

I don’t know.

But I sense it’s indefinitive,

de- and con- structure something else,

like trace or foggy margin,

the space between the sounds

that continues (us and them).

All-ways

On By NW FilbertIn absence, creative writing, desire, eros, relation, Writing3 Comments

HE in the feeling of HER approach.  That syrupy abyss.  Unknowing.  Every anticipation and guess.

HER name.  A bird’s song.  Bird’s songs (all of them).

What other flesh is.

Any time you are enabled

to touch it.

We could imagine IT as HIM wanting.  Awaiting.

But there is no resemblance to wait for.

Only HER, the delicious, dilemma, unknown.

Loss of memory.  Hope of presence.

“Ecstasy” as commonly referred –

– the surprising rarety of ‘being-out-of’…

“HER,” “HE” calls it, names it, designates, conjures, conceives.  (Perhaps “HER” has a name?)

In the center a shrine a temple.  And no center exists, except by imagining, by metaphor, metonymy.  Delusional illusion of some living cartography.

The words “NOW,” “HERE”…continuously NO/WHERE.

He longs.  Desires.  Fantasizes.  Dreams.

This is urgency.

Each pressing and critical, earnest, persistent scenario and situation –

In-sistent.

It’s always coming.  In.  The status and singling.  Ever singing.

Sometimes shrieking.

NO/WHERE : NOW/HERE.  Same scintillating occurrence, occurring… per-sist-ence, pursuant and ins-is-isn’t-it?  Awaiting approaching.

HE/HIM/HIS – SHE/HER/HERS                                            (with)

[All-ways]

What might have been experienced as “LONGING” – that which is extended, strained toward…

SHE… a recoiling, a reconnaissance, some new emission.

HE laughs, as if capitulating, a surrender, a stab, asunder.

THEY… blend and weave inconceived.  Inconceivable.  Unknown.  Never any stasis.  Never NOW/HERE, never NO/WHERE.

In other words, too many… uncountable stories (may) have begun (begin)…

[All-ways]

Lettering

On By NW FilbertIn absence, anxiety, communication, desire, friendship, Gratitude, longing, relation, Writing2 Comments

Dear Michael, Dear Jonathan, Dear Scott, Dear Laurie, Dear Lydia, Dear Sam; Dear Meghann, Dear Summer, Dear Tyler and Karl; Dear Edie, Dear Sara, Dear Mari; Dear Albert, Dear Paul, Dear Denise; Dear Tristan, Dear Aidan, Dear William; Dear Andy, Dear Pippin, Dear James; Dear Timothy, Dear Jada, Dear all of you who save my life from time to time, by being:

Perhaps I should not own a phone.  It’s Short Message Service, in my employ, allows a nearly ubiquitous, immediate reach of the text, from my thumbs.

Thank you for telling me about the exhibition, I have the retrospective tome near me even now, attempting to go in and near the two-dimensional images on paper.  It is not the same as being present to the sculptures and paintings, their ambience.  But now I know I could not move around them, nor touch them, I’d have only to use my eyes and very little of my body.

This obsession with connection.  Once I would have had to go to work unlinked to any of you for hours at a time.  Once my going home would mean your absence unless we arranged for sharing space and time.  Now I reach, I report, I ask and beg, and enter your lives like someone shoving a newspaper, pamphlet or flyer into your hands at will – without contact – propaganda blaring from speakerless speakers.

Your mails and email show deference and thought.  I am happy to have your works near at hand to consult and resort to time and again.  I see the care in the hand-writing, the pacing of thoughts, the reasoning reflection, the sense of your audience.  They lie about me on the floor, I can feel them, turn them, taste them if I wish.

Your phone makes a hum or a buzz.  An ejaculatory missive from Filbert again.  He’s lonely, he’s excited, he’s drunk.  He wants to share.  He needs to share.  He needs communique.  He wants connection.  He is not thinking of us, he suffers the duress of himself.  He spouts, he shouts, he slurs.  He insists he needs solitude and rest, needs quiet, less public.  At any hour, at all hours, these textual packets flow.

Perhaps I should not own a phone.

Where do the gaps that make the heart grow fonder bloom?  What is banal and what evental?

Thank you for your poem.  I will read it again and again.  Thank you for that clip of music, I repeat it throughout the days, when the mood demands an answer.  Thank you for your books, your artifacts, your gardens, your hands.  Thank you for your eye-contact (those of you I’ve sat or walked, camped or climbed with).  Thank you for the melodies of your particular voices.  Thank you for your hugs, your nourishing, your care.  Your listening.

I do remember the ground there, how it fell away desperately or rose violently into sky.  What the birds did.  Where the fire flowed.  Yes, the leaves.  Yes, the sleeping bags.  Here’s to the unknown trails, the stumbling, to whatever’s discovered.

I am sorry I flood your phones with less than thoughtful driveling – explosions of fear, anxiety, want.  Am I alone?  Am I alone?  Do I matter?  Does anyone want my voice?  Am I also missed?  But also love.  Yes, sometimes I merely wish to tell you the difference you make to being alive, that I feel you out there, somewhere…

Perhaps I should not own a phone.

Untitled

On By NW FilbertIn absence, being, Complexity, creative writing, death, Poetry, Writing4 Comments

Then:

pregnant with fore and aft –

a jumbled detritus

of flotsam and jetsam

and chance.

.

Like now.

But where is the body

alive?

in what chances,

for whom –

all the whens,

all the wheres,

.

here:

nothing happening

but thought and a world;

what is: being some feeling of –

circumstance – small bubble,

same as there.

.

Go on,

take your rest

and escape…

you cannot leave it.

And then you do.

Last Days of the Year (12.31.2017)

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Art, Blogging, change, creative writing, Experience, Literature, longing, Writing2 Comments

after Helene Cixous’ First Days of the Year (all quotations from)

 

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“…writing doesn’t know the story…”

– Helene Cixous –

Writing had dissipated, eroded and erasured, “the stream, the slender silent stream with its singing arms,” dried, swallowed, scabbed to dusty ground, hardened wounds, simple soundless scarring – unmarked, unmapped, uninterpreted or deciphered.

“Writing, that link, that growth, that orientation” and mysterious connection in the veins – beneath earth, across times, that leaky, throbbing, flowing, trickling tickle in the fingers of the throat – evaporated to ether.

Space is full of voids again, the entire body is corpse.  It was air that was missing – oxygen and hydrogen – a liquid, invisible, fluid force and blazing trail – its quiet tireless effort coursing, a desert without shore.

“’It has been many years now,’… thought the author”…many years of dwindling, echoing thoughts…many years without solution or solvent, no bed, no pull, no sea or slope – an eviscerated wandering lacking movement, without promise or retreat, direction or return, rather something absent, lost, unknown.

Bedrest – a way to heal by falling fallow, running out, caesura and inaction.  Some old trace viewed from scale, an only remnant held by wind – a sentenced shrub, a stop of phrase.  Riverbedrest and desertduned unwinding – depiction’s dearth, branches clotstopping gravity’s swill or swirl, deadwooded filaments tumbling anywhere the green had been, the iron bled from vein.

“I am going to write,” he had thought at first… but I weigh 47 years and “writing is eternal [knowing] neither weight nor time,” it will not lift and carry me, breezing past as it always has every present unto present – ageless phantom, foreign phrase I am unable to pronounce.

Vanishing link between the bodies, submerged and buried and unspoken – “writing doesn’t know the story” – dumb and blind as memory’s ‘I.’  The lost and forgotten, what will not come to be.  “To me, this is a blow, a threat.”

“…the book we do not write.  There is a book.  That we do not write…” … wordless and disobeyed, unwritten extinction, disordered and undone.  Passage and passing of this now here.  This book that’s not here.  Irrelevant utopia.  A desiccated thread, a wilderness with imperceptible end, some perhaps forlorn and far-off song, long since warbled into stillness.  I “do not have what it takes to make a book,” long-lost imagining and fabricated dreams, suffered weeping for what-is-not, what-never-was, the known and haunting will-not-be, pains of life assigned to us.

Sightless, flightless bird without brain enough or claw for scribbles, vision canceled by the crossings-out and scratchings, greedy skimming scamper seeking recognizable seeds, some words less foreign or forgotten, that might crack in the craw and cackle a sigh, a chortle, some wheezy whisper… anything other than absence, the starving shame, the empty marrow, acrid arteries, and granulating groin.  Wretched rictus claw, blindly scraping at a pen, a page, a flesh-as-grass, a drop of dew, some ancient call –

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL

…and thank you

Ways of Naysaying

On By NW FilbertIn absence, communication, desire, Experimenctes, Language, love, Negativity, relation, Uncertainty, WritingLeave a comment

It was funny how she, how I, refused, declining enticing invitations of love.  Once.

Then again.  Or not.

Still, it happens, rejected or otherwise.  Naysaying, that is.

Negotiations.

Strange relations.  Using yes for no, and their returns and variations.

She says no though.  I did.

It eventuates, seemingly regardless of our answers.

Check boxes.  Lists.  Identities.  Likert-scales of experiencing.

Mouths inclining.  Decline.  A trajectory of eyes.  Reclining seduction.

I decided not to go along.  (Where do we go instead?  Who goes?  When?).  Each denial an assent.

What did the trees refuse?  What was the grass fighting, then?  The clouds?  I watched… she observed birds.

The dancers’ bodies.  A dismissal of space.  The removal of sound.  Absent silences.

Where was she?  I?

We said no.

Do words incline or recline for us?  What of the ear, the eye?

Still I smelled her.

“I love,” I thought, “I cannot love.  I can not.”  She declines.

These are the ways of naysaying, all our doubled negatives, equaling… what, exactly?

I love her.  I can not.  She won’t.  Will not.  Negativity in a vacuum.  Apparatus.

The squirrel upside down, above the lawn, on the long tree limb.  What is it denying?  And where is the use of speech?

We cried out, decrying.  (What could that mean?  That seems always in question).

I asked Beckett and Blanchot.  They each said that she said “no.”

Apparently, she says “no.”  “I’d really like to, but can not, must not,” i.e. “no.”

It rings out, like bells – so radiant, so silent, such dissipation.  Such temporal hazard and warning.

Something refuses the air.

I remember.  She traces back.  What means “over”?

Sound refusing silence.  The first.  The second.  The next.

What is “last”?

She says no.

I recall dreams from time to time.  Unable.

Something may have been said.