or, it matters what you do with it.
The following are papers made by my children for me for Fathers Day 2012 –
they knew what to do with it!
(hopefully I will learn!)
Category: Art
Apropos Jean Fautrier (1898-1964)
I have filled my head with images, almost. Substances evolving, fossilized. Suggested.
“Everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all” –Jean Fautrier
Not difficult to find. More difficult to gaze.
Remember, great pleasure builds.
Canvas – paper – plaster – oils.
Pen swoop, pencil curve, scattered dusts of inks.
Essential layering and beauty, simple mysterious complexities – the female form
To mix the media, the processing, to express and discover the sculpture of painting, the painting of clay, the drawing of oil and etchings in sketch. To flurry the senses.
I hear with my eyes the wail of the hostage
I smell with my fingers the verdancy of fruit
I see with my mouth the movement of women
Conflation. “Original reproductions” – pattern and design redone yet never the same
If ‘everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all,” I have tried. His is substantial suggestion; though relatively small in size, like geometric theorems or graphing physics they structure abyssals and infinities. The body wants to know what lies beneath, or through, out, or in.
Capturing the vibratory stillness of monuments and remembered events – the meditativeness of gazing and time – with the erratics of movement and frenzy of action. Stay stare; move make; know seek.
“Everything may be expressed with almost nothing at all”
What once was here
Talk about “prompting” photos! If there aren’t thousands of stories in photos like these…the eye, the mood and the technique combine to provide worlds to discover and invent. Thankful for this work.
Writing: the Blocks
Writing: the Blocks
“and everything here like an incomprehensible explanation”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
There are those times of overwhelm. Edit? Create? Organize? Submit? Wander about (for “inspiration”)? or sit and stare (“meditation”)?
There are those times. So much written, nothing sold. Years of working, thinking, learning, feeling…orphaned. Turned away. Left out. Sent back.
Rejection.
Here’s the open field and some more ever-uncertain time. Feels fragile. I feel I should be making, arranging words toward unknown meanings or inferences, but I’m also drowning in them – so many of my own, millions of others as well. Approved words, theirs, successful words, words now “bound,” where mine (I try the positive) are “free,” “independent,” “loose”… not owned by any other hands or minds.
But the words seem to want it. They emit their own desires. For partners, for dances, for strolls. Attachment. They even like to work! Anything at all – they just want to be, active.
Mine aren’t. They jimmied their way around my emotions and spleen; infested every nook, cranny and fold of my brain; strained my throat and cramped my hand…but once I’d rid myself of them – sealed them between the bars of blue lines, they began to wither and starve. Atrophy. My words – these voiceless victims.
They’ve got plenty of company all lined up and folded together – hell, they’re stacked on top of each other…but they need human parts for life. Need eyes and mouths, lungs and ears, hands and minds, perceptors, receivers and nerves. I look down on them all like leaves from last winter, or hidden away in mausoleum-like drawers. I feel sorrow.
There are zillions of others – exactly the same as mine but for their order – speeding all over the world – through wires and lights – through voices, canals – held gently in hands – slick and shiny on mags – proclaimed on billboards and signs. But not mine. Not these innumerable identical versions but for my script, my experience, my faulty manipulation.
What gives?
What gives at these moments, these gulag-ish terms of withholding and stasis?
A letter or email perhaps. A talk with my wife or my sons or my daughter. A glance at a spine or a page. Some music with lyrics. A friend. They are moving, alert. Every-ready for use. In use. Wording their function. My continued submissions might be jail-breaks for them. My blogs and my posts and my readings. The phone calls. We could try it? See how they still work?
Or even something like this. This query of what do they want? Working them into myself. Materializing them.
I don’t know. I don’t know if it helps. I can’t tell at this moment. They seem stuck. And yet not. Here they are, ever coming, ever becoming, nothing.
Like us. Maybe I’m stuck. Becoming nothing (inevitably) but becoming nonetheless, all the while.
I guess I’m suggesting that there’s really no such thing as stasis or block in living beings. Regardless what or who or how, we’re becoming (the 5 Ws all taken care of). Now & Here all five essential questions are active whether I write down answers or not. As long as we breathe. Work is going on.
And words, so eagerly activated.
N Filbert 2012
Writing: the Characters
Writing: the Characters (1)
Not beginning from anywhere but here.
Here being where I am looking for a character, a someone, and specific, with a mind, a body, and particular knowledge and actions, whom I might observe and record. On whom I might test out my language. Whom I create.
Exercise in perception, then. To see what I could see, perhaps, if I looked a certain way, at or into a certain person. What I might hear, and how to say it. What would be felt and its work of translation. The smells and the tastes and the histories, for both of us. Or perhaps even all. No, that’s too far.
Right here, though, investigating perception, that preform vehicle, formed by our surroundings – imagination – the multiplex of learning structures allowing me to sense, to perceive. That also, is here.
Imagination and perception – their invention we call world, and a character, a subject/object like my hand I might observe, hold aside of me while attached by nerves and cells, tissues and blood, by life, its embodiment.
Non-abstract abstracted – that conundrum – here. The truthfulness of experiencing becoming honest lies. The words, the print of hand, what tells (or who), and how.
Perhaps another thinks this way? Well, not exactly, but shares concerns with idiomatic nuances? Perhaps his education (or hers) was difficult, or pleasurably a breeze, they mastered information like a large and thirsty sponge? Absorbed and were absorbed in such interstitial structures. Or not. Not at all.
An uneducated person with adaptive gifts for resonance. A mimicking trickster riddling what is heard into naïve and complex wisdoms? That would be fun.
Perhaps another world – country, continent, planet? Someone observed for years suddenly inserted in a strange context, situation. How do they behave, react, manage and survive? I could use myself in a planet of clouds, or the tunnels of worms, what would characterize me? How would I change? What might I effect? If I were made of clay or had a thousand lovers in a desert?
The only edge to possibility is what experience brings.
But pretending to begin right now, I see him clear. There is a woman he is watching he finds beautiful. When she works he sees the curve of her small breast which he desires. He is ruddy yet refined, of middling age. He’d like to court her but fears all pain that can’t be bandaged. He’s afraid of words and their millions of ropes and anchors. Reality feels like conflict, for him, a continual coming-against, and adjustment. Adaptation he experiences as loss. Of unrealized ideals. And so he walks, spinning narratives in his head.
Here, that possible visitor handmade. But who? And how would I know him? And where was he from? How was he formed? Who does he belive? And so forth…
One way to be here.
One way to press your hand against the wall.
The Violation in Art
The Violation in Art
The trouble with artists, as I see it, is that they’re always breaking things. Breaking out, breaking in.
As if their experience of the world (and in my opinion anyone might be an artist at any given time)…well, look at it like this…a human person develops perceptions and accumulates. Artistry consists in these experiences transmuting, transforming and breaking out in alternate forms.
The world seeps, floods, sifts or bursts its way into the artist’s mechanisms of being, and their processing of said worlding breaks its way out, somewhere, somehow. Often anywhere, anyhow!
Breaking in to us.
A person combined with their experience breaks out in a form through their hands or their vision, movements or mouth…the artifact then enters our perception, experience, breaking in to our own operations and proceedings…entering us.
Now you’ve a mingling of persons going on via artifact, motion or sound.
If you think about this, it’s threatening. It’s criminal! It’s viral. And it can happen at great distances, even invisible, even in your sleep. It may appear at first benign, even pleasurable, might mirror some part of ourselves (or so it seems) – because of its careless remove from identity toward object it feels safe and external…but how we take it in!
With anger or lusting or joy. Voyeuristically, “privately,” or in a well-guarded institution. Through literature, youtube, mp3s. In deep thought or with staid attention, and passing glances or air-gathering ears. No matter, there’s infusion, con-fusion, an intimate entwining going on.
And it is without-which-not on either side: construction/reception, speaker/hearer, writer/reader, dancer/audience. We all become necessary and involved, creating ubiquitous perpetration. And no one to accuse once it’s part of our experience, our (perhaps unwitting) invitation.
Like cancer or nutrients, an other-marked entity joins with our own joining to theirs in apprehension, a collusion of worlds and of persons. An act in which all are responsible: reciprocal engagement of voyeuristic and combinatory intimacy, breaking open, breaking in,
breaking out
breaking through
a delicious and permissive crime.
Sunday Sustenance
conversations with my wife (www.lifeinrelationtoart.wordpress.com & www.ekphrastixarts.com)
and all accompanied by:
Sigur Ros’ relatively new “Valtari” album
hope your day is great!
Writing: the Margins
Writing: the Margins
“All words run along the margins of their secrets”
– Susan Howe –
Now we are getting somewhere. Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told. If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.” If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…
there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets? Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.
That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets. I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.
And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.
Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.
So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating. That is, it is possible. Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?
If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.
Therefore
“it is not infinite. Even infinite is a term”
-Louis Zukofsky-
by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.
Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.
Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.
Perhaps and possibly.
N Filbert 2012
Day Dreamer Award!
I’m back from my five minute, coffee-laden, brain-reprieve.
Thanks to Lotus Ohms for awarding me this badge/honor/advice?
It is an honor to be read, thought of, and chosen.
Award works like this:
Upon receipt of this award, you are to take a mental vacation for 5 minutes. (Gaze off into space, look out of the window, have yourself a wonderful daydream….)
When you have returned from you daydream, you are required to take another one tomorrow.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Award this to 3 other people. You can only pass this award on to three (3) people.
And me own nominees for this self-loving reprieve include:
the Self Appointed Life Counselor at http://unwantedadvice.wordpress.com/
lots of thought and reading go into these blogs
Jean-Paul Galibert and his “philosophy of non-existence”
(philosophizing can always use some aimless gazing for fuel)
and
some hefty poetry-writing happening there
You guys take five and refuel…dive in…do it again…dive in.
Thanks for working!
manoftheword
Experiential Ekphrasis
by Holly Suzanne
Hello dear followers – I can hardly thank you enough for taking time out of your lives to look at, read and engage things I am involved in the making of. Your support and attention is a constant encouragement. THANK YOU! (and thank you for offering and creating your own!)… I wanted to invite you (if you are interested) to visit/follow a couple of other blogsites I also create in/with –
THANKS AGAIN!
All my Words are Silent 