Category: Art

Waiting for words to tell…

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Writing3 Comments

Immersed in summer and studies, I find myself struggling with capacities of some purer form of origin beyond connections.  The creativity that satiates me in relationship and studies is one of associations, extensions, combinatory experiments of life-experiences and informations and knowledges.  Fiction and poetry, in a unique manner, seem to process the connectivities and associations invented somehow more within myself.  Not so much in activities of external bonds and ties that loop within/without between concepts and voices, persons and family, and my own; but what bonds those activities and informations spawn within me.  I am finding that these recognitions and constructions take a different sort of time and attention than the frenetic and immediate processings of conceptual knowledges and intimate relations.  Those, of necessity, must be continuous, on the fly, in situ.  Creative writing, in distinction, requires for me the ability for bracketing a space and time in which I am able to attend (somehow) to the recursive loops and dangling ganglia of my own organism of thoughts and emotions.   A sort of internal processing vaguely distinguishable from reciprocal or social processing.  It may not even be real, but only a sensation of process, a variant attention, a sidelong perspective.  In any case, it emits something unique in my writing and reflection, feelings and sensations, and something that I cannot simply produce; something that must be prepared and allowed for, visited, beckoned, welcomed.

I recognized this as I struggle to create for a project, and also possess a yearning to be creating new fictions.  The process art both provides and requires is unique and intense, difficult and serious.  It calls to mind the “effortless efforts” of things like meditation and awareness, mindfulness and tolerance.  The writings of Laura (Riding) Jackson piqued this recognition for me and I will share a couple of early paragraphs from her book The Telling.

“[1] There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait.  In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity.  We know we are explainable, and not explained.  Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told, but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place.  Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness.  Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

[4] Everywhere can be seen a waiting for words that phrase the primary sense of human-being, and with a human finality, so that the words themselves are witness to what they tell.  The waiting can be seen not only in the eager inclined posture of believers.  It can be seen also on the faces of disbelievers, the idolizers of the evident: they are not happy in their impatient assurance of there being no cause but uncaused circumstance, they wear the pinched look of people whose convictions make them a meagre fare.  In the eyes of all (in the opaque depths in them of unacknowledged presentness to one another) are mirrored (but scarcely discerned) concourses where our souls ever secretly assemble, in expectation of events of common understanding that continually fail to occur.  We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are.  We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.

[5] …A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time – the telling of what came first and before done forever…How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions!  Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with one another for our ears; and science competes with all together.  And for each we have a different set of ears.  But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.“

from The Telling by Laura (Riding) Jackson, 1967

 

Henry Magazine

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Philosophy, Photography, Poetry, Traces, Writing3 Comments

Greetings all – thanks to the continuous hard work of Lisa Thatcher et. al., the experimental literary-aesthetic new magazine Henry is live!  I’m excited about this project, not only because Thatcher’s own work and interests are so astute and lively, but the principle of the thing and the open energy of the legacy of Henry Miller.  I invite you all to check it out (helps if you are able to read French), and you will also find a piece of creative writing by myself within.  Thanks Lisa & co., thanks Henry for verve and example, thanks writers and readers – it manifests!

a link to my piece on The Whole Hurly Burly

Accompanying me home

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading5 Comments

“For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible.  Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction.  It wasn’t until I brought him a story that was purposely confusing and obfuscating that he seemed at all impressed and pleased.  He said, smiling, “You made me work, son.”  He once said to me in a museum, when I complained about an illegible signature on a painting, “You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.”  He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now.  What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, thought he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.”

-Percival Everett-

compliments of:

It is Still with Me

On By NW FilbertIn Art3 Comments

Last night Holly and I viewed Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, having no preparation or knowledge about subject or style.  One of those films you throw in the bag at the library so you have a variety to select from should the time offer itself.

The Tree of Life (2011) Poster

turns out as a meditation, the oscillatory experiences of nature/grace; faith/doubt; hope/cynicism; mother/father…

and so on.

A kind of imaging of dialectics.

Aside from the choice of personal pronouns relating to “ultimate questions” it has stayed with me.

Ruminatively.

The oddities of learning development for the human organism; the broader context our lives happen within; contexts and networks, systems from family-to-universe, from cell-to-individual.

The developments of guilt and shame.  The nostalgia for innocence, the wonder of betterment, of choice.

What experiences “stick” and become paradigms to fit new experiences within.

The music was glorious and suited expertly to the images and tone.

I guess I recommend it.

It is a worthwhile experience to add to your complex and idiosyncratic mix.

In the arena of my recommendation that humans watch Synechdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufmann at least once every six months, to retain self-awareness and humility…

Announcing: STUDIOVOGUE Gallery Group Exhibit “Harmony in Diversity” with Holly Suzanne

On By NW FilbertIn Art1 Comment

Announcing: STUDIOVOGUE Gallery Group Exhibit “Harmony in Diversity” with Holly Suzanne.

So proud of this particular artist!  Congrats – wish we could be there!  Love you brilliant wife!

We Make Art

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Journallings9 Comments

We Make Art: A Query toward Perceptive Extension

paper snowflakes by Holly & children
paper snowflakes by Holly & children

Waking reminded –

I’ve been working over things in my sleep.  Parenting issues, marriage.  Vocation deadlines, assignments.  Logistics and payments and scheduling.  Improbable care of the self.

– that overwhelm is inevitable, inherent.

Everything we know (or surmise) about anything indicates vast beyonds unknown and ignored.  In order to see, to breathe, to speak, to hear, to feel, to think, to live.  We filter and avoid.  Press the vast majority of the world’s availability into a void.  So of course we can’t manage our world, or comprehend, even minimally control.  We can barely deal with even a relatively microscopic set of variables, and those only enough to survive.

Reminded, awake then, that overwhelm is constant and inevitable.  Inherent to the systems of which we are and are a part.  Living is processing vastness.  Essentially unscalable.  And we thought bacteria were small!

            So it comes as no surprise that at times we feel oppressed, drowned, immersed – helpless, confused and at loss.  Pretend for a moment that we have to-dos that seem important + unforeseen and substantial grief + illness + snow days (which = a house full of ecstatic children, active and noisy and eager to be entertained) + inclement weather shuffling schedules and doctors, activities and possibilities around + limitations of time, energy and internal resources + anxiety or mood ‘disorders’ + love and high hopes + responsibilities and intentions + fears and deep hurts + a body (bodies) mind (minds) to feed and nourish +…

Too Much Information, a saturated context for the human organism.  The black box crashes.  The connections run slow.  The screen jerky and fuzzy.  Head aches, breath thickens or shallows, noise is incommensurate – the signals scramble…

At first breach, first sign of imperturb…we check in, acknowledge – perhaps argue or fight or make love (i.e. signify our overwhelm and our intensity), sit still, register what we can…

and wake up, reminded:

WE MAKE ART.

            Once ground is touched, we go in (or out) – “seventh direction perception” – we begin to consciously process/perceive.

 

 

The query that sprouted is as follows: might the activity of art-a creative dialogic relation of index-sign-symbol, signifier-signifiant-and interpreter, i.e. “becoming-forth” – expand our perceptive capacities/processing?

In other words, in enacting the relationship of making, creatively, holistically, might we draw on more of the world’s availability – perceived and “dismissed” – a fuller context of experience less limited by intentional activities of categorical aims and constraints, thereby opening more of us to more of it in an open reciprocal dynamic interrelation, thereby sort of processing in “lump sums” – a gulping digestion of overwhelm?

We set aside prescribed roles, beliefs and opinions and work out, work into, an arbitrary generalized conventional (safe) medium…we fog our normalized paradigms and strictures of interpretive alertness – mores, values, expectations and censorship – we reach out gathering in.  Interact.  It seems something larger is carried, is moved – more than the medium, more than ourselves, more of a context, a world.

Does art extend our perceptive capacities?  Our scope of perception – to process, to be?  A kind of open-boundaried passage of experiencing between organism and world?

works in progress by Holly Suzanne
works in progress by Holly Suzanne

PROTEUS MAG

On By NW FilbertIn Art1 Comment

PROTEUS MAG

 

PROTEUS MAG.

happy to find (ever-so-tardily) – and kansas-bred-proud

fRiction – necessary to the stream of life

On By NW FilbertIn Art, WritingLeave a comment

Combinatory Art in Motion.

Incessant

New (and oh-so-welcome) Arrivals – Feb. 4

On By NW FilbertIn Art2 Comments

RE-GIFTING PRESENTS, part two: SHARED EXPERIENCE (art)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Philosophy7 Comments

Roughly speaking, I understand “art” to be something created through human interaction with the world.  Whether perceptually noticed or purposively constructed, that which we experience in what we might call “aesthetic ranges” are always results of interactivity and, as far as we know, only occur for human organisms.

In light of my previous post attempting to address the function, variability and necessity of language or sign-types for human perception, survival and being-in-the-world, I want to address something fresh for me that arose in that inquiry.

Previously, I lamented the inevitable distance that occurs in living organisms between originary experience in and with an environment and the organism’s perceptual experience of it.  No matter how miniscule, there is always a gap between our encountering (for instance, of scent and our recognition of smelling; or of light toward eye and our “seeing” of colors; touching flame and reacting retracting) and our awareness of the encounter.  Neurons and nerves pass time in their messaging.  By the time we’re aware, our present is past.

But awareness and perception, cognition and sensation are themselves happening presently, occurring in a process continuously and simultaneously to ongoing encountering.  In other words, it is always the present, and we are always present, doing many different things.  Being presently and what we’re aware of presently are widely variant items, but always both and all, simultaneous with (indeed identical to); the present.

The present is the only reality occurring.

Who and what, where and how are all only ever present concerns.  When is always already answered:  NOW.

If the human organism has adapted and developed the creation and usage of sign-systems to more efficiently navigate processes of survival, I want to look a little bit into what the purposive involvement in, engagement with, those sign-usage capabilities might accomplish for us.

If our survival process, as I remarked before, is one of perceiving and predicting our individual organism’s likelihood and opportunities for existing in any given environment (context, situation), then our perceptive processes are amazingly collaborative toward quickly organizing and evaluating a chaos of inputs and outputs into maneuverable assessments and survivable actions.

Language is our principle medium of signs, used by humans to select, describe and choose what is going on at any moment both inside of us and around us.  Something like water is for jellyfish, perhaps, the medium that both constructs their world and enables them.

But language become, becomes its own experience to become again and again.  In other words, the processing of perception, awareness, consciousness, is also experience in itself.

hand

This is where it struck  me that sign-mediums are a kind of gifting again and again of present experiences.  As we interact with mediums, forming and formulating them into semiotic artifacts (whether spoken phrases, bodily movements, plastic figures or oil-smeared canvases) we are both utilizing those media to organize and process (become aware of and perceive) select elements of our encounter/experience, but also concocting new experiences as well as future presents.  Artifacts delineating our presents will be perceived, signed, comprehended again and again newly, each moment various and ever-present.

In other words, inhabiting our mediums purposively, experimentally, exploratorily, reflectively, creatively, we are both organizing, discovering and determining our own present(s) while simultaneously being new presents and gifting present experiences to become (for ourselves and others via artifacts, writings, sounds and movements).

This seems simple to me and I’m sure the wriggly seams of it, the liminal, necessarily RELATIONAL actualities of it have been sussed out much more eloquently and adequately (made present, re-presented) than this cursory blurt of mine, but it has flooded me recently like an a-ha (fresh awareness of the present?) in answering questions about “wrestling with everything inhabiting my medium.”

So thanks to all of you – writers and artists, filmmakers and philosophers – for plumbing the mediums that give you your present(s) again and again, and then offering them onward to us – a community continually re-gifting our present(s) by consciously inhabiting what our media inhabit. The What Where How Who it moves us within and between.