The Songs I Do Not Know (1)

“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.

Language/Life

This is the same struggle – (LanguageLife)

this mis-match, trans-mesh, between media (their mediums)

.

A woman arrived – beautiful.

First thought: why isn’t language like her?

no – why isn’t language Her.

The difference. Media.

Eventually I felt this about music, painting, photography.

Eventually I felt this about perception, expression, myself.

.

i.e. Why isn’t one thing another to the same effect? Why doesn’t one temporally unified multiplicity (perception) correlate adequately in another?

.

My writing, these shapes, lines, movements, and possible sounds and touches and sayings are ever as real as hers, (equal), but not her (different) <in so many ways, sort of> <and not many ways, kind of>

.

There is animated material in motion with layers of perception – interpretation – impression / meanings. And here as well.

But they are not the same,

metaphorically, experientially, actually.

And they are.

(We are, species-level, carrying similar realities in similarly leaky containers).

And we aren’t.

  • Effect (1)
  • Affect (2)
  • Mode (0)
  • Artifice (N+1 / N-1)
  • Occurrence Happening Being (=)

We are.

And aren’t.

Same Difference

.

Language lives. is alive. is not life. is life.

As also language.

And not.

She and I are. And are modally identified. Materially.

And are categorically for many striations,

same.

And not.

Effect. Affect. Also same difference, everywhere within scales. Eventually, no difference?

Eventually…only same? In a thin layer, deep and thickly.

Undone. Coordinated.

Same difference.

eventuates:

AND – – – – OR – – – – NOT

(same differencings, as each require equal potentialities)

.

Endless.

This is a slippery slope of a flat plane.

.

Therefore I love the “Book of Idolatry,” “truth,” empirical methods! Same differences, endlessly, potential, infinite variation and similitude. Swerving curves of identity deranged.

Lo how the mirror distorts in its clarity.

The painting clarifying distorted.

Voila.

Another.

The same.

Again.

Differently.

.

One might suppose differing due to activity – close circle – if static could be posited or possible we’d see (as we are seen). But seeing is active. As is that seen.

therefore, indeterminate

that is, knowably unknowable

i.e. uncertain in its certainty

Voila!

What?

same difference

BEING

matters

a view from nowhere?

he can only be distracted by nothing (the reflection of everything), light uncontained or perceived, even though he cannot cease registering her flesh and its forms, thigh-lines, tone and texture, fluidity of folding and motion. Nothing refuses to contain it, and rather brings it back, and forth, or all at once space, always “this. this here. here.” Nothing missing mirror, his emptiness replete.

Bends and scent, nonsensed, indelible.

Him, there (here), composed observer, unable/disabling any view from nowhere. It is without a not…

our small lives are traversed by momentous movements, avalanches in the depths of the everyday

Knausgaard, Summer

How much longer still dreaming of a language

Not enslaved to words as it is today…

des forets, Poems of Samuel Wood

so we use words in order to go beyond words

Markides, Mountain of Silence

What constitutes unbounded in literature?

Knausgaard, My Struggle 6

…still she remains a remarkable beauty (how so easily contorted from inside?). If inner bodies resembled outer, how different life would be, observable reversed as well – cultural ugliness/fear/repulsion softens from inner loveliness, even as prettiness suffers its evils. That being said, the inner therefore rules the day for beauty, and earth must be divine.

Veins outstrip hand lotion. Wrinkles give the lie.

he depends on his non-mirror, and many come to light. Refractions, glints, unending activity – a world (or however you attempt to measure the imagined) exists as relation alone (all-one) – infinite interdependence ‘to be.’

slope, angle, apparent rest – the wrist, the knee, the curve to ankle, each knuckle and blade about the eye, how else to distinguish hair from head from air from skin from water – its relative.

all i do is sense and praise (that poorly) – relation, gratitude. Awareness – attention – all act. Calves, puppies, elbows, crooks – sway and struggle, chaos-strife, relations of same differences, now.

he calls out, a wave of vibrations; he smiles, a rippling fabric; looks (out or in at once) – “becoming” (some have spoken or written) – enacted, enbodied, at-once ‘taking place’ – now. Here it is, they are, him/her with in of. It goes. Nowhere but here (it comes in other words). his left, your right, his east, your west, up-down-other: relation. Occurs.

No else. No one. No thing. No where. Never. All depending, relating to this, us, that, here, now. Without which? Unknown, inconceivable, imperceptible, nonsensical…only possible.

Quiet. Dampening.

so this is how you swim inward,

so this is how you flow outward,

so this is how you pray

Mary Oliver, Five A.M. Pinewoods

Rain, snow,

damper pedal.

softening…

slowing…

so that sound

may

rise –

Arise quiet sound –

its feel –

tonight, now,

then

a melancholy birth,

nostalgia and utopia

again, combined.

.

Sustain.

Cabin Reflections (July 2022)

Between

(sky and birds), between

(enclosed and contained),

between the not existing and the sleepless

there are no obstacles.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia

it’s hard to make sense

outside of the world

or in a larger world

things don’t register

in expected ways

.

the pace is all different

and nothing is counting

time, space, and motion

do their thing as one

the human happenings

.

don’t make sense

or seem separate, divorced,

a frantic scale

the earth holds quietly

.

even words dissolve

and transform

like breezes

and bird-calls,

not meaning the same

.

passing, passing, held

passing, passage, hold

i imagine at Heidegger’s hut

he was murmuring

these things, being

.

hard to make sense of it

with reason or belief

a stance

but easy sense

outside

.

Where do you listen?

What are you listening

with and for?

How do you listen?

Silently, with wing-beats

aflutter

water moves

.

i move

out of my head

into the rest

of me, my skin

an open passage

my organs trudging

patiently, waiting

blood moves

.

accordion chest

filling my limbs

hands holding

feet touching

grounded

.

lay back

all in

an other

with / in / of

this world,

here.

Exscribing: a Process

Image result for hand writing with pen on paper

How stories are written.

They are experienced.  They are felt, intimated, intuited and interpreted.

Sometimes spoken through or about.

They become body.

They are lived – if only imaginatively – they are invented (always).

If inescapable or unavoidable, the only way to “pass” them – find them, become in relation to them (i.e. ‘go on’) – is to expel, express them… put them outside the body, psyche, person: MAKE them, forge them, create with them…

“ex” (out-of) “term” (language) “in” (-scribe or –voke) “ate” (devourable form) them.

Stories are composed, inscribed, evoked, in order to ex-term-in-ate them.  To live on – through and past – to survive what marks/marked the person who must process and be rid of them in order to… go on experiencing (live).

.

Search those tales that traverse your body – its space, and over time. 

Watch what arises again and again – a trope, a chorus, a theme, a complaint.

Though memory (creative narrative), perhaps it holds a not-forgotten, an almost-permanence.  That which seems to stay with you, in you, may be of you – there’s story there.  Don’t worry truth.  Truth never worries.  And no stories are about it.  And constructs of “facts” – or, agreement of observations and perceptions – hardly tells as well.  Stories – good, real stories – lie in differences.

Perhaps difference is kind of true.

Practice synesthesia with what you uncover / discover: hear what you see; taste the sounds; feel what you smell; look deeply at all you touch; be something like a being – an organism whose senses are always combined in the perceiving and experiencing.  That you are is a thing unto itself, and can not be exhausted as long as.

.

And so to write, to exscribe.  In the beginning was… the true fact that you are, however doubting and unknowable.  This too is experiencing.  To be experiencing is to live.  Prepositions and propositions notwithstanding.

It writes.

.

And so it is said, a kind of exscription, a thinking-out-with.  As breath surges sound or even whispers.  To follow – not following – the forms of the objects (obstacles) – lungs and throat and palate, tongue and teeth and lips, not to mention faces and the movements of limbs and digits.  The lineation of terms and letters, vocables and consonants – exscription-with, even air, atmosphere.  And should the context change (and it is changing as you say, think, exscribe) – you write, you sound, you scribble, going-on-with…

Thus it is written.

.

And so it becomes.

Stories are an history of mortality.  Where it begins in first awareness that it ends.  And so memories, so comparisons – lessness and mostness and the little by little of forgetting.  How it’s made through its undoing, to the last.  We story only as we die.

What is it that was said?  You say?

Dusk becomes, and a sort of lost.

The first way in, being out.

Ex-scription.

The forth is all.  Experiencing.

.

Letting it air out.  This seems important though many might advise that writing is a matter of devotion, dedication, discipline.  Maybe it is?  What have I written in way of stories?  Much time is involved in the shaping of rivers’ courseways… and chance… and the continuous involvement of the with-out.

.

Re-membering that the activity and activist (one doing the activity – actor/actress?) are entirely muddled in the ‘between’ that equals: “Here.”  Forging or forcing ex-scription tends to falsify the act and turn it towards an in-scription of something – report or epitaph, confession, statement, fable, style, form.  But storying and writing, like living and all activity, are between formless and formed – taking form, forming.  We are not producing or conveying information, we are in formation through the activity of writing. To assume a stance, a stasis, a point-of-view or position or stake… authorial authority or control – is to leave the messiness of “here” and arbitrate a “there.”  No longer the presence-between sayer-and-saying, thinker-and-language, writing-and-written, imagining-and-inventing, feeler-and-feeling, etc… but reduced to a repetition of forms, ideas, concepts – borrowed, received, believed, or accepted (“in-formed”).  Composed verses composing; produced versus producing; almost a copyist versus a compositor (with com-posing and com-positing referring to making-with, viewing-with, creating-with complex multiplicities).

.

Con-, com-, con-.  With, with with- (these are the fields of ‘between’ where we are).  Ever, always, only – between – experiencing through exscribing – this stays on, vibrating in the lettering, arcs and tones of the writing…as activity going-on.  Experiencing.  Energy.  The forthness of creativity is its unknowable, indecipherable, inextricable withness.  Perhaps.

.

Authorial authority or control a sort of repetition of law, convention, acceded power, regime(n).  An attempt to step aside from the stream of experiencing and treat the activity of writing (or exscribing) not as an activity of being – alongside thinking, loving, believing, feeling, working, etc., – but something mechanical, technical, somehow outside the confluence of being, the flow of experiencing.  Feigning objectivity, knowledge, pre-cluded rather than preludic (decided-before versus approaching the play or dance or swim of activity in complexity).  Told versus happening.  Production versus process.  Untrue, or less or more than actual.  Mortality – dead letter – versus verbal occurring…as-is.

.

To return to ending – the beginning of story – our limits, death, and finitude – that which forces us to forge – to attempt memories, notate change as loss or gain, seek patterns, learn, sing, exscribe, act… imagine… dream… craft and create – the knowing, the reality, that experiencing is not endless.  Attend: it ends.

And so we story.

Exscribing…experiencing…what there is, while there is, along many modes of action.  What is perceived as happening and runnels through the body, swirling currents of memory, the staining of refrains… and the activity of exscribing it – of moving it out-with-in-to relation of world as compositing – not copying, stating, reporting – but ever keeping in mind that the activity of writing is also a live, indeterminate, and infinitely complex way of being-with-world… we are hardly machines translating experience, or computers spitting out data… everything we do so long as we’re living, is living – alive and uncertain, conformation-with everything that surrounds and drowns us.  Participation.  Being.

Exscribing as a process of being alive.

 

Letter to a Lover – March 2018

The month of March, in Kansas, can be almost anything, like most of the other months of the year, almost.  Tonight it is moisty, breezy, there is wetness hovering like a redolent air, nearly a fog.  I am killing myself.  You are feeding me.  I sharpen your knives in the kitchen.  From the top of my throat toward deep in my belly is an acidic ruin caused by far too many liters of hard alcohol in far too much volume, too often, for too many hours of too many days over too many years to not be transforming my internal landscape into a ravaged terrain of destruction.  So though I’m unable to breathe, speak, lie down, or work without unignorable hurt, I am still useful.  I am sharpening your knives in your modest kitchen.  I am reading and writing sentences.  I am trying to keep myself from you.  You are preparing a meal for us, and I find it so difficult to stay away from you – to not breathe at your ear, kiss or nibble your neck, grasp at your bottom, finger your elbows, hover, caress, overwhelm.

Boundaries are reduced in mist and wind.  In motion it can be hard to tell where the lines that mark objects begin or end.  In cloaks of obscurity finding shapes or sounds, edges or entries, can be, well, con-fusing (over-mixed, blended, woven)… as perhaps any “thing” we try to think apart ‘in fact’ always is… “inscrutable,” “indivisible,” “unclear.”

If you extricate the ginger from the garlic from the cabbage from the chicken from the oil, the rice, the salt, the pepper, the lime and ancho, the butter, the liquids and oxygens, thicknesses and scents… where is the meal?  If you separate “me” out from “world,” relations, surround (like a theory, a concept, a logic…) how might I then live, or “be” what you presume me to be?  I will not, cannot, am not (removed from my surround) and so it goes… limbs and flesh and organs… dissect… to cells and fluids, molecules and motions, viscosity and energy… to atoms… to subatomic ‘particles’ and/or ‘waves’ – and at each dismantle you will have lost the entity you proposed or pursued.

Division does not equal.

You’ve quoted out of context – neither copied, reproduced, nor plagiarized.  Simply failed.  Missed.  Lost.

The burning rot, corrosive erosion of my body by the maladies of my preferences, pleasures, and habits…

…erasure of letters, terms, phrases, meanings…

…excision and surgery, atopic autopsying of…

…are things already dead, deceased once de-cised, as ‘identifiable portions or pieces, ‘things'”?

These written marks with definable shapes and spaces… yet if disjoined… no sense can be had…

What might “it,” “I,” be… apart-from?

I lay on a ground I cannot stand up without, cannot jump, move, fly or float away without…

I address you – impossibly – unless we’re inseparable… otherwise address and interaction cannot…

The gesture recognizes the necessary collusion as a dream of a fictive repartee, a figurative gap which – if there really were a break or breach – would have no effect or recognition – no reach, no contact…

Relation is repetition of conjoinment, actions without function if connectedness is not always already…

…as if drawing attention toward redundancy.

And so we kiss, we eat, we call out, we listen, as repercussions of contact… reassurances of inseparability.  You reach for your phone, I fall to sleep, unable to be undone or we would not be able to know

 

The Incompletion of Words

We tried, once.

Attempted an adjoining.

No one cared or cares.

It’s not a point.

THE point.

.

I never wanted it to mean anything.

It never has.

(I never wanted it to).

Never really thought it could.

It might.

It doesn’t.

It won’t.

Hasn’t.

.

The only point I perceive

Is our dismissal.

Evolution.

Another term we use for mortality.

.

Something hopeful.

Never helpful.

Just is.

The way of things.

.

I’m not here.

I’m not anywhere.

There are birds.

‘One’s’ thoughts on in-here-nt bounds

The “world,” as it were, as it ‘is’ (also, reduced, in addition) “for us.”

How it comes to be as we are – briefly.  Almost incalculably miniscule.  Almost ‘happenstance.’

“Our” world, as it were: all we cannot know, that we are part in, of, with.

One wonders what “world” can possibly mean.

Every meaning apparently nothing outside of this microscopic sliver of kind… EVERYthing and more, “for us.”  Some ‘infinity’ or ‘void;’ ‘abyss’ or ‘chaotic complexity’ – a reference to every-thing (or not) that so far surpasses us, outstrips us, beyonds us.  Some so-called…”world.”

One. Can.

One could turn toward all that, could ‘be-itself,’ bi-pedally, shrimpishly, speck-o-dust uprightedly, with/in ‘it’…and have a dwarfed, almost indiscernible ‘experience.’  Or “one” (were such a thing possible) could de-cide, di-vide, con-sider (?) – place oneself ‘over against’ or ‘in contrast’ (contra-di-stinction) to all that: otherness, ‘world,’ ‘uknown/unknowable,’ ‘beyond,’ ‘out-side,’ infinite… and de-term-in.

Squash it down to ‘one’s own scale, name it / call it / sign it, and ‘fit’ it in.  i.e. cut it small enough to be comprehensible, digestible, sensible (according-to-one’s-own) and pre-tend, fore-tell, image-in, sign-i-fy it ACCORDING TO… ‘one,’ ‘us,’ ‘me’ (such as math, logic, language, communicable signs, etc – in-(ter)ventions on/of our own terms).

Human knowledge, inquiry, disciplines, creations, theories, etc. are EXACTLY (and perhaps ONLY, one surmises) THAT: at the scale of the human. ‘One’ is prone to automatically grant every ‘other’ (plant, material, organism, structure, system, etc) the ‘same’ ‘world’ – as Wittgenstein indicated: indecipherable, untranslatable or communicable between kinds, but most probable, no? – Umwelts – worlds upon worlds within worlds outside worlds… we (‘ones’) can have no share, understanding, con(with)cept, com(with)munication of…

To each its scale of experiencing, and all scales together…

Given the human (so-self-called) scale, this seems pertinently and poignantly most evident…

…why would we chafe against our limits… or (perhaps) every scale always is – no ‘one’ could know this… ones (and many ones) are only ones – more and less than their own possible perspectives… in- and out-looks OF.  Scale.  (Perhaps).

Obviously, com(with)posing in your/our language… whatever I dream is representative of my scale… i.e. is only a capacity of ‘one’(kind) … of many.

Pleasurably so… or why not?

Dreaming beyond scale (or, inventing scale and its beyond – in the de-term-in-ing) demonstrates itself as a capacity… (e.g. mythology, science, religion, fiction/fantasy, psycho-anything, spirituality, philosophy, history, and so forth) … all imagined efforts beyond-scale, that, in occurring demonstrate the possibilities/limitations of human scale…

What ‘beyond’ could ‘one’ see, think, feel, etc., that is not a demonstration of limited and actual capacity of ‘one-scale’-to-experience?

So ‘one’ has a-, con-, etc. scales… all part of one’s scale (abilities, capacities, possibilities, options, kind).  Against, with, creative, reductive, but ALL and ANY activities of one kind (so-self-called ‘human’) show its locked and limited capacity.  One never goes beyond.

Fini.

To ‘work limits,’ and boundaries are clearly elements of our ‘limits’ and ‘boundaries’ of the scope and scale of the ‘human.’

“Gods,” cosmologies, dreams, histories, theorizing, etc., all contained within the ‘bounds’ or capacities of the ‘kind-of-thing-‘One’-is.  Perhaps.

It is the ‘perhaps’ that haunts us.  [but what could ‘haunt’ indicate but another human capacity – perhaps a ‘felt capacity’ of bursting or extending our capacities?]

Witchcraft.  Art.  Technology.  Religion.  Theoretical and experimental anything.  Logos.  Arche.  Tohu.  Bohu.  Beginning.  Universe (must needs always shrink to one’s own scale… in order to uni-anything… ‘multiverse’ simple exponents of capacities for in our microscopic self-experienced sphere… we named ‘infinity’ – is there no exponent we can’t add – within our tiny range of potential?).

One’s own anthropology.

Logically [though I excessively distrust that program of human-ing] – what con-cept, i-dea, imagine-ing, or object-ivity is not necessarily always paramatered by the human ex-periential capacities?

The bounds may be elastic or no – there would be no way for a kind to know – being all-ways the ‘one’ experiencing.

IN-HERE-NT BOUNDS.

Fragment: Brief Conversation

“How come language (or drinking) makes the pain of language (or drinking, or relationships) go away, recede, soothe…and then becomes language (drinking, relation) and its pain…again?” he asks.

I smoke.  I look at him.  He is examining (with obvious pretend furtivity) my pale, smoothe legs, coming out of my singular light dress.  At my arms, my skin, my cheek and throat, my hair.  Lasciviously thoughtful, he.  Almost curious.  Almost authentic in his desire.

He is trying to daydream.

I am trying to be.

We are drinking now.

I am young, he less so.

Or neither.  We do not know.  Anyone can be so near their end.

So the story goes…

“The world smells good,” he says, and the delectability to the nostrils clearly depended on death: burning wood, smoking pig, a nostalgia of forests…

I knew not what I felt.  Mixtures.  Pleasures and sorrow.  Excitement and fear.  Doubt.  I did not respond, just masked placidly.  Pleasantly, I hoped.  Ambiguous.  And what does he sense?