Category: communication

Celldom (continuation)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, identity, Language, love1 Comment

oval sketching

(click image for previous content)

            Unwittingly, I suspect, you or they have begun encouraging me to fantasize, concoct alternate realities, to record what “self-awareness” I might possess – in effect, to make art.  To use artifice.  Pretend.

As they frustrate with my mind, I sense them agitate, they request I try again to inscribe ‘emotional states or fluctuations’… what I hear is: “Be delusional!  Pretend you can be other than yourself and fabricate observations or reports of what you find!  Write for us from a realm of your imaginings!”

I write: “Magenta with a violet, a blackened green, a touch of white and several mixtured hues of blue.”  One morning simply “ultramarine.”  The view up is amazing from the window when I wake – another problem – what is waking, what is not.

At this point I begin to draft single-lined wriggles and ovals (as near to circles as I am able) – day after day – delivering these gestures as my only possible responses of non-delusional self-observation / “awareness.”

They transport me somewhere.  “Some place quieter, restful, pastoral and with the sound of water,” they say.  My only hope is thunderstorms.

Thunderstorms shake me through and through somehow.  I profess rainfall to be cleansing, charming, enervating and distracting, but thunderstorms really tear me away from things toward some other beauty.  I draw an oval filling the page (as much as possible given the argumentative shapes) with emptiness.  Is this what is desired?  Am I approaching an “expression” with this instrument?

Another day I attempt a square and rectangle, even triangles – all with single lines and full of nothing, but none of these standardized and recognizable forms seem accurate.  No self-portrait (is this what you’re after?) could be so distinct.  Perceivable.  “Only bits and fragments appear common among ‘selves,’” I say (regrettably), “unless there be love.”

They (you?) pounce on this – “love! Ah!  Might you tell us, write” (very different things of course) “more about what you mean by this?”

“Don’t get hung up on words,” I whisper, and I’m off again to silence.

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

            There seems to be no library here, yet if I request books they arrive from somewhere.  All a matter of electricity, buttons and money.  As long as they last, I suppose.  And at higher costs each year, I think.

Thunderstorms, then, in lieu of the other unknown (“love”).  Something about their breadth and depth, the long slow accumulation of elements from such vast distances and sources: the implausibility of their construction, the buildup…composition…complexity…the billions of collisions that activate the enormous releasings.  Thunderstorms suggest the miraculous in nature, the dangerous prospect of entities coming together…some awe-full beauty.

Provenances, directions, blusters and still points, specific conditions, temperatures, “fronts,” uncountable molecules, atoms, producing just this dynamic event/effect…

This day I make a spiral down the page.

Biologies, psychologies, humors and pleasures, emotions and moods, habits, likes, dislikes, abhorrences, opinions – these seeking common spaces, manufacturing convergent territories…a prisming trap.  Love must be a fantasy or delusion like self-awareness…circles within circles…lapping, overlapping, twisting round, across and through.  A wovenness.  A magnetism, I think I meant earlier – a lust of imagination – would not knowing another be as futile as knowing oneself?  I think.  Learning by observation, interaction, what you cannot but effect, cannot become separate from?

A woman reads to me at night.

Celldom

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, meaningLeave a comment

Click the image for the first entry:

34-IMG_0708

            They brought me a pencil.

Just as easily broken, but the softness and variations of shading are gentler, and it emits a soothing sound (whatever “soothing” might mean for me here).  As well, I am able to watch it exhaust itself, and must keep rotating it within my fingers to fashion readable markings.  I do enjoy whispering in these lines with graphite.  Its liminal appearance and capacity for subtlety and starkness.

A pencil accomplishes something (I am thinking).  Makes tangible the dust and fog – our weathers of uncertainty.  You have to squint a little to make it out when used for forming language, and it quickly evaporates, fades.  Feels more made of matter than an ink pen…more temporary and inevitably fragile, decomposing.

They led me to the library today, accompanied closely, of course.  I saw more colors, shapes and forms than I have seen for weeks.  Selection was limited but there were some illustrated texts on natural science and even a few collections of art.  “What do you think these pictures express?” they asked of paintings or sculptures I paused upon.

“Look” I said, “look.”

I pretended sullen and began to ecstatically absorb – lines with dozens of colors peeking about the edges, throwing some other sector of the painting into bright relief, leading my eyes like young tight calves signaling, dashing about in summer.  My eyes leapt about after splotches and strokes, sunk slowly into (imagined) vast planes of layer upon layer of shading and tone (what an interestingly borrowed term!), scratched back, built over, washed in and out.  I danced through sprays of evocative squiggles, hyphens, circles, blocks and splatters, all in the space of half of an hour (does ‘space’ really apply to sequence?  To time? – “Don’t get hung up on words” again, always afraid I’ll disappear more fully, remove to too far a distance).

And why should they (or you) care?  Why should anyone?

broken pencil

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

            Too much shading, pencil evaporated, disappeared (literally “before my very eyes!” – what a ridiculous statement – as if eyes were anything without the information of the hands!)

Why distance is required.

This pen appears to be blue, although by the light I am provided to scribble by, it is difficult to tell (Ha!  Eyes even need speech to operate!)

What messages are all our so-called senses constantly inundating our poor cerebrum with?  Life is one massive assault on minds from birth until its end.  It’s no wonder then, is it?

One requires a kind of distance to “see” (observe, perceive, etc.).  How might one achieve this necessary gap from what one must inevitably be the substance and content of?  One needs a mirror and a separate self.  I believe this is variously referred to as “dissociation,” “transference,” “schizophrenia,” “writer.”

It is suggested that I attempt to describe further what I am noting down.  I already know that is not possible.  “Ouroborous” I say, and close my lips and eyes, quieting my hands.

Tyranny of Transition

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, human, identity, Journallings, meaning2 Comments

Greetings all – I wanted to apologize for the sloppy frenzy of disregulated writings I’ve been releasing with little meditation or editing of late.  “In the midst of things…” somewhere near the crossover looping of composition, storage, digestion, excretion, and growing…I’ve found it somewhat difficult to know what it is I am doing aside from what must be done.

400px-Cycles_of_Life

Feeling change,

an entering of halves and fractions

tired and ecstatic

sad and delighted

moving on and along.

Having lost and lost and lost

while ever continuing to gain,

such simple equations

of little sense

yet filled with meaning

a meager promise

and maximal joy.

Thanksgiving

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, Language, meaning, Music1 Comment

Thanks

Thanks to all of you I have become aware of – for creating, expressing and sharing your thoughts, ideas and works – giving me the opportunity to engage.

Thanks

And thanks to those of you who take the time and consideration to engage my thoughts, ideas and works – giving things a life beyond my small circumference.

Left to Say

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, relationships, Writing8 Comments

felzmann-swarm

What she said was.

And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.

What she said was

I…

To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.

Even I’d be overwhelmed.  Why with the even?

What she said was

It is too much.

I…

But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.

Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…

I cannot.

.

Think of where that leads!

She said

She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.

I cannot.

Is what she said.

She says.

I listen like a camera.

I record.

Her stillness moves too much.

Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.

I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.

.

She says it is too much, I will not try.

But I am trying.

Which does not change.

Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.

She can’t decipher.

What it is.

She will not say.  Says I cannot.

I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.

(Depress, record).

She will not can.

I take a picture.

It does not hear.

.

And what she says is

There’s too much for me to wager on a word

Even in flocks

Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,

Even in swarms.

I blink.

I snap the shutters.

She has said nothing

She will not say

I hold the stillness, how it flutters.

Silence seems.

Seems only.

But what she says is

She cannot.

.

The birds swoop past

And there is nothing

Left to say.

Compositional Caveat

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Journallings, Reflections, Writing7 Comments

Greetings any readers.  I wanted to let you know that I am quite aware of the imperfections of my recent series of draft blogs.  These are first draft typings that I am doing mostly to convince myself that I am not ONE thing (a graduate student) and to have an outlet for unrestrained creative work outside of my studies.  I apologize that I currently do not have the time, attention or energy to perfect them prior to posting – and beg your latitude and generosity in browsing them.  Being that they are first occurrences of these words and this strange little trail, I more than welcome any and all feedback as to what might capture your attention or what is off-putting about their style, content or formal appearance.  I thank you for your graciousness – perhaps more time will open for more careful production by the first of the year….

N W Filbert

Interstices – continuing in between

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

more sections arriving from the Beginnings and the Second

– 3 –

Message being – she looked at me, incredulously.

– “What and/or Who – are you?” she requests.

I don’t know.  No one knows, I said, half-joking, persisting, prolonging, staying alive.

Longing = staying alive.  Longing = I’m still alive.  And I look at her, longer.  Which means: if only I knew.  The interstice (according to me).  We converge.  A gaze.  I must go.

That’s what I wanted.  The choice.  The decision.  A godlike thing for a fragile, finite boy.  The both of them: god – a fragile, finite boy.

No one owns.

When I returned, I could have said “My love, I am not present with you now.  I am in a future predicted by a possible past.  I am afraid.  I am not here.”

She might have responded: “I see and hear and understand that you are not here with me.  I too will retreat, remove, go away, until you return to me – here, to here.”

I babble on.

But I don’t say “Hello, my love.  I am not present.”  No, what I speak instead is a muddled report of my feelings and fears, my ideas – my present experiencing – a gummy wad of future and past, uninformed by where I am (with you) or who I am with (you) or when (now).  Constructed instead by where I believe I have been (past), where I think we are heading (future), and how I feel about that (afraid).

She recoils.

“I’m going away now” she says.  Which is not where I am.  Not with me.

But I meant.  I meant to say (once I figure out where I actually am): “Hello love.  I am afraid.  I am past and future.  I am absent.”

To which she replies: “Good to know.  Tell me when you arrive, here.  With me.”

Here now.  Or, Nietzschean-ly now/here, is that, and “exactly” : unlocatable.  Nowhere.  NOW + HERE…present.  It can only be lived, not thought.  Thought is too slow.  Lags ahead, leaps behind.

Oh you, I might have said.  And she may have recognized me.  Perhaps.  Now.  Here.  Presently – in the nowhere – the between – the “Interstice.”  Where what occurs, occurs.

“Hello.  I love you.”

– 4 –

Finite, fragile boy.  The fragility and finitude are true, I suppose, but not unquestioned.  However they withstand (the questioning).  They withstand the questioning.  Because I don’t know, and it is not wisdom, this cloud of unknowing, it is finitude, and I am fragile, not only because it’s true.

I am fragile because not all the branches hold.  When climbing.

– “What is it we are speaking of?” she asks (she – the you – asks me – the I).

Past and future, I might have answered.  The unknowing.  But did not.  Instead said – “unreliable.”  Rises, passes away.  Novel-to-familiar.  First one thing then another, desire fades.  I am not stimulus.  Enough.  For no reason.

I, illogical.

You, burdened.  And thus you sigh.  (She sighs her burden, a question).

And I retort.  “No.”  Or, “don’t go.”  But you might, because I have gone (or didn’t arrive, not HERE, not NOW, but somewhere else made of cobbled up pasts and unpredictable aheads).

“I love you.”

But how can that be?

It can’t.  Yet it is.

Perhaps.

I don’t know.  But it is not wisdom.