Category: creative writing

Fits & Starts

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, hope, life, Writing3 Comments

What scribbles out the sides, longing for a place to go…

while I’m busy with other things

743-C.TWOMBLY.

The sentences broke between them. Β Not twisting or scrambling, no encrypted script noising up communication; more like letter parts and chunks of words crumbling away before they even bridged the gaps. Β Sayings that collapsed on themselves as they emerged.

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At the point we begin imagining ourselves insane and institutionalized, conjuring car wrecks or dreaming deaths in the family to avoid our obligations…we are well-advised that something has gone wrong…

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Whenever what might be called an “encounter” occurred between them, everything else grew less pressing, less…significant or unsurvivable. Β She became a solution and a re-solution all at one go…

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

fragments, in other words.

The days have to be enough…they’re all we have.

Velocity and Friction

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, Fear, fiction, love, relationships, Self-Doubt, Writing2 Comments

This uncovered writing has parts that feel like 16-year-old wordplay mixed with the aging man…sigh.

FROM THE 9 NOTEBOOKS

desert driving

Velocity and Friction

9 Notebooks

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experience, identity, Kafka, life, notebooks, Writing1 Comment

In an act of rebellion and a kind of self-serving exorcism or slate-clearing (what blog is NOT an attempt atΒ an entity’sΒ expression, communication?), and facing the duress of weeks burdened with commitments and inescapable responsibilities…[in other words]…I intuitΒ I am encountering a “time” (weeks / months / foreseeable futures?) that I deduceΒ as laden – somehow preordained – for preoccupations of employment, previously established obligations – freighted with encumberances complexly negotiated…[under pressure I compose]…and so I search for aΒ project [as is my way] that is FOR ME[?] (something autotrophic, self-cannibalizing and nourishing at once, individually comprised and contained) an insurrection and defiance honoring self [so I surmise] facing compulsion…

…and I unearth these 9 Notebooks…all aborted undertakings from the past 12 months…via which I propose to mount mutiny by posting all that seems potentially warranted in them [upon re-reading as if the first time, long forgotten]…toward little other purpose than for purging, opening, erasing – a clearinghouse of efforts – that might evolve toward some novel substitution, unforeseenΒ modification, development,Β emergence…

“this is what directs him to learning – where he may encounter fragments of his own existence,

fragments that are still within the context…”

– Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka –Β 

9 Notebooks

There will be stories, concepts, poems, characters, reflections, essays…and ephemeral scraps like these…

  • think feel – attune to meaning – reflect and refract
  • befriend your body, take care with your mind
  • be gentle, be open. Β move fluidly, breathe
  • go alert to your dreams
  • wish more than hope, walk don’t run, run sometimes
  • be careful of rules, they’re always changing, it’s the nature of the rule, the measure, the standard
  • keep your eyes and ears open, along with heart and mind – only let things close into pleasure and pain – and that more of a wince
  • don’t be afraid of your story – write and rewrite it, edit and revise, revise, revise, and write it again
On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, human, meaning, Writing6 Comments

Witt Quote

Sometimes it seems, it takes me so much time (it seems) to find whereof I can speak…

An attempt viewed in incompletion

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, human, identity, Journal, Poetry1 Comment

sad skeleton

Impromptu

Arid time and things, they pass

Erase, not quite, deteriorate

Inexact as well, but depleting

Depleting.

Depleting.

.

Not exactly end, ending

Never a beginning

Ever picked up midstride

Midstream

Only ever in the midst

.

Tiring then,

Worn down,

Depleted, she said,

Exhausted,

.

and yet what from?

From what is he so tired

unto ruin?

What is ruin-ed?

What never was?

Perhaps.

.

Always midstride, then

Nearer to the end

this depletion

Depleting

.

nothing

Begun ever

Certainly nothing

ever completed.

Always midstride,

and nearer to the end,

incompleted, and

depleting

Depleting

.

Unable to keep up with 1/8 of the 9-year-old,

worrying the 10, the 17, the young man

fails the partner

fails the weather

failing his own mind

Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β  own dreams

Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β  his own body

.

ideas

.

Depleting

.

Always midstream,

frozen in place

nearer to the end

this present

Depleting

.

Would like to write it out

Write it off

Pick up again

Declare a start

But he can’t

or won’t

.

Nearing the end,

Never getting there,

(near completion, never that)

only begun and that just barely

joined midstride

nearer to the end

simply depleting

.

Inexorably

.

Without fail.

The one thing without fail.

The one absolute success.

The one almost-completion:

.

depletion.

Depleting

.

Always midstride

and nearer to the end –

very much like dancing

on bleeding broken legs

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Experience, Journal, life, Writing4 Comments

Losing

Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness.Β  Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again.Β  Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand.Β  Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind.Β  Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins.Β  Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind.Β  One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.

– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –

Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991.Β 

For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.

Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.

Reading.Β  Writing.Β  Reading.Β  Writing.Β  Reading.Β  Writing.Β  Thinking.

Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,

the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,

grew redundant with desire…

…desire for language to do some certain things,

…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:

to write the ambiguities.

Repeatedly:Β  to be a writer of β€œthe grey,” β€œthe foggy,” the layered and the liminal.Β  Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear.Β  That light in which even our shadows go unseen.

Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,

encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,

my writing desire grows more active,

toward the active,

and its happening,

writing verbally,

writing living:

to write losing.

Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity.Β 

Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.

TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING

to loose losing

…perhaps to lose it…

…face to endlessness…

will he make it?

Provisionally, some fiction

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Current Reading, dreaming, Experimenctes, fiction, meaning1 Comment

PROVISIONALLY

– a novel? –

We untiringly construct the world in order that the hidden dissolution, the universal corruption that governs what β€˜is’ should be forgotten [Death, or its refusal] in favor of a clear and defined coherence of notions and objects, relations and forms…

-Maurice Blanchot-

Thought and writing weave an apprenticeship…

…it will not hold, meaning and words, it will not hold.

-Dan Beachy-Quick & Matthew Ghoulish-

our limited mode of access to reality

-Laurie Scheck-

The novel hurled to the ground breaks into verse and achieves a perfect synthesis

-Ben Lerner-

each page a fractured, beating thing

-Laurie Scheck-

He woke far too early, and could not back to sleep.Β  Even slumber.Β  Broken into verse.Β  Eyes needled with discomfort, asking for their closing, refusing to stay shut.Β  And her.Β  Her, the one pushing away, the one who woke him, the one asking him to β€˜please move farther’ when there is no room.Β  And so he enters a deep – after a fashion, or of a sort – a sleepy sleepless land, an engagement like great fiction.

Without synthesis and not unbroken, but scattered in its way, as insomnia might be, like stars, like sky, the bewilderment of travel.Β  An apprenticeship in weaving.Β  The dreaming in the waking.Β  Age-old questions, rich and beautiful: unanswered.Β  The meaning and the words continue refusing to hold.Β  Something β€œlike” that, unlikably.

our words are so light that they keep opening out into questions…

…when you affirm, you still question

-Maurice Blanchot-

Impromptu

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Experience, grief, human, life, love, meaning, Poetry4 Comments

Death.

Abundance.

Extravagant generosity of depletion.

Lust with which the world gives way.

And life.

Things.

Prominence.

.

I have entered a world

in which I am

saddened

begladdened

nostalgic

and eaten away

.

It is “Today”

this world –

the realm, the sphere, the moment:

Now.

A time that’s never,

only almost

and a just-was.

.

Each beginning

what equals

another end.

ThatΒ time.

What was.

What will be.

What I remember

and predict.

.

The first day

once again;

each possibly

the last

.

It is like this –

each time –

it is the present:

that attachment

that letting go.

Incessant welcome,

and its goodbye.

FYI – in margins

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Experience, life, WritingLeave a comment

Although nearly silent, or, too busy to conjure and compose, or…

I have not given up, having not ceased,

somewhere in the mix of these,

somewhere between voices…

ASPECTS OF WRITING

To 2015, then

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Image, life, motion, Poetry, wisdom2 Comments

“Great changes in life are always a help…”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky-

A STEP AT A TIME

Now one eye daylight

and one not

there was a lifetime

before they flew

their true colors

but I must have known

the moment I was born

the pans of the balance

swinging along with me

always two poles

with the seasons rocking

between them

.

and the familiar the unexplored

the city the country

abroad almost at home

and home never quite there

just the way it was before

.

left foot right foot

on the same way

my own way

of finding and losing

and in my own time

coming to one

love one place

day and night

as they came to me

.

but the knowing and the rain

the dream and the morning

the wind the pain

the love the burning

.

it seems you must let them come

so you can let them go

you must let them go

so you let them come

– W. S. Merwin