“the writer must expose himself to his exteriority”
-William Brogan-
In the process of inscription, I am neutral. Ambiguously being. Neutered.
Existing via language that has not yet been written opens a sort of potential – possible becomings, as yet unknown, unidentified – possible positings of the impossible – WRITING enaction. I am unspecified before the letters which commence demonstrating what / who / how as It (this human) encounters them – imagines, recalls, learns, selects, experiments and undoes, chooses and deletes. Engaging with the sea. With hearsay and learning, words read or perceived, borrowing, borrowing, sifting and hybridizing.
From wherever, therefore, whomever, toward knows-not-what…IN THE MIDST…WRITING: activity, action, attempt…Everything trying.
A human. A person. Acting. Toward what ends? Perhaps to say. To express. To communicate. To discover. Invent. Investigate. Imagine. To play. To die. Not to die. Becoming / evincing / composing / traversing ‘knows-not-what.’ Anything. Nothing. Living…to Death.
This is why. This is why my own ‘need-to-write.’ To become. To try. To live on. To keep going. Living toward, forward, into… perhaps.
Not-knowing I do not know. At the edge, or a limit. Searching a way. To say. To discover. To hear. To emerge. Wanting to express, to find out, to dialogue – capable of expressing “Very little…almost nothing,” I “try again. Fail again,” and hopefully (but “no matter”) “fail better.”
The internal urgency to write rather than speak, or to speak writing or even write speaking arising when I don’t know the words with which to.
‘The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words.”
-Maurice Blanchot-
Selecting the pen, scribbling into the paper when there are no words (that I know) for that which (before words) I experience an urgency toward.
Therefore…working and playing – experiment and effort – name-changing and changeling – It commences. Exploring. Expeditions into letters and language. Into sounds, mouths and breaths. Into indeterminate dreams and dubious memories. Desires and wishes and hopes. To connect or converge. To speak or hear back. To know by finding out. WRITING: to learn by failing.
“becom[ing] the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges”
-Maurice Blanchot-
Melancholy (Lispector, Pessoa, Beckett, Jabes, Kafka, Blanchot?) and ecstatic (Rilke, Mallarme?, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Cixous?) human activity/task/capacity. “Need.”
“That there is language.”
Begin. Again.
at the point at which nothing can be done with words
***************************
I attempt to express the extent of my experience of love…
Endeavor to language particular beauty…
Strive to tell you how I… try to say…
Make effort to describe my children, the cheek/lip/ankle/voice/presence of my beloved, the eye contact and thought-contact of a friend, paw of a kitten, core of a concept, element of a scent, a breeze, a trace, a view…
Venture some new construction, a world, characters, possibilities…directions and directives…
“To recognize yourself in… To multiply your likenesses”
-Edmond Jabes–
And what do you suppose it is to be a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” human? To be named? Alias Harlequin?
What do you suppose it might be like to be “Ida Sophia Lind Filbert”? “Jada Lynette Smith”? “Oliver Myshkin”?
“Hallie Noel Linnebur”?
“Tristan Rene Wells Filbert”? “Simon H. Lilly”? “Aidan Stafford”? “Herman Melville”? “Paul Feyerabend”? “Rachel S. Como”? “Paul O’Callahan”? “Meghan Miller”? “Jim H. Charles?” “Warren Charles Farha”? “Amanda Marie Lind”? “Fernando Pessoa”?
A cow. A particular cow – an Hereford – on a particular plot of land in Mitchell County, Kansas?
“Plato”? “Kathy Downes”? “Ortho Stice”? A Welsh Corgi “Tippy”? “Napoleon Bonaparte”? “Charles S. Peirce”? The clerk at the grocery store? “Christopher Fynsk”? That Forest Ranger? A pet hamster “Jacques”? “Claudius”?
WHY SHOULD ANY ONE HUMAN BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?
WHY SHOULD ANY ONE ORGANISM BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?
What means: “EFFECT”?
“William Shakespeare”? “Avital Ronell”? “God”? “John Wayne Gacy”? “Helena Bonham Carter”? “Microsoft”? A caterpillar (be specific)? “Mahatma Ghandi”? A sparrow? Molecules composing particular dust?
WHAT IS?
how are we able to ask that question?
WHAT ARE WE?
how might we be “WHOs”?
Starting local:
What might it be like – as a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (Nobody) – to BE a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (A body)?
I’m not sure HOW to answer that.
“Perhaps writing means overcoming all resemblances within the very heart
of resemblance, being finally like yourself, like nothing.”
Edmond Jabes –
i.e. How that can be answered.
– WHO or WHAT answers – ?
WHAT MIGHT IT BE LIKE…TO BE?
(qualified to ANSWER)
can ANYthing “answer”?
does “answering” imply “language”?
WHAT IS AN ANSWER?
(in relation to – ?)
What is(?) Nathan Wayne Filbert, Alias Harlequin?
IS “Nathan Wayne Filbert”?
WHAT IS?
WHAT IS IS?
(how?)
WHAT IS A QUESTION?And WHY/HOW can a question be asked?
WHAT IS IT – are our – ideas? – To “IMAGINE”?
what are ideas?
What might it be to “conceive”?
“to generate concepts” (D&G)
framings of our world-experience
[WHY? HOW?
WHAT FOR?]
WHAT is a “person”? HOW? WHY? WHO?
Always and ever – HOW & WHY can we / do weASK?
WHO QUESTIONS?
(WHAT)?
(HOW)?
Something begins
(in/with all this)
it would seem
(it seems)
it seems that something begins in/with questioning
Alias Harlequin, i.e.
– the one whom this effects, the one on whom this has effect, the one (same? No!) affected by him or her, by whom and it. By this. This. That. By Other, others, and therefore, Alias again, patchworked and quilted, becoming, undoing, altering. Alias.
“Presumably most writers have many more ideas than they are able to act on”
– Ivan Vladislovic, The Loss Library –
Alias Harlequin – identities – is as is affected, effects, effected with/by.
Alias, i.e. as effected by “Hallie Noel Linnebur”; as effected (generated? Co-composed-with-) “Pauline Margaret Kresin Filbert”; the St Bernard “Zorro”; a specific train on a particular journey at a particular time; that mountain in that moment; Dec. 16, 1997 – a flu; and so on…
Alias – as situated in moments – e.g. “each one.” Harlequin – the human surname quilted with environment (micro-to-macro) in concourse. “Alias” as the “name in shreds” – the fragmentary and provisional, pragmatically specifiable address.
Ambiguous and fluid (like “river” itself – capable of designation but inconsistently contained) transient yet locatable, in form…perhaps. Yet no. “Alias” perhaps the medium (in-between) of morphing form and varying substance – what nothing also is (is not).
Name/term/signal/sign (“Alias”) as related to HNL, Dr. K, Dostoevsky, rustled grass, these sounds, this space-time and its company (surround) and then again, these again (but never “again”) – designating “NOWs”. Perhaps. It depends.
What or Who, How “Alias Harlequin” ALWAYS depends on a totality of other dependencies, as it were (or is?) “As such.”
Alias Harlequin, representative? Not that can of worms. AND the “thing” itself? (network of momentary dependencies-in-relation)?
What might we call (it/him/etc.) then? And what would “calling” be/do – how?
WHO questions?
This Alias Harlequin.
“I am already so much the inscription of a divergence…What I was, if that could be described, was a whirlwind of tensions…”
–Helene Cixous–
“A word is binding and at the same time breaks our bonds. To which of them shall I, one day, owe my freedom?”
508 N. Belmont – Wichita, Kansas (son & daughter born)
???? (house) – Grand Rapids, Michigan
???? Cornell – Grand Rapids, Michigan
L—– Switzerland
Alt—- UK
1151(?) Hermitage – Grand Rapids, Michigan (son born)
350(?) S. Clifton – Wichita, Kansas (son born)
New Hope, Pennsylvania
3028 E 2nd N – Wichita, Kansas
In no particular order. Revisits. Can’t remember much. Side streets, neighborhoods – nothing is familiar. More apt to recall where friends or lovers lived than “self.” Makes a list:
-Baxtrom – Welch – Kremenak – Kruse – Evans – Lathrop – Keil – Allen – Erickson – Welch – Rose – Martha – Neel/Franklin – Krieger – Fall – Bond – Franz – Jones – Hartig – Russell – Griffin – O’Callahan – Farha – Goldbarth – Coleman – Harder – Reffner – calls them “foundational relations” – friends and lovers slewn together.
Dostoevsky, Giacometti, Kafka, Lispector, Cixous, Blanchot, Nietzsche, Jabes, Beckett, Wm. James, CS Peirce, Lorca, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Pessoa, Schiele, DF Wallace, Kozelek, Musil, Fernandez…and those lying in wait: This Will Destroy You, Vila-Matas, Marcus…Harlequin has inscribed in his flesh.
Might be useful to make a story.
The way things are – with everything falling apart, coming undone, wearing down or out, dwindling in function – calls for such measures – i.e. fitted to new purposes, given new life, repurposed, renamed, remixed, restored.
Making lists against memory. Visiting / revisit. Trying.
It’s coming apart.
He’s worked long in this manner.
Something breaks or dies, goes defunct…fix it with change.
Washing machine, body parts, relationships, parents. Tools or appliances, activities and paths… rather than forcing some obedience to its past or presence – alter the context (as large as it needs to be – micro to macro) round about it, until its usefulness is assuaged or established, regained or reconstructed. Until it makes sense – AS-IS-NOW.
“Presently” includes all of above. His body – losing ‘shape,’ gaining aches, kinks, and torsions; doorways and windows, paint and light fixtures; machines and vehicles grinding down – leaking, cracking, and broken; dwindling desires of his partner; increased independence and mystery of his offspring…nothing quite capable of ‘control.’ Employer threats of performance and reviews; family tensions of politicized faiths; stamina shot as both parent and friend; patient lover and male…
…all it requires a new mythology – some new scaffolding – structure and content and aim.
What story is. What languaging is for. Imagine – abstraction and dream. What neuroses. Subject and author and plot. Continuous revision – the edit and pulp and rewind. We cut and paste and press ‘new.’ File, document, folder, image: LIFE.
We rename.
There is story and language and code. Writing and saying and message. Harlequin’s not the first to say “I think by writing” and perhaps he will not be the last. Some perspective invented, some objective fabrication, some construction of a feeling of reflection, recount. Grappling after what is getting lost. A dream that a ruling, an external, can be seen or encountered, manipulated and tested. If an accounting exists, there is material (reality) AGENCY to work WITH, THROUGH and ON.
Harlequin forms words.
Yet there are none that he ‘makes’ – just borrows, revises. Uses, shapes, and arranges. Gives place. Inscribes in some ancient tradition – it’s “writing” – using marking or code in conventions. Absorbing idiosyncracies into generalities. Depending on a community that shares such signs – can lend, agree, and interpret. It’s fragile. Insecure and uncertain. There’s no meaning. Like the earth – writing just IS. To be taken and changed, charged and made and appropriated. Dis-card-ed.
What was a ‘card’ but token carrying message or code? In-formation – letters arranged. Who knew – and why – and how? Doesn’t matter. Undone. Broken and over and through. Electronic currency now – if this you can even decipher (decode).
Letters, stories, and language. Harlequin marks on a page – sets of signals. The cells, the emotions, the organs – signals and signs. Tired and old and afraid – always dying. Since day one, always dying – fearfully. How It Is. He remembers and prays (in a way) – a communication with the dead – mediated – to the Beckett, the Kafka, the Dostoevsky. David Foster Wallace, Hegel and Marx. Maybe Nietzsche, Deleuze or Blanchot. And the ladies: Lispector, Cixous and Dickinson. Doesn’t matter. For Harlequin, all a part of the same realization – it comes, it ages, it goes, and it’s gone. Human living. Human life. Just what is: How It Is.
Labor, relation, and trial. What is being? Labor, relation, and trial.
He succumbs. Is succumbing. Is tearing apart.
A story makes of it what it will.
You can have your knowledge – facts or theories, experiences and concepts – but the stories reason and resemble them. Lend them ambiguity and occasional senses. Possibilities.
Perchance they go together like this. Or like that. Or another way. Stories. Sanity. Something.
Something becoming – a linked set of symbols in an ecological order. Stories try experience on for fittings. Until it fits. Until it tatters, or is otherwise overused or outgrown.
Becomings and undoings. Compositions and deletes. All the edits (on the fly). Survival.
Over, through, attempting…beyond, become, a traversing or explore. An assay. Interactive. Emerging. To eventuate.
*
Someone is writing for something to happen. To participate in occurrence, to entangle in becoming. To begin, continue, hoping toward an unknowable end. Writing.
Like loving, eating, dreaming, or survival – one of many ways.
I am uncertain why I am sharing this, it comes from a personal email response to a friend, but as I was writing it, things that were coming up resonated profoundly in me. Composition just does this for me. I suppose I want it on public record for my own remembering. That I learn things about me, that change is possible, that decay is transformative. Okay then I am posting a personal reflection for myself – to declare it more widely in lieu of a personal social group.
“leaning upon nothing because nothing offers support”
-Maurice Blanchot-
The following is a response to a scholarly conversation regarding philosophy, science, cognition and so on…entirely out of place or sync, but seemed a personal confession on the passage of time and what it reveals…
Greetings —-. It is good to hear from you. I’ve been inundated per usual with family activities – good and tiring – and disorienting to my habits of reflection to some extent. Feeling a bit bewildered re: semester start-up and the madness it brings, and yes, missing ANY considered interaction and dialogue. I feel lucky to have encountered you.
Wee, random breaks and work-from-home days incite my nostalgia and bodily recall of creating creative work in language. I ache for it. Loss of its regularity is a depletion that changes me. But then I read, “the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay” from a book about butterflies. And “we have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning” from a commentary on it by Rebecca Solnit, a fine book – A Field Guide to Getting Lost that I like to read while traveling.
I suppose as the library is closed and our work quiet and insect-like on research, curriculum, and admin reports back here…my sociality turns to the work of being open and refusing stress in interacting with my beautiful children. Which clicks onward into the ever-insistent questioning I face regarding whether there are adult relationships that can be predominately nourishing or reciprocally intimate. Do we offer one another boon? Any of us? Our interactions have consistently done so, and I am very thankful to you for that. So much conversation wears on me with the subterfuge and maneuvering to get anywhere near meaningful discourse. I suppose I am tired, and perhaps in a strain of melancholy. The wishing I could sit back with a drink and listen to intelligent talk without necessity of defense or critical acumen. Just enjoying that we can. Imagine and inform one another as humans. I want this to mean something for me. To mean I go about things variantly, shy from exhaustion and welcoming to possibilities. From where does this determination to endure come from? To “make the most of” idle repartee, body language, archaeology of behaviorisms and attitudes, – supplying too much (or inordinately) in order to learn in situations. I dream of the luxury of perception and interpretation without analysis. Reception. Or where analysis co-creates itself. Mutuality. Enjoyment versus labor. Or an effortless labor to enjoy. Ahem. Off-track and losing…
All this, I suppose, to apologize for my lack of acumen in the dear and full emails you and —- have provided…and probably an explanation of my messages of links rather than thought. Others’ works as hopefully substantial stand-ins for my intellectual lack or confusion. I do not know where the path is at present. Just spinning in a lot of literature and activity. Confession.
Trying to view decay in a hopeful manner. The slow tears in relationality that introduce distances. From friends, to partners, to ‘self’ – the flux of it all. Many seem to have a greater capacity than I for working thematically regardless of internal/external context. More flexible beings, I suppose, less bound by circumstance and scenario. Ah well, this is no relevant response to your missals. Apologies. They enliven me – simply that thought and invention are going on around me – so please share them all as they arise – it is a great matter of hope for me to watch thought and process in others. A stay against loneliness. Thank you. As I age along, some confusions do seem to dissipate…particularly confusions of my own blindnesses. What nourishes me: intimacy (emotional, intellectual and physical), the thought and imaginative work of others, people striving to process experience on multiple levels, quiet & rest & reflection. The commerce of ideas and bodies – entangled minds and bodies – passion and gentleness and reflection. When these dissipate or decay or are absent in some strange idiosyncratic equilibrium, life is just harder for me to insist on. And how terribly crucial the activity of writing is for me in my own ability to process my experiencing. A weird alchemical embodied activity for me that seems to bring forth learning, feeling, imagination and all those characteristics I would like to take root in myself, to be me. I am better when I write. Better when I love. Better when I rest. Better with meaningful dialogue. All sounds simple and general, but revealed ever more insistently to me as my epidermis thins.
Another turn of the wheel, bellows to the desire to thrive before the end.
The year’s end approaches. Writing by hand grows slower. In need of practice. The ubiquitous milieu of technology. A differing technology, and our relation to it. Our co-evolution with it. My father’s handwriting is beautiful. Still. Differentiation of the digital. Digital purposes. Digits accustoming to tapping, percussive, losing their ability to flow, to caress. I squeeze this pen too tightly. As if in fear of losing.
Embedded in each loss a gain, development, adaptation, transformation. Slowness for speed. Close- for hyper- (reading). Ambiguity for binary. Sloppy for distinct. Mystery – machinic. Unique for uniform. Elegance to efficiency. What is communication?
Interesting to me, easing my grip on the pen, recalling, desiring, hoping, [nostalgia]…
…it occurs to me:
Habitude. For years, approaching the blank page [paper] – began with “in the beginning was the word…” an “as if,” as if the void, emptiness, blankness of pulped tree afforded emergence, ex nihilo, some everclear clean unknowing evolution out from inchoate. Trace and track from complex disorder toward infinitely specifiable order. Each session a composition of the new…
I am struck by the assumption. Presupposition of potential: that ANYthing might blankly begin (already, like bicycling, shoulder-elbow-wrist-hand and its particular angles operating this ink-stick picking up pace, stretched and loosening, reaching stride). Presumption of absence, emptiness, a universal glory of “From nothing: This.” I create.
Happens no more. Reviewing the increasingly sparse occasions (with age and responsibilities) I am able to operate with technologies of paper, pen and hand-i-writing over the past few years of employment, reading, writing, parenting and relationship…the fundamental (as in foundational, originary) manner of approach…to composition, inception, expectation, hope and desire…is significantly altered.
The fidelity to languaging remains. That belief, commitment, conviction and trust that ordering the disordered – shaping absence, mattering energy – still transacts secrets into reveals, fabricates meanings of mysteries, is an activity of arbitrary author-ing/-ity; that experiencing’s a processing of signs, of signaling and symbol – that invention, discovery and behavior = complex activities/adaptations of interactive dynamic systems interlocking at multiple scales – inexplicable, indecipherable, far beyond observation or comprehension – and that action or activity actualizes SOMEthing = something unknown, unforeseen, “free” or “new” or potential simply via the inter-, intra- activity of operationalizing with an environment – IN it, part and particle, (that all ‘moments’ eventuate this)…and yet,
There is difference. Cermonializing, greeting, risking the activity of encountering, engaging, marking a blank page (against death, in hopes of being, realizing desires, imagining, etc.) no longer invokes “In the beginning…” or “word…” somewhere/sometime along the living this transmuted into “Who is writing – ?”
Space-time carved, empty notepad placed, pen inked and ready, and only the sensation, the amorphous geography of a question emanates – Who is writing here now?
No more an assumption that Someone prepares to express, incise, inscribe. No more presumption that given the space and the time “I” am an entity full of content waiting for production. No more Someone with Something to process, work out, or to say…
Simply – “Who is this coming to write?”
And any word will do. Any mark. But not just ANY word (although also that) – whatever word(s) come to occur between the living – the instrument – the surface – and said ACTIVITY, INTERACTION, RELATION becomes its own answering.
In the “opening” – questioning and answering are one and the same: RESPONSE and ABILITY.
Writing, a certain sort of what might be culturally convened ‘creative writing’ – for me has become a constituting behavior/action of RESPONS-ABILITY. Given the temporary knot of my organism-in-its-environment or context…what inscribes here represents my ability to respond within it, at this time.
Who is this writing? replies in the writing, and also takes shape as a Who in the writing. In A beginning (inception of a specific way of acting) is neither Word nor Who but a bothness occurring in its occurrence…
Who is this writing?
“When I write I escape myself, I uproot myself, I am a virgin; I leave from within my own house and I don’t return. The moment I pick up my pen – magical gesture – I forget all the people I love; an hour later they are not born and I have never known them. Yet we do return. But for the duration of the journey we are killers. (Not only when we write, when we read too. Writing and reading are not separate, reading is a part of writing. A real reader is a writer. A real reader is already on the way to writing.)”
“poetic language directs us not towards what gathers together but rather towards what disperses, not towards what connects but rather towards what disjoins, not towards work but rather towards the absence of work […], so that the central point towards which we seem to be pulled as we write is nothing but the absence of center, the lack of origin…”
Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone. Suspect I can’t believe them. I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that. Won’t even attempt ‘within reason.’ Suggest.
There’s no “let me explain.”
– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly.”
Exactly the point, I would say, or nearly precise – that there isn’t. I don’t know. But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) we’re dismissed. Or not-missed – how to say it?
There’s a meeting. It seems. In a margin or more.
*
Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap?
I don’t know. I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer. Longer. It’s a fight against death, that small word. Simply, longer. With you.
*
Am I clear? Making any sense? I don’t know.
– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying,” she says “near ‘exactly.’”
I don’t know. It’s unwise.
And I hum when the words sound just so.
– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.
Interaction. Locution. Between (I am thinking).
“Interstitial,” I say. Interstitially? How could I know. It’s all susceptible to the mark. The mark of the question. I think of changing my own name. Have before. I like titles. It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music. I would be Mark, Remarking. The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved with a point…on everything = ?
“My point exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark. (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind, anything).
It’s okay. I’m familiar. Not that you worried. There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction. It’s just so (so it seems). “Just-So Stories” he wrote, long ago, they’re alike and akin, episodic. We describe.
Neither here and/nor there. Interstitial. In-between. What I wanted to tell her, to say. And I would have, had I known.
– “Known what, exactly?” she once said, and I stopped, for the meaning was lost, nonexistent. Just so.
“That’s just how it is” I had said. And don’t know, was surmising. The world hypothetical and inspired ( I thought, at the time ) – simply possible. I was wrong (perhaps). But she stayed (temporarily). The words lose their meanings.
All my Words are Silent 