Category: Current Reading

What I’m buried in this week or this moment

The Temptation to Exist

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

“’I am both wound and knife’ – that is our absolute, our eternity”

“the idolatry of becoming”

“blasted joys and jubilant despair”

E.M. Cioran

The Temptation to Exi(s)t

 

We’ve got our words all backwards.  Ever trapped in what we deny.  Our escape = net.

Space.  Time.

If we say it is all relative, yet act.  “Choose.”  Freedom is nothing.  The words, then, are all backwards, you see, we “mean” our opposites.

Desire.

Could cumulate as the evil.  But still – you see?  Hope for understanding, for wisdom, knowledge, some trivial insight.  Log of shipwreck: cling.

Desire.

Another enemy: “intensity.”  Synonym “passion,” carpe diem.  Opposite: freedom.

In-tense-ity.  State of inhabiting tension, clinging to stress, to invite suffering (“jubilant despair”).  Opposite: being. freedom.

A blasted joy.  (Suffering).  Opposite of freedom: want.  Making antonyms by definition: “to be.”

If we seize, choose, behave, acquire, reach, speak, move…”the idolatry of becoming” – antonym? = freedom.

Kingdom equals freedom.  Queendom.  Selfdom.  “To be”-dom.  Backwards words.  Backwords.

Opposite of intense: rest, quietude : thought and action one : in-sane.  Opposite of want, greed : poverty : possession-less, without, without within : beggar.

Freedom : opposite : control.  Self-, other-, environmental-, habitation-, security-.

Be/have : to exist is to grab, to steal, to do violence.  Being + having : system : be/have.  Opposite: freedom.

Say it backwards.  We say it backwards.

I shout “freedom” driving the blade into my throat, bloody want.  Cannot “have.”  Are (are NOT = desire to become – false worship – be/having).

Religion : human organization to be/have.  Become.  To be.  Religion as an argument for (against) existence.

Already ARE.  Before “being,” prior to “having.”  No need : freedom.  “Meaning” the opposite of what we say.

We’ve got our words backwords.

Backwards: have-been.  There it is clear.

The temptation of the system, the race or kind, was “to be” as something to have, to get, to come into, be-come…that existence was a goal, something to arrive at, achieve, seizing the days, the moments,

Synonyms: act, will, intent, purpose, do.make.say.think. to mean

Synonym: be/having

Opposite: freedom.

Existence having been from the first.

Having been = at the last.

Synonym : freedom : nothing.

 

A different kind of personal (2)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing2 Comments

secondly,

a fresh stack from the library yesterday…to soak into…

The Essential Peirce (vol. 1) – my hero

How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Blakewell

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Of Learned Ignorance by Nicolas Cusanus

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

The Temptation to Exist by E.M. Cioran

great philosophers who failed at love by andrew shaffer

Signeponge by Jacques Derrida

Drawing from the Glyptothek by Jim Dine

joy!

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Philosophy, Photography, Traces3 Comments

for instants!

J Walters's avatarCanadian Art Junkie

The Scribbled Line Portraits of illustrator Ayaka Ito and programmer Randy Church began as a class assignment before the stunning digital photography innovation came to public attention at a Toronto FITC workshop.

The series showing shredded human bodies integrated 3D and programming for a project with a three-day deadline while the two were at the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Ito and Church “put their models through the shredder” using a custom Flash drawing tool, HDR lighting, Cinema4D and Photoshop.

The project began as a class assignment and grew into a fully realized series which won an Adobe Design Achievement Award and has been featured in 3D World Magazine and Communication Arts Magazine.

A post from DesignBoom with more technical detail on the process, here.

NOTE: This is from the Art Junkie archives, 2012.

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Reminder…

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing3 Comments

    “”I write.”  This statement is the one and only real “datum” a writer can start from.  “At this moment I am writing.”  Which is also the same as saying: “You who are reading are obliged to believe only one thing: that what you are reading is something that at some previous time someone has written; what you are reading takes place in one particular world, that of the written word.  It may be that likenesses can be established between the world of the written word and other worlds of experience, and that you will be called upon to judge upon these likenesses, but your judgment would in any case be wrong if while reading you hoped to enter into a direct relationship with the experience of worlds other than that of the written word.”  I have spoken of “worlds of experience,’ not of “levels of reality,” because within the world of the written word one can discern many levels of reality, as in any other world of experience.”

-Italo Calvino-

p.s….

“A work of literature might be defined as an operation carried out in the written language and involving several layers of reality at the same time”

“The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work”

(further Calvino’s)

Affinities : Possessing the Wordless

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing4 Comments

The following quotations are from “Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)” by Jim Dine.  Where he uses “draw” or “drawing” substitute “write” or “writing” and I find a remarkable similarity with my own experience making things…I find his work and thought quite inspiring to my own and wanted to share with you many writers/artists/thinkers…

 

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“I’ve always had a wish to put down  marks”

“My mind was going and so was my hand”

“I love building up, erasing, losing it, bringing it back, taking it away.  I trust my method of not trusting”

“He’s always so frightened of failure and of finishing, and that moves me” (of Giacometti)

“But what is really the optimal situation for me is to get my brain around what I’m trying to do.  That’s all.”

“I have a total connection between my hand and my eye – it’s just that I can’t see sometimes”

“Drawing is not an exercise.  Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere.  Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey.  For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere.  The quest is to keep the thing alive – “

“I’m interested in making a vehicle within which it is possible to feel certain things…And these emotions don’t have words.  They really don’t”

“I want to get my drawing out of my heart the way photography accesses my marginal thoughts and images”

“The state of wanting to draw something, for me, is a way to capture it and that’s a primary emotion for me.”

“I want to possess them and what better way of possessing them than to draw them.  The reason I wanted to possess them is they reminded me of other things that are wordless”

“Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life”

THANK YOU JIM DINE!

PRESS ON – Thank You

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing7 Comments

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“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted,

nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”

-Sir Francis Bacon-

“One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change…

ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”

-Harold Bloom-

“everything directly accessible to us (in reading) – except for the perceived characters (letters and symbols and space) – would be only our ideas, thoughts, or, possibly, emotional states”

-Roman Ingarden-

           

RUSH

I’m thinking storm-wind and flood.

The press and surge of words and images.

I’m thinking adrenalin and frenzy.

WORD:PRESS

                        It dawns on me today that blogging incites and anxiety to produce.  A pressing to keep up and create.

There’s a radiance to that.

On the one hand, to feel it.  That, even just here, at WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of creative human beings thinking, expressing, making…exponentially increasing my already over-saturated reading list.

RUSH

                        And I mean it, it’s downright EXCITING to view and ingest the enormous, surprising, sincere and ever-expanding activity of humans!  (There’s a thank-you in that to all of you I’ve found so far!)              WHOOSH!    RUSH!

On the other…frenetic.  If “all human beings are the same, but everyone is human in their own way” (Adler on Franz Kafka), then you all are as limited as I by time and space and finitude…i.e. face the anguish of not being able to give the people and things in your immediate surround let alone verbal and visual artifacts from around the world what seems to be their due attention.  To weigh and consider, to respond.

I spend a lot of time studying semiotics and theories of communication – how we, as humans, might “put in common,” “share” – “thoughts, information and opinions through speech, writing, images or signs” – “crafting passages between places and persons.”

Hundreds of thousands (actually many more) – passages made sensible, visible, right here with every click on WordPress, vimeo, Weebly, etc…

So long to fears re: death of reading, of art, culture, any such ‘thing.’

And there’s the ‘rub.’  Visiting “philosophy” pages today, I was significantly encouraged by so much sustained argumentation going on.  Persons thinking hard and working it out with signs and gestures.  Photographer’s sharing their eyes and the difficult work of seeing.  Artists shaping the world through the world’s materials and all their minds and bodies process into it.  Our poets, our healers, each of us shaping one another’s days/minds/experiences.

So thank you ALL for this thunderous RUSH.  For the challenge to take care, to work and enjoy, to weigh and consider who we are, who I am, what I do, what I intend to create, present and offer…

Press on…read in…find value.

“What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible?…

I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear…

what is the fear inside language?  No accident of the body can make it stop burning”

-Anne Carson-

“Behind, always behind the things in a hurry to be, you must search for what is”

-Edmond Jabes-

The Open

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing2 Comments

“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?

Choose, why choose?”

-J.M.G. LeClezio-

“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know'”

-Robert Creeley-

“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”

-Michel Serres-

Incidental Courage in the Crevices

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing1 Comment

I’ve taken someone’s advice and picked up David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary – what a potent little delight!  Immediately slid into place with Alain de Botton’s On Love and Macedonio Fernandez’ The Museum of Eterna’s Novel; Jesse Ball’s The Curfew and The Way Through Doors.  Also moved me back to Daniel Handler’s Adverbs and (so-far) wonderful Why We Broke Up.  In the process, feeling forever stunted as a “writer,” I cracked A. Alvarez’ The Writer’s Voice yesterday to these jewels:

“For freelance writers like myself who belong to an endangered species which, as long ago as 1949 Cyril Connolly was already calling ‘the last known herd in existence of that mysterious animal the man of letters,’ writing is less a compulsion than a misfortune, like a doomed love affair.  We write because we fell in love with language when we were young and impressionable, just as musicians fall in love with sound, and thereafter are doomed to explore this fatal attraction in as many ways as we can…fifty years of writing for a living have taught me that there is only one thing the four disciplines have in common: in order to write well you must first learn how to listen.  And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers.  Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false.  It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire.”

Adding it up

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Philosophy, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Reading, Writing – the ‘Rithmetic

You know, I honestly don’t know why I think of the many things I think of.  “About” usually, yes, usually I can surmise why I stick to a thinking project – it might be something that troubles or worries me, maybe it involves something about which I care deeply or enjoy – then I’ll ruminate around on the subject or object for awhile, attempt to figure or follow the thinks, arrange some digits or sounds, contents, feelings or symbols until I make fit or get lost in the simple joy of tinkering.

But then other times, and really quite often, I can’t locate the instigative trail or balancing of reason for why (or how) items pop into or swish by my apprehending (apprehensive?) brain.

For instance, just now (and it’s precisely the unknowing that prompts me to write about it, to squeeze it through language), I was sitting quietly to desk after a very full day of soccer games, bicycle rides and birthdays, perusing Ron Loewinsohn’s Goat Dances, Anne Carson’s plainwater, Jon Anderson’s The Milky Way and Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays – a very normal way I have of grounding myself, discovering a location by mapping found paths, when sploosh! across the internet of my mind zipped:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”

            And then I stopped.  Closed the books, slid them aside, rested my chin in my hand and gazed toward nowhere, wondering what question that sounds-like-an-answer phrase was responding to or anticipating.

Why would I think that?

Lost in language like dancing and syllables, stars and night skies, withs and relation and choros, why would my only clear thought (recognizably anyway) be:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”?

            When something stops me like that, and I already hear a rhetorical response, but no answers satisfy and questions only multiply exponentially…

I grab loose blank notebook pages and a ball-point pen…

and begin doodling, dabbling, and “showing my work.”

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” (implied automatic resonant answer: because it does) leads precisely (in this case, given all the contingencies and conditions) to the chicken-scratching rambling preceding this period.

In other words, not to a solution, or perhaps even a working equation or problem, but simply to activity.  Reading, writing, thinking it out in lines, shapes and signs.

Now during all this scribble-sketching around the inceptive phrase, my bodymind has been mantra-ing responsorials:  “because it really does,” “because I’m not even aware of things happening until verified in language,” “because life just occurs and I don’t know about it until I manifest the experience some way – bounce it off of a counterpart or internal funhouse mirror (other’s words) to learn what it is and isn’t” and so on…so-called “reasons” I guess?  Hypothetical rationales for the random (apparently) phrase having typed itself in my nervous wirings?

The only “fact,” as I experience them, is that this phrase: “I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” clearly spat itself across the innards of my cranium while I was going about the very normal activity of recovering, soothing, pausing and nourishing myself on books at hand, wishing somewhere it hadn’t taken me all day to reach this quiet, wishing somewhere that all conversations went like this listening, wishing somehow I had something that felt like it needed to be written down, wishing somewhere that I understood myself.

And alas: a baffling sentence in response to no one silently carves and engraving on my consciousness:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depends on it”

My entire body replying: “well…YEAH!  It does!  It’s the only way YOU know that there’s possibly LIFE at all, and not just sensations, emotions, thinkings and dreams; reactions, responses and stimuli!  Without reading about it or writing words out I personally have no concrete object to sound my experience against, to test a happening – everything else out there from spouse to “god” is always moving, shifting, adapting, changing…just like me.”

“I guess I always read and write BECAUSE my ‘life’ depends on it”

Two Helpmeets Today (extended quotations for the journeying)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing2 Comments

1.  From Georgi Gospodinov’s And Other Stories:

“And our personal stories are the only moves, the only moves that help us postpone, at least for a while, the predetermined ending to our game.  And even though we are going to lose the game from the strategic point of view, the idle moves of our stories always postpone the end.  Even if they are stories about failure.”

2.  From Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights

The Hammock

When I lay my head in my mother’s lap

I think how day hides the stars,

the way I lay hidden once, waiting

inside my mother’s singing to herself.  And I remember

how she carried me on her back

between home and kindergarten

once each morning and once each afternoon

.

I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.

.

When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:

Do his father’s kisses keep his father’s worries

from becoming his?  I think, Dear God, and remember

there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:

They have so far to arrive.  Amen,

I think, and I feel almost comforted.

.

I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.

.

Between two unknowns, I live my life.

Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am

by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am

by outliving me.  And what’s it like?

Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?

A window, and eternity on either side?

Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.