From Laszlo Krasznahorkai: “Like a ninja.”

On June 11, 2015June 11, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, fiction, Language, meaning, Writing13 Comments

“In this system, nothing is more dangerous for an artist than success”

“Who made artists believe that art can be practiced only ‘successfully’? Who made them believe that for a book to reach its goal and its readers, the ‘taste-makers’ are absolutely necessary? How could they have allowed the critics, the editors, the owners of the chain bookstores, and so on, have so much power? And who made them believe that they are truly artists? Artists have come to believe that they, too, just like other people, need money and fame, money and fame for everyday life, moreover for being able to lead a lifestyle; and that these two repugnant things are seen as necessary for everything is not only tragic but ridiculous as well. What kind of artist or writer lives like that? Who is going to believe even a single line written? What kind of esteem can the art of our age garner for itself after even one such bout of deal-making? No, the artist’s needs are few: let there be something for him to eat and a place to live, and then every day he should circumambulate the city and country, like mendicants of old. Nothing whatever can be more important for him than his own personal dignity, and this is exactly what he loses forever after the very first deal-making transaction…And so what do I recommend? The taste of failure in place of success, poverty instead of wealth, anonymity in place of renown. For now, utter concealment as opposed to publicity, perfect camouflage to the point of invisibility, because what the artist who lives in personal freedom and independence finds himself confronting today is unbelievably strong, and seems invincible…above all else, an artist must be cautious. Like a ninja.”

all excerpts taken from a powerful volume of Music & Literature:

WRITING YOU

On March 22, 2015 By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, life, love, meaning, Poetry5 Comments

What I should do is phone; the circuitry

is there and we’re both somewhere in the circuitry.

I need to talk. What should I find to say?

You know how it is: it rings; you answer; no click;

no dial tone. Hello? Hello? No word.

Not even goodbye – I couldn’t give you that.

Listen to this: to write you requires a scheme,

subtends an apparatus, such that here

be an I, you be he there, space

discerns the entities , depicts them such

as the scheme requires. Are you lost? I am.

I want to be not lost. I write even so.

Tell me what to do. I want to show.

Schemelessness. Undress. To speak from that.

I want the secrecy; I want it said.

To speak from wordlessness. There are certain things

that happen and we don’t know: proteins meet

and shape each other. We are the husk of this.

Whatever happens happens in some such wise,

under attention. I hate all huskiness.

Let me be where it happens, let me be the hidden cells

and silent if silence is all there is to say.

I want to talk though. I want to talk to you.

I despair of what to say. Goodnight. Goodnight.

– William Bronk

WRITING MEANS CLIMBING THE STEPS OF OUR LACK

– as if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come..”

– Edmond Jabes –

An Open Letter on Statistical Analysis

On March 12, 2015March 12, 2015 By NW FilbertIn being, change, Current Reading, doing, Experience, human, life, meaning, Reflections, research, statistical analysis, timeLeave a comment

I used to shy away from Statistical Analysis as a means to meaning.

Now different thoughts occur.

Last night my daughter was struggling with 5th-grade division problems that involved endless remainders…

I used to be really uncomfortable with the “why?” of mathematics…

…last night I found it fascinating, as if it were opening entirely new sets of mysteries and unknowns to me trailing off as it did, like endless reflection and inquiry.

QUERY 1: “WHY?”

Common enough thought for a philosopher.

Seems to me the “good philosopher” (effective, useful, usable, relevant) consistently ponders and inquires into the Affect and Effect of whatever is under observation or scrutiny. What / How / Why / Where / & for Whom does it “mean” that we’re Doing / Being / Knowing this or that or what-not. Anything, really. Anything at all.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

Which got me to thinking…

what/how/why/where/when/for-whom do all these infographics, demographics, assessments, quizzes, ticked responses, reviews, # of views, feedbacks, “likes,” “unlikes,” and so forth “mean” for our Doing/Being/Knowing?

(what’s it all mean, Big Data [pronounced “Big Dadda”?)

QUERY 2: “Huh?”

WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

The question that drives, allows, enables any help a “philosopher” might be able to foster…

AND HERE COMES STATISTICAL ANALYSIS!

(the philosopher asks)…

For the moment, just…just-now, here, this-when…

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY MATTERS MOST TO YOU IN YOUR LIFE?

**************(Stop.)************

************(Breathe.)***********

************(Ponder.)*********

Let’s check out your personal statistics (YOU’LL have to do this part of the work – observation, comparison & contrast, open inquiry & interpretation)

for instance…WHAT things do you nudge toward qualitative analysis or quantitative analysis?

A few simple questions regarding:

time with children/partner/self/nature/friends/world (in relation to) time at work?
time scrolling Facebook / browsing internet (in relation to) time gazing at / listening to / caressing / doing-being-knowing-with your loved-ones?
time realizing time-tested wishes or longings (in relation to) accepted responsibilities?
time reading/moving/resting (in relation to) time watching/viewing/receiving
pleasurable time (in relation to) suffering time

and so on….

[or how well do such things mesh up / converge / resolve, etc?)

(finding ways statistical analysis might mean)

and then, of course, there’s the more totalizing EXPERIENCING of such analysis / account / record / actuality [REALITY]…

…at least ONE way a statistical analysis might MEAN?

(and a humane use of philosophy?)

(science & mathematics?)

(humanities & arts?)

INQUIRY

WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOU?

(maybe think of 3-5…rank them?)

HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF YOURSELF?

(keep track of your minutes / hours for 3-5 days)

WHAT DOES YOUR ACTUAL BEING / DOING / KNOWING REPORT ABOUT WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

(compare. contrast. assemble. interpret. reflect.)

CREATE.

[RESEARCH: it all depends on context]

and it’s all immersive EXPERIENCE

(…used my lunch break for grocery-shopping to alleviate evening stress after work when I need to get the kids to multiple locations and events, and prepare dinner while hopefully interacting with them, witnessing their goings-on in the ONE place I can be at a time, while finishing up that revised CV I need for perhaps continuing employment in a position I actually feel suited to, find challenging, and organizing an upcoming theater production, parceling energy with hopes I might have some left for my prime concern: my partner, or maybe myself – isn’t that part of all of it too? – and the reading/writing/reflecting I’d love to do, acquiring plane tickets and maps for upcoming family journeys, counting breaths to relax, aiming for meta-cognition and emotional awareness so that I don’t miss, ignore, injure, need to exercise, plus the laundry and housework, and…)

all the time, is just the time you have

Rambling

On March 12, 2015March 12, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Aging, change, Current Reading, family, Fear, hope, human, Journal, lifeLeave a comment

How oddly and uniquely our dear bodies exhibit the effects of stress. For some days now, exhausted and craving rest, I wake ever-so-early in a kind of sleepless sleepiness. Wanting only to burrow in, immerse in comfort and calm, be tenderly near the one I love, instead I toss, turn, disturb and achieve none of my wishes.

Is this another emerging effect of aging?

My parents soon will celebrate 50 years of marriage – an example of what Andre Gorz describes: “If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage. Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations. We will be what we do together.” (Letter to D)

which means that I also approach 50.

So there’s also that – a kind of nostalgia, melancholy, joy, awareness…

I’m one to search and seek and inquire without end.

One to wonder and ponder and interrogate my experience with hopes of understanding it – but increasingly I find that apparently my being simply wants to be SO ALIVE. Sometimes I feel that is what is happening with my waking body – that it doesn’t want to miss. Anything. The presence of my beloved next to me in sleep (Gorz describes what I am experiencing in that regard very well also: “how love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them”), the particular quality and type of that morning time, house-sounds, obfuscated consciousness…I, one of those who have “just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine”…sometimes it feels…and that this particular kind of love slowly strips and erodes those away to the irreducible, undefinable reality of each ONE of us…

FITS & STARTS

I shoulda wrote a letter. There are the griefs, the emotions mistrusted, the longings delta’d out, and a million wishes. “The past is still the past : a bridge to nowhere.” And then there is SO MUCH NOW. The children and their emerging, engrossing creating lives; my wonder/love – a thriving, amazing individual who loves me and has so much of her own; there are the animals, the leaves, the waters and the breezes. The breaths, the touches, the thoughts. The feel of it all.

The word/concept/term “Mashup.”

Perhaps that is what is going on in my sleepless sleepiness. My habit of reading has always been to read 30 or more books from various fields, genres, authors, subjects, literatures in order that my mind would have to do it’s weird mysterious complexity/chaos/emergence/dynamic/creative adaptive process of making some new idiosyncratic sense of a kind of global dissonance – our inherent ability to be a Convergence Creator. To not be caught obeying, devoting, under the sway of some authority or perception or ideology not a Mashup. Perhaps the thickness of being alive to what is life, attempting to attend, note and notice, enthralls the entirety in a similar manner – experience is a Mashup – so many sources, so many responses, so many interactions, so many affects and effects, roles, obligations, identities, loves, fears, perceptions, interpretations…and perhaps I’m currently simply immersed in a particularly cogent nexus of complexity and chaos – the operation toward adaptive emergence and some temporary convergence being administered in clumsy and cluttery fits & starts…

Perhaps each now is realization & threshold. And, as a friend recently pointed out…“hope is such a restless state”.

Resources

On March 9, 2015March 9, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, human, life, Literature, meaning, Writing1 Comment

One of the many reasons (words-turned-to-meanings) he’s tattooed on my veins…

A Brief and Derivative Hello / Interview

On February 27, 2015February 27, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experience, Literature, meaning1 Comment

Provisionally, some fiction

On February 10, 2015February 10, 2015 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 ‘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. Even slumber. Broken into verse. Eyes needled with discomfort, asking for their closing, refusing to stay shut. And her. Her, the one pushing away, the one who woke him, the one asking him to ‘please move farther’ when there is no room. 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. An apprenticeship in weaving. The dreaming in the waking. Age-old questions, rich and beautiful: unanswered. The meaning and the words continue refusing to hold. Something “like” that, unlikably.

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

…when you affirm, you still question

-Maurice Blanchot-

“Not another word.”

On October 30, 2014October 30, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, Writing3 Comments

“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it you can ever let anyone know…this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you.” – DFW.

I don’t know what to tell you. If this piece by DFW doesn’t resonate and “work” on you, well, ok. Perhaps he’s not for you. Please give it a read, again, if you have…

click for link to “Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace

Summer Recapitulation

On July 6, 2014July 6, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Language, Philosophy, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

Given the nature of things… withdrawal from school… disregulation of schedule / child-rearing / presences… obligated projects, desired collaborations, attempts… preponderance of labor… decrepitude and erosion of house, car, body…

Herein lies a revised Summer Reading List – old and new and recapitulatory…

“FICTION”

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“POETRY”

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“OTHER”

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To be continued…

On May 19, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, LanguageLeave a comment

“Yet if language gives no words for what happens…it nevertheless gives itself”

-Christopher Fynsk-

“Communication is the awareness of a chain of meaning of which every speaker and interpreter is part”

-Renate Lachmann-

“Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence”

-Mikhail Bakhtin-

All my Words are Silent

Category: Current Reading

From Laszlo Krasznahorkai: “Like a ninja.”

WRITING YOU