Category: Experience

Cabin Reflections

On By N FilbertIn being, desire, Experience, family, Gratitude, grief, Journaling, Loss, love, meaning, Photography, Reflections, Writing3 Comments

IMG_2623[1]

“Penelope remembers having read that of all the liquids and fluids produced by the human body – sweat, semen, vaginal fluid, saliva – tears are the only one without any trace of DNA… Impossible to identify someone from their tears, we’re all identical when we weep despite the many different reasons we have for weeping, something like that.  Unlike unhappiness, tears don’t set us apart, they make us the same.”

Rodrigo Fresan, “The Invented Part”

Last week I spent with my four offspring at a cabin on the Pikes Peak Massif in Colorado.  Mostly I register grief and loss in my experience of living… but interestingly enough, the first entry of my vacation journal begins with the simple sentence “I’m happy.”  Unqualified, that’s it – myself + my offspring + a rich world reeking of “no service” and untellable beauty… “I’m happy.”  Here are some notes I made throughout the week:

Simple things innerheard during cabin stay:

The stars: “We can’t tell the difference: between light or dark, death or what remains.”

The streams: “Where have we come from, where are we going? / Where we have come from, where we are going.”

Growing things (grass, moss, wildflowers, mushrooms, wild berries, etc…): “Not yet, not yet.  Who knows?”

The rocks, the boulders: “Once upon a time.  Now.”

IMG_2613[1]

The mountain(s): “Maybe.  May Be.”

The cabin:  “Us.  Here.  We.  With.  Hold.”

Phrases of my children:

  • “It’s good to live this way once in awhile.”
  • “Why do we leave here, ever?  I never want to.  What is have to?”
  • “Dad, everything here is your ‘favorite‘.

And me:

  • “Nothing is like this.  Nothing… Belonging, I belong.  Time changes, it’s different here.  As if there isn’t.  THIS PLACE IS ‘BEAUTY’ TO ME.  THIS PLACE IS WORTH MY LIFE.”
  • on climbing: “I’m a dad: we ALL make it, or none of us really do.”
  • on love: “If I say ‘I love you’ – please don’t hear it as worship, as inordinate.  In love we see the ‘too much‘ of the other – that which is always beyond our own reach, the ‘too much’ in each of us we struggle with, and seem to be unable to assimilate or observe in mirrors of our own.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons the conundrum we call ‘love’ exists?

Addresses to my children and loved ones:

  • To T: “Always beware of logic – our fabricated things.  What we may wish toward but doesn’t make matter.”
  • To A: “Recall.  There are differences.  Beware.  There are openings for more life.”
  • To I: “You have it.  You carry your own water.  Your own dreams.  Your own beginnings.”
  • To O: “Heroes also may shrink you, diminish, contain.  You are deeply your own.”
  • To H: “Never mind.  I am not the one who can conquer it in you.  I believe someone will.”
  • To ?: “I love you.  Like literature: the possible of life.  Impossible.”

IMG_2605[1]

Thank you mountains, rocks, growing things, streams….

Working Around the Void

On By N FilbertIn desire, Experience, meaning, Poetry, Unknown, Writing6 Comments

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve whittled away at my brain toward a poem…  I’m not sure that’s what this is, but it’s fresh effort:

Working Around the Void

How can we have

such clear impressions

of what is not?

 

Absence

Silence

Nothing

 

maybe God,

Santa Claus,

or meaning.

 

Things

lacking evidence,

experience

 

I believe I dream

and vice-versa,

as a doubt-drenched thinker

 

As long as we’re using language

for these –

what is our perception of love?

 

Imagination?

Is it?

Time?

 

Between appear and disappear.

Articulate desire.

 

The Last Wolf: or, “I showed you the darkness in the beginning”

On By N FilbertIn Confusion, depression, desire, Experience, fragments, Journal, Literature, Loss, Melancholy, Perception, Poetry, Reflections, survival, Writing4 Comments

I remember that I am falling

That I am the reason

And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be

Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

– W.S. Merwin, “When You Go Away”

Time keeps accumulating on my inability to write, to find time to write, to process living with language.  Simply to keep this space alive, I am posting a journal-like entry so as not to give up.

Recent weeks have been dominated by readings of Doug Rice, Laurie Sheck, Jon Fosse, Georges Bataille, Larry Levis, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Franco Berardi, Robert Bringhurst, Jeremy Fernando, Elfriede Jelinek and others…

What a traversal, passage, the past couple of months have been…

…like following the draw of the moon through dire straits

in dark, tumultuous seas…

…a feeling that everything is at its limit (Bataille, l’extreme) – EXPERIENCE.

  • pressured work projects, needs, deadlines, demands
  • endless and constant family logistics, accidents, needs
  • relentless parenting, relating, service to others
  • throngs of people and groups
  • lack of friends, lovers, supportive presences
  • fear, health, danger, exhaustion
  • failure
  • loss of partner
  • inexistence of calm or solitude
  • imposed travels
  • absence of sleep and rest
  • indulgence in desire and harm
  • minimal process
  • poor eating or nourishment
  • tension, strain
  • depression
  • lack (wellness) & excess (pressure)

…a teetering balance…

Mind you, this is how it feels in me, not how it is.

I miss everything that is/was good

…fail better…

There is a certain uncertain sorrow to things

(presence of melancholia, moon-draw)

Georges Bataille’s certainties:

  • WE ARE NOT EVERYTHING
  • WE WILL DIE

THE UNKNOWN                   THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE

darkness                                              levity

Lynda Barry & the “Underground Skateboard” – how we draw from others work what we need to survive

Lemony Snicket & the autographing instruction that I should “read something else”

FAMILY

immersion (doom, closure)                                 held in levity

conscious moderation

– 1st Tarot reading –

(processual journey mythical)

Jacob recommends Homer – The Odyssey

doubling                                letting go – holding together                    The Devil/The Chariot

dark surfaces / surfaces of darkness (The Fool)

The Moon (dark journey) crossed by the Queen of Swords (wounding love)

THE UNKNOWN                       THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE 

-Summer

Temperance

The King of Wands – leaders, pole vaulters, utilizing tension toward propulsion

leap over?  through?  on?

The Fool

Pas sage – not wisdom                                                      FRAUGHT JOURNEY

– Odyssey –

BATAILLE: “nothing is final…”

– “what is not there, which, once it is seen, often in literature, tells us what is” (Fosse)

Inner Experience

“the suffering of the disintoxicated” (Bataille)

The Human:

  • challenging everything (of putting everything into question) – Bataille
  • always a breakdown of systems that will not be restored – Sheck

“Experience reveals nothing and cannot found belief nor set out from it” – Bataille

“The hand moves forward, the tragedy begins” – Bataille

“no one grieves with you for what you are unable to say”

“life itself…always swerves away from my mouth”

– Elfriede Jelinek –

“how I’m owned by that which will not answer” – Sheck

“What you are will be spelled by whatever

lies trapped in your hand” – Robert Bringhurst

– emptiness is also empty –

“what is the part of us… feels…unnamed…

…i must live at some distance from convinced” – Sheck

 

“When I say you to what isn’t there – I mean me” (Larry Levis)

“you won’t find me in me” (Jelinek)

Experience eludes understanding ( Bataille)

– nor can I compute the possible (Sheck)

This too

is just one

more opinion

to move through

(Bringhurst)

FIRST AND FOREMOST YOU WRITE (Fosse)

“From an abandoned myth

(I write to you)” (D. Rice)

– wanting them to mean nothing –

– and suggest everything (L Levis)

 

INTENTION:

  • hold open the imagination of possibility
  • “do not go gentle into that good night”
  • Moderation.  Extreme limit.
  • Contra-digitalia.  First and foremost write.
  • Be-Read

 

 

Self-Beckett Confessions

On By N FilbertIn Aging, Experience, fragments, Language, Literary References, Samuel Beckett, Writing1 Comment

“I have only to go on, as if there were something to be done, something begun, somewhere to go.  It all boils down to a question of words, I must not forget this… May one speak of a voice, in these conditions?… If only I knew what I have been saying… Bah, no need to worry, it can only have been one thing, the same as ever…”

“At no moment do I know what I’m talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how nor why”

“Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of…”

“I don’t know what I’m saying.  I’m doing as I always did, I’m going on as best I can”

– Samuel Beckett –

Hyphen & Hymen, Pt. 2

On By N FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, Embodiment, Experience, Experimenctes, Language, meaning, Writing6 Comments

“Philosophy is the hyphen and the hymen of Being, and difference is the trait that cuts across and unites the twofold side of Being [mathematic-genetic / poematic-epiphanic; or in-itself / for-us-in-it]”

– Michel de Beistegui, Truth & Genesis –

“each word, need no more words, we don’t need words about words, each word enough with its excess and insufficiency, proliferation and paucity, problematics and production, each term inevitable blunder and surprise, miscarriage and gratuity”

– N Filbert, journal entry –

Everything that is not linguistic is absurd

– Vilem Flusser, Philosophy of Language –

I have no story.

Wherever I occur in the tangled, incalculable threading we might call “existing” or “being” or “living” I can make out no beginnings nor endings, only enigmatic, complicated “is.”  Slight, partial, imperfect.

I have trouble with memory.

But we needn’t any other words.  Or more words.  Or words about words.  Any word is enough.

There’s no story not made of inadequate and superfluous words.  These words that might tremble any direction of the webbed and indecipherable, indeterminate and knotted operations that co-construct now, or whatever happens to be (for-us, with-us, in-us, with-out).

Stories like struck and resounding tones.

A vibration might seem harmonic or cacophonic, dull or brash.  Violent, vanishing, or barely perceptible in the noise.

There’s no story in this.  But many words, perhaps.

Wiggling, vague, offensive, bold, hardly visible, ephemeral words.  Terms (demands?), language (lingual?), weaving darts between – inventive, fabulating, reductive, constraining – unknown syllables, shapes, referents (irreverent) toward and away from…

Vocables of happening.  In-script-ions.  Tyrannical and uncertain.

Accidents and rules.

My body of words.  Limbs, organs, “hyphen and hymen” of being. My body of words – taste, touch.  What passes un-sign-if-i-cant?

Accidents and rules.

Birdsong.  Heard.  “Bird” “song” “to hear.”  This body of words.  No note without notation.  No recognition without cognition.  Any one word enough enigma.

Grass, caress, event: embodying words, wording embodied.  Tapestries or electrons – flood, immersion, surround within.  Languaging: gesture, groan, gelatinous.  Language.

Say “in-term-in-able.”  Say “de-term-in-ed.”

Hyphen.  Hymen.  Accident.  Rule.  Deceptive measurements.  Siphons, conduits, ex-press-in-g im-press-ions. 

One is enough to sense there’s no story here.

Always more-than-one.  All ways.

Perhaps what is called “experience” [what is it called “experience”? – one word is enough – think “love” or “fact,” “me” or “real,” even “tomato” to be made well aware of difference, ambiguity – of wobbling kinds pressed toward inauthentic and inaccurate generalities.  Uniformity.  Accidents and rules that hardly, so slightly, pertain].

Experience: inexpressible?  In-term-in-able?

What is the story here?  The trial and always (all ways) error.  Errant words.  Insufficient to their purposes (supposed).  Perhaps.

Purpose being?

The questioning.

Our voices and gestures.

Enigma.

Irresolvable, over-determined.  Language.

Systems like molds, scopes of lenses, structuring grids, abstract proofs and theorems:  rules and measures, melodies, diagrams – not mirroring, mirage.

I have no story to tell.

Untelling.  Moving back against the words with a “not.”  Unworking.  Unravel.  Erase.

Toward?

Experience: to test, try; to feel, to undergo.  Knowledge gained by repeated trials.  Risk.  Out-of.  Try.  To get handy at.

To undergo.  Gone under.

The Drunken Brain: Ending it all one word at a time.

In-term-in-able trials.  “Everything that what is isn’t” (Jan Zwicky).

“There is yet a way of speaking that leaves room for what can’t be said”

– Jan Zwicky –

Is there?

I’d like to language that way.  Move, sound, gesture, touch.  Word, waver, delete.

Try. 

From the midst.  In the midst of.  Within.  Risk, trying “out,” Feel, undergo.  Words.

I have no story either, no narrative or narrator.  I forget, I re-member, invent.  Wherever, whenever I am (is it “I”?) – multiplicity, indiscretion.  A-static.  No beginning, no ends, -ing, -ing, -ing.  Repeatedly, differently.

I think language pre-tends experience.

What is tried-out, already de-term-in-ed.

Oh to break.

To start.

To begin – become – be.

I have no story.

“I cannot get beyond language by means of language”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein –

Hyphen & Hymen, Pt. 1

On By N FilbertIn being, change, communication, Cosmology, creative writing, Current Reading, Experience, fragments, Hermeneutics, Language, meaning, Perception, Semiotics, Writing8 Comments

“All discourses…would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur…

What difference does it make who is speaking?”

Michel Foucault

“We talk only because of a persistent desire to understand what is it we are saying”

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

“Again and again there is the attempt to define the world in language and to display it –

but that doesn’t work”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

According to a receipt yellowed in the pages of The Impossible book, 16 years ago I purchased the Story of Rats by Georges Bataille.

“What are you ‘getting at’?”

“What do you mean by ‘kernel’?”

Questions are asked.  I ask them myself.

Today I got bored of it.

Uncertain I ‘get at’ anything.  Doubtful even that ‘I’.  Yet “feel” pursuit of some ‘kernel.’  In other words, because, simply, ‘other words’ (fore-words, afterwords) sometimes eventuate communication…

…as if experience were an undifferentiable ocean of moving waves – incalculably deep waters ever in motion – unstoppable, interminable, immersive, and overwhelming – and something splashes, a cup dips, a boat prow plows its way, an arm drops, or rock, or bird flashes down talons – and a surface becomes, is broken…

“A word”

…ruin.  Ruined.  Inalterably (no, that’s not accurate – rather incessantly alterable, altering, altar-ing, alterity – othered and changed) altered, altared – SACRIFICED to perception, experience – peering-in-out-of, or peering/prying-out-of-in, out-of-pry-into

“and vice-versa”

Rue-in, is what ‘I’ seem to do.  Bring sorrow, lack, and loss with each perception, each calling, each again/comparison/re-cognition…Ruin, rue-in.  Touching, seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing – continual selection and ignor-ance (DE-selection, de-lectory, de-clamation, di-visory…) rues-in, sorrows-in, i-dentifies creating lack, erasure, damage.

“What happens – ?”

The temptation together [to gather]…to peer and pry into, in, with…to test and to try…to extract and bring, to-gather… to form-u-late.  AFTER experience, to create other…posit(-ion) a “You,” “out,” exo-, ex-tend, ex-plain, ex-haust, ex-hilerate and ex-aspirate…to KILL, CRUSH, SLICE, DIFFERENTIATE…’I’ hiding somewhere in All and Every.

An ‘I’ in All is AIL.  Rue-in.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t get sick?  But we do.” – Jan Zwicky

“Don’t be so hard on yourself…we all…”

Separate, tear, disjoint, di-chotomize, di-vulge, de-story, de-struct [de-con-struct i-we-form de-form]

“Hey!  Enough!”

As I was saying, try-pry-di-ing to say…

“Who?  When?  Where?  How?”

Tri-, di-, all in-volves, in-volutes, con-volutes a cutting, a ripping, a be-lying of de-struction – as it crafts an alternate structure (con-struction)…

“the ‘kernel”

Oui.  We.  Yes.  The sense that  Is the sense of being-thrown, dropped, something making a splash, separating the waters… a kerneling, an ob-ject (re-ject, ab-ject) dis-turbance that sub-jects turbulence…

Thrown.  Splash.  Change.  Alteration.  Altaration.  Altarity.  Othering.  For-IN (foreign)… kernel.

“What are you ‘getting at’?”

“So that’s what you mean by ‘kernel’?  Dis-turbance… Turbulence… something must be… in order to…”

“What thing?  Why?”

“In the beginning was the Word… was God… and God moved…and divided the waters…” (John 1:1, Genesis 1:1, 6, KJV) a Bar, a “firmament,” a permanent Between “called Heaven.”  And so separating, separation be-gins…from the first very first motion, movement, change… ex-pulsion, ex-crement, ex-ultation, ex-is-stance.  Out.  OUT.  OUT-of… posit-ion.

“You’ve lost me…”

“Oui – what are you ‘getting at’?”

Ex-perience.  Prying, peering.  Trying.  Be-ing separates?  Dis-joins?  Dis-tracts?  ‘I’ am a rupture.  Dis-rupts: not two, not one.  I stray, strive, volition, volute…de-story, de-volve.  What am ‘I’ but a weapon-blade?  Rue-in.  And thus I speak, say with pointed pen…poke and pry and terrorize – ex-perience.

“Glorious or gory-ous – visions are di-visions”

So it seems…

“So it is…”

Is, was, will be spoken into/out-of our stance (existance)…falsified di-visions…

“I cannot get beyond language by means of language”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

This. Interesting. Day.

On By N FilbertIn being, change, communication, Complexity, creative writing, Critical Thought, Current Reading, desire, existence, Experience, Living, Mapping, Parapraxis, Reading, Samuel Beckett, WritingLeave a comment

Interesting:  it will come, whispering in your imagination that the English interest comes from the Latin inter esse, literally “in-between-being.” – Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

“something must have changed” – Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

I guess I just decided to let something else happen…

I suppose I decided

insofar as we do

to let something else

become…

“This is what I’ve decided.  I see no other solution.  It is the best I can do…

…that little space of time, filled with drama, between the message received and the piteous response…

 …Of  myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others…”

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

distrusting human plans

Confusion : Fusion-with

On By N FilbertIn absence, Aging, being, Blogging, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Experience, family, intimacy, Journaling, Loss, Perception, Reflections, seasons, Writing4 Comments

azure-liminal-sky

The light is good.  I’m confused.

What “good”?  “Good” for what, and in relation to?  Diffuse, azure atmosphere of oncoming dusk.  Chilly, not cold.  Nearly pleasant, yet crisp enough for shiver and grip.  Unsteady, trembling grasp of pen, a striving for control mated to its lack.

Hardly daylight.  Liminal.

I would like to express.  What I do not know, perhaps am even unable to.

This is why I approach a page – blank, blind, lined, empty – in “good” light and confusion.

Fusion-with, what?  Chemistry, alchemy, biosphere, organism, complexity, surround.  Others’ emotions, experience.  Possibilities not actualized, each swarming potential of vocabulary, gesture, signification – line, sign, mark, motion – converging formulation, conveying contrivance / re-cognition. What is not, hovering about each “is.”  To write.  To write (only) this.  When…

Once begun.  Light, terms, cursive.  Blue Bic ball-pointed pen.  Moleskine substitution and human and language and in- and ex- perience and some =, some theorized equation of functions and results.

January 29, 2017.  Nathan Wayne Filbert.  5:44 pm according to a Centrally Standardized Timepiece, an Apple product, arranged amidst pages from many centuries and sources, composed music sounding from the last, temperatures…”actualities”?…amid vast, incomputable com-possibilities.

If Nathan had not been “this one,” had not begun with a “T” or a “T + h + e” in this light, in this almost comfortable, discomfiting condition, in this notebook, with this pen and its ink at this time on this bastardized quality of paper, among such circumstances and scenarios, amid these relations as a father, a student, librarian, scholar, male – of this certain (arbitrarily standardized mandatory and countable) age, intimately (accordingly – to strata not set by either) coupled to- caring for-, concerned with-, worried by-, wishing for-, happy about-, and so on…

this word or letter at this time in this space with these extremely idiosyncratic and unlikely determinate positions and scenes in a surround incrementally rare and unreckonably accidental…

“The light is good.  I am confused” leading itself its own very peculiar particular wave way toward each next and next co-dependent with innumerable constituents and counterparts yet occurring here, now, 5:54 pm CST in Wichita, Kansas in United (are they?) States of America (wha-? why? how? when?) 2017 (by what calendar and whose and wherefore?) at an intersection outside of a centuries-old and decrepit “house” it calls “home” (why? wherefore? from whence toward and…?)…

Indeterminate.  Indecipherable.  Unreasonable and incalculable.  Not accountable or even conceivable…but IS (apparently).  Simply IS, what is written, at this time, in this place, by this organism, of these relations, in this surround, at this moment, occasion, “actuality”…

…as it happens… as if

“The light is good.  I am confused.”

Displaying FullSizeRender.jpg

Cloud Fragment #3

On By N FilbertIn being, Blogging, change, communication, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Experience, Language, Loss, memory, Photography, time, Traces, Uncertainty, Writing6 Comments

cloudswirl.gif

To swirl.  There.  He said it, stated intention, directly.  To be lost, languishing (anguish is in there), full of lose and seeking, squirming, rutting, snuffling about.  Scent search of what?  Or not what quite, but how, now?  The unknowable, uncertain, which lies beyond perhaps, inaccessible, indeterminate, resistant to decipher, discretion, or decode.  He plies.  Ruin of movement, beyond conceit and loosely bound, tearing terror of graspage.  An infinity of words, or if not, many disordered magnitudes more compossibly complex than he –wrecked in kind with troubles of time, reductions of selection.  What means, all knotted in already-known.  A scumble then, without, arms treading, legs a-flutter, cognition confused in the mass, mess, unaccommodated, arranged re-arranging, affective and effecting, assaying never fully, nor enough, insufficient temporals and scope, shortfall of finitude, unbecoming, irrealized, incomputable surround.  To swirl or swoon perhaps – intends eccentric excentricity, without with-in, within outside and othering.  Immersed, submerged, tumbling almost-struggle, almost-drift, thoroughfare and passaging, limning swaths of runnels, channels, margins.  Copiously coping, how would he go?  What are the  motions lesser than stir and more absorptive?  And what of the when?  Who now, where now, how when?  Confusion, then – confusion, swooning and swirl.  A wriggling receipt, some commingling transference transmitting, attention intending undoing, origins ever receding, irremediable in rot and excess, dismembered invention – begin – excise and evince, glide of erasure and uncover, indiscernible activity of process, waving particles, particular waves, currents and tropes, passively permeable patterning passageways [not that!] imperceptible part-i-cipatory breakage and shatter, dispersion deconstructing refusal.  He ruins, inevitably.  That stands – there.  Unworking integration every angle or approach, from inside, decay, a desiccate and undone doing.  Mismade by allowance, a scribbling palimpsest or correction – be cognized, be written, be spoken, transcribed – he wails into unruly, disruptive, erupting fluid floodings of voiding, of nothing.  Not afloat, asail, aswim.  Neither drowning nor submerged.  Nearly saturate with swallow and exhale, a lineament on empty, some faulty trace.

Cloud Fragments #2

On By N FilbertIn change, communication, Complexity, creative writing, desire, Experience, fragments, holidays, Language, Writing5 Comments

oceanwaves.gif

What the whispers, wreathing wraithwords, wisp-whooshing ways, weave-unweaving willful wreckage.  Watery-unwound wrapping-about while unwrapping wishful rending renderings.  Wronged construals in warped wrestlings – reachings, wrenchings – resiliently resisting.  Wranglage, wronguage, writ.

Remains for re(sign)ation.  Re-as(sign)ment.  Relinquishing rest or rectitude.  Repentant writing.  Riddled and recoiling, recombinantly removeable recklessness.  A raucous rancor irregular, irrational, and ever ill-advised in its deviant devising.

Devastating detour: devouring the decrepit, dissimulate, divisable devisor of description.  Descry the dilettante, the decayed decoding at diminish.

Wrest a return: remandering mayhem, maladaptive remainder.  Roping radicals round reason – irrational redescription in rascally remorse.  Mismade and mismanaged.  Wranglage, wronguage, writ.

-toward the New Year