Category: Experience
Alias V. Harlequin, remembers (via language)
I always wondered at my naming – “Alias V.” Not knowing where I come from, and finding all locatable Harlequins tricky and at play.
“Alias Verbum” – who would name an infant that? Another name, a word. Also known as, logos. Usually I identify as iota subscript, after Robert Frost.
No one knows my origin, but he’s very hard to find, everywhere, continually on his odyssey.
i‘m reading a book entitled “How Words Make Things Happen.” What have we made? Ideas, spells; subjects, objects, and actions. Incantations all. Beginnings, I suppose, but not the first.
As I understand it, aging along, someone had to be there for me to come about, and coming-about would be my story. Who or what might tell it? Acted, sung, or read? Becoming other after other after other. Known again as… by any other name. The player. The trickster. The Joke.
In the beginning was… and I began, an alias of something… and everything its word.
Nil
We could have played other games,
ever so many on offer
whiling the distribution and dissipation
time might be
.
Yet “I” became,
constructing choices –
the parenting,
the poetry,
philosophy,
and family;
addiction,
restriction,
believing all the loving –
each complicity
.
To be
.
At least some things,
anything,
.
everything
one knows not what
.
but still
less (or more)
than nil.
With Out
I never had to pay for words
yet how much my words have cost me
.
There is (there seems to be):
.
Experience.
.
I am insufficiently prepared
for it.
[how each beauty hurts so much in joy]
I am.
.
Ever unprepared:
.
Experiencing –
.
always sourced with outside
and ever without sides,
filled up, as is.
.
This is
.
Differing to ‘I am’
An other
Any
other
.
All thens
and equaling nows
complete without –
.
the wolf howls
bear bellows
in woods –
.
my lingering past –
.
with out.
.
somehow
I never learned what words are for
so
I begin
.
Again
almost
Drunk Like a River in Flood
Swelling my banks,
perturbedly turgid,
effervescently carbo-
nated, almost,
(or perhaps it’s entire…
depending on who
&/or what you believe,
with their reason…)
Swollen, in flow,
a thundering racket,
flotsam and jetsam
I wail at the bends.
A “bender” they call it.
I’m here, all the while
passing through.
Drenched (or “besotted”) –
the rain.
I am home
and I’m rushing
to-ward and away,
instinct with desire,
for which fire
is no match,
only patience…
I’m a patient
and ill to the bones…
you will see.
But I gurgle
these songs
as I pass..
filled with belches
and farts,
it’s unseemly…
Drunk
like a river
in flood
[too apparent] –
here’s
where the poem
begins
Deconstructing Definitions
Perhaps “work” means something must be done, regardless of desire,
and signifies felt effort.
If “to love’s” “unassailable affirmation,”
something verbal, and not only.
“Education” as “familiarity with thoughts of others” (K. O. Knausgaard),
entails “experience” as “familiarity with itself”?
And what of “wisdom”?
I wonder if “deaf” implies “not-listening,” or/and, “our forgetting of the body.”
and who defines “republic”?
Or “nowhere” and “now here” in all their differance?
Frere Jacques (yes, go and sing it)
suggests impossibility fuels valuation –
negation requiring its positive with –
terms all ways relative in their contexts,
indeterminate and groundless,
yet term-in-able, undecided, written-in.
I don’t know.
But I sense it’s indefinitive,
de- and con- structure something else,
like trace or foggy margin,
the space between the sounds
that continues (us and them).
Reduce (‘to lead back, to bring back’)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/reduce
Thrum –
that is the hum of the liveliness
the phrasing which your voice emits
the charging of rememory
the shock that members monsters
–
Thrum spark! –
the difference between hearing
and listening-for, anticipation.
Or expectation? and its careful ache
awaiting every painful jolt
–
The fear involved –
an awful angst of joy –
timbre re-minding the body,
bodies, of things that surge
–
Like language –
what’s drawn out
and quartered
into inestimable more
–
So like-wise, the idiot
breath and ready veins
fill up with begging
bursted already in the mouths and hands
–
and far beyond.
Reach in, reach out
one motion as touch
the no-one-knows-where
–
Leading back,
bringing back,
reduce:
our introduction
What Words Do
“language cannot cope with its relation with the world”
– Giorgio Agamben –
“language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein –
Sometimes it seems that words might do anything! Connecting things and people; defining, describing, explaining and exclaiming; naming, inventing, questioning… arguing, fomenting, discovering; seducing, displacing, and singing. Very little experiencing of the human kind comes unaccompanied by terms. – Is that so?
There are dreams – like signs and billboards of liqueous or exaggerated perceivings… “the sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” (A. Dragomoshchenko)… and slit it does. We bleed.
And breathing, heart’s-pulse, sleeping along with the intake of food, its output as waste, our birthing and walking, working and running… and dying. All our play. Intercourse, of course. Do moans and groans, grunts and cries and sighs, lisps and complaints (our myriad utterances) – mean words? mean language? What of our relative silence? The thrumming body of the speechless and deaf? Eye-gaze dumb, its blindness?
The skin has been rubbed off my fingers.
Wordlessly, soundlessly, lust and desire screech on…shrill in body and bone – both where the starving exudes and toward its petulant prey.
What of the growth of grasses? Is language there? In rhythmic patterning of rain? A sense of sunlight?
Sometimes wind whispers.
A cat moves. Silently.
And a “sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” – darkness visible, darkness speaks – (it has been claimed – via words, the verbal).
Sweet and troubling confluence: activity and languaging (the same): the “verbal.” Of sound and motion. Our noise. Moving sound around in and with our bodies – in speech or dance, in strain and the clamor of being.
What falls (or grows, blooms, disappears) outside the devouring knife – that which segments and shrivels the fluid songs of experience and reverie? Of presence. The Slicer-Dicer we’ve composed, posing together to cut from faultless fabric?
As utterance, inscription fondles its way, brushingly and blade-like, sensually surreptitious. Caressing and crafty, rapaciously blessing its praying and braying of names – who can counter its reduction, repression, its blame or silvery shame?
Ye without words, cast the first stone.
As if genesis were language and time: space to create with.
Comprehensively unknown.
How it is, part exponential
We followed the arc of the diver, losing it in the fog, wishing to make it out clear. I might have said this meant “philosophy.”
“Poetry,” he said, “is utilizing known language to invoke the unknown.” Or certaintly uncertainty, or something like that, which I liked, and indicated by asking what is not uncertain?
Your hands, the music. My desire, a naming for them. I think of your waist as a séance.
What is it to be crippled? I keep trying to use words.
Another asked about the “arc of the diver.” How should I know? All of my sentences should be read as questions. I wonder how divergent questions or commands might be… as statements.
She said, “it falls between. It has to go somewhere.” I guess we pressed it there… were poietic… since we couldn’t find a name. “Dis-appearance” might be one. Like a guess that can’t be falsified.
We all hold a paper marker printed “You are here.” Perhaps paper is too substantial. But it still seems like an invitation I wish we had.
Maybe this is why Albahari inscribed “Words are something else.” We leave it at that. And are flummoxed as to what “that” refers to.
Still we look.
You move like flocks of birds that wheel. I’ve never comprehended “swarm.” Mathematics doesn’t cut it, though it certainly uncertainly tries.
The telephone Pictionary of ear-mouth-brain when we issue sound or gaze. Don’t foibles equal actions? Parts of us experience this as violence, as valence.
Relation as a struggle to balance victimhood and perpetration. Uncertainly.
When or where does this infiltrate unknown?
He went on to say…
I thought (imagined?) your ankles, knees, elbows and knuckles as adroit sworls in swift mountain streams.
So also losing it in the fog, hoping to remember where the trees were. Philosophy. Or was it the forest?
Poetry as ocean surface between “known”/unknown? So wavy, so heaving. No one said that.
The richest respect he gave was his readiness to call me “Nobody.” Or “Anybody.” Carte blanche.
She said.
I can hardly perceive what’s in your head now. Potentia? An horizon of waves. A place where words press images press events, the banal. Perhaps. Uncertain sphere of unknowing? They say learning happens there. Like a cell in a culture, animal in terrain. Cacophony of dreams.
Each time we encounter.
