Category: Experimenctes

My own quick attempts at inscribing experience + experiment, languaging

What = Now

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Music, WritingLeave a comment

EROSION

“to change patterns…expose the wounds…”

– Charlie Kaufman – 

1.  Truth is…truth was…truth is… 

And this was the daily game of Reality-Telling…two truths with at least one lie.  A morning-midday-evening list-assembling of continuous is-was-ises.  Spilled coffee, set aright, sopped with towel.  Triples.  Thing – thing – relation.  So many relations revising so many “things.”  Complicating, co-creating, is-was-is.

“Change is never lossless,” it was written.  Once comforted by the is of experience – that no matter the grief or anguish, no matter the disaster or rift, the poverty or destruction – experience kept accruing.  “Experience is additive even in reduction.”  Even deletion adds to experience.  Isn’t it nice to know that regardless of what or who or how – for every living thing – at least something accumulates?  Grows richer, more varied, expands?

But how calculate that every addition is reductive?  That the raw fact of everything adding up = losing?  At least this is one way of working the figures.  An instant added is an instant taken away.  “The Lord giveth…”

The very momentariness, unquantifiability of what happens seems to attest to this.  Two precisely equal processes, or hands.  The one inviting and offering, delivering; the other letting-go, sweeping aside, and waving goodbye.  Moment in, moment past.  Experience added, one less experience to have.

Life as a riverbank – new deposits and constant erosion.

            The truth is: experience

            The truth was: experience brought exactly what it took away

            The truth is: experience

(therefore): NOW =

            And thus it is known that living is equal to dying and “He who would save his life will lose it” is just a simple fact.  Dying is equal to living.  It all happens in the same instant.  One step further = one step nearer to something else.

Sometimes people smile when they’re together.  Sometimes they don’t.  And sometimes other things happen.

Intolerable Vulnerabilities – the fictions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing3 Comments

Intolerable Vulnerabilities – fictions

lonely old man

I.

There comes a time when being referred to as “sir” by 100% of an establishment’s wait-staff is no longer over-polite and ironic respect, but simply a pronouncement that in these contexts you have no peers.

Eventually you’ll be skeletal, perhaps before too long the way things are going, you’ve never been difficult to avoid.

And it’s never been easy to know what you want – are you being selfless or self-protective in the attention you pay toward your lovers?  Are your emotions inaccessible (some stunted empathy) or over-attuned in such a way as to pay your own processes no mind?

Whatever the case, you’re threatened.

 

And now you are old, sir, and alone.  And both nothing and everything is safe, because you are no one to lose.  And any potential of personal contact – some sort of opening – would inevitably create leakage, exponentially multiplying your probabilities of loss.

If only it could be viewed as sport – this frolicking across the page.  (It’s not).

 

Who lays the trail

in the white sand

of the page?

 

Who explains it?

-Cees Nooteboom

            You.  Not you.  Here.  Not here.  Ever trapped in beginnings because of so many ends.  At this age, sir, you must force it.  Opportunity becomes a consolation called survival.

No one is fooled, particularly not you, sir.

But she reminds you of something, probably someone, which is no help to you, just an increase in the accumulated weight of what’s past.  You’ll go on, because why not? – You are nothing to lose.

The Intolerable Vulnerability of beginnings…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing3 Comments

I am desperately vulnerable to being unable to move beyond beginnings….as witnessed by the following attempts…Lengle - VulnerabilityINTOLERABLE VULNERABILITIES

I.

When we begin – anything – we begin with.  We start out already always somewhere as some one, some thing.  Some entity or element among others.  There are no, is no, such thing as a ‘fresh start,’ as a living organism.

From our particular inceptions we are loaded and formed with genetic baggage – our cells and context shaped by conditions far beyond and external to ourselves.  And nary a freedom is advanced.  Sure we participate in the shaping and construction and continuance of us, but we are never extricated, abstracted, or independent from an environment, a shared and shaping surround – it’s the contingency for existing: Other(s).

A world not formed by us.  A plural existence, NEVER a solitary, isolated or uniform one.

Many find these ever-initiating constraints intolerable.  That one is unable EVER, to start from scratch, re-invent, re-formulate, or create ex nihilo.  Nothing, absence, void, simply – is not.

Therefore, ever existing in the already-established, already formulating, already-begun, we come together and transform.

Cells and genes, energy, matter and air conscribe to carry on in ripples and subject/objects of being.  Including, colluding us – we, you, me, I.

Wholly integrated (smoothly or with great difficulty) into the ongoing flux and flow of languages, practices, thoughts and behaviors of a very large and intricate, complex and dynamic world – we arise – conditioned, constrained and subject to our sort of organization – make-up, culture, circumstance, arrangement, perception, emotion, body, reason, available resources, types, renditions of being A being in this possible world.  A world, impossibly, that is just this way.

And the task is (always has) already begun – how will/does this particular, unique combination and configuration of elementary particles (a living, bounded, active, exchanging system/organism) adapt, effect, adjust, infect, evolve with its environment?

An environment of people, places, activities and things ALWAYS ALREADY begun, and also always already NOT-YET…awaiting, accepting, adapting, adjusting with US.

Our configurations, energy, activities and behaviors.  Nothing the same with us.  Nothing without.

Incalculable.

You, me, we make all the difference – along with EVERYthing else.

Some call this a paradox.  If you did not begin, it would make no difference.  If you do, it makes all difference.  Both, always, true.

Nothing is the same with you.  Nothing would be the same without you.

The world is a situation = both / and / more.  A complex and indiscernible system that just seems to work this way.  Call it “Butterfly Effect,” “Creation” or “Evolution,” “Chaos,” “Order,” “Life” – it all makes NO difference AND ALL the difference to actual experience.

And it is so.

Thus we begin – embedded, embodied, and extended – in an environment always long established, ongoing and begun: constrained, constructed, collaborated, and free.

I begin.  I beg – “let me start over”, fully incorporated, already begun – I: in.

Groundlessness

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Reflections4 Comments

Chodron - groundlessness

 

I seem to be unable to stop digging in and reflecting on When Things Fall Apart.  My memories range over its engagements with this book, most of the circumstances blurred and dissipate, but not the wisdom of the text.  I was trying to explain to my teens the odd euphoria that follows suicidal determination – what neuroscience knows as “shut-down.”  As the body begins to burn, or be ripped apart by fangs, riddled with bullets or smashed into bits…pain ceases to be useful to the organism and it is flooded with endorphins…a kind of blissed-out euphoria like a systemic morphine drip.  “There is definitely something tender and throbbing about groundlessness,” Pema says.

hypnotic-notions-holly-suzanne-filbert

 

But the idea isn’t shut-down.  The idea is more like a drowning compression without a bottom…a fall…a float…if fear – flight; if anxiety – distract; if anguish – addictive comfort; all these options for moving away, slipping out, attempt at relief, escape, a concretization of experience, rather than its flow.  It’s now-ness.  This drowning compression without bottom – what if we BE THERE?  What if we sit in it, and breathe.  The groundlessness, bottomlessness, suddenly becomes some space.  A little room…there’s opening.  We don’t know what to do, don’t know where to go, don’t know how this happened, don’t know why we did.  “Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all...Life is like that.  We don’t know anything.  We call something bad; we call it good.  But really we just don’t know.”

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.  We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.  They come together and they fall apart.  Then they come together again and fall apart again.  It’s just like that.  The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen:  room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

Blemishes

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

– all quotations Pema Chodron

Intimacy

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, WritingLeave a comment

Greetings, in an effort I am making to “make sense”… I have been encouraged to chronicle the benefits of my experiences to investigate personal meanings.  That might not make sense.  Suffice it to say that I am plunging into the world of my recent past in an attempt to discover how it has changed me.  A working title might be “Intolerable Vulnerabilities,” (a phrase lent me by my mental physician) and its subject is yet to be defined…but here are the beginnings of an intro…

Intimacy - Amy Bloom

 

The hesitant beginning…

” Most all of us have been caught up in the proverbial “throes of love.”  The ecstasy and heartache of opening oneself to another, being enraptured, plagued with doubt and hope, captive to longing and the myopia of the significance of the beloved.  But perhaps less of us experience intimacy.  Intimacy may be something quite different from love.  Although usually initiated in its atmosphere, intimacy reaches beyond the experience of love and journeys toward closeness.  Intimacy is about the intertwining of lives, the multiform intricacies of barely-boundaried involvement.  What occurs when lives are meshed and melded – shaped with and around one another – physically and immaterially, actually and theoretically, imaginatively and really.  Where histories are remade and revamped together in a present.  Where hopes are remade and reshaped as a couple.  Where the unit and body that counts as an “I” extends to a “we,” and sensation, perception and thought happen always with an external mirror.

Where intimacy takes us is awesome.  I mean this in the most fearsome and incredible ways.  Human closeness is fraught with archetypal danger.  When exposed in such nearness, our lives seem at stake.   It goes to the “heart of us.”  Within the weathers of love, the wedded experience that intimacy brings seems to make us or break us – our futures and fortunes, significance and meaning rise or fall in accord with an Other.  We, in ways, “are not our own” but become something new, something larger and fresh.  Something open, extended and possible.  Something at risk, distended, and vulnerable.  Our lives shared in the hands of another.  Our minds shaped with the mind of another.  Our purposes, intentions and behavior ever effecting conjoined scenarios.  The world is different.  Intimate.  Involved.  Precious and fragile.

There are (at least) two sides to the story…a territory of doubled strength and minimal safety.  Of terrifying exposure and (possibly) multiplied protection.  Of enhanced security and absolute danger.  This is the province of love.  This is the prospect of intimacy.”

Love - John Armstrong

 

-John Armstrong, The Conditions of Love–

Word & Image

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings3 Comments

Words & Images 

In the game Telephone Pictionary, a group of people begin with a numbered stack of paper fragments and an idea.  The idea could be an action, a character, a concept, anything.  Each player writes their idea on the top paper scrap and slides the stack to the player next to them.  The next person depicts the words passed to them, placing the words at the bottom of the pile.  The next writes what they interpret the drawing to be, and so on, alternating write/draw until the pile goes full circle or back to the originator, the same place as the end.  Most usually the character, action, description, originating logos has changed dramatically through its person-to-person journey and return.  Yet also usually, on looking at the miniature picture book as a whole, from start to finish, you are able to find a thread or see a path and deviations leading to the end.

A journey made up of an originating construction, altered and transformed through interactions with persons full of words and images (culture and nature), sometimes simplified, sometimes extended, and coming to its end with traces of the original construction and much difference.  It’s an easy one – it’s like life, we think – but to say “life is like that” is redundant, for it is part of life, playing the game is life.  It’s why any metaphors are available, why all metaphors work at some level – metaphor-making is life, as are games, interpretations, comparisons, changing, being handled, encountering persons with all their languages and images and ideas, editing, revising, with our limited number of pages, years, days.  Yes, being an initial cluster of cells and passing through the cultures and natures of others is very like the way our life narratives come to be constructed, composed, altered, imagined and revised to their ends – their beginning places – clusters of cells.

I began in the hands of my parents and sister, formed by the words and images they surrounded and infused me with: a particular kind of Christianity, music, morals, travel, touch, a sense of gender, my name, and so much more.  I suppose they’d each have their own words and images about and for me as well.

How quickly we are passed through hand after hand full of words and images – persons, institutions, cultures, families, nations, teachers, peers, friends, enemies, lovers and so on…The language, the picture – the culture, the nature – the numbered days – and we, the originating cluster altering and morphing, editing and highlighting, adopting and dropping, blacking out images, underlining phrases – palimpsests of living artefacts by our end.

Co-created through an unknown trajectory characterized by the interplay of self (or organism) and other (or world).

A beautiful, horrible thing.

An Ultimate Prompt

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Writing11 Comments

What “prompts” us?

A pain.  A joy.  Surprise.  Loss, meaning, something that crashes, crushes, alerts or in some way causes blurts or blasts to our system that create cross-connections – surge energy / electricity / pulsings between links and channels that otherwise run their own course.  Unexpected.  Expected.  SIGNIFICANCE.

I am intrigued by what “catches” us, “moves” us, CHANGES us.  As many times askance as head on.  What gathers and whispers behind us.  What we are confronted with.  Explosive, erosive, evolutional.  You could call them “shocks to the system.”  Sometimes cumulative, sometimes immediate.  But they effect change, and attention.  Design, and process.

I’m thinking of them as prompts.

There are a few works of literature and art, throughout my life, that ALWAYS “prompt” me.  A few authors.  A few painters, sculptors, musicians.  I do not know why this is, but it is so – some voices, some styles, some appearances and sounds unfailingly “move” me, by which I mean continuously change my orientation to the world.  Often subtly, sometimes radically, but surely.

Macedonio Fernandez is one such creator.

MacedonioHis writings NEVER FAIL to alter me.

I could query my analytics to find how many times I have quoted him, referenced his “first good novel”

Museum of Eterna's Novel

and today I am passing the PROMPT that this novel is – and IS contained in it – on to you… from Fernandez himself – I have lived with it, considered it, dreamt of it… a prompt he left us that haunts and inspires me… an ultimate sort of prompting….

Composition

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing24 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers – January 31, 2014

Composition

Copyright -Claire Fuller

He heads to the room in the attic.  This is where it happens, where it all occurs.  Everything needed is there, at the ready.  A factory for making.  The tools and materials – this is where the work gets done.  Such a tiny place – 53 cm of circular feedback.  Yet somehow within it expands.  Almost limitlessly, it seems.  Whatever is needed appears, is created, invented – “on the spot” manufacturing “just in time.” Manufabulating.  Manuscripting.  You can almost make out all the details – electricity, wiring, elaborate connections – the inside, the outside, and back – and yet how it gets done is quite hazy.

photo by Claire Fuller

Spillage.2 – ecce homo

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings3 Comments

 

another entry from the distant past…

ouroboros5.jpg

I am that I am

(click title to view)

 

 

Spillage.1 : Action Writing

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing1 Comment

action writingIn searching through the files on my computer for particular photos, I have been running across many files of which the names are unrecognizable to me, many dating from months and moons ago.  Some of them startle me, some are encouraging, all provide record of where I’ve been, how I’m thinking, what’s at work in me at various given moments.  I thought I’d share a few that seem worthy of being shared, they will arrive under the tag “Spillage” – detritus left to the side when my focus is on projects.  Here’s a sample, found labelled: Action:Writing. (simply click on title link to view)

Action Writing