Category: Experimenctes

My own quick attempts at inscribing experience + experiment, languaging

Going on from there…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy4 Comments

“For that I blame the craven desire to speak, to write, to be heard.”

-Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet–

Nerve Language by Daniel Schreber
Nerve Language by Daniel Schreber

Semantic Animals

It goes on.  Seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, I read.  I write.  In dilettante-like forays into advanced mathematics, physics, cognitive sciences and biology,  I learn:

“The first message is that there is disorder”

(-James Yorke, attributed with naming the science known as Chaos)

            So back to first principles (they have a habit of coming in threes, and splitting into fragments).  I take out a blank sheet of paper, filled with lines.  A patterned absence.  Boundarying void.  I write “seduced” because I’m thinking about language.  Thinking instinct and survival and desperate need.  Thinking overload, “more than you could possibly imagine.”  Semantic animals.

When I last saw the snow fall, it was raining, offering an impression of “wet.”

She is far from me in two dimensions.  Only two, of multiples of three.  I count by the “trick of the nines.”

If only there were a way to collect accurate data.  Then adequately calculate and organize.  Unfortunately, life is mostly made of problems existing on continuums of countless dynamic variables, most of which – unsolvable.  They call these “differential,” or Derrida’s Infinitude of Differance.  Professionals finally agreeing: “regularity is aberration.”

We search for patterns.  Even in chaos we find them (or create).  Seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, we “read.”  There are so many oscillating signals that even the few we don’t inherently tune out we call “noise.”

Philosophically, on the other hand, where I feel more like an amateur or novice, I understand the problem/hypothesis/theory equation to be: EVERYTHING goes into EVERYTHING, that we’re only ever engaging possibilities.  That probables are fleeting, and certainties are few:  You are limited, peculiar, and definitely will die.

In other words, “the very process of cutting up and cutting off, opens up and opens out,” or some of us are developing “a belief in the musicality of creative disjunction” (Lance Olsen), because, seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, we select and collage our own inspection.

It’s easy to forget the first things that we find, i.e. that all positive statements and beliefs are built on “that there is disorder,”

and seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols,

we go on from there.

Spontaneous Reduction

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings7 Comments

ink and touch

Then I dropped my voice – BOOM – right onto the sidewalk.

A glitter, a spritzing, a spark.  A diffusion and ooze.  It runs out.

Watch it pour along the surface, draining toward sewage.

Voice.  A voice.  My voice.  Sploosh.

 

All the books I want are priceless.

Those I need – they cost too much.

I am a writer who learns.

I am a learner who writes.

I am a failure that loves.

I am a lover that fails.

It becomes apparent: Yes, I am.  A parent.

The book I am not reading –

Emotions and Understanding

caught in a withdrawal.

That is, boundaried from writing.

Between abstraction, and empathy.

There lies a void, inevitably.

You can’t trust silence.

We rush to fill.

(That distant sound).

Therefore,

I read for conversation.

But Writer says I’m “vague”

(don’t fulfill responsibilities)

Attention.  Integrity.  Inquiry.  Response.

(-ability)

I simply tripped, a clumsiness

[I dropped my voice]

but I am here.

Enmeshed in words but unable.

(metadata lacking)

I’m no librarian.

Vague because I say so.

(my human apparatus little equipped for the overwhelm of data)

Ant in a kingdom

-of words-

of signifiers.

Less than that.

I wrap my brain around it.

Waving goodbye to body.

My voice drops.

Alberto Giacometti sketch of Diego Giacometti

 

 

Points of a Journey

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes37 Comments

Thank goodness (again) for Friday Fictioneers – fostering the insistence and reprieve of manageable creative work when I’m finding it ever so hard to pull away from endless research.  I always mean to set aside a little time, or “get to it” at a break – and just write awhile…but days have a way of eluding me.  So thank you Rochelle et. al. for the weekly prompt and community that kindly obligates us to create, at least a few paragraphs, 100 words (I borrowed 9 from Doug).  A healthy distraction.

copyright-Rich Voza

            The beginning is filled with arrivals/departures, dogfights of fly-bys and paradise islands.  Ecstasy and remorse, all seeped in the past and aimed toward a future, took place in realms  in-between.  Between a rock and hard place, between the cities we called home, between obligations and accidents, here and there, me and you.

In the long middle we developed mistrust and fostered desire.  Building on distance with dependencies and betrayals.  Which flies faster – a sparrow?  Depends which side the wings are on.  We flew and we crashed.  We survived.

Bringing us to the end, the point at which we always arrive, together.

N Filbert 2013

Fictions of Family, pt. 10

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

the developing words:

FAMILY A FICTION

Family 1

and part 10:

10

It taking so long to figure it out.  What it’s “about.”

Discombobulates like sporadic noise.  The fragments living are.

 

Four decades, seven children from three wives until he recognizes relation.  Which changes things.  Significantly.

It is the third wife (times charm) – out three strikes she staid on.  Stays on.  The difference between things.

In relation to one another.  Evolving perception.  The what-not, call it “aboutness.”  Or in relation to…

 

This in relation to that is about this much this high this far.  Or else nothing at all.  In itself.  By itself.

By himself, barely amount, insignificant cipher, plus three plus seven plus anything adding up, er, becomes.

Alone is less than one, or, not a number.  It takes 1 to know 1, in other words, all-one really means no 1.  Unless distinguished from something else, another 1, an other.

 

This he could tell.  The third wife, the difference between.  The aboutness.  Differing shapes entirely, nearer still, at this distance.

1 cannot equal.  Impossible equation.  Might as well be naught, be 0 – a 1 wrapped around itself (turned-in) – revealing just a hole, something seen through.  Looked straight through.

Telescope, microscope, still substance unseen, a looking at, really, looking for.  Simply looking, opened at both ends.  Perhaps a simple function.  What an organism is, alone.

 

She calls out, in fact pursues him halfway across.  As if to say she sees something, peering through her self-same circularity – that he is there.  He begins experience, begins to get it – something else must be looking, another 1, for him to be seen, to hear of himself.

In what she tells him.

 

Multiple inputs introduce noise (read chaos, read being), make possibilities, provide things to figure out.  With all the variables it takes a lot of time (to get what it’s about).

The Anniversary

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes43 Comments

FRIDAY FICTIONEERS – WEEK OF February 1

(please consider joining us)

The Anniversary

I remember what the sculptor said, at our wedding:

“How very many years it takes to get to this – the unitary lean.  Two figures completed in one.  So much stripping and friction, hacking and cuts.  So very many tools applied.  The hurt and the loss, the heat and the cold.  Form and substance are hard to reshape.  A person is a stubborn thing.  Nuance and habits of matter overcome.  Natural processes and straining retrained.  Rock removed from its quarry – blasted and torn where it rested and grew.  A new context of becoming so forceful and delicate.  Ravaged and renewing till it holds itself up.”

– how our weight is supported, these 22 years.

Fiction in Families – 9

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

the collective to now:

language

9

“There was something tragic in fighting the borders, the heroism of shortcomings, the panic of passion.”

-Bruno Schulz/Jonathan Safran Foer-

Remembering first site: where met, what seen, who did, said and how.

We can go there, recreationally, anew.

Tangly garden, the smell of food, moisty air and a she and a him wandering through florid trellises on barely trails.  Something begins.

An arrival, a vision, a breath.

 

They eat and speak, jostling giggles, tangling knees.  They are happy with anticipation to realize.

Eye-movements and alcohol, presenting.  Blending to flavor their mouths for the meeting.  And further still, past introduction – names and facts and telephones – for months of hours.

Even sleeping through nights, receivers awake in their slumber.  But face-to-face invented an optimal – expression exceeding – verbal/aural toward visually kinetic.

Hand to dancing leg, uplifted and exposed, a slight flirtation interlocking and embrace.  The sky was leaking bliss and they without umbrellas, faces opened and upraised to be forward.

 

The rented room, hesitant jumble.  Limbs like ganglia on music, flailing and pulsing and alternating rhythms.  On such a scale.  Spiraling themes, and everything improvised.

 

Which became the uncanny and announcements to friends.  “That’s a lot of baggage,” they replied to excitement, calculating spouses, careers, digiting the children and distant thousands of miles.  Let alone all the dangling remainders.

 

And yet they persist.  Airfare and phonelines, sitters and several states.  Unable to locate square roots, figuring unresolvable answers to nonlinear equations.

 

Seemingly insoluble.  They worked at the problems, nearly convinced of their theories.  Hypotheses and tangents matched excuses unrestrained.  A mountain hollow downpoured with rain.  Something fell, an infidelity to measures.  And again, wrapped in a mail bomb of message.  Risk was reported.  Purporting fear.

 

The letters flew over the lines, bodies mired in their pasts.  Something was bound up to break.  And fracturing, she did.

 

Families of Fiction. Pt 8.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

link to previous:

Family 1

 suggest reading accompanied by : Home Again by Keith Kenniff

8

“we live in accumulations of the actual / with so little understanding”

–Verlyn Klinkenborg–

I believe that it is possible to make stories out of anything, with words.  Even wordless ones.

Stories on the move, within movement, perhaps even moving.

Accumulation and erosion, not addition and subtraction, multiples or divides – not mathematics, simply or complex.

In relations – part of related systems of relations, related further on, in, out – there are no statics, numbers, letters – even hypothetically.  When you fix one you’ve simply entered another system of relations relating to other fixed (or agreed-upon) relations, lifeless but for you.  Until employed.  Then your letter, number, static sign or symbol dissolves right back into what it came from – the roiling motion of temporal patterns and relations – change processing itself.

The meanings meander through like liquids.  Each part spilling its own glass.  Watch it flow, divert, tumble and pool.  Percolate.  Evaporate.  Stories.

Describing them, no matter how many points of view or entry, how many semiotic systems employed, internal or external – observation is evaluation, almost objectively subjective – merely mean a story, embodying an absorbing and evaporative spilling of change.  Eddies a bit, branches and drips, absorbs here and there, ever morphing form and content.

I can only ever tell you – in this system of systems of relations, this language – what I do not know.

The fathers, the mothers, their partners and pasts, the living of nine children to this moment – refuse to be snap-shotted still, photographed, imagined, or defined.  They are unknowns, rife with variables, and related.  Related to relations and related systems of relations related further out, in, on…

Genuinely incomprehensible.  Evaporating almost as soon as precipitate, incalculable with options and openness – far more than this system can relate.

The fathers love their wives and women, their sons and their daughters, and sometimes it’s even perceived that way.  The women, mothers, partners, also love – and everyone’s love is conditioned and conditional.  Givers, receivers, assertive, supportive, neglectful, abusive, indulgent, and free at a price.  Relational acts in related systems of relations – addressors and addressees, perceived and perceiving, at once.

Each its own glass spilling.  Each its own refilled.  The sharing of endless waters.

Shagg dribbles fluid ice-cold onto a young one’s burn.  Rather than soothe it stings.  Recoils.  Mother in attempting to quench a thirst, drowns it instead.  A child spills that all might see, might hear, might feel.  Instead it’s absorbed deftly and quickly – instinctively – by inanimate terry cloth, a dish-towel, a bathrobe.

A possiblitiy of endless supply, of infinite, is foreign to all but dreams.  We know nothing unpolluted or immeasurable.  We must not write what we know.  Nothing there but an emptying glass.

Instead, perhaps, to offer and receive – these fluids, this language – of unknown origin and imperceivable limit – spilling together compounding toward stories.  Even as it spills.  Even uncontrollable and ill-perceived.

Families of stories.  Write what you do not know.

Fictional Families, pt. 7

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes11 Comments

click here for previous entries

: Family 1

 

7

“…like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern.”

–Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove–

Boy meets girl.  Man, Woman.  Husband, Wife.  Father, Mother.  Produces the child, a child, children.

Pieces shake out of joint.

Father.  Husband.  Man.  Girl.  Woman.  Boy.  Produces the child, a child, children.

Arranges different order.

Husband meets girl.  Man, Woman.  Husband, Wife.  Mother, Father.  Mother.  Produces the child, a child, children.

Jumble and collide, slide over.

Girl meets boy.  Man.  Husband.  Father.  Woman.  Husband.  Wife.  Mother.  Mother.  Child, child, children.  Produces none.  Adds three.

Kaleidoscopes fresh patterns.

Husband, Wife.  Men.  Women.  Father.  Father.  Mother. Mother. Mother.  Child. Child. Child. Child. Child. Child. Child. (Children).

Many is the new unit.  Same – the new variety.  Names – the faulty designators.

Fall the doctrines of origin and cause.  The sense belong.  The myths of ontology.  Infinite regress.  Unlimited semiotics.

Turn the scope, altering view – collage is the new entire.  Copy – the new original.  Fragment – the new whole.

Child. Child. Child. and Child. Child. Child. Child. “belonging” now to Father-Mother. Father. Mother-Mother. Mother-Father.

Fresh pattern.

By steps and halves and partnerships; alliances and circumstance and blood.

Arithmetic of variables multiplied by chance and power.

Now Mo3 + M3 = 2 + 2 + 3.5 or F3 + W3 = 2(-1/2) + 2(-1/2) + 3-1 where Mo=mother (Mo1, Mo2, Mo3, Mo4), M = man (F=father, W=wife, H=husband, and so forth-1 once removed).

The scraggly male through one variable and nonsymmetrical equation would be F2×2(+3/.5)H3M? for W3/C2+C2+1/2C3 or Father of C=biological children 4 times via 2 sets with 3 additional ½-children by marriage to W3 (third wife) which man or woman they are for one another is an n = unknown variable.

A physicist might be able to map this new arrangement, fresh patterning of conventionality: the family by strands of blood and webbed relations multiplying, bending and stretching (read: re-signifying) concept terms and nouns of relation such as brother, sister, mother, father, spouse &/or partner.

All in variable contexts.  Involves Theory of Complexity.  Without mastery or solutions.  No absolutes.  Arbitrary forms actively adapting.  No truths.  A world of half-breeds and bastards.  Infinite regress.  Anomaly.

=

 

RE-GIFTING PRESENTS, part two: SHARED EXPERIENCE (art)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Philosophy7 Comments

Roughly speaking, I understand “art” to be something created through human interaction with the world.  Whether perceptually noticed or purposively constructed, that which we experience in what we might call “aesthetic ranges” are always results of interactivity and, as far as we know, only occur for human organisms.

In light of my previous post attempting to address the function, variability and necessity of language or sign-types for human perception, survival and being-in-the-world, I want to address something fresh for me that arose in that inquiry.

Previously, I lamented the inevitable distance that occurs in living organisms between originary experience in and with an environment and the organism’s perceptual experience of it.  No matter how miniscule, there is always a gap between our encountering (for instance, of scent and our recognition of smelling; or of light toward eye and our “seeing” of colors; touching flame and reacting retracting) and our awareness of the encounter.  Neurons and nerves pass time in their messaging.  By the time we’re aware, our present is past.

But awareness and perception, cognition and sensation are themselves happening presently, occurring in a process continuously and simultaneously to ongoing encountering.  In other words, it is always the present, and we are always present, doing many different things.  Being presently and what we’re aware of presently are widely variant items, but always both and all, simultaneous with (indeed identical to); the present.

The present is the only reality occurring.

Who and what, where and how are all only ever present concerns.  When is always already answered:  NOW.

If the human organism has adapted and developed the creation and usage of sign-systems to more efficiently navigate processes of survival, I want to look a little bit into what the purposive involvement in, engagement with, those sign-usage capabilities might accomplish for us.

If our survival process, as I remarked before, is one of perceiving and predicting our individual organism’s likelihood and opportunities for existing in any given environment (context, situation), then our perceptive processes are amazingly collaborative toward quickly organizing and evaluating a chaos of inputs and outputs into maneuverable assessments and survivable actions.

Language is our principle medium of signs, used by humans to select, describe and choose what is going on at any moment both inside of us and around us.  Something like water is for jellyfish, perhaps, the medium that both constructs their world and enables them.

But language become, becomes its own experience to become again and again.  In other words, the processing of perception, awareness, consciousness, is also experience in itself.

hand

This is where it struck  me that sign-mediums are a kind of gifting again and again of present experiences.  As we interact with mediums, forming and formulating them into semiotic artifacts (whether spoken phrases, bodily movements, plastic figures or oil-smeared canvases) we are both utilizing those media to organize and process (become aware of and perceive) select elements of our encounter/experience, but also concocting new experiences as well as future presents.  Artifacts delineating our presents will be perceived, signed, comprehended again and again newly, each moment various and ever-present.

In other words, inhabiting our mediums purposively, experimentally, exploratorily, reflectively, creatively, we are both organizing, discovering and determining our own present(s) while simultaneously being new presents and gifting present experiences to become (for ourselves and others via artifacts, writings, sounds and movements).

This seems simple to me and I’m sure the wriggly seams of it, the liminal, necessarily RELATIONAL actualities of it have been sussed out much more eloquently and adequately (made present, re-presented) than this cursory blurt of mine, but it has flooded me recently like an a-ha (fresh awareness of the present?) in answering questions about “wrestling with everything inhabiting my medium.”

So thanks to all of you – writers and artists, filmmakers and philosophers – for plumbing the mediums that give you your present(s) again and again, and then offering them onward to us – a community continually re-gifting our present(s) by consciously inhabiting what our media inhabit. The What Where How Who it moves us within and between.

Passages

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes33 Comments

quick quip for Friday Fictioneers…

Copyright-Renee Homan Heath

Not as if we’ve much choice.  Forward?  Back?  If we could see a little further, higher, or what might be underneath.  There’s a reason we’re heading this direction, away from what’s behind, but still.  We needed water, we’re given sand.  Needing shelter, we find a beach.  It won’t do to stop here, but where do we go?  Carrying on is unknowing, all the same to me, and yet.  Something’s bound to open up, if we could locate a horizon.  You go on ahead, I’m surely unfit to lead.  Why does it always seem like this?

N Filbert 2013