Category: Experimenctes

My own quick attempts at inscribing experience + experiment, languaging

RE-GIFTING PRESENTS, part 1: Inhabiting the Medium We Inhabit

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy7 Comments

Juame Plensa sculpture

This post is an attempt at exploring and hopefully explicating (at least a little) a dialogue that began in a series of comments between the excellent thinker/writer Tocksin and myself.  The comment thread can be read in full here (if you wish), but I will highlight two sections for purposes of this post:

tocksin says: I am noticing we two like to wax philosophical at the expense of letting our characters speak. We are mere babes in the woods being raised by wolves. Tooth and nail we will fight to have our day. Write we must.
N Filbert says: I find that to be true – what you say about being babes in the woods. Wrestling with everything else inhabiting our medium.
tocksin says: Let me feel you more with what you mean by wrestling with everything else inhabiting our medium.

At which point I made some bumbling effort toward it, seemingly tangling into more confusion.  And was set thinking – how would I verbalize what I mean by the wrestling that using language is?  The next two (or more) posts will be my preliminary attempt to language into it.

I interpreted Tocksin’s first message (above) to concern our propensity as writers to be unable to “leave ourselves out of it” (e.g. to let plot and characters, narrative and action be), rather than to voice-in, reflect, trouble and scrutinize our place in the mix of it, the ourness in the howness of any languagings aboutness.  “Tooth and nail we will fight to have our day.  Write we must.”

All of this started rattling about in my old noggin with what darts around in there from Wittgenstein, William James, Gertrude Stein, Bakhtin, M.A.K. Halliday, J.R. Firth, Benjamin Whorf, C.S. Peirce, Edward Sapir, Peter Berger, and thousands of other voices and ideas regarding LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, BEING, PERCEPTION, etc…

As far as I can tell, these relations have concerned humans since humans have experienced concern.  Who are we?  What are we?  How are we?  When are we?  even from time to time expeditioning toward Why?

language

A few posts ago I quoted Judith Butler from her Excitable Speech to the tune of:

 “language is not a tool that merely allows meaning to happen.  Rather, the relation between language and its users represents a complex ‘matrix of intelligibility’ that makes us readable to one another.  Language, in other words, represents a framework that constitutes both the ‘doing’ and the ‘doer’ alike: the subject always exists in a condition of relation to language that implicates the person using it, as much as the addressee – ‘we do things with language…produce effects with language, and…do things to language’ because ‘language is the thing that we do.’ (from Christina Milletti).

Much greater minds than mine have attempted to tackle this – in language, with language, to language, as well as in painting and music, film and image and architecture and dance: Who are we?  What are we?  How are we?  When?  What is?  Happening?  Basic problems of being as faced by our particular type of organism’s means of awareness: senses, perceptive apparatus, and largish brain – all inputting and outputting, inter- intra- extra- extro-putting simultaneously.

Due to our conditions, one of the stickiest problems seems insurmountable – the ability to experience (consciously) BEING.  Or NOW.  The Present.  IS-ness.

In our splendiferous operations of surviving/existing, the mechanisms and processes of doing so (predictive, inductive, deductive, collaborative, receptive, perceptive, oscillatory, responsive, reactive, self-generated, externally infringed, incited, and so on – AMAZING processes!) TAKE TIME, if only nanoseconds…all to say that our perception and/or sensation of being and existing NECESSARILY are not simultaneous to its occurrence, and yet also ARE, because the organizing and perceiving of our activity also constitutes our experiences AS they occur.

This is one of the reasons William James insists on the metaphor of “stream” for our being.

Here he writes on introspection (self-reflection, becoming conscious of consciousness, or perceiving perception – what language and symbols, signs allow, enable, concoct):

“introspecting the contents of that stream, more precisely, a particular item floating along it, interrupts the streaming, arrests the item (or objectifies), detaches and isolates it.  Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is…As a snow-flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated.  The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.”

experience

And is also experience, experience becoming.

As I am considering language, that is – assigning description, value, reality using symbol/sign/or index to something in human experiences – I am presenting a coming-to-terms (languaging) for myself of what I attempted (languaging) to “mean” (communicate, share, RELATE) in my off-handed comment to Tocksin regarding “wrestling with everything inhabiting our medium,” as well as an hypothesis that has been haunting me since.

“Wrestling with our medium/habitat – language” means for me in this way: As I conceive (language) the being or existence of the human organism, I interpret an organism of proactive and retroactive complex processes organizing and imputing value to its environment, selectively perceiving and constructing a context or situation in which it can get what it needs to survive.  In the scheme of things (or, its organismal specificities IN RELATION TO other organisms and contexts) the human has developed metaphoric and metonymic signification capacities for purposes of more efficient and productive navigation / survival.

Language, (or humans as semiotic beings) then is a medium in the sense of a manipulator of gaps, or a “thing” insofar as it operates between, RELATIONALLY.  Signs are always IN RELATION TO.  Inner experience, outer experience, communication, description, definition, etc…a SHARED HABITAT, an activity, indeed a primary thinking process – signing experience is a composition, exploration, examination and organizing (improvisational and purposive) of our world and our perceptual relations within experience of it.

Signing – languaging world – is for us our activity of finding out, making sense, interpreting, composing and exploring being/existing.

So when we go with purpose to the page to write language – all of this is inherent to the medium – we make our world (as we experience it) inhabit language so that we can experience it and also we inhabit language in order to experience (perceive our perceiving, become conscious of our awareness).  Language is the “stuff”(?) – the medium – the lubricant of passage between ourselves and our senses and perceptions; and everything beyond those individual sensings and perceptions.  Thinking organizes and determines experience.

So self-consciously involving ourselves in language opens up all our experience (known and unknown, much like dreams) to be wrestled with in attempting to make a poem, a story, a report, or a conversation, or, even, a thought.

That is part of what I was trying to say, Tocksin.  Part two will be the idea that has haunted me since…

Immediate sources referenced:

Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry.  U. of California Press, 2000.

R.M. Berry & Jeffrey Di Leo, editors. Fiction’s Present:Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. SUNY Press, 2008.

Gyorgy Buzsaki.  Rhythms of the Brain.  Oxford, 2011.

Rudolfo Llinas.  I of the vortex.  MIT Press, 2002.

William James.  Principles of Psychology.  Cambridge, 1981.

The Family of Fiction – 6

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes14 Comments

The story to now…

Family 1

and part the sixth…

6

“I propose description as a method of invention and of composition.  Description…is phenomenal rather than epiphenomenal, original, with a marked tendency toward effecting isolation and displacement, that is toward objectifying all that’s described and making it strange…Description then is apprehension, ‘the act or power of perceiving or comprehending’ and a motivating anticipatory anxiety, expectant knowledge…the very writing down seems to constitute the act of discovering it…but also and problematically an act of interpreting it.”

-Lyn Hejinian-

            Hybrids.

What is “normal” or “traditional,” what forms remain (for long) in a universe of chaos ever emerging and expending?  Convergences, then.  Bloodline here, bloodline there, cross it through and pull it taut.  Cultural collage.

The parents lead the way, though not as masters, more experiments – of brother linked to sister linked to brother step toward brothers veined by half with sister same as brother.  Not personal or by choice until fixed in the same installation.  Could be called art, called family.

Other halves and steps by three with partners of their own yet bleeding half their blood.  Where are they?  A sitcom cast of lesbians and addicts, the wealthy and the poor, the liberal, constrained.  Kaleidoscoping styles and beliefs – “it takes a village” – and they’ve settled one.

Working well enough – a jalopy needing constant tinkers.  It most assuredly breaks down.  Imagine society.  Or the size of it, extended.  How many grandparents can a child acquire?  Its fine for rituals like births and holidays – multiplying spoils – but where does one belong?  With whom?  Family-by-affinity?  Reunions become a game of pick-up-sticks or jacks and marbles (except with persons).  Arbitrary circles depending on usable space.

The family tree she drew for therapy’s a forest.  Cottonwoods and pines, baobab, bonsai.  An oak thrown in for measure, and barely identified shrubs.  What base is there to touch?

Parliament versus monarchy, troubling the court of appeals.  With manager-types and generals, gurus, debaters and clowns.  Stir in deconstruction and some faith for emotive stew.  It’s a kinky chain of command, yet all are bound by it.  Children vying a vote.

And if infected by the peacemaker-pleaser-gene, the torsion becomes a complicated interpretive dance.  A surplus of baggage with all the due fees.  A lot to saddle on young.

They’re resilient.  Navigating democracy and other octagonal squares -awkward parallelograms – never quite losing site of Atlantis.  Lost kingdom, utopian, buried deep under vast emotional sea, at times nearly glimpsing a spire.  At least some strange stirring.  Dreams of a large enough house.  Solving nonsymmetrical fusion equations.  These children are smart.

If an artist paints the picture she performs mixed-media collage with inks and clay and dozens of paints, incorporates cloth and wire and found objects with hopes enough resin or wax will contain it.  Hold it all fast.  And still let everything – everyone – be seen.   The composer creates an erratic symphony – arrhythmic with regular dissonance, whelming moments dramatic with harmony and occasional measures of quiet resolutions.  The scientist keeps figuring on emergent chaos, open-ended systems like weather and complexly variable algorithms.  Author writes it down and edits, erases as much as inscribes, constantly losing track.

Each makes their own scribbled lines, overlaid.  Its sketchy and messy and thick.  Kids jumping ropes, fingering string figures, string theory, Spiderman-webs.  It gets made.

Mirrors & Shadows

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings5 Comments

“Ten times a day you must overcome yourself.  You must want to burn yourself up in your own flame.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

The Shadow, Andy Warhol
The Shadow, Andy Warhol

“the lesson is clear: one is multiple, the same is different, the representation is the negative of the person…both original and copy, identical and different, they are the same and the other, interchangeable and monumental…In the dark room of his studio, Warhol develops himself.  In so doing he ‘unmakes’ himself.”

-Victor Stoichita-

Shadows, Andy Warhol
Shadows, Andy Warhol

“Death follows artists around like their shadow and I think that’s one of the reasons artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and nothingness of life.”

-Francis Bacon-

Children singing choruses.  Joyous chants and rhymes.  Distant.  Repetition forming memory.

Chasing shadows, or running from.  Self-same body blocking sun.  To be sought, to be feared.  Identical and strange.

Known alone in traces and reflections.

I say that “I” was young once.  That it’s only patterns of light, only the passing of time, only angles of vision.

I repeat myself.

Each day reassembling, developing, dissembling, to reassemble again.  My body a gathering post.

Mirroring image has gone from the closest thing to self-awareness we might uncover to a flat reflective surface full of nothing.  Ephemeral and changing by the second, dependent on the looker, a vacant mirage.

Shadow has proceeded from a designator of real presences to an outline of actual vacuity.  From a measurable symbol of substance to a vague hint of objects passing.

Voices like a bag of small bells and grass.  Something shaking and stirred.  Snippets of a tune, the catchy parts.

What I can tell I read, observe, attend and consider, opening a dialogue of days.  But I only get to see in glimpses and portions.  A hand moving, holding an instrument here; flat feet from crossed legs there; a shoulder, some hair of a beard, the frames of glasses.  I don’t see myself seeing, nor see myself as seen.

There’s the mirror and the shadow – intangible, eminently interpretable and malleable “things” – emphases of the transitory.  Receptacles like language – merely signs or indices – pointing back at absence.

Moment, moment, moment…now then now then now…endless fantasies of dissection moving round the room, faster than shuttling clips of film.  A self presenting / representing itself after again, appearances only, shimmering skein mingling veils of light…

While they sing like breezes dreaming – “Who sees?” and “What is seen?”

He who has ears let him hear,

bypassing illusion,

in marks and gestures

Question

Family: A Fiction the Fifth

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes1 Comment

to browse the gist of things…a little where-its-coming-from-where-its-going, start here:

Family 1

otherwise, here’s the newest particles:

5

            There being always more sides to the stories.

Building blocks of broken bones.

Families at bone-splintering nearness.  Whether abusive or conditional; assertive, supportive, overindulgent or neglectful.  The pressures in an atom wiggle and hum, each entity squeezed and redirected into another, without foregoing elemental ingredients.

Why drawing so close hurts so much, compounding all the bruisings.

Take seven shattered anatomies and circle them into a hug.  Ouch, oof, shrieks and tears.  Sounding like sport or war.  Ahem.  The game is designed to figure out where it’s safe to rest and heal.  Together.  Every press accentuates wound, but may also set the fracture.

The littered trail.  Fragments, chips, and joints.  Ankles, ribcage, skulls.  The longer held together, dwindles the percentage unharmed.  Increases deformation, reformation, and strength in the bindings.  History makes the call.  Families get made this way.

Alpha male’s left-side stress-fractures filigree – he brings them in close to the mama.  Pain ensues globally, harder gripping cuts and tears her.  Dislodging hip and rib, she wails back, threatening to come undone, wrapping and withholding fragile loins.  Glass-cracked between the eyes evincing wince, he lumbers to the bottle – an anesthetic, fog-inducing ICU.

Boys pummel and cling on trampoline.  Superheroes blasting at their foes, setting right the world.  Divine ninja tricksters, eluding all blows, fending sacred space from viral intrusion.  Morphing Jekyll into Hyde.  Two-against-one turns to three-on-three, searing yelps and hollered rage compound the fractures and spread the lesions until a fuming heap of shame remains.

Emotion rivers throughout a system.  Elaborate table-game of chance, every draw altering rules.  And conditions.  One discretion cheats them all.

Resistance (fear) and just revenge.  Creating hypotheses – infinite dis-ease.

Tuck them in with tender warmth.  Dabbing sores with salve.  Reconnoitre, reassemble, holding court, calling assembly.  The luxury is not repeating childhood, home is not a corridor of labs.  Parent positioned now as doctor; infected all the same.

Blood is issue, possible transfusion, tearing tissues.  Don’t ignore, curing is a share.  having invented them in this inventive world, they must also be wriggled through.  Calls for help, from any corner, equate a demand.

The family as quarantine.

To serve and protect.

Seek.  Assist.

Quarantine.

Sanctuary.

Sanitarium.

Touch base.

Proceed.

Fiction Family 4

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes1 Comment

Pieces that precede can be read in order here:  FAMILY: A FICTION

Family 1

section three closing thus….

They build a monument, calling it travel.  Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum.  Humans tend to revert to familiar.  Habitude of experience.  With no experience, alteration comes to bear.  Predictable as weather.

No one’s leaving home.

Other words coming to mind.

4

            Resistance.

There is, it seems, in families, this propensity.

Whatever is said, corrected, even when agreed.

 

Existing to clarify his spouse – to illuminate and exhibit.  In turn, she elucidates him.  Providing bases or cause – extrapolates.  Siblings arguing each other, united they stand, all as deserters.  Seven eventual versions of the parental wake-up blare: AWOL.

It’s good to be king.  Graph the assassination attempts – looks like innards of clocks.  A searing clap of surprising betrayal each time.  Unlike the spurned and necessarily nutrient mother.  Shagg proclaiming the law (as devised and developed by nature – read lifegiver/lawgiver “mom” – female coupling nurture and structure within dependency).  He handles rebellion, warding attacks and spying the skirmishes, she breeding resentment from ongoing need.

These are general patterns, biologically driven, no symphony the same.  With eight keys plus a half, on a twelve-tone scale, the songs recognizable according to differing orders.  Typify and characterize.  Declare it false.

Scraggydad is nurturing, allowing/confirming resistant responses and recumbent emotions, shame-shirking under her gaze.  In other words – as one of them – a remedial complicity.  Which she echoes into her drama – the leadership, the guilt, the collapse.

Each wanting to be cradled – rock, paper, scissors style – with an occasional simultaneous Bingo.  However unlikely, it’s what probability’s for.

Thus every level its lingo.  Select a word (sex or heaven, death or boy) and provide a taxonomy of related meanings from the eldest parent through littlest child.  It comes clear.  There are altering thesauri of usage.

Family as a game of Scrabble on the board of Life, each settling Catan.  With beeps and whistles and a slew of avatars.

A technique known as mapping provides lay of the land, similar to a geneologist’s tree applied to the present.  A thing to be explored or verified.  Corrected through each journey.  In several dictions.

The family edition.

A Family of Fiction, pt. 3

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

“all attempts at interpretation must abandon any pretence at direct understanding and concentrate on second degree understanding.”

-Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow-

Family 1

FAMILY A FICTION (the story to now)

Section 3:

3

            Girl-princess-daughter, her experience as only.  Not quite true collectively, there being also steps- and halves- another, older, never cohabitant, but still.  The members were stacked.  Against or for, another matter.  Depending.

The younger, caged one, doesn’t eat.  Is self-restricting.  Flutters like a bird.  Her brain engulfs her self, a genetic trait.  Possessed also, in some measure, top-down.  Each with their own rendition.  One definition of family.

Cohabitants.  Genetics.  Affinities.  Their opposite.  Relations.  Some, after all, being half-habitants, some post-, some occasional-, some rare-.  Or endangered.  Or in transitions.

If there is a nucleus, it is Scraggly and Self-aware, both co- and in-habitants constantly, at least according to them.  In the minds of their children.  Whenever they were.  Adding an unknowable “if.”

The grown and growing exhibit it.  The three on their own.  Three nearly capable, at least two of which: disinterested.  This is not about them, not a descriptive analysis.  Maybe more like a song, composing a fugue: each line for itself replete with recurring variations, cringes of dissonance and harmonic highlights.  Something like a family, a novel, a history, religion.

Oscillations that swivel near a truth, only to loop and to veer into something more real.  Being actual.  That is to say, is happening.

Inopportune call and subsequent jail time.  Jealousies and rivalries, differentials of power.  Stirred with a paste of abuse and traces of –isms.  Coupled to all the unpredictably brave accomplishments.  That sort of thing.  The life of a species.

With no one sure how to tell it.  Who solos, who’s chorus.  And when.  Where hardly matters in webs.  Or does it?  Authoritative nights at the table, father propounding to a coven of illumined and down-turned faces – forged not of incantations, but synergies of private networks.  Ubiquitous strands of escape.  Virtual tunneling.  Not to mention insolence.  Or simply vanishing within.  Daddy lost in thought.  Or mum diagnosing (she doesn’t like to think it that way).  Seldom either/or.

They build a monument, calling it travel.  Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum.  Humans tend to revert to familiar.  Habitude of experience.  With no experience, alteration comes to bear.  Predictable as weather.

No one’s leaving home.

Other words coming to mind.

Family is Fiction, part two

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing8 Comments

FAMILY: A FICTION, PT. 1

Family 1

2

            Quick to give up, or in, to description.  Sidelong glances, or enough periphery, and it’s known – they are there.  Are here.  Which is firstly what needs be established.  Shaggy in-turned male and self-consciously-nondescript-as-a-waged-war-within-herself – are here – whether explicitly denoted or not, for that is not what this story’s about.  And all of their children – as if we’re in shadows – near presences felt.

If the man were currently reading (he is reading now), and is sitting at his desk, surrounded by more words, words bound up to burst and licking the chops of their leafy lips, prepared to murmur and shout.  It seems to him.

And she would be (read “is”) pushing a broken body into limited stress-inducing motions purposed to loosen and tighten.  Laying on a mat on a floor watching women on a screen count and stretch and breathe, mimicking them with her own limbs and torso. Accentuating her “core,” strengthening her “self” for this losing battle.

The children are learning and eating, playing and working – whatever it is youth do to fend for themselves and their futures – their shadow-dance with age.

Unable to say it as is – the is too complete and far from attainable – in segments and particles, or a falsified whole from great distance.  Oh nature.  Oh being.  Because of the facts, we have to just enter, and being recursive it matters only slightly where or when – inception/conclusion are unrecognizable to a decentralized everywhere, connective and mobile.

Some are known by their doings, some by their fathers’ or mums’; others according to their works or the times.  Some hardly known of at all.  To speak of them is to personally encounter –  as if face-to-face – an intersubjectivity of optimal expressivity.

Or not.  Language gets carried away.  When we search for a meaning or some explanation is it not because we already believe it is there?  Something already imagined?  What remains is a tying together in  idealized systems like logic – building a case or crafting a theory, replete with supporting cast of regulatory theorems.  Which demonstrates little but our ability to make science out of anything.  Exercise in closing the systems.  While all remain open.

The rugged male shifts from his papers, given possibilities, which it turns out rhymes everything.  She teases her hair nonchalantly (she hopes) and attempts to forget her over-calculations by delving into them – representing them – externalizing image and textures.  Viewed askance not head-on, but in outlines and shades or peered at and through, as we’d envision a form from behind.  Anything to remove the scrutiny of mere appearance – incorporate more and defraggle illusions of skin.

She scribbles it onto used papers,  ready surfaces already marred, turning scarrings and blots into figures and wounds; while he accentuates the peculiar, alarmed by specifics and seeking connective similitude.  If a thought comes queer, he tattoos it with ink until it sounds available.

Both, in a way, finding commerce, a transaction with others engaging/avoiding themselves.  Feeling so like and unlike.  A pestilence of the species, er, human condition – overwhelming similarities of form with infinite intricacies of difference.  Everything related – never one without another – a closed system of incalculable possibilities.  They labor in.

Male smells sour in just a few days, not accustomed to shouldering public, perhaps what allows for his mess.  Adapting  to the threat of her attention, though in the absence of comprehension.  She allows him his comforts till they confront and offend.  Peaceable enough – this arrangement – and duly provocative:  they enhance and combine, stimulate and remind one another in a struggling intimacy – they love.  Not without precedents or fear, but they love.

And in their sleep, the gears will turn.

He writes off stuck places – the uncanny processes of dreams.

The children behave like loosely arranged magnets, at times slamming close, or sullenly repelled.  Usually vibrating, tensely, between.  The volatility of past and a future reacts in young bodies as now.

Viewed collectively – it’s an inter-&-co-dependent mechanism, sketchy and atomically diagrammed – similarly potent (at least potentially) in its splittings and pressures.

Live things best metaphor themselves.

Found Objects

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing25 Comments

Greetings all – squishing this in before the homework hits.  As always I highly encourage any and all of you creatives out there to take these generous prompts and craft away, as exercise or effort – The Friday Fictioneers weekly wonderful co-creativity :

Copyright-Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

“Look, the details don’t matter, okay?  It happened, and here’s the proof, and now nothing will ever be the same.”

“As if it were.  As if things could change like that – all over and immediate.  How do we even know what from this collage?”

“Jesus Ralph!  They’re connected by the photograph!  Look!”

“As if the image were the thing itself.  C’mon Rachel, really?”

“God dad!  It’s grandpa, a menorah, a dial-up and some crayons – how obvious does it have to be?”

“I’m gonna need something more than a sign Rachel, something more than a trick of the light.”

N Filbert 2013

Fumbling toward FICTION

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing14 Comments

Okay, here goes.  I’ve been diddling my way into another attempt at a longer go of writing, and today have decided, (largely by the courage of company – Tocksin has also begun posting portions of a novelistic go) to post a few rudimentary fragments.  Up until yesterday  the working title was simply FICTION.  I’ve written 3-5 chapters over the past month or two and in seeking an orientation for the work certain symbols and recurrences have led to an inquiry.  “Write about what you want to know” Lance Olsen says, and I can see I’m searching after something in these words.  The epigraphs that shoot me on are the following…

“Reality is the motif”

-Wallace Stevens-

“The universe was the glue that held him together”

-Jonathan Lethem-

“I only care about fiction that raises the question of what fiction is…”

-R. M. Berry-

“The line is only a shadow cast by one (memory or fiction) over the other (fiction or memory).  Once I place memory into language, memory becomes a rumor that makes room for uncertainty.  Memory slips into fiction but then fiction becomes memory once again in an/other way…It is difficult to separate fiction from memory, which is different from separating truth from lying.”

-Doug Rice-

and so it begins…

Family 1

Family 12Family 13

Aspects of Writing: Writing the Impetus. The Self-Reflexive.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing10 Comments

The Self-Reflexive.  Impetus.

The urgency, that is, the urging I feel in setting forth to compose, is dismantling.

In other words, the forcings that encroach, impinge and unleash within me when I’m ‘of a mind’ (experiencing the intention of) ‘to create’ is one of destruction, a defensive attack.

I am thus synonymed by sculptor, woodcarver, archaeologist.

One wants to undo the stories before they reach the page.

In order to find, discover, the figure of them, a more lasting (perhaps) form or shape.

To strip them of their ‘qualities’ or ‘style.’  Their manipulations.  Creation as a straining of the weak, the falsifiable…a process in survival of the fittest, the more “true”(?) or apt.

Chiseling personal explanations and perspectival descriptions down to possibilities.  Unraveling myths toward oracles.  Discounting proofs into theories.

–

The impetus of writing evokes the motivation of doubt, the landscape is struggle.

“To be inspired” might mean to be activated by an experience accurately called “perfink” (David Krech), or, “perceiving, feeling and thinking at once” (Jerome Bruner).

Regurgitant feeling: investigation, analysis, interpretation – meanings attacking meanings, in hopes.  In hopes that a perfink of “meaning” (a satiation of anxiety, terror, doubt) might prove indestructible – as a possibility.

–

The narrative, then (the verbal expression of a perfink), is a traffic jam of conventions, presuppositions, reality-views and solipsistic Gnosticism forged within the forging self; writing – as apparatus, activity, function – reflexes: brings self-world to bear on self-worlds in attempts to deconstruct automatic (as it were) constructions of perceiving/feeling/thinking – fighting, clawing, tearing against it with the information and energy of shared resources: language, “knowledge,” the usable past.

–

Clashings of systems, perfinking perfinks, violent internal skirmishes and acts of terror(ism) – a doing that attempts the undoings of doings – an otherwise endlessly insular, of unverifiable and infinite traces, activity known as self-reflexive –

– producing stalemates of exhaustion, individual paucities of supply and reinforcement, ourobourosian –

offering only extrinsic chances for momentary cease-fires – the artifact, figure, form of the battlefield, photographed in process and thus submitted – to critics, to readers, to colleagues, to shadows (i.e. to genuine Others) that it might become real (exist in relation, to be directly experienced), corroborated or dismissed by equally limited and idiosyncratic perfinking, outside – both in the world, and of it.

“the contest any artist has with his or her art: working toward a perception that is his or her mind’s peace.”

-Louis Zukofsky-

“the mind carries an austere

inwardness that will not put out its eyes”

-Laurie Sheck-

“Writing is a lonely business’ is both a dull myth and a material fact of the profession, one I happen to be temperamentally suited to endure but which doesn’t gratify my sense of what it’s for.”

-Jonathan Lethem-

Creeley

-Robert Creeley-

see Aspects of Writing