Category: Experimenctes

My own quick attempts at inscribing experience + experiment, languaging

Of Inquiry (Inquiring)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy6 Comments

Of Inquiry (Inquiring)

“Inquiry, then, is more like running around a circle and back and forth between different points on it than walking in a straight line”

-Stephen Littlejohn / Karen Foss-

Theories of Human Communication

            And yet whoever thought of it otherwise?

Still sometimes we use logic, as diversion, among the so-called “points,” letting it go.  Circular, perhaps, in that way.  Much as we’d like to, never quite constructing a web.  For capture.  Or a moment to observe, re-flect.  Rather, more de-flect.

If you get their picture.

Would be something like this:

 

“Intention provides the field for inquiry and improvisation the means for inquiring”

-Lyn Hejinian-

The Language of Inquiry

That is, I assume, if for “improvisation” we substitute some creatively imagining wandering – the wonderings of intention or querying of some inceptive experiencing?  After a fashion.

I’m prone to argue the “point.”  I.e., “What/where/when/how – a ‘point’?”  Inconceivable for me.  As my understanding of ‘point’ is like my comprehension of ‘god’ or ‘time,’ ‘truth’ or ‘being’ – concepts as moving targets without definite characteristics – indefinable insubstantials.  E.g., the falsity of my diagram.

It wouldn’t surprise me if I thought of inquiry as motricity.  When we intend to inquire we’re moving (point-less) and inquiry moves us (point-less) among (therefore, obviously) moving things (thereby point-less), if only in relation to us.  The denial of a dead present.  Pointedly.

No stasis for the living.  Life (logic leads), as, literally, pointless.

 

So how do we refer?  Index?  Sign?  “Point” to – in all this motion?  Commotion?

Language levies us these lies.  These helpful and distorting machinations and maps of partial, hazy truths.  Like mathematical “laws” providing invisible scaffolding in which to graphically refer.  To question and inquire into falsely stable invisible objects.  Creative and imaginative markers.  Hypothetical space-time convergences – true experientially – but unlocatable save for the traces in ongoing movement – unstoppable, uncharitable, unrecordable – each stoppage (representation), chart or reading of ‘reality’ being an-Other, a deflection, an improvisation and wandering (i.e. a new experiencing)…

…dropping the term “experience” as blatantly false.

…retaining till death “experiencING.”

Not, then, “to question,” but questionING, one and same with observING, evaluatING, inquirING, seekING, readING, creatING, fabricatING the impossibility of a truthful past tense.

…running round and round and back and forth,

not between points,

simply, actually, between.

 

N Filbert 2012

 

Decisions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing9 Comments

A quick response to this week’s Friday Fictioneers prompt, a quirky, multi-faceted, and wonderfully open collective of writers from all over the globe riffing their words to an image – a weekly task I am thankful for, and company I admire.  So, from the midst of this holiday week in N. America, something:

And Yet

Mom is right.  It is hard to deny that something points a clear direction, unambiguously, and difficult to argue.  But for reasons I’m at pains to reveal or explain, I am uneasy.  Seriously, I couldn’t ask for a more definite sign – but is clarity everything?  I mean, what about signals from below?  Like how I feel?  Or that strange uninterpretable “intuitive” stuff?   Something isn’t right.  As if I were standing at an intersection without a crossroad, a highway with no exits, opened out before me, shining bright.  And yet.  I have misgivings, doubts.  Troubling the obvious. Are all exceptions exhausted?  Every option foreclosed?  Pressure is on, expectations real – I’ll be a laughing idiot to choose otherwise.  And yet.  And yet.  I have the feeling it will end in a horrible guffaw.

N Filbert 2012

Spilling the Marbles

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

Spilling the Marbles

Which got me thinking (a process I’d describe as internal), about how we find things out when we act.

My wife was talking (a process I’d call external), about what occurs for her when she journals (with a physical pen or pencil on physical paper).  Which she described as “internal processing,” (an activity I’d designate externalizing), whereby she mysteriously splits herself into observer and subject at once, providing case-notes or records of the interaction.  (Did I listen well?).  The arm a kind of thread-of-self arcing out to the needle of a writing instrument, jittering and inscribing its EKG-like “reading” onto the blank pages and looping back in for more.  The self as inkwell?

My body hitched at this.  Read: torso clinched and weather vane set spinning in grey matter.  Like I might if someone told me “god told me to…”, or that they were “inspired by the Muse,” or “carried away by the spirit” and whatnot.  A reaction remote from wife’s account – so what was happening for me?  In other words, am I re-enacting her activity presently?

There’s the thinking part, surely.  And then there’s the intention to find something out – observation, attention, inquiry – “why did I cinch up at that depiction?”, “what felt ‘off’ to me in that account (as related to my own experience)?”, “what was I ‘feeling’”?

I felt uncomfortable, that’s what.  Squirmy, antsy, bothered.  Was that chemically induced, like overall mood-disorder stuff, or related to her message?  I thought about this, and now I’m writing about thinking about it – what’s the difference?

It leaves traces?  It does.  And so?

I’m making something of it?  I suppose.  Why?  How?  And – ?

Why?  Hmmmm.  It comforts me to write.  Like organizing marbles on a tabletop.  It diverts my attention.

To the marbles.

Ah, yes.  That’s it, exactly.

That is to say (in this case silently with tangible markings), the reason I am unable to identify with my wife’s remarks about writing about thinking about her “self,” is that I get distracted.  In my head, it’s a swirl of sounds and concepts, images and sensation-symbols or impulses infiltrating and becoming one another like smoke strands in an overturned glass.  But transforming to paper it becomes language, marbles, metaphors.

            Some whispering gap of translation.  I wouldn’t have thought marbles on a tabletop or envisioned smoke swirling in an upside-down glass – what would be the point?  Do I need to describe myself to myself?  Could I even?  Deceive myself so?  But through a medium – a thick, loamy, granular medium like language – that’s cause for intention, apparatus of selection and choice, opportunities outside the body, drawn from the big wide world.  That’s external, that’s INTERACTION with a history, a culture, and a society of humans that gave rise to its agreements and standards, components and flavors and rules.

Jolting out through the arm via muscle controllers and a mechanical tool, I’m participant far outside my finite organism – in contents and structures, systems and meanings way beyond my doing or the thinks I might think.  The threads that I sew, the fabric I stitch in, the stylus, ink and letters I write are not mine – the pen, paper, leaves, spark, or smoke emitted into the clear crystal container all already exist, given or available, as it were, to me.

It’s hard to find the part I play in the process, or how the words relate to me – more like the words relate me – render me relatable – if I’m able to finagle myself to their categories and nuances.

So it is (for me) as if the movement to write is spilling the marbles – turning me out of myself into a world where language matters – discursive, discussive, dialogically or to some expressive purpose – catching at these rolling targets and corralling them toward some organizational assemblage (that, I suppose, being my part in the meaningful game).  I pick the red one and set it there, not there.  Or prefer the one with the chip in it next to the tiger’s eye, and so forth.  (There’s no accounting for taste – is that “style”?  (Really!?)).

So “what have I written?” I think, and I’m sure I don’t know, but thanks for the language and time, it’s a process – and now you have the bagful of marbles…

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Intimacy as Art

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing6 Comments

Intimacy as Art

“A way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being”

“that ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being’… was what fiction was for.  ‘A way out of loneliness’…”

Jonathan Franzen, on David Foster Wallace

“If the novel were able ‘to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves,’ it opens the potential that she might, as a result, feel ‘less alone inside’”

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, on David Foster Wallace

My son and I arguing about the nature of things – is there anything we can agree on?  mutually believe?  are we similar? – in what began as an attempt (on my part) to soothe obvious hurt and confusion (on his part).  He kept pointing to (referencing) his mirror, his bedside table, in an effort at agreement, at a meeting-point that might be solid, be reliable, be “correct,” or “true.”  Some relatively stable collection of roving and vibrating molecules we might sharingly recognize, might hold, attend, or unite around – together.

Throughout my life I’ve attempted to comprehend – to make a symbol for myself –  what works of art, particular pieces of music, specific phrases or pages of literature, momentary glimpses of nature, dollops of emotional experience DO.  How they work.  Why they “feel” – move us, take an occasional effect we might call “profound.”  Why, even if they shatter us, cause us to weep, provoke in us the enormous courage required to change, we also somehow still feel safe, often empowered, somewhere beyond “okay” (ecstatic? – out of ourselves?)?

Although often evoking experiences I’d describe as most completely, totalizingly personal, I always felt their effectiveness, their possibilities of success and individuated power, came precisely because they were not (personal).  That what intimacy they provided – what outlet or spillage, what expression they represented or evinced – was contextually impersonal, through matter and energy uniquely organized, mediated.

In other words, we could throw all of ourselves into, at, toward or away from them (works of art, formal arrangements of world) without the danger or threat, anxiety or fear, of influence.  We wouldn’t hurt, harm, embarrass, shame, offend or be misunderstood by a cornflower, a collective of strokes of paint, a recording of sound waves, moving molecules.  No direct hits of miscommunication, misinterpretation.  Perfect, variable, flexible presentations of world, of other, that we might release ourselves in relation to, without fear.

Existent things, moments, that genuinely represent otherness from ourselves but without direct exposure, without a being’s inquiry, possible scrutiny, judgment or evaluation.  Interpretation.  Many-sided, borrowed perhaps, but mediated via only one person – me.  I could not fail, fall short, be inadequate to, or otherwise  mess up a novel, poem, composition or film, and if I experienced myself as any of those things – it was my own judgment, assessment.  Mediated.

After years of such exposure, why do I still choose sides, entrench myself in arguments of logic, when I mean to comfort, soften and heal?  Alone, later, I sat and asked myself over and over – IF I have changed, grown, matured in any fashion in my 42 years of life, IF I have learned anything to the point of conscious belief, what might it be? – what  might I say that I know?

I don’t know.

What I scribbled into the margin of my journal was simply that my fundamental belief about the world and life in it was that – at the core of things – “Everything is essentially messy.”  By which I (at least partially) meant (intended) was incomplete, mobile and complex.

Nothing “fixed.”  Staid, finished, whole.

Throughout years of journaling, as I’ve grown to understand how deeply I desire “intimacy” (which I suppose I would describe as “shared personhood” or “met experience”?  Co-events?) I have repeatedly diagramed what seems to me an only possible means between humans:

             Using Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbits to represent whatever we happen to perceive ourselves as, and “Art” on an easel representing anything as a mediated format outside of our “selves” (themselves, I surmise, also likely a constructed medium for experiencing world), to or in which multiple human persons might invest all they experience themselves to be, without necessary personal organism-survival fears, and, possibly, perhaps, occasionally MEET via that medium in toto (or as nearly as possible): experience intimacy, mutuality.  No longer isolated as a being, alone, but finding a common, a sharing-realm, co-perceiving, co-experiencing.

If it be so, that, in fact, as human organisms, all of our entity-type experience is, truly, mediated – through various organizations of mobile and voluble matter and energy – never identifiable as a stasis or final form, if we might begin to see it (us) as such – might we become able to experience direct, person-to-person (experientially) intimacy?  Co-being?  This is where I have turned effort (driven by desire) with my wife, my children.  What if we became safe mediums for one another to experience through?

That would be another entry altogether.

Wobbling

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

What I might name or designate, “the Here.”  The present.  Synonym to “only.”  That there are not points in time.

Perhaps always movement.  Have we uncovered something that is still?  Not that I know of.  But perhaps.  What do we call it?

Rather IS-ness is what I’m referring to.  Things that ARE.  NOT eternally the same.  NOT really able (reliable) to be depended on or assumed.  NOT all-anything, omni-nihilism.  But  movement, active, undergoing change (literally – in way less than fractions of milliseconds – remember, we’re talking about things that ARE – no fractions).  Like a rock, or an ocean, a sense-of-self or single cell.

Truly momentary, present-ly – precisely why the adverb was made – to come closer to experience, reality, in its motion and manner, without fantasizing it into a definable, locatable, or measurable.

While all is wobbly and wobbling – shifting, bouncing, deteriorating, expanding, dancing, vibrating, whatever – once in a while things wobble together (actually, constantly), and when certain things do (oscillation, pulse, a kind of unison rhythm),  moments also occur (to us).

Never resumed, never recalled, never predicted.  Ever occurring.  It is shaky, reality.

N Filbert 2012

Elaborate Organisms (for my wife)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes41 Comments

My response to this week’s Friday Fictioneer prompt (thanks Rochelle for the weekly work)

Her Body a Beehive

She lives.  She parents.  She paints.

She has pain.

She walks.  She sees.  She loves.

She speaks and she reaches.  She sleeps.  She weeps.

Occasionally, she laughs.

She thinks.  She feels.  She moves.  She listens.

She eats and drinks.  She works and worries.

She falls.  She goes on.  She fears.  She insists.

.

You ask me, “how? – all this!”

“Her body is a beehive of batteries – an intricate electrical network flipping switches and adapting to surge, wearing down, sparking up – each neuron, each pulse, each collective oscillation crafting her unique motricity powered with chemicals of emotion, an elaborate and interactive field of energy, an organism.”

She is.

N Filbert 2012

Among the Leaves

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography1 Comment

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Suddenly I found myself among the leaves, diffuse as light, but darker.  Almost a shadow, if I’d found myself at all.

For it came of a simple moment in-between.  Between responding to this or fetching that.  Perhaps waiting for coffee to brew, or just breathing.  In cold sunlight.  In kitchen.  It had something to do with my daughter.  Or she was the first one I told.

“I’ve found myself,” I burst upstairs and explained, holding out my phone which had captured the image like communication.  “I’ve found myself, see?”

But no one quite did.  I was thereby forced to point it out.  Which is a lot more like making something up rather than discovering.  More like envisioning than recognition or taking notice.

Yet I can tell you I saw right through it in that gap.  Made out my identity in that fluster of sunrays and blockage.

An insubstantial sort of silhouette designated by a drove of other things – that “it” – that ephemeral, vacuous “me.”

In fact, the way I remember it, I was harried by flickering thoughts, responsibilities, and a mantled dose of tired, and it was only morning.  I’d backed up against the steely sink and weighted my palms, hoping my neck might loosen by letting it drop.  The floor there.

Something alerted me – a “honey?” or a child’s announcement from some other room – and so I swung and hoisted toward action.  My roving eyes sniffed at calendar and began steadying toward a list comprising my future, but instead.

Instead, a patterning of leaves translating immediately to a scatter-shot messaging of light, exposing some presence in its midst that was absorbing or otherwise deflecting.  Signifying, nonetheless.  A kind of tracing of a head, a photo-graph I guess, a contour drawing by our prominent star.  And if light could trace it, could scribble a quick sketch out of me, well then,

I’d guess I’d found myself among the leaves,

which went something like these pages.

N Filbert 2012

2 Exhibitions

On By NW FilbertIn Art, ExperimenctesLeave a comment

I’m excited about 2 exhibitions occurring this month with which I am involved one way or another…

ReMades will bring multiple local artists together, hauling sundry objects and materials  to their homes and studios to begin remaking, recombining and incorporating these items into lasting objects and artifacts, which will then be exhibited throughout the Fall and Winter at Fisch Haus Studios’ tremendous gallery space, thus preserving their potential to enliven and enlighten our communities.

Opening Reception on Final Friday, November 30, from 7-10pm

Fisch Haus, 524 S. Commerce, Wichita

An exhibition of work by local artists using materials fromThe LUX renovation process that would have otherwise been lost.

                                                    

And also my lovely amazing wife’s exhibition currently available at Mead’s Corner in Wichita KS

Friday evening, November 23, 6-9 pm there will be an artist’s reception with an artist’s talk by Holly Suzanne at 7:30!

Hope to see you there!

Address: 430 E. Douglas
Wichita,KS 67202
Hours: 8am-11pm Sun
7am-11pm Mon-Thu
7am-1am Fri
7am-1am Sat

HOPE TO SEE YOU HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE!

(and support art and artists! – BUY IT!)

Myopia

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes18 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers, November 9, 2012.

 

How to describe it?  The grief is heavy, distinctly.  Regret, fear, and misgivings.  The experience is prominent, yet so difficult to explain.  Actuality gives way to traces, as if patterned into nature, something that should have been known all along, but not possible to identify.  This mix of things – complexity – the oversight of choices.  Myopia, like scales, and the fracturing, the cloud.  Peering and peering, inside and out, straining for meaning, for reasons.  Dimly opaque, only powerful suggestion, like lace over frost.

N Filbert 2012

Chaos Pieces : Election Day

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

Election Day

The way things that seem to need doing impose mayhem on those things we were wanting to do (vice-versa).

A sort of ratcheting of oddly shaped pieces tumbling down towards one another on an inclined plane.  Necessary bits and fragments of desire rattling against, around and into one another, oppositely directed, apparently, and all with force or momentum (time, change, survival).  They clatter.  They clatter and clutter, like there’s a microcosm of chaos in us, the spillage of some enormous container of Legos.

Is this unfamiliar?

Something, always, functioning as noise in the wavering systems of our message(s)?

I want.  I  need to….  A hunch, an intuition.  A concrete demand.  An idea spawns.  And tasks arise.

That kind of oscillation is what I’m talking about.  And it goes both ways.  All ways.

I set about a chore and am derailed by an idea.  I dream and the over timer intrudes.  I breath and it hitches to a cough.

Not that it’s always that way.  Sometimes the texts come right on time, just when I was getting up anyway.  Sometimes the activities that need the doing, also fuel the dreams.  Think of such a time.

No wonder it’s called “flow.”

Yet it hardly seems “reality,” or “daily life.”  Perhaps that’s only me, that the pieces that construct me are preiteratively cross-purposed?  Maybe my fragments’ forces are centripetal (or centrifugal), either way multi-directional and simultaneous?  ADD?  ADHD?  “Life?”  Speaking animal?

Like Election Day.

N Filbert 2012