Category: Experimenctes

My own quick attempts at inscribing experience + experiment, languaging

“Communication”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces2 Comments

“Communication”

We, in our world, have a theory, a process really, that we call “communication.”  In various states of profundity it might also be referred to by “love.”

“Communication” is the process of signaling/decoding; saying/listening; writing/translating; touching/feeling by which we become aware of one another, about one another, of one another.

All things considered, “communication” is pretty important for us, though not necessarily to us.  While appearing more complex and refined than single cells or parts of cells vibrating under a microscope; more elaborate and extensive than a swarm of birds or school of fish, it hardly works as well.  As if certain sharp things and certain dull things cancel one another out.

Pitch, tone, palate and respiration.  Vocabulary, grammar, syntax.  Associations occurring in the brain, the glands, the organs, the body.  I’ve always thought of our existence as “fraught” and it never ceases to amaze me!

Amaze and astound, in no particular order.  As if “stound” were past-tense for “stand.”  Stopped-in-tracks-reeling-backwards.

There’s nothing to it really, we all do it, all of the time, innately, it would seem, given we could not survive without it.  And yet.  “Innate” wouldn’t be the right word.  Maybe “potential” as if capacities and possibilities surround every cell toward response.  And then.  What becomes.  Responsibility.  Of that interstellar stuff moving and extra-anatomical stuff too.  Kind of equals.

So we’re not necessarily “good” at it, and hardly possess a measure, everyone on equal footing at some point, depending on the context, depending on construction (of the possibles) and so forth.  It’s often accurately called “fuzzy” or “messy” – an entanglement of sorts in no sense negative.

I always liked William James – the jumble-up of him.  “Rich thicket of reality” he called it, a passage to get caught up in, sometimes snared, sometimes struggling, but ever in its midst, I suppose.

Lyn Hejinian once pronounced it “inexhaustible.”

I just wanted to mention…

“The argument would go something like this: reality exists; it is independent of what we think though it is the only thing we can think; we are a part of reality but at the same time consciousness of this fact makes us separate from it; we have a point of reentry (a ‘centrique happinesse’), which is language, but our reentry is hesitant, provisional, and awkward”

-Lyn Hejinian-

Toronto

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes9 Comments

Friday Fictioneers, August 31, 2012

Toronto

How well I remember the day, injured, sharp pain in every step, alone and far, hoping for once the rain might hold.  That solid, turbulent sky.  Street smells of rot and iron, bodies and fuels.  All muffled for me in the reasons – what sense and thinking does – that thick overlay of shiftings and emotion.

It was here, right here, looking up for bearings, that I knew all was doubtful.  Doubtful I’d find my way, doubtful my body would hold up, doubtful anyone would wait or notice.  Particularly not the distant.

Of course I knew what to do.

And what about the rain?

N Filbert 2012

In-Shadows

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

In-Shadows

“The Artist, he who even takes the shadows of things in hand…”

-Macedonio Fernandez-

“He who imagines will never know non-being.”

 

A morass of shadows.

A repletion of blips and flashings.

An absence : I understand.

 

I swipe my hand through the shadows.  I sense disturbance, but my palm returns empty, save the moisture of fog in dark woods.  If even.  There has been dust.

I stir the ashes.  I kindle the fire.  The brain a roadmap of chaos.  And intricately precise.  Subject to accident and lesion and a cross-pollination of impulses and energies beyond present calculations.  Not withstanding infinity, of course, which hardly makes sense, given the matter.

A squalor of shadows.

Currents of whispering air, of motion.

A ubiquity that trembles.

I open my mouth to the world.  I emit and inhale.  Shouting resonant within, because I have ears.  Equipped with particulars.  Apparatus.  Other cells stay quiet but do not cease, I lack the equipment to hear.  Stone, lizard, mushroom.  Light in its veils.  I cry out.  Echo =, tree hardly cares.  I’m remiss and listen myself for response.

Breathing the smoke.  I stink and I cough and I smell.  My hand passes through without ashes or mist.  I am not everywhere.  I do not know my ends.  If a melody came through like a sight or a sound, I would not name it.  I am emptying full.

 

As shadows thicken and disperse.

Objects as subjects and objects again.

Something live in the darkness.

 

That is darkness for me, not the night owl or mouse, salamander or bat, not the tree.  No, it is me, I, we, that conjure the “darkness” as difference from “light,” however similar, however same.  As if emitting symbols.  As if meaning to manufacture.  I construct a sign and call it poem, collaborate a you and a me.  We converse.  I begin.

If doubt incites a thought, thought conspires doubt to further action.  As if shadows were transparent.  And meaningless was choice.  Eye – mouth – hand : open to the world, the world opens.  I begin in signs and gestures, a collaborative entanglement, reentered.

 

In dispersion shadows reconvene.

Clearly thickened by old growth.

Body minding nets.

 

Would I make a “here” it would be “we.”  A desire for presents is relation.  What its plural ought to be (“presence”).  I unwrap unable to view the gift.  Tell me of it, will you?  “Inside” is lost in shadows.  What’s perceptible from “there”?  Tree, raven, sky.  Plastic object pulsed in heartbeat or emotion: what could I learn from “there”?

What isn’t simultaneous?  And how like the infinity we are constrained not to absorb?  Enclose me.  Lend me a form, a border, a threshold.  Entangle.  Experience may come.

“the silence of the page allows us to hear the writing”

-Octavio Paz-

 

Pre-qual(ia): A sort of introduction: What Language: &

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

            We happen in a substantial liquid.  A surround we effect.  Are affected by.  We move, it moves.  It moves, we are moved.  Moving it.  Being moved by.  Each, all.  What’s between.  Those spaces.  Empty and full, of course.

You know what I mean.  You breathe.  Hearing silently what is written.  You see.  Thinking the emptiness between, what fills.  Is filled by.  Is full.  Before it thinks empty.  Feels.

Liquid, permeable as skin, as mobile, as inseparable.  The thought, the body of that thinking.  Or, a “body of text.”  Such liquid air.  Insubstantiated emptiness without which we would not.

Happen in that liquid/not-liquid.  Like particles and waves.  Either-ors reduced to ands.  Themselves.  With which is struck a chord.  Male/female, yes/no, self/other, you/me, hot/cold: variations of permeable boundaries, without borders, like overlapping zones, difficult transparencies.

We grew out of, becoming, precedented, pro-perceptive/re-perceptive.  Remember.  Without parts, but designated.  You hear.  You see.  You taste.  You feel.  You, thinking emotion, feeling in brain, mind matterless matter…mem(e)brane(-ain).  Liquidy occur.  Movement.

The leaf.  Exhaust.  Intake.  A wave.  A particle.  Re-perception.  Mem(e)ory.  Or me.

You know the drill.  Acting.  Play.  A wobble, a quiver.  We tremble.  We hum.  We happen.  It’s a wonder.  Every it.  Unknown, unknowable knowledge experienced.  I-qualia.

Sense-making.  What is.  In essence nonsensical.  Incommunicable between.  Inescapable intersubjectivity.  Either parts public, private.  Neither/nor.  This boundary, porous.  And.  As conscious would not be a thing but a process, more definitively.  Noun/verb.  And.  Shared structures of DNA, destructured and oscillate.  Me/you.  Either and or.  Bubble pierced with raindrops.  A fashioning.  A possibility that.

Existence.  IS.  Co-existence.  AND.

I being either noun and verb or neither.

As liquid is not.

So a border a threshold, a line, a triangle.

AND.

“that silk is stitching our lungs”

-Christina Mengert-

“In order for my specific subjectivity to fill the general slot of the first person pronoun, that word must be ‘empty’:  ‘I’ is a word that can mean nothing in general, for the reference it mines can never be visualized in its consummated wholeness…it is a general token of absence that can be filled in any particular utterance.”

-Michael Holquist-

It happens

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes14 Comments

mist

            It would happen.  The things approach us.  We feel them in our horizons.  Extending out behind us.  A sort of fullness.  A swelling, sweltering cool.  Billowing possibility.  Stand and stare, even in our movement, unseeing.  We blindly gaze.  Caught short, upended, the rhythm is certainly sea.  We are dry.  We will happen.  We are bound to.  Look out.

Remote murmur.  You know.

Not trauma.  Distant thrumble.

You speak.

Echo absorbs.

It would happen.  Consider.

It will happen.  Just you wait.

A world is a kind of ode.

Your body a stylus.

We are here.

N Filbert 2012

for Friday Fictioneers, August 24, 2012

The Sounding Tree

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes16 Comments

quick submission to Madison-Woods Friday Fictioneers…thankful for a task I can get my mind around!  Please join, newcomers.

tree

As close as he would ever come to stillness, the boy, lying here, slit and dying at the base of this strange tree.  How could he have?  Only one simple task, one clear instruction that might have spared them all.  Any boy could do it, why not he?  Why must he never be capable, never succeed, always fall short?  How he’d run, as the marauders swooped down, how he’d raged through the woods, torn through the brambles toward the sounding tree.  How could he have missed it, faltering here, now, cut from ear to ear, staring at the shofar of alarm, secure in its nook?

Drawing a Blank ________________ …

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

Okay, it really isn’t my preference to clutter you with personal information / process…but the month of July turning into August has been something of a whirlwind of large changes for our family.  Traveling for three weeks and all the saturation that implies (very GOOD – but overwhelming for one like me who likes to control the pace and type and style and content of input 🙂 )…now registering everyone for school, gathering supplies, moving into new vocations or returning to vocation outside of our home studio…enduring a home burglary in which one of our children was assaulted and some irreplaceable valuables stolen…you get the picture.  After spending most of yesterday trying to “touch base” with our home and our lives, I found a few moments personally directed.  What I encountered felt like a Void.  The last I’d recorded in my reading list journal was July 8.  The last I’d written in my private journal was July 6.  I couldn’t remember the projects I’d been in the midst of when we took to the mountains, the road, the lakes, the cabins.  I was bewildered.  I drew a blank…some empty fullness…and here is what tumbled out:

Drawing a Blank _________________ …

 

So that after long whiles, some sometimes, nothing

nothing left or right remembers stirs reminds

conjures therefore a kind of empty fullness emptied

of what seems everything but is nothing for we feel

pretty certain (what is called “knowledge”

i.e. “belief”) that nothing empties, nothing

moving nowhere neither expanding nor

retracting, not replete or depletable,

so to say a blank is begin, as you see it

__________________________ …

indicates (is a kind of sign) indexes you

elsewhere toward or away, that is, movement

what we might apply another sort of signifier

otherwise (a.k.a) simply known as “blank”

becomes arbitrarily a point of action (more

accurately a line) trail train of efforts

here, like god, as I understand the term,

to name without knowing or under-

standing:  “begin.”

__________________________ …

empty trajectory boundary border

line emptied of nothing (not possible)

remains only to be filled with doing

which I’m doing, once a word like “god”

enters as a placeholder, rhythmic beat,

disregulating reorganizer that empty

fullness reveals itself full indeed

by which I mean synonyms collect

(as I experience them) through action

upon within the emptied track

(emptied of nothing, nonsensical)

or trace, that is, “god” =

_______________________ …

metamorphosing in my apparatus I

once perceived as empty, better

said “lost” or “chaos-crossed”

too full in a way to recognize it-

self until such a thud as god

should stir the matter like a magnet

drawing unto after it syllable

after syllable sounds sounding as

“death” as “human” what resounds

in my cranium with deity, but death

of which or both at once, such

emptied fullness I think, led by

__________________________ …

because I’d though how much humans

were like god in their deaths and invention

death like a horse dragging a sledge

without sleds grinding splinters shafts

“substances” to naught, limbs undone

what we thought were wholes – holes

skull shrinking withered of hopes

and fears, identity’s loss, how

death depurposes unknowns…all

the strenuous loves and desperate

frights I gave names and space and

time during life that were not

anything actual only possibilities

but words worries made them seem

death immediately deletes leaving

______________________ …

like character or personality, what

is memorable or terrifying even

unimaginable things we imagined

treating, relating to, engaged as

real entities death erased, again

the emptying, of nothing, no thing

to be rid of but a sound, a rhythm

a term – god, human, death –

superadditives, ideas, beliefs, myths

theories without basis no matter

observation perception interpretation

super-imposed on

________________________ …

emptied of nothing as nothing being

undiminishable death demons-

trates depurposing de constructions

we attribute fully to emptiness

what is unknown its own sort

of impossible excepting conjecture

consideration deleted at death

by death what life had spent

on deities and persons, ideas or myths

where nothing was, actually empty

but for matter beneath and slowly

ground back down toward away

emptying the nothing to fullness

_____________________ …

drawing a blank

N Filbert 2012

Corrosion: Friday Fictioneers August 3

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes16 Comments

Home from vacating for a couple days.  Free-write 100 words prompted by photo as follows (thanks to Friday Fictioneers / Madison Woods instigations/inspirations.  Please join)

The trouble is corrosive.  Is rank.  I do not say what you think I say.  I do not say what you say I say.  I hear you wrong.  Rot.  You love taking pictures of ruins.  I love the effects of rust.  On iron.  On rock.  The meal of erosion is slow.  Don’t yell.  Things erase when we turn our heads.  Eyes such enormous editors.  My ears confuse wind with anger.  What you think is running water is something else.  Is sobbing.  Are tears.  Words are constructed of contexts.  Are hints and withers.  What accrues is corrosive.  Is gentle.  Is fierce.

N Filbert 2012

Collecting Fragments : The Engineer of Himself

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Poetry5 Comments

Posting an ongoing project, a long(ish) poem(-tic) reflexive effort to at least hear myself if not understand.

The Engineer of Himself

The Engineer of Himself: A Poem

“Thinking is willing you are wild

to the weave not to material itself”

Susan Howe

“a new music of verse stretching out into the future…”

William Carlos Williams on Louis Zukofsky

 

I.

I have tried to tell this story time and time again.

I’ve set out to tell this story.

This one story.  This one, apparently, mine.

 

This story takes all of my life, as do all of the stories that go deep in the mines.

Mole’s holes without boundaries – forward and back equal speed – ever the hunting, never the full.

We develop our routes in this way.

Creating patterns.

We forget so many channels and tunnels and homes.

 

Will I ever find the subject

When asked what I am writing? Continue reading “Collecting Fragments : The Engineer of Himself” →

Altitude

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings1 Comment

Altitude

 

“A proposition is only a pretext to go over the limits of what’s proposed…A man in a room does not have strict boundaries until the moment when something forces him to take up one or another activity…

…I don’t have to write all this to be convinced that what is written exists.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“Don’t blame me.  I measure the shadow of the shadow with the shadow,

signifying here.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees” (Paul Valery)

 

I hear a bewildering variety of birds – singing, cawing, chirping, saying.  It exists whether I say so or not.  Some things exist because I say so.

Like dolumbritz and community.

The steps being easy and difficult between.

They leave shadows.  Sometimes.

Metaphor avoids this.

 

If we got to the bottom of it all, we would fall.  Perhaps upward, if direction had anything to do with it (it doesn’t).  So we say “alas.”  Which once was short for the bottom – a-ha! “at last!” there is (here is) THIS.  But now is code for sigh.

She said so, and I heard her, at last.  I sigh.

“I have the feeling that the meaning of things will never be sorted out” is a paraphrase of a poet.  Alas.

Like philosophy: the sequence of excitable sighs, then exhaustion.

 

I am here (wherever that is).  I could describe it and become able to forget, having given it you.  But once described, something else, and then poetry – “always something else.”  Metaphor.  Not likeness but difference.

I am here.

I would know this insofar as it were validated – verified : affirmed.  But that would change and then unknown.  I reach out as like to open without a demonstration, only signs or their perceivers.  Senseless gestures filled with sense.  First one and then another “like meanings smashing each other (I don’t say metaphor)” (Dragomoshchenko).

 

A family of deer just walked in front of me, led by the elder, stopping to curiously stare (extending their field) – a simultaneity.  I gazed back and added noise to which a tail flap and head cock, followed by a smile and a welcoming.  While you notice people on the street, in the office, over lunch.  And a child hears a fairy’s call.  What is and what is not need each other to exist.

“Imagination differs from fantasy as the form ‘is’ from the form ‘if.’  The scope of my imagination is no less than the scope of desire” (Dragomoshchenko).  If he seems to make more sense or to express it is because I provide a context and steal a fragment, thus expanding what it is by what it’s not, which also is if only ‘if’ therefore as written.

“I do not have to write all this to be convinced…”

In fact an opposite’s expanding here…

N Filbert, Pike’s Peak CO, 2012