My own quick attempts at inscribing experience + experiment, languaging
caveat: thrown together quickly! (Friday Fictioneers prompt – www.madisonwoods.wordpress.com)
Against the Day
And what was there to do?
High school now behind us, Frank’s dad dead, and no promise of college, work, or love; we were lost, angry, confused.
We’d all of us read Pynchon, we knew very well what to expect, and it wasn’t good.
And lots of it.
So much burned inside us.
At the city’s River Festival we spotted the blimp.
And somehow we knew.
We just knew.
Now, it begins.
N Filbert 2012
“Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness”
Life is, but a dream
is also life. Like a string of letters fitting an experience is also an experience itself. A person’s body, in other words. Things are inseverable, she said.
I notice it in the colors of the sunset, when I think of it in terms of color rather than it being its own name. Which might also be a word for color, each time.
Saying the word, “you.”
It would seem (abstractedly) to give us much to think about, but that would be on to something else. Which we also name “distraction,” which, of course, is not what that’s about. Dis-traction, abs-traction, con-traction, at-traction = they’re all our traction with the world, with what’s other, defamiliar, including, of course, our selves.
Nothing is recursive but thinking makes it so. “I am talking about paradigms,” he said, instituting one in the speaking.
What it all means. Exactly.
The sunsetting, the dreaming, the thinking, unpatternable patterning, the life. “One should always say living,” they say. Says who?
On what I’m seeking to analyze – synonym (I suspect) – “to digest,” in other words I am performing a series of actions, some bodily progression (process-ion?) here to here to here. Never getting anywhere else, but altering it, all the same.
The “men of action” we all are (without doubt including women and children – historical music of lines, still).
To sleep, perchance to dream; to rise, perchance to wake, the difference being? Differently the same, life is
but a dream is also living was what I’d set out to say with no chance of expressing any one thought without having already moved along, here, living, same different thing.
The unlikelihood of the same (EXACT) dream, or a fitness to a paradigm-dictionary, abstraction of types or categories…its own dreaming action, so to speak.
You follow?
Here, here, do not give up hope of the real, it’s another possibility, though we do not understand it, dreaming it as we do, living. As we do, people of action.
So “Rise up! Awake ye sleepers! Dream on!” it says, on….
N Filbert 2012
Such Great Heights: On Loving
“I wonder at vocalism’s ability to rephrase or reenact meaning and goodness even without the wished-for love. Can a trace become the thing it traces, secure as ever, real as ever – a chosen set of echo-fragments? … The still eye reflects a neutral ‘you’ that is me; and yet secret. Who can hold such mirroring cheap? It’s a vital aspect of marriage and of deep friendship.”
-Susan Howe-
These are things she told me:
She tells me she just needs to be held. Held and heard. And validated. That I understand how she feels, that I empathize. No need to agree with her or her feelings, no need to fix anything. Just pay attention (“be with me” she calls it), say some things back kind of like echoes so she can hear that I’m listening, knows I’ve “got” it, and nod and affirm. Saying things like “I hear how hard that is for you,” or “I can see this makes you angry” and the like. A safe place, a sounding board, a kind of mirroring…a world-the-size-of-arms or bodies in which it’s okay to be in process, to have your stuff, to be inaccurate, and be.
I tell her I just want to be loved for who I am, not what I do or how I perform, whether I make someone feel better or not, whether I’m useful or succeed, get stronger, am sensitive, smart or good-looking. I’m fine with being any of those things, but they will always feel like side-effects or attributes, things taken up from time to time, situation-contextually. I really want to be loved for who I am also, or otherwise, the self I do not know, am unaware of, except that it’s always changing. I’m wanting value as a being, I suppose, that it’s simply good enough, and matters, that I am. That someone would choose that.
She’d like to be appreciated for all of her efforts. All the pains she endures, compromises she makes, limitations she accepts in order to account for me, for my “neuroses” (read “personality”). ‘d like to hear a heartfelt “thank you” now and then for her services and sensitivities, considerations and workings toward dialogue, care and attention. She’d like to be recognized, feel wanted, feel loved and craved and adored.
I’d like to be loved with my spaces and misgivings. From a distance, and the distance loved too – the whole globe of me – my fears, paranoias and worries. My anxious body. Jealous narratives, fantastic brain. As an entity – yes – as a system or sphere, to be chosen, sought out and let be, even celebrated as this odd, unique and difficult human, just like all the others, but different too, in exactly the same ways we all of us are. A curious realm of unknowns and effects. Would like that cloud of debris I refer to as “me” to trigger charges in her, of desire, of respect, of wonder and intimate knowledge. A paradox really. To be known as unknown, loved dissimilarly, absolutely, and so on. Misplaced desires, but there all the same. I ask her to love indeterminacy and confusion.
She asks to be free of her past – not its effects but its definitions. That we encounter it together – our childhoods and children, our spouses and griefs, our risks and our failures, fulfillments and joys – not compared with the present, competitively, but engaged, encouraged, absorbed. That not everything “not-me” be a threat, not her job and its clients, her acquaintances, family and friends, past lovers our journeys, events – that they be welcomed and included as ours now – memories, sources, realities we bring to a NOW. Not as distractions, escapes, private holdings. That we invite each other whole and unprocessed. That we be a process for each. That I be here now with, see her moving toward me, being here, not fragment and dissect her into her pasts and the world.
I tell her I’d like to be ultimate, her be-all, end-all, preference and ideal. Chaos and all, that this mass of me be some divinity-like, awe-inspiring wonder of an incomparable glory she adore and pursue. I want to feel special, holy, set apart, unbelievably brilliant and beautiful – in short, spectacular – in all my grungy messy remedial ways and blundering battles. That it truly stun her how amazing I am all muddied up and crazy, insecure and inconsistent, incompatible and at serious odds with myself – that I be wonderful to her.
She told me she’d like it to be real. To be purposive and true. That we be brave and open, vulnerable and strong. Flexible and protective, guarded and unafraid. That we feel life securely and take great risks, be certain and unsure. That we trust and be trustworthy in every metamorphoses we move through. Tenderly powerful, gently fierce, insistent and forgiving, patiently intense. That we strive for balance, a balance I guess like nuclear fusion – unaccountable energies in a strangely held rest.
I said it all sounds good, sounds like love to me, and impossible. Which is fine as I’ve started as a failure, but heroic, and she’s a god arose from ashes. Hell, she’s died and lived again. We latch on, strap in and unwind. We are here. Here we go. These terrible chasms and such great heights.
These are things I tell myself.
N Filbert 2012
(couldn’t help but think of this – click for tunes)
Blurt
We have to hold still. To take care. To look at each other. To remember what we’ve never quite understood: the value of one another. Which we’ve never really comprehended, nor, finally, are we quite able to.
I suggest the exercise: Pretend-Everything-Depends-On-It, that is, on The Other, i.e. even within yourself. See how far it goes, if it chances to keep you alive, or defends the rights of another, imaginary or not.
Luckily, the always perhaps. Perhaps, to a point. To the point – what is possible – tell me who might be the one deciding that? (or the many?). I’m listening. This is where God lies. The possible. Irreducible without end, fortunately. And how.
Go on then, practice, live, throw yourself into it – see what becomes. At least you will. Forget about it! There’s always until. What has that to do with us? Very little, finally, it’s something we will never experience, we cannot process or reflect upon. So get to it now, then. That’s all I’m saying. Pretend, provoke, prevent and process. There’s nothing to it.
Defend the other with your life.
Writing: the Apparatus
“one can think of the work (of writing) as a dialogue between the two distinct demands bearing on it (the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible). Or between its two poles (measured form, measureless disintegration) or between the embodiments of these two ‘centers of gravity,’ if you will: reader and writer…two come together in a place where neither can be found…One of them keeps dragging it into the light of day as a completed oeuvre, a realized whole, something that has actually taken form and come to be (read, that is, or, you could say, heard), while the other pulls it back into the dark whence nothing ever springs (but where there is a chance that, coming to pieces, something might come to be written or said)”
– Anne Smock, What is There to Say? –
-the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible-
The tools the writer possesses.
That there must be something to say…that it is impossible to completely say. Finally, definitively, to have done with, saying experience.
What does one make of this? With this? Paradoxical demand, desire, exigency – imperative, self-generating, uncaused and ineffectual, drive?
Our tools: awareness. Attention. Passion. We observe and take note, feel-with, and seek to spell it out (for ourselves, for world).
Our tools: available language, sound, gesture. Entering the woven barrier and thoroughfare of what is shared, common, constitutive, we act, operate, select, arrange, choose, rearrange from this quilted information of the world, our saying of it. Or singing, or stating, shouting or whispering and mumbles.
It seeks into fact. We construct an object, made up of nothing, of airwaves, scratch-marks, designs. Barely effable cues, hints, notions and signs. We begin again with that. With what it fails to say, to communicate or reveal. We tinker with and tamper, excise and expand. Ever the remainder. Inexact invention. Something there, some things not.
We pursue what is not. What fell aside or seeped away. The evaporate. The unknown (here I adore the French: je ne sais quoi – that feeling that one knows it, and knows it so well and so deeply, and yet is unable to say what it is that one knows!).
Endless anticipation, expectation, a lusted desiring…
Endless frustration, falling short or to the side, inevitable (inherent even?) failing, shortcoming, irresolution.
These are the tools of the trade. The writer’s apparatus.
A caveat: from time to time I’ll wager to say we all of us take in some language or sound, vision or world that seems “just,” feels ripe, adequate, full and exact to the perception of our experience. This is wondrous, thrilling, satiating, “ecstatic,” a moment’s completion, wholeness, perhaps.
Yet is it? What does the masterful painting, the pregnant poem, the echoing song or fulfilling experience result toward? Yes, toward, not “in.” Not arrival but generation, bursts of multiplications of words, sounds, sights and movements now invigoratingly fueled and stimulated – fecund to go on…for more…fuller…richer…or even repeat!?
“Such then, would be my task, to respond to…speech that passes my understanding, to respond to it without having really heard it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak…To name the possible, to respond to the impossible. I remember that we had designated in this way the two centers of gravity of all language…Why two to say one thing? – Because the one who says it is always the other…”
– Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation –
Hello dear followers – I can hardly thank you enough for taking time out of your lives to look at, read and engage things I am involved in the making of. Your support and attention is a constant encouragement. THANK YOU! (and thank you for offering and creating your own!)… I wanted to invite you (if you are interested) to visit/follow a couple of other blogsites I also create in/with –
THANKS AGAIN!
Mark Marking Marks
“oh it’s working, it’s magic, each word lifts me up, takes me away from here,
from this nothing; I feel…I am…speak always, Maybegenius.”
Writing as the ‘Talking Cure’
As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, – ?
WHAT IS REAL?
As long as I keep talking to myself, even better the inscribing, using matter somewhat foreign to myself, like this plastic pen, this sheet of paper, this blue ink…I am providing myself with evidence. A humming continuity, a series of marks, a silent sounding breathed into air.
But when unable?
As long as I keep telling myself these stories, Mark thinks, – ? then what – ? why – ?
There is evidence that I am here, he says to himself, marking it down. Marks make Marks, he supposes, I am, at least as far as the reach of this pen, and I stay, at least longer than my thoughts, he thinks.
Mark got tattoo’d. He did so for evidence, a permanence. They said it could not be undone. So he had them spit into his skin the names of those who had changed him, affected. As if to say, to go on and on saying, these, these existed for me, in and on me, these folks made impressions that made impressions on me, therefore I must, yes, it logically follows, here – you can see them can you not – ?, it logically follows that I must exist – to have these names, these titled and organized and permanent woundings of names, of those who existed (it’s attested by many), so it follows, it must, with them pierced in my arms, that I, too…
If it all keeps on talking, these whispering names, the sound of my voice, the terms in my head, and if I work to make it real, as an object, if I chisel or stencil or ink it to the world, then surely it must testify on my behalf – I was here! I am here! I’ve left my Mark! Mark marking Mark – a declare!
Or so he is thinking through his days, through his life or lives, through his odd and self-imposing tormenting sort of fear, of worry.
Am I?
To no effect? he wonders – ?
Mark often fears he’s interchangeable. Or worse. Perhaps another boy would have been a better son, left a fuller name, a more remarkable mark than – ?. Another man a truer spouse and more sensitive or empathetic, more evolved or more mature than his straggly droopy heavy brain of a – ?. A more substantial father with clearer love and direction, firmer hands, readier tears – ?. Mark was aware they were out there. They’d been fellow students, inhabited stories and novels and other people’s lives. Why were his people stuck with the – ?. His nagging mark, so often read right over as innocuously as a comma or period. Weren’t they looking for content not a pause or an absence? A man marked by inquiry?
But if I leave here some trail strewn round my desk, this floor all these cupboards, perhaps at some point they will see I was here! I am! And I was watching and listening, loving and feeling them all. Spending myself and my worries in this strange attempting to trace and to hold, to keep and remember their details, their effects, my responding.
Someday shuffling through or perhaps clearing out, maybe they’ll stop, pause, question and wonder. Who was this man? Where was he? When? How? Why?
What did he do think make say? And perhaps they’ll find these markings. Perhaps they won’t have burned or mouldered away, and all these messaging reports, all these processings and accounts will come to mean, to have significance, these bird-routes of scratches and marks, dashes dots lines, this pouring forth of constructing an identity against with the world…
As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, possibly –
– ? –
Inscribing a Now
Today I just feel like writing. I don’t have anything in particular to say, no specific emotion I am needing to express (that I know; or am aware of), simply a kind of quiet delight in our capacity to make language. To fit words together, to knit our lives, to be.
Enormously unusual (I cannot stress that enough!) it is around 50 degrees and solidly overcast in Kansas this June 1st. Not humid even, but sprinkling now and again, the kind of precipitation you could enter and be refreshed, but a long time in getting wet. As if the sky is asking us to take it easy, to relax, be reprieved, just enjoy.
My children are reading and practicing stringed instruments; my wife is making sounds that are delicious as she struggles with a painting; my room is dark. These are moments of peace, are unexpected, a relief, a protection, a comforted grief.
Language is a beautiful necessity, unnecessarily. Like bodies and voices, flowers and food. Like mountains. Oh, necessity can be argued for each, but what’s the point? The world is, and that’s enough, that’s what’s important. It seems. And what a hinge-word! It means we’ll never know, and that’s not the point. Is must be different from certainty.
Perhaps I’m engaging a kingdom of “trust”?
An as-if-ness that isn’t afraid?
How little I know.
So the ambling to no purpose again. “Angling” is how I heard it in my mind. Seems it must be so. To language in leisure must be near to the impulse of finding to-do for a bored adolescent. Dropping a line. Seeing what bites. Or even just nibbles.
Sprinkling rain. Haphazard, unpatternable, occasions. Delight.
No expectation, desire (that’s pressing). Just a wandering way.
It evokes a wishing-well torso for me. So many words in the world used in anxiety, in need. So much language and gesture, expression and sign, mobilized to “get” or “secure;” “ensure” or “relieve.”
Not that, not right now, not need. Just rest, an in-pleasuring, a reprieve. Just an hello or a thanks. A “notice that?” or an “indeed.” An agreement of person and term, an almost “natural” weave.
Sounds and sense, tones and rhythms, raindrops tickling shingles and birds. Tires whispering snare-drum waters, puddles triangle-tinkling away.
Hello. These are words. It feels good to shape them – a cursive-recursive flow. To be real (enough), here (enough), to know (enough) to inscribe. What a pleasure, a leisure, a joy.
Thank you, world, for that hour.
Mark Marking Questions
“Man is a riddle. Our complex relation to others may also be affected by our fascination with this riddle…Origin means, perhaps, question”
“Writing as the ‘talking cure’
he thought, thinking in language what he thought language might do. Be doing. To him.
He heard “why?,” a term learned early in order to learn, and thenceforward laid over nearly everything he read, encountered, overheard or stumbled across, as if it were his placeholding destiny in some infinitely progressing equation simplified “world.”
He’d read he needed other persons and things, places and times to know his own. – “Why?”
He’d heard “until others acknowledge or teach you your shape, your ideas, what you see what you feel what you taste or speak or hear, your perceptions and scope, you won’t be aware of a thing. You’ll have no ideas or sensations per se, you’re essentially Nothing without Them.”
Arching his back and shrieking a sound at an absence of breast: “why?”
“I guess I’m just punctuated that way,” he came to think, as he adapted vocabulary. “My role in a sequence is: – ?”
“And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was…” well, maybe – ?
“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao…” well, maybe – ?
“1 + 1 = 2,” well….maybe – ?
“You are Mark, a male form of a human animal, replete with these working organs, the English language, and certain beliefs. These are your parents, your sibling, your probable friends. Here are some feelings, some expressions and thoughts. Here are your words.” Well. Maybe – ?
Shaped with letters and numbers and sounds. Voices and touchings and feels, he became, slowly, surely, puttied toward a recognizable form – perceptible to others, acknowledged, even affirmed or engaged from time to time.
“Why?” propelled the lengthening problem of life but never grew toward solutions.
He read elaborate explanations and descriptions as he borrowed more languages. Spiritual terms, medical terms, words scientific, political, philosophical and intimate. Thick reams of median symbols asking to be joined or embraced, understood or imbibed.
Mark enjoyed these fabrics, and found a belonging among them. Layers and theories, emotions and dreams – he simply need append his simple gesture – ?
Trouble, in the form of discomfort or pain, of disjunction, arose when agreement was desired. Explicitly or implicitly, this undermined his form. In situations where reciprocation or statement, some firm relation was called out for, his questioning mark failed to serve. Choices, commitments, integrities or beliefs turned to drizzle around his definitive (self-identified) symbol.
“I love you,” she wooed. “-?-“ he replied. “I cannot know what you mean, what your language portends, I am unable to verify why?” he’d respond. To collapse and retreat.
Even thoughts and decisions were questioned and split open on his sharp weapon of a mark. He was not trusted or deemed trustworthy as doubt was perceived an anomaly.
He remained uncertain.
Self-perceivably, he reliably questioned, he’d respond and then take it away with his mark, his “signature move” as it were, his undoing. “Yes I will…” “This I think…” “I am…” always followed by his -?- (which sounded like “why?” in the air) and found no rationale that could not be further put to query.
The world was unstable as well as a “self” for him. All under the branding shadow of “why?” This Mark never outgrew in all his adaptations, acquisitions, mutations and metamorphoses. His certain core of uncertainty. His permanent doubt. His oxymoronic reality of being, not-being -?-
They perceive him – they really do – but as full of content with no substance; as possible and capable yet a great risk; as veritably human but unnamed from within. Without “identity.” This is true even of his wife and his children, parents and friends, all unsure who or what they are relating to, marked with the sign of the -?- The indeterminate one, the questionable and uncertain, the duplicitous and vague, are various ways he is read and conceived – standing there as he does on his tiny spot of here, long-legged and stooped as in prayer, or inquiry – ? –
Telling Our Stories
After all, it is language, this story. This telling of you, of me, of our feelings and years, whatever we’ve done. We are just speaking, really, creating from language our world and our children, our works and our actions as if we remembered.
I can’t see the harm in it.
I say I remember, here looking at you, that first time in your eyes, whether 18 or 40, when we may have sat facing each other or entwined, as if we’d first met and must absorb everything. How large they seemed, how blue and soft as rain, how far I could swim there as if building a nest.
I don’t see the danger in using our language to say so. In making up stories, alone or together, about us; our world and our selves, what we think.
After all, it is language we share. As you bend at your work, your collar reveals a fresh sentence, your skirt a painting of terms, in your flesh all these stories I study to learn. Of your breast and your elbow and hair. The nape of your neck exclaims and your scars everywhere. What the poet said, also with words, combining verbs and adverbs and nouns: “Your body is a book of thoughts that cannot be read in its entirety.” Just words, but I keep them and sing them again, I can’t see the harm in the trying.
I love you with terms of my body. I sign them to you when it’s dark. It is language, oh yes, and you hear me. We read with our skin. Typography refers to impressions. You impress me, even as I Braille what I need. How else might we weave what is we without terms and strokes or gestures?
Only language, after all, that we borrow, I get it.
But where is the frailty in trying?
I read and I read and I read what you tell, ever growing a Talmud of comment. I notate, I argue, I vent. Then repeat. I praise and I question and soothe. You likewise make of my verbiage a stream; a spring from far peaks that dissolves to a delta. What should we call what we do? Relat-ivity? Our capacity to engage and to meet – to relate? Communication? Always co-, ever with, filling munitions and messaging, our vocation?
To say, to listen, to hearken, to spell. Here we tumble and thicken and age. Her we interpret, reply and enrage. Here we bind ourselves, it is language we keep using, keep finding, continue to tell…
“………………..Even in sleep
our bodies seek each other, your face the moon
lighting my dreams. And by day, scenes beyond
untanglement. Tell me my story, love;
how could I know it, we are such knotted things?
-Philip White, from Aubade
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