And so it begins…again…beginning within…

Starting Out

 

And so it begins, as it so often does, begun long ago.

With the tone of a quest – an inception, a conflict, a cure.  Anxieties of disillusionment and fear, inadequacy and doubt, peppering the path.  But hopes too, and promise – what seem like successes or substance occur ascend along the way.  Perhaps desire with approximations of love, and frustrations translated to passion or anger.  Always there is grief and loss, what marks out time, and makes our days memorable.  Why we attend at all, the keeping track and transformations, insistent process of our undoing.

For once arrived in the scene, what else is there but the variegated haul to a destined demise?  Is it, then, always the “same ol’” fresh story?  A posited entity, a series of markings – accruals and deletions – to the closure of cessation?  What else might be told?  To what purpose?

There are moments, you say, moments of pause or release, elation or tragedy that form knots in the threads.  These might be dislocated to some profit, no?  At least for the living?

Midstream, and in motion you might trace it, you say, inscribing what’s open, what opens…emergence itself.  The clutter that punctuates being – its in-forming and injury?

Perhaps.  To guide others along possible pitfalls or options; to preserve instants and subjects; to fuel or to warn.  Perhaps.  Or simply to dream, to escape the inevitable awhile – what’s wrong with that?  That we in the glory and grind take a break, imagined or not, and drift or pursue, engage or elope to some alternate, parallel course?

What is: possible.

All of it is.  The values are relative, individuated.  Personal.  There’s no accounting for taste or of preference to dwell.  The matter hardly matters, after all, can be apparently “explained” (see also – epigenetics, chaos, theory and the like).  How we journey or survive, become or desist is an isolate concern.  Effecting all.

And there’s the rub, this sense of pattern, of system, of interconnectivity.  The impression that all might belong.  It won’t be long.  Insufficient gravity and incommensurate propulsion.  And so we move, arrange, derange, seeking for forms like the banks, or directions like currents.  We flow.  And it begins again, beginning within, as it always does, begun so long ago…

N Filbert

“Round, round, round, round, ‘I’ gets around”

Upside-down twisted i

Paring down the Signals

(please click on title for text!)

The following stories…

Lifewordthread

“Life evolves in a thread of knots that get more and more tangled.

The narrative segments are intentionally dislocated and rearranged,

so the knots become the characters, as it were.”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

            The impression like a manual typewriter’s arm – thunk! – left in either hemisphere… (they say)

begins knotting and tangling

as additional – thwap! – embossings are left.

“Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous”

-George Oppen-

 

The following story.

 

Not that the answers were handled judiciously (judgmentally?) or even weighed or considered.

No answers given to evaluate or direct…

The question(s) already condemned.

Thwak!

“Shouldn’t be –“  “Too young – “ “Can’t handle – “

“STOP ASKING!!”

-(Pastor. Parent. Teacher. Friend.)-

But not books, not texts, not words…

…these welcomed them…

…welcomed me

Words seem to love being dislocated and rearranged and then marked into question.

In fact, for the reader, each word of a sentence or phrase, exposed on a page, seems to wonder itself!

As if language were a query.  Inquiry.

Something to begin with.

 

The following story.

Aged 12.

“Your reasoning’s wrong” (some voice, any voice, whap!, it stuck)

Awry.  Twisted.  Disfigured.  Maimed.

“That’s not the right question…ought not be questioned at all…!”

“Thus saith the Lord (a.k.a. the “Word”)

(to which I added my mark – “?” :

– is it the Word?  What Word? and Whose? let alone How?

and ever the too many “Whys?”

(those have quieted now)

But I devoted myself to fashioning questions,

so that even descriptions or

statements of fact…question themselves

as if essential, inherent to this medium,

of its nature

Smack! –

?

Decompression Addendum: Redefining Terminologies: Finding Words

“The variety of words is another error…I believe words must be conquered, lived, and that the apparent publicity they receive from the dictionary is a falsehood…I now recognize among the thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

Rudiments: Places of Operation

Redefining Core Existence Terminology

 

Family: those with whom one “belongs,” chosen and not, like it or not, one’s “tribe” – born into and/or evolved and developed.

Home:  states of being or locations, settings in which one IS.  Settings in which one is freest to be.

Love:    shared and mutual, reciprocal regard, respect, desire and preference.  Those with whom one thrives and incites the thriving of.  Intention and attention ( a relation between not inhering in beings)

Friendship:  unmitigated affirmation, reciprocal and intentional.  Native complementarity of being.

World:  internal and external context at any given moment

Self:  whom one is or shows up as in one’s world – at any given moment: individual weave or presentation in circumstantial contexts and settings.

Language:  whatever serves as communique betwixt individual and others and world (internal/ external)

I:  utterer of language, behaver of behaviors, actor of actions, feeler of feelings – as regards the “self”

Other:  any and all beings not the self-regarding individual

Vocation:  that which one IS and DOES; self-perpetuating passion – that which drives and rewards, fulfills and seduces, nourishes and excites desire for an individual…one’s propulsion, desire and satisfaction in being.

Leisure:  rest, reprieve, de-stressification

Fun/Play:  light enjoyment, carbonated experience

Sex:  whole-cloth woven world of contexts of one or more individuals

Art:  combinatory effect of an individual’s self, world, vocation and play; any “otherwise-not” creation of a living being’s given and concocted whole

Thought:  a self’s languaging of “world”

Habits:  automatic or instinctual activities of an individual, supposedly self-soothing or self-managing

Perception:  individual sifting of “world” and “self” (see also: interpretation)

Reading:  engaging the language of others or world or self-as-other

Intepretation:  an individual or group of individual’s “spin” on “universe”

Universe:  arbitrary boundary comprehending all that can be perceived/conceived by an individual or group at a given moment

Conception:  consideration and invention of possibilities of “universe”

Writing:  an effort to live, to exist

Decompression: A Process

it goes on…this emptying search…

(Re)Assesments

 

At something of a loss, what feels like a “crossroads” except that perhaps nothing in existence is really either / or.

That was not a sentence.

Bewildered without anxiety, I approach a sort of noisy blank.  A surfeited absence.

I have the amorphous sensation of being entirely undone and woven up as a satchel of my everything.  Every instance of myself threads the material of an empty knapsack that is me, dangling from a stick over the shoulder of the world I inhabit.

That the bag, indeed, is empty.  No objects or trinkets in that wee darkness to finger or grasp, no spirits to set free, emotions to unstopper.  Nothing within to escape, not even air.

My entirety fabricated as an emptied bag.

 

All I’ve ever written, attempted, every action, thought, adventure or relation.  All my labors, abilities, acquisitions, emotions and dreams; every word or intuition, fear or blatant risk, all ongoing consequence(s)…EVERYTHING – internal, external; past-present-future: is the skin of a being, the form and the boundary, the grafted substance of an absent individuality.

 

I experience this neither as a blockage, nor an impasse; no meaninglessness, purposelessness or ennui – simply a vague, obvious experience that all I am as a being is my interface with the world within and around me, idenitifiable without essence.

Responsible, shaped, recognizable and devoid of identity – no narrative or plot, character or definitive name, just an inextricably meshed passel of experiences forming a pliable veneer around a vacant hollow.

That all will carry on, as such, until its end.  Experience upon experience, before experience, during and after experiences and experiments – weaving, threading, joining…this being-form, this walking thinking speaking shape, this perceptive living husk or porous shell, a wave and trajectory of experiencings.

To feign a purpose, an intention or choicy action as this reality requires some arbitrary groundwork – hypotheses and rudimentary organizational operations.  What might this handbag proffer?  Or emit?  What song might be huffed from this void?

 

This is where I seem to be.  Evaluate.  Assess.  No pillars, few givens, a smattering of beliefs and bones and hunches, a median vocabulary of gestures.  From this – what pretend to build?  What fabricate?  I find that I want to, have desire to, create.  Make out of what is woven – everything that forms me / allows me to be – but in what manner?  Open.  Free.

 

As if the absence is realized, the content in-formed, substance resulting from wafting motions and play.  Capacity for invention.  Something like soap bubbles – materials forming a translucent and wobbly funhouse mirror of shapes…leaking…nothing!  Yet capable of popping fragments like droplets or spittle, or words.

 

This seems to be where I am.  I know not what might emerge, but I’d like to leave some trace of the fabric experience has made of me.  Scraps or ephemeral stains, artifacts.

 

Out of the Cave

I really don’t know what these things are I’ve been writing (“Ideas of Home”, this one…).  Seem to be open ramblings.  I apologize if they waste time for any readers, I think I’m trying to open up channels inside of me with less self-conscious shaping and imposition of some pre-formed concepts of style, order, characterization, plot, even poesy.  Opening veins, trying to allow swollen connections between pockets of my body and brain that otherwise occur only in dreams or infrequently heightened states.  Not sure what’s going on, just writing.

 

In the Depression, A Cavern

 

The outlook that prides its common sense (for those who bear it)

“I cannot comprehend our attachments to beings”

-E.M. Cioran-

Airtight logic.  Closed circle of belief.

The end is doom and oblivion, i.e. “end.”

Therefore, “I cannot comprehend attachment” –

to things?  Well, perhaps, for personal endurance, a comfort while still understanding their nature (“truth”: “things fall apart, the center cannot hold”)

that all become, belong to silence (no total comprehension, understanding) all is constant change, therefore ephemeral, ridiculous to trust or develop dependence – everything changes, and then you die…

that, well that does not seem to alter much.  Perhaps it wavers.

As all things wobble and waver, are insecure, uncertain.

Well, but maybe not “ends” and “loss” – almost certain, almost absolutely so,

but then not everything has happened, as far as we know.

Hold on to joy’s illusions – real experiences – and why not?

Embrace.

Let go.

You better let go

or it will be taken, suffocated, crushed.

Smile, but don’t forget to cry, there are many truths.

And much matter(s) to perceive (momentarily)

But then there’s that: the individuality of perception

and the fact that that capacity will cease.

Heightened moments, erasing duration,

fictions of time and space.

Self and other.

World.

Ideas of Home

Hello everyone!  For whatever reason (I’m not always a bigger believer in a source for reason!), a few days ago between cargo-ing children to and fro from all the places they must be S. Carey’s song “We Fell” came through my stereo and the weather was Spring-ish cool and the air was nice and I was overwhelmed with feelings, I guess you’d call them, (sentiments?) of being home.  As I pulled in the drive the light struck the deteriorating garage and trampoline movingly, and I took a few shots that matched my feeling.  Then throughout the past days I’ve just been letting those feelings/sentiments/ideas swirl about in my head thinking they’d find an organization they wanted.  They didn’t.  So today I’m just going to post the notes I jotted down the way they tangled and fumbled out of me…In my mind they go with S. Carey’s song and always Mark Kozelek’s tunes (his music often is my home)…

oh, here are the lyrics to “We Fell”

The consonance of drone

And love sounds its own

Your arms wrapped around home

All the in-betweens

Lay so blue beside me

We fell

More than skin and bones

No we’re not alone

We fell

Like stones

Between

S. Carey

And here follow my photos and ramblings:

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Ideas of Home

(click to read text)

THANK YOU!

Wonderful World of Texts!

Mystery Text #1: Of Origins and Ends

 

Many have participated – untranslatable translations and definitions undefined – signals of the ineffable.

Speaking of texts…writings and utterances, organizations of alphabets.

Writingreading, readingwriting – with an existing text – pray tell me the difference?

 

On the one hand – anyone.  On the other – the same.

Between = a text.

Words on a page are a circle.

No origin, no conclusion.

 

Who writes this?  Is it me?  Who is “me”?  Was it you?  Who were “you”?

Who deciphers?  Is it me?  And when “I” read again – is it the same “me”?  Later this evening in the quiet?  Saturday at the cafe?  In bed while a movie plays?  Is it you?

Reading as continual rewriting in the same alphabets, same words and phrases.  But the content?  Denotation(s)?  Connotation(s)?  Connections?  Disjunctions?  Referents?  References?

Who leads?  What follows?  Who follows?  What leads?

 

I venture to commend the signs of the text are the subject, the object we observe and receive, perceive and interpret.

 

Who authors?  And what is authored by that who?

Author following, adapting, borrowing and conceiving the text’s arrangement.  Or reader authoring the significations, meanings, referents(-ces) and possibilities of thusly arranged words?

 

Double absence.  Absence of the one constructing the text, absence of the possible recipient.  Anyone (or no one) at the origin, no one / anyone at the end.  Text(s) of no closure and of ever-questionable intent.

Text as ever-ready presents(-ations), like letters – always between the past, the void of dead, or the future, the empty potential and the unformed future, unknowable recipient.

 

Remarkable, to me, to be capable of participation in such a vital and energetic, ever-evolving and malleable, yet lifeless matter – able to be as stable as an inscription in marble –

the artifact:  word or image, painting, photograph, text: gestures of the dead or the missing, yet constantly enlivened, resurrected with each encounter!  This is passing strange!  Out of the unknown, toward the unknown and lifeless in-between!

 

Ever a-rising out of no-more and availing the not-yet:  unnecessary necessity of authorial entities – the necessary unnecessary of receipt.  The still spinning wheel of lifeless matter on a page… in potentia.

A marvelous mystery to behold


Another opportunity – for collaborative creativity

my spouse/partner etc. posted this this morning and I find it instigative – love to see/hear what comes of it for the rest of you!

http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/10/ekphrastic-opportunities/

(more pix to work from at post!)

Friday Flash Fictioneers attempt

            Remembering the wolf and the maid, but never the moon in the trees, not last night.

And what of the whispers?  Not those.  Where are they?  All had been silence.  Or noise.  Perhaps an enormity turning to absence.

Now mirrored.  Must be lying down, in order to see, like this.

Yes, this: bright pupil, diseased sighs, and the webbing aging around.

But, in fact, the eye sees itself in the above phenomenon merely as it does so in ordinary optical reflexion.

If the visual organ proper really were fire…if vision were the result of light issuing from the eye as from a lantern, why should the eye not have had the power of seeing even in the dark?”

– Aristotle, The Senses

http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/photo-prompt-for-100-word-flash-fridayfictioneers-29/