Category: Experimenctes

My own quick attempts at inscribing experience + experiment, languaging

Old John Teneman

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Old John Teneman Learns Us Language

What he means when he says “the queen has arrived” (not to be didactic) “in a parade of turtles.” Just that something big is going down and our sense of time is slowing for its occurrence.

Or “radiant bunnies rip at the cartilage”: a nymphomaniac’s raunchy ride – how it ravages the body.

He says things like this, like “well, there would be sound,” and believes that “’I’ lasts for instants.”

Drowning the proverbial cat, of course clenching your tongue, and safe in the bag.

Not that we didn’t believe him. Why not? His metaphors came true time and time again. Or we made them so.

I guess that’s what I most wanted to say on this occasion. That “only stars dance naked,” “every surface dons a mask” and so forth, “the purples plop from the fingers.”

Language comes and language goes.

He described the first leg of the journey as “a hopper carrying grain” – we ask for bread and milk and the verbiage carries what it says, like “tumble-toes” and “titty-twist” – learning to walk, fed at the breast. Sound signifies.

Which leads to prefabricated composites: “Tonka takes theos and the dozer digs democracy” – the mind learning letters gained extended alphabets. A=A (a) + all blacks are assholes. B=B (b) buh, buh, b + beauty is internal so you better look your best. C=C c k, k, ss, sss, + candidates against abortion are cool, and so on. In other words, in a world of point and name-shoot, point: “cat”, point: “ball,” at oven: “hot,” etc., it was easy to add a bunch of 2-for-1s, special offers loading the distinct and directive dictionary.

Until definitions didn’t match. “I=you=I=?” and “hippie chic preaches Christ in the death camps.” “muddy waters sing of soul and the light has not overcome it” and so on. The thesaurus of antonyms begins. This-that-the other thing = same color, same alphabet, similar grammars and syntax, and “lilt means love, fricative foe.”

“Gravy made from plastic” starts a new game in the language carnival. “Yes, the correct answer is ‘false’,” the teacher says, waking in your seat shot full in the chest with the news. Know you don’t know, haven’t the faintest, what they mean, what you mean, how it gets swallowed.

“It’s like that,” he says, “bright day, pleasant breeze, scented like ferment or foment, and everything you eat tastes like shit – literal turds gloppy and rot on teeth and tongue, and gagging at the entrails.” Meaning: up for grabs. “Love’s l the blade cutting ecstatic o‘s with that sharpened v-blade, screaming the e-ars.” Or “Hope’s Hell-is-Other-People-Even-Saviors” sort of thing.

“The instant-I shatters, playing jacks with fragments, collage-collage-bricolage,” he sings, “the game of gluing shrinky dinks in sun-ovens.” The remainder. “Long-hauler train they’re dumping coal in the grain cart, fuel on the coal, water on wood and livestock in the dining car, and sometimes you smoke, eat the shit, go up in flames as your structural beams swell and rot.”

That is to say, “it’s a crapshoot, and it splatters.” Still it matters. Each selection, choice, intonation, intention. Can be burned for warmth or fuel, can fertilize the soil, or stave off salespersons and politics.

“Language is a social semiotic,” he quotes, “made by everyone at all times, undone and rejoindered.” “Our paradox pals pebbling our pockets, pick ’em at will with pretension, marble-pop into the chalk-circle while it rains.”

The gleam of his eye – genuine excitement – as he’d intone – “buddy buttress the Babel-babble” walking away in whispers and warble.

N Filbert 2012

Religion Revision

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, TracesLeave a comment

I was raised in a faith that was based on a book full of words. At times it exploded with prescience and resonances in the life I was becoming, at others it fell flat or rang false, but its education in languaging experience held merit. When I say “raised” I mean inculcated and immersed. I learned terms and their arrangements by “heart” or memory and rote – as principles and rules for interpreting world and self. Childhood learning has a way of patterning subsequent life, and it comes back to me again and again when world overwhelms and skips past my reason plopping its bulky finger on “play.” I woke to it this morning and I listened. This is what I heard:

 

The Word: A Commentary

“In the beginning was the Word

the Word was with God

and the Word was God.

(the same) was with God in the beginning.

Through (the Word) all things came into being,

not one thing came into being except through (the Word)”

  • Gospel of John 1:1-3 –

The light comes on and I see that you are there. I can describe you now, move toward you, interact with more knowledge and intention. I now see the table and chair on my right, between us to the side, underneath the window which is covered and which I had not known to be there, nor the “outside” or beyond, even the gap of it, the doorways, the thresholds, until the light came. On.

I had not known the cat nor dog that made their sounds of presence, like your voice and breath I sensed, until the space of living was enlightened.

The Writer’s gospel, the good news, about language and mystery and its use to shed light. Brings to awareness, aids comprehension, might even be said to bring into being (for its users) all that comes to register as existent in its own particular way.

Emotions and landscapes, persons and things. The self, once considered in words, takes on. Until that moment all is inchoate, unformed, a mix of sensations unlocalized like innumerable living points in air. The Word(s) direct and give shape, question and expose. Let there be light.

Whatever rudimentary forms of communication prevail, among cells, among plants, among animals and stars, this light, language, the words and ideas, is the light of humankind. The life of its persons.

This is a gospel that I can believe in, bearing itself out in experience. As one’s vocabulary expands to circumstances and situations, life begins to seem understood, seen-through, engaged, if only in the duration of the verbal processing.

Linking the field like fenceposts and wires, the word traverses the between and the voids or the opens, like light reflecting matter, whether in the subtlety of the atmospheric layers or the gleam of a yellow school bus. It is there, I am here, we become. Same registering difference, word requiring letter and sense, being: being-with.

And so the surface grows scribbled. Notated, defined, addendum’d and erased. The living word, in action as much as its participants, adjusting, accounting, enumerating; revise and repeat. Expand. Express.

It is the territory between exterior/interior, centripetal/centrifugal, ever breathed into the void, calling to and called by. Ever beginning, the become of all things. As we segment times and spaces, sense duration and bounds, so the Word moves along with each complex, reporting, revising,

Recall. The naming of ocean and air – what were they before but a void exhibiting difference? The animals, people, feelings and actions – unknown variations – “behaviors” and “appearances” – then light.

It has come into the world. Avail yourselves of it. Turn on the lights – and read, and write. Bring what is (for you) into being. In the beginning, the Word, and at its end, the beginning. There is always more word for the void.

N Filbert 2012

from the notebooks & files

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Moment: Airy

(being an experiment, in theory

a result)

It is hard.

It is hard and it is cold.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather. Well below the freezing point. But his gloves staid on, his lips held a cigarette, and he boxed.

He could box that paper. That paper-thin page. Already beaten to a pulp.

Him with a theory.

The theory a sort of equation.

The equation as follows:

ALL (whatever a person is, has, does) + ALL (a person’s skill, effort, strength, talent, knowledge and ability)

= Appearance of Art (momentarily)

Notation: A + A = AA

An utter mystery to him.

So he sat in the freezing cold, a pen in his hand, the ink sludging slow, paper on a desk, digging/ exposing / exploring himself, believing / composing / revising language,

oh, and the catalyst necessary to the actual experimentation of this theory – (he writes) – MAKING

One had always to be making (working, acting, writing, performing) with ALL (of him or herself) and ALL (of one’s capacities, faculties and tools) to carry out this experiment, i.e. to test the hypothesis.

Catalyst: (he notes) making(out of/into/with/toward)

Source and goal (purpose, intent) unnecessary, indifferent

Any action requires an energy source. In this case: living organism possessing capacities, perhaps even proficiencies, and coffee, and cigarettes.

No specified laboratory or station or constituents (conditions) to each his own [marginalia]

Quite a simple test really.

Requiring no great funding, no special services or permissions, few qualifications, variant supplies.

Simply vast amounts of time and consistent (persistent) and enormous amounts of effort. (As he saw it).

Reviewing centuries of other experimentations and practitioners of this simple eternal test led him to observe : results in momentary airy results (often discovered in different places at different times dependent on observer – even in same test results – thus airy, ephemeral moments)

 Feeling he had yet to produce an AA. A momentary Appearance of Art, he was compelled to introduce a compendium of criteria – identifiable attributes – whereby to justly analyze resultant artifacts and actions.

Again the qualities boiled down quite simply: put the equation into reverse for the observer or verifying assistant:

an Appearance of Art results through the remaking process or catalyzation of the observer,

requiring as a result, ALL of the observer’s person and ALL of the observer’s capacities,

faculties, abilities.

Notation: criteria for AA to be AA:

AA = (must equal) A + A

He practiced this experiment from both sides of the equation – attempting to verify Appearances of Art by engaging / observing / remaking results that demanded enormous effort, large amounts of time and all of his experience and capacities, and as the performer of the experiment – devoting vast amounts of time, energy and effort of his total self to the making of Appearances of Art.

It wasn’t going well.

It is hard (extremely difficult)

And it happens to be very cold (causation: weather in Winter)

He’d read of other conditions explicated by practitioners before him: contingencies such as warmth, geographical position, silence, wealth, solitude, suffering (the Ss came up quite often); specific environments, times or places, assistant substances or particular tools or resources, even difficulty itself had been recorded – but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason, certainly no agreement, in fact, very often direct and incommensurable contradictions between one catalystic experimentor of A + A = AA and the next, which led to his marginal note (copied above): “to each its own”

He carried on, in spite of the grave difficulties, confusions and multivalent referents of the equation’s elements. Once in awhile he believed he had discerned a momentary result – an appearance of art in his own private performances of the experiment; unfortunately he could not obtain verification of his tests from contemporary scholars/students/or adepts of the ancient and cryptically-clear equation.

He had no trouble himself verifying most attested AAs, given sufficient time and effort, but, as he progressed in his work, identification became more efficient yet verification demanded more and more of him, devouring his time, energy and effort, interfering with and greatly complicating his own experiments and test cases from the equation’s other end.

He began to understand why past personages were led to choose to practice and perform the experiment from one side or the other.

It is hard.

It is cold.

And there is only so much time and effort.

There is only so much living organism to be had.

Limitations began to seem insurmountable.

But by now he had come too far.

There was only to go on.

It is hard, he wrote.

It is hard and it is cold, he recorded.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.

But my gloves stay on, he wrote, and my lips still hold a cigarette, right to the end.

His gloved hand fighting the pages.

There is only so much life.

N Filbert 2012

Art & Appearances

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Art & Appearances

A day’s work

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Traces1 Comment

Films of Maya Deren

words of Clarence Majors, Helene Cixous, Simon van Booy, MAK Halliday, Samuel Beckett, Alain Badiou

coffee

therapy

music – Do Make Say Think and  a composition of my own

the thises and thats:

“For we live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; and our time should be counted in the throbs of our hearts as we love and help, learn and strive, and make from our own talents whatever can increase the stock of the world’s good.” from a monumental-looking effort of A.C. Grayling “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible” – I recommend you pore over it

“The author has a passion for doors.  All doors:  doors to mystery…the passion for books, the ferocity, the need, the exultation, the haste to flee the places inhabited by those people close to me, in order to regain the poets and other characters, in their books…In the middle of the house we open the white door and we’re no longer here…escape in broad daylight…people I would’ve never dreamed of approaching while they were alive enter, sometimes, in the very moment I turn toward them as toward people essential to my existence, forever indissociable from my taste, my mobility, my view, enter, suddenly, my other country…” -Helene Cixous “Firstdays of the Year”

and perhaps:

Begin Ending Beginnings

To learn from crows

To father children

To accumulate and recede

Some event sets in motion

Taking wing or stumbling feet

To oscillate between

Begin or conclude

Always the same at once

No difference that we know of

So begin, ending something

as crows and as carrion,

and the first buds of Spring

N Filbert 2012

Imagining Memory / Remembering Imagination

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"Dress" by Holly Suzanne

Imagining Memory / Remembering Imagination

She came again in a light summer’s dress.

The box. The lock. No key.

Imagine that! After all that time, to come again. To make her approach in a light summer’s dress, just as I’d always pictured it, but somehow more real the last time.

Always like a dream, with soft light, hazy, dust-motes and sun’s rays and then

she approached again in a light summer’s dress. Floral prints, breezy. Perhaps cotton. But nothing is simply cotton or silk or chiffon anymore, no, some bastardized blend or mixture of cloths and stitchings.

Nevertheless, she came.

I might have known before that she would. Where the dead go, or are. Might have known by that time, or deep enough in sleep, perhaps comatose, the locked box, the secret safe, the without key, that it resided somewhere down in there, somewhere always just further off. But not without effect.

No, it was not without effect I perceived her waltzing forth again, all calves and hips, slim-shouldered and ankles, her long goosey neck, a summer’s dress, aswaying, coming up the walk toward the house.

Must be 36 years, more or less, decades anyway, since before and then to now. Hadn’t expected a return. Might have, or hoped for somewheres secretly, but not expected. Not maybe or perhaps. Not even wistfully.

No, just flitting dreams or visions, sometimes sounds, like scents or memories of the dead. Occasional, accidental, ephemeral, nostalgic. No expected return. Past history.

Not this elegant aged woman wearing a summer’s dress, tottering up the walk, holding herself dignified, looking 19 or 25, but well beyond that, decades beyond and unexpected.

My own skin drained of its sap and crinkling. Spotted and buttoned and slack. My eyes burn from the dryness, always wanting to close, me always urging them open, just, probably, for such sights as these, some hope somewhere, not quite really a maybe or perhaps, no, nothing like that, but irrational, breathing, looking, listening about at my age. For something such as this: dignified first love now free of the world, unwanted and failing, and, alas,

she comes back in a light summer’s dress.

And I too old, too tired, to make the stairs, to holler out, to see,

I sit without believing my eyes, certainly not believing, (there was no perhaps or maybe)…no perhaps or maybe, just time coming on, asunder, crumbled, eroding, no eyes for that, for glimpsing an approach, no ears either, barely a lung for the breathing, just barely. With the music loud the melody line can be guessed at but no tune really, I don’t perceive an actual tune,

the songs, then, are gone. The songs are gone. And the trees, not well enough to see branches anymore, sometimes vaguely a trunk or a tangle, if old enough, if large and ancient, but no songs or views, really, no language…

especially not for this, though they say this happened, that nearer to the end she came back, on round the fence, walking the walk, opening the gate and come knocking, in an elegant summer’s dress, not for that, not I, no, not that much sense or detail without perhaps or maybe,

more like the comatose or anesthetized without enough dosage, something like that in my reading chair, at my desk, unable to be “through,” to cease altogether, just present there, something, to feed and to change and medicate, occasionally to move, perhaps a push or a roll-over or around, so as not to break anything not already broken, who’s to say, the children perhaps, or whoever “they” is, voices indistinctly murmured as if shouting about and around, not me, not for me to see or to say

how she might have appeared out of a glaring haze, what all sunshine becomes by now, a headache and a blazing fog, in a light summer’s dress, sure I see her all those years ago, that I might recall, perhaps, occasionally, like the dead, my parents, my children, my spouses, my love, occasionally in that way almost, maybe, like faulty memory bandied about or smothered together, flattened I guess, two-dimensional in there, behind the eyeballs, like a camera, nearly black and white, maybe like that I’ve seen her come around walking

but not with real flesh or real eyes, none of that lioness hair, no almondy skin, no hips no shoulders or neck long like a cobra, no, no hands there, no wrists or ankles, no voice,

just hazy, the fading-out of dusk or dawn, I guess is fading-in, but always dusk then now, dawn is just blindness. No details, no objects, maybe light, a little movement, no more beyond, and that from hearsay, like the children, the smaller ones, as a mouse in the house used to be, only from the corner of the eye then, only that, some dim sense that something went past, and at times it is haunting,

like that, might be, hard to say once you’ve almost heard them say “she was here” “A woman came to see you ‘pop’ or Mr. so-and-so, or somesuch, came back in a light summer’s dress,” they say.

What I might have given. The lock, the box, the key.

N Filbert 2012

Two Photographs – A Surprise

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Two Photographs – A Surprise

Sleeping between books, in the firstdays of the year, surprise falls out toward me in the form of two. Two persons, two photographs, surprising joy. Perhaps I tell you about them, for they drive my pen to paper, to tell myself. Writing comes about for me when I want to tell myself about something I seem unable to know.

Not even for certain, but merely to recognize, although like-recognition is the sort of feeling that spurs me. Then I want to tell myself about what I think I almost recognize but am unable to say. To claim. Only, apparently, to guess. And guessing into writing enables an object that might be examined. Scientifically, almost. Constructs an object that is there, to be perceived, rather than a deep in moving waters that might be called intellect or subjectivity. Perhaps intellect is just that – subjectivity cluttered with objects?

In any case, while reaching the book to its resting place, two surprises slip out I almost recognize a secret in. A secret that I think I might discover by telling about them (it) on paper, in pen. The photographs are objects: they represent, image-in, two figures against a slab of wood (it appears). I remember, immediately, and happiness as well. But between myself and the photograph-objects, what is recognized founders. I almost remember, almost recall what the photographs imagine, imagining to myself, and therefore losing objectivity – a certainty, a palpability, as it were – in a kind of alpine air, like memory.

As if visualizing distance. Spontaneously – surprise. It takes up 8 inches between my eyeballs and the glossy surfaces of 4”x6” rectangles of graded color making shape and form. Of two faces, my wife’s and my own, before she is my wife, before I am my own. Cheek-to-cheek in the one, lip to lip in the other, taken minutes apart in a restaurant booth by friends across the table. Our eyes and smiles say joy is frozen there. Not many years ago. By friends no longer friends, in skins that have slackened and wrinkled, from eyes the worse for wear, with different combinations and cuts of hair.

Surprise! A “shock of recognition” emotionally evocative, rationally unsure. Distances of many angles – 8 inches from my spectacled eyes, thousands of miles from this desk, years of days from the present.

The gaps are the voids that vacuum certitude. What looks like a record of an instant or instants of time passed, vortices layers of interpretation. Viewing the photographs is a NOW, an actual happening, a direct perception of images of my wife and I very close and notably happy – no suggestions of misgivings. Great pain lies before and ahead of these recorded moments. This I know from experience. Experiences as tangible as this Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper held between the pads of my fingers and thumbs.

We are beautiful. The surprise lands like sunrays warming the chest on a porch in Winter. I am not surprised that we are happy. What takes me off guard is the unexpected and unpredictable re-cognition of what must be called re-imagining experience through objects, fragile paper objects featuring a depiction. Light – ephemeral and enormous light – bounces off a substance that must be real enough to reflect it, gathers onto chemicalled plastic, negative-thin, gets held there, imprinted and re-produced in darkness, transcribed into colors like our flesh, our clothes, our hair, our eyes. As we were. The photograph is.

These happy chance surprises come to me in the first days of a difficult year, out of Helene Cixous’ Firstdays of the Year. This is part of the surprising. That the rising (or falling, really) of the physical objects imagining us, the photographs, should tumble today, from there, to here, just now.

Into the midst of, I feel certain, millions of other circumstances and situations contingenting a new instant from the instants recorded there. And yet… and yet… the immediate almost-recognition they provoke is also familiarity. A strange agreement, a feeling of compatibility with what I see. That is me, that is her (is it not?), we are happy. I know that press of shoulder, that squeeze of hand and silken neck. Those eyes lit with verve and passion, with gratitude, with pleasure. And my own – tired from wandering, matched to hers. Our life, emblematically.

Two heads and partial torsos. Two lives held on a dime. Before and after pouring from the back of the papers. Clipped. Shot. Stolen. Photographic terms. Seconds we are gathered for, doing nothing but presenting.

More than that. The chosen action. What’s deliberate. We are sweet, close and radiant, but look here – we are joined. It is clumsier, not posed. At times to near to see one another, not ready, we are there one to the other, in one another’s space and face, mid-sentenced and off-guard – surprise!

This is how we arrive, and select, falling always from betweens, in instants, we appear, we draw nigh. With barely a moments notice we are made objects, describable and frozen. Until we act. Say, believe or move, and we are subject again, alive and becoming, undoing. Which is why it comes as a surprise, an almost-but-not-for-certain, neither cumulative nor complete at any click.

I don not know, do you know? Who these two are. They are perhaps, but not yet done and never-ending. Even eventual stillness, like these photos, continues on. They say “this happened” “is a once” among billions of particled others. “They were there.”

If only a fleeting moment.

I digress.

Like a vase of perfume in the passing, it alerted and re-minds. Somethings and manythings, unsure and inconclusive. We began and we begin, and always further on. I almost remembered what is not quite known and began telling. I went further. Did I?

 N Filbert 2012

A Portrait

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces4 Comments

 

“Tornado Baby 2” by Larry Schwarm

 

The Portrait

“nothing more than silver crystals arranged on paper or, in the case of digital photography, nothing more than a concatenation of 1s and 0s resident on a hard drive. Yet, when it’s a portrait, a person looking back out at us from a photograph, we could believe that the photograph has captured something of the sitter’s essence – something of the stuff that is in his head…we are programmed by natural selection to project ourselves into the world…we want to know where we end and the world begins…where that line is. It’s the deepest problem of epistemology”

–Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing–

Disabused of nonsense, I examine the paper. Silver crystals or programmed numerals, eh? Both I cannot see. What I see is an arrangement of darker and lighter on a grey scale, constituted by hundreds of gradations and variances. I see whites and blacks bastardized into shapes and forms making up the content of an 17”x22” piece of archivally produced watercolor paper, matted on one side. There the code has adhered.

My looking I will say “automatically” seeks resemblance in the shapes and differences I perceive to anything I may have perceived sensually before. It reports “rounded,” “textured,” “wrinkled,” “object” and “background” (notice three dimensions – space, time and substance) without question. But the paper is strictly rectangular, its surface has a subtle grain, but by no means “wrinkled or textured,” and it is patently two-dimensional, a flat plane.

But perception had bypassed even these errors and already concluded “head,” “eyes,” “face,” “mouth,” “nose,” “ears,” “clothing.” Beyond that “corduroy,” “shirt,” “doll,” “cracks” and “sand” or “dirt,” “young,” “infant,” perhaps even “toy.” Far cries from variations of color on pulped and compressed organic matter. And a radical leap from fact or “truth” (something corresponding to reality)!

Intelligent and rigorous as I propose to be, I am clearly susceptible to grand illusions. In fact I find myself incapable of convincing my mind or senses of the truth of the matter. I stopped myself short of providing name or narrative to what I perceived, but nothing held me from taking it as far as gendering a figure!

This “light-writing” – how do I read it? Clearly I read the contents of my own brain onto it. This piece of paper littered with variables of grey becoming a full-blown imagined, invented physical object in a context, instantaneously with it coming into view!

If this doesn’t prove me religious or mystical or addicted to fictions and fantasies, it indisputably labels me as primed from groundless faith and beggars my “rationality.” I take the bait, compose a scene and conjure an experience.

“To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it…it’s the revenge of the intellect upon art…upon the world!…to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’…it is to turn the world into this world…it is the modern way of understanding something”

-Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation–

And did I deplete it? Instead of seeing the open subtle radiance of what was there before me, I took to deconstructing, categorizing and delimiting it. “Forming” or “fabricating” it toward narrower and narrower possibilities (allowances?). As if I were arbiter, de-Terminator, as it were.

Show me light and dark and I’ll dismantle, disentangle and simplify it down to specifics, something bite-size. But not available specifics, no, not the particulars there before me – in themselves – open and presenting – no, not those free existing presences, but to particulars I can re-cognize, things I am ready to see. What something in me wants to see, familiar or unfamiliar.

My socioeconomically-shaped brain saw light and dark dusted together and secured to a surface and re-presented it to myself in ways that supported or validated my trained and chosen view of things – a doll’s head wrecked from use or disuse, floating free as an object within a surround. I lied to myself to support what I’d accepted in belief, what reassured me. To make an order I could not understand into a reordering that I could.

This masterfully selected and developed photograph arrive to my body unnamed, with no captions or text, no intention or meaning. It presents a photographer’s interest – something caught in a person’s perception at a certain moment of time, an arrangement of world that we say “spoke” to him, albeit without language or sound.

The photographer’s eye then detached and defined, from a context endless in all directions, this frame of materials, of sight, and tore it away at just these parameters, from just this angle, and recorded it – took it. From there he expanded the size of what he saw, magnified it and brought it through darkness and an elemental chemical stew into light. He scanned the result, still looking for more, perhaps even seeing more than could literally be seen.

Further affecting this discreet tiny rip of the reality of the world, he manipulated it carefully, painstakingly, revealing and creating ever more extant artificiality, unto his own personal, private and unknowable satisfaction. At that point he produced a new object of matter into the world that we call a “print.” Jetting countless points of ink with the aid of a mechanical device onto hearty paper created for paints, he concocted (remember – always in tandem with machines, ever relational, in flux, at risk and imminently malleable) this single variable fingernail-thick object reflecting light to our eyes: a portrait photograph.

The elaborate efforts of a human at one end of an emblematic chain, toward the elaborate efforts of another human being at the other…a something we may, given incalculable and mind-bogglingly enormous situationally-specific conditions, come to encounter as “art.” And it is this I am declaiming to you here, with something very much like a religiously fervent belief.

N Filbert 2011

go on

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Dec. 14, 2011

precious breath

two birds showering in rain

delight

two lovers on a swing

Winter needn’t always be cold

side by side

and separately

mutual enjoying

radiance

music

what counts for heartbeat

the pitter-pattering

and thumps

what serves as warmth

conflict                          change                      relief

sky goes on

releasing                                                                 resolving                                                               remind

there are first days

and still others

go on…

N Filbert 2011

Today – First Words –

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