More fears….

On December 8, 2011June 21, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos7 Comments

This post does not occur formatted as I have written it, but near enough. The inserted quotations are actually sidebars in the original text, not inserted, but I couldn’t find a way to do that here. Let me know what you think!

"Fear-No Fear" by Robert Frank — “Fear – No Fear” by Robert Frank

“Experience teaches not to trust experience”after Robert Frank

-Lynne Tillman-

“It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions,

is to understand ourselves as fully as we can”

-Jeanette Winterson-

The “Talking Cure” they called it.

Fear

It occurred to me to talk to myself again.

“Finally, after five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me and for which no power will compensate me, though all were under obligation to do so, it occurs to me to talk to myself again”

-Franz Kafka,

Diaries 1910-

I’d gotten lost. In images. In grey.

Fear

Pictures of dolls mangled by storms. Pictures of 19^th century Parisian street scenes. Pictures of the American South in the 1940s. Pictures of hands, the sea, of flowers. Fragments. Instants. Without contexts.

Transposing my values to ambiguous greyscale. They called it “Black & White.” Albumen. Platinum. Ambrotype, Calotype, Collotype. Half-tones. Silent.

I had walked away at “unable.”

Fear

“My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then? That I do not know is probably connected with my inability to write. And without knowing the reason for it, I believe I under-stand the latter”

-Franz Kafka,

Diaries 1910 –

I wasn’t unhappy, exactly. Not happy either. Not indifferent nor ill nor unusually fatigued. No crisis attended my aporia absorption…I simply hesitated…still.

There sat my typewriter, as every day, on top my large wooden desk, flush to the window, bright sheet of paper curled clean round the platen.

Loose pages scattered around, unmarked but willing, blank notecards and various writing implements all there, at which I sat and stared, unable…

Fear

(“the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with an obligation to express”…Samuel Beckett)

…not knowing why.

Someone suggested the talking cure.

“Why don’t I stay within myself?”

-Franz Kafka,

Diaries

What would that mean? I thought. To whom would I speak, about what, with what and for what I could not imagine.

It occurs to me to talk to myself again.

me: might it be fear?

me: but fear of what?

me: fear of the unknown perhaps? the blank page, some swallowing void? distance?

me: I wouldn’t know what to be afraid of in that scenario

me: how could I fear?

“the blank page, the void where everything is called into question”

Ronald Sukenick

me: all these questions!

me: fear of having nothing to fear, yet feeling anxious or afraid

me: the obligation to express

me: from where or whom? and with nothing to express

me: nor apparently the wherewithal to express it

me: perhaps to express that fear, unknown, having nothing to fear?

me: make up a fear

Fear

I find myself afraid of losing things. Things changing. In other words, not being unhappy, I imagine alterations that might requisite unhappiness, might disturb a pleasant, if anxious, calm.

Someone with whom I have to relate, or find myself relating, might become dissatisfied or discontent. Travel, clothing, socializing, any number of disruptions are apt to dismember the present.

How fragile is the now!

me: afraid of change then?

me: the losses that change brings

me: and what of the gains?

me: what gains?

me: knowledge, experience, emotions, sensations

me: do you – do I – really go in for all that?

me: that change is advance? evolution, adaptation?

me: quite right – outside of a controlled environment – there are plenty, countless in fact, chaotic elements in this little room, our little house by the sea

me: I suppose

me: all we need for knowledge we can gather here, I’ve no doubt we’re not experiencing one another fully as it is – not ourselves, nor one another

me: susceptible to disease, age, time, accident, weather, supply or lack thereof, erosion, pests, mechanical failures

me: moods, thoughts, states, dreams, sounds

“words…are the source of mis-understandings”

The Little Prince

Saint-Exupery

me: one another and ourselves

me: words and expressions

me: point taken

Fear

me: not of unknown but unknowable?

me: fragility, insecurity, contingency, frailty of finitude

me: mercy!

me: seems at the mercy of everything within / without

me: reason to fear then, logical rational evidential reason

me: but I wasn’t afraid!

me: we invented that in order to try the “talking cure”

me: it had occurred to me

No Fear

Not fear, finally, but dislike, distaste. Can a reasonable person fear what is inevitable? Mustn’t he or she come to terms with it? Lack of control, utter insecurity, constancy of change, approach of unknowable end? A trembling truce, an honesty.

It is conceivable to me that some humans might be such as inviting, engaging these things – find them exciting, compelling – to pass their time in action, adventure, experiment. Seems possible.

Various interpretations, fabrications, means for developing – in unaccountable degrees (albumen, Collotype, platinum, half-tones), hundreds, billions of shades.

me: if I were such a person

me: an explorer, a sailor, a hunter…Gracchus

me: yes Dante, Babbage, Rimbaud

me: inventive, welcoming, brave, per chance

me: bon chance!

me: nothing would be done

me: too much living and then dead

me: the noise, over-exposure, chaos

me: blown circuits

me: let’s stick with the metaphors

me: no limits

me: nothing contained

I walked away at “unable,” desk just so, the papers, the pens, the typewriter, the window.

Not knowing what to do. The waves kept doing. Grasses and winds. Even the page danced from time to time (in light, in draft).

Fear – no fear

The talking cure, they’ve called it.

It occurs to me to talk to myself, again.

I’ve nothing to say.

No way of expressing it.

“

“When people look at my photographs I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice”

-Robert Frank-

the genuine writer has nothing to say. Only a way of speaking. Must create a world,

but starting from nothing, from the dust…”

-Alain Robbe-Grillet-

Fear – No Fear

To be, or not To Be

as blank at the end as at the…

It occurs to me…

VOCABULARY FOR THE VOID

On December 5, 2011 By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

“the void is waiting for vocabulary”

-Edmond Jabes-

Hundreds of thousands of bloggers just today. More hundreds of thousands of words. If internet and web cloud technocommunication virtuality haze space signifies anything to me it’s an enormous, incalculable black hole. Like numbers of the dead in war-torn countries, the mind numbs, is unable to actually perceive, barely conceive the truly vast amounts of language traversing the aether even as my fidgety cursor leads me on.

Greyscale. Fog. If we could layer the sentences uploading and downloading each nanosecond we would create a gigantic palimpsest of shadows and abstraction. With all of these voices, all these digits and copies and pastes and links and quotations and -ipedias of information flooding, flooding, pouring forth…who might hear? How will your line or my line, each individual’s arrangement, profession, offering into the dialogue/multilogue languaging necessarily is – find a hint of an echo, a reverberation, let alone a true response?

“There are many more languages than one imagines. And humans reveal themselves much more often than they wish. So many things that speak! But there are always so few listeners, so that humans, so to speak, only chatter in a void when they engage in confessions. They waste their truths just as the sun wastes its light. Isn’t it too bad that the void has no ears?” -Friedrich Nietzsche-

Void: deaf and hungry, is that what I’m understanding? Like black-hole-vacuumings…taking everything in without distinction, churning it up like a sink-e-rator, farting it further through the absence of space?

And what of Jabes…a seer…some hopeful pseudo-Biblical desert screamer…personalizing the void? Trying to soothe or encourage us in our madness to express, uncover, discover, be acknowledged, be heard – urging us to seed the void with our words? A void without ears waits for language – what does this mean?

“the whole struggle of literature is in fact an effort to escape from the confines of language”
-Italo Calvino-

“Any page of writing is a knot of silence unravelled”

“Letters give form to absence”

-Jabes-

Closer…at least to some thinking…that this reaching, this stretching, this hope beyond hope and irrational exigency to language language language this world…is also to get further, farther out, farther in to our world in its muteness. Void might be empty, deaf, dumb, blind…and our language, our images and movements and sounds might cohere once in awhile…if only…this cosmosphere of chatter (i think i’ve even read “blogosphere” somewhere) might possibly torque us forward, pulling from our mouths languagings that belong…”to make writing appear, is not to dispose of privileged knowledge: it is to discover what everyone knows but no one can say. It is to try, just once, to raise the veil which maintains us in an obscurity we have not chosen” (Philippe Sollers)

So everyone, keep feeding the sphere, fertilizing clouds, singing into the canyon…the void waits and waits and will always be waiting (else it could not be void)…there seems to be something Promethean, mythic, human about the effort to fill it, one word at a time

“the blank page, the void where everything is called into question”

-Ronald Sukenick-

“and you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say”

-Denis Johnson-

“mysteries are problems that encroach on their own data” (George Santayana)…

to be continued

WordRain, an experimencte

On December 5, 2011December 5, 2011 By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

WordRain

Words are dropping like heavy Autumn rain off of leaves. I walk over them like lily pads, every step a stride over something not said, that liquidy deep.

They lie here tendentially. Bobbing so lightly against the surface of things, skin on a bubble, what can they hold?

They feel heavy, made of water and air, a breath. I test them with “heaviness,” with “weight.” They hold. I try “mountain,” I try “sea.” I heave “sorrow” and “darkness” and “death” into the words. They continue to stick to the surface, though I could not see them underneath.

I step again. Around me the pluck and leave marks, then vanish away.

I step. I have landed on “brick” held fast by the world. It wobbles a bit as if in a thick fluid, but I’ve balanced and am able to stand. I use “house” to shelter and observe. I choose “window” and “bay” and “uncovered” to watch them fall, to try and count them.

How they plop and then slide on each object in my surround. For moments they adhere, just long enough for me to piece them out – “branch” “wagon” “tarp” “barn” “flower” and then they have wriggled on and away, objects identified by attention and sense. Yet the rain of words is steady and all-over-at-once so I cannot take them off-guard, or catch something before its language is there. This is true as well for all of my perceptions.

I smell “must” and “dust” and baking “bread.” Wet “smoke,” “plants,” and “heater fumes,” some I am unable to see,

the sounds of “piano” and “strings” traveling toward me from great distances, invisible, and yet filled up with words.

I step again, into this grey rain.

I am wanting more language to catch on more surfaces, especially the unseeable ones. These “feelings,” “melancholy” and “nostalgia” with “sentiment” and “ennui.” More words please, more details in this downpour: identify “griefs” and these “loves.” I open my arms out wide, hunch over, lean back – where must they fall in order to land on these things I uncover no words for?

“Silvery” “mercurial” and “faint.” “Ominous,” “wistful” and an “obtuse pain.”

Not only. So much more without name in them!

“Molly.” “Wendy.” “Theodore.” “Distance,” “remorseful,” “unrequited” and “maimed.” “Misbegotten,” “disabled,” “mourn of the manufacturer’s defect.” “Insoluble.” “Ineffable.” “Now.”

I lay down. Afloat on the words as the stream together, overlap and cohere. Wide open now, mouth, legs, eyes and arms, rain runneling ears and nostrils, fingers and clothes – saturate me with words, let me hear of it all, all that there is, inward and out –

I am ready to drown – if all might be covered in words.

N Filbert 2011