Category: Experimenctes

My own quick attempts at inscribing experience + experiment, languaging

Interstitial

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

part two of a rambling….

visual fields

– 2 –

            Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone.  Suspect I can’t believe them.

I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that.  Won’t even attempt “within reason.”  Suggest.

There’s no “let me explain” to this.

– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly?”

The point, I would say, exactly, or nearly precise – that there isn’t.  I don’t know.  But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) – we’re dis-missed.  Or not missed – how to say it?  There’s a meeting.  It seems.  In a margin, or more.

Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap?  I don’t know.  I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer.  Longer.  It’s a fight against death, that small word.  Simply, longer.  With you.

Am I clear?  Making sense?  I don’t know.

– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying” she says, “near ‘exactly’.”

I don’t know.  It’s unwise.

And I hum when the words sound just so.

– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.

Interaction.  Locution.  Between.  (I am thinking).

“Interstitial,” I say.  Interstitially?  I wonder.  How could I know.  It’s all susceptible to the mark.  The mark of the question.  I think about changing my name.  Did before.  I like titles.  It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music.  I would be Mark, Remarking.  The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved to a point, on everything : ?   “My point, exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark.  (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind…anything).

It’s okay.  I’m familiar.  Not that you’re worried.  There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction.  It’s just so (so it seems).  “Just-So Stories,” he wrote, long ago, relatively – they’re alike and akin, episodic.  We describe.

Neither here and/nor there.  Interstitial.  In-between.  What I wanted to tell her, to say.  And I would have, had I known.

– “Known what, exactly?” she’d once said, and I’d stopped, for the meanings were lost, non-existent.  Just so.

“That’s just how it is” I had said.  And don’t know, was surmising.  The world hypothetical and inspired (I’d thought, at the time) – simply possible.  I was wrong (perhaps).  But she stayed (temporarily).  The words lose their meanings.

I hum.  To myself.

I write: “This is what I wanted to do.”

All that’s required is a ‘trigger’…a rule.

We

NANOWRIMO Reminds: Any Excuse to Write

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, Writing2 Comments

THE INTERSTICE

I told her that I would have told her, had I known.

-“Known what, exactly?” she said, “Really!?” she said.

Yes, I said, yes, I would have explained what I felt to be true – about the “interstice” – what I felt I understood, I would have said.

As usual, the sighs, the diverted glances, the “I-don’t-knows.”

It’s okay.  I’m pretty used to it, not that it still doesn’t hurt, or squash some deep part of me – annihilate, erase – but familiarity breeds, and it’s not contempt, at least not for me.  More like resolve, or, well, accustom, I don’t know.

Still I would have conversed about the interstice.  Or its plural.  No one can know what we’re talking about (in my opinion) – that’s why we talk (in my opinion).  But I like to look at her.  Very much.  So sometimes I keep talking so that I can look at her longer.

Thus I would have explained – tried to – about the Interstice…had I known, I tell her.

-“Known what, exactly?” she asks, “Really?!”

It’s okay.  I’m used to it – exasperation.  It’s a sort of fatigue that settles on my interlocutors – my family, my friends, my lovers – as I triple/quadruple/unendingly (exponentially?) second-(meaningless term in this accounting)-guess whatever it is (emotion, idea, memory, event) I attempt to convey.

I don’t trust a thing as long as it’s questionable, and I’ve yet to discover something unquestionable.  I like inventing titles though.

She’s looking at me – softly, sadly, gently and quiet.  Sometimes she strokes my hair with her hands and lets me rest my head (the physical part) in her lap.  It kind of helps.  But the rest doesn’t rest.

It’s okay, for the most part, I’m used to it.  It’s “me” as they say, as it were – what I’m used to.  It doesn’t matter, or does in unquantifiable ways, but I keep at it.  Anyway.  I can’t seem to help it.  Well, some things do – like vodka, sex, sleep – but only temporarily.

Things are only temporarily.

That’s the sort of idea that keeps me alive.  Temporarily.  And second-(exponentially)-guessing.

She’s still there.  Here.  Though.  Hence the interstice.

I try to explain.

As if “interstice” possessed meaning – definition beyond the moment activated or utilized.  As if it indicated.  “Meant” – a convergence-point (limitless above and below and abroad) of conventions of time and of space – a realm that felt (seemed) shared.  Held in common.  Nothing is “held” – or that temporarily.  It seems.  I don’t know.  It’s certainly questionable – is it – “certainly”?

I don’t know.  Which I thought, or I think, is the entry to wisdom, but even that – I don’t know.

She’s still here.  And I question – who is it?  Who is still here?  And what for and/or why?  And where is this trembling “here”?  I can wonder, after all.

-“Wonder what, exactly?” she queries.

I don’t know.  I’m a human.  Some odd conundrum of pieces and parts that cohere, correspond or reciprocate in hold-together activities for awhile…call it “organism,” there’s that, it would seem, but seem only, digging in it is hard to convince – a location, identity, consistency, avocation or being.  It’s just so – apparently – temporarily.

Exasperating.  You see?  You dig?  What I mean?  That’s what we’re after (I think) – what it means.  But what that means is uncertain, I think or surmise.  We don’t know, it would seem, we’re uncertain.

We ask.

Let me describe this – the interstice…

“Not another word.”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, Writing3 Comments

“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it you can ever let anyone know…this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you.” – DFW.

I don’t know what to tell you. If this piece by DFW doesn’t resonate and “work” on you, well, ok. Perhaps he’s not for you.  Please give it a read, again, if you have…

DFW - Oblivion

click for link to “Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace

Neuroses : or, why not begin again….?

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

Neuroses: or, Dynamite Walls Contain Us

– a self-help novel (what great novel isn’t?) –

            They said he, well, those who knew him said.  Really it should be “they” – not “ him.”  Inclusive.  “They” (neurobiologists) say neuroses can increasingly be viewed and investigated as ancient and useful survival strategies for our race.  Perhaps misapplied.  (Fragment, consider revising).

How does one decide between active and passive?  Betwixt present, future, past when creating, recounting or telling stories?  You’d think future, past, present, accordingly.  But there’s the aversion.  Aversion to active and present because it’s “suggested” : by programs – institutional and academic, technical and authoritative – software, hardware, “officiated.”  Machinated and conventional.  In stead, he’s drawn (attracted to, magnetized, compelled) toward past and passive – the un-recommended and untoward.  Why?  “They” – the humans.  The neurotics.  The ones that qualify.  Can qualify.  Will, do qualify.  Neuroses = something humans can (be/do/are).

The “they.”  Contained by equal and opposite neuroses: when this is evident, maybe we (or it) is called: “love.”  The balance of tension.  The incorporate.  I don’t like the rules.  I am predisposed.  (Fragment, reconsider).  I’m aware of my predisposition.  Therefore.

She.  He.  They.  Dynamite walls…contain us.  Or not.  (Fragments, reconsider).  The sentence/sentencing tells you – active, passive, future.

I want to tell a story in this way:  sometimes it happened; sometimes it happens; sometimes it keeps happening;  sometimes it might happen; sometimes it will.  Pause, breathe.  You are human – you never can tell.  There will always (perhaps) be too many contingencies, contexts, effects, probabilities, possibilities, variables.

A friend addresses the “four fundamentals of metaphysics” (oxymoron) – the Known-Known; the Known-Unknown; the Unknown-Known, and the Unknown-Unknown.  Makes sense.  Doesn’t.  Think about it:  we are possible, we are already, we have…

She was like, he said.  I said.  The 4th-grader wrote exactly what the adult said “in his head.”  Who could I be?  Perhaps the “he” – to contradict the known – (of the 4th grader).  She/it/he was correct.  I/you/we – were/are/will-be – exposed…via empathy, familiarity – the all that’s strange and true.

We are.  We were.  I am.  She is.  She will have been was.  As I.  As you, as we, will be, have been, was.

And LOVE.  And BE.  And.  And.  And.  This will ALWAYS be a NOVEL (i.e. some timeless combination of the known and unknown – what is, was, could be – living realities unknown as realities).

The she, the he, the they.  The you, the I, the us.  Love.  Hope.  Despair.  Being.  (Fragments – consider revising).

  • Dynamic walls contain us –

And how dynamic those walls!  Which shows the self-helping nature of understanding : knowledge comprehended and integrated…assists.  Assists insofar as efforts are being made at (or toward) making sense.  In other words – when each “individual” comes to realize that the containers are dynamic and uncertain (i.e. active and inter-, ex-changing permeable moment-to-moment[1] – altering apparent boundaries) – it will help “make sense of” why an individual’s “identity” is experienced as so very fluid and variable and shifty.

“Just the facts ma’am.”  Precisely.  (Perhaps).

In fact, no one knows the facts any more than we understand the properties or structures of fluids…of water…[2]  [There’s no footnote there – just a fascination by the conventional procedure of indicating a foot[3] by an elevated marking].  Public agreements – methods for maneuvering a world in concord, together – a gathering-space – endlessly intriguing).

I gesture.  You acknowledge.  (Fragments, reconsider – some conventional-mutual agreements {keep writing “arguments” where “agreements” supposedly goes}, commands/suggestions/authorizings).  I look longer.  Then am hooked.  You ARE curious, novel, strange, fascinating, unique.  AND familiar, recognizable, similar, probable, regular/regulated, assimilable, banal.  Strange AND familiar, novel AND banal, fascinating AND tiresome, conventional AND innovative – all at one go (when I pay attention).  I love you.  I am tired, not tired.

And so it is – the story goes – a familiar plot made interesting via details of circumstance and style.  The story goes (fragment, considered).

I am drawn to you.  BY you, in relation to.  Dynamite walls created interactively, actively, intertwined.  Intermingled and intertwined – intermingling (via gaze, touch, sound and sense) intertwining (via molecules, atoms, particles and waves, genes, movement) particles thereof, actions of particles of particles of = Intertwingled (-ing).  So to “speak.”

Traditionally (convention + repetition over time and selection (“history”)) “neuroses” have been publicly agreed to be “pathologies” – that is “disease-words,” irregularity-actions, abnormality-beliefs.  No longer!  NOW (perhaps?) the disease-describing (INscribing) words are themselves mutual banalities (thank you social sciences, relativism, anthropology + archaeology coupled to psychology/art/philosophy/biology/chemistry/medicine and…

“Inter-“ is useful for this – disciplinary/-mingled/-twingled/-spersed.

As the story goes: actively, passively, possibly.

She + He + It.  Sheheit…excrement with a Southern drawl.  The allure of things.  (Fragment reconsidered).  The taboo and grotesque, the extreme and revolting – and we’re right back to the banal.

Everyday.  The other, (the one eminently important to me, the neurotic) expressed emotion, attachment, attraction and bondedness toward (with) me.

A story began (in this case – BEGINS)

I -too-experienced (felt, dealt, smelt) interest toward / investment in – “her” strangeness (uniqueness and novelty, surprise and specificity) and familiarity (comfort, belonging, accord, comprehensibility) – THEREFORE – neuroses in reaction (alchemy, chemistry, biology, engineering, imagination) – RELATION – “love.”

Successful (“effective”?) interaction – an experience some call “power”(ful) [syn. compatibility, attraction, lust, desire, intimacy, connectivity – convergence – (relationship)].  WORDS.

We have yet to surmise, investigate, explore, hypothesize LANGUAGE ITSELF (i.e. modes or methods of conventional [publicly, mutually agreed] interactive, SHARED expression/impression tactics, activities, gestures, contexts and contents).

Now I stop (writing) in order to read (engage recognition + innovation – “learn”).

Sex is central.  Sex and perspective (in other words, “desire” and “belief”).

Easy to dub it all doublespeak, excepting that it’s the somewhat singular communicative way we humans go about storying our experiences…via dialogue, convention and sensation (conversation) – through one mediated path or another.

[1] -10 to the 10th power

[2] Footnote

[3]note

Re-searching: Hope Questions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Language, Writing8 Comments

skeleton at desk

I archive.

– Edouard Leve –

At some point in the future this will be very important to someone: that I wrote.  Will be significant.  To someone.  That I disciplined my “self” determinedly, conspicuously to experience; to experience experience.  That I asked questions of as much as I could, and as many, and then held on to each question in a kind of world’s-largest-ball-of-twine or world’s-largest-bundle-of-wire or inter-cranial-neuronal-tangle, or… that each little curiosity that cropped up as I “came up against”, each discomfort, each discomfiting sensation, I translated – and when I rendered it, became something different, something new in the world (even though agelessly repetitious) and that new thing was another questioning animal – and those questions disappeared into the world’s-largest-body-of-water – doubt – oceans and underground marshes, or, in actual everyday life, simply a “questioning spirit,” an “inquiring mind,” a “researcher” (to search again) – a human that keeps turning round and around observing things, seeking, searching, asking, in other words, I feel like it will be important – to some other existent thing/individual/organism/ being – that I quizzed and catechized (and that, mostly genuinely, compunctionally) whatever discomposing-affective-awareness-alert occurred for me (thereafter losing them all, after their fashion, in the generalized posture or aspect of querying) followed it in accord with its continuance of interest and then released, lost, offered it to a larger sign:

question mark

Someday it will matter that every little thing, moment, perception (i.e. “experience”) that I noticed, felt, underwent – was aware of becoming-encountering – I interrogated, I archived, I disoriented, mislaid, lost track of in some larger point-of-view, mien or cast: I had reservations, I chronicled, I forgot.  And inscribed.  Addressed and assigned in whatever way I was capable of.  Marked and then faded, cancelled by the mere activity of demarcating.

Translating manifestations and intimations into gestures and cues delimited and distinguished (de-scribed) the perturbation and disconcertment into ambiguous and indeterminate denotations…opaque obfuscations or auguries that bore little substance or portent.

My questioning, rather than resulting in poignant prognostications or revealing adumbrations simply fed the murky mass of life’s analysis – a scrupulous and turbid scrutiny.

I beggared the question and then repented.  Metanoia.  I aimed and turned, aimed and swerved, and turned again.

When the engagement perturbed, I transliterated, diverted, and sacrificed it to a chaotic deity … discovering … language.

 

 

 

it might be Autumn

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, seasons, Writing4 Comments

It might be Autumn.  It takes awhile to know (here).  In any case, the confusion is enormous, is bewildering, is sometimes stultifying.

Multiple persons – some who know me and some who seem like they do – all seem confident about it.  About the book.  About that “there is a book in me” just waiting to be born or written, composed or transcribed – however a “book” comes to be.  I am certain of none of it, excepting that I love books, in fact I crave well-connected letters as much as (although differently from) my desire for love, for intimacy (or “satisfaction” – itself a kind of surprise and delighted exhaustion), for meaningful connections (being understood, acknowledged, beloved, and so on).  Strange beasts, we.  I.  I-we.

The “I” is “we” if you take into account all the variance – the inconsistencies and variety and contextual divergences.  “Bewildering” is the word I most usually apply to this business or blessing of living… of being alive.

Maybe that’s what this is about, like birthdays.  The strange pivoting celebration of another year undergone or accomplished, simultaneous with its absence and cessation.  Living, dying – same thing?  The introduction that serves as farewell.  A tightly romance.

Does “paradox” indicate two apparently incompatible things being the case at once?  These are not flip-sides of a coin, but two things on the same surface, depending.  Living/dying, suffering/joy, love.  Now as before and after in the same instant, so to speak.  I will always be battling the incapacity of words as the only things capable.  Communicative paradox – language as, at once, in the same sphere/realm/scale/reality – that which reveals and conceals, says and does not say, speaks and remains silent, clarifies and obfuscates, signals and misleads…fails and succeeds.

So that every effort of greeting also grieves, and each introduction is yet another form of farewell.

 

I loved her.

a little more…

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

Intro Farewell

Xopher Alexander Porches

Progress

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Music, WritingLeave a comment

Introduction - Farewell

 

Work in Progress

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, fiction, relationships, Writing3 Comments

Intro Farewell

a little something I’ll be working on through the Fall… believing, against all odds that there really IS a book in me somewhere….

Scripture : Roots

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Language, Reflections, Writing8 Comments

Scripturient

“In the beginning was the word…”

“…and the word was god.”

Enigma.

My youth was spent immersed in a form of neo-fundamentalist, conservative, evangelical Christianity.  It would be difficult for me to estimate the number of bible readings, passages memorized, commentaries consumed, and sermons received during my first twenty-some years of life.

Twenty-some years later, libraries of world literature later, this particular phrase, passage, verbal construction remains like a haunting, a rule, a resonance and reverberation of the deepest sort – a kind of First Sentence that rises and echoes in me whenever I turn myself to writing.  A statement some whole of me attached to in presumptive belief and passion that constitutes, in its way, the work of my adult life.

In what “beginning” was the word?  And what was that word, are we to read this word as, literally, “god”?  Or are words themselves divine, godlike in their creativity and actionable functions?  In the full passage we read that the word is both “with” god and itself god…a quintessential meta-statement from whatever interpretive stance one selects.

“In the beginning was the word [in beginnings words become?  In words become beginnings?],

and the word was with god [words that are with] and the word was god [words that are].”

            Religiously:  when humans spoke “god,” gods became.  Conception creating realities.  Referentiality – a term is attached to an object, idea, relation…and the object, idea, relation begins to become that term (and vice-versa, through public practice).

Words epitomize co-creation, collusion.  I am a tiny human organism, an infant birthed into a community of persons.  This community attaches a term to me: “Nathan.”  I grow into that name, define and fill it with characteristics, behaviors, activities, experiences…and, for my communities (the others I relate to) that word “Nathan” comes to mean my specific organism in the world.

Words are beginnings, are like relational diagrams, invisible cross-hatchings and webbing throughout lived experience as humans – inceptions of internal and external possibilities and limitations via their activity as connective linkages, as references and realities.  Every term is metaphor – symbol, signal, object – requiring its interpretant.  The multi-sided act: language.

So what began with language?  Language that joins with and is?

I suggest meaning.  Conscious participation, co-mmunication, reflective relating.

Religiously:  posit Supreme Being and it posits world.  Speak reality and reality speaks.  All a matter of relating, relation…communication…language.

World becomes via collaboration, interaction – made possible through efforts of mutuality and distinction: gestures, intelligible utterances, multilogues, dialogues – communication.

Possible interpretation: A god languages “god” into being.  “Unicorn,” “fairy,” “truth,” “quark,” “molecule,” “consciousness,” – invisible, imperceptible “realities” language (WITH) and then become (ARE).  Subsequently the commerce and exchange of the universe alters…

Each utterance brings new relations and thereby new “things/realities” into concourse.

I can believe that what begins in language (or, communication/relation/collusion) is MEANING (such a word as “god” itself).

I find, trundling through countless notebooks, pages, typescripts, letters and journals, that at the head of any larger work or endeavor I attempt is inscribed this personally indelible takeaway from my youth’s indoctrination:

In the beginning is the word

a thing that creates in being constructed

always co-constructed WITH something else/Other

and becoming something else/Other in its utterance and collusion

organism + environment = meaning

all reality resides in relation

all of these also words, beginnings, possibilities

In beginnings are words

and in words begins begins begins

ever forging relations into realities into relations

tying things one to another to another to another

in concourse

en route as route