“Cat litter,” the last thing said, and something about that abandoned bicycle, a child’s bike, deep red, repainted, left askew on their lawn for days.
Those were the last things. The last things she said. And so he’d begun to move about much more carefully. Timidly some might say, an amalgam of caution and care. Ever tender, aware that things break, or tear, spill, or fall apart. End.
But then Laramie, his sister, mother, the kids – some entities seem to persist, so few and so stubborn, inexplicably, threatening almost, as if an accumulating disaster, an heavier withdrawal. He doesn’t know what to make of it.
Abandonment crushes all scales and statistics – but pebbles and dust, foundations and roots still remain. Persistent. Resilient. Irrational.
Like a sloth he repaired to his desk, as delicate and slow. He took up a pen with his head in his hand. He was lonely, alone but for quiet, sweet silence, and branches and birdsong and wind, autos and dogs. Not quite quiet. Not quite alone. But abandoned, far as he could surmise.
He wrote. Rather drew. Looping lines that were shaky on paper. Tried to make his operation more smooth. It failed. He shakes now, does Alias, from drinking and smoking, aging and grief. From perspective. His perspective.
A rattling undone, an erosion. He sighs.
A bike, and “cat litter,” then gone. Others had left for much more and much less. Litanies of reasons of wrongs are so easy with humans involved, never mind the ‘weight of the good.’ Can’t compete. Won’t compute. There are mistakes, and effort involved – both are failures, no matter the theories or talk, no matter their universality. He was wrong and a failure, which equals abandon no matter the words they produced.
Alas, Alias. A depression. An outlook that colors the field, but it’s charcoal. No matter the ‘whom’ it will bleed, run them dry, and disfigure. No one’s withstood it for long, for all of his kindness and passion (devised to distract from the swallowing dark, or the primer – his base coat is death). He’s alone.
Not a Laramie, mother, or kin. Without doubt there’s no lover, no friend. Just a man and his books and incessant grey thoughts, and a pen.
He begins, looping lines…forming “Cat litter,” the last thing she said…
Laramie shoots and kills. Laramie loves and captures. Catches and release.
Riding along the ridge, singing, swearing, singing. This journey’s a long time coming.
The need to get away. For autonomy. To be self-called. To begin after all of this and that. Recall and resound. Taking stock.
He’s always been this way – a little undomesticated. A touch of untamed wild. Never finding a place. Never quite belonging.
Boundaries forged by relation and response (-ability) all forwarding to limits, cages, toward constraints or restraint he can not abide. Each vocation or program, discipline or field, replete with vocabularies and methods, praxis and behaviors misfitting to degrees he finds it hard to accept. A ‘lone wolf,’ ‘self-made man,’ a patent failure or ‘with no name.’ Renegade?
He rides. The shuffling flanks feel heavy under him, providing awareness of his own weight. Considers Alias, and thinks how both do not belong. How adamant and vehement he himself cries freedom, how Alias skinnies and wriggles past the gates.
How neither could ever be said to have ‘succeeded.’ How both (in his mind) would never have failed. How neither and both are alike. Neither and both are so different. Neither and both alive.
Rides on. Too old for all this but he’ll camp out tonight. To prove to himself that he’s old both and wild. Yet. That he aches to be tamed and untame. Yearns to belong, independently. The want for a self that is selfless. The urge for a course without banks.
Laramie wants to be world, alive. Wants to be fertile and virile, viral, untrained. Wants claimed and confessed-for, wants derided and praised.
“We’re the renegade scholars,” sometimes he would say, “learning the lingo and undoing like acid its heart.” “We master and tell of its weakness, expert novitiates in all.” “We unwind and unravel. Travel and root. We are rhizome,” he says, “drawn out from anywhere. We absorb and vituperate, ingest and expel.”
He rides, and he rides, in love with the muscling flanks. The wind tearing through hair and beard, blistering cheeks, stinging his eyes. There are tears. Laramie swallows. The sorrow and joy are one. Life and its death copulating…heaving and sweating, oily and dry to the bone. He is brittle.
Laramie is needing to stop, and he feels it. His body is singing – pain tells. Time is ripe. There’s an end. It is coming. Unrolling his pack…here it goes…
I am not certain why stories sicken me so. By “sicken” perhaps I mean something closer to depletion or boredom, gluttedness or exhaustion. By stories I mean shaped texts of language – narrative fictions, philosophical arguments, journals and declarations and ads.
“I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.”
– Samuel Beckett, The Expelled
It has something to do with that. My own writings sicken me faster than others, but all writings, once entangled in plots, developing characters, or pursuing a narrative…tend me toward disgust.
The motion of “progress,” falsity of construction, illusion of meaning begins to fray as language gets “handled” or forced into order. The squeezing and pressure and molding of shaped texts, especially as they develop into sections, seem bound to conform to the size of the creator. Many texts start out wildly, with chaotic promise, almost infinite exploding potentials – but threads develop, and lines, sentences form, and shapes, causes and results, actions and repercussions, and ever so surely the mass is twisted to the size of a snake. And then I’m tired, exhausted by “how alike they are.” We are. It is.
Language imploding and exploding. This is what I want. Language available like elements. Language operative in a chaotic surround, like experiencing. Language that doesn’t know next. Language becoming, not necessarily or even especially something – just becoming within/without human.
So I read words, less to learn or be entertained, less to follow or empathize, less to argue or understand, and more to exist in a sea of potential communication and commerce, to respond, to be open and closed by each term and their relations, to go on.
As if language were oxygen, blood, water. As if language were soil. As if language were all these mystifying, crazy, strange, different and unknown others surrounding us everywhere. As if language were environment. Context. Medium. Not tool. Not machinic. Not discipline. Not function. Not at our service or in our control.
We know that it’s not. It does indeed possess others – carries and transfers multitudes – times, cultures, histories, humans, vagaries of meanings. It is untamed and unpredictable, available and unsolvable, like ourselves. But we often use it for us rather than in or with us. We often torment it into cages and patterns, (I’m doing it now) – forced representation, desiccated potentials – marks of expression or intention or persuasion or telling.
I declare. I unravel. I investigate. I express. I guess. I wonder. I commit a sound to form. It leads. I resist. I say. I listen. It leads (each of us in particular ways). I resist. I ponder. It takes shape. Incites. I want. I resist. I query.
Doing and undoing language becomes the only way to use it and avoid strangling it down to my size. Persisting and resisting, experimenting and erasing, canceling / canceling-out, backwards, forwards, at the angular. Listening to others. Throwing in, throwing away. Desist. Insist. Consist. And delete. Chaos and pattern. Detangle, knot up. Fracture. Fragment. Avoid. A void. Void and null and emergent. Perhaps. Perhaps. The attempt to leave open. It suffers to form.
Laramie liked to think himself a poet. One attuned, natural, native to his world(s). He liked to think he had unique feelings, perhaps an “insight,” an acute attention – that maybe he saw just a little bit more than others saw. And was able to say so.
A farmer-cowboy type from the upper Midwest, he played a lot of sports and performed muscled labor – at times enjoying the solitude of pasture rides and the company of large mammals. He felt a “care,” not sure for what, suspect he’d call it a kind of “connection” – with crop growth, animals, the waters and the skies. And felt he could say so. And he could sing. Musician, farmer, cowboy, son. Husband, scientist, laboring man. Father, friend, and “poet” (he might say). Laramie James Backstagger, dearly known to Alias.
“When you’re making it – forming words or music – do you feel somehow that you’re ‘getting it’?” Alias might ask, as they ambled the fields chopping at thistles, remedying fence. “Do words add to experience or just chop it up? Diminish? Reduce?” Alias chimed.
Laramie would go silent, plodding along, smelling and listening. Looking.
At times they’d play basketball, tennis (this was all in their youth, Alias having blown out his knees at the pigskin). And careful.
They both went on to cities: education, enlightenment, the ‘experience’ of cultural promises. They still had their debts to pay.
“I mean, when you ‘see’ it, or ‘hear’ it, are immersed – it’s not seeing or hearing or sensing – am I right? It’s just being – and then – ?” Alias prodded, “and then – what happens?” “You hear language, or find it or forge it, dream times or ‘intuit,’ you consider ways you’d be able to MARK it – note it down (letters or score) – recount or recreate it – even extend or rescind it – and that all seems like media to me: communication: expression or history or talk…but reduced. Reduced to what YOU can comprise or compose – not the ‘same’ as the moments, trembling in the web, and borrowing, borrowing, borrowing – from the wind and the trees, weather and bees, family and learning, working and friends – and our culture! – all funneled and cored to some desiccated fraction of bone – eviscerated – ‘HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’: some words or an etude or painting. Even action. Even sowing or reaping or pruning or care…’HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’ – wow! Really?! Amazing! One moment made this?! AND WHAT CARES? WHAT MATTERS? WHAT PURPOSE OR POINT, BENEFIT OR CONSEQUENCE…the next ‘now’?!”
Alias could go on and on like this. Often doing what he’d just described or decried.
And Laramie’d slow, maybe stop, often sit, and stare out. Have a smoke (he didn’t smoke, but pretended – his children and wife didn’t like it). And Alias would drink and get wiser. A little calmer and sad. And all might go quiet, save the world always humming.
Laramie Backstagger sighed.
“Well? Whadda ya think?” challenged Alias – “how is it for you when you speak, feel or sing?”
And how would he know, ailing Laramie? Been too many years of conflicting events and results and mixed feelings. Too many miles that worked out without working, or failed for the working too much. “I’m uncertain,” he said, “I’m uncertain.” “But you’re pushing at something in me.”
By now Alias was off on his own like a mammal, had concocted a scent for to trail. Maybe the ache was for sharing the thing they were sharing: agreement. Maybe to get through the whole business at once, simultaneously. Maybe to not be divided and different or just pieces of things – to be doubled or tripled or multiple? Harlequin – pieceworked and patched, back then and now and some future. An assemblage, a collage wanting melding.
“All uncertain,” Laramie said. “I can’t know, just I do it and feelings will follow. New ones. Pains from smashed understandings, joys from promising starts, aches at the poorness I lend them – but something goes on, carries forth – it don’t end with the birds and the breeze. The words have it too, and the voices. The shapes and the meanings and lines. Even tones. It goes on, both the good and the ill, and I’m part, or it seems such.”
“How ‘bout you?” Laramie wants to know. “Why do you carry on and keep blabbing,” he taunts.
“Just to borrow,” Harlequin murmurs. “Just to steal.” “To have something to say. To keep silent. To wish that it might carry on.” “It’s what we’ve got, all these things. Try as I might, I don’t know what else to do, and at times feel compelled, god dammit. Like Foucault or Blanchot or Spinoza. Or Buddha or Christ, Kafka or little Jane,” (little Jane was the crazy old lady – lived two miles from the Backstagger’s farm – she’d sparkle to company no matter the cause and just cackle and croon – mixing nonsense and stories, opinions and facts, just talking and talking and talking. No one knew if it ceased when they left, it never stopped within range of the hearing).
“I hear you” said Laramie, “I see.” To which Alias always replied “But you don’t – I don’t know that. Have no method of saying it’s true.” And they’d keep walking on…toward night.
Alias “boyfriend,” alias “daddy,” alias “instructor,” alias “friend.” Alias “person.” Alias “student,” alias “son;” alias “scholar,” alias “man.”
Alias “Alias.” Always additional roles (or functions, behaviors, responses, and on…)
I.e. disciplines: philosophy, sociology, science. Alias “arts” and “humanities” and “lover” and “partner” and “parent.” Alias “human.” Alias everyone. I.e. no one.
Alias Ignatius Evgeny Harlequin, a simple human pattern, sample, example, i.e. so-far-survivor. It’s nothing, really, but something enough to write.
“His” body distinct in the way of all bodies, but matching no cultural icon. “His” mind above average – no matter. Mattered/matters little, just a human. Related to others in lieu of dependencies – that “human” is not a species that can live on its own. Therefore at least elements of an immediate surround are, well, ALWAYS, essential. Genuinely. Utterly. Whether air or land or water; people, chemicals, fuel. No human exists without others. Simply.
Therefore (i.e.) even the meaningless, unnoticeable Alias Harlequin could not survive without a surround. But might his “surround” survive without him? On this query, Alias’ presence (and present) is hung.
“To recognize yourself in… To multiply your likenesses”
-Edmond Jabes–
And what do you suppose it is to be a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” human? To be named? Alias Harlequin?
What do you suppose it might be like to be “Ida Sophia Lind Filbert”? “Jada Lynette Smith”? “Oliver Myshkin”?
“Hallie Noel Linnebur”?
“Tristan Rene Wells Filbert”? “Simon H. Lilly”? “Aidan Stafford”? “Herman Melville”? “Paul Feyerabend”? “Rachel S. Como”? “Paul O’Callahan”? “Meghan Miller”? “Jim H. Charles?” “Warren Charles Farha”? “Amanda Marie Lind”? “Fernando Pessoa”?
A cow. A particular cow – an Hereford – on a particular plot of land in Mitchell County, Kansas?
“Plato”? “Kathy Downes”? “Ortho Stice”? A Welsh Corgi “Tippy”? “Napoleon Bonaparte”? “Charles S. Peirce”? The clerk at the grocery store? “Christopher Fynsk”? That Forest Ranger? A pet hamster “Jacques”? “Claudius”?
WHY SHOULD ANY ONE HUMAN BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?
WHY SHOULD ANY ONE ORGANISM BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?
What means: “EFFECT”?
“William Shakespeare”? “Avital Ronell”? “God”? “John Wayne Gacy”? “Helena Bonham Carter”? “Microsoft”? A caterpillar (be specific)? “Mahatma Ghandi”? A sparrow? Molecules composing particular dust?
WHAT IS?
how are we able to ask that question?
WHAT ARE WE?
how might we be “WHOs”?
Starting local:
What might it be like – as a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (Nobody) – to BE a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (A body)?
I’m not sure HOW to answer that.
“Perhaps writing means overcoming all resemblances within the very heart
of resemblance, being finally like yourself, like nothing.”
Edmond Jabes –
i.e. How that can be answered.
– WHO or WHAT answers – ?
WHAT MIGHT IT BE LIKE…TO BE?
(qualified to ANSWER)
can ANYthing “answer”?
does “answering” imply “language”?
WHAT IS AN ANSWER?
(in relation to – ?)
What is(?) Nathan Wayne Filbert, Alias Harlequin?
IS “Nathan Wayne Filbert”?
WHAT IS?
WHAT IS IS?
(how?)
WHAT IS A QUESTION?And WHY/HOW can a question be asked?
WHAT IS IT – are our – ideas? – To “IMAGINE”?
what are ideas?
What might it be to “conceive”?
“to generate concepts” (D&G)
framings of our world-experience
[WHY? HOW?
WHAT FOR?]
WHAT is a “person”? HOW? WHY? WHO?
Always and ever – HOW & WHY can we / do weASK?
WHO QUESTIONS?
(WHAT)?
(HOW)?
Something begins
(in/with all this)
it would seem
(it seems)
it seems that something begins in/with questioning
Alias Harlequin, i.e.
– the one whom this effects, the one on whom this has effect, the one (same? No!) affected by him or her, by whom and it. By this. This. That. By Other, others, and therefore, Alias again, patchworked and quilted, becoming, undoing, altering. Alias.
“Presumably most writers have many more ideas than they are able to act on”
– Ivan Vladislovic, The Loss Library –
Alias Harlequin – identities – is as is affected, effects, effected with/by.
Alias, i.e. as effected by “Hallie Noel Linnebur”; as effected (generated? Co-composed-with-) “Pauline Margaret Kresin Filbert”; the St Bernard “Zorro”; a specific train on a particular journey at a particular time; that mountain in that moment; Dec. 16, 1997 – a flu; and so on…
Alias – as situated in moments – e.g. “each one.” Harlequin – the human surname quilted with environment (micro-to-macro) in concourse. “Alias” as the “name in shreds” – the fragmentary and provisional, pragmatically specifiable address.
Ambiguous and fluid (like “river” itself – capable of designation but inconsistently contained) transient yet locatable, in form…perhaps. Yet no. “Alias” perhaps the medium (in-between) of morphing form and varying substance – what nothing also is (is not).
Name/term/signal/sign (“Alias”) as related to HNL, Dr. K, Dostoevsky, rustled grass, these sounds, this space-time and its company (surround) and then again, these again (but never “again”) – designating “NOWs”. Perhaps. It depends.
What or Who, How “Alias Harlequin” ALWAYS depends on a totality of other dependencies, as it were (or is?) “As such.”
Alias Harlequin, representative? Not that can of worms. AND the “thing” itself? (network of momentary dependencies-in-relation)?
What might we call (it/him/etc.) then? And what would “calling” be/do – how?
WHO questions?
This Alias Harlequin.
“I am already so much the inscription of a divergence…What I was, if that could be described, was a whirlwind of tensions…”
–Helene Cixous–
“A word is binding and at the same time breaks our bonds. To which of them shall I, one day, owe my freedom?”
508 N. Belmont – Wichita, Kansas (son & daughter born)
???? (house) – Grand Rapids, Michigan
???? Cornell – Grand Rapids, Michigan
L—– Switzerland
Alt—- UK
1151(?) Hermitage – Grand Rapids, Michigan (son born)
350(?) S. Clifton – Wichita, Kansas (son born)
New Hope, Pennsylvania
3028 E 2nd N – Wichita, Kansas
In no particular order. Revisits. Can’t remember much. Side streets, neighborhoods – nothing is familiar. More apt to recall where friends or lovers lived than “self.” Makes a list:
-Baxtrom – Welch – Kremenak – Kruse – Evans – Lathrop – Keil – Allen – Erickson – Welch – Rose – Martha – Neel/Franklin – Krieger – Fall – Bond – Franz – Jones – Hartig – Russell – Griffin – O’Callahan – Farha – Goldbarth – Coleman – Harder – Reffner – calls them “foundational relations” – friends and lovers slewn together.
Dostoevsky, Giacometti, Kafka, Lispector, Cixous, Blanchot, Nietzsche, Jabes, Beckett, Wm. James, CS Peirce, Lorca, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Pessoa, Schiele, DF Wallace, Kozelek, Musil, Fernandez…and those lying in wait: This Will Destroy You, Vila-Matas, Marcus…Harlequin has inscribed in his flesh.
Might be useful to make a story.
The way things are – with everything falling apart, coming undone, wearing down or out, dwindling in function – calls for such measures – i.e. fitted to new purposes, given new life, repurposed, renamed, remixed, restored.
Making lists against memory. Visiting / revisit. Trying.
It’s coming apart.
He’s worked long in this manner.
Something breaks or dies, goes defunct…fix it with change.
Washing machine, body parts, relationships, parents. Tools or appliances, activities and paths… rather than forcing some obedience to its past or presence – alter the context (as large as it needs to be – micro to macro) round about it, until its usefulness is assuaged or established, regained or reconstructed. Until it makes sense – AS-IS-NOW.
“Presently” includes all of above. His body – losing ‘shape,’ gaining aches, kinks, and torsions; doorways and windows, paint and light fixtures; machines and vehicles grinding down – leaking, cracking, and broken; dwindling desires of his partner; increased independence and mystery of his offspring…nothing quite capable of ‘control.’ Employer threats of performance and reviews; family tensions of politicized faiths; stamina shot as both parent and friend; patient lover and male…
…all it requires a new mythology – some new scaffolding – structure and content and aim.
What story is. What languaging is for. Imagine – abstraction and dream. What neuroses. Subject and author and plot. Continuous revision – the edit and pulp and rewind. We cut and paste and press ‘new.’ File, document, folder, image: LIFE.
We rename.
There is story and language and code. Writing and saying and message. Harlequin’s not the first to say “I think by writing” and perhaps he will not be the last. Some perspective invented, some objective fabrication, some construction of a feeling of reflection, recount. Grappling after what is getting lost. A dream that a ruling, an external, can be seen or encountered, manipulated and tested. If an accounting exists, there is material (reality) AGENCY to work WITH, THROUGH and ON.
Harlequin forms words.
Yet there are none that he ‘makes’ – just borrows, revises. Uses, shapes, and arranges. Gives place. Inscribes in some ancient tradition – it’s “writing” – using marking or code in conventions. Absorbing idiosyncracies into generalities. Depending on a community that shares such signs – can lend, agree, and interpret. It’s fragile. Insecure and uncertain. There’s no meaning. Like the earth – writing just IS. To be taken and changed, charged and made and appropriated. Dis-card-ed.
What was a ‘card’ but token carrying message or code? In-formation – letters arranged. Who knew – and why – and how? Doesn’t matter. Undone. Broken and over and through. Electronic currency now – if this you can even decipher (decode).
Letters, stories, and language. Harlequin marks on a page – sets of signals. The cells, the emotions, the organs – signals and signs. Tired and old and afraid – always dying. Since day one, always dying – fearfully. How It Is. He remembers and prays (in a way) – a communication with the dead – mediated – to the Beckett, the Kafka, the Dostoevsky. David Foster Wallace, Hegel and Marx. Maybe Nietzsche, Deleuze or Blanchot. And the ladies: Lispector, Cixous and Dickinson. Doesn’t matter. For Harlequin, all a part of the same realization – it comes, it ages, it goes, and it’s gone. Human living. Human life. Just what is: How It Is.
Labor, relation, and trial. What is being? Labor, relation, and trial.
He succumbs. Is succumbing. Is tearing apart.
A story makes of it what it will.
You can have your knowledge – facts or theories, experiences and concepts – but the stories reason and resemble them. Lend them ambiguity and occasional senses. Possibilities.
Perchance they go together like this. Or like that. Or another way. Stories. Sanity. Something.
Something becoming – a linked set of symbols in an ecological order. Stories try experience on for fittings. Until it fits. Until it tatters, or is otherwise overused or outgrown.
Becomings and undoings. Compositions and deletes. All the edits (on the fly). Survival.
“We are at the bottom of a ditch and there is just a parcel of air to be found, a parcel and when it is done, we push at the space, and another little space of air presents itself. Who can talk of love? There is only air – or none, and if there is none then there is nothing at all.”
“All of a sudden, he thought, all of a sudden, nothing is enough for me.”
“But if life is just that, just being reasonable, then there is nothing in it – nothing worthwhile. So, the yearning that we have to keep dead things living – or to make unreasonable things reasonable. That is why a person should live.
— Is it a paradox?
— I don’t think it is. I think the whole thought makes sense together. Neither side is complete.”
“I am alive, he thought, and now I am capable of living.”
All my Words are Silent 