Time to Revisit

On June 19, 2012June 19, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Writing2 Comments

What is fiction, what isn’t? William Gass…and self-apparent words…

“that words and sentences should refer less to an outside, signified reality, and more to themselves – whether in their individual physical sounds, or in the train of associations they build within the sentence or paragraph…In this case fiction is the lovely woman Babs (the text), who is made love to (shaped into a novel) by a series of clumsy unappreciative lovers (writers who fail to realize the richly self-apparent potential of language in their hands)…the earlier philosophical work (Blue) is more qualitatively fictional than the second…in each case, the meandering associations are conceptual, triggered by words of course which are first of all there for their self-apparent sense…but which for action depend upon intellectual content, which takes us back (and forth) from fictional self-apparency into philosophical debate…Gass’ theory…is his fiction itself…” -Jerome Klinkowitz

and Gass himself: “well, it’s really what I’m running into all my inks about, so I had better mention it: the use of language like a lover…not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.” (Wm Gass, On Being Blue)

Metaphors of Mind

On June 14, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, Philosophy6 Comments

Metaphors of Mind

I thought about the East like sunrise, or, the bright shadow of sun as it sets on the sea. Opening out, up, growing wider from a perceptive center.

I thought of my own like a spider rushing to complete its web and attachments to structures while the prey already wriggles in its core. Spinning quickly, creating patterns, finding foundations so one might approach, carefully, and engage.

And of the wise, “responding with the submissiveness of a mirror to a completely unthinkable array of things where there’s no space or time” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia). “And which I can’t accept” (he adds immediately afterwords).

My wife like a field of slender grasses made out of senses waving in rain. It touches everywhere and then is guided and drawn into the veins and roots in a natural process.

An ecstatic: the moon hovering above, without details, yet influencing tides.

Fundamentalists jackhammering surfaces to shape; drilling from the riggings a far cylindrical bore.

The verbavore – translating, translating, translating…signs, digits, numbers.

Intuitionists: winds situationally directed by unseen prompts or hidden obstacles.

Perhaps the thing itself – sensual and complex machine – absorbing, recording, repeating and combining – crafting temperaments at the switchboard?

N Filbert 2012

Writing: the Margins

On June 8, 2012June 7, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Art, Graphotos, Traces, Writing6 Comments

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Writing: the Margins

“All words run along the margins of their secrets”

– Susan Howe –

Now we are getting somewhere. Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told. If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.” If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…

there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets? Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.

That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets. I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.

And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.

Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.

So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating. That is, it is possible. Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?

If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.

Therefore

“it is not infinite. Even infinite is a term”

-Louis Zukofsky-

by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.

Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.

Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.

Perhaps and possibly.

N Filbert 2012

Experiential Ekphrasis

On June 3, 2012June 3, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

Figures Seated in Mid-Air
by Holly Suzanne

Experiential Ekphrasis.

Hello dear followers – I can hardly thank you enough for taking time out of your lives to look at, read and engage things I am involved in the making of. Your support and attention is a constant encouragement. THANK YOU! (and thank you for offering and creating your own!)… I wanted to invite you (if you are interested) to visit/follow a couple of other blogsites I also create in/with –

www.ekphrastixarts.com and

www.spoondeep.wordpress.com

THANKS AGAIN!

Mark Marking Marks

On June 3, 2012June 2, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, WritingLeave a comment

Mark Marking Marks

“oh it’s working, it’s magic, each word lifts me up, takes me away from here,

from this nothing; I feel…I am…speak always, Maybegenius.”

–Macedonio Fernandez–

Writing as the ‘Talking Cure’

As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, – ?

WHAT IS REAL?

As long as I keep talking to myself, even better the inscribing, using matter somewhat foreign to myself, like this plastic pen, this sheet of paper, this blue ink…I am providing myself with evidence. A humming continuity, a series of marks, a silent sounding breathed into air.

But when unable?

As long as I keep telling myself these stories, Mark thinks, – ? then what – ? why – ?

There is evidence that I am here, he says to himself, marking it down. Marks make Marks, he supposes, I am, at least as far as the reach of this pen, and I stay, at least longer than my thoughts, he thinks.

Mark got tattoo’d. He did so for evidence, a permanence. They said it could not be undone. So he had them spit into his skin the names of those who had changed him, affected. As if to say, to go on and on saying, these, these existed for me, in and on me, these folks made impressions that made impressions on me, therefore I must, yes, it logically follows, here – you can see them can you not – ?, it logically follows that I must exist – to have these names, these titled and organized and permanent woundings of names, of those who existed (it’s attested by many), so it follows, it must, with them pierced in my arms, that I, too…

If it all keeps on talking, these whispering names, the sound of my voice, the terms in my head, and if I work to make it real, as an object, if I chisel or stencil or ink it to the world, then surely it must testify on my behalf – I was here! I am here! I’ve left my Mark! Mark marking Mark – a declare!

Or so he is thinking through his days, through his life or lives, through his odd and self-imposing tormenting sort of fear, of worry.

Am I?

To no effect? he wonders – ?

Mark often fears he’s interchangeable. Or worse. Perhaps another boy would have been a better son, left a fuller name, a more remarkable mark than – ?. Another man a truer spouse and more sensitive or empathetic, more evolved or more mature than his straggly droopy heavy brain of a – ?. A more substantial father with clearer love and direction, firmer hands, readier tears – ?. Mark was aware they were out there. They’d been fellow students, inhabited stories and novels and other people’s lives. Why were his people stuck with the – ?. His nagging mark, so often read right over as innocuously as a comma or period. Weren’t they looking for content not a pause or an absence? A man marked by inquiry?

But if I leave here some trail strewn round my desk, this floor all these cupboards, perhaps at some point they will see I was here! I am! And I was watching and listening, loving and feeling them all. Spending myself and my worries in this strange attempting to trace and to hold, to keep and remember their details, their effects, my responding.

Someday shuffling through or perhaps clearing out, maybe they’ll stop, pause, question and wonder. Who was this man? Where was he? When? How? Why?

What did he do think make say? And perhaps they’ll find these markings. Perhaps they won’t have burned or mouldered away, and all these messaging reports, all these processings and accounts will come to mean, to have significance, these bird-routes of scratches and marks, dashes dots lines, this pouring forth of constructing an identity against with the world…

As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, possibly –

– ? –

The Cleaving

On May 28, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, Photography, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“Connection is the recognition of the intimacy of a division…

to make a division is to give substance form”

–Madeline Gins–

“Therefore shall a person leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto another

and they shall be as one flesh”

Genesis 2:24

The Cleaving

How do we come to know, believe or accept this ancient concept? It has mited its way to the deepest reaches of Being (Dasein): Heidegger’s rift, linguistics address, each individual body’s pulse or breath or tremor. That only the separateness may truly join. Only the differences are recognized as similar. Only the rifts require a bridge.

I do not know. It is a reality I feel with as much pain as hope or joy. That cleaving is both the splitting apart, the splintering wood and severing rope, AND their clinging together, their sealing and sealant. It undoes me. As a metaphor, concept or signification it rings true and carried dark howls and bright screams out of the depths of me.

And yet it comes so naturally. Fight or flight. Attack, retreat. The extremities of the urges to join and drive to cease. In the utterly intimate action of cleaving, we expose and unite – right in the most susceptible, vulnerable, life-threatening places.

The “cutting out,” “cutting off” – to cleave – you know what I’m referring to – when that which is most important to you becomes unreachable. That impression that you are being “given up on,” that someone is “letting go,” even actively removing themselves or casting you away, chopping the cord – the umbilical torn, gushing, pulsing, the infant left writhing and wailing in the dumpster or thorny woods, a closet or dark alley. Cleft.

In truth: that severing of relationship, whether momentary or fatal, is a life-threatening, death-dealing blow. Abandonment. The dawning that you are at the front and there will be no reinforcements, you are cut from the supply train. There is shock, there is scream and then a canyon of void with no other side. It is we at our most disastrous, mortally dependent state.

We in the face of absence. We without response – no face in a mirror, no echo of sound, NO THING. Cleft.

Individual, alone, solitary entity. Facing the reality: we are insufficient to our needs, incompetent to our existence, impossible to self-sustain. We in our fragility. Our valid, appropriate, ontological FEAR.

Whack! In anger, in grief, in silence, in bruise, we are severed, ultimately exposed, whether through small offense or enormous rejection – we have been cut. Past the bone. The reverberations tumble and crumble out far and wide, seemingly ubiquitously, regardless of the specific instant’s severity. This is “the cleaving” done as much to us as by us in our madness to survive, to be real, to be verified and validated.

In the “drawing near,” in the “clinging” of to cleft, on the other hand, we are born. We become. As another reflects or responds to our raw broken mortally wounded finitude and fragility, we get glued to the vitality of these limited lives we have in us. As these fearsome exposures are clasped, bonded, covered by another – transfused and salved, bandaged and wrapped or dressed by another – we know we are possible, we feel we exist and we matter, we join toward world and its being, brief though it is.

These are our chances and capacities: to effect, to mean, to act, create or be. It is in the drawing near that what life there may be is acknowledged, fostered, affirmed. Con-firmed. Cleft – grafted into the ongoing reality of things, parting through wholes, participating and enhancing of semiotic systems. As if life does not really belong to us, but we must belong to it, by belonging with one another.

“Leaving,” “cleaving.” The leaf cleft from its branch will not survive, but cleft or grafted to another stem or soil or root may for awhile yet, live on, grow, produce, change and become.

We continuously leave and cleave to varying extents, and these just may be the principal elements of our thriving. Cleft we perish, shrivel, die away. Cleft we heal, nourish and grow life. Both options/realities occurring in the cuts, the core places, the sources.

Here we panic, here we rejoice. Here we suffer, here we love. Here we become, and here we cease to be.

This mysterious activity necessitates both significations, counter-intuitive though it seem. The need to be cleft exposes the places needing cleft. Awareness of the sources for supply determines the crucial treasure, dependency, and gifts of supply.

We are chopped to the truth of death

and joined to the reality of life

Cleft.