Category: human

“Now” “again”: or, desire in times of control

On By NW FilbertIn anxiety, desire, human, Language, Perception, Poetry, time, Writing3 Comments

The times are not easy.

Time never was.

Yet we insist

on enumerating

our lack of control,

unknowing…

.

“God,” we say, (in 3 digits)

“atom” at four, or the “facts” being five,

“knowledge” (as 9) over

“wisdom” – contrived in 6 letters

resembling “power” (which is slightly less-than) –

.

pretending we’re nearer

a “truth.”

Splintering this countless discourse

making babble –

pathways dividing again and again

.

Not to worry,

No-One,

least not here,

never there, nary hereing

we strive to forget –

.

the small fractions

we are,

even increments fail –

our instrumentation –

excrement turning to soil.

.

We say on,

calculating

in terms.

Splits on a dial

or bits switching voltage

to light

and/or sound –

inexplicably deafblind

we human – perceiving,

depleting, reduce.

.

The times never easy,

or real,

and all barely broken apart –

what we call the “fantastic”

(9 marks) nearly actual

.

what goes on

is a “now” and “again”

without ceasing…

a particle-waving

at sea

and to stars

.

an endlessness

born of its end.

Being something

On By NW FilbertIn being, human, Living, Perception, Poetry, Writing1 Comment

This is how we see:

a set of brackets, dark,

moving across wires in the sky

(that we placed there)

because of the angle of light

and it’s changing

– perhaps –

and perhaps it’s the change

and the angling,

and perhaps it’s involved with the light

What Words Do

On By NW FilbertIn Complexity, Experience, Experimenctes, human, Language, meaning, WritingLeave a comment

Jean-Christophe Giacottino - Asemic writing work (Having no specific semantic content, Writing without words ... The form without the sense - Secret talismanic writings... Asemic calligraphy)

“language cannot cope with its relation with the world”

– Giorgio Agamben –

“language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein –

Sometimes it seems that words might do anything!  Connecting things and people; defining, describing, explaining and exclaiming; naming, inventing, questioning… arguing, fomenting, discovering; seducing, displacing, and singing.  Very little experiencing of the human kind comes unaccompanied by terms.  – Is that so?

There are dreams – like signs and billboards of liqueous or exaggerated perceivings… “the sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” (A. Dragomoshchenko)… and slit it does.  We bleed.

And breathing, heart’s-pulse, sleeping along with the intake of food, its output as waste, our birthing and walking, working and running… and dying.  All our play.  Intercourse, of course.  Do moans and groans, grunts and cries and sighs, lisps and complaints (our myriad utterances) – mean words?  mean language?  What of our relative silence?  The thrumming body of the speechless and deaf?  Eye-gaze dumb, its blindness?

The skin has been rubbed off my fingers.

Wordlessly, soundlessly, lust and desire screech on…shrill in body and bone – both where the starving exudes and toward its petulant prey.

What of the growth of grasses?  Is language there?  In rhythmic patterning of rain?  A sense of sunlight?

Sometimes wind whispers.

A cat moves.  Silently.

And a “sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” – darkness visible, darkness speaks – (it has been claimed – via words, the verbal).

Sweet and troubling confluence: activity and languaging (the same): the “verbal.”  Of sound and motion.  Our noise.  Moving sound around in and with our bodies – in speech or dance, in strain and the clamor of being.

What falls (or grows, blooms, disappears) outside the devouring knife – that which segments and shrivels the fluid songs of experience and reverie?  Of presence.  The Slicer-Dicer we’ve composed, posing together to cut from faultless fabric?

As utterance, inscription fondles its way, brushingly and blade-like, sensually surreptitious.  Caressing and crafty, rapaciously blessing its praying and braying of names – who can counter its reduction, repression, its blame or silvery shame?

Ye without words, cast the first stone.

As if genesis were language and time: space to create with.

Comprehensively unknown.

Thickets

On By NW FilbertIn being, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, human, meaning, Perception, Questions, Uncertainty, WritingLeave a comment

Thicket

The world overgrown.  At least any accessible sector.  I’ve heard tale of open, of empty, of spacious, of dearth.  Not where I approach.  Even my own body – its in- or out-sides, its wherewithal.  Always where-with-all.

Tangled, almost briny, in some instances.  If able to determine a surround wherewith or whenwith to take a stance in.  Even thinking, even breath, even a pulse of bloodbeat.  Any sound we form toward music.  Any making-sensible.  For us.  Our kind.  Those within the overgrown – the untamable, reckless warp and weft.

To hunch there, immediately becomes here.  How different – if imagined?  To gather, to pre-tend.  To suppose a disposition, a presence somehow differentiated.  How-some?  To curl in, therefore (perchance? per theory?) “to find,” to be able to, to call, to be-in-g?  Yet how?  Or why?  Where is the for?  And what might the hole be suspected to fill?

Where is the gap between this and the other?  Between you and me, he or she, this-that-the-other, between…any/thing?  Something wishes to know, apparently… and this wishing/motion/decision/desire/activity/drive (whatever “  “) begins by implicating violence… bi-lining a world with borders, invented barriers, perceived traces, intuited splits, cuts and hacks that are not there until.  How un-till this supposed “soil” from which to distinguish, fabricate, or function?  From which to “operate.”  Surgeon-species.

What knowledge is expected by destroying?  Deconstructing (or constructing) – both requiring joints?  By suture and slice?  By taking life?  Prone to decompose.  What a trajectory.

What options?  Compelled…to con-fuse…confess…to communicate, express, enjoy, enjoin (what we find ourselves joined to) still even to de-scribe, in-scribe, in-voke, ex-tol, inter-act or en-gage provokes difference, demands separations, dismemberment.  To cleave.

To try to body.  To try to mind.  Attend.  Acknowledge.  Distortion.  To twist and torture an other, as the one or…alteration.  De-pict.

Impossible connection already seems to be.  Each, every add-ition a disconnecting, a cutting, a stitching seam according to a pattern.  Whose?  Whats?

Over, under, whelmed.  Where is the open, the undifferentiated, the is?  Always already be-fore.  All ways, all ready, be-for.  In other words…not possibly worded.  Prior to word.  Involving act (including language) but unincorporated (already corporal), defying design-ation (surprisingly? one would think ‘it’ [not] is at the end of de- or un-signing/signifying), erasure of description, all palimpsests equaling… perhaps (per-happening) – infinite, certainly uncountable, incalculable, without ordination, order, ordaining, without with-in or –out.  Only WITH, inconceivable, imperceptible (perception cuts), irretrievable (the rejection of any re-), disabused, disturbed perturb, a dreaming dreamed turbulence = a happen to be.

Still this thinks with.  Language.  Lost already, displaced and falsified by a tiny thread, an whole fabric, a world-veil at least whilst continuing as world…

Think again.  Dream.  Confuse.  Imagine.  Invent.  Art ducts (vents) for breath… further re-moves, com-pli-cations, furthering within, for fun?  A dance, a play, a re-morse (cryptic codification, surreptitious and additional) some native complicity to immeasurable complexity.  As is.  As if.  And so on…

Measures of Life

On By NW FilbertIn human, Language, meaning, Media, Writing1 Comment

“‘Word work,’ Toni Morrison said in Stockholm, ‘is sublime because it is generative,’ its felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. ‘We die,’ she said.  ‘That may be the meaning of life.  But we do language.  That may be the measure of our lives.'”

Lewis Lapham, Word Order

Lapham Word Order

Read full text here: Word Order, Lewis Lapham

Remembering. Repeat.

On By NW FilbertIn human, Loss, memory, thought, Writing4 Comments

To try.

Try to

re

member.

Stitching together the dismembered, again.

It is “us”?  “That”?  A substance?  A trajectory?

A subject?  A story?  (Fable)?

.

What might re-member, and re-member what?

Sensations?  Who?  Events?  When?  Experiences?  How?

Is re-membering an aspect of Why?

Moods?

Times?

Being?

.

Where are the members to be re-stored, re-gathered, re-composed, or freshly constituted?

.

That pre-(before)-fix (secured, pinned, stayed) “re-“.  To do over, again, re-peat.  Peat is a furry humus, a difficult detangling.  Nigh impossible to dismember without caveat or faith.  Some belief in categories or divisions, de-cisions, parts and wholes, composites and particles, atoms, scales, cells, waves or functions… no longer “peat.”  How would one forge that again?

.

Moist and messy tangle, eons into bog…

.

I thought.

Thought “it” – “I”.

Knifeblade activity.

.

Peat.  Re.  Member(s).

.

Desire.  (Mood?  Emotion?  “Drive”?).

.

Prompted to thicken.  The caked, flaky, dry – toward some humid, muddy moor.  A memory.

.

To re-member one must pre-fix.  In order to carve members to append and rivet.  Desiccate to gather.  Continuous forgetting forging together.  Organic?  Decomposition’s ritard?

.

Where does one go for the matter of “parts”?  Ingredients for concoction, for the rotten mixing and blend.  A meaning dependent on decay.

.

What is it we spoil in re-membering?

.

Experiencing.  Out of – perceiving – in to.  Wherefrom, wherefore, this ‘out of’?  And the in-to flows – ?  The membering limn.  The meeting-joints. The fields of grave. Are there objects?  Is it obstacle?  In-to-eruption?  Happen-stance?

.

Vivisection for autopsy – our arbitrary blade.  Figures cut.  Marking the joins, indivisibly.  Perception.  To sieve-for.  For what?  For whom?  In the mire.

.

Try.

Try to re-member without division.

Immersively, immanently, experiencing… without within, within without.

.

Re-peat.

‘One’s’ thoughts on in-here-nt bounds

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, Confusion, Cosmology, dreaming, Experience, human, Philosophy, thinking, Writing2 Comments

The “world,” as it were, as it ‘is’ (also, reduced, in addition) “for us.”

How it comes to be as we are – briefly.  Almost incalculably miniscule.  Almost ‘happenstance.’

“Our” world, as it were: all we cannot know, that we are part in, of, with.

One wonders what “world” can possibly mean.

Every meaning apparently nothing outside of this microscopic sliver of kind… EVERYthing and more, “for us.”  Some ‘infinity’ or ‘void;’ ‘abyss’ or ‘chaotic complexity’ – a reference to every-thing (or not) that so far surpasses us, outstrips us, beyonds us.  Some so-called…”world.”

One. Can.

One could turn toward all that, could ‘be-itself,’ bi-pedally, shrimpishly, speck-o-dust uprightedly, with/in ‘it’…and have a dwarfed, almost indiscernible ‘experience.’  Or “one” (were such a thing possible) could de-cide, di-vide, con-sider (?) – place oneself ‘over against’ or ‘in contrast’ (contra-di-stinction) to all that: otherness, ‘world,’ ‘uknown/unknowable,’ ‘beyond,’ ‘out-side,’ infinite… and de-term-in.

Squash it down to ‘one’s own scale, name it / call it / sign it, and ‘fit’ it in.  i.e. cut it small enough to be comprehensible, digestible, sensible (according-to-one’s-own) and pre-tend, fore-tell, image-in, sign-i-fy it ACCORDING TO… ‘one,’ ‘us,’ ‘me’ (such as math, logic, language, communicable signs, etc – in-(ter)ventions on/of our own terms).

Human knowledge, inquiry, disciplines, creations, theories, etc. are EXACTLY (and perhaps ONLY, one surmises) THAT: at the scale of the human. ‘One’ is prone to automatically grant every ‘other’ (plant, material, organism, structure, system, etc) the ‘same’ ‘world’ – as Wittgenstein indicated: indecipherable, untranslatable or communicable between kinds, but most probable, no? – Umwelts – worlds upon worlds within worlds outside worlds… we (‘ones’) can have no share, understanding, con(with)cept, com(with)munication of…

To each its scale of experiencing, and all scales together…

Given the human (so-self-called) scale, this seems pertinently and poignantly most evident…

…why would we chafe against our limits… or (perhaps) every scale always is – no ‘one’ could know this… ones (and many ones) are only ones – more and less than their own possible perspectives… in- and out-looks OF.  Scale.  (Perhaps).

Obviously, com(with)posing in your/our language… whatever I dream is representative of my scale… i.e. is only a capacity of ‘one’(kind) … of many.

Pleasurably so… or why not?

Dreaming beyond scale (or, inventing scale and its beyond – in the de-term-in-ing) demonstrates itself as a capacity… (e.g. mythology, science, religion, fiction/fantasy, psycho-anything, spirituality, philosophy, history, and so forth) … all imagined efforts beyond-scale, that, in occurring demonstrate the possibilities/limitations of human scale…

What ‘beyond’ could ‘one’ see, think, feel, etc., that is not a demonstration of limited and actual capacity of ‘one-scale’-to-experience?

So ‘one’ has a-, con-, etc. scales… all part of one’s scale (abilities, capacities, possibilities, options, kind).  Against, with, creative, reductive, but ALL and ANY activities of one kind (so-self-called ‘human’) show its locked and limited capacity.  One never goes beyond.

Fini.

To ‘work limits,’ and boundaries are clearly elements of our ‘limits’ and ‘boundaries’ of the scope and scale of the ‘human.’

“Gods,” cosmologies, dreams, histories, theorizing, etc., all contained within the ‘bounds’ or capacities of the ‘kind-of-thing-‘One’-is.  Perhaps.

It is the ‘perhaps’ that haunts us.  [but what could ‘haunt’ indicate but another human capacity – perhaps a ‘felt capacity’ of bursting or extending our capacities?]

Witchcraft.  Art.  Technology.  Religion.  Theoretical and experimental anything.  Logos.  Arche.  Tohu.  Bohu.  Beginning.  Universe (must needs always shrink to one’s own scale… in order to uni-anything… ‘multiverse’ simple exponents of capacities for in our microscopic self-experienced sphere… we named ‘infinity’ – is there no exponent we can’t add – within our tiny range of potential?).

One’s own anthropology.

Logically [though I excessively distrust that program of human-ing] – what con-cept, i-dea, imagine-ing, or object-ivity is not necessarily always paramatered by the human ex-periential capacities?

The bounds may be elastic or no – there would be no way for a kind to know – being all-ways the ‘one’ experiencing.

IN-HERE-NT BOUNDS.

A Letter in Employ

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, communication, Complexity, Compromise, creative writing, Experimenctes, human, identity, Living, meaning, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

I am performing a task for my employer.  I am writing a professional letter.  I am letting you know that I labor.  I am here to be useful, and used.  I submit.  My actions indicate that I accept structure and system as representative of survival.  I will do what you ask.  I recognize organization as power.  In fact, any kind of organizing indicates a position of imaginative power and control.  To differentiate, to specify, to label, name, assign – all are a fiat of power and authority or authorship – a claiming of superiority over things named, situated, recognized.  Supposedly if I comply dutifully – bow and behave in ways that signify structure as something larger (or more important) than me – I will have internet access, some food, air-conditioning, coverings, a car, and someplace to live (in certain mountainous areas, none of these are beneficial).  “Teamwork” is misnomer.

My philosophy is simple:

  • The mind or brain is an intermittent trickle of the rivers of the body which are hardly discernible in the waves of the world.
  • “I” am No one, Nowhere, which is to say Everyone, right Here. A poet wrote of presenting his face as a smashed window baring open sky – I thought that was me – No one Nowhere = Everyone right Here (whenever/wherever that happens to be).
  • Experience is what happens. What happens is what is.  If criticized as “for us” (whichever ‘experiencer’) I ask – what else could it be?
  • Knowing limits. If “for-this” is all my experience can be, then those are my limits.  Once I sense my limits I can attempt to challenge, question, and extend them, for alternate experiencing.
  • Ideas/Thoughts/Concepts/Theories [abstractions/imaginings] (like structure, perception, systems, organization, self, number, truth, etc.) are compelling because the limits of their effects are unknown to us. Ideas (ideologies) allow us to ‘experience’ power and control and compliance of the world around us (apparently), even though the dripping-trickle-stream-river-ocean of our limited participation in world flows always and is unalterably changing and miniscule.  Bodies die.  Each every/no-one where/when-ever.
  • The propensity or lust for belief – in ‘observation,’ ‘experiment,’ ‘objectivity,’ ‘analysis,’ ‘deduction,’ ‘ideas,’ numbers or language or effects of imagined power and control (technicity) – are wishes against the body, against dying, against limitation, against what happens, anyway.
  • Thoughts and effects do not make experience longer.
  • Experience is living, is limited.
  • Living is the extremely limited experience of dying.

Admitting or confessing that I exist to meet needs, that this is my employment, may be a Credo of Little Import.  A submission of insignificance in accepting others’ systems, structures, and arbitrary claims to power.  Compliance.  Resignation.  Complaisance.  Dependence. [Co-dependence – opting out of experience/living exits the submission-religion].

My voice dribbles, a hardly perceptible microorganism in the ocean of world.  My experience a parenthetical waving particle.  My living its effective dying.

In a beginning that never began, the ending already comes.

World is an intermittent trickle of the rivers of living, barely and scarcely discerned.

We are Here Now, how would we like our fleet experiencing of dying to be?