Prologue

On July 14, 2015July 16, 2015 By NW FilbertIn human, Language, meaning, Writing4 Comments

Even if it’s only a prologue, it is necessary to begin. To start with the starting itself. Some origins are good at that: a bang, a blast, a whisper.

My starts tend to happen with fits. Inconsistent and occasional, not inceptions, revelations, events.

Supposing it begins in a “mood” and emerges at pen. Or simply pass by. Aborted, forgotten. The pen is what matters, not me.

Swerving from mood to mood, idea / experience, relation / response, passaging effect to affect to effect. Hardly recognizable. Yet if the pen is involved, or some other artifact-creator, symbol-maker, discretionary device, a remnant emerges, a record, a trace.

Never the mood itself, not even the experience, but some marker of it, a token or emblem, remains.

Starting with the loss then. Beginning at the bones.

There’s a boon to that, you see. It ceases to be important: what the where. Beginning with the pen, it doesn’t matter. Memory, emotion or event. Past, presence or future. All of those – NO MATTER. But the instrument – the tools ready-to-hand – typewriter, pencil, keyboard or pen = matter. Some thing happens then: it begins.

Now it’s started. Starting with the starting also leads (you must perceive). If the aim is the action itself, the rest does follow. Hand leading eye, leading ink, following line, copying language, searching the words, shaping the letters, changing ideas (using different terms), evoking a thought, altering memory, writing a process: a process called “writing.” A particular animal scraping at paper with ink.

It happens.

Begins.

Follows, outstrips, and results. Always something greater and lesser, more-than / deprived, exactly inaccurate.

Ambiguous and real. Using language.

“A ‘beginning’ is something other than a ‘commencement’. A new weather pattern, for example, begins with a storm. Its commencement, however, is the complete change of air conditions that brings it about in advance. A beginning is the onset of something; a commencement is that from which something arises or springs forth…

…Whoever begins many things often never attains a commencement.”

–Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin’s Hymns”

Writing Outside Philosophy: An Interview with Simon Critchley » 3:AM Magazine

On June 20, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experience, human, Literature, meaning, PhilosophyLeave a comment

I am extremely honored and anticipating studies this summer with the guidance and instruction of Simon Critchley. If you attend to this interview, you will probably notice the many resonances and ideas I “sense” and look forward to engaging…

Writing Outside Philosophy: An Interview with Simon Critchley » 3:AM Magazine.

My Species

On May 29, 2015 By NW FilbertIn human, love, Patience, Poetry1 Comment

even

a small purple artichoke

boiled

in its own bittered

and darkening

waters

grows tender,

grows tender and sweet

patience, I think,

my species

keep testing the spiny leaves

the spiny heart

– Jane Hirshfield

Philosophy / Philosopher

On April 13, 2015 By NW FilbertIn human, Language, love, meaning, Philosophy, Purpose, Wittgenstein, Writing1 Comment

Things happen.

Accidents.

Today, I was browsing the shelves of the library at which I work, looking for books most precious to me to “represent” me as a person – a librarian, human, father, partner, son, life-trajectory, organism, friend – in honor of (yet another inexplicable almost insane “let’s-find-a-reason-for-celebration-instead-of-accepting-reality” National arbitration of “National Library Week” among perhaps many other things we are trying to laud ourselves for being every day/week/month/year). And I stumbled across a title related to a hero of mine I had never seen – combining both the delights of the personage & thought I associate with him, and a favorite thing to ponder – communication or discourse:

From that point on, it has been what Eugene Gendlin might label felt experiencing: the occasional yet over-powering moments in life where we feel all-in, fully alive, in the flow, MET… RESONANT… acknowledged and identified.

The book opens with a prefatory essay by one of Wittgenstein’s students, literary executors, and, quite clearly, astute thinker in himself, Rush Rhees.

I include it here because it evinced that moment of relief, exhaustion, affirmation, Okay-ness, that comes from Emily-Dickinson-like “What – you too?” moments in our strange, convoluted, web-networked, chaotic and most-often-indecipherable human Who-Am-I existences…

All to say I read this brief and delightful (to me) report of a fellow human and thought: Okay, I let down, I collapse, I am guilty of what you describe… and elated to find I am not alone.

For what it’s worth… this seems to “get me” :

From

Boiling it down to words

On April 7, 2015April 7, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Complexity, Experience, human, Language, meaning, Physics, Semiotics3 Comments

Scope. Amount. Scale. Weight. Quantity. Quality.

Levels. Layers. Planes. Fields.

Discourses.

Genetic. Neuronal. Cellular.

Physio- Bio- Psycho- Logical.

Socio-cultural. Political. National. Natural. Regional. Personal. Familial.

Speci-al.

At what, which, and how many – ?

Aesthetic. Philosophical. Anthropological.

Spiritual. Zoological. Hermeneutical. Fantastical. Objective. Subjective.

Ontological. Object-oriented. Linguistic. Super-natural. Semantic.

Accounting. Assessing. Observing. Reflecting.

Positing. Reporting. Reviewing. Corroborating. Demonstrating. Scrutinizing.

Questioning. Replying.

to what depth, amount, extent?

Hypothesizing. Evaluating. Theorizing. Validating.

Claiming. Proving. Imagining. Dreaming. Making.

Inventing. Fabricating. Evidencing. Doing.

Acting. Thinking. Being.

Saying. Becoming. Asking.

Telling. Meaning.

Subconsciously. Unconsciously. Consciously. Aware. Remembering.

Hoping. Feeling. Sensing. Perceiving. Behaving. Conjuring. Constructing.

Deconstructing. Surmising. Testing. Forgetting. Trying. Grieving. Pretending.

Wanting. Wishing. Loving. Listening. Sounding. Hating. Dwindling.

Deciphering.

Archaeological. Historical. Sociological. Epistemological. Scientifically. Religiously. Experientially. Romantically. Poetically. Mathematically. Surreptitiously.

Doubting. Displaying. Marking. Determining. Undermining. Mistaking. Remarking.

Portraying. Representing. Creating. Erasing. Collaborating. Emitting. Evincing.

Eliminating. Describing. Exploring. Inscribing. Translating. Transmitting.

Mending. Lending. Tending.

how many ways on how many levels?

at what scope, scale, quality, quantity

depth, breadth, value, radius, remainder

quotient, sum, absence, addition

Discipline. Field. Behavior. Practice. Activity. Interaction. Stillness. Thoroughness. Modes.

Searching. Re-searching. Troubling. Uncovering. Accessing. De-accessioning. Programming. Deprogramming.

at what point, proof, progress, prospect, projection

is one’s EXPERIENCE VALIDATED

as GENUINE, AUTHENTIC, REAL?

Aware and acknowledged

Approved

and to whom? how? why?

the what?

Inexhaustibility Theorem

Incompleteness Theorem

Uncertainty Theorem

Chaos Theory

Complexity

unbound incalculable not demonstrable

Begin.

BECOMING: A Something-Writing …Provisionally (cont’d)

On March 23, 2015March 23, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Art, being, creative writing, Experience, fiction, human, identity, Language, meaning1 Comment

Say it – “Mikhail!”, say it “Lover,” “son,” or “dad.”

Give me a robe, a title, anything,

let me to be,

yet call me “Person.”

(same as you).

Just like with all our difference.

Generic sets.

And without cease.

What’s inexhaustible

and finite.

Here We Be.

Call us “Person(s)”

In order to get by, to get along, to carry on, I invade your body as if planned. Swapping breath and sounds and fluids. Making more. A “he” a “she.” A “husband,” “wife.” A “muse” and “lover.” We pretend in our pretense and we become.

Call us Person(s).

We raise the dead and name it “memory,” name it “history,” name it “god.”

We start to drown, but we’ve become, and name it “family,” name it “nation,” name it “state” or “land” or “friendship.”

We disperse.

We send out tracts: “PLEASE CALL US PERSON(S)!”

No response.

And we become what we will be.

**************************************************

I scream your name for I am helpless, “I” am hopeless without you. And so I grasp and shape your body, your behavior, your aplomb. I demand answer for my question is the telling and I need to be an I: “Call me Person!”

It begins.

And it is reckless, it is violent and warm.

I am coddled, moisty, fragile. I need purchase(d). I need won.

You are one, and there are many.

We begin.

“Mother.” “Lover.” “Child.”

Call me Person.

Call me something.

We grow limbs and we grow hair. We swap shapes and alter presence. We emerge and we invade.

I am Ishmael, I am

Allah, I am Sam.

You are giant, you are troll, you are fairy.

I can’t tell but for the asking (as if same, as if identical) – simple call.

Call me Person.

We begin.

**********************************************************************

In some ways our job [for survival] is simply to affirm one another.

To provide response (which is a call) to a call (a form of response).

I affirm you (which affirms I) by telling you (asking back) when you ask (telling me you are – where?).

Co-respondence is affirmation – positive or negative (each a both/and) [as with most things living].

You there –where?—ask me, I will acknowledge – thereby telling “you” –

both of us thereby affirmed, established…

…Being…

Thusly, there are Varieties of Presence.

I am Stephen K. Plato, Laurell H. Hardy, John

Quincy Locke,

call me “Person.”

“We” will therefore become via our calling, our response,

-mutually constituted identities

-for the moment.

Johann Sebastian Souza strikes a note

Federico Garcia Chopin hears that tone,

thereby constituting,

no, co-constituting…

…sound.

Sound, press of fingerpads on forearm, shoulder, buttocks, calf,

breast, or clay,

each,

each each,

resonance, difference, identification,

-a becoming, become-

Affirmation.

Compliance.

What might seem

passive, active, passing to-and-fro, creating “We,” “Us,” “People,” “Person(s)”

Trolls beneath the bridge.

Knocking, knocking.

We. Are. There.

(Which is “Here” for NOW).

*******************************************************************

Being. and Time.

(one might say)

Call me Friedrich, Ortega, Alfred.

or: Being + Event.

Address me Giorgio, Alain, Ricky G.

Actor, actant, the motion of bodies.

Ludwig Joycenstein;

rejoice in time;

Osip, Anna, the noise of time.

Being. Event.

kairos

“it is Time”

fullness.

redolent.

predilective. propicient. promising. proclamative.

NOW.

In the Beginning, the wormy End.

Every Ending a Begin.

Transference. Transmission. Translation.

It is love.

Call. Response.

Affirm

Telling Asking

Achieve.

Archive.

WE ARE

You/I a He/She

(not long before combine, breed, be/have)

–BE-COME–

WE.

“I” was lost, until you found me…

…in other words…

…varieties of presence.

bumping into brambles,

slipping into sea,

hearkening to shriek,

Ask Tell

yay/nay,

no matter,

what matters?

too much, too little?

near enough

Begin.

Become.

just BE.

Be. Be. Bee.

1. B. 2. C. D.

Dee Harvey Osmont.

Olivia Newton jaunt.

Wolfgang Adolf Heisman.

Prince Albert Nobel.

Call “me” “Person.”

Julio W. G. Sebold.

Sign on page,

raised to the eye,

digited “touch,”

BECOME.

Vocable. Insignia. Etching. Stroke. Motion.

WE.

Call us Person(s).

*********************************************

“The pen asks / much more than it can answer /

one word at a time”

-Philip Levine-

BECOMING: A Something-Writing …Provisionally

On March 19, 2015March 19, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, human, Language, meaning, Philosophy, thought1 Comment

Provisionally: A Something-Writing

-What I Have in Me to Write Now-

I am Melville, I am Aristotle Dostoevsky. Address me as Plato, Poinsot, Peirce. Franz Ferdinand Pessoa. I don’t care.

Call me Person. Anyone madly bearded and wielding a pen.

The one writing, saying, speaking. The gesturer. Being-doing-becoming. The Nothing-sans-audition. The Singer-without-ears. Seer-without-vision. Images – begone!

Call me Person. Listen! – it becomes.

Wrapped in filthy sweet meconium and lies, lays, swaddling undone. Wrapt, swaddled, held: Become.

It begins. A sighing and a sound. A saying and a listener. Bronk, Bakhtin, Blanchot. Call it what you will. Call me Person-with-a-Pen. Number me “Frail Parcel.”

I utter, you reply. I gains an “I.”

She responds and “I” becomes a “He.”

Call me Shakespeare, call me Tolstoy, call me Sterne. I yelp a Joycean Woolf! It begins.

Call me Person.

Damaged, swollen and undone, without a reason, and yet a flailing voice.

We translate love and I become. We cobble names. “Honeywizz,” “Beastyballs,” “Xanadu.”

Say a word, and say again.

It sounds like singing.

Cry out Jeezus! Aquinas! and let us move.

Heidegger, Hegel, Haar. William Dewey, Tomas Pynchon. Another ring, another rung, another syllable.

Translation, transmission, footnoting insertions, assertion. I am John James, Alfred South Hampton. Bewildered and Amazed. Immanuel (God-with-us) Nietzsche, Darwin D. Descartes.

Just call me Person and I will answer, becoming “I” and I become.

The whisper and its hearing,

you moaned and I perked up.

“Yes?” “No!” Otherwise.

We are here.

Call us Person(s).

I/You, Self/Other, He/She, Says/Hears, Touches/Felt, Imagine the memory.

Begin.

**************************************************************************************

At long last, we arrive. Gilles and Jacques and Simon. Luce and Helen and Clarice. Paired, impaired, distorted.

You may call us Person(s). We are named.

Once called, for a response. The asking is the telling.

I cry out.

There is echo.

It begins.

Frail parcel.

Laurence Carlyle.

Samwell Bronte.

Simone de Cortazar.

Someone sings, it garners litany,

“We are here.”

please call us Person(s).

At first I was a scientist: a philosopher of stories,

for you I depicted scenes and portraits,

invented tools.

Everything a bridge.

The word “between.”

We gestured: “Call us Person(s)”

We said Moscow, India and Greece. We stuttered America. We shrieked of Arabia and England.

A run of names and numbers, symbols and beliefs. We made equations, normatives, reliefs. We consulted, constructed, and revised.

All us People. Call me Person. Calling “you.”

I made an image of yourself, and you became…along with “I.”

We shouted slogans, rafted rivers, swam the seas. We scaled the peaks. We dug beneath. We drifted out.

And kept on calling, calling back

and calling forth, all the asking that is telling, and the stating towards inquire.

It began. It formed a we, and that resulted in an I and a Thou, gone either way, but none other.

It plays with brain and body is the brain the body,

call us “Person(s)”

A kind of beast and gentle species.

We, animal and saint

because we said so.

“Call us Person(s)”

for the asking and the telling

the query-and-response

its to-and-fro

and the becoming

We will be.

******************************************************************************

What we intended – -ologies and –isms and parades.

And “we” begins

Call us People, call us Person(s)

The beasts, alive for NOW –

a simple Zone,

a sphere, an angle,

our “perception” as we say.

I am Maurice and Piaget, von Uexkull van Beethoven

Call me Person

And drunk on signs

(that We developed)

in-between

so we might BE.

(Let’s call them “words”)

Let’s call them breaches, bridges, dreams.

Let’s call it Love.

(and its undoing, its location, its domain)

Let’s call it governance or law.

Let’s make a Zoo with separate cages, create a Zone for disciplines and fields. Feelings. Cultivating crops and crafts and musics. Let’s call it “Science” and beg for silence, and beg for naming and for names, more names and names and things, more names and names for things.

Let’s mix them up and cause explosions.

Me + You.

and co-created.

Please call us “Person(s)”

And let us mark and underscore: Disprove. Debate. Erase.

Let’s say “adjust.”

Let’s try to capture or discover – now we’re we.

But call us “Person(s)”

We will be.

I have become.

An Open Letter on Statistical Analysis

On March 12, 2015March 12, 2015 By NW FilbertIn being, change, Current Reading, doing, Experience, human, life, meaning, Reflections, research, statistical analysis, timeLeave a comment

I used to shy away from Statistical Analysis as a means to meaning.

Now different thoughts occur.

Last night my daughter was struggling with 5th-grade division problems that involved endless remainders…

I used to be really uncomfortable with the “why?” of mathematics…

…last night I found it fascinating, as if it were opening entirely new sets of mysteries and unknowns to me trailing off as it did, like endless reflection and inquiry.

QUERY 1: “WHY?”

Common enough thought for a philosopher.

Seems to me the “good philosopher” (effective, useful, usable, relevant) consistently ponders and inquires into the Affect and Effect of whatever is under observation or scrutiny. What / How / Why / Where / & for Whom does it “mean” that we’re Doing / Being / Knowing this or that or what-not. Anything, really. Anything at all.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

Which got me to thinking…

what/how/why/where/when/for-whom do all these infographics, demographics, assessments, quizzes, ticked responses, reviews, # of views, feedbacks, “likes,” “unlikes,” and so forth “mean” for our Doing/Being/Knowing?

(what’s it all mean, Big Data [pronounced “Big Dadda”?)

QUERY 2: “Huh?”

WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

The question that drives, allows, enables any help a “philosopher” might be able to foster…

AND HERE COMES STATISTICAL ANALYSIS!

(the philosopher asks)…

For the moment, just…just-now, here, this-when…

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY MATTERS MOST TO YOU IN YOUR LIFE?

**************(Stop.)************

************(Breathe.)***********

************(Ponder.)*********

Let’s check out your personal statistics (YOU’LL have to do this part of the work – observation, comparison & contrast, open inquiry & interpretation)

for instance…WHAT things do you nudge toward qualitative analysis or quantitative analysis?

A few simple questions regarding:

time with children/partner/self/nature/friends/world (in relation to) time at work?
time scrolling Facebook / browsing internet (in relation to) time gazing at / listening to / caressing / doing-being-knowing-with your loved-ones?
time realizing time-tested wishes or longings (in relation to) accepted responsibilities?
time reading/moving/resting (in relation to) time watching/viewing/receiving
pleasurable time (in relation to) suffering time

and so on….

[or how well do such things mesh up / converge / resolve, etc?)

(finding ways statistical analysis might mean)

and then, of course, there’s the more totalizing EXPERIENCING of such analysis / account / record / actuality [REALITY]…

…at least ONE way a statistical analysis might MEAN?

(and a humane use of philosophy?)

(science & mathematics?)

(humanities & arts?)

INQUIRY

WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOU?

(maybe think of 3-5…rank them?)

HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF YOURSELF?

(keep track of your minutes / hours for 3-5 days)

WHAT DOES YOUR ACTUAL BEING / DOING / KNOWING REPORT ABOUT WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

(compare. contrast. assemble. interpret. reflect.)

CREATE.

[RESEARCH: it all depends on context]

and it’s all immersive EXPERIENCE

(…used my lunch break for grocery-shopping to alleviate evening stress after work when I need to get the kids to multiple locations and events, and prepare dinner while hopefully interacting with them, witnessing their goings-on in the ONE place I can be at a time, while finishing up that revised CV I need for perhaps continuing employment in a position I actually feel suited to, find challenging, and organizing an upcoming theater production, parceling energy with hopes I might have some left for my prime concern: my partner, or maybe myself – isn’t that part of all of it too? – and the reading/writing/reflecting I’d love to do, acquiring plane tickets and maps for upcoming family journeys, counting breaths to relax, aiming for meta-cognition and emotional awareness so that I don’t miss, ignore, injure, need to exercise, plus the laundry and housework, and…)

all the time, is just the time you have

Rambling

On March 12, 2015March 12, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Aging, change, Current Reading, family, Fear, hope, human, Journal, lifeLeave a comment

How oddly and uniquely our dear bodies exhibit the effects of stress. For some days now, exhausted and craving rest, I wake ever-so-early in a kind of sleepless sleepiness. Wanting only to burrow in, immerse in comfort and calm, be tenderly near the one I love, instead I toss, turn, disturb and achieve none of my wishes.

Is this another emerging effect of aging?

My parents soon will celebrate 50 years of marriage – an example of what Andre Gorz describes: “If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage. Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations. We will be what we do together.” (Letter to D)

which means that I also approach 50.

So there’s also that – a kind of nostalgia, melancholy, joy, awareness…

I’m one to search and seek and inquire without end.

One to wonder and ponder and interrogate my experience with hopes of understanding it – but increasingly I find that apparently my being simply wants to be SO ALIVE. Sometimes I feel that is what is happening with my waking body – that it doesn’t want to miss. Anything. The presence of my beloved next to me in sleep (Gorz describes what I am experiencing in that regard very well also: “how love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them”), the particular quality and type of that morning time, house-sounds, obfuscated consciousness…I, one of those who have “just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine”…sometimes it feels…and that this particular kind of love slowly strips and erodes those away to the irreducible, undefinable reality of each ONE of us…

FITS & STARTS

I shoulda wrote a letter. There are the griefs, the emotions mistrusted, the longings delta’d out, and a million wishes. “The past is still the past : a bridge to nowhere.” And then there is SO MUCH NOW. The children and their emerging, engrossing creating lives; my wonder/love – a thriving, amazing individual who loves me and has so much of her own; there are the animals, the leaves, the waters and the breezes. The breaths, the touches, the thoughts. The feel of it all.

The word/concept/term “Mashup.”

Perhaps that is what is going on in my sleepless sleepiness. My habit of reading has always been to read 30 or more books from various fields, genres, authors, subjects, literatures in order that my mind would have to do it’s weird mysterious complexity/chaos/emergence/dynamic/creative adaptive process of making some new idiosyncratic sense of a kind of global dissonance – our inherent ability to be a Convergence Creator. To not be caught obeying, devoting, under the sway of some authority or perception or ideology not a Mashup. Perhaps the thickness of being alive to what is life, attempting to attend, note and notice, enthralls the entirety in a similar manner – experience is a Mashup – so many sources, so many responses, so many interactions, so many affects and effects, roles, obligations, identities, loves, fears, perceptions, interpretations…and perhaps I’m currently simply immersed in a particularly cogent nexus of complexity and chaos – the operation toward adaptive emergence and some temporary convergence being administered in clumsy and cluttery fits & starts…

Perhaps each now is realization & threshold. And, as a friend recently pointed out…“hope is such a restless state”.