Category: identity

Logos

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, Experimenctes, identity, Language, meaning, relationships, Writing5 Comments

logos

Forced to engagement, he usually says “I”.  Generic reference: one of you, one of us, one of a kind.

Something different and else gathers when asked for his name.  Standing by words.  “Nathan”, then.

Something given.  Something earned by a story.  An occupation, a station, a set of behaviors and moods.  A moment, response.

Most of the time he is human.  A style, a class and a trope.  At “Nathan” he gains all his failures – a “he” and a “father”, a “writer”, a “son.”

He prefers being “I” – one among digits, a 0 or 1 all the same.  Taking an instantaneous place in the code.

Feels uncomfortable filling up “Nathan”.  Making choices, selections of now and then, here or there, commitments to plans and what has been done.

Occupation.  Specific surround.  Others creating identity.  1s, 0s, all in a malleable line, disrupted by every stroke of a key.  Each return and deletion and send.

Fluid duplicities of multiple minds…converged and conjoined.

With our “names” we profess a location.  Always so far from the truth: provisional goals.

logos

From the start “she’s” been too much to handle.  Representative of dreams and beyond, culminative, a paradoxical [paradaisical?] symbol of sorts.

He drowns in.  Desire.  An ache and overwhelm.  Another is always too much.  An other requires one to be.  Stake positions.  Select.  Choose.  Behave and act.  Become.

Desire feels like less than a choice.  A responding.  Implicit, reminding the lack of control.  He is base, greedy, hungry.  1 among many.  He is tissue and cell.  Energy.  Magnetism.  Gravity.  Reaction.  “She” determines.

“Nathan” is constructed of carbon and water.  It burns and it flows.

Weak bonds and strong.  Necessity and chance.  Survival and growth.  Spirals.  Returns.  Recursion.

The name is assemblage.  Situated, dependent:  “Nathan”.  “Nathan”.  Nathan.

To give.

Give way, give place, give meaning.  Give prominence, power, support.  Give out.  Give in.  Giving everything.

Desire undoes him, undoes me, even I.

Somehow it accrues and accretes to the name and gets seen, blamed and reported.

This one.  Now.  Becomes.

Like formulating sentences – attempts toward complete – so various, anonymous, available.  Becomes.

Insubstantiated concretion – at “And you are?”  “I mean, what is your name?”  “How are you called?”  A power relation demanding a “choose!” and derision, analysis, judgment.  Accounting, solution, report.

This equals “Nathan” in this context…I am.

“He” goes sick at encounter.  Disclosed.  Disappointing.  Disabled.

Potential of speaking as “I” (1 of us) become static and constrained by “this 1”.

Identities form.  In relation to – her, them, here, then, there, now.  In relation to – “what is your name?”  WHO ARE YOU?  In relation to – ELSE and its difference – Othering.

too-many-name-tags

I-Native Writing: Attempt at a Self-Portrait

On By NW FilbertIn Art, identity, Language, meaning, Self-Doubt, sign, symbol, Writing3 Comments

Ouroboros

Things one realizes about oneself when one is “partnered” or loved well.  That seems to be the theme for me of late.  The differences between “automatic” self-recrimination when the Other speaks of an annoyance or a threat to useful relating vs. a kind of awareness and curiosity about one’s own behaviors that opens up understanding and attention related to the same habitual practices…

For instance.  For years, the only tattoo I got that was not an author or artist’s name / signature / or self-portrait, was a whim of “…and then there’s me…”: and I had a simple Ouroboros inked into my shoulder.  The snake eating its own tail.  Sign of health, sign of destruction.  Sign of…

What’s in a “sign?”  A fundamental query ruling the bulk of my waking hours, and carried over from my sleep.

Ouroboros2

THIS NIGHT.  Reading others’ words it dawns on me…”My biography is my catalog.  But the man who was there before I decided to become a reader is missing.  I, in short, am missing.” [Vila-Matas – Dublinesque]

I, in short, am missing.  So long accustomed to defining and describing myself in relation to world, others, children, parents, education, travels, experiences, friends…roles, behaviors, actions, theories, ideas, feelings…and so on…

Each scenario, event, surround, circumstance, company : co-creating WHO / WHAT I am – with no idea what “I” might be stripped of literature, philosophy, family, knowledge, accomplishments, relationships, language, interpretations, and so on…

I had marked myself with “signs” of who I “am” for my children postmortem.  OTHERS.  Read these people, look at these artists, think about these things…and you will have some idea of who your father “was” – Nathan Filbert – a bibliography.

Infinite Ouroboros

Hmmmm.

I AM what I am related to.  Never being able to come to the end of it…I do not know what/who I am.

I can say something of the how…which felt like a revelation on me of why the most off-handed permanent mark I requested to be inscribed into my body has come to feel most adequate / representative / apt / true?

The how is like this.  I recognize in intimacy and dialogue with a loving other (my partner) over time habits of mind: annoyances, arrogancies, logorrhea, unwise knowledge-sharing (always borrowed)…INSECURITY, self-doubt, terror, UNCERTAINTY.

In most seconds of my awakeness two things are tangled, wound, immediate, simultaneous, recursive and self-devouringly going on: WHAT AM I DOING/WHAT AM I? and WHY?

My children run in, blast a request that feels like a demand – at the kitchen counter I: what am I hearing?  What am I feeling about what I’m hearing?  Why am I feel-hearing that?  What should I do?  Why do I think ‘should’?  How should I respond?  Why do I think there’s a ‘should’-how to respond?

On the porch reading with coffee:  Why do I cross my legs?  Why do I like coffee?  What am I looking at?  Why does a squirrel catch my eye?  Why did I choose these glasses?  Why am I thinking about these things?  Is this what others think about?  What ‘should’ I be thinking about?  Why ‘should’?  How should I work?  How should I think?  Why do I think I should have a way of thinking?  Why do I think about the way that I sit?  What kind of being thinks about the way it sits when it thinks on a porch and is distracted by a squirrel?

WHAT AM I?/WHAT AM I DOING?  and WHY? leading to HOW?

What am I doing?  Looking at letters on a screen.  Why do I look at these letters on a screen?  Why does language move me, draw me, resonate?  What is resonating?  Why?  Should other things be resonating?  I enjoy looking at my love.  Am I looking in the ‘right’ way?  Why do I enjoy looking at my love?  How should I look at my love?  Why do I look at my love?  What kind of thing is drawn to gaze at his love?  What is love?  Why do we love?  How should we love / might we love?  Why do I hold books certain ways.  How do I hold them?  How might I hold them?  Why?  What kind of thing thinks about how and why and what he holds?  What was that tone?  Why that tone?  What kind of being uses that tone?

And so on.  Moment after moment.  I get a drink.  Why did I get a drink.  Why was I thirsty.  What does it mean that I was thirsty.  How should I vary what I drink to my thirst?  Why?

Rarely do I consider “Who” does these things.  It’s too far removed.  Too unknowable – beyond any what/why/how I can even begin to contemplate.

But constantly constantly constantly WHAT AM I DOING?  WHAT AM I? (in this situation, this situation, this situation) and WHY?  HOW?

tangled ouroboros

And this is how my days pass.  Finding myself moving, teaching, listening, talking, drinking, eating, loving, avoiding, forgetting, imagining, smelling, saying, wishing, regretting, ashamed, confused, uncertain, unknown…but always searching, observing, inquiring, scrutinizing…

WHAT AM I DOING?  WHAT AM I that DOes such things?  WHY am I doing them?  HOW ‘should’ I do them and where/why/what/who thinks of ‘should’?  WHY?

And finding nothing but infinite tangles, recursive spiraling production and reduction, endless context surrounding every moment that is constructed only of questions and hypotheses…

I chose a good tattoo.

Permanently self-devouring and regurgitant.

Self-Imitations of Myself. (Gordon Lish)

doubleourobors

perhaps shed light on through an-other?

“A single voice raises the clamor of being”

Gilles Deleuze

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

On 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-

Everyman logo

9 Notebooks

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experience, identity, Kafka, life, notebooks, Writing1 Comment

In an act of rebellion and a kind of self-serving exorcism or slate-clearing (what blog is NOT an attempt at an entity’s expression, communication?), and facing the duress of weeks burdened with commitments and inescapable responsibilities…[in other words]…I intuit I am encountering a “time” (weeks / months / foreseeable futures?) that I deduce as laden – somehow preordained – for preoccupations of employment, previously established obligations – freighted with encumberances complexly negotiated…[under pressure I compose]…and so I search for a project [as is my way] that is FOR ME[?] (something autotrophic, self-cannibalizing and nourishing at once, individually comprised and contained) an insurrection and defiance honoring self [so I surmise] facing compulsion…

…and I unearth these 9 Notebooks…all aborted undertakings from the past 12 months…via which I propose to mount mutiny by posting all that seems potentially warranted in them [upon re-reading as if the first time, long forgotten]…toward little other purpose than for purging, opening, erasing – a clearinghouse of efforts – that might evolve toward some novel substitution, unforeseen modification, development, emergence…

“this is what directs him to learning – where he may encounter fragments of his own existence,

fragments that are still within the context…”

– Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka – 

9 Notebooks

There will be stories, concepts, poems, characters, reflections, essays…and ephemeral scraps like these…

  • think feel – attune to meaning – reflect and refract
  • befriend your body, take care with your mind
  • be gentle, be open.  move fluidly, breathe
  • go alert to your dreams
  • wish more than hope, walk don’t run, run sometimes
  • be careful of rules, they’re always changing, it’s the nature of the rule, the measure, the standard
  • keep your eyes and ears open, along with heart and mind – only let things close into pleasure and pain – and that more of a wince
  • don’t be afraid of your story – write and rewrite it, edit and revise, revise, revise, and write it again

An attempt viewed in incompletion

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, human, identity, Journal, Poetry1 Comment

sad skeleton

Impromptu

Arid time and things, they pass

Erase, not quite, deteriorate

Inexact as well, but depleting

Depleting.

Depleting.

.

Not exactly end, ending

Never a beginning

Ever picked up midstride

Midstream

Only ever in the midst

.

Tiring then,

Worn down,

Depleted, she said,

Exhausted,

.

and yet what from?

From what is he so tired

unto ruin?

What is ruin-ed?

What never was?

Perhaps.

.

Always midstride, then

Nearer to the end

this depletion

Depleting

.

nothing

Begun ever

Certainly nothing

ever completed.

Always midstride,

and nearer to the end,

incompleted, and

depleting

Depleting

.

Unable to keep up with 1/8 of the 9-year-old,

worrying the 10, the 17, the young man

fails the partner

fails the weather

failing his own mind

            own dreams

            his own body

.

ideas

.

Depleting

.

Always midstream,

frozen in place

nearer to the end

this present

Depleting

.

Would like to write it out

Write it off

Pick up again

Declare a start

But he can’t

or won’t

.

Nearing the end,

Never getting there,

(near completion, never that)

only begun and that just barely

joined midstride

nearer to the end

simply depleting

.

Inexorably

.

Without fail.

The one thing without fail.

The one absolute success.

The one almost-completion:

.

depletion.

Depleting

.

Always midstride

and nearer to the end –

very much like dancing

on bleeding broken legs

The bum-rush of living

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, human, identity, meaning1 Comment

entanglement

There are places we “escape to,” i.e. repair to for very specific reasons and purposes.  Maybe an acquaintance’s pad for hurried or feverish orgasms.  A park or patch of woods for perspective, silence or briefly encounters with “natural nature.”  A carrel in a library to prompt and focus our studies.  A basement stairwell for sustaining shots of liquor, bathroom window or fire escape for a stealthy cigarette.  Favored chair and lighting for reading, drawing, reverie…

Repair.

A therapist’s office wherein to be oblivious for a moment, anonymously honest, saved from (and toward) pressing responsibilities.  A café, a waiting room, a stoplight, a store.  Our furtive thievery of solitude.  Self-care.  Secrets.

A human is a strange animal indeed.  Tantalized by taboo.  Somehow more fully owner when the product is taken for oneself.  Somehow more strenuously truthful when maintaining a lie.  Somehow better at self-care when stealthy and artfully dodging.

Perhaps not all of us.

Who claims directly to know what they want?  What feels good to them?  What they obsessively desire?

“Pre-emptive strikes.”  We are wary.  We negotiate rather than demand or direct (what separates the “neurotic” from the “psychopath”?).

The time goes by.  Incrementally, unceasingly, dependably.  In leaps.  Life, again, moment after moment, wends and charges, plows and slips its certain way into death.

We hesitate, we detour, we “pit stop.”  We navigate, wander and avoid.  We indulge and punish, set out and swerve, ashame and repent.  Sort of.  Sneaking pleasures, performing roles and rites, detracting, desisting, compulsing, rewarding…

Remarkable at tricking and deceiving ourselves.

We are interesting characters, sincerely.

Operative on many contradictory planes.  Ridiculous, incredible, foolish, amazing…complex.

Woven into surrounds we continually seek to distinguish ourselves from, in, for.  Tremendously unstable, uncertain, tormented, delighted and undone.

Just try to piece it apart: what you WANT, and what you WANT.  What you DO and what you WISH.  Where you GO and where you ARE.  Who you APPEAR and why you BE.

What you want and what you want.  What you desire and what you mean.  What you do and what you say.  How.  How.  Why.  and What.

It is all quite twisted.  Very weird and strange and unusually usual for us, to BE.  The “high” and the “low.”  “Good” and “bad.”  “Productive” and “lazy.”  Health and unhealthy, partial and whole, fragment and phrase.

Complicated beings in intricate surrounds.  The regularity is what’s irregular, the constancy is changing, that which we’d love to consider paradox or mystery.  The off-putting put on.  The performance unmasked.

“How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?”

-Ben Lerner, 10:04–

Deceptive dialogues giving so much away.  Proper behaviors exposing our lies.

My son recently said he was a “walking contradiction” and I thought is that not the nature of humanity?

Confusion and contrast, contractions and deconstruct.

Wilder beasts – fearful and proud, generously scrooged, clinging as it slips our grasps.

Odd, misnomered things.  Smart here, dull there, sexy and unkind, popularly rejected, abnormally similar.  Attempts to be truthful mire us in espionage.

The bum rush of living – death’s inescapable quicksand

Celldom (continuation)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, identity, Language, love1 Comment

oval sketching

(click image for previous content)

            Unwittingly, I suspect, you or they have begun encouraging me to fantasize, concoct alternate realities, to record what “self-awareness” I might possess – in effect, to make art.  To use artifice.  Pretend.

As they frustrate with my mind, I sense them agitate, they request I try again to inscribe ‘emotional states or fluctuations’… what I hear is: “Be delusional!  Pretend you can be other than yourself and fabricate observations or reports of what you find!  Write for us from a realm of your imaginings!”

I write: “Magenta with a violet, a blackened green, a touch of white and several mixtured hues of blue.”  One morning simply “ultramarine.”  The view up is amazing from the window when I wake – another problem – what is waking, what is not.

At this point I begin to draft single-lined wriggles and ovals (as near to circles as I am able) – day after day – delivering these gestures as my only possible responses of non-delusional self-observation / “awareness.”

They transport me somewhere.  “Some place quieter, restful, pastoral and with the sound of water,” they say.  My only hope is thunderstorms.

Thunderstorms shake me through and through somehow.  I profess rainfall to be cleansing, charming, enervating and distracting, but thunderstorms really tear me away from things toward some other beauty.  I draw an oval filling the page (as much as possible given the argumentative shapes) with emptiness.  Is this what is desired?  Am I approaching an “expression” with this instrument?

Another day I attempt a square and rectangle, even triangles – all with single lines and full of nothing, but none of these standardized and recognizable forms seem accurate.  No self-portrait (is this what you’re after?) could be so distinct.  Perceivable.  “Only bits and fragments appear common among ‘selves,’” I say (regrettably), “unless there be love.”

They (you?) pounce on this – “love! Ah!  Might you tell us, write” (very different things of course) “more about what you mean by this?”

“Don’t get hung up on words,” I whisper, and I’m off again to silence.

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

            There seems to be no library here, yet if I request books they arrive from somewhere.  All a matter of electricity, buttons and money.  As long as they last, I suppose.  And at higher costs each year, I think.

Thunderstorms, then, in lieu of the other unknown (“love”).  Something about their breadth and depth, the long slow accumulation of elements from such vast distances and sources: the implausibility of their construction, the buildup…composition…complexity…the billions of collisions that activate the enormous releasings.  Thunderstorms suggest the miraculous in nature, the dangerous prospect of entities coming together…some awe-full beauty.

Provenances, directions, blusters and still points, specific conditions, temperatures, “fronts,” uncountable molecules, atoms, producing just this dynamic event/effect…

This day I make a spiral down the page.

Biologies, psychologies, humors and pleasures, emotions and moods, habits, likes, dislikes, abhorrences, opinions – these seeking common spaces, manufacturing convergent territories…a prisming trap.  Love must be a fantasy or delusion like self-awareness…circles within circles…lapping, overlapping, twisting round, across and through.  A wovenness.  A magnetism, I think I meant earlier – a lust of imagination – would not knowing another be as futile as knowing oneself?  I think.  Learning by observation, interaction, what you cannot but effect, cannot become separate from?

A woman reads to me at night.

Tyranny of Transition

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, human, identity, Journallings, meaning2 Comments

Greetings all – I wanted to apologize for the sloppy frenzy of disregulated writings I’ve been releasing with little meditation or editing of late.  “In the midst of things…” somewhere near the crossover looping of composition, storage, digestion, excretion, and growing…I’ve found it somewhat difficult to know what it is I am doing aside from what must be done.

400px-Cycles_of_Life

Feeling change,

an entering of halves and fractions

tired and ecstatic

sad and delighted

moving on and along.

Having lost and lost and lost

while ever continuing to gain,

such simple equations

of little sense

yet filled with meaning

a meager promise

and maximal joy.

Existence is the Cusp – A Journal Entry

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, Language, meaning3 Comments

cursive journaling

It’s December, and I’m writing outside, lucky by so many counts.

  • It’s December, and 45°
  • My partner in love and life instills health and wellness in me
  • I’m writing
  • James is serving me coffee, ice water and double greyhounds enabling me to work without interruption

I’m in what you might call a “Cusp Area.”

The present is always a liminal space.  I am a few days away from completing a Master’s degree in Library & Information Management, and months away from embarking on a PhD in Media & Communication coupled to the Arts at a University in Switzerland.

I work very part-time (10-20 hours / week) for the United States Postal Service, attend regular psychotherapy sessions, parent 4 children, read and write as much as I can, cook and clean a LOT, and spend as much time as I can with my beloved (a brilliant, gorgeous, amazing, resourceful, intelligent and creative human).

I rest very little.

We (my immediate family) will not survive January on my income (sans school loans).  Cusp.

Change is imminent, and yet NEVER is NOT.

Every day relationships morph.  What could be termed “stability” in life must be radically redefined to have any resemblance or “fit” to reality – which is always, ALWAYS in enormous, factually ubiquitous, tremendous FLUX.

There is something like “similarity” – of persons, circumstances, situations, emotions, experiences… which we occasionally tag “familiar” or “repetition,” (providing a modicum of regularity, “consistency,” “normativity”) but none of it, EVER!! – is “identical,” “same,” “repeated.”  Not even ourselves, one “moment” to the next (i.e. in spans of cursive time – what seems utterly continuous is still difference – otherwise could not be noticed).

I am writing this in cursive in attempts toward continuities of form and content.  And yet there is vast uniqueness with each stroke.  “Distance,” difference, change.

I delight in working in language – a symbology for expressing experience – a fabric, social set and structure – a shared and flexibly rule-bound medium.

Possessing or harboring…containing vast incommunicable DIFFERENCES – between ethnicities, cultures, geographies, genders, contents, shapes, habits, practices, processes…REALITIES.  And yet useable.  Useful.

I am writing outside in December, in Kansas, in the United States of America, in cursive, in English, in black ball-point ink, in a ruled soft-covered notebook, in 2014, in attempts partially to think, to recount, to visualize, to express, to extend, to discover, remember, critique, perceive, view… understand a curious unstoppable flow –

The Experience of Being a Living Organism

with billions of particularities – both structures and substance, arrangement and order, experience and resources, habits, capacities, learning, abilities, perceptions, interpretations, emotions…

THIS kind, type, genus, species, instance, sort, occurrence, happening of this one/many, living (active, interactive, interacting, linked, dependent, individual, functioning) THING.

Differently now and now and NOW.

I cannot curtail difference.  I can hypothesize similarities.  I have agency, but an energy and forcefulness utterly dependent and constrained by countless systems, substances, processes and constituents.

I have a kind of power – corralled by everything within and around me.  I am at the mercy of – the support and boundary of – all else + the combinatory elements and activities of WHAT I exist of and the rest of existings.

I do not fool myself into thinking I am a cause or blame, and yet I am utterly response – able / – ible.  “My” interactions and interactivities, are mine / “me” / THIS.

THIS & THAT, Yin/Yang, Individual/Environment, “self”/”other”, – difference without discontinuity, ever in exchange: molecularly, actively, REALLY, and wholly.

cusp area

EXISTENCE IS THE CUSP.

I love while / as / if / because / in spite of (or in contradistinction to) I am loved.

I move with / against / into / around / while / within / because of / in distinction from, possible movements, contents, and affordances / constraints of everything about / within / around me.

I “exist” (stand-out) because I am, in a swarm, a sea, of existences, existings.

I have no other chances to be…

…outside of my surrounds.

I am.  Within a lifeworld.  Without which – I am not.

And still, “I am.”  Singular / plural.  Similar across space-time, an appearance and occurrence of similarity marked by difference.

The safest expression (for one seeking at “truths” or reliable, testable regularities) is:

WE ARE

or

IT IS.

We, the living.

architectural animal

I thank you.

Coming Bare

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, meaning, Writing5 Comments

head-silhouette-with-question-mark

In the interests of authenticity…

  • The fact or quality of being true or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness. Also (overlapping with sense) accurate reflection of real life, verisimilitude.  
  • Genuineness;
  • The quality of truthful correspondence between inner feelings and their outward expression; unaffectedness, sincerity.
  • A mode of existence arising from self-awareness, critical reflection on one’s goals and values, and responsibility for one’s own actions; the condition of being true to oneself.
  • The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014.)

Unveiling.  The action of reveal.  Is the “condition of being true to oneself” a possibility?

Recently my partner and love wrote me a revealing, unveiling, letter that blunted me with authenticity – a quality of herself that she was questioning in that very message.

Self-awareness.  Sincerity.  Something corresponding to actuality, reality.  Genuineness.

How often do we present or re-present ourselves authentically?  Do we all wish to?  What would it look like?  Sound like?  Would we lose friends?  Lovers?  Jobs?  If our outward expressions matched our inner feelings?

WHO AM I?

The complaint was compromise.  Pretense.  The wriggling falsities of “fitting in” or “being useful” or “surviving” in the world of humans.  In social groups and situations.  In life.  The feeling that what “works” or garners respect, interest, desire in the commerce of human beings is not authentic to who I actually am.  That what I am “liked” for is a misrepresentation, a partial product, a fabrication, a mixed message, does NOT “correspond to actuality, reality.”  And is it possible to undo that?  To live authentically in the variegated, unpredictable, situational and relative world of humans?  And is authenticity of an individual even a potential actuality / reality?

This has prompted me days of thought.  In effect it was relieving, releasing – my lover is exhausted of the “play of living” – the work of “fitting in,” “surviving with others,” “belonging” in ways that feel partial, inexact, false even, untrue, ALWAYS incomplete, inaccurate, inauthentic.

I felt freed to say my honesty.  When I father, I pretend to be a father.  I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what I should be doing.  I don’t know what it means to father children.  I love them, I care about them, I am frightened by them, I am exhausted by the responsibility, I gauge my activities based on parenting behaviors I DON’T feel comfortable with, or that I wished for…I act, I pretend I’m a man who knows how to love, instruct, “raise” children!  I do not know what I’m doing.  I feel inauthentic.  Like I’m reaching, practicing, experimenting, trying to be what I think a good “father” might be.

For years and years and years and years I have “feigned” being a writer, a musician, a scholar, an artist (it feels like).  Yes, I’ve read a lot. Yes, I’ve studied, I’ve practiced, I’ve performed.  Yes I think I “get” some things about the world and our human experience of it.  Yes I LOVE writing words, mixing them up, crafting phrases and sentences with them, attempting to mate them to my internal experiences, ideas, emotions… but I almost ALWAYS feel an impostor not an expert, like I’m trying out voices, expressions, characters, compilations to FIND OUT if that’s how I think, feel, imagine?!  So if ever I’m desired, complimented, responded to – I think it is an accident, a gratuitous kindness, a pitying.  That I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m simply trying, groping in language in a thorough darkness.

As a lover, a partner, I have simply tried to please.  To find out what is wanted and do, be, perform that.  How does an intimate relationship “work”?  I don’t know.  Everyone is different.  Nothing I learn to enact, behave, communicate, engage – is successfully effective in the next relationship (or, obviously, in the relationships ended before that!).  Could I BE whatever mucky morphing “self” “living human organism” I am (at any given moment) and be loved?  It seems so unlikely!  I don’t even know what that is (the mucky morphing living individual human organism) to express or represent to the Other one… – do they?  Does ANYone?

So do we ALL feel like we’re FAKING our way through being human?  Adapting “roles” and “styles” and “opinions” and behaviors in order to survive?  To be liked?  To fit in?  To feel good about ourselves?  To feel useful?  To BE?

Over decades, I have found that there are some things that steadily characterize me.  I like to drink and smoke and read and write.  I love to love and desire and be loved and desired.  All of those things share the “actuality” and “reality” of being activities that I don’t understand.  Things that seem to steady, nourish and keep me vital…and yet also damage, wound, hurt and make me vulnerable.  That wobble.  That trembling.

Identity

To my lover I responded theoretically.  That my understanding of a living organism is that its “identity” in fact is created and activated in every moment’s situation and surround.  That ALL of being a human is identifying oneself in relation to circumstance – a moment-to-moment relation and response to THOSE and THAT which constitutes its happening.  That “living” involves trying style, voice, behavior, activity, vocation, perception, interpretation, thought after another after another – quickly realizing that in EVERY instance the “fit” is partial, inauthentic, somewhat true (what feels good) and somewhat false (what is uncomfortable) – that BEING ALIVE is a wandering experimental trial of sorts.  That if we CHOSE or locked ourselves into an IDENTITY and attempted to be consistent in it – we would in fact deteriorate, become bitter – that the wisdom is NOT “I AM THAT” but “THAT IS PARTIALLY ME” for now, in this instance, at present…

????

The questions keep coming.  We bemoan that when we take a job, a position, a role, responsibilities… we tire of them as we feel the constraint of structured, required, or expected behaviors and activities.  When I compose a writing work – within pages I tire of its direction, its characters, its ethos – I can feel where a thing is going and whether it’s interesting to me or not, I tire of it – feel constrained by what’s created, feel fake in pushing it in another direction…even innovation and inventiveness feel PRETEND.

Perhaps LIVING = the tension of partiality.  Striving to “fit” to “belong” to “match” (be safe in, acknowledged, understood, allowed) means adaptation, alteration, invention, reciprocal construction, which would seem to inherently demand compromise, partiality, veiling and highlighting – what will seem / feel to be INAUTHENTIC, misrepresentation, “FAKE.”

And yet – it is through this wriggling tango that we also come to discover what “fits” us – what we enjoy, what our perspectives are, who/how/with whom we like to be, what feels “good” to us and what makes us afraid/uncomfortable/ and so on…

Cynical view: we’re ever pretending and untrue.  Hopeful view: we’re navigating and discovering, becoming.  And it seems that both are “real” and “actual.”  Authenticity (maybe?) equals partiality and pretense for humans?  Equals morphing and becoming?  Equals uncertainty and acting (adapting)?  Equals attempting to be?