I have to agree that one major thing I have never been able either to tell when talking with others, nor explicate when trying to share – about writing, the activity – is the pleasure. For me, if I can move my experience of the world into language and there let language create a new experience with world for me, whether I’m miserable or joyous, in tedium or ennervated, things feel alright with the universe. Sometimes even if I’m just drawing letters onto paper, words or not, phrases or not, discernable meaning or not – I still feel fine. But then, if there seems like a resonant flow – if the language available and the experience felt engage recursively – there truly IS nothing quite like it in my experience of life. David Foster Wallace says it this way, and I’ve heard similar attempts come out of my mouth:
“When I discovered writing I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I’d not dared to hope for from anything”
that rang exactly true for me….and…
“when i’d sit down and look up and it would be hours later and there’d be this mess of filled-up notebook paper and I just felt wrung out and well-fucked and, well, blessed.”
I probably wouldn’t blog that term (“blessed” or “f*@ked”), but there it is, and again, it does come as close as I can think to that satisfied, dizzying, emptied loose feeling that comes from a safe and open, intense and releasing session of writing. I am thinking that the words “combination” and “pleasure” and “fulfillment” do the most to describe the process and experience of experimenting and experiencing in language for me. And it is very similar to sexual intimacy, because once you have moved into the other (in this case, language) – the other has as much to do with, as much control over, as much effective presence in, the beauty and sense of meaning of, content and activity of the process and results or engagement as you – the writer – do.
Making it with the world is one of those weird mysterious ecstasies that are incomparable and indescribable. I would be deceptive if I said that anything were “better” than it, though it has (in our limited emotional/emotive base) many similarities to being “spent” with one’s spouse, or those rare and profound connections with one’s children – I guess it ought to make some sense that intimacy-with would draw from the same human wells. There is a quiver of experiences that no one speaks of without a touch of awe, a befuddled amaze, or a glad bafflement, and for me, the activity of reading and writing is one of these.
received this little garland today and a congratulations from WordPress – my account is 1 year old!
“Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed.”
-Maurice Blanchot-
“The world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both by the public motion and their own. Even constancy itself is no other but a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my object; ‘tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness; I take it as it is at the instant I consider it; I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.”
-Michel de Montaigne, 1580-
“Sincerity – it’s the insatiable process
of transition, of fluctuation…”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
I began one place, and become another.
Wallace remarked that the most difficult thing to teach young writers was the difference between expressive writing and communicative writing.
“Two utterances cling tightly to each other, like two bodies but having indistinct boundaries.” (Maurice Blanchot)
A notification informs me that today is the first anniversary of my experience of the blogosphere.
Humbled over 365 days.
And thank you.
.
I imagine many writers/artists start out, in the youth of their writing (or creative work) from a singular sense. There’s this “me” experiencing this “world,” it seems like – an I and a chaos, an identity and a multitude. When the I (or eye) feels full, it is like to burst. Things touch us, hurt us, impinge on our locus, our “self,” and it seems something must be done about it – we must exert – strike back, reach out, kiss, craft – exhibit our presence. Interact. The dualities are clear.
Are confused. Experience turns out to be very mixed, an impossibly confusing weave. As we begin to plunder these “moments,” we’re countered. Things that happened to us, we were there for, in all fairness, our activities encroach.
We begin perhaps to recognize our existence as agents – not only done to, but doing; not only recipients but respondants, reactive. The wrestle of expressing ourselves through materials (language, movement, matter or sound) teaches us this. The Other’s inextricably woven – what occurs and results is the same. Is unlike. We lose balance.
Conceiving the work as a subject toward object (our creating) deriving from object to subject (our experiences) – our investigations quickly expose this unclear. Attacked by requirements of how. Stubborn like marble or tricky as oils, even recalcitrant conventions, we begin to comprehend a falsity to working on, as a single direction, and realize it’s all a working with. And we struggle.
Even working with. The earth, or people, or bodies, or clay, things rarely abide our intentions. We set out to disburden ourselves, get incited to construct or create (to “use”) and find ourselves consistently foiled. Reality doesn’t care. We find precious little room for expression. Compromise and nuance, novelty or style – ineffective to the longings we exude.
Perhaps at this stage we lose faith in our voices or visions – what we seek we does not seem to obtain. This is fine. This is something no product can resolve. For there isn’t. There is no solution to life. We are IN it. And there is no replacement for death. Then we’re OUT.
Whether language or matter, movement or sound, our “I” never works on an Other. We are INsulated. INextricably. Communicative activity means cohabiting the spaces, simultaneous-ing the times. Realities – experiences – accord. Everything possessing the prefix co-. It’s admitting the reciprocal, the recursive – we’re not separate beings being, we are beings expressing ourselves commensurately. Perhaps control is adjusting to convention. Accepting agreements with place. Expression living IN and WITH, communication the word for the weave. That we’re behaving, creating, co-mposing in inseparable connectivity (inexpressible process) – transition, fluctuation, IN –
I am telling you a simple story. A simple story of simple things and full of details. I will be telling it the rest of my life.
Details.
detail – Anselm Kiefer
tree bark
age and character
Take time.
It takes time to develop the details, these simple stories. Bear with me.
This year I stopped smoking. I began “vaping” e-cigarettes on Father’s Day, a reciprocal gift from my family, ostensibly FOR my family: my health – their comfort and security.
I had thought of my habit as an addiction and pleasure – it’s satisfactions including (but not limited to) the occupation of my body and sense so my mind might generate more freely – an item in the hand and oral fixative, the beautiful tedium of packing and rolling, the scents of tobaccos and sweet crackling of flame to thin paper, the distinctive clink of a Zippo. And there was the intake – that onrush of Other-air against the back of the throat, the lung’s recognition that breath is substantial – has meaning and purpose. A matter of routine, comfort, psychophysiology and control. Among other things. Fine insofar as it goes. Pieces of detail. Replacement sufficed.
Last week I contracted a version of the flu [please be patient – the process goes roughly as follows: details accumulate but require time to coalesce and organize toward a meaning – our lives as cabinets of curiosities]. Out of character for me – this was the real deal – an incapacitating sick. Associated with it was the scent and flavor, the electric verve of the nicotine-drop-oils that crackle and pop when my ecig works its vaporous magic. Compounding the problem (if illness is a “problem” per se – perhaps more appropriately “discomfort”) – my comfort no good to me.
In early October, due to an oversight in my timing (hang on – gather ingredients, let them simmer and stew, the feast is ahead), I depleted my store of these essential oils without backup, amidst a time of unusual stress. As a stop-gap measure and to avoid hurt or offense (a grouchiness and malaise isolating those around me) I purchased a package of “all-natural” tobacco cigarettes to get me by until my liquids were refilled. The cigarette had changed – no, it was I who now found it insufficient and distasteful – acrid and smelly – inconvenient and inferior to my system. So I squirreled them away – in case of emergency.
Emergency! (well, hardly, but still): slowly recovering from flu, sore and exhausted, wife away on a ten-day journey to faraway climes, two naughty puppies causing trouble, and tending and taxiing four active, hungry children, one of them herself quite ill – at day two without nicotine (happy pill / support / community / God / alcohol / touch / solitude / nature / music / food – whatever one’s personal representation/manifestation of “comfort” might be)…details…
while my daughter lay napping, the others at school, in a moment of relative quiet…I ferreted out one of those “Natural American Cigarettes,” by now all dried up and crispy, months opened and old, and slipped out to the porch…
Voila!
Except not, really.
Not a sudden revelation – but an accumulation of details taking particular shape.
Not an enlightenment – but light swollen and fractured to specific degrees.
Not momentous insight – but a lens crafted and ground, melted and curved to a singular clarity.
Bic schicks. A flame. A crackle. I inhale. Nothing special to the taste, nothing tremendous for throat or lung. Just a smoky draft of air – as from the belchings of a campfire in the mountains, or a compound conflagration of a family reunion bonfire in the late of night (but it isn’t!) when the kids are down and the adults unwind (but I’m not)…
A detail I’d overlooked about smoking (amassed over more than two decades – stay with me now) was precisely that. Looking things over. Smoking drove me outside and it stopped me. For the length of a cancer stick’s burn in this anti-smoking campaign of a culture, I would be isolated from friends and family, house or home, commerce or eatery, and would be situated somewhere where all there was to do was look over and listen. My hands and mouth, neck and torso occupied – eyes and ears thus freed, for a few minutes, to simply wander and attend. Caught by details.
Like these:
a Jetstream, held in a pale sky, contrasted by solid starkly swaying Winter branches, juxtaposed with the sturdy steel of a streetlight. And the dirtying yellow of late Autumn’s surprise bloomings held in some final tangled stubborn greens among deceasing leaves and grasses. Cracking boards, peeling paints and muted hues of dust in sunlight’s shadows – a vibrant puppy, warm and dark – our lives – amassing details – collating and collecting.
[Cigarettes are unnecessary for this] (a mere detail).
When my wife/partner/spouse/friend/coworking companion and lover is away, a part of me gets excited – when the children are busy with school or their moms – it portends to offer me a kind of working solitude – a something I’m forever whining about – idealizing, anticipating, “requiring,” in its absence. A chance to be temporally isolated with my brain, my body, and language – to think (ostensibly) without limit, read or write to my little heart’s content, to create or conspire with no active consciousnesses to account for but mine – no schedules to sync, no dinners to heed, the only limitations my own (and those sweet blasted puppies – a significant detail!), but still: abnormally free to dig and delve, explore and enjoinder, experiment and invoke reveries without feeling selfish…
but, the details, amassed in this way, exposed something quite different…
Jetstream, streetlamp, sky and tree. Angle of roof, discolored paint, fragmenting light – the nature of materials.
I’m at a loss for what to search or explore, discover, uncover…from what vantage point or perspective? Me? – in relation to – Me? Set out from an entire illusive fabrication? An emptiness without basis?
A point as a map is a nowhere unless there’s something surrounding. Unless there’s another point…somewhere. Me pushing through (the details profess) is a movement nowhere, without reference to something or someone outside, different, Other.
My wife is my primary referent (and “wife” is too small, as grand as it is). My person, my artist, my human. The being attached to me – not really mine at all, but for her purposings toward me. Our children, our puppies, our things. Habitat. “Econiche.” World. What I “relate” to equals me, enables me, crafts me into someONE, someWHERE, doing someTHINGS…which otherwise would NOT be…
Co-dependence? Inter-dependence? I like IN. IN-dependence – in depending, attaching, choosing and evaluating ourselves in our Others – we ARE.
Jetstream, streetlamp, color and line
background, foreground, texture, time
space and matter, energy, form
Details.
The details accrue and accrue, and with time…combine, reformulate, convene – which can feel new and curious and true, but simply go on gathering more, detailing to no end, as they relate, interact, recombine – can feel revelatory, enlightening, even profound – perhaps they all are – but they all are and ongoing…
amass and revise, amass and renew, accumulation and attention, awareness and incremental adjustments of relation…
Without Life in Relation (both the active reality, and the her that makes, with me, an us), I have little where or whom to set out from or toward
When there are assignments – yes, that’s the word – trajectories commissioning the laborious application of signs – I resemble a young school-age girl white-bloused and checkered-skirted skipping little curlicues down a sunlit autumn sidewalk. Either in performance or avoidance of what demands to be done. Activity testifies to play. The weight of the backpack keeps the frolic tethered to the ground.
Geometrically you could geo-graph-ically map the carefree trail, which would end up looking quite a bit like the path of Woodstock’s flight (extended)
[how I investigate world]
Relieved of positive burden – reputation, obligation, guilt, shame, agreement – anywise some sort of internal enforcer relating to the external world – is as if Schulz erased the yellow birdy’s gravitation. The backpack become balloon with the force of hot air but random like helium – set free of a hand and willy-nilly flitting to loss in midwesternly wind-raked sky.
Mine is more of a breach or a gap in the hedge – squares of deconstructed sidewalk without boards.
Collapsing toward me in slow-motion imminence are towers of books and billings, due dates and mouths to feed, souls to placate or nourish…rebar extending in its warped way out of the soil behind me – projects halfway done, future commitments previously agreed, promissory plans enacted for stabilizing measures. Even now I hear the dogs barking outside, wanting in. But the knot of rubber and tie of string are so easily undone…like mowers accidentally thud-chopping coiled garden hose that lay mimicking the hoppity school-girl’s jaunting…and all drifts off and away, falling through space, spinning in time – neither up nor down nor to or fro – simply set free / total loss – momentary or not: unknown – vacuous absence – somehow unmoored.
“A way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being”
“that ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being’… was what fiction was for. ‘A way out of loneliness’…”
Jonathan Franzen, on David Foster Wallace
“If the novel were able ‘to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves,’ it opens the potential that she might, as a result, feel ‘less alone inside’”
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, on David Foster Wallace
My son and I arguing about the nature of things – is there anything we can agree on? mutually believe? are we similar? – in what began as an attempt (on my part) to soothe obvious hurt and confusion (on his part). He kept pointing to (referencing) his mirror, his bedside table, in an effort at agreement, at a meeting-point that might be solid, be reliable, be “correct,” or “true.” Some relatively stable collection of roving and vibrating molecules we might sharingly recognize, might hold, attend, or unite around – together.
Throughout my life I’ve attempted to comprehend – to make a symbol for myself – what works of art, particular pieces of music, specific phrases or pages of literature, momentary glimpses of nature, dollops of emotional experience DO. How they work. Why they “feel” – move us, take an occasional effect we might call “profound.” Why, even if they shatter us, cause us to weep, provoke in us the enormous courage required to change, we also somehow still feel safe, often empowered, somewhere beyond “okay” (ecstatic? – out of ourselves?)?
Although often evoking experiences I’d describe as most completely, totalizingly personal, I always felt their effectiveness, their possibilities of success and individuated power, came precisely because they were not (personal). That what intimacy they provided – what outlet or spillage, what expression they represented or evinced – was contextually impersonal, through matter and energy uniquely organized, mediated.
In other words, we could throw all of ourselves into, at, toward or away from them (works of art, formal arrangements of world) without the danger or threat, anxiety or fear, of influence. We wouldn’t hurt, harm, embarrass, shame, offend or be misunderstood by a cornflower, a collective of strokes of paint, a recording of sound waves, moving molecules. No direct hits of miscommunication, misinterpretation. Perfect, variable, flexible presentations of world, of other, that we might release ourselves in relation to, without fear.
Existent things, moments, that genuinely represent otherness from ourselves but without direct exposure, without a being’s inquiry, possible scrutiny, judgment or evaluation. Interpretation. Many-sided, borrowed perhaps, but mediated via only one person – me. I could not fail, fall short, be inadequate to, or otherwise mess up a novel, poem, composition or film, and if I experienced myself as any of those things – it was my own judgment, assessment. Mediated.
After years of such exposure, why do I still choose sides, entrench myself in arguments of logic, when I mean to comfort, soften and heal? Alone, later, I sat and asked myself over and over – IF I have changed, grown, matured in any fashion in my 42 years of life, IF I have learned anything to the point of conscious belief, what might it be? – what might I say that I know?
I don’t know.
What I scribbled into the margin of my journal was simply that my fundamental belief about the world and life in it was that – at the core of things – “Everything is essentially messy.” By which I (at least partially) meant (intended) was incomplete, mobile and complex.
Nothing “fixed.” Staid, finished, whole.
Throughout years of journaling, as I’ve grown to understand how deeply I desire “intimacy” (which I suppose I would describe as “shared personhood” or “met experience”? Co-events?) I have repeatedly diagramed what seems to me an only possible means between humans:
Using Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbits to represent whatever we happen to perceive ourselves as, and “Art” on an easel representing anything as a mediated format outside of our “selves” (themselves, I surmise, also likely a constructed medium for experiencing world), to or in which multiple human persons might invest all they experience themselves to be, without necessary personal organism-survival fears, and, possibly, perhaps, occasionally MEET via that medium in toto (or as nearly as possible): experience intimacy, mutuality. No longer isolated as a being, alone, but finding a common, a sharing-realm, co-perceiving, co-experiencing.
If it be so, that, in fact, as human organisms, all of our entity-type experience is, truly, mediated – through various organizations of mobile and voluble matter and energy – never identifiable as a stasis or final form, if we might begin to see it (us) as such – might we become able to experience direct, person-to-person (experientially) intimacy? Co-being? This is where I have turned effort (driven by desire) with my wife, my children. What if we became safe mediums for one another to experience through?
The way things that seem to need doing impose mayhem on those things we were wanting to do (vice-versa).
A sort of ratcheting of oddly shaped pieces tumbling down towards one another on an inclined plane. Necessary bits and fragments of desire rattling against, around and into one another, oppositely directed, apparently, and all with force or momentum (time, change, survival). They clatter. They clatter and clutter, like there’s a microcosm of chaos in us, the spillage of some enormous container of Legos.
Is this unfamiliar?
Something, always, functioning as noise in the wavering systems of our message(s)?
I want. I need to…. A hunch, an intuition. A concrete demand. An idea spawns. And tasks arise.
That kind of oscillation is what I’m talking about. And it goes both ways. All ways.
I set about a chore and am derailed by an idea. I dream and the over timer intrudes. I breath and it hitches to a cough.
Not that it’s always that way. Sometimes the texts come right on time, just when I was getting up anyway. Sometimes the activities that need the doing, also fuel the dreams. Think of such a time.
No wonder it’s called “flow.”
Yet it hardly seems “reality,” or “daily life.” Perhaps that’s only me, that the pieces that construct me are preiteratively cross-purposed? Maybe my fragments’ forces are centripetal (or centrifugal), either way multi-directional and simultaneous? ADD? ADHD? “Life?” Speaking animal?
Ah, “the perpetually changing, muddied, maid-of-all-work, our common language…a public instrument, a collection of traditional and irrational terms and rules, fantastically created and transformed, fantastically codified, heard and uttered in many different ways”
-Paul Valery-
Summarization often feels inherently erroneous. Much as I have an insatiable passion for “figuring things out,” for the observable “hows” and “whats” of scientific inquiries and theory, much as it evokes a delight of fascination and sense of knowledge or understanding to learn of the makeup and behaviors of neurons or cells, cerebellums or furry beasts, none of it ever feels comprehensive or resolving. The human, to me, is some paradoxical wonder of natural capacities and probabilities and dynamics and flexibility that can endlessly occupy and consume us. Like any part of the cosmic system, from quarks (or smaller?) to global social and environmental systems. Language has long served as a place of experiment and observation for me of just such probability- and convention-governed behavior coupled with a kind of infinite openness and flexibility. I believe this is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to working in words as a medium. But listening to other artists it is easy to see that oils, wax, clay, plastic, etc. also have these inherent qualities. Dance. Music. Craft. Parenting. Romantic loves. Friendships. Relations. Essentially, relations.
A primary personal pleasure for me is delving into theories. Semiotics, linguistics, neurobiology, aesthetics, philosophy, information systems, communications, psychology and the like – all provide me rich excitement and spell-bound, breathless appetites and anticipations. The process of learning and becoming – interacting with world, others, ideas, stuff – it is what makes me tick in realms of gladness. This past week I’ve burrowed down into the work of Max Black and related source documents, particularly Wittgenstein. I wanted to share some of Black’s “summarizations” because they retain the mess and complexity of what he is observing in a way that feels authentic. For those of you who share the interests…the following derive from Max Black’s The Labyrinth of Language.
“The extraordinarily ramified network of skills, habits, actions, conventions, understandings, which we bundle together under the label of ‘language’ is too complex to admit of any simple summary…”
“For all its fixity of structure at any given time, a living language has an inherent plasticity and capacity for growth and adaptation (it is more like a developing organism than an inflexible machine).”
so instead of definition, Black offers what he calls a “landing stage” for directing our attention to certain features of language…including the following:
Language is rooted in speech
Language is directed, reversible and self-regulating
Language is an institution (always part of a speech-community, a participatory action)
Language is a particulate system (“a finite repertoire of elements and arrangements generating infinite diversity and novelty”)
Language is meaningful (expressive and evocative)
Language is plastic (of the most rigid and most malleable of human institutions)
so I offer these reflections today as a celebration of the magnificent medium we all of us are using to some extent throughout all of our lives and activities – ah language – ah “open systems” – ah humans – ah world!
How different the meaning of “precious.” Also “alive.” What the self rearranges.
There was a time.
In the beginning, the excitement of puppies. That generosity. The concept of dependence revised.
A dawning recognition involving hope and helplessness – their power. Sheer organism. Complexity. Alive, mobile, emerging. What wears away, gets broken. What heals, what hardens. Your part in it.
The changing nature of survival, and terms like “health,” “okay,” and “wellness.”
An awareness of trajectories: expansion versus maintenance, collage versus carve, assembling as opposed to mending. The children, the parent.
What persons are. Attachments. Difference. Freedom. Control.
The blowing snow left in their absence. The ways they vanish, into themselves, their people, cracks in the world, airstreams and oceans.
How control rarely changes hands, nearly always remains invisible, what no one grasps.
The erratics of growth, the scale of unexpected development, of motives, of attention.
Intention and the noise inherent in communication. The stage of sighs – their nuances.
We age. Our eyes grow joy and sorrow, and both look like pride coupled to grief.
Randomness of adulthood. Vagaries of time and consequence. Learning curves like tangled thread.
All my Words are Silent 