Category: Journallings

Just posted thoughts and reflections

The Graces

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces9 Comments

as in “unexpected blessing,” or surprising gifts.

Words that Flow like Water

has nominated me for another Lovely Blog award!

Surprising, I suspect, because I oft don’t find my own voice “lovely.”

I am very thankful some find it so, or something about the overall content here.

THANK YOU!

(rules of the game attached to the logo)

1.  My real name is not Nathaniel.

2.  My favorite authors/artists are embedded in my flesh.

3.  I am pursuing a vocation in Information Sciences.

4.  I am drawn to large white rectangles.

5.  I don’t believe in “spiritual.”

6.  I enjoy laughter.

7.  I deeply desire to travel in Russia, Nepal and Portugal.

For the nominees I’d like to pass the award along to (bon chance!) I will post the list that proved exorbitantly long for the rules last week, as follows:

in the library with a lead pipe

Words that Flow Like Water
The Language we Speak

art unraveling
Appropriately Frayed
Ute Schatzmuller
Madison Woods (for keeping us all busy and honest)

A Philosopher’s Take
Careful for Isa 
The Artsy Forager
Writing with Water
Anton Jarrod
Photography of Nia
and, of course, my beloved (even if time doesn’t allow, I read whatever arrives :))
Life in Relation to Art

simplified structure of entailment (Gordon Pask)

Thankfulness

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces13 Comments

Given the shiftings and obstacles and reappointments of time and priorities that have effected me over the past month or two, I am very grateful to receive news, messages, word that what work I am able to do is being read, is given attention.  Thank you!

Yesterday I received a message from Michele D’Acosta that she had nominated me for the “One Lovely Blog” award, I was surprised and ever so grateful.

Receiving this award asks that the recipient tell readers seven things that they may not know about the creator of the blog:

1.  I’m a parent to seven children.

2.  I’m a new graduate student in library and information sciences.

3.  I adore theory.

4.  I’m a classically trained vocalist and pianist.

5.  I love all things peanut butter.

6.  I have very few friends.

7.  I long to be a published author.

Then the recipient is asked to recommend to the readers 10-15 other blogs that he or she finds compelling or necessary:

I’ve recently found it necessary to pare down the blogs I follow due to the time constraints my life imposes and a feeling of overload in providing each blog its due attention.  So I’ve had to think hard about what blogs seriously enhance my existence that I engage.  I will pass a few of them along here.

Adventures in American Writing

Searching to See

Objects

draw and shoot

biblioklept

unwanted advice

Ooggetuige

the hour of soft light

SUNLIT RAIN

maurice sapiro

Want Beautiful

barbaelka

Lady Fi

Dark Pines Photo

We Need More Time to Stand and Stare

my daily art display

lisa thatcher

Christian Mihai

that’ll have to do…as I go over my list of blogs I follow I realize there are SO SO SO many whose news/thoughts/artifacts/messages are meaningful to me.  But to list them all!  So follow the leads and find the good stuff!

A sincere thank you to all who take time to engage my thoughts and stuff.

Nathan

Minding the Gaps in the Membranes: A perforation, an hiatus, a foramen

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings3 Comments

Intermission.

It is likely you will experience “an interruption in the intensity or amount of something.”

Quite probable, in fact.  Possibly certain.

I might say that a human being is a process consisting of a body and a situation in constant flux and adaptation…dialogue of inescapable intersubjectivity.

Now I have.

Lyn Hejinian has said that “‘aboutness’ (in writing, but, I would argue, also in life) is transitional, transitory,” and that,

“language is a medium for experiencing experience…of inquiry…writing is a process of improvisation within a framework (form) of intention…”

like consciousness, self, and all of its constitutive surround…

i.e. being (or becoming) human.

In the midst of which…otherness, the unknown, openness in the structure

– a gap, a leap, a hiatus, an abatement –

For instance, this blog.

Having been fortuitously enabled to devote considerable amounts of time and effort to it this past year, it has changed and moved, grown and altered me beyond my expectations – experimenting in language with experience and painstakingly risking and studying, following passions and trails, ideas and stories – always attempting to language the knowing – has been a phenomenal (literally) vocation for me.

The contexts are shifting…whatever I am is being differently situated – times, spaces and surrounds…requiring temporary suspensions to my efforts here at manoftheword.

I will work seriously to keep up with at least 100 words of fiction per week (thank you for the promptings Madison-Woods and Friday Fictioneers) and any poetic bursts or artifacts that get me along in my experiences; images or residual thought-projects that are not necessary to my schoolwork, family or professional life I purpose to share in this forum and spoondeep mag or gypsy wall.  My wife and I are currently committing ourselves to a larger multi-media project over the next year or so, but will also attempt to freshen Ekphrastix Arts as time allows, at least with updates.  My own creative efforts are being redirected to my studies at SLIM, some exciting articles for an upcoming art exhibition in Wichita, Kansas (stay posted with Lux Fisch Haus Exhibition and related links) as well as a longer project I’m committing my sanity (or its loss) to – currently denoted in myself as Qualia, probable connected fragment-instants of subjective experience which also may leave some effluvia worth commending to you here.

All of this to say a ginormous THANK YOU and KUDOs to the incredible world of WordPress bloggers and visitors – please continue to follow and check on us – I promise at LEAST weekly there will be new content here – your support and attention mean such a great deal to me/us.  And I will certainly continue to read and view what I can in the interstices of my goings-on.  I genuinely appreciate everyone’s efforts, creativity and artifacts here.

“[language]…is denotatively social…but not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgment – and that constitutes a sort of unknowing.  To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness (i.e., the unknown and perhaps unknowable).  [Writing] undertakes acknowledgment as a preservation of otherness – a notion that can be offered in a political, as well as an epistemological, context.

This acknowledging is a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on…”

(Lyn Hejinian)

THINK ON.  MAKE ON.  BLOG ON!

Locating my mind

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces2 Comments

Nothing is the force / that renovates the world.

-Emily Dickinson-

Please read the following conversation between poets Christine Hume and Rosmarie Waldrop (pp.76-88, click on image for text)

Rosmarie Waldrop

Waldrop has always been a heroine of mine, and I’ve been struggling again with “Who am I?” “What do I do?” “How am I?” – questions of identity and difference that come up in times where we are suffused in roles – students, parents, spouses, artists, employees, gendered, and so on…In insular places where I feel safe I am able to theoretically conjure a kind of flow, that these aren’t choices but movements, that things and actions do not exist, only ‘occasions”, “relations,” but under stress I quickly find myself wishing I knew who/what/where/when/how I am.  Today I received this book through inter-library loan, and kept opening to the Waldrop chapter… apparently for good reason.  I share many of her points of view, and would like to share them with whomever finds themselves interested.

I think of the ‘between’ more in terms of both, and of extending the gray zone between the black/white in the direction of multivalence. ‘The yes and no in everything.’

-Rosmarie Waldrop-

SLIM-pickings

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings1 Comment
A Supreme-Librarian in Meta-Space

Apparently I am soon to be one of these.

But just now, I’m

one of these…

and it’s the first official day of classes!

It reminds me of playing the saxophone.  Throughout high school, academics, vocal/piano and saxophone, tennis, religion and friends all vied for the top spots on my list of passions/interests/priorities and concerns…and all got ample time and attention.  Upon entering the load of college and the requirements of degrees in theology, music performance (piano & voice) and composition, saxophone-playing and tennis became those delights one participates in for fun and relief, the “free associations” as it were.

It is not my intention, but I can tell by these first few days of hours spent trying to navigate Blackboard, discussion threads, wikis and tikis and tavs, assignment links and syllabi texts, lists and conduits and course reserves, moduled lectures and more…that manoftheword is going to be leaking into to sheer babel and blather by the time he/I opens this page and clicks “new post.”

Case in point.

I’m hoping you’ll stick with me as my energies transfer and translate.  I’m expecting a rough patch of blurted postings until some new rhythm evolves and I’m able somehow to manage my time and brain between “free associations” and “required readings and writings / uploading assignments and creating virtual connections with teams.”  (Not that I don’t “require” a fair amount of the “free” to remain a person, it’s just…)

my time for tripping over a knot in the language ropes, plopping down and unraveling/tangling loose ends is getting gravely delimited.

I’ll figure it out

surely I’m OCD or enough anxiety-prone to devise

necessary borders and boundaries, divisions of timespace to synergize the tasks.

just giving you fair warning…there may be a lot of vomiting/swallowing circular writing here…and less obsessive drilling into pipes of terms and letterings…a little more of simply touching base or syncing up or finding bearings….

Defining Spaces

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings1 Comment

August 14, 2012, the first day (DAY) of rain in Kansas that I am able to recall for a very long time.  Not a passing windy thunderstorm, but a wet dripping sky holding temperatures in the 60s.  A genuine “rainy day.”

We are home.  Inhabiting a structure we have designed and filled up with ourselves, each one, and altogether.  It’s been awhile.

For days we’ve struggled to catch up: reports, bills, groceries, supplies, dust, papers, books, photographs, laundry, enrollments, business, correspondence, maintenance, rest.

Organization as definition.

Definition as form, parameter, boundary.

Defining a space (reorganization) to find or enable content.

Rearranging contents to formulate new space.

Needing the space…drawing the blanks___________…to manipulate a safety, a breathing, an empty, to allow.

In chaos I write, as if pinning down terms could needle a swarm of locusts to a board for inquiry and examination.

In emptiness I build by finding blocks to set: my lover’s eyes, my children’s sounds and bodies and play, a coffee cup, clear desk, blank paper…then Jabes, Shklovsky, Wittgenstein, Blanchot.  Wallace Stevens, Dragomoshchenko, Montale, Bakhtin.

Fencing a fallow field.

I check my pockets for seed.

I’ve been an astronaut.

I can’t remember rain.

I am what I am reported to have said.  As are those around me, if only in our heads or dreams or passion or anger or fear.

Opening an old notebook I am stunned by a page lacquered in heavy charcoals and dark pastels.  I make out in fierce giant letters “WE WILL DIE!”, then scribbled around it, hard to decipher in the noise of the marks, the names of each one in my family.

I think “so begin.”

Stop.  Locate a space.  Breathe.  Then move.

Movement is beginning.

Connectives of  meaning or purpose may follow the following of orders or order the following connections of meaning.

I begin with my body, following my fingers as they formulate form, defining the spaces with words…

“if the meaning-connexion can be set up before the order, then it can also be set up afterwords”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“each is no more or less than the words he is reported to have said”

-Richard Stamelman, of Edmond Jabes’ rabbis

Edmond Jabes

For Example

On By NW FilbertIn JournallingsLeave a comment

Life is a Blur

July…wha-?  whe-?

I’m usually a fairly meticulous and ritualized journal-keeper…for the month of July 2012 I have ONE entry!

Like that.  Colorado…Missouri…enrolled and entering a first week of Master of Library & Information Sciences programs…

kids heading back to 1st grade / 3rd grade / freshman in HS! / JUNIOR in HS! –

wha-?  whe-?

I’m honestly working

at something

creatively

(I remember)

when I find it

it will appear

WordPress dynamos

I catch what I can!

Another brief lapse

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Branson Landing Fountains

with kiddos at Branson and Table Rock Lake

Table Rock Lake, Missouri

Inspirations

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Photography3 Comments

Photos from recent mountain jaunt

Inspirations.

Altitude

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings1 Comment

Altitude

 

“A proposition is only a pretext to go over the limits of what’s proposed…A man in a room does not have strict boundaries until the moment when something forces him to take up one or another activity…

…I don’t have to write all this to be convinced that what is written exists.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“Don’t blame me.  I measure the shadow of the shadow with the shadow,

signifying here.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees” (Paul Valery)

 

I hear a bewildering variety of birds – singing, cawing, chirping, saying.  It exists whether I say so or not.  Some things exist because I say so.

Like dolumbritz and community.

The steps being easy and difficult between.

They leave shadows.  Sometimes.

Metaphor avoids this.

 

If we got to the bottom of it all, we would fall.  Perhaps upward, if direction had anything to do with it (it doesn’t).  So we say “alas.”  Which once was short for the bottom – a-ha! “at last!” there is (here is) THIS.  But now is code for sigh.

She said so, and I heard her, at last.  I sigh.

“I have the feeling that the meaning of things will never be sorted out” is a paraphrase of a poet.  Alas.

Like philosophy: the sequence of excitable sighs, then exhaustion.

 

I am here (wherever that is).  I could describe it and become able to forget, having given it you.  But once described, something else, and then poetry – “always something else.”  Metaphor.  Not likeness but difference.

I am here.

I would know this insofar as it were validated – verified : affirmed.  But that would change and then unknown.  I reach out as like to open without a demonstration, only signs or their perceivers.  Senseless gestures filled with sense.  First one and then another “like meanings smashing each other (I don’t say metaphor)” (Dragomoshchenko).

 

A family of deer just walked in front of me, led by the elder, stopping to curiously stare (extending their field) – a simultaneity.  I gazed back and added noise to which a tail flap and head cock, followed by a smile and a welcoming.  While you notice people on the street, in the office, over lunch.  And a child hears a fairy’s call.  What is and what is not need each other to exist.

“Imagination differs from fantasy as the form ‘is’ from the form ‘if.’  The scope of my imagination is no less than the scope of desire” (Dragomoshchenko).  If he seems to make more sense or to express it is because I provide a context and steal a fragment, thus expanding what it is by what it’s not, which also is if only ‘if’ therefore as written.

“I do not have to write all this to be convinced…”

In fact an opposite’s expanding here…

N Filbert, Pike’s Peak CO, 2012