Category: Journallings

Just posted thoughts and reflections

Another Pause, Another Someday

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

“Words give clothing to hide our nakedness”

–Susan Howe–

“But a word is a bottomless pit”

–Lyn Hejinian–

And then it arrives, unexpectedly, another gap.  She sees a magician in bright jester’s garb, seated on a branch in a tree.  Amid the traffic.  Amid a swarm of bees, of thrumming crows and starlings.  A bat lies in labored breathing on the sidewalk.

Lightning- and Lady- bugs.

Like that, like both.

There is no goal to it in the beginning.  At first.  The seconds’ glow catches you off guard.  “What was that?” neon spot moving in the night.  Imperceptible polka-dotted red creeping carefully over your toe.  Structures pause.  Structures moment.  When realized, when you bring your own accident: awareness.

What pressures turns out to be necessity.  Of deadline, of assignment, of transactional fulfillment – relationship or vocation, even health.  Without apparent choice.  Or ever so long ago.  Why markings called parentheses are shields.  What gives pause.  And stays the pressuring.  For the moment.

An extended kiss.

A lapse in volume.

An ignored alarm.

You find yourself there : (YOU).

The rest of the world lining up, encroaching, exerting itself, themselves, your other selves, against the slender boundaries, the slick curving walls – they can’t be climbed, nor be toppled, only inverted )if you accept the pressures(, or erased as if they’d never happened.  Become brackets.  Prison versus asylum (in its native safety-seeking sense).

(YOU)?  )YOU(?  [YOU]?  ]YOU[?

            Now and then.  Another pause.  Another Sabbath.  A so-called rest.  Time is not the issue (as duration).  Time is at issue in its momentary absence.  Glancing the lightning-bug, bird-call, ladybug feeling out the stem.

“Another pause” with pressures all around.  Expectations or chores.  But no one calling, not this now.  Last week too, unexpected, unprepared, cage door left awry, or finding key in hand.  Parentheses.  And then you sleep that active way we call “rest.”  For a moment.  You make, for the joy of making, or not.  Either way is pleasure.  Or pleasant at the most.

Such as now, another pause, this day, another Someday that arrived.

Inscribing a Now

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing7 Comments

Inscribing a Now

 

Today I just feel like writing.  I don’t have anything in particular to say, no specific emotion I am needing to express (that I know; or am aware of), simply a kind of quiet delight in our capacity to make language.  To fit words together, to knit our lives, to be.

Enormously unusual (I cannot stress that enough!) it is around 50 degrees and solidly overcast in Kansas this June 1st.  Not humid even, but sprinkling now and again, the kind of precipitation you could enter and be refreshed, but a long time in getting wet.  As if the sky is asking us to take it easy, to relax, be reprieved, just enjoy.

My children are reading and practicing stringed instruments; my wife is making sounds that are delicious as she struggles with a painting; my room is dark.  These are moments of peace, are unexpected, a relief, a protection, a comforted grief.

Language is a beautiful necessity, unnecessarily.  Like bodies and voices, flowers and food.  Like mountains.  Oh, necessity can be argued for each, but what’s the point?  The world is, and that’s enough, that’s what’s important.  It seems.  And what a hinge-word!  It means we’ll never know, and that’s not the point.  Is must be different from certainty.

Perhaps I’m engaging a kingdom of “trust”?

An as-if-ness that isn’t afraid?

How little I know.

 

So the ambling to no purpose again.  “Angling” is how I heard it in my mind.  Seems it must be so.  To language in leisure must be near to the impulse of finding to-do for a bored adolescent.  Dropping a line.  Seeing what bites.  Or even just nibbles.

Sprinkling rain.  Haphazard, unpatternable, occasions.  Delight.

No expectation, desire (that’s pressing).  Just a wandering way.

It evokes a wishing-well torso for me.  So many words in the world used in anxiety, in need.  So much language and gesture, expression and sign, mobilized to “get” or “secure;” “ensure” or “relieve.”

Not that, not right now, not need.  Just rest, an in-pleasuring, a reprieve.  Just an hello or a thanks.  A “notice that?” or an “indeed.”  An agreement of person and term, an almost “natural” weave.

Sounds and sense, tones and rhythms, raindrops tickling shingles and birds.  Tires whispering snare-drum waters, puddles triangle-tinkling away.

Hello.  These are words.  It feels good to shape them – a cursive-recursive flow.  To be real (enough), here (enough), to know (enough) to inscribe.  What a pleasure, a leisure, a joy.

Thank you, world, for that hour.

Passing Thoughts

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces, Writing5 Comments

Passing Thoughts

“People don’t always understand what they see…it’s always better with a few verses”

-Henri Rousseau-

“I don’t understand it.  The injustice of it, the random, unpatternable thing life is, feels like guilt, at first, and then matures (thought the verb is obscene in the context) into sorrow.”

-Larry Levis-

            I often feel something that must be near sorrow when I pretend for a moment that I am able to reflect or observe my own life.

Usually this occurs a few minutes after everyone that inhabits the home in which I live have tottered off to their beds or their dreams or wherever it is that they go when they’re alone.  I pour myself a cup of coffee, take on cigarette out of its case, and swing gently on the porch in the night’s dark.

At first, I simply listen.  For the trees, the breeze, my breath.  Then I let my eyes  gaze.  Neither here nor there but some middle-distance that never asks to focus.  Three or four puffs in, two or three sips of day-old reheated coffee, and I begin to feel.  My body reports its day.  How long it has been awake, what muscles have been used, what nutrients processed (or wasted).  I start to find emotions.  Perhaps lodged in the elbows or neck, gut or temples or knees.  Places they sneak off to in the day’s demands.  I gain what feels like a sense of things.  A “this is what you’ve enjoyed, endured, has transpired in your waking.”

And I breathe.  The smoke, exhaling, tells me so.  And the knowing the days that remain are smaller.  And that the days that compose me stretch out.  And I wonder.  “I don’t understand it.”  It baffles me so.

I have the impression throughout my aging frame, that so many places, engagements, and events that require all of me should not feel so dangerous, such threatening.  That the places we spill for one another, on one another – where we come forth – why do we fear so deeply? and try so hard? – why don’t they give rise to elation rather than wound?

I see moments, occasions, and encounters that have scared me to my silent howls – but from here, now, look like people in love giving themselves or trying to – declaring, expressing, vulnerably opening.  Why the fullness of human persons should overwhelm and frighten us so, when we are also one of them – why is this?

Why do I not feel I can hold my own in another’s anger or grief, sorrow or fear?  What is so uncomfortable about difficulty and complexity and unknowns?

The haunting guilt of finitude, of insufficiency, eventually levels out toward a universe of conundrum peopled with questions, and a kind of sorrow and grace seeps in.

By now my smoke has gone out, the coffee has cooled, and it is high time I join my spouse in our final accord.  The waves rise, they wash out.  They rise again.  There is a passing, and some passage, it is ephemeral and sure, and it goes on.

All these passing thoughts, and days.

I don’t understand what I see, but it’s usually better with a few verses…

“I have the suspicion that the meaning of things

will never be sorted out”

-Denis Johnson-

 

(click image for musical accompaniment to the text:

“Broken” by S. Carey)

(it’s worth listening to even if not reading all the text)

First Award / Acknowledgment

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces7 Comments

I would like to thank G.E. at http://thedawnerupts.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/more-to-be-thankful-for/ for nominating myself and others for the “One Lovely Blog Award.”  It is nice to know that our work is being read and that people are also glad that they are reading it.

7 things you wouldn’t already know about me?

1.  I’m a classically trained musician

2.  I have a name.

3.  I actually exist in space and time, embodied.

4.  I am part of a large complex rewarding family.

5.  I really really really like the music of Mark Kozelek

6.  I am looking for work in the writing field.

7.  I studied in Jerusalem, Heidelberg and Oxford during undergraduate days.

I commend to you the following:

Written in Water

brainsnorts, inc.

very small kitchen

the dad poet

life in relation to art

pigment pondering

Alphabet Soup Miniscule

canadian art junkie

the light ekphrastic

severnspoon

Anton Jarrod

you each and so many more i would love to press – lovely blogs indeed

the “rules” for the award, I guess, are to thank and link and nominate 10 or so you likewise think are lovely

thanks all!

The Bewildered Bewildering (attempts toward clear thinking)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

Searching for truth(s)

As one attempts to come nearer to one’s existence as a human – its systems, structures and functions – from mental imaginative realms down to cellular genetic levels – the complexity and confluences involved can be bewildering.

Are bewildering.

It is easy to get one’s self “lost” as a human being.  On literally billions of levels we participate in constant (and I mean unceasing) input and output of information, movement, form, energy and so on.  It’s more than we can individually handle.  Yet we are made to.

In other words, it is we as individual humans – our bodies, our minds and experiences – doing the bewildering we find bewildering.  Perhaps this is my first noble truth: consciousness means being aware of and bewildered by our bewilderment.

How to proceed?  There are a bewildering amount of possibilities and processes for us bewildered humans to bewilder our way into.  We can study, forge purposeful relationships, work, play, think, dream, parent, fight or flee our bewilderment.  Opened up, we do not know the options or capabilities, the extent our bewilderment can reach.

Everything is strange.  If this were my second noble suggestion, it would imply that with each moment of our existence we are encountering the unknown.  We recognize our existence by dissimilarity, non-identity, difference.  This makes all things new.  We literally have never been where we are in space, time or living at any instant, before.  We do not re-live, we are ever living-into.  The contents of the past can become part of our structuring and processing, but nothing repeats, everything “enters.”  Each no-time now is brand new experience of unknown reality, experienced, imagined, interpreted, perceived and felt by us in incalculable ways through a vortex of communications and processes we have very little control over.

We, the producing products.  Perhaps this is noble human notation number 3.  What happens in our bewilderment of presentness is that our individuality opened out ubiquitously functions to produce experiences which are products of our experiencing.  In other words we are unceasing experimentors producing experiences as our products.  It all applies; it all exports.  There are no deletions, erasures or extractions – only new experiences, new dissimilar moments of ongoing processing.

There is no exit from this process.  Form 4: NO EXIT.  Imagined observation, fabricated explanation, hypothetical objectivity, invented theories, meanings, interpretations of sense – none of these removes us from our experiencing or transfers us to any other point-of-view from our individual field.  Bewildering in our bewildering surround.  Semblances, “insights,” knowledge and so on are just pieces of the ongoing differentiation in bewilderment.  How we exist, perhaps not the ant or paramecium or tree cell.  But, then again, perhaps so!

If a lion spoke we wouldn’t understand them, Wittgenstein proffered.  Another way of saying we’re us, bewildered and bewildering beasts, forging into the unknown.  Our access limiting in its unlimitedness (i.e. finitude); systematically mind-blowing and ecstatically depressing in an awe-full or awe-some(?) way.

Be human.  Be glad for it.  Be wilder.

N Filbert 2012

Baffling Wisdom (really a long roundabout babble aimed towards my wife)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing1 Comment

Going back through the writings that have been piling up on, around and near my desk over the past few days working out the hoped-for verbalization of whatever it is that’s been stirring around in my brain I ran across a few more pages that seemed interesting / to the purpose…

“I am looking for words….”

Baffling Wisdom

i.e. thinking things through

Swarm. Absorb. (the words, pt. 2)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Photography, Poetry, Writing2 Comments

Swarm.  Absorb.

 

metaphor:  the entire discography of Mark Kozelek (+ Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) / each version of Max Richter’s “Haunted Ocean” on dizzying random repeat – this is the setting:  atmosphere.  environment.  “context.”

metaphor:  the Kansas sky in storm

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            metaphor:  dealing with Ache.  (“being human”)

metaphor:  “Control without Hierarchy” by Deborah M. Gordon…on some page in a book called Swarm by Lucas Felzmann:

“A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something that people don’t know how to do: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer.  It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies…Life in all its forms is messy, surprising, and complicated.  It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy.  We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions.  Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs – without any person directing another, or having more power than another.  Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in nature.”

think of language.

            what is scattered widely or uniquely ubiquitous – call it “swarm.”

“I”…lost.

I know I cannot gather to a grown pillar of I-ness, something you might recognize, could “identify.”

I know I cannot be where I am as long as “time” and “space” function effectively in my frames of reference…

I spread.

I swarm.

“I-swarm”

(the “human” world-situation)

            Leaving that aside.

How might one (dependent on two or more in order to, well, in order to simply “be”)

how might that one (singular mark – “/”) handle (manage? survive?) “its” Ache?

“To be or not to be, that IS the question”

(o wise god)

            So I split…up…

I canvas the sky, the context, the landscape, the sitz im leben, in fragments.

I approach, engage, invade the world like shot scattered from the anguished burst of a wombgun.

I-particle.

I-swarm.

Absorb.

from “Swarm” by Lukas Felzmann

            Seminal-syllable words resound –

– Let their pulse reverberate your bodies like hymns –

God.  Void.  I.  You.  Song.  Life.  Death.  Love.  Real.  Being. (Not).

and so on…

all with no definition…

IS.  IT.  THIS.

nowhere near

where we mean to be.

Absorb.

Swarm.

from Swarm by Lukas Felzmann

            In this situation then,

of too much

of grave luck

(all that hope and final destitution)

I swarm.  I absorb.

I decenter.  I explode.

I desist in pretense

in sense

I spread.

One mark….thousands of pixels….without hierarchy

(a swarm of cells)

(a flock of birds)

(a fish in school)

I swarm.

I absorb.

[ – I love you – ]

 -for my wife

Some Stellar Instigations

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Writing3 Comments

“Multiple incompatible hypotheses are needed to provide an adequate account of any phenomenon – aesthetic, material or psychological… which of course means no explanation at all”

–Charles Bernstein–

“All literature, highbrow or low, from (at least) the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction…All novels are sequels; influence is bliss”

–Michael Chabon–

“You must talk with two tongues, if you do not wish to cause confusion”

–Wyndham Lewis–

“Unknowing does not come before knowing but very long after”
-Edmond Jabes-

“Human speech is made of words that have been created a long time ago; those words are preserved in dictionaries, but poets and writers change”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“I wanted to read.  Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.”

-Alan Jacobs-

Ache ( the words, pt. 1)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing6 Comments

I think it significant that this post and these thoughts were constructed/composed to Max Richter‘s composition “The Haunted Ocean 4” from his Waltz With Bashir soundtrack.  I have been unable to figure out how to load that piece here but so wanted you to be able to listen while you read.  I have found “Haunted Ocean 1” which has similar themes, but if you are able to listen to #4 please do!

(our environment writes as much as we do)

Ache

 

Borges writes “immanence,” Blanchot “infinite” and “void;” Beckett’s “dim” is Jabes’ “absence.”

– Let the attributes ring in your bodies like hymn –

Someone’s “silencio” is another one’s “vague.”  Heidegger’s “Dasein,” a collective of “Tao’s.”

Whence this pull toward placed-ness, toward wholes, toward meaning?

What evidence have we that this could ever be the case?

From “birth”?  Or “death”?  And what might we mean by “life”?

Words.

Language.

“words are not the reality of language: words – by themselves – do not exist”

–Jorge Luis Borges–

He illustrates this simply.  And might be demonstrated even more concisely, like this:

God.  Dieu.  יהוה.  Allah.  and so on…

Or, with Borges:

“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero recorder” (12 words)

“In a place in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall”  (14 words)

“En un pueblo manchego cuyo nombre no quiero recorder”  (9 words)

“In a Manchegan village whose name I don’t want to recall”  (11 words)

or

I love you.  Te amo.  J’taime.  Я тебя люблю etc…

or

I adore, crave, honor, respect, delight, select, prefer…

            It isn’t the words, it’s the language.  And the language isn’t just words.

Ache.

Torment lies here.  Angst, frustration, agitation, anger and want.  Fear and inadequacy, limitation and failure, desire and doom.

Ache.

If the words not the thing nor the thing without sign or presentation…for what, for what do we yearn?

Ache.

We seem unable to be HERE, PRESENT, and simultaneously FULLY SO.  Some faculty, some capacity slighted.  Either intellect suffers to passion, or understanding commands immersive sensation.  Ever a split, a just-nigh or just-shy.

Ache.

To long for, to crave covet and burn…

Ache.

My love is absent.  I ache, I yearn.  But when she returns and is present, I lose the pregnant and consumptive fullness of her absence.

Either way I ache, for more, for all – for comprehensive life.

            Called by “I,” “void” or “it.”  “Being,” “nirvana” or “love.”  “Youth” or “joy” or “wholeness.”  “Pleasure” “emptiness” or “thou.”  Nothing.  or All.

I name it Ache, today, intending by it some constitutive condition or state, a description of “living,”

by which so many meanings are lost,

and I ache.

And so it begins…again…beginning within…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Traces, Writing2 Comments

Starting Out

 

And so it begins, as it so often does, begun long ago.

With the tone of a quest – an inception, a conflict, a cure.  Anxieties of disillusionment and fear, inadequacy and doubt, peppering the path.  But hopes too, and promise – what seem like successes or substance occur ascend along the way.  Perhaps desire with approximations of love, and frustrations translated to passion or anger.  Always there is grief and loss, what marks out time, and makes our days memorable.  Why we attend at all, the keeping track and transformations, insistent process of our undoing.

For once arrived in the scene, what else is there but the variegated haul to a destined demise?  Is it, then, always the “same ol’” fresh story?  A posited entity, a series of markings – accruals and deletions – to the closure of cessation?  What else might be told?  To what purpose?

There are moments, you say, moments of pause or release, elation or tragedy that form knots in the threads.  These might be dislocated to some profit, no?  At least for the living?

Midstream, and in motion you might trace it, you say, inscribing what’s open, what opens…emergence itself.  The clutter that punctuates being – its in-forming and injury?

Perhaps.  To guide others along possible pitfalls or options; to preserve instants and subjects; to fuel or to warn.  Perhaps.  Or simply to dream, to escape the inevitable awhile – what’s wrong with that?  That we in the glory and grind take a break, imagined or not, and drift or pursue, engage or elope to some alternate, parallel course?

What is: possible.

All of it is.  The values are relative, individuated.  Personal.  There’s no accounting for taste or of preference to dwell.  The matter hardly matters, after all, can be apparently “explained” (see also – epigenetics, chaos, theory and the like).  How we journey or survive, become or desist is an isolate concern.  Effecting all.

And there’s the rub, this sense of pattern, of system, of interconnectivity.  The impression that all might belong.  It won’t be long.  Insufficient gravity and incommensurate propulsion.  And so we move, arrange, derange, seeking for forms like the banks, or directions like currents.  We flow.  And it begins again, beginning within, as it always does, begun so long ago…

N Filbert