Category: Journallings

Just posted thoughts and reflections

Unknown and Unnamed Undoing: the swoon and the swarm (a kind of mathematics to be continued in rain)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

Unknown and Unnamed experiences: the swoon and the swarm

 

I hadn’t remembered it like this (trying not to remember).  That all of it got into you.  That all of it came out!

Immersion.  Enthrallment.  Ecstasy – words that come, to mind.

That if en-joined, then out-sourced.  Becoming indecipherable – like epistemology.

A moment’s rush, for example.  I encounter – which encountering looks like insertion and abstraction on me.  I move toward, feel it out, then back off and observe.  Active, passive; a swing, a rocking boat.

This is different.  Inundation, a flood.  Unable to say what’s mine, what’s not; who’s me, who’s you.  Unable, frankly, to say, at all.  Only be.

Motion, reception; injunction and release.

Think sky-diving: that decision to jump, trusting something, someone will hold together as form in all that air.  Like diving the deep blue sea, compression surround, that some element will remain intact without ground or solidity.

It works that way.  Give and take, see and saw, this uncanny to and fro of body, perceptions, breath.  Eyes contact then fog to some self between.  Fleshes – distinct and specific – now con-fused.  Who’s sweat?  Who’s secretions?  It’s sticky, yes, like that – a gluey bond.

Then the wave, the distended moment – incalculable clockwork – where all borders and boundaries seem lost, some extended and mutual sigh or moan within which the voice is other and the same without identity.

The swoon of it.  The swarm.

Dizzying rush of blood as warmth or wind; eyes roll back, also in, but not to my darkness.  As if limbless or prosthetically invented, my body grows – grows yours or ours or contracts to another covering, but inside-out.

As if leap or let go were no longer options, but instinct.

As if hot and cold – undifferentiated – some something that must define pleasure –

as in emptiness, fullness

the yin, the yang

a cellular entanglement

The swoon, the swarm

emerge

But what?  Or whom?

And what occurs in the median?

Who were that?                                                                                                       What was those?

The swoon, the swirl, the swarm.

            No one effecting.  Effected.  What does that indicate?

Nothing, essential to event – if nothing, than an absence utterly imbued.

A radiance, evocation,

like a sleeping brain on dreams…

with-you, the unknown gets no/w/here.

Whatever the constants, coefficients and variables, given the operator as convergence, the equation = whole,

where the w stands for we,

without which none – (“hole”).

Affecting substance…no one gains currency…necessity (no 1, but at least 2)… and then – ?

No one, unknown, unnamed, no/w/here as 0+O

where O stands for other

in this case, you

O requiring as much as I

inferring – ?

you can’t have 1 without anOther

but where anOther occurs must be at least 1 (other)

even if unknown, unnamed

in order to be lost and found in the joining

the immersion and enthrallment

the ecstasy

I, in instances of jell-o

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

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I, in instants, divested

 

Let me put it this way:  I find mysterious pockets of habitual thinking functioning like cradles of jell-o.

Say couple’s therapy is called for: I consciously feel gung-ho, pro-choice, empowered by trust and intention and reciprocal hope.  Our determination, our hope.  But the rear half of my skull, the scape my subject lands in, I realize is slicky, silently and squishily snuggling into a jello-y bed of “there’s something wrong with me.  I’ve got the problems.  We’re really trying to figure out why I’m so hard to live with; how my moods impede relational success and happiness; my fears – intimacy.  If the truth were told, my spouse is acting graciously and sacrificially in order to get me help.”  It’s as natural as instinct for me to believe I’m a burden, a difficulty, a special case.

The endless desires of youth.  Our adolescents seem never to be satisfied (perhaps aren’t even “meant” – biologically, psychologically, socially, developmentally – to be), rarely “up” for family events or participation in chores, games or outings.  Seem preoccupied with themselves and their wants and preferences, shifts and swerves.  Rationally – I sense the raging hormones; the violent ego-mania seeking a code, a reflection, its own DNA; the psychoses of self/other, boy/girl, love/lust and so forth – upheaval and growth!  But my torso is wiggling and sliding itself into the slushy comfort of “I have no idea how to guide these kids!  Who am I to parent and protect, encourage and inspire?  I’m just as fragmented, uncertain, conflicted, aroused and cynical as these guys!  No way I’m good enough, strong enough, wise enough, and so on… unqualified to father, even at directing myself!”

The list goes on – as reader, writer, artist.  As male, friend, laborer.  As handyman, citizen, spouse.  As mind, as body, as conglomerate selves:

How does it come so natively to cuddle in, automatically, unself-consciously and familiarly into negative perceptions, fraught with inadequacy, victimhood and failure, with no perpetrator(s) to blame?

Ideologically, philosophically, linguistically, aesthetically, psychologically, and so on, I can adapt party lines and mottos of health, truth, justice, fallibility and courage; equality and imperfection; becoming and process,

but wherever this social solidarity is not called-for or aimed at, this prompting to blend toward community or “normalcy,” my actual mind-body-complex demonstrates an incredible proclivity to nestle and burrow into a gooey surround of personal suspicion and doubt, misgivings and cynicism…like a worm to mud, or a fossil its imprint.

What the I/eye prefers.

How we see what we see.

How something – something – (but what is it?!)

contradicts mind’s understanding and body’s sensation/perception/evidence and goes its own hellbent way in whatever direction it selects!?

I-cipher.

I-estrangement.

I-observer,

                                                            for instants,

for instance.

The Unknown Unnamed scribble-sketches – just a minute

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, Journallings, Traces, Writing1 Comment
overweight head, foreshortened body (misjudges lankiness for heft), unintended while inscribing a circle, lines of meaning?, where the webs are sourced?, self-reflexion

I, the infinite? instants…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

I, Gelaftimus

 

A jumble of words.  A spasm, a syndrome.  The spraying of a passing fancy, designation.

You don’t know where I got these words, nor do I, or only rarely.  A voided origin, a lifetime suffering verbs and the masks of nouns.

Experience: feels like something moving forward, somethings breaking and tumbling about it.  “Feels like.”

A kind of perceptual first instance, shaped by everything before, altered by everything after.

At the limit then, boundary-lip, threshold.  Moving, and that ceaselessly.  Colliding.

A poet, after committing suicide in his youth, now festering under the ground, is found to have remarked that “a tree grows upward…the path of least resistance.”  So most of us.

Whatever “us” might mean, a jumble of words, perhaps a spasm, unconscious and involuntary instinct, so carefully and meticulously learned: to say.

Gelaftimus is what I feel today, this moment, my wife sitting and stewing on her couch, me (whatever “me” might mean) crabbing over my desk, this white paper, with a ball-point pen, scribbling – “a jumble of words, a spasm.  A syndrome.”  Perhaps.  But it is gelaftimus, I tell you that.

Early on I was assigned this particular label: “Nathan,” only later coming to find that “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context.  In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.”  (V.N. Volosinov, et. al.)  “Feels like” experience.

Needless to say, “I” have struggled with defining the cluster of words “I,” “Nathan,” “man,” “boy,” “me,” “son,” “husband,” “father” and so on in their perpetually altered contexts, circumstances and situations, ever re-de-term-in-ing their possible meanings.

A jumble of words.  A spasm and syndrome.  Instinct and accomplishment (accomplice-ment?)

My wife, last night on the swing, beside me, in the dark, on the porch, spoke of “not being allowed to say” as a child – so very many experiences “not to talk about” –  frozen (perhaps) in their places or processed without knowledge dementedly deep underground (out of sight, out of mind, and so forth).

Contextually, she was addressing the decades-old infancy of “figuring out the world around me and my relation in and to it.”

“Reality works in overt mystery”

–Macedonio Fernandez–

which I found (what she said) to feel like truth (as in actuality) – the jumble of words, the spasms and syndromes of “making words fit.”  The odd difficulty we sometimes name “maturity,” i.e. beginning and growth.

I would confuse myself in this (were I to find me).

Alas it floats on the crest of the wave, breaks and spreads on the shore, regathers in a reflective pool, drifts away and starts again in fragments and particles.

Poised on a threshold, hardly poised.  Rather in the breeze, a metaphor passing hands.

This jumble of words.  Syndromes and spasms.  Accumulated masterfully and haphazardly over ages and accidents.  Feels like, experience.

Gelaftimus, today.

 

“A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; [or making it fit with prefabricated words? –N.F.] and in writing [that babble at the crest of the wave –N.F.] one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) [?! –N.F.] and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, [ever creating more waves – N.F.] it makes words to fit it [or fits it to words which recognize? – N.F.]”

–Virginia Woolf–

I, for Instants, inevitable infinity

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Poetry, Writing3 Comments

Attempts at Auto-bio-graphy, or, self-life-writing, or, the inevitably ineffable

 

longitude

lassitude

 

aberrations of pain

with twisting serpents

 

origin: absence

defined by failure and loss

the inevitably ineffable

 

so say it

I do not love myself

nor find a self to love

and it’s nobody’s fault

but mine

(who?)

 

a descent of crows

inevitable,

ineffable,

undone

and scoring marks

into a void

 

of absence

and solitude

without a solo

 

no validation

no remorse

an abyss of ontology

and chaos of course

 

vocation

fashioning masks

of contexts

and stories

 

aberrations

of hypotheses

blind, deaf

and dumb

 

insurmountable

point

Borges’ Aleph

all,

if

 

uncertain

promise

trial and error

errantly

 

possible

within, without

and unlikely

unless

 

I do not love myself

and find no self to love

and it’s nobody’s fault

but mine

(whose?)

unless

undone

inevitably

ineffable

 

I say

 

I, for Instants: the writer question

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

I the Question; I the Answer That Does Not Satisfy

“I am both wound and knife”

E.M. Cioran

“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river;

it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger;

it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Jorge Luis Borges

“The question inaugurates a type of relation characterized by openness and free movment; and what it must be satisfied with closes and arrests it.  The question awaits an answer, but the answer does not appease the question, and even if it puts an end to the question, it does not put an end to the waiting that is the question of the question.”

Maurice Blanchot

“all things oscillate round me, and I with them, an uncertainty unto myself.

All for me is incoherence and change.  All is mystery and all is meaning…”

Fernando Pessoa

 

I am the writer.  Am I also what is written?

Both wound and knife.

I am the husband?  What the husband does.

I am their father.  Am I also their fathering?

 

I am the writer.  Not the writer I believe I am, want to be, imagine.  Am I the writer?  What is written does not appease, does not satisfy.  I am waiting, asking, waiting in openness for possibility.  I am the answering I do not desire.

 

Am I what is written?  Partial answers.  Fragments pieced together forming questions.  I wait.  Am I the one who waits?  While writing?

 

I love.  Do I love?  I answer by loving.  I am dissatisfied by my loving – it is not what I had hoped, was waiting toward, believed possible.  I am not the lover I asked for.

 

I feel I am the open, the possibility – the questioning.  My answering closes, arrests, delimits me.  I am neither satisfied nor appeased.

 

I am the human.  Am I human?  If I answer for that I am dissatisfied, given the question, the possible replies.

 

I write I am the writer, the one writing, this phrase of the question.  Its answer never satisfies, leaves me waiting, asking again, anew.  The questions.

 

“the anarchist keeps watch within us and opposes our resignations”

E.M. Cioran

 

The Temptation to Exist

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

“’I am both wound and knife’ – that is our absolute, our eternity”

“the idolatry of becoming”

“blasted joys and jubilant despair”

E.M. Cioran

The Temptation to Exi(s)t

 

We’ve got our words all backwards.  Ever trapped in what we deny.  Our escape = net.

Space.  Time.

If we say it is all relative, yet act.  “Choose.”  Freedom is nothing.  The words, then, are all backwards, you see, we “mean” our opposites.

Desire.

Could cumulate as the evil.  But still – you see?  Hope for understanding, for wisdom, knowledge, some trivial insight.  Log of shipwreck: cling.

Desire.

Another enemy: “intensity.”  Synonym “passion,” carpe diem.  Opposite: freedom.

In-tense-ity.  State of inhabiting tension, clinging to stress, to invite suffering (“jubilant despair”).  Opposite: being. freedom.

A blasted joy.  (Suffering).  Opposite of freedom: want.  Making antonyms by definition: “to be.”

If we seize, choose, behave, acquire, reach, speak, move…”the idolatry of becoming” – antonym? = freedom.

Kingdom equals freedom.  Queendom.  Selfdom.  “To be”-dom.  Backwards words.  Backwords.

Opposite of intense: rest, quietude : thought and action one : in-sane.  Opposite of want, greed : poverty : possession-less, without, without within : beggar.

Freedom : opposite : control.  Self-, other-, environmental-, habitation-, security-.

Be/have : to exist is to grab, to steal, to do violence.  Being + having : system : be/have.  Opposite: freedom.

Say it backwards.  We say it backwards.

I shout “freedom” driving the blade into my throat, bloody want.  Cannot “have.”  Are (are NOT = desire to become – false worship – be/having).

Religion : human organization to be/have.  Become.  To be.  Religion as an argument for (against) existence.

Already ARE.  Before “being,” prior to “having.”  No need : freedom.  “Meaning” the opposite of what we say.

We’ve got our words backwords.

Backwards: have-been.  There it is clear.

The temptation of the system, the race or kind, was “to be” as something to have, to get, to come into, be-come…that existence was a goal, something to arrive at, achieve, seizing the days, the moments,

Synonyms: act, will, intent, purpose, do.make.say.think. to mean

Synonym: be/having

Opposite: freedom.

Existence having been from the first.

Having been = at the last.

Synonym : freedom : nothing.

 

A different kind of personal (2)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing2 Comments

secondly,

a fresh stack from the library yesterday…to soak into…

The Essential Peirce (vol. 1) – my hero

How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Blakewell

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Of Learned Ignorance by Nicolas Cusanus

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

The Temptation to Exist by E.M. Cioran

great philosophers who failed at love by andrew shaffer

Signeponge by Jacques Derrida

Drawing from the Glyptothek by Jim Dine

joy!

Stopping to think, or, “not finding my own words,” or, “something to uncommunicate” (Blanchot)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, Writing2 Comments

My Own Words

 

            Stopping to think, and using my tongue, a silent and plural speech, writing, how thinking does not stop.

There are clouds, many-layered in many motions, colluding, in sky.

I would see them, were I to face the outside.

Inside,  no difference.

Letting speech beyond.  No beyond, in part.

I had written, earlier, “so not finding my own words…”

A song was playing (is playing, NOW) in which a deep-voiced singer repeats “all thoughts are prey to some beast.”  He repeats the phrase enough times (so that it seems like more than enough) that I hear it: the phrase, his voice, drums and strings.

Earlier it was about trees and soil, beach and sea, which have no language.  I had thought perhaps I did.  “Not finding my own words,” alas.

It makes for quiet.  A banner fastened over the mouth: blood-red, pitch-black.

Begun before, though, the plural.

Taken outside by the hand.  Inside, outside – no difference.  “Not finding my own words,” as earlier.

B called it “weariness” and “infinite conversation,” requiring interruption.  Causing a silence (stubborn, sullen) and a listening (unavoidable, imposed).  Plurality.  “Not finding my own words,” I pilfer.

Dissemination.

The launch – erasing – opposite of launch.

Why I like the word “thrum” (“not finding my own words”) and “inscribe.”

Bent, crooked, stooped over a desk with a lamp of single bulb, I imagine “scribe” as “scholar.”  Inscription going both ways, like tying a knot requires both ends.  Binding.

Such physicality to the immaterial.

As easy as lying (also snatched from a spine).

Stopping to think on how thinking never ceases.

“Not finding my own words” I turn, reverting to the silent plural speech of my mouth’s hand.

I call it “writing,” not finding my own words, even for that.

N Filbert, 2012

A different sort of personal

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings3 Comments

Good day to all!

It’s a rare, propitious 48 degree morning in Kansas – thickly clouded, “chill” instead of “warm” or “mild” Spring day (comes like a gift).

I have some posts for the day, and they will follow, but am experiencing an initial gladness that I wanted to honor by saying.

Firstly, I don’t know that there is any other song I prefer to enter any day with than this:

Caspian: Epochs in Dmaj

thank you guys. (every day)

Secondly.  (more to come)