Category: Journallings

Just posted thoughts and reflections

Writer Neurosis…inevitable…dose of reality…purely journaling

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing1 Comment

This morning my horrorscope advised me not to begin new projects but to complete the ones underway.  We don’t put a lot of stock in the stars in my household, but I reflected on this one for awhile…jotting the following in my journal:

Projects piling up

pages and pages in manuscript

–          all of them –

 

my work sustains

only immaterial parts of myself –

Nothing, else

 

so stacks

and stacks

and stacks

of papers filled by pens

notebooks, journals, folders full

 

a wife, seven children

a house, utilities

a car, a yard, fuel

food, shelter, clothing

activities

 

no way to insure

no bartering fodder

just thought

and effort

and art

and thousands of books read, to read

 

what are these values?

what is my “system”?

beliefs?

 

I see a photograph

–          it becomes words

I view a painting

–          becomes words

hear music and speech

–          becomes text

feel emotions, bodies

–          become language

taste food or drink

–          and write

hope, dream, surmise

–          and write

read, learn, look & listen

–          for words

“as if the language itself could take us where it will never go”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

p.s. unfortunately,  I seem inherently averse to “submission” in any form… L  alas

I, for instants…renewed?

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

Neologism

I wish I were an I, some gathered locus of selves, remarkable.

A fullness that might be characterized, signified.

Even the assortment of lines that structure my name – hundreds of corners and swerves, crossings and redirections, don’t represent much of me.

And the little pronouns – they might direct one toward the objective subject that I am, but they’re pointing everywhere.

So I scribble, sketch, doodle and draw, adding lines upon lines, erasing, rewriting, deleting and searching thesauri and definitions…

It comes out looking like this:

or sometimes this:

signs and diagrams, theoretical possibilities, charts and patterns, fantasies, dreams

ever in search of the neologism

some necessary invented term

Writing Exorcise?

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing6 Comments

The Textures of Other

Whatever your age when reading this, I’m asking you to remember.

It’s an experiment beggaring proof.

Find a comfortable position and setting – a favorite chair and drink, your all-time essential musical accompaniment, the woods, a mountain, a porch.  Wherever it is, whatever the surround that most allows you to relax, let go, and drift.

Don’t think, exactly, just breathe and attend.  Float or lie down.  Allow your torso to lead.  Feel your legs, your shoulders, the back of your head – sense them with your mind.

Once all of you feels reprieve, you’re under no specific pressures, these moments are free and they belong to you.  You’re not dead yet, not needed anywhere, whatever pains you feel are truly part of your reality, NOW.  Close your eyes, gently.  Hear the air traveling into your nose, and quietly, slowly, exhale.

Be soft.  Be silent.  Be held.  NOW.  Notice a finger curled on a cup, an ankle or toe moving to or fro – give them a break, let them stop awhile.  Be still.  Allow your lungs, your heart, to keep time alive.

Good.  Stay.  Just be – you – sitting/lying/leaning/standing, wherever you are, hearing what you hear, touching where you touch, smelling, feeling your mouth with your tongue… rest.

Now drift: float over, stroll, swim, whatever is easiest for you, carefully, openly, gently back into your years.  Begin here or with your earliest memories…anywhere…

What are they made of?

Colors?  Sounds?  Sights?  Faces?  Places?  all of these?  Examine on, calmly.  Are they combinatory?  An edge of a counter in a childhood kitchen, your mother’s back at sink or stove, a glinting sun through a window?  The weight of your first tiny child in your lap, your forearms and fingers cradling its downy skull?  The tumult of a raft on rapids, against boulders, rush and foam?  The excited terror of walking the steps to preschool, or path to college dorm?  Your grandfather pale in coffin?

Where do you go?  What comes?  Do you still hear earth-thudding booms of ammunition?  Wails of the bleeding faces dying?  A friend’s laughter, your own, good tears?  Slaps of fists, warmth of hugs, wet of kisses?

How many bare arms caress your naked body?  Whose?  Can you smell their skin?

First mountain-view.  First foreign city.  First flown kite.  First Christmas recalled.  A sibling.  A parent.  A pet.  Be there, each where and when, touch in.

Where are they?  Can you hear voices?  Whispers?  In moments you were celebrated – does your chest still jitter?  Play favorites.  Go for good.  Relive, as it were, whatever you consider joy.

What’s it like?

What are you viewing?  What do you “feel”?  What might it “mean”?

Remember.

Stay relaxed if you can.  Walk the empty morning pasture alone.  Recall bonfires, ocean winds, swingsets, music.  Dream revisitations.

I’d love to know what you’re finding, how you are.  Take your time – these are yours.

Reach into the textures.  The moments belong.

 

Now hope.

And renew.

We get to.

 

Affinities : Possessing the Wordless

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing4 Comments

The following quotations are from “Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)” by Jim Dine.  Where he uses “draw” or “drawing” substitute “write” or “writing” and I find a remarkable similarity with my own experience making things…I find his work and thought quite inspiring to my own and wanted to share with you many writers/artists/thinkers…

 

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“I’ve always had a wish to put down  marks”

“My mind was going and so was my hand”

“I love building up, erasing, losing it, bringing it back, taking it away.  I trust my method of not trusting”

“He’s always so frightened of failure and of finishing, and that moves me” (of Giacometti)

“But what is really the optimal situation for me is to get my brain around what I’m trying to do.  That’s all.”

“I have a total connection between my hand and my eye – it’s just that I can’t see sometimes”

“Drawing is not an exercise.  Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere.  Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey.  For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere.  The quest is to keep the thing alive – “

“I’m interested in making a vehicle within which it is possible to feel certain things…And these emotions don’t have words.  They really don’t”

“I want to get my drawing out of my heart the way photography accesses my marginal thoughts and images”

“The state of wanting to draw something, for me, is a way to capture it and that’s a primary emotion for me.”

“I want to possess them and what better way of possessing them than to draw them.  The reason I wanted to possess them is they reminded me of other things that are wordless”

“Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life”

THANK YOU JIM DINE!

I, for Instants, You

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, Poetry, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

I, for Instants, You

 

“Simply to name it is to con-

fuse it, altogether:

here now you

is a form you will not fill”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

 

“artists very often forget that their work holds the secret of true time:

not empty eternity but the life of the instant”

-Octavio Paz-

 

The children are reading Basho.

It was raining.

There’s a bright diamond

there where the legs in your jeans

come joined together

Is there a name for that small absence?

Where nothing blocks the light?

Between

Where your flesh fuses together

Con-fused, seamlessly?

 

In this case, I am eye

For instants, and then you move.

The children still reading Basho.

(they “get” it)

Rain coming again

this time not from cloudy skies

but wind shaking trees

PRESS ON – Thank You

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing7 Comments

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“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted,

nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”

-Sir Francis Bacon-

“One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change…

ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”

-Harold Bloom-

“everything directly accessible to us (in reading) – except for the perceived characters (letters and symbols and space) – would be only our ideas, thoughts, or, possibly, emotional states”

-Roman Ingarden-

           

RUSH

I’m thinking storm-wind and flood.

The press and surge of words and images.

I’m thinking adrenalin and frenzy.

WORD:PRESS

                        It dawns on me today that blogging incites and anxiety to produce.  A pressing to keep up and create.

There’s a radiance to that.

On the one hand, to feel it.  That, even just here, at WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of creative human beings thinking, expressing, making…exponentially increasing my already over-saturated reading list.

RUSH

                        And I mean it, it’s downright EXCITING to view and ingest the enormous, surprising, sincere and ever-expanding activity of humans!  (There’s a thank-you in that to all of you I’ve found so far!)              WHOOSH!    RUSH!

On the other…frenetic.  If “all human beings are the same, but everyone is human in their own way” (Adler on Franz Kafka), then you all are as limited as I by time and space and finitude…i.e. face the anguish of not being able to give the people and things in your immediate surround let alone verbal and visual artifacts from around the world what seems to be their due attention.  To weigh and consider, to respond.

I spend a lot of time studying semiotics and theories of communication – how we, as humans, might “put in common,” “share” – “thoughts, information and opinions through speech, writing, images or signs” – “crafting passages between places and persons.”

Hundreds of thousands (actually many more) – passages made sensible, visible, right here with every click on WordPress, vimeo, Weebly, etc…

So long to fears re: death of reading, of art, culture, any such ‘thing.’

And there’s the ‘rub.’  Visiting “philosophy” pages today, I was significantly encouraged by so much sustained argumentation going on.  Persons thinking hard and working it out with signs and gestures.  Photographer’s sharing their eyes and the difficult work of seeing.  Artists shaping the world through the world’s materials and all their minds and bodies process into it.  Our poets, our healers, each of us shaping one another’s days/minds/experiences.

So thank you ALL for this thunderous RUSH.  For the challenge to take care, to work and enjoy, to weigh and consider who we are, who I am, what I do, what I intend to create, present and offer…

Press on…read in…find value.

“What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible?…

I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear…

what is the fear inside language?  No accident of the body can make it stop burning”

-Anne Carson-

“Behind, always behind the things in a hurry to be, you must search for what is”

-Edmond Jabes-

Stumbling Man

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing3 Comments

“This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief opportunities”

-Michel Serres-

            What I really want to ask, is where I am?  Implying already the question of an “I” to locate, whether or not there’s a who that could be.  I really DO wake into questions.

Pop over to my “currently reading” page/list.  It hasn’t changed a lot, perhaps gained a few pounds.  I set in this tribal circle, stacks of books like temple pillars, and feel like I’m made of shavings and fragments.  Some strange conglomeration of paper-thin shreds, filled with phrases and songs, floating in air.  Like using dust as a puzzle.

What sits in that center, bathed in blaring desk-light, really?

“a slapdash piece of [sometimes very hard] work, subject to the vagaries of time [its growth and its wear] and the [sometimes brilliant] blunders of brief opportunities”

That feels pretty accurate.  My parents, my sister, my Kansas.  My musical training.  Education, educators, friends.  Marriages and children, travel and work.  These words, this blogsite.  How “I” originates and am formed.  And thousands upon thousands of books, hours and hours of movies and song.

Then the dust and the shavings keep collecting: mountain climbs and ocean views, orchestras and art museums, foreign countries and people.  Slapdash, subject to vagaries, blunders of opportunities.

I’ve an urge to look closer (a terminal “illness” of mine).  For “slapdash” I find ‘things done hastily, carelessly,’ but I’ve often taken great pains over  much time with fervent investment – yet, yes, the results have definitely been ‘roughcast’ and ‘haphazard.’

And “vagaries” – ‘erratic, extravagant, or outlandish’ occurrences, ‘unexpected and inexplicable change.’  Admitted, time works this way, as (the dictionary suggests) the ‘variations of weather’ – a ‘wandering’ ‘fluctuation.’  I accept.

And what of ‘blunders,’ of blundering?  ‘Mistakes, usually serious, caused by ignorance and confusion.’  ‘Clumsily or blindly’ mannering forth.  However else could I proceed with this limited mind and body, space and shape, this miniscule duration (recalling ‘hastily’ – how much time, relatively, do we really have in a larger scheme?).  Yes, I am always walking into an unknown next, ‘blindly’ as it were, piecing together a ‘haphazard’ and ‘erratic’ assemblage of imagined/remembered experiences, ‘clumsily’ hauling them forward breath-by-breath.  Fair enough, ‘extravagant’ or ‘serious mistakes,’ I blunder.

Remains the “opportunities” to set it all aright.  These are described as ‘favorable or advantageous circumstances, or combinations of circumstances.’  ‘Suitable chances for progress or advancement.’  Possibles.  And this scattered smattered hollow or vortex, opens out again.

 

So – I’m here, and this – a clumsy blind wanderer stumbling through unexpected and inexplicable changes to haphazard and outlandish results; a con-fused combination of circumstances ever entering favorable and advantageous, suitable chances to progress and keep going…into the ever-possibles…

Voila.

I breathe and gaze.

I stumble on.

N Filbert 2012

Choose. Why choose?

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?  Choose, why choose?”

-J.M.G. LeClezio-

a blank page

“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”

-Michel Serres-

Choose.  Why choose?

Deep in love

the sight, the thought, the feel.

Look around.

 

Over here a line comes singing, her misting whispers, behind the ear.

Bold graffiti in the midst: the faces, the lettering.

Trilling of a baby’s babble.

 

Choose.  Why choose?

I build my shelter, I fashion my tent of language.

I might hide here.  I might scribble the wall.

Curving words, like celanic, like ocean.

 

I choose.

Why choose?

To shelter, to bloom.

I build a barn of story, the structure to hold it in.

 

This body, its experiences.

This wife, and hers.

Seven starling children, darting out and in.

And things: stuff, books, ideas, smells.

Dreams and hopes; fears and memory.

Do words burn?

 

I make a sprinkler, and a hose.  I fill them with water.

There is a fire there.  For warmth.

 

To build a well.

I am speaking tools.

Choose.  Why choose?

 

To erase disease-words, and plight.

She says color and I leave it on the walls.

Call and response, they’re in, through the windows.

 

I sing a night with rain.

I sculpt a bed of vowels.

We cry out in the form of wings:

 

Take shelter.

And choose.

Why choose?

 

“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know.’”

-Robert Creeley-

The Open

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing2 Comments

“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?

Choose, why choose?”

-J.M.G. LeClezio-

“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know'”

-Robert Creeley-

“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”

-Michel Serres-

Incidental Courage in the Crevices

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing1 Comment

I’ve taken someone’s advice and picked up David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary – what a potent little delight!  Immediately slid into place with Alain de Botton’s On Love and Macedonio Fernandez’ The Museum of Eterna’s Novel; Jesse Ball’s The Curfew and The Way Through Doors.  Also moved me back to Daniel Handler’s Adverbs and (so-far) wonderful Why We Broke Up.  In the process, feeling forever stunted as a “writer,” I cracked A. Alvarez’ The Writer’s Voice yesterday to these jewels:

“For freelance writers like myself who belong to an endangered species which, as long ago as 1949 Cyril Connolly was already calling ‘the last known herd in existence of that mysterious animal the man of letters,’ writing is less a compulsion than a misfortune, like a doomed love affair.  We write because we fell in love with language when we were young and impressionable, just as musicians fall in love with sound, and thereafter are doomed to explore this fatal attraction in as many ways as we can…fifty years of writing for a living have taught me that there is only one thing the four disciplines have in common: in order to write well you must first learn how to listen.  And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers.  Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false.  It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire.”