Category: Journallings

Just posted thoughts and reflections

Nebulous Thoughts

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


But what if we went right on ahead?

If we charged like bulls bellowing our mysteries?

When I think of you, think about us, I want to.  That’s exactly what I want to do: be done with mysteries, be one in fact.

But when I look at you, when I touch, taste, smell and listen you, I cannot conceive it.  Can’t even imagine comprehending all that’s unknown, inexplicable.  And I’m afraid to.  That too, I’m frightened of some unfathomable overwhelm.

Yet from a distance, I mean, from here, now, it feels plausible.  To declare all mysteries, one to another, in song or verse or gesture.  Enaction.  To enact our mysteries and imperceivables all at once in some enormous chaotic unison, unashamed.  What is there to be ashamed of?  Secrets are not mysteries, only their private signs.  What forges them is larger and unclear.  Diversity and variation – these we celebrate – no?

Step out of your houses and enact your whole selves!

We will bewilder one another – not such a bad catharsis!

Running, perhaps amok, perhaps silenced to a shuddering ball – who knows?  It’s a mystery!

Perhaps we’d shout in brand new languages – delighting everyone’s ears!  Perhaps we’d alter the surface of the earth, its environments?

Would that we were one expressive impressive cacophonous voice!

Would that we were?

I’d split into a willow tree dropping language-boulders from my fragile limbs.  I’d erupt a perfect mountain steaming as a cold clear lake.  I’d mud.  I’d sprout as a milky pasture of weeds.

You’d Sousaphone in primary colors woven as a world-shawl.  You’d be all the quiet stars, glimmering in their conflagration.  You’d whisper through grain and aspen, moving through air like helium.

We’d crash without injury, fomenting monuments of grandeur.  Melding our mysteries.  You-topia.  Humana-topia.  “Other”-worldly.

Perhaps.

Perhaps a universal dancing, a carnival of beauty so trouncing our balancing globe as to shatter it, sitting afloat or casting about – some atmospheric inferno.  Perhaps a gaseous stench would burst forth, a deadly poison.  Perhaps disaster.  Apocalypse of  invisible revealed.

We could surely say “we know not what we do” living mysteries, eh?

“Off the hook” even as it gores us.

Earthquaking order in riotous glee.

The maniac’s laugh.

A universe of blindness and flare.

Breaking the eggs, precarious shells.

No wonder veneers.  Elaborate mechanisms.

Flexible and porous, rigid and finely tuned.

It wears  out, the strain and stress: containing, defending.

What if we went right on ahead?

Plunged up out of deep waters, rocketing down from our skies?

Going through with our propensities: explosion/implosion?

What do you imagine?  The beginning?  The end?

A flood, a conflagration?  Some perfect balance?

We hardly know ourselves, one another…

secrets give way to hiding, large blank territories blocking the unseen, from ourselves, one another…

equilibrium-fear

we call eco-system, survival, “life.”

Undoing?

From here, right now, I want to release, to channel and broadcast – to expose without imposition, sing that I might hear, dance that I might see, enact in order to know…become some inward/outward thing, supernova and black hole at once…

nothing escaping, nothing withheld.

Who (what) are we?

Begin.

Adding it up

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

Reading, Writing – the ‘Rithmetic

You know, I honestly don’t know why I think of the many things I think of.  “About” usually, yes, usually I can surmise why I stick to a thinking project – it might be something that troubles or worries me, maybe it involves something about which I care deeply or enjoy – then I’ll ruminate around on the subject or object for awhile, attempt to figure or follow the thinks, arrange some digits or sounds, contents, feelings or symbols until I make fit or get lost in the simple joy of tinkering.

But then other times, and really quite often, I can’t locate the instigative trail or balancing of reason for why (or how) items pop into or swish by my apprehending (apprehensive?) brain.

For instance, just now (and it’s precisely the unknowing that prompts me to write about it, to squeeze it through language), I was sitting quietly to desk after a very full day of soccer games, bicycle rides and birthdays, perusing Ron Loewinsohn’s Goat Dances, Anne Carson’s plainwater, Jon Anderson’s The Milky Way and Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays – a very normal way I have of grounding myself, discovering a location by mapping found paths, when sploosh! across the internet of my mind zipped:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”

            And then I stopped.  Closed the books, slid them aside, rested my chin in my hand and gazed toward nowhere, wondering what question that sounds-like-an-answer phrase was responding to or anticipating.

Why would I think that?

Lost in language like dancing and syllables, stars and night skies, withs and relation and choros, why would my only clear thought (recognizably anyway) be:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”?

            When something stops me like that, and I already hear a rhetorical response, but no answers satisfy and questions only multiply exponentially…

I grab loose blank notebook pages and a ball-point pen…

and begin doodling, dabbling, and “showing my work.”

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” (implied automatic resonant answer: because it does) leads precisely (in this case, given all the contingencies and conditions) to the chicken-scratching rambling preceding this period.

In other words, not to a solution, or perhaps even a working equation or problem, but simply to activity.  Reading, writing, thinking it out in lines, shapes and signs.

Now during all this scribble-sketching around the inceptive phrase, my bodymind has been mantra-ing responsorials:  “because it really does,” “because I’m not even aware of things happening until verified in language,” “because life just occurs and I don’t know about it until I manifest the experience some way – bounce it off of a counterpart or internal funhouse mirror (other’s words) to learn what it is and isn’t” and so on…so-called “reasons” I guess?  Hypothetical rationales for the random (apparently) phrase having typed itself in my nervous wirings?

The only “fact,” as I experience them, is that this phrase: “I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” clearly spat itself across the innards of my cranium while I was going about the very normal activity of recovering, soothing, pausing and nourishing myself on books at hand, wishing somewhere it hadn’t taken me all day to reach this quiet, wishing somewhere that all conversations went like this listening, wishing somehow I had something that felt like it needed to be written down, wishing somewhere that I understood myself.

And alas: a baffling sentence in response to no one silently carves and engraving on my consciousness:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depends on it”

My entire body replying: “well…YEAH!  It does!  It’s the only way YOU know that there’s possibly LIFE at all, and not just sensations, emotions, thinkings and dreams; reactions, responses and stimuli!  Without reading about it or writing words out I personally have no concrete object to sound my experience against, to test a happening – everything else out there from spouse to “god” is always moving, shifting, adapting, changing…just like me.”

“I guess I always read and write BECAUSE my ‘life’ depends on it”

Intimacy

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, WritingLeave a comment
photo by ParkeHarrison

Intimacy

“People really understand very little of one another”

-Anne Carson-

            You might say we studied one another through a thick fog.  Or learned one another in the dark, guessing, reaching, feeling our way.

For many years.

We were determined.

Recording nuances, memorizing beats, mimicking rises and falls.  Taking fingerprints with our bodies, collecting snapshots for official documents.  We created and invented artifacts together in order not to know – who was who and which was which.  We merged as often as we could, and more than often asked.

We still remember general shapes and movements – tones, colors, outlines.  Each a sort of negative of the other – surfaces accepting imprints, continuous translations.

You could say we were scholars and specialists.  At times we counted hairs, many times while splitting them.  From observation it is hard to tell bodies tangled in fighting from those wrestling in love.  Unfettered laughter from convulsive wails.  We learned to do so by watching them changing one to another and back again.  Momentary gradients.  We were able to dance on thin lines.

In earnest we catalogued vocabularies by rote, genetics, neuroses, causes and effects, our marriage a lab of research and experiment.  Encycopedic and replete.

Through interference of weather and evolution’s inexplicable leaps we adapted apparati for morphing data, constructing theses.  Compared and bickered notes and conclusions, matters and intention.  Interpretations varied.

More astrology than –onomy, more alchemy than chemistry, we carried forth our quest.  Meteorology, geology, archaeology we sought of one another, growing compendiums of analyses and flow, catalysts and katharses.

Our distance became cosmically microscopic, mythological and rite.  You might say we were studying one another in a great fog.  We kept on receiving each other in the dark.

…more fears…

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Poetry, Writing2 Comments

My Anxiety

“Limits are what any of us are inside of”

-Charles Olson-

Deep in the cave of gates

latches and locks

and no moon

no light to speak of

silent and dark

and appropriately caged

unwound

Deep in the cave of gates

in the company of beasts

without vision

or light to see by

fearful and rabid

atrociously caged

unbound

 

Deep in the cave of gates

at risk and unhinged

without air

and promise of drowning

flailing incapacity

the autonomous cage

unfound

 

“The mechanisms that keep us from drowning are so fragile: and why us?”

-Anne Carson-

What is there to say?

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

    

 
 

A book I am reading asks, in its title, What is there to say?  Another, next to it on its anticipating shelf, states “very little…almost nothing.”  Are they in conversation?

In completing Dust by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko for perhaps the ninth time, I come across a phrase I’ve starred and underlined in three colors: “We talk only because of a persistent desire to understand what is it that we are saying.”

            If someone took the time to calculate how many times the word “other,” used to refer to a subjective entity, occurs in philosophical texts post-Heidegger.

What is being?

 

I often experience the anomalous reality of hoping wildly in the midst of despair, a fervent belief in oxymorons – things like “Poetic Influence” and “Romantic Love.”

How music crafts melancholy and joy.

Perhaps someday we will concoct a system of chaos.

The weather is large enough.

 

I say “I love you” because I’d like to understand it.

 

Edmond Jabes has it that “the words of the book were trying, in vain, to say Nothing” (writing of sacred texts) or, in other words, some persistent and extravagant Babeling into Derrida’s vast abysme of origins and effects.  What is impossible.  “Our persistent desire.”  So Jabes asks “Is our relation to the world first of all a relation…to an expectation, a hope of world pregnant with all possible beginnings?”

            I ask myself, then, what is it I have to say?  The echoing answer “very little…almost nothing.”  Persistent desire.

The Garden of Selves, a thought-experiment

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Journallings, Photography, Poetry, Writing6 Comments
Garden of Selves
Robt. ParkeHarrison

Garden of Selves (unmasking, a thought-experiment)

“All my life I’ve heard one makes many”

-Charles Olson-

This is what I hear here.

Someone sitting up and looking round.

Someone peeking.

And one makes many.

How many?

 

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is what the others are doing.

When only one looks up as if to speak.

I am hearing “tend the garden”

I am hearing “heteroglossia”*

I am reading “every on their own Babel”*

 

Why are the many huddled in boxes, like seedpods?

Perhaps shriveling, or nearly dead?

What prompted the one?

I hear here one prompting many.

I hear the call “Rise up!”

A voice sounds singular.

 

Which is not the case.

A person is a chorus.

Something else pressures for soloists.

What if each their cadenza, in unison?

Who then, what then, how would we be?

This is what I see in this sea.

 

And why so many-yous asleep?

How we tranquilize and put under

Person – what have you done?

The space of a world we call web

is made for a show of hands

nothing is not connected…

 

Wake.

This is what I hear here.

Wake up.

You are not alone.

You are one many,

singularly plural.

 

Tend to the garden of selves.

Know the manufacturer’s labels on every packet of seed.

When it is yours you have chosen and planted

look up

join the chorus

shouting down the mummer’s call

N Filbert 2012

*M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the plurality of utterances and personhood

*from great British linguist J.R. Firth

The Fool

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings10 Comments
The Fool

Ah, April 1.  And I had been breathlessly preoccupiedly waiting the work day to begin…today I begin a journey into The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson, after a gentling scan into The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom, both of which “just happened” to arrive at my local library yesterday – arbitrary arrivals from my Interlibrary Loan list of “wants”.  Fool or not, nose in book, pack on back, and harried by wolves, it is what I do (am?).  Here I go!  (no fooling) 🙂 (why have I not seen so many cliffs and falls just ahead?)

Systems Theory

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Graphotos, Journallings, Writing5 Comments
synapses

Regulating Relationships

From most points of view, life is a system.  Enormous and elaborate interlacing activities keep it going on.  Biology, physics, religion, mathematics and logic; semiotics, psychology, aesthetics and history; chemistry and health, poetry and politics, philosophy and fame – all intricate reverberant systems of night (and possibly?!) infinite interconnections – visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious.

I feel it all the time.  I’m “affected.”

Hubbub over sports, havoc of war, hullabaloo of cosmology and genetics.  Tentacles of memory, omens from the past, illnesses and love.  My own aches and pains.  Allergies, anxiety, pleasure and joy.  Tastes, values.  All of/in these indecipherably interlocking worlds of living things, views, theories, events and conundrums.  Words, images, feelings.  Wires, energy, matter.  Signals, symbols.

I feel it.  I’m “affected.”  Always.

All ways.

An hypothetically infinite ganglia or swarm of influences and infections  — a finite and mortal middle-aged male inhabiting a very small space made of receptors, pores, nerves, cells and liquids: constantly thrumming, sloshing, snap-crackling, emoting and perceiving a cosmos of effects/affects.

This is why I keep saying: I get it, I’m totally “a/effected.”

The situation is perhaps similar to a paramecium channeling a bolt of lightning.  Most likely the little sucker survives in some fashion – but what the – ?

How do we manage?

No wonder we blitz out, dull, “veg,” “pass out,” sleep.  Drugs, fantastical entertainments, thrills, spills and crack-ups…anything to direct/divert the universe-sized charges incessantly overwhelming us.

Something struck me today.  In our growing history of surviving, perhaps even thriving, how have humans as a species often overcome overwhelming difficulties?  Well sure, all of the ways mentioned above: escape, denial, “tuning out,” apathy, ignorance, fantasy, insanity or violence, danger and so on, but when we are perceived (perceive ourselves) to “advance” “progress” or “grow” – what is the method?  (When we can interpret one apart from “accident” or “effect”?)

Have we not repeatedly immersed ourselves in our reality (“the way things are”) and used them to our benefit rather than detriment?  Technology, science, arts and beliefs – the seeking of the facts, turning them to our interests or needs, finding fulfillment and challenge – furtherance – survival.

What snapped in me today (I’ve had years of “managing” my “e/affectedness” thorugh alcohol, isolation or the dependence of my children) is this:  if our inquiries and theories by and large agree/propose that “life” is one phenomenal, inescapable and gargantuan set of layered and inter/intra-relational systems, then “relating/relationships,” their process(es) and effects are precisely where the work, the living, the surviving (perhaps thriving) emphases ought to be engaged.

That balancing, recharging, nourishing, coping, diversion and awareness might be best figured out right where it happens – in systems of relationships.  That where we are “affected” and what “effected” by is precisely where our greatest opportunity to “effect” must be.   Our process of relating, our relationships with/in the cosmos of possibilities, is our living.  What we know or think seems to tell us – our attention, our “solutions,” our being belongs there: in relationship.

Energy
Linguistic diagram

Thank you Holly (my wife), Scott (my dearest friend), children (all of you, my charges) – and others – you truly regulate me in this world.

Making Words

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing6 Comments

Action: Writing

 

Woven in the circles of making, I felt and I thought, I wrote (I thought) “What is called writing?”

An action, a process, a braiding of becoming.

In that way it is like breathing, sensing, walking.

Also not.

 

I wouldn’t, for instance, “do it anyway” – wasn’t born with the instinct of muscle and nerve to be verbal, textual.  I needed other people for that, and the whole history of the world, and the tiny stories of my community and location.  All those things, all those “others” – elements and entities NOT me trained me to language.  Taught me to “mean’ something with a sound or a gesture, out of an enormity of possible sounds and motions, infinite and miniscule in their variety.  So that I utter and behave as a Kansas boy raised in the 1970s in the United States of America; I can say “what” about forty different ways, but not like someone from Tokyo, Moscow or Bangladesh.

Clearly I went along with it, became, developed my own versions of signification and cadence, intonation and grammar.  Working well enough when among the great pool of English-speakers who read literature, philosophy, poetry or know something about parenting, divorces, theology or art.

Outside of that I suspect I’m a foreigner.  A penguin squawking and waddling about.

Given the breathing, perceiving, pulsing, walking thing, I can usually find my way among other humans anywhere, but not without a strangeness and suspicious curiosity about the way I do it, and why.

Likewise.

Words written are things.  Objects to collage, cut and paste, assemble/dissemble, rearrange.

That’s what I love to do.  I like very much listening to their silences, their potential precision and fluid spillage and wash.  I love finding shapes there and rhythms.  After all, music isn’t about the melody, but all of its sounds and silences together.  But writing isn’t music, it’s writing.

Stories aren’t histories, expressions or truths – they’re words.  Lists aren’t tasks performed or groceries, notes aren’t emotions or commands – they’re words.  A painting of a mountain isn’t a mountain.  It’s a painting.

So my blog, my work, my play, my joy my grief my desire and delight is this puzzling and fiddling about with this (for all practical finite purposes and aptitude) infinite galaxy of lettered objects.

What it might “mean” or “say,” “express” “communicate” or “intend” and so on – I guess that’s up to you – making your own creative use of my arrangements from your very own culture of sounding signing and gesturing.

A happy medium, as far as I’m concerned.

N Filbert 2012

Some goods to get you through

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Poetry, Traces, WritingLeave a comment
Kozelek cover image

“Coincidences depend not so much on desire as on the density of existence”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“The full meaning of the adage Humanum est errare, we have never woken up to”

-Charles Sanders Peirce-

“Act your heart.  There’s nothing else”

“The world is where we fling it”

–Theodore Roethke-

“To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it”

–Wallace Stevens-

“Action painting – action writing – the process is the same, with emphasis less on the finished product than on the author’s process of creation”

-Jerome Klinkowitz-

a personal p.s.: I love the poetic world of Mr. Scott Krieger, and the music of Mark Kozelek (ahhhh)

“The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything”

-Wallace Stevens-

(for Scott)