FormingFictionForming

Empathy

the sounds of the shapes of what’s sounding in me….

a story or writing that seems to be growing/assembling by slow accretion…

“everything gives way, opens up, flows out, flows back, flecks…”

Beckett“I am in words, I am made of words, of the words of others, what others, this place too, the air too…”

Samuel Beckett

As the semester’s projects begin to disintegrate into final clumps of submission…my innards yawn and stretch and struggle awake, expressing a yearning to search…spill forward instead of re-searching…explore and extend…

to construct and create without resources – to invent from the miscellaneous stockpiles of information and data accrued through intense weeks of devouring and ingesting…

This essay, from Maurice Blanchot, regarding Samuel Beckett – “Where Now?  Who Now?” – captures that no-place of beginning – amid a chaos of signs and sensations – knowledge and ignorance – words and emotions concocted from immersion in information sources and recorded knowledge that constitutes “higher learning”…

please engage!

Blanchot - Beckett 1

Blanchot - Beckett 2

Blanchot - Beckett 3Blanchot - Beckett 4

maurice_blanchot_3734

For Restoring, for Keeping Connections

What Follows

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the notebook I grabbed in case of moments of free creative scribbling contained prior forgotten reflections that carried me into further reflections…recorded below:

journalingThe wonderful thing…

The wonderful thing about writing…

The wonderful thing about writing is that you can always begin.  You always face opportunity.  BEGIN.

In addition to that…”in other words”…

In other words, you can always start over.

Begin.  Start over.  Begin.  Start over.

It’s a wonderful thing.

Language.  like moving your body, there’s a kind of body to inhabit.  A world.  A way of being.  You wake.  You move.  You remember…by dis-membering.

In other words.

You sleep.  As you cease to sleep, you remember.  You remember by feeling your limbs, your breath, by seeing, by feeling things (Dismembering).  As you dismember (stuffy nose, neck-ache, coffee smell, pain behind the eyes, the need to potty, and so on…) – you also re-member (stitch together, sew, seam, canvas, invent) and become (again).  Writing is like this.

Language.  A body dismembered – waiting for membering (memory, membership) – invention, use.  Beginning.  Again.

In other words, like organs instructured in-skinned, awaiting awareness, the fabric of socio-cultural symbology (languaging) lies:  in wait:  to be animated, enlivened, embodied:  woke up.

The substance, the atoms and organs – await.  Circulation, enervation, emergence – to live – animate –

to be possible

And become.

In other words, to create, to move, to motivate.

There is no such thing as starting from scratch.

But a scratch is a beginning.

In our bodies, within matter,

in the world – moving gauze, filling quilts,

sensing flesh, donning clothes, filling whispers…

I’m alive.  I begin.

The wonderful thing about writing…

…to awake into a way of being.

IMG_6607p.s… i’m thinking that each begin includes a hope to mean

Found Thoughts

As I snatched books and items to head to a weekend class I grabbed an old partially used notebook just in case I’d sneak a moment or two to scribble my thoughts.  I did, but I also found the following past set of jottings that I catapulted off of for what I wrote next…

They felt like found thoughts that found me again…so I thought I’d share…

Oxford NotebookFrom Old Notebooks

I get a little weary of philosophy.  It fascinates and intrigues, has its spectacular, glittering moments – like architecture, hard sciences, and fiction – but with each human activity there can be too much of a good thing.  Perhaps it’s the fantasies involved in abstraction, in the “feeling” of figuring things out, or of “making sense” (instead of sensing) – our human super-additives to experience that are also experience themselves – that I, at times, weary of.  That eminently falsifiable intuition that everything is made up.

It can be hard work to keep a worldview active.  They involve such complexities and details, layer upon layer of biological and logical, illogical and irrational, intuitive – ologies and descriptions, manipulated perceptions and interpretations re-interpreted re-interpreted without ceasing, that a being grows tired.  Can grow tired.

Those same realities, capacities, activities are also exponentially inspiring, enervating, exciting – those behaviors of creativity, imagination, and survival – and our weird confounding capacity to think we can observe our perceptions make for a very strange frenzy of energy and productivity…

…our infinitely (perhaps?!) webbed interdependence with our surround provides for mysterious and copious possibilities of activity (material)…all bewildering.  Chaos can be so generative.  Chaos – so stultifying.

What might we know?

That we are organisms within systems?  How would we know that, from within systems?

That we are dynamic organism enmeshed with other dynamic forms of matter and energy, waves and particles, movements?  Seems to be our sense of it.

So what?

Alongside and within – in order to be – there is NO way to exist detached or without: to imagine distance, objectivity without imagination capacity of fantasy, illusion, for purposes like logic, mathematics, narratives and codes – DElusion in order to play the games with delusional sincerity – effectively.  The delusions are effective, often pragmatic, evolving, so they must also be part of being with/in a myriad of dynamics…

One would hypothesize.  Or suppose.  Infer, as in fantasize.

All enabled by immersion in symbols, languages, stipulated relations…

…which is what I had set out to consider – immersion in symbols –

the wonder of it

the delusion…

…to follow…

 

Scribbling – Formless Thing Things Form Being in Motion Exploring Complexity – week of 9/7/2013

Scribbling

Formless Thing Things Form   Being in Motion   Exploring Complexity

            In the first place (after a letter to Seth and moving and thinking and painting with wife and a few hours of homework – reviewing Management and Organization Theory and Design no less) the first thing to do is to write.  To simply write by hand, being in motion, that is, setting into motion, and all that follows, which usually happens (like today) first – after folding laundry, washing dishes, required reading, getting kiddos fed, dressed, off to school, checking email and phone messages and new assignments, touching base with wife, drinking (making and drinking) coffee, homework, family, tasks, events, chores, responsibilities, choices – after that the first thing to do is to write, after somehow quieting the buzziness of busyness, at the desk, reading something slow and singular like poems, philosophy, science, or art – something chosen, maybe a walk, maybe music, maybe a task, and then, oh then, the first thing to do is be in motion, set into motion, set being in motion at my desk with a ball-point pen (Bic) and blank, clean, beautiful, hungry, precious, anxious (anticipatory, aroused) lined notebook paper in a loose, forgiving stack, ready, ready, ready…

…for the first thing.

            Which is not to say I was an object before, or that anything was ever a thing, or still (static) prior to pen + paper by my hand – no – Formless Things were Thinging Forms in all the other ways of motion, movements, relationships between tools and water, emotions, skin, utensils and hands and mouths and sounds and voices and contact continuous through air, always movement, humming being in motion beings forming thingless things forming formlessness, changing motion swerves and stoops, bends and helps listening to movements vibrations tones noticing shapes and lines and particling waves of substances moving moving attaching disseminating shapes, sequencing, paces, difference all pointing out where everything connects to everything else – the joining nature of boundaries – what is always next to – observe how the line works:

ι

ι

ι

 

before which space was “empty” but now it holds together, walls like stitches, buildings like blocks stuck together so things stay gathered, movements, lines, dance, breeze, blood, noises, gluing, gluing, gluing every to-gether, difference repetition pattern

Categories.  To keep things adjoined, combined.  Lists, minutes, days, tasks, timelines, hours, keeping thingless things attached in their movements – different ways of sameness – being in motion – and so forth  →

→ Forth toward firstly, to write.  Being in motion, set in motion, slowly faster, faster by slowly, by hand instead of tapping, fluid choices – typing is stop-motion, discreet, discontinuous – comparatively faster but less efficient, slower (by hand) efficacy thinking images or imaginary thinking now less critical (embedded critique): fluid.  I stop.  Breathing continues with hand thought memory hope – NOW –

A kind of yearning motion movement in letters read as words, phrases, meanings, less representative more relational – unnatural to this and this and that and other.  Confusing writing, drawing, space and time, concept object sign symptom, doodle.

To communicate.  Being in motion together if sequentially the linking looping line (by hand) tracing where we meet, are joined, in movement against/with, with, with one another – here is where we meet, inadvertent/advertently.

Being in motion, set in motion by hand – to draw writing – an advert for connection, to construct lines to bring things together, to notice.  Exploring complexity through being in motion.  Reading is movement.

            We are.

 

Self-writing / Autography

web I

 

I want to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including wanting to know how wanting to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including wanting to know how wanting to know how wanting to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including…

 

A Real-ization?

A Real-ization(?)

“…And here begins my despair as a writer”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph

 

I should say, “began.”  And not “as a writer,” per se, or even primarily, no, I should more accurately portray the experience “…and so began, and ever continues to begin, my despair as a human.”

For experiences, no matter where or when, in full matter of where and when, are multitude that begin such despair.  They are occurrences of a process we call variously “knowing,” “comprehending,” “understanding” – encounters with unlimited and unnecessary contents we might describe as “revelatory,” “visionary,” or “true.”  We describe their feeling and fumble with content.

For they seem to circumscribe an everything – as contained and opening out – well-metaphored by the scientifically religious Big Bang, an un-caused cause or some like.  Experiences we couch in the babbles of mystery: synchronicity, omniscience, omnivorous, omnipotent and omnipresent.  We feel them like an orb or spiral, a series of looping waves without succession.

A.k.a “convergence,” simultaneity and emergence coming together at now and here.

I write “as a human” because I cannot be anything else.  And a human, as a living being, is characterized by limitations and potentials.  Although kinds of things never exhaust their potentials (as far as we know) – thereby always altering what might constitute affordances and constraints lists – nevertheless, in order to be unique (or anything at all – “what –so-ever”) humans must be limited, those limitations providing the very contexts for exploring potentials and potency.

One such environment or niche is the operation of our living processes in space and through time.  I.e. a simultaneous occurrence of everything cannot be processed, cannot be shared, as such.  It must needs be dissected and dismembered via many spaces and over time in order to be perceived by such an animal as we – re-membered and imaged-in (imagined) according to our nature (our processes and practices in our environments).

This is why moments we might re(in)fer to as “transcendent” or “wholistic” perhaps “encapsulating” or “converging” – compressing and expanding (synonymously) some happening that seems “total” generate despair for our kind or species.

I am unable to deny what comes to experience, but with labels and descriptions (interpretation) must take care.  One often turns to symbols or metaphors: icons that serve to absorb a variegated but comprehensible share of human experiences.  Accrued via descriptions and depictions over time, these symbols resonate and traverse times and boundaries in order to gather experiences of a kind.  Take for example the term “hunger,” or a drawing of an eye.  Mirrors, or a resolving I-IV-V progression.  These activities of reference and participation, renewal and recognition, present and re-present for us experiences that seem to extend or equal (again, synonymously) us.

Despair comes in the desired specificity each individual of the species wishes to convey (form of convergence – communicate meaning for our kind can be spotted by our use of the prefix co-).  That experience (in itself necessarily co-), in order to have meaning(humanly speaking) must be shared – we find that telling/singing/dancing/painting/acting/writing/ filming/making/working/sculpting/creating/crafting or any combination of them all and the human-specific processes this entails are unable to re-present such “totalizing” experiences, except at certain angles, perspectives, fragments, over time.

Yet, were it otherwise, we would have no need of any of our abilities – for we would know.  The relations, practices, potentials and processes depend on this inability (limitation) to be.  For us to be, as humans, what and whom, where and when, we are.

Unity would undo this.  In fact, we have no evidence that ANY living entity “shares alike” – reciprocates perfect understanding or replication (or reproduction, ex-ist-ing) exactly…down beyond our cells…there is difference, mis-matching, variation.  In fact, all the co-operations that provide con-vergence and co-mmunity, me-and-ing (meaning) depend on the disjunctions we strive to come over or through in order to express, be understood, known, “as one.”

So, though never “of the same mind,” perspective, or feeling, even when we experience me-and-ing together (gathered) – – this is also how we are.

Perhaps then, less despair than real-ization?

 

An Example of Structuring – Priorities

1.  Family

Nuclear Families

 

2.  School

Scholarly Pursuits

3.  Prioritization of Personal Pursuits

Structural Prioritization of Readings: Fall 2013

(please click on image for display)

Readings

Please Stand By. Restructuring. Thank You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEq-Y8-vZF4

Thank you.  And I mean that.

The years of blogging, developing manoftheword/The Whole Hurly Burly have been life-changing.  Blogging has enabled me to learn to share my work, to discover what resonates in my work with whom and what sorts of interests.  Blogging has given me courage, most definitely helped me discover my voice, and linked me to an amazing community of creators and thinkers.  In that way it has given me hope.

I appreciate everyone who has visited (or will visit) these pages, who has taken the time to interact, comment, critique, challenge and question my process, my content, my style.

Thank You

It has been a significant mode of expression in which I have felt that I mattered, have been heard, seen, can contribute something to a large and complex world.

I am unsure of my intentions with a caesura, apart from feeling profoundly that the time and energy I put toward this is needed in other areas of my life right now.  The Whole Hurly Burly of life has its ways and effects.

As in brief breaks before (beginning grad school again, starting a business with spouse, children home for summer and the like) – should something worthy come forth I will share it, but for a time will be unable to consistently interact in this medium.

It has been a great pleasure – both “followers” (I hope not!) and those I “follow” – to become acquainted with your works, your gifts and talents, your ideas and artefacts – and truly – to have been offered a context that feels safe for experimencting mine.  THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

I cannot predict the time I will need for this restructuring, but I can assure you this experience and network and relation has been profound and meaningful in my life.

Here’s to WordPress

Wordpress

and to all of YOU who make it worth pressing.

TO LIFE!

Nathan W Filbert