Category: Language

Borrowing

On By NW FilbertIn fiction, Jesse Ball, Language, life, love, meaning, pain, suicide, Writing3 Comments

“We are at the bottom of a ditch and there is just a parcel of air to be found, a parcel and when it is done, we push at the space, and another little space of air presents itself.  Who can talk of love?  There is only air – or none, and if there is none then there is nothing at all.”

“All of a sudden, he thought, all of a sudden, nothing is enough for me.”

“But if life is just that, just being reasonable, then there is nothing in it – nothing worthwhile.  So, the yearning that we have to keep dead things living – or to make unreasonable things reasonable.  That is why a person should live.

— Is it a paradox?

— I don’t think it is.  I think the whole thought makes sense together.  Neither side is complete.”

“I am alive, he thought, and now I am capable of living.”

–Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide

Ball - Gerard - Suicide

Accidents changing our lives

On By NW FilbertIn Language, life, love, meaning, mystery, uncanny, unthinkable2 Comments

And how “by accident” it all turns out to be, to seem.  When impossible to parse the “whys” and details.  Circumstancing great scales of complexity.

*Why that was the season, the night, the event, some almost-invitation, I was compelled, felt a should in my organs and limbs, an unreasonable reason or needling urge-fit lasting just long enough, despite all of my fight and resistance, attempts at desistance, assailing with vodka and fears, yet I made myself go, or uncannily managed it, testing a public event… …and there YOU.

*Why today, remote reference occurs, through a link, through bibliography of an article mentioned in a webinar, as an aside, distant source, finally triggering [how was I free of obligation, conversation, some due project?] memory, intrigue and drive, a cumulative motive to step out and climb stairs, find LOC Hs, glance up (searching Garfinkel, his Relations in Public) and catch sight of Sarraute, her Uses of Speech, slender and black and pre-unknown to me, on a shelf up above and reach up and retrieve it and read it and breathlessly change…

Only so many persons and books after whom one is never the same (yes, that’s arguable), but those moments you know it somehow, at first sight, as it happens, within during, something you only can say is “profound” and “uncanny,”  inexplicably so, and indelible – beyond which no returning – and it’s you and this book among others

When we cannot describe, explicate…

And we wonder and shudder…

*

And we cannot remain…

Inexplicable

“Once-occurrent uniqueness or singularity cannot be thought of,

it can only be participatively experienced or lived through.”

-Mikhail Bakhtin-

from the Ruled Writing Tablet

On By NW FilbertIn architecture, communication, creative writing, Language, meaning, relationshipsLeave a comment

ruled writing tablet

Interstitial

Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone.  Suspect I can’t believe them.  I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that.  Won’t even attempt ‘within reason.’ Suggest.

There’s no “let me explain.”

– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly.”

Exactly the point, I would say, or nearly precise – that there isn’t.  I don’t know.  But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) we’re dismissed.  Or not-missed – how to say it?

There’s a meeting.  It seems.  In a margin or more.

*

Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap?

I don’t know.  I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer.  Longer.  It’s a fight against death, that small word.  Simply, longer.  With you.

*

Am I clear?  Making any sense?  I don’t know.

– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying,” she says “near ‘exactly.’”

I don’t know.  It’s unwise.

And I hum when the words sound just so.

– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.

Interaction.  Locution.  Between (I am thinking).

“Interstitial,” I say.  Interstitially?  How could I know.  It’s all susceptible to the mark.  The mark of the question.  I think of changing my own name.  Have before.  I like titles.  It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music.  I would be Mark, Remarking.  The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved with a point…on everything = ?

“My point exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark.  (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind, anything).

interstitial

It’s okay.  I’m familiar.  Not that you worried.  There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction.  It’s just so (so it seems).  “Just-So Stories” he wrote, long ago, they’re alike and akin, episodic.  We describe.

Neither here and/nor there.  Interstitial.  In-between.  What I wanted to tell her, to say.  And I would have, had I known.

– “Known what, exactly?” she once said, and I stopped, for the meaning was lost, nonexistent.  Just so.

“That’s just how it is” I had said.  And don’t know, was surmising.  The world hypothetical and inspired ( I thought, at the time ) – simply possible.  I was wrong (perhaps).  But she stayed (temporarily).  The words lose their meanings.

*

I hum.  To myself.

*

I write: “This is what I wanted to do.”

Temporality: or, “in your absence I dwindle, I diminish…’I’ disappears”

On By NW FilbertIn Cosmology, Language, life, Loss, meaning, Philosophy, Poetry2 Comments

for Hallie

(please read in pace with tune below)

absence

I.

Feel.

Profoundly.

Meaning

–

(less).

from the Ruled Writing Tablet

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Language, love, meaning, Philosophy, Self-DoubtLeave a comment

ruled writing tablet

Interstice

I told her that I would have told her, had I known.

-“Known what, exactly?” she said, “Really!?” she said.

Yes, I said, yes, I would have explained what I felt I understood – about the “interstice” – what I felt I understood, I would have said.

As usual, the sighs, the diverted glances, the “I-don’t-knows.”

It’s alright.  I’m pretty used to it, not that it no longer hurts, or squashes some part of me, but familiarity breeds…and it’s not contempt, at least for me.  More like resolve, or, well, I don’t know.

Still I would have conversed about the “interstice.”  Or its plural.  No one can know what we’re talking about (in my opinion) – that’s why we talk (in my opinion).  But I do like to look at her.  And sometimes keep talking so that I can look at her longer.

Thus I would have explained – or attempted to – about the “interstice”… had I known, I tell her.

– “Known what, exactly?” she asked, “Really!?”

It’s ok.  I’m pretty used to it – exasperation.  It’s a sort of fatigue that settles on my interlocutors – my family, my friends, my lovers, my children – as I triple/quadruple/undendingly (exponentially?) second (meaningless term in this context) guess whatever it is (emotion, idea, memory, event) I attempt to convey.

I find I do not trust a thing as long as it might be questioned, and I have yet to discover something unquestionable.  I like inventing titles though.

She’s looking at me – softly, sadly, gently.  Sometimes she strokes my hair and lets me rest my head (the physical part).  It helps.  But the rest doesn’t rest.

Fair enough, for the most part, I’m used to it.  It’s “me” (as we are wont to say) – what I’m accustomed to.  It doesn’t matter, or does in unquantifiable ways, but I keep at it.  Anyway.  I can’t help it.  Well, some things do – vodka, sex, sleep – but only temporarily.

Things are only temporary.

That’s the sort of idea that keeps me alive.  Temporarily.  And second-(exponentially)-guessing.

Interstices1

She’s still there, here, though.  Hence the interstice.  I try to explain.

*

As if “interstice” possessed a meaning, a definition, beyond the moment I activated or utilized it.  As if it indicated.  Meant – convergence-point (limitless above and below and around) of time and space conventions in a realm that felt (seemed) shared.  Held in common.  Nothing is “held,” or only temporarily.  Changed with its containment.  It seems.  I don’t know.  It’s certainly questionable – is it, ‘certainly’?

I don’t know.  Which I thought, or think, is the entry to wisdom, but even that – I don’t know.

She’s still here.  And I question – Who is it?  Who is still here?  And what for?  How? Why?

And where is the vibrating “here”?  And what for, how &/or why?  I can wonder.

– “Wonder what, exactly?” she inquires.

I don’t know.  I’m a human.  An odd conundrum of pieces and parts that correspond or reciprocate in hold-together activities for a while…call it “organism,” there’s that, it would seem, but seem only, digging in it is hard to convince or confirm – a location, identity, consistency, avocation or being.  It’s just so – apparently – temporarily.

Exasperation.  You see?  You dig?  What I mean!?  That’s what we’re after (together, I think) what it means.  But what that means is uncertain, I think or surmise.  We don’t know, it would seem, we’re uncertain.

We ask.

The Death of Knowledge – Complicit Communication

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, desire, Language, love, meaning, pain1 Comment

The Complicity of Communication: The Death of Knowledge

Death Knowledge

Perhaps we talk what we “know” to death.  Is that in the definition “to know”?  To shrink, reduce, fit-to-one’s-size, assimilate?

Is communication inherent complicity?  The effort at taking a complex and messy, wholistic, excessive, leaky, mysterious and comprehensive lived-experience and rat-tat-tatting away at it with letters and sounds, symbols and utterances toward some acceptance, some convergence of ‘meaning’ necessarily equaling its crucifixion, its disappearance, its waste?  If we manage to twist and contort it to language have we wrung it of reality?  Making a different one?  A communicable one?  A humanly manageable one?

I know (for one) that when I seek to inscribe, assay, proclaim or declare “what happens” – as soon as some assent or understanding seems achieved I sense the evisceration of the expression.  Whether it’s descriptive, imaginative, poetic, academic or pragmatic…forcing it, wrenching it, seducing and eliciting it (sentencing it) into vocabulary, into dialogue, into verbiage…leaves me with a variant experience than the one I sought to transfer.

I mean this…we arrive at…this.  I feel, perceive, desire this…it comes out hackneyed and damaged.  Holy crap!…this occurred! – Can I just say?  Will you let me tell? – and then…what proceeds is an entirely different occasion…a wounded, striated, cut and assembled collage that never equals the issue.

Convergence.  Its own beautiful, extravagant phenomenon.  But not quite expression.  Not quite translation.  Not quite… Always saying more than I intended and less than I meant.  Always saying less than I intended and different from what I meant.  Language.  Open, flexible, ambiguous, gargantuan…and limited, boundaried, sensible, requiring…

I try, tried, keep trying.  And never.  Each utterance a signing off.  Each proclamation death-sentencing its sensation.  Each squeezing toward the dictionary, no matter how scrambled and undone, redone, invented, inverted, still wringing the beauty to beast.

I said I love you.  It came out conditioned.  Assented to.  Agreed.  & Compromised.

I said I want you.  Interpreted “if…”

I said I am… emitting particulars and contradictions.

I said I wish… conditioning demands.

I wanted to say.  To sing.  To whisper.

Vocabling calm and certain and saturation.

Sounding like need and fear and some small evil.

Echoing an anxious desperation.

There is this……..which verses that……and do not equal.

So I am alone

As are you

and then this

between

and same

and different

mix –

some third business –

contorted angle

wound and rendered

wrapped about

and wriggled

writhing

&

struggling

to be

near

what it

is

I love you.

Wind and Bone

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Language, meaning, Poetry1 Comment

found in Liu Hsieh, Chamberlain for the Surrogate Secretary in the Easter Palace, in his book The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, represented here by Eliot Weinberger…

Weinberger - Elemental Thing

“The twenty-eighth of the fifty chapters in his book is called “WIND BONE,” wind and bone, and is the most mysterious.  To express emotions one must begin with WIND; to organize the words, one must have BONE.  He whose bone structure is well-exercised will be well-versed in rhetoric; he who is deep of wind will articulate well his feelings.  It would seem that WIND is sentiment and ideas, and BONE is language, but Liu also says that to be thin in ideas and fat in words, confused and disorganized, is a sign of the lack of BONE.  And yet when ideas are incomplete, lifeless and without vitality, it is also a sign of the lack of WIND.  What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.”

–Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing—

birdsinflight

Wisdom

On By NW FilbertIn human, Language, Mary Ruefle, meaning, Poetry, wisdom, WritingLeave a comment

Ouroboros

“If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me.  If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life’s work”

-Mary Ruefle-

To read “such a quiet thing as thinking”: A we

On By NW FilbertIn European Graduate School, Journaling, Language, meaning, Philosophy, Study4 Comments

The rigor of this program (for me) puts me in 9-10 hours of seminar/symposium per day, 7 days / week, and therefore very little time to process, do self-selected-readings, even journal.  At the same time, the strange reality that introduces – of an intensity and exhaustion I truly have never encountered (save perhaps in parenting and certain periods of intimate relation) – presses (prods?) me to adapt, alter, re-think.  So, in order to survive, when moments arise for me to work with a pen and blank pages, I am going to post them as a record, as much for myself forward, as for a witnessing from any of you.  As you can see, a certain blitzing of the brain/body incurs that confuses or disorients.  So this will be a kind of journal / personal notation space for myself (needing witnessed) until time passes and (I hope!) the plenitude of this experience seeps in, along.

Today I found an hour to scribble, and here is how it goes.  Drained, depleted, dissolute-feeling, I translated the first week into an expression around a too-much that exhausts, an overwhelm that empties.

To read such a quiet thing

(click title to view)

Uncannily (as many happenings this first week) – the evening’s lecture concluded with a translating of Maurice Blanchot – to the effect of: “we will maintain plenitude in (or unto) the nothing.”

On a Personal Note

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Books, Fear, Joy, Language, meaning, Philosophy, Travel9 Comments

Prologue:  I do not know what I am about to write.

saas-fee

Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

In less than one week I will be in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in the midst of a thousand novel things.  I am going as a participant in the European Graduate School’s PhD in Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought program, studying with 15 or so others, guided by Simon Critchley, Giorgio Agamben, Christopher Fynsk, Boris Groys, and Luc Tuymans, et. al.

For weeks now, any spare moment has loomed like this:

7.25.15

working my way through the bulk of Agamben’s corpus, Heidegger, Hegel, Kojeve, Derrida, Brecht, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Spinoza, and columns of secondary literature.  I do not know what to expect.  I expect small seminars of conversation and dialogue, led by persons tattooed on my arms – persons I “assume”? “understand”? are paid to think – employment I would SO love to land – to experience & think, inquire & think, research & think, & report.  Perhaps?  So we’ll gather for 6 to 9 hours a day (or more) – discuss principal thoughts/texts/events of human thought-about human thought-about human being-experience…and…?

Walk in the mountains – Nietzsche claimed his thoughts would only be possible up here.  Sleep.  Read.  Think.  I really don’t know.

It’s been the first time in my life (I can remember) in which the hours of reading I’ve poured into this have actually eventuated in headaches.  Distinguishing terminologies and concepts.  Following trails of thought.  Engaging them.  Responding to them.  Add to the above William James, A.N. Whitehead, Eugene Gendlin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Steven Shaviro, Brian Massumi, Gilbert Simondon – my own favorite philosophical corpus – to construct conversations, critiques, and alternate points of view through.  To think-through-with.  And still with thousands of pages to go.

EGS

Here the classrooms and buildings.  Mountains and trees.  Novel, novel, novel.  The minds I’ll encounter.  Novel.  From all over the world, perspectives, perceptions, reflections, opinions, resources, references, practices, habits…novel.

And mostly (always?) I still simply want to write.

As my mindbody gestates and swells with new jargon and lingo, concepts and theories, voices and styles, there are many moments of cluster, confusion, conjoining and merger.  Thoughts disarrayed.  Set loose from their sources and synapted to knots and knobs of my own kernels of thought & experience.  A pregnant field.  A chaos.  I will need to walk.  Need to sleep.  i lose my bearings.

Language.   Other moments it feels everyone is considering the same things in different voices.  The same ‘truths’ in variant language-games.  The same purposes.  Not always.  But those hunting and haunting human experience – with that strange zeal and compulsion, near-desperation of finding-something-out, making-sense, questing meaningful presence…from diverse times and cultures, languages and histories, feelings and vocabularies…

I sense similarities, ties.  Tangles and diversions.

“the chief error in philosophy is overstatement”

-Alfred North Whitehead-

WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE

is what I have written at the beginning of my notebook for the journey.  What are you talking about & how? written just underneath.  Wittgenstein.  Whitehead.  Bakhtin.  James.  What we experience together alters everything we bring.  When we dialogue occasions occur, events happen.  When we encounter and meet.  Interaction.  Action and process take place, differentiated, by Other.  

From another pile: Knausgaard, Mary Ruefle, William Bronk, Wallace Stevens.  Ivan Vladislavic, Ben Marcus, David Foster Wallace, Joshua Cohen.  In my readings – Valery, Rilke, Holderlin.  Blanchot, Kafka, Beckett.

Voices.  Styles.  Experiences.  Occasions.

Interpretations.  Experiences.  Thoughts.  Language.

EGS crest

What I expect is that “something is doing.”  Activity is going-on.  We/I will be being-with and being-in.  There will be convergence, dissonance, emergence and change.

It will be a variant “me” coming “home.”

http://panocam.skiline.cc/saas-fee/laengfluh

(live webcam of area)

To the mountains then.  To think.  To learn.  To live.  To be-with and be-in.

To become.