Category: Language

Celldom, continued

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, human, Language, mental healthLeave a comment

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(click image for work-to-present)

I’ve fallen asleep to the written word spoken for many years now.  As when you allow your eyes to relax and the world doubles and then goes hazy, I find written language spoken, or sometimes even spontaneous monologues or conversational chattering to blend like the pitter-pattering of rain.  This young lady alternates between Fernando Pessoa, James Joyce and Macedonio Fernandez, occasionally inserting a poem by Rilke, myth from Borges, language of Sabato or Blanchot.  I’ve requested Laurence Sterne and Chuang-Tzu.

My statement on file is that “only great literature might help me sort out what it is that is asked of me,” and that the mind ‘they’ or ‘you’ are apparently concerned with will only remain attentive and communicable if constantly  nourished by music, language and the visual arts.  Otherwise I’ll be shutting it down, I said.

“How does that feel?” you, they, say again.  “It thinks,” I reply, “it thinks…perhaps it approaches an ‘idea-feeling,’ as the godfather of novels put it, or ‘intuition’ as used in the history of aesthetics…but ‘feel’ still confuses me,” I say.  I need to rest.

I’m beginning to believe I’m caught up in some laboratory system.  Led through corridors, slept in cell-like-hotel-room-type spaces, fed a steady array of the food groups, allowed brief walks out-of-doors (always accompanied, but not all in lab coats).  I have relatively kind courtiers, but I don’t bother with their names, they/you seem human enough, and we all run similar gamuts of experience, as I imagine it.

Yet I don’t really understand why I’m here, or anywhere, for that matter.  Seems an experiment of mind-observation.  One fellow (always accompanied by two or more others) regularly asks me questions about what and how I am doing, what I have done, what I think of doing, have thought about, dreamt, (asking ‘feeling’ questions less and less, as it always throws me off my game, resulting in bewildered wordlessness).  Today he mentioned ‘memory’ while flashing lights along a bar or tapping on the backs of my hands while they lay on my lap.  It’s an odd sort of world to end up in, after all.  I said I remembered a waterfall, a pleasantness, that it may have been Gaugin or Courbet, that they might take me through a museum or find some books about that…He dropped in the ‘how does it feel?’ query again, or ‘where in my body does that memory register?’  What to say to these people?  “In the mind!” I grumbled, “it is only all in the mind – perceptions, sensations, ideas, messages…all my skin, limbs, nerves and flesh send their impulses through there,” I stated, “let me lie down now.”  And thus I am.

They claim this day is my birthday.  That I am allowed to have it “off.”  I believe you, he said, and left me a genuinely glorious stack of books someone fetched from the library.  “We’d still love for you to record your experience,” they added, “if you’d like.”  Create my experience is more like it, I thought.  Fabulate it into these marks on a canvas lacking color or texture, I thought.  Sculpt a word or two in two dimensions, black, white, and yet I do suppose it passes the time (whatever ‘time’ it may be, is).  Who brought me here?

The stack on the table comprises a fifth of this weeks requests I write out when they ask me my needs.  “Weekly” is a term they use, for some reason I accept it.  Exhibition catalogs of Cy Twombly, R.B. Kitaj, Corot and Courbet, Susan Rothenberg, Emil Nolde, Clyfford Still, Millais, Thiebaud, Gwen John, Sam Gilliam, John Piper, always a new Giacometti, the journals of Rilke, writings by C.S. Peirce, Lessing, stories by Brecht, and some medical studies on optics.

It is quiet.  I had asked for music by Max Richter or Arvo Part for my “special day,” apparently this was too much, or none could be found.  They, or he, uses the term “melancholy” a lot in reference to my musical tastes.  And of course inquire (in increasingly subtle terminologies) how that makes me “feel.”  Phrases like “how does that occur to you;” “what do you consider regarding this?” “what impressions do these stir” and so on.  “Make” me feel, hmmmm.  I draw ovaled circles for them, if I’ve a pencil, I have taken to shading them in from time to time, altering lighter and darker passages.

I can’t conceive what their interest might be.  My suspicion grows that it’s simply their job.  What can they learn from a circle besides what they invent?  Maybe it’s their task to confabulate patterns or conclusions, narratives or hypotheses from observing or investigating me, as if I’m a text or a painting.  The world is a strange place to endure.  I think there are very many rooms in this building – have I been misplaced?  From time to time I’ve thought I’ve caught other shuffling souls (I think they planted that idea actually).  It is quiet today.

I get some nifty ideas of what to do with my pen from Twombly today (puts me in mind of Mark Tobey), so I clutter up a page with scribbles until it’s a balanced equation of masses and gaps, much like my daughter’s…”What’s that?!” he/you asks excitedly – “your daughter?!”  “I’ve always imagined I’ve a family” I replied – “children realize.”

I lie down.

I wake realizing I’d never read of Twombly’s life.  He at least had access to crayons if I’m to believe the reproductions in this book, as well as ample unlined paper.  But I also quickly recognize that much of it is simply in pencil, yet it provides me with an almost emblematic understanding…like the mapping of eye’s movements they’re so fond of here.  Perhaps Twombly inhabited a space such as this as well?  This is a touch shaming.  No, couldn’t be, I detect oils or gouache underneath some of these.  How I adore his busy little stories – like scratch papers of a physicist or schoolboy doodles, notes to the self, etcetera.  I’ll copy some as my written reports the next few days and see what you/they make of that!

I lie down.

Celldom (continuation)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, identity, Language, love1 Comment

oval sketching

(click image for previous content)

            Unwittingly, I suspect, you or they have begun encouraging me to fantasize, concoct alternate realities, to record what “self-awareness” I might possess – in effect, to make art.  To use artifice.  Pretend.

As they frustrate with my mind, I sense them agitate, they request I try again to inscribe ‘emotional states or fluctuations’… what I hear is: “Be delusional!  Pretend you can be other than yourself and fabricate observations or reports of what you find!  Write for us from a realm of your imaginings!”

I write: “Magenta with a violet, a blackened green, a touch of white and several mixtured hues of blue.”  One morning simply “ultramarine.”  The view up is amazing from the window when I wake – another problem – what is waking, what is not.

At this point I begin to draft single-lined wriggles and ovals (as near to circles as I am able) – day after day – delivering these gestures as my only possible responses of non-delusional self-observation / “awareness.”

They transport me somewhere.  “Some place quieter, restful, pastoral and with the sound of water,” they say.  My only hope is thunderstorms.

Thunderstorms shake me through and through somehow.  I profess rainfall to be cleansing, charming, enervating and distracting, but thunderstorms really tear me away from things toward some other beauty.  I draw an oval filling the page (as much as possible given the argumentative shapes) with emptiness.  Is this what is desired?  Am I approaching an “expression” with this instrument?

Another day I attempt a square and rectangle, even triangles – all with single lines and full of nothing, but none of these standardized and recognizable forms seem accurate.  No self-portrait (is this what you’re after?) could be so distinct.  Perceivable.  “Only bits and fragments appear common among ‘selves,’” I say (regrettably), “unless there be love.”

They (you?) pounce on this – “love! Ah!  Might you tell us, write” (very different things of course) “more about what you mean by this?”

“Don’t get hung up on words,” I whisper, and I’m off again to silence.

**********************

            There seems to be no library here, yet if I request books they arrive from somewhere.  All a matter of electricity, buttons and money.  As long as they last, I suppose.  And at higher costs each year, I think.

Thunderstorms, then, in lieu of the other unknown (“love”).  Something about their breadth and depth, the long slow accumulation of elements from such vast distances and sources: the implausibility of their construction, the buildup…composition…complexity…the billions of collisions that activate the enormous releasings.  Thunderstorms suggest the miraculous in nature, the dangerous prospect of entities coming together…some awe-full beauty.

Provenances, directions, blusters and still points, specific conditions, temperatures, “fronts,” uncountable molecules, atoms, producing just this dynamic event/effect…

This day I make a spiral down the page.

Biologies, psychologies, humors and pleasures, emotions and moods, habits, likes, dislikes, abhorrences, opinions – these seeking common spaces, manufacturing convergent territories…a prisming trap.  Love must be a fantasy or delusion like self-awareness…circles within circles…lapping, overlapping, twisting round, across and through.  A wovenness.  A magnetism, I think I meant earlier – a lust of imagination – would not knowing another be as futile as knowing oneself?  I think.  Learning by observation, interaction, what you cannot but effect, cannot become separate from?

A woman reads to me at night.

Celldom

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, meaningLeave a comment

Click the image for the first entry:

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            They brought me a pencil.

Just as easily broken, but the softness and variations of shading are gentler, and it emits a soothing sound (whatever “soothing” might mean for me here).  As well, I am able to watch it exhaust itself, and must keep rotating it within my fingers to fashion readable markings.  I do enjoy whispering in these lines with graphite.  Its liminal appearance and capacity for subtlety and starkness.

A pencil accomplishes something (I am thinking).  Makes tangible the dust and fog – our weathers of uncertainty.  You have to squint a little to make it out when used for forming language, and it quickly evaporates, fades.  Feels more made of matter than an ink pen…more temporary and inevitably fragile, decomposing.

They led me to the library today, accompanied closely, of course.  I saw more colors, shapes and forms than I have seen for weeks.  Selection was limited but there were some illustrated texts on natural science and even a few collections of art.  “What do you think these pictures express?” they asked of paintings or sculptures I paused upon.

“Look” I said, “look.”

I pretended sullen and began to ecstatically absorb – lines with dozens of colors peeking about the edges, throwing some other sector of the painting into bright relief, leading my eyes like young tight calves signaling, dashing about in summer.  My eyes leapt about after splotches and strokes, sunk slowly into (imagined) vast planes of layer upon layer of shading and tone (what an interestingly borrowed term!), scratched back, built over, washed in and out.  I danced through sprays of evocative squiggles, hyphens, circles, blocks and splatters, all in the space of half of an hour (does ‘space’ really apply to sequence?  To time? – “Don’t get hung up on words” again, always afraid I’ll disappear more fully, remove to too far a distance).

And why should they (or you) care?  Why should anyone?

broken pencil

******************************

            Too much shading, pencil evaporated, disappeared (literally “before my very eyes!” – what a ridiculous statement – as if eyes were anything without the information of the hands!)

Why distance is required.

This pen appears to be blue, although by the light I am provided to scribble by, it is difficult to tell (Ha!  Eyes even need speech to operate!)

What messages are all our so-called senses constantly inundating our poor cerebrum with?  Life is one massive assault on minds from birth until its end.  It’s no wonder then, is it?

One requires a kind of distance to “see” (observe, perceive, etc.).  How might one achieve this necessary gap from what one must inevitably be the substance and content of?  One needs a mirror and a separate self.  I believe this is variously referred to as “dissociation,” “transference,” “schizophrenia,” “writer.”

It is suggested that I attempt to describe further what I am noting down.  I already know that is not possible.  “Ouroborous” I say, and close my lips and eyes, quieting my hands.

Celldom

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, meaning5 Comments

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“he accepted each moment

shocked by having a face in the mirror

or torn away from it by the beauty of the world”

– from Zen by Stephen Berg

“…its mumbled inadequacy reminds us always

In this world how little can be communicated.

And for these, they too are only tokens

Of what there is no word for:…”

– from To Dido by W. S. Merwin

Then this is my canvas, my clay, the space I am allotted to “begin.”  “To write what I feel” as they put it.  From a palette of words, of letters, the shapes of sounds.

What color would they be?  What lines and outlines?  What surfaces, form?  What I am representing onto this blank?  When or where or what or how is it / was it present before this?  Had I more than a pen I might draw.  Monochrome doesn’t suit the subject I observe.  (“The greater the challenge” I suppose they or you or I might suggest – ack).

As if it were a can to pour.  A brush to dab or spread.  A chisel to pound or some multi-dimensional possibility.  No – one color, a flat surface, and whatever twisted lines I might make with this dark blood.

“Don’t simply regurgitate your story,” I heard, “write things we don’t already know or are able to find out in multitudes of ways.”  This is why “feelings” you say (they say).  Do we really have feelings bereft of ideas?

I imagine this is what is meant by declension.  Some traceable undoing.  Some fodder to deconstruct, patterns or plot recognition: analysis.  Is that so?  “Feelings” you say?

“I began to write down the things I feel,” I wrote, firstly, quoting them, but quickly realizing that that was a quote of a quote, and perhaps out of context, perhaps accidental, of another I have great affinity for, of mind, form and content, but would not dare or hope to repeat or revise.  Stillborn.  Abort.

“Feelings.”  And how might I gain access to this?  These?  Are not, spoken, emotions dissolved?  Transformed into some other reality?  Or fiction?  Does anyone even know yet what we talk about when we talk about “emotion”?  (I suspect there is a sort of object to them/it out there somewhere to be found and to dissect, describe, observe or experiment with – on the in-fernal-ternet or recordings of the surgings of the brain, the body, our systems).  Probably it goes without saying, but I have no “access” here.  “In” here.

How then should I represent void?  And again I ask – where/who/how ever might void have ever been presented in the first place as some natural sign I might re-present?  This is what a medium is for, no?  An intermediary between?  A vehicle or method of expression, disclosure, communication, power?  So what is this barely material of ink and pulp (one color or hue each, mind you!) between?

Them or you and my emotions?  Is that it?  One unknown and untranslatable to another?  I might describe here or caricature the you or them I imagine examining this frame, this “picture,” but who would pretend or proffer that I might, in that process, be knowing them to you?  And like the immateriality of an inner world, even if I could copy all the pulses, darts, knots and dashes of a stenciling electric light on some screen or render a mapping of neuronal activities imaged in all my various “states.”  What would be revealed in that?  What more would ANY of us know?

The electricity and charges my brain produces we might label “agitated subject,” or “concentrated subject,” “depressed subject,” “gazing subject,” “excited,” “disregulated,” and so on.  Within each of which (and millions of others besides) the terms occur so ambiguously and objective-arbitrarily we end further away than we began.

Alas, it wearies me to consider.  Efforts doomed and erroneous at the outset…scoffable.  How did such a project even crop up amongst us?  What did we think we might uncover?  (Ah, back to the mysterious ocean or caves from which we may have sprung!  Our reptilian selves, our triune brains, conjectures, conjectures, wild-ass-hairs of a nightmare!)

“Fine” they gently, politely nod, “fine.”  You (me/I) are doing well.  Don’t get hung up on “feelings” “emotions” terms – just put pen to paper, let’s just see what comes forth.  Don’t get “hung up on words” eh?  Yet make more words.  Is not inquiry senseless?  I rest my case.  I drain and break the pen.  If only I had flame at my disposal.

Existence is the Cusp – A Journal Entry

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, Language, meaning3 Comments

cursive journaling

It’s December, and I’m writing outside, lucky by so many counts.

  • It’s December, and 45°
  • My partner in love and life instills health and wellness in me
  • I’m writing
  • James is serving me coffee, ice water and double greyhounds enabling me to work without interruption

I’m in what you might call a “Cusp Area.”

The present is always a liminal space.  I am a few days away from completing a Master’s degree in Library & Information Management, and months away from embarking on a PhD in Media & Communication coupled to the Arts at a University in Switzerland.

I work very part-time (10-20 hours / week) for the United States Postal Service, attend regular psychotherapy sessions, parent 4 children, read and write as much as I can, cook and clean a LOT, and spend as much time as I can with my beloved (a brilliant, gorgeous, amazing, resourceful, intelligent and creative human).

I rest very little.

We (my immediate family) will not survive January on my income (sans school loans).  Cusp.

Change is imminent, and yet NEVER is NOT.

Every day relationships morph.  What could be termed “stability” in life must be radically redefined to have any resemblance or “fit” to reality – which is always, ALWAYS in enormous, factually ubiquitous, tremendous FLUX.

There is something like “similarity” – of persons, circumstances, situations, emotions, experiences… which we occasionally tag “familiar” or “repetition,” (providing a modicum of regularity, “consistency,” “normativity”) but none of it, EVER!! – is “identical,” “same,” “repeated.”  Not even ourselves, one “moment” to the next (i.e. in spans of cursive time – what seems utterly continuous is still difference – otherwise could not be noticed).

I am writing this in cursive in attempts toward continuities of form and content.  And yet there is vast uniqueness with each stroke.  “Distance,” difference, change.

I delight in working in language – a symbology for expressing experience – a fabric, social set and structure – a shared and flexibly rule-bound medium.

Possessing or harboring…containing vast incommunicable DIFFERENCES – between ethnicities, cultures, geographies, genders, contents, shapes, habits, practices, processes…REALITIES.  And yet useable.  Useful.

I am writing outside in December, in Kansas, in the United States of America, in cursive, in English, in black ball-point ink, in a ruled soft-covered notebook, in 2014, in attempts partially to think, to recount, to visualize, to express, to extend, to discover, remember, critique, perceive, view… understand a curious unstoppable flow –

The Experience of Being a Living Organism

with billions of particularities – both structures and substance, arrangement and order, experience and resources, habits, capacities, learning, abilities, perceptions, interpretations, emotions…

THIS kind, type, genus, species, instance, sort, occurrence, happening of this one/many, living (active, interactive, interacting, linked, dependent, individual, functioning) THING.

Differently now and now and NOW.

I cannot curtail difference.  I can hypothesize similarities.  I have agency, but an energy and forcefulness utterly dependent and constrained by countless systems, substances, processes and constituents.

I have a kind of power – corralled by everything within and around me.  I am at the mercy of – the support and boundary of – all else + the combinatory elements and activities of WHAT I exist of and the rest of existings.

I do not fool myself into thinking I am a cause or blame, and yet I am utterly response – able / – ible.  “My” interactions and interactivities, are mine / “me” / THIS.

THIS & THAT, Yin/Yang, Individual/Environment, “self”/”other”, – difference without discontinuity, ever in exchange: molecularly, actively, REALLY, and wholly.

cusp area

EXISTENCE IS THE CUSP.

I love while / as / if / because / in spite of (or in contradistinction to) I am loved.

I move with / against / into / around / while / within / because of / in distinction from, possible movements, contents, and affordances / constraints of everything about / within / around me.

I “exist” (stand-out) because I am, in a swarm, a sea, of existences, existings.

I have no other chances to be…

…outside of my surrounds.

I am.  Within a lifeworld.  Without which – I am not.

And still, “I am.”  Singular / plural.  Similar across space-time, an appearance and occurrence of similarity marked by difference.

The safest expression (for one seeking at “truths” or reliable, testable regularities) is:

WE ARE

or

IT IS.

We, the living.

architectural animal

I thank you.

Thanksgiving

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, Language, meaning, Music1 Comment

Thanks

Thanks to all of you I have become aware of – for creating, expressing and sharing your thoughts, ideas and works – giving me the opportunity to engage.

Thanks

And thanks to those of you who take the time and consideration to engage my thoughts, ideas and works – giving things a life beyond my small circumference.

Left to Say

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, relationships, Writing8 Comments

felzmann-swarm

What she said was.

And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.

What she said was

I…

To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.

Even I’d be overwhelmed.  Why with the even?

What she said was

It is too much.

I…

But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.

Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…

I cannot.

.

Think of where that leads!

She said

She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.

I cannot.

Is what she said.

She says.

I listen like a camera.

I record.

Her stillness moves too much.

Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.

I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.

.

She says it is too much, I will not try.

But I am trying.

Which does not change.

Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.

She can’t decipher.

What it is.

She will not say.  Says I cannot.

I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.

(Depress, record).

She will not can.

I take a picture.

It does not hear.

.

And what she says is

There’s too much for me to wager on a word

Even in flocks

Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,

Even in swarms.

I blink.

I snap the shutters.

She has said nothing

She will not say

I hold the stillness, how it flutters.

Silence seems.

Seems only.

But what she says is

She cannot.

.

The birds swoop past

And there is nothing

Left to say.

Interstice – 6: the coupling

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, Language, meaning, relationships1 Comment

System Environment Coupling

– 6 –

And then the narrative runs away.  Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds.  We yield them occurrence in time.  Over time.  Across locations.  We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so.  Their occurrence is now.  The moment of happen.  And the telling is here just as well.  The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember.  The moment of happen, and never “again.”  “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.

Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles.  We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have.  Construct forms to obey.  She stumbled, or stuttered.  Appeared in a robe.  When it opened, she stayed.  For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.

Not undone.  No undoing – just fall shy.  Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.  An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change.  She (you) and he (I), it (us).  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.

See the couple coupling.  A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle.  Huffs and spurts and clawing.  The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure.  Bodies in command.  It’s grotesque.  Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal.  She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting.  He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake.  They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.

From inches of distance the movements are grueling.  A repetitive taking advantage.  These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need.  The fish flaps on dry ground.  In a terror.  A panic afraid that relief will not come.  Release.  In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.”  But there is an other.  He/she senses the lover’s retreat.  The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction.  They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor.  Asynchrony.  What needs, needs its doing, is done.  Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…

From one angle.

See the couple coupling as animals.  The dog, the bear, the wolf.  The bird or bee or dragonfly.  The distance.  The unawares.  What if the lion leaned into the neck?  What if the squirrel caressed?  If the snakes lay entangled.  The cats licking flanks.  The stories would pour into morphing.  What have we seen?  During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received.  Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving.  His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine.  Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again.  In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else.  Animals humping and huffing,  not by instinct alone, something more.  Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.

In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be.  From the feline receiving her guest.  There is more taking place through the need.  The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond.  Bodies converging in dialogue.  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.  Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create.  The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace.  What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.

We muster.  We glyph.  We resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.

The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.

“Not another word.”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, Writing3 Comments

“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it you can ever let anyone know…this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you.” – DFW.

I don’t know what to tell you. If this piece by DFW doesn’t resonate and “work” on you, well, ok. Perhaps he’s not for you.  Please give it a read, again, if you have…

DFW - Oblivion

click for link to “Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace

“The Conflux of Floods” : an Imagined Interview

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Journallings, Language, WritingLeave a comment

two-rivers-colliding-geneva-switzerland-rhone-and-arve-rivers_2

            In a recently daydreamt interview (I realize these may be narcissistic, but they have occurred all through my life, and come to function as ways to take account of myself) – in which I had composed writings that earned critical acclaim AND garnered popular and commercial success (crazy, right?!) – I was being astutely questioned (after all, I am both interviewer and interviewee – it’s a daydream), and pressured to account for both the critical acclaim and the mass consumption of the tangled materials of my celebrated novelistic-poetic-essaying (some multi-genred hodge-podge and hurly-burly’d collaging of human inscription).   [Which is also, obviously, occurring in this everyday attempt at its retelling].  For better or worse.

By any account, each time I endeavored to formulate an answer to reckon for the apparent realities under fantasized questioning, I was foiled – ultimately unable to appropriately language ANYthing I strove to express – for the fundamental reason that the shared social convention of language – the available (or known) English nouns, verbs, structures, phrases, vocabulary, ontologies, etymologies, forms, content and context seemed false to my meaning as soon as I spoke them.

I would begin to assay a response, and each available term (even though utilizing an extensive and deft, adept English vocabulary) – each word I was choosing – would seemingly cancel itself.  I was caught in pregnant pauses – an author seeking a term – and the accessible signs and sounds of an encyclopedic dictionary all clanged untrue – inaccurate, incomplete and implausible – incorrect!

The interview proceeded (notably un-entertainingly and un-interestingly) with solid and well-considered queries posed from the history of human making, reflection and inquiry…followed by prolonged silences as I contemplated what might be honest, authentic replies…resulting in the beginnings of obsessive-compulsive, over-thought, manically scrutinized hesitations – cancelled out and undone, revised and corrected, taken back or erased as soon as they were spoken.  Simultaneously to becoming aware of their possible interpretations – conventionalized meanings gassing the atmosphere – the breath and air of their saying and hearing.

For example:  “Well, I think that authors…how could I speak for others…it seems to me…no that’s not right,” or, “It is my intuition, sense of things…my felt experience… no, that’s not quite it.”  “As the mind processes the body’s…wait…what is not body about the mind?  Our language presents a splitting of the two that was never there…I mean…no, no, this is inadequate…” and so on.  Nothing being said.

“Ever try.  Ever fail.  No matter.

Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”

-Samuel Beckett-

            The failure of the interview eventually came around to the following… a couple responses that might represent something almost accurate, maybe.  May communicate a touch of something authentic, honest.  It has stuck with me for a few days, and yet I can’t quite be sure…

A question arose concerning what I might have done, or be doing if I had fathered less children, were not bound to sustaining a family, and so on… I reflected awhile… and soon realized that I am unable to imagine my life without offspring.  Nearly half of my existence has been lived as a father, and I cannot think of experiences or expressions that they do not co-create in some way.  If any of it were taken back – the struggles and fears, broken marriages, anxiety, joys and determination to survive, regular interactions with their development, activities, quizzings and personalities… I only feel impoverished.

The illusional interview concluded with a large catch-all question, something along the lines of: “Your writings have profoundly moved some readers, yet you consistently express discontent – revising, beginning again, evading – even disappointment in your faltering, hesitant works.  Can you talk about this experience?  How do you account for your dissatisfaction in light of your readers reported satisfaction?”

My reply:  “The only way I can think to address this right now is in terms of a conflux of flood waters.  I, the writing one, have a flood of experience that I wish to understand, interact with, relate to somehow, attempt to comprehend.  I utilize the methods, marks and systems that we, as a species over time, have collaborated and devised with which to communicate – with ourselves, with others – and I attempt, attempt, attempt to forge some accord between the vast swarming flood that my life-experience ever is – as an organism embedded in world – and the means and methods we have for making sense of, imagining, and transcribing such total experiential flow.”

“The resulting expression is always more-than, distinct and different-from the felt experience I have of the flood (as the medium borrows from far beyond my own individual abilities or thoughts, capacities – an enormous fund of expressions, vocabulary and species-deep conventionalized experiences I could not possibly evince on my own) AS WELL AS less-than, deficient, incapable and variant from (not equal to) the ubiquity of my experienced flood.  I am left simultaneously hoping the conventions of language will prove adequate, and despairing they never will be.  What results from this tangle is a writing – a text, document, artifact – of my individual attempts to process the flood of my human experience in conventionalized signs.”

“From the other side of the markings comes the flood of each individual reader’s human experience.  As they (or we, I’m describing my reading experiences) engage the verbal expressions the writer selects to represent or elicit their own flood, the reader’s flood rushes through, around, with, into these written expressions.  When what is deciphered via these conventional funds of language feels apropos, accurate or apt to the reader’s experiential living flood – we are moved, feel met, acknowledged and represented, almost comprehended and understood, and we may feel that this collection, order, expression of language we have discovered in reading actually writes us, so to speak.  Which is why you may hear readers say such things as “I couldn’t have said this better…” or “I can’t imagine this expressed any other way…let me read it to you” (the thrust of quotation).  The section of text, general outlook, sound, rhythm or content of the artifact feels almost miraculously adequate and accurate to our own flood of experience.  Of course, often it does not – in which cases we revise or repurpose our readings toward knowledge or entertainment, something partial or other than full-flood experiencing, holistic (as nearly as possible) communication.”

“We know, as readers, no Other’s experience can be identical to our own, but in lucky moments it feels so.  Feels possible that our experience of the living flood is shared, understood, that our individuality, solipsism is not a locked room, or impassable barrier.  This is the “magic,” if you will, of human social conventions as mediums for individual experiences: they enable or facilitate our joinings, our cooperation, solidarity, convergence.”

“So neither the writer nor the reader are responsible for authoring profound writings, or rather BOTH are: multiple floods of experience crash through the arranged signs and symbols, separated by time and space and differences, but still possible violent confluences – depending on both, or all.  Living experiencings rushing the sign-sets enabling some felt sympathy, intimacy, accord between the floodings and the expressions: conflux.”

“Otherwise it simply doesn’t ring true – might be appreciated for its artistry or ingenuity, ideas, craft, imagination – but NOT an occasion for profound felt accord, convergence, a totalizing feel of representation/expression.”

“Floods in conflux: right now this seems to me the opportunity that care and attention, effort and awareness of our socially species-al co-creating mediums of communication (art, music, technologies, labors, habitudes, languages, modes of inquiry, etc…) allow for, offer us, in moments of fortunate concord.”

“Does that answer your question in any way?”

Tape ends.