Category: Language

Free to Write

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Confusion, creative writing, Experimenctes, identity, Language, meaning, Semiotics, Writing6 Comments

Wobbly

With the freedom and challenge of writing nothing, with nothing to write.

An assemblage without shape, a conditioned concoction…constrained by language, by individuality, by knowledge and finitude.  Dependent on what it is that “I” am, the funds of culture, genes, society and cells “I” am able to access and “person-al” (!?) abilities or capacities to operate, utilize, actuate, participate in/with.

Writing veritable nothing(s) seems easy, suddenly.  (When viewed from perspective of self-reference – envisioned this way it almost feels inevitable).

Perhaps I am incapable of writing SOMEthing, some THING.  Perhaps I am unable to create a fact-of-artifice, an object, an artifact.  Something-being-on.  Perhaps I can neither begin work, nor complete it…perhaps “I” is always the EXCLUDED MIDDLE.  The liminal divisor, the limit-of-being-this, the present/presence of this particular effort, happening, this action-in-its-taking-place…ALWAYS AFTER and ALWAYS BEFORE.  Event?  Never quite NOW, excepting AS the action, but EVER precipitate and EVER resulting.

I write.  Neither conclusively nor originary.  Verb-al.

Skirting this void (where there might have been nothing, no thing such as THIS – these letters) “I” scribble known (“shared?”) language…marks meaning…something…almost.  Meaning SOME things to SOME persons, never unambiguous, never decisive or clear, not quite agreed.  This is language, these letters, these symbols, these marks.  May be scrambled, assembled, undone, recombined – but still marks – recognizable to SOME, and processed through “me,” significance is what is in question.

Understandability, inter-pretation, com-munication, con-course (of the stream of inking letters onto a page to in-scribe knowable triggers…to refer, to signify, to re-mind, to com-pose, to make happen, avail-able, IN-BE-TWEEN: to split BE-ing as shared or con-joined).  To joinwith by posing, positing, offer-ing marks formed toward potentially recognizable inscriptions as con-constructed / – accepted words toward meaning.  Con-fusing.

Yes it involves effort.  Yes it depends on unlike-ness and emptiness or faith.  Yes it seems un-like-ly (NOT like-able, not able-to-be-liked) and yet I give it, construct (co-construct) and offer up (sacrifice) what “I” com-pose (set out for sight – with) “YOU” (other) in order.

In order to…?  for…?

Assembling identifiable language sets, verbal Lego blocks, so that…?

(an “I” might be posed? seen? heard? recognized? present-ed?)

Meaning, writing nothing – “having nothing to write, and lacking the means to write it, and the extreme compulsion to keep writing” (Beckett) and not to get in your way…

Perhaps this is near what I’ve done,

  • a waste
  • a con-fusion
  • a voiding an ab-sense
  • a disruption…

…getting it out of the way (my desire) perhaps I’ve writ nothing of note but a circling, a dawdling, an hesitation, dis-traction and trip-stumble-fall…

…a fragment and faltering, figment frustration.

Nothing of worth, of no value, sign-if-icance, just words.

Perhaps THIS is nothing of note.

What “I’ve” done with the freedom and challenge…the time, urge, and ability:

NOTHING

Mappa Mundi

On By NW FilbertIn Cosmology, Current Reading, existence, Experience, Heidegger, Knowledge, Language, Mapping, meaning, Semiotics, Writing9 Comments

mappemundi

The key question is not what a given sentence means but what it does, especially how it does whatever it does…to know is by definition to say that something is something else and be believed when one says it – Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

Whatever we might say, we see in all that we say. – Sophocles

Only apparently is it a ‘presentation.’ – Martin Heidegger

It follows that in the world of humans any mark is better than no mark, for without categorization there is nothing at all, not even nothing at all. – Olsson, Abysmal

How small life is here / and how big nothingness.  – Robert Walser, Oppressive Light

Alias Thinks Back…On…

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Alias Harlequin, awareness, creative writing, death, desire, Experience, Journaling, Language, loneliness, longing, Loss, love, Melancholy, time, Uncertainty, Writing6 Comments

“To bring a work to ‘a conclusion,’ as Picasso said, is like putting an end to a bull – to kill it.”

-Francois Jullien-

diaries

from the diaries…

Woke this morning with a particular feeling.  I’ve never been one to believe people could name their emotions or feelings.  The best we can say are parts.

Words like a parts catalog: indicating pieces and components, but never the working, not the operative whole.  Machines are full of mystery.  What’s hidden.

They say you cannot know.  As you age.  Cannot know if it’s the end, exactly.  Perhaps they’re right – I’ve surely been surprised in middle age, believing everything was lost, doomed, downhill and erosive, some slow and steady depleting – and then WOW!  Who could have known or imagined!  This luck, this place, this woman or experience!  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  But maybe we do.  Maybe we really know, once twilight settles.  I’ve never trusted “them” – the “experts,” the “scholars” and “scientists,” “politicians” or “leaders” or “doctors,” the “speakers for” and “authorities”…i.e. privileged observers (an illusion or delusion or both – no one ever gets to be ‘outside’ existence, any more than any other).

What with Laramie gone, and a birthday round the corner, and language just a parts catalog – my experience.

I woke with a particular feeling.  That things were near their ends.  That I am nearing ends.  Work, love, breathing, will.  That the stories I’m involved with are dwindling in pages, thin and wearing out.  These ‘particular feelings,’ “somehow we just know,” kinds of things: lay down, close your eyes, cross your hands over your chest and hope things are in order.  Or not.  Depends on inclination and values, I suppose.  What one cares about, or for.  Perhaps.  “They” say you cannot know.

I’ve been surprised.  Even wildly.  Much I’ve never been able to believe and yet it seems: my children – engendered by me and of such promise; this beautiful woman that loves me; that I’m still alive.  One never knows (is what they say).  So who knows what?  And how do “they” know that?

I think I do, what with Laramie gone, and my faulty parts catalog, and this particular way that I feel.  I’ve worked too long and too much.  Tried too failingly.  Never quite trusted or believed.  Never found my worth.  Maybe now I know.  Maybe now I’m certain of something.

The end is coming – for me – always concerned and consternated by beginnings – how to start, where to set out – and now, here (nowhere) the path, it dwindles away.  What have I done?  What did I mean to?  What did I wish?  Why didn’t I?

I wanted to write a scholarly work about something that truly obsessed me.  Something I’d spent my life searching.  Something that likely doesn’t even exist, but no matter – because Scrabble, because poems, because science.  Unscramble (by scrambling) the letters – you’ll see: it can almost be said, almost anything – existent or not – almost.  Parts constructing strange wholes and plugged in, eventual malfunctions, repairs – and yet “no matter, try again, fail again, fail better” (Sam Beckett – I’ve read and I’ve taught far too long).

And one solid work of fiction and some poems.  That’s all.  That’s what I wanted to do.

So I studied, and traveled and loved.  Raised children, made music, pushed learning and literature publicly, worked and worked, and drank and drank.  Took in stragglers and strays, made it work where I could, doubted and doubted, desired.  Everything but what I wanted – that’s how you perpetuate desire.

I woke today with a particular feeling, though “they” say you cannot know.  Cannot know for certain, that things are yet to surprise you, yet to get better.  I will not argue.  Perhaps.  But what with Laramie gone, and all that’s undone, maybe I know, maybe we do.  Maybe we’re aware when our endings are coming.  Who could know?  Who could tell us?

My ends are coming.

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on.

(still more from Beckett)

Related: Alias Harlequin

Addenda of sorts

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Complexity, Current Reading, Language, Mapping, meaning, Semiotics, Writing7 Comments

Gunnar Olsson

“…in the universe of the sign there are no clear-cut identities, only delayed differences.  Never a dead end, always an already-but-not-yet; never a genuine original, always an imperfect copy.  Language is a simulacrum of simulacra, the privileged hiding-place of the psychoanalyst’s repressed supplement.

“Pushed to its own limits, the difference between identity and difference is that in the world of the former everything sticks to itself, while in the heaven of the latter everything escapes from itself.  Comparison rests on a foundation of difference, for once a sign is interpreted it no longer is what it used to be.  And exactly therein lies the crux of the matter, for it is well established that the structure of language itself makes perfect translation impossible.  It follows that reality is never what it is said to be, for reality and language are never one and the same, a painful lesson…

“The conclusion is straightforward: although word and object are always related, they are never identical.” – Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

Signifying Writing – Figure 2

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, desire, Experimenctes, fragments, Language, longing, Mapping, Perception, Semiotics, sign, Writing5 Comments

Sign-language

Figure 2

A relief in the unreality.  A kind of re-sign-ation and release…capitulation…to the impossible.

“how we find our way in the unknown by drawing on invisible maps of the invisible and by following…”

(Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal)

Sign-language.  Gesturing.  Ambivalent approximations.

At times unbearable.  At times a satisfaction of “all we have” and the effort of maximizing it.  At times re-solve (for x?).  At times a re-linguishing abandonment:  despair.

I study her, hair splitting and spreading, trailing inky-green over the vein-passages, delicately swollen, along the backs of her hands, superfluous and jewelry-like wrist-bones, concatenation and symphony of muscled, cartilage-limned lineations from thigh to knee-bend to calf, turning into sun-drenched marble of ankle, tendon, toes…painted, dusted, perfection…

The beauty will not hold to term.  Will never be contained.  It was impossible before it began.  Eventuated, erupted, but was not “meant” or realized for any capture.  It’s irreducible and indescribable, and I always already knew that – thus a torment, self-torture, a suicide term-inating – necessary failures I will elect to die trying: inconceivable, yet experienced; an incalculable worthless worth because unshared and uncommon.  Just perception, experience, singular…impossible.  Not factual.  Incommunicable.  HER.

To simply see (receive, perceive, conceive) – non-transferable, i.e. ‘unreal,’ unrepeatable, or ‘not the same’ as that.  Untranslatable.

Yes, it starts to map.  A conjecture of imaginary spaces, places, locations.  Lines drawn wobbly and around, surround, what mystery?  To dialogue and dream – hypothesize, surmise, polygraphy.  I.e. to fail.

Ends in its begins, becoming something ‘else,’ as self might with each other – between showing new unknowns.

Not sure its believed in any more: “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

It goes on.

A trace, congesture, autography.

Experience.

Abysmal

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Language, Mapping, meaning, Philosophy, Semiotics, Wittgenstein, Writing5 Comments

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein –

“The silent spaces between words often speak louder than the words themselves”

-Gunnar Olsson – 

Signifying Writing, Figure 1

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Art, awareness, Confusion, desire, Experimenctes, Graphotos, human, Image, Language, Mapping, Semiotics, sign, Traces, Writing9 Comments
Opicinus De Canistris World Map
Figure 1

Opicinus De Canistris World Map

*

The map began as a scribble, a doodle.  Begins as a failure to write, to “compose.”

In lieu of a word there’s a wiggle of pen wandering aimless in search.  Cartography-graphology-psychology – a loitering for logos.

Begins this way – in hope of words, a sort of squiggle.  A body desiring a mind.  To show up, to take over, provoke or convince – to appear, make a meaning, disclose – to figure toward sign.  Some unconcealing.

The signal’s not there, so it moves: the hand, the instrument, the breath and the heart – are they tools?  And for what?  A cartographer’s dream.  Of no training, no knowledge, even reason is lacking.

A pen making marks on a page, mapping none.  Tracing nonsense.  It begins in this way, and it leads, so he hopes (it hopes, is hope, is desire).

The scrawl travels over the page – given borders and boundaries, arbitrary and set – 6”x9” and lined with a soft viscous grey.  He (it) slows down.  Just a hand and an arm and a shoulder – in motion – holding a technical device filled with fluid – black, yes, like bile, but less tacky, diluted – it flows, threading lines – it’s con-fusion – yet taking, biting, inscribed.  Something happens.  Drawings are locked to a medium stock.  Incomprehensibles stained on a page.

It crawls on.

*

This mapping begins in a loss.  He is lost.  It is lost.  Doesn’t “know.”  Just beginning, because – with desire.  It is driven, compelled, WRITER WANTS (for to write) with “nothing to write, and no means to write it” yet constrained to keep writing, to expunge merely SOMEthing, some THING.  Which is NO thing, no THING, but to mark.  It goes on.

Makes a map, a map-ping, tangled series of lines meaning nothing, no THING, but creating TO-WARD.  Ward off absence, off void, ward off death, this is to – .

It (he) is tired.  Is forlorn.  Is an absence and loss, a re-mission, re-cursion, re-morse.  And not even that clear.

Scribbles on.  NOT a map.  NOT directions.  For NO where to go – NOW here, now HERE, no-where.  Which begins all the longing, for “he’s” heard it said, found it written – in signs, in-scribed, sign-i-fied: but NOT HERE.  Not in him or this body.  NOT THIS.  No sense.  Non-sense.  “It’s” not “working.”

Trail dwindles along cross the page.  It’s a map.  Just of being.  NOW here.  Now.  HERE.  Looks like this – some electrocardiomusculoskeletalpsycognilinguadigital-gram.  From this angle, this tool, these techniques.  As a Ouija.  No meaning.  Saussurating.  Arbitrary.  Mediate.  Only markings.

It falters.

And so it begins – as a failure to write – as a scribble – an assay – a tribute to write – that cannot, that will not, that does not…quite occur.

 

Regurgitating Language

On By NW FilbertIn Complexity, Confusion, Experimenctes, Idle Talk, Language, Literature, Mania, Perception, WritingLeave a comment

smoke

Voicing Smoke

(click image or text to read)

Recycling…in retrospect

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, identity, Language, Literary References, Literature, longing, notebooks, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Two variations of older, longer works…trying to remember possibilities…

Words Gestures Order

Fragments

Words & Gestures

 

We are. Are we not.

On By NW FilbertIn absence, desire, Experimenctes, identity, Language, love, Other, Poetry, relationships, Uncertainty, WritingLeave a comment

knottyhands

Beginning this way, I have jettisoned my goal.

No one is able to say precisely when it will rain, until it is raining.  Not this one.  Nor…

At times it is raining.

 

When will I be here? Or, better, perhaps – When am I here?  (Already?  Again?)  How?

Am I when and where I love you?  And how?  Forego why, too complicated.

 

Say “I am this one who loves you” now and now and now again.  As if a presence on repeat, differently again.  Registers and tones; layers, levels, circumstance; sense/nonsense and the liquid continuum between.

Who are you?

Say “you are the one this one loves.”  Or the many.  Or the one this one loves in relation to I.  Or the other-than-one loving other-than-one, here, now, again, again, differently.

When is this love?  And how?  Dropping why in the craggy abyss, as it dissipatively floats, up and away.  Where is this love?

I begin.  It is raining.  Say that you are.  If I say that you are, or how, when, or why, I have failed what I set to inscribe (you).  Say now.  I just missed it.  Say love, saying what?

I’m aware of your absence with pain I can’t tell.  I say “love.”  I say “miss.”  I say “yearn.”  Goal discarded.

Please say that you are.  I will be that relation.  Will not.  And I am.

It is raining.  What it?  Say I am and you are.  Less than one and still more, it’s becoming.  Undone.  The suture begins in the cut.  We are we.  We might be, when we are.  Now and now, say now, and is differently.

We’re unfound in this you and this I inter-change.  Inter-change-able as we.  And we’re not.  Either you or an I as these two, but not quite, there’s an extra: BETWEEN.

Which is nothing, like water in air, molecules known by connections.  Re-cognized.  Understanding might pull them apart, separate, while reason(s) constructs some assemblage.

Say I love you, as this one to this.  Say it’s so, without knowing, ‘cause with.  In between, together; understanding, a part; reasoning a sort of equation.

Where am I?  I appear in this with.  Who are you?  This one forming between.  When now comes it is raining, again, again different.  Some of the notion we are.