Category: Language

Discursive Tangles

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, communication, Complexity, Journaling, Language, Living, Reflections, relationships, Samuel Beckett, Writing13 Comments

SighForSignificance-1

Increasingly I find myself filled with the desire of simply saying what I think about.  To some generative effect.

“We live.  We die.  We wish the living mattered.”

But “that’s too simple,” you say.  “Everyone knows that.”

And you’re right, again, and it’s the best that I can do.

Not that I don’t do other things, in living.  I hold jobs and work for pay (at nearly ANYthing) to keep a home, feed and educate my children, and attempt to convince them to try to try.

And then there’s the dynamo of desire.  Urges and drives, lusts and obsessions simply to have someone who will allow me to be close to them – to touch them and smell, listen and taste, copulate and serve and talk back and forth.  I don’t expect them to love me.  I’ve long given up being wanted or desired.  Can’t imagine I’ve ever considered myself necessary to someone or something.  For connection – to world, to literature and art, to thoughts and conversations, to knowledge and nature.

“No matter,” He says, “Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better,” He says.

I cannot.  Oh I try.  I try.  I try again.  But never imagine proximity of others not involving pity, and my failure seem ever further from their marks.  Not better.  I’m 45 now!  Or 80!  No matter.

No matter, indeed.

No matter, at all.  Perhaps.  I know this, that, some other stuff.  No matter. So I crave and wish and hope.  Failing further, and worse, never better.

Long hours of days pleasing others (or trying).  No matter.  Family and employers, students and friends.  No matter.  Perhaps?

But to say something simply.  How that?  I feel caught in a tangle of discourses.  What language to say in?  What field?  How to be heard, perhaps evaluated, to “count” or to “matter.”  I read something years ago by Nathalie Sarraute comparing the dreams or demands of Dostoevsky and Kafka to be recognized…no, acknowledged  (“From Dostoevsky to Kafka” in The Age of Suspicion). To matter.  Appear.  Have a voice.

Said simply:

“We live.  We die.  We wish the living mattered.”

Selah.

Not-Belonging, Chapters

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, Confusion, creative writing, Critical Thought, desire, fiction, fragments, identity, Language, Literature, longing, Melancholy, Philosophy, relationships, Self-Doubt, Traces, Writing3 Comments

I feel somewhat apologetic, but here is one more selection from my archives.  Another that when I re-read I am unable to see how I might do better, or how I ever got it done at all, yet all my work un-published or rejected, so I know it is not “good enough” per whatever the current cultural milieu would prefer.  “No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”  Perhaps.  In any case, it circles around for me like the tail-eating snake I am, in hopes it might engender something new, no, in hopes it might be put to rest.  For any who read it, I would be hard pressed to metaphor my astonishment, humility, gratitude and begging-of-patience, including a sheer and sharp ache of deep appreciation for your life’s time and likely unwarranted, gracious, attention.

does-not-belong-worksheet-worksheet

Chapters That Don’t Belong

(please click image or title for text)

many thanks

A Far Story – Samuel Beckett

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Current Reading, death, depression, desire, human, identity, Language, Literature, Samuel Beckett, WritingLeave a comment

I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine.  That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be.

– Samuel Beckett

Beckett - Stories Texts Nothing

Nos. 3 & 4, Texts for Nothing by Samuel Beckett

it doesn’t get better than this…unless it’s more of beckett

Alas, Alias

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Alias Harlequin, depression, fiction, grief, Language, loneliness, memory, Perception, Writing8 Comments

kitty-litter

“Cat litter,” the last thing said, and something about that abandoned bicycle, a child’s bike, deep red, repainted, left askew on their lawn for days.

Those were the last things.  The last things she said.  And so he’d begun to move about much more carefully.  Timidly some might say, an amalgam of caution and care.  Ever tender, aware that things break, or tear, spill, or fall apart.  End.

But then Laramie, his sister, mother, the kids – some entities seem to persist, so few and so stubborn, inexplicably, threatening almost, as if an accumulating disaster, an heavier withdrawal.  He doesn’t know what to make of it.

Abandonment crushes all scales and statistics – but pebbles and dust, foundations and roots still remain.  Persistent.  Resilient.  Irrational.

Like a sloth he repaired to his desk, as delicate and slow.  He took up a pen with his head in his hand.  He was lonely, alone but for quiet, sweet silence, and branches and birdsong and wind, autos and dogs.  Not quite quiet.  Not quite alone.  But abandoned, far as he could surmise.

He wrote.  Rather drew.  Looping lines that were shaky on paper.  Tried to make his operation more smooth.  It failed.  He shakes now, does Alias, from drinking and smoking, aging and grief.  From perspective.  His perspective.

A rattling undone, an erosion.  He sighs.

A bike, and “cat litter,” then gone.  Others had left for much more and much less.  Litanies of reasons of wrongs are so easy with humans involved, never mind the ‘weight of the good.’  Can’t compete.  Won’t compute. There are mistakes, and effort involved – both are failures, no matter the theories or talk, no matter their universality.  He was wrong and a failure, which equals abandon no matter the words they produced.

Alas, Alias.  A depression.  An outlook that colors the field, but it’s charcoal.  No matter the ‘whom’ it will bleed, run them dry, and disfigure.  No one’s withstood it for long, for all of his kindness and passion (devised to distract from the swallowing dark, or the primer – his base coat is death).  He’s alone.

Not a Laramie, mother, or kin.  Without doubt there’s no lover, no friend.  Just a man and his books and incessant grey thoughts, and a pen.

He begins, looping lines…forming “Cat litter,” the last thing she said…

Bike

Meta-Recursion: Some thoughts on the task of writing

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, being, Complexity, culture, Experience, fragments, Journaling, Knowledge, Language, Neuroscience, Perception, Physics, Plasticity, Science, WritingLeave a comment

cropped-fish.png

Life becomes ideas, and ideas come to life

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Metacognition is a buzzword these days – as contemporary sciences dive in to the neuro, neuron, chemistry and activity of bodily systems, we get to “see” our activities and “think” about them in different possible ways.  Our sciences concoct novel theories and processes, instruments and concepts and categories with regularity, and then our cultures absorb and incorporate these beliefs into our self-understanding and relating.  Metacognition “the awareness or understanding [ha!] of one’s own thought processes” is just such a theory – one writers have long thought about and acted as if, never without problematics.

Recursion, or, “the repeated application of a recursive procedure or definition,” is another one – looped and locked in repetitive activities in which our procedures and language “relate to or involve a program or routine of which a part requires the application of the whole, so that its explicit interpretation requires in general many successive executions,” each successive stage affected by the previous and effecting the following, the inside / the outside, the near / the far, the experienced & imaginary, the art / the life.  Endless recursion within a reigning myth of metacognition…and I am writing.

A writer knowing that I’m (a shifting pronoun) writing so also knowing that I’m writing about knowing that I’m writing (yet uncertain or finitely unable to ascertain all that entails) while I’m writing and therefore writing about that as well as what I’m writing, and so on…pertains to language, truthfulness, reason, perception, behavior and any other human activity…complex and recursive in a culture professing metacognition as a possibility.

This complicates writing in tremendous ways.  It becomes very difficult when composing letters and spaces to evaluate anything as “impossible.”

Quantum sciences, computer technologies, object-oriented ontologies and anthropocenes – complexity, indeterminateness, and relativity all serve as a soup in which we simmer, constraining and affording us opportunities that usher us right up to the edges of our finitude.  The interconnections (internet) of things (or not!) reminds us we cannot understand or know enough to write knowledgeably about even our own organisms, and also expose us billions of encounters and experiences per day that recursively become within our systems.  I spread wider and decenter as the membranes that compose me increasingly appear as sieves.

The larger and smaller scales of life may not be operating like our daily experience, yet we often refer to our lives as “daily rounds.”  Relativity and indeterminateness and reversals of such equations, undo previous comprehensions of the filters of space and time, even as the Western ‘historical’ sense of narrativity and order comes undone, tangling in its possible untangling as potentially ‘solved’ in multiple directions at once…leaving us directionless and indeterminate per any ‘correspondence to reality or ‘truth.’”  Selah.

We must have experienced by now toggling between subject and object in any situation, and to whatever degrees our systems are genetically alike they are multitudinously variant as well.  We are currently aware that our perceptive calculations of our contexts are hypothetical or apply in very limited specificities…i.e., ONCE.  So our taxonomies flux, our histories alter, our cognition and perception get meta-statized, and language becomes a wobbling sign in Big Weather.  Waves and warps, folds and possible interjections.

Apparently it might all be in-formation, movements accessible through relation for operationalizing.

Our “subject matter” dissolves since we no longer have a subject acting through a predicate, but all matter interacting in theorized randomness and happenstance with nary a drive to avoid extinction.  Hosts of events (plot?) with endless extrapolations or interpretations, wherein things long distant and disparately far might “fold in” or “warp past” or correlate via some vibration – and perhaps they do? (memory as a pass of ‘reversal’ in subjective time?)

I am writing.  And so all this must be written, in our stories and imaginary objects, holding nothing, requiring application of the whole and very many successive executions.  Sounds ominous, but the terminus thusfar we can still count on.  It will end (for us, as we experience it).  It must be written – increasingly aware of all I do not / most likely cannot know or understand, and that nothing experienced “fits together” while belonging together in ways we haven’t been able to imagine, fragments fed by fragments feeding fragments inseparably fluid…and I write, I try to write it, in channels of existent vocabularies and beliefs inaccurately scoped.

I (whatever that means) seem to be writing with an awareness that I-am-more-not-I-than-I or I is tenuously distinguishable or occasional, and am writing that I am writing while I am writing that I am thinking about writing which thinking is happening through various media like paper and pen and keyboard and digital text and electricity and air and an incalculable and miniscule trajectory of experience waving particles undone and mutated, I adapt, to no purpose (it is theorized) and go on or along and keep writing unaware even of what I am aware of and operationalize a tiny selection of language flooded with other usages and contexts and I write we write it writes as its writing.

“it is through my writing that I keep a hold on life” – Franz Kafka

And, holding nothing, I am unable to stop.

You must go on.  I can’t go on.  I’ll go on.

Samuel Beckett

Homo Scribus Attonbitus

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, identity, Language, Literary References, meaning, Philosophy, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

a text from the archives…ready again, relevant, near…

hand eye heart

Homo Scribus Attonbitus 

(2012?)

Interconnection and Autonomy

On By NW FilbertIn communication, family, identity, Knowledge, Language, love, meaning, relationships, Technology, Writing7 Comments

a personal note

I have long disliked and had an intense aversion to telephone calls.  Like televisions transmitting in shared or public spaces, they present inescapable interruption and intrusion.  One could be in thought, repose, intimacy, conversation, activity — in fact, whatever one is about when one is not on the telephone – and then suddenly must react to a demand.  A call.  But WHO is calling?  WHY?  Why now?  When my attention is demanded through interruption or intrusion, my body anticipates emergency.

Disembodied conversation shifts the burden of dialogue to the voice.  Therefore the natural indicators for “I’m thinking…” or “give me a moment,” nods, smiles, frowns or gestures that flow in face-to-face interaction, offering wholistic responses, are all pressured onto the mind and voice – forcing incessant reports and the trickiness and difficulty of translating bodily experience into language.  I require time to listen, consider, and respond.  Movement.  Silence.  Whether it’s a simple invitation, business matter, question or request – it always emerges as demand on the telephone.  Respond to this NOW.  (public or shared-space televisions – SEE this NOW).  You cannot escape, select, regulate or direct such importunities.

Global Communication Technologies, – our networks, internetworks and their myriad machines and devices – have provided some enormous benefits toward expanding our social lives outside of limited demographics and cultures, opening realms of activities and artifacts, information and resources that in any other time-period we may never have known about or encountered.  As these technologies proliferate into internets of things, ubiquitous (or pervasive / invasive) computing, and manifest the inherently linked realities of our world…simultaneously providing ambient findability (all of these terms and phrases as easily interpreted as violence or intrusion as well as opportunities or boon).

I’ve long preferred face-to-face interaction (in spare doses, they are taxing & rewarding) and textual communications (obviously, but also texting, emails, postal correspondence), because in the F2F we are offered and allowed appropriate cues to follow and respond to one another, and in textual discourse we are allowed the time and distance to craft and dictate our translations of experience, messaging intentions, and terminological tones.

Of late, however, I have noted a convergence of Call-Anxiety and Pervasive-Communications.  And am wondering about our levels of autonomy (if there even is such a thing for the human) or self-direction, any amount of governance we might preserve over our lives and activities and choices in a world populated with linked devices?

How much of our days – work time, supposedly “personal”/private time, play time, labor time, interpersonal time, family time, meal-times, chore-times, reading times, creative times, necessity times, and so on…- are steered and directed, controlled and dictated by the consistent, persistent, pervasive and invasive thoroughfare of MESSAGES from OUTSIDE?  If we consult our devices upon waking – how often are that day’s events passively designed around what we receive?  If we respond to text vibrations / updates / posts / SMS or IMs / emails – how much are they eroding self-governance and discipline or choice and instead simply ANNOUNCING (demanding?) direction and response?

How many swerves do we make in our causeways of living by our over-saturation with “friends,” our communicative reach far beyond our communities, our global information system versus our local work offices or families or few (actual) friends?  There have been plenty of studies from nearly every field of inquiry reporting that our safe or thrivable social capacities are quite limited – most studies indicate humans do best in consistent contact with 30 or less others.  Proffering sufficient opportunities to know, understand, interact and relate.  Yet any given Facebooker or tweeter or snappy-chatter may have exponentially larger engagements nearly every minute of their lives.

How different would my relationships with co-workers,  children, family, friends, BE if we weren’t including thousands of others in remote places, professional connections throughout the world, images and language and emotional reports and happenstances flooding like telephone calls and tele-visions and noise into our domains, habitats, domiciles, studies?  What might i NOT buy if it weren’t so easy?  How differently might I know books, movies, music, animals, persons – if they weren’t in virtually infinite supply?Do we preserve moments of choice and connection, safe from Call-demands or Pervasive/Invasive-communication-technologies?  Or do we simply escape or take breaks from time to time?  Going for a walk or having a dinner, camping, hiking or traveling once in a while without our devices?  What would it be like to lose them?  What would we know?  What kinds of knowing would we produce?  What sorts of makings?   What might be drawn or composed, felt or engaged, seen or heard if we were DISconnected to the hive of activity and input? How might we relate to those around us?  Where might we go?  Who might we be?

Well, that’s what I’m thinking about.  Pondering.  Wondering.  Queries of value and quality and meaning.  Stress-levels, anxiety, physical wear of being “on alert,” alarm, reactive, responsive to ubiquitous “Calls.”  Demands.  Invasions.

What if we saved intrusions for emergencies?  Took time to send only specific, relational-oriented, relevant and appropriate information to one another?  Thought critically?  Reflected?  Looked, touched, listened, and managed more wholistic presence with our immediate surrounds?

I don’t know.  I’m just wondering.

[The lucky piece for us at present is that, like pulling the phone line from the wall, our technologies are remarkably easy to dismantle and turn OFF, should we CHOOSE to]

Alias Alone

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, friendship, human, identity, Language, loneliness, longing, Loss, survival, Writing4 Comments

“it was neither the cradle nor the grave of anything whatever.  Or rather it resembled so many other cradles, so many other graves, that I’m lost.”

–Samuel Beckett-

The silence.  The separation.  The solitude.  This is not novel, not uncanny, not even irregular or unexpected.

Betwixt Alias & Laramie, in fact, it would not be unusual for 1-3 years to pass without interpersonal communication.

The interruption, irregularity, or stretching intermittence of intimate interaction (current parlance “intensive interaction” – what they’re calling genuine conversation these days – a sort of treatment or therapeutic method for the autistic or ‘disabled,’ – akin to the ‘Talking Cure’ of psychoanalytics past) wasn’t really odd or unexpected or otherwise for Alias…merely unfortunate…he accustomed to his cycles and wishes, routines and desires – never mated very well with the world-at-large…his surround.

Still somehow Laramie’s “off” was different.

Perhaps.

No matter.

Alias driven back to Kafka, Beckett, Jabes, and other authors of silences whom he’s long aspired to – wishing (not so secretly) that he might require only some genuine solipsism or solitude, a kind of retreat or reversal from the cultural logorrhea (social media posts, artist’s talks, professional blogs and listservs, tweets/tumbs/grams & feeds) –

incessant reports on one’s self

– disgusting yet enticing,

If other humans ever happened to ‘like’ or ‘follow,’ ‘share’ or ‘pin-it’ or – could it be – actually care?

Alias entering thickets alone.  Laramie “off” (in every way his ‘right’).  No human (living, warm, alive, and responsive).  Alias turns to the ‘mind’ (texts, images, memories, dreams, literature, language, art, thoughts) – in any case or scenario – some abstracted cerebral, cognitive-capacity, the Human Imaginary.  The Pretend.

Meaning.    God.    Religion.    Truth.    Santa.    Satan.     Logic.     Math.

His pet feline “Luna(tic)” and fractured Chihuahua “Gizmo” as company.  And printed literature.  Recorded music.  Playback audio-visual-cinematography.  Machinic animations.  Pornography.  Movie.  Television.  Photographs.  WHATEVER.  Virtual Realities in the place of persons.

Attempts to stay alive, carry on, delude oneself that meaning and reason and experience and expression had validity and representation, communication and comprehension, and so forth.

To “keep calm…& carry on.”

Breathe.

Or…whatever.

Laramie: “OFF”

and

Alias: (“ON”)?

never the twain shall meet?

well, occasionally

(he says, he thinks, he imagines, she says, someone hopes)

The HUMAN (Alias surmises) – ‘an interminable thinking-speech,’ Alias think-speeches, “surely I read/heard/saw/overheard that somewhere.”

It’s Alias alone…free(?), unfettered, allowed, supposedly “ON”

Laramie – “OFF,” Alias sighs.

(and therefore no way to ‘think through’)…

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

Point is, Alias thinks as he murmurs and walks along, there is no meaning, purpose, or point to it all.  “Think-writing” Laramie once called it (re: Alias’ poetry) – “simply inscriptions of progress, er, process…languaging what happens in your miniscule portion of the world (as you know it).”

Think-writing, write thinking, “fuck you!” Alias thinks (writes).  “How can one think without someone or something to think ‘off’ of or ‘with’ or ‘in relation to’?”  Alias grumbles – “yet you’re ‘OFF,’ gone, along, beyond, and so remains me, it, this ‘against,’ ‘in relation to,’ this withless ‘with’ (all versions of the same) ANYthing, EVERYthing, NOThing.”

Something!

“OFF” said Laramie, he

said to Alias, “simply ‘OFF’” like a switch, a light, a life, a dream, a thought, an inception of memory, an hope, ON/OFF, ON/OFF, there/gone, here/gone, you/I, yes/no,…’OFF’ said Laramie, he said to Alias that day, that last day, that latest traversal, that…

…dream,

imagining, encounter, hope, wish, Alias imaginary…

———————————-

…because no one cares, and there is surely no reason to (Alias ruminates).

Having always wanted, desired, craved (it might even be said) to be some strange, unrepeatable and unique (or recognizable) combination of human/person/lover/writer/philosopher/musician/writer/virile male and sensitive, omniscient (no, not ‘omniscient,’ not ‘all-knowing’ but ‘all-considering,’ ‘all-comprehending’ and ‘-allowing,’ ‘understanding’) homo sapien.

There is never any reason (Alias considers) that he should (in any way) be special, “special,” and yet, and yet…

There’s no smidgen of doubt (Alias i. e. Harlequin, piecemeal patchwork of human male – a man, a father, son, parent, professor, laborer, home-owner, some-time partner, friend, teammate, band member, student, child-like adult, mature-seeming child, and so forth…animal, patron, caretaker & guardian, public, customer, businessman, blah, blah, blah, descriptor, descriptor, word, word, term…) that Alias i.e. Harlequin, in relation to Laramie James Backstagger, in relation to J, J, K, T, A, H, O, I, Sam, Franz, Helene, Clarice, mom, sister, dad, daughter, cat, dog, cow, instructor, stranger, landscape, realm, city, genre, language, world…

wanted, even craved (it might be said)

being “special.”

Alias Harlequin.

Alone.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

A thousand shades from cynical to fine…

…medium nor method, mechanism nor machine matters…

…it’s simply the persons involved…

…the choices they make…

….ways they behave…

…what is made of it…

….making and interpreting…

…given the day, the moment, the situation…

…without matter or evidence or reason.

The world happens.

And then we die.

And then world continues.

Happens (for us) (me) (Alias) (Laramie) (you)

No more.

The equations very, VERY simple.

Here & Gone

Heaps of trouble in between

Self-causation

-regulation

Autopoeisis

 

 

Worstward ho

On By NW FilbertIn Language, Literature, meaning, Parataxis, Samuel Beckett, WritingLeave a comment

Worstward ho

samuel beckett

The Sickening of Stories

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, fiction, Language, meaning, stories, Writing4 Comments

jose-parla-broken-language-exhibition-haunch-of-venison-recap-1

I am not certain why stories sicken me so.  By “sicken” perhaps I mean something closer to depletion or boredom, gluttedness or exhaustion.  By stories I mean shaped texts of language – narrative fictions, philosophical arguments, journals and declarations and ads.

“I don’t know why I told this story.  I could just as well have told another.  Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another.  Living souls, you will see how alike they are.”

– Samuel Beckett, The Expelled

It has something to do with that.  My own writings sicken me faster than others, but all writings, once entangled in plots, developing characters, or pursuing a narrative…tend me toward disgust.

The motion of “progress,” falsity of construction, illusion of meaning begins to fray as language gets “handled” or forced into order.  The squeezing and pressure and molding of shaped texts, especially as they develop into sections, seem bound to conform to the size of the creator.  Many texts start out wildly, with chaotic promise, almost infinite exploding potentials – but threads develop, and lines, sentences form, and shapes, causes and results, actions and repercussions, and ever so surely the mass is twisted to the size of a snake.  And then I’m tired, exhausted by “how alike they are.”  We are.  It is.

Language imploding and exploding.  This is what I want.  Language available like elements.  Language operative in a chaotic surround, like experiencing.  Language that doesn’t know next.  Language becoming, not necessarily or even especially something – just becoming within/without human.

So I read words, less to learn or be entertained, less to follow or empathize, less to argue or understand, and more to exist in a sea of potential communication and commerce, to respond, to be open and closed by each term and their relations, to go on.

As if language were oxygen, blood, water.  As if language were soil.  As if language were all these mystifying, crazy, strange, different and unknown others surrounding us everywhere.  As if language were environment.  Context.  Medium.  Not tool.  Not machinic.  Not discipline.  Not function.  Not at our service or in our control.

We know that it’s not.  It does indeed possess others – carries and transfers multitudes – times, cultures, histories, humans, vagaries of meanings.  It is untamed and unpredictable, available and unsolvable, like ourselves.  But we often use it for us rather than in or with us.  We often torment it into cages and patterns, (I’m doing it now) – forced representation, desiccated potentials – marks of expression or intention or persuasion or telling.

I declare.  I unravel.  I investigate.  I express.  I guess.  I wonder.  I commit a sound to form.  It leads.  I resist.  I say.  I listen.  It leads (each of us in particular ways).  I resist.  I ponder.  It takes shape.  Incites.  I want.  I resist.  I query.

Doing and undoing language becomes the only way to use it and avoid strangling it down to my size.  Persisting and resisting, experimenting and erasing, canceling / canceling-out, backwards, forwards, at the angular.  Listening to others.  Throwing in, throwing away.  Desist.  Insist.  Consist.  And delete.  Chaos and pattern.  Detangle, knot up.  Fracture.  Fragment.  Avoid.  A void.  Void and null and emergent.  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  The attempt to leave open.  It suffers to form.

Sickening me.