Category: love

The Writing of the Disaster

On By NW FilbertIn Complexity, Compromise, Confusion, desire, ecstasy, erotic, Language, Literature, longing, love, pain, Writing4 Comments

You think twice.  You plan.  I do these things.

Finally incapable of mind over matter.  The capacity of drunkenness.  Full experience.

The body.  The lust and wanting.  The work to let it alone.  To surpass or supersede.

Supplant desire with will.

Language works with, on and in the body.  Larynx, lung, tongue and movement.  Gut, brain and blood.

Without satiating muscle.  Without exhausting the possibilities.  Without terminating lust.

I think twice.  I plan.  You do these things.

Intention.  Commitment.  Decision.

“I will transcend the body.  I will overcome desire.  I will compensate and supplant urges with verbs.  Consonants will become my flesh’s contact and content.  Interoperation with world will equate to traversing its languages.  To write will be my sexuality.  Language my intimate other.”

I will compose my satiation.  I will think my end.  I will language my undoing and completion.  I will create what I need.

Still the body rises.  Erects itself.  Rushes and longs.  Aches.

I rub language all over it.  Stroke it with breath and sounds.  Caress every part with a term.  Toy and pleasure each hollow and tense with tongued noise.

It wants.  It desires.  I want.  I desire.  I long for what it says without diction.

 

Be Drunk

Charles Baudelaire, 1821 – 1867

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

Language.  Alcohol.  Language.  Alcohol.  To void and satiate the body.  To provide full experience.  Pair satiating self.  Ache and desire.  Want and sensation.  As a whole – the desire to be drunk – to fulfill – saturation of pleasure and knowledge – perception/sensation and abstraction/thought – TO RESPOND.  Shower the body, challenge the mind.  Work the muscles.  Lingua the self.  Tickle with letters and edges; heat, fill, temper and calm  salve and sensitize the skin and organs – flood the whole: language and alcohol.  Avoid depending on kind, species, occasion.  Avoiding dependency.

How might an human organism satiate itself?

I dreamt language.  I imagined correspondence, intelligence, sexuality, the wide-openness of commerce between one human and another.  Particularity, difference, biology, culture, knowledge, capacity undoes this.  Incapacitates convergence.  Ruins union.

Intimacy with other = impossible.

Intimacy with self-system = ?

Language.  Alcohol.  Immaterial / Matter.  Body-mind.  Embodied mind.  Enminded body.  How solve desire?  Lust, want, biology, sociology, anthropology (and so on) – the logoi of BEING HUMAN.

Be wild and crazy and drunk with Love,

if you are too careful, Love will not find you.

~Rumi

 

Love depends on Other.  Love depends on converging, connection, call / response / return.  Love is impossible.  Cohesive mingling.

To say the unsayable.  The reach beyond.  The experiment, invention, imagine.  Commerce with species and kind, taking it in (language), absorbing and transforming seeds, spewing it out (language).  Giving / Giving Back.  Receiving / Offering.  Language – perfect intimacy seed.  Perfect contact and context differentiating and responding each to each, body to body, mind to mind… sans orgasm, sans drunkenness, sans satiety… regardless of ecstatic fullness.

This is the disaster.

Unfillable.

Insatiable (body)

Satisfied mind.

This is the disaster.

 

Someone is Writing for Something to Happen

On By NW FilbertIn being, creative writing, Language, Living, Loss, love, Writing2 Comments

Someone is writing.

Writing a long story never told.  Never entire, always undone, elaborate and fabricated, once begun.

Tubes, nerves, roots and vessels.  Pathways.

Encounters, experiences, events.  Relations.

scribbles

*

Language is part of it.  Emotion.  Thought.  A strange logic (situational ordering, a kind of management of complexity, sometimes called ‘chaos’).

A rhizome, a network, a knot.

There are inputs and outputs, sources/emissions, but never clean, nary discreet.

Recursive, redundant, asymmetrically reciprocal.  Untold and untellable, it’s writing, written, writing on…

Over, through, attempting…beyond, become, a traversing or explore.  An assay.  Interactive.  Emerging.  To eventuate.

*

Someone is writing for something to happen.  To participate in occurrence, to entangle in becoming.  To begin, continue, hoping toward an unknowable end.  Writing.

Like loving, eating, dreaming, or survival – one of many ways.

Laughing, weeping, inventing, desiring,

to be…

To 2016

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, awareness, being, Blogging, change, Confusion, creative writing, death, Experience, Journal, Loss, love, Melancholy, Writing6 Comments

I am uncertain why I am sharing this, it comes from a personal email response to a friend, but as I was writing it, things that were coming up resonated profoundly in me.  Composition just does this for me.  I suppose I want it on public record for my own remembering.  That I learn things about me, that change is possible, that decay is transformative.  Okay then I am posting a personal reflection for myself – to declare it more widely in lieu of a personal social group.

chrysalis

“leaning upon nothing because nothing offers support”

-Maurice Blanchot-

The following is a response to a scholarly conversation regarding philosophy, science, cognition and so on…entirely out of place or sync, but seemed a personal confession on the passage of time and what it reveals…

Greetings —-.  It is good to hear from you.  I’ve been inundated per usual with family activities – good and tiring – and disorienting to my habits of reflection to some extent.  Feeling a bit bewildered re: semester start-up and the madness it brings, and yes, missing ANY considered interaction and dialogue.  I feel lucky to have encountered you.

Wee, random breaks and work-from-home days incite my nostalgia and bodily recall of creating creative work in language.  I ache for it.  Loss of its regularity is a depletion that changes me.  But then I read, “the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay” from a book about butterflies.  And “we have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning” from a commentary on it by Rebecca Solnit, a fine book – A Field Guide to Getting Lost that I like to read while traveling.

I suppose as the library is closed and our work quiet and insect-like on research, curriculum, and admin reports back here…my sociality turns to the work of being open and refusing stress in interacting with my beautiful children.  Which clicks onward into the ever-insistent questioning I face regarding whether there are adult relationships that can be predominately nourishing or reciprocally intimate.  Do we offer one another boon?  Any of us?  Our interactions have consistently done so, and I am very thankful to you for that.  So much conversation wears on me with the subterfuge and maneuvering to get anywhere near meaningful discourse.  I suppose I am tired, and perhaps in a strain of melancholy.  The wishing I could sit back with a drink and listen to intelligent talk without necessity of defense or critical acumen.  Just enjoying that we can.  Imagine and inform one another as humans.  I want this to mean something for me.  To mean I go about things variantly, shy from exhaustion and welcoming to possibilities.  From where does this determination to endure come from?  To “make the most of” idle repartee, body language, archaeology of behaviorisms and attitudes, – supplying too much (or inordinately) in order to learn in situations.  I dream of the luxury of perception and interpretation without analysis.  Reception.  Or where analysis co-creates itself.  Mutuality.  Enjoyment versus labor.  Or an effortless labor to enjoy.  Ahem.  Off-track and losing…

All this, I suppose, to apologize for my lack of acumen in the dear and full emails you and —- have provided…and probably an explanation of my messages of links rather than thought.  Others’ works as hopefully substantial stand-ins for my intellectual lack or confusion.  I do not know where the path is at present.  Just spinning in a lot of literature and activity.  Confession.

Trying to view decay in a hopeful manner.  The slow tears in relationality that introduce distances.  From friends, to partners, to ‘self’ – the flux of it all.  Many seem to have a greater capacity than I for working thematically regardless of internal/external context.  More flexible beings, I suppose, less bound by circumstance and scenario.  Ah well, this is no relevant response to your missals.  Apologies.  They enliven me – simply that thought and invention are going on around me – so please share them all as they arise – it is a great matter of hope for me to watch thought and process in others.  A stay against loneliness.  Thank you.  As I age along, some confusions do seem to dissipate…particularly confusions of my own blindnesses.  What nourishes me: intimacy (emotional, intellectual and physical), the thought and imaginative work of others, people striving to process experience on multiple levels, quiet & rest & reflection.  The commerce of ideas and bodies – entangled minds and bodies – passion and gentleness and reflection.  When these dissipate or decay or are absent in some strange idiosyncratic equilibrium, life is just harder for me to insist on.  And how terribly crucial the activity of writing is for me in my own ability to process my experiencing.  A weird alchemical embodied activity for me that seems to bring forth learning, feeling, imagination and all those characteristics I would like to take root in myself, to be me.  I am better when I write.  Better when I love.  Better when I rest.  Better with meaningful dialogue.  All sounds simple and general, but revealed ever more insistently to me as my epidermis thins.

Another turn of the wheel, bellows to the desire to thrive before the end.

To 2016 then.  And hope.

Something better soon.Kockelman_Figure 9, BSTCSG

Needing the Other

On By NW FilbertIn being, Complexity, desire, erotic, grief, life, Living, love, Poetry, Writing1 Comment

Ghandi - Interdependence

Sometimes we weep, “I need you so much.”

 

Do we grieve from the weight of the need?

Or the needing of differing things?

Do we weep that our need’s not provided?

 

We need.

And need differing things.

And need other than can be provided.

 

As long as the grief is not shame.

For what harm in need?

Like anything else,

we depend

-in truth-

on a world

made of so many

things –

to exist, to alive,

to continue.

 

And why not one another?

 

I am and you are

Without which we are not

 

That is need,

that is all,

that is fact.

 

Without air, food or water

the body declines.

Without commerce,

event,

the mind will not thrive.

Without you

what is I

will diminish.

 

That is nature.

 

There’s no shame in the needing.

No recall in the fail.

The “meeting” is all –

the approach and response,

the expression of need

and its answer.

 

Insufficient and varied,

incomplete and alloyed,

is never the fault of the need –

only moment.

 

“I need you,” I weep,

and I do, it is true,

and the you that is current

needs me.

That is all.

It is fact.

It’s the case.

We can change it, okay.

We can do.

 

But the need will remain,

because that’s how we are –

dependent by nature

on nature, on world,

on persons and places and things –

on each other.

 

We’re human, you see?

Altogether be–cause

We BE from the CAUSE

of each other.

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 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.

Old Ruled Writing Pad

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, grief, Journal, love, meaning, memory, time, WritingLeave a comment

Old Ruled Writing pad

today, searching for paper to make notes on for work…I grabbed a used “ruled writing tablet” of mine, last written in in 2014…and read…

“I am an educated writer who loves a lot of things.  I love language, I love learning, I love relationships – to partners, children, nature, arts, literature, and ideas – to “world.”  I love to study.

By “love” I mean that I choose and enjoy expending my available energy on these things.

I like very much to reflect and consider, experiment with and actualize what seems meaningful for living as a human individual.

That is what I know of myself, besides the facts which are unruly, shifting and so very difficult to capture or recount with accuracy.  All the terms (‘born,’ ‘lived,’ ‘married,’ ‘completed,’ ‘received,’ ‘produced,’ ’employment,’ ‘accomplishments,’ ‘age,’) and their explications are far to vague to be useful here.”

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.

The Loving(?) [dis]Organization of Fire

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, desire, Experimenctes, Literature, love, meaning, PowerLeave a comment

for lispector

“and it came, with its long passageways without end”

-Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm –

and then again, the words, the words they came, presently, fluently, astonishingly as miracles, your body, the languid haunches – temptations, always – your breasts – these letters, formed in the hands…you, you, you, all of you, and I want/ed, I want, I am wanting to grapple, devour and subsume, consume (no, never!) you, but utterly – to the end – to everything – a swallow and fire and drowning and drought – to eviscerate, desiccate, absorb – to thorough you. I want to thorough.  I want to you, thoroughly.  Yes, that is what.  That is the who what am I?  The always when and every how – I want you thoroughly, but not you as realized by or digested in or taken or given or experienced thoroughly (without remainder) but rather

What I am saying (without remainder) What I mean is, what I am saying, shouting, quite silently shrieving, shrieking, screeing, WHAT I CRAVE REVEALING ENTIRELY BY RAVAGING TO END…

I WANT TO YOU.

And I want you to want to me, as mad, as madly, as terribly and

I am ravenous now, each instant and you for starving for me (I’d like that – have me)

but yes and I am having taking giving receiving AND YOU.

I do not understand.

It maddens, controls,

frees.

And this is what I mean.

In hopes that I was born for this…

for Hallie