Category: meaning

Laramie Poeticus

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, Art, being, Compromise, Experience, fiction, friendship, Language, life, meaning, nature, Poetry, Writing5 Comments

Laramie liked to think himself a poet.  One attuned, natural, native to his world(s).  He liked to think he had unique feelings, perhaps an “insight,” an acute attention – that maybe he saw just a little bit more than others saw.  And was able to say so.

A farmer-cowboy type from the upper Midwest, he played a lot of sports and performed muscled labor – at times enjoying the solitude of pasture rides and the company of large mammals.  He felt a “care,” not sure for what, suspect he’d call it a kind of “connection” – with crop growth, animals, the waters and the skies.  And felt he could say so.  And he could sing.  Musician, farmer, cowboy, son.  Husband, scientist, laboring man.  Father, friend, and “poet” (he might say).  Laramie James Backstagger, dearly known to Alias.

“When you’re making it – forming words or music – do you feel somehow that you’re ‘getting it’?” Alias might ask, as they ambled the fields chopping at thistles, remedying fence.  “Do words add to experience or just chop it up?  Diminish?  Reduce?” Alias chimed.

Laramie would go silent, plodding along, smelling and listening.  Looking.

At times they’d play basketball, tennis (this was all in their youth, Alias having blown out his knees at the pigskin).  And careful.

They both went on to cities: education, enlightenment, the ‘experience’ of cultural promises.  They still had their debts to pay.

“I mean, when you ‘see’ it, or ‘hear’ it, are immersed – it’s not seeing or hearing or sensing – am I right? It’s just being – and then – ?” Alias prodded, “and then – what happens?”  “You hear language, or find it or forge it, dream times or ‘intuit,’ you consider ways you’d be able to MARK it – note it down (letters or score) – recount or recreate it – even extend or rescind it – and that all seems like media to me: communication: expression or history or talk…but reduced.  Reduced to what YOU can comprise or compose – not the ‘same’ as the moments, trembling in the web, and borrowing, borrowing, borrowing – from the wind and the trees, weather and bees, family and learning, working and friends – and our culture! – all funneled and cored to some desiccated fraction of bone – eviscerated – ‘HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’: some words or an etude or painting.  Even action.  Even sowing or reaping or pruning or care…’HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’ – wow!  Really?!  Amazing!  One moment made this?!  AND WHAT CARES?  WHAT MATTERS?  WHAT PURPOSE OR POINT, BENEFIT OR CONSEQUENCE…the next ‘now’?!”

Alias could go on and on like this.  Often doing what he’d just described or decried.

And Laramie’d slow, maybe stop, often sit, and stare out.  Have a smoke (he didn’t smoke, but pretended – his children and wife didn’t like it).  And Alias would drink and get wiser.  A little calmer and sad.  And all might go quiet, save the world always humming.

Laramie Backstagger sighed.

“Well?  Whadda ya think?” challenged Alias – “how is it for you when you speak, feel or sing?”

And how would he know, ailing Laramie?  Been too many years of conflicting events and results and mixed feelings.  Too many miles that worked out without working, or failed for the working too much.  “I’m uncertain,” he said, “I’m uncertain.”  “But you’re pushing at something in me.”

By now Alias was off on his own like a mammal, had concocted a scent for to trail.  Maybe the ache was for sharing the thing they were sharing: agreement.  Maybe to get through the whole business at once, simultaneously.  Maybe to not be divided and different or just pieces of things – to be doubled or tripled or multiple?  Harlequin – pieceworked and patched, back then and now and some future.  An assemblage, a collage wanting melding.

“All uncertain,” Laramie said.  “I can’t know, just I do it and feelings will follow.  New ones.  Pains from smashed understandings, joys from promising starts, aches at the poorness I lend them – but something goes on, carries forth – it don’t end with the birds and the breeze.  The words have it too, and the voices.  The shapes and the meanings and lines.  Even tones.  It goes on, both the good and the ill, and I’m part, or it seems such.”

“How ‘bout you?” Laramie wants to know.  “Why do you carry on and keep blabbing,” he taunts.

“Just to borrow,” Harlequin murmurs.  “Just to steal.”  “To have something to say.  To keep silent.  To wish that it might carry on.”  “It’s what we’ve got, all these things.  Try as I might, I don’t know what else to do, and at times feel compelled, god dammit.  Like Foucault or Blanchot or Spinoza.  Or Buddha or Christ, Kafka or little Jane,” (little Jane was the crazy old lady – lived two miles from the Backstagger’s farm – she’d sparkle to company no matter the cause and just cackle and croon – mixing nonsense and stories, opinions and facts, just talking and talking and talking.  No one knew if it ceased when they left, it never stopped within range of the hearing).

“I hear you” said Laramie, “I see.”  To which Alias always replied “But you don’t – I don’t know that.  Have no method of saying it’s true.”  And they’d keep walking on…toward night.

 

Laramie & Alias

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, awareness, being, creative writing, fragments, friendship, meaning, Melancholy, Writing11 Comments

Nobody

Laramie and Alias play ball.  Laramie or Alias.  Alias, Laramie.  What game are we playing?

Riven, desiccated, they lag.  Every day there is more to it.  More and less to them.  Laramie, Alias, friends as long as they can remember, or markers of memory and experience for one another that initiated chronos, now an aeon, now all of what they know.

Laramie falls behind.  Laramie, a little hoarse from laughing, spits out a “hold back!”

“C’mon you little horse,” Alias decries.

What are they playing at?

Long enough that when Laramie commands “Alias Harlequin!,” at this age,  the same mixture of guilt and fear, defensiveness and shame, defiance and harshly judged helplessness Alias feels when seriously called out by parents or lovers shivers his body.  Occupies his mind.  Why?  Why are these things in me, Alias looks down and away.

There is no ball.  It wasn’t a game.  Laramie and Alias walk and wander.  In woods, on paths, through fields.  They try to think together.  Alias has always wondered who he was, or is, or might be.  Laramie never knew, but did it anyway.  Somehow together they were themselves, or felt that way, felt like nothing at all, just present and curious and comforted.  Like learning, Alias thought.  I feel like I’m learning with Laramie.  Always learning something neither of us know.  They talk together.  They call this thinking.  Many refer to it as a game.

Laramie’s butt is on a bench.  He is smoking.  He doesn’t smoke.  His wife doesn’t like it.  His kids don’t like it.  His body, even, has begun to finally recoil.  Alias takes a drink.  Leans against the bench, still guilty, still staring into the trees.  He doesn’t want Laramie to die.  He doesn’t like death much.  It scares him, and it seems simple and true – unavoidable – simply ruinous.

Alias Harlequin sighs.

And Laramie asks what he is thinking.  Or feeling.  Or what is going on, at that moment, for him.

Alias is silent.  How could he know?  If he reaches in, or pays attention to any part – a limb, his gut, the sithering language slithering in what seems like his head – he’ll be inaccurate.  He can only tend to fragments.  Figments of experiencing.  But he doesn’t want the game to be like that.  He’d always hoped someone might know.  Like maybe Laramie knows and is just waiting to see what aspect Alias would select.  Might know something else about Alias’s present that comes from outside of him, that can observe him as a whole, that looks in another direction.

“What do you think?” Alias says.

“Nostalgic,” Laramie reports.  “Some sort of melancholy in lots of places at once.”  “A wend, a bundle, an amorphous pool of forms.”  “This is how it comes and goes at our age,” he breathes.

Nothing.  No response.  Not now.  But it’s an infinite conversation.

Laramie and Alias

The Need for Help

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, change, communication, Experience, life, Literature, meaning, relationships, Writing6 Comments

“I am affected not just by this one other or a set of others, but by a world in which humans, institutions, and organic and inorganic processes all impress themselves upon this me who is, at the outset, susceptible in ways that are radically involuntary.  The condition of the possibility of my exploitation presupposes that I am a being in need of support, dependent, given over to an infrastructural world in order to act, requiring an emotional infrastructure to survive.  I am not only already in the hands of someone else before I start to work with my own hands, but I am also, as it were, in the ‘hands’ of institutions, discourses, environments, including technologies and life processes, handled by an organic and inorganic object field that exceeds the human”

  • – Judith Butler –

Howitis - Beckett

“Help!?”

He cried, it cried, I cried.  But help, it will not come, for me.  And why should it?  Who could owe me assistance, and why?  And what would it benefit another? Even how might the crying become?  Often silent, unheard; a gesture or tone; a constant “I am unable to do this alone.”  There’s no reason.  No reason that someone might help me.

Help has come.  Many times, and that greatly.  Otherwise I would not be alive.  Irrational, inconceivable, as ‘last measure,’ – the cry’s been expressed, even shouted or posted: “I need help or we will not survive!”  And it’s come.  Never “I.”  The yelp always weighted with “we.”  In deep over my head as a man, as a father, a worker and thinker as well – always “help!?”  Needing contact or touch or attention.  Needing hearing or care or advice.  Needing teaching, protection, support.  Needing money or sitters or transport.  Needing food.  Needing shelter.  Such needs.

I need help.  “I.”

Whatever effects or affects, I believe that I do try to help.  To have food for my children, and beds.  To respond to emotional traumas, disturbs – to hear and attend and comply.  To love others embodied and minded.  Within (my) reason, I do what I can to assist, especially those gathered about me.  I experience my’self’ as RESPONSE-able – once engaged there’s a sense that I must.  Some say that we choose to do good – but I question.  Many insist we always have  choice, yet I seem unable to abandon or neglect, unless, perhaps, my “self” or theoretically.  I am prone to the “people are people” – shaped by time and engagements – to behave in the world as they are, and continue the way that they be (in small measure).  The issues of scale and of time.  We do what we can to survive.  Some prone to survival of others, some not.  Depends on the value of “self,” so it seems.  I help, which develops that value (I hope).  To think I might matter, be dependable/depended on, be important – to someone, somewhere, at some time. Survive.

And I notice myself ever howling for help.  Help!?   As I age, I distinguish the needs.  Need for contact and talk – to think and to feel; needing help with evolving demands.  “Man,” “parent,” “student,” “professional,” – all extensions of what I once was – just a “human.”  I can’t even survive being that, let alone all these complex designations.  Artificial “helps” like alcohol or nicotine, religious belief or “self-help” seem to do as much harm as relief.  As babies and aged we are weakened…our “primes” occasioned by a nexus of supports.  In our weakness, we comprehend need(s).

I need.  “Help!?”

Without knowing what it is or might look like.  I know that I’m drowning.  I age.  I know no one owes it, the benefits would have to be rationalized.  I fail.  I can’t go on.  I must go on.  I go on.

 

You must go on, that’s all I know. 

            They’re going to stop, I know that well:  I can feel it.  They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts?  It will be I? 

            You must go on. 

            I can’t go on.          

            You must go on. 

            I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.) 

            It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know. 

            You must go on.          

            I can’t go on. 

            I’ll go on.

–Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

 

Anatomy & Physiology

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, depression, life, Mania, meaning, Melancholy, Robert Burton1 Comment

Burton - Anatomy of melancholy frontispiece

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-Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy –

Burton - Moods

Something Becoming…Shaking a rattle

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, Language, meaning, Philosophy, relationship2 Comments

SHAKING THE RATTLE

“our fear: this is what we are made of: our weakness”

– Helene Cixous

“A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something that people don’t know how to do: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer…I study ant colonies, and how they get things done without any central control.”

– Deborah M. Gordon in Lukas Felzmann’s Swarm

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“Let us agree to apply the word ‘talk’ to all ways of experiencing sensations, actions, and ideas in signs of any kinds, and also to all ways of interpreting signs, and [let us] apply this word ‘sign’ to everything recognizable whether to our outward senses or to our inward feeling or imagination, provided only it calls up some feeling, effort, or thought…Nothing does speak for itself, strictly nothing, speaking strictly.  One cannot bid his neighbor good morning, really, effectually, unless that neighbor supplies the needed commentary on the syntax.  If he does not, I might as well shake a rattle.”

– Charles S. Peirce

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Borrowing: James

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, being, Complexity, Language, meaning, Philosophy, Self, william james1 Comment

Felzmann - Swarm

“In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own body, of each other’s persons, of these sublimities we are trying to talk about, of the earth’s geography and the direction of history, of truth and error, of good and bad, and of who knows how much more?”

-William James-

Pursuing what Eludes…Borrowing : Blanchot / Bataille

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Georges Bataille, life, Literature, Maurice Blanchot, meaning, Reality2 Comments

“Perhaps dread is always the more powerful; 

perhaps the joy granted to the only animal that knows it is not eternal is poisoned from the very beginning.”

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe – Ending & Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot

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“Indeed, man is always in pursuit of an authentic sovereignty…We shall see that in a number of ways he continued to pursue what forever eluded him.  The essential thing is that one cannot attain it consciously and seek it, because seeking distances it.  And yet I can believe that nothing is given us that is not given in that equivocal manner…”

“Thus, at all costs, man must live at the moment that he really dies, or he must live with the impression of really dying.”

“INDEED, NOTHING IS LESS ANIMAL THAN FICTION…”

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“It is not Hegel alone, it is all of humanity which everywhere always sought, obliquely, to seize what death both gave and took away from humanity”
“In order for a person to reveal himself ultimately to himself, he would have to die, but he would have to do it while living – watching himself ceasing to be…”

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“Man does not live by bread alone, but also by the comedies with which he willingly deceives himself.

In Man it is the animal, it is the natural being, which eats.  But Man takes part in rites and performances.

OR ELSE HE CAN READ:

to the extent that it is sovereign – authentic – LITERATURE prolongs in him the haunting magic of performances, tragic or comic.”

Georges Bataille – Hegel, Death & Sacrifice

Borrowing

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

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

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

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

— Is it a paradox?

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

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

–Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide

Ball - Gerard - Suicide

Accidents changing our lives

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

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

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

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

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

When we cannot describe, explicate…

And we wonder and shudder…

*

And we cannot remain…

Inexplicable

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

it can only be participatively experienced or lived through.”

-Mikhail Bakhtin-

from the Ruled Writing Tablet

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

ruled writing tablet

Interstitial

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

There’s no “let me explain.”

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

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

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

*

Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap?

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

*

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

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

I don’t know.  It’s unwise.

And I hum when the words sound just so.

– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.

Interaction.  Locution.  Between (I am thinking).

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

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

interstitial

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

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

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

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

*

I hum.  To myself.

*

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