Category: Philosophy
Metaphors of Mind
Metaphors of Mind
I thought about the East like sunrise, or, the bright shadow of sun as it sets on the sea. Opening out, up, growing wider from a perceptive center.
I thought of my own like a spider rushing to complete its web and attachments to structures while the prey already wriggles in its core. Spinning quickly, creating patterns, finding foundations so one might approach, carefully, and engage.
And of the wise, “responding with the submissiveness of a mirror to a completely unthinkable array of things where there’s no space or time” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia). “And which I can’t accept” (he adds immediately afterwords).
My wife like a field of slender grasses made out of senses waving in rain. It touches everywhere and then is guided and drawn into the veins and roots in a natural process.
An ecstatic: the moon hovering above, without details, yet influencing tides.
Fundamentalists jackhammering surfaces to shape; drilling from the riggings a far cylindrical bore.
The verbavore – translating, translating, translating…signs, digits, numbers.
Intuitionists: winds situationally directed by unseen prompts or hidden obstacles.
Perhaps the thing itself – sensual and complex machine – absorbing, recording, repeating and combining – crafting temperaments at the switchboard?
N Filbert 2012
The Violation in Art
The Violation in Art
The trouble with artists, as I see it, is that they’re always breaking things. Breaking out, breaking in.
As if their experience of the world (and in my opinion anyone might be an artist at any given time)…well, look at it like this…a human person develops perceptions and accumulates. Artistry consists in these experiences transmuting, transforming and breaking out in alternate forms.
The world seeps, floods, sifts or bursts its way into the artist’s mechanisms of being, and their processing of said worlding breaks its way out, somewhere, somehow. Often anywhere, anyhow!
Breaking in to us.
A person combined with their experience breaks out in a form through their hands or their vision, movements or mouth…the artifact then enters our perception, experience, breaking in to our own operations and proceedings…entering us.
Now you’ve a mingling of persons going on via artifact, motion or sound.
If you think about this, it’s threatening. It’s criminal! It’s viral. And it can happen at great distances, even invisible, even in your sleep. It may appear at first benign, even pleasurable, might mirror some part of ourselves (or so it seems) – because of its careless remove from identity toward object it feels safe and external…but how we take it in!
With anger or lusting or joy. Voyeuristically, “privately,” or in a well-guarded institution. Through literature, youtube, mp3s. In deep thought or with staid attention, and passing glances or air-gathering ears. No matter, there’s infusion, con-fusion, an intimate entwining going on.
And it is without-which-not on either side: construction/reception, speaker/hearer, writer/reader, dancer/audience. We all become necessary and involved, creating ubiquitous perpetration. And no one to accuse once it’s part of our experience, our (perhaps unwitting) invitation.
Like cancer or nutrients, an other-marked entity joins with our own joining to theirs in apprehension, a collusion of worlds and of persons. An act in which all are responsible: reciprocal engagement of voyeuristic and combinatory intimacy, breaking open, breaking in,
breaking out
breaking through
a delicious and permissive crime.
Life is, but a dream
“Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness”
Life is, but a dream
is also life. Like a string of letters fitting an experience is also an experience itself. A person’s body, in other words. Things are inseverable, she said.
I notice it in the colors of the sunset, when I think of it in terms of color rather than it being its own name. Which might also be a word for color, each time.
Saying the word, “you.”
It would seem (abstractedly) to give us much to think about, but that would be on to something else. Which we also name “distraction,” which, of course, is not what that’s about. Dis-traction, abs-traction, con-traction, at-traction = they’re all our traction with the world, with what’s other, defamiliar, including, of course, our selves.
Nothing is recursive but thinking makes it so. “I am talking about paradigms,” he said, instituting one in the speaking.
What it all means. Exactly.
The sunsetting, the dreaming, the thinking, unpatternable patterning, the life. “One should always say living,” they say. Says who?
On what I’m seeking to analyze – synonym (I suspect) – “to digest,” in other words I am performing a series of actions, some bodily progression (process-ion?) here to here to here. Never getting anywhere else, but altering it, all the same.
The “men of action” we all are (without doubt including women and children – historical music of lines, still).
To sleep, perchance to dream; to rise, perchance to wake, the difference being? Differently the same, life is
but a dream is also living was what I’d set out to say with no chance of expressing any one thought without having already moved along, here, living, same different thing.
The unlikelihood of the same (EXACT) dream, or a fitness to a paradigm-dictionary, abstraction of types or categories…its own dreaming action, so to speak.
You follow?
Here, here, do not give up hope of the real, it’s another possibility, though we do not understand it, dreaming it as we do, living. As we do, people of action.
So “Rise up! Awake ye sleepers! Dream on!” it says, on….
N Filbert 2012
Writing: the Apparatus
Writing: the Apparatus
“one can think of the work (of writing) as a dialogue between the two distinct demands bearing on it (the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible). Or between its two poles (measured form, measureless disintegration) or between the embodiments of these two ‘centers of gravity,’ if you will: reader and writer…two come together in a place where neither can be found…One of them keeps dragging it into the light of day as a completed oeuvre, a realized whole, something that has actually taken form and come to be (read, that is, or, you could say, heard), while the other pulls it back into the dark whence nothing ever springs (but where there is a chance that, coming to pieces, something might come to be written or said)”
– Anne Smock, What is There to Say? –
-the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible-
The tools the writer possesses.
That there must be something to say…that it is impossible to completely say. Finally, definitively, to have done with, saying experience.
What does one make of this? With this? Paradoxical demand, desire, exigency – imperative, self-generating, uncaused and ineffectual, drive?
Our tools: awareness. Attention. Passion. We observe and take note, feel-with, and seek to spell it out (for ourselves, for world).
Our tools: available language, sound, gesture. Entering the woven barrier and thoroughfare of what is shared, common, constitutive, we act, operate, select, arrange, choose, rearrange from this quilted information of the world, our saying of it. Or singing, or stating, shouting or whispering and mumbles.
It seeks into fact. We construct an object, made up of nothing, of airwaves, scratch-marks, designs. Barely effable cues, hints, notions and signs. We begin again with that. With what it fails to say, to communicate or reveal. We tinker with and tamper, excise and expand. Ever the remainder. Inexact invention. Something there, some things not.
We pursue what is not. What fell aside or seeped away. The evaporate. The unknown (here I adore the French: je ne sais quoi – that feeling that one knows it, and knows it so well and so deeply, and yet is unable to say what it is that one knows!).
Endless anticipation, expectation, a lusted desiring…
Endless frustration, falling short or to the side, inevitable (inherent even?) failing, shortcoming, irresolution.
These are the tools of the trade. The writer’s apparatus.
A caveat: from time to time I’ll wager to say we all of us take in some language or sound, vision or world that seems “just,” feels ripe, adequate, full and exact to the perception of our experience. This is wondrous, thrilling, satiating, “ecstatic,” a moment’s completion, wholeness, perhaps.
Yet is it? What does the masterful painting, the pregnant poem, the echoing song or fulfilling experience result toward? Yes, toward, not “in.” Not arrival but generation, bursts of multiplications of words, sounds, sights and movements now invigoratingly fueled and stimulated – fecund to go on…for more…fuller…richer…or even repeat!?
“Such then, would be my task, to respond to…speech that passes my understanding, to respond to it without having really heard it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak…To name the possible, to respond to the impossible. I remember that we had designated in this way the two centers of gravity of all language…Why two to say one thing? – Because the one who says it is always the other…”
– Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation –
Remarking Mark…Part the Second
Mark Marking Questions
“Man is a riddle. Our complex relation to others may also be affected by our fascination with this riddle…Origin means, perhaps, question”
“Writing as the ‘talking cure’
he thought, thinking in language what he thought language might do. Be doing. To him.
He heard “why?,” a term learned early in order to learn, and thenceforward laid over nearly everything he read, encountered, overheard or stumbled across, as if it were his placeholding destiny in some infinitely progressing equation simplified “world.”
He’d read he needed other persons and things, places and times to know his own. – “Why?”
He’d heard “until others acknowledge or teach you your shape, your ideas, what you see what you feel what you taste or speak or hear, your perceptions and scope, you won’t be aware of a thing. You’ll have no ideas or sensations per se, you’re essentially Nothing without Them.”
Arching his back and shrieking a sound at an absence of breast: “why?”
“I guess I’m just punctuated that way,” he came to think, as he adapted vocabulary. “My role in a sequence is: – ?”
“And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was…” well, maybe – ?
“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao…” well, maybe – ?
“1 + 1 = 2,” well….maybe – ?
“You are Mark, a male form of a human animal, replete with these working organs, the English language, and certain beliefs. These are your parents, your sibling, your probable friends. Here are some feelings, some expressions and thoughts. Here are your words.” Well. Maybe – ?
Shaped with letters and numbers and sounds. Voices and touchings and feels, he became, slowly, surely, puttied toward a recognizable form – perceptible to others, acknowledged, even affirmed or engaged from time to time.
“Why?” propelled the lengthening problem of life but never grew toward solutions.
He read elaborate explanations and descriptions as he borrowed more languages. Spiritual terms, medical terms, words scientific, political, philosophical and intimate. Thick reams of median symbols asking to be joined or embraced, understood or imbibed.
Mark enjoyed these fabrics, and found a belonging among them. Layers and theories, emotions and dreams – he simply need append his simple gesture – ?
Trouble, in the form of discomfort or pain, of disjunction, arose when agreement was desired. Explicitly or implicitly, this undermined his form. In situations where reciprocation or statement, some firm relation was called out for, his questioning mark failed to serve. Choices, commitments, integrities or beliefs turned to drizzle around his definitive (self-identified) symbol.
“I love you,” she wooed. “-?-“ he replied. “I cannot know what you mean, what your language portends, I am unable to verify why?” he’d respond. To collapse and retreat.
Even thoughts and decisions were questioned and split open on his sharp weapon of a mark. He was not trusted or deemed trustworthy as doubt was perceived an anomaly.
He remained uncertain.
Self-perceivably, he reliably questioned, he’d respond and then take it away with his mark, his “signature move” as it were, his undoing. “Yes I will…” “This I think…” “I am…” always followed by his -?- (which sounded like “why?” in the air) and found no rationale that could not be further put to query.
The world was unstable as well as a “self” for him. All under the branding shadow of “why?” This Mark never outgrew in all his adaptations, acquisitions, mutations and metamorphoses. His certain core of uncertainty. His permanent doubt. His oxymoronic reality of being, not-being -?-
They perceive him – they really do – but as full of content with no substance; as possible and capable yet a great risk; as veritably human but unnamed from within. Without “identity.” This is true even of his wife and his children, parents and friends, all unsure who or what they are relating to, marked with the sign of the -?- The indeterminate one, the questionable and uncertain, the duplicitous and vague, are various ways he is read and conceived – standing there as he does on his tiny spot of here, long-legged and stooped as in prayer, or inquiry – ? –
The Bewildered Bewildering (attempts toward clear thinking)
Searching for truth(s)
As one attempts to come nearer to one’s existence as a human – its systems, structures and functions – from mental imaginative realms down to cellular genetic levels – the complexity and confluences involved can be bewildering.
Are bewildering.
It is easy to get one’s self “lost” as a human being. On literally billions of levels we participate in constant (and I mean unceasing) input and output of information, movement, form, energy and so on. It’s more than we can individually handle. Yet we are made to.
In other words, it is we as individual humans – our bodies, our minds and experiences – doing the bewildering we find bewildering. Perhaps this is my first noble truth: consciousness means being aware of and bewildered by our bewilderment.
How to proceed? There are a bewildering amount of possibilities and processes for us bewildered humans to bewilder our way into. We can study, forge purposeful relationships, work, play, think, dream, parent, fight or flee our bewilderment. Opened up, we do not know the options or capabilities, the extent our bewilderment can reach.
Everything is strange. If this were my second noble suggestion, it would imply that with each moment of our existence we are encountering the unknown. We recognize our existence by dissimilarity, non-identity, difference. This makes all things new. We literally have never been where we are in space, time or living at any instant, before. We do not re-live, we are ever living-into. The contents of the past can become part of our structuring and processing, but nothing repeats, everything “enters.” Each no-time now is brand new experience of unknown reality, experienced, imagined, interpreted, perceived and felt by us in incalculable ways through a vortex of communications and processes we have very little control over.
We, the producing products. Perhaps this is noble human notation number 3. What happens in our bewilderment of presentness is that our individuality opened out ubiquitously functions to produce experiences which are products of our experiencing. In other words we are unceasing experimentors producing experiences as our products. It all applies; it all exports. There are no deletions, erasures or extractions – only new experiences, new dissimilar moments of ongoing processing.
There is no exit from this process. Form 4: NO EXIT. Imagined observation, fabricated explanation, hypothetical objectivity, invented theories, meanings, interpretations of sense – none of these removes us from our experiencing or transfers us to any other point-of-view from our individual field. Bewildering in our bewildering surround. Semblances, “insights,” knowledge and so on are just pieces of the ongoing differentiation in bewilderment. How we exist, perhaps not the ant or paramecium or tree cell. But, then again, perhaps so!
If a lion spoke we wouldn’t understand them, Wittgenstein proffered. Another way of saying we’re us, bewildered and bewildering beasts, forging into the unknown. Our access limiting in its unlimitedness (i.e. finitude); systematically mind-blowing and ecstatically depressing in an awe-full or awe-some(?) way.
Be human. Be glad for it. Be wilder.
N Filbert 2012
Baffling Wisdom (really a long roundabout babble aimed towards my wife)
Going back through the writings that have been piling up on, around and near my desk over the past few days working out the hoped-for verbalization of whatever it is that’s been stirring around in my brain I ran across a few more pages that seemed interesting / to the purpose…
“I am looking for words….”
i.e. thinking things through
Swarm. Absorb. (the words, pt. 2)
Swarm. Absorb.
metaphor: the entire discography of Mark Kozelek (+ Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) / each version of Max Richter’s “Haunted Ocean” on dizzying random repeat – this is the setting: atmosphere. environment. “context.”
metaphor: the Kansas sky in storm
metaphor: dealing with Ache. (“being human”)
metaphor: “Control without Hierarchy” by Deborah M. Gordon…on some page in a book called Swarm by Lucas Felzmann:
“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. It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies…Life in all its forms is messy, surprising, and complicated. It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy. We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions. Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs – without any person directing another, or having more power than another. Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in nature.”
think of language.
what is scattered widely or uniquely ubiquitous – call it “swarm.”
“I”…lost.
I know I cannot gather to a grown pillar of I-ness, something you might recognize, could “identify.”
I know I cannot be where I am as long as “time” and “space” function effectively in my frames of reference…
I spread.
I swarm.
“I-swarm”
(the “human” world-situation)
Leaving that aside.
How might one (dependent on two or more in order to, well, in order to simply “be”)
how might that one (singular mark – “/”) handle (manage? survive?) “its” Ache?
“To be or not to be, that IS the question”
(o wise god)
So I split…up…
I canvas the sky, the context, the landscape, the sitz im leben, in fragments.
I approach, engage, invade the world like shot scattered from the anguished burst of a wombgun.
I-particle.
I-swarm.
Absorb.
Seminal-syllable words resound –
– Let their pulse reverberate your bodies like hymns –
God. Void. I. You. Song. Life. Death. Love. Real. Being. (Not).
and so on…
all with no definition…
IS. IT. THIS.
nowhere near
where we mean to be.
Absorb.
Swarm.
In this situation then,
of too much
of grave luck
(all that hope and final destitution)
I swarm. I absorb.
I decenter. I explode.
I desist in pretense
in sense
I spread.
One mark….thousands of pixels….without hierarchy
(a swarm of cells)
(a flock of birds)
(a fish in school)
I swarm.
I absorb.
[ – I love you – ]
-for my wife
This is Water
I found myself in a fairly uncommon (for me) setting this morning, my son was performing a Double Concerto of Bach‘s at a Methodist Church. I happened to be there (reading Larry Levis) on “graduation Sunday,” so the message/sermon/interpretation of texts was geared toward the cultivation of wisdom. As I listened to the suggestions/advice of a “spiritual authority” figure, to our young/privileged/promising…I was struck again by my personal favorite commencement address I’ve ever come across/heard/read and thought given the Spring of things perhaps it was time to push it out toward eyes and ears wherever I could, again.
Here it is…by a personal hero David Foster Wallace… (and therefore in his honor as well)
All my Words are Silent 