http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/weekly-photo-challenge-close/
Category: Photography
What once was here
Talk about “prompting” photos! If there aren’t thousands of stories in photos like these…the eye, the mood and the technique combine to provide worlds to discover and invent. Thankful for this work.
Friday Fictioneers – June 8, 2012
caveat: thrown together quickly! (Friday Fictioneers prompt – www.madisonwoods.wordpress.com)
Against the Day
And what was there to do?
High school now behind us, Frank’s dad dead, and no promise of college, work, or love; we were lost, angry, confused.
We’d all of us read Pynchon, we knew very well what to expect, and it wasn’t good.
And lots of it.
So much burned inside us.
At the city’s River Festival we spotted the blimp.
And somehow we knew.
We just knew.
Now, it begins.
N Filbert 2012
Telling Our Stories
Telling Our Stories
After all, it is language, this story. This telling of you, of me, of our feelings and years, whatever we’ve done. We are just speaking, really, creating from language our world and our children, our works and our actions as if we remembered.
I can’t see the harm in it.
I say I remember, here looking at you, that first time in your eyes, whether 18 or 40, when we may have sat facing each other or entwined, as if we’d first met and must absorb everything. How large they seemed, how blue and soft as rain, how far I could swim there as if building a nest.
I don’t see the danger in using our language to say so. In making up stories, alone or together, about us; our world and our selves, what we think.
After all, it is language we share. As you bend at your work, your collar reveals a fresh sentence, your skirt a painting of terms, in your flesh all these stories I study to learn. Of your breast and your elbow and hair. The nape of your neck exclaims and your scars everywhere. What the poet said, also with words, combining verbs and adverbs and nouns: “Your body is a book of thoughts that cannot be read in its entirety.” Just words, but I keep them and sing them again, I can’t see the harm in the trying.
I love you with terms of my body. I sign them to you when it’s dark. It is language, oh yes, and you hear me. We read with our skin. Typography refers to impressions. You impress me, even as I Braille what I need. How else might we weave what is we without terms and strokes or gestures?
Only language, after all, that we borrow, I get it.
But where is the frailty in trying?
I read and I read and I read what you tell, ever growing a Talmud of comment. I notate, I argue, I vent. Then repeat. I praise and I question and soothe. You likewise make of my verbiage a stream; a spring from far peaks that dissolves to a delta. What should we call what we do? Relat-ivity? Our capacity to engage and to meet – to relate? Communication? Always co-, ever with, filling munitions and messaging, our vocation?
To say, to listen, to hearken, to spell. Here we tumble and thicken and age. Her we interpret, reply and enrage. Here we bind ourselves, it is language we keep using, keep finding, continue to tell…
“………………..Even in sleep
our bodies seek each other, your face the moon
lighting my dreams. And by day, scenes beyond
untanglement. Tell me my story, love;
how could I know it, we are such knotted things?
-Philip White, from Aubade
The Cleaving
“Connection is the recognition of the intimacy of a division…
to make a division is to give substance form”
“Therefore shall a person leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto another
and they shall be as one flesh”
Genesis 2:24
The Cleaving
How do we come to know, believe or accept this ancient concept? It has mited its way to the deepest reaches of Being (Dasein): Heidegger’s rift, linguistics address, each individual body’s pulse or breath or tremor. That only the separateness may truly join. Only the differences are recognized as similar. Only the rifts require a bridge.
I do not know. It is a reality I feel with as much pain as hope or joy. That cleaving is both the splitting apart, the splintering wood and severing rope, AND their clinging together, their sealing and sealant. It undoes me. As a metaphor, concept or signification it rings true and carried dark howls and bright screams out of the depths of me.
And yet it comes so naturally. Fight or flight. Attack, retreat. The extremities of the urges to join and drive to cease. In the utterly intimate action of cleaving, we expose and unite – right in the most susceptible, vulnerable, life-threatening places.
The “cutting out,” “cutting off” – to cleave – you know what I’m referring to – when that which is most important to you becomes unreachable. That impression that you are being “given up on,” that someone is “letting go,” even actively removing themselves or casting you away, chopping the cord – the umbilical torn, gushing, pulsing, the infant left writhing and wailing in the dumpster or thorny woods, a closet or dark alley. Cleft.
In truth: that severing of relationship, whether momentary or fatal, is a life-threatening, death-dealing blow. Abandonment. The dawning that you are at the front and there will be no reinforcements, you are cut from the supply train. There is shock, there is scream and then a canyon of void with no other side. It is we at our most disastrous, mortally dependent state.
We in the face of absence. We without response – no face in a mirror, no echo of sound, NO THING. Cleft.
Individual, alone, solitary entity. Facing the reality: we are insufficient to our needs, incompetent to our existence, impossible to self-sustain. We in our fragility. Our valid, appropriate, ontological FEAR.
Whack! In anger, in grief, in silence, in bruise, we are severed, ultimately exposed, whether through small offense or enormous rejection – we have been cut. Past the bone. The reverberations tumble and crumble out far and wide, seemingly ubiquitously, regardless of the specific instant’s severity. This is “the cleaving” done as much to us as by us in our madness to survive, to be real, to be verified and validated.
In the “drawing near,” in the “clinging” of to cleft, on the other hand, we are born. We become. As another reflects or responds to our raw broken mortally wounded finitude and fragility, we get glued to the vitality of these limited lives we have in us. As these fearsome exposures are clasped, bonded, covered by another – transfused and salved, bandaged and wrapped or dressed by another – we know we are possible, we feel we exist and we matter, we join toward world and its being, brief though it is.
These are our chances and capacities: to effect, to mean, to act, create or be. It is in the drawing near that what life there may be is acknowledged, fostered, affirmed. Con-firmed. Cleft – grafted into the ongoing reality of things, parting through wholes, participating and enhancing of semiotic systems. As if life does not really belong to us, but we must belong to it, by belonging with one another.
“Leaving,” “cleaving.” The leaf cleft from its branch will not survive, but cleft or grafted to another stem or soil or root may for awhile yet, live on, grow, produce, change and become.
We continuously leave and cleave to varying extents, and these just may be the principal elements of our thriving. Cleft we perish, shrivel, die away. Cleft we heal, nourish and grow life. Both options/realities occurring in the cuts, the core places, the sources.
Here we panic, here we rejoice. Here we suffer, here we love. Here we become, and here we cease to be.
This mysterious activity necessitates both significations, counter-intuitive though it seem. The need to be cleft exposes the places needing cleft. Awareness of the sources for supply determines the crucial treasure, dependency, and gifts of supply.
We are chopped to the truth of death
and joined to the reality of life
Cleft.
New Arrivals…New Invaluables
“meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we’d become from the language toxin…
The know-it-alls are always the last to know. Everyone’s a diagnostician, and everyone’s wrong…”
-Ben Marcus-
“As is usual with me I would not go on with the rest of the story and come back to the difficult sentence later. With others it may be different – but when I am that far in a work the story must exist in each word or I cannot go on…”
-Louis Zukofsky-
-Lukas Felzmann-
I know….there’s a LOT of envy fuming out of you readers eyes!
(use your local library!)
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
Ideas of Home
Hello everyone! For whatever reason (I’m not always a bigger believer in a source for reason!), a few days ago between cargo-ing children to and fro from all the places they must be S. Carey’s song “We Fell” came through my stereo and the weather was Spring-ish cool and the air was nice and I was overwhelmed with feelings, I guess you’d call them, (sentiments?) of being home. As I pulled in the drive the light struck the deteriorating garage and trampoline movingly, and I took a few shots that matched my feeling. Then throughout the past days I’ve just been letting those feelings/sentiments/ideas swirl about in my head thinking they’d find an organization they wanted. They didn’t. So today I’m just going to post the notes I jotted down the way they tangled and fumbled out of me…In my mind they go with S. Carey’s song and always Mark Kozelek’s tunes (his music often is my home)…
oh, here are the lyrics to “We Fell”
The consonance of drone
And love sounds its own
Your arms wrapped around home
All the in-betweens
Lay so blue beside me
We fell
More than skin and bones
No we’re not alone
We fell
Like stones
Between
S. Carey
And here follow my photos and ramblings:
(click to read text)
THANK YOU!
Another opportunity – for collaborative creativity
my spouse/partner etc. posted this this morning and I find it instigative – love to see/hear what comes of it for the rest of you!
http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/10/ekphrastic-opportunities/
“Over there, it is raining…”
I’ve spent many years proclaiming, exclaiming, disputing and evangelizing my love of rain.
More intimately, for decades my journals and diaries are soaked through with ink and reflections of agonizing effort to verbalize just what it is, exactly, that the circumstance of raining represents, evokes, fulfills or actualizes in and for me.
I’ve written of fog and dusk, how they soften the edges, blur the inessential, provide a veil of connectedness and symbiosis of what is perceivable, in keeping with my sense and belief about selves, things, world.
I’ve written of smoke, the ephemerality of moments, a texturing for the fragility of what’s present.
I’ve noted how the greying of cloud, runnels and droplets heighten other colors like green, rather than glaring them out in the brightness of sun. We filter everything – visible precipitation provides the physical opportunity of “seeing” that.
Or what is blocked and distorted (rain on glasses, windows, drops on an eye or a lash) – how choosy and minutely invested our visions are – what we choose to see, shape, create and how multitudinous what we skew, block out and deny.
Also its comfort – the blanketing, softening and quieting of snow and rain on atmosphere and mood. Like a muting and subtlety; a gentling and slowing of a pace. I’ve always felt I can curl up in rain, in fog, in mist and drizzle – cloaked, protected, respected, wombed.
And nourished. How birds, soil, plants, trees, worms, flowers, sand crave and delight in the generosity and equanimity of rainfall. How it blesses all regardless. Helps me feel part, wholed, valuable and real. I can stand in rain, clean in rain, play in rain, drink rain – without wealth or beauty, intelligence or strength, position or power.
What struck me today was how the pattering of rain – patterned and random, distinct while flowing together – was in perfect accord with my inner world – how my thoughts and feelings go, move, through, pool, form streams, gather, swell, evaporate.
The porosity. The feeling that rain both permeates and respects boundaries, wets without drowning, soaks without penetrating. Gives and gives and gives. Inward, outward; saturate but rarely flood; joins without binding.
The list goes on. What I find I repeat most often, having no words to explain it, is that the condition of rain (like the music of Mark Kozelek), of all the world most closely approximates my own fullest experiences or feeling of myself.
Somehow feeling that if someone “gets” the joy and glory, protection and soothing of rain, they’re a long way toward “getting” me, or me toward being known,
or at least somehow related.
All my Words are Silent 