Category: relationships

Quotation / Interpretation

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Hermeneutics, Language, meaning, relationships, WritingLeave a comment

“To read a distant text, distant in space, time, or conceptual world – is a utopian task…The task is one whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it…”

– Ortega y Gasset –

“In that sense the activity of language is in many particular ways utopian: One can never convey what one wants to convey.”

– A. L. Becker –

“it is deficient in the sense that it says less than it wishes to say, 

and it is exuberant in the sense that ‘it says more than it plans’

This utopian characteristic of language is a source of flexibility that results from signs that are simultaneously deficient and exuberant.”

– Yair Neuman –

communication utopia

Writing Anyway

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, depression, fiction, hope, Language, meaning, relationships2 Comments

EVERY HUMAN LIFE IS A STORY THAT COMES TO AN END

selected fictions of self-pity

entropy

  • INEVITABLE ENTROPY

Maybe this just is the gist of it.

I spend a good portion of my life (such as it is) – all of its waking and sleeping hours anyway – struggling to determine a meaning for it – its meaning (a concept? term? reference?) on its own that I may have very little luck determining or understanding.

This elusive compendium of thoughts/feelings (EXPERIENCE I’ve corralled with the sound/shape ‘meaning’) – how might it be described?  explained? : What might it … ahem … ‘mean’?!

Were I to describe it – it would evoke and involve (were I to describe it well) a sense that I was necessary, useful, desired and desirable, of some merit and account, acknowledged, approved, purposive, poignant…whatever those (each) might also ‘mean.’

Something I happen to be “good” at that is also of benefit or boon throughout the world I’m wedded to, both near (intimate, familial, selected-for) and far (given, happenstance, environment).

But what I’m “good at” is “Depression.”  The function of slowing and drag…exhibiting sorrow among happiness, erosion within emergence, noising up messages…despair contained in joys.  Doubt, skepticism, intricate inevitable workings of what we agree to name ‘death’ intertwingled with what we call ‘life.’

Entropy.  Sorrow.  Failure.  Defeat.  Depression.  Grief.  Doubt.

Unlikeliness.

Unlikeableness.

Me.

Self-pitying, self-concerned, self-oriented, self-obsessed…at this I am quite ‘good’ – adept, astute, adroit, capable and facile – of smearing, marring, being sad in circumstances of beauty, of success, of benefit and chance…

My children are healthy, talented, innovative and beautiful.  My wife is stunning, accomplished and accomplishing, intelligent, inventive, supportive, sexy and kind.  Generous.  I am employed in circumstances that suit my learning, commitments and goals.  I inhabit relatively stable wards and routines.  I am alive, middle-aged without illness, debility, war or threat of imminent dangers.  Still expertly I can imbue and include a lowering, slowing, gravitational angst and fear into anything I encounter as ‘good.’

I am ‘good’ at dismantling ‘good.’

Which means (back to ‘meaning!’) I also despise, loathe, resent and regret myself and my operations. Representing wear and tear, unraveling and decoupling, erosion, rust and decay to what strives and conjoins, promises and grows.  Somehow, somewhere, in some indisputable and unignorable way I am married to disorder.

When I strive to sing, express or communicate – what emits is disturbance and noise.  When I construct, I create mayhem.  When I combine – I fall apart.

Significant discoveries during my life-range – their exposition and documentation – include complexity, chaos, emergence, and entropy.  These I represent, or so it seems.

Ever unable quite to take credit for accomplishment (chaos, complexity, evolution, emergence); never able to know – to sufficiently understand or trace (dynamic, processual, complex, systemic); yet acutely aware of dissonance and destruction, dis-pair and difference (entropy, chaos, noise).  Viral, incipient, parasitic and accidental – I adapt, attach, alter and disrupt – change and undo.

Which makes me sorry in an unstoppable way.  Unable, hesitant, terrified, dangerous and afraid.  A soiled activity of ground.  Questions beggaring and buggering replies.  A kind of programmatic cancer, a hitch in the breath, a massage that makes sore.

I message – and fragments.  I propose – and divide.  Link up by pulling apart.  With such yearning – an insatiability for connection and attachment that (frighteningly) never fails to strip, erode, scrape and shred that which it clings to.

Modus operandi: ENTROPY.  Clutter, damage, foil.  Complication and conundrum.  Ant in sugar, weevil to wheat, cog in machinery, speculation to proof.  Maxwell’s Demon, uncertainty on principle, the mouldering remainder: “I.”

I, entropy.

I, divorce.

I, disease.

I, confusion.

I, disruption.

I, doubt.

I, Descartes.

I the obscure.

complex, simple

unwanted, unwarranted, unsure

I the wobble precipitating break

I, depress.

You colour, I neutralize.

You shine, I dull.

If offered a peaceable end (thinking twice, thinking thousands) I’d accept it – unquestioningly.

New Topia.

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

maggot

This is what he thought of it.  What he thinks.  This one, inextricable from a world, just like everyone else, part AND parcel, the becoming and become, apparent apparition, here-and-then-gone every one-in-the-many.

He thinks irreplaceably.  Nothing without merit.  Necessity emerges and occurs.  Unstoppably.  With(in) all its stoppage and its stopping.

            He thinks: “what occurs occurs at once.”

            He thinks: “being and nothingness is being in time.”

            He thinks: “this is one way of thinking.”

            He thinks: “thinking is process.”

            Inevitable.  And more-than, that.

Stop Making Sense happened at a time that makes sense, and continues to do so.  Absorbed into machinery.  The operations of ‘reality’ for each type, each kind, each species.  And without.

“There does not seem to be a correlation,” he thinks.  “Between this one and that, experience and experience (the dog, the tick, the grass; the human, the sun, the soil). A convergence of dependence without necessity.”

He thinks: HER

He thinks: THEM

He thinks in wishes.

He wishes his thoughts.  Difference.

He (accidentally) dreams a New Topia.

In this New Topia, a difference.  A sense-making, a motile trajectory.  A structure to revolutions : convergence + emergence.  A hope rather than.  Such despair.

            He thinks: he reaches, makes effort, attempts.

            He wishes: he could do otherwise

            He thinks: everything ends

            He wishes: something might end in beginning

Because he is able to, he looks at ‘his’ eyes in a mirror.  Glasses, no glasses.  Hair, hair pulled back and away.  Blue.  Morose.  Green.  Avaricious.  And blue-grey: Now.  Now.  Now.

He thinks: I should be brushing my teeth – and always regrets pronouns and possessives.  Conventions.

            He wishes: there was beyond

            He thinks: I exist in my limits

            He wishes: possibility

            He thinks: organism.  finitude.

He writes as he has learned to do so.  Using words, made out of letters, infrastructures that – while scrambled and undone, reworked and reordered toward a sort of confusion or unsettling – are still the only means he has…toward anything.

            He thinks: “anything resembling anything – these are my limits; and limits = usefulness, probability and possibility, constraints.  My hope.”

            He wishes:  Re-inscribed.  Remade.  Novel.  Capable.  Composed.  From one-to-one.  For her.  For them.  For ‘It.’  (It: New Topia).

            He divests.  Dissects.  Dissembles.

No one follows his ‘meaning.’

[Therefore it does not mean].

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

parasite

Grown ever-so-tired of options.  The limits, precursors, avail.  Starts again, but never new.

This is an attempt to bind.  To couple.

Writes to forge a chain.

Writes to create connection.

Writes to compose a real accordingly.

Fails.

The letters, marks, terms and expressions are borrowed, reworked or remade, still.  Symbols wide open.  Pre-filled, refilled, unmade.

Touch then.  Touching nothing new.  Touched before.  Been touched.

“Nothing new under the sun.”  New again under new sun, newly impossible, com-possible.  Newly inadequate and all there is…adequate to the necessary task.  Ever less.  Ever more.  Never quite.  Never quite common enough.  Human.  All too human.  Never quite common enough.

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

Dust.  Ash.  Dust.  Ash.  Dust.  Ash.  Dust.  Ask.

Item Found in Archival Tangle – “Jim”

On By NW FilbertIn communication, fiction, Language, meaning, relationshipsLeave a comment

Author by Hallie

jim

Jim p1 Jim p2

A Provisional Writing

On By NW FilbertIn being, change, creative writing, fiction, life, love, relationships3 Comments

He, frightened, uncertain, inexhaustible and weak, somehow mustered the strength to ask or act for what he wanted.

Perhaps she would not comply.

Or could not, and remain who she needed to be.

Yet there would always be response –

– even ignoring, diverting, pretending to sleep.

It hurt to ask.  To attempt – its exposure – admission of lack and need – the venture, to try.  The fear of undoing, of incompleteness, of rejection, impossibility.

Still he acted and asked.

The alternative grown unbearable over time – constructions and deconstructions, composition and erosion, the living through time and space.

Time approaches in which time isn’t worth it – without.

Without knowing and acknowledgment, honesty and rejection, awareness…

…until the response is given…isn’t there still chance?

Untoward, illusory, unlikely and so slim…and yet?

As if…

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

Varieties of presence.

Certain opportunities of world.

Of doing.  Being.  Making.

As life runs out, so too the prospects of meaning, of experience. 

Had begun to feel he must,

or never.

Discover, find out, uncover, unearth, reveal

at least for a moment.

This moment.  The moment.

Nearing NOW.

But how?  Who?  And what sorts of whys were required?

What lent him the right and wherewithal, the luck, the chance, or desperation?

And why now?  What for?  How her?

 

Hesitates.

 

After all, perhaps?

Perhaps its merely panic, neuroses, a fracturing diminishing end?

What motivates?  And why?  And why this one?  And this now?  And here…in the midst of.

 

Always already in the midst of…and always already not-yet.

 

Between.  Desiring a line to be drawn.  As if the world depended on it.  His world (perhaps theirs?).  His life, his living, his NOW.

 

It remains to be seen.

Ever remains to be seen, evidenced, emergent,

Proven.

 

Can there be any proving?  If things had been different, some slight change in the initial conditions, conditions so complex?

 

Could it be different?

 

He must, he has to, he is compelled to act / to ask.

What will she reply?

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

The always begin.  Begin, begun, always.  Climbing the steps of his lack…behaving…becoming.  Ever some begin – some something, something shifting, changing, altering, becoming something else, something altered and novel, new, not combined in quite this way before – submerged, emerged, converged…yet differently.

No?

Next?

With N (next) = Begin?  +1, +1, +many + again, else, other…Equaling not before, prior, exact…NOT repetition but difference, remainder, chaos, complexity

Impossible,

seemed inexhaustible,

almost infinite,

not quite.  Not remotely.

“He,” “She” will surely end (in a way)

as a form of beginning

As a form of

a form of

motion, movement, becoming.

Things happen, or happening produces things (at some scale, interaction, percept)

What becomes undoes becoming undoing

(and so on).

Uncertainty.

              Mobility.

                          Activity.

                                    Becoming.

                                                   Undoing.

                                                                Undone.

He becomes.

Unraveled enough, to a point (a seemingly certain threshold) he will risk,

wants risk,

                                          feels compelled,

                                                                   concerned,

                                                                                                for survival, needs, depends,

decides to act or ask for what he’s wanting (needing?  lacking?  desiring?  believing?)

And where / who / what / why / is she?

And there and which and whom and when?

He will act, ask,

she will needs-be

in response to the violence of movement, address,

intruded perception, sensation,

respond.

In what way?

Velocity and Friction

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, Fear, fiction, love, relationships, Self-Doubt, Writing2 Comments

This uncovered writing has parts that feel like 16-year-old wordplay mixed with the aging man…sigh.

FROM THE 9 NOTEBOOKS

desert driving

Velocity and Friction

Left to Say

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, relationships, Writing8 Comments

felzmann-swarm

What she said was.

And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.

What she said was

I…

To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.

Even I’d be overwhelmed.  Why with the even?

What she said was

It is too much.

I…

But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.

Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…

I cannot.

.

Think of where that leads!

She said

She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.

I cannot.

Is what she said.

She says.

I listen like a camera.

I record.

Her stillness moves too much.

Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.

I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.

.

She says it is too much, I will not try.

But I am trying.

Which does not change.

Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.

She can’t decipher.

What it is.

She will not say.  Says I cannot.

I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.

(Depress, record).

She will not can.

I take a picture.

It does not hear.

.

And what she says is

There’s too much for me to wager on a word

Even in flocks

Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,

Even in swarms.

I blink.

I snap the shutters.

She has said nothing

She will not say

I hold the stillness, how it flutters.

Silence seems.

Seems only.

But what she says is

She cannot.

.

The birds swoop past

And there is nothing

Left to say.

Interstice – 6: the coupling

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, Language, meaning, relationships1 Comment

System Environment Coupling

– 6 –

And then the narrative runs away.  Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds.  We yield them occurrence in time.  Over time.  Across locations.  We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so.  Their occurrence is now.  The moment of happen.  And the telling is here just as well.  The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember.  The moment of happen, and never “again.”  “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.

Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles.  We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have.  Construct forms to obey.  She stumbled, or stuttered.  Appeared in a robe.  When it opened, she stayed.  For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.

Not undone.  No undoing – just fall shy.  Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.  An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change.  She (you) and he (I), it (us).  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.

See the couple coupling.  A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle.  Huffs and spurts and clawing.  The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure.  Bodies in command.  It’s grotesque.  Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal.  She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting.  He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake.  They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.

From inches of distance the movements are grueling.  A repetitive taking advantage.  These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need.  The fish flaps on dry ground.  In a terror.  A panic afraid that relief will not come.  Release.  In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.”  But there is an other.  He/she senses the lover’s retreat.  The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction.  They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor.  Asynchrony.  What needs, needs its doing, is done.  Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…

From one angle.

See the couple coupling as animals.  The dog, the bear, the wolf.  The bird or bee or dragonfly.  The distance.  The unawares.  What if the lion leaned into the neck?  What if the squirrel caressed?  If the snakes lay entangled.  The cats licking flanks.  The stories would pour into morphing.  What have we seen?  During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received.  Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving.  His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine.  Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again.  In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else.  Animals humping and huffing,  not by instinct alone, something more.  Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.

In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be.  From the feline receiving her guest.  There is more taking place through the need.  The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond.  Bodies converging in dialogue.  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.  Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create.  The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace.  What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.

We muster.  We glyph.  We resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.

The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.

Interstices…continuing…

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, relationships, Writing2 Comments

earlier portions of this can be found HERE

– 5 –

Narrative seeming regurgitant, redundant, and indulged…yet as it occurred it was quite dramatic.  A vibrant life of tragic deaths and violent love.  The kind of loving one imagines as a lion gutting prey.  That ferocity and devouring.

Language always there, most assuredly, in circularity and dismay, its hesitant encumberance.  Its dance of waltz with tango, its distance from its cause.  We were ravenous for life, steeled in healing, shriveling seeds immersed in waters.  An obsessive metaphor.

She came.

From where?  Like lamps at sea.  Inside of windows, inside of houses, nonexistent.  The sea is no foundation in its turbulence, its depths.  I never charted.  But there she shone.  And there I strove, even while she drifted toward me.

The sky is murky.  A sound of panting.  My memories faint.  I grabbed her collar and held her still, bent down, like that, spread open (in my dreams).  They feed, they lion.  The forms reverse.

Talking a mean streak.  Accidental – no, – unavoidable or some inevitable undoing that I do.  I won’t stop speaking, but go on.  When I shouldn’t, when I can’t, when I do.  I am.

What I say (I said) goes like this, or would have, but the force, the draw, consumption – I speak in digits, speak in code, I squeeze pronouncing.  I will not say.  What I am saying, if I would not, would have been as it were love.  Instead I feed.

And she retracts and she releases, she relents but won’t rely.  We’re frightened beings, gorging beasts, so here it is – the valiant story, the fragile lines, the treacherous risk.

I engulf her.  Still she comes.

She feasts and I retreat.

The battles rage, my hair grows wild (she makes it so), her full of bruising, fully of greed – my want, my spunk.  Our torsos open.  We choose withdrawal along with weapons for attack.  I bare my teeth and force her hand while she recoils, she hits, she sneaks.

We die away.  I have remorse, and so I speak: again, again.  Say “what I meant” I do not mean.  Say wonder why.  She will not speak.

There’s never truce but we find trust, a glyph we muster, when we must, because we want (for something), want (for edges), want (for love).

She says my name.  Says “you remember!”  And I don’t.  Says work from there.  My body rotted, her blackened breasts, her flesh unwilling, still we progress.  We feed and lion.

A torturous joy.  An adumbration..  Spiraled mind and twisting body.  And there we are beneath a flow I cannot cease, my acrid words, my oily blunder.  Why should I think, and what?  While she moves thunder.

With firm resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Then here screes the story wrenched of life – away and from – she drains a bank I cannot fill, I rob her purchase.  We are one.

The scene begins.

Work in Progress

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, fiction, relationships, Writing3 Comments

Intro Farewell

a little something I’ll be working on through the Fall… believing, against all odds that there really IS a book in me somewhere….

Invisible Man Chronicles, cont’d

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, relationships2 Comments

Click HERE for parts 1 and 2

2-xray handshake

III.

 

            Rattling bones, deep-falling diaphragm – through continuous sightings and encounters with “H” (“her”) these consistently occur – even over hours, days, and months.

            I might say that what characterizes our particular version of intimacy are curiosity and wonder and the ecstasy of discovery and finding – imbuing apparently abandoned spaces with vitality and imagination.

 

            A week later was a potluck for the visiting artist.  Small-talking with “her” in the kitchen – I felt inadequate to be occupying her time and “let her go” to mingle with the many I was certain were desirous of her indomitable and imaginative company.  I spoke with her partner, the farm-inhabiting-best-friend-artist-lady, and H sidled in.  There was much laughter (their minds are contagious and entertaining – as if the structures of adulthood and professional culture never quite ‘took’ or corralled possibilities)…around “her” my breath dissipates.  We’d both been hired as rural mail carrier associates with joint training to occur the week following; both commissioned to respond to this artist’s intimately relational performance work; both in love with abandoned places and their loss and decay – both committed to discovering lost or overlooked things. 

            There we were.

            I in poverty. 

            Day one of training sat us next to one another, her length and beauty, doodles and read-alouds from the training manual enthralling.  I worked to breathe and lived through my peripheral perception – registering her movements, hair, wrist, knee, hands, mouth pronouncing acronyms, quirky nervous habits, footwear, scent and clothing…

            She suggested (did she?) lunch together.  I’m quite certain that converged through a clumsy stumbling and fragmented semblance of conversation.  I had planned only banana and peanut butter on my budget – yet each day we went – for that amazing hour – somewhere I’d never been before in a city I’d spent over three decades in and around.  An abandoned hotel, a nature trail, small chain restaurants, of which one, perhaps, constituted a first “date,” as, after placing our orders, she removed to the restroom and I was left to pay the bill!  (Delightful things like that).

 

            Blessings.  I was gaining practice in “soaking in the good” – a strategy instructed through my therapy, and H was much better than I ever imagined, a remarkable alchemy of behaviors and body parts – co-constituting an unknown ‘ideal’ to my mind, sensations, experience and history.  I was dumbstruck, amazed, bewildered, befuddled – in other words – alive and in hope.

 

            I’d been asking her coterie of creator-friends to visit my home for fire or food or an art-making party – to no response or avail.  Everyone taking a read.  She agreed, then doubted, then declared she thought she might appear via an internet message.  Thus she arrived, of a Sunday afternoon in April, to my home.

             We parlayed and exchanged – art, family, friends, lives, plans, hopes, strategies, likes and dislikes, ideas and tears, meanings and lies and other truths.  I ached toward her – finding romance and desire and a periscope of loving peeking out, looking round, checking for safety.  It isn’t safe.  It’s unlikely, bizarre, fantastical : sixteen years between us and four marriages – her blossoming while I fade to grey, her popping with –larity, my struggling for place.  She asked me to sit next to her.

            The sides of our arms.  Legs.  Eventually fingers becoming entangled.  We talked staring straight ahead, caught in some astronaut training module machine, no gravity, no reference, dizzied and desirous, disbelieving and desirous, frightened and desirous, with just the right amount of belonging and estrangement, novelty to craft courage and excitement throughout our neural nets.

             We concocted funnel cakes of cinnamon and sugar, mustard, jalapenos and sausage.  They flopped and sickened, we laughed and she left.  I think perhaps we loved, even then, that day.  She left behind a bevy of hands from a book she created, by extraction.  Our hands were open, our minds and hearts, a letting-go, with patterns and a freeing, a dance: in common, in Kansas, in history, in hope, in commitments, in fears and neuroses.

             Letting-go.

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