“One day I want to write,” I say to myself, every day. This is one of those days. And also what it is to write.
Category: Self
Autumn Reflections, their sound and fury
“Sometimes God, sometimes nothing”
-Franz Kafka –
“Blank page called a day.
God.”
– Dan Beachy-Quick –
The praxis of empty signifiers : words : full of sound and fury.
If you accept the ‘I’, or find a name to call yourself – like using a credit card received in the mail (illusion of invisible funds), what do you charge to it, and does it always end in debt?
Does it make of you a consumer to believe the ‘I’? To use self-reference as a token or coin?
How soon do “my” and “mine” follow after, even though each object, event, or transaction, is clearly only a loan?
What is charged to the ‘I’ must be paid back – to put it in legal or religious terms.
Be careful what you say.
Wittgenstein claimed that we mostly speak without giving full meaning to the terms we use – that we ought remain silent whereof we cannot speak with adequate comprehension. Where we sing beyond our knowing –
very few (if any) utterances comply.
But how learn anything (even the untrue) without not-knowing? Without composing walls to break apart or knock upon, to breach or to climb? Without making it up to unlearn and repent of?
A word changes direction.
It’s happening as I write or think or imagine this. As if.
As if it signified something. I write with sound and fury. Into silence.
It’s what ‘I’ do – so I should do it! (shouldn’t I?!)
I seem to know I’m alive by touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing – things other… feeling, sensing, perceiving… crafting empty signifiers like nostrils, like a tongue, a kind of eyesight and ear, my fingertips. My flesh on loan. To be paid back.
In debt to what then? ‘World’? To sing. To sound. To dance a little. Imagine.
If ‘I’.
If I am given the sound of leaves as they crisp and color the Autumn breeze, refracturing light; if I can smell the moisting decay (debts repaid by undoing what was charged), if I can gather them with my hands and roil about them with my body, if I can bake the seeds and chew, take them in…
…what does ‘I’ owe?
You sentence me: two I’s. I hear your melodious song. You whisper, close.
I say ‘I love.’ Terms lacking comprehension. Metaphysics. Their meanings beyond knowing. Unlearned. “We” are (whereof we cannot speak).
Charging invisible funds we become responsible for. Obligated.
Swiping our cards for contents.
What do we owe?
What do we know?
What can we?
Each their own set limits. Sometimes raised, sometimes lowered, depending on our fidelity to pay with interest.
We owe. We all of us owe.
Even for our silence.
Even cash-only – that empty signifier – words. Even simply action. ‘I move’ – is a statement on credit, like breath.
Sweet burst of being! To “is.” To “I.” To “we.” All so heavily borrowed, contingently. Imagine.
Imagine what it means. To owe.
Again I break the silence of what I do not know via signs of repentance. These words.
All the silence they require.
Alias Harlequin – Identities
“To recognize yourself in… To multiply your likenesses”
-Edmond Jabes–
And what do you suppose it is to be a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” human? To be named? Alias Harlequin?
What do you suppose it might be like to be “Ida Sophia Lind Filbert”? “Jada Lynette Smith”? “Oliver Myshkin”?
“Hallie Noel Linnebur”?
“Tristan Rene Wells Filbert”? “Simon H. Lilly”? “Aidan Stafford”? “Herman Melville”? “Paul Feyerabend”? “Rachel S. Como”? “Paul O’Callahan”? “Meghan Miller”? “Jim H. Charles?” “Warren Charles Farha”? “Amanda Marie Lind”? “Fernando Pessoa”?
A cow. A particular cow – an Hereford – on a particular plot of land in Mitchell County, Kansas?
“Plato”? “Kathy Downes”? “Ortho Stice”? A Welsh Corgi “Tippy”? “Napoleon Bonaparte”? “Charles S. Peirce”? The clerk at the grocery store? “Christopher Fynsk”? That Forest Ranger? A pet hamster “Jacques”? “Claudius”?
WHY SHOULD ANY ONE HUMAN BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?
WHY SHOULD ANY ONE ORGANISM BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?
What means: “EFFECT”?
“William Shakespeare”? “Avital Ronell”? “God”? “John Wayne Gacy”? “Helena Bonham Carter”? “Microsoft”? A caterpillar (be specific)? “Mahatma Ghandi”? A sparrow? Molecules composing particular dust?
WHAT IS?
how are we able to ask that question?
WHAT ARE WE?
how might we be “WHOs”?
Starting local:
What might it be like – as a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (Nobody) – to BE a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (A body)?
I’m not sure HOW to answer that.
“Perhaps writing means overcoming all resemblances within the very heart
of resemblance, being finally like yourself, like nothing.”
- Edmond Jabes –
i.e. How that can be answered.
– WHO or WHAT answers – ?
WHAT MIGHT IT BE LIKE…TO BE?
(qualified to ANSWER)
can ANYthing “answer”?
does “answering” imply “language”?
WHAT IS AN ANSWER?
(in relation to – ?)
What is(?) Nathan Wayne Filbert, Alias Harlequin?
IS “Nathan Wayne Filbert”?
WHAT IS?
WHAT IS IS?
(how?)
WHAT IS A QUESTION? And WHY/HOW can a question be asked?
WHAT IS IT – are our – ideas? – To “IMAGINE”?
what are ideas?
What might it be to “conceive”?
“to generate concepts” (D&G)
framings of our world-experience
[WHY? HOW?
WHAT FOR?]
WHAT is a “person”? HOW? WHY? WHO?
Always and ever – HOW & WHY can we / do we ASK?
WHO QUESTIONS?
(WHAT)?
(HOW)?
Something begins
(in/with all this)
it would seem
(it seems)
it seems that something begins in/with questioning
Alias Harlequin, i.e.
– the one whom this effects, the one on whom this has effect, the one (same? No!) affected by him or her, by whom and it. By this. This. That. By Other, others, and therefore, Alias again, patchworked and quilted, becoming, undoing, altering. Alias.
“Presumably most writers have many more ideas than they are able to act on”
– Ivan Vladislovic, The Loss Library –
Alias Harlequin – identities – is as is affected, effects, effected with/by.
Alias, i.e. as effected by “Hallie Noel Linnebur”; as effected (generated? Co-composed-with-) “Pauline Margaret Kresin Filbert”; the St Bernard “Zorro”; a specific train on a particular journey at a particular time; that mountain in that moment; Dec. 16, 1997 – a flu; and so on…
Alias – as situated in moments – e.g. “each one.” Harlequin – the human surname quilted with environment (micro-to-macro) in concourse. “Alias” as the “name in shreds” – the fragmentary and provisional, pragmatically specifiable address.
Ambiguous and fluid (like “river” itself – capable of designation but inconsistently contained) transient yet locatable, in form…perhaps. Yet no. “Alias” perhaps the medium (in-between) of morphing form and varying substance – what nothing also is (is not).
Name/term/signal/sign (“Alias”) as related to HNL, Dr. K, Dostoevsky, rustled grass, these sounds, this space-time and its company (surround) and then again, these again (but never “again”) – designating “NOWs”. Perhaps. It depends.
What or Who, How “Alias Harlequin” ALWAYS depends on a totality of other dependencies, as it were (or is?) “As such.”
Alias Harlequin, representative? Not that can of worms. AND the “thing” itself? (network of momentary dependencies-in-relation)?
What might we call (it/him/etc.) then? And what would “calling” be/do – how?
WHO questions?
This Alias Harlequin.
“I am already so much the inscription of a divergence…What I was, if that could be described, was a whirlwind of tensions…”
–Helene Cixous–
“A word is binding and at the same time breaks our bonds.
To which of them shall I, one day, owe my freedom?”
“To one only. Your name in shreds.”
-Edmond Jabes, Book of Resemblances–
Borrowing: James
“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-
Secret 2
i want never to encounter work I wish to edit
A little secret
i hope all that goes into keeping me alive, is worth it
Antic Ontology
But I do know something of being alive as a human being.
44 years of living. Sometimes awake, sometimes sleeping.
Often bruised in/with activity. “Alive” nonetheless, operative.
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And that is that: there always seems to be a “you.”
An othering. For humans. Nature, world, self.
I-you=we.
And that is that. Buber perhaps, correct: Being is relation,
(or vice-versa?) for anything (anyone – could we ever get down to that)
exists, stands-forth/out, becomes, in so far…insofar as – “it relates.”
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The gist= A we. Wonder. More-than is constitutive.
We are, and are made of/from/with more than what we “are.”
Being/beings (something needs troubled here) Here.
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If I characterized…TODAY = noise & speed.
“What calls for thinking?” “What calls thinking?” “What is called thinking?”
Slowness. Quiet. Almost silence. In praise of. Praise?
To? For? What?
Relation. A we. Equals.
And then…more than…= “become.”
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Behold. Arrive. Appear. A we.
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Reticence.
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Hallie. Tristan. Aidan. Ida. Oliver.
World – air, plants, animals, motion…
how else do I know? How else do I know that I am?
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only
in relation to
with
relation
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RE(lation)ALITY.
Polysemic Stupor 