Category: survival

The Last Wolf: or, “I showed you the darkness in the beginning”

On By NW FilbertIn Confusion, depression, desire, Experience, fragments, Journal, Literature, Loss, Melancholy, Perception, Poetry, Reflections, survival, Writing4 Comments

I remember that I am falling

That I am the reason

And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be

Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

– W.S. Merwin, “When You Go Away”

Time keeps accumulating on my inability to write, to find time to write, to process living with language.  Simply to keep this space alive, I am posting a journal-like entry so as not to give up.

Recent weeks have been dominated by readings of Doug Rice, Laurie Sheck, Jon Fosse, Georges Bataille, Larry Levis, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Franco Berardi, Robert Bringhurst, Jeremy Fernando, Elfriede Jelinek and others…

What a traversal, passage, the past couple of months have been…

…like following the draw of the moon through dire straits

in dark, tumultuous seas…

…a feeling that everything is at its limit (Bataille, l’extreme) – EXPERIENCE.

  • pressured work projects, needs, deadlines, demands
  • endless and constant family logistics, accidents, needs
  • relentless parenting, relating, service to others
  • throngs of people and groups
  • lack of friends, lovers, supportive presences
  • fear, health, danger, exhaustion
  • failure
  • loss of partner
  • inexistence of calm or solitude
  • imposed travels
  • absence of sleep and rest
  • indulgence in desire and harm
  • minimal process
  • poor eating or nourishment
  • tension, strain
  • depression
  • lack (wellness) & excess (pressure)

…a teetering balance…

Mind you, this is how it feels in me, not how it is.

I miss everything that is/was good

…fail better…

There is a certain uncertain sorrow to things

(presence of melancholia, moon-draw)

Georges Bataille’s certainties:

  • WE ARE NOT EVERYTHING
  • WE WILL DIE

THE UNKNOWN                   THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE

darkness                                              levity

Lynda Barry & the “Underground Skateboard” – how we draw from others work what we need to survive

Lemony Snicket & the autographing instruction that I should “read something else”

FAMILY

immersion (doom, closure)                                 held in levity

conscious moderation

– 1st Tarot reading –

(processual journey mythical)

Jacob recommends Homer – The Odyssey

doubling                                letting go – holding together                    The Devil/The Chariot

dark surfaces / surfaces of darkness (The Fool)

The Moon (dark journey) crossed by the Queen of Swords (wounding love)

THE UNKNOWN                       THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE 

-Summer

Temperance

The King of Wands – leaders, pole vaulters, utilizing tension toward propulsion

leap over?  through?  on?

The Fool

Pas sage – not wisdom                                                      FRAUGHT JOURNEY

– Odyssey –

BATAILLE: “nothing is final…”

– “what is not there, which, once it is seen, often in literature, tells us what is” (Fosse)

Inner Experience

“the suffering of the disintoxicated” (Bataille)

The Human:

  • challenging everything (of putting everything into question) – Bataille
  • always a breakdown of systems that will not be restored – Sheck

“Experience reveals nothing and cannot found belief nor set out from it” – Bataille

“The hand moves forward, the tragedy begins” – Bataille

“no one grieves with you for what you are unable to say”

“life itself…always swerves away from my mouth”

– Elfriede Jelinek –

“how I’m owned by that which will not answer” – Sheck

“What you are will be spelled by whatever

lies trapped in your hand” – Robert Bringhurst

– emptiness is also empty –

“what is the part of us… feels…unnamed…

…i must live at some distance from convinced” – Sheck

 

“When I say you to what isn’t there – I mean me” (Larry Levis)

“you won’t find me in me” (Jelinek)

Experience eludes understanding ( Bataille)

– nor can I compute the possible (Sheck)

This too

is just one

more opinion

to move through

(Bringhurst)

FIRST AND FOREMOST YOU WRITE (Fosse)

“From an abandoned myth

(I write to you)” (D. Rice)

– wanting them to mean nothing –

– and suggest everything (L Levis)

 

INTENTION:

  • hold open the imagination of possibility
  • “do not go gentle into that good night”
  • Moderation.  Extreme limit.
  • Contra-digitalia.  First and foremost write.
  • Be-Read

 

 

Laramie & Alias & possible ways to end

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Alias Harlequin, being, creative writing, death, depression, desire, Experimenctes, longing, motion, mystery, survival, WritingLeave a comment
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Not Found

“Just find a way through to an end,” Laramie thinks, fallen there, and hurting.

“the void is waiting for vocabulary,” Alias reads, and ponders alone what the void might be comprised of.  “Perhaps the void is composed of perhapses,” he writes, “combined with some organization of relations we are incapable of imagining, cannot begin to fathom.  Awaiting and constraining possibilities, likelihoods and unforeseens in a kind of complex and chaotic equation or balance.”  Irreducible, inexhaustible, and unsayable, he marks on the wall-sized whiteboard in his office.

“If I figure how to end…make it to an end,” Laramie whispers, hoarsely, internally, excruciatingly, silently.  He cannot sense his horse, nor smell the fire.  It will begin to rain.

“Perhaps,” Alias cursives at his desk, dire, lonely, remiss.  “Perhaps each motion, feeling, thought…perhaps the shaping of an ‘a’ instead of an ‘I,’ perhaps this particular curve or flutter of line, this pen rather than another, the way it sits in my hand, perhaps the letter-to-word conjured depends on so much more than I can conceive or dream: smoke rising to atmosphere in some African desert; a precise selection of neurons inhibited and allowed in my body; the varying flow of blood and calculus of cells active in my thighs, my ankles; the trajectory of wind – its velocity.  Perhaps what registered itself in my synapses and muscles 17 years ago is playing out in curves versus straight; what she said; or his coughs in the night.  The amount and location of sperm; exact army and height of each dandelion stem; the president’s breath; engine ignition in China; the current temperature of Jupiter.  Perhaps.”

Laramie works to focus on his breathing, attempts to concentrate his eyes.  Seeks localization and diagnostics of injury.  His vision is “impaired.”  His legs have gone numb.  Some liquid burn fires through chest-shoulder-arm.  He cannot wriggle his fingers.

“Perhaps every ‘moment’ or movement, influence, decision, activity, intention, expression truly depends on everything else – EVERYTHING…since ANYthing occurred – however that may have become.  And the motion of my arm, its difficulties, my emotions and thinkings, what I am able to perceive, just as much participates in the perhapses and perchances as EVERYthing else – directs them accordingly while equally or ratio-reciprocally affected and determined by.  Some inexhaustible, irreducible, assemblage – unsayable from my specified and fluctuate limitations – my finitude, but imaginatively infinite (perhaps not) in chances-are,” Alias furiously scribbles.

Attempts to roll over.  Effort towards sky.  Finds himself clutching left arm, his legs akimbo but working into a ball.  Breath harsh and labored.  Sight unseen.  Somewhere far, separate, Laramie is suffering.  Finding a way to an end.

“Perhaps,” Alias drones.  “Perhaps deaths and births, seedings and desiccations, galactics and atomic behaviors, cheetah-screech and egg-breaks, politics and business transactions, theories and documents and artifacts, particular weights of the world and all of their unformed-formings gather every instant to become again, particularly.  Planar, scalar, interactive and recursive, never still, never stable, not quite patterned – ever potent, ever determined, ever possible, ever realized – EVERYWHERE + HOW + WHY + WHO + WHAT – always possible and continually actual – without possible worlds – just IS.  Just IS.  Just IS, again.”  Alias slumps.  Decides again to drink.  Looks at porn.  Longs for intimacy, for desire – to be craved, wanted and longed-for.  To be satisfying, satiating.  To be some whacky, untellable, sort of “enough.”  Wishes and wishes – 15,000 things.

Nothing now but distress, pang, shards, fire.  Something like the neigh or whinny of a horse.  A coyote yelp or yip.  Dying insects, a squashed ant.  Sparks fizzled in mist and wind.  Harsh, hard, and consuming.  Consumptive.  Agony.  Laramie unable to locate his body, his voice…himself.

data-rot
data-rot

Alias Alone

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, friendship, human, identity, Language, loneliness, longing, Loss, survival, Writing4 Comments

“it was neither the cradle nor the grave of anything whatever.  Or rather it resembled so many other cradles, so many other graves, that I’m lost.”

–Samuel Beckett-

The silence.  The separation.  The solitude.  This is not novel, not uncanny, not even irregular or unexpected.

Betwixt Alias & Laramie, in fact, it would not be unusual for 1-3 years to pass without interpersonal communication.

The interruption, irregularity, or stretching intermittence of intimate interaction (current parlance “intensive interaction” – what they’re calling genuine conversation these days – a sort of treatment or therapeutic method for the autistic or ‘disabled,’ – akin to the ‘Talking Cure’ of psychoanalytics past) wasn’t really odd or unexpected or otherwise for Alias…merely unfortunate…he accustomed to his cycles and wishes, routines and desires – never mated very well with the world-at-large…his surround.

Still somehow Laramie’s “off” was different.

Perhaps.

No matter.

Alias driven back to Kafka, Beckett, Jabes, and other authors of silences whom he’s long aspired to – wishing (not so secretly) that he might require only some genuine solipsism or solitude, a kind of retreat or reversal from the cultural logorrhea (social media posts, artist’s talks, professional blogs and listservs, tweets/tumbs/grams & feeds) –

incessant reports on one’s self

– disgusting yet enticing,

If other humans ever happened to ‘like’ or ‘follow,’ ‘share’ or ‘pin-it’ or – could it be – actually care?

Alias entering thickets alone.  Laramie “off” (in every way his ‘right’).  No human (living, warm, alive, and responsive).  Alias turns to the ‘mind’ (texts, images, memories, dreams, literature, language, art, thoughts) – in any case or scenario – some abstracted cerebral, cognitive-capacity, the Human Imaginary.  The Pretend.

Meaning.    God.    Religion.    Truth.    Santa.    Satan.     Logic.     Math.

His pet feline “Luna(tic)” and fractured Chihuahua “Gizmo” as company.  And printed literature.  Recorded music.  Playback audio-visual-cinematography.  Machinic animations.  Pornography.  Movie.  Television.  Photographs.  WHATEVER.  Virtual Realities in the place of persons.

Attempts to stay alive, carry on, delude oneself that meaning and reason and experience and expression had validity and representation, communication and comprehension, and so forth.

To “keep calm…& carry on.”

Breathe.

Or…whatever.

Laramie: “OFF”

and

Alias: (“ON”)?

never the twain shall meet?

well, occasionally

(he says, he thinks, he imagines, she says, someone hopes)

The HUMAN (Alias surmises) – ‘an interminable thinking-speech,’ Alias think-speeches, “surely I read/heard/saw/overheard that somewhere.”

It’s Alias alone…free(?), unfettered, allowed, supposedly “ON”

Laramie – “OFF,” Alias sighs.

(and therefore no way to ‘think through’)…

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

Point is, Alias thinks as he murmurs and walks along, there is no meaning, purpose, or point to it all.  “Think-writing” Laramie once called it (re: Alias’ poetry) – “simply inscriptions of progress, er, process…languaging what happens in your miniscule portion of the world (as you know it).”

Think-writing, write thinking, “fuck you!” Alias thinks (writes).  “How can one think without someone or something to think ‘off’ of or ‘with’ or ‘in relation to’?”  Alias grumbles – “yet you’re ‘OFF,’ gone, along, beyond, and so remains me, it, this ‘against,’ ‘in relation to,’ this withless ‘with’ (all versions of the same) ANYthing, EVERYthing, NOThing.”

Something!

“OFF” said Laramie, he

said to Alias, “simply ‘OFF’” like a switch, a light, a life, a dream, a thought, an inception of memory, an hope, ON/OFF, ON/OFF, there/gone, here/gone, you/I, yes/no,…’OFF’ said Laramie, he said to Alias that day, that last day, that latest traversal, that…

…dream,

imagining, encounter, hope, wish, Alias imaginary…

———————————-

…because no one cares, and there is surely no reason to (Alias ruminates).

Having always wanted, desired, craved (it might even be said) to be some strange, unrepeatable and unique (or recognizable) combination of human/person/lover/writer/philosopher/musician/writer/virile male and sensitive, omniscient (no, not ‘omniscient,’ not ‘all-knowing’ but ‘all-considering,’ ‘all-comprehending’ and ‘-allowing,’ ‘understanding’) homo sapien.

There is never any reason (Alias considers) that he should (in any way) be special, “special,” and yet, and yet…

There’s no smidgen of doubt (Alias i. e. Harlequin, piecemeal patchwork of human male – a man, a father, son, parent, professor, laborer, home-owner, some-time partner, friend, teammate, band member, student, child-like adult, mature-seeming child, and so forth…animal, patron, caretaker & guardian, public, customer, businessman, blah, blah, blah, descriptor, descriptor, word, word, term…) that Alias i.e. Harlequin, in relation to Laramie James Backstagger, in relation to J, J, K, T, A, H, O, I, Sam, Franz, Helene, Clarice, mom, sister, dad, daughter, cat, dog, cow, instructor, stranger, landscape, realm, city, genre, language, world…

wanted, even craved (it might be said)

being “special.”

Alias Harlequin.

Alone.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

A thousand shades from cynical to fine…

…medium nor method, mechanism nor machine matters…

…it’s simply the persons involved…

…the choices they make…

….ways they behave…

…what is made of it…

….making and interpreting…

…given the day, the moment, the situation…

…without matter or evidence or reason.

The world happens.

And then we die.

And then world continues.

Happens (for us) (me) (Alias) (Laramie) (you)

No more.

The equations very, VERY simple.

Here & Gone

Heaps of trouble in between

Self-causation

-regulation

Autopoeisis