Category: Traces

All the wow I come across in the world of languaging assembled – heroic efforts discovered as they come to be unconcealed for me

Tapping at Windows of Words

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, desire, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, Traces, Writing7 Comments

The bestial want

is it ever more?

Evermore.

.

Ache beauty

its terrible

hunger

.

The voyeur

at what is not

“mine.”

.

What can be taken?

What “had”?

In the seeking,

the peeping,

the glimpse

or the glance –

its desire?

.

Such beastly want,

evermore,

grasping

.

forth or out

I reach –

a solid pane.

.

I am limited

constrained

delimited –

.

it would seem

I see clearly

but it cannot be

touched.

.

‘I’ is alone

with-out.

With-in

comes from ‘you.’

.

So ‘I’ scopes –

a feral yearn –

and gazes…

.

tapping at windows

of words.

Autumn Reflections, their sound and fury

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, relation, Self, Traces, Unknown, Writing7 Comments

leaves wind

“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.

The Confession, or, “I am a thing that breaks” – Laurie Sheck

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, Complexity, creative writing, Experimenctes, fragments, time, Traces, Writing2 Comments

I’ll map it out for you.

No, I’ll inscribe it.

47 cuts (myopic) in everything.

  1. That’s as far back as the lineage has been traced. A patchwork of stitches, genes, and lines (or lies).

Unfinished.  Inability to understand apparatus.  Has not accomplished death.

Librarian, parent: attempts to track, preserve, and access – things precious, silent, useful.

Pseudo-scholar (any otherwise?), thinker: an inability to avoid pollution when considering or engaging relics of world.

If desired sexually, probably will… it depends.

Begins halfway.

Sometimes only in pieces.

Life is hard to figure.  Mostly illegible, as well.

47 marks on anything.

Read what you can, listen.

Smells are.

Skin-shaped textures.  Walks on land.  Occasionally tree or canyon.  Mountain, river, ravine.

As easy to trace as wind.

Whatever being.

Kiss for kiss.  Breathing.

Something (someone?) called “melody.”

Hurts too.

.

Intimate uncertainty?  Certainly not.  Perhaps.  She would know.

Maybe furry, fuzzy androgyny.

Offspring reveals: “Crow’s a Decomposer.”

.

Decomposer.

.

What is poet?

Said all things grow, cannot hold, to dust and such.  Singing.

Some might remember.

Touch.  Taste.  Trying.

.

Loves deeply.  Expects nothing but passing, passage.

Fabricates patterns.

Dances.  Slowly.  Grasslands.  Prairie.

AND.  OR.  NOT.  (every day. moment) +/-?

What equals?

.

Like erasure.  Accumulation.  Obscurity.

Sometimes.

.

Decomposer.  Lover.  Friend.  Everenemy.

Anonymity.

.

“Love” (used, spoken, felt, lost, wished-for, pondered).

.

Language, landscape, living organism… perhaps that equals.

.

Sing “You Fucking Did It”

When does death arrive?  Why?

.

Glossy haze = language, landscape, living organism.

.

Children.  Music.  Language.  Elements of play.

Emotion.

Sex.

.

Stretched out.  A boy and a girl (E. Whitacre).  A boy and a boy.  Girl upon girl.  They and them.

Exchanging foam.

.

A poet working a way to an underworld.

Death is.  (a “thing”).  Exists.  =.

.

Kansas:  what gives silence for silence.

As easy to trace as wind.

.

Igloo.  Cabin.  Family farm.

DNA.  Bacteria.  Cancer(ous) cellular cell’d activity.

.

The living.  The dying.

.

Unfinished undoing.

.

47 paces toward the dark.

.

Re-membering foam.

.

How life gets made.  A ratchet, a sprocket, an engine and a wheel.  Add water.  Fuel to the fire.  Desiccate.

.

Perhaps it will rain.  A slight ritard.  Some sounding quiet.  Remediate.

.

Take 47:

Watching flowers blooming to dissolve.  A capture.

Sight slated to dim.  Shuffling ensues.  The stoop.

In a chair nearby, another.  More better for company.  When alone.

Exchanging foam.

47 paces in the fog.

Take three, four, and so on.

.

Circle round.  Loop back.  Never again.

Erasure.

Easy to trace as wind.

.

Leaving lights on.

Reading words, far from men.

Lost facilities.  The stakes.

Dwindle toward final.

The effort, the offspring, the progeny.

Prognosis.

.

47 accounts of the night and the wheel-well thickened with road.

Splashes the mill.  Grinds crank.  Pressures to turn,

turning back, away, toward.

Another.

47 gaps in the shawl.  Inconnu.

With something like delight.  How to stand before them.

Poeting down for underworld.

Looking back.

Slows.

Was there ever progress?

Thinks over.

Takes the hand.

Strikes the key.  The 47th.

.

Saturate for stupid.  Loses steps.  Must wake.

A happy mess.  Weighted results, dependencies, accumulation.

As easy to trace as wind.

Utilizes snow too much.  The rain.

Abandoned places.  What removes.  The melt.  What remains.

The unfinished.  Undoing.  Become.

.

For ‘I’ is a thing that breaks.

.

47 footprints from the hands.  The notable.

Swirly ways of working.  Feels like – .

Inspiration hopelessness.  This language.

This living organism.  Landscape.

47 miles to go.  All the cracks and divets.

Bolt after bolt unscrolled as flesh.  Laid out.  Stretched out.  Smoothed.  Sagged.  Ironed.  Smelt.

Felt for quality.  Caressed and examined.

The lonely wonder.  Represent.

47 X x = ?

.

Confusion persuasive.  Revelation / insight.  Chords resolve.  Dissonance.

Language + landscape + living.  47 measures.

Months go by.  Chairs and couches filled by others’ beds.  Warmth weighs.

Waits on wisdom.  Depletion.  Adventure as excited strain.

.

Poison intravenous.  Copulating cells and fluids.

Ends of the guilty.  Interpret unfinished systems.  Dis-ease.

The long whine wail across the prairie.  Animal manual.  Wind wires rain.

What gets whispered and transcribed.

Stumbling toward the underworld.  Looking back.

Eyes up, ocean bottom.

Some things are out of hand.

Like danger.

The grey and black.  The dimming.

47 warnings.  The morning comes.

.

Making it.  Happens.

Diagnoses and analyses.

Shuffles, stumbles, strikes the keys.

Easy to trace as wind.

Chorded coagulation, confounding,

comprehending (very little, almost nothing)

language, landscape, living,

another note tunes the swing on the porch –

inconnu – 

what’s wide open, open wide

.

Shrewd and undiminished.

Minimize = understanding.

A matter of scale,

for I am a thing that breaks.

.

47 slices of nothing.

Light, as a feather

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, friendship, Image, Perception, Photography, Traces, Writing5 Comments
Lee_Light Feather 2018
unfixed photographic print of a feather – gift from Summer Lee

How seeing depends… opacity, clarity… foggy horizons between tumultuous sea and sky…

Light, as a feather – the dawn in darkness, or the hoping carrying despair.

What is seen, then?  What fore- or back- grounds an image?  How?  In mist, in motion.  In a dream that waking brings.

In which direction, grounding?  And wherefore?  Lightness limning itself again, again, in midst of darker swells and slighter traces.

How seeing depends… on light, the eye, the stimmung – the stemming of mood – and graver swirls… beg-ins and sets-out from.  Within.  Without.  Finding curious concord.  Even when there’s barely there.  Either.

Deepens, depends, opens out, away, in deep ends, hollow holing, turbulent tunnels, seeing unseen, a groping for/in light where none.  Peering is something, as the closing of the eyes – telescopic blindfold.

Perhaps dawn is down, where despair is rising.  Hope precipitating beyond eithers, or… differences imperceptible save the seeing…

How seeing depends… and deepens with what is searched for, what wants, who opens,  what feels, within each where-when, becoming there-thens, seeing how.

It begins, then, all seeing, between.  Bounding back-forth in light and light and any weighted things, ever shifting seeing-sea and emptied sky, re-membering differences to seamlessness, with opaque clarity, as such your “I.”

Lee Letter 2018
Text included with photograph – Summer Lee 2018

Credo

On By NW FilbertIn Clarice Lispector, creative writing, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Language, Literature, longing, Traces, Writing5 Comments

I’m afraid to write.  It’s so dangerous.  Anyone who’s tried, knows.  The danger of stirring up hidden things – and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea.  In order to write I must place myself in the void.  In this void is where I exist intuitively.  But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood.  I’m a writer who fears the snares of words: the words I say hide others – which?  maybe I’ll say them.  Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.

Do I write or not?…A light and gentle meditation on the nothing…

Does “writing” exist in and of itself?  No. It is merely the reflection of a thing that questions.  I work with the unexpected.  I write the way I do without knowing how and why – it’s the fate of my voice.  The timbre of my voice is me.  Writing is a query.  It’s this: ?

I write for nothing and for no one…I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time.  The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive…

I feel as though I’m still not writing…My problem is the fear of going mad.  I have to control myself…And so I’ll leave a page blank or the rest of the book – I’ll come back when I can.

Clarice Lispector, Breath of Life 

Cloud Fragment #3

On By NW FilbertIn being, Blogging, change, communication, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Experience, Language, Loss, memory, Photography, time, Traces, Uncertainty, Writing6 Comments

cloudswirl.gif

To swirl.  There.  He said it, stated intention, directly.  To be lost, languishing (anguish is in there), full of lose and seeking, squirming, rutting, snuffling about.  Scent search of what?  Or not what quite, but how, now?  The unknowable, uncertain, which lies beyond perhaps, inaccessible, indeterminate, resistant to decipher, discretion, or decode.  He plies.  Ruin of movement, beyond conceit and loosely bound, tearing terror of graspage.  An infinity of words, or if not, many disordered magnitudes more compossibly complex than he –wrecked in kind with troubles of time, reductions of selection.  What means, all knotted in already-known.  A scumble then, without, arms treading, legs a-flutter, cognition confused in the mass, mess, unaccommodated, arranged re-arranging, affective and effecting, assaying never fully, nor enough, insufficient temporals and scope, shortfall of finitude, unbecoming, irrealized, incomputable surround.  To swirl or swoon perhaps – intends eccentric excentricity, without with-in, within outside and othering.  Immersed, submerged, tumbling almost-struggle, almost-drift, thoroughfare and passaging, limning swaths of runnels, channels, margins.  Copiously coping, how would he go?  What are the  motions lesser than stir and more absorptive?  And what of the when?  Who now, where now, how when?  Confusion, then – confusion, swooning and swirl.  A wriggling receipt, some commingling transference transmitting, attention intending undoing, origins ever receding, irremediable in rot and excess, dismembered invention – begin – excise and evince, glide of erasure and uncover, indiscernible activity of process, waving particles, particular waves, currents and tropes, passively permeable patterning passageways [not that!] imperceptible part-i-cipatory breakage and shatter, dispersion deconstructing refusal.  He ruins, inevitably.  That stands – there.  Unworking integration every angle or approach, from inside, decay, a desiccate and undone doing.  Mismade by allowance, a scribbling palimpsest or correction – be cognized, be written, be spoken, transcribed – he wails into unruly, disruptive, erupting fluid floodings of voiding, of nothing.  Not afloat, asail, aswim.  Neither drowning nor submerged.  Nearly saturate with swallow and exhale, a lineament on empty, some faulty trace.

Cloud Fragments 1

On By NW FilbertIn Complexity, Confusion, Experience, Experimenctes, fragments, Image, Language, nature, Perception, Traces, Writing2 Comments

cloudysky.gif

Within the lip and loom of limbo.  Limb lazy, almost unperturbed, but living still, slightly shaken, a subtle stir.

Difference scarcely scored, imperceptible is not worth mention.  A canny kind of collude.  There (might be) this, (might be) that – too hard to say, and who could do it?  Only one driven to be wrong, reductive, defining.  Only one agitated or alarmed by the way of things – that there were no way.

Indiscernibles.  Indeterminate.  Impossible to compute: is how it is.  These signs erase, and we are there.  As if in front with, as if of face and gaze.  As if event.  As if participant and become.  As if no one might tell apart.

Why tell apart?

Wrangled together in wrestle, why choose?  If breath must mingle to say, why delegate, select?  Cloud moves over, under and through, toward, into, and away – to no one’s noticeable chagrin.  Why we?

Tender spots trace gentle rain, in river, barrel, lake, exempt of rage or reason.  Only a sprinkle, a feed and possible weal, so glance and touch, brush and care, a slightly stumble, a cell’s conceive.

Misremembered, but no mind, flavor, sight, the wind through trees.  Nothing is without.  Nothing alone, should it perchance to be.  Mysterious, illogical motive of undoing.  Prepositional violence.  Pre-positions, a tearing apart.

Muscle, scent, and fur.  The various forms of water – cloud, drizzle, flow.  Flesh with flesh and whispered angles.  Breath with sound and ear.  A thought.

Inseparability and subterfuge.  Had never been, may not be, unstill it is…the way….questionally unquestioned, sifting in drift, conjunctions of convergence, some impossible begin.

Friends to Fall

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Dying, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, friendship, human, loneliness, seasons, Traces, Writing1 Comment

Elf says “ripe.”

Martin responds, wondering.  Curious as to that which it applies, or whom, or what.  Contemplating reference.  Filled with questions.  Martin says, “yes,” almost under his breath.

Elf shrugs.  Elf walks on.

Martin follows, thinking, looking at leaves falling into blades of grass, alerted by the shushing and darting of squirrels, saddened at the amplified pffft of cars passing by.  Wishing for silence.  Wondering if Elf will speak a further word or two.  Sensing like a dowsing rod for meanings.

Walks on.  Shuffles.  Walks on.

Martin, too.

There’s a relative silence from the two of them – these humans wandering across a concreted trail.  Sure there’s the sound of their footfalls, scuffles, even some noise in the pause of it.  Or the noise of the absence of noise.  But you’d have to be different to hear the breathing, the heart pulse, the slide of muscles and blood.  As far as humans-in-environs go, the pair presents retraction.

Hard to say for soil.  The squares composing sidewalk must suffer pressure, absorbed by the earth beneath and shared out through verberations for miles.  Hard to say for air.  Full-grown males, plodding forth like prows along a rickety line-of-motion has to be pushing particles around, making waves.  Nothing gives report.

Elf stops and sighs.

Martin responds, slowing, looking out, looking forward, looking round.  Lets his hands limp his sides.

Elf crouches down.

Martin scans the street, examines bark, follows trunks and branches, admires leaves and colors and movements.  Birds.

Elf.

Martin.

Writing Ontologically? – the shit thickens

On By NW FilbertIn desire, identity, notebooks, Purpose, time, Traces, Writing11 Comments

“It is the slowness of the art of writing, in its mechanical execution, that for years now has at times repelled and discouraged me: the wasted time of a writer throwing words on the page.“

Julien Gracq – Reading Writing

for Jean Lee @ Jean Lee’s World, with apologies

I really “mean” it when I say that I don’t know what I am writing, and that the REAL WHY is because I want to write, and am able, and that I honestly have no character, event, or idea in mind or body as I apply this mediatory marking instrument (ball-point-pen) between whatever-myself-is and this-blank-lined-paper.

I truly might be WASTING LIVING TIME.

OR…might be recording something useful…providing traces…leaving marks of process…like masturbation, cooking, politics, or work – HOW LIVING TIME IS “WASTED.”

Who knows?  The scientists?  Or neurobiologists?  The philosophers or anthropologists?  Historians?  Pastors?  Sociologists?  CEOs?  Artists?  Who determines (evaluates and judges) what is “waste” from what is “significant”/”important”?  Do humans?  Does Time?

For what it’s worth, I have an ellipsis of minutes I am not (apparently) needed by children, pets, work, or world…and so I have taken up a writing tool and am drawing letters in collectives called words onto an empty section of a blank lined notebook.

Is this valuable?  Don’t we wonder or ask this regarding every action and breath?  From holding a child, to exercise; fixing plumbing to sleeping?  Laundry.  School.  DOES THIS MATTER?!?  And, if it might, to WHOM or WHAT…why?

I cannot imagine to whom it might matter that I am stumbling out sentences with nothing in mind other than WRITING, TO-BE-WRITING – excepting my insignificant eperiencing of “self” that WANTS TO BE WRITING – in any case.  Therefore, I AM writing.

All those who seem to depend on me for their well-being, survival (or SENSE of same) also SEEM to be surviving and existing at relative comfort.  Those who purchase (shamefully) my “LIFE.TIME” via employment – have proffered the day off as a normative weekend practice.  For the time being, apparently NOTHING has immediate NEED of me, so I am left to determine what to do with “TIME.”

(my LIFE).

And because I overhear myself continuously complaining, desiring, wishing and bemoaning that I ‘never have time’ to write – I AM WRITING.  Because.

As far as I can tell, I am writing nothing (of worth) because, as much as I desire to write, I actually don’t know WHAT to write, or for WHOM, or WHAT – and so i am just WRITING because.  Serving no one, not even myself, yet perhaps.  Perhaps, because the WANT or URGE “to write” as a writer…is NOT to WRITE SOMETHING (as far as I can surmise – albeit I also regularly wish I were writing something ‘great’ or ‘evental,’ etc…) but truly is simply to be IN THE ACT OF…WRITING, which I AM, and therefore I cannot know what good any of it does beyond being what I wish I were doing…becoming ACTUAL.

Wishes come true: I AM WRITING.

To no point of purpose but the fulfillment of desire: I AM DOING WHAT I WANT TO BE DOING: I AM WRITING.  And it does feel good, and part of it (I think) feels good because I am unable to discover a path, direction, or ‘way’ for it to feel good FOR.

In conclusion: I AM WRITING

and this is: WHAT I WANTED TO BE.

Mission.  Accomplished.

(to/for whomever wherever whatever)

i.e. IN FACT – I AM WRITING.

Signifying Writing, Figure 1

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Art, awareness, Confusion, desire, Experimenctes, Graphotos, human, Image, Language, Mapping, Semiotics, sign, Traces, Writing9 Comments
Opicinus De Canistris World Map
Figure 1

Opicinus De Canistris World Map

*

The map began as a scribble, a doodle.  Begins as a failure to write, to “compose.”

In lieu of a word there’s a wiggle of pen wandering aimless in search.  Cartography-graphology-psychology – a loitering for logos.

Begins this way – in hope of words, a sort of squiggle.  A body desiring a mind.  To show up, to take over, provoke or convince – to appear, make a meaning, disclose – to figure toward sign.  Some unconcealing.

The signal’s not there, so it moves: the hand, the instrument, the breath and the heart – are they tools?  And for what?  A cartographer’s dream.  Of no training, no knowledge, even reason is lacking.

A pen making marks on a page, mapping none.  Tracing nonsense.  It begins in this way, and it leads, so he hopes (it hopes, is hope, is desire).

The scrawl travels over the page – given borders and boundaries, arbitrary and set – 6”x9” and lined with a soft viscous grey.  He (it) slows down.  Just a hand and an arm and a shoulder – in motion – holding a technical device filled with fluid – black, yes, like bile, but less tacky, diluted – it flows, threading lines – it’s con-fusion – yet taking, biting, inscribed.  Something happens.  Drawings are locked to a medium stock.  Incomprehensibles stained on a page.

It crawls on.

*

This mapping begins in a loss.  He is lost.  It is lost.  Doesn’t “know.”  Just beginning, because – with desire.  It is driven, compelled, WRITER WANTS (for to write) with “nothing to write, and no means to write it” yet constrained to keep writing, to expunge merely SOMEthing, some THING.  Which is NO thing, no THING, but to mark.  It goes on.

Makes a map, a map-ping, tangled series of lines meaning nothing, no THING, but creating TO-WARD.  Ward off absence, off void, ward off death, this is to – .

It (he) is tired.  Is forlorn.  Is an absence and loss, a re-mission, re-cursion, re-morse.  And not even that clear.

Scribbles on.  NOT a map.  NOT directions.  For NO where to go – NOW here, now HERE, no-where.  Which begins all the longing, for “he’s” heard it said, found it written – in signs, in-scribed, sign-i-fied: but NOT HERE.  Not in him or this body.  NOT THIS.  No sense.  Non-sense.  “It’s” not “working.”

Trail dwindles along cross the page.  It’s a map.  Just of being.  NOW here.  Now.  HERE.  Looks like this – some electrocardiomusculoskeletalpsycognilinguadigital-gram.  From this angle, this tool, these techniques.  As a Ouija.  No meaning.  Saussurating.  Arbitrary.  Mediate.  Only markings.

It falters.

And so it begins – as a failure to write – as a scribble – an assay – a tribute to write – that cannot, that will not, that does not…quite occur.