Category: Uncategorized

(IF) I am a storm. (IF) I am a blizzard.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Uncategorized, Writing4 Comments

FROM MY OLD NOTEBOOKS

It is beginning to appear that this Autumn-Winter season will not afford me many, if any, chances to compose writings or work beyond those necessary for school and work.  Gradually facing this fact – with reluctance and resistance – yet not wanting this forum simply to cease, I have decided to grab notebooks and loose pages stacked and scattered about my now-dusty attic writing cavern and cull them for writings I don’t feel ashamed of, and which would otherwise most likely never find opportunity to be engaged, read, criticized or perhaps even enjoyed.  As always, for what it’s worth… writings…

Dust-Bowl1-532x382

(IF) I AM A BLIZZARD

He/I/Writer hadn’t mentioned her (you/it/women) before, she had not factored in the memory because the hole was so deep there.  Like being from Kansas and not mentioning that you live on the planet Earth.  Constituent context.

His four-year-old used words like “conundrum” and “paradox;” said “I’m a particular kind of guy and I need my space.”

Literature, music and art invented Writer.

When snowing it had a way of being everywhere at once.

An infinity of points-of-view.  The angles of things.

 

Language like flakes, like droplets, ice forming on dust, on grains of sand.  Memories.  When they come back, as they came back, a fuzziness and quiet formed on everything.  Accrual of haze.  At times difficult to see through.  Uncertain.  Otherwise unknown.  Like prefacing everything with “I am finite and everywhere,” like mentioning (aside) that you are alive on planet Earth.

Like evaporation.  What seemed to be there just moments ago.

Concocting one way, then another.

Possible to build with what appear to be concrete blocks, distinct and limited, occupying a space with heft and hardness.  Or the voices of birds cawing out over air.  Vibrating, in motion, unlocatable like the dark, or “love,” or “fear,” or “joy.”

 

If I am a blizzard I occur over and across.  I extend and then fall (Winter might think).  (How “Writer” mimics “Winter”).

A “bird,” a “plane,” a dolphin leaping.  (Can/does anything really “leap” without legs?).

“Whiteout.”  Dust storm.  Memory.  History.

Writers’ progeny and progenitors.

Has anything ever really happened?  “Occurred”?

The Mimicking Birds are a Message to Bears.

So what (if anything) is known?

 

First thing, third thing, ninth.

 

Building a world from “facts” (shape, color, sound, size).  What the senses misrepresent or make guesses with: blowing wind.  Emotion.

 

In the midst of the blizzard.  What expulsions massive ambiguity.  As if blown from a mouth the size of a sun.  As if an arrangement that would craft The Great Depression and give birth to someone’s father.

As if Kansas, on planet Earth.

As if the word “me” ever even made a kind of sense.

 

The dark vacuum of “she,” “her,” “It,” “Other.”

Always an unsolved equation.  What holds pursuant consideration.  What moving from absence to presence might be like.  Things to consider and observe.  To take in.  Ruminate.  Decide.  Finitude and consequence (such fearsome things).

 

How a spoken word thuds a gargantuan typewriting arm onto air.  Like thunder.  How you are stuck with your language.  You open your mouth (Writer thinks) you are shoveling a grave.  The chink and thock of it.  The bite, the thrust, the throwaway.

 

The unlocking and the liftaway that sound and sense tend to be.  Spoonfuls of soil.

These are very small things.  Bitesize or microscopic.  Amino acids, molecules.

But we also possess imagination – webs and blankets.  Musics from spheres.  Scintillating overlays of networks and digitalia.  (What the mind can imagine! thinks Writer).

Let’s invent some All-Encompassing.  A Universal Meteor Shower, a Snow, a God.

((IF) I am a blizzard).

At times the word “love” feels this way.

Grandiose and miniscule.

 

  • Does it matter if we hasten our deaths – ?

 

Silly play of interaction.  Every single movement that person + person might be (is).

 

Writer lost in invention: what the mind is capable of: dream, memory, imagination, logic.

 

Spread it out.  Fly away.  Expand.  Contract.  Escape.  (Writer tells himself: “let go,” “set it/them free”).

Parachutes and sparrows.

 

There are scars on Writer’s hands.

And what of scars?

Below her ankle, beneath the eye, down the chest between her breasts, across the hip and back and thigh.  The hollows punched into the backs of knees (science must have named it),

How evaluate the residue of wounds?

 

If I forcibly spread her beautiful nakedest body out over this dining room table, askew and akimbo, that I might insert myself passionately inside her or press and pound into – (what does “physicality” mean?).

 

Flitting thoughts, mimicking birds, back and forth, to and fro – snow.

 

**** Interruption.  Interference.  Intrusion. ****

 

            A blizzard means static.  Windstorm.  Mindstorm.  Deletion and chaos.

 

Expectation.  Writer awaiting.  Awaiting letters in mail.  Music and language, experience.  To breathe is expectancy, anticipation.  Another child en route.

Something to live for.

A seven-mile-journey.

 

In the hopes that someone might read (some fine day) that someone might care, or, after encountering find that they “needed” (or something like it) to continue.  Art for the Writer:  discovery or uncovering of met needs never known until fulfilled and then absent = Art.

Things human people can give.

A blizzard (words, tones, and touches).

 

Blizzard – that we are, can be, may

 

  • an inherent isolation

“Person,” Writer thinks.

Person as inherent isolation (or Death again – the Unmattering – the Opposition to meaning).  The Void.

What haunts as forever, but actually is “never,” an End.

 

So go with it.  Flow.  And then die.

This brief burst of being.

With inevitable conclusion.

Children / Ideas / Actions / Creations / Labor / Life

What is: “Masterpiece” (Absence. Void. Boundary).

An insufficient multiplication.  An equation that will not figure.  We came.  We saw.  Deleted.  The system crash an accident.  Fini.  Sweet promise of tomorrow.

 

This is the arabesque, the frivolous gift.  The Enormance – beginning and end.  The all that in-between.  What is NOW.

All that “then” that is “now.”

 

Absorbency of blizzard.  Precipitate Earth.  6 billion lives falling like snow.  Beliefs and experiences, experiments, emotion, hatreds and loves.  Veritable shit storm with strange little gusts.  Enormity.

A blizzard.  A torrent.  A wind and a whiteout.

            A “blank.”

 

An ever-approaching storm…of void…

Finitude.  Fact.

Limitation.

 

To begin.

((IF) I am a storm.  (IF) I am a blizzard).

 07/09/2010

Black Blizzard

 

The fluid character of the life process

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Uncategorized10 Comments

Alright – I know that if you’re scrolling through a blogroll you aren’t looking to read intently, carefully and thoroughly some theoretical finely-tuned creative innovative rendition of what it is to “be alive.”  Beyond that, I’ve posted this before.

Here’s the thing.  Over a couple of years of this blog-o-sphere bus(y)ness, I’ve been happy to have network/meshworked into some pretty intriguing and instigative minds here.  And a few of these things that spur me – well, I get compelled again and again (as I reread them again and again) to share them – with the compulsion murmuring – “this is going to feel like home, elation and release” to these mind-persons.

So, I offer Tim Ingold’s “Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials” once again – hoping that those of you (you’ll know who you are when you start into it – you’ll have a difficult time stopping) who accord with this sort of thing will take the time (when you’re able), NO, that you’ll MAKE some time, a nourishing opening – to pore through this one and respond or reverberate with it…

Tim Ingold – click image for article fulfillment

FYI in addition:

Tim Ingold: To Learn is to Improvise

I trust you’ll be delighted

In praise of versatility

On By NW FilbertIn Uncategorized, Writing4 Comments

People seem to blog for very many reasons.  For all who follow or glance at The Daily Post blog with its tips and hints and prompts it is clear that some use these community-spaces for singular aspects of their lives (say to showcase or try out their poetry or paintings, photography or thoughts); others to engage in philosophical dialogues or take culture’s pulse; other’s as a form of public journaling, travel albums and so on.  And then there are those that swirl round a broad flux of themes and forms, artefacts and issues.  A versatile blog can be hard to come by, as, unless fueled by a collaborating group, most blogs sprout from individual minds and lives.  Yet we are socially-constructed beings.  A species made up out of context and interrelation.  Versatility is inherent in our adapting and survival.  All that to say that I am honored to have been chosen by maxadaland blog to receive the:

award.

Much thanks.  Sometimes I think we can feel pretty vorticed in our own imaginations…the paradigms and preformulating grids our experience passes through can start seeming quite idiosyncratic and even incommunicable.  Like a catch in an audio file, skipping and repeating such small fragments of possibility – like solipsistic feedback loops – and one can wonder whether interaction / intersubjectivity / reciprocation / communication is happening or not.  If we are hearing, being heard.

One thing I greatly appreciate for my life about having taken the leap of tending to and creating a blog is the daily (or almost) wander through the “Reader” feature of WordPress.  Artists, writers, commentators, philosophers, dramatists and encyclopedic representations of images, texts and audio from all around the world, out of every imaginable cognitive perspective drift past us, triggering synapses and volting neurons in places forgotten or buzzing dormant throughout our bodies.  It presents the wonderful possibility of contrast and integration, stimulae to creation and juxtapositions fundamental to our growth as organisms.  I thank you all for that.

Below, please find a few blogs I follow that in themselves seem to offer worlds of variety – of voices, of inputs and outputs, of interests and concerns – blogs I find that continuously spur new connections, unknown avenues, concepts or artefacts I otherwise would have perhaps never engaged.  Thank you to all – and it is taken for granted that we all know this worldwideweb is full of such spaces, ever only incorrect finger-splotches away.

for starters….

THANKS TO ALL!

Reasons for Thanks – inspiration

On By NW FilbertIn Uncategorized, Writing11 Comments

in·spire/inˈspī(ə)r/

Verb:
  1. Fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, esp. to do something creative
  2. Create (a feeling, esp. a positive one) in a person

Many thanks to Music & Meaning / The Rag Tree for awarding me the “Very Inspiring Blogger” award.  The work there is genuinely inspiring, in fact, just this week I was speaking with my spouse, artist & blogger Holly Suzanne, about RT’s work, particularly in translations and all that brings with it regarding languages and cultures and purposes of art.  Thank you Rag Tree!  I am honored and, indeed, inspired, by your work.  In fact, I would hazard to guess that the decision to begin a personal blog or website, followed by the clunky and quirky process of finding or constructing a steady community of readers or viewers might be characterized by inspiration.  As we watch one another follow their urges to “do or feel something…creative” it does “create a feeling, esp. a positive one” in us to continue doing/working/creating our own.  I am thankful to the blogosphere for providing such a cheap and relatively easy format for those of us who will to expose our work far beyond our limited personal spheres, and especially to receive comments and criticism, and gather multitudes of inputs from others works all throughout the world, that we, most likely, would never have otherwise been exposed to.  It gladdens me deeply if my work inspires others to work or think or be, and all of you that I follow have done the same for me.

I relish in giving awards to other bloggers, as there are so many out there, but we’d live in social media were we not forced continually to edit and select the number we can truly “follow,” and actually attend to.  By that point, a blogger has gone through (for me) the same sort of criteria any music I listen to, literature I read, or conversation or activity I participate in does – engaging it involves an enhancement of meaning for my life.  How can one not want to award or acknowledge, thank or praise those whose work and words enhance and expand your daily living?!  So I find no difficulty in finding bloggers to pass the gratitude on to, the hardest thing is choosing!  This blog comes with a few “rules”, as follows:

  1. Display the Nomination logo on your blog
  2. Link back to the person who nominated you
  3. State 7 things about yourself
  4. Nominate 15 others and link to them
  5. Notify those bloggers of the nominations & award requirement

Seven Things About Myself

1.  Writing joins me to the world.

2.  I love theory – as a way of thinking about thinking about the world and anything in it.

3.  I am particularly fascinated by the way humans learn and change.

4.  My wife and children amaze me and expose and explode un-countable aspects of the world into me.

5.  Rain is my favorite weather – especially the thick drizzly kind, the all-day kind (or all-week or -month) – optimum temperatures 40s     or 50s.

6.  I read 4-6 hours a day.

7.  I like cabins and caves.

Now for those I recommend.  For the selections for this, I have spent a good deal of time thinking “which blogs do I truly go to for inspiration?”  Not only interest or admiration, information or curiosity, but that I seek out and miss if I don’t see, and that genuinely create in me the urge to “do or feel something creative…” perhaps even the “ability” to do so.  Here they are:

Life In Relation to Art – see also www.hollysuzanne.net: yes, this is my wife and co-creator in everything I do.  It’s true she always makes my lists for blogger awards, and it is also true that no other’s life or work inspires me remotely as much as living life side-by-side with her.  I can attest to the effort and deep work that goes into each of her creations, and how her creating fuses into every aspect of our lives and activities.  Thank you, love, for inspiring me every moment of my life.

Objects – see also www.spoondeep.wordpress.com – contributions by author “severnspoon.”  This author also occurs with each of my kudos and thanks because he, too, constructs the courage to be alive in me.  His work in graphics, poetry and mixed media ALWAYS inspirit me to do and make and think.  Thanks, compadre.

Draw and Shoot – see also www.karenmcrae.photoshelter.com – when I first spied Karen’s work I was impressed by the mood and quality of each shot.  Now, over months, I must say that I anticipate each shot, and have truly come to be amazed by the “capturing” her eye, technique and production do in relation to the world.  These are photos I go back over again and again, almost as a meditation, guaranteed to evoke feelings, thoughts and the urge to create in me.

Christian Mihai – how can one NOT be inspired by the quality, content and sheer verve of Christian Mihai – he is instructive, productive and full of ideas and insights, as well as fine and evocative creative writing.  Press “random post” again and again – let me know how many times it took before you stumbled across something “not interesting.”!  Thanks CM – for all your work – and work FOR all of us!

Ironwoodwind and Photography Of Nia – Doug and Nia are two of the most humane, attentive, genuine, interested and interesting blogger-people I’ve come across.  Both obviously care about the world around them and the people and organisms in it, and express themselves warmly and carefully into it.  I notice from many that their efforts at commenting and encouraging others goes a LONG way in inspiring ongoing work in the community of WordPress.  Thank you both for your kindness and creativity and communal encouragement.

Settle + Chase – in line with Draw & Shoot, S+C’s work indeed settles deep into the subject and chases what is ephemeral, mysterious, or not objectifiable in it.  This leads consistently to photography that we are able to “enter in” instead of just observe and admire.  I enjoy work like this that asks to be questioned over time…and continually provides new responses.  Thank you S&C!

Boy With a Hat – I can’t remember how I came across this blog, but have not missed a post since I did.  Here is some ingenious, fresh and alive writing and thinking.  His 50-word stories are little explosions of insight, and his particular way of involving the reader in whatever it is he is considering in language is admirable and unique.  Thank you Vincent Mars!

atelierscheune2012 – see also Ute Schatzmuller – here you’ll find visual art and collaborative work that I promise will evoke new ideas in you, inspire new collaborative desires, and set your mind or hands or eyes off on new explorations internally and externally.  Ute’s work is suggestive and entire in a spiraling manner – each piece feels complete and yet also as if it’s the beginning of a journey. Thank you Ute!

The Disorder of Things – I promote this blog because I admire blogs that take on big issues and are willing to dig deep and explore options and ideas.  I appreciate this because whether or not I agree with any position or concept under inquiry – it invites and enervates more thinking – which is inspiring.

Ooggetuige – primarily portraiture of some sort, the settings and background textures combined with perspective on subject consistently intrigue me.  These photos start stories.  Thank you!

The Hour of Soft Light – the writings, images, poems, quotations and reflections here nearly always brush some deep human place of longing, nostalgia, wonder or gratitude.  Important things to keep alive in us.  I appreciate the breadth and depth of the entries – the range of our human experiences.

Quirk’n It – inspiring in subject, expression and real-lifeness of it.  The energy, interest and genuineness of her intention and attention to subjects, meanings, and scene are delightful to follow.  (Also, there’s collaboration in the works – being considered for it is inspiring in itself).  Thanks!

It Started With a Quote – likewise – so much of my life is inspired or rises out of what I read and then winds in and out of my lived relational experience, testing, proving, questioning the language of it.  Here you encounter all sorts of worthy inspirations and get a chance to watch them thread through, effect and alter an able mind into the world of experience.  

The Artsy Forager – I am SO thankful for the work of the Artsy Forager – bringing all manner of creative, enlivening, interesting works and activities into our days.  Our family has a funny attribution to “feeling artsy” – for when we have that curious, active want-to…the Forager satisfies and often increases this want-to.

barbaraelka.com and Dark Pines Photos  – two sites that do things with photographs that make me want to do things with words – change the finish, crack the background, tear the edges, skew the subjects…MAKE IT NEW!  Very thankful for their work and steady spontaneous creativity.

There it is – longer than usual, but fortunately for me – it’s Thanksgiving Week in the USA, so seems appropriate.  Hope you visit and enjoy each of these!  And follow the tags onward to new brilliant blogs!

Sincerely, mano’theword

in·spire  (n-spr)

v. in·spired, in·spir·ing, in·spires
v.tr.

1. To affect, guide, or arouse by  influence.
2. To fill with enlivening or exalting emotion: hymns that inspire the congregation; an artist who was inspired by Impressionism.
3.

a. To stimulate to action; motivate: a sales force that was inspired by the prospect of a bonus.
b. To affect or touch: The falling leaves inspired her with sadness.
4. To draw forth; elicit or arouse: a teacher who inspired admiration and respect.
5. To be the cause or source of; bring about: an invention that inspired many imitations.
6. To draw in (air) by inhaling.
7. Archaic

a. To breathe on.
b. To breathe life into.
v.intr.

1. To stimulate energies, ideals, or reverence: a leader who inspires by example.
2. To inhale.

Red Spark

On By NW FilbertIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

“it is necessary to aspire to elevate spontaneity to consciousness”

-V.I. Lenin-

Red Spark

 

Asking yourself the question, what was it I intended to do?  Conceiving balance, proportion, invention, response.  Went about it like this: first, then second, then third, revise.  The choosing keeps changing each thing.  Yet you’re insisting on it.

You had started to bleed, just there, not bothering to stanch it.  Caught chunk of knuckle, leaving a fleshy gaping to pool.  Dab, pool, dab, pool.  Redundancy of wounds.  They had said let it flow to your paper.  Gives you a feel for the work.  Of getting your life out.  Opening a vein.

It’s not really all that.  There’s no pure letting the inside out.  It’s traveled a billion conduits, picked up and fought off zillions of miniscule aids and oppositions.  Polluted, infused.  You may be a “type,” but whatever your genre, its inextricably bound to all your surround.  In-filtrated, even as you are infecting.

The world is viral, and you – parasitic.

Whatever you’re intending – this is the outcome.

This is known by various names: “life-process,” “being,” “creativity,” just to name a few.  Some prefer “system” or “symbiotic machine.”  We’re handling synonyms and points-of-view.  The “intentions.”

All to mention your moves, as your choice and selection, as made in (by/with) the world.  Learning the language(s).  What is foreign in-heres.  You in-hear.  There are echoes.  Tracings in the blood.  You see it in typescript like this, a trans-literation, a bastard cross-current: sobytiinyi (as “evental”) brain placing “Soviet,” so be it, so-bytie, so- so close to co- (i.e. a “withness”) bytie (“existence or being”) implying that any event, that is, what happens, is always, always only conjunctive, collision, with-someone or something, you and other.

There’s Russian in your blood, after all, dripping off the thumb, some epigenetic repercussions of unknowing, the certainty of solitude failing.

Or, without which not.

And so on, as your intuition announces itself through inscription, a writing impossible alone – having need of some tools and an alphabet and ages of learning and co-being that uni-cates, some understood calling and shared, might occur.  What is – “to share.”

In other words, we all have a share in the stock, but no share counts for much without value in the stock, as it is shared.

I.e. your intention.  Sharing your share in the co-event (experience) of being (existence)…ancient mingling of bloods, as if there were origins to get to.

“Original Reproductions” then, co-mpliments of you.

Aimed from some desire toward co-mpletion; that perhaps this stock of shares shared increasingly might expand the value of each.  A Soviet dream.  And so be it.

So be us.  Only insofar as you provide your share in part with ours.  Our ares.  Ars.

Suggesting direction for the arts as an arc, shaping production of individual shares in the whole or evolving, an assemblage of expression, incremental co-habitus, -ation, drive or desire for some rhapsodic (raph-a seam; raphtein-to stitch; oide-song) symphony (a sounding together), the outmoded truism of “medley.”

The intent was to lift up in part.  Your part or your share, instrumental voice toward the theme you’re discovering to be in the join.

Our arts as the arc forming the theater…And why we urge you sing out –

so be it

so-viet

sobytie

 

An Opinionated Review

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Uncategorized6 Comments

Eat.  Pray.  Love.

 

On a wonderful jaunt to our public library yesterday, my wife spotted a movie based on a mega-bestselling memoir that she’d been curious to see since its release a couple of years ago.  We checked it out and viewed it last night in hopes of a light, relaxing fare to happy us toward slumber.

It was excruciating.  My first reaction was – can a person’s biography truly resemble such a cliché’d American self-realization mythology?  Basically a woman goes on a journey away from her responsibilities to others to “find” or “heal” herself, in the process (and apparently justifiably since it delivers her to a goal of peace, happiness, pleasure and love with a seasoning of spirituality) wrecking others’ lives and forgiving herself for it, ending in the arms of a handsome foreigner on a tropical island with some standard religious “truths” in tow.

Here are things I realized about myself:

I am suspicious of personal pleasure that causes others pain.

I am oh-so-glad and grateful that I grew up in a reserved Western culture with Continental philosophy and theologies at its roots.  I much prefer battling to wisdom and calm through the frenetic and anxiety-ridden vertigo of a convoluted mind ferociously doubting and investigating than through some “be here now” philosophies of higher unities and cosmic accord.  Rather interrogate now than “let go” and “let be.”  I am attached to the workings of our brains and our languages, pestering perception and scrutinizing sense experience with imaginative and skeptical rationales.

I radically doubt “gurus,” “prayer,” “saviors,” and other spiritual or “wholistic” practices of “balance” that accomplish “goals.”  Outcome-based anything feels totalitarian and programmatic and therefore facile to me, as if there were a form or behavior we might fit ourselves to that would lessen the struggle or suffering of “to be.”

The film’s story took a year’s time, replete with life-changing habits of mind and body and some claimed resultant growth.  As if wisdom came from Apple or McDonald’s.  The past was hardly processed, responsibilities released like thoughts during Zen, and no effort to apologize or repair any damage or hurts the main character had caused those close to her along the way (thank goodness no children were involved!).

It was the time-tested failure of the American Dream: do what you want to get yourself comfortable in your own skin (whatever beliefs, illusions and experiences that might seem to require) and everything will be alright in your world.

I simply don’t buy it.  And I won’t.  If we are socially constructed realities (and my point-of-view on the cosmos supports this) then final import is not in a self, but in a system.  Not toward results but a how of processing.  Not a personal calm or pleasantness but a social accord.

The film made me terrifically thankful for scrutiny and doubt, fervent self-questioning in light of surroundings, and the “wisdom of no escape.”  It just goes on.

For what it’s worth,

here lies a steaming pile of my opinions.

N Filbert 2012