Greetings all – I’m not sure I’ll have much time in/on here over the next couple of weeks – will be spending my time with spouse and children!  Here is a touch of holiday/end-of-year type thinking/experimencting and warm wishes to all.

Conditions

The conditions are few:
birth, life, death,

an elaborate moving context

 

in the midst of which,

in between, all at once,

we are

with various means

yet not meaning.

 

Given our capacities

we make

and are made,

each extrapolation

and experiment

without erasure.

 

Reach out or recoil

participate or refuse

(another participation)

subtle gradients

inter-action

each

 

given the conditions,

capacities,

possibility.

 

N Filbert 2011

Do we ever want to produce work suitable to our talent?

(spawned by a quote by Danilo Kis in interview – that “next time he’ll try something easier, more suitable to his talent” 🙂 never did, which made him great, no?)

A Depiction of Language

A moonbeam –

soft and aqueous substance

originating between me and thee                                  my hello-ing gesture –

a tender amorphous bridge                                            your response

.

A spear –

forked tongues jetting out and piercing

punctuating pores of the face                                         brutal slap-shout

bulleting pellets                                                                and rebuff

.

Clouds breathed back and forth –

exchange. CPR.

At least one body to at least another                  his melodious expression of love

mouthing bubbles to be tasted on the tongue                and its passage through

                                                                                     the orchestra shell of her heart

Spit and kisses –

a whistle, a sneeze

particles and organisms                                                        information posited –

systematically forging highways and rails                         process

.

A jetstream

a rope bridge                                                                          demand and reprieve

chaos and string at once,

cosmos and culture

.

growing itself, itself growing

like that, to and fro, an oscillation,                                    a medium –

teeth tapped toggles                                                              its composition

parasitically nested inside the ear.

N Filbert 2011

“It can be safe to say that when we learned to speak to, and listen to, rather than strike or be struck by, our fellow human beings, we found something worth keeping alive, worth the possessing, for the rest of time.  Might it possibly have been the other way around – that the promptings of friendship guided us into learning to express ourselves, teaching ourselves, between us, a language to keep it by?”                – Eudora Welty –

Reciprocality.

Echoes.

Necessity.

Living is a Kind of Madness

Writing is a madness.

When you hope the tearing will be done.

The ripping sound, then gathering the pieces, hoping to see something in the jumbled pile. Of sorts.

Wife calls this “attachment theory” by which I assume she means something along the lines of conflict and loss=feeling or that consequence, because

What making is

or seems to be

dealing with all that

There are four rocks on my desk, well really one is a petrified bone from the penis of a whale and then the rest seem partially fabricated, only insofar as some human’s hand has touched them, obviously, thereby construing them an “object” (too smooth, too bastardized to be native, believable) [“object” for attachment or detachment I presume]

See, they’re kind of “favorite things,” talismans after a fashion, that’s why they occur more than once. They make up my surround, thereby influencing my thought and otherwise.

like wife, reclining Buddha, a mouse holding sheaths of quotations up for my view and mystical hands (an encaustic painting/collage by said wife) among other things (or everything else in my surround). I’d share more pictures but why should you care, and I’m not interested in that kind of common knowledge.

Suffice it to say loads of books shape my nest. Maybe I can’t bear being alone or something. Noisy conversations –

– imagine that!? – a cacophony of chattering, ceaseless, every voice saying something earth shatteringly important (leastwise how they say it). That’s the chaos I exist in.

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for examples.

Perhaps the “madness” referred to above comes blitzing out of the concatenation of conversing brilliant voices from remarkable minds, a kind of primordial dust for my own flint-ticking brain to spark fires.

(Be that as it may)

I have children too, seven to be exact, all offering a raw freshness of human expression and avarice at all times, a kind of explosive vitality of persons-in-the-making for good or for ill (for themselves). A mighty influx and demand for my own crusty mechanisms to mulch and digest

  tearing                             gathering                     stepping back to observe

if any forms…

“Explosive” on purpose because so agile and all-over at once (waking-through-sleeping), those children: angry, eager, generous and quick-witted; intelligent, selfish, selfless; hard, tender, but all of it, more total-like, not sundered quite the same as middle age.

Creates shards, fragments, flames and flights; more noise; more wonder and awe and helplessness. More hope. Some despair.

I’d call it “love,” not certain what attachment theory would say (I probably appear shell-shocked or “detached” much of the time in my overwhelm).

This is how I row the boat.

Wrap scraps and strings around a heap

(it doesn’t hold much, but some things stay intact, at least temporarily, in this way)

I call it “writing”

I feel a little less like I lose it if I make a note of it. Or even list it…a touch more manageable, as if one element at a time – even though that’s farcically fictitious.

The part that’s “real” or “true” being that my hands are only capable one word at a time, one mark really, even if contiguous; that is, at best, letter-by-letter…

Tearing                       Gluing

stringing lines

Attempting to bundle a cloud of dust, as it were

(it doesn’t have to be children – alive and loud silent genius-voices buzz about the ether as well)

(it could be anything – smells (or stench) of a passenger next to you, the size of the landscape, wind, employment, hardship, illness, memory, emotions)

you name it (which can help)

it’s too big or way outsizes you

To be alive is to exist in maximum-capacity space every moment

(i think)

(writing is one way to pretend it’s not quite, like snagging only one butterfly in the net when there are thousands, or at least saying so, which does something, the admission of helplessness, an individual’s version of a “demand letter”)

Now I’m thinking attachment theory might resemble a semiotician’s “systems theory,”

i.e. whoever says ‘system’ says arrangement or conformity of parts in a structure which transcends and explains its elements…everything is so necessary in it that modifications of the whole and of details reciprocally condition one another, Emile Benveniste shouts out above the crowd from the shelf over yonder

Makes a kind of common sense

Like signifier and signified aren’t terrifically helpful concepts examined separately, since neither one exists without the other, really one concept catching light as it flutters…anyhow, language (perception-interpretation) does that

stairs going up and down

both sides of the paper

chickens and eggs

ad nauseum

                                                         ripping apart (abstraction)

                                                                                                                        melding together (composition)

as it were.

Perhaps its a process, if you stretch it out a little, set it in motion (notice it always already is)

and so on…

embedded on my body

“i am here, more than that i do not know, further than that i cannot go”

-Franz Kafka-

“i am what is around me”

-Wallace Stevens-

N Filbert 2011