we are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love – a connection between things.
– Mary Ruefle –
Category: Writing
Labor
“I do not know whether I work in order to make something or in order to know why I cannot make what I would like to make.”
-Alberto Giacometti-
Logos
Forced to engagement, he usually says “I”. Generic reference: one of you, one of us, one of a kind.
Something different and else gathers when asked for his name. Standing by words. “Nathan”, then.
Something given. Something earned by a story. An occupation, a station, a set of behaviors and moods. A moment, response.
Most of the time he is human. A style, a class and a trope. At “Nathan” he gains all his failures – a “he” and a “father”, a “writer”, a “son.”
He prefers being “I” – one among digits, a 0 or 1 all the same. Taking an instantaneous place in the code.
Feels uncomfortable filling up “Nathan”. Making choices, selections of now and then, here or there, commitments to plans and what has been done.
Occupation. Specific surround. Others creating identity. 1s, 0s, all in a malleable line, disrupted by every stroke of a key. Each return and deletion and send.
Fluid duplicities of multiple minds…converged and conjoined.
With our “names” we profess a location. Always so far from the truth: provisional goals.
From the start “she’s” been too much to handle. Representative of dreams and beyond, culminative, a paradoxical [paradaisical?] symbol of sorts.
He drowns in. Desire. An ache and overwhelm. Another is always too much. An other requires one to be. Stake positions. Select. Choose. Behave and act. Become.
Desire feels like less than a choice. A responding. Implicit, reminding the lack of control. He is base, greedy, hungry. 1 among many. He is tissue and cell. Energy. Magnetism. Gravity. Reaction. “She” determines.
“Nathan” is constructed of carbon and water. It burns and it flows.
Weak bonds and strong. Necessity and chance. Survival and growth. Spirals. Returns. Recursion.
The name is assemblage. Situated, dependent: “Nathan”. “Nathan”. Nathan.
To give.
Give way, give place, give meaning. Give prominence, power, support. Give out. Give in. Giving everything.
Desire undoes him, undoes me, even I.
Somehow it accrues and accretes to the name and gets seen, blamed and reported.
This one. Now. Becomes.
Like formulating sentences – attempts toward complete – so various, anonymous, available. Becomes.
Insubstantiated concretion – at “And you are?” “I mean, what is your name?” “How are you called?” A power relation demanding a “choose!” and derision, analysis, judgment. Accounting, solution, report.
This equals “Nathan” in this context…I am.
“He” goes sick at encounter. Disclosed. Disappointing. Disabled.
Potential of speaking as “I” (1 of us) become static and constrained by “this 1”.
Identities form. In relation to – her, them, here, then, there, now. In relation to – “what is your name?” WHO ARE YOU? In relation to – ELSE and its difference – Othering.
Prologue
Even if it’s only a prologue, it is necessary to begin. To start with the starting itself. Some origins are good at that: a bang, a blast, a whisper.
My starts tend to happen with fits. Inconsistent and occasional, not inceptions, revelations, events.
Supposing it begins in a “mood” and emerges at pen. Or simply pass by. Aborted, forgotten. The pen is what matters, not me.
Swerving from mood to mood, idea / experience, relation / response, passaging effect to affect to effect. Hardly recognizable. Yet if the pen is involved, or some other artifact-creator, symbol-maker, discretionary device, a remnant emerges, a record, a trace.
Never the mood itself, not even the experience, but some marker of it, a token or emblem, remains.
Starting with the loss then. Beginning at the bones.
There’s a boon to that, you see. It ceases to be important: what the where. Beginning with the pen, it doesn’t matter. Memory, emotion or event. Past, presence or future. All of those – NO MATTER. But the instrument – the tools ready-to-hand – typewriter, pencil, keyboard or pen = matter. Some thing happens then: it begins.
Now it’s started. Starting with the starting also leads (you must perceive). If the aim is the action itself, the rest does follow. Hand leading eye, leading ink, following line, copying language, searching the words, shaping the letters, changing ideas (using different terms), evoking a thought, altering memory, writing a process: a process called “writing.” A particular animal scraping at paper with ink.
It happens.
Begins.
Follows, outstrips, and results. Always something greater and lesser, more-than / deprived, exactly inaccurate.
Ambiguous and real. Using language.
“A ‘beginning’ is something other than a ‘commencement’. A new weather pattern, for example, begins with a storm. Its commencement, however, is the complete change of air conditions that brings it about in advance. A beginning is the onset of something; a commencement is that from which something arises or springs forth…
…Whoever begins many things often never attains a commencement.”
–Martin Heidegger, “Holderlin’s Hymns”
In a word…
Someone (some voice in my head) recently asked me this question: “If you had only one word to describe human existence, from your experience, knowledge, and present perspective: what would that word be?”
I heard living…being…survival…I thought – “What I think (I think, at least presently) is that you will never know, or be able to imagine, how you will survive.” The jobs you will have, the people you will grow close to or far from, the ‘successes’ or ‘failures’ your path will exhibit, struggles or ecstasies you will sustain, what you will achieve or create or ignore or forget…you cannot predict, cannot forecast, how it will actually play out. Loves, griefs, happinesses, sorrows, places, events, connections, schisms, likes/dislikes, preferences/abhorrences, and so on…
Looking back…one day…attempting to recount, account for, surmise or shape what happened!? in your life/lifetime/process – it will be surprising. Unpredictable, unaccountable, unREcountable – a lot of “who would have imagined that!?” Or that that would lead to that with her or him or them, and then that – who could have known?
SURPRISE!
Sure there are tendencies, “natural draws” as it were. I’ve continually been uncomfortable with authority, laws, sunlight, loud noises and hot weather. I’ve been consistently upset by imbalances of power, by crowds, by presuppositions and arbitrary assertions. I’ve always been a touch distressed by the power of emotions and the weakness of will/intentions. There are characteristics that appear contiguous – I’ve long been drawn to classical music / melodic / spare & melancholic sounds; I’ve always been invigorated by the rain; I’ve noticed a penchant for solitary spaces and human-less environments; a taste for progressive/reflective/informed/ intelligent culture (recognizing each of those as highly contested terms, i.e. – a fascination with communication – language, words, expressions, conventional meanings and gestures; a distaste for popularity & fame / ‘pop culture’/ mass effects; a distrust of temporary desire; an emaciated self-esteem and expansive self-concern; a craving for passion / romance / intensity of human encounter; and so on. I’ve always moved toward cool colors, particularly in the fields of grey, stormy blue, dusty browns and pine-needle green; always distrusted people who shout, yell or preach – drama, makeup, surface effects. Hell when we search for things consistent from birth to death, our lists could run quite long…and yet…
How’d we get here? What if we look at the events, the people, the places, the feelings, interactions and all the ways we recall them (at specific instances, in particular situations)?
What if we look at what we do? Whether we drink or smoke or not, get angry more or less, the ways we engage strangers / friends / family? What we read, listen to, pay attention, are distracted by (same thing), are pulled to observe, think about, and why? How much we touch? When no one needs us? When we’re alone? Or falling to sleep? Or have slipped out of the stream, have “free time,” traveling, assumed to be otherwise engaged?
If Mormons came to your door and asked “Do you believe in God?” And you, after shuffling your feet, considering your day, pondering whether you wanted to spend part of it talking with religious strangers, checking in with your dependents (in this case, 4 children that are your human charge & devotion), zipping the past through your education, upbringing, familial ties & traditions, behaviors, relationships, responsibilities, concerns, and so forth, responded “No, no, I do not find myself believing in God.” And then these polite young men said – “Well then, what do you believe in, if you don’t mind us asking?”
SURPRISE!
More shuffling, pondering, internal argument and gentleness, patience, consideration, critical inquiry…(i.e. politeness)…and “hmmmm! I haven’t been asked that directly in quite some time!” (Is it that no one wants to hear? Know? That I divert it? Don’t know? Is “care” involved?). I said something in the order of Meaning. Something to the tune of – “Well, pardon me, but I guess I must believe/think (in Wittgenstein these are inseparable), that from our atoms & cells to our bodies, relationships, labor, behaviors, emotions, environment, world, ‘cosmos’ – trying to know as much as I can about each aspect of my being a human being – I think/believe that perhaps we each try to assemble, account for, respond, act, engage, construct experiences that give a shape to, a confluence, a medium, rationale, tone that feels satisfactory to our breathing, being, seeing, feeling, happening…making meaning, I guess. Including, but oddly outstripping, simply surviving. Much that seems unnecessary (tastes, preferences, selections, refusals). Religions, philosophies, teams, employment, families, nations, entertainments, cultures and interests – all these might provide some larger structuring for our shaping, and all, no doubt, influence how we piece it together, make a kind of sense, provide potential “fits” for our choices, responses, activities and emotions…but we each also fashion all this living, this experiencing, this acting and being in apparently very idiosyncratic ways…”
“I guess I believe that this is the sort of thing we do. I guess I think/believe that…at this moment.”
???
I think when these considerate young men return, and to the voice in my head that constantly interviews me…next time I might just respond:
SURPRISE!
I believe that life is surprising. Unbelievable, astonishing, revelatory, frightening, sometimes shocking and amazing, astounding, uncanny and a pain/joy/ache/pleasure/exhaustion/stimulus to be wondered at.
My answer today, in one word…
Life is – surprise.
From Laszlo Krasznahorkai: “Like a ninja.”
“In this system, nothing is more dangerous for an artist than success”
“Who made artists believe that art can be practiced only ‘successfully’? Who made them believe that for a book to reach its goal and its readers, the ‘taste-makers’ are absolutely necessary? How could they have allowed the critics, the editors, the owners of the chain bookstores, and so on, have so much power? And who made them believe that they are truly artists? Artists have come to believe that they, too, just like other people, need money and fame, money and fame for everyday life, moreover for being able to lead a lifestyle; and that these two repugnant things are seen as necessary for everything is not only tragic but ridiculous as well. What kind of artist or writer lives like that? Who is going to believe even a single line written? What kind of esteem can the art of our age garner for itself after even one such bout of deal-making? No, the artist’s needs are few: let there be something for him to eat and a place to live, and then every day he should circumambulate the city and country, like mendicants of old. Nothing whatever can be more important for him than his own personal dignity, and this is exactly what he loses forever after the very first deal-making transaction…And so what do I recommend? The taste of failure in place of success, poverty instead of wealth, anonymity in place of renown. For now, utter concealment as opposed to publicity, perfect camouflage to the point of invisibility, because what the artist who lives in personal freedom and independence finds himself confronting today is unbelievably strong, and seems invincible…above all else, an artist must be cautious. Like a ninja.”
all excerpts taken from a powerful volume of Music & Literature:
On Articulating Experience
“The more ways of articulating human experience one knows the better.”
– Eugene Gendlin
I would like very much to say/write something today. Something resonant and broad, something that would stimulate empathy, reflection, acute sensations, self-awareness and some renewed purposiveness toward what any reader might consider their own “good” and the larger “good” of the “world.” That would motivate us to be more fully, attentive to what we most value, what we most wish to value; that would tickle, trigger and activate that within each of our experiencings whatever it is in us that occurs in those sweet, heartbreaking and perception-exploding moments in which we feel like WE matter, that the WORLD we participate in matters, that meaning is worth, well, Life…and that Life as we are living it, we live together.
But I haven’t the first idea, concept or “hook” to know how to do that. I have nothing to say. I have urges, wishes, passions, dreams and a kind of crushing, yearning hope – that we might focus a little, shape ourselves, choose something for ourselves and one another and act with and toward ourselves, one another and the world in ways and fashions that could soothe, nourish, calm, comfort, extend and enhance our collective experience of being humans in a world full of so many other things we depend and inter-depend and co-depend on and with. Rather than our easy, disruptive, erratic, dissatisfying instinctual and common practice of reacting, responding, self-protecting, guarding, distancing, lashing out, closing in…separating, hurting and harming, frightened, cowardly and weak.
I don’t know where to start with that. I would that I could write the experience of others, could find synchrony and sympatico with my friends, family and acquaintances, could articulate the complexity and depth, mystery and reticulated implicit intricacies of their experiencings: their pains, joys, desires, griefs, knowings & doubts, wonderings and certainties, histories and prognoses, lusts and woundings… that I might be so much more tender to them, embracing, receptive, unthreatened and inclusive, gentle and comprehending.
I would like so desperately to be able to articulate the human experience of the world accurately…yet I am always wrong when I speak another, always deficient even when I speak myself…
other things articulate as well…
sciences, arts, histories, events, activities, gestures, accidents, philosophies, medicines, practices, rituals and religions
here are a few sounds (and in this order!) that have articulated my experience, today:
and
remarkable “accidental” or “fortuitous” articulations…
along with The Jerusalem Address by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
the sorrow and struggle of my love
the energy and delight of local biology professors to their craft and instruction
the events and experiencings of a day….
Here’s to us all
Social Media Space
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Articulating-Experience-with-The-Whole-Hurly-Burly/1507331726208608
in case you want to join me there as well…
Quotation / Interpretation
“To read a distant text, distant in space, time, or conceptual world – is a utopian task…The task is one whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it…”
– Ortega y Gasset –
“In that sense the activity of language is in many particular ways utopian: One can never convey what one wants to convey.”
– A. L. Becker –
“it is deficient in the sense that it says less than it wishes to say,
and it is exuberant in the sense that ‘it says more than it plans’
This utopian characteristic of language is a source of flexibility that results from signs that are simultaneously deficient and exuberant.”
– Yair Neuman –
All my Words are Silent 