This uncovered writing has parts that feel like 16-year-old wordplay mixed with the aging man…sigh.
Category: Writing
9 Notebooks
In an act of rebellion and a kind of self-serving exorcism or slate-clearing (what blog is NOT an attempt at an entity’s expression, communication?), and facing the duress of weeks burdened with commitments and inescapable responsibilities…[in other words]…I intuit I am encountering a “time” (weeks / months / foreseeable futures?) that I deduce as laden – somehow preordained – for preoccupations of employment, previously established obligations – freighted with encumberances complexly negotiated…[under pressure I compose]…and so I search for a project [as is my way] that is FOR ME[?] (something autotrophic, self-cannibalizing and nourishing at once, individually comprised and contained) an insurrection and defiance honoring self [so I surmise] facing compulsion…
…and I unearth these 9 Notebooks…all aborted undertakings from the past 12 months…via which I propose to mount mutiny by posting all that seems potentially warranted in them [upon re-reading as if the first time, long forgotten]…toward little other purpose than for purging, opening, erasing – a clearinghouse of efforts – that might evolve toward some novel substitution, unforeseen modification, development, emergence…
“this is what directs him to learning – where he may encounter fragments of his own existence,
fragments that are still within the context…”
– Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka –
There will be stories, concepts, poems, characters, reflections, essays…and ephemeral scraps like these…
- think feel – attune to meaning – reflect and refract
- befriend your body, take care with your mind
- be gentle, be open. move fluidly, breathe
- go alert to your dreams
- wish more than hope, walk don’t run, run sometimes
- be careful of rules, they’re always changing, it’s the nature of the rule, the measure, the standard
- keep your eyes and ears open, along with heart and mind – only let things close into pleasure and pain – and that more of a wince
- don’t be afraid of your story – write and rewrite it, edit and revise, revise, revise, and write it again
Sometimes it seems, it takes me so much time (it seems) to find whereof I can speak…
Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness. Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again. Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand. Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins. Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind. One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.
– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –
Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991.
For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.
Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.
Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Thinking.
Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,
the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,
grew redundant with desire…
…desire for language to do some certain things,
…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:
to write the ambiguities.
Repeatedly: to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal. Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear. That light in which even our shadows go unseen.
Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,
encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,
my writing desire grows more active,
toward the active,
and its happening,
writing verbally,
writing living:
to write losing.
Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity.
Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.
TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING
to loose losing
…perhaps to lose it…
…face to endlessness…
will he make it?
FYI – in margins
Although nearly silent, or, too busy to conjure and compose, or…
I have not given up, having not ceased,
somewhere in the mix of these,
somewhere between voices…
ASPECTS OF WRITING
Another Rejected (albeit kindly!) fiction…
Curious… I rarely remember things I’ve written… this is no exception… but stumbling across it I am pleased that this happened…
WHO THEN IS SPEAKING?
“the preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character – the author of the work… the author’s name and the various ‘I’s’ that go to make up the ‘I’ who is writing”
“’I’ can only be identified by the instance of speech which contains it, and by that alone”
“Who, then, is speaking?”
who is speaking:
I am the one, come to tell the story, the code of information and words, with letters and gestures and some touches of inflection, but I mean to tell it straight and impartially, save the parts I must needs factor in.
who is writing:
And I am the one, come to present the speech in images – to sketch, doodle, scrawl and scribble – marks and…
View original post 1,508 more words
A Narrative Construction
This weird stuff:
The sky is “cloudy.” This is part of who he is, just now, in this case. She’d said “______ ___ _______, _____!” in just that tone, this manner – another aspect constructing him. That he’s a “he” is also not irrelevant. Of so many “years,” “locations,” “relations,” “activities” and “behaviors,” “interactions” and “learnings” ought not be ignored or left aside. There’s no other way to identify him, along with appearance, but that depends (and has changed dramatically from those first cells).
The man is “of an age,” as some might say, keeping track in the ways that people will. Is “like” (comparing as they do). Says and does, makes and thinks, with categories shared among the lot of us. A male human, then, within the commerce of the world, regardless of distinctions, and because of them.
“Specialness” is a classification reserved for none and all. A sensuous “unique,” observable and rich, endless and utterly common.
And yet we’ll pay attention, for awhile, to THIS ONE. The one recounted and described, gradually revealed (such as it is), and selected for this tale and task (a narrative product of our genes). We abide.
Recording “life” – an optional project at our disposal, and “communication” – a capacity shared. Let’s do this then, with “me” – teller, author, scientific artist; and “you” (all) – necessary “others,” listeners, readers, hearers, respondents. Composing and perceiving, interpreting, creating – the ways we get along and mean, “make sense of,” all that “happens”
as we’re “in it.”
as we “are it.”
Let’s begin.
We have begun.
And “long” ago, in its beginning – wherever (whenever) – that might be for any one of us. “Us” – that spreads the lying truth of it – that we are “We” and never “one” or “me” or “he” or “she” or “it” or “they” without the others. Simply being – substances and structures interactive in “their” ways…
We, the happening, as we perceive it.
What we make of it.
(Whomever we are).
Squirrel, fir tree, trout.
Stone, astronaut, wetness.
“We” – bound by our conditions.
Let’s begin.
[I’m glad we’re sharing] (he says).
THERE IS A BEAR
…and for her,
whose face
I held in my hands
a few hours, whom I gave back
only to keep holding the space where she ws,
I light
a small fire in the rain*
And so, the story, such as it is
We start. We start out. We dance into a light. We are seen. We have become. We are embodied.
This is how it begins for us. We are noticed as a being, as a living, as living beings. Addressed.
Some one, some thing, is aware of “us.” We become. Something. Someone.
I am born. I have…”be-come.” And that, a result…a result, resolution, resolublution, happenstance, happening of cum. Plus. Cum (sperm, spermatazoa, DNA transport system) PLUS egg (potentia, potentiality, amorphous stew – DNA resourcing, inchoate, unpredictable, predictable)
CUM + EGG = possibility
A be-cumming. A chance, a shot, a gumbo – ME.
And then I AM.
And that “I am” is a simply recognition, a simply acknowledging, acknowledgment, an awareness, a “noticing” – a THAT – THERE IS – a “There is: That.”
A “Nathan.”
A nothing be-cums (in collusion with egg) a “Nathan” – named, cognized, acknowledged, noticed and noted: Nathan is NOT a Nothing, but is a Some Thing… a “Being,” a “human,” a “boy,” a “creature,” even…a “Person.”
And I become. We. Become. A combination of things cognizable in individuality and commerce. A singularity in multiplicity…
THIS combination of possibilities = Nathan
= THIS one
= ??????
this ITEM is accounted, is sensed, perceived, listed, catalogued – BECOME.
And so, we start out. Cells of a particular way. Become. Noted, recognized, be-come, be-came, be-CAUSEd. IT. THIS. YOU. (ME).
Held. Cooed. Coddled. Nursed. Murmured and whispered as an “I,” a “You,” an “It,” a “They,” an “A,” a “Him.”
I am a Definite Article.
A/The Some Thing. Being. Organism. Combinatory intricate systemic reality object of cellular operations – genetic, bio-logical(?), “existent,” “happening/happenstance,” as… THIS ONE, THING, REALITY.
And so, we begin.
I try to go back there. To the beginning, that initial “noticing.” (“Honey, I think I might be pregnant”). Effect. A. The. This one. Son. Boy. He. It. Him. Here: a coagulation of cells.
Biology. Psychology. Chemistry. Anthropology. Philosophy. Science. Metaphysics.
“I” began. By being accounted for. Taken note of. Recognized. Attached or detached from. Signaled, symbolized, named and noted.
Here comes a new “One.” (that is, Many). – A “Person.” Awkward, precedented (unprecedented) amalgam equaling a “You” “It” “He/She” “Being” “Person” “Human” “Child.”
NAMED (accounted for and acknowledged, reported AS…)
“Nathan Wayne Filbert”
A-ha! So – this one! That, right there…different from and the same as this other kind…
An observable being, a kind of individual sample, remarkable and marked down, documented, evidential data…A, The, It, An…
Here begins a definite article.
An individual.
An example.
Sample.
Kind.
Type.
Organism.
Characteristic.
Assortment.
Collusion.
Combination.
Instance of.
SOME THING.
And life goes on.
Happens.
Takes shape.
Becomes.
Invents.
Occurs.
Adapts.
Results.
Resolves.
again…again…again…
Here rises/lies Nathan Wayne Filbert,
named and acknowledged,
become, begun, existent,
(such as it is)
(from time to time)
ahem
cough, cough
(occasionally)
grrrrr
Hello.
Coming Bare
In the interests of authenticity…
- The fact or quality of being true or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness. Also (overlapping with sense) accurate reflection of real life, verisimilitude.
- Genuineness;
- The quality of truthful correspondence between inner feelings and their outward expression; unaffectedness, sincerity.
- A mode of existence arising from self-awareness, critical reflection on one’s goals and values, and responsibility for one’s own actions; the condition of being true to oneself.
- The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014.)
Unveiling. The action of reveal. Is the “condition of being true to oneself” a possibility?
Recently my partner and love wrote me a revealing, unveiling, letter that blunted me with authenticity – a quality of herself that she was questioning in that very message.
Self-awareness. Sincerity. Something corresponding to actuality, reality. Genuineness.
How often do we present or re-present ourselves authentically? Do we all wish to? What would it look like? Sound like? Would we lose friends? Lovers? Jobs? If our outward expressions matched our inner feelings?
WHO AM I?
The complaint was compromise. Pretense. The wriggling falsities of “fitting in” or “being useful” or “surviving” in the world of humans. In social groups and situations. In life. The feeling that what “works” or garners respect, interest, desire in the commerce of human beings is not authentic to who I actually am. That what I am “liked” for is a misrepresentation, a partial product, a fabrication, a mixed message, does NOT “correspond to actuality, reality.” And is it possible to undo that? To live authentically in the variegated, unpredictable, situational and relative world of humans? And is authenticity of an individual even a potential actuality / reality?
This has prompted me days of thought. In effect it was relieving, releasing – my lover is exhausted of the “play of living” – the work of “fitting in,” “surviving with others,” “belonging” in ways that feel partial, inexact, false even, untrue, ALWAYS incomplete, inaccurate, inauthentic.
I felt freed to say my honesty. When I father, I pretend to be a father. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what I should be doing. I don’t know what it means to father children. I love them, I care about them, I am frightened by them, I am exhausted by the responsibility, I gauge my activities based on parenting behaviors I DON’T feel comfortable with, or that I wished for…I act, I pretend I’m a man who knows how to love, instruct, “raise” children! I do not know what I’m doing. I feel inauthentic. Like I’m reaching, practicing, experimenting, trying to be what I think a good “father” might be.
For years and years and years and years I have “feigned” being a writer, a musician, a scholar, an artist (it feels like). Yes, I’ve read a lot. Yes, I’ve studied, I’ve practiced, I’ve performed. Yes I think I “get” some things about the world and our human experience of it. Yes I LOVE writing words, mixing them up, crafting phrases and sentences with them, attempting to mate them to my internal experiences, ideas, emotions… but I almost ALWAYS feel an impostor not an expert, like I’m trying out voices, expressions, characters, compilations to FIND OUT if that’s how I think, feel, imagine?! So if ever I’m desired, complimented, responded to – I think it is an accident, a gratuitous kindness, a pitying. That I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m simply trying, groping in language in a thorough darkness.
As a lover, a partner, I have simply tried to please. To find out what is wanted and do, be, perform that. How does an intimate relationship “work”? I don’t know. Everyone is different. Nothing I learn to enact, behave, communicate, engage – is successfully effective in the next relationship (or, obviously, in the relationships ended before that!). Could I BE whatever mucky morphing “self” “living human organism” I am (at any given moment) and be loved? It seems so unlikely! I don’t even know what that is (the mucky morphing living individual human organism) to express or represent to the Other one… – do they? Does ANYone?
So do we ALL feel like we’re FAKING our way through being human? Adapting “roles” and “styles” and “opinions” and behaviors in order to survive? To be liked? To fit in? To feel good about ourselves? To feel useful? To BE?
Over decades, I have found that there are some things that steadily characterize me. I like to drink and smoke and read and write. I love to love and desire and be loved and desired. All of those things share the “actuality” and “reality” of being activities that I don’t understand. Things that seem to steady, nourish and keep me vital…and yet also damage, wound, hurt and make me vulnerable. That wobble. That trembling.
To my lover I responded theoretically. That my understanding of a living organism is that its “identity” in fact is created and activated in every moment’s situation and surround. That ALL of being a human is identifying oneself in relation to circumstance – a moment-to-moment relation and response to THOSE and THAT which constitutes its happening. That “living” involves trying style, voice, behavior, activity, vocation, perception, interpretation, thought after another after another – quickly realizing that in EVERY instance the “fit” is partial, inauthentic, somewhat true (what feels good) and somewhat false (what is uncomfortable) – that BEING ALIVE is a wandering experimental trial of sorts. That if we CHOSE or locked ourselves into an IDENTITY and attempted to be consistent in it – we would in fact deteriorate, become bitter – that the wisdom is NOT “I AM THAT” but “THAT IS PARTIALLY ME” for now, in this instance, at present…
????
The questions keep coming. We bemoan that when we take a job, a position, a role, responsibilities… we tire of them as we feel the constraint of structured, required, or expected behaviors and activities. When I compose a writing work – within pages I tire of its direction, its characters, its ethos – I can feel where a thing is going and whether it’s interesting to me or not, I tire of it – feel constrained by what’s created, feel fake in pushing it in another direction…even innovation and inventiveness feel PRETEND.
Perhaps LIVING = the tension of partiality. Striving to “fit” to “belong” to “match” (be safe in, acknowledged, understood, allowed) means adaptation, alteration, invention, reciprocal construction, which would seem to inherently demand compromise, partiality, veiling and highlighting – what will seem / feel to be INAUTHENTIC, misrepresentation, “FAKE.”
And yet – it is through this wriggling tango that we also come to discover what “fits” us – what we enjoy, what our perspectives are, who/how/with whom we like to be, what feels “good” to us and what makes us afraid/uncomfortable/ and so on…
Cynical view: we’re ever pretending and untrue. Hopeful view: we’re navigating and discovering, becoming. And it seems that both are “real” and “actual.” Authenticity (maybe?) equals partiality and pretense for humans? Equals morphing and becoming? Equals uncertainty and acting (adapting)? Equals attempting to be?
The Costume
The Costume
When there is dialogue, or perception. When he’s awake. But what to name it? How describe? Perhaps even while sleeping.
The lag.
At checkout counter, clerk addresses: to absorption, numbness, mumble. Other.
Strikes Alfonse as he’s driving toward home: there are trees bending, being present in their way. Cars, pedestrians, small animals scurrying. A school bus. Neighborhoods – definite yards and homes. A mail-delivery-person. A filmy mist. A fall-behind in his perception. Gap. Perhaps.
He initially considered it a veil. A tremulous fog. A curious “vagueness to things.” Like long, cold Winter. Haphazard inceptions: tree, bus, children; cat, dog, car. No attachment. A muffling and delay. A foreigner. Driver inside steel mechanism, separate by seconds, very nearly removed – a skein, a skin, a veil. An organism with apparatus. The slow calculator.
The smeary light when she speaks: lover, mother, friend. Overlaps, palimpsests, a smudging feedback, a decay. The children crying. Vocalization evokes. Indicates. Needs. Response. Remembers he is human. Particular understandings, expectations. Affirmations and acknowledgments. Times for saying yes. Attentional assent.
Alfonse disbursed. Pernicious regress. As if he’d be immediate. As if the others were. As if it all were touching, interspersed and in exchange. This thing and another. He is embodied. The body seems slow, or surprisingly fast, almost anticipatory (unbeckoned, unmeditated erections). He can’t make sense from it. Body makes sense he knows not of. Who knows not of? Of what? Even how might be accurate here. Alfonse cannot seem to know, this is his costume, a glassy shroud, the sluggishness between the here and now. Without a zipper or a tag.
Inside a bottle within distorted frame, but without an image described so clearly. Costumes are alive – expose the motions of the wearer. Notions. Reveal, conceal, but variant things. Who dressed him this occasion? This dismantled undoing and random erasure, perpetual hiatuses of interpretation? His hesitant reality – a retardation, sensational slag, both slow-soaking sponge and absorbency-abdicator.
“I got nothing,” he murmurs, “didn’t catch a word you said…” as if in some other language of different rhythm and tune. Not understood. Multiple things unrelated, cannot tell, cannot smell, is uncertain where he is in his motions. Not quick enough, just out of joint, who what where why when never equals now for him, nor how. He is Alfonse and he seems costumed.
Making love – a metaphor for intimacy – those direct invasive actions – and yet he’s steps away, slow to the uptake, uncertain who is doing where and when. That comes later and looks like smudges that he estimates with guessing.
Is this uncommon? – is what he wonders. Am I the only one who cannot tell? Does she know what she is doing, feeling it as it happens? He’s asking something far away he cannot measure. He wakes each morning, to himself, inside this costume, and dons the heavy cloak of it for sleep. Asynchronous, distant, accidental and traumatic, but postponed – perpetual flush of shut-down, shock, bewilder.
He thinks “flamingo” inside a jar of unfocused space in alternate materials in artificial frame and anesthetic wall in analagesic scheme, so far, far, far, far… the clock is slipping. The span from here from now, from him from there, from this to happening, happens.
And so it goes. Costume he can’t remember wearing that encases and engulfs. Awareness too long after to affect. A lostness in the makeup or makeover, the becoming and become. Too late. Ineffective. Ever after and begone.
Echoes. Surely something must be said, something addressed to him, something interjected, interacted and applied – only ever now arriving quite beyond a sensibility toward response – apposite, inappropriate, out of line and time and sense. Unsettled and uncouth. A threatening out-of-sorts, off-color and unfelt. Feeling suffocated, unrelating.
Alfonse swimming being, non-concurrent, unawares. Ineffably indistinct. Imperceptibly misinterpreted. Not. Never. Was. But. Here. Where. No. Not. Now. It slides away. He heard something (her mouth, lips, the child-in-walkway, bird, tree bent to breeze) – no, not yet, before, never always, when? How?
Soughing in a muddy river, ice overhead shifting, yesterday. Forever. There is no today in the mix, the undertow, a disconnected untoward, who where when – not he – can’t remember, a caesura of consequence – plugging, plunging him far from present, dark and drear.
So far between the now and when – not-knowing.
Invisible costume. Alfonse’s weight. Indistinguishably unable – uncommonly common, this viscous opaque coating – no known axis or location – simply not. Not. Not.
Knots of not…not-knowing, not-quite-hearing, not-feeling, not-tasting, ever too late. Undone for undoing.
Alfonse within costume, a muzzling muffle of indigestive guzzle, of life. A weather and reprove, a restrictive deconstruction, a not-quite-absence in the presence of the everywhereabouts and everywhen of… of… everything.
All my Words are Silent 