Category: Writing
Writing: Impetus
It’s hypnotic. Illogic. You may recall genetic components – a sentiment, experience, curiosity or sensation…the fabrication begins its own spells. That plane where you drift from expression or fractaling inquiry toward Medium. When plot is played out and the voices keep talking. Or some other member begs a word.
You are no longer quite “author.” When it begins I’m usually puzzled or amazed. A vague and shifty core obsesses and eludes me. I ponder awhile, do research, spawn a dialogue or few with available others…but eventually turn to writing. A word inscribed in secret not only leads to more, but ricochets through spacetime like a pinball. The versions of the brain call out over the callosum: “Felt anything like this before? Have we had an experience that resonates?” / and / “Say – it seems I’m in the midst of something – check it out! Any words in your concordance for such as this?” To and fro – attemps to signify and symbolize, reify, rectify, making truce with our immersion.
The “language drill.” As it burrows metaphor, it fragments and splinters dust around the edges. Retrieving as it leads. Recalling through invention. I use my handwriting to find out. To find out. Searching something, spelunking expeditions, a nettling curiosity blind-feeling hunches and perceptions. Pulling them towards words in attempts to trick them into trap. Building tunnels, margins, stairwells to aim the lights at. As if broad enough term-corrals might lasso and then spiral, slowly cinching it round, whatever “it” is.
But whoa then, hold on! Once a breadcrumb trail’s discerned, it forges. Makes its rhinoceric way in accrual and erasure. Constructing as you follow, conundrum’d and deleting. A word – and sources cling like filaments. None of them accurate and all informing. History, culture – traditions. Intimate pain and joy. Perception, conception and query. Discovering bewilderment. Creating the unsaid.
Victim and perpetrator both, you, author, artist, song. Skewing and distorting in equal measures. Changing as you change it. This is the making. The being-made. Creator and created both. The artist in her medium.
There is no “having done.” Failure or not, it virals and contaminates. The path is incompletion. “The Artist’s Way…” Never through, until it’s through with you, coincident with a life.
Who do we say that we are?
Boomerang
Another “aside” – writings that happen in the meantimes…
Boomerang
I consider myself ‘straight as an arrow’ that swerves like a boomerang. In other words, I ruminate clear sensations, desires, opinions – consider, and then revise. It all comes back to me.
When I was a child, I thought as a child, behaved as a child…but now…now that…well, I’ve put away the childish things. Now I’m just a fucked-up adult. It’s hard for me to tell from what’s coming or going.
She’s cumming. Now she’s going.
I saw a coyote the other day. I was driving in the country, speeding along a gravel road. A grey coyote, large, apparently healthy, came streaming through the corn or wheat or soybeans pacing my van like a dog. These things surprise me. And happen.
Now she’s going.
Like a coyote I set out to pace her, run alongside, track and trace her. She’s cumming, I’m breakneck, I’m hungry, I’ve got her, I’m with her, we’re “in” as it were…
She’s going.
I run straight and fast and hard and she knows it. I’m honest. I can’t tell truth from lies. She loses me, I parallel, and now we’re neck-and-neck, side-by-side, and sprinting, I’ve got her, she’s stretching, I’m on her, she’s spreading, I’m ravenous, she’s daunting, I fear, I crave, on point, in flight, the Caravan has nothing on me.
If I were a sailor. An aardvark. A policeman. I am none of these. But I love her, she outpaces me, I can’t catch, and she looks back, and she’s cumming, and now going.
I wish.
And that would be how it would end, with my wishing, her being, my envisioning and inventing and conspiring, but there’s more. And the coyote, and the rabbit, and the hawk and howling wind. And the mountain and the river and the ocean and breezy glade. And there’s life – yes, there’s that, and we’re here, or somewhere, and everything rushes, and to be honest I don’t know deception from reality, my perceptions and illusions are the same, but I dream. And a coyote, and a boy. And a human and a male. And she’s a lady and a wolf, a rodent and a scream, and we tossle and we fight, and devour and delight, and it’s all a simple game – a complex, coordinated, disjunctive weather of dance that never quite syncs up, and that’s okay, because the coyote thrives in run, and the owl lives for the hunt…the mouse delights in escape, and the thought its incompletion…
And I straight as an arrow, swerving like a boomerang.
Lessons Learning in Metaphors
HERE. Abandoned places fall apart. Decay to exposure. We, bereft. We, grieving. In the absence of care… Upkeep. Keeping up. Often when significant change occurs, we do not bother “keeping up.” Rather things, people, places, seem to hold on as long as possible to what is familial / familiar / to what seems known, as long as they can. Perhaps this marks some difference between survival and thriving. Maintenance versus development. Preservation versus advance. Enclosing versus opening.
But time. Molecules move and shake around; synapses shift, come undone, frackle, rewire…adjust. Adapt. There are new conditions. The movement of beings, of the world, continuously alters our context, alters ourselves. When they left, or something seemed lost, other inhabitants, presences, qualities, realities fill the perceptive interoperable surround…some constraints are increased, some loosened, restraints, license, “competition”: wind, rodents, weather, routine… The primary structuring relationships morph. Continually.
Now wife. Now wife and children. Now certain finances. Now no finances. Now surety, stability, now uncertainty, hazard, CHANGE. CHANGE (never not occurring) ALWAYS EQUALS OPPORTUNITY (for living things), ALWAYS EQUALS DIFFERENCE.
Now no wife. Now children. Now no job. Now scrapping for sustenance. Now certain friendships. Now the absence of certain friends.
Now different care.
What will the winds do? The rain, the sun, the heat, the ice? Critters? What new sounds will my structure make – interactions – given the changes in conditions, in surround? WHAT ARE WE NOW? The same. Structurally – a form made for interaction, a part of the world, interlocked and interwoven, a bundle of functions and processes, intentions and conditions – exposed by happening in a world.
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”
(Great! How else…life?)
And how beautiful the potencies of change. How messy. How easy to attribute – “good” “bad” “difficult” “help” “harm” “ease”…
But is what’s happening to the homestead, the barn now – in lieu of human use and care – less easy? Less beautiful? Does not every context surrounding and composing a structure of forms – both help and harm of a sort?
Would it be false to say this erosion, this abandonment to other interests and types of care, this shifting of primary interactions, reciprocating attachments, looks like loss? With all that light pouring through? All the redolent air and wheezing whistling and rattle? Has the new (ever-altering) context of comings-and-goings helped or harmed this structure…or, perhaps mostly…BOTH? Just like the previous and every future one?
We. I. You. Crafted ever-so-intricately in contexts we are unable to adequately identify (comprehensively) or evaluate – for they ARE the context that is co-creating (in-forming) our identifications and evaluations. We interpret – according to the context we are enmeshed in/with.
CHANGE CONTEXT – CHANGE PERCEPTION, INTERPRETATION, IDENTIFICATIONS, EVALUATIONS…change even what we look for…
A breaking, a leaving, an abandonment, some loss…(simply, really, change) – do they not equal a kind of damage, a kind of harm, so full of openings, exposure, new perspectives granted the initializing structures that we truly DO NOT KNOW what living is for? But this? – TO LIVE?!
The rent places let the outside in in novel ways, creating coevally novel openings for the inside to emerge. The wear co-creates other structural stresses and reliefs, new releases and new enclosures, novel shapes and textures, colors perhaps we never knew were possible to begin with. Never a potential until the context came that facilitates and allows, enacts and enables.
Always interacting, we change. Always changing (along with our entire surround) defines INTER-ACTION. Barn: Enter, Action. Always.
NOW…this…
Experiences confoundingly rendered with these sound contexts:
Creativity’s Luck
Last week I in fact took one day “off.” Truly OFF. It rained. I read. It rained. I read. I wrote…
Eight hours later, finally, I am drunk with language. Like Kansas soil, I require such storms for the necessary surplus… for markings to begin to pool, swirl and confuse – for essential destabilization – undoing language from its conventional attachments and turning it toward an alchemy, a natural compound and resource, something to be stirred and sludged or steeped – allowing for aroma, skimming and residue. Just language, less meaning – an additive experience, unknown potentials of letters combined by some strange combinatory activity of intuition, convention and accident. Creativity’s luck.
There is a point to drunkenness – whether artificial, of language or pleasure or love, whether substance, experience or drug – it is to be estranged and immersed – in some sense undone. Renewed. Despoiled. It slows and diffuses me enough to write beautifully again. Instead of making words, to concentrate on shaping letters. Forces to create.
It is a baffling and bewilderment – allowing us to require effort for focus, selection and choice – so discreet motions of bodies become both complex and marvelous again, the capacity for smell a wonder and delight, communication and gesture (at all) a mysterious gift.
Inebriation levels the field. Returns to a source. Baudelaire may have meant we are potential and solidarity at once – flounderers grasping at tools and beginnings, constructing, cooperating. We are begun.
Perhaps, then, we drink to erase and begin. We scramble ourselves toward infancy that we might make effort to grow, while minimizing automated meanings. To struggle to learn, to be becoming rather than operative. Innovative over automatic. To develop and realize.
I love to form letters once drowned in the rain of them.
Flood everything to discover what’s possible.
Saturate in order to dredge, to pan, to anticipate.
From the Notebooks… a poem perpetually in progress…
Untitled (In Progress)
The poem linked above I pushed out last week… and marked it as “in progress” because for some reason it is one that the process of making, unmaking, forging and revising it (still feels “off” as published at above) has intrigued me. Here are the pages of notebook from which it hails, perhaps this is of interest, perhaps not, for better or worse…
We are working on an exhibition of new media for June at Wichita’s Fisch Haus, and have been battling over how to show process and creation when exhibiting technologically enabled and activated art. Perhaps that is why I’ve been more conscious of my own processes of making and revising. In any case, here is a little trail through the notebooks as a piece is coming to be…
In Progress….
.
I am thankful for this loosening quiet,
your slackening ties of dusk.
Though often shackled by a fear of loss
in love, I may open toward a growing –
.
possibilities of a learning, as in youth,
less about the being something
than, profoundly, just to be…
that which relaxes and allows
.
like a cow caught up in weather,
or warm engagements with a child,
with the blossom, and make-believe.
Empowered when our symbol’d systems –
.
confused by what is happening –
begin to sign that loss
(a form of death) ensures the safety
of our risks. That harm and haven
.
are our home – the same as truth:
what’s loved is lost –
and thus we come to love.
Wisdom undoing opposites
.
in terms of life.
I amt ridiculed by youth –
it’s how I know that many lessons
come unlearned,
.
that “completeness is
a process of revision”
as they say,
and that our closures
.
are what open
every day.
.
The above was an editing of the following…which is why it’s still “In Progress…”
child, the blossom, the make-believe
And
.
And then I want to say
that I am thankful
for this loosening
.
I want to say
And then I want to say
that I am grateful/thankful
in/for this loosening quiet
for its / and the slackening of ties
.
perhaps we’d once been shackled by
the fear of loss in love
.
leaving space for other and tenderness and availability,
freed of the shackling fear of loss
in love
not in the order of other pursuits
thus fencing a truth again
or forging some identity –
burned and brandished iron –
.
but that we might allow
the finding, its discovery –
all the safeties that arrive with risk –
in all directions
whether in the child, the blossom, or the make-believe
.
the will to love and to enjoy
our engagement
with world and things and persons
.
unraveling the expectations
of hurt and damage
parenting ourselves to freedom
.
the assurance we are looked after,
at least by ourselves,
as well the plenteous others –
our families, our species, our friends
.
we will probably survive,
unless we do not
and then no matter
death was here from the start
.
nor had it intention or opportunity
not to be
attachment and loss
and room for growth
.
so we begin, so we will be
the template that stifles
symbolic structures
learned of experience
.
in certain ways
.
do not ask permission
but simply deceive
they are not truthful
.
Look at your child,
your pet, your mother –
you would not have them
to be a certain thing
.
an object, tool or concept
but to live and change and grow
until they die and thus dissolve
which is not damage so much
so much as change
.
thus let it be,
it is quiet
the ties are slackened
the noose loosened
.
around your heart.
we are here –
the squirrel, man and mountain,
every weather, part and parcel,
as are you
.
It is begun
we are resolved
to open and allow
for your enjoyment
for your experience
should you engage
.
and cease to fear
cease to fit to your equation
to whatever maths you assent and ascribe
and start to scribble
doodle, sketch
.
to select potential
over priority
exception(al) over rule
dynamic in place of determined
.
and friendship more than fact
.
perhaps you were meant to be
over being
to selve more than self
.
for “we were not meant to survive,
only to live.”
.
*********************
.
We thank you for the loosening quiet
We are the slackened ties of dusk
.
I am grateful to this the loosening quiet,
the darkness and this its slackening of ties…
what is once was shackled by the fear of loss
in love, now opened may open toward a growing –
.
possibilities – a learning, as in youth,
that it is much less about being something
as than it is, profoundly, just to be
that which relaxes and allows
.
the squirrel (cow) caught up in weather,
our warm engagement with the child,
the blossom, or the make-believe,
empowered when our symbol’d systems
.
can be get confused with awareness by what is happening,
and when we are able to see that loss,
a form of death, ensures the safety
of our risks. That harm and heaven haven
.
are the same – our home as truth
what’s loved is lost
and thus we get come to love.
Wisdom undoing opposites
.
in the terms of life
I am get ridiculed by youth
it’s how I know that lessons
are get unlearned,
.
that “completeness
is a process of revision”
as they say, and that a that our closures
opens every day.
.
“TO SPEAK SO AS NOT TO MEAN, BUT TO BE”
-Dan Beachy-Quick-
in progress
I am thankful for this loosening quiet –
your silence slackening the ties.
Often shackled by a fear of loss
in love, I might yet open toward a growing –
.
the possibilities of a learning, as in youth –
less about the being something,
than, profoundly, just to be –
that which relaxes and allows
.
like a cow caught in rough weather,
or warm engagements with a child,
with the blossom, & make-believe.
Empowered when our symbol’d systems –
.
confused by what is happening –
begin to signify that loss,
a form of death, ensures the safety
of our risks. That harm and haven
.
are our home – the same as truth:
what’s loved is lost,
and thus we come to love.
Wisdom undoing opposites
.
in terms of life.
I am ridiculed by youth –
it’s how I know that many lessons
come unlearned,
.
that “completeness…
View original post 18 more words
I, Artifact, Anyone
I and the Anyone Artefact.
Given the miniscularity and brevity…and, say, the import or apparent heft – foils of mountain, sea, sky, and other incremental gravities or scale-altering engagements…
…what boils down in my insignificant, barely mappable blip of a space-form “life-span”?
What do I want? (Mountain. Man. Collective of actionable atoms.)
Or how about in another form: I, mountain, atom, want to write, am writing,
leaving record (partly), making record (partly), finding record (partly),
recording (partly), imagining (partly), learning (partly), playing (partly),
wondering (partly), thinking (partly), providing (manufacturing) company (partly),
because I can and it makes living-through delightful, meaningful, poignant, aware, alert…
Simply…I accounted for happiness recently as reading, writing and forms of companionship, because reading and writing (inseparable companions, or perhaps two aspects utterly meshed and merged, inextricably joined) – experiencing them seems to me to be enhanced when compatibly shared, mutually valued, reciprocated and informed.
I want to write. I want what I write to provide sustenance for my self and children and home. I want to write whatever I have it in me to make out of language, not what people ask me to write or pay me to write or suggest that I write.
PART ONE:
There is a grand, iconic, snow-capped mountain – Kilimanjaro, Hood, Vesuvius – symmetrical-seeming mounds of earth that simply and irreducibly and undeniably say – silently and continuously – “I AM HERE.”
Part One:
I exist. I mark. I testify to and quarry that existence in my way. I artefact.
[Write well. Parent well. Perhaps partner.]
“Companionship”: friendship, fellowship, closeness, togetherness, amity, intimacy, rapport,
camaraderie, brotherhood, sisterhood; company
[wants to be a writer. writes. AM a writer. wants to support existence by doing that which it wants : to write]
“the intersection of talents and joys”
[wants to parent well. to develop thoughtful, compassionate, productive child-persons of survivable health. parents.]
To artefact (not for longevity or endurance [perhaps partly – a kind of sustenance surely]) but to quarry the systems and processes – the multitude of unknowns to living-through.
I artefact – consciously to be present, to offer, to be worthwhile, to further matter (to participate in generation, ongoing complexity, collaboration, coordination and collocation – co-being, co-construction with world).
Write. Parent. Relate. (therefore) I, artifact (make ‘art’ in ‘fact’).
[take in artefacts via world – learn, adopt, adjust, adapt, extend – and artifact this process out]
These are wonderful, benign, banal, investigations.
The Simply Difficult: WHAT AM I? WHO AM I? WHY? HOW? : The Questions of Living-Through.
(I repeatedly note that life interests me insofar as I am querying WHY people think they exist and attending to HOW …)
What are your answers to these? (my present mobile answers provided in parentheses)
- WHAT are you? (a temporary and dynamic collection of active molecules idiosyncratically coupled and formed)
- WHO are you? (a fluid and alterable co-depending individuated space-form reciprocally coupled to its perceptual and perceiving, cognizable surround)
- WHY are you? (a form of life…to be)
- HOW are you? (idiosyncracies=personhood: the fluctuating continuum of activities and behaviors between what I contain and what contains me…the marginal substance where uniqueness exhibits)
Or… I, Mountain / You, Sky. Ocean. Flock. Field. Plain.
Metaphor: perhaps our primary mode of learning? Posit, compare, examine, observe, revise, pretend, fabricate, manipulate, invent: “Make-sense”=”Knowledge / Learning”
All of this to say that every object(form) at every moment is responsible for the possibilities of meaning.
We could be anyone (and will be, have been, are, plus…) individually (or ‘uniquely’ ANYone).
IN OTHER WORDS: I want to stop whatever this is and tell you.
Want to tell you I LOVE YOU. I am personally thankful that you exist and am convinced the entire world would be different (no matter how miniscule or brief you may be) if there were not you (seems to be the way EVERYthing – systemically – IS). So I am thankful (good or ill) that: ARE. IS.
Say there is/was a child. Mountain. Hypothesis. Arrangement. Beginning. Again. Scenario.
ARTIFACT: Chance. Atom. Action. Experience. Being.
Pretend: Sky crashes.
Mountain melts away.
All = nada.
And then “YOU”= WHO? WHAT? WHY? HOW? (WHERE is implicit)
p.s. someone will die in someone’s arms
p.p.s. someone will write about it, remember
p.p.p.s. someone might sing
p.p.p.p.s. someone will represent it in paint/clay/language/dance/sound
Mountain Sky Ocean Trees Soil
Nothing is No-Matter-What
finally hearing a bit of poetry in things again!
Here is what I want to say:
There are many You’s and I’s in love,
with its constant violation
made of We’s.
.
As hopes are wishes and intentions,
a world of mountains, skies and sea
plus endless weather –
their erosion.
.
And the work – this all of it – a singing
of narrative hums and harmonies –
la grande bellezza fraught
with its necessary discord.
.
There are far too many factors
for the truth. Indeed, a ‘truth’ may be
whatever is that’s all of them –
.
the beauty, and its imperfecting –
ever-ending,
always already begun.
All my Words are Silent 