Category: Writing

Arriving today + Reflections

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Reflections, Writing8 Comments

Jakobson - On Language

…and wonderings about language as a tool and an abstract medium.  Wondering if in the endless bewilderment of experience – of living – rife with woundings and joys – we move to shared media, providing communally devised realms in which to re-vision, simultaneously creating new life, wherewith and wherein to investigate and inquire, to dig and dig and…

Language as constructed or agreed-upon and functional (tool) medium.

Then there’s this full of resonances and also contributing to the reflections – required text of a current course:

Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles

…and I quote:

“As the reader gropes the stacks – lifting books and testing their heft, appraising the fall of letterforms on the title page, scrutinizing marks left by other readers – the more elusive knowledge itself becomes.  All that remains unknown seems to beckon from among the covers, between the lines.  In the library, the reader is wakened from the dream of communion with a single book, startled into a recognition of the word’s materiality by the sheer number of bound volumes; by the sound of pages turning, covers rubbing; by the rank smell of books gathered together in vast numbers…the physicality of the book is strongest in libraries, where the accumulated weight of written words seems to exert a gravity all its own.”

“So the library is a body, too, the pages of books pressed together like organs in the darkness…[in libraries] I can fool myself that the universe is composed of infinite variations of a single element – the book – that I, too, am made of books, like the person in Giuseppe Arcimboldo‘s painting The Librarian“

Archimboldo - the Librarian

“…a person made of books; his is not a single book but a whole library”

“I have the distinct impression that the millions of volumes may indeed contain the entirety of human experience: that they make not a model for but a model of the universe.”

“…texts, fabrics to be shredded and woven together in new combinations and patterns…”

“everything in the world exists to end up in a book” (Stephane Mallarme)

“With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words – books are an amalgam of [Roger Bacon‘s] three classes of substance capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal”

“For any question, the library offers no hope of a definitive answer…unlimited and cyclical”

“Together they tell us stories that they could not tell alone”

library pic

“In many places, the volumes are thick with dust, pocked with the holes left by insects,

which are almost as hungry for books as I“

-all quotes except where noted – Matthew Battles Library: An Unquiet History

And somehow I can’t help but think the interface and interstice of languaging matter in this way – a way that provides comfort and the slightest skin of distance from the raw inside of skin – inseparable recursions – but mediated immediately – kind of like magic; a LOT like alchemy; always experience – but less abrasive or intrusive than “direct.”  Perhaps paint, light, cameras and brushes, clay, etc – any art that borrows matter outside the body – similarly provides a soluble, gentled, media through which to live forward…

…in other words…are our preferences for embodiment a part of what define us as artists in the societal mesh?  The media through which we most naturally express or experience or embody indicative?  Textuality as embodiment for the writer; clay, stone, marble, etc. for the sculptor; movement for the dancer; oil, pigment, brush, etc. for the painter; lines for the draughtsman and so on…

 

Experience, anyway. (parts 6 and 7 are new)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

This work is a slow-grower.  I think it wants to be read that way as well.  Slow accretions of interaction and recursively referent.  Not sure where it will continue.  Click the title page to investigate.  Comments are welcome.

experience anyway cover

LOVE

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LOVE.

De-Presses

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“What a joke it is to read or hear—as I have read or heard more times than I can count—that writers ‘see more clearly’ or ‘feel more deeply’ than non-writers. The truth of the matter is that writers hardly ‘see’ or ‘feel’ at all. The disparity between a writer’s works and the world per se is so great as to beggar comment. Writers who arrange their lives so as to ‘have experiences’ in order to reduce them to contemptible linguistic recordings of these experiences are beneath contempt.”

—Something Said, by Gilbert Sorrentino

Dalkey Archive

Via strange twists of events, connections that could only be re-constructed through fantastic imagination, I have been moved back into perusing publishers for work that inspires, raises and extends one’s ideas of what “art,” “literature,” “human” are.

While most publishers must infuse their catalogs with books that will sell, there are still a few presses that are simply committed to grandeur – to works that express and challenge what humans are capable of making, thinking, expressing, creating – works that assess and challenge our condition of being.

Two presses I’d like to promote – that continually provide works that surprise and engage (fully) and elastically foment my boundaries of concept and possibilities – with bewildering form and content – in other words, publishers from whom you might randomly purchase titles and ALWAYS be made richer, better, exponentially more humane – (THIS IS A REMARKABLE THING):

 

http://www.openletterbooks.org/
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/

please visit them and order…ANYTHING…

your life will be BETTER.

 

 

Potent Selections from Vacation Reading

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

“I wondered what indeed it meant about me that I was so set against the notion of convention that I should attack it.  So, I replaced the dream with the novel, stripping the stories of my dreams of any real meaning, but causing the form of them to mean everything.”

“…the gap between the subject of enunciation and the subject of enunciating not only failed to appear to me as a place of entry, but also failed to register as something I might elide.  For me, there was no gap, as there is no gap for anyone.”

P Everett 1

“…generally, people are only inclined to speak of the past with those they believe will somehow not only share some commonality, but who will also be disposed to exhibiting sympathy.”

“Is a photograph always present tense?  I described them so…better, let the question be, is what is in the photograph always in the present, without a before, without an after?  Of course, it is.  And isn’t that actually you in the picture?”

ennuyeux

“On Ludwig Boltzman’s tombstone is carved: S=k. LogW.  S is the entropy of a system, k represents Boltzman’s Constant, and W is a measure of the chaos of a system, essentially the extent to which energy is dispersed in the world.  This equation meant little to me as I read of it the first time, but as I considered it I grew excited.  The space between S and W is the space between the living thing in front of me and stuff hidden inside beyond my observation and comprehension.  It raises the question:  How many ways can the parts of a thing be rearranged before I can see a difference?  How many ways can the atoms and molecules of my hand move and recombine before I realize that something is wrong?  Thinking about it scared me.  Certainly, I understood that natural events symbolize collapse into chaos and that events are motivated by dissolution, but the idea of such subversive and invisible change moved me.  I likened it to observing the minds of others.”

P Everett 2

ootheca

“Ezra Pound said, ‘Every word must be charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’  Let it be the case then.  But words need no help from anyone.  Bet thew ords kneeknow hellip freeum heinywon.  Context, story, time, place – don’t these work like Bekins men, packing the words like so many trunks?  But finally, words are not cases to be packed at all, but solid bricks (and, of course, like a brick, even a word’s atoms are not motionless).”

“We do not give the creature reality enough credit, choosing to see it sitting out there as either a construct of ours or an infinitely regressing cause for the trickery of our senses.  But I claim here that the most important thing I have learned is that reality has a soul, reality is conscious of itself and of us, and further is not impressed by us or our attempts to see it.  In fact, we see it all the time and don’t know it, perhaps can’t.  It is like love in that way.”

-all quotes by Percival Everett

from his novel, Glyph

Glyph - Everett

(The First Good Novel)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing16 Comments

Meaning

In any breaks in necessity – between semesters, breaks at work, children otherwise occupied, no “required” readings or commissioned work, etc… – with each passing season, I gradually discover what matters most to me (literarily speaking, which, for me, involves much of my lived life) – perhaps I might refer to it as my meaning-making-factory-resources (Blanchot says of Borges that he is “an essentially literary man – which means that he is always ready to understand according to the manner of comprehension that literature authorizes).”  At this point in my living, over four decades along, and a large percentage of the pie devoted to reading, those voices I turn to, their messages and efforts, have become quite consistent.  Each year there are new ones, new threads and concepts, theories and expressions that very significantly impact my living – but they tend to find their place as commentaries, extensions, additives and queries to what (I suppose) now forms my central “canon” of sorts.

This struck me, following my return to Bakhtin and Blanchot, and as we prepare for vacation how I immediately reached for Soulstorms by Clarice Lispector and The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) by Macedonio Fernandez.  In searching for this image of Fernandez:

Macedonioa host of Google’s “related images” arose – including Borges, Lispector, David Foster Wallace – and I got that vision of how pantheons develop and connect and gradually form a kind of woven semiotic pattern – a “worldview” or “Innenwelt” I guess – it begins to make sense what’s connected to what and whom to whom throughout time and space of world-being.  Beckett, Blanchot, Dostoevsky, Pessoa, Rilke, Cixous, Kafka, Bakhtin, Jabes, these visions and verbals I return to again and again and again and again – inexhaustibly – and although my copies are nearly glutted with markings and underlinings – and they feel intimate and familiar (on the one hand) – that I also feel I am always learning them anew, freshly, with EVERY read.

These things astound me.

Museum of Eterna's Novel

Of this particular book (which I often say is the very best novel I have ever read, repeatedly), Adam Thirlwell writes “It is a novel which does not want to begin.  Or, perhaps, it is really a novel which does not want to end…The aim of Macedonio Fernandez’s novels is to convert all reality into fiction (or the other way around).”  “The real subjects of this lightly playful novel are the grave ones of death and love.”

“In his novel, Fernandez tests the possibility that all philosophical questions are only meaningful in relation to human relations: that all questions of infinity are really questions about love.”

and so on.

Macedonio 2

Macedonio is, for me, a hero the likes of Bakhtin, Blanchot, Beckett – those writings and writers I will never “get over,” never “get around.”  Writings I can only ever “go through.”

Perhaps these writings are characterized by the question – “What is it to be real?”  I recently discovered in one of those “shock of recognition” moments that although I’ve studied theology, philosophy, classical music, art and literature and now information sciences and systems theories – that none of the CONTENTS of these fields sustain my passions – it is the relationships between them – the ligaments and synchronous reverberations they emit – the MEANING-making effects of their pursuit and inquiry that is REALLY what drives me toward, into and through them.  I’m not looking for truth or necessarily facts or any answers – but for PROCESSES and PRACTICES that enrich, enhance and extend my biological life in relation to the world I’m “thrown into.”

Borges wrote of Fernandez: “Macedonio is metaphysics, he is literature” and that “writing was no trouble for Macedonio Fernandez. He lived (more than any other person I have ever known) to think.  Every day he abandoned himself to the vicissitudes and surprises of thoughts as a swimmer is borne along by the current of a great river.”  The novel’s translator writes: “The method is madcap; the intent is desperately human.”

Perhaps that is what I’m after – to be “desperately human.”

and now we’re heading off to the wilds – to be desperately human with-world with-family – replete with above-mentioned authors and without wi-fi or internet services!

P.S. (also from current reading – The Waste Books by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg):

“Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare:  this is the whole law of philosophy.”

and

“To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.”

All the best!

As relates to…

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

 

bakhtin2

I have wanted to share (for years) the significance and import of Mikhail Bakhtin‘s manner of thinking, writing in the formation of my own worldview and understanding of the confounding irritations of working in language and the interactional miracles of the medium.  C.S. Peirce and Bakhtin strike me as two composers with whom I do not encounter a brilliantly organized thought or true-ringing arrangement of letters that they are not echoed in.  I discover re-presentations and simulacra of their models, but rarely extensions, corrections, or improvements.

With that in mind, I have been poring through a multi-authored volume entitled Bakhtinian perspectives on language and culture: meaning in language, art, and new media edited by Bostad, Brandist, Evensen and Faber.  Note-taking, underlining, cross-referencing, formulating, and it has occurred to me that these texts are SO mesh-marked with mnemonic traces for me, that I should simply provide interested readers access to all I can link.  Setting out to locate a Pdf of the introduction and chapter 2: “Rhetoric, the Dialogical Principle and the Fantastic in Bakhtin’s Thought” I came across the entire collection available online – and so I offer it here.  If you begin, and the perspective captivates you – read on – to the chapters that carry concepts you are passionate about.  If not, never ye mind!  I am happy that texts like this can be available – not easily “stumbled upon” in contemporary bookstores and libraries (unfortunately).

To life:

Bakhtinian Perspectives

 

par example:  “Language is to be experienced as an interaction of signs neither neutral nor innocent: the word bears the burden of the contexts through which it has passed.  And every speaker or listener bears the consequences of signs put into circulation, of signs he perceives and answers, of signs he picks up and makes use of for his own ends.  One cannot stifle the traces stored in them.  One has to face the cultural experience a whole language underwent in its history.  Speaking this language and listening to it one unwittingly responds to this experience – the ‘word that lies on the border between one’s own and the other,’ the ‘word that is actually half someone else’s.’  The one meaning cannot maintain itself in the face of the many meanings.  B’s concept irritatingly links the atomizing intrusion of the many meanings into the one (an act that atomises this meaning) with the idea that meaning ‘explodes’ in the contact of two different meanings.  In other words: splitting up and differentiation, accumulation and trace must be thought of as occuring in the word simultaneously…Because meaning is always a recourse to another meaning and a project for creating new meaning, it doesn not achieve a decisive, definite presence.”

And so forth….!!!!

Traces…of ekphrasis…of chaos…of semiosis…of emergence

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Experience, anyway. Coupling. (section 5)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

Coupling Chaos

 

5

 

Couplings

 

            We conferred, that is, we engage, experiencing contact.

 

We will set out, clinging, and submerge in, together.  To gather, to keep hold.  To track and trace in the tracing of trackings.  To recognize with(-ness).  To witness with-ness.  As experiment – critical.  Experience, anyway.  “Ours.”

 

Between the quark and the jaguar, we leap in, already moving.  Enduring much criticism: stop-motion behavior/practice.  A snipping tool.  We move on.

 

Must have been moving before we begin, different organization, as also (ever “also,” both/and) until “we” is spoken, still speaking.  In other words.

 

If complexity allows purpose, however shallowly combined – moment-airy radiant gradient – if selection involved “choice” (in other words), so we.  So-viet.  Co-Be=”It.”

 

We continue beginning potentials.  Experience.  Anyway, any way at all, even those unimagined per se – potentially – given contexts (complexes before and beyond) to speak spatially (corrupted language: co-ruptured, erupting-together).  “Always more than one,” our simple mantra.  Breathe.  Walk.

 

Early ones (to speak temporally, parler temporellement, another language) tout “the world knows not boundary.”  Perceptual divisor, arbitrary (i.e. species-specific) and then some.  Or boundary as invented in traversal, trespass, complex thoroughfare, reciprocity.  Feed-forward in a sort of randomness, chaos emerging orders.

 

We blend thus to cognize.  We merge to pattern difference.  Another way of saying “no boundary” (i.e. engagement, interactivity, living, being).  To couple.

 

Beginning again in infinite multiplicity (our limited numeracy) – were we able to count even to we.

 

casclick here to read Experience, anyway. in its current entirety

Mirror-Mirage

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing2 Comments

“Contemporary authors who construct a thick barrier between themselves and their readers such that authorial vulnerability is revealed negatively, i.e., via the construction of the barrier.”

Lavender-Smith - FON

“The scientist and philosopher are like identical twins in a world without mirrors.”

–Evan Lavender-Smith