“Language is a thing: it is a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist.”
Maurice Blanchot
Category: Writing
Entanglement
Getting back into A swing of things, I’ve missed the past couple of prompts for the wonderful mixed company of creatives that take part in the Friday Fictioneers (yes, please DO join us!). So here’s to restarting refreshed…
Entanglement
So this is our journey. No way out of it. Bound together, bound apart, bounded in. We call it “Situation.” Shared in common. Held by circumstance. Anything might bow us, but both will be effected. The cords behind, some measures of rest, and whatever comes next – it all impacts the song. Lucky for an other – no sound can be heard if there is only one, if our strings never touch. Though sometimes cross and crossed over, at others we vibrate one another to the sweetest hum. It happens together in our ever-bordered context – the space of our entanglement.
N Filbert 2013
back at it with renewed vigor for the new year!
I keep rereading this post by Simon. It is one to take in slowly, repeating the lines, offering bounty. I am humbled and honored by the dedication. These places – “(What I cannot grasp – that resonant fullness / of a dying chord).” “Sketched, grasped / but lost.” “Reachable, / Signifying / What is no more.” and yes “Attack, decay, sustain, release” (repeatedly) – a significant writing. Thank you so much Simon.
OUR MUSIC
( for n. filbert)
Spiraling.
But up or down?
The heart moves in and out.
Its own rhythm.
Has no memory, no sorrow, no joy
(the wild geese cry, flying away,
Away to the horizon of light).
The heart has no words, no tears.
(What I cannot grasp – that resonant fullness
Of a dying chord).
The heart has no words-
The reason music is.
First words
laid down in thought,
Sketched, grasped
But lost.
The path between breathing in
And moving out,
A pull, a chord
A melody.
Formless form,
Existent for an instant.
Possibly enough to light a light –
A dying arc in the bubble chamber,
Proton, antiproton, quark –
A path measured but no longer
Reachable,
Signifying
What is no more.
(embellish, embroider, garnish,
In the end all stories are a rope
To cling to in our vast uncertainty).
The beautiful line of that…
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Continuation of the Gift that Explodes: In Which is Entered the Rich Thicket of Woods
Here is page two of the blank notebook from my daughter as it fills:
and here it’s typeset form:
2
In Which is Entered the Rich Thicket of Woods
In the beginning was the wood. It took us much time to discover its uses. We ate its tough skin for roughage, we mashed its soft heart into pulp. We chopped it to bits, we rearranged them. We played games with it. Sometimes it was all that kept us afloat. Sometimes we structured them carefully and turned to them for shelter. As we learned what woods could do, we began to comprehend their value. At times we relied on them for everything necessary to survive – the fruit of a tree gave us sweet liquid and meaty flesh. The fragility of the dead still warmed us as it disintegrated in the flames. They grew to be almost sacred – the world as we knew it came to rely on them. We crafted them into signs and created many sounds from them – enabling us to communicate over vast spaces. We were capable of traveling quite far, able to reach one another over distances before considered impassable. Woods made this possible my dear! Some days I might spend hours simply admiring them – looking them over – taking them in. Each with its own fine shape, and own specific range of uses. Some were embellishments, some anchored the whole forest together, some provided seamless access or served as bridges to crawl carefully across great dangers. We constructed some for fences and walls – they helped us keep the unwanted out. Others we piled up like babble in the sheer joy of conflagration and release – it seemed they could life our heavy spirits like colorful smoke. Oh the woods, my darling, the woods! It is they that really enabled us to become what we are today. To reveal our capacities, our feelings and thoughts, intentions and dreams. In woods we could concoct our plans and rest in their leafy comfort. There are times when all one needs is woods. Things can seem overwhelming, catastrophic or of unmentionable sorrow or fright, and yet finding the right type of wood, or clinging to a wood that is kind and safe and strong can sometimes leverage us through great storms. My precious dear, learn as many woods as you can – make peace with them – seek out their countless paths that you might always have a place to go, a world to be.
Intro to the Gift that Explodes
Holidays have a way of obstructing and crowding out creative time for me. Oh we find ways to express and produce – Holly’s making candles with all sorts of found objects downstairs as I type this, paper snowflakes, new stories and pictures from the children, new compositions sounding throughout the house, but for the snail’s pace of reading/writing processing/producing I prefer…well… I often find the compounding of anxiety-inducing public spaces and family gatherings, people and lights and jangling music and cheer, busying trips and spendings and time limits to all but obliterate my ability to bring anything out of the scraps. Last Saturday, my daughter Ida, who is forever cabbaging papers, pens, markers and tape anywhere she can find them, metamorphosing them into handmade notebooks, letters, scripts and stories to read and share with her lucky family and friends, handed me the following with the message: “this is for you.” So today, amid projects and budgets and organizings and so forth…when I was just about to write off the next two weeks for personal creativity…I grabbed this and took it to my desk…
…and so it begins…
In case you can’t read my mumbling handwriting – here is a typed copy: (have to click a couple of times for some reason?!)
Essential Ignorance : Hypotheses : Possible Worlds
“As I was saying perhaps ignorance is the key. We all of course know what’s going to happen next.
Only artists don’t know what’s going to happen next a quirk of ignorance they share with history and the weather.
This is the key quirk of the quirky mind that produces the work of the artist…
…Stories don’t have reasons.
Or if they have them they have them after the fact like the weather.
Then the reasons become part of the story.
The mind is like the weather and this is the reason that everyone likes a good story.”
-Ronald Sukenick-
“For, in effect, the humanities have as their implicit agenda the cultivation of hypotheses, the art of hypothesis generating.
It is in hypothesis generating (rather than in hypothesis falsification) that one cultivates multiple perspectives and possible worlds to match the requirements of those perspectives…
…the language of evocation substitutes metaphors for both given and new, leaving it somewhat ambiguous what they are substitutes for…
the ‘relative indeterminacy of a text’ that ‘allows a spectrum of actualizations.’
And so ‘literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves.’
And that is what is at the core of literary narrative as a speech act: an utterance or a text whose intention is to initiate and guide a search for meanings among a spectrum of possible meanings…
…the author’s act of creating a narrative of a particular kind and in a particular form is not to evoke a standard reaction but to recruit whatever is most appropriate and emotionally lively in the reader’s repertory…
…set forth subjunctively to allow them to be rewritten by the reader, rewritten so as to allow play for the reader’s imagination.”
-Jerome Bruner-
Book of the Dead + commentary, cont’d.
This person makes an enormous difference in my life.
All my Words are Silent 