Category: Writing

Taking it In

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

Wandering back over writings from the past year that I have yet to “organize”…I’m running across portions of interest (that I can’t even access to fix typos in now!? having been done on a former computer and transferred/transmuted with missing marks / disintentions, alas) – but something I can do when I’m sick… so I’ll post a few of these and you can weigh in (if you will) with what you think – whether interesting, worth filing away, saving forward and what-not.  Thank you!

press here : Taking It In : press there

Roughing (ralphing) a Draft

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing8 Comments

Bare Bones and Synapses : Oscillating (a Story)

Feel like I’ve been out of the game…aside from Friday Fictioneers I haven’t had time for concocting, playing and revising original texts for awhile…feeling this time opening up a little bit I’ll be trying to finish up some long-term projects, while also working out some ideas that have been swaying to and fro in me cranium…here’s a gutturally wrenched structure that I barfed up today…we’ll see what becomes of it…

 

#1 perks up, signaling  “it’s about time something truly great were written…at least what we’re capable of writing…the best we can do, right now.”

#2, energized by this, by the vibe that the entire gang might be on board, the whole shebang ready to summon resources and operate, sync up, as it were, breathlessly quivers, smiling shyly, eager

#3 promptly curls over and balks, doubts, folds under, clenches.  Mostly afraid of failure, or of not having what it takes to see this thing through – concoct something “great” – shimmies and blocks out, switches off the snaps and veils the crackling lights in nearest hallways

#4 is feeling good, having been freed to excesses in the night, sensing the throbbing in the basement and burning like a reptile in the sun, pleased and exotic, inspiring

#7 with pleasurable visions of fantasies and victory.  Floodlights on, matched to #4’s bask, but also pulling in air, rolling back shoulders and drawing up the chest while sucking in the tummy

#5 babbling away nondescript utterances, filterlessly spilling data, codes and equations of plots, prose and characters grabbed here and there from the crooks and crannies, gutterways and mushy sewage-scapes like pebbles stuck in gluey glia.

#1 now boisterous and bellowing, carried away in surges, blurting out hurrahs and coach-cliches, beckoning a kind of connective huddle

If #4 could think alone, he’d claim erotic inception for the will of #1, having woken aroused by images spun from #7 throughout their “sleeping” 8Hz

But #1 is wanting more and #3 isn’t giving or opening up

#6 and #7 providing soundtracks and scenarios, pressuring #4 to kick up the heartbeat, #2 to activate arms and hands

Four of the seven are joined, yawping and dipping, rippling a recursive wave – this group is on the move

#4 sends chills down the surface and tingles spine and loins

#2 adjusts all openings, focusing on bright lights and sparkly things, deep greens and muted blues

#4 pounds “approach” and “happy” buttons like timpani

#6 starts sweat and shuffles memory volts of breezes

#3 begins to forget as #5 yammers and badgers and #4 jacuzzies the mass in hot syrups

#1 commands #2 to to focus, clip and edit #5, while #6 and #7 distract with many-colored bouncing balls

Optimally they’ll link up and ride this wave in balance – each informing the other – shocking, supporting and inspiring the murky mass trapped in 22 inches of bone.

                          

Oscillating

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, WritingLeave a comment

Like margins, thresholds, beginnings.

Species of relation.

I am drawn to synthesizing agents, it seems.  I find myself attuned to, and triggered by, generalizations, and yet curiously constantly in search of them.

Fitting things where they converge, borders of meetings and passings.

.

Oscillation is one such theory.  Neurologically cognizable perceptively, passaging to and from hemispheres and lobes, neurons and systems, and productive.  From which we get “fire together – wire (conspire) together.”  Symphonic circuitry.  Fluctuate congruity.  A jazz band improvising.

Extended to bodies in spaces and times, collective moods, or space and time themselves, if you will.  Constructive theory of observation.  Oscillation.

As if a structural template for an expression of personal creative process.

As if an introduction toward a story, that story that’s been brewing, surging, throbbing and stewing throughout my physiological corpus for days, since an opening of light, of breath – a semester’s impending conclusion – aptly (I hope) nominated “break.”

If “break” belongs with “dance” and poetic feet fall into step, or sentences seek their stride.  She hopes so, as does he, now ungendered in a unison of copulatory oscillation, my hope for the tremoring bits that vibrate me toward a Nathan : writing.

…to be continued…

On By NW FilbertIn WritingLeave a comment

another fascination…

NW Filbert's avatarGypsy Wall

I continue to be passionately intrigued by the processes of “camera-less photography.”  Chemigrams, Cyanotypes, C-Prints, Dye Destruction prints, Gelatin-Silver prints, Luminograms, Photogenic drawings and (overall category) Photograms.  The most recent inquiry being this fine collection (tied to an exhibition) by Martin Barnes: Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography.  In his introduction, Barnes makes statements like the following: “the essence of photography lies in its seemingly magical ability to fix shadows on to light-sensitive surfaces…an apparently unmediated emergence of form out of formlessness.”  “Camera-less photography can be viewed as an embodiment of this definition, the images created through the process itself harnessing the ephemeral…showing what never really existed, but have the appearance of fragments, signs, memories or dreams.”  That, dropping the distortion of lens and eye, camera-less photography is a process of “fixing traces, accepting elements of mystery and dealing with forces beyond normal vision.”  As if it confuses roles and relationships…

View original post 159 more words

Reasons for Thanks – inspiration

On By NW FilbertIn Uncategorized, Writing11 Comments

in·spire/inˈspī(ə)r/

Verb:
  1. Fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, esp. to do something creative
  2. Create (a feeling, esp. a positive one) in a person

Many thanks to Music & Meaning / The Rag Tree for awarding me the “Very Inspiring Blogger” award.  The work there is genuinely inspiring, in fact, just this week I was speaking with my spouse, artist & blogger Holly Suzanne, about RT’s work, particularly in translations and all that brings with it regarding languages and cultures and purposes of art.  Thank you Rag Tree!  I am honored and, indeed, inspired, by your work.  In fact, I would hazard to guess that the decision to begin a personal blog or website, followed by the clunky and quirky process of finding or constructing a steady community of readers or viewers might be characterized by inspiration.  As we watch one another follow their urges to “do or feel something…creative” it does “create a feeling, esp. a positive one” in us to continue doing/working/creating our own.  I am thankful to the blogosphere for providing such a cheap and relatively easy format for those of us who will to expose our work far beyond our limited personal spheres, and especially to receive comments and criticism, and gather multitudes of inputs from others works all throughout the world, that we, most likely, would never have otherwise been exposed to.  It gladdens me deeply if my work inspires others to work or think or be, and all of you that I follow have done the same for me.

I relish in giving awards to other bloggers, as there are so many out there, but we’d live in social media were we not forced continually to edit and select the number we can truly “follow,” and actually attend to.  By that point, a blogger has gone through (for me) the same sort of criteria any music I listen to, literature I read, or conversation or activity I participate in does – engaging it involves an enhancement of meaning for my life.  How can one not want to award or acknowledge, thank or praise those whose work and words enhance and expand your daily living?!  So I find no difficulty in finding bloggers to pass the gratitude on to, the hardest thing is choosing!  This blog comes with a few “rules”, as follows:

  1. Display the Nomination logo on your blog
  2. Link back to the person who nominated you
  3. State 7 things about yourself
  4. Nominate 15 others and link to them
  5. Notify those bloggers of the nominations & award requirement

Seven Things About Myself

1.  Writing joins me to the world.

2.  I love theory – as a way of thinking about thinking about the world and anything in it.

3.  I am particularly fascinated by the way humans learn and change.

4.  My wife and children amaze me and expose and explode un-countable aspects of the world into me.

5.  Rain is my favorite weather – especially the thick drizzly kind, the all-day kind (or all-week or -month) – optimum temperatures 40s     or 50s.

6.  I read 4-6 hours a day.

7.  I like cabins and caves.

Now for those I recommend.  For the selections for this, I have spent a good deal of time thinking “which blogs do I truly go to for inspiration?”  Not only interest or admiration, information or curiosity, but that I seek out and miss if I don’t see, and that genuinely create in me the urge to “do or feel something creative…” perhaps even the “ability” to do so.  Here they are:

Life In Relation to Art – see also www.hollysuzanne.net: yes, this is my wife and co-creator in everything I do.  It’s true she always makes my lists for blogger awards, and it is also true that no other’s life or work inspires me remotely as much as living life side-by-side with her.  I can attest to the effort and deep work that goes into each of her creations, and how her creating fuses into every aspect of our lives and activities.  Thank you, love, for inspiring me every moment of my life.

Objects – see also www.spoondeep.wordpress.com – contributions by author “severnspoon.”  This author also occurs with each of my kudos and thanks because he, too, constructs the courage to be alive in me.  His work in graphics, poetry and mixed media ALWAYS inspirit me to do and make and think.  Thanks, compadre.

Draw and Shoot – see also www.karenmcrae.photoshelter.com – when I first spied Karen’s work I was impressed by the mood and quality of each shot.  Now, over months, I must say that I anticipate each shot, and have truly come to be amazed by the “capturing” her eye, technique and production do in relation to the world.  These are photos I go back over again and again, almost as a meditation, guaranteed to evoke feelings, thoughts and the urge to create in me.

Christian Mihai – how can one NOT be inspired by the quality, content and sheer verve of Christian Mihai – he is instructive, productive and full of ideas and insights, as well as fine and evocative creative writing.  Press “random post” again and again – let me know how many times it took before you stumbled across something “not interesting.”!  Thanks CM – for all your work – and work FOR all of us!

Ironwoodwind and Photography Of Nia – Doug and Nia are two of the most humane, attentive, genuine, interested and interesting blogger-people I’ve come across.  Both obviously care about the world around them and the people and organisms in it, and express themselves warmly and carefully into it.  I notice from many that their efforts at commenting and encouraging others goes a LONG way in inspiring ongoing work in the community of WordPress.  Thank you both for your kindness and creativity and communal encouragement.

Settle + Chase – in line with Draw & Shoot, S+C’s work indeed settles deep into the subject and chases what is ephemeral, mysterious, or not objectifiable in it.  This leads consistently to photography that we are able to “enter in” instead of just observe and admire.  I enjoy work like this that asks to be questioned over time…and continually provides new responses.  Thank you S&C!

Boy With a Hat – I can’t remember how I came across this blog, but have not missed a post since I did.  Here is some ingenious, fresh and alive writing and thinking.  His 50-word stories are little explosions of insight, and his particular way of involving the reader in whatever it is he is considering in language is admirable and unique.  Thank you Vincent Mars!

atelierscheune2012 – see also Ute Schatzmuller – here you’ll find visual art and collaborative work that I promise will evoke new ideas in you, inspire new collaborative desires, and set your mind or hands or eyes off on new explorations internally and externally.  Ute’s work is suggestive and entire in a spiraling manner – each piece feels complete and yet also as if it’s the beginning of a journey. Thank you Ute!

The Disorder of Things – I promote this blog because I admire blogs that take on big issues and are willing to dig deep and explore options and ideas.  I appreciate this because whether or not I agree with any position or concept under inquiry – it invites and enervates more thinking – which is inspiring.

Ooggetuige – primarily portraiture of some sort, the settings and background textures combined with perspective on subject consistently intrigue me.  These photos start stories.  Thank you!

The Hour of Soft Light – the writings, images, poems, quotations and reflections here nearly always brush some deep human place of longing, nostalgia, wonder or gratitude.  Important things to keep alive in us.  I appreciate the breadth and depth of the entries – the range of our human experiences.

Quirk’n It – inspiring in subject, expression and real-lifeness of it.  The energy, interest and genuineness of her intention and attention to subjects, meanings, and scene are delightful to follow.  (Also, there’s collaboration in the works – being considered for it is inspiring in itself).  Thanks!

It Started With a Quote – likewise – so much of my life is inspired or rises out of what I read and then winds in and out of my lived relational experience, testing, proving, questioning the language of it.  Here you encounter all sorts of worthy inspirations and get a chance to watch them thread through, effect and alter an able mind into the world of experience.  

The Artsy Forager – I am SO thankful for the work of the Artsy Forager – bringing all manner of creative, enlivening, interesting works and activities into our days.  Our family has a funny attribution to “feeling artsy” – for when we have that curious, active want-to…the Forager satisfies and often increases this want-to.

barbaraelka.com and Dark Pines Photos  – two sites that do things with photographs that make me want to do things with words – change the finish, crack the background, tear the edges, skew the subjects…MAKE IT NEW!  Very thankful for their work and steady spontaneous creativity.

There it is – longer than usual, but fortunately for me – it’s Thanksgiving Week in the USA, so seems appropriate.  Hope you visit and enjoy each of these!  And follow the tags onward to new brilliant blogs!

Sincerely, mano’theword

in·spire  (n-spr)

v. in·spired, in·spir·ing, in·spires
v.tr.

1. To affect, guide, or arouse by  influence.
2. To fill with enlivening or exalting emotion: hymns that inspire the congregation; an artist who was inspired by Impressionism.
3.

a. To stimulate to action; motivate: a sales force that was inspired by the prospect of a bonus.
b. To affect or touch: The falling leaves inspired her with sadness.
4. To draw forth; elicit or arouse: a teacher who inspired admiration and respect.
5. To be the cause or source of; bring about: an invention that inspired many imitations.
6. To draw in (air) by inhaling.
7. Archaic

a. To breathe on.
b. To breathe life into.
v.intr.

1. To stimulate energies, ideals, or reverence: a leader who inspires by example.
2. To inhale.

Decisions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing9 Comments

A quick response to this week’s Friday Fictioneers prompt, a quirky, multi-faceted, and wonderfully open collective of writers from all over the globe riffing their words to an image – a weekly task I am thankful for, and company I admire.  So, from the midst of this holiday week in N. America, something:

And Yet

Mom is right.  It is hard to deny that something points a clear direction, unambiguously, and difficult to argue.  But for reasons I’m at pains to reveal or explain, I am uneasy.  Seriously, I couldn’t ask for a more definite sign – but is clarity everything?  I mean, what about signals from below?  Like how I feel?  Or that strange uninterpretable “intuitive” stuff?   Something isn’t right.  As if I were standing at an intersection without a crossroad, a highway with no exits, opened out before me, shining bright.  And yet.  I have misgivings, doubts.  Troubling the obvious. Are all exceptions exhausted?  Every option foreclosed?  Pressure is on, expectations real – I’ll be a laughing idiot to choose otherwise.  And yet.  And yet.  I have the feeling it will end in a horrible guffaw.

N Filbert 2012

Some Reasons…for Some of Us

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing12 Comments

“I am someone who tries to write, who right now more and more seems to need to write, daily; and who hopes less that the products of that need are lucrative or even liked than simply received, read, seen…why I’m starting to think most people who somehow must write must write.  The need to indite, inscribe – be its fulfillment exhilerating or palliative or, as is more usual, neither – springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads.  On one side – the side a philosopher’d call ‘radically skeptical’ or ‘solipsistic’ – there’s the feeling that one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the big Exterior of life on earth…The need to get words & voices not only out – outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them – but also down, trusting them neither to the insusbstantial country of the mind nor to the transient venue of cords & air & ear – a necessary affirmation of an outside, some Exterior one’s written record can not only communicate with but inhabit…the textual urge, the emotional urgency of text as both sign and thing.  The other side of the prenominate 2-bind – … – is why people who write need to do so as a mode of communication.  It’s what an abstractor like Laing calls ‘ontological insecurity’ – why we sign our stuff, impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed.  “I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing – & all good writing…

what must the world be like if language is even to be possible?”

got it, David.  Thank you.

Intimacy as Art

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing6 Comments

Intimacy as Art

“A way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being”

“that ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being’… was what fiction was for.  ‘A way out of loneliness’…”

Jonathan Franzen, on David Foster Wallace

“If the novel were able ‘to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves,’ it opens the potential that she might, as a result, feel ‘less alone inside’”

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, on David Foster Wallace

My son and I arguing about the nature of things – is there anything we can agree on?  mutually believe?  are we similar? – in what began as an attempt (on my part) to soothe obvious hurt and confusion (on his part).  He kept pointing to (referencing) his mirror, his bedside table, in an effort at agreement, at a meeting-point that might be solid, be reliable, be “correct,” or “true.”  Some relatively stable collection of roving and vibrating molecules we might sharingly recognize, might hold, attend, or unite around – together.

Throughout my life I’ve attempted to comprehend – to make a symbol for myself –  what works of art, particular pieces of music, specific phrases or pages of literature, momentary glimpses of nature, dollops of emotional experience DO.  How they work.  Why they “feel” – move us, take an occasional effect we might call “profound.”  Why, even if they shatter us, cause us to weep, provoke in us the enormous courage required to change, we also somehow still feel safe, often empowered, somewhere beyond “okay” (ecstatic? – out of ourselves?)?

Although often evoking experiences I’d describe as most completely, totalizingly personal, I always felt their effectiveness, their possibilities of success and individuated power, came precisely because they were not (personal).  That what intimacy they provided – what outlet or spillage, what expression they represented or evinced – was contextually impersonal, through matter and energy uniquely organized, mediated.

In other words, we could throw all of ourselves into, at, toward or away from them (works of art, formal arrangements of world) without the danger or threat, anxiety or fear, of influence.  We wouldn’t hurt, harm, embarrass, shame, offend or be misunderstood by a cornflower, a collective of strokes of paint, a recording of sound waves, moving molecules.  No direct hits of miscommunication, misinterpretation.  Perfect, variable, flexible presentations of world, of other, that we might release ourselves in relation to, without fear.

Existent things, moments, that genuinely represent otherness from ourselves but without direct exposure, without a being’s inquiry, possible scrutiny, judgment or evaluation.  Interpretation.  Many-sided, borrowed perhaps, but mediated via only one person – me.  I could not fail, fall short, be inadequate to, or otherwise  mess up a novel, poem, composition or film, and if I experienced myself as any of those things – it was my own judgment, assessment.  Mediated.

After years of such exposure, why do I still choose sides, entrench myself in arguments of logic, when I mean to comfort, soften and heal?  Alone, later, I sat and asked myself over and over – IF I have changed, grown, matured in any fashion in my 42 years of life, IF I have learned anything to the point of conscious belief, what might it be? – what  might I say that I know?

I don’t know.

What I scribbled into the margin of my journal was simply that my fundamental belief about the world and life in it was that – at the core of things – “Everything is essentially messy.”  By which I (at least partially) meant (intended) was incomplete, mobile and complex.

Nothing “fixed.”  Staid, finished, whole.

Throughout years of journaling, as I’ve grown to understand how deeply I desire “intimacy” (which I suppose I would describe as “shared personhood” or “met experience”?  Co-events?) I have repeatedly diagramed what seems to me an only possible means between humans:

             Using Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbits to represent whatever we happen to perceive ourselves as, and “Art” on an easel representing anything as a mediated format outside of our “selves” (themselves, I surmise, also likely a constructed medium for experiencing world), to or in which multiple human persons might invest all they experience themselves to be, without necessary personal organism-survival fears, and, possibly, perhaps, occasionally MEET via that medium in toto (or as nearly as possible): experience intimacy, mutuality.  No longer isolated as a being, alone, but finding a common, a sharing-realm, co-perceiving, co-experiencing.

If it be so, that, in fact, as human organisms, all of our entity-type experience is, truly, mediated – through various organizations of mobile and voluble matter and energy – never identifiable as a stasis or final form, if we might begin to see it (us) as such – might we become able to experience direct, person-to-person (experientially) intimacy?  Co-being?  This is where I have turned effort (driven by desire) with my wife, my children.  What if we became safe mediums for one another to experience through?

That would be another entry altogether.

David Foster Wallace – “both a quantum of information AND a vector of meaning”

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing3 Comments

ah how I relish in his mind and language…

Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report

from

Masterful Hejinian on Language

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing6 Comments

“Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.  

We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children.  Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects – balls and rivers.  Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes.  

They discover the words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them – a displacement producing a gap.

Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world.

Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions.

Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition.

This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it – 

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes.

It makes us restless.

As Francis Ponge puts it, ‘Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.’

Instead that center of gravity seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.

Language itself is never in a state of rest.

Its syntax can be as complex as thought.  And the experience of using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active – both intellectually and emotionally.

The ‘rage to know’ is one expression of the restlessness engendered by language.  ‘As long as man keeps hearing words / He’s sure that there’s a meaning somewhere,’ as Mephistopheles points out in Goethe’s Faust…”

–Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry–