http://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html
Category: Writing
Writing it out : writing in
Into (and out of) the labyrinth of language
“there can be no fully articulated thought without symbolic embodiment…
language is the very stuff of which ‘ideas’ are made…
to separate thought from its symbolic manifestation would be as futile
as to try separating a mind from its embodiment in a human organism”
-Max Black, The Labyrinth of Language–
“words are part of action and they are equivalents to actions”
-Bronislaw Malinowski-
Sometimes silenced. Pressured in channels. A void creates a vacuum. Fettered speech – often necessary but variant to “open” or “expressive” on a relative continuum. To a purpose. Carrying a message. Responsive. Reducing uncertainty. Extrinsic. Sometimes.
As if a balance of scales. A fluid diagram – flow chart. Internal at the individual end, external at the communicative social. Between are many pages, many possible sounds.
If days go by. When days go by. After days without a feeling of spillage, a “seems” – the experience, for this writer, of unexpurgated, unconventional intrinsic release – that is, writer’s personal experience (a complexity of interactions – organism with environment and others) there ensues a kind of illness, like constipation, like perpetrated violence or censorship, like oppression – that, unless a leakage is allowed, some systemic crack, a private valve – writer risks implosion. (Say – depression, frustration, resentment, anger). Holding a forest beast under the lake.
Slipping out and away, writer beast finds a crevice or hollow, cavern or plain in which, from whence, he or she can reduce uncertainty, verbalizing observations and ideas. As if life is the laboratory that would go unmarked and unnoticed without jotting tallies on a page.
Writing it out – writing in – a labyrinth.
Taking up the ball-point pen, dragging it along the surface of clean paper, is like turning the tap.
Hiss and sputter – tubes finding matter or substance, inciting energy – then flow.
I write about heaven and hell, the monsters here to there. Of inscribing itself, the requirements of entity and imagined self or other. The many, the few, and the plants and the beasts. What air. In the woods and the desert, the mind. The heart with its loves and its rage. Perpetual fears and the virus of mayhem. I write about her and the children, of friendships and evil and time. About death, about life, about learning. In senses, in theories, in words.
It’s not difficult, I’ve just done it. And you have provided the meaning, already. Each term stimulating your “abouts,” descriptions and definitions, the semantics. I craft words your eyes and ears compose commentaries to. Little point to my telling.
Yet some of you read differently, perhaps listening. Maybe wonder the about. How it comes to be, what is signified for me, and why just so?
Creates conversation. Your doctor can doll out the pills you receive and absorb, internalizing into your existent system. Your god may tell you what you should do. Your boss indicates how you should do it and when, friends and family surround you to be.
Not I. I don’t want it to work quite like that. I am spinning no story for you to follow along, no pattern upheld to your measure. Writing it out in the labyrinth of language, I mean for exchange, for a wander – we enter, we leave the deposits we find, discover and fashion with so many hands, so many eyes, ubiquitous ears.
Write it out writing in, in the reading together, again, wending our way trading secrets and gems, co-constructing meanings and moods all to the tunes of language.
I step out of the water and dry.
by Max Black
N Filbert 2012
This has been one of those weeks…children home sick from school, an art show to hang (see here!), school studies, and all the sundries of necessity leaving very little time for nourishing reading and composition. Needed to set aside some time beginning this day.
Reminded of things…
arbitrary views of aging posts on my site somehow meandered me into this…
and I like it!
http://bweal474.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/postmodern-fiction-paper-21.pdf
(I still can’t find that masterful essay “The New Tradition in Fiction” by him I so want to share with all of you)
you can find it in here!
I’m Learning
Within the architecture of participation, she asked for plausible promise. More is different, she said. I was learning a new society. Worlds become foreign in very small missteps. I am learning.
It’s never one-to-one. Each encounter multiplies complexity. Even the same. Identity remains to be found. Only hints and surmisings.
In that look I believed I had found you. I suppose I did, and so many, pronouns always plural.
We disparage our language its labyrinths. Drowning in oceans of context. Each arriving a slipping away.
How else might it be true?
“Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.”
– Lyn Hejinian –
*phrases lifted from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody
Question: What Makes a Masterpiece?
“A masterpiece isn’t a masterpiece until it is well known and has absorbed all the interpretations to which it has given rise, which in turn make it what it is. An unknown masterpiece hasn’t had enough readers, or readings, or interpretations…A work of art isn’t created a masterpiece, it becomes one…the authority, the familiarity and the relevance of a great work of literature: we open it, and it speaks to us of ourselves…naturally every reading affects the book, in the same way as the events we experience effect us…”
–Umberto Eco & Jean-Claude Carriere, This is Not the End of the Book–
Your thoughts…? Any “unknown” masterpieces possible?
Outside This Window
I struggled this week, this picture, and the myriad of life going on…couldn’t seem to find a spark. But in the spirit of Friday Fictioneers, felt I oughta make a go of it. So here it is – and in accord, many thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields for taking up the inspirational, curatorial mantle of keeping our practice alive!
Stomps back, livid grimaced flesh flushed, shouts, more of a gritty scrape of screed: “you never…anyway…I don’t know why I ever…” huffs, seethes, jolting in a kind of place.
Unseen, steely, weight of concrete in its rage, him, silent, back there, unmoving. Something trembles.
Wind too, perhaps occasions of rain, drizzle, precipitation seems likely, somewhere, here, somehow.
She keeps it going, it’s like a flood, like a multi-chambered dart gun, can’t seem to stop, doesn’t want to end. Not silence. Not distance. Disregarding.
Something recedes, perhaps him. Substances exiting every direction. All wearing out.
Everything outside this window.
N Filbert 2012
Holly Suzanne and the Layering of Experience
It is my great pleasure to be composing something for myself regarding my wife’s art in regards to an upcoming showing of hers in Wichita KS (see below for details). I am accustomed to engaging her work with an ekphrastic/participatory sensibility and interaction rather than an observer’s point of view. The pieces below are mixed media encaustic works by Holly Suzanne on 6×6 or 8×8 wood boards.
“First my…forever my…grown in a…garden” of hands, words, expressions, visages and image.
The mind in bloom, the mouth as fruit, our world in our hands, are nothing new.
Underlying love vaguely aware of an end from the stars of night to ground of flesh,
in layers.
I was thinking of text-emotion-change-emotion-text-emotion-change. Of over and again. Begin.
With rarely the perspective to see in, or through, as we are forming and tattering layers simultaneously. Always.
There is something viscous about us, like warm wax.
“Turning away…she saw herself…” But not really. Recollection rearranges, perception also blinds. Assemblers and dissemblers we. Our stories. Growing them even as we prune. Story over story, backwards, forwards, like the strokes of a brush, the trembling of hands, motions of a body at rest. What comes out, in, or through depends on the moment. Each story a backstory with a curious future.
“First my…forever my…” ever-altering “garden,” the world in my hands behind my face. I tinker and trouble, collage and create, rationally embodied in emotion. What shields and separates reveals and connects: our skin, our language(s), our sighs.
Even our names are malleable, oily pools.
Look at, look in, look through. And over again.
Begin.
If near Wichita…you can look for yourself!!:
October 31-November 30, 2012
see more of Holly’s works here: Holly Suzanne: A Gallery of Creative Artistry
and visit her blog! Lifeinrelationtoart
Related: Show Announcement – Mead’s Corner (Combinatory Art in Motion)
Sentence Strokes
About running small. Over a surface made of paint. Exhilerating lostness. It is then I know texture. Arms draped over a streaking swell. Scritches and scumbles underfoot. Are there this many colors in the sea? Splattering like sparrows. Am I getting the picture? I lie down. Cairns and edgings against my back. What seemed soft – crisp and poky as briars. What looked hard and smooth gives like dried glue. I scurry in the trenches left by brush. Spin through dips and curls. A painting is a planet I inhabit. Directed through the paths of subtlest vein. To explore I engage. Guard asks that I step away.
N Filbert
What Happens (with a semblance of truth): A True Story (that is never true)
Many things might have happened, indeed, could have happened. It is impossible to tell until it happens. Whatever happens. And so it goes.
Recollection subjects what happens to interpretation, a puzzling assemblage of memory (embodied brains in changing circumstances) and occurrences (embodied brains in specific situations), making it impossible to tell what happens, when it happens, or after it happened, save from a very particularized attention and intention, point-of-view, disposition and enmeshment (the factors being relatively endless).
And so we call histories, scientific observations, statistical reports, etc. al., “stories;” journalism, research, theories or assays (essays), “fictions;” and personal memoirs, dialogue, descriptions or statements – “fantasy.”
Everything that happens or happened is what might have happened.
Let’s theorize that an author or reader, group or individual, has a concern for “truth” – something being what it seems to be – who or what has total and essential access? The only truth in human expression that I can surmise is that it is truly “made up.”
An individual may have something approximating total and essential access to a thought or feeling, personal experience or idea, but insofar as it actually occurred according to an experiencer, there are already multiple points of view, ranging from molecular to cosmic, matter/energy to cultural. To say nothing of the complicating fabrics incumbent on expression – whether a grimace or a novel, a shriek of pain or a tally mark on a chart – it has entered uncertain and collaborative interpreted ground.
All to say “experience” is utterly specific and solipsistic (non-transferable “truly”) and is an enabled product of embedded participation in significant (if identifiable as an “event” or “occasion,” “moment” or “intuition” – any feeling, sensation or awareness) surroundings, expanding niches of existing things with variant points of view.
This is how I can guarantee that nothing I show you or tell you is “true.”
It may be more or less accurate to my experience or understanding of it (depending also on your experience/understanding of my presentation of it) but it will in no wise be what it is or was, in truth. I assume truth to be as impossible as god. It would require omnipresence, omniscience, boundary less experience (which could not accord with our experience, or a grain of sand, or an ocean) and would be immediately foiled by the omni-ability (omnipotence?) those other necessary qualities would demand. One could not be absolutely enmeshed or identical-with and entirely and completely objectively separate or alien-from at once. At always. That is not a paradox but a contradiction. If imaginable, incommunicable.
So we speak of a “semblance of truth” or a “truth-seeming” quality to account for our realities and desires (our want for security, to grow order in chaos, to know, to choose or act with less fear or uncertainty). Things like our ages, census reports, laws and principles (grammar, mathematics, semantics, processes and methods, etc.) a creepage over toward what we think of as “facts” – majority-mutually-agreed-upon-interpretations/perceptions/hypotheses. These can hold for a long time because they’re held by so many, so widely. But they most assuredly change over time, again, from atomic behaviors to the shape of the earth and its relation to elsewhere, from what constitutes pain to what gets moniker’d “god.”
What counts as fact does so by being open and shared. Semblance of truth comes by corroboration, conversation and multiplying points-of-views and expressions of experience.
Perhaps this is one reason we blog. To try “it” out on everyone, potentially. If our expressions resonate with others, perhaps they have a semblance of truth, or contribute toward creating it. Enough “I know, right?’s” and we’re on our way to a fact. But no amount of data or language, materials or activity makes it so…it rests on agreement and compromise, observation and interaction shared most widely, coagulations of interpretations, accretions of experiencing – fabrication.
Make then, express. Hypothesize and share your experience – we ask for your two-cents worth – we’re accumulating a fund.
final light-writing this week 🙂
closing out the week with these…the crew seems familial to me…working the light
All my Words are Silent 