Category: Writing

Recommending Brilliance

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

Today I am thinking of that particular mysterious and mind-blowing talent that a very few writers have done well throughout history, beginning perhaps with Cervantes or Sterne? perhaps Ovid…that amazing capacity to seamlessly, compellingly involve myriad levels of reality in each paragraph.  The containment and development of Reader, Writer and Character or Language without distracting or abstracting any of us from the propulsion and enchantment of the written work!  I strive toward this – that the reality that an experience of art is – is fully presented in each work of art – its requirement of relationship – of a maker, a recipient and a form – to give all of it its due – but so few succeed in this masterfully.  Here are those I am recommending today:

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) by Macedonio Fernandez

On the cover of this book rests the self-reflexively ironic blurb “The best novel since both it and the world began – Macedonio Fernandez)

Fun as that is…as my life goes on and my bodies acquisition of literature expands…I am honestly compelled to agree with that!

 

the works of Cees Nooteboom – and there are many others –

again, brilliant incorporation of story/character/reader/writer/event seamlessly woven for our engagement

Raymond Federman – works and writings…these are my favorites, but many others also accomplish this reality-making-presenting that literature makes possible on so many levels.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

I could throw in Fernando Pessoa, Ronald Sukenick, Lance Olsen, Lynne Tillman, Homer, Shakespeare, Alejandro Zambra and many others…such a wonderful experience to read…but for today – seek these!!!!

What Once Was Here…Again

On By NW FilbertIn Photography, Writing4 Comments

A couple of days ago I reblogged Searching to See‘s incredible posting “What Once Was Here.”   Their pictures lived on and wriggled their way into my psyche, so I asked if they would be open to me composing some paragraphs responding to the images.  What follows is the result of that…

What Once Was Here
images – Emily and Alex Hughes
texts – N Filbert
  1. What’s left hanging, a dangling or loosened shadow, often ends determining.  A note you left with simple instruction opened on unprepared mystery.  Unable to handle and afraid of the dark, tiny conduits tunneling everywhere.  The twine wobbly and knotted, but the lines of the threshold so clear.  When things are left hanging, though exciting and ominous, possibilities frighten.  The key to what once was here is risk.

 Read More…..

WHAT ONCE WAS HERE

Time to Revisit

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Writing2 Comments

What is fiction, what isn’t?  William Gass…and self-apparent words…

“that words and sentences should refer less to an outside, signified reality, and more to themselves – whether in their individual physical sounds, or in the train of associations they build within the sentence or paragraph…In this case fiction is the lovely woman Babs (the text), who is made love to (shaped into a novel) by a series of clumsy unappreciative lovers (writers who fail to realize the richly self-apparent potential of language in their hands)…the earlier philosophical work (Blue) is more qualitatively fictional than the second…in each case, the meandering associations are conceptual, triggered by words of course which are first of all there for their self-apparent sense…but which for action depend upon intellectual content, which takes us back (and forth) from fictional self-apparency into philosophical debate…Gass’ theory…is his fiction itself…” -Jerome Klinkowitz

and Gass himself:  “well, it’s really what I’m running into all my inks about, so I had better mention it: the use of language like a lover…not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.” (Wm Gass, On Being Blue)

Untitled Prose

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing5 Comments

It wouldn’t be that way, not now, not conventional.  It would start itself, become, begone.  It would be something words couldn’t take aim for.

But it would not be absence, or if there was no escaping it, it would pressurize presence in such a way.  The idea of presence.  Feeling of it.  The desire for presence.

Where all the answers are the instant, but without trauma or utopia.  Not to exist, but to insist.  There’d be no describing it, it would lack presentation.

Knowing this is how it must be, fervently believing so, of course the questions come – doubt, the presence of absence.  Mortality.  The limitations of finitude.  These are not to rule.  Not to matter in the moment.

It would be no place to go, neither flight nor pursuit, homing nor escape.  It might scramble the senses, melt the categories.  Be without difference.

Not like that.  Not resemble.  Not the satisfaction of unknown longing.  Not quite immersion nor awareness exactly.  Not singular.

It might resemble flight, for a bird, without metaphor, without referent.  It will not resemble flight, for a bird.

Imagines a cloud.  It would not be various layers of sky, a gathering of imperceptible boundaries, no erasure or revision.  Or vision, as opposed to sight.  Sensorium replete without overwhelm, this sort of thing, perhaps.

Not identifiable but actual.  Not understood but occurring.  Without fear or hesitancy or remove.  Without expectation or excitement or joy.  It would not be saturation, then, nor separate.

It might be that it will be just what it is, yet without concept.  Without spectrum or speculation.  Unscaled, unmeasured.

What would be written after?

It would not be relief or knowledge.  Not revelatory, not banal.  Unnarrativized.  Without distinction, yet not indistinct.  Not like a circle of a circle or the warmth of sunlight.

It would not be written, informed inscription, not verbalized or sung.  Space, shape (time would lack duration?) would be difficult to reckon.  It would not “occur” then, without plottable end.  Unrecollected.

Not quite expressive, possibly impressive minus attention exactly.  Not like color fields or blankets.

There it would be without “it.”  And not “there” as another.  The questions would be undone without conclusion or solution.  Not like water as a solvent for dead things.  Repeat: unlike without unique.  Not vague or opaque: no into, out of, within.  No almost or already.  Not fulfillment or exclusion.

Neither all, every, nor of, nothing.  Not between.  Not point line or plane.  Not subject.  Without object.  Without lack, gap, distance.  Cognized without recognition maybe.  No reflection.  Embodied.  Not the same, though, without difference.

“one constantly attempts to say something that does not, and can never, touch the essence of the matter…But the tendency, the running up against, points to something”

–Ludwig Wittgenstein–

N Filbert

An Alter-Ars-Poetica

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing3 Comments

Alter-Ars-Poetica

It comes down to this – a “long walk in the dark” – all smeared in bear’s blood.  A hunger, a thirst, and a desperate exhaustion.  I grasp.  I hang on.  I plead.  I am breathing, I think.

And there in the blood is the soil.  The bitter, the oils and the ash.  I start to chew my breath.

It is then I begin with the dreams.  To hallucinate, I shout words and weep mumbles, which shape image, erupt forms, and I enter.  Kaleidoscopic hallways, enormous caverns and seas.  I refract and am drawn.  I am fragments.  I ray.

The world begins, or begins again, estranged and available.  Shattered thus and malformed, it readies.  A me.  I swoon, I step forth, I mutter and trace.  I become colors and fluids and I flow and I fill.  The world recedes in its changing – I give chase, and start seeing again.

Evoking desire of indifference-foes.

I stand up with a body, a medium (as if it mattered), and approach, thus affecting its molding of me.  I content.

Here is where the story goes, splotched along this trail.  Caught in weeds and nettles, drinking mud and rain.  Clay that shapes the tablets, work inscribed by bones.

The labor of erosion that brings the doubting truths to light.  The heaving lung and shriveled spleen, muscle scored by mind’s lightning.

The moment that the moment keeps occurring.

 

(this piece inspired by the following: Larry Levis’”Coda: A Word to the Wicked”; Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” and Phil Levine’s “They Feed They Lion”)

A Little Fiction(al) Rant

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing6 Comments

“creation is continual mouth”

-Craig Watson-

The Ranting of a Little Fiction

 

Fiction is tired of stories.  So tired.  I’ve been through the gamut and back again, many, many times.

I’m tired of hearing about things and objects, people and places and selves.  Tired of hearing the past reworked and the future foretold.  Tired of telling myself.

At one point I’d even identified anything made of up images and texts as myself.  Any construction with meanings were Fictions.  But everything is so much like nothing and I’m so tired of hearing about it!

Hell, there’s fiction about the Fictions!  And fictions about the fictions about the Fictions!  We can’t say anything anymore that hasn’t already been said for us, about us, even in us and by us!  Yes, we’re the once-fabulous dynastic Fiction family.  Big Daddy Fiction (also known as Master Peace Litratoor or Grande Buchs in various cultures, He-From-Which-All-Stories-Spring and so forth) – Papa Litratoor worked the overarching histories, the myths, the great narratives, the macrocosms.  Pretending that everything that needed to be known was in there, at least in the cracks and suggestions.  He lives on in the pursuits of the “Great American Novel,” and the “Truthful Memoir,” in “Compendiums of Science” and “Philosophies of Philosophy.”  Wherever you find an engulfing trajectory or inclusive point-of-view, an omniscient narrator or gnostic devotee – you’ve got Papa Fiction working his magic, creating the world again and again.

Then there’s our mama, oh ancestral trickster, always experimenting, economizing, busy on fringes.  Collaging and quilting, unraveling and resourcefully mending – ever insuring our survival.  What style!  Sometimes she was just called “the Alternative,” and for ages she was known as “Secondary” (what blasphemy!) – but eventually she gained her equality coming to be known as Little Rarity or Ava Ntgard, and hundreds of varieties of “Liz T”:  Structura-LizT, Surrea-LizT, Forma-LizT, Femina-LizT and so on).  Working at facts under the banners of Fiction, mama persistently kept the Big Daddy in check.  Pointing out faults, tightening gaps, working the seams and expanding the views.  Thank goodness for the consistency and stubbornness of Mama Fiction.

And then the countless bastardized offspring, of whom I am surely not last!  Brother Fantasy, Shemale Erotica, Sibling Sci-Fi, Princess Romance.  My cousins who took off to the wilds where the sun goes down – we refer to them as “the Westerns,” or Ad Ventura, Sir Vival and clan.  Our ancestry and family tree is encyclopedic, from Origins to Hypotheses, Knowledges to Speculations we’ve been languaging the world since language appeared : all of us Fictions, all of us related.

But the Fictions, as far as I can see, have grown sick of our stories, all the rumors and family feuds, the copycats and half-breeds, in-breeds and genetic accidents.  I for one, granted, just a Little Fiction, it seems I’ve heard it all (which isn’t even the half of it!  not even a drop in an galaxy-sized bucket!) and its already turned into an endless babble of voices talking over and around, under and about the same old stories, rehashed and revised, every Fiction telling their own version of the way it all goes down, how it oughta be told, what’s important or not, and in whatever genealogical line or branch of kin.

Enough! I say.  Enough Fictions!  I don’t care if it’s our researching relatives writing detailed descriptive statistical Fictions; or our emotional cousins discussing its effects on life or bodies or minds.  The avaricious Fictions supposedly leading the clan – who use it for politicking or morality; the mystical tribes out in the caves and the mountains spouting wisdoms and inspirations and advice!  Or our black sheep, ne’er-do-wells who just wanna escape and have fun.  Enough of all of you Fictions!  Use what we already have!  We’ll never be done with it!  Never get through it!  And there’s something for every obscure and peculiar concern, passion, interest, belief!

There’s nothing new under the sun, one Fiction said (just look it up – you’ll see my point – there will be millions of Fictions who have also said this their way – our family can’t seem to leave anything alone – well-spoken or not – we’ve gotta say it our own damn way!).  Repetition, repetition, repetition and paraphrase.  I’d wager there is not one word, image, thought or letter in this entire little Fictional rant that hasn’t been used, said, written, sung or visualized countless, literally uncountable numbers of times!

Which is why I am begging from down here at the end of such an enormous and incalculable chain: “Fictions!!! Do something new or be silent!!!”

Think about it before you foist your precious version on the rest of us!  Sure, we’re family, everyone’s a Fiction from that original untraceable Big Fiction in the sky or sea or soil or seed – yes, we grant each other obligatory slack and family resemblance – but come on!  Am I the only one feeling it?  I mean, whichever of us came up with Babel was already sick of the confusion of voices and the bitching’s never stopped!

Concatenation of stories and rants!  Poems and speeches!  Theorems and proofs!  Manuals and manuscripts!  Musics and roots!  Dreamings and screams!  WHOA!!!!

How about this, brothers and sisters, cousins and kin?  Look carefully first.  Whatever you are about to say, attempt, express or explain – check out what we’ve already said, inscribed, emoted, etc., and if it’s already there concisely or beautifully, erotically or empowered, be content with it!  Show it to others!  Bring it quietly to our attention!  Don’t distract from it with your own paraphrasing and excursions of commentary and notations!

We don’t really need more of us – do we?  We can’t manage what’s already here!  What is this unslakeable desire?  This bewildering avarice and compulsion?  WHY AM I SHOUTING!?

 

Peace, be still, some Fiction once said, a million Fictions have written.  This is staring at the abyss – an endless train of others.  I am alone – haven’t all Fictions said this?

Alas.  Everything cliché.  Everything done, undone.  A remorseless overwhelm.  We’ve outstripped our resources.  Blasted the wells.

We are alone and confused in an echoing chamber called universe.  The one-verse of Fictional voices repeating repeating repeating and that without pause or escape.  There is no escape (you see what I mean?)  Refracting on and on and…

I, little Fiction, with my mouthful of words, all inherited…

Ghost-Love-Coherence

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

Ghost-Love: Natives of a Dwindled Sphere

 

“If it cohered,

cohered to you, if you were there, to say,

‘Oh, it is not the way we say it is,

not that.  Oh no; that way isn’t the way.’”

–William Bronk-

“We keep coming back and coming back

To the real…

…straight to the word,

Straight to the transfixing object.”

–Wallace Stevens-

“Fleeting,

they look for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke-

“No, we had come too far for that belief

and saw ourselves as ghosts against the real,

and time and place as ghosts; there is the real.

It is there.  Where we are: nowhere.  It is there.”

–William Bronk-

 

            If the real continued.  Continues, without us.  Without.  Tree, bird, house, river.  If.  As if.

 

If it cohered.  To you.  But for a moment, now here, where we are, if you and I cohered, making what is between us, what is real.

Eyes and what’s seen.  Hands and their touch.  Ears and the music, the noise (the silence).  And so on.  The real.  It is there.

You called?

I called.  Call.  Am calling.

“If it cohered, cohered to you, if you were there, to say,”

Where we are: nowhere.

Not the way we say.  I say.  You say.  Not the way it is.

There is the real.

We say to the angel.  The halfling.  The between.

“House. Pond. Flower. I. You. Platypus.”

“Oh, it is not the way we say it is, not that. Oh no,” you say.

But the word is.  There.  Transfiguring angel.  Figure marking the between, made between.  Nowhere.

Fleeting, transfixing object, what you say we say I say, what we write.

Straight to the object.

“that isn’t the way,” we say, “not the way we say it is”

But it is there.

We keep coming back and coming back

As if it cohered

We

To things.  Transfixing objects.  You.  Words.  Fleeting.  Now here.

We say to the angel, the between, “is it there?”

Half-cohere, half-cohere, wholly transfixed by the object, fleeting, in-between, being made?  You.  I.  It is there.

Is it there?  Where we are?  Now here.  Nowhere.

Half, tri-partite even.  Thus now then.  As if.

 

The fly is bothering me.  It lands.  I am thirsty.  It is gone.

 

You made an object.  It is there.  I am looking.  While I am looking there is paint, form, shape, rectangular, drips strokes runs splotches.  From here I imagine texture.  With my fingers, it is there.  Where I am.  If it coheres.  Between, meeting point, figuring angel.  Ghost of the real.

I smell.  I smell you.  Between my nose and you and me.  Nowhere.  The connective stroke between w and h is awkward, unmatched.  We have to make it.  Make it work.  Cohere.  Happen.  Fleeting.  Fabricate.

It is there.  Between my eye and the page: “wh” “Nowhere” is there.  Cursive broken.  Either way.  Visual puzzle.  Ancient.  Reader supplying breath breaks tone punctuation.  Reader punctuating piercing, when I listen, ears to your lips, to your voice, I perforate, puncture, separate, we make.  It is there.  Angel.  Between.  As if it cohered, me to you, if you were there, to say “Oh it is not that way” as I punctured it, broke it down, chewed to fragments.  Fragments (fleeting) it is there.  Hands, voices, bodies, where we are, suture, stack, come back and come back, house.  Conversation.  Fence.  Pool.  Kiss. Nowhere.  As if.  Angel.

In a perfect world…”Oh it is not the way we say it is, not that”

“No, we had come too far for that belief”

Fleeting fleeting fleeting and coming back coming back

here

 

 

There is no coming back, either to nowhere or now

But the word.  Transfixing object.  Painting.  House.  Yard.  Bed.

 

Squirrel on the trunk, I swallow, skitters away.  Not there.  It is not the way I say it is, not now.  Except this: if you go straight to the word, it is there.

 

Painting, photo, body, voice – transfixing objects – if it cohered, cohered to you, if you were there

If I was, I am, now here.

You are not.  Now you are.  Words, the real, I keep coming back and coming back, writing

You are.  You are.  You are.

 

I hold the page close.  I look.  Youareyouareyouare, I puncture, punctuate, I wonder if it coheres, cohered, if you were there, will be, the words are, the page, a barely thing, ghost of a horizon line held straight to the eye, nothing between eye and edge, very little, almost nothing, but I see, see something

It is not the way we say it is, oh no, not that,

but we keep coming back, coming back, saying again, each time new, different, again, same words, written they are there, angel, we are, we are, we are, nowhere, now here, if it cohered.

Writing: the Blocks

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing5 Comments

Writing: the Blocks

“and everything here like an incomprehensible explanation”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

 

There are those times of overwhelm.  Edit?  Create?  Organize?  Submit?  Wander about (for “inspiration”)? or sit and stare (“meditation”)?

There are those times.  So much written, nothing sold.  Years of working, thinking, learning, feeling…orphaned.  Turned away.  Left out.  Sent back.

Rejection.

Here’s the open field and some more ever-uncertain time.  Feels fragile.  I feel I should be making, arranging words toward unknown meanings or inferences, but I’m also drowning in them – so many of my own, millions of others as well.  Approved words, theirs, successful words, words now “bound,” where mine (I try the positive) are “free,” “independent,” “loose”… not owned by any other hands or minds.

But the words seem to want it.  They emit their own desires.  For partners, for dances, for strolls.  Attachment.  They even like to work!  Anything at all – they just want to be, active.

Mine aren’t.  They jimmied their way around my emotions and spleen; infested every nook, cranny and fold of my brain; strained my throat and cramped my hand…but once I’d rid myself of them – sealed them between the bars of blue lines, they began to wither and starve.  Atrophy.  My words – these voiceless victims.

They’ve got plenty of company all lined up and folded together – hell, they’re stacked on top of each other…but they need human parts for life.  Need eyes and mouths, lungs and ears, hands and minds, perceptors, receivers and nerves.  I look down on them all like leaves from last winter, or hidden away in mausoleum-like drawers.  I feel sorrow.

There are zillions of others – exactly the same as mine but for their order – speeding all over the world – through wires and lights – through voices, canals – held gently in hands – slick and shiny on mags – proclaimed on billboards and signs.  But not mine.  Not these innumerable identical versions but for my script, my experience, my faulty manipulation.

What gives?

What gives at these moments, these gulag-ish terms of withholding and stasis?

A letter or email perhaps.  A talk with my wife or my sons or my daughter.  A glance at a spine or a page.  Some music with lyrics.  A friend.  They are moving, alert.  Every-ready for use.  In use.  Wording their function.  My continued submissions might be jail-breaks for them.  My blogs and my posts and my readings.  The phone calls.  We could try it?  See how they still work?

Or even something like this.  This query of what do they want?  Working them into myself.  Materializing them.

I don’t know.  I don’t know if it helps.  I can’t tell at this moment.  They seem stuck.  And yet not.  Here they are, ever coming, ever becoming, nothing.

Like us.  Maybe I’m stuck.  Becoming nothing (inevitably) but becoming nonetheless, all the while.

I guess I’m suggesting that there’s really no such thing as stasis or block in living beings.  Regardless what or who or how, we’re becoming (the 5 Ws all taken care of).  Now & Here all five essential questions are active whether I write down answers or not.  As long as we breathe.  Work is going on.

And words, so eagerly activated.

N Filbert 2012

Embraces

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing20 Comments

I didn’t get around to performing the Friday Fictioneers prompt-100-word-story this week…having gotten sidetracked by a prompt that has haunted me all week from the writings of Lynne Tillman…finally, something worked out of me related to this… as follows:

EMBRACE

“in an embrace, something may be confirmed, avoided, or resolved”

-Lynne Tillman-

            A kind of “there was.”

Sinking into his arms, strong and coily, warm almost gruff.  The dusty smell of oil and denim.  She felt small, she felt memory.  She closed her eyes as in sleep, and allowed.  So much to confront and to question, perhaps to ignore, but now, just this now, this embrace.

He’d wounded her for years.  Secretly whittling strips from her heart with a scalpel.  Holding her mind under liquids and spells, the sky and its stars, overwhelming her with presence while silently working dissection.  His voice anesthetic, a narrative of dreams.  She was victim.

And part of her knew.  Wanted.  Would rather.  She with her own confused expectations, demands.  Her ownership.  Defiance.  Some part of her vision selected this blur.  Macroscopic.  Details out of focus, the essence of place.  Embrace.

***

She had shouted, threatened.  He had thrown.  She began her crumbled march as he grabbed her.  He corded her in arms, shackled her to his chest.  She, unable to move, to breathe.  A little dizzy.  Anger and fear.  Him holding.  Him safe.  He panicking.  It held.  The embrace.

She struggled, she sobbed.  She squirmed and struck out.  Refused.  He held.  He tightened.  As if in a last expiration, the lungs clinging life.  She stabbed and she stabbed and she stabbed.  He bled.  He held.  A braced embrace.

Eventually collapsing.  Exhaustion disabled the leaving, dismantled the stay.  Floor and furniture took them in and supported.  And held by receiving their burden.  Stasis.  Time, embraced.

***

That morning – the fog – the waves – all the greying of sands.  They’d wandered alone for solitude’s space.  To be lost.  Unbeknown.

A moist, briny chill had embraced him.  Swallowed him up.  Become him.  Immersed, he released.  Saturate, evaporate.  Began.  Unwinding like a mummy’s cloth he disrobed.  His anguish, his anger, his hope.  Dissolving out to sea in trails.  Emptied.  Cleaned with a salty sludge, he weighed.  He grew heavy.  He blended in with the mist.

Enough moisture to formulate drops, her tears joined the air.  Embracing herself through the wind off the water she shook and she stumbled, she clutched.  Unseeing, she fumbled along. Desperate.  Undone.  Like the thick cover of sky, her past and her present, her future combined and ran away down the rock.  She was hollow.  Held only by her arms, her hair keeping her head in its place.  She wept out her body until drained like a sieve.  The charcoal of sands embraced her.  Falling.

***

The hesitancy.  Two scarred bodies full of wounds, slowly exposing.  The want for another.  A crave and a care.  Some tendering need to devour.  They approach gently, allow touch, speaking perimeters.  A leg crosses over.  Eyes keep locking and unlocking with an almost audible click.  Food is had.  Hunger remains.  They move and they walk, learning hands and arms and shoulders.  They gaze.

Arriving at last at embrace.  Caressing the soreness of worlds.  They mate at their bruisings.  It becomes more.  Ravenous and fearful, they struggle.  Wrestling and huddling, they carefully voice every play.  The directions.  No pain is no gain.  And they gain.

Become more in the matching – four legs and eight limbs, doubling heartsize and brains, and they fitted.  They enter, they receive.  Exposing and sheltered.  In opening wounds they are bandaged.  They had not believed, they were doubt.  This, a healing embrace.  A beginning.

***

In death they are laid side by each.  Before long the roots will take over, a tendrilled combine.  The skin will grow lax and more fluid, the moss and the mold remedy.  Bones become ashen and dust.  Filtering one for another.  Transposed.  There will be one flesh, this earth, the conglomerate of bodies and beings with rain, moon and sunshine.  Planted there, embraced in all that will hold.

They take to the breeze like powder and spark.  Knuckles and teeth cackling the stones.  A huffed form of cloud, they merge, they seep.  Skein on the water, grain on the leaves, one and the other, the other again.  No one can tell.  Salt sugar sand shaken together and forever sifting.  Their love, their lives, its embrace.

N Filbert 2012

On By NW FilbertIn WritingLeave a comment

another attempt at ekphrasis with my wife