Category: Writing

Writing: the Blocks

On By Alias HarlequinIn 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 Alias HarlequinIn 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 Alias HarlequinIn WritingLeave a comment

another attempt at ekphrasis with my wife

Writing Prompt

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Writing5 Comments

I have been attempting to take part in Madison Woods organized Friday Fictioneers which has been very enjoyable and a fantastic exercise – particularly to see the many figments of minds operating on a singular prompt – how various persons / how various world!  I came across this sentence standing on its own in the midst of a story by Lynne Tillman recently and it just will not leave my head.  I thought “a picture is worth a thousand words!?” – how about “these words are worth a billion pictures!?”  I’m sharing them here hoping they might also inspire in many of you reams of stories…And I’d love to receive links to the works that you create with/in/from them – any length, any time.  Here’s the sentence:

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

-Lynne Tillman from her story “Phantoms” in This is Not It–

Writing: the Characters

On By Alias HarlequinIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing1 Comment

Writing: the Characters (1)

 

Not beginning from anywhere but here.

Here being where I am looking for a character, a someone, and specific, with a mind, a body, and particular knowledge and actions, whom I might observe and record.  On whom I might test out my language.  Whom I create.

Exercise in perception, then.  To see what I could see, perhaps, if I looked a certain way, at or into a certain person.  What I might hear, and how to say it.  What would be felt and its work of translation.  The smells and the tastes and the histories, for both of us.  Or perhaps even all.  No, that’s too far.

Right here, though, investigating perception, that preform vehicle, formed by our surroundings – imagination – the multiplex of learning structures allowing me to sense, to perceive.  That also, is here.

Imagination and perception – their invention we call world, and a character, a subject/object like my hand I might observe, hold aside of me while attached by nerves and cells, tissues and blood, by life, its embodiment.

Non-abstract abstracted – that conundrum – here.  The truthfulness of experiencing becoming honest lies.  The words, the print of hand, what tells (or who), and how.

Perhaps another thinks this way?  Well, not exactly, but shares concerns with idiomatic nuances?  Perhaps his education (or hers) was difficult, or pleasurably a breeze, they mastered information like a large and thirsty sponge?  Absorbed and were absorbed in such interstitial structures.  Or not.  Not at all.

An uneducated person with adaptive gifts for resonance.  A mimicking trickster riddling what is heard into naïve and complex wisdoms?  That would be fun.

Perhaps another world – country, continent, planet?  Someone observed for years suddenly inserted in a strange context, situation.  How do they behave, react, manage and survive?  I could use myself in a planet of clouds, or the tunnels of worms, what would characterize me?  How would I change?  What might I effect?  If I were made of clay or had a thousand lovers in a desert?

The only edge to possibility is what experience brings.

 

But pretending to begin right now, I see him clear.  There is a woman he is watching he finds beautiful.  When she works he sees the curve of her small breast which he desires.  He is ruddy yet refined, of middling age.  He’d like to court her but fears all pain that can’t be bandaged.  He’s afraid of words and their millions of ropes and anchors.  Reality feels like conflict, for him, a continual coming-against, and adjustment.  Adaptation he experiences as loss.  Of unrealized ideals.  And so he walks, spinning narratives in his head.

 

Here, that possible visitor handmade.  But who?  And how would I know him?  And where was he from?  How was he formed?  Who does he belive?  And so forth…

One way to be here.

One way to press your hand against the wall.

 

 

 

On By Alias HarlequinIn Writing2 Comments

how bout that!

Carolyn Page's avatarABC of Spirit Talk with Carolyn Page

Wichita, Ks, USA   (Listen while you read)  

(Once upon a time there was a town. This town was lonely; it was in need of company. And so, what did this little town do? We shall tell you, dear friends. This little town decided to attract people by way of it’s ordinarily outrages scope of things to do. This it did. It decided to make itself attractive by way of making itself extraordinarily attractive. And, how did it achieve this?

This little town achieved this success by being innovative. It is today a city that is noted for its innovations which have proven, over time, to be so different from its neighbours that it is today a city marked by one or two attractions not seen elsewhere. It is this inventiveness that spurs on the inhabitants to be even more innovative within their own lives.

They can be seen doing…

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A Parable

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

A Parable

Perhaps one day you will ask for something that you want but do not need, or even need but don’t quite understand.  On a lark, let’s say, out of a “why not?” not exactly exasperation nor as fueled as curiosity, almost a simple value, who knows, but perhaps you do.

How will they respond to your free request (a spontaneity without expectation) now having burdened them with options?  You had thought it a gift, an eruption, a “no harm done,” “nothing to lose,” but of course, in the world, there is more.

So your request floats out, on the air, like a streamer, swaying and curving, rippling past the subjects to which it’s addressed.  For some it’s a slap, for others a trial, still others just dodge it and head for silent hills.

You had thought it a good, an offering of joy, a connection and possibility, not something to wind or to bind.  Never something so knotty.  A kind of safe enclosure that’s open, a meadow of sorts, where gentle counterparts might convene when they wanted or needed and whomever appeared could relate.

But in order to appear each required a turn, of attention, of glance, of an ear – to surmise and to meet, to attend.  Bodies incapable of severance.  Could they send an arm, an eye, a knee or other organ, they happily would, provided it would not be missed any elsewhere (their “here”) – and this proved impossible.

One respondent, upon lending a hand, was not able to help his young son tie his shoes.  Another offered her hair only to find herself fired from her workplace.  Each was affected by your generous request while you were left with dismembered parts in your park.

Unintentional, no doubt, you found as well that it was not spare fragments you were needing for your want.  The severed hand grew stiff and cold under your knees; the hair like strands of sand in the night on your chest.  The smells were changing.  The eyes you’d assembled were distracted, neither here nor there the parts were failing.

In an awkward flashing of a dream a teacher’s voice arrived with cliché: “be careful what you wish for.”  You’ve been waking to that for awhile.

The Violation in Art

On By Alias HarlequinIn Art, Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

The Violation in Art

 

The trouble with artists, as I see it, is that they’re always breaking things.  Breaking out, breaking in.

As if their experience of the world (and in my opinion anyone might be an artist at any given time)…well, look at it like this…a human person develops perceptions and accumulates.  Artistry consists in these experiences transmuting, transforming and breaking out in alternate forms.

The world seeps, floods, sifts or bursts its way into the artist’s mechanisms of being, and their processing of said worlding breaks its way out, somewhere, somehow.  Often anywhere, anyhow!

Breaking in to us.

A person combined with their experience breaks out in a form through their hands or their vision, movements or mouth…the artifact then enters our perception, experience, breaking in to our own operations and proceedings…entering us.

Now you’ve a mingling of persons going on via artifact, motion or sound.

If you think about this, it’s threatening.  It’s criminal!  It’s viral.  And it can happen at great distances, even invisible, even in your sleep.  It may appear at first benign, even pleasurable, might mirror some part of ourselves (or so it seems) – because of its careless remove from identity toward object it feels safe and external…but how we take it in!

With anger or lusting or joy.  Voyeuristically, “privately,” or in a well-guarded institution.  Through literature, youtube, mp3s.  In deep thought or with staid attention, and passing glances or air-gathering ears.  No matter, there’s infusion, con-fusion, an intimate entwining going on.

And it is without-which-not on either side: construction/reception, speaker/hearer, writer/reader, dancer/audience.  We all become necessary and involved, creating ubiquitous perpetration.  And no one to accuse once it’s part of our experience, our (perhaps unwitting) invitation.

Like cancer or nutrients, an other-marked entity joins with our own joining to theirs in apprehension, a collusion of worlds and of persons.  An act in which all are responsible: reciprocal engagement of voyeuristic and combinatory intimacy, breaking open, breaking in,

breaking out

breaking through

a delicious and permissive crime.

Paper Dolls: A Dress Series in Paint and Poetry

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an artifact we conjured

Writing: Resonance and Quotation

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Resonance: Reverberations: The Nature of Quotation

 

“Awake O sleeper!…”

(Ephesians 5)

“…life is but a dream”

(children’s rhyme)

“The Tao that can be spoken…”

(Tao te Ching)

“From the way I say your name I always know…”

(???)

“In the beginning was the Word…”

(John 1)

“To be or not to be”

(Hamlet)

“Try again.  Fail again.  Try again.  Fail better.”

(Sam Beckett)

“I went to the word to make it my gesture.  I went, and I am going”

(Edmond Jabes)

            Color stained into fabric woven into rug.  Of a piece, as they say, indistinguishable from the object itself.  So the words flow into us, saturate and stain us, are absorbed and resurface as we ourselves.  Like echoes in the cranium, or instinctual responses of the body.  Resonant reverberations.

“And so it was…” (A.A. Milne?)

“Once upon a time..”  “In the beginning…”

Countless appearances, an abyss of sources, the word lives on.

Who first used “love” or “light”?  “To be” or “not”?  “Hello,” “yes,” “a”?

Our life is quotation, interpretation, paraphrase.

We shelter in a common blanket.

We’re covered with a shared snow.

We drink of one great water.

Languages one to another, stained and woven rug.

N Filbert 2012