caveat: thrown together quickly! (Friday Fictioneers prompt – www.madisonwoods.wordpress.com)
Against the Day
And what was there to do?
High school now behind us, Frank’s dad dead, and no promise of college, work, or love; we were lost, angry, confused.
We’d all of us read Pynchon, we knew very well what to expect, and it wasn’t good.
And lots of it.
So much burned inside us.
At the city’s River Festival we spotted the blimp.
And somehow we knew.
We just knew.
Now, it begins.
N Filbert 2012
“Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness”
Life is, but a dream
is also life. Like a string of letters fitting an experience is also an experience itself. A person’s body, in other words. Things are inseverable, she said.
I notice it in the colors of the sunset, when I think of it in terms of color rather than it being its own name. Which might also be a word for color, each time.
Saying the word, “you.”
It would seem (abstractedly) to give us much to think about, but that would be on to something else. Which we also name “distraction,” which, of course, is not what that’s about. Dis-traction, abs-traction, con-traction, at-traction = they’re all our traction with the world, with what’s other, defamiliar, including, of course, our selves.
Nothing is recursive but thinking makes it so. “I am talking about paradigms,” he said, instituting one in the speaking.
What it all means. Exactly.
The sunsetting, the dreaming, the thinking, unpatternable patterning, the life. “One should always say living,” they say. Says who?
On what I’m seeking to analyze – synonym (I suspect) – “to digest,” in other words I am performing a series of actions, some bodily progression (process-ion?) here to here to here. Never getting anywhere else, but altering it, all the same.
The “men of action” we all are (without doubt including women and children – historical music of lines, still).
To sleep, perchance to dream; to rise, perchance to wake, the difference being? Differently the same, life is
but a dream is also living was what I’d set out to say with no chance of expressing any one thought without having already moved along, here, living, same different thing.
The unlikelihood of the same (EXACT) dream, or a fitness to a paradigm-dictionary, abstraction of types or categories…its own dreaming action, so to speak.
You follow?
Here, here, do not give up hope of the real, it’s another possibility, though we do not understand it, dreaming it as we do, living. As we do, people of action.
So “Rise up! Awake ye sleepers! Dream on!” it says, on….
N Filbert 2012
Such Great Heights: On Loving
“I wonder at vocalism’s ability to rephrase or reenact meaning and goodness even without the wished-for love. Can a trace become the thing it traces, secure as ever, real as ever – a chosen set of echo-fragments? … The still eye reflects a neutral ‘you’ that is me; and yet secret. Who can hold such mirroring cheap? It’s a vital aspect of marriage and of deep friendship.”
-Susan Howe-
These are things she told me:
She tells me she just needs to be held. Held and heard. And validated. That I understand how she feels, that I empathize. No need to agree with her or her feelings, no need to fix anything. Just pay attention (“be with me” she calls it), say some things back kind of like echoes so she can hear that I’m listening, knows I’ve “got” it, and nod and affirm. Saying things like “I hear how hard that is for you,” or “I can see this makes you angry” and the like. A safe place, a sounding board, a kind of mirroring…a world-the-size-of-arms or bodies in which it’s okay to be in process, to have your stuff, to be inaccurate, and be.
I tell her I just want to be loved for who I am, not what I do or how I perform, whether I make someone feel better or not, whether I’m useful or succeed, get stronger, am sensitive, smart or good-looking. I’m fine with being any of those things, but they will always feel like side-effects or attributes, things taken up from time to time, situation-contextually. I really want to be loved for who I am also, or otherwise, the self I do not know, am unaware of, except that it’s always changing. I’m wanting value as a being, I suppose, that it’s simply good enough, and matters, that I am. That someone would choose that.
She’d like to be appreciated for all of her efforts. All the pains she endures, compromises she makes, limitations she accepts in order to account for me, for my “neuroses” (read “personality”). ‘d like to hear a heartfelt “thank you” now and then for her services and sensitivities, considerations and workings toward dialogue, care and attention. She’d like to be recognized, feel wanted, feel loved and craved and adored.
I’d like to be loved with my spaces and misgivings. From a distance, and the distance loved too – the whole globe of me – my fears, paranoias and worries. My anxious body. Jealous narratives, fantastic brain. As an entity – yes – as a system or sphere, to be chosen, sought out and let be, even celebrated as this odd, unique and difficult human, just like all the others, but different too, in exactly the same ways we all of us are. A curious realm of unknowns and effects. Would like that cloud of debris I refer to as “me” to trigger charges in her, of desire, of respect, of wonder and intimate knowledge. A paradox really. To be known as unknown, loved dissimilarly, absolutely, and so on. Misplaced desires, but there all the same. I ask her to love indeterminacy and confusion.
She asks to be free of her past – not its effects but its definitions. That we encounter it together – our childhoods and children, our spouses and griefs, our risks and our failures, fulfillments and joys – not compared with the present, competitively, but engaged, encouraged, absorbed. That not everything “not-me” be a threat, not her job and its clients, her acquaintances, family and friends, past lovers our journeys, events – that they be welcomed and included as ours now – memories, sources, realities we bring to a NOW. Not as distractions, escapes, private holdings. That we invite each other whole and unprocessed. That we be a process for each. That I be here now with, see her moving toward me, being here, not fragment and dissect her into her pasts and the world.
I tell her I’d like to be ultimate, her be-all, end-all, preference and ideal. Chaos and all, that this mass of me be some divinity-like, awe-inspiring wonder of an incomparable glory she adore and pursue. I want to feel special, holy, set apart, unbelievably brilliant and beautiful – in short, spectacular – in all my grungy messy remedial ways and blundering battles. That it truly stun her how amazing I am all muddied up and crazy, insecure and inconsistent, incompatible and at serious odds with myself – that I be wonderful to her.
She told me she’d like it to be real. To be purposive and true. That we be brave and open, vulnerable and strong. Flexible and protective, guarded and unafraid. That we feel life securely and take great risks, be certain and unsure. That we trust and be trustworthy in every metamorphoses we move through. Tenderly powerful, gently fierce, insistent and forgiving, patiently intense. That we strive for balance, a balance I guess like nuclear fusion – unaccountable energies in a strangely held rest.
I said it all sounds good, sounds like love to me, and impossible. Which is fine as I’ve started as a failure, but heroic, and she’s a god arose from ashes. Hell, she’s died and lived again. We latch on, strap in and unwind. We are here. Here we go. These terrible chasms and such great heights.
These are things I tell myself.
N Filbert 2012
(couldn’t help but think of this – click for tunes)
a new poem I kinda liked…the form just happened and felt right
unable to preserve the poem’s format as a post, i have provided the link here:
thank you
“Anything you can write is already somehow immanent in the language, a baffling fact that has various ways of affecting those who discern it…For if we both of us, reader and writer, command our common language – and if not, why go on? – then we both know, potentially, whatever it can say, and shall neither of us gain anything if I raise my voice…Let us agree to pay attention, then, to some sequences of words which I shall now set down, with my usual respect (which you share)…uses of words which entail ways of being used by words”
-Hugh Kenner, from the foreword to Prepositions, and applicable to both)!
Thank you Wichita Public Library! Thank you Inter-Library Loan!
Blurt
We have to hold still. To take care. To look at each other. To remember what we’ve never quite understood: the value of one another. Which we’ve never really comprehended, nor, finally, are we quite able to.
I suggest the exercise: Pretend-Everything-Depends-On-It, that is, on The Other, i.e. even within yourself. See how far it goes, if it chances to keep you alive, or defends the rights of another, imaginary or not.
Luckily, the always perhaps. Perhaps, to a point. To the point – what is possible – tell me who might be the one deciding that? (or the many?). I’m listening. This is where God lies. The possible. Irreducible without end, fortunately. And how.
Go on then, practice, live, throw yourself into it – see what becomes. At least you will. Forget about it! There’s always until. What has that to do with us? Very little, finally, it’s something we will never experience, we cannot process or reflect upon. So get to it now, then. That’s all I’m saying. Pretend, provoke, prevent and process. There’s nothing to it.
Defend the other with your life.
early experimenting…can’t exactly praise the quality – but our hearts are in it!
Writing: the Apparatus
“one can think of the work (of writing) as a dialogue between the two distinct demands bearing on it (the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible). Or between its two poles (measured form, measureless disintegration) or between the embodiments of these two ‘centers of gravity,’ if you will: reader and writer…two come together in a place where neither can be found…One of them keeps dragging it into the light of day as a completed oeuvre, a realized whole, something that has actually taken form and come to be (read, that is, or, you could say, heard), while the other pulls it back into the dark whence nothing ever springs (but where there is a chance that, coming to pieces, something might come to be written or said)”
– Anne Smock, What is There to Say? –
-the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible-
The tools the writer possesses.
That there must be something to say…that it is impossible to completely say. Finally, definitively, to have done with, saying experience.
What does one make of this? With this? Paradoxical demand, desire, exigency – imperative, self-generating, uncaused and ineffectual, drive?
Our tools: awareness. Attention. Passion. We observe and take note, feel-with, and seek to spell it out (for ourselves, for world).
Our tools: available language, sound, gesture. Entering the woven barrier and thoroughfare of what is shared, common, constitutive, we act, operate, select, arrange, choose, rearrange from this quilted information of the world, our saying of it. Or singing, or stating, shouting or whispering and mumbles.
It seeks into fact. We construct an object, made up of nothing, of airwaves, scratch-marks, designs. Barely effable cues, hints, notions and signs. We begin again with that. With what it fails to say, to communicate or reveal. We tinker with and tamper, excise and expand. Ever the remainder. Inexact invention. Something there, some things not.
We pursue what is not. What fell aside or seeped away. The evaporate. The unknown (here I adore the French: je ne sais quoi – that feeling that one knows it, and knows it so well and so deeply, and yet is unable to say what it is that one knows!).
Endless anticipation, expectation, a lusted desiring…
Endless frustration, falling short or to the side, inevitable (inherent even?) failing, shortcoming, irresolution.
These are the tools of the trade. The writer’s apparatus.
A caveat: from time to time I’ll wager to say we all of us take in some language or sound, vision or world that seems “just,” feels ripe, adequate, full and exact to the perception of our experience. This is wondrous, thrilling, satiating, “ecstatic,” a moment’s completion, wholeness, perhaps.
Yet is it? What does the masterful painting, the pregnant poem, the echoing song or fulfilling experience result toward? Yes, toward, not “in.” Not arrival but generation, bursts of multiplications of words, sounds, sights and movements now invigoratingly fueled and stimulated – fecund to go on…for more…fuller…richer…or even repeat!?
“Such then, would be my task, to respond to…speech that passes my understanding, to respond to it without having really heard it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak…To name the possible, to respond to the impossible. I remember that we had designated in this way the two centers of gravity of all language…Why two to say one thing? – Because the one who says it is always the other…”
– Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation –
Hello dear followers – I can hardly thank you enough for taking time out of your lives to look at, read and engage things I am involved in the making of. Your support and attention is a constant encouragement. THANK YOU! (and thank you for offering and creating your own!)… I wanted to invite you (if you are interested) to visit/follow a couple of other blogsites I also create in/with –
THANKS AGAIN!
Mark Marking Marks
“oh it’s working, it’s magic, each word lifts me up, takes me away from here,
from this nothing; I feel…I am…speak always, Maybegenius.”
Writing as the ‘Talking Cure’
As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, – ?
WHAT IS REAL?
As long as I keep talking to myself, even better the inscribing, using matter somewhat foreign to myself, like this plastic pen, this sheet of paper, this blue ink…I am providing myself with evidence. A humming continuity, a series of marks, a silent sounding breathed into air.
But when unable?
As long as I keep telling myself these stories, Mark thinks, – ? then what – ? why – ?
There is evidence that I am here, he says to himself, marking it down. Marks make Marks, he supposes, I am, at least as far as the reach of this pen, and I stay, at least longer than my thoughts, he thinks.
Mark got tattoo’d. He did so for evidence, a permanence. They said it could not be undone. So he had them spit into his skin the names of those who had changed him, affected. As if to say, to go on and on saying, these, these existed for me, in and on me, these folks made impressions that made impressions on me, therefore I must, yes, it logically follows, here – you can see them can you not – ?, it logically follows that I must exist – to have these names, these titled and organized and permanent woundings of names, of those who existed (it’s attested by many), so it follows, it must, with them pierced in my arms, that I, too…
If it all keeps on talking, these whispering names, the sound of my voice, the terms in my head, and if I work to make it real, as an object, if I chisel or stencil or ink it to the world, then surely it must testify on my behalf – I was here! I am here! I’ve left my Mark! Mark marking Mark – a declare!
Or so he is thinking through his days, through his life or lives, through his odd and self-imposing tormenting sort of fear, of worry.
Am I?
To no effect? he wonders – ?
Mark often fears he’s interchangeable. Or worse. Perhaps another boy would have been a better son, left a fuller name, a more remarkable mark than – ?. Another man a truer spouse and more sensitive or empathetic, more evolved or more mature than his straggly droopy heavy brain of a – ?. A more substantial father with clearer love and direction, firmer hands, readier tears – ?. Mark was aware they were out there. They’d been fellow students, inhabited stories and novels and other people’s lives. Why were his people stuck with the – ?. His nagging mark, so often read right over as innocuously as a comma or period. Weren’t they looking for content not a pause or an absence? A man marked by inquiry?
But if I leave here some trail strewn round my desk, this floor all these cupboards, perhaps at some point they will see I was here! I am! And I was watching and listening, loving and feeling them all. Spending myself and my worries in this strange attempting to trace and to hold, to keep and remember their details, their effects, my responding.
Someday shuffling through or perhaps clearing out, maybe they’ll stop, pause, question and wonder. Who was this man? Where was he? When? How? Why?
What did he do think make say? And perhaps they’ll find these markings. Perhaps they won’t have burned or mouldered away, and all these messaging reports, all these processings and accounts will come to mean, to have significance, these bird-routes of scratches and marks, dashes dots lines, this pouring forth of constructing an identity against with the world…
As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, possibly –
– ? –
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