new work by my wife and I – her visuals my verbals – hope you’ll check it out! Thank you
Category: Writing
The Cleaving
“Connection is the recognition of the intimacy of a division…
to make a division is to give substance form”
“Therefore shall a person leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto another
and they shall be as one flesh”
Genesis 2:24
The Cleaving
How do we come to know, believe or accept this ancient concept? It has mited its way to the deepest reaches of Being (Dasein): Heidegger’s rift, linguistics address, each individual body’s pulse or breath or tremor. That only the separateness may truly join. Only the differences are recognized as similar. Only the rifts require a bridge.
I do not know. It is a reality I feel with as much pain as hope or joy. That cleaving is both the splitting apart, the splintering wood and severing rope, AND their clinging together, their sealing and sealant. It undoes me. As a metaphor, concept or signification it rings true and carried dark howls and bright screams out of the depths of me.
And yet it comes so naturally. Fight or flight. Attack, retreat. The extremities of the urges to join and drive to cease. In the utterly intimate action of cleaving, we expose and unite – right in the most susceptible, vulnerable, life-threatening places.
The “cutting out,” “cutting off” – to cleave – you know what I’m referring to – when that which is most important to you becomes unreachable. That impression that you are being “given up on,” that someone is “letting go,” even actively removing themselves or casting you away, chopping the cord – the umbilical torn, gushing, pulsing, the infant left writhing and wailing in the dumpster or thorny woods, a closet or dark alley. Cleft.
In truth: that severing of relationship, whether momentary or fatal, is a life-threatening, death-dealing blow. Abandonment. The dawning that you are at the front and there will be no reinforcements, you are cut from the supply train. There is shock, there is scream and then a canyon of void with no other side. It is we at our most disastrous, mortally dependent state.
We in the face of absence. We without response – no face in a mirror, no echo of sound, NO THING. Cleft.
Individual, alone, solitary entity. Facing the reality: we are insufficient to our needs, incompetent to our existence, impossible to self-sustain. We in our fragility. Our valid, appropriate, ontological FEAR.
Whack! In anger, in grief, in silence, in bruise, we are severed, ultimately exposed, whether through small offense or enormous rejection – we have been cut. Past the bone. The reverberations tumble and crumble out far and wide, seemingly ubiquitously, regardless of the specific instant’s severity. This is “the cleaving” done as much to us as by us in our madness to survive, to be real, to be verified and validated.
In the “drawing near,” in the “clinging” of to cleft, on the other hand, we are born. We become. As another reflects or responds to our raw broken mortally wounded finitude and fragility, we get glued to the vitality of these limited lives we have in us. As these fearsome exposures are clasped, bonded, covered by another – transfused and salved, bandaged and wrapped or dressed by another – we know we are possible, we feel we exist and we matter, we join toward world and its being, brief though it is.
These are our chances and capacities: to effect, to mean, to act, create or be. It is in the drawing near that what life there may be is acknowledged, fostered, affirmed. Con-firmed. Cleft – grafted into the ongoing reality of things, parting through wholes, participating and enhancing of semiotic systems. As if life does not really belong to us, but we must belong to it, by belonging with one another.
“Leaving,” “cleaving.” The leaf cleft from its branch will not survive, but cleft or grafted to another stem or soil or root may for awhile yet, live on, grow, produce, change and become.
We continuously leave and cleave to varying extents, and these just may be the principal elements of our thriving. Cleft we perish, shrivel, die away. Cleft we heal, nourish and grow life. Both options/realities occurring in the cuts, the core places, the sources.
Here we panic, here we rejoice. Here we suffer, here we love. Here we become, and here we cease to be.
This mysterious activity necessitates both significations, counter-intuitive though it seem. The need to be cleft exposes the places needing cleft. Awareness of the sources for supply determines the crucial treasure, dependency, and gifts of supply.
We are chopped to the truth of death
and joined to the reality of life
Cleft.
The Bewildered Bewildering (attempts toward clear thinking)
Searching for truth(s)
As one attempts to come nearer to one’s existence as a human – its systems, structures and functions – from mental imaginative realms down to cellular genetic levels – the complexity and confluences involved can be bewildering.
Are bewildering.
It is easy to get one’s self “lost” as a human being. On literally billions of levels we participate in constant (and I mean unceasing) input and output of information, movement, form, energy and so on. It’s more than we can individually handle. Yet we are made to.
In other words, it is we as individual humans – our bodies, our minds and experiences – doing the bewildering we find bewildering. Perhaps this is my first noble truth: consciousness means being aware of and bewildered by our bewilderment.
How to proceed? There are a bewildering amount of possibilities and processes for us bewildered humans to bewilder our way into. We can study, forge purposeful relationships, work, play, think, dream, parent, fight or flee our bewilderment. Opened up, we do not know the options or capabilities, the extent our bewilderment can reach.
Everything is strange. If this were my second noble suggestion, it would imply that with each moment of our existence we are encountering the unknown. We recognize our existence by dissimilarity, non-identity, difference. This makes all things new. We literally have never been where we are in space, time or living at any instant, before. We do not re-live, we are ever living-into. The contents of the past can become part of our structuring and processing, but nothing repeats, everything “enters.” Each no-time now is brand new experience of unknown reality, experienced, imagined, interpreted, perceived and felt by us in incalculable ways through a vortex of communications and processes we have very little control over.
We, the producing products. Perhaps this is noble human notation number 3. What happens in our bewilderment of presentness is that our individuality opened out ubiquitously functions to produce experiences which are products of our experiencing. In other words we are unceasing experimentors producing experiences as our products. It all applies; it all exports. There are no deletions, erasures or extractions – only new experiences, new dissimilar moments of ongoing processing.
There is no exit from this process. Form 4: NO EXIT. Imagined observation, fabricated explanation, hypothetical objectivity, invented theories, meanings, interpretations of sense – none of these removes us from our experiencing or transfers us to any other point-of-view from our individual field. Bewildering in our bewildering surround. Semblances, “insights,” knowledge and so on are just pieces of the ongoing differentiation in bewilderment. How we exist, perhaps not the ant or paramecium or tree cell. But, then again, perhaps so!
If a lion spoke we wouldn’t understand them, Wittgenstein proffered. Another way of saying we’re us, bewildered and bewildering beasts, forging into the unknown. Our access limiting in its unlimitedness (i.e. finitude); systematically mind-blowing and ecstatically depressing in an awe-full or awe-some(?) way.
Be human. Be glad for it. Be wilder.
N Filbert 2012
Fathers Voices
With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach
We would climb the highest dune,
from there to gaze and come down:
the ocean was performing;
we contributed our climb.
Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide.
Standing on such a hill,
what would you tell your child?
That was an absolute vista.
Those waves raced far, and cold.
“How far could you swim, Daddy,
in such a storm?”
“As far as was needed,” I said,
and as I talked, I swam.
see also, Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares
The Howl and The Whisper
Howling is a buried feat
epigenetic
leaking everywhere
Howling is done with the body
in terror
a raging fear
imagine the reddened and purpling frame
a six-month-old baby left
naked on a hardwood floor
arching back
jerking tremors
piercing wail
flailing, throttling, choking at air
it will not stop
it is vulnerable.
Say the father rushes it
say he scoops it into his arms
whispers and cradles
The infant fits in the fathers’ large hands
held close to his cheek
ear-brushed lips
the father coos
infant trembling revolts
feeling its death
the father rocks it gently
kisses its skin
sniffing the child
while the infant howls.
He says “leave it to me. Everything will be alright”
on repeat
says “I know we are vulnerable”
as the shuddering
comes to cease.
Let the infant howl
raise it up
bring it near
hold it close
that is all.
I, an infant’s father.
note:
I have had many incidents of late in which I howl at the dreaded prospect of losing my wife (to others, to distance, to death, to herself). These have come out slantwise: as anger or jealousy, criticism and challenge. It is physiological.
A therapist recently suggested some alternate meanings. When my body convulses in paranoia and terror, what might its messaging be? Might it be saying that something or someone is terribly important to me, as significant as my own life and that I might well feel utterly helpless at that vulnerability? He suggested that my body is indeed feeling real-life threat…and that the left side of my brain whooshes in hoping to rescue (“SuperMeaningMan”) to concoct a story to match, to account for the tremors and heartbeat and anxious breaths. Things like: “I must not be good enough for her. She must be cheating. See how she dresses? See how she is tired when she looks at me? See how she keeps leaving the house?” and so on, or any number of scenarios…
When in possible fact I’m a flailing infant desperate for assurance and comfort, for a tender voice near. Which made a world of sense.
He said: supply it.
This is part of that work.
N Filbert
Baffling Wisdom (really a long roundabout babble aimed towards my wife)
Going back through the writings that have been piling up on, around and near my desk over the past few days working out the hoped-for verbalization of whatever it is that’s been stirring around in my brain I ran across a few more pages that seemed interesting / to the purpose…
“I am looking for words….”
i.e. thinking things through
Noteworthy (not noteworthy – “omniscient observing” – worthy!!)
I continually conclude that these two are up to something unique and astounding in American letters:
and….
i advise you fervently…be aware
Remarking Mark Remarking
Greetings readers. I’ve been in a bit of a swirl or “swarm” of information, activity, relation and language of late, nothing wrong with it really, but its producings have seemed a bit ephemeral, inchoate, more wisps than winds. Yesterday as I sat to work, a new character introduced himself to my scribbling hand…here’s a sort of mock-up or intro to that relation. I’d love to hear what you think? Is he interesting? Are his thoughts? Should he live? 🙂
Thank you SO much, each viewer and reader for taking time out of your lives which must be as busy as the rest of us, to listen and look at my blog and my work. This community has significantly grown my courage.
(please click on title for full text – thanks!)
New Arrivals…New Invaluables
“meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we’d become from the language toxin…
The know-it-alls are always the last to know. Everyone’s a diagnostician, and everyone’s wrong…”
-Ben Marcus-
“As is usual with me I would not go on with the rest of the story and come back to the difficult sentence later. With others it may be different – but when I am that far in a work the story must exist in each word or I cannot go on…”
-Louis Zukofsky-
-Lukas Felzmann-
I know….there’s a LOT of envy fuming out of you readers eyes!
(use your local library!)
All my Words are Silent 