I continually conclude that these two are up to something unique and astounding in American letters:
and….
i advise you fervently…be aware
Category: Writing
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!)
Thoughts
“No useless chatter, but a word of necessity face to face with itself.
With this word, I have written my books.
Word of sand. Word of eternity.
Thoughts of shipwreck, but also of haven.”
“To approach silence before the silent sign.
To approach the book before the page.
To wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us.”
-Edmond Jabes-
“When a sparrow feels the freezing cold air, he puffs up his feathers and gathers his feet under his body;
he bears the surrounding cold by countering it with his inner warmth.
The writer, who is also warm-blooded, fights even harder”
-Viktor Shklovsky-
“The bow’s harmony arises from the strained stick forced by the bow-string.
Subsequently, harmony resides in unity and contradiction.
It is kinetic energy that’s about to become dynamic energy.”
In Praise of Darkness
“And those of us, never angels, who are verbal, who ‘on this low, relative ground’ write, those of us who lowly imagine that ascending into print is the maximum reality of experiences? May resignation – the virtue to which we must resign ourselves – be with us. It will be our destiny to mold ourselves to syntax, to its treacherous chain of events, to the imprecision, the maybes, the too many emphases, the buts, the hemisphere of lies and of darkness in our speech.”
-Jorge Luis Borges-
Swarm. Absorb. (the words, pt. 2)
Swarm. Absorb.
metaphor: the entire discography of Mark Kozelek (+ Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) / each version of Max Richter’s “Haunted Ocean” on dizzying random repeat – this is the setting: atmosphere. environment. “context.”
metaphor: the Kansas sky in storm
metaphor: dealing with Ache. (“being human”)
metaphor: “Control without Hierarchy” by Deborah M. Gordon…on some page in a book called Swarm by Lucas Felzmann:
“A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something that people don’t know how to do: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer. It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies…Life in all its forms is messy, surprising, and complicated. It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy. We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions. Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs – without any person directing another, or having more power than another. Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in nature.”
think of language.
what is scattered widely or uniquely ubiquitous – call it “swarm.”
“I”…lost.
I know I cannot gather to a grown pillar of I-ness, something you might recognize, could “identify.”
I know I cannot be where I am as long as “time” and “space” function effectively in my frames of reference…
I spread.
I swarm.
“I-swarm”
(the “human” world-situation)
Leaving that aside.
How might one (dependent on two or more in order to, well, in order to simply “be”)
how might that one (singular mark – “/”) handle (manage? survive?) “its” Ache?
“To be or not to be, that IS the question”
(o wise god)
So I split…up…
I canvas the sky, the context, the landscape, the sitz im leben, in fragments.
I approach, engage, invade the world like shot scattered from the anguished burst of a wombgun.
I-particle.
I-swarm.
Absorb.
Seminal-syllable words resound –
– Let their pulse reverberate your bodies like hymns –
God. Void. I. You. Song. Life. Death. Love. Real. Being. (Not).
and so on…
all with no definition…
IS. IT. THIS.
nowhere near
where we mean to be.
Absorb.
Swarm.
In this situation then,
of too much
of grave luck
(all that hope and final destitution)
I swarm. I absorb.
I decenter. I explode.
I desist in pretense
in sense
I spread.
One mark….thousands of pixels….without hierarchy
(a swarm of cells)
(a flock of birds)
(a fish in school)
I swarm.
I absorb.
[ – I love you – ]
-for my wife
This is Water
I found myself in a fairly uncommon (for me) setting this morning, my son was performing a Double Concerto of Bach‘s at a Methodist Church. I happened to be there (reading Larry Levis) on “graduation Sunday,” so the message/sermon/interpretation of texts was geared toward the cultivation of wisdom. As I listened to the suggestions/advice of a “spiritual authority” figure, to our young/privileged/promising…I was struck again by my personal favorite commencement address I’ve ever come across/heard/read and thought given the Spring of things perhaps it was time to push it out toward eyes and ears wherever I could, again.
Here it is…by a personal hero David Foster Wallace… (and therefore in his honor as well)
Some Stellar Instigations
“Multiple incompatible hypotheses are needed to provide an adequate account of any phenomenon – aesthetic, material or psychological… which of course means no explanation at all”
“All literature, highbrow or low, from (at least) the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction…All novels are sequels; influence is bliss”
“You must talk with two tongues, if you do not wish to cause confusion”
“Unknowing does not come before knowing but very long after”
-Edmond Jabes-
“Human speech is made of words that have been created a long time ago; those words are preserved in dictionaries, but poets and writers change”
-Viktor Shklovsky-
“I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.”
-Alan Jacobs-
Ache ( the words, pt. 1)
I think it significant that this post and these thoughts were constructed/composed to Max Richter‘s composition “The Haunted Ocean 4” from his Waltz With Bashir soundtrack. I have been unable to figure out how to load that piece here but so wanted you to be able to listen while you read. I have found “Haunted Ocean 1” which has similar themes, but if you are able to listen to #4 please do!
(our environment writes as much as we do)
Ache
Borges writes “immanence,” Blanchot “infinite” and “void;” Beckett’s “dim” is Jabes’ “absence.”
– Let the attributes ring in your bodies like hymn –
Someone’s “silencio” is another one’s “vague.” Heidegger’s “Dasein,” a collective of “Tao’s.”
Whence this pull toward placed-ness, toward wholes, toward meaning?
What evidence have we that this could ever be the case?
From “birth”? Or “death”? And what might we mean by “life”?
Words.
Language.
“words are not the reality of language: words – by themselves – do not exist”
He illustrates this simply. And might be demonstrated even more concisely, like this:
God. Dieu. יהוה. Allah. and so on…
Or, with Borges:
“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero recorder” (12 words)
“In a place in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall” (14 words)
“En un pueblo manchego cuyo nombre no quiero recorder” (9 words)
“In a Manchegan village whose name I don’t want to recall” (11 words)
or
I love you. Te amo. J’taime. Я тебя люблю etc…
or
I adore, crave, honor, respect, delight, select, prefer…
It isn’t the words, it’s the language. And the language isn’t just words.
Ache.
Torment lies here. Angst, frustration, agitation, anger and want. Fear and inadequacy, limitation and failure, desire and doom.
Ache.
If the words not the thing nor the thing without sign or presentation…for what, for what do we yearn?
Ache.
We seem unable to be HERE, PRESENT, and simultaneously FULLY SO. Some faculty, some capacity slighted. Either intellect suffers to passion, or understanding commands immersive sensation. Ever a split, a just-nigh or just-shy.
Ache.
To long for, to crave covet and burn…
Ache.
My love is absent. I ache, I yearn. But when she returns and is present, I lose the pregnant and consumptive fullness of her absence.
Either way I ache, for more, for all – for comprehensive life.
Called by “I,” “void” or “it.” “Being,” “nirvana” or “love.” “Youth” or “joy” or “wholeness.” “Pleasure” “emptiness” or “thou.” Nothing. or All.
I name it Ache, today, intending by it some constitutive condition or state, a description of “living,”
by which so many meanings are lost,
and I ache.
And so it begins…again…beginning within…
Starting Out
And so it begins, as it so often does, begun long ago.
With the tone of a quest – an inception, a conflict, a cure. Anxieties of disillusionment and fear, inadequacy and doubt, peppering the path. But hopes too, and promise – what seem like successes or substance occur ascend along the way. Perhaps desire with approximations of love, and frustrations translated to passion or anger. Always there is grief and loss, what marks out time, and makes our days memorable. Why we attend at all, the keeping track and transformations, insistent process of our undoing.
For once arrived in the scene, what else is there but the variegated haul to a destined demise? Is it, then, always the “same ol’” fresh story? A posited entity, a series of markings – accruals and deletions – to the closure of cessation? What else might be told? To what purpose?
There are moments, you say, moments of pause or release, elation or tragedy that form knots in the threads. These might be dislocated to some profit, no? At least for the living?
Midstream, and in motion you might trace it, you say, inscribing what’s open, what opens…emergence itself. The clutter that punctuates being – its in-forming and injury?
Perhaps. To guide others along possible pitfalls or options; to preserve instants and subjects; to fuel or to warn. Perhaps. Or simply to dream, to escape the inevitable awhile – what’s wrong with that? That we in the glory and grind take a break, imagined or not, and drift or pursue, engage or elope to some alternate, parallel course?
What is: possible.
All of it is. The values are relative, individuated. Personal. There’s no accounting for taste or of preference to dwell. The matter hardly matters, after all, can be apparently “explained” (see also – epigenetics, chaos, theory and the like). How we journey or survive, become or desist is an isolate concern. Effecting all.
And there’s the rub, this sense of pattern, of system, of interconnectivity. The impression that all might belong. It won’t be long. Insufficient gravity and incommensurate propulsion. And so we move, arrange, derange, seeking for forms like the banks, or directions like currents. We flow. And it begins again, beginning within, as it always does, begun so long ago…
N Filbert
All my Words are Silent 