another attempt at ekphrasis with my wife
another attempt at ekphrasis with my wife
Metaphors of Mind
Metaphors of Mind
I thought about the East like sunrise, or, the bright shadow of sun as it sets on the sea. Opening out, up, growing wider from a perceptive center.
I thought of my own like a spider rushing to complete its web and attachments to structures while the prey already wriggles in its core. Spinning quickly, creating patterns, finding foundations so one might approach, carefully, and engage.
And of the wise, “responding with the submissiveness of a mirror to a completely unthinkable array of things where there’s no space or time” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia). “And which I can’t accept” (he adds immediately afterwords).
My wife like a field of slender grasses made out of senses waving in rain. It touches everywhere and then is guided and drawn into the veins and roots in a natural process.
An ecstatic: the moon hovering above, without details, yet influencing tides.
Fundamentalists jackhammering surfaces to shape; drilling from the riggings a far cylindrical bore.
The verbavore – translating, translating, translating…signs, digits, numbers.
Intuitionists: winds situationally directed by unseen prompts or hidden obstacles.
Perhaps the thing itself – sensual and complex machine – absorbing, recording, repeating and combining – crafting temperaments at the switchboard?
N Filbert 2012
Places
The Essence of Place
“To record the essence of a place, so that it can be inhabited by something outside itself, is to start a story. This means searching for a language, one that we know intuitively but cannot spell out.”
-Lukas Felzmann, Landfall–
“The time has come to talk of whatever we want”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia–
“the work drives beyond promise, craving and time”
-Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions–
Sometimes there were birds there. They passed through in groups, in swoops.
I’ve seen people there too, but not swooping or grouping. It just isn’t that kind of place.
It felt large and open yet cloistered, contained. There were large trees all around and throughout. Somehow it seemed level.
I don’t recall there being water, but I believe it staid nearby. As if it were ready for when it was needed.
I’ve no memory of critters or pets, cycles or frogs. Only birds that might swarm like the leaves filling trees as they swayed.
Oh my, but the blur! The soft focus in apprehending! It rocks and it waves, it flows through you while sitting, I say!
I wonder the eyelids of storms. I leap lying down. I silently sing out the shrieking of birds. I love in this place. As wild or as calm as is needed, a respondent surround.
When I’m here I try to tell you, by searching for words or the making of pictures. That don’t capture.
Have you wandered here before? To the essence of a place?
Please do tell me or show me what’s yours…
N Filbert 2012
Writing Prompt
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
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.
how bout that!
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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An Opinionated Review
Eat. Pray. Love.
On a wonderful jaunt to our public library yesterday, my wife spotted a movie based on a mega-bestselling memoir that she’d been curious to see since its release a couple of years ago. We checked it out and viewed it last night in hopes of a light, relaxing fare to happy us toward slumber.
It was excruciating. My first reaction was – can a person’s biography truly resemble such a cliché’d American self-realization mythology? Basically a woman goes on a journey away from her responsibilities to others to “find” or “heal” herself, in the process (and apparently justifiably since it delivers her to a goal of peace, happiness, pleasure and love with a seasoning of spirituality) wrecking others’ lives and forgiving herself for it, ending in the arms of a handsome foreigner on a tropical island with some standard religious “truths” in tow.
Here are things I realized about myself:
I am suspicious of personal pleasure that causes others pain.
I am oh-so-glad and grateful that I grew up in a reserved Western culture with Continental philosophy and theologies at its roots. I much prefer battling to wisdom and calm through the frenetic and anxiety-ridden vertigo of a convoluted mind ferociously doubting and investigating than through some “be here now” philosophies of higher unities and cosmic accord. Rather interrogate now than “let go” and “let be.” I am attached to the workings of our brains and our languages, pestering perception and scrutinizing sense experience with imaginative and skeptical rationales.
I radically doubt “gurus,” “prayer,” “saviors,” and other spiritual or “wholistic” practices of “balance” that accomplish “goals.” Outcome-based anything feels totalitarian and programmatic and therefore facile to me, as if there were a form or behavior we might fit ourselves to that would lessen the struggle or suffering of “to be.”
The film’s story took a year’s time, replete with life-changing habits of mind and body and some claimed resultant growth. As if wisdom came from Apple or McDonald’s. The past was hardly processed, responsibilities released like thoughts during Zen, and no effort to apologize or repair any damage or hurts the main character had caused those close to her along the way (thank goodness no children were involved!).
It was the time-tested failure of the American Dream: do what you want to get yourself comfortable in your own skin (whatever beliefs, illusions and experiences that might seem to require) and everything will be alright in your world.
I simply don’t buy it. And I won’t. If we are socially constructed realities (and my point-of-view on the cosmos supports this) then final import is not in a self, but in a system. Not toward results but a how of processing. Not a personal calm or pleasantness but a social accord.
The film made me terrifically thankful for scrutiny and doubt, fervent self-questioning in light of surroundings, and the “wisdom of no escape.” It just goes on.
For what it’s worth,
here lies a steaming pile of my opinions.
N Filbert 2012
A Parable
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
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
an artifact we conjured
All my Words are Silent 