an artifact we conjured
Paper Dolls: A Dress Series in Paint and Poetry
an artifact we conjured
Another Pause, Another Someday
“Words give clothing to hide our nakedness”
“But a word is a bottomless pit”
And then it arrives, unexpectedly, another gap. She sees a magician in bright jester’s garb, seated on a branch in a tree. Amid the traffic. Amid a swarm of bees, of thrumming crows and starlings. A bat lies in labored breathing on the sidewalk.
Lightning- and Lady- bugs.
Like that, like both.
There is no goal to it in the beginning. At first. The seconds’ glow catches you off guard. “What was that?” neon spot moving in the night. Imperceptible polka-dotted red creeping carefully over your toe. Structures pause. Structures moment. When realized, when you bring your own accident: awareness.
What pressures turns out to be necessity. Of deadline, of assignment, of transactional fulfillment – relationship or vocation, even health. Without apparent choice. Or ever so long ago. Why markings called parentheses are shields. What gives pause. And stays the pressuring. For the moment.
An extended kiss.
A lapse in volume.
An ignored alarm.
You find yourself there : (YOU).
The rest of the world lining up, encroaching, exerting itself, themselves, your other selves, against the slender boundaries, the slick curving walls – they can’t be climbed, nor be toppled, only inverted )if you accept the pressures(, or erased as if they’d never happened. Become brackets. Prison versus asylum (in its native safety-seeking sense).
(YOU)? )YOU(? [YOU]? ]YOU[?
Now and then. Another pause. Another Sabbath. A so-called rest. Time is not the issue (as duration). Time is at issue in its momentary absence. Glancing the lightning-bug, bird-call, ladybug feeling out the stem.
“Another pause” with pressures all around. Expectations or chores. But no one calling, not this now. Last week too, unexpected, unprepared, cage door left awry, or finding key in hand. Parentheses. And then you sleep that active way we call “rest.” For a moment. You make, for the joy of making, or not. Either way is pleasure. Or pleasant at the most.
Such as now, another pause, this day, another Someday that arrived.
Sunday Sustenance
conversations with my wife (www.lifeinrelationtoart.wordpress.com & www.ekphrastixarts.com)
and all accompanied by:
Sigur Ros’ relatively new “Valtari” album
hope your day is great!
THANK YOU AND AWARDS FOR ALL – it’s long, but please read – it’s directed at YOU!
Acknowledgement and Re-cognition
Lately there’s been a rash of occasions in which I’ve been requested to tell things about myself (my wife would immediately note the choice of nouns as descriptor and tack on “well, that’s one way to look at it” i.e. as irritant, possible disease, discomfort – a “rash”).
I’ve noticed that discomfort. Say I’m elated to have a poem accepted somewhere, or receive these lovely and encouraging blogging awards in WordPress, each joy arriving along with these little nettles: “please provide two paragraphs of biography,” or “tell us about yourself,” “list seven things about yourself your readers probably don’t know” and so on.
And I desire to tackle it all poetically, as fiction, an invention (which perhaps I think it actually is : “self-perspective” blah blah blah)…
…and yet…
Why are we writing or sharing recipes or art in the first place? What is that urge?
To express, perhaps – we feel aburst with something and want relief, to press it out…into where? why viewable? readable? hearable? physical? For whom?
For ourselves, we might say, some more objective, ab-stracted processing of what goes on in us as we struggle to live? Okay. But, again, why do we share it? Click the keys and hit “send” or “publish” or “post”? Why not leave it all on our desks, in our journals, our notebooks, as undeveloped film and private files?
Maybe we write to discover, to create, pass along information, simply verbalize…I agree. But also – why not just read? We’ll never compass it all, even without adding another jot or image. And if we’re paraphrasing experience as an exercise in knowing – echo – why share it? Why book? Why picture? Why avail?
My guess is that, whether I like it or not (about myself, about being a social human critter, about existing) we all of us make/use signs, marks and gestures in order to engage. In fact we must and we need to. To acknowledge and be acknowledged; to process and join the process; to have our being validated, even to ourselves, which still requires another.
I find that many of the blogs and their creators I have come so much to value are likewise reticent, withdrawn, coiled in a very unique, particular and special veil of language and machinery, cybernetic cyberspace…a safety of at least felt and imagined control over what re-presents us in our world, an edited voice, or bodiless pattern of thought. Where we feel some level of risk-management and damage-control.
My wife was recently bullied in a small claims court case. Last year one of my children was bullied on a walk home from school. In both cases, I was enraged. Almost uncontrollably vehement at what I perceived as injustice, depersonalization, predatory victimization, intimidation and abuse of power (etc.) I quickly activate into activist, I do things, strike back, strike out, and defend. As she talked me down through this recent event, my beloved spouse asked me what it might feel like to come to my own defense in that way? To be incensed at being ignored as a person, a voice, a being? To say “no, you don’t get to do that to me” as if I were just as valuable as her, as our children?
WHAM.
I could hardly imagine such a scenario. My instincts have defended me in fright or danger. I’ve escaped, avoided or saved myself in andrenalin-rushed bravado or terror, but never really exhibited courage for myself, or because of my personally estimated worth. Billions of graves, agnosticism, “life-happens-and-then-you-die” awareness along with saturations of accounts of wars and their rumors, poverty, destitution, abuse, genocide and all the etceteras have left me pretty humble around complaint, as if “first-world problems” didn’t count as “problems,” after all.
I haven’t figured all that out, but I’m willing to say that in whatever world, we all of us actually matter, and would do well to respect ourselves at least as much as we must all these others we care about, visit or “like,” protect or take the time to read.
I may never know any of you in a fully personal way, that is, embodied and face-to-face or voice-to-voice, but I am learning that whatever we do is personal, for the simple fact that we are persons doing whatever however whyever whenever we do.
So thank you – EVERYONE. Whether you’re disguised behind an invented gravatar, code-name or handle, some fictional aspect of yourselves – it doesn’t matter – I believe it’s originating with a person, that’s important to me, and so are you. Thank you each for whatever it is you provide to this vast and wriggling system of signs.
A “Person Award” to you all – as in recognition, not as bestowal.
THANK YOU
Writing: Resonance and Quotation
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
Solidarity
a little something of our shared work…came to me as I stepped into her office and saw the work on a table…and thought – why haven’t we ever written on that?
Writing: the Margins
Writing: the Margins
“All words run along the margins of their secrets”
– Susan Howe –
Now we are getting somewhere. Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told. If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.” If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…
there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets? Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.
That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets. I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.
And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.
Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.
So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating. That is, it is possible. Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?
If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.
Therefore
“it is not infinite. Even infinite is a term”
-Louis Zukofsky-
by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.
Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.
Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.
Perhaps and possibly.
N Filbert 2012
Friday Fictioneers – June 8, 2012
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
Life is, but a dream
“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
