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!)
Borrowed, but WOW! BAM! (and I’ll regale you no more!)…
“‘The omniscient observer,’ Dala said continuing for them out of another day, ‘reads from the first word to the last with great care for the spaces between them so they are unframed by enthusiasts or detractors”
-Louis Zukovsky, from Little“
MAY WE ALL READ THIS WAY!
Needing Advice!?I
Greetings WordPressers….
I don’t want to come off unappreciative or paranoid…but the past week or so I have had a marked increase in viewings from one location…like hundreds a day…and posts hit are ranging throughout everything I’ve posted…so either there’s a wonderful reality where someone is actually compelled by all I’ve written and want to work there way through its whole history…or…perhaps things are being copied? Should I be concerned? Should I just rejoice that someone’s finally reading it all? I’d love advice from some of you that have been here awhile and have a multitude of followers/readers?
Thanks so much…
N Filbert
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-
