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

Writing Rejections (on the rejection of several more submissions)

Self-Soothing

 

The drudgery of dawning – sometimes so elegant and enlightening, sometimes belabored and torturous impatience – always the heavy friction of waves.  Of particles as they place and displace in their constant rearrangement, the permanent battle of hope and resignation.  Rising up, coming down.

How I write about disappointments – the very act of writing an urgent inking of the sky, even while it fades or darkens, glares or washes out.

Of rejections – their steady dismissal, the missed sunrise/sunset – a glory of chance forever undone.  Overlooked.  “Wrong place at the wrong time.”

In other words, again.  That waves and particles eons-old rumble and bumble about around and against one another, often contrary impulses and contents dislodging, jockeying, a kind of dance seen from extremely close or far enough away, making out of blue or black a purpled-grey tinged greenish pink and orange; or a bleeding scrape of burgundy’d magenta replete with yellowing sears.

Straining can produce glorious things.

The continuous waffling betwixt bright and ominous, stars glittering through their winky charms, or a saturate void.  White dreaming pale translucence or deeper colors leaking through.  It never stops, the gradients without lines.  So I continue in the way that I flow, waves and particles of me assembling/reassembling and what results is what the friction sparks – disappointments and the hope to write them out.

“Round, round, round, round, ‘I’ gets around”

Upside-down twisted i

Paring down the Signals

(please click on title for text!)

one of my favoritest writers ever… and i say this one is beautiful and rich

severnspoon's avatarSpoondeep

      Born a skipping stone 

        pray tell 
                  you sing 
           
    what promise? 
                  series of hours 

the stirring gift 
                  again recall 

   think to study 

                  endure 
        the press 
corroded 
         slivered 
                  - 
               a 
          burn 
               chart of 
     this life 

               call 
           day 

               greet year 

          your 
               tongue 

    a kindness 
               over strawberries 
 wishing me 42 
               more 
   a story for 
               each 
                    worth a year 

               let 
     new songs 
               emerge 
from that wish 


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Manifold Instants of “I”

If you happen to have curiosity around the function and latitude of the letter “I” in the human realms (as “I” certainly do)…here is a book that delightfully provides an invigorating wealth of instants and instances to consider…

Vanishing Point by Ander Monson

and I recommend it to all levels of readers…highly

The following stories…

Lifewordthread

“Life evolves in a thread of knots that get more and more tangled.

The narrative segments are intentionally dislocated and rearranged,

so the knots become the characters, as it were.”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

            The impression like a manual typewriter’s arm – thunk! – left in either hemisphere… (they say)

begins knotting and tangling

as additional – thwap! – embossings are left.

“Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous”

-George Oppen-

 

The following story.

 

Not that the answers were handled judiciously (judgmentally?) or even weighed or considered.

No answers given to evaluate or direct…

The question(s) already condemned.

Thwak!

“Shouldn’t be –“  “Too young – “ “Can’t handle – “

“STOP ASKING!!”

-(Pastor. Parent. Teacher. Friend.)-

But not books, not texts, not words…

…these welcomed them…

…welcomed me

Words seem to love being dislocated and rearranged and then marked into question.

In fact, for the reader, each word of a sentence or phrase, exposed on a page, seems to wonder itself!

As if language were a query.  Inquiry.

Something to begin with.

 

The following story.

Aged 12.

“Your reasoning’s wrong” (some voice, any voice, whap!, it stuck)

Awry.  Twisted.  Disfigured.  Maimed.

“That’s not the right question…ought not be questioned at all…!”

“Thus saith the Lord (a.k.a. the “Word”)

(to which I added my mark – “?” :

– is it the Word?  What Word? and Whose? let alone How?

and ever the too many “Whys?”

(those have quieted now)

But I devoted myself to fashioning questions,

so that even descriptions or

statements of fact…question themselves

as if essential, inherent to this medium,

of its nature

Smack! –

?

Decompression Addendum: Redefining Terminologies: Finding Words

“The variety of words is another error…I believe words must be conquered, lived, and that the apparent publicity they receive from the dictionary is a falsehood…I now recognize among the thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

Rudiments: Places of Operation

Redefining Core Existence Terminology

 

Family: those with whom one “belongs,” chosen and not, like it or not, one’s “tribe” – born into and/or evolved and developed.

Home:  states of being or locations, settings in which one IS.  Settings in which one is freest to be.

Love:    shared and mutual, reciprocal regard, respect, desire and preference.  Those with whom one thrives and incites the thriving of.  Intention and attention ( a relation between not inhering in beings)

Friendship:  unmitigated affirmation, reciprocal and intentional.  Native complementarity of being.

World:  internal and external context at any given moment

Self:  whom one is or shows up as in one’s world – at any given moment: individual weave or presentation in circumstantial contexts and settings.

Language:  whatever serves as communique betwixt individual and others and world (internal/ external)

I:  utterer of language, behaver of behaviors, actor of actions, feeler of feelings – as regards the “self”

Other:  any and all beings not the self-regarding individual

Vocation:  that which one IS and DOES; self-perpetuating passion – that which drives and rewards, fulfills and seduces, nourishes and excites desire for an individual…one’s propulsion, desire and satisfaction in being.

Leisure:  rest, reprieve, de-stressification

Fun/Play:  light enjoyment, carbonated experience

Sex:  whole-cloth woven world of contexts of one or more individuals

Art:  combinatory effect of an individual’s self, world, vocation and play; any “otherwise-not” creation of a living being’s given and concocted whole

Thought:  a self’s languaging of “world”

Habits:  automatic or instinctual activities of an individual, supposedly self-soothing or self-managing

Perception:  individual sifting of “world” and “self” (see also: interpretation)

Reading:  engaging the language of others or world or self-as-other

Intepretation:  an individual or group of individual’s “spin” on “universe”

Universe:  arbitrary boundary comprehending all that can be perceived/conceived by an individual or group at a given moment

Conception:  consideration and invention of possibilities of “universe”

Writing:  an effort to live, to exist

Decompression: A Process

it goes on…this emptying search…

(Re)Assesments

 

At something of a loss, what feels like a “crossroads” except that perhaps nothing in existence is really either / or.

That was not a sentence.

Bewildered without anxiety, I approach a sort of noisy blank.  A surfeited absence.

I have the amorphous sensation of being entirely undone and woven up as a satchel of my everything.  Every instance of myself threads the material of an empty knapsack that is me, dangling from a stick over the shoulder of the world I inhabit.

That the bag, indeed, is empty.  No objects or trinkets in that wee darkness to finger or grasp, no spirits to set free, emotions to unstopper.  Nothing within to escape, not even air.

My entirety fabricated as an emptied bag.

 

All I’ve ever written, attempted, every action, thought, adventure or relation.  All my labors, abilities, acquisitions, emotions and dreams; every word or intuition, fear or blatant risk, all ongoing consequence(s)…EVERYTHING – internal, external; past-present-future: is the skin of a being, the form and the boundary, the grafted substance of an absent individuality.

 

I experience this neither as a blockage, nor an impasse; no meaninglessness, purposelessness or ennui – simply a vague, obvious experience that all I am as a being is my interface with the world within and around me, idenitifiable without essence.

Responsible, shaped, recognizable and devoid of identity – no narrative or plot, character or definitive name, just an inextricably meshed passel of experiences forming a pliable veneer around a vacant hollow.

That all will carry on, as such, until its end.  Experience upon experience, before experience, during and after experiences and experiments – weaving, threading, joining…this being-form, this walking thinking speaking shape, this perceptive living husk or porous shell, a wave and trajectory of experiencings.

To feign a purpose, an intention or choicy action as this reality requires some arbitrary groundwork – hypotheses and rudimentary organizational operations.  What might this handbag proffer?  Or emit?  What song might be huffed from this void?

 

This is where I seem to be.  Evaluate.  Assess.  No pillars, few givens, a smattering of beliefs and bones and hunches, a median vocabulary of gestures.  From this – what pretend to build?  What fabricate?  I find that I want to, have desire to, create.  Make out of what is woven – everything that forms me / allows me to be – but in what manner?  Open.  Free.

 

As if the absence is realized, the content in-formed, substance resulting from wafting motions and play.  Capacity for invention.  Something like soap bubbles – materials forming a translucent and wobbly funhouse mirror of shapes…leaking…nothing!  Yet capable of popping fragments like droplets or spittle, or words.

 

This seems to be where I am.  I know not what might emerge, but I’d like to leave some trace of the fabric experience has made of me.  Scraps or ephemeral stains, artifacts.

 

Ekphrastic Poem: Apparition: the Artist

new ekphrastic attempt with Holly Suzanne at Combinatory Art in Motion:

http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/15/ekphrastic-poem/

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ex nihilo…to begin (crisis / catharsis)

“So the books are waiting.  Of this you may be confident:  they’ll be ready when the whim strikes you.”

-Alan Jacobs-