“We spontaneously obey and follow an inner voice because we know it to be personal.
What would we say if we learned that in descending into ourselves to find our solitary voice we meet an alien one,
the voice of words?”
-Edmond Jabes-
Wonderful World of Texts!
Mystery Text #1: Of Origins and Ends
Many have participated – untranslatable translations and definitions undefined – signals of the ineffable.
Speaking of texts…writings and utterances, organizations of alphabets.
Writingreading, readingwriting – with an existing text – pray tell me the difference?
On the one hand – anyone. On the other – the same.
Between = a text.
Words on a page are a circle.
No origin, no conclusion.
Who writes this? Is it me? Who is “me”? Was it you? Who were “you”?
Who deciphers? Is it me? And when “I” read again – is it the same “me”? Later this evening in the quiet? Saturday at the cafe? In bed while a movie plays? Is it you?
Reading as continual rewriting in the same alphabets, same words and phrases. But the content? Denotation(s)? Connotation(s)? Connections? Disjunctions? Referents? References?
Who leads? What follows? Who follows? What leads?
I venture to commend the signs of the text are the subject, the object we observe and receive, perceive and interpret.
Who authors? And what is authored by that who?
Author following, adapting, borrowing and conceiving the text’s arrangement. Or reader authoring the significations, meanings, referents(-ces) and possibilities of thusly arranged words?
Double absence. Absence of the one constructing the text, absence of the possible recipient. Anyone (or no one) at the origin, no one / anyone at the end. Text(s) of no closure and of ever-questionable intent.
Text as ever-ready presents(-ations), like letters – always between the past, the void of dead, or the future, the empty potential and the unformed future, unknowable recipient.
Remarkable, to me, to be capable of participation in such a vital and energetic, ever-evolving and malleable, yet lifeless matter – able to be as stable as an inscription in marble –
the artifact: word or image, painting, photograph, text: gestures of the dead or the missing, yet constantly enlivened, resurrected with each encounter! This is passing strange! Out of the unknown, toward the unknown and lifeless in-between!
Ever a-rising out of no-more and availing the not-yet: unnecessary necessity of authorial entities – the necessary unnecessary of receipt. The still spinning wheel of lifeless matter on a page… in potentia.
A marvelous mystery to behold
Another opportunity – for collaborative creativity
my spouse/partner etc. posted this this morning and I find it instigative – love to see/hear what comes of it for the rest of you!
http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/10/ekphrastic-opportunities/
Friday Flash Fictioneers attempt
Remembering the wolf and the maid, but never the moon in the trees, not last night.
And what of the whispers? Not those. Where are they? All had been silence. Or noise. Perhaps an enormity turning to absence.
Now mirrored. Must be lying down, in order to see, like this.
Yes, this: bright pupil, diseased sighs, and the webbing aging around.
“But, in fact, the eye sees itself in the above phenomenon merely as it does so in ordinary optical reflexion.
If the visual organ proper really were fire…if vision were the result of light issuing from the eye as from a lantern, why should the eye not have had the power of seeing even in the dark?”
– Aristotle, The Senses –
http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/photo-prompt-for-100-word-flash-fridayfictioneers-29/
The Unknown and Unnamed recalculates and barrels on…
“& knowing from
the look of the others
that a panic has come
into your own eye
to know yourself only
as an instance”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
Am I indeed no/w/here – is this a place to founder?
Are you here too? Now? And what might that mean? (Or is that already to abstract, extract, exit to a changing no/w/here?)
I have my concepts. I have my doubts.
I am unidentifiable, no/w/here.
If you happen to find me (or dis-cover?) would you please point me out? Just a gesture will do.
You can use the simplest sign, that concept, just a dash, a briefest line – “/”.
Or a slapdash curly loop to momentarily contain it all in, all of that malleable nothing with thousands of experiences passing through: .
Loop-the-loop-de-loop go the organs and wires, the pores of the flesh, the nerves and the neurons, the veins and cells…
I am bewildered.
I think I am a concept. (I thought I was a verb).
I get the joke! “I think” – I am a verb.
So runs the conception.
Selah.
The ?/’I’ Barrels On…(the Unknown and Unnamed recalculates)
Empty concept or full flow, he advances (advances?) – he verbs.
Verbalizes.
He acts. The marking concept, the tiny scratch – ‘/’ – goes on, regardless (of my regarding).
No/w/here.
This is IT. (was IT and becomes so again) as ‘/’ act.
This unknown, unnamed subject/object absent presence moves like a filter screen being swished through a tub of air always tagged “IT,” (if this were a game). Is IT?
Beginning from no/w/here and heading there too, and always at once…
it’s downright unsettling! (literally – there is no settling or pause!)
I find (without actually locating a thing, even a speck or a fragment, not “conceived”) I am always no/w/here, and that no-place is always (ALWAYS) changing, moving, different(ly).
Unknown(-able?) Unnamed(-able?) Unlocated(-able?)
Homo Scribus (homo-anything!) – person-as-verb – erases as it writes, deletes as it constructs, falsifies as it truths, acts in its passivity,
ever equaling the equation at zero!
(no/w/here)
I’ve gotta steer clear of math, of physics…I don’t compute!
“Some Blind Alleys: A Letter”
Should you have the time…and it requires a bit…I would love to hear responses to the following essay by E.M. Cioran from all you interesting minds I observe! Thanks –
-E.M. Cioran-
The Unknown and Unnamed regains composure
The Unknown and Unnamed: the Conception
A few days naked and I’ve bewildered myself.
I was never good at math.
But I do love the rain (absorption, immersion, ambiguity).
There’s no accounting for taste.
I think I am a concept.
“a concept is a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distinct experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more”
What’s in a name?
“the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and the validity of a concept consists in the impossibility of reducing the content…to unity, without the introduction of it…the conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content.”
I ran into a sign.
I was flooded, I saw and I seemed, I heard and replied, have been undone in my doing… I’m a roving mark, like a vessel constantly being filled and emptied, at once.
I can’t perceive without a concept, why not the simplest one – a single mark, a dash, say “/”?
/ fear it “plainly has no content.”
/’m confused.
“I am what surrounds me”
Advancing “empty,” a flesh-coated collection of organs replete with a coding of operational signs (we’ll call them ‘language’), I foundered. Considering no one in pursuit of no/w/here, I became wherever that was (is?).
“This conception of the present in general, or IT in general…is before any comparison or discrimination can be made between – what is present – must have been recognized as such, as IT without parts abstracted and attributed to it…”
-C.S. Peirce-
No/w/here – nothing – no one: “embracing thousands of distinct experiences (while attributable or identical to none of them) and ready to take in thousands more.” ALWAYS.
Every/w/here, everything, every/one: I conceptualize a concept, a mark to attribute an infinity of experiences toward : “/”.
Names changing by the millisecond.
A concept without content, or all conceivable content.
A baffle, a paradox, distinct and unidentifiable (in essence).
Here “/” come! (the unknown and unnamed) possibly sporting any knowledge, any name – perhaps heading your way even now! Beware! It’s conceivable, whether intended or not, that all of us are empty concepts, flooded concepts, without content, and all of us heading no/w/here at once!
“Here is where one seems to be”
“The place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now”
“’I’ can only be identified by the instance of speech which contains it, and by that alone”
(to read all the Unknown/Unnamed writings thusfar accumulated
visit my Experimenctes pages! Thanks)
New Ekphrastic Works from myself and Holly Suzanne!
New verbal/visual work from our studio at home!
It rains…complicating equations, understand? (for the Unknown Unnamed)
[please bear with these ramblings…they are taking shape…and each stumbling advance leads…i promise…:)]
Standing in rain. Under rain. Understand.
Unknown, unnamed, still wet. Still cleansed. Garnering names…
One. Other. Wet one. Lost one. Un-one. More.
Hearing one. The replier. Seeing one, seems, seams, semes.
No/w/here: under rain, understanding some thing(s).
The wet can flood and drown, or cleanse and caress.
Can surround, come down, or buoy and uphold.
Understanding rain.
One water-name, countless individuals.
Unknown infinity, possibly.
Unnamed – an incalculable number of names – possibly.
The Writing One and the One Who Reads. The One-Standing-Under-Rain and The One Rain Falls Upon.
The One Reaching the Other and The Other Receiving One. A One Necessary Other for joinder and boundary, their rift and cleft, the possibilities.
If “to understand” counts as knowledge, he is many-known and many-named as he engages, encounters no/w/here.
[if w always presents we]
so that without w there is no-here and no now.
N/amed
O/ther
W/e
+/= here. now here. how here. now here.
He realizes this direction is constantly unknown, even at its end. If he can know it is raining, he cannot know how many. And whenever it ceases, the water will be elsewhere, other-wise.
The Thinking One. Confused Other.
He is unable to inscribe or translate even a fraction of his names in a single no/w/here…which are not singular, ever.
Names rain when he looks, listens, feels. Attends.
Ecstatic One. Diluted Other. Watery One. Solid Other.
Who?
Unknown and unnamed begins to understand, standing under (and in) no/w/here’s rain.
Muchly known, muchly named, ennui…
in-we
he goes on…
standing under rain,
in the middle of,
no/w/here.
An Ekphrastic Exploration of Two
Attempting to get our new collaborative site at wordpress off the ground! Bear with us and enjoy as we build! Thanks
All my Words are Silent 