I see nothing

On By N FilbertIn being, Confusion, desire, Experimenctes, Language, meaning, Nothing, Perception, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

“The sky would have to be inside me for my words to have the brilliance of stars”

– Edmond Jabes, “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book”

“Dasein means: being held out into the nothing”

– Peter Sloterdijk, “The Art of Philosophy”

“Even when nothing / replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing”

– Jack Gilbert, “Collected Poems”

I was driving in the dust of this planet while wondering how I knew the sky was not inside me.

After all, there are theories.

But my words do not have “the brilliance of stars.”

–

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber concocted The Enigma of Reason… and I want to say …of Reasons.

–

For after all.

After all (i.e. “in the beginning”), where we set out from seems to be an enigma of reasons.  The proffering of theories (the art? of fabricating reasons?).  The urgency to describe or define, explicate or explain, ‘make sense’ of things like her glance, or my illness; the weather, or wear (time), something felt or imagined, desired.  Each engendering theories.

–

We call that engendering the imagination.  Using language and sensing, others and other, an-experience-in-the-world to … give reasons.  And why?

There are theories.

–

No bottom.

Haven’t we begun everywhere?  With urges and instincts, desire and relation, observation and interpretation, and so on… and yet it’s only ever ‘mine’ or ‘ours,’ – a giving of reasons and investigation that is human – no, not quite.  Not even that.

–

We incorporate ‘earth’ in it.  And many things nobody owns or created.  Language and sense, and earthy-othery tools: microscopes, telescopes, instruments, numerals, metals and plastics and paper.  Electricities.  Motion.

–

Anything to wrap ourselves in and around… and give reasons.

–

That experiencing: when one aches for a knot or a kernel, a key or a gem.

Mine might be the Texts for Nothing.  A nothing I never can reach (and I knew it).  Don’t we all begin once we discover we can’t?  After it’s all already begun?  In the midst of?

Why why?

–

Mystic-scientists propose an only-what.  Eschew reasons.  The lock of the rational derive.  Sense or no, this is what we observe in conditions.  Phenomenology.  The human (“observer”) limited experiencing.  Only that.  Being-there.

But the tekne collaborates and alters.  There never is only.

–

Reportage.  Disinterested.  Impersonal.  Facts and accuracies.

–

A reason:

I pursue nothing because I know I can’t find it.  Will not find it until I am not.

Even then?

So I err at desire.

Like a theory.

–

A digression.  Transgression.  Omission-emission.

–

A longing for order?  For sense transcribed into reason?  For nothing to give rise to all and these everythings to foment continuing?

But we know don’t we?  Deeper down, without bottom?  Don’t we know we’re a tiniest book?  Carried in the arm of a world-without-end?  Of further reaches?

No, we don’t.

–

We don’t know.  We make ‘knowing’ or ‘knowledge’ – a description – a typification (a logic, a rationality, i.e. a reason, a theory).  Floating in infinite perhaps.

–

They say we share common elements we’ve devised observationally.  So the sky might be inside of me.  But words aren’t stars, are they?  Theories.  Experience.  Ours.

–

We’ve come to experience not-knowing as a kind of ‘humility’, ‘valor’, and ‘honesty.’  But why?  We don’t know.  If that’s so, we can’t know we don’t know.  And life is a loop of inquiry, perception… that leads to the giving of reasons and the making of sense.  Beginning ourselves from began.

–

Things ‘ring true,’ resonate, and we follow… on… seeking reasons, making sense (where there is none?).

Posit ‘God.’  Posit ‘Method.’ And we’re caught in the crevice of crafting for reasons.

–

“Even when nothing / replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing.”

My Correspondence with Nothing

On By N FilbertIn absence, creative writing, Current Reading, desire, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, Literary References, loneliness, longing, Loss, love, notebooks, Writing2 Comments

Displaying FullSizeRender.jpg

he who already knows cannot go beyond a known horizon

– Georges Bataille, Inner Experience – 

In a bout of acute loneliness (a sharp pang of alone signifying a sort of paralysis – some definite inability, however temporary, to start oneself up by or with oneself) I reached out to Hannah.

For some of you, the term Hannah will conjure connotations and resonances, perhaps emotions or concerns, discomforts, even though she does not exist.

Or I loaded the film Satantango by Bela Tarr & Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

A start-up, a stimulus, a searching.

Actually I wrote the name Hannah, or Hollie or Holly or Hallie or Halley or Bela or Chris or Maurice Blanchot.

Perhaps Kafka.

To be lonely and to reach out.

A drink then, for interaction.

A scribble on a page.

A smoke for an ‘other.’

Some music.

I read Beckett.

The cat.

Maria.  Edie.  Sarago.  Marcuse.

To become.  To be.  To begin.

As if I knew.

In a bout of acute loneliness I penned a letter to Herman Melville.

I wrote words onto a lined page.

I made an ‘other’ and called her, Hannah.

Or Meagan or Meghann, Angie or Angela or Angelo.  Gilles or Jill.  Jean and Jan and Jen.

I reach out.  I almost full fill.  Another notebook.  A drink.  A smoke.  A page marked and turned.

I do not know what loneliness is.

Perhaps it is nothing, or nothingness.  Perhaps frustrated desire.  For – ?  What is not (isn’t that what defines desires?).  The missing, the absence, the unknown.

I called it Hannah.

Or Hamza.

Hell or Helen or Helene/Helena.

Laurie.

No one knows but the name that works best.  Christy or Christina.  Vernoica/Veronique.

Beatrice.

I read Jabes.

A drink to an other (to signify might be).  A smoke for the presencing.  Another word, another name for something.  Out there = O ther.  Elves of else.

The book’s called Nothing Matters: a book about nothing, because “that nothing becomes the quest, which in turns begets something” (Ornan Rotem).

Dear Herman, Dear Samuel, Dear Franz:

Dear Larry, Dear Jack, Dear Jon:

Dear Hannah:

I do not know what it is to be alone, and my loneliness is painfully acute.

Dear Laura, Dear Sara, Dear Simone:

This is my correspondence with nothing.

The Last Wolf: or, “I showed you the darkness in the beginning”

On By N FilbertIn Confusion, depression, desire, Experience, fragments, Journal, Literature, Loss, Melancholy, Perception, Poetry, Reflections, survival, Writing4 Comments

I remember that I am falling

That I am the reason

And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be

Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

– W.S. Merwin, “When You Go Away”

Time keeps accumulating on my inability to write, to find time to write, to process living with language.  Simply to keep this space alive, I am posting a journal-like entry so as not to give up.

Recent weeks have been dominated by readings of Doug Rice, Laurie Sheck, Jon Fosse, Georges Bataille, Larry Levis, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Franco Berardi, Robert Bringhurst, Jeremy Fernando, Elfriede Jelinek and others…

What a traversal, passage, the past couple of months have been…

…like following the draw of the moon through dire straits

in dark, tumultuous seas…

…a feeling that everything is at its limit (Bataille, l’extreme) – EXPERIENCE.

  • pressured work projects, needs, deadlines, demands
  • endless and constant family logistics, accidents, needs
  • relentless parenting, relating, service to others
  • throngs of people and groups
  • lack of friends, lovers, supportive presences
  • fear, health, danger, exhaustion
  • failure
  • loss of partner
  • inexistence of calm or solitude
  • imposed travels
  • absence of sleep and rest
  • indulgence in desire and harm
  • minimal process
  • poor eating or nourishment
  • tension, strain
  • depression
  • lack (wellness) & excess (pressure)

…a teetering balance…

Mind you, this is how it feels in me, not how it is.

I miss everything that is/was good

…fail better…

There is a certain uncertain sorrow to things

(presence of melancholia, moon-draw)

Georges Bataille’s certainties:

  • WE ARE NOT EVERYTHING
  • WE WILL DIE

THE UNKNOWN                   THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE

darkness                                              levity

Lynda Barry & the “Underground Skateboard” – how we draw from others work what we need to survive

Lemony Snicket & the autographing instruction that I should “read something else”

FAMILY

immersion (doom, closure)                                 held in levity

conscious moderation

– 1st Tarot reading –

(processual journey mythical)

Jacob recommends Homer – The Odyssey

doubling                                letting go – holding together                    The Devil/The Chariot

dark surfaces / surfaces of darkness (The Fool)

The Moon (dark journey) crossed by the Queen of Swords (wounding love)

THE UNKNOWN                       THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE 

-Summer

Temperance

The King of Wands – leaders, pole vaulters, utilizing tension toward propulsion

leap over?  through?  on?

The Fool

Pas sage – not wisdom                                                      FRAUGHT JOURNEY

– Odyssey –

BATAILLE: “nothing is final…”

– “what is not there, which, once it is seen, often in literature, tells us what is” (Fosse)

Inner Experience

“the suffering of the disintoxicated” (Bataille)

The Human:

  • challenging everything (of putting everything into question) – Bataille
  • always a breakdown of systems that will not be restored – Sheck

“Experience reveals nothing and cannot found belief nor set out from it” – Bataille

“The hand moves forward, the tragedy begins” – Bataille

“no one grieves with you for what you are unable to say”

“life itself…always swerves away from my mouth”

– Elfriede Jelinek –

“how I’m owned by that which will not answer” – Sheck

“What you are will be spelled by whatever

lies trapped in your hand” – Robert Bringhurst

– emptiness is also empty –

“what is the part of us… feels…unnamed…

…i must live at some distance from convinced” – Sheck

 

“When I say you to what isn’t there – I mean me” (Larry Levis)

“you won’t find me in me” (Jelinek)

Experience eludes understanding ( Bataille)

– nor can I compute the possible (Sheck)

This too

is just one

more opinion

to move through

(Bringhurst)

FIRST AND FOREMOST YOU WRITE (Fosse)

“From an abandoned myth

(I write to you)” (D. Rice)

– wanting them to mean nothing –

– and suggest everything (L Levis)

 

INTENTION:

  • hold open the imagination of possibility
  • “do not go gentle into that good night”
  • Moderation.  Extreme limit.
  • Contra-digitalia.  First and foremost write.
  • Be-Read

 

 

“Internal Monologue” (Virno)

On By N FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, Language, meaning, Perception, Semiotics, Writing5 Comments

“Thoughts constituted by non-uttered words…This monologue always – ‘I speak’”

Paolo Virno – Word Became Flesh

“its thisness, then, cannot be fully articulable since any such articulation would require the articulation of a complete context, which in all cases is the world…often the experience includes an awareness of not being able to give an account of the this”

Jan Zwicky – Wisdom & Metaphor

“457. Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone”

Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations

“…I wept up to a great age, never having really evolved in the fields of affection and passion, in spite of my experiences”

Samuel Beckett – Malone Dies

“to frame the unsayable, & mute the sayable… he was the singing and the no one there…”

Larry Levis – The Darkening Trapeze

“All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel – or rather by several characters”

Roland Barthes – Roland Barthes

*****************

– I believe I told them that “all language was like a metaphor” in several characters.

I heard nothing, I said to myself, as if nothing were something that might be heard.

Still I stroked her ankle, index-finger-pad to delicate-bird-bone.  And lip.  Finding textures and surfaces with lips and tongue.  Precarious…it never lasts.  Taste and touch are like that [metaphor] immediate.

Am I speaking when I write?  What is happening now?

Several characters.

– “often the experience…includes an awareness of not being able…” (J. Zwicky)

She tasted of…

“…to give an account of the this…” (Zwicky)

…coffee grounds, sandalwood, humidity, and turquoise…

I left off my exploring.

What is it like [metaphor] to…?

I told them that ‘I speak’ is a metaphor…as is indeed all the rest having to do with language.

(consolations of philosophy)

I hear nothing when I talk with myself. [metaphors].

The sounds of flying a kite.

It’s rare that I am naked.  But “yes: meaning is like going up to someone” (L.W.)…some sort of connection is made (some convergent affect) and a resolution leaks open…resonance…endlessly (perhaps).

“I wept up to a great age”…by which we always mean the aggregate…which seems quite less than my ‘great age’, if ever there was one.

What is ‘great’ like? [metaphor]

Once I was younger…

– Always wished you’d known –

Are photographs metaphors?

I said that ‘nothing made is like.’

(“in spite of my experience”)

“Did I say I only say a small proportion of the things that come into my head?” (ontology of perception) (Samuel Beckett)

I intended to quote: “It is a pretty little object, like a – no, it is like nothing” (Samuel Beckett)

But what is ‘nothing’ like?  A “pretty little object”?

We know what he means (“like going up to someone”) … I was naked, I tasted.

You know the story… “I wept up to a great age.”  I touched, I tried, I felt.

What do you see?

Hardly ever the point.  Perception + Reflection = Imagination (perhaps) I told them – it’s a metaphor – a “crossing-over,” some traversal.  The trace of sweat behind her knee just above the calf.

Once I was alive.

I crossed over.

Several characters: ‘I speak.’

“Affection.  Passion.” I said.  (what I had thought it was ‘to learn’ [metaphor]).

– “in spite of my experience” –

Perhaps language wasn’t made for speaking.

Someone.  Somewhere.  Maybe.  Here.  Now.

That thing that words do [metaphor].

The “experience of this”…”non-uttered words.”  Non-utterable?  Perhaps, this.  (I traced the swerve of her, its curvature, hair-smell and sounding…’I speak,’ non-uttering…)

What is writing?

I believe I was speaking of metaphor…

Something crossed-over.

Nothing.

“Yes,” I said, “yes…” “it’s always alright to weep.”

On By N FilbertIn awareness, Complexity, creative writing, Dream, Experimenctes, Language, Loss, Writing1 Comment

“This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown…”                  – Jan Zwicky, Alkibiades’ Love

“the dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought… So, too, philosophy.  So, too, the gestures through which we bind, and let go of, our lives.” – Jan Zwicky, Alkibiades’ Love

“…readiness is all…” – William Shakespeare

neuron gif

On our way down above the below, recognition dwindling through each swerve, turn, and curve.  Uncertain of finding, finding uncertainty.

What began in fantastic.  Unanticipated.  Such sights, indescribable, feels.  Sirening sounds, whooshing and whining; colors and tones past belief, perhaps, unless of course you’ve been there…I had thought that you were?  We followed by following, relentless, directionless openings, vague paths.

Kaleidoscope world of liminal pinwheels, whirring musics of future and past, tinged with voices we wish that we knew, and we did.  It seemed you were there…?

Where have we been?  Where are we going?

Navigations that spiral – we wind and knot, unwind, become.  And over again – yet nothing is ever not new.  Or so nearly, almost.

I, if indeed it was I looking out (or in) kept distracting desires (and extracting) ~ wanting this way and that, akin to imagine, hungrily, wily, and wild.  As effects of strong wishes might be – subterranean, subsumed, leveraged like magnets and threats.

I stumbled, turned ‘bout, perhaps even flew, there were times that I ran – indistinguishable voices undoubtedly precious, familiar, like realizing wants tended constant as fuse…dangerously sparked to go off…

…now this and this and this…fierce purpling red, liquid breasts and svelte buttocks, elbows and shins, calves and thighs (ah! sweet the ankles and knees, wrists and shoulders, the lips, the hair, and the eyes… I love bodies! I crave!) the serpents, the birds, the language and leaves flung like banners… where were you?  I had thought you were there… and you… and you… and many others of Is beside…

Darkening greens.  What gathers and whispers in pleasure, awareness acute, we We again in these margins and loops.  We reach and we blend, wrestle and harm, struggle and rush, and we mend.  We are bound and unbounded, boundlessly shaped in our flight.

Constrained in the thickets, the azures, the blood.  I choke and cry out (do you strangle?)… we are veining, okay, seeming ever en route, all approachings and wanders from here.

I (if it’s ‘I’) I am there, by which I must mean, “it is here,” diving downward or in to the out and the others, another, anew.  We’ve become and we’re far more than we – both generic and common – and burning, aflame, each of ever a kind, made of ice and so crystalline, clear, so…

…unknown and still further… along, further on, further out and away, further in, indecipherable and never forewarned…

“There is IT!”

“There is IS!”

And our readings surround as do laughter or tears, streamings of verbiage, mellifluous notes, and you and I and countless of we, and no matter, we happen, or are, happening, or become, as we come, as we enter, reveal, as we’re reaching…

I had thought you were here –

Where are we?

“The Dream’s Navel”: an adaptation

On By N FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fragments, Language, Perception, Semiotics, WritingLeave a comment

…yet another example of negotiating tools and context.  The previous post it seemed natural, as if I reached into the surround in order to work through something, reveal or discover something I hunched toward.  For me this is often why reading, why conversation, why activity – in order for something to emerge, perhaps unsubmerge, for perhaps…

As I sat to write the other day, I recognized my reaching (a little more).  That because 4 colors of pen were available… because they fill my surround when I am annotating texts I read… more voices seemed to join the conversation.  Perhaps intoned by the colors, perhaps offering myself other conversations, altering access, even as the shape of the page contains my possibility.  Or evokes it.

Anyway… the notebook notions tincture now… and I – both follow and concoct…

Adaptation

“words are drying out” – Franco “Bifo” Berardi

                                                       …and for her,

whose face

I held in my hands

a few hours, whom I gave back

only to keep holding the space where she was,

–

I light

a small fire in the rain”

– Galway Kinnell

“Who will ever be able, in this heap of dust, to tell the words from their underpinnings of paper?”

– Edmond Jabes

“Life is the search for the impossible via the useless…no one truly knows how to know and thinking confuses everything.”

– Fernando Pessoa

“man has no other way of living ‘now’ at his disposition besides the possibility to realize it through the insertion of discourse in the world”

– Emile Benveniste

“…if philosophy can be defined at all…”

– Silvia Jonas

“THE DREAM’S NAVEL”

or, Troubling Abstraction

or, refusing reduction

or, peircing the generic

There was a fox with a beautiful tail.  And wondrously colorful.  Like a dream, but tangibly perceptible.

– A dream then, while you’re thick in it –

No, an actual.  Not a virtual.  An imagining.  Beauty.

And this, it is said, is philosophic thought… the questioning and caress of what is, unknown.

– Perhaps unknowable? –

What I do not know.  Have not experienced.  Know this way.

– Imagining. –

Experience.  Experiencing.  Almost like a dream, but languaged now, i.e. controlled, labeled, made discrete and symbolically communicable…signified.  Not that.

  • Again
  • An other
  • Anew

– Something, anyway.  Try again.  Become. –

To cross.  Trans-late.  Waver boundaries of meaning.  Only to continue discretely, or to discretely continue.  To work at the edge… both/and versus either/or versus verses… Weaving.  Text-ure.  

Ever again, always another other, anew, again… What is: difference, and repetition.  Never the same, almost, again

– What? –

Someone or something is living.  Is being.  Perhaps simply is.  Perhaps that… if only we knew.  If anyone could.

– Imagine –

Perhaps.

****

Someone (something?) said.  Set down, symbolized, spoke… suggested…

– Something to work with – from, into toward, away, perhaps. –

Perhaps.

Dip and scratch, gesture, limit, now one, now another, both?  The thread, the fox’s multi-colored tail.  Needle.  Point.  Pierce.  But the thread connects above/below, under/over, in/out, alike… just traversing, transforming, betweening, continuous.  Air, breath, blood, wave, particle, motion, fluid…  Almost a point-of-meeting, a multi-sided trace, not a touch.  Not touching, perhaps.  But touching’s not a point of contact.  Where do you feel the touch of your hand to a leaf?  The touch of your hand to yourself…?

Perhaps.

I’d imagined so.  I’d dreamt of thought.  Particularized continuity.  Cognizable flow…

– Something to work on… in… to be… come… –

Participate?  Renew?  Anew?  A gain?

There was a fox with a beautiful tail.  Like a dream, not quite limit or form or shape… potential, like beauty, like amost…AND…  Like a resonant word meaning this and more also, perhaps non-compliant, unresolved

– How “hate” = “love”, both and neither? –

What!?  I don’t know.

Adjoin.  A margin?  Where what, which, might be meeting – meets all ways?  Area?  Neither/nor, both/and, reciprocity?

– Someone spoke “transduction” –

The fox’s tail is never still, too many hairs to distinguish, melded, trembling in airy surround.  Sometimes the light seems colored, sometimes the fox’s tail.

I began

– Perhaps –

Always part question, regardless the notion, emotion, or statement.

May not have been a fox

– Every thing questions –

Such is our “stance”? – ever in motion

Only a question, questing, going-on/in/for/toward/away?

I saw colors in the light, or air, I “took” to be a fox.  I ex-tracted, ab-stracted, perceived… removed and oriented, made foreign, recognizable.  This woman is so beautiful.

– In other words, “desire,” an imagining –

Almost like a dream

What is?

– What IF?  What if we take back as we give, and offer as we reduce or remove?

Seams

Now one thing and another

And others more and more

– Only extension, addition?  To multiply? –

No.  Also…

Cuts that open and join… multiply and combine…

A fox with a beautiful tail, perhaps… flowing in forested light…

Anything, anywhere, and also

– And also not-this, not-that, not-quite, almost… else…

Perhaps.

What is?

 

 

A Short Sort of Story

On By N FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Literary References, Reading, Writing5 Comments
_308, 11/21/05, 3:16 PM, 8C, 2660×4154 (2070+2267), 100%, bent 6 stops, 1/40 s, R75.2, G58.3, B72.2

“can the illegible be legible?” – Helene Cixous

“one cannot write without repeating something” – Jeremy Fernando

I repeat.  I am an ant.

I have forgotten.

I remember.

It is finished.

~~~~~~~~~

I begin.

It has begun.

~ in media res ~

It never begins.

~~~~~~~~~

I am.

Not.

Maybe.

Why?

~~~~~~ 

Salutations!

Voila!

‘allo!

—-

~~~~~~

Otherwise.

In other words.

A.K.A.

Not.

(Knots)

Do you realize how important “whatever” is?

I follow (in) a trail of marks.

I have become.

“My” beginning.

Insofar.  (In so far).  [in media res]

-NO MATTER.  TRY AGAIN.  FAIL AGAIN.  FAIL BETTER.- Beckett

I repeat – “I am an ant”

“Hello little ant in a line!”

“Look at that cute creature!”

Footfalls.

~~~~~~~~~

Feet fall.  Thump, thud.

Repeat.

Continue.

“I can’t go on.  I’ll go on.”

~~~~~~~~

I repeat an ant.

Hello.

…and so on…

…begins…

“…or is it that language already says more already?…” – Roland Barthes

…and so it begends.

“the other cannot be determined or decided” – Leslie Hill, on Blanchot

Marking My Way

On By N FilbertIn Art, Complexity, creative writing, Experimenctes, Language, meaning, Semiotics, Writing1 Comment
What follows is exemplary of my tendency when I open a notebook and begin to write… digression… sigh…

“a man, however intelligent, is no better at maze-running than a rat, unless assisted by notes, whether these are remembered verbally or sketched out in a drawing”

– Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man –

artwork – Pamela Caughey

I am beginning this story with words, for I am writing, and writing has often occurred as the transformation of experience to perceivable mark for communicable purpose: programming code, impressions in sand, lines about the mouth and eye, numbers, letters, notations and visible strokes.

The mark I begin with is “I.”  To imaginative purpose.  Say we could coordinate belief around marks (which “we” already have, or “you” are unable to comprehend, co-perceive or mutually interpret anything of what “I” am scribbling).  Imagine with me that we can: foster markings and gestures, sounds and expressions, that stabilize over time toward agreement…

1, I; 2, we; 3, you; 4, with; 5, world; 6,… and so on… where marks come to re-present a sharing or relation toward – together we assemble at “tree(4)” or “word(4),” at “sign(4)” or “kingdom(7),” at “ours(4)” and “us(2)” and at “we(2)” or whatever(8).  All might be marked other ways, sounded or gestured – a squirrel’s flicking tail, a whale’s sonic wail, bird twitters, rock cracks and colors, cloud movements, sighs.  Images, letters, motions, or sounds.  Impressible, expressible movements.  Relations enacted, touches and probes, effects and affects across spaces and times, this is language in-scribed and con-scribed –communicability – glance of finger or toe or of eye, brush of hair or of death or of light… con-tact.  Tactility, touchability, WITH.

Imaginatively-agreed-illusory and often elusive – “Abstraction (11, or 10+1, or..)” – What-is-not becoming what-is.  “Creation(8 or eight or 11111111…).”  Coordinated occurrence of subjectless objects and objectified subjects and things among things among things “co-existing(10),” – or so “we” mark “it.”

I begin with a mark that is “i” or 1, or the slightest, least notable line.  “iota” in Greek, as Frost deftly inscribes – just a pass, accident, happenstance, hardly constructed and simple – a stick falls from a tree and leaves an “L” or a “Y” in the soil, but an “i”?

A mistake usually, a drip.

So “I” use it to refer to “just 1” = “what-is-not.”  No “one(1)” has yet known only one.  With “one(1)” there is nothing ‘to know’ – to attend to, perceive.  With 1 there is only the one – less than nothing.  1 counts the same in negation.  You have nothing or one, but once perceivable three – the 1, the 0, the difference.

We make marks.

The mark I began with is “I,” just the least, the inception, the start of a “we.”  A cry, a twitch, a tone or effect, a coloration, occurrence.  What’s the difference…

“I” could have made a sound.  Could have poked, puked, stomped, wriggled…simply gestured into wind…

ANYthing, EVERYthing can only happen as more-than-one.  More than meaningless mark (/) or vanishing point, it indicates RELATION.  If 1=nothing, we still get 1 + -1 = 0…all ways at least 3.  And if 1 is alone (“all-one”) there’d be no knowing, telling, perceiving, deciding without at least a “NONE(4, 0)” or “TWO(3, 2)” to proffer recognition – ALWAYS MORE THAN ONE for there “2B.”

I could not propose “I” without other or else (no-thing could be perceived without difference, and difference demands at least two + a relation, [even similarity – which always harbors difference] – therefore 3 at the least for a mark).  If “you” couldn’t tell a difference (perceive or experience something…how would you know some thing is?).  Identi(cal)ty would seem (necessarily) IM-perceptible.

1 NEVER EQUALS 1.  Such is my thesis.  If equality and sameness are possible no one could mark it, perceive it, proclaim it – 1=1 is not perceptible.  For 1(“I”) to be identifiable, not-1(not-I) is required, which demands a 3rd(third) that might distinguish or experience – whether relation-itself 1±1 or Otherness to “tell apart” or cleave.

Identification demands Other.  A mark, even the slenderest, simplest, accidental dash – to be perceptible, to matter – must be different from an other.  Therefore, always 2 have to be for a 1 to be, and for that to be perceptible a third(5, 3) must exist… 1≠1=3, and 1=1=3…

i.e. I begin with “I” to invoke/inscribe MANY.

I am beginning this story with words…

Self-Beckett Confessions

On By N FilbertIn Aging, Experience, fragments, Language, Literary References, Samuel Beckett, Writing1 Comment

“I have only to go on, as if there were something to be done, something begun, somewhere to go.  It all boils down to a question of words, I must not forget this… May one speak of a voice, in these conditions?… If only I knew what I have been saying… Bah, no need to worry, it can only have been one thing, the same as ever…”

“At no moment do I know what I’m talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how nor why”

“Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of…”

“I don’t know what I’m saying.  I’m doing as I always did, I’m going on as best I can”

– Samuel Beckett –

Hyphen & Hymen, Pt. 2

On By N FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, Embodiment, Experience, Experimenctes, Language, meaning, Writing6 Comments

“Philosophy is the hyphen and the hymen of Being, and difference is the trait that cuts across and unites the twofold side of Being [mathematic-genetic / poematic-epiphanic; or in-itself / for-us-in-it]”

– Michel de Beistegui, Truth & Genesis –

“each word, need no more words, we don’t need words about words, each word enough with its excess and insufficiency, proliferation and paucity, problematics and production, each term inevitable blunder and surprise, miscarriage and gratuity”

– N Filbert, journal entry –

Everything that is not linguistic is absurd

– Vilem Flusser, Philosophy of Language –

I have no story.

Wherever I occur in the tangled, incalculable threading we might call “existing” or “being” or “living” I can make out no beginnings nor endings, only enigmatic, complicated “is.”  Slight, partial, imperfect.

I have trouble with memory.

But we needn’t any other words.  Or more words.  Or words about words.  Any word is enough.

There’s no story not made of inadequate and superfluous words.  These words that might tremble any direction of the webbed and indecipherable, indeterminate and knotted operations that co-construct now, or whatever happens to be (for-us, with-us, in-us, with-out).

Stories like struck and resounding tones.

A vibration might seem harmonic or cacophonic, dull or brash.  Violent, vanishing, or barely perceptible in the noise.

There’s no story in this.  But many words, perhaps.

Wiggling, vague, offensive, bold, hardly visible, ephemeral words.  Terms (demands?), language (lingual?), weaving darts between – inventive, fabulating, reductive, constraining – unknown syllables, shapes, referents (irreverent) toward and away from…

Vocables of happening.  In-script-ions.  Tyrannical and uncertain.

Accidents and rules.

My body of words.  Limbs, organs, “hyphen and hymen” of being. My body of words – taste, touch.  What passes un-sign-if-i-cant?

Accidents and rules.

Birdsong.  Heard.  “Bird” “song” “to hear.”  This body of words.  No note without notation.  No recognition without cognition.  Any one word enough enigma.

Grass, caress, event: embodying words, wording embodied.  Tapestries or electrons – flood, immersion, surround within.  Languaging: gesture, groan, gelatinous.  Language.

Say “in-term-in-able.”  Say “de-term-in-ed.”

Hyphen.  Hymen.  Accident.  Rule.  Deceptive measurements.  Siphons, conduits, ex-press-in-g im-press-ions. 

One is enough to sense there’s no story here.

Always more-than-one.  All ways.

Perhaps what is called “experience” [what is it called “experience”? – one word is enough – think “love” or “fact,” “me” or “real,” even “tomato” to be made well aware of difference, ambiguity – of wobbling kinds pressed toward inauthentic and inaccurate generalities.  Uniformity.  Accidents and rules that hardly, so slightly, pertain].

Experience: inexpressible?  In-term-in-able?

What is the story here?  The trial and always (all ways) error.  Errant words.  Insufficient to their purposes (supposed).  Perhaps.

Purpose being?

The questioning.

Our voices and gestures.

Enigma.

Irresolvable, over-determined.  Language.

Systems like molds, scopes of lenses, structuring grids, abstract proofs and theorems:  rules and measures, melodies, diagrams – not mirroring, mirage.

I have no story to tell.

Untelling.  Moving back against the words with a “not.”  Unworking.  Unravel.  Erase.

Toward?

Experience: to test, try; to feel, to undergo.  Knowledge gained by repeated trials.  Risk.  Out-of.  Try.  To get handy at.

To undergo.  Gone under.

The Drunken Brain: Ending it all one word at a time.

In-term-in-able trials.  “Everything that what is isn’t” (Jan Zwicky).

“There is yet a way of speaking that leaves room for what can’t be said”

– Jan Zwicky –

Is there?

I’d like to language that way.  Move, sound, gesture, touch.  Word, waver, delete.

Try. 

From the midst.  In the midst of.  Within.  Risk, trying “out,” Feel, undergo.  Words.

I have no story either, no narrative or narrator.  I forget, I re-member, invent.  Wherever, whenever I am (is it “I”?) – multiplicity, indiscretion.  A-static.  No beginning, no ends, -ing, -ing, -ing.  Repeatedly, differently.

I think language pre-tends experience.

What is tried-out, already de-term-in-ed.

Oh to break.

To start.

To begin – become – be.

I have no story.

“I cannot get beyond language by means of language”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein –