A Narrative Construction

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, meaning, Writing2 Comments

This weird stuff:

This Stuff

            The sky is “cloudy.”  This is part of who he is, just now, in this case.  She’d said “______ ___ _______, _____!” in just that tone, this manner – another aspect constructing him.  That he’s a “he” is also not irrelevant.  Of so many “years,” “locations,” “relations,” “activities” and “behaviors,” “interactions” and “learnings” ought not be ignored or left aside.  There’s no other way to identify him, along with appearance, but that depends (and has changed dramatically from those first cells).

The man is “of an age,” as some might say, keeping track in the ways that people will.  Is “like” (comparing as they do).  Says and does, makes and thinks, with categories shared among the lot of us.  A male human, then, within the commerce of the world, regardless of distinctions, and because of them.

“Specialness” is a classification reserved for none and all.  A sensuous “unique,” observable and rich, endless and utterly common.

And yet we’ll pay attention, for awhile, to THIS ONE.  The one recounted and described, gradually revealed (such as it is), and selected for this tale and task (a narrative product of our genes).  We abide.

Recording “life” – an optional project at our disposal, and “communication” – a capacity shared.  Let’s do this then, with “me” – teller, author, scientific artist; and “you” (all) – necessary “others,” listeners, readers, hearers, respondents.  Composing and perceiving, interpreting, creating – the ways we get along and mean, “make sense of,” all that “happens”

as we’re “in it.”

as we “are it.”

Let’s begin.

We have begun.

And “long” ago, in its beginning – wherever (whenever) – that might be for any one of us.  “Us” – that spreads the lying truth of it – that we are “We” and never “one” or “me” or “he” or “she” or “it” or “they” without the others.  Simply being – substances and structures interactive in “their” ways…

We, the happening, as we perceive it.

What we make of it.

(Whomever we are).

Squirrel, fir tree, trout.

Stone, astronaut, wetness.

“We” – bound by our conditions.

Let’s begin.

[I’m glad we’re sharing] (he says).

THERE IS A BEAR

Contingent Narratives

                                                …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 ws,

I light

a small fire in the rain*

Narrative Construction

Tyranny of Transition

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, human, identity, Journallings, meaning2 Comments

Greetings all – I wanted to apologize for the sloppy frenzy of disregulated writings I’ve been releasing with little meditation or editing of late.  “In the midst of things…” somewhere near the crossover looping of composition, storage, digestion, excretion, and growing…I’ve found it somewhat difficult to know what it is I am doing aside from what must be done.

400px-Cycles_of_Life

Feeling change,

an entering of halves and fractions

tired and ecstatic

sad and delighted

moving on and along.

Having lost and lost and lost

while ever continuing to gain,

such simple equations

of little sense

yet filled with meaning

a meager promise

and maximal joy.

Existence is the Cusp – A Journal Entry

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, Language, meaning3 Comments

cursive journaling

It’s December, and I’m writing outside, lucky by so many counts.

  • It’s December, and 45°
  • My partner in love and life instills health and wellness in me
  • I’m writing
  • James is serving me coffee, ice water and double greyhounds enabling me to work without interruption

I’m in what you might call a “Cusp Area.”

The present is always a liminal space.  I am a few days away from completing a Master’s degree in Library & Information Management, and months away from embarking on a PhD in Media & Communication coupled to the Arts at a University in Switzerland.

I work very part-time (10-20 hours / week) for the United States Postal Service, attend regular psychotherapy sessions, parent 4 children, read and write as much as I can, cook and clean a LOT, and spend as much time as I can with my beloved (a brilliant, gorgeous, amazing, resourceful, intelligent and creative human).

I rest very little.

We (my immediate family) will not survive January on my income (sans school loans).  Cusp.

Change is imminent, and yet NEVER is NOT.

Every day relationships morph.  What could be termed “stability” in life must be radically redefined to have any resemblance or “fit” to reality – which is always, ALWAYS in enormous, factually ubiquitous, tremendous FLUX.

There is something like “similarity” – of persons, circumstances, situations, emotions, experiences… which we occasionally tag “familiar” or “repetition,” (providing a modicum of regularity, “consistency,” “normativity”) but none of it, EVER!! – is “identical,” “same,” “repeated.”  Not even ourselves, one “moment” to the next (i.e. in spans of cursive time – what seems utterly continuous is still difference – otherwise could not be noticed).

I am writing this in cursive in attempts toward continuities of form and content.  And yet there is vast uniqueness with each stroke.  “Distance,” difference, change.

I delight in working in language – a symbology for expressing experience – a fabric, social set and structure – a shared and flexibly rule-bound medium.

Possessing or harboring…containing vast incommunicable DIFFERENCES – between ethnicities, cultures, geographies, genders, contents, shapes, habits, practices, processes…REALITIES.  And yet useable.  Useful.

I am writing outside in December, in Kansas, in the United States of America, in cursive, in English, in black ball-point ink, in a ruled soft-covered notebook, in 2014, in attempts partially to think, to recount, to visualize, to express, to extend, to discover, remember, critique, perceive, view… understand a curious unstoppable flow –

The Experience of Being a Living Organism

with billions of particularities – both structures and substance, arrangement and order, experience and resources, habits, capacities, learning, abilities, perceptions, interpretations, emotions…

THIS kind, type, genus, species, instance, sort, occurrence, happening of this one/many, living (active, interactive, interacting, linked, dependent, individual, functioning) THING.

Differently now and now and NOW.

I cannot curtail difference.  I can hypothesize similarities.  I have agency, but an energy and forcefulness utterly dependent and constrained by countless systems, substances, processes and constituents.

I have a kind of power – corralled by everything within and around me.  I am at the mercy of – the support and boundary of – all else + the combinatory elements and activities of WHAT I exist of and the rest of existings.

I do not fool myself into thinking I am a cause or blame, and yet I am utterly response – able / – ible.  “My” interactions and interactivities, are mine / “me” / THIS.

THIS & THAT, Yin/Yang, Individual/Environment, “self”/”other”, – difference without discontinuity, ever in exchange: molecularly, actively, REALLY, and wholly.

cusp area

EXISTENCE IS THE CUSP.

I love while / as / if / because / in spite of (or in contradistinction to) I am loved.

I move with / against / into / around / while / within / because of / in distinction from, possible movements, contents, and affordances / constraints of everything about / within / around me.

I “exist” (stand-out) because I am, in a swarm, a sea, of existences, existings.

I have no other chances to be…

…outside of my surrounds.

I am.  Within a lifeworld.  Without which – I am not.

And still, “I am.”  Singular / plural.  Similar across space-time, an appearance and occurrence of similarity marked by difference.

The safest expression (for one seeking at “truths” or reliable, testable regularities) is:

WE ARE

or

IT IS.

We, the living.

architectural animal

I thank you.

And so, the story, such as it is

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, human, Image, Writing2 Comments

Embryo,_8_cells

We start.  We start out.  We dance into a light.  We are seen.  We have become.  We are embodied.

This is how it begins for us.  We are noticed as a being, as a living, as living beings.  Addressed.

Some one, some thing, is aware of “us.”  We become.  Something.  Someone.

I am born.  I have…”be-come.”  And that, a result…a result, resolution, resolublution, happenstance, happening of cum.  Plus.  Cum (sperm, spermatazoa, DNA transport system) PLUS egg (potentia, potentiality, amorphous stew – DNA resourcing, inchoate, unpredictable, predictable)

CUM + EGG = possibility

A be-cumming.  A chance, a shot, a gumbo – ME.

And then I AM.

PRinc_rm_photo_of_7-8_week_embryo

And that “I am” is a simply recognition, a simply acknowledging, acknowledgment, an awareness, a “noticing” – a THAT – THERE IS – a “There is: That.”

A “Nathan.”

A nothing be-cums (in collusion with egg) a “Nathan” – named, cognized, acknowledged, noticed and noted: Nathan is NOT a Nothing, but is a Some Thing… a “Being,” a “human,” a “boy,” a “creature,” even…a “Person.”

And I become.  We.  Become.  A combination of things cognizable in individuality and commerce.  A singularity in multiplicity…

THIS combination of possibilities = Nathan

= THIS one

= ??????

this ITEM is accounted, is sensed, perceived, listed, catalogued – BECOME.

And so, we start out.  Cells of a particular way.  Become.  Noted, recognized, be-come, be-came, be-CAUSEd.  IT.  THIS.  YOU.  (ME).

Held.  Cooed.  Coddled.  Nursed.  Murmured and whispered as an “I,” a “You,” an “It,” a “They,” an “A,” a “Him.”

I am a Definite Article.

A/The Some Thing.  Being.  Organism.  Combinatory intricate systemic reality object of cellular operations – genetic, bio-logical(?), “existent,” “happening/happenstance,” as… THIS ONE, THING, REALITY.

And so, we begin.

embryo

I try to go back there.  To the beginning, that initial “noticing.”  (“Honey, I think I might be pregnant”).  Effect.  A.  The.  This one.  Son.  Boy.  He.  It.  Him.  Here:  a coagulation of cells.

Biology.  Psychology.  Chemistry.  Anthropology.  Philosophy.  Science.  Metaphysics.

“I” began.  By being accounted for.  Taken note of.  Recognized.  Attached or detached from.  Signaled, symbolized, named and noted.

Here comes a new “One.”  (that is, Many).  – A “Person.”  Awkward, precedented (unprecedented) amalgam equaling a “You” “It” “He/She” “Being” “Person” “Human” “Child.”

NAMED (accounted for and acknowledged, reported AS…)

“Nathan Wayne Filbert”

A-ha!  So – this one!  That, right there…different from and the same as this other kind…

An observable being, a kind of individual sample, remarkable and marked down, documented, evidential data…A, The, It, An…

Here begins a definite article.

An individual.

An example.

Sample.

Kind.

Type.

Organism.

Characteristic.

Assortment.

Collusion.

Combination.

Instance of.

SOME THING.

And life goes on.

Happens.

Takes shape.

Becomes.

Invents.

Occurs.

Adapts.

Results.

Resolves.

again…again…again…

Here rises/lies Nathan Wayne Filbert,

named and acknowledged,

become, begun, existent,

(such as it is)

(from time to time)

ahem

cough, cough

(occasionally)

grrrrr

Hello.

handprint1

Coming Bare

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, meaning, Writing5 Comments

head-silhouette-with-question-mark

In the interests of authenticity…

  • The fact or quality of being true or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness. Also (overlapping with sense) accurate reflection of real life, verisimilitude.  
  • Genuineness;
  • The quality of truthful correspondence between inner feelings and their outward expression; unaffectedness, sincerity.
  • A mode of existence arising from self-awareness, critical reflection on one’s goals and values, and responsibility for one’s own actions; the condition of being true to oneself.
  • The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014.)

Unveiling.  The action of reveal.  Is the “condition of being true to oneself” a possibility?

Recently my partner and love wrote me a revealing, unveiling, letter that blunted me with authenticity – a quality of herself that she was questioning in that very message.

Self-awareness.  Sincerity.  Something corresponding to actuality, reality.  Genuineness.

How often do we present or re-present ourselves authentically?  Do we all wish to?  What would it look like?  Sound like?  Would we lose friends?  Lovers?  Jobs?  If our outward expressions matched our inner feelings?

WHO AM I?

The complaint was compromise.  Pretense.  The wriggling falsities of “fitting in” or “being useful” or “surviving” in the world of humans.  In social groups and situations.  In life.  The feeling that what “works” or garners respect, interest, desire in the commerce of human beings is not authentic to who I actually am.  That what I am “liked” for is a misrepresentation, a partial product, a fabrication, a mixed message, does NOT “correspond to actuality, reality.”  And is it possible to undo that?  To live authentically in the variegated, unpredictable, situational and relative world of humans?  And is authenticity of an individual even a potential actuality / reality?

This has prompted me days of thought.  In effect it was relieving, releasing – my lover is exhausted of the “play of living” – the work of “fitting in,” “surviving with others,” “belonging” in ways that feel partial, inexact, false even, untrue, ALWAYS incomplete, inaccurate, inauthentic.

I felt freed to say my honesty.  When I father, I pretend to be a father.  I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what I should be doing.  I don’t know what it means to father children.  I love them, I care about them, I am frightened by them, I am exhausted by the responsibility, I gauge my activities based on parenting behaviors I DON’T feel comfortable with, or that I wished for…I act, I pretend I’m a man who knows how to love, instruct, “raise” children!  I do not know what I’m doing.  I feel inauthentic.  Like I’m reaching, practicing, experimenting, trying to be what I think a good “father” might be.

For years and years and years and years I have “feigned” being a writer, a musician, a scholar, an artist (it feels like).  Yes, I’ve read a lot. Yes, I’ve studied, I’ve practiced, I’ve performed.  Yes I think I “get” some things about the world and our human experience of it.  Yes I LOVE writing words, mixing them up, crafting phrases and sentences with them, attempting to mate them to my internal experiences, ideas, emotions… but I almost ALWAYS feel an impostor not an expert, like I’m trying out voices, expressions, characters, compilations to FIND OUT if that’s how I think, feel, imagine?!  So if ever I’m desired, complimented, responded to – I think it is an accident, a gratuitous kindness, a pitying.  That I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m simply trying, groping in language in a thorough darkness.

As a lover, a partner, I have simply tried to please.  To find out what is wanted and do, be, perform that.  How does an intimate relationship “work”?  I don’t know.  Everyone is different.  Nothing I learn to enact, behave, communicate, engage – is successfully effective in the next relationship (or, obviously, in the relationships ended before that!).  Could I BE whatever mucky morphing “self” “living human organism” I am (at any given moment) and be loved?  It seems so unlikely!  I don’t even know what that is (the mucky morphing living individual human organism) to express or represent to the Other one… – do they?  Does ANYone?

So do we ALL feel like we’re FAKING our way through being human?  Adapting “roles” and “styles” and “opinions” and behaviors in order to survive?  To be liked?  To fit in?  To feel good about ourselves?  To feel useful?  To BE?

Over decades, I have found that there are some things that steadily characterize me.  I like to drink and smoke and read and write.  I love to love and desire and be loved and desired.  All of those things share the “actuality” and “reality” of being activities that I don’t understand.  Things that seem to steady, nourish and keep me vital…and yet also damage, wound, hurt and make me vulnerable.  That wobble.  That trembling.

Identity

To my lover I responded theoretically.  That my understanding of a living organism is that its “identity” in fact is created and activated in every moment’s situation and surround.  That ALL of being a human is identifying oneself in relation to circumstance – a moment-to-moment relation and response to THOSE and THAT which constitutes its happening.  That “living” involves trying style, voice, behavior, activity, vocation, perception, interpretation, thought after another after another – quickly realizing that in EVERY instance the “fit” is partial, inauthentic, somewhat true (what feels good) and somewhat false (what is uncomfortable) – that BEING ALIVE is a wandering experimental trial of sorts.  That if we CHOSE or locked ourselves into an IDENTITY and attempted to be consistent in it – we would in fact deteriorate, become bitter – that the wisdom is NOT “I AM THAT” but “THAT IS PARTIALLY ME” for now, in this instance, at present…

????

The questions keep coming.  We bemoan that when we take a job, a position, a role, responsibilities… we tire of them as we feel the constraint of structured, required, or expected behaviors and activities.  When I compose a writing work – within pages I tire of its direction, its characters, its ethos – I can feel where a thing is going and whether it’s interesting to me or not, I tire of it – feel constrained by what’s created, feel fake in pushing it in another direction…even innovation and inventiveness feel PRETEND.

Perhaps LIVING = the tension of partiality.  Striving to “fit” to “belong” to “match” (be safe in, acknowledged, understood, allowed) means adaptation, alteration, invention, reciprocal construction, which would seem to inherently demand compromise, partiality, veiling and highlighting – what will seem / feel to be INAUTHENTIC, misrepresentation, “FAKE.”

And yet – it is through this wriggling tango that we also come to discover what “fits” us – what we enjoy, what our perspectives are, who/how/with whom we like to be, what feels “good” to us and what makes us afraid/uncomfortable/ and so on…

Cynical view: we’re ever pretending and untrue.  Hopeful view: we’re navigating and discovering, becoming.  And it seems that both are “real” and “actual.”  Authenticity (maybe?) equals partiality and pretense for humans?  Equals morphing and becoming?  Equals uncertainty and acting (adapting)?  Equals attempting to be?

Thanksgiving

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, Language, meaning, Music1 Comment

Thanks

Thanks to all of you I have become aware of – for creating, expressing and sharing your thoughts, ideas and works – giving me the opportunity to engage.

Thanks

And thanks to those of you who take the time and consideration to engage my thoughts, ideas and works – giving things a life beyond my small circumference.

The Costume

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, fiction, Writing3 Comments

Bill Jacobsen - Untitled 1999

The Costume

            When there is dialogue, or perception.  When he’s awake.  But what to name it?  How describe?  Perhaps even while sleeping.

The lag.

At checkout counter, clerk addresses: to absorption, numbness, mumble.  Other.

Strikes Alfonse as he’s driving toward home:  there are trees bending, being present in their way.  Cars, pedestrians, small animals scurrying.  A school bus.  Neighborhoods – definite yards and homes.  A mail-delivery-person.  A filmy mist.  A fall-behind in his perception.  Gap.  Perhaps.

He initially considered it a veil.  A tremulous fog.  A curious “vagueness to things.”  Like long, cold Winter.  Haphazard inceptions:  tree, bus, children; cat, dog, car.  No attachment.  A muffling and delay.  A foreigner.  Driver inside steel mechanism, separate by seconds, very nearly removed – a skein, a skin, a veil.  An organism with apparatus.  The slow calculator.

The smeary light when she speaks:  lover, mother, friend.  Overlaps, palimpsests, a smudging feedback, a decay.  The children crying.  Vocalization evokes.  Indicates.  Needs.  Response.  Remembers he is human.  Particular understandings, expectations.  Affirmations and acknowledgments.  Times for saying yes.  Attentional assent.

Alfonse disbursed.  Pernicious regress.  As if he’d be immediate.  As if the others were.  As if it all were touching, interspersed and in exchange.  This thing and another.  He is embodied.  The body seems slow, or surprisingly fast, almost anticipatory (unbeckoned, unmeditated erections).  He can’t make sense from it.  Body makes sense he knows not of.  Who knows not of?  Of what?  Even how might be accurate here.  Alfonse cannot seem to know, this is his costume, a glassy shroud, the sluggishness between the here and now.  Without a zipper or a tag.

Inside a bottle within distorted frame, but without an image described so clearly.  Costumes are alive – expose the motions of the wearer.  Notions.  Reveal, conceal, but variant things.  Who dressed him this occasion?  This dismantled undoing and random erasure, perpetual hiatuses of interpretation?  His hesitant reality – a retardation, sensational slag, both slow-soaking sponge and absorbency-abdicator.

“I got nothing,” he murmurs, “didn’t catch a word you said…” as if in some other language of different rhythm and tune.  Not understood.  Multiple things unrelated, cannot tell, cannot smell, is uncertain where he is in his motions.  Not quick enough, just out of joint, who what where why when never equals now for him, nor how.  He is Alfonse and he seems costumed.

Making love – a metaphor for intimacy – those direct invasive actions – and yet he’s steps away, slow to the uptake, uncertain who is doing where and when.  That comes later and looks like smudges that he estimates with guessing.

Is this uncommon? – is what he wonders.  Am I the only one who cannot tell?  Does she know what she is doing, feeling it as it happens?  He’s asking something far away he cannot measure.  He wakes each morning, to himself, inside this costume, and dons the heavy cloak of it for sleep.  Asynchronous, distant, accidental and traumatic, but postponed – perpetual flush of shut-down, shock, bewilder.

He thinks “flamingo” inside a jar of unfocused space in alternate materials in artificial frame and anesthetic wall in analagesic scheme, so far, far, far, far… the clock is slipping.  The span from here from now, from him from there, from this to happening, happens.

And so it goes.  Costume he can’t remember wearing that encases and engulfs.  Awareness too long after to affect.  A lostness in the makeup or makeover, the becoming and become.  Too late.  Ineffective.  Ever after and begone.

Echoes.  Surely something must be said, something addressed to him, something interjected, interacted and applied – only ever now arriving quite beyond a sensibility toward response – apposite, inappropriate, out of line and time and sense.  Unsettled and uncouth.  A threatening out-of-sorts, off-color and unfelt.  Feeling suffocated, unrelating.

Alfonse swimming being, non-concurrent, unawares.  Ineffably indistinct.  Imperceptibly misinterpreted.  Not.  Never.  Was. But.  Here.  Where.  No.  Not.  Now.  It slides away.  He heard something (her mouth, lips, the child-in-walkway, bird, tree bent to breeze) – no, not yet, before, never always, when?  How?

Soughing in a muddy river, ice overhead shifting, yesterday.  Forever.  There is no today in the mix, the undertow, a disconnected untoward, who where when – not he – can’t remember, a caesura of consequence – plugging, plunging him far from present, dark and drear.

So far between the now and when – not-knowing.

Invisible costume.  Alfonse’s weight.  Indistinguishably unable – uncommonly common, this viscous opaque coating – no known axis or location – simply not.  Not.  Not.

Knots of not…not-knowing, not-quite-hearing, not-feeling, not-tasting, ever too late.  Undone for undoing.

Alfonse within costume, a muzzling muffle of indigestive guzzle, of life.  A weather and reprove, a restrictive deconstruction, a not-quite-absence in the presence of the everywhereabouts and everywhen of… of… everything.

Flamingo Robert Frank

Left to Say

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, relationships, Writing8 Comments

felzmann-swarm

What she said was.

And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.

What she said was

I…

To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.

Even I’d be overwhelmed.  Why with the even?

What she said was

It is too much.

I…

But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.

Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…

I cannot.

.

Think of where that leads!

She said

She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.

I cannot.

Is what she said.

She says.

I listen like a camera.

I record.

Her stillness moves too much.

Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.

I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.

.

She says it is too much, I will not try.

But I am trying.

Which does not change.

Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.

She can’t decipher.

What it is.

She will not say.  Says I cannot.

I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.

(Depress, record).

She will not can.

I take a picture.

It does not hear.

.

And what she says is

There’s too much for me to wager on a word

Even in flocks

Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,

Even in swarms.

I blink.

I snap the shutters.

She has said nothing

She will not say

I hold the stillness, how it flutters.

Silence seems.

Seems only.

But what she says is

She cannot.

.

The birds swoop past

And there is nothing

Left to say.

Compositional Caveat

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Journallings, Reflections, Writing7 Comments

Greetings any readers.  I wanted to let you know that I am quite aware of the imperfections of my recent series of draft blogs.  These are first draft typings that I am doing mostly to convince myself that I am not ONE thing (a graduate student) and to have an outlet for unrestrained creative work outside of my studies.  I apologize that I currently do not have the time, attention or energy to perfect them prior to posting – and beg your latitude and generosity in browsing them.  Being that they are first occurrences of these words and this strange little trail, I more than welcome any and all feedback as to what might capture your attention or what is off-putting about their style, content or formal appearance.  I thank you for your graciousness – perhaps more time will open for more careful production by the first of the year….

N W Filbert

Interstice – 6: the coupling

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, Language, meaning, relationships1 Comment

System Environment Coupling

– 6 –

And then the narrative runs away.  Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds.  We yield them occurrence in time.  Over time.  Across locations.  We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so.  Their occurrence is now.  The moment of happen.  And the telling is here just as well.  The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember.  The moment of happen, and never “again.”  “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.

Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles.  We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have.  Construct forms to obey.  She stumbled, or stuttered.  Appeared in a robe.  When it opened, she stayed.  For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.

Not undone.  No undoing – just fall shy.  Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.  An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change.  She (you) and he (I), it (us).  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.

See the couple coupling.  A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle.  Huffs and spurts and clawing.  The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure.  Bodies in command.  It’s grotesque.  Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal.  She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting.  He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake.  They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.

From inches of distance the movements are grueling.  A repetitive taking advantage.  These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need.  The fish flaps on dry ground.  In a terror.  A panic afraid that relief will not come.  Release.  In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.”  But there is an other.  He/she senses the lover’s retreat.  The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction.  They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor.  Asynchrony.  What needs, needs its doing, is done.  Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…

From one angle.

See the couple coupling as animals.  The dog, the bear, the wolf.  The bird or bee or dragonfly.  The distance.  The unawares.  What if the lion leaned into the neck?  What if the squirrel caressed?  If the snakes lay entangled.  The cats licking flanks.  The stories would pour into morphing.  What have we seen?  During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received.  Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving.  His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine.  Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again.  In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else.  Animals humping and huffing,  not by instinct alone, something more.  Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.

In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be.  From the feline receiving her guest.  There is more taking place through the need.  The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond.  Bodies converging in dialogue.  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.  Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create.  The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace.  What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.

We muster.  We glyph.  We resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.

The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.