A Kind of Credo : Intertextuality : “Art is Difficult” : Manifesto?

“perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point”

-Anne McConnell, Approaching Disappearance

But then there is a reality to writing – the unexpected, the making-up, emergence and invention.  I believe in it, in spite of my theories, in spite of acquired knowledge.  Something like the terms of paradox.  Little matter, much substance (not really).

For fun, let’s say (in the manner of a credo):

  •  “I believe…

that language is a socially constructed resource recursively constituting and innovating meaning potential

  • “I believe…

‘the notion of meaning potential can be characterized as a heterogeneous totality of knowledge of conventionalized patterns of normatively correct situated verbal behavior which manifests itself and emerges from social practices of a given social community’ (-Mika Lahteenmaki)

  • “We believe…

that actual meanings are emergent from meaning potentials – are jointly created – recursively and interactively dependent – in their situatedness and perspectivity, unique and irreducible

  • “We believe…

‘reality works in overt mystery’ (-Macedonio Fernandez, via JL Borges)

  • “We believe…

that to live ‘is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed’ (-Gilles Deleuze)

  • “We believe…

that living occurs via the ‘conservation of autopoiesis and the conservation of adaptation – a constant and mutual structural coupling of continuous transformations betwixt organisms and environments (envorganisms)’ (-Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Paul Kockelman)

  • “We believe…

in complexity and meaning, difference and repetition, redundancy and novelty, structures and contingencies, openness and change

Measures of reality (situated and perspectival…partial and relative to) – our As-if-oscope and Toxic spoon-deep.  A hurly-burly and chaotic entanglementintertwingled – adjoined in movements (writing of writing) to use an outdated metaphor:  textuality and trace.

  • “We could believe…

that ‘texts record the meanings we make: in words, pictures and deeds…shaping and shaped by our social relationships, politically, as individuals as members of social groups’ (-Jay Lemke)

That no effect is not mutual, recursive, intermingled and intertwined.  Life is ambient, writing of writing.

In other words.

  • “We believe…

that ‘Art is difficult’ (-Viktor Shklovsky) and meanings dialogic/multilogic / multimodal/multivalent (-Mikhail Bakhtin, Gunther Kress, Bruno Latour, semiosis)

Empiricism regarding ourselves is impossible (the situation and perspective necessary are not available) so we rely.  i.e. we need one another and beyond.  Envorganisms, we.  We believe (we could say.  I might).

“When we leave each other, we leave.”

Henrik Nordbrandt

A text composed is intertexuality – an Irish monk illuminating a copy; a modern blogger mashing-up – bricolage, meaning – I write, WITH.

To say I instantiate a social practice.  It becomes.

Thank you.  And welcome.

-a glyph is a hunt for optimism-

Slideshow of works cited:

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Troubling Identities, cont’d: Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow”

Kafka - Drawing

-please click image for textual content-

Troubling Identity in Writing – What Scribbling Does

As an addendum and prequel to writing anything/everything I wanted to share a couple of terrific essays on the strange elimination (or difficulty of perceiving) a “self” or “personality” or “identity” or any of those socially constructed concepts relating to human individuals.  Prompted by the scribbling exercise of last week (see previous post) – the conundrum has long fascinated me and seems to be so well presented in texts like Jorge Luis Borges‘ The Nothingness of Personality (also perhaps available here) and this tremendous first essay – relating to Maurice Blanchot‘s writings – in Anne McConnell’s Approaching Disappearance – (click image to read)

McConnell - Approaching Disappearance

all help me to understand better why it often seems hard for writerlies to formulate or maintain “strong senses of self” – as the practice of entering language in such a way seems to dissolve the separations that might preserve that artificial construction.

Related…

“Yet if language gives no words for what happens…it nevertheless gives itself”

-Christopher Fynsk-

“Not to discover – not to be able to discover – the solution, is the general tragedy of all writing”

“To try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life are one and the same thing”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

“Reality works in overt mystery”

-Macedonio Fernandez-

Creatively Connecting In Movement and Painting

some things we do

Scribbling – Formless Thing Things Form Being in Motion Exploring Complexity – week of 9/7/2013

Scribbling

Formless Thing Things Form   Being in Motion   Exploring Complexity

            In the first place (after a letter to Seth and moving and thinking and painting with wife and a few hours of homework – reviewing Management and Organization Theory and Design no less) the first thing to do is to write.  To simply write by hand, being in motion, that is, setting into motion, and all that follows, which usually happens (like today) first – after folding laundry, washing dishes, required reading, getting kiddos fed, dressed, off to school, checking email and phone messages and new assignments, touching base with wife, drinking (making and drinking) coffee, homework, family, tasks, events, chores, responsibilities, choices – after that the first thing to do is to write, after somehow quieting the buzziness of busyness, at the desk, reading something slow and singular like poems, philosophy, science, or art – something chosen, maybe a walk, maybe music, maybe a task, and then, oh then, the first thing to do is be in motion, set into motion, set being in motion at my desk with a ball-point pen (Bic) and blank, clean, beautiful, hungry, precious, anxious (anticipatory, aroused) lined notebook paper in a loose, forgiving stack, ready, ready, ready…

…for the first thing.

            Which is not to say I was an object before, or that anything was ever a thing, or still (static) prior to pen + paper by my hand – no – Formless Things were Thinging Forms in all the other ways of motion, movements, relationships between tools and water, emotions, skin, utensils and hands and mouths and sounds and voices and contact continuous through air, always movement, humming being in motion beings forming thingless things forming formlessness, changing motion swerves and stoops, bends and helps listening to movements vibrations tones noticing shapes and lines and particling waves of substances moving moving attaching disseminating shapes, sequencing, paces, difference all pointing out where everything connects to everything else – the joining nature of boundaries – what is always next to – observe how the line works:

ι

ι

ι

 

before which space was “empty” but now it holds together, walls like stitches, buildings like blocks stuck together so things stay gathered, movements, lines, dance, breeze, blood, noises, gluing, gluing, gluing every to-gether, difference repetition pattern

Categories.  To keep things adjoined, combined.  Lists, minutes, days, tasks, timelines, hours, keeping thingless things attached in their movements – different ways of sameness – being in motion – and so forth  →

→ Forth toward firstly, to write.  Being in motion, set in motion, slowly faster, faster by slowly, by hand instead of tapping, fluid choices – typing is stop-motion, discreet, discontinuous – comparatively faster but less efficient, slower (by hand) efficacy thinking images or imaginary thinking now less critical (embedded critique): fluid.  I stop.  Breathing continues with hand thought memory hope – NOW –

A kind of yearning motion movement in letters read as words, phrases, meanings, less representative more relational – unnatural to this and this and that and other.  Confusing writing, drawing, space and time, concept object sign symptom, doodle.

To communicate.  Being in motion together if sequentially the linking looping line (by hand) tracing where we meet, are joined, in movement against/with, with, with one another – here is where we meet, inadvertent/advertently.

Being in motion, set in motion by hand – to draw writing – an advert for connection, to construct lines to bring things together, to notice.  Exploring complexity through being in motion.  Reading is movement.

            We are.

 

The Myth of the Universal Library

Universal Library

Myths of the Universal Library by John Thiem

I found this text captivating

Self-writing / Autography

web I

 

I want to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including wanting to know how wanting to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including wanting to know how wanting to know how wanting to know how everything we do (as the human kind of organisms) functions for us, including…

 

A Real-ization?

A Real-ization(?)

“…And here begins my despair as a writer”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph

 

I should say, “began.”  And not “as a writer,” per se, or even primarily, no, I should more accurately portray the experience “…and so began, and ever continues to begin, my despair as a human.”

For experiences, no matter where or when, in full matter of where and when, are multitude that begin such despair.  They are occurrences of a process we call variously “knowing,” “comprehending,” “understanding” – encounters with unlimited and unnecessary contents we might describe as “revelatory,” “visionary,” or “true.”  We describe their feeling and fumble with content.

For they seem to circumscribe an everything – as contained and opening out – well-metaphored by the scientifically religious Big Bang, an un-caused cause or some like.  Experiences we couch in the babbles of mystery: synchronicity, omniscience, omnivorous, omnipotent and omnipresent.  We feel them like an orb or spiral, a series of looping waves without succession.

A.k.a “convergence,” simultaneity and emergence coming together at now and here.

I write “as a human” because I cannot be anything else.  And a human, as a living being, is characterized by limitations and potentials.  Although kinds of things never exhaust their potentials (as far as we know) – thereby always altering what might constitute affordances and constraints lists – nevertheless, in order to be unique (or anything at all – “what –so-ever”) humans must be limited, those limitations providing the very contexts for exploring potentials and potency.

One such environment or niche is the operation of our living processes in space and through time.  I.e. a simultaneous occurrence of everything cannot be processed, cannot be shared, as such.  It must needs be dissected and dismembered via many spaces and over time in order to be perceived by such an animal as we – re-membered and imaged-in (imagined) according to our nature (our processes and practices in our environments).

This is why moments we might re(in)fer to as “transcendent” or “wholistic” perhaps “encapsulating” or “converging” – compressing and expanding (synonymously) some happening that seems “total” generate despair for our kind or species.

I am unable to deny what comes to experience, but with labels and descriptions (interpretation) must take care.  One often turns to symbols or metaphors: icons that serve to absorb a variegated but comprehensible share of human experiences.  Accrued via descriptions and depictions over time, these symbols resonate and traverse times and boundaries in order to gather experiences of a kind.  Take for example the term “hunger,” or a drawing of an eye.  Mirrors, or a resolving I-IV-V progression.  These activities of reference and participation, renewal and recognition, present and re-present for us experiences that seem to extend or equal (again, synonymously) us.

Despair comes in the desired specificity each individual of the species wishes to convey (form of convergence – communicate meaning for our kind can be spotted by our use of the prefix co-).  That experience (in itself necessarily co-), in order to have meaning(humanly speaking) must be shared – we find that telling/singing/dancing/painting/acting/writing/ filming/making/working/sculpting/creating/crafting or any combination of them all and the human-specific processes this entails are unable to re-present such “totalizing” experiences, except at certain angles, perspectives, fragments, over time.

Yet, were it otherwise, we would have no need of any of our abilities – for we would know.  The relations, practices, potentials and processes depend on this inability (limitation) to be.  For us to be, as humans, what and whom, where and when, we are.

Unity would undo this.  In fact, we have no evidence that ANY living entity “shares alike” – reciprocates perfect understanding or replication (or reproduction, ex-ist-ing) exactly…down beyond our cells…there is difference, mis-matching, variation.  In fact, all the co-operations that provide con-vergence and co-mmunity, me-and-ing (meaning) depend on the disjunctions we strive to come over or through in order to express, be understood, known, “as one.”

So, though never “of the same mind,” perspective, or feeling, even when we experience me-and-ing together (gathered) – – this is also how we are.

Perhaps then, less despair than real-ization?

 

An Example of Structuring – Priorities

1.  Family

Nuclear Families

 

2.  School

Scholarly Pursuits

3.  Prioritization of Personal Pursuits

Structural Prioritization of Readings: Fall 2013

(please click on image for display)

Readings

Please Stand By. Restructuring. Thank You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEq-Y8-vZF4

Thank you.  And I mean that.

The years of blogging, developing manoftheword/The Whole Hurly Burly have been life-changing.  Blogging has enabled me to learn to share my work, to discover what resonates in my work with whom and what sorts of interests.  Blogging has given me courage, most definitely helped me discover my voice, and linked me to an amazing community of creators and thinkers.  In that way it has given me hope.

I appreciate everyone who has visited (or will visit) these pages, who has taken the time to interact, comment, critique, challenge and question my process, my content, my style.

Thank You

It has been a significant mode of expression in which I have felt that I mattered, have been heard, seen, can contribute something to a large and complex world.

I am unsure of my intentions with a caesura, apart from feeling profoundly that the time and energy I put toward this is needed in other areas of my life right now.  The Whole Hurly Burly of life has its ways and effects.

As in brief breaks before (beginning grad school again, starting a business with spouse, children home for summer and the like) – should something worthy come forth I will share it, but for a time will be unable to consistently interact in this medium.

It has been a great pleasure – both “followers” (I hope not!) and those I “follow” – to become acquainted with your works, your gifts and talents, your ideas and artefacts – and truly – to have been offered a context that feels safe for experimencting mine.  THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

I cannot predict the time I will need for this restructuring, but I can assure you this experience and network and relation has been profound and meaningful in my life.

Here’s to WordPress

Wordpress

and to all of YOU who make it worth pressing.

TO LIFE!

Nathan W Filbert