In the Night, Among the Lost

On By NW FilbertIn WritingLeave a comment

This spring I have the good fortune to be working with Jennifer Koe (of Quirk’n It – http://giddysap.wordpress.com/) on a photo/poem project. Over the next few weeks poems I have constructed that don’t quite fit the theme or plan of the project I’ll be posting on Spoondeep. This is one such poem.

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In the Night, Among the Lost


I sleep.
It fractures.
Visited, as if through a window,
stained and partitioned.
If I reach it will shatter.
There is only – no breathing – to wait.

.
I sleep,
they murmur.
I am alone.
As if dreams were enclosures
or blanketing veils,
wrapped to the earth.

.
I sleep –
to endure.
He comes, she comes, or it,
I am upbraided
by my past and failure.
The night is dark and full of stars
they say.

.
I sleep,
perchancing to dream,
a further remove and immersion
among what is lost and forbidden,
the distance between
you and me.

N Filbert 2013

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In praise of versatility

On By NW FilbertIn Uncategorized, Writing4 Comments

People seem to blog for very many reasons.  For all who follow or glance at The Daily Post blog with its tips and hints and prompts it is clear that some use these community-spaces for singular aspects of their lives (say to showcase or try out their poetry or paintings, photography or thoughts); others to engage in philosophical dialogues or take culture’s pulse; other’s as a form of public journaling, travel albums and so on.  And then there are those that swirl round a broad flux of themes and forms, artefacts and issues.  A versatile blog can be hard to come by, as, unless fueled by a collaborating group, most blogs sprout from individual minds and lives.  Yet we are socially-constructed beings.  A species made up out of context and interrelation.  Versatility is inherent in our adapting and survival.  All that to say that I am honored to have been chosen by maxadaland blog to receive the:

award.

Much thanks.  Sometimes I think we can feel pretty vorticed in our own imaginations…the paradigms and preformulating grids our experience passes through can start seeming quite idiosyncratic and even incommunicable.  Like a catch in an audio file, skipping and repeating such small fragments of possibility – like solipsistic feedback loops – and one can wonder whether interaction / intersubjectivity / reciprocation / communication is happening or not.  If we are hearing, being heard.

One thing I greatly appreciate for my life about having taken the leap of tending to and creating a blog is the daily (or almost) wander through the “Reader” feature of WordPress.  Artists, writers, commentators, philosophers, dramatists and encyclopedic representations of images, texts and audio from all around the world, out of every imaginable cognitive perspective drift past us, triggering synapses and volting neurons in places forgotten or buzzing dormant throughout our bodies.  It presents the wonderful possibility of contrast and integration, stimulae to creation and juxtapositions fundamental to our growth as organisms.  I thank you all for that.

Below, please find a few blogs I follow that in themselves seem to offer worlds of variety – of voices, of inputs and outputs, of interests and concerns – blogs I find that continuously spur new connections, unknown avenues, concepts or artefacts I otherwise would have perhaps never engaged.  Thank you to all – and it is taken for granted that we all know this worldwideweb is full of such spaces, ever only incorrect finger-splotches away.

for starters….

THANKS TO ALL!

Deep and Wide in Kansas

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings1 Comment

meant to be read to the accompaniment of Ben Howard’s “Highland Drifting” which was playing as we flew

Safe in smooth salt from a Permian sea.  

  wide land preserve us.

Dizzying dreams.

The hum, the rumble, the altering sky.

things get stirred up

family dozing, off the horizon

you listen.  to nothing.  to all.

  a sense is made of comparisons with  sea

the winds.  the open.  the variable border between land and sky.  its permeable skin marked by  few trees.

and memory.

how i only hold names and not faces.

language whispers while images fade.

family.  friends.  relations.

at some time I was young.

now diffusing.

it goes on.

it is Spring.

we were there.

we are here

Into Letters…Words…Language

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces4 Comments

(click image for music)

New Arrivals

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading10 Comments

Minds as Museums

On By NW FilbertIn TracesLeave a comment

woke up with this fed from memory…

The zany mind of Stanislaw Szukalski

Or perhaps correspondence…(Asking after the Nature of Nobody, pt. 3)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes9 Comments

from pt. 2:

This is a portion of a map that does not represent the territory.  There are, perhaps, moments – instances – in which I fit with my surround – but usually it is organizing a mapping conference of sensation, affect, percept and infinite inputs coupling to pre-formed acquired categories and classes, fuzzy generalizations to stencil lines and rivers, mounds and fissures with very little correspondence to the world.

It writes this as “my world,” or “the world that I in-habit.”

Or perhaps correspondence…

(Asking after the Nature of Nobody, pt. 3)

…is precisely what is occurring.

“Each biological life-form, by reason of its distinctive bodily constitution (its ‘biological heritage,’ as we might say), is suited only to certain parts and aspects of the vast physical universe.  And when this ‘suitedness to’ takes the bodily form of cognitive organs, such as our own senses, or the often quite different sensory modalities discovered in other lifeforms, then those aspects and only those aspects of the physical environment which are proportioned to those modalities become ‘objectified,’ that is to say, made present not merely physically but cognitively as well…the difference between objects of experience and elements of sensation is determined primarily not by anything in the physical environment as such but by the relation or, rather, network and set of relations that obtains between whatever may be ‘in fact’ present physically in the surroundings and the cognitive constitution of the biological organism interacting with those surrounding here and now.”

-John Deely, Umwelt–

Given the apparent disjunction of its maps to the potential largesse and intricacy (unknowns) of the territory, it reconsiders.

It thinks it may be inextricably related to the territory.  In no way accurately or exhaustively (in relation to the territory) yet constitutively via what kind of co-respondence pertains (in relation to the species of which it is an example).

In other words, by inter-relation to the territory, and by nature of its dynamic organismal systems of sensation-perception-cognition and communication (+ language – the capacity to model the above relational systems): it is I.

It co-evolves personhood.  The capacity to refer to an I among Is.  An individual personality among a We.

Map and territory, co-respondent.  The map being a model of that correspondence and correlation.  Therefore, of course it is idiosyncratic and fraught with misperceptions, disjunctions and erroneously organized interpretations and representations of the networked environments…yet the map = correspondence with the territory in species-specific experience.

Perhaps?

Correspondences of one to many and many to one, and to a very delimited aspect of the territory, but still constructed by real linkages (reciprocal relations and responses) to that “Territory.”

Bees’ links look different.  If a lion were to speak we would not understand.  Every organism its own relations to the territory, selecting and responding, sensing and processing various aspects of the territory into species-specific lifeworlds, but correlated and corresponding particular to their kind.

Or…our maps are our maps.  Ever changing, adapting, responding to our environments and experiences, genuinely related to the territory, representations of our habits of being in the world (in-habit-ing it as humans).

I can’t lay claim to truth about the territory, but my maps derive from it and shape my forays within it, can be shared and examined, evaluated and adjusted with other mapmakers, and trusted as the experience of a peculiar entity of a particular species modeled in reciprocal relation to specific environs of the territory.

“The map is not the territory” but a model, a depiction, a fragment co-evolved in and with that territory, a specific kind of rendering and representation, and valuable for the explorer-species of the sign.

Umwelt by John Deely

On By NW FilbertIn Writing1 Comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE4ce4mexrU

Disjunctive Cartography – Our Propensities, Asking after the Nature of Nobody, cont’d

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

“The map is not the territory.  That’s an expression which  means

the world does not match the picture in our heads”

-Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions, vol. 1–

            It thinks.  It considers that it has not done with it.  It reasons that I will know more tomorrow.  Its hope of reading, of selecting and organizing, of patterning and arranging toward some partial whole, toward an item, an element, a concept or thought (any Other) that it might also become (or have been, an “I”).

In other words, it requires difference.

Yesterday I played soccer with  my son, it concocts.  I was the Other experiencing, moving, tripping-shouting-laughing – discretely – other than the ball or grassy ground, other than the leafy trees and wind, the boy (the one I called son), it was anOther yesterday, and therefore it may refer to that example of human-in-a-context (a surround of not-it) by a meaningful (adequately functional) pronoun (name-toward), namely “he” or “I.”

I gained definition by my surroundings, it conjures.  Any object will do (it’s perceiving assorted matter and energy, its limbs rest on some as “desk,” the 10” fence as “books” and the process of sensing, transforming to perception as “time” and mediates “it” as separate-though-connected – of the same stuff (matter) but in motion and of a unique form (relating to) – and names its organized system “self,” “me,” “I”).

It meditates (categorizes, classifies, identifies, compares and contrasts) on these sensations/percpetions/affectations and wonders.  “It was I,” it hears without sound – a confession aimed at a photo of a boy-child near against an aged man I knew as “grandpa.”  I looked so different – of different cells and height and weight, blood pressure and vision, facial contours, bones, hair and skin – so very different (it looks at a reflection) – how is it the “same” (identical to) “I” it is now?

Or might be tomorrow – through an utterly unknowable future of events, weather, interactivities, sensations, affectations and cognitions.  Will it be me tomorrow?  It wonders how identity can withstand such difference – variance, change, even replacement and erasure – and still meaningfully or validly considered “same”?

It places its’ head on its’ wrists.  It writes these words (is writing) in order to create (or craft) a recognizable trace, an effect, communally learned, socially agreed-upon marks that construct a momentary reflexivity its’ own existence.  A sort of extrinsic, partial it, to feel like also an I, at a moment.

It in-scribes in a medium, borrowed from others – borrowed, acquired, manipulated, stolen – a kind of proof to it that it is, and is unique, separatively connected, yea, conjoined seamlessly, molecularly, and yet… distinguishable… therefore I-able.  Referable.  Nominal.

It senses discomfort in parts labeled (categorized, classified, i.e. generalized and lumped indiscriminately/arbitrarily or learned) “head” and “neck” and “shoulders.”  It shuts its eyes.  I slept well last night, that is, I woke refreshed, my discomforts (aches) diminished.  It remembers I went to bed dry-eyed and suffering allergic responses to Springtime.  It drinks coffee.  It is not the same.

This is a portion of a map that does not represent the territory.  There are, perhaps, moments – instances – in which I fit with my surround – but usually it is organizing a mapping conference of sensation, affect, percept and infinite inputs coupling to pre-formed acquired categories and classes, fuzzy generalizations to stencil lines and rivers, mounds and fissures with very little correspondence to the world.

It writes this as “my world,” or “the world that I in-habit.”

-Becoming Human: Asking after the Nature of Nobody pt. 1

Set Screens

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing25 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers, March 15, 2013.

Copyright - Lora Mitchell

With age I come to see more clearly, through glaucoma and the cataracts.  Each layer beamed away, burning holes in cloudy veils.  Colors hardly remembered, bright edges that the world lends.  All that glitters can’t be told.  Even my hearing improves, as if long years of practice had taught me how to listen.  The paper of my skin whispers pages’ sound.  Dying’s process of deletion, dropping memories like scales.  Surgery after surgical procedure – removing the lens, installing; expanding tubes, constricting; bypassing and shunting – internal edits increasing my awareness that I’ve no idea how deep my set screens go.  I am yet to see this world, through the versions that I’ve filmed.

N Filbert 2013