Gathering Information : “Making Sense” : I am that I am
“I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it…[I want to write] stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.”
-David Foster Wallace-
That sense that the moon is obscure – cracked or marred in some indefinable way. That it might never rain. That parenting equals living with people you helplessly love.
Or marriage as painting, but you can’t control the medium, or even learn to think in it. You’ll never be wood, cloth, pigment or oils. I was never good at math, chemistry or geometry. For making a masterpiece, my chances are slim. Manic-depressive’s “in love” – like playing chess with marbles and confusing the rules of the games.
It seems possible that people who age wish they were young – tighter, unwrinkled, new-made. I don’t know – people don’t seem satisfied, somehow. You get the feeling, sometimes, I don’t know…I get the feeling sometimes that people wished they weren’t people. You know, that, like, they wished they were simple or something. Simple scientifically. Not complex, elaborate organisms, you know? But more like a single cell or an amoeba – something with apparent purpose or sort of unified mission. That they knew what to do. Or would – if they could just pull everything together, into line.
I think that’s what people mean by “making sense”? Something like that. Something like inventing God, some unified theory, some golden thread, some identity, some narrative. People are weird like that, but it makes for a fascinating species – the Storytelling Species – ingenious and fantastic, often unbelievable – the lengths to which these collectives will go to spin a yarn. Fit experience.
They’ll use numbers and actions and colors. Matter or energy and form. Inventing for anything a space and a duration. It looks like fighting with nature, but it’s kinda not – ‘cause it’s also how they perceive it. People.
With these enormously intricate mechanisms for constructing order, fabricating texture and variation and difference. To mash it all back together uniquely – imprinted, as it were – some new amalgam and full of traces – shadows and whispers of origins. Con-fused. Remade. Undone.
I used to think that was a purpose – to give meaning. Now I see it as a condition. A convention of rare and specific animals. At least we convene. We wouldn’t do well isolate – craving a single-cell or elemental type existence. We’re collectives – conventional conceptions. People! (said with a huff-sigh of air and exhausted incredulity).
You gotta love ‘em! ‘Cause if you’re reading this – “making sense” of these frenetic marks and spaces, light and shadow – then you’re one of them, and it does you no good to resist or despise yourself. Your own kind. Though people can, and many do.
Funny (peculiar) how you’ll find people that want to be much greater, grander than the mysterious incalculable beings they are, and then a bundle that wish they were less, tinier, singular things, and then the incredible bulk of people who somehow conflate the two: believing simplicity to be grandeur, the one – the all, everything/nothing, unity/diversity same difference and so on – go figure! (Really, try it).
Let’s choose a pinnacle example: say unpack “God” or the workings of atoms and molecules, hell, even protoplasm – seems we could learn an awe-full LOT from each of these straightforward messages we uncover: “I am that I am.”
Book of the Dead + commentary, cont’d.
This person makes an enormous difference in my life.
In Living Memory
Not like there’s a whole lot there. It is what it is, my memory – glossy, apparently endless, and stripped bare. But there seem to be windows, areas the light creeps in, and doorways – entries to room after room of possibilities. If I could get in there, could move past this moment of glimpsing, find the courage to carry myself forward (or is it back?). Remains to be seen, here – me at the cusp, in full view, just on the verge, of remembering.
What just happened?
N Filbert 2012
this post created as participation in beloved weekly Friday Fictioneers – check it out! join!
Excerpt from the Book of the Dead – Jabes (replete with traces)
“Why render that experience through fiction? First, because we are only fiction.
We are only the idea we have of ourselves.”
-Edmond Jabes-
Thank you : I don’t know what I am saying…
“Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed.”
-Maurice Blanchot-
“The world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both by the public motion and their own. Even constancy itself is no other but a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my object; ‘tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness; I take it as it is at the instant I consider it; I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.”
-Michel de Montaigne, 1580-
“Sincerity – it’s the insatiable process
of transition, of fluctuation…”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
I began one place, and become another.
Wallace remarked that the most difficult thing to teach young writers was the difference between expressive writing and communicative writing.
“Two utterances cling tightly to each other, like two bodies but having indistinct boundaries.” (Maurice Blanchot)
A notification informs me that today is the first anniversary of my experience of the blogosphere.
Humbled over 365 days.
And thank you.
.
I imagine many writers/artists start out, in the youth of their writing (or creative work) from a singular sense. There’s this “me” experiencing this “world,” it seems like – an I and a chaos, an identity and a multitude. When the I (or eye) feels full, it is like to burst. Things touch us, hurt us, impinge on our locus, our “self,” and it seems something must be done about it – we must exert – strike back, reach out, kiss, craft – exhibit our presence. Interact. The dualities are clear.
Are confused. Experience turns out to be very mixed, an impossibly confusing weave. As we begin to plunder these “moments,” we’re countered. Things that happened to us, we were there for, in all fairness, our activities encroach.
We begin perhaps to recognize our existence as agents – not only done to, but doing; not only recipients but respondants, reactive. The wrestle of expressing ourselves through materials (language, movement, matter or sound) teaches us this. The Other’s inextricably woven – what occurs and results is the same. Is unlike. We lose balance.
Conceiving the work as a subject toward object (our creating) deriving from object to subject (our experiences) – our investigations quickly expose this unclear. Attacked by requirements of how. Stubborn like marble or tricky as oils, even recalcitrant conventions, we begin to comprehend a falsity to working on, as a single direction, and realize it’s all a working with. And we struggle.
Even working with. The earth, or people, or bodies, or clay, things rarely abide our intentions. We set out to disburden ourselves, get incited to construct or create (to “use”) and find ourselves consistently foiled. Reality doesn’t care. We find precious little room for expression. Compromise and nuance, novelty or style – ineffective to the longings we exude.
Perhaps at this stage we lose faith in our voices or visions – what we seek we does not seem to obtain. This is fine. This is something no product can resolve. For there isn’t. There is no solution to life. We are IN it. And there is no replacement for death. Then we’re OUT.
Whether language or matter, movement or sound, our “I” never works on an Other. We are INsulated. INextricably. Communicative activity means cohabiting the spaces, simultaneous-ing the times. Realities – experiences – accord. Everything possessing the prefix co-. It’s admitting the reciprocal, the recursive – we’re not separate beings being, we are beings expressing ourselves commensurately. Perhaps control is adjusting to convention. Accepting agreements with place. Expression living IN and WITH, communication the word for the weave. That we’re behaving, creating, co-mposing in inseparable connectivity (inexpressible process) – transition, fluctuation, IN –
– attempting to paint its passage.
Thanks so much for reading, joining, my attempts.
N Filbert 2012
Another Fragment…
Pieces from the Book of the Dead
All my Words are Silent 