more Nelson-Atkins works that caught our eyes…Gary Fabian Miller – and truly “light-writing”
taken by her work after this weekend’s visit to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City
A trip to the library
– a sampling of the results…
Semantics
Semantics
Are words the poison? The inevitable, unavoidable miscommunication? 75-80% of communication is “nonverbal,” yet according to the American Library Association even a corpse is a “document.”
What is it with semantics? Is it sickness, like some original stain in brains such as ours – a terminal disease called “fabrication of meaning”? “Second Sight”?
So that an arm movement, a particular gait, an expiration or whittled scar in rock will all be given significance? All some addition, complexiting, a superadded content?
What is this penchant? From where does it come?
It looks like the survival mechanism we think of (signify) as “prediction,” i.e. guesswork.
If we can surmise, invent, fantasize possible leads or outcomes…we’d have a better shot at preparing for it.
We make stories.
Often this is paranoia.
It’s the avoidance and terror of death.
Guess a metaphor for every existing moment, action, thing…and possibly you will survive it…know what’s coming and how to defend against or wriggle past.
Therefore, an alphabetical letter like a post-it note on possibilities, a warning-sign for danger, a diagram of fear.
Her head turns quickly – off put? Offended? Alert to me? Tuned in?
Context.
Octagonal red sign at the corner…I stop.
Top sphere illuminated…I go.
“Crack!” I shift, swivel, flee.
One finger extended, my chest concaves, shoulders furl.
Drip, drip, my mouth begins to salivate.
Anticipation, desire, intuition, knowledge – all spawned in this erratic, sensationalized guessing.
Charlatans and spoofs, all of us.
“Interpreters,” “attributers of meaning” – he/she was so wrong, he/she isn’t listening,
hears, sees, feels what he/she wants (or doesn’t want – desiring either way) to.
Words are not the problem. Signs, symbols, gestures, tones and moods – not the problems.
It’s the fear of death, our innate paranoia, our strict steeped instinct for survival.
Apathy might cure it. Certainly suicide. Some embracing of the facts.
It remains to be seen.
It will look like destruction.
These are only words.
N Filbert 2012
To Advance
This week’s feeblish attempt at Friday Fictioneers 100-word stories…
It was never difficult to see the way, it’s the getting there that problems. The paths unique to our movements. We tend to think it’s the setting out – that getting going presents the obstacle – but we’re always going somewhere. The millions of streets and alleys, those are what throw us, what keep us from the end. How do we know, in constant diversion? Oh I see a way, but not the destination. I’ll move as I see fit. As will you.
Consider, then choose. But always keep moving. There’s no other way. Keep your eye on the opening.
N Filbert 2012
Lifecycling Parenthood
For those of us with children.
How different the meaning of “precious.” Also “alive.” What the self rearranges.
There was a time.
In the beginning, the excitement of puppies. That generosity. The concept of dependence revised.
A dawning recognition involving hope and helplessness – their power. Sheer organism. Complexity. Alive, mobile, emerging. What wears away, gets broken. What heals, what hardens. Your part in it.
The changing nature of survival, and terms like “health,” “okay,” and “wellness.”
An awareness of trajectories: expansion versus maintenance, collage versus carve, assembling as opposed to mending. The children, the parent.
What persons are. Attachments. Difference. Freedom. Control.
The blowing snow left in their absence. The ways they vanish, into themselves, their people, cracks in the world, airstreams and oceans.
How control rarely changes hands, nearly always remains invisible, what no one grasps.
The erratics of growth, the scale of unexpected development, of motives, of attention.
Intention and the noise inherent in communication. The stage of sighs – their nuances.
We age. Our eyes grow joy and sorrow, and both look like pride coupled to grief.
Randomness of adulthood. Vagaries of time and consequence. Learning curves like tangled thread.
Inevitable dismissal.
N Filbert 2012
To Grow
try driving through the Flint Hills in Kansas
with accompaniment
Nothing, In General
In which case, he writes, for life. As if asked about nothing, in general. There never has to be a reason, what is called illusion or delusion, he can’t remember which. He is at a loss, that much he knows, unsure if “at” is place or time, so often hand in hand.
Writing.
He could just as well be painting, singing, creating some other cultural artifact, and all offered up in an aether, but he’s not. He writes, for life, in this case, as if in general, about nothing. Which is everything also, for him – writing, at a loss – the nowhere now here is.
The words, like images, serve. Serve to draw out and reflect. Like actions or encounters, self-portraits or redundancies. In other words, those would be. In writing he extends his veins and neural works, outstrips his body into text – an alchemy of sorts – and then relates to them as if an other, at a loss, in what he sees, or reads, as the case may be, words as much an image when inscribed.
Which are now here, which were not, because he’s writing. Which, in fact, he does, at a loss – moments so much like chaos, say “entropy” – for the offering of something indicative, external, outside – as if verifying a place and a time, i.e. organizing a disorder, finding a nowhere.
Similar to nothing, in general, become something, in particular. Like an idea, or an atom, an interpreted emotion, or a god. Each action a creation like an assortment of patterns on chaos. Like nothing in general, or everything in particular.
At which point, in which case, he writes.
N Filbert 2012
Wisdom Today
“The same urge that leads us to mistake idiom for Word leads us to create a philosophical unconscious by repressing the origins of our concepts.”
-H. L. Hix-
All my Words are Silent 