from this weeks reading…
3 wholistic recordings of the lived experience
and its entagled entailments
“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else”
-Emilry Dickinson-
ca. 1843
from the Journals of the Claxton Brothers, ca. 1843.
After experiencing what we’d come to call “the Plunge,” we traveled the familiar creekbed back toward our cabin. On departing for the hunt the water flowed strong, securing our wagon deep in its tow. It was dry now, the entire wagon missing. And our homestead, hewn of stone, carefully plugged and plastered, now displayed gaps and cracks, with dust and moulder monitoring its decay. Having left just hours ago at the tail-end of night, how could things have altered so? As if ages and drought, plunder and wear all visited here meanwhiles. Window given over to darkness, the entrance as open and vague as a ghost.
Thankfulness
Given the shiftings and obstacles and reappointments of time and priorities that have effected me over the past month or two, I am very grateful to receive news, messages, word that what work I am able to do is being read, is given attention. Thank you!
Yesterday I received a message from Michele D’Acosta that she had nominated me for the “One Lovely Blog” award, I was surprised and ever so grateful.
Receiving this award asks that the recipient tell readers seven things that they may not know about the creator of the blog:
1. I’m a parent to seven children.
2. I’m a new graduate student in library and information sciences.
3. I adore theory.
4. I’m a classically trained vocalist and pianist.
5. I love all things peanut butter.
6. I have very few friends.
7. I long to be a published author.
Then the recipient is asked to recommend to the readers 10-15 other blogs that he or she finds compelling or necessary:
I’ve recently found it necessary to pare down the blogs I follow due to the time constraints my life imposes and a feeling of overload in providing each blog its due attention. So I’ve had to think hard about what blogs seriously enhance my existence that I engage. I will pass a few of them along here.
Adventures in American Writing
We Need More Time to Stand and Stare
that’ll have to do…as I go over my list of blogs I follow I realize there are SO SO SO many whose news/thoughts/artifacts/messages are meaningful to me. But to list them all! So follow the leads and find the good stuff!
A sincere thank you to all who take time to engage my thoughts and stuff.
Nathan
Grammaring Perseverance
Grammaring Perseverance
“A grammar is an on-going system of relationships…a system which is always in the process of articulating itself – not simply changing, but actually making itself up as it goes along”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
My hand trembles when I move to write. Time changes. What is called perseverance, equals age.
As beautiful to me now, she. More.
I refuse her loss on any terms. In any context.
I investigate the language of inquiry. Always a difference of relation.
Never expect to be heard. Nor heeded.
Language makes itself up…and it goes along…articulating itself…again.
With this hand, along the incalculable curve of her hip, my palm records cellularly, but never repeats.
Lef hand entangled, her thick head of hair, tomorrow otherwise, should it work its way out. Or ever want to.
The side of my knee prepositions her thigh, slides into a phrase, shaping a passage, not as if the surface is ever the same, yet no doubt it belongs, only, to her.
My ankled feet, like bony whips, eager to explore, inadvertently pain – the slope of the pedal, bolt of the swivel and up the liquid skin and calf.
It will leave its bruise, its passioned impression.
Everything becomes an aching to know. Everything is on-going process.
Systems of relations.
When perseverance oppresses. Again, again, not emptying the land, but altering it. To cause the seeking, redundancy, both the wanted and the wanting wear. Tools whittling down, different structures, various nerves, must learn again, of course the surfaces having changed.
My thigh registers her buttocks, elbow in her neck held by shoulder. For lips to memorize her ear, only that moment. I rely on her contours similarity hour to hour, so that details are not lost, just renewed.
An eroding resource, yet we are layered, and wrinkled through the timing. What preserves? Naught but the process itself, for which our charts are made. Remade.
The motion does not cease.
As the curves to the apple, subjective object of measurement. Objecting a subject to a sensual scrutiny. Not unlike remembering, or illusion. Information, an obvious verb. Whether coming undone or accruing.
That began in the perseverance of my quivering hand. Once connected, steadied by context, the grid of associations and leaps. The world is a boundary to trace, to follow along, diverting the dots and the dashes, the lines and the colors, reenacting the tracks.
A stumble is anything but halting, more like surge and accident and a reaching out to stay. My fingers tend to fumble through the filaments – those once vocabulary now a tangling stitching of signs.
To be decoded, recoded, as it were, what hollow mouth or aural labyrinth does not effect? We know of no recipients, no audience, only sometimes, luckily, co-conspirators, co-creators of a co-event, called (sometimes) knowing, (sometimes) conversation, (sometimes) simultaneity.
I’ll reach out, my hand tremored right down to its core, its code, its quarks or its atoms,
and find a steadying or pattern, metaphors of richer entanglements that may not be explained
my qualia, slight blue lines on pallid vacant surfaces, directing possibilities.
In-formation – that everything that is, in its multiplied becomings, as discrete as my flesh traversing yours.
A continuous severing enabling us knowing – our grammaring, our ongoing, its enclosure.
“At the ‘inmost heart of each thing’ is an ongoing process, an unfolding which is its identity”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
“Communication”
“Communication”
We, in our world, have a theory, a process really, that we call “communication.” In various states of profundity it might also be referred to by “love.”
“Communication” is the process of signaling/decoding; saying/listening; writing/translating; touching/feeling by which we become aware of one another, about one another, of one another.
All things considered, “communication” is pretty important for us, though not necessarily to us. While appearing more complex and refined than single cells or parts of cells vibrating under a microscope; more elaborate and extensive than a swarm of birds or school of fish, it hardly works as well. As if certain sharp things and certain dull things cancel one another out.
Pitch, tone, palate and respiration. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax. Associations occurring in the brain, the glands, the organs, the body. I’ve always thought of our existence as “fraught” and it never ceases to amaze me!
Amaze and astound, in no particular order. As if “stound” were past-tense for “stand.” Stopped-in-tracks-reeling-backwards.
There’s nothing to it really, we all do it, all of the time, innately, it would seem, given we could not survive without it. And yet. “Innate” wouldn’t be the right word. Maybe “potential” as if capacities and possibilities surround every cell toward response. And then. What becomes. Responsibility. Of that interstellar stuff moving and extra-anatomical stuff too. Kind of equals.
So we’re not necessarily “good” at it, and hardly possess a measure, everyone on equal footing at some point, depending on the context, depending on construction (of the possibles) and so forth. It’s often accurately called “fuzzy” or “messy” – an entanglement of sorts in no sense negative.
I always liked William James – the jumble-up of him. “Rich thicket of reality” he called it, a passage to get caught up in, sometimes snared, sometimes struggling, but ever in its midst, I suppose.
Lyn Hejinian once pronounced it “inexhaustible.”
I just wanted to mention…
“The argument would go something like this: reality exists; it is independent of what we think though it is the only thing we can think; we are a part of reality but at the same time consciousness of this fact makes us separate from it; we have a point of reentry (a ‘centrique happinesse’), which is language, but our reentry is hesitant, provisional, and awkward”
-Lyn Hejinian-
Toronto
Friday Fictioneers, August 31, 2012
Toronto
How well I remember the day, injured, sharp pain in every step, alone and far, hoping for once the rain might hold. That solid, turbulent sky. Street smells of rot and iron, bodies and fuels. All muffled for me in the reasons – what sense and thinking does – that thick overlay of shiftings and emotion.
It was here, right here, looking up for bearings, that I knew all was doubtful. Doubtful I’d find my way, doubtful my body would hold up, doubtful anyone would wait or notice. Particularly not the distant.
Of course I knew what to do.
And what about the rain?
N Filbert 2012
In-Shadows
In-Shadows
“The Artist, he who even takes the shadows of things in hand…”
-Macedonio Fernandez-
“He who imagines will never know non-being.”
A morass of shadows.
A repletion of blips and flashings.
An absence : I understand.
I swipe my hand through the shadows. I sense disturbance, but my palm returns empty, save the moisture of fog in dark woods. If even. There has been dust.
I stir the ashes. I kindle the fire. The brain a roadmap of chaos. And intricately precise. Subject to accident and lesion and a cross-pollination of impulses and energies beyond present calculations. Not withstanding infinity, of course, which hardly makes sense, given the matter.
A squalor of shadows.
Currents of whispering air, of motion.
A ubiquity that trembles.
I open my mouth to the world. I emit and inhale. Shouting resonant within, because I have ears. Equipped with particulars. Apparatus. Other cells stay quiet but do not cease, I lack the equipment to hear. Stone, lizard, mushroom. Light in its veils. I cry out. Echo =, tree hardly cares. I’m remiss and listen myself for response.
Breathing the smoke. I stink and I cough and I smell. My hand passes through without ashes or mist. I am not everywhere. I do not know my ends. If a melody came through like a sight or a sound, I would not name it. I am emptying full.
As shadows thicken and disperse.
Objects as subjects and objects again.
Something live in the darkness.
That is darkness for me, not the night owl or mouse, salamander or bat, not the tree. No, it is me, I, we, that conjure the “darkness” as difference from “light,” however similar, however same. As if emitting symbols. As if meaning to manufacture. I construct a sign and call it poem, collaborate a you and a me. We converse. I begin.
If doubt incites a thought, thought conspires doubt to further action. As if shadows were transparent. And meaningless was choice. Eye – mouth – hand : open to the world, the world opens. I begin in signs and gestures, a collaborative entanglement, reentered.
In dispersion shadows reconvene.
Clearly thickened by old growth.
Body minding nets.
Would I make a “here” it would be “we.” A desire for presents is relation. What its plural ought to be (“presence”). I unwrap unable to view the gift. Tell me of it, will you? “Inside” is lost in shadows. What’s perceptible from “there”? Tree, raven, sky. Plastic object pulsed in heartbeat or emotion: what could I learn from “there”?
What isn’t simultaneous? And how like the infinity we are constrained not to absorb? Enclose me. Lend me a form, a border, a threshold. Entangle. Experience may come.
“the silence of the page allows us to hear the writing”
-Octavio Paz-
Pre-qual(ia): A sort of introduction: What Language: &
We happen in a substantial liquid. A surround we effect. Are affected by. We move, it moves. It moves, we are moved. Moving it. Being moved by. Each, all. What’s between. Those spaces. Empty and full, of course.
You know what I mean. You breathe. Hearing silently what is written. You see. Thinking the emptiness between, what fills. Is filled by. Is full. Before it thinks empty. Feels.
Liquid, permeable as skin, as mobile, as inseparable. The thought, the body of that thinking. Or, a “body of text.” Such liquid air. Insubstantiated emptiness without which we would not.
Happen in that liquid/not-liquid. Like particles and waves. Either-ors reduced to ands. Themselves. With which is struck a chord. Male/female, yes/no, self/other, you/me, hot/cold: variations of permeable boundaries, without borders, like overlapping zones, difficult transparencies.
We grew out of, becoming, precedented, pro-perceptive/re-perceptive. Remember. Without parts, but designated. You hear. You see. You taste. You feel. You, thinking emotion, feeling in brain, mind matterless matter…mem(e)brane(-ain). Liquidy occur. Movement.
The leaf. Exhaust. Intake. A wave. A particle. Re-perception. Mem(e)ory. Or me.
You know the drill. Acting. Play. A wobble, a quiver. We tremble. We hum. We happen. It’s a wonder. Every it. Unknown, unknowable knowledge experienced. I-qualia.
Sense-making. What is. In essence nonsensical. Incommunicable between. Inescapable intersubjectivity. Either parts public, private. Neither/nor. This boundary, porous. And. As conscious would not be a thing but a process, more definitively. Noun/verb. And. Shared structures of DNA, destructured and oscillate. Me/you. Either and or. Bubble pierced with raindrops. A fashioning. A possibility that.
Existence. IS. Co-existence. AND.
I being either noun and verb or neither.
As liquid is not.
So a border a threshold, a line, a triangle.
AND.
“that silk is stitching our lungs”
-Christina Mengert-
“In order for my specific subjectivity to fill the general slot of the first person pronoun, that word must be ‘empty’: ‘I’ is a word that can mean nothing in general, for the reference it mines can never be visualized in its consummated wholeness…it is a general token of absence that can be filled in any particular utterance.”
-Michael Holquist-
It happens
It would happen. The things approach us. We feel them in our horizons. Extending out behind us. A sort of fullness. A swelling, sweltering cool. Billowing possibility. Stand and stare, even in our movement, unseeing. We blindly gaze. Caught short, upended, the rhythm is certainly sea. We are dry. We will happen. We are bound to. Look out.
Remote murmur. You know.
Not trauma. Distant thrumble.
You speak.
Echo absorbs.
It would happen. Consider.
It will happen. Just you wait.
A world is a kind of ode.
Your body a stylus.
We are here.
N Filbert 2012
Minding the Gaps in the Membranes: A perforation, an hiatus, a foramen
Intermission.
It is likely you will experience “an interruption in the intensity or amount of something.”
Quite probable, in fact. Possibly certain.
I might say that a human being is a process consisting of a body and a situation in constant flux and adaptation…dialogue of inescapable intersubjectivity.
Now I have.
Lyn Hejinian has said that “‘aboutness’ (in writing, but, I would argue, also in life) is transitional, transitory,” and that,
“language is a medium for experiencing experience…of inquiry…writing is a process of improvisation within a framework (form) of intention…”
like consciousness, self, and all of its constitutive surround…
i.e. being (or becoming) human.
In the midst of which…otherness, the unknown, openness in the structure
– a gap, a leap, a hiatus, an abatement –
For instance, this blog.
Having been fortuitously enabled to devote considerable amounts of time and effort to it this past year, it has changed and moved, grown and altered me beyond my expectations – experimenting in language with experience and painstakingly risking and studying, following passions and trails, ideas and stories – always attempting to language the knowing – has been a phenomenal (literally) vocation for me.
The contexts are shifting…whatever I am is being differently situated – times, spaces and surrounds…requiring temporary suspensions to my efforts here at manoftheword.
I will work seriously to keep up with at least 100 words of fiction per week (thank you for the promptings Madison-Woods and Friday Fictioneers) and any poetic bursts or artifacts that get me along in my experiences; images or residual thought-projects that are not necessary to my schoolwork, family or professional life I purpose to share in this forum and spoondeep mag or gypsy wall. My wife and I are currently committing ourselves to a larger multi-media project over the next year or so, but will also attempt to freshen Ekphrastix Arts as time allows, at least with updates. My own creative efforts are being redirected to my studies at SLIM, some exciting articles for an upcoming art exhibition in Wichita, Kansas (stay posted with Lux Fisch Haus Exhibition and related links) as well as a longer project I’m committing my sanity (or its loss) to – currently denoted in myself as Qualia, probable connected fragment-instants of subjective experience which also may leave some effluvia worth commending to you here.
All of this to say a ginormous THANK YOU and KUDOs to the incredible world of WordPress bloggers and visitors – please continue to follow and check on us – I promise at LEAST weekly there will be new content here – your support and attention mean such a great deal to me/us. And I will certainly continue to read and view what I can in the interstices of my goings-on. I genuinely appreciate everyone’s efforts, creativity and artifacts here.
“[language]…is denotatively social…but not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgment – and that constitutes a sort of unknowing. To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness (i.e., the unknown and perhaps unknowable). [Writing] undertakes acknowledgment as a preservation of otherness – a notion that can be offered in a political, as well as an epistemological, context.
This acknowledging is a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on…”
(Lyn Hejinian)
THINK ON. MAKE ON. BLOG ON!
All my Words are Silent 