Life is a Blur
July…wha-? whe-?
I’m usually a fairly meticulous and ritualized journal-keeper…for the month of July 2012 I have ONE entry!
Like that. Colorado…Missouri…enrolled and entering a first week of Master of Library & Information Sciences programs…
kids heading back to 1st grade / 3rd grade / freshman in HS! / JUNIOR in HS! –
wha-? whe-?
I’m honestly working
at something
creatively
(I remember)
when I find it
it will appear
WordPress dynamos
I catch what I can!
with kiddos at Branson and Table Rock Lake
Home from vacating for a couple days. Free-write 100 words prompted by photo as follows (thanks to Friday Fictioneers / Madison Woods instigations/inspirations. Please join)
The trouble is corrosive. Is rank. I do not say what you think I say. I do not say what you say I say. I hear you wrong. Rot. You love taking pictures of ruins. I love the effects of rust. On iron. On rock. The meal of erosion is slow. Don’t yell. Things erase when we turn our heads. Eyes such enormous editors. My ears confuse wind with anger. What you think is running water is something else. Is sobbing. Are tears. Words are constructed of contexts. Are hints and withers. What accrues is corrosive. Is gentle. Is fierce.
N Filbert 2012
Posting an ongoing project, a long(ish) poem(-tic) reflexive effort to at least hear myself if not understand.
The Engineer of Himself
The Engineer of Himself: A Poem
“Thinking is willing you are wild
to the weave not to material itself”
Susan Howe
“a new music of verse stretching out into the future…”
William Carlos Williams on Louis Zukofsky
I.
I have tried to tell this story time and time again.
I’ve set out to tell this story.
This one story. This one, apparently, mine.
This story takes all of my life, as do all of the stories that go deep in the mines.
Mole’s holes without boundaries – forward and back equal speed – ever the hunting, never the full.
We develop our routes in this way.
Creating patterns.
We forget so many channels and tunnels and homes.
Will I ever find the subject
When asked what I am writing? Continue reading “Collecting Fragments : The Engineer of Himself”
Altitude
“A proposition is only a pretext to go over the limits of what’s proposed…A man in a room does not have strict boundaries until the moment when something forces him to take up one or another activity…
…I don’t have to write all this to be convinced that what is written exists.”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
“Don’t blame me. I measure the shadow of the shadow with the shadow,
signifying here.”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees” (Paul Valery)
I hear a bewildering variety of birds – singing, cawing, chirping, saying. It exists whether I say so or not. Some things exist because I say so.
Like dolumbritz and community.
The steps being easy and difficult between.
They leave shadows. Sometimes.
Metaphor avoids this.
If we got to the bottom of it all, we would fall. Perhaps upward, if direction had anything to do with it (it doesn’t). So we say “alas.” Which once was short for the bottom – a-ha! “at last!” there is (here is) THIS. But now is code for sigh.
She said so, and I heard her, at last. I sigh.
“I have the feeling that the meaning of things will never be sorted out” is a paraphrase of a poet. Alas.
Like philosophy: the sequence of excitable sighs, then exhaustion.
I am here (wherever that is). I could describe it and become able to forget, having given it you. But once described, something else, and then poetry – “always something else.” Metaphor. Not likeness but difference.
I am here.
I would know this insofar as it were validated – verified : affirmed. But that would change and then unknown. I reach out as like to open without a demonstration, only signs or their perceivers. Senseless gestures filled with sense. First one and then another “like meanings smashing each other (I don’t say metaphor)” (Dragomoshchenko).
A family of deer just walked in front of me, led by the elder, stopping to curiously stare (extending their field) – a simultaneity. I gazed back and added noise to which a tail flap and head cock, followed by a smile and a welcoming. While you notice people on the street, in the office, over lunch. And a child hears a fairy’s call. What is and what is not need each other to exist.
“Imagination differs from fantasy as the form ‘is’ from the form ‘if.’ The scope of my imagination is no less than the scope of desire” (Dragomoshchenko). If he seems to make more sense or to express it is because I provide a context and steal a fragment, thus expanding what it is by what it’s not, which also is if only ‘if’ therefore as written.
“I do not have to write all this to be convinced…”
In fact an opposite’s expanding here…
N Filbert, Pike’s Peak CO, 2012
something like…while i’m doing a bit of this
you can just hit “random post” up under “manoftheword”
and visit stuff i can’t remember
something new will (hopefully) arise
in my journeys
and hopefully
you will find it interesting
but for now…
you guys keep working
so i stay inspired
upon return
Hey everyone – this is basically what i’m looking at for the next 8 days (and climbing). Happened in to town for groceries and water…and a cafe-created coffee (which happened to host wi-fi) – thanks for reading, for your comments and i’m sure your posts – i’ll get to as many of them as i can when i return next week for two days of Kansas’ hell-hot heat and then we’re off for another week until BOOM school/work/etc. starts!
I can tell you that thusfar feeling high-altitude breezes, looking at deer, marmots, chipmunks, rabbits, and an amazing variety of birds and flora – my mind is cruising into a calmly-breathing state I haven’t known in a very long time. Hopefully much will soothe and settle and i’ll notice something interesting or beautiful to share upon my return. For now, I’m resting, climbing, loving, and exploring these mountains 🙂
Thanks and happiness to all
What Occurs : What Prompts : Whatever
I’m prepared to admit that I am moody…(significant others would readily attest this). My range of expression is evolving. Formerly I drank vodka so as to physically present a Zen-like kindness and placidity. My family didn’t fall for it. Many other medications have been recommended me wherewith to alter my individual chemistry and be a finer, better human. Different. Okay. It’s almost two years now since I’ve drank with regularity for balance. (Imbalance). Almost two months since I’ve managed on a braid of nicotine and tar. I’m at the mercy of the winds. In me.
I’m moving, frighteningly, toward “what you see is what you get” – some reckless combination of a voracious and highly informed neurotic intellect, strange aesthetically, theory-laden embodiment, and a high-voltage bundle of emotional attachment needs…a kind of human specimen to myself…and whatever literature I imbibe and an incredibly courageous family that somehow stays around me, thusfar regardless of…
If pressed, I would say I survive by language. By art. Whether visual, musical, or literary, I always feel (believe?) that there’s some place for me, some haven to inhabit, in the tremendous world of frivolous human invention/concoction/creation. Though there is overwhelming evidence from my spouse, children and immediate/extended family and friends that I’m safe and accepted as the crazy creature I am, that’s a slow-growth root for relative paranoia (or shame).
All that, to highlight a miniscule moment that accentuated an obvious stimulant to my own commitments to compositions in whatever media or form.
A mood obtains. Like clothing, I often feel surrounded and represented by my emotional states. When this occurs, I look for “matches.” Things in the world to mirror or affirm me – that I might maintain some sense of individuality and worth – i.e., “self.”
Something happens that I don’t pretend to understand, shifting my contextual fabric of existence into a new whereabouts/whatabouts/howabouts, and I look at the literatures that I saturate my living spaces with, the sounds I ensure are in queue, and images / persons / environments (etc.) arranged so as to secure or anchor me, and I ask for resonance, reflection, validation.
That isn’t fair.
I see that.
Thus I relate, to what’s around me.
Not so subtly (as my whomabouts can attest) I seek what mates with my singular in-sperience.
Not fair.
I see that.
It’s what I do.
Often there is very little in my surround “feeling WITH me.” I.e. identical to myself. Therefore, bigotedly, I feel alone. And seek.
Today – in some combination of emptiness (moving away from four children and ‘home’ to be with two other children and beautiful mountains) and rich anticipation (my beloved ONLY flying back to me from another country – my spouse, my dearest deepest friend, my survivor); grief (two years of self-directed study and creation drawing to a close); irritation (growing consecutivity of 3-digit temperatures and a scalded environment – these Midwestern plains); an only partially confirmed/verified confidence (in mental avarice and aptitude, linguistic and theoretical comprehensions and abilities); excitement (of movement, vacation, escape, in-drawal with significant others); terror (maturing independence of children, un-necessity as parent, annoyance, superfluity, archaism); erotic desire (days spent apart from spouse + discipline + commitment + theory + desire); hope (renewed relationships, devotion to integrity, celebration of fidelities); melancholy (death is always the next thing); pride (I’ve managed thusfar); luck and sorrow (the ridiculous imperilments of tragedies)…
I’m realizing as I write that this list is a quick abyss of connections and trajectories. Life is endlessly sourced and indiscriminately smeared…
In this molten, cumulative state I perused my essential companions – literary, musical, and visual…and…NO MATCHES!!! All so far beyond me in each of their strengths – stretching, compelling, inductive… but not “mating”/”conflating”/”reflecting” to my own present presence…
and so…
…I write…
…seeking what I need…
…to create it…
And one day?
To find?
Summer is quickly departing. In the next few weeks – school supplies, a trip to the Rockies to a rustic cabin, a trip to Branson with little children and wizened parents, work, deadlines, textbooks, and BAM! the “Fall” begins. I don’t know if I’m easily overwhelmed, perhaps so, I can say I am overwhelmed. I think I’m good at surviving things, at persistence, but in a rather melancholic way, steeled and a little removed.
I am not certain what will become of this blog as two years of a most incredible opportunity that cost us so much is coming to an end – the ability for Holly and myself to devote ourselves to our personal passions, our internal vocations: our families, our art. Enormous changes are afoot. I will be back to work and a full-time graduate student, Holly will practice more therapy and a little less creating artifacts, two high schoolers ever increasing their busyness, fullness; and two young ones growing ever so fast. Our older children are fairly self-sufficient, but also ever growing and expanding, and keeping up with all requires our hearts.
In a recent interview, my interviewer looked at me and addressed the cliche “Change is difficult.” Pause. I agreed all over my body. She resumed: “change is NOT difficult, it is always occurring, ALWAYS. What we experience as “difficult” during the endless changing is perspective.”
She was right. My mind and body were not. I create the difficulties by my approaches and interpretations. The difficulties themselves often becoming creative catalysts of change. “I am proud to be melancholic.” (see following quote). It is empowering to gradually claim responsibility for one’s self and one’s constant choices of outlook, intake, response, action. Thus I enter the ensuing flow.
This morning has been spent reflecting the feelings I’m having of loss in relation to this blog, more open time for reading/writing/composing, family-time, couple-time. The feeling that perspectival anticipation re: these ensuing shifts has slumped me, lessened my determination, devotion. I countered it with Lynne Tillman (as I often do), and read the following, from Madame Realism Lies Here (everything is intentional in her writings :)):
“In her waking life, as in her dreams, she concocted art that confronted ideas about art.
So life wasn’t easy; few people want to be challenged…
…Madame Realism’s work wasn’t her child. But, inevitably, it was related to her, often unflatteringly…
…what if art can’t tell the truth? What if it lies?…
…Art was a golem. It had taken over. It had a life of its own, and now she feared it was assessing her. What did it say about her?…
What I make is not entirely in my power, as conscious as I try to be. It’s always in my hands and out of my hands, too. I like to look at things, because they make me feel good, even when they make me feel bad. I’m proud to be melancholic. I like to make things, because they usually make me feel good. I am not satisfied with the world, so I add to it. My desires are on display. What I make I love and hate…
…She made a spectacle of herself from time to time, mostly in her work, trying to tell the truth and finding there’s no truth like an untruth. She kept pushing herself to greater and greater joys and deprivations, which were invariably linked. And like any interesting artist, who can’t help herself and is in thrall to her own discoveries, Madame Realism shocked herself most, over and over again.”
(from Lynne Tillman, This is Not It)
It’s like this. So onward I go. Be assured I will try to stay up with all of you wonderful creators. And I will (“can’t help himself”) keep making at each opportunity. And I thank you all so much for these past 8 months or so where I have had the inception of experiences of finding an audience, truly being read and responded to, a sort of community of creativity. It has greatly influenced my life and practice and confidence in keeping to my dreams. Thank you!
Be well everyone. Be well.
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