We could have played other games,
ever so many on offer
whiling the distribution and dissipation
time might be
.
Yet “I” became,
constructing choices –
the parenting,
the poetry,
philosophy,
and family;
addiction,
restriction,
believing all the loving –
each complicity
.
To be
.
At least some things,
anything,
.
everything
one knows not what
.
but still
less (or more)
than nil.
I’ll map it out for you.
No, I’ll inscribe it.
47 cuts (myopic) in everything.
Unfinished. Inability to understand apparatus. Has not accomplished death.
Librarian, parent: attempts to track, preserve, and access – things precious, silent, useful.
Pseudo-scholar (any otherwise?), thinker: an inability to avoid pollution when considering or engaging relics of world.
If desired sexually, probably will… it depends.
Begins halfway.
Sometimes only in pieces.
Life is hard to figure. Mostly illegible, as well.
47 marks on anything.
Read what you can, listen.
Smells are.
Skin-shaped textures. Walks on land. Occasionally tree or canyon. Mountain, river, ravine.
As easy to trace as wind.
Whatever being.
Kiss for kiss. Breathing.
Something (someone?) called “melody.”
Hurts too.
.
Intimate uncertainty? Certainly not. Perhaps. She would know.
Maybe furry, fuzzy androgyny.
Offspring reveals: “Crow’s a Decomposer.”
.
Decomposer.
.
What is poet?
Said all things grow, cannot hold, to dust and such. Singing.
Some might remember.
Touch. Taste. Trying.
.
Loves deeply. Expects nothing but passing, passage.
Fabricates patterns.
Dances. Slowly. Grasslands. Prairie.
AND. OR. NOT. (every day. moment) +/-?
What equals?
.
Like erasure. Accumulation. Obscurity.
Sometimes.
.
Decomposer. Lover. Friend. Everenemy.
Anonymity.
.
“Love” (used, spoken, felt, lost, wished-for, pondered).
.
Language, landscape, living organism… perhaps that equals.
.
Sing “You Fucking Did It”
When does death arrive? Why?
.
Glossy haze = language, landscape, living organism.
.
Children. Music. Language. Elements of play.
Emotion.
Sex.
.
Stretched out. A boy and a girl (E. Whitacre). A boy and a boy. Girl upon girl. They and them.
Exchanging foam.
.
A poet working a way to an underworld.
Death is. (a “thing”). Exists. =.
.
Kansas: what gives silence for silence.
As easy to trace as wind.
.
Igloo. Cabin. Family farm.
DNA. Bacteria. Cancer(ous) cellular cell’d activity.
.
The living. The dying.
.
Unfinished undoing.
.
47 paces toward the dark.
.
Re-membering foam.
.
How life gets made. A ratchet, a sprocket, an engine and a wheel. Add water. Fuel to the fire. Desiccate.
.
Perhaps it will rain. A slight ritard. Some sounding quiet. Remediate.
.
Take 47:
Watching flowers blooming to dissolve. A capture.
Sight slated to dim. Shuffling ensues. The stoop.
In a chair nearby, another. More better for company. When alone.
Exchanging foam.
47 paces in the fog.
Take three, four, and so on.
.
Circle round. Loop back. Never again.
Erasure.
Easy to trace as wind.
.
Leaving lights on.
Reading words, far from men.
Lost facilities. The stakes.
Dwindle toward final.
The effort, the offspring, the progeny.
Prognosis.
.
47 accounts of the night and the wheel-well thickened with road.
Splashes the mill. Grinds crank. Pressures to turn,
turning back, away, toward.
Another.
47 gaps in the shawl. Inconnu.
With something like delight. How to stand before them.
Poeting down for underworld.
Looking back.
Slows.
Was there ever progress?
Thinks over.
Takes the hand.
Strikes the key. The 47th.
.
Saturate for stupid. Loses steps. Must wake.
A happy mess. Weighted results, dependencies, accumulation.
As easy to trace as wind.
Utilizes snow too much. The rain.
Abandoned places. What removes. The melt. What remains.
The unfinished. Undoing. Become.
.
For ‘I’ is a thing that breaks.
.
47 footprints from the hands. The notable.
Swirly ways of working. Feels like – .
Inspiration hopelessness. This language.
This living organism. Landscape.
47 miles to go. All the cracks and divets.
Bolt after bolt unscrolled as flesh. Laid out. Stretched out. Smoothed. Sagged. Ironed. Smelt.
Felt for quality. Caressed and examined.
The lonely wonder. Represent.
47 X x = ?
.
Confusion persuasive. Revelation / insight. Chords resolve. Dissonance.
Language + landscape + living. 47 measures.
Months go by. Chairs and couches filled by others’ beds. Warmth weighs.
Waits on wisdom. Depletion. Adventure as excited strain.
.
Poison intravenous. Copulating cells and fluids.
Ends of the guilty. Interpret unfinished systems. Dis-ease.
The long whine wail across the prairie. Animal manual. Wind wires rain.
What gets whispered and transcribed.
Stumbling toward the underworld. Looking back.
Eyes up, ocean bottom.
Some things are out of hand.
Like danger.
The grey and black. The dimming.
47 warnings. The morning comes.
.
Making it. Happens.
Diagnoses and analyses.
Shuffles, stumbles, strikes the keys.
Easy to trace as wind.
Chorded coagulation, confounding,
comprehending (very little, almost nothing)
language, landscape, living,
another note tunes the swing on the porch –
inconnu –
what’s wide open, open wide
.
Shrewd and undiminished.
Minimize = understanding.
A matter of scale,
for I am a thing that breaks.
.
47 slices of nothing.
after Helene Cixous’ First Days of the Year (all quotations from)
“…writing doesn’t know the story…”
– Helene Cixous –
Writing had dissipated, eroded and erasured, “the stream, the slender silent stream with its singing arms,” dried, swallowed, scabbed to dusty ground, hardened wounds, simple soundless scarring – unmarked, unmapped, uninterpreted or deciphered.
“Writing, that link, that growth, that orientation” and mysterious connection in the veins – beneath earth, across times, that leaky, throbbing, flowing, trickling tickle in the fingers of the throat – evaporated to ether.
Space is full of voids again, the entire body is corpse. It was air that was missing – oxygen and hydrogen – a liquid, invisible, fluid force and blazing trail – its quiet tireless effort coursing, a desert without shore.
“’It has been many years now,’… thought the author”…many years of dwindling, echoing thoughts…many years without solution or solvent, no bed, no pull, no sea or slope – an eviscerated wandering lacking movement, without promise or retreat, direction or return, rather something absent, lost, unknown.
Bedrest – a way to heal by falling fallow, running out, caesura and inaction. Some old trace viewed from scale, an only remnant held by wind – a sentenced shrub, a stop of phrase. Riverbedrest and desertduned unwinding – depiction’s dearth, branches clotstopping gravity’s swill or swirl, deadwooded filaments tumbling anywhere the green had been, the iron bled from vein.
“I am going to write,” he had thought at first… but I weigh 47 years and “writing is eternal [knowing] neither weight nor time,” it will not lift and carry me, breezing past as it always has every present unto present – ageless phantom, foreign phrase I am unable to pronounce.
Vanishing link between the bodies, submerged and buried and unspoken – “writing doesn’t know the story” – dumb and blind as memory’s ‘I.’ The lost and forgotten, what will not come to be. “To me, this is a blow, a threat.”
“…the book we do not write. There is a book. That we do not write…” … wordless and disobeyed, unwritten extinction, disordered and undone. Passage and passing of this now here. This book that’s not here. Irrelevant utopia. A desiccated thread, a wilderness with imperceptible end, some perhaps forlorn and far-off song, long since warbled into stillness. I “do not have what it takes to make a book,” long-lost imagining and fabricated dreams, suffered weeping for what-is-not, what-never-was, the known and haunting will-not-be, pains of life assigned to us.
Sightless, flightless bird without brain enough or claw for scribbles, vision canceled by the crossings-out and scratchings, greedy skimming scamper seeking recognizable seeds, some words less foreign or forgotten, that might crack in the craw and cackle a sigh, a chortle, some wheezy whisper… anything other than absence, the starving shame, the empty marrow, acrid arteries, and granulating groin. Wretched rictus claw, blindly scraping at a pen, a page, a flesh-as-grass, a drop of dew, some ancient call –
HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL
…and thank you
A man stumbles into a bar… (perhaps you’ve heard this one before)… truly more of a sauntering in seeming need of assistance… must be no stranger here, his drinks await him wherever he finds or chooses or results in sitting: a something-with-vodka, large glass of water, and occasionally a cup filled with coffee.
“You’re the one that always has books,” some say, “you some kind of writer or something?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he mumbles. “I’m always tired, I feel ugly and old, I don’t like my body but don’t desire doing anything about it, perhaps I should, I’m sure to lose it someday…” (he isn’t talking to anyone). “Thank you, always, you’re ever so kind,” he says.
He says “My children seem to remember me,” shifting in his chair as if to leave, or relocate tables, “my children they seem to remember, and they hurt me, they have hurt me, my body hurts, mostly in sport, and what they do and don’t remember.” He opens a book, looks as if he’s reading, another round of drinks appears.
He writes and marks in many colors. He is dirty. He wears overalls and moccasins. He never seems cold. It is cold.
“I decided to shower today,” he mutters. “Some ladies still talk to me,” something-and-vodka drips through his beard, “some will even hug or hold me yet, even this way” (patting his belly, grimacing) “I guess I didn’t like my smell or simply thought it might change me, it’s awful hard to be alone with my body.” He moves, his drinks are waiting at another table, both fresh fills and half-drunks, and a sandwich of some kind. The cook passes and pats him on the shoulder, smiles, asks of how he’s doing. They hug. The man praises him and his eyes are moist. The man isn’t anyone in particular. He isn’t anyone.
“What you doing with all those books?” she asks, he thinks. Pretends that someone’s interested. “Not the young ones much anymore,” he says, “they are needing something else, they can tell I’m aged and tired, carrying the trouble of experiences, but a few, a few older ones will let me hug them, touch, perhaps a kiss, perhaps an accidental overnight, that strange collapse.”
“I have them to read,” he replies, “there’s always more to read,” he whimpers, “so much, so many, to read,” he sighs and smiles like a boy receiving toys, “if only people, my children, if, if they felt read this way by me, some women, some wonderful women, if I could delve, could attend, if others felt read this way, these books, I love them, I love and need them, their words, I love and need and want them…if others felt that way, I’d like to feel that way – loved, wanted, needed… sometimes my children…”
“Another?” she says so warmly with her tight and fast-moving body, lithe and breasted, friendly with its clothes. She has a fresh vodka-with-something, he says “no I shouldn’t, but sure, I guess, you’re so kind to me, why not? I will, yes” (wanting, loving, needing.. books scattered over the tabletop, all closed). He drinks.
“My children, my friends – so smart, so beautiful, with verve… so helpful… I did shower today,” he thinks, “maybe I’ll be useful to one or some of them, but probably not, what could they need or want of me,” he drinks. “Not the young ones, though, not anymore,” he thinks, “what could I offer – these worn experiences, these words and doubts, these lacks of memories, confusions, waking dreams, these wonders.”
“You’ll need to go soon,” she chides, “you can’t be staying here.” “But he’s the writer,” a boisterous drinker shouts, “he oughta tell a story, oughta earn his keep!” Drunk old friendly at two in the morning (bar time – it’s actually 1:35).
“Tell us something,” they gather, they prompt. “Say some of those words,” they prod.
So he opens his notebook and begins to write…
“…the contradiction which awaits the writer is great. There is no mission, he cannot undertake it and nobody has sent him on it, that is to say he will have to become nobody to accept it; a contradiction which he cannot survive. That is why no writer can hope to preserve his life’s freedom for the benefit of the work… everything takes place between the artist and himself; no one else can do anything about it; it is a mystery like love that no extraneous authority may judge or understand.”
– Maurice Blanchot-
On my Deathbed
I told language:
Thanks for having my children
The language had names,
As did the children:
They were all words.
I dreamt of a door
The kind without windows
That always stands open.
I remembered some more
So I said the unspoken:
I gave them my want.
It declined.
I am performing a task for my employer. I am writing a professional letter. I am letting you know that I labor. I am here to be useful, and used. I submit. My actions indicate that I accept structure and system as representative of survival. I will do what you ask. I recognize organization as power. In fact, any kind of organizing indicates a position of imaginative power and control. To differentiate, to specify, to label, name, assign – all are a fiat of power and authority or authorship – a claiming of superiority over things named, situated, recognized. Supposedly if I comply dutifully – bow and behave in ways that signify structure as something larger (or more important) than me – I will have internet access, some food, air-conditioning, coverings, a car, and someplace to live (in certain mountainous areas, none of these are beneficial). “Teamwork” is misnomer.
My philosophy is simple:
Admitting or confessing that I exist to meet needs, that this is my employment, may be a Credo of Little Import. A submission of insignificance in accepting others’ systems, structures, and arbitrary claims to power. Compliance. Resignation. Complaisance. Dependence. [Co-dependence – opting out of experience/living exits the submission-religion].
My voice dribbles, a hardly perceptible microorganism in the ocean of world. My experience a parenthetical waving particle. My living its effective dying.
In a beginning that never began, the ending already comes.
World is an intermittent trickle of the rivers of living, barely and scarcely discerned.
We are Here Now, how would we like our fleet experiencing of dying to be?
What’s happening now…and why I’m not writing much – reading, teaching, librarying, parenting…
“To bring a work to ‘a conclusion,’ as Picasso said, is like putting an end to a bull – to kill it.”
-Francois Jullien-
from the diaries…
Woke this morning with a particular feeling. I’ve never been one to believe people could name their emotions or feelings. The best we can say are parts.
Words like a parts catalog: indicating pieces and components, but never the working, not the operative whole. Machines are full of mystery. What’s hidden.
They say you cannot know. As you age. Cannot know if it’s the end, exactly. Perhaps they’re right – I’ve surely been surprised in middle age, believing everything was lost, doomed, downhill and erosive, some slow and steady depleting – and then WOW! Who could have known or imagined! This luck, this place, this woman or experience! Perhaps. Perhaps. But maybe we do. Maybe we really know, once twilight settles. I’ve never trusted “them” – the “experts,” the “scholars” and “scientists,” “politicians” or “leaders” or “doctors,” the “speakers for” and “authorities”…i.e. privileged observers (an illusion or delusion or both – no one ever gets to be ‘outside’ existence, any more than any other).
What with Laramie gone, and a birthday round the corner, and language just a parts catalog – my experience.
I woke with a particular feeling. That things were near their ends. That I am nearing ends. Work, love, breathing, will. That the stories I’m involved with are dwindling in pages, thin and wearing out. These ‘particular feelings,’ “somehow we just know,” kinds of things: lay down, close your eyes, cross your hands over your chest and hope things are in order. Or not. Depends on inclination and values, I suppose. What one cares about, or for. Perhaps. “They” say you cannot know.
I’ve been surprised. Even wildly. Much I’ve never been able to believe and yet it seems: my children – engendered by me and of such promise; this beautiful woman that loves me; that I’m still alive. One never knows (is what they say). So who knows what? And how do “they” know that?
I think I do, what with Laramie gone, and my faulty parts catalog, and this particular way that I feel. I’ve worked too long and too much. Tried too failingly. Never quite trusted or believed. Never found my worth. Maybe now I know. Maybe now I’m certain of something.
The end is coming – for me – always concerned and consternated by beginnings – how to start, where to set out – and now, here (nowhere) the path, it dwindles away. What have I done? What did I mean to? What did I wish? Why didn’t I?
I wanted to write a scholarly work about something that truly obsessed me. Something I’d spent my life searching. Something that likely doesn’t even exist, but no matter – because Scrabble, because poems, because science. Unscramble (by scrambling) the letters – you’ll see: it can almost be said, almost anything – existent or not – almost. Parts constructing strange wholes and plugged in, eventual malfunctions, repairs – and yet “no matter, try again, fail again, fail better” (Sam Beckett – I’ve read and I’ve taught far too long).
And one solid work of fiction and some poems. That’s all. That’s what I wanted to do.
So I studied, and traveled and loved. Raised children, made music, pushed learning and literature publicly, worked and worked, and drank and drank. Took in stragglers and strays, made it work where I could, doubted and doubted, desired. Everything but what I wanted – that’s how you perpetuate desire.
I woke today with a particular feeling, though “they” say you cannot know. Cannot know for certain, that things are yet to surprise you, yet to get better. I will not argue. Perhaps. But what with Laramie gone, and all that’s undone, maybe I know, maybe we do. Maybe we’re aware when our endings are coming. Who could know? Who could tell us?
My ends are coming.
I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.
(still more from Beckett)
Related: Alias Harlequin
Marc hasn’t approached such things in a very long time, having left ranches for cities decades ago. He’s never perceived his father this way – a sodden, curled lump, a heavy heap of human – laying not far from a dissolving and evaporating campsite. Still.
Alias ponders “still as stasis or persistence or both/and?” in his notebook in his study. “Most often I use ‘still’ with some indication of both – stubborn, persistent, continual, unmoving – obstacles.”
Son standing over his father. Father, fallen, humped, underfoot of son. A stubborn statue, status, state. Something resilient, resolute, apparently ineradicable and permanent – as far as permanence goes.
“Sons stumped by their fathers. Fathers blocking their sons.” Alias wrote as Lucy re-entered their provisional home (what “home” is not?).
Laramie lay still, sopping, weighing more than any many should, it seemed to Marc. Now fathering the labor of his unfortunate offspring, hovering over it/him like a bent tree, not quite as strong, but still stuck and rooted.
“The child is father to the man…still,” Alias jotted, telling Lucy that he’s stuck in the awful muddling middle of things, still wanting several things to be possible at once, believing they ought appropriately have right to be – including (but not limited to) both of their happinesses and satisfaction… fulfillments… but unable to see quite how, and for some strange reason thinking acutely of Laramie, wondering about him today – where he is and how – and all of their good, promising, talented grown children, and why they all increasingly feel alone, distant, farther from one another with age, in spite or in direct conflict with his feeling of the relative, mandatory, even necessary import and significance of these very few – very few consistent, momentous, continual and crucial relations – one another, their some sort of shared offspring or circumstanced charges, numbered friends, one another… handful of humans they ‘trust’ ‘still’ – and the vagaried ambiguity of all of these terms.
Marc stares: his father: a persistent stasis: there, still. His mother. What now? Himself? His wife, sister, the children? And there… here… Laramie Paul Backstagger… still. Present. Here. Present. Still.
Lucy, in annoyed concern – Alias inebriated, anxious, composing, fantastical, undone – suggests they simply call Anna or Marc, Maribel or Laramie his own self, and check in if he’s so concerned, so (“apparently”) troubled and unsettled about them. But Alias, of course, of matter-of-course, of persistent stubborn stasis, replies, sighing: “Whatever. I’m overwhelmed. Over-reacting, under-developed, undone… Forget about it. Sorry. How was your walk – your outsiding?”
Marc prods the body with his boot. His father weighs too much. Too heavy. Too absent. Too still. Sensei had startled his mother Maribel, returning to the ranch stables alone. Who startled his sister Anna, startling Marc via telephone, still. And now here, miles from anywhere, hating, prodding, regretting, wishing this sodden, sullen lump of heavy matter wasn’t his lifeless father, Laramie, his mother’s errant husband, his sister’s rugged hero, the persistent stasis of his dad.
Tension reigns, still. Vitality. Forces working upon and with forces. Matter and space and energy and time, perhaps. At the very least a conflicted Alias in tangled tango with his beloved antagonist Lucy, unaware, intuitive, confused and undone, while Marc is shoving his inert father, Maribel quivers, Anna waits, and Lucy huffs down the hall. Life keeps pressing on and stopping, still.
Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems
Everything Trying: Practical Philosophy
I’ve been thinking a lot this weekend about a kind of “credo,” or some sort of explicatory description regarding foundational experiencing that informs my perspective on being / world / living. I.e., what have I experienced in 45 years of surviving as a human organism – as a bookseller, musician, philosopher, father, academic librarian, various conventional-cultural-relationally-roled son / spouse / sibling / friend / coworker / writer; student of multiple disciplines – that comes so close to a similarity or repetition, a near-consistency, that it evinces as near as I can imagine to a belief or pattern, a compiling evidence or seeming-steadiness, structuring a framework for my perception and navigation of being a living thing.
As a bookseller, librarian, and philosopher (“professionally” for nearly two decades) – I find I operate with a kind of conviction (yet to be foiled) – that ANYthing ANYone can concoct or intuit as a query, theory, illusion or idea, dream / hope / fantasy or wondering, can be uncovered pre-existing SOMEwhere in the recorded history of homo sapiens. I interpret this as indicating boundaries and borders of our specific kind of organism – albeit changing, adapting, extending and diminishing over and throughout time – limits or inherent finitude to our capacities, contextual whelmings, procedural experiencings of being human kind.
Conceptual development, creative expression, technological or theoretical “advance” or novel efforts or elucidations, all seem to come about as recombinations, complex reformulations, convergences or collaborative emergences and collusions of ever-present conundrums. The sphere of human being bubbles at mysteries and limits, “realities” intrinsic to our kind of existing. We seem to design and develop varieties of “tools” with which to supposedly plumb and plunder the ever-expanding cosmos of unknowing, but also seem to be simply drilling differing holes into an amorphous void – conjuring observations and explanations, combining fanciful analyses and results – constrained and directed by our “tools” of inquiry (whether conceptual hypotheses, technological apparatus, socio-political experiments, mythico-religious imaginings, practical experiences, and so on).
We are limited beings, with (to our aspect) unlimited potential. Over millennia, this would not seem to be the ‘case” of the world. We are limited at every angle and turn – another being alongside many other sorts of beings and organisms, each restrained by our compositions and abilities, our frailties and affordances.
(Apparently) potentially endlessly individuated differings and nuances of activity-in-the-world / also (apparently) insuperably restricted frontiers to our possible activities-with-the-world. Like any other species (given our “ways-of-inquiry” or “points-of-view/sensing”) we arise or arrive via incredibly (and genuinely unknown) complex processes and will likely desist and depart via incredibly (and genuinely unknown) complex processes.
Given the limitations of our kind of being – with ALL things composing our surround and withins – it would appear:
Principles we only (it seems to me) slightly comprehend – incompleteness, complexity, irreducibility, relativity, and so forth – whatever these ideas’ standing might be in relation to anything we might posit as “reality” – (only ever from our miniscule, or relatively very limited sphere-of-experiencing) – combine to intimate that:
Innately, as it were, we elect/select these recursions and available gamut-of-human-existing ideas, processes, habits and practices (beliefs, behaviors, relations, stances) – all funded and founded on arbitrary groundings in individuated recombinations and experiencings suited to an effort at survival, that might be characterized (scalarly) on a wave-patterned range of “living” – each variable individuating occurrence (“self”) may characterize from “more-thriving” to “more-surviving” – or roughly resembling individuated differentiations of what we might interpret as experiencings of “pleasure” or “pain” and ever-changing self-selecting imaginings of ends or goals (telos).
For some of us, the very play and experimentation of extending and investigating limits and grounds, via the widest variety of human endeavor and activities we can surmise or imagine (currently) is a sort of curious “thriving” in itself. I would call this something along the general web of “philosophizing” – but finds its application and practice in ANY human capability. Whether adventurers, scientists, artists, inventors, warriors, parents, killers, children or politicians – ANY human might be experimenting and investigating, attempting to extend and elucidate (for their particularized occurring) their limits and grounds… what distinguishes what we might think of as philosophy or conceptual-knowledge involves a notable self-illusion-conviction of “reflection” or “recursive inquiry” (something variously nominated “awareness,” “thought,” “wisdom,” “faith,” or “fantasy”).
With the caveat (doubling as a confession of faith) – that the “whole ball of wax” as we are able to conjecture it – is ALWAYS BECOMING – with never a moment of stasis or rest. There is never a moment to pin down or set grounds or fundamentals on – multi-relational interactive complexities never cease BECOMING other. So even this “credo” is in flux…and will alter without notice. Exactly as the living…
Compulsion, I suppose…
par example: https://creativisticphilosophy.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/formalizability-in-the-english-language/
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