Tag: arguments

Homo Fictus

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes6 Comments

“words are not a translation of something else that was there before they were”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

Homo Fictus

 “Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories”

-Jonathan Gottschall-

            Knowing how / knowing why.  Procedures and structures.  Diversify and unify.  Complexity-to-simplicity turned complex all over again.  Reuse and construction.  Stories.

We are saturate with story.  Each word of that sentence.  If I provide the skeleton – you’re sure to flesh it out.   The productivity of words, the how & why of humans.

Perhaps I’ll call it “making sense,” but the sense is there before, what follows is a meaning – through procedures and structures, reuse and construction, the wired and the firing, implicity spinning explicitly – and for reasons not yet fully known, I’ve gotta have mine.

“The knowledge of good and evil, all in one.  Both. 

Somebody finally said, I know my own mind.”

-Janet Kauffman-

            Experience is a complex collision I diversify and unite.  Following patterns infused by my own.  If you provide a list of observations and complaints, I may spend entire days reorganizing them – they didn’t quite “fit.”  Perhaps I’ll throw them back.  I’d like to be certain.

“the absence of doubt is of the essence of a language-game”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

            A personalized language-game full of cues, thesauri and symbols – my controlled vocabulary meshing your data…

“The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told.

I have to tell it myself.

What is it I have to tell myself again and again?

That there is always a new beginning, a different end.

I can change the story.  I am the story.

Begin.”

-Jeanette Winterson-

            …ah, now I’ve figured it out (made it fit  my form) – this is my story now, please listen and confirm (complexity-simplicity) – oh no?  you don’t? (complexity again) and back to the storyboards or diary…

The yearn is toward some balance, stasis, surety.  Re-cognizable re-currency.  Re-presentation.  Re-anything.  Want familiar.  The excitement may very well come with the disruptions, eruptions, defamiliarization, the constant change – it certainly heightens our senses and intension – the thrill is in the thunderous gathering of troops – flickering flashing neurons – dogs set on the intrusion…but soon we stabilize the perimeter again…incorporate the drama…

“the important thing is to consider the significance of things and not to worry about their authenticity…it’s difficult to tell at the end of the day whether it was theory or need that got you through it.”

-Joy Williams-

            …with our stories (and lies)…our illusory perceptions…needing organized to our organism…and tales are conjured, fiction begins, typing on our limited keys…

…even while the body’s at rest…

“in short, nothing so central to the human condition is so incompletely understood”

-Jonathan Gottschall-

this post inspired in part by

Fiction Family 4

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes1 Comment

Pieces that precede can be read in order here:  FAMILY: A FICTION

Family 1

section three closing thus….

They build a monument, calling it travel.  Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum.  Humans tend to revert to familiar.  Habitude of experience.  With no experience, alteration comes to bear.  Predictable as weather.

No one’s leaving home.

Other words coming to mind.

4

            Resistance.

There is, it seems, in families, this propensity.

Whatever is said, corrected, even when agreed.

 

Existing to clarify his spouse – to illuminate and exhibit.  In turn, she elucidates him.  Providing bases or cause – extrapolates.  Siblings arguing each other, united they stand, all as deserters.  Seven eventual versions of the parental wake-up blare: AWOL.

It’s good to be king.  Graph the assassination attempts – looks like innards of clocks.  A searing clap of surprising betrayal each time.  Unlike the spurned and necessarily nutrient mother.  Shagg proclaiming the law (as devised and developed by nature – read lifegiver/lawgiver “mom” – female coupling nurture and structure within dependency).  He handles rebellion, warding attacks and spying the skirmishes, she breeding resentment from ongoing need.

These are general patterns, biologically driven, no symphony the same.  With eight keys plus a half, on a twelve-tone scale, the songs recognizable according to differing orders.  Typify and characterize.  Declare it false.

Scraggydad is nurturing, allowing/confirming resistant responses and recumbent emotions, shame-shirking under her gaze.  In other words – as one of them – a remedial complicity.  Which she echoes into her drama – the leadership, the guilt, the collapse.

Each wanting to be cradled – rock, paper, scissors style – with an occasional simultaneous Bingo.  However unlikely, it’s what probability’s for.

Thus every level its lingo.  Select a word (sex or heaven, death or boy) and provide a taxonomy of related meanings from the eldest parent through littlest child.  It comes clear.  There are altering thesauri of usage.

Family as a game of Scrabble on the board of Life, each settling Catan.  With beeps and whistles and a slew of avatars.

A technique known as mapping provides lay of the land, similar to a geneologist’s tree applied to the present.  A thing to be explored or verified.  Corrected through each journey.  In several dictions.

The family edition.

Outside This Window

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing19 Comments

I struggled this week, this picture, and the myriad of life going on…couldn’t seem to find a spark.  But in the spirit of Friday Fictioneers, felt I oughta make a go of it.  So here it is – and in accord, many thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields for taking up the inspirational, curatorial mantle of keeping our practice alive!

Stomps back, livid grimaced flesh flushed, shouts, more of a gritty scrape of screed: “you never…anyway…I don’t know why I ever…” huffs, seethes, jolting in a kind of place.

Unseen, steely, weight of concrete in its rage, him, silent, back there, unmoving.  Something trembles.

Wind too, perhaps occasions of rain, drizzle, precipitation seems likely, somewhere, here, somehow.

She keeps it going, it’s like a flood, like a multi-chambered dart gun, can’t seem to stop, doesn’t want to end.  Not silence.  Not distance.  Disregarding.

Something recedes, perhaps him.  Substances exiting every direction.  All wearing out.

Everything outside this window.

N Filbert 2012