Tag: Art

Holly Suzanne and the Layering of Experience

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Writing3 Comments

It is my great pleasure to be composing something for myself regarding my wife’s art in regards to an upcoming showing of hers in Wichita KS (see below for details).  I am accustomed to engaging her work with an ekphrastic/participatory sensibility and interaction rather than an observer’s point of view.  The pieces below are mixed media encaustic works by Holly Suzanne on 6×6 or 8×8 wood boards.

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“First my…forever my…grown in a…garden” of hands, words, expressions, visages and image.

The mind in bloom, the mouth as fruit, our world in our hands, are nothing new.

Underlying love vaguely aware of an end from the stars of night to ground of flesh,

in layers.

I was thinking of text-emotion-change-emotion-text-emotion-change.  Of over and again.  Begin.

With rarely the perspective to see in, or through, as we are forming and tattering layers simultaneously.  Always.

There is something viscous about us, like warm wax.

“Turning away…she saw herself…”  But not really.  Recollection rearranges, perception also blinds.  Assemblers and dissemblers we.  Our stories.  Growing them even as we prune.  Story over story, backwards, forwards, like the strokes of a brush, the trembling of hands, motions of a body at rest.  What comes out, in, or through depends on the moment.  Each story a backstory with a curious future.

“First my…forever my…” ever-altering “garden,” the world in my hands behind my face.  I tinker and trouble, collage and create, rationally embodied in emotion.  What shields and separates reveals and connects: our skin, our language(s), our sighs.

Even our  names are malleable, oily pools.

Look at, look in, look through.  And over again.

Begin.

If near Wichita…you can look for yourself!!:

Holly Suzanne Show: Mead’s Corner Coffee House
October 31-November 30, 2012

see more of Holly’s works here: Holly Suzanne: A Gallery of Creative Artistry

Holly Suzanne Fine Art

and visit her blog! Lifeinrelationtoart

Related: Show Announcement – Mead’s Corner (Combinatory Art in Motion)

Words & Images (Viggo Mortensen)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, GraphotosLeave a comment

 

What Happens (with a semblance of truth): A True Story (that is never true)

On By NW FilbertIn Philosophy, Writing1 Comment

Many things might have happened, indeed, could have happened.  It is impossible to tell until it happens.  Whatever happens.  And so it goes.

Recollection subjects what happens to interpretation, a puzzling assemblage of memory (embodied brains in changing circumstances) and occurrences (embodied brains in specific situations), making it impossible to tell what happens, when it happens, or after it happened, save from a very particularized attention and intention, point-of-view, disposition and enmeshment (the factors being relatively endless).

And so we call histories, scientific observations, statistical reports, etc. al., “stories;” journalism, research, theories or assays (essays), “fictions;” and personal memoirs, dialogue, descriptions or statements – “fantasy.”

Everything that happens or happened is what might have happened.

Let’s theorize that an author or reader, group or individual, has a concern for “truth” – something being what it seems to be – who or what has total and essential access?  The only truth in human expression that I can surmise is that it is truly “made up.”

An individual may have something approximating total and essential access to a thought or feeling, personal experience or idea, but insofar as it actually occurred according to an experiencer, there are already multiple points of view, ranging from molecular to cosmic, matter/energy to cultural.  To say nothing of the complicating fabrics incumbent on expression – whether a grimace or a novel, a shriek of pain or a tally mark on a chart – it has entered uncertain and collaborative interpreted ground.

All to say “experience” is utterly specific and solipsistic (non-transferable “truly”) and is an enabled product of embedded participation in significant (if identifiable as an “event” or “occasion,” “moment” or “intuition” – any feeling, sensation or awareness) surroundings, expanding niches of existing things with variant points of view.

This is how I can guarantee that nothing I show you or tell you is “true.”

It may be more or less accurate to my experience or understanding of it (depending also on your experience/understanding of my presentation of it) but it will in no wise be what it is or was, in truth.  I assume truth to be as impossible as god.  It would require omnipresence, omniscience, boundary less experience (which could not accord with our experience, or a grain of sand, or an ocean) and would be immediately foiled by the omni-ability (omnipotence?) those other necessary qualities would demand.  One could not be absolutely enmeshed or identical-with and entirely and completely objectively separate or alien-from at once.  At always.  That is not a paradox but a contradiction.  If imaginable, incommunicable.

So we speak of a “semblance of truth” or a “truth-seeming” quality to account for our realities and desires (our want for security, to grow order in chaos, to know, to choose or act with less fear or uncertainty).  Things like our ages, census reports, laws and principles (grammar, mathematics, semantics, processes and methods, etc.) a creepage over toward what we think of as “facts” – majority-mutually-agreed-upon-interpretations/perceptions/hypotheses.  These can hold for a long time because they’re held by so many, so widely.  But they most assuredly change over time, again, from atomic behaviors to the shape of the earth and its relation to elsewhere, from what constitutes pain to what gets moniker’d “god.”

What counts as fact does so by being open and shared.  Semblance of truth comes by corroboration, conversation and multiplying points-of-views and expressions of experience.

Perhaps this is one reason we blog.  To try “it” out on everyone, potentially.  If our expressions resonate with others, perhaps they have a semblance of truth, or contribute toward creating it.  Enough “I know, right?’s” and we’re on our way to a fact.  But no amount of data or language, materials or activity makes it so…it rests on agreement and compromise, observation and interaction shared most widely, coagulations of interpretations, accretions of experiencing – fabrication.

Make then, express.  Hypothesize and share your experience – we ask for your two-cents worth – we’re accumulating a fund.

A trip to the library

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment

– a sampling of the results…

Nothing, In General

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

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

Singing in the Rain

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing4 Comments

“No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions”

-Rene Char-

“There was something tragic in fighting the borders, the heroism of shortcomings, the panic of passion”

-Bruno Schulz via Jonathan Safran Foer-

 

            It may be raining, very gently, while whispering its verdant perfume, just behind me, just outside my open window.  If it’s not, I’m pretending it is, and the world is agreeable.

I’ve been reading an older essay by Susan Sontag entitled “The Aesthetics of Silence,” an article from which I feel a chiding exposure of invented artistic double binds, a renewed challenge for integration and expression (the ways rain shares), and primarily the pleasure of yet another perspective.

Like “the heroism of shortcomings” from Bruno Schulz as carved out of pages by Jonathan Safran Foer in The Tree of Codes – the powers of self-negation and its failure in the likes of Kafka and Kleist, Jabes and Joubert, Artaud and Rimbaud, Blanchot and Beckett and so on.  Those great unsilent successes of botched commitments to silence.

As emptiness might only occur in a context of fullness.

 

Being so glad that I am writing this by hand, as I do with every document I create, usually quite uncertain of what is inside each letter until the systems of nervous muscles begin to work.  The quotes above, for instance, copied from handwritten notecards copied from marginal notes and underlines copied from the midst of other authors reworked texts, and then copied again here with the proviso that perhaps in forming it yet another time, by hand, something missed before gains another change to arise.

I am thankful that writing is quiet.

Although I used to use the typewriter’s beat to edit my lines of poetry.

And I’m sure the background music, passing cars, and sounds of squirrels and wind and children all have their effect.

 

I also appreciate seeing the whole page, battling mood-related or arthritically scribble script versus partial views on-screen and standardized formations of fonts.  I enjoy those bloggers who scan their manuscripts and writings but don’t trust your powers of vision compared to the particular words I end up selecting by the time I reach the machine.  No need to add difficulty to difficulty, in this case.

Still, you’d probably know something more (or at least differently) were you opening up an envelope gathered from your mailbox with this folded up inside.

 

Like silence or a thicket of questions, rain or a grumbling stomach, everything comes round to context.  Persons embodied, embedded in an active variable surround expressing through media, tools, machines, to wherever, whomever, however you are reading, deciphering, translating, decoding, interpreting, creating yet again in another contextual universe of another time.

 

Such a dynamic endeavor.  Our artifacts, messages, calls and displays.

Panicked passion, tragic fighting of borders, heroic shortcomings these.  Aesthetics of silence.  All.

With hearts to sing in our questioning thickets.

 

Sing.

Your Own Story

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces5 Comments

For over a month I have faced the following on my desk:

created for me and delivered with a a sheaf of empty pages and a stapled complete story by my precious daughter Ida, aged 8:

Ida aged 8

 

I am passing it along to each of you…as I struggle with the task…

“One needs to have wandered a lot, to have taken many paths, to realize, when all is said and done,

that at no moment one has left one’s own…

…To forget in order to know; to know in order to fill up the forgotten, in its own time.”

-Edmond Jabes-

 

The Graces

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces9 Comments

as in “unexpected blessing,” or surprising gifts.

Words that Flow like Water

has nominated me for another Lovely Blog award!

Surprising, I suspect, because I oft don’t find my own voice “lovely.”

I am very thankful some find it so, or something about the overall content here.

THANK YOU!

(rules of the game attached to the logo)

1.  My real name is not Nathaniel.

2.  My favorite authors/artists are embedded in my flesh.

3.  I am pursuing a vocation in Information Sciences.

4.  I am drawn to large white rectangles.

5.  I don’t believe in “spiritual.”

6.  I enjoy laughter.

7.  I deeply desire to travel in Russia, Nepal and Portugal.

For the nominees I’d like to pass the award along to (bon chance!) I will post the list that proved exorbitantly long for the rules last week, as follows:

in the library with a lead pipe

Words that Flow Like Water
The Language we Speak

art unraveling
Appropriately Frayed
Ute Schatzmuller
Madison Woods (for keeping us all busy and honest)

A Philosopher’s Take
Careful for Isa 
The Artsy Forager
Writing with Water
Anton Jarrod
Photography of Nia
and, of course, my beloved (even if time doesn’t allow, I read whatever arrives :))
Life in Relation to Art

simplified structure of entailment (Gordon Pask)

Thankfulness

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces13 Comments

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

Searching to See

Objects

draw and shoot

biblioklept

unwanted advice

Ooggetuige

the hour of soft light

SUNLIT RAIN

maurice sapiro

Want Beautiful

barbaelka

Lady Fi

Dark Pines Photo

We Need More Time to Stand and Stare

my daily art display

lisa thatcher

Christian Mihai

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

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

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-