Tag: Art

Minding the Gaps in the Membranes: A perforation, an hiatus, a foramen

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings3 Comments

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!

The Light Ekphrastic

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Poetry4 Comments

I’m very honored and happy to be a part of this fine journal – “The Light Ekphrastic”!!

See my work and read many others HERE!

Thank you!

Inspirations

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Photography3 Comments

Photos from recent mountain jaunt

Inspirations.

Why I Write (?)

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings10 Comments

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?

Scribbling. Toward purpose.

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings9 Comments

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.

On By NW FilbertIn Art1 Comment

Holly is having a dickens of a time getting there – but she’s on her way! Wish I could see the show – if you’re in Toronto – please check it out!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dreaming

On By NW FilbertIn Photography1 Comment

This one developed into a series.  My wife’s art works are all about the house and I move them here and there for various inputs/effects on my brain as I work…She recently hung a few encaustic pieces in our dining room where I have been writing due to the heat in our studio attic.  For “dreaming” I’d had the idea that I’d challenge myself with my Pantech phone and try to take some pictures of my head and smear it up without help from photoshop or other treatments.  It grew into a little series, beginning with her pieces and their slow consumption of my world.

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Feeling Blind

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments
Antoine Coypel – Studies of the Blind

 

Feeling Blind

“Art always divides objects and offers a part instead of the whole, a feature of the whole, and no matter how detailed it is, it still is a dashed line representing a line”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“A fragment is not a fraction, but a whole piece”

-Lyn Hejinian-

“Those girls!,” we say of our puppies, as if we know.  As if they behaved like us.  We are, after all, wild animals, without a master large enough to keep us from fighting.  The puppies are so small.

 

I remember filling a large square of canvas (“large” being relative to my body, not a mountain) with loads of spattered paint.  It felt good and looked neat, even interesting, crammed as it was with accidents and intentions.  Runs and spills and layers of carefully made strokes.  Nothing was recognizable or familiar in the result, but I’d swear it was representation.

 

Again and again I attempt to feel blind.  Not empathetically, by tightly wrapping my head and completely covering my eyes with some solid fold of cloth, then wandering through a day or night or week of time.  Nothing like that.  I’m capable of removing my glasses and learning the world without edges or shapes.  Feeling blind is usually sexual for me.  In the way I use my senses.  It’s never the same if I know what I’m touching or tasting, hearing or smelling.  To “feel blind” means losing familiar.  I write blind every day.  Defamiliarizing myself in order to learn something.  About language, about emotion, about me and a world of signs.  It’s de-meaning.  Bring me my lover’s body replete with organs and breath, thoughts and flesh, and lay her down beside me.  I’ll tell you what it’s like.

 

They like to escape, to cross boundaries.  If you turn your back, they scamper.  They’ll sniff and chew on anything, and leave their feces anywhere.  Artistic mediums rarely work the way I want them to.  Paint slips away where I place it thick and neat, clay cracks when it dries or fractures in the fire.  Words mean something else.  Her breath creates an atmosphere, moving particles and waves.  I can smell the colors of her thoughts.  At this distance it is easy to hear the goosebumps on her shoulder curling forward to her armpit.  I feel her hair, thick and brown, around my ankles.

 

I try to use mistakes.  The pups will eat their poop.  Her buttocks create parentheses in my dreams.  If I stack the pieces just so, another thing will happen, come to be.  Sticks preferable to stuffies.  The arches of her feet never cease whispering their curving tones.  I rarely intend what I make.  They stumble their way to fresh treasures of foul-smelling, old-buried rot.  Her crotch controls weather, I ache deep in my bones when it’s humid.

 

It does not cease to amaze me, what’s found.  Candy-wrapper, weed-stalk, squirrel-scent.  Everyone’s a critic.  The purposeless finds purpose in the eyes of the beholders.  The meeting of the needs.  The way the caps of her knees taste like buttons of mushrooms, just that tiny and soft on my tongue.  The slogans her scent shouts into my ears, rushing the drums like a throng.  They drag it until it dissolves.  Everyone makes up a context.

 

And eventually tire.  With ignorance things are recharged.  She is different when I open my eyes.  I had registered warm mango with coconut milk, they’d spilt honey on an old wet rag.  Apparently the “trajectory of my new works on paper.”  She came with a gasp and a shudder as I deciphered her Braille, she had never liked crowds and my mouth was crowded by terms.  No one understands it, or perhaps they do and I don’t, pups fast asleep and me feeling so blind with attention.

 

 

Writers Resources

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

“Chekhov in his letters to his brother wrote: ‘Start writing from the second page.'”

“He was more blunt in conversations: ‘Tear out the first half of your story; you’ll only have to change a few things in the beginning of the second half and the story will be perfectly clear.'”

“The unity of a composition is not based on whether it has a beginning, a middle and an end, but whether it creates a unique interrelation between its parts.”

“The concept of unity (the whole) is historically changing.”

“Aristotle wrote in Poetics (Chapter 8):

‘Unity of plot does not, as some people think, consist in the unity of the hero.  For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.'”

[all quotations from Bowstring by Viktor Shklovsky]

Blurting : what WAS this?

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

Found this in my files…probably isn’t even worth posting, but something kinda fascinates me about it…I’ve never been a drug-user, but something had surely opened the gates of the dam on the day this came forth.  Sometimes writings (by others) do this to me – I read and sort of get “drunk” I guess, with language and then somehow that stirs and stimulates whatever words fill up my cranium and then… well, for what it MIGHT be worth… here is What It IS

What it IS

 

 

is all of these things, trying to explain,

the trees, the flowers (dying), the grass (needing mown),

in line at the store, filling with gas, last nights’ remnant of dream (also the dreams from before, books read, voices heard/overheard/never heard), a multitude of feelings, the way she draws a heart, a star, what guilt feels like (now, then), the difficult struggle in parenting of love and direction, how language comes (or gesture, vocabulary or intonation), how silence, what we do with it, our decisions, who to love, where to live, how to say, what to smoke, when to fight, where to run, what to eat, why at all, what floating in a pool feels like (or a pond, a lake, the ocean), which music when, where, what we mean into it, the grades we make and receive, how we work, squirrels sounds and behaviours, what friendship is (might be), what is learned, absorbed, observed, what we touch, scents in closets (in bathrooms, at relatives, of genders or nationalities), associations, childhood, ambiguities, paintings and sculptures, religions or symphonies, taxes, liking to dance (or not), with people or alone, the postal service, how often, how much, your mother, who said so, aging,

trying to explain,

divorce, vocations, contradiction, philosophy, hunting, mountains, arrogance, wounds, broken bones (or hairline fractures), colors, fashion, changing the oil in the car (the mower, the boat), politics of oil of belief of emotions and opinions and genetics, diseases (like pleurisy and cancer and rust and decay), who family is, how you come by, sexuality, remorse, pleasure and pain and fences and institutions, architecture, advertising, electricity and electronics, pi, mohair, virtual and visual, palpable and “real,” poetry, names you can’t remember (but what is it you remember), can’t forget, incense, train rails, Marcia’s hair (shimmer and idealized clarity), meat, diapers, rain and humidity, historical “accounting,” memory theory money, mythology, facts and things like rocks and apples, pears science, bronze, doorways, “home” or houses, dead presidents, Casio, intuition, astrology, newspapers, rotations, reciprocation and differences, if anything is the same, what repeat might mean, definitions, experience, gasoline, yogurt, how fast you run, if you have arms or legs or are able to see or hear, clouds,

to try to explain this,

there is more here….

much more,

let’s see, hear, touch, smell, feel

wonder….

and death too…

to explain, include, describe

imagine