Writing: the Apparatus

On June 4, 2012June 3, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

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Writing: the Apparatus

“one can think of the work (of writing) as a dialogue between the two distinct demands bearing on it (the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible). Or between its two poles (measured form, measureless disintegration) or between the embodiments of these two ‘centers of gravity,’ if you will: reader and writer…two come together in a place where neither can be found…One of them keeps dragging it into the light of day as a completed oeuvre, a realized whole, something that has actually taken form and come to be (read, that is, or, you could say, heard), while the other pulls it back into the dark whence nothing ever springs (but where there is a chance that, coming to pieces, something might come to be written or said)”

– Anne Smock, What is There to Say? –

-the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible-

The tools the writer possesses.

That there must be something to say…that it is impossible to completely say. Finally, definitively, to have done with, saying experience.

What does one make of this? With this? Paradoxical demand, desire, exigency – imperative, self-generating, uncaused and ineffectual, drive?

Our tools: awareness. Attention. Passion. We observe and take note, feel-with, and seek to spell it out (for ourselves, for world).

Our tools: available language, sound, gesture. Entering the woven barrier and thoroughfare of what is shared, common, constitutive, we act, operate, select, arrange, choose, rearrange from this quilted information of the world, our saying of it. Or singing, or stating, shouting or whispering and mumbles.

It seeks into fact. We construct an object, made up of nothing, of airwaves, scratch-marks, designs. Barely effable cues, hints, notions and signs. We begin again with that. With what it fails to say, to communicate or reveal. We tinker with and tamper, excise and expand. Ever the remainder. Inexact invention. Something there, some things not.

We pursue what is not. What fell aside or seeped away. The evaporate. The unknown (here I adore the French: je ne sais quoi – that feeling that one knows it, and knows it so well and so deeply, and yet is unable to say what it is that one knows!).

Endless anticipation, expectation, a lusted desiring…

Endless frustration, falling short or to the side, inevitable (inherent even?) failing, shortcoming, irresolution.

These are the tools of the trade. The writer’s apparatus.

A caveat: from time to time I’ll wager to say we all of us take in some language or sound, vision or world that seems “just,” feels ripe, adequate, full and exact to the perception of our experience. This is wondrous, thrilling, satiating, “ecstatic,” a moment’s completion, wholeness, perhaps.

Yet is it? What does the masterful painting, the pregnant poem, the echoing song or fulfilling experience result toward? Yes, toward, not “in.” Not arrival but generation, bursts of multiplications of words, sounds, sights and movements now invigoratingly fueled and stimulated – fecund to go on…for more…fuller…richer…or even repeat!?

“Such then, would be my task, to respond to…speech that passes my understanding, to respond to it without having really heard it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak…To name the possible, to respond to the impossible. I remember that we had designated in this way the two centers of gravity of all language…Why two to say one thing? – Because the one who says it is always the other…”

– Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation –

Experiential Ekphrasis

On June 3, 2012June 3, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

Figures Seated in Mid-Air
by Holly Suzanne

Experiential Ekphrasis.

Hello dear followers – I can hardly thank you enough for taking time out of your lives to look at, read and engage things I am involved in the making of. Your support and attention is a constant encouragement. THANK YOU! (and thank you for offering and creating your own!)… I wanted to invite you (if you are interested) to visit/follow a couple of other blogsites I also create in/with –

www.ekphrastixarts.com and

www.spoondeep.wordpress.com

THANKS AGAIN!

Passing Thoughts

On June 1, 2012May 31, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces, Writing5 Comments

Passing Thoughts

“People don’t always understand what they see…it’s always better with a few verses”

-Henri Rousseau-

“I don’t understand it. The injustice of it, the random, unpatternable thing life is, feels like guilt, at first, and then matures (thought the verb is obscene in the context) into sorrow.”

-Larry Levis-

I often feel something that must be near sorrow when I pretend for a moment that I am able to reflect or observe my own life.

Usually this occurs a few minutes after everyone that inhabits the home in which I live have tottered off to their beds or their dreams or wherever it is that they go when they’re alone. I pour myself a cup of coffee, take on cigarette out of its case, and swing gently on the porch in the night’s dark.

At first, I simply listen. For the trees, the breeze, my breath. Then I let my eyes gaze. Neither here nor there but some middle-distance that never asks to focus. Three or four puffs in, two or three sips of day-old reheated coffee, and I begin to feel. My body reports its day. How long it has been awake, what muscles have been used, what nutrients processed (or wasted). I start to find emotions. Perhaps lodged in the elbows or neck, gut or temples or knees. Places they sneak off to in the day’s demands. I gain what feels like a sense of things. A “this is what you’ve enjoyed, endured, has transpired in your waking.”

And I breathe. The smoke, exhaling, tells me so. And the knowing the days that remain are smaller. And that the days that compose me stretch out. And I wonder. “I don’t understand it.” It baffles me so.

I have the impression throughout my aging frame, that so many places, engagements, and events that require all of me should not feel so dangerous, such threatening. That the places we spill for one another, on one another – where we come forth – why do we fear so deeply? and try so hard? – why don’t they give rise to elation rather than wound?

I see moments, occasions, and encounters that have scared me to my silent howls – but from here, now, look like people in love giving themselves or trying to – declaring, expressing, vulnerably opening. Why the fullness of human persons should overwhelm and frighten us so, when we are also one of them – why is this?

Why do I not feel I can hold my own in another’s anger or grief, sorrow or fear? What is so uncomfortable about difficulty and complexity and unknowns?

The haunting guilt of finitude, of insufficiency, eventually levels out toward a universe of conundrum peopled with questions, and a kind of sorrow and grace seeps in.

By now my smoke has gone out, the coffee has cooled, and it is high time I join my spouse in our final accord. The waves rise, they wash out. They rise again. There is a passing, and some passage, it is ephemeral and sure, and it goes on.

All these passing thoughts, and days.

I don’t understand what I see, but it’s usually better with a few verses…

“I have the suspicion that the meaning of things

will never be sorted out”

-Denis Johnson-

(click image for musical accompaniment to the text:

“Broken” by S. Carey)

(it’s worth listening to even if not reading all the text)

Thoughts

On May 21, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“No useless chatter, but a word of necessity face to face with itself.

With this word, I have written my books.

Word of sand. Word of eternity.

Thoughts of shipwreck, but also of haven.”

“To approach silence before the silent sign.

To approach the book before the page.

To wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us.”

-Edmond Jabes-

“When a sparrow feels the freezing cold air, he puffs up his feathers and gathers his feet under his body;

he bears the surrounding cold by countering it with his inner warmth.

The writer, who is also warm-blooded, fights even harder”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“The bow’s harmony arises from the strained stick forced by the bow-string.

Subsequently, harmony resides in unity and contradiction.

It is kinetic energy that’s about to become dynamic energy.”

Some Stellar Instigations

On May 19, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Writing3 Comments

“Multiple incompatible hypotheses are needed to provide an adequate account of any phenomenon – aesthetic, material or psychological… which of course means no explanation at all”

–Charles Bernstein–

“All literature, highbrow or low, from (at least) the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction…All novels are sequels; influence is bliss”

–Michael Chabon–

“You must talk with two tongues, if you do not wish to cause confusion”

–Wyndham Lewis–

“Unknowing does not come before knowing but very long after”
-Edmond Jabes-

“Human speech is made of words that have been created a long time ago; those words are preserved in dictionaries, but poets and writers change”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.”

-Alan Jacobs-

Decompression Addendum: Redefining Terminologies: Finding Words

On May 15, 2012May 15, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing2 Comments

“The variety of words is another error…I believe words must be conquered, lived, and that the apparent publicity they receive from the dictionary is a falsehood…I now recognize among the thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

Rudiments: Places of Operation

Redefining Core Existence Terminology

Family: those with whom one “belongs,” chosen and not, like it or not, one’s “tribe” – born into and/or evolved and developed.

Home: states of being or locations, settings in which one IS. Settings in which one is freest to be.

Love: shared and mutual, reciprocal regard, respect, desire and preference. Those with whom one thrives and incites the thriving of. Intention and attention ( a relation between not inhering in beings)

Friendship: unmitigated affirmation, reciprocal and intentional. Native complementarity of being.

World: internal and external context at any given moment

Self: whom one is or shows up as in one’s world – at any given moment: individual weave or presentation in circumstantial contexts and settings.

Language: whatever serves as communique betwixt individual and others and world (internal/ external)

I: utterer of language, behaver of behaviors, actor of actions, feeler of feelings – as regards the “self”

Other: any and all beings not the self-regarding individual

Vocation: that which one IS and DOES; self-perpetuating passion – that which drives and rewards, fulfills and seduces, nourishes and excites desire for an individual…one’s propulsion, desire and satisfaction in being.

Leisure: rest, reprieve, de-stressification

Fun/Play: light enjoyment, carbonated experience

Sex: whole-cloth woven world of contexts of one or more individuals

Art: combinatory effect of an individual’s self, world, vocation and play; any “otherwise-not” creation of a living being’s given and concocted whole

Thought: a self’s languaging of “world”

Habits: automatic or instinctual activities of an individual, supposedly self-soothing or self-managing

Perception: individual sifting of “world” and “self” (see also: interpretation)

Reading: engaging the language of others or world or self-as-other

Intepretation: an individual or group of individual’s “spin” on “universe”

Universe: arbitrary boundary comprehending all that can be perceived/conceived by an individual or group at a given moment

Conception: consideration and invention of possibilities of “universe”

Writing: an effort to live, to exist

Decompression: A Process

On May 15, 2012 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

it goes on…this emptying search…

(Re)Assesments

At something of a loss, what feels like a “crossroads” except that perhaps nothing in existence is really either / or.

That was not a sentence.

Bewildered without anxiety, I approach a sort of noisy blank. A surfeited absence.

I have the amorphous sensation of being entirely undone and woven up as a satchel of my everything. Every instance of myself threads the material of an empty knapsack that is me, dangling from a stick over the shoulder of the world I inhabit.

That the bag, indeed, is empty. No objects or trinkets in that wee darkness to finger or grasp, no spirits to set free, emotions to unstopper. Nothing within to escape, not even air.

My entirety fabricated as an emptied bag.

All I’ve ever written, attempted, every action, thought, adventure or relation. All my labors, abilities, acquisitions, emotions and dreams; every word or intuition, fear or blatant risk, all ongoing consequence(s)…EVERYTHING – internal, external; past-present-future: is the skin of a being, the form and the boundary, the grafted substance of an absent individuality.

I experience this neither as a blockage, nor an impasse; no meaninglessness, purposelessness or ennui – simply a vague, obvious experience that all I am as a being is my interface with the world within and around me, idenitifiable without essence.

Responsible, shaped, recognizable and devoid of identity – no narrative or plot, character or definitive name, just an inextricably meshed passel of experiences forming a pliable veneer around a vacant hollow.

That all will carry on, as such, until its end. Experience upon experience, before experience, during and after experiences and experiments – weaving, threading, joining…this being-form, this walking thinking speaking shape, this perceptive living husk or porous shell, a wave and trajectory of experiencings.

To feign a purpose, an intention or choicy action as this reality requires some arbitrary groundwork – hypotheses and rudimentary organizational operations. What might this handbag proffer? Or emit? What song might be huffed from this void?

This is where I seem to be. Evaluate. Assess. No pillars, few givens, a smattering of beliefs and bones and hunches, a median vocabulary of gestures. From this – what pretend to build? What fabricate? I find that I want to, have desire to, create. Make out of what is woven – everything that forms me / allows me to be – but in what manner? Open. Free.

As if the absence is realized, the content in-formed, substance resulting from wafting motions and play. Capacity for invention. Something like soap bubbles – materials forming a translucent and wobbly funhouse mirror of shapes…leaking…nothing! Yet capable of popping fragments like droplets or spittle, or words.

This seems to be where I am. I know not what might emerge, but I’d like to leave some trace of the fabric experience has made of me. Scraps or ephemeral stains, artifacts.