Tag: Arvo Part

Expectation

On By NW FilbertIn anxiety, creative writing, eros, Experimenctes, Fear, fiction, hope, relation, Writing4 Comments

“Whether it makes any difference what you say – whether there is any point in it anyway; whether there is any point in saying anything anyway.”

– Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein & the possibility of discourse

It was the mystery that found us, all the unknown buried beneath and beyond.

She said to me, or rather she offered her hand, or rather we made eye contact, well, she greeted me and held out her hand and we looked at or into one another’s faces.  Just the surface of the ocean.  Seas and skies are larger than our imagining.

Say skin, language, thought, or feeling are flexible bordering insides and outsides, contained and beyond.  Something like that I thought, unknowingly.

He spoke to me, then hugged me, with an asking.  I couldn’t know the question, but I understood the words.  We seemed friendly and respectfully embraced, hesitant and expressive at once.  There’s a cliff at the end of the trail.  Sometimes I don’t remember.

Sharp curves on roads in mountainous terrain.  That sort of thing, voids that look empty but allow plummet.

And whether it makes any difference, she said.

Difference is made, apparently.

Mother used to tell me, what was it?  Her voices are clear, kind of, almost, but the words are lost in others.  Deep waves are like that, it seems; hard to follow or find, prominent and obvious while rocking the boat, regardless the size.  Clouds.  Wind makes little sense of skies.  Everything is out there.

Inside, it’s raining.

I was asked for a cigarette and large trees moved above rooftops.  She offered her hand the way he hugs me, my son playing music on the piano while a cat escapes and someone’s doing homework.  They say the ground goes deeply down beneath us, compiled by potential millennia.  Nobody knows, though we have tools to measure by.  Whatever those tools measure.

I remember first times.  Every time.  Only it’s perplexing that they’re exactly the same.

Does anything repeat?

Father got on me again about irresponsibilities, my dreaminess.  If only I’d been military I’d be disciplined.  Different.  She offered her hand plus an ankle, a hip, a breast, a womb.  I’d have values. The crook of a knee, a neckline.  Take responsibility.  He wanted it in my mouth – that feels best, he said.

What do I know?

Surfaces of oceans.

She stops and reads books.  I do.  There is music and a din of dialogue.  Raucous.  Discomfort.  Anxiety is familiar, always the first time again.

I am afraid.  Usually.  Deep water disturbs me.  No one knows.  Many are afraid of flying.

Crying is its own thing.  How is an ocean made?  I won’t succeed.

Whether it makes any difference – saying anything anyway.  Someone speaks at me.  Eyes meet.  A brush of lips.  A grasp of hand.  What is the question?  Skies and oceans.  Earth’s depths.  What do I understand?  Always ending begins, beginnings.  What ends.  What has no end?  It begins.  Again.  Always first times.  Nothing.

Her breath tastes good, inhaled.  His muscle.  Seawater burn.  Heartloss.  So much fresh air.  The turn is sharp.

Saying anything anyway: the point is whether, weather, difference…its repetition.

The how and why of her.  Of him.  Of it and other.

There I must have been when I saw her or felt it or once again the beginnings.  Once again the first time.  Always again.  Begin.  While ending.  While ends.

He said so – whether there is any point in saying anything.  He said what felt best when he hugged me, kindly.

She offered.  Someone asked for something.  Like surfaces on oceans.  Horizon lines.  The ground beneath our feet, beneath that.  Differences.  The above.  I cut my skin.

 

 

Writing Anyway

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, depression, fiction, hope, Language, meaning, relationships2 Comments

EVERY HUMAN LIFE IS A STORY THAT COMES TO AN END

selected fictions of self-pity

entropy

  • INEVITABLE ENTROPY

Maybe this just is the gist of it.

I spend a good portion of my life (such as it is) – all of its waking and sleeping hours anyway – struggling to determine a meaning for it – its meaning (a concept? term? reference?) on its own that I may have very little luck determining or understanding.

This elusive compendium of thoughts/feelings (EXPERIENCE I’ve corralled with the sound/shape ‘meaning’) – how might it be described?  explained? : What might it … ahem … ‘mean’?!

Were I to describe it – it would evoke and involve (were I to describe it well) a sense that I was necessary, useful, desired and desirable, of some merit and account, acknowledged, approved, purposive, poignant…whatever those (each) might also ‘mean.’

Something I happen to be “good” at that is also of benefit or boon throughout the world I’m wedded to, both near (intimate, familial, selected-for) and far (given, happenstance, environment).

But what I’m “good at” is “Depression.”  The function of slowing and drag…exhibiting sorrow among happiness, erosion within emergence, noising up messages…despair contained in joys.  Doubt, skepticism, intricate inevitable workings of what we agree to name ‘death’ intertwingled with what we call ‘life.’

Entropy.  Sorrow.  Failure.  Defeat.  Depression.  Grief.  Doubt.

Unlikeliness.

Unlikeableness.

Me.

Self-pitying, self-concerned, self-oriented, self-obsessed…at this I am quite ‘good’ – adept, astute, adroit, capable and facile – of smearing, marring, being sad in circumstances of beauty, of success, of benefit and chance…

My children are healthy, talented, innovative and beautiful.  My wife is stunning, accomplished and accomplishing, intelligent, inventive, supportive, sexy and kind.  Generous.  I am employed in circumstances that suit my learning, commitments and goals.  I inhabit relatively stable wards and routines.  I am alive, middle-aged without illness, debility, war or threat of imminent dangers.  Still expertly I can imbue and include a lowering, slowing, gravitational angst and fear into anything I encounter as ‘good.’

I am ‘good’ at dismantling ‘good.’

Which means (back to ‘meaning!’) I also despise, loathe, resent and regret myself and my operations. Representing wear and tear, unraveling and decoupling, erosion, rust and decay to what strives and conjoins, promises and grows.  Somehow, somewhere, in some indisputable and unignorable way I am married to disorder.

When I strive to sing, express or communicate – what emits is disturbance and noise.  When I construct, I create mayhem.  When I combine – I fall apart.

Significant discoveries during my life-range – their exposition and documentation – include complexity, chaos, emergence, and entropy.  These I represent, or so it seems.

Ever unable quite to take credit for accomplishment (chaos, complexity, evolution, emergence); never able to know – to sufficiently understand or trace (dynamic, processual, complex, systemic); yet acutely aware of dissonance and destruction, dis-pair and difference (entropy, chaos, noise).  Viral, incipient, parasitic and accidental – I adapt, attach, alter and disrupt – change and undo.

Which makes me sorry in an unstoppable way.  Unable, hesitant, terrified, dangerous and afraid.  A soiled activity of ground.  Questions beggaring and buggering replies.  A kind of programmatic cancer, a hitch in the breath, a massage that makes sore.

I message – and fragments.  I propose – and divide.  Link up by pulling apart.  With such yearning – an insatiability for connection and attachment that (frighteningly) never fails to strip, erode, scrape and shred that which it clings to.

Modus operandi: ENTROPY.  Clutter, damage, foil.  Complication and conundrum.  Ant in sugar, weevil to wheat, cog in machinery, speculation to proof.  Maxwell’s Demon, uncertainty on principle, the mouldering remainder: “I.”

I, entropy.

I, divorce.

I, disease.

I, confusion.

I, disruption.

I, doubt.

I, Descartes.

I the obscure.

complex, simple

unwanted, unwarranted, unsure

I the wobble precipitating break

I, depress.

You colour, I neutralize.

You shine, I dull.

If offered a peaceable end (thinking twice, thinking thousands) I’d accept it – unquestioningly.

New Topia.

**********************************

maggot

This is what he thought of it.  What he thinks.  This one, inextricable from a world, just like everyone else, part AND parcel, the becoming and become, apparent apparition, here-and-then-gone every one-in-the-many.

He thinks irreplaceably.  Nothing without merit.  Necessity emerges and occurs.  Unstoppably.  With(in) all its stoppage and its stopping.

            He thinks: “what occurs occurs at once.”

            He thinks: “being and nothingness is being in time.”

            He thinks: “this is one way of thinking.”

            He thinks: “thinking is process.”

            Inevitable.  And more-than, that.

Stop Making Sense happened at a time that makes sense, and continues to do so.  Absorbed into machinery.  The operations of ‘reality’ for each type, each kind, each species.  And without.

“There does not seem to be a correlation,” he thinks.  “Between this one and that, experience and experience (the dog, the tick, the grass; the human, the sun, the soil). A convergence of dependence without necessity.”

He thinks: HER

He thinks: THEM

He thinks in wishes.

He wishes his thoughts.  Difference.

He (accidentally) dreams a New Topia.

In this New Topia, a difference.  A sense-making, a motile trajectory.  A structure to revolutions : convergence + emergence.  A hope rather than.  Such despair.

            He thinks: he reaches, makes effort, attempts.

            He wishes: he could do otherwise

            He thinks: everything ends

            He wishes: something might end in beginning

Because he is able to, he looks at ‘his’ eyes in a mirror.  Glasses, no glasses.  Hair, hair pulled back and away.  Blue.  Morose.  Green.  Avaricious.  And blue-grey: Now.  Now.  Now.

He thinks: I should be brushing my teeth – and always regrets pronouns and possessives.  Conventions.

            He wishes: there was beyond

            He thinks: I exist in my limits

            He wishes: possibility

            He thinks: organism.  finitude.

He writes as he has learned to do so.  Using words, made out of letters, infrastructures that – while scrambled and undone, reworked and reordered toward a sort of confusion or unsettling – are still the only means he has…toward anything.

            He thinks: “anything resembling anything – these are my limits; and limits = usefulness, probability and possibility, constraints.  My hope.”

            He wishes:  Re-inscribed.  Remade.  Novel.  Capable.  Composed.  From one-to-one.  For her.  For them.  For ‘It.’  (It: New Topia).

            He divests.  Dissects.  Dissembles.

No one follows his ‘meaning.’

[Therefore it does not mean].

***********************************

parasite

Grown ever-so-tired of options.  The limits, precursors, avail.  Starts again, but never new.

This is an attempt to bind.  To couple.

Writes to forge a chain.

Writes to create connection.

Writes to compose a real accordingly.

Fails.

The letters, marks, terms and expressions are borrowed, reworked or remade, still.  Symbols wide open.  Pre-filled, refilled, unmade.

Touch then.  Touching nothing new.  Touched before.  Been touched.

“Nothing new under the sun.”  New again under new sun, newly impossible, com-possible.  Newly inadequate and all there is…adequate to the necessary task.  Ever less.  Ever more.  Never quite.  Never quite common enough.  Human.  All too human.  Never quite common enough.

***************************

Dust.  Ash.  Dust.  Ash.  Dust.  Ash.  Dust.  Ask.