Tag: being

Oracles

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journaling, meaning, Philosophy, Questions1 Comment

The Delphic Oracle that has guided philosophy – “Know thyself” – in Nietzsche (in my “reading”, opinion) realizes itself as “Trust thyself”: mine, articulate your experience: or (from Heidegger, et. al.) “start nearest”: perhaps even better – Notice the Nearest.

Tendency = looking past.  Going “large”, going “small”, searching causalities, progress, development, Time.  Being.

But no.  Always already “being.”  Always already a “that there” EXPERIENCING.  Once there, one might re-cognize (A-tension, attention).  (A new “there”).  And consider possibilities.  Partially, or collaboratively, present-ly, select some more-than (…), NEXT THAT-THERE.  (see Eugene Gendlin).

That’s something.  Could be labeled “awareness”?  Don’t know.  But something, certainly (? – is this possible?) EXPERIENCE: which perhaps synonyms to some potential degree – HUMAN BEING.

“We” don’t need Dasein.  In very many ways any word will do.  Nearest, native.  “I”, “me”, “Nathan”, “Rachel”, “Mark”, “Luanna”, perhaps beneath (before) that: no substrate: : That-there (I/you-Here) EQUALS.  Nearest.  Now.  Native.  (An archaeology of the generalized “we” – it’s ok).

Simply following thoughts, attempting attention, another “more-than” (…) BEING THAT-THERE (WHOM? – within).

Simple thoughts.  Drawing (?) near.  We (?) are such “beings” as might attempt/assent “to be.”  Strange, that-there.

(notes, 08.10.15)

other jottings spilled from the fuel-can:

“Dasein has its being to be, and has it as its own” –Heidegger

[The Unknowable Alive]

for each “kind”? of being (perception) I wonder if it is not “turtles all the way down” and so, perhaps, eventually, we just “be”?

(Paul Bains)

“THE QUESTION OF EXISTENCE NEVER GETS STRAIGHTENED OUT EXCEPT THROUGH EXISTING ITSELF” – Heidegger

Inquiry into existing: “How can we ask about asking?” in any meaningful way?  Access (Eugene Gendlin)

There is nothing that we “do” that is not what we “do.”  We cannot get around a corner and become something else/other.  Therefore we must content ourselves (or, it behooves us to) with being.  Ourselves.  Being.

Creeping through it.  trying (?) merely (fully?) to BE.  BE IN WITH AS WHAT – does he address how we have the capacity to imagine otherwise? (than being?) (Heidegger)

-Why do I consistently feel that I need/ought to SPARE others from my own “existing”?  that I might make my way somewhere somehow that would not tax them?

Logos

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, Experimenctes, identity, Language, meaning, relationships, Writing5 Comments

logos

Forced to engagement, he usually says “I”.  Generic reference: one of you, one of us, one of a kind.

Something different and else gathers when asked for his name.  Standing by words.  “Nathan”, then.

Something given.  Something earned by a story.  An occupation, a station, a set of behaviors and moods.  A moment, response.

Most of the time he is human.  A style, a class and a trope.  At “Nathan” he gains all his failures – a “he” and a “father”, a “writer”, a “son.”

He prefers being “I” – one among digits, a 0 or 1 all the same.  Taking an instantaneous place in the code.

Feels uncomfortable filling up “Nathan”.  Making choices, selections of now and then, here or there, commitments to plans and what has been done.

Occupation.  Specific surround.  Others creating identity.  1s, 0s, all in a malleable line, disrupted by every stroke of a key.  Each return and deletion and send.

Fluid duplicities of multiple minds…converged and conjoined.

With our “names” we profess a location.  Always so far from the truth: provisional goals.

logos

From the start “she’s” been too much to handle.  Representative of dreams and beyond, culminative, a paradoxical [paradaisical?] symbol of sorts.

He drowns in.  Desire.  An ache and overwhelm.  Another is always too much.  An other requires one to be.  Stake positions.  Select.  Choose.  Behave and act.  Become.

Desire feels like less than a choice.  A responding.  Implicit, reminding the lack of control.  He is base, greedy, hungry.  1 among many.  He is tissue and cell.  Energy.  Magnetism.  Gravity.  Reaction.  “She” determines.

“Nathan” is constructed of carbon and water.  It burns and it flows.

Weak bonds and strong.  Necessity and chance.  Survival and growth.  Spirals.  Returns.  Recursion.

The name is assemblage.  Situated, dependent:  “Nathan”.  “Nathan”.  Nathan.

To give.

Give way, give place, give meaning.  Give prominence, power, support.  Give out.  Give in.  Giving everything.

Desire undoes him, undoes me, even I.

Somehow it accrues and accretes to the name and gets seen, blamed and reported.

This one.  Now.  Becomes.

Like formulating sentences – attempts toward complete – so various, anonymous, available.  Becomes.

Insubstantiated concretion – at “And you are?”  “I mean, what is your name?”  “How are you called?”  A power relation demanding a “choose!” and derision, analysis, judgment.  Accounting, solution, report.

This equals “Nathan” in this context…I am.

“He” goes sick at encounter.  Disclosed.  Disappointing.  Disabled.

Potential of speaking as “I” (1 of us) become static and constrained by “this 1”.

Identities form.  In relation to – her, them, here, then, there, now.  In relation to – “what is your name?”  WHO ARE YOU?  In relation to – ELSE and its difference – Othering.

too-many-name-tags

Self-reflective Intrigue of the Day

On By NW FilbertIn communication, desire, erotic, Experience, love, meaning, pain, Philosophy4 Comments

“I have tried to describe a feeling that has often troubled me: I revenge myself on it by giving it publicity”

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

THE SOLIDARITY OF MIND-BODY-WORLD

MINDBODYWORLD

In my life, desire has been a ceaseless problem.

I have always possessed an unquenchable, ravenous, hunger for knowledge, relation & sex.

For the first time (in nearly 45 years) I can see it as a wholism.

I could read & reflect in the literature and learning of the world 18-20 hours a day without tiring.

I could engage & evince sexual fulfillment and bodily orgasm repeatedly without complaint.

I could interact & dialogue with another willing human around issues of being 18-20 hours a day without exhaustion.

These seem equalities; totalities; wholisms.

The refusal of dualities and scissions.

Inasmuch as my mindbody organism never tires and perpetually desires experiences of stimulation, information, novelty and introduction : research – literature – science – philosophy – style of expression – CONTENT-RICH, CURIOUS, CREATIVE, IDIOSYNCRATIC, NOURISHING, INFORMATIVE OR CHALLENGING...

so does my body: traditional/conventional intimate relationships seem characterized by graphable, chartable periods of intimate craving passion of new love (novelty) / regulation of growing familiarity (intimacy) / rhythmic relational ritual regarding sexual (bodily) ecstatic experience…yet NEVER has that satisfied me.  I have always longed for CONTENT-RICH, CURIOUS, CREATIVE, IDIOSYNCRATIC, NOURISHING, INFORMATIVE &/or CHALLENGING bodily pleasure AS MUCH AS I have for my learning mind…with my bodily experience.

As with sex, so with reading (& vice-versa): the IMPORT is the quality, stimulation & unique learning & fulfillment that each author / partner / interaction / experience brings…NOT a quest for repetition or sameness…

I can read Kafka, Dostoevsky, Musil, Proust, Scripture, Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault, Gendlin, Rilke – indeed THOUSANDS of thinkers/artists OVER AND OVER again NEVER tiring or failing to notice / learn / experience some new insight / perception / feeling / LEARNING / ecstasy …

LIKEWISE – physical human partners – I WOULD NEVER tire, grow used to, familiarize, exhaust, cease or lessen to crave, desire, starve for – unique, intriguing, wonderful physical bodies for stimulation, perception, experience, learning, ecstasy …

Seems a Wholism to me.  With what is GOOD – nourishing, stimulating, fulfilling – I NEVER CEASE TO CRAVE IT, & NEVER AM FULFILLED – or “accustomed,” “familiarized,” “apathetic,” “exhausted” of detail, inquiry, pursuit, exploration…

Long and long I have felt BAD about this:

feeling that I am weird, a sexually addicted person, uncannily erotic, unnaturally intellectual/abstract etc…

No more.  I realize my MIND and my BODY are the same thing: ONE THING : a PERSON…and that exactly as much as I ache/lust/pine/hanker for intellectual stimulation and inexhaustibility in great works of human creativity and expression/reflection…SO I ache/lust/pine/hanker for stimulation and inexhaustible pleasure of bodily interaction… 

FOR ONCE…PERHAPS I AM NOT THE “WEIRD” ONE

The one desiring equally and inexhaustibly ecstasy of mind and body, untiringly, unceasingly, unsatisfiably…

The perpetual “quest” for the “endless joy of erotic experience”

MIND & BODY – Aristotle, Augustine, Heidegger, Agamben…

Sappho, Rumi, Rilke, Pessoa…

MIND & BODY EVER CRAVING

PERPETUAL DESIRE

PERPETUAL JOY 

impossible to fulfill

impossible to fail

ECSTASY

the perpetuation of joy and desire

WHOLLY

Well-matched, then.  Identical, then.  SELFSAME, then: mind & body

desire & fulfillment

joy and longing

selfsame in me

and I am not ashamed.

tricircle_fractal

LIFE: REALMS OF PERPETUAL DESIRE AND FULFILLMENT VIA THE JOY OF DESIRE AND PERPETUAL FULFILLMENT NEVER SATISFIED ALWAYS CRAVING ALWAYS NOURISHED CRAVING MORE 

PERPETUAL

DESIRE/FULFILLMENT

IDENTICAL

RECURSIVE

NO DESIRE WITHOUT FULFILLMENT

NO FULFILLMENT WITHOUT DESIRING

Ouroboros

WHAT I AM.

A Provisional Writing

On By NW FilbertIn being, change, creative writing, fiction, life, love, relationships3 Comments

He, frightened, uncertain, inexhaustible and weak, somehow mustered the strength to ask or act for what he wanted.

Perhaps she would not comply.

Or could not, and remain who she needed to be.

Yet there would always be response –

– even ignoring, diverting, pretending to sleep.

It hurt to ask.  To attempt – its exposure – admission of lack and need – the venture, to try.  The fear of undoing, of incompleteness, of rejection, impossibility.

Still he acted and asked.

The alternative grown unbearable over time – constructions and deconstructions, composition and erosion, the living through time and space.

Time approaches in which time isn’t worth it – without.

Without knowing and acknowledgment, honesty and rejection, awareness…

…until the response is given…isn’t there still chance?

Untoward, illusory, unlikely and so slim…and yet?

As if…

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

Varieties of presence.

Certain opportunities of world.

Of doing.  Being.  Making.

As life runs out, so too the prospects of meaning, of experience. 

Had begun to feel he must,

or never.

Discover, find out, uncover, unearth, reveal

at least for a moment.

This moment.  The moment.

Nearing NOW.

But how?  Who?  And what sorts of whys were required?

What lent him the right and wherewithal, the luck, the chance, or desperation?

And why now?  What for?  How her?

 

Hesitates.

 

After all, perhaps?

Perhaps its merely panic, neuroses, a fracturing diminishing end?

What motivates?  And why?  And why this one?  And this now?  And here…in the midst of.

 

Always already in the midst of…and always already not-yet.

 

Between.  Desiring a line to be drawn.  As if the world depended on it.  His world (perhaps theirs?).  His life, his living, his NOW.

 

It remains to be seen.

Ever remains to be seen, evidenced, emergent,

Proven.

 

Can there be any proving?  If things had been different, some slight change in the initial conditions, conditions so complex?

 

Could it be different?

 

He must, he has to, he is compelled to act / to ask.

What will she reply?

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

The always begin.  Begin, begun, always.  Climbing the steps of his lack…behaving…becoming.  Ever some begin – some something, something shifting, changing, altering, becoming something else, something altered and novel, new, not combined in quite this way before – submerged, emerged, converged…yet differently.

No?

Next?

With N (next) = Begin?  +1, +1, +many + again, else, other…Equaling not before, prior, exact…NOT repetition but difference, remainder, chaos, complexity

Impossible,

seemed inexhaustible,

almost infinite,

not quite.  Not remotely.

“He,” “She” will surely end (in a way)

as a form of beginning

As a form of

a form of

motion, movement, becoming.

Things happen, or happening produces things (at some scale, interaction, percept)

What becomes undoes becoming undoing

(and so on).

Uncertainty.

              Mobility.

                          Activity.

                                    Becoming.

                                                   Undoing.

                                                                Undone.

He becomes.

Unraveled enough, to a point (a seemingly certain threshold) he will risk,

wants risk,

                                          feels compelled,

                                                                   concerned,

                                                                                                for survival, needs, depends,

decides to act or ask for what he’s wanting (needing?  lacking?  desiring?  believing?)

And where / who / what / why / is she?

And there and which and whom and when?

He will act, ask,

she will needs-be

in response to the violence of movement, address,

intruded perception, sensation,

respond.

In what way?

An Open Letter on Statistical Analysis

On By NW FilbertIn being, change, Current Reading, doing, Experience, human, life, meaning, Reflections, research, statistical analysis, timeLeave a comment

Stat anal chart

I used to shy away from Statistical Analysis as a means to meaning.

Now different thoughts occur.

Last night my daughter was struggling with 5th-grade division problems that involved endless remainders…

I used to be really uncomfortable with the “why?” of mathematics…

…last night I found it fascinating, as if it were opening entirely new sets of mysteries and unknowns to me trailing off as it did, like endless reflection and inquiry.

QUERY 1: “WHY?”

rodin-thinker-detail-upper-body-right-side-landscape-view

Common enough thought for a philosopher.

Seems to me the “good philosopher” (effective, useful, usable, relevant) consistently ponders and inquires into the Affect and Effect of whatever is under observation or scrutiny.  What / How / Why / Where / & for Whom does it “mean” that we’re Doing / Being / Knowing this or that or what-not.  Anything, really.  Anything at all.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

Which got me to thinking…

what/how/why/where/when/for-whom do all these infographics, demographics, assessments, quizzes, ticked responses, reviews, # of views, feedbacks, “likes,” “unlikes,” and so forth “mean” for our Doing/Being/Knowing?

(what’s it all mean, Big Data [pronounced “Big Dadda”?)

QUERY 2: “Huh?”

confusion diagram

WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

The question that drives, allows, enables any help a “philosopher” might be able to foster…

AND HERE COMES STATISTICAL ANALYSIS!

(the philosopher asks)…

For the moment, just…just-now, here, this-when…

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY MATTERS MOST TO YOU IN YOUR LIFE?

**************(Stop.)************

************(Breathe.)***********

************(Ponder.)*********

Let’s check out your personal statistics (YOU’LL have to do this part of the work – observation, comparison & contrast, open inquiry & interpretation)

statistical control chart

for instance…WHAT things do you nudge toward qualitative analysis or quantitative analysis?

A few simple questions regarding:

  • time with children/partner/self/nature/friends/world (in relation to) time at work?
  • time scrolling Facebook / browsing internet (in relation to) time gazing at / listening to / caressing / doing-being-knowing-with your loved-ones?
  • time realizing time-tested wishes or longings (in relation to) accepted responsibilities?
  • time reading/moving/resting (in relation to) time watching/viewing/receiving
  • pleasurable time (in relation to) suffering time

and so on….

[or how well do such things mesh up / converge / resolve, etc?)

(finding ways statistical analysis might mean)

bodyaffectchart

and then, of course, there’s the more totalizing EXPERIENCING of such analysis / account / record / actuality [REALITY]…

Aha-moments

…at least ONE way a statistical analysis might MEAN?

(and a humane use of philosophy?)

(science & mathematics?)

(humanities & arts?)

INQUIRY

  • WHAT MATTERS MOST TO YOU?

(maybe think of 3-5…rank them?)

  • HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF YOURSELF?

(keep track of your minutes / hours for 3-5 days)

  • WHAT DOES YOUR ACTUAL BEING / DOING / KNOWING REPORT ABOUT WHAT MATTERS TO YOU?

(compare.  contrast.  assemble.  interpret.  reflect.)

CREATE.

[RESEARCH: it all depends on context]

and it’s all immersive EXPERIENCE

i-u-line_01-Context_click

(…used my lunch break for grocery-shopping to alleviate evening stress after work when I need to get the kids to multiple locations and events, and prepare dinner while hopefully interacting with them, witnessing their goings-on in the ONE place I can be at a time, while finishing up that revised CV I need for perhaps continuing employment in a position I actually feel suited to, find challenging, and organizing an upcoming theater production, parceling energy with hopes I might have some left for my prime concern: my partner, or maybe myself – isn’t that part of all of it too? – and the reading/writing/reflecting I’d love to do, acquiring plane tickets and maps for upcoming family journeys, counting breaths to relax, aiming for meta-cognition and emotional awareness so that I don’t miss, ignore, injure, need to exercise, plus the laundry and housework, and…)

why

all the time, is just the time you have

Rambling

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, change, Current Reading, family, Fear, hope, human, Journal, lifeLeave a comment

Fits and Starts

How oddly and uniquely our dear bodies exhibit the effects of stress.  For some days now, exhausted and craving rest, I wake ever-so-early in a kind of sleepless sleepiness.  Wanting only to burrow in, immerse in comfort and calm, be tenderly near the one I love, instead I toss, turn, disturb and achieve none of my wishes.

Is this another emerging effect of aging?

My parents soon will celebrate 50 years of marriage – an example of what Andre Gorz describes: “If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage.  Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations.  We will be what we do together.” (Letter to D)  

mom and dad wedding

which means that I also approach 50.

So there’s also that – a kind of nostalgia, melancholy, joy, awareness…

I’m one to search and seek and inquire without end.

One to wonder and ponder and interrogate my experience with hopes of understanding it – but increasingly I find that apparently my being simply wants to be SO ALIVE.  Sometimes I feel that is what is happening with my waking body – that it doesn’t want to miss.  Anything.  The presence of my beloved next to me in sleep (Gorz describes what I am experiencing in that regard very well also: “how love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them”), the particular quality and type of that morning time, house-sounds, obfuscated consciousness…I, one of those who have “just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine”…sometimes it feels…and that this particular kind of love slowly strips and erodes those away to the irreducible, undefinable reality of each ONE of us…

FITS & STARTS

I shoulda wrote a letter.  There are the griefs, the emotions mistrusted, the longings delta’d out, and a million wishes.  “The past is still the past : a bridge to nowhere.” And then there is SO MUCH NOW.  The children and their emerging, engrossing creating lives; my wonder/love – a thriving, amazing individual who loves me and has so much of her own; there are the animals, the leaves, the waters and the breezes.  The breaths, the touches, the thoughts.  The feel of it all.

The word/concept/term “Mashup.”

Perhaps that is what is going on in my sleepless sleepiness.  My habit of reading has always been to read 30 or more books from various fields, genres, authors, subjects, literatures in order that my mind would have to do it’s weird mysterious complexity/chaos/emergence/dynamic/creative adaptive process of making some new idiosyncratic sense of a kind of global dissonance – our inherent ability to be a Convergence Creator.  To not be caught obeying, devoting, under the sway of some authority or perception or ideology not a Mashup.  Perhaps the thickness of being alive to what is life, attempting to attend, note and notice, enthralls the entirety in a similar manner – experience is a Mashup – so many sources, so many responses, so many interactions, so many affects and effects, roles, obligations, identities, loves, fears, perceptions, interpretations…and perhaps I’m currently simply immersed in a particularly cogent nexus of complexity and chaos – the operation toward adaptive emergence and some temporary convergence being administered in clumsy and cluttery fits & starts…

Perhaps each now is realization & threshold.  And, as a friend recently pointed out…“hope is such a restless state”.

hope butterfly

A Brief and Derivative Hello / Interview

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experience, Literature, meaning1 Comment

An attempt viewed in incompletion

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, human, identity, Journal, Poetry1 Comment

sad skeleton

Impromptu

Arid time and things, they pass

Erase, not quite, deteriorate

Inexact as well, but depleting

Depleting.

Depleting.

.

Not exactly end, ending

Never a beginning

Ever picked up midstride

Midstream

Only ever in the midst

.

Tiring then,

Worn down,

Depleted, she said,

Exhausted,

.

and yet what from?

From what is he so tired

unto ruin?

What is ruin-ed?

What never was?

Perhaps.

.

Always midstride, then

Nearer to the end

this depletion

Depleting

.

nothing

Begun ever

Certainly nothing

ever completed.

Always midstride,

and nearer to the end,

incompleted, and

depleting

Depleting

.

Unable to keep up with 1/8 of the 9-year-old,

worrying the 10, the 17, the young man

fails the partner

fails the weather

failing his own mind

            own dreams

            his own body

.

ideas

.

Depleting

.

Always midstream,

frozen in place

nearer to the end

this present

Depleting

.

Would like to write it out

Write it off

Pick up again

Declare a start

But he can’t

or won’t

.

Nearing the end,

Never getting there,

(near completion, never that)

only begun and that just barely

joined midstride

nearer to the end

simply depleting

.

Inexorably

.

Without fail.

The one thing without fail.

The one absolute success.

The one almost-completion:

.

depletion.

Depleting

.

Always midstride

and nearer to the end –

very much like dancing

on bleeding broken legs

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Experience, Journal, life, Writing4 Comments

Losing

Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness.  Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again.  Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand.  Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind.  Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins.  Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind.  One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.

– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –

Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991. 

For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.

Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.

Reading.  Writing.  Reading.  Writing.  Reading.  Writing.  Thinking.

Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,

the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,

grew redundant with desire…

…desire for language to do some certain things,

…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:

to write the ambiguities.

Repeatedly:  to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal.  Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear.  That light in which even our shadows go unseen.

Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,

encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,

my writing desire grows more active,

toward the active,

and its happening,

writing verbally,

writing living:

to write losing.

Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity. 

Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.

TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING

to loose losing

…perhaps to lose it…

…face to endlessness…

will he make it?

Impromptu

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Experience, grief, human, life, love, meaning, Poetry4 Comments

Death.

Abundance.

Extravagant generosity of depletion.

Lust with which the world gives way.

And life.

Things.

Prominence.

.

I have entered a world

in which I am

saddened

begladdened

nostalgic

and eaten away

.

It is “Today”

this world –

the realm, the sphere, the moment:

Now.

A time that’s never,

only almost

and a just-was.

.

Each beginning

what equals

another end.

That time.

What was.

What will be.

What I remember

and predict.

.

The first day

once again;

each possibly

the last

.

It is like this –

each time –

it is the present:

that attachment

that letting go.

Incessant welcome,

and its goodbye.