Tag: books

A different kind of personal (2)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing2 Comments

secondly,

a fresh stack from the library yesterday…to soak into…

The Essential Peirce (vol. 1) – my hero

How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Blakewell

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Of Learned Ignorance by Nicolas Cusanus

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

The Temptation to Exist by E.M. Cioran

great philosophers who failed at love by andrew shaffer

Signeponge by Jacques Derrida

Drawing from the Glyptothek by Jim Dine

joy!

instants of yous

On By NW FilbertIn Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

I, for Instants, You

 

I activate the mechanism

by opening.

All there.

Which happens to be here,

between

eye and this book.

Incidental Courage in the Crevices

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing1 Comment

I’ve taken someone’s advice and picked up David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary – what a potent little delight!  Immediately slid into place with Alain de Botton’s On Love and Macedonio Fernandez’ The Museum of Eterna’s Novel; Jesse Ball’s The Curfew and The Way Through Doors.  Also moved me back to Daniel Handler’s Adverbs and (so-far) wonderful Why We Broke Up.  In the process, feeling forever stunted as a “writer,” I cracked A. Alvarez’ The Writer’s Voice yesterday to these jewels:

“For freelance writers like myself who belong to an endangered species which, as long ago as 1949 Cyril Connolly was already calling ‘the last known herd in existence of that mysterious animal the man of letters,’ writing is less a compulsion than a misfortune, like a doomed love affair.  We write because we fell in love with language when we were young and impressionable, just as musicians fall in love with sound, and thereafter are doomed to explore this fatal attraction in as many ways as we can…fifty years of writing for a living have taught me that there is only one thing the four disciplines have in common: in order to write well you must first learn how to listen.  And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers.  Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false.  It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire.”

Adding it up

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Philosophy, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Reading, Writing – the ‘Rithmetic

You know, I honestly don’t know why I think of the many things I think of.  “About” usually, yes, usually I can surmise why I stick to a thinking project – it might be something that troubles or worries me, maybe it involves something about which I care deeply or enjoy – then I’ll ruminate around on the subject or object for awhile, attempt to figure or follow the thinks, arrange some digits or sounds, contents, feelings or symbols until I make fit or get lost in the simple joy of tinkering.

But then other times, and really quite often, I can’t locate the instigative trail or balancing of reason for why (or how) items pop into or swish by my apprehending (apprehensive?) brain.

For instance, just now (and it’s precisely the unknowing that prompts me to write about it, to squeeze it through language), I was sitting quietly to desk after a very full day of soccer games, bicycle rides and birthdays, perusing Ron Loewinsohn’s Goat Dances, Anne Carson’s plainwater, Jon Anderson’s The Milky Way and Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays – a very normal way I have of grounding myself, discovering a location by mapping found paths, when sploosh! across the internet of my mind zipped:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”

            And then I stopped.  Closed the books, slid them aside, rested my chin in my hand and gazed toward nowhere, wondering what question that sounds-like-an-answer phrase was responding to or anticipating.

Why would I think that?

Lost in language like dancing and syllables, stars and night skies, withs and relation and choros, why would my only clear thought (recognizably anyway) be:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”?

            When something stops me like that, and I already hear a rhetorical response, but no answers satisfy and questions only multiply exponentially…

I grab loose blank notebook pages and a ball-point pen…

and begin doodling, dabbling, and “showing my work.”

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” (implied automatic resonant answer: because it does) leads precisely (in this case, given all the contingencies and conditions) to the chicken-scratching rambling preceding this period.

In other words, not to a solution, or perhaps even a working equation or problem, but simply to activity.  Reading, writing, thinking it out in lines, shapes and signs.

Now during all this scribble-sketching around the inceptive phrase, my bodymind has been mantra-ing responsorials:  “because it really does,” “because I’m not even aware of things happening until verified in language,” “because life just occurs and I don’t know about it until I manifest the experience some way – bounce it off of a counterpart or internal funhouse mirror (other’s words) to learn what it is and isn’t” and so on…so-called “reasons” I guess?  Hypothetical rationales for the random (apparently) phrase having typed itself in my nervous wirings?

The only “fact,” as I experience them, is that this phrase: “I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” clearly spat itself across the innards of my cranium while I was going about the very normal activity of recovering, soothing, pausing and nourishing myself on books at hand, wishing somewhere it hadn’t taken me all day to reach this quiet, wishing somewhere that all conversations went like this listening, wishing somehow I had something that felt like it needed to be written down, wishing somewhere that I understood myself.

And alas: a baffling sentence in response to no one silently carves and engraving on my consciousness:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depends on it”

My entire body replying: “well…YEAH!  It does!  It’s the only way YOU know that there’s possibly LIFE at all, and not just sensations, emotions, thinkings and dreams; reactions, responses and stimuli!  Without reading about it or writing words out I personally have no concrete object to sound my experience against, to test a happening – everything else out there from spouse to “god” is always moving, shifting, adapting, changing…just like me.”

“I guess I always read and write BECAUSE my ‘life’ depends on it”

Two Helpmeets Today (extended quotations for the journeying)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing2 Comments

1.  From Georgi Gospodinov’s And Other Stories:

“And our personal stories are the only moves, the only moves that help us postpone, at least for a while, the predetermined ending to our game.  And even though we are going to lose the game from the strategic point of view, the idle moves of our stories always postpone the end.  Even if they are stories about failure.”

2.  From Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights

The Hammock

When I lay my head in my mother’s lap

I think how day hides the stars,

the way I lay hidden once, waiting

inside my mother’s singing to herself.  And I remember

how she carried me on her back

between home and kindergarten

once each morning and once each afternoon

.

I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.

.

When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:

Do his father’s kisses keep his father’s worries

from becoming his?  I think, Dear God, and remember

there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:

They have so far to arrive.  Amen,

I think, and I feel almost comforted.

.

I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.

.

Between two unknowns, I live my life.

Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am

by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am

by outliving me.  And what’s it like?

Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?

A window, and eternity on either side?

Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.

What is there to say?

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing4 Comments

    

 
 

A book I am reading asks, in its title, What is there to say?  Another, next to it on its anticipating shelf, states “very little…almost nothing.”  Are they in conversation?

In completing Dust by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko for perhaps the ninth time, I come across a phrase I’ve starred and underlined in three colors: “We talk only because of a persistent desire to understand what is it that we are saying.”

            If someone took the time to calculate how many times the word “other,” used to refer to a subjective entity, occurs in philosophical texts post-Heidegger.

What is being?

 

I often experience the anomalous reality of hoping wildly in the midst of despair, a fervent belief in oxymorons – things like “Poetic Influence” and “Romantic Love.”

How music crafts melancholy and joy.

Perhaps someday we will concoct a system of chaos.

The weather is large enough.

 

I say “I love you” because I’d like to understand it.

 

Edmond Jabes has it that “the words of the book were trying, in vain, to say Nothing” (writing of sacred texts) or, in other words, some persistent and extravagant Babeling into Derrida’s vast abysme of origins and effects.  What is impossible.  “Our persistent desire.”  So Jabes asks “Is our relation to the world first of all a relation…to an expectation, a hope of world pregnant with all possible beginnings?”

            I ask myself, then, what is it I have to say?  The echoing answer “very little…almost nothing.”  Persistent desire.

The Fool

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings10 Comments
The Fool

Ah, April 1.  And I had been breathlessly preoccupiedly waiting the work day to begin…today I begin a journey into The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson, after a gentling scan into The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom, both of which “just happened” to arrive at my local library yesterday – arbitrary arrivals from my Interlibrary Loan list of “wants”.  Fool or not, nose in book, pack on back, and harried by wolves, it is what I do (am?).  Here I go!  (no fooling) 🙂 (why have I not seen so many cliffs and falls just ahead?)