Tag: communication

Celldom

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, meaningLeave a comment

Click the image for the first entry:

34-IMG_0708

            They brought me a pencil.

Just as easily broken, but the softness and variations of shading are gentler, and it emits a soothing sound (whatever “soothing” might mean for me here).  As well, I am able to watch it exhaust itself, and must keep rotating it within my fingers to fashion readable markings.  I do enjoy whispering in these lines with graphite.  Its liminal appearance and capacity for subtlety and starkness.

A pencil accomplishes something (I am thinking).  Makes tangible the dust and fog – our weathers of uncertainty.  You have to squint a little to make it out when used for forming language, and it quickly evaporates, fades.  Feels more made of matter than an ink pen…more temporary and inevitably fragile, decomposing.

They led me to the library today, accompanied closely, of course.  I saw more colors, shapes and forms than I have seen for weeks.  Selection was limited but there were some illustrated texts on natural science and even a few collections of art.  “What do you think these pictures express?” they asked of paintings or sculptures I paused upon.

“Look” I said, “look.”

I pretended sullen and began to ecstatically absorb – lines with dozens of colors peeking about the edges, throwing some other sector of the painting into bright relief, leading my eyes like young tight calves signaling, dashing about in summer.  My eyes leapt about after splotches and strokes, sunk slowly into (imagined) vast planes of layer upon layer of shading and tone (what an interestingly borrowed term!), scratched back, built over, washed in and out.  I danced through sprays of evocative squiggles, hyphens, circles, blocks and splatters, all in the space of half of an hour (does ‘space’ really apply to sequence?  To time? – “Don’t get hung up on words” again, always afraid I’ll disappear more fully, remove to too far a distance).

And why should they (or you) care?  Why should anyone?

broken pencil

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

            Too much shading, pencil evaporated, disappeared (literally “before my very eyes!” – what a ridiculous statement – as if eyes were anything without the information of the hands!)

Why distance is required.

This pen appears to be blue, although by the light I am provided to scribble by, it is difficult to tell (Ha!  Eyes even need speech to operate!)

What messages are all our so-called senses constantly inundating our poor cerebrum with?  Life is one massive assault on minds from birth until its end.  It’s no wonder then, is it?

One requires a kind of distance to “see” (observe, perceive, etc.).  How might one achieve this necessary gap from what one must inevitably be the substance and content of?  One needs a mirror and a separate self.  I believe this is variously referred to as “dissociation,” “transference,” “schizophrenia,” “writer.”

It is suggested that I attempt to describe further what I am noting down.  I already know that is not possible.  “Ouroborous” I say, and close my lips and eyes, quieting my hands.

Existence is the Cusp – A Journal Entry

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, Language, meaning3 Comments

cursive journaling

It’s December, and I’m writing outside, lucky by so many counts.

  • It’s December, and 45°
  • My partner in love and life instills health and wellness in me
  • I’m writing
  • James is serving me coffee, ice water and double greyhounds enabling me to work without interruption

I’m in what you might call a “Cusp Area.”

The present is always a liminal space.  I am a few days away from completing a Master’s degree in Library & Information Management, and months away from embarking on a PhD in Media & Communication coupled to the Arts at a University in Switzerland.

I work very part-time (10-20 hours / week) for the United States Postal Service, attend regular psychotherapy sessions, parent 4 children, read and write as much as I can, cook and clean a LOT, and spend as much time as I can with my beloved (a brilliant, gorgeous, amazing, resourceful, intelligent and creative human).

I rest very little.

We (my immediate family) will not survive January on my income (sans school loans).  Cusp.

Change is imminent, and yet NEVER is NOT.

Every day relationships morph.  What could be termed “stability” in life must be radically redefined to have any resemblance or “fit” to reality – which is always, ALWAYS in enormous, factually ubiquitous, tremendous FLUX.

There is something like “similarity” – of persons, circumstances, situations, emotions, experiences… which we occasionally tag “familiar” or “repetition,” (providing a modicum of regularity, “consistency,” “normativity”) but none of it, EVER!! – is “identical,” “same,” “repeated.”  Not even ourselves, one “moment” to the next (i.e. in spans of cursive time – what seems utterly continuous is still difference – otherwise could not be noticed).

I am writing this in cursive in attempts toward continuities of form and content.  And yet there is vast uniqueness with each stroke.  “Distance,” difference, change.

I delight in working in language – a symbology for expressing experience – a fabric, social set and structure – a shared and flexibly rule-bound medium.

Possessing or harboring…containing vast incommunicable DIFFERENCES – between ethnicities, cultures, geographies, genders, contents, shapes, habits, practices, processes…REALITIES.  And yet useable.  Useful.

I am writing outside in December, in Kansas, in the United States of America, in cursive, in English, in black ball-point ink, in a ruled soft-covered notebook, in 2014, in attempts partially to think, to recount, to visualize, to express, to extend, to discover, remember, critique, perceive, view… understand a curious unstoppable flow –

The Experience of Being a Living Organism

with billions of particularities – both structures and substance, arrangement and order, experience and resources, habits, capacities, learning, abilities, perceptions, interpretations, emotions…

THIS kind, type, genus, species, instance, sort, occurrence, happening of this one/many, living (active, interactive, interacting, linked, dependent, individual, functioning) THING.

Differently now and now and NOW.

I cannot curtail difference.  I can hypothesize similarities.  I have agency, but an energy and forcefulness utterly dependent and constrained by countless systems, substances, processes and constituents.

I have a kind of power – corralled by everything within and around me.  I am at the mercy of – the support and boundary of – all else + the combinatory elements and activities of WHAT I exist of and the rest of existings.

I do not fool myself into thinking I am a cause or blame, and yet I am utterly response – able / – ible.  “My” interactions and interactivities, are mine / “me” / THIS.

THIS & THAT, Yin/Yang, Individual/Environment, “self”/”other”, – difference without discontinuity, ever in exchange: molecularly, actively, REALLY, and wholly.

cusp area

EXISTENCE IS THE CUSP.

I love while / as / if / because / in spite of (or in contradistinction to) I am loved.

I move with / against / into / around / while / within / because of / in distinction from, possible movements, contents, and affordances / constraints of everything about / within / around me.

I “exist” (stand-out) because I am, in a swarm, a sea, of existences, existings.

I have no other chances to be…

…outside of my surrounds.

I am.  Within a lifeworld.  Without which – I am not.

And still, “I am.”  Singular / plural.  Similar across space-time, an appearance and occurrence of similarity marked by difference.

The safest expression (for one seeking at “truths” or reliable, testable regularities) is:

WE ARE

or

IT IS.

We, the living.

architectural animal

I thank you.

Thanksgiving

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experience, Language, meaning, Music1 Comment

Thanks

Thanks to all of you I have become aware of – for creating, expressing and sharing your thoughts, ideas and works – giving me the opportunity to engage.

Thanks

And thanks to those of you who take the time and consideration to engage my thoughts, ideas and works – giving things a life beyond my small circumference.

The Costume

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, fiction, Writing3 Comments

Bill Jacobsen - Untitled 1999

The Costume

            When there is dialogue, or perception.  When he’s awake.  But what to name it?  How describe?  Perhaps even while sleeping.

The lag.

At checkout counter, clerk addresses: to absorption, numbness, mumble.  Other.

Strikes Alfonse as he’s driving toward home:  there are trees bending, being present in their way.  Cars, pedestrians, small animals scurrying.  A school bus.  Neighborhoods – definite yards and homes.  A mail-delivery-person.  A filmy mist.  A fall-behind in his perception.  Gap.  Perhaps.

He initially considered it a veil.  A tremulous fog.  A curious “vagueness to things.”  Like long, cold Winter.  Haphazard inceptions:  tree, bus, children; cat, dog, car.  No attachment.  A muffling and delay.  A foreigner.  Driver inside steel mechanism, separate by seconds, very nearly removed – a skein, a skin, a veil.  An organism with apparatus.  The slow calculator.

The smeary light when she speaks:  lover, mother, friend.  Overlaps, palimpsests, a smudging feedback, a decay.  The children crying.  Vocalization evokes.  Indicates.  Needs.  Response.  Remembers he is human.  Particular understandings, expectations.  Affirmations and acknowledgments.  Times for saying yes.  Attentional assent.

Alfonse disbursed.  Pernicious regress.  As if he’d be immediate.  As if the others were.  As if it all were touching, interspersed and in exchange.  This thing and another.  He is embodied.  The body seems slow, or surprisingly fast, almost anticipatory (unbeckoned, unmeditated erections).  He can’t make sense from it.  Body makes sense he knows not of.  Who knows not of?  Of what?  Even how might be accurate here.  Alfonse cannot seem to know, this is his costume, a glassy shroud, the sluggishness between the here and now.  Without a zipper or a tag.

Inside a bottle within distorted frame, but without an image described so clearly.  Costumes are alive – expose the motions of the wearer.  Notions.  Reveal, conceal, but variant things.  Who dressed him this occasion?  This dismantled undoing and random erasure, perpetual hiatuses of interpretation?  His hesitant reality – a retardation, sensational slag, both slow-soaking sponge and absorbency-abdicator.

“I got nothing,” he murmurs, “didn’t catch a word you said…” as if in some other language of different rhythm and tune.  Not understood.  Multiple things unrelated, cannot tell, cannot smell, is uncertain where he is in his motions.  Not quick enough, just out of joint, who what where why when never equals now for him, nor how.  He is Alfonse and he seems costumed.

Making love – a metaphor for intimacy – those direct invasive actions – and yet he’s steps away, slow to the uptake, uncertain who is doing where and when.  That comes later and looks like smudges that he estimates with guessing.

Is this uncommon? – is what he wonders.  Am I the only one who cannot tell?  Does she know what she is doing, feeling it as it happens?  He’s asking something far away he cannot measure.  He wakes each morning, to himself, inside this costume, and dons the heavy cloak of it for sleep.  Asynchronous, distant, accidental and traumatic, but postponed – perpetual flush of shut-down, shock, bewilder.

He thinks “flamingo” inside a jar of unfocused space in alternate materials in artificial frame and anesthetic wall in analagesic scheme, so far, far, far, far… the clock is slipping.  The span from here from now, from him from there, from this to happening, happens.

And so it goes.  Costume he can’t remember wearing that encases and engulfs.  Awareness too long after to affect.  A lostness in the makeup or makeover, the becoming and become.  Too late.  Ineffective.  Ever after and begone.

Echoes.  Surely something must be said, something addressed to him, something interjected, interacted and applied – only ever now arriving quite beyond a sensibility toward response – apposite, inappropriate, out of line and time and sense.  Unsettled and uncouth.  A threatening out-of-sorts, off-color and unfelt.  Feeling suffocated, unrelating.

Alfonse swimming being, non-concurrent, unawares.  Ineffably indistinct.  Imperceptibly misinterpreted.  Not.  Never.  Was. But.  Here.  Where.  No.  Not.  Now.  It slides away.  He heard something (her mouth, lips, the child-in-walkway, bird, tree bent to breeze) – no, not yet, before, never always, when?  How?

Soughing in a muddy river, ice overhead shifting, yesterday.  Forever.  There is no today in the mix, the undertow, a disconnected untoward, who where when – not he – can’t remember, a caesura of consequence – plugging, plunging him far from present, dark and drear.

So far between the now and when – not-knowing.

Invisible costume.  Alfonse’s weight.  Indistinguishably unable – uncommonly common, this viscous opaque coating – no known axis or location – simply not.  Not.  Not.

Knots of not…not-knowing, not-quite-hearing, not-feeling, not-tasting, ever too late.  Undone for undoing.

Alfonse within costume, a muzzling muffle of indigestive guzzle, of life.  A weather and reprove, a restrictive deconstruction, a not-quite-absence in the presence of the everywhereabouts and everywhen of… of… everything.

Flamingo Robert Frank

Interstice – 6: the coupling

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, Language, meaning, relationships1 Comment

System Environment Coupling

– 6 –

And then the narrative runs away.  Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds.  We yield them occurrence in time.  Over time.  Across locations.  We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so.  Their occurrence is now.  The moment of happen.  And the telling is here just as well.  The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember.  The moment of happen, and never “again.”  “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.

Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles.  We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have.  Construct forms to obey.  She stumbled, or stuttered.  Appeared in a robe.  When it opened, she stayed.  For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.

Not undone.  No undoing – just fall shy.  Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.  An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change.  She (you) and he (I), it (us).  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.

See the couple coupling.  A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle.  Huffs and spurts and clawing.  The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure.  Bodies in command.  It’s grotesque.  Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal.  She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting.  He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake.  They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.

From inches of distance the movements are grueling.  A repetitive taking advantage.  These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need.  The fish flaps on dry ground.  In a terror.  A panic afraid that relief will not come.  Release.  In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.”  But there is an other.  He/she senses the lover’s retreat.  The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction.  They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor.  Asynchrony.  What needs, needs its doing, is done.  Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…

From one angle.

See the couple coupling as animals.  The dog, the bear, the wolf.  The bird or bee or dragonfly.  The distance.  The unawares.  What if the lion leaned into the neck?  What if the squirrel caressed?  If the snakes lay entangled.  The cats licking flanks.  The stories would pour into morphing.  What have we seen?  During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received.  Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving.  His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine.  Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again.  In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else.  Animals humping and huffing,  not by instinct alone, something more.  Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.

In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be.  From the feline receiving her guest.  There is more taking place through the need.  The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond.  Bodies converging in dialogue.  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.  Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create.  The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace.  What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.

We muster.  We glyph.  We resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.

The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.

Interstices – continuing in between

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

more sections arriving from the Beginnings and the Second

– 3 –

Message being – she looked at me, incredulously.

– “What and/or Who – are you?” she requests.

I don’t know.  No one knows, I said, half-joking, persisting, prolonging, staying alive.

Longing = staying alive.  Longing = I’m still alive.  And I look at her, longer.  Which means: if only I knew.  The interstice (according to me).  We converge.  A gaze.  I must go.

That’s what I wanted.  The choice.  The decision.  A godlike thing for a fragile, finite boy.  The both of them: god – a fragile, finite boy.

No one owns.

When I returned, I could have said “My love, I am not present with you now.  I am in a future predicted by a possible past.  I am afraid.  I am not here.”

She might have responded: “I see and hear and understand that you are not here with me.  I too will retreat, remove, go away, until you return to me – here, to here.”

I babble on.

But I don’t say “Hello, my love.  I am not present.”  No, what I speak instead is a muddled report of my feelings and fears, my ideas – my present experiencing – a gummy wad of future and past, uninformed by where I am (with you) or who I am with (you) or when (now).  Constructed instead by where I believe I have been (past), where I think we are heading (future), and how I feel about that (afraid).

She recoils.

“I’m going away now” she says.  Which is not where I am.  Not with me.

But I meant.  I meant to say (once I figure out where I actually am): “Hello love.  I am afraid.  I am past and future.  I am absent.”

To which she replies: “Good to know.  Tell me when you arrive, here.  With me.”

Here now.  Or, Nietzschean-ly now/here, is that, and “exactly” : unlocatable.  Nowhere.  NOW + HERE…present.  It can only be lived, not thought.  Thought is too slow.  Lags ahead, leaps behind.

Oh you, I might have said.  And she may have recognized me.  Perhaps.  Now.  Here.  Presently – in the nowhere – the between – the “Interstice.”  Where what occurs, occurs.

“Hello.  I love you.”

– 4 –

Finite, fragile boy.  The fragility and finitude are true, I suppose, but not unquestioned.  However they withstand (the questioning).  They withstand the questioning.  Because I don’t know, and it is not wisdom, this cloud of unknowing, it is finitude, and I am fragile, not only because it’s true.

I am fragile because not all the branches hold.  When climbing.

– “What is it we are speaking of?” she asks (she – the you – asks me – the I).

Past and future, I might have answered.  The unknowing.  But did not.  Instead said – “unreliable.”  Rises, passes away.  Novel-to-familiar.  First one thing then another, desire fades.  I am not stimulus.  Enough.  For no reason.

I, illogical.

You, burdened.  And thus you sigh.  (She sighs her burden, a question).

And I retort.  “No.”  Or, “don’t go.”  But you might, because I have gone (or didn’t arrive, not HERE, not NOW, but somewhere else made of cobbled up pasts and unpredictable aheads).

“I love you.”

But how can that be?

It can’t.  Yet it is.

Perhaps.

I don’t know.  But it is not wisdom.

Interstitial

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

part two of a rambling….

visual fields

– 2 –

            Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone.  Suspect I can’t believe them.

I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that.  Won’t even attempt “within reason.”  Suggest.

There’s no “let me explain” to this.

– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly?”

The point, I would say, exactly, or nearly precise – that there isn’t.  I don’t know.  But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) – we’re dis-missed.  Or not missed – how to say it?  There’s a meeting.  It seems.  In a margin, or more.

Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap?  I don’t know.  I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer.  Longer.  It’s a fight against death, that small word.  Simply, longer.  With you.

Am I clear?  Making sense?  I don’t know.

– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying” she says, “near ‘exactly’.”

I don’t know.  It’s unwise.

And I hum when the words sound just so.

– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.

Interaction.  Locution.  Between.  (I am thinking).

“Interstitial,” I say.  Interstitially?  I wonder.  How could I know.  It’s all susceptible to the mark.  The mark of the question.  I think about changing my name.  Did before.  I like titles.  It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music.  I would be Mark, Remarking.  The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved to a point, on everything : ?   “My point, exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark.  (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind…anything).

It’s okay.  I’m familiar.  Not that you’re worried.  There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction.  It’s just so (so it seems).  “Just-So Stories,” he wrote, long ago, relatively – they’re alike and akin, episodic.  We describe.

Neither here and/nor there.  Interstitial.  In-between.  What I wanted to tell her, to say.  And I would have, had I known.

– “Known what, exactly?” she’d once said, and I’d stopped, for the meanings were lost, non-existent.  Just so.

“That’s just how it is” I had said.  And don’t know, was surmising.  The world hypothetical and inspired (I’d thought, at the time) – simply possible.  I was wrong (perhaps).  But she stayed (temporarily).  The words lose their meanings.

I hum.  To myself.

I write: “This is what I wanted to do.”

All that’s required is a ‘trigger’…a rule.

We

NANOWRIMO Reminds: Any Excuse to Write

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, Writing2 Comments

THE INTERSTICE

I told her that I would have told her, had I known.

-“Known what, exactly?” she said, “Really!?” she said.

Yes, I said, yes, I would have explained what I felt to be true – about the “interstice” – what I felt I understood, I would have said.

As usual, the sighs, the diverted glances, the “I-don’t-knows.”

It’s okay.  I’m pretty used to it, not that it still doesn’t hurt, or squash some deep part of me – annihilate, erase – but familiarity breeds, and it’s not contempt, at least not for me.  More like resolve, or, well, accustom, I don’t know.

Still I would have conversed about the interstice.  Or its plural.  No one can know what we’re talking about (in my opinion) – that’s why we talk (in my opinion).  But I like to look at her.  Very much.  So sometimes I keep talking so that I can look at her longer.

Thus I would have explained – tried to – about the Interstice…had I known, I tell her.

-“Known what, exactly?” she asks, “Really?!”

It’s okay.  I’m used to it – exasperation.  It’s a sort of fatigue that settles on my interlocutors – my family, my friends, my lovers – as I triple/quadruple/unendingly (exponentially?) second-(meaningless term in this accounting)-guess whatever it is (emotion, idea, memory, event) I attempt to convey.

I don’t trust a thing as long as it’s questionable, and I’ve yet to discover something unquestionable.  I like inventing titles though.

She’s looking at me – softly, sadly, gently and quiet.  Sometimes she strokes my hair with her hands and lets me rest my head (the physical part) in her lap.  It kind of helps.  But the rest doesn’t rest.

It’s okay, for the most part, I’m used to it.  It’s “me” as they say, as it were – what I’m used to.  It doesn’t matter, or does in unquantifiable ways, but I keep at it.  Anyway.  I can’t seem to help it.  Well, some things do – like vodka, sex, sleep – but only temporarily.

Things are only temporarily.

That’s the sort of idea that keeps me alive.  Temporarily.  And second-(exponentially)-guessing.

She’s still there.  Here.  Though.  Hence the interstice.

I try to explain.

As if “interstice” possessed meaning – definition beyond the moment activated or utilized.  As if it indicated.  “Meant” – a convergence-point (limitless above and below and abroad) of conventions of time and of space – a realm that felt (seemed) shared.  Held in common.  Nothing is “held” – or that temporarily.  It seems.  I don’t know.  It’s certainly questionable – is it – “certainly”?

I don’t know.  Which I thought, or I think, is the entry to wisdom, but even that – I don’t know.

She’s still here.  And I question – who is it?  Who is still here?  And what for and/or why?  And where is this trembling “here”?  I can wonder, after all.

-“Wonder what, exactly?” she queries.

I don’t know.  I’m a human.  Some odd conundrum of pieces and parts that cohere, correspond or reciprocate in hold-together activities for awhile…call it “organism,” there’s that, it would seem, but seem only, digging in it is hard to convince – a location, identity, consistency, avocation or being.  It’s just so – apparently – temporarily.

Exasperating.  You see?  You dig?  What I mean?  That’s what we’re after (I think) – what it means.  But what that means is uncertain, I think or surmise.  We don’t know, it would seem, we’re uncertain.

We ask.

Let me describe this – the interstice…

“The Conflux of Floods” : an Imagined Interview

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Journallings, Language, WritingLeave a comment

two-rivers-colliding-geneva-switzerland-rhone-and-arve-rivers_2

            In a recently daydreamt interview (I realize these may be narcissistic, but they have occurred all through my life, and come to function as ways to take account of myself) – in which I had composed writings that earned critical acclaim AND garnered popular and commercial success (crazy, right?!) – I was being astutely questioned (after all, I am both interviewer and interviewee – it’s a daydream), and pressured to account for both the critical acclaim and the mass consumption of the tangled materials of my celebrated novelistic-poetic-essaying (some multi-genred hodge-podge and hurly-burly’d collaging of human inscription).   [Which is also, obviously, occurring in this everyday attempt at its retelling].  For better or worse.

By any account, each time I endeavored to formulate an answer to reckon for the apparent realities under fantasized questioning, I was foiled – ultimately unable to appropriately language ANYthing I strove to express – for the fundamental reason that the shared social convention of language – the available (or known) English nouns, verbs, structures, phrases, vocabulary, ontologies, etymologies, forms, content and context seemed false to my meaning as soon as I spoke them.

I would begin to assay a response, and each available term (even though utilizing an extensive and deft, adept English vocabulary) – each word I was choosing – would seemingly cancel itself.  I was caught in pregnant pauses – an author seeking a term – and the accessible signs and sounds of an encyclopedic dictionary all clanged untrue – inaccurate, incomplete and implausible – incorrect!

The interview proceeded (notably un-entertainingly and un-interestingly) with solid and well-considered queries posed from the history of human making, reflection and inquiry…followed by prolonged silences as I contemplated what might be honest, authentic replies…resulting in the beginnings of obsessive-compulsive, over-thought, manically scrutinized hesitations – cancelled out and undone, revised and corrected, taken back or erased as soon as they were spoken.  Simultaneously to becoming aware of their possible interpretations – conventionalized meanings gassing the atmosphere – the breath and air of their saying and hearing.

For example:  “Well, I think that authors…how could I speak for others…it seems to me…no that’s not right,” or, “It is my intuition, sense of things…my felt experience… no, that’s not quite it.”  “As the mind processes the body’s…wait…what is not body about the mind?  Our language presents a splitting of the two that was never there…I mean…no, no, this is inadequate…” and so on.  Nothing being said.

“Ever try.  Ever fail.  No matter.

Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”

-Samuel Beckett-

            The failure of the interview eventually came around to the following… a couple responses that might represent something almost accurate, maybe.  May communicate a touch of something authentic, honest.  It has stuck with me for a few days, and yet I can’t quite be sure…

A question arose concerning what I might have done, or be doing if I had fathered less children, were not bound to sustaining a family, and so on… I reflected awhile… and soon realized that I am unable to imagine my life without offspring.  Nearly half of my existence has been lived as a father, and I cannot think of experiences or expressions that they do not co-create in some way.  If any of it were taken back – the struggles and fears, broken marriages, anxiety, joys and determination to survive, regular interactions with their development, activities, quizzings and personalities… I only feel impoverished.

The illusional interview concluded with a large catch-all question, something along the lines of: “Your writings have profoundly moved some readers, yet you consistently express discontent – revising, beginning again, evading – even disappointment in your faltering, hesitant works.  Can you talk about this experience?  How do you account for your dissatisfaction in light of your readers reported satisfaction?”

My reply:  “The only way I can think to address this right now is in terms of a conflux of flood waters.  I, the writing one, have a flood of experience that I wish to understand, interact with, relate to somehow, attempt to comprehend.  I utilize the methods, marks and systems that we, as a species over time, have collaborated and devised with which to communicate – with ourselves, with others – and I attempt, attempt, attempt to forge some accord between the vast swarming flood that my life-experience ever is – as an organism embedded in world – and the means and methods we have for making sense of, imagining, and transcribing such total experiential flow.”

“The resulting expression is always more-than, distinct and different-from the felt experience I have of the flood (as the medium borrows from far beyond my own individual abilities or thoughts, capacities – an enormous fund of expressions, vocabulary and species-deep conventionalized experiences I could not possibly evince on my own) AS WELL AS less-than, deficient, incapable and variant from (not equal to) the ubiquity of my experienced flood.  I am left simultaneously hoping the conventions of language will prove adequate, and despairing they never will be.  What results from this tangle is a writing – a text, document, artifact – of my individual attempts to process the flood of my human experience in conventionalized signs.”

“From the other side of the markings comes the flood of each individual reader’s human experience.  As they (or we, I’m describing my reading experiences) engage the verbal expressions the writer selects to represent or elicit their own flood, the reader’s flood rushes through, around, with, into these written expressions.  When what is deciphered via these conventional funds of language feels apropos, accurate or apt to the reader’s experiential living flood – we are moved, feel met, acknowledged and represented, almost comprehended and understood, and we may feel that this collection, order, expression of language we have discovered in reading actually writes us, so to speak.  Which is why you may hear readers say such things as “I couldn’t have said this better…” or “I can’t imagine this expressed any other way…let me read it to you” (the thrust of quotation).  The section of text, general outlook, sound, rhythm or content of the artifact feels almost miraculously adequate and accurate to our own flood of experience.  Of course, often it does not – in which cases we revise or repurpose our readings toward knowledge or entertainment, something partial or other than full-flood experiencing, holistic (as nearly as possible) communication.”

“We know, as readers, no Other’s experience can be identical to our own, but in lucky moments it feels so.  Feels possible that our experience of the living flood is shared, understood, that our individuality, solipsism is not a locked room, or impassable barrier.  This is the “magic,” if you will, of human social conventions as mediums for individual experiences: they enable or facilitate our joinings, our cooperation, solidarity, convergence.”

“So neither the writer nor the reader are responsible for authoring profound writings, or rather BOTH are: multiple floods of experience crash through the arranged signs and symbols, separated by time and space and differences, but still possible violent confluences – depending on both, or all.  Living experiencings rushing the sign-sets enabling some felt sympathy, intimacy, accord between the floodings and the expressions: conflux.”

“Otherwise it simply doesn’t ring true – might be appreciated for its artistry or ingenuity, ideas, craft, imagination – but NOT an occasion for profound felt accord, convergence, a totalizing feel of representation/expression.”

“Floods in conflux: right now this seems to me the opportunity that care and attention, effort and awareness of our socially species-al co-creating mediums of communication (art, music, technologies, labors, habitudes, languages, modes of inquiry, etc…) allow for, offer us, in moments of fortunate concord.”

“Does that answer your question in any way?”

Tape ends.

 

Scripture : Roots

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Language, Reflections, Writing8 Comments

Scripturient

“In the beginning was the word…”

“…and the word was god.”

Enigma.

My youth was spent immersed in a form of neo-fundamentalist, conservative, evangelical Christianity.  It would be difficult for me to estimate the number of bible readings, passages memorized, commentaries consumed, and sermons received during my first twenty-some years of life.

Twenty-some years later, libraries of world literature later, this particular phrase, passage, verbal construction remains like a haunting, a rule, a resonance and reverberation of the deepest sort – a kind of First Sentence that rises and echoes in me whenever I turn myself to writing.  A statement some whole of me attached to in presumptive belief and passion that constitutes, in its way, the work of my adult life.

In what “beginning” was the word?  And what was that word, are we to read this word as, literally, “god”?  Or are words themselves divine, godlike in their creativity and actionable functions?  In the full passage we read that the word is both “with” god and itself god…a quintessential meta-statement from whatever interpretive stance one selects.

“In the beginning was the word [in beginnings words become?  In words become beginnings?],

and the word was with god [words that are with] and the word was god [words that are].”

            Religiously:  when humans spoke “god,” gods became.  Conception creating realities.  Referentiality – a term is attached to an object, idea, relation…and the object, idea, relation begins to become that term (and vice-versa, through public practice).

Words epitomize co-creation, collusion.  I am a tiny human organism, an infant birthed into a community of persons.  This community attaches a term to me: “Nathan.”  I grow into that name, define and fill it with characteristics, behaviors, activities, experiences…and, for my communities (the others I relate to) that word “Nathan” comes to mean my specific organism in the world.

Words are beginnings, are like relational diagrams, invisible cross-hatchings and webbing throughout lived experience as humans – inceptions of internal and external possibilities and limitations via their activity as connective linkages, as references and realities.  Every term is metaphor – symbol, signal, object – requiring its interpretant.  The multi-sided act: language.

So what began with language?  Language that joins with and is?

I suggest meaning.  Conscious participation, co-mmunication, reflective relating.

Religiously:  posit Supreme Being and it posits world.  Speak reality and reality speaks.  All a matter of relating, relation…communication…language.

World becomes via collaboration, interaction – made possible through efforts of mutuality and distinction: gestures, intelligible utterances, multilogues, dialogues – communication.

Possible interpretation: A god languages “god” into being.  “Unicorn,” “fairy,” “truth,” “quark,” “molecule,” “consciousness,” – invisible, imperceptible “realities” language (WITH) and then become (ARE).  Subsequently the commerce and exchange of the universe alters…

Each utterance brings new relations and thereby new “things/realities” into concourse.

I can believe that what begins in language (or, communication/relation/collusion) is MEANING (such a word as “god” itself).

I find, trundling through countless notebooks, pages, typescripts, letters and journals, that at the head of any larger work or endeavor I attempt is inscribed this personally indelible takeaway from my youth’s indoctrination:

In the beginning is the word

a thing that creates in being constructed

always co-constructed WITH something else/Other

and becoming something else/Other in its utterance and collusion

organism + environment = meaning

all reality resides in relation

all of these also words, beginnings, possibilities

In beginnings are words

and in words begins begins begins

ever forging relations into realities into relations

tying things one to another to another to another

in concourse

en route as route