Tag: creative writing

Where the Summer has Gone

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings5 Comments

GetOutWayJuly

WordPress peers and inspiring friends – new love, new work, busy summer offspring and the above explain my lack of involvement here.  Autumn approaches, new semesters, school year beginning, and so on.  I SO hope to be active in your company again.  I appreciate your comments and patience.  What a large thing life is.

As I catch up on your works – I am SO thankful for the talents, visions, expressions, idiosyncratic thought and emotion that each of you have found a particular and meaningful (and SIGNIFICANT in whatever medium) way to realize in this forum.  I appreciate it greatly and am truly humbled and grateful for these odd and generative connections.

thereading

image from the reading replete with lifeguard (son), hostess handing out favors (buttons, nipples), stewardess serving odd mixtures of airline snacks, a priest blessing and moving people around, a waitress and a dapper emcee, a basket of fortunes created by my daughter, and myself wandering the space reading pieces and climbing on things.

 

Summer Recapitulation

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Language, Philosophy, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

Given the nature of things… withdrawal from school… disregulation of schedule / child-rearing / presences… obligated projects, desired collaborations, attempts… preponderance of labor… decrepitude and erosion of house, car, body…

Herein lies a revised Summer Reading List – old and new and recapitulatory…

“FICTION”

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“POETRY”

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“OTHER”

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Boomerang

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing6 Comments

Another “aside” – writings that happen in the meantimes…

Boomerang

I consider myself ‘straight as an arrow’  that swerves like a boomerang.  In other words, I ruminate clear sensations, desires, opinions – consider, and then revise.  It all comes back to me.

When I was a child, I thought as a child, behaved as a child…but now…now that…well, I’ve put away the childish things.  Now I’m just a fucked-up adult.  It’s hard for me to tell from what’s coming or going.

She’s cumming.  Now she’s going.

I saw a coyote the other day.  I was driving in the country, speeding along a gravel road.  A grey coyote, large, apparently healthy, came streaming through the corn or wheat or soybeans pacing my van like a dog.  These things surprise me.  And  happen.

Now she’s going.

Like a coyote I set out to pace her, run alongside, track and trace her.  She’s cumming, I’m breakneck, I’m hungry, I’ve got her, I’m with her, we’re “in” as it were…

She’s going.

I run straight and fast and hard and she knows it.  I’m honest.  I can’t tell truth from lies.  She loses me, I parallel, and now we’re neck-and-neck, side-by-side, and sprinting, I’ve got her, she’s stretching, I’m on her, she’s spreading, I’m ravenous, she’s daunting, I fear, I crave, on point, in flight, the Caravan has nothing on me.

If I were a sailor.  An aardvark.  A policeman.  I am none of these.  But I love her, she outpaces me, I can’t catch, and she looks back, and she’s cumming, and now going.

I wish.

And that would be how it would end, with my wishing, her being, my envisioning and inventing and conspiring, but there’s more.  And the coyote, and the rabbit, and the hawk and howling wind.  And the mountain and the river and the ocean and breezy glade.  And there’s life – yes, there’s that, and we’re here, or somewhere, and everything rushes, and to be honest I don’t know deception from reality, my perceptions and illusions are the same, but I dream.  And a coyote, and a boy.  And a human and a male.  And she’s a lady and a wolf, a rodent and a scream, and we tossle and we fight, and devour and delight, and it’s all a simple game – a complex, coordinated, disjunctive weather of dance that never quite syncs up, and that’s okay, because the coyote thrives in run, and the owl lives for the hunt…the mouse delights in escape, and the thought its incompletion…

And I straight as an arrow, swerving like a boomerang.

Difficulties & Pronouncements

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

What happens when I avoid “required texts”…

Windwriter - Parke-Harrison

Difficulties & Pronouncements

For this is what I do.

When facing difficulties, Harlan makes pronouncements.  Conundrums = hypotheses.  “Yes, I love you, consistently,” he might say, but does not think, for Harlan does not think, he behaves, that is, he acts habitually.

Sometimes I think I am a writer.

For instance, Harlan might be confused or confounded by the behavior of others, particularly those with whom he shares his life, interacts with daily, corresponds.  He might find himself baffled, able to find no explanation or solution for a “problem” – (situation in which he does not know what to do) – and therefore announce that which he considers a “reality.”  E.g. – when happening upon his children bickering and unable to agree on peaceable courses of action, he might state: “it is common for people to consider the ‘ways they do things’ as the “correct” ways TO DO things…but when such consideration involves more than one family, group or person, there is often conflict, i.e. – ‘what should be done?’”  Thereby solving nothing, nor finding any resolution, only offering up his own feelings of helplessness as a catalyst.

He looks at her.

Sometimes I look at you.

Sometimes I think I am a writer.

For instance, Harlan might find himself bewildered by mixed emotions (a “difficulty” in his habit-of-being) and, instead of naming the mixed emotions and going from there, instead might pronounce – “humans are complex interfusions of emotion and reason, biology and philosophy/psychology – we aren’t yet quite sure what con-spires to activate and animate us.”  Thereby solving nothing, nor finding any resolution, only offering up his own feelings of helplessness, his own uncertainties, as a potential catalyst to reason.

Reason fails.

Reason is insufficient.

Harlan speaks to me about the insufficiency of reason:  “Say, you know how we often try to make lists of what we ought or need to do?  You know, IF we (perhaps) performed the following activities, accomplished the following feats, we might feel some sense of order in our lives, some sense that we were possessed of a direction, a purpose, a…modus operandi, and therefore felt that LIVING made a kind of SENSE?”  I nodded.  Sometimes I think I am a writer, and therefore listen carefully.

Anyway, plans are confusing because so regularly undone.

He looks at her.  They gaze.  I (also) look at you, but your eyes are closed.  Still I look, and look again, and look more (at you, wistfully – imaginatively ‘into’ you) and just am looking.  Harlan and Meribeth are actually looking AT, perhaps ‘toward’ or ‘con-spicuously’ WITH one another.  I’m just borrowing, observing, wishing, and longing-for.

Harlan says – (there is difficulty) – “isn’t she beautiful?” (a sort of backwards pronouncement – he thinks, well, not ‘thinks,’ rather ‘feels’ [or whatever] she is beautiful) – often we respond out of habitus, instinct, notion – I keep looking at you, hoping I’m, well, wishing (sometimes believing) that I’m a writer, after a fashion, of sorts, perhaps or probably…

Harlan states the obvious obscurely when faced with problematics.  Harlan is attracted to Meribeth, and Meribeth to Harlan, but such a combination of lives, of persons, of families, of children, of burdens and complexities = DIFFICULTY… and difficulty (for Harlan) stimulates the regurgitation of flimsy “absolutes” – or conventional, accepted “Truths” – therefore Harlan simply states – “I love her Nathan, god knows – or Whomever – or No one – that I desire and adore and wish for and ache in relation to that lady, Meribeth.”  I know that, I say, being acute and observant, sometimes thinking I am a writer and therefore privileged to description and awareness.

The kids cry.  The movie’s over and it’s far beyond ‘bedtime’ on the absolute clock of shoulds and woulds (for “good” parenting).  Harlan says – “Brush ‘em and orchestrate [they don’t know that word, but clearly understand what it means, unlike machines or ‘predictive text’] yourselves for nighty-night!”  Harlan looks at Meribeth – the sort-of ‘fun aunt’ or ‘older girl cousin’ or ‘delightful female guest’ the kids have been curious about this evening and attempted to entertain or woo or utilize to their own purposes THIS evening – with a kind of drunken swooning, a kind of animal desire, a kind of helpless confusion and bewilderment – and Meribeth looks back at him with a kind of “Am I all that?  Am I really distinct, different, unique-in-the-world, exceptional?” look… and the kids begrudgingly and grumblingly rumble off toward the bathroom because Harlan’s voice has a certain gruff, man-like edge to it (a growling of a different sort of desire from authority – the older ones might tick it the ‘daddy-voice’).  I notice all these things because I consider myself a ‘writer’ – a person attuned to the subtle realities of human-animalness, quirks of idiosyncratic behaviors – someone predisposed to inventing or discovering or collaging words from language into odd combinations of metaphors that might shake loose emotions related to the ways our particular species behaves (NOT thinks or reasons, or rather AND thinks and reasons) in this world – and Harlan exhibits clear, semi-drunk desire for Meribeth, and Meribeth mirrors a kind of dumb, flattered and pretend-complimentary bewilderment to Harlan’s aching want, and I jot scribbly notes into a little travel notebook with sketches of London on its cover, and people are confused and want each other [or SOMEone] and I chuckle at the ingenuity of children, and wonder at the difficulties and pronouncements that accompany the rest of us.

“It’s a boatshitload,” Harlan says.

 

 

 

From the Notebooks… a poem perpetually in progress…

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Poetry, Writing3 Comments

Untitled (In Progress)

The poem linked above I pushed out last week… and marked it as “in progress” because for some reason it is one that the process of making, unmaking, forging and revising it (still feels “off” as published at above) has intrigued me.  Here are the pages of notebook from which it hails, perhaps this is of interest, perhaps not, for better or worse…

We are working on an exhibition of new media for June at Wichita’s Fisch Haus, and have been battling over how to show process and creation when exhibiting technologically enabled and activated art.  Perhaps that is why I’ve been more conscious of my own processes of making and revising.  In any case, here is a little trail through the notebooks as a piece is coming to be…

edited drafts

In Progress….

 .

I am thankful for this loosening quiet,

your slackening ties of dusk.

Though often shackled by a fear of loss

in love, I may open toward a growing –

 .

possibilities of a learning, as in youth,

less about the being something

than, profoundly, just to be…

that which relaxes and allows

 .

like a cow caught up in weather,

or warm engagements with a child,

with the blossom, and make-believe.

Empowered when our symbol’d systems –

 .

confused by what is happening –

begin to sign that loss

(a form of death) ensures the safety

of our risks.  That harm and haven

 .

are our home – the same as truth:

what’s loved is lost –

and thus we come to love.

Wisdom undoing opposites

 .

in terms of life.

I amt ridiculed by youth –

it’s how I know that many lessons

come unlearned,

 .

that “completeness is

a process of revision”

as they say,

and that our closures

 .

are what open

every day.

.

The above was an editing of the following…which is why it’s still “In Progress…”

child, the blossom, the make-believe

And

 .

And then I want to say

that I am thankful

for this loosening

 .

I want to say

And then I want to say

that I am grateful/thankful

in/for this loosening quiet

for its / and the slackening of ties

 .

perhaps we’d once been shackled by

the fear of loss in love

 .

leaving space for other and tenderness and availability,

freed of the shackling fear of loss

in love

not in the order of other pursuits

thus fencing a truth again

or forging some identity –

burned and brandished iron –

 .

but that we might allow

the finding, its discovery –

all the safeties that arrive with risk –

in all directions

whether in the child, the blossom, or the make-believe

 .

the will to love and to enjoy

our engagement

with world and things and persons

 .

unraveling the expectations

of hurt and damage

parenting ourselves to freedom

 .

the assurance we are looked after,

at least by ourselves,

as well the plenteous others –

our families, our species, our friends

 .

we will probably survive,

unless we do not

and then no matter

death was here from the start

 .

nor had it intention or opportunity

not to be

attachment and loss

and room for growth

 .

so we begin, so we will be

the template that stifles

symbolic structures

learned of experience

 .

in certain ways

 .

do not ask permission

but simply deceive

they are not truthful

 .

Look at your child,

your pet, your mother –

you would not have them

to be a certain thing

 .

an object, tool or concept

but to live and change and grow

until they die and thus dissolve

which is not damage so much

so much as change

 .

thus let it be,

it is quiet

the ties are slackened

the noose loosened

 .

around your heart.

we are here –

the squirrel, man and mountain,

every weather, part and parcel,

as are you

 .

It is begun

we are resolved

to open and allow

for your enjoyment

for your experience

should you engage

 .

and cease to fear

cease to fit to your equation

to whatever maths you assent and ascribe

and start to scribble

doodle, sketch

 .

to select potential

over priority

exception(al) over rule

dynamic in place of determined

 .

and friendship more than fact

 .

perhaps you were meant to be

over being

to selve more than self

 .

for “we were not meant to survive,

only to live.”

 .

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

 .

We thank you for the loosening quiet

We are the slackened ties of dusk

 .

I am grateful to this the loosening quiet,

the darkness and this its slackening of ties…

what is once was shackled by the fear of loss

in love, now opened may open toward a growing –

 .

possibilities – a learning, as in youth,

that it is much less about being something

as than it is, profoundly, just to be

that which relaxes and allows

 .

the squirrel (cow) caught up in weather,

our warm engagement with the child,

the blossom, or the make-believe,

empowered when our symbol’d systems

 .

can be get confused with awareness by what is happening,

and when we are able to see that loss,

a form of death, ensures the safety

of our risks.  That harm and heaven haven

 .

are the same – our home as truth

what’s loved is lost

and thus we get come to love.

Wisdom undoing opposites

 .

in the terms of life

I am get ridiculed by youth

it’s how I know that lessons

are get unlearned,

 .

that “completeness

is a process of revision”

as they say, and that a that our closures

opens every day.

 .

“TO SPEAK SO AS NOT TO MEAN, BUT TO BE”

-Dan Beachy-Quick-

 

 

 

 

All Points

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings1 Comment

Let me get this out of your way

The way they occupy space

All Points

All Points

If it were a point

if form and object were combined

SCENARIO

You know there was a particular kind of sorrow that came with confusion, or a certain feeling of being flustered.

She said:  Between Point A and Point B is epic poetry, the pathways of taxis, the flights of birds and bees…the shortest distance…follows the molecule

She was surprised by what she saw, she said, I remember.

I don’t remember how to make stories, or ever tell what happens.  I hardly remember the words.

Someone said they’d like to write like that, like me, that they would feel good about it.  Maybe so.  I don’t remember.  I just place the words hoping one way or another they might end up meaning.

Something needs to shake, shake up, quiver and tremble.

I need to be rolled dice.

I am troubled (at times) by the absence of narrative.  My impatience.  Describe what you want, embellish the action and details, characters and plots – I’ll be reading for the meaning, watching for it to happen – we rarely need the bells and whistles.

Like a good poem might be – line after line – meaning.

Potentially.

Facts are of little use unless we doubt them.  Without gaps we’ve nowhere to move.

I don’t know what to tell you, I want to write, and my brain rattles like a busted engine.

What if there were desire – if I wanted something, faced conflict, suffered,

instead

instead – what?  I want to want.

If this.

Ramblings…10,000 Words

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Music, Reflections, Writing4 Comments

First of all, let me apologize for not being very consistent or active here the past week or two.  And then apologize for the following length (somehow I felt it was okay, given the silence caused by entanglements of necessity and sustenance)…

            If I were a mountain.  This was my first thought, while reflecting on you, me, our children, planets and plants, birth, death, brains and bodies and societies of persons, nations, sciences and myths, plus at least 10,000 other things.  The effort to consider everything – a total picture – my limited whole with as many details as possible.  As if meanings were stars and knowledge all the darkness around them.

Taking time.  If I conjure everything I know – time-saving habits and fixes, sundry scientific theories, the feel of my children’s hair, the path of a bee, each lip that’s found its way against mine, every person, voice, place I remember in part, pancake recipes, varieties of soil I’ve walked over, tasted, smelled, languages living and dead…don’t worry, I won’t list 10,000 things and their changing nuances…

What is common for me, when not immediately struggling to make ends meet up, are these attempts at collocating and corroborating my experiences and knowledge to date…and it inevitably leads to profound sensations of brevity and minisculity (?).

If what I have experienced, lived-through and wended into my body and brain represented stars (those sometimes recognizable flickering points of light)…

…all I have not heard of, thought, experienced, lived-through or felt

would be represented by the gargantuan dark – the endless, perhaps infinite, space.

            My 43 years.  Books I have read, courses taken, jobs held, skills learned, places inhabited and endured.  Women I’ve loved, children I’ve borne and partially raised, persons I’ve met, objects and activities engaged and observed, skies, senses, stuff.

Pretend you are space.

A space that is full, perhaps something akin to our idea of atom.  Imagine your space, of space, in space.  In other words – your little flexible dynamic space is both made of space, contained in space, occupying and participating in space and spaces and shares its participatory space(s) with 10,000…10,000,000,000,000…uncountable space-forms and forms of space…

I, atom.  Barely a point in space-time, hardly formally recognizable, and from what angle or distance?  Limited space-form through limited space-times.  A flexible, dynamic, ever-morphing relatively microscopic or enormous form-ish space-ish thingy.

An atom bounding, ricocheting, trembling and changing throughout a little universe…a variable assemblage of atom-like moments transforming in particular ways of a sort addicted to accounting for and measuring itself and its surroundings (a way of distinguishing presence in these manners of matters).

Forms and Objects 

            If I were a mountain (that is, in relation to “you”) I’d likely be quieter, perhaps slower, present and patient – you might reference or measure yourself by me (I was thinking).  I might want less.  Not have the same desires and activities formally compressed into 70-80 “years…”

And then if you were a sky full of stars or dawn, an enormous canvas of clouds and colors, ubiquitous…and there was that mountain…

So very small, so very brief:  Me.

            Couple all of that to the profound affects felt (in and on me) by other malleable collectives of atoms we refer to as “us” – plus mountains, valleys, rivers and seas, weather, events, animals, places and things: at our scale, and between ever-so-many scales, we have significant import and effect, albeit almost nothing at all viewed fractionally and/or noticeably at minimally larger scales (I suppose that could be argued…)

Anyway, we exist for ourselves primarily at our own shared scale, imagining (or inventing) other scales in order that we might examine ourselves, potentially compare or evaluate…us.

But if I were a mountain…how different would our relation be?  I imagine it this way:  You in your human scale, and me as mountain.  In rain, ages, erosion and accretion, growing trees and dropping boulders…and you, briefly, tramping across me, perhaps admiring or photographing me, resting on me, using me as a direction or a landmark – always there, there, there.  Other things, people, events, experiences of your immediate scale rise and fall, come and go, attach and detach, begin and end, flux and alter…

            You as sky to me, and I – mountain.

            This thinking – that it might help me somehow to imagine life at other scales… Perhaps this is why…

Fiction

Science

Philosophy

Art

Religion

History

…what might we mean at another scale?  between scales?  Not simply as we are to ourselves, as we experience or live-through our brief experiences as space-forms in space-times, but from alternate frames and scalar perspectives?

Imagine…from the view of our constituent elements and systems…over large ranges of processes (“history,” “time”) or briefer ones (Mayfly, ant, daisy)…from tectonic or astronomical lenses…where we can’t even register as an entity, object or form…and by the time whatever activity we mustered – energy or noise we emitted in our being reached a distant planet or star we’d have been gone for thousands and thousands of our decades?!

As if, even at our scale, we are molecules shaking in a beaker.  Vibrating, jostling one another, coming together, splitting apart, sometimes bonding, sometimes break – but most often simply bouncing to and fro.  Jiggling.  Adapting and adjusting.

Mountain.  Sky.  Metaphors of import.

10,000 words on 10,000,000,000,000…things (or just the one)

“Ain’t it like most people?  I’m no different.

We love to talk on things we don’t know about.”

-Avett Brothers-

 

Intolerable Vulnerabilities – the fictions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing3 Comments

Intolerable Vulnerabilities – fictions

lonely old man

I.

There comes a time when being referred to as “sir” by 100% of an establishment’s wait-staff is no longer over-polite and ironic respect, but simply a pronouncement that in these contexts you have no peers.

Eventually you’ll be skeletal, perhaps before too long the way things are going, you’ve never been difficult to avoid.

And it’s never been easy to know what you want – are you being selfless or self-protective in the attention you pay toward your lovers?  Are your emotions inaccessible (some stunted empathy) or over-attuned in such a way as to pay your own processes no mind?

Whatever the case, you’re threatened.

 

And now you are old, sir, and alone.  And both nothing and everything is safe, because you are no one to lose.  And any potential of personal contact – some sort of opening – would inevitably create leakage, exponentially multiplying your probabilities of loss.

If only it could be viewed as sport – this frolicking across the page.  (It’s not).

 

Who lays the trail

in the white sand

of the page?

 

Who explains it?

-Cees Nooteboom

            You.  Not you.  Here.  Not here.  Ever trapped in beginnings because of so many ends.  At this age, sir, you must force it.  Opportunity becomes a consolation called survival.

No one is fooled, particularly not you, sir.

But she reminds you of something, probably someone, which is no help to you, just an increase in the accumulated weight of what’s past.  You’ll go on, because why not? – You are nothing to lose.

Spillage.1 : Action Writing

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing1 Comment

action writingIn searching through the files on my computer for particular photos, I have been running across many files of which the names are unrecognizable to me, many dating from months and moons ago.  Some of them startle me, some are encouraging, all provide record of where I’ve been, how I’m thinking, what’s at work in me at various given moments.  I thought I’d share a few that seem worthy of being shared, they will arrive under the tag “Spillage” – detritus left to the side when my focus is on projects.  Here’s a sample, found labelled: Action:Writing. (simply click on title link to view)

Action Writing

A Letter of Yearning Light – Friday Fictioneers 1-17-2014

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing19 Comments

Copyright - Erin Leary

It mingles as I tarry here.  Fence and branches joining what they distinguish.  From here to there I yearn.  Details all so near.  In my reaching they grow hazy.  I long for you.  I follow.  I wander.  Toward you?  From me?  Out beyond?

There was a time.  It’s lost its focus.  Forward, back, I cannot tell.  I am here.  A something-is divides us.  Even as it joins.  I reach across.  I feel you back.  And yet.

Yet not.  The moony sun illuminates.  Draws attention.  Drawing all the lines connecting us, all the angles between.

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

Many thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields and Erin Leary‘s image

for the continuous and faithful prompts to compose 100 words

responding to instigating images and the Friday Fictioneers participants