perhaps you will be able to play this WHILE you read the linked entry below (as it was written)
Immunity (Writings from Everywhere)
Tag: creative writing
2 Things in absence of composition
My maker-wheels or whatever complex machinery sometimes con-fuses to generate documents of creative writing are apparently on the fritz. Β In lieu of some relatively originary textual flow (idiosyncratic dip into the semiotic waters of the resource of language) I forward along a poem that stands out to me from this weeks’ readings, and a plea that interest-piqued readers immerse themselves in a particular book regarding our co-creation and involvement with the rest of the world and one another…
First, the poem – from Bob Hicok‘s “Elegy Owed” – a fine collection:
and second a plug for a compelling study by Ian Hodder – “Entangled: An Archaeology of the relationships between humans and things”
Experience, anyway. (parts 6 and 7 are new)
This work is a slow-grower. Β I think it wants to be read that way as well. Β Slow accretions of interaction and recursively referent. Β Not sure where it will continue. Β Click the title page to investigate. Β Comments are welcome.
The Meticulous Blur
entry for Friday Fictioneers, June 28, 2013
How it left my mouth, toward her.Β How long Iβd ached and labored it.Β How meticulously prepared.Β From amorphous origins β a preoccupation and urge, a hunch, desire.Β Like longing + some desperate attention.Β Had I shared this constant process, theyβd have named it βobsession.βΒ A phrase, a statement, a promise, a claim.Β How it left my mouth when the moment arrived, arrowing itself toward her.Β A chiseled and hair-thin fibre of sound, a core-content-chain of DNA, let free in the matter between us.Β How it blurred and whooshed past.Β Disintegrative and smeared in possible meanings.Β How quickly the resulting compound decomposed and deconstructed.
June 23, 2013 β 3:44 pm β if you had the coordinates you could Google Map it.
What I was composing the other day in my head, or wherever daydreaming occurs: filling up that gap between inside or outside, idea and actual, etcetera.Β They told me not to worry about losing it β that it would return, re-emerge.Β I lost it.Β The idea, sensation, form, content β everything.Β Well, not everything, exactly, I guess, because how could I conjure that there was something, some experience, some initiative or other, had I truthfully lost it?Β Okay, maybe theyβre right, and βeverythingβ is a question of access.
In any case, well, no β in present case or tense or whatever now-situation might be (βWeatherβ? β see Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, or Tim Ingoldβs essay in Vital Beauty) I am not experiencing βaccessβ to something some part or parts of me (some connectivities) believe or invent a past tense for β a disjunction/abstraction/detachment from.Β A difference.
I am believing that I felt differently about something at some other time, that language was forming out of me relating to that affect, and that I had the potential capacity to express all that semiotically β or, in a way that it might make sense, be shared, exist.
Now Iβm languaging nothing.Β Or, not exactly nothing, more like a different something that in fact is the semiosis of another inexpressible or inaccessible possible something.Β Which means, potentially, anyone could find it, discover/uncover/invent/compose/co-construct (co- probably redundant to con- but then Iβm not Russian, at least not currently) that initiative and perhaps Iβd re-cognize or re-member whatever realigned threads rewove into this particular weaving (what is βnowβ).
Etcetera.Β This is how it goes down for me (current context taken mostly for granted).
The Gifted
a pretty obvious take, but in the midst of a nearly impossible week,
it’s what i could do…Friday Fictioneers 6-14-2013
The obvious one.Β Anyone could tell.Β The way he bobbed his head in traffic or nodded slowly in the wind, syncopating steps with the train railsβ click-clack, fingers never still at the table – proverbially whistling as he worked.Β Even his breath had a cadence – nary emitting verbal lines without their shaping tones.Β Foot bevel harmonizing crossed-legged knee bounce β friends said βhe always had it in him.βΒ Phrasing his rises and his falls.Β Ears ever plugged wide open β he tasted and he touched, he heard, saw and smelled the world as sound.Β He really was into music.
Significant?
Toying withΒ significance, practicing writing by hand.
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Cause of which: Β online graduate school (hybrid) perhaps. Β Blackboard (not a blackboard + a hand moving chalk), wikis, MS Word, blogosphere…
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Writing is a different word than typing (“keyboarding,” “texting,” “thumbing,” “fingering?”)
Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Handwriting – is there another?
Writings is different fromΒ typing.
not only pacing.
Significance
“People exist
to attach importance”
Exercise.
Once I had the most beautiful pen-man-ship. Β Admired, envied, revered.
My hand now working by jolts and shirts (“stammering”)
Wife says I jerk in the night, in my sleep. Β As if the wires were hot and crossed. Β “Traumatic,” she says.
Like my father.
Who has elegant penmanship – consistent, beautiful, and flowing.
What I aspired to.
And achieved.
Now interruptive. Β Herky. Β Stuttering. Β Multi-controlled. Β Cross-wired.
Muscles, nerves, vision, brain + its fabricating memory and prediction: out of sync.
Β Β Β I exercise a few moments in which I don’t feel particularly pressured and am thinking aboutΒ significance.
“I listened with great interest and desire to have it be of no significance.
But you know how it goes. Β Significance abounded.”
Now my thoughts arrive sturdier through a machine. Β Body – extension – return. Β The pen was extension. Β The ink. Β Dependent on the body. Β Embodied, enminded. Β Transductive.
“‘transductive’ (a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituents)”
Tools. Β Media.
Humanity — technology.
Me : keyboard : thought : language.
Me : pen/paper : thought : language.
Transductive. Β Co-constituent. Β Interdependent.
Significant?
Dreaming of – imagining – my recovered penmanship.
Therefore, exercise.
Communication.
Transductive.
“It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Β Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention. Β Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change. Β Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present. Β Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning. Β Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical. Β Even if the language is unknown. Β Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content. Β Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.”
(Percival Everett)
“A metaphor cannot be paraphrased”
Window Dressing
for Friday Fictioneers, May 31, 2013
You, in your bluish hue β nostalgic and hopeful β ever inhabiting a kind of aether, neither here nor there, but possible – like heavens, like waters β deep, open, beyond.Β A different form of presence, not with, but altogether.Β Perhaps.Β Whereas I, in fleshy, earthbound, soiling tones β dressed to catch the eye β hang myself into the world of shapes and edges, angles and points – risking extravagant extension rather than mirroring sea and sky.Β Butting bodies – yours forgiving and surrounding, just shy of the resistance for friction β mine stolid and secure, and flagging its pronouncement.
N Filbert 2013
“The literary word resembles a person who roams at will” – Robert Musil
“The sentence not only derives its meaning from the words: the words derive their meaning from the sentence, and the relationship between page and sentence, whole work and page, is no different…the embracing and the embraced develop their meaning mutually out of each other, and the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it…”
“One can only explain that it is from all the details taken together, and through their mutual interpenetration, that the whole arises in a way that remains mysterious…a transformation of sense that eludes logic…but theΒ meanings are related to each other, and when one grasps one meaning the others peep through beneath it…”
-Robert Musil – “Literati & Literature” –
“It is only meaningful to speak of originality where there is a tradition” – Robert Musil
“thus one could probably ‘dissect’ any writer whatever (formally, or according to subject matter, or even according to the intended meaning), and would find in him nothing but bits and pieces of his predecessors; by no means completely ‘taken apart’ and ‘newly assimilated,’ but preserved in broken shards”
“Thus in serious literature the peculiar situation emerges that the general ongoing tradition and the personal contribution of the individual cannot be separated from each other. Β In this process the continuum does not grow in any dimension other than extent, nor does the personal element gain a solid position. Β The whole consists of variations that randomly come to rest on each other.”
-Robert Musil, “Literati & Literature”-
All my Words are Silent 