Tag: creative writing

Spontaneous Reduction

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Journallings7 Comments

ink and touch

Then I dropped my voice – BOOM – right onto the sidewalk.

A glitter, a spritzing, a spark.  A diffusion and ooze.  It runs out.

Watch it pour along the surface, draining toward sewage.

Voice.  A voice.  My voice.  Sploosh.

 

All the books I want are priceless.

Those I need – they cost too much.

I am a writer who learns.

I am a learner who writes.

I am a failure that loves.

I am a lover that fails.

It becomes apparent: Yes, I am.  A parent.

The book I am not reading –

Emotions and Understanding

caught in a withdrawal.

That is, boundaried from writing.

Between abstraction, and empathy.

There lies a void, inevitably.

You can’t trust silence.

We rush to fill.

(That distant sound).

Therefore,

I read for conversation.

But Writer says I’m “vague”

(don’t fulfill responsibilities)

Attention.  Integrity.  Inquiry.  Response.

(-ability)

I simply tripped, a clumsiness

[I dropped my voice]

but I am here.

Enmeshed in words but unable.

(metadata lacking)

I’m no librarian.

Vague because I say so.

(my human apparatus little equipped for the overwhelm of data)

Ant in a kingdom

-of words-

of signifiers.

Less than that.

I wrap my brain around it.

Waving goodbye to body.

My voice drops.

Alberto Giacometti sketch of Diego Giacometti

 

 

Points of a Journey

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes37 Comments

Thank goodness (again) for Friday Fictioneers – fostering the insistence and reprieve of manageable creative work when I’m finding it ever so hard to pull away from endless research.  I always mean to set aside a little time, or “get to it” at a break – and just write awhile…but days have a way of eluding me.  So thank you Rochelle et. al. for the weekly prompt and community that kindly obligates us to create, at least a few paragraphs, 100 words (I borrowed 9 from Doug).  A healthy distraction.

copyright-Rich Voza

            The beginning is filled with arrivals/departures, dogfights of fly-bys and paradise islands.  Ecstasy and remorse, all seeped in the past and aimed toward a future, took place in realms  in-between.  Between a rock and hard place, between the cities we called home, between obligations and accidents, here and there, me and you.

In the long middle we developed mistrust and fostered desire.  Building on distance with dependencies and betrayals.  Which flies faster – a sparrow?  Depends which side the wings are on.  We flew and we crashed.  We survived.

Bringing us to the end, the point at which we always arrive, together.

N Filbert 2013

Possible Fictions: Fragments from the Book of the Living

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment
-Christina Milletti, from Innovative Fiction and the Poetics of Power
-Christina Milletti, from Innovative Fiction and the Poetics of Power

Aspects of Writing: Writing the Impetus. The Self-Reflexive.

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Writing10 Comments

The Self-Reflexive.  Impetus.

The urgency, that is, the urging I feel in setting forth to compose, is dismantling.

In other words, the forcings that encroach, impinge and unleash within me when I’m ‘of a mind’ (experiencing the intention of) ‘to create’ is one of destruction, a defensive attack.

I am thus synonymed by sculptor, woodcarver, archaeologist.

One wants to undo the stories before they reach the page.

In order to find, discover, the figure of them, a more lasting (perhaps) form or shape.

To strip them of their ‘qualities’ or ‘style.’  Their manipulations.  Creation as a straining of the weak, the falsifiable…a process in survival of the fittest, the more “true”(?) or apt.

Chiseling personal explanations and perspectival descriptions down to possibilities.  Unraveling myths toward oracles.  Discounting proofs into theories.

–

The impetus of writing evokes the motivation of doubt, the landscape is struggle.

“To be inspired” might mean to be activated by an experience accurately called “perfink” (David Krech), or, “perceiving, feeling and thinking at once” (Jerome Bruner).

Regurgitant feeling: investigation, analysis, interpretation – meanings attacking meanings, in hopes.  In hopes that a perfink of “meaning” (a satiation of anxiety, terror, doubt) might prove indestructible – as a possibility.

–

The narrative, then (the verbal expression of a perfink), is a traffic jam of conventions, presuppositions, reality-views and solipsistic Gnosticism forged within the forging self; writing – as apparatus, activity, function – reflexes: brings self-world to bear on self-worlds in attempts to deconstruct automatic (as it were) constructions of perceiving/feeling/thinking – fighting, clawing, tearing against it with the information and energy of shared resources: language, “knowledge,” the usable past.

–

Clashings of systems, perfinking perfinks, violent internal skirmishes and acts of terror(ism) – a doing that attempts the undoings of doings – an otherwise endlessly insular, of unverifiable and infinite traces, activity known as self-reflexive –

– producing stalemates of exhaustion, individual paucities of supply and reinforcement, ourobourosian –

offering only extrinsic chances for momentary cease-fires – the artifact, figure, form of the battlefield, photographed in process and thus submitted – to critics, to readers, to colleagues, to shadows (i.e. to genuine Others) that it might become real (exist in relation, to be directly experienced), corroborated or dismissed by equally limited and idiosyncratic perfinking, outside – both in the world, and of it.

“the contest any artist has with his or her art: working toward a perception that is his or her mind’s peace.”

-Louis Zukofsky-

“the mind carries an austere

inwardness that will not put out its eyes”

-Laurie Sheck-

“Writing is a lonely business’ is both a dull myth and a material fact of the profession, one I happen to be temperamentally suited to endure but which doesn’t gratify my sense of what it’s for.”

-Jonathan Lethem-

Creeley

-Robert Creeley-

see Aspects of Writing

Aspect of Architecture

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading4 Comments

“A well-crafted sentence overturns the notion that thought is distinct from thinking.  A well-crafted sentence enacts the sense it makes rather than representing it.  The result of writing well-crafted sentences is that your reader will have the most vivid sense that something is happening to him or her and with the irresistible urgency of their own dreams.”

“Dedicate yourselves to reading most energetically that which you don’t immediately understand.  Read with a special attention to the prospect that what doesn’t appear to make sense matters most because of the possibilities of sense-making that are portended in it.”

author Alan Singer

taken from:

ELSE – Aziff : Prompted by Comments

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes4 Comments

(a continuation of Else  – Erasure : Beginnings)

Aziff : Prompted by Comments

Once begun, and begun in You-ness, though perhaps not – indeed probably not in any way! – in Newness, you take leave in the middle.  Or if not the middle of this brief engagement, somewhere, alas, in its midst, you set out.

“The place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now” Ludwig Wittgenstein said, which you almost remember, and in any case you think of now, triggered by its inscription among the paper scraps scattered over your writing desk.

Already you’re sick of it.  The You-ness you hijacked in hopes of Newness.  Your playabout with something Else.  Attempting to trip or trick yourself into some place else, somewhere other than where you “must already be at now” – the Else you set about pursuing, by dissecting and deconstructing it on your desk.

You come up short.  Feel foiled.  A stray comment from some other immediately exposing a cheap and shoddy sleight-of-hand you yourself could not perceive.  The danger of others, of else.  The dangers of self-encounter in dialogue.

In any case, you create, or you go on making with all that is already tired and old.  Namely, yourself, and whatever is at your easy disposal, fearing in advance what might be required to move.  Toward what could be New, into the unknown of the Else.

You tackle the pieces, a limited arena of shuffled scraps – quotations, emotions, experiences – in hopes a pattern emerges, an inventive cohesion.  Unlikely, or forced.  The banality of meaning – a fundamentalist smallness of purposes or cause.  You vomit.

It’s a discomfort – as if from some trauma stored throughout your body and brain – a fear of what you cannot identify, having experienced it (“suffered” is how you put it, and “endured”) as an unspecified complexity of connectivities too slender to hold or locate – the incomprehensible self – that atomistic and invisible dot-point in a universe of flickering.

Whereas you are able to imagine others and else as substantial – entities with agency – in all the vastness.  What you can observe with less participation, seeming more real to you, somehow.

Else – you just get lost in the dissection.  Labyrinthine traces of fact upon facts, ad nauseum infinitum…  The searching for cause and impact in a loop within a web caught in a net stranded among strands inextricably interlocuted in endless structures and systems imperfectly operational.  And so forth, you consider the sources.  Always coming up missing or bereft.

Cease.  And breathe like a statue.  It doesn’t.  You don’t.  Else.

Not what you thought you were looking for.

New probably just meaning something different, you repeat yourself, something Other, something Else.

You set out.

Excerpt from the Book of Living Words

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading2 Comments
from Farther Away - Jonathan Franzen
from Farther Away – Jonathan Franzen

Tripping into a “break” with no break, or antidote – meaning? purpose?

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, JournallingsLeave a comment

Investigating “breaks”: antidote? meaning?

When there are assignments – yes, that’s the word – trajectories commissioning the laborious application of signs – I resemble a young school-age girl white-bloused and checkered-skirted skipping little curlicues down a sunlit autumn sidewalk.  Either in performance or avoidance of what demands to be done.  Activity testifies to play.  The weight of the backpack keeps the frolic tethered to the ground.

Geometrically you could geo-graph-ically map the carefree trail, which would end up looking quite a bit like the path of Woodstock’s flight (extended)

 [how I investigate world]

Relieved of positive burden – reputation, obligation, guilt, shame, agreement – anywise some sort of internal enforcer relating to the external world – is as if Schulz erased the yellow birdy’s gravitation.  The backpack become balloon with the force of hot air but random like helium – set free of a hand and willy-nilly flitting to loss in midwesternly wind-raked sky.

Mine is more of a breach or a gap in the hedge – squares of deconstructed sidewalk without boards.

Collapsing toward me in slow-motion imminence are towers of books and billings, due dates and mouths to feed, souls to placate or nourish…rebar extending in its warped way out of the soil behind me – projects halfway done, future commitments previously agreed, promissory plans enacted for stabilizing measures.  Even now I hear the dogs barking outside, wanting in.  But the knot of rubber and tie of string are so easily undone…like mowers accidentally thud-chopping coiled garden hose that lay mimicking the hoppity school-girl’s jaunting…and all drifts off and away, falling through space, spinning in time – neither up nor down nor to or fro – simply set free  / total loss – momentary or not: unknown –  vacuous absence – somehow unmoored.

Where I am.

Among the Leaves

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Photography1 Comment

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Suddenly I found myself among the leaves, diffuse as light, but darker.  Almost a shadow, if I’d found myself at all.

For it came of a simple moment in-between.  Between responding to this or fetching that.  Perhaps waiting for coffee to brew, or just breathing.  In cold sunlight.  In kitchen.  It had something to do with my daughter.  Or she was the first one I told.

“I’ve found myself,” I burst upstairs and explained, holding out my phone which had captured the image like communication.  “I’ve found myself, see?”

But no one quite did.  I was thereby forced to point it out.  Which is a lot more like making something up rather than discovering.  More like envisioning than recognition or taking notice.

Yet I can tell you I saw right through it in that gap.  Made out my identity in that fluster of sunrays and blockage.

An insubstantial sort of silhouette designated by a drove of other things – that “it” – that ephemeral, vacuous “me.”

In fact, the way I remember it, I was harried by flickering thoughts, responsibilities, and a mantled dose of tired, and it was only morning.  I’d backed up against the steely sink and weighted my palms, hoping my neck might loosen by letting it drop.  The floor there.

Something alerted me – a “honey?” or a child’s announcement from some other room – and so I swung and hoisted toward action.  My roving eyes sniffed at calendar and began steadying toward a list comprising my future, but instead.

Instead, a patterning of leaves translating immediately to a scatter-shot messaging of light, exposing some presence in its midst that was absorbing or otherwise deflecting.  Signifying, nonetheless.  A kind of tracing of a head, a photo-graph I guess, a contour drawing by our prominent star.  And if light could trace it, could scribble a quick sketch out of me, well then,

I’d guess I’d found myself among the leaves,

which went something like these pages.

N Filbert 2012

Preserving Blogs, ebooks, interactive and hypertext files….lots being done here!

On By Alias HarlequinIn Writing3 Comments

http://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html