Tag: creative writing

Friday Fictioneers: “The Brambles”

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes10 Comments

Another failure…I nearly doubled the word count ’cause he wouldn’t shut up.  Probably shoulda aborted it, but here it is:

raspberry

The Brambles

He was painting a picture for us.  “Now this takes significant time to develop,” he said, “but I promise it’ll be worth the wait.”  “The fruits, they aren’t easy pickings, but if you’re willing to work it, I mean really get in there and give it a go – you’ll find ‘em, and they,” he assured us, “even these beautiful berries, nuggets, sweet bloody fleshes can seem prickly and tart at the first – it’s kind of an ‘acquired taste’ as they say – from years and years of this trying/acquiring and trying/acquiring – but those tiny pert jewels, held deep ‘round the heart of its center, those phenomenal pearls of good juice, as they finally give way and pop open,” he said, “that rush!  That momentary flood of powerful delight, that untangleable blend of most delicate morsel and sun-bittered time, that salting of aging and ripeness – it’s a wonder!”  “You’ve just got to get to them and find them, one after one and by one, have persistence!” he admonished, “far along, deep within, there’s always this unbelievable cluster of most amazing, unique and mouthwatering reward – yes, it seems tiny and ephemeral and difficult to grow or achieve, but it’s worth it!” he encouraged us, “the dedication of labor and time, constant tending and pruning pursuit; the right balance of trimming and rest, nourishment and fallow…”

Why he’d referred to our marriage as “the Brambles.”

N Filbert 2012

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Friday Fictioneers

Scribbling chapters that don’t belong…part 3

On By Alias HarlequinIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

3 – ?

“’Appearances / remain suspended / in transmission’ (Craig Watson) are not so much perceived as apprehended, handled; the one affecting, infecting, the next”

(Charles Bernstein)

 

            Or something to hold what dies off.  The reverberations without resonance.  All edited, edited out, according to needs for appearance, depending on what apprehends, the shape of the handler’s snare.

Think of it – what is selected for capture, in captivity, infects, slipping frequencies to drift on, transmitting, transmitting, there is always ash that won’t be removed, no amount of soaking, scrubbing or spray…

perhaps it’s under the nails, clogging the pores, dusting the follicles… the remains.

We don’t know why we write, trusting such ephemeral weightless shifty particles to catch as motes in an eye…appearances, like dust (in just the right angle of light), remaining suspended in their transmission…hoping (without, really, hope) to, in apprehension – apprehend, by being handled to affect, infect…

always wanting next.  Making it so.

Depending.

Why the book is needed (as ashtray) as form to hold the crumbling, an urn for the remains, until such time as they might be stirred or shaken or spilled.

Again in the commerce of bodies, handled, brushed and staining.

It gets everywhere.  And remains.

Note its infective spread.

Language, whether structures/systems of, or fragments – bits and pieces, lying everywhere implicit.

To write – to make explicit?  It asks more than it answers, word by word, by letter, by ash…

And what remains?  Suspended…in transmission…for affect…a dormant virus…

waiting to be breathed…

Scribbling chapters that don’t belong…(2)

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes3 Comments

2.  The Chorus

“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’…

…A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text”

(Lyn Hejinian)

            Explicitly.

I.e. “the loss was always implicit as the longing” (Alain de Botton).  And I quote, quoting from someone else’s quotation, but I forget which (or whose).  For.

I’m certain for various reasons.  Which beggar the certainty.

A pause, arose, and fragmented this text.

Because I don’t

know

what I’m

doing

I am writing,

and it questions.

            As if we could get intimate with our process, so near it as to join.  In other words, if our action, breathing, effort, language, thinking, senses and the uncountable inborn “blind spots” that a human system circulates were, well…coterminus.

Is that a question lacking its mark?

It would seem so.  About.

Either too large or too small, perceptively, I suspect.

Causing a pause to rise,

as I search for something implicit.

            Explicitly.

Given the fragmentary text(s) (you agree?) I have to ask:  might writing be possibling an other?  “Consciousness is always consciousness of something” (he said).

That is a possibility, isn’t it?  (the second part’s elusive),

Blatantly – I feel caught in a snare I am setting, as spacious as I imagine chance to be, (having no other name I can call it), ensnared as I seem – some web, some matrix, some universe and beyond – too large or too small to perceive (I am guessing)

which always gives rise to a pause, implicitly.

What I had hoped to make explicit.

What I call “wanting actually resonate,” some loss implicit as longing.

I write, asking more than it answers, or “the closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back” (Karl Kraus, which I quote off someone else, who knows who – yet I hope someone does!)

“But of any material, the first thing to make is an ash-tray”

(Lyn Hejinian, I quote this text from its source,

apparently).

Scribbling chapters that do not belong…

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes3 Comments

1.  “wake up, snare-setter, / in the snare / spacious, like chance” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko)

 

And sometimes I do, wake up.  St. Sebastian pinned as a still-life with crystal lances, a clarity.  But that is catching too, and refracts.  “I think that what I thought when I was thinking that, at least in thinking of it now, I am thinking that I thought it…” and so on.  Crystal lances.  Thoughts refracting.  The occasional conviction.  (Which we call certitude).

The margins within margins, windows in reflection.

Every image being an entrance through which we exit.  From.

 

I call this “letting actually resonate.”  This being, activity, thinging we do.

If I stand still, so to speak, I form a spiraling vortex, an enormous vacuum.  What is: portal and Black hole every now.  With.

Prepositions being ever-so-important, say “sign-ificant,” that they deserve their own sentencing.

 

I’ll never know what it is “to write.”  If only because it questions.  Every word.  In.

I can think of it as a working, out, but that is far from any truth I can conceive.  “the second part elusive” with each toggle of a term.

 

Gravity enforcing force, to fly.

I’ve never been fond of violence, but how else might we change?  Or even move?  On.

 

A recent well-organized text I perused and then ate, mentioned dialetheia as a two-way truth; or, “true contradictions,” that is, in one.  Word.  Split with a twin.  Comparison as congenital doubling.  Of difference.  Equals such same.

 

We look toward what can be seen.  Compromised and concealed by a frame.  Otherwise unseen.  Learn, therefore, (through your senses), in-visibility.  Dialetheia.

We do (many of us) love to be astonished, after all.  With.

 

If there are more parts to this I haven’t found them.  They’re either too large or too small.  I’ll have to wait.  I’m unable.  Nothing living waits.  Patience is pretense, pretend.  Waiting, is searching; patience, is longing.  Loss is implicit.

 

 

An Equation

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

I’m running through files trying to organize things and adjust to a new computer.  Once in a while I stumble on something I hardly remember making but still feel a deep accord with.  This was one of those things.  I think it stands for.  Still.  What.

(i only wish it were still freezing)

Here goes:

Moment: Airy

(being an experiment, in theory

a result)

 

It is hard.

It is hard and it is cold.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.  Well below the freezing point.  But his gloves staid on, his lips held a cigarette, and he boxed.

He could box that paper.  That paper-thin page.  Already beaten to a pulp.

 

Him with a theory.

The theory a sort of equation.

The equation as follows:

 

ALL (whatever a person is, has, does) + ALL (a person’s skill, effort, strength, talent, knowledge and ability)

= Appearance of Art (momentarily)

Notation:  A + A = AA

An utter mystery to him.

So he sat in the freezing cold, a pen in his hand, the ink sludging slow, paper on a desk, digging/ exposing / exploring himself, believing / composing / revising language,

oh, and the catalyst necessary to the actual experimentation of this theory – (he writes) – MAKING

One had always to be making (working, acting, writing, performing) with ALL (of him or herself) and ALL (of one’s capacities, faculties and tools) to carry out this experiment, i.e. to test the hypothesis.

Catalyst: (he notes) making (out of/into/with/toward)

Source and goal (purpose, intent) unnecessary, indifferent

Any action requires an energy source.  In this case: living organism possessing capacities, perhaps even proficiencies, and coffee, and cigarettes.

No specified laboratory or station or constituents (conditions) to each his own [marginalia]

 

Quite a simple test really.

Requiring no great funding, no special services or permissions, few qualifications, variant supplies.

Simply vast amounts of time and consistent (persistent) and enormous amounts of effort. (As he saw it).

 

Reviewing centuries of other experimentations and practitioners of this simple eternal test led him to observe : “results in momentary airy results”

(often discovered in different places at different times dependent on observer – even in same test results – thus airy, ephemeral moments)


 

Feeling he had yet to produce an AA.  A momentary Appearance of Art, he was compelled to introduce a compendium of criteria – identifiable attributes – whereby to justly analyze resultant artifacts and actions.

Again the qualities boiled down quite simply:  put the equation into reverse for the observer or verifying assistant:

an Appearance of Art results through the remaking process or catalyzation of the observer,

requiring as a result, ALL of the observer’s person and ALL of the observer’s capacities,

faculties, abilities.

Notation: criteria for AA to be AA:

AA = (must equal) A + A

He practiced this experiment from both sides of the equation – attempting to verify Appearances of Art by engaging / observing / remaking results that demanded enormous effort, large amounts of time and all of his experience and capacities, and as the performer of the experiment – devoting vast amounts of time, energy and effort of his total self to the making of Appearances of Art.

 

It wasn’t going well.

It is hard (extremely difficult)

And it happens to be very cold (causation: weather in Winter)

 

He’d read of other conditions explicated by practitioners before him: contingencies such as warmth, geographical position, silence, wealth, solitude, suffering (the Ss came up quite often); specific environments, times or places, assistant substances or particular tools or resources, even difficulty itself had been recorded – but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason, certainly no agreement, in fact, very often direct and incommensurable contradictions between one catalystic experimentor of A + A = AA and the next, which led to his marginal note (copied above): “to each its own”

 

He carried on, in spite of the grave difficulties, confusions and multivalent referents of the equation’s elements.  Once in awhile he believed he had discerned a momentary result – an appearance of art in his own private performances of the experiment; unfortunately he could not obtain verification of his tests from contemporary scholars/students/or adepts of the ancient and cryptically-clear equation.

He had no trouble himself verifying most attested AAs, given sufficient time and effort, but, as he progressed in his work, identification became more efficient yet verification demanded more and more of him, devouring his time, energy and effort, interfering with and greatly complicating his own experiments and test cases from the equation’s other end.

He began to understand why past personages were led to choose to practice and perform the experiment from one side or the other.

 

It is hard.

It is cold.

And there is only so much time and effort.

There is only so much living organism to be had.

Limitations began to seem insurmountable.

But by now he had come too far.

There was only to go on.

 

It is hard, he wrote.

It is hard and it is cold, he recorded.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.

But my gloves stay on, he wrote, and my lips still hold a cigarette, right to the end.

His gloved hand fighting the pages.

There is only so much life.

 

 

 

N Filbert 2012

 

 


Embosched

On By Alias HarlequinIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing1 Comment

A story-like creature I found in the paintings of Breughel and Bosch…recently submitted to Fresh Ink…thought I would reblog here.

Embosched

Giving Melancholia a Go

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments
Oregon rain

“I would stop celebrating loss, if I could figure out what replaces it”

–Lynne Tillman–

            In the way I describe the barn, can you feel it?  The barn is rugged and old but stays dry.  Light would find its way in if sun ever broke through.  But the world here is moist and grey.  A totaling overcast with a ground and a sky making one thickened thing.  The green of the trees turned so dark that the world peers back black and white.  That austere, filled with that many increments.

A perhaps melancholy is more like a humidy cold.  You can perceive it in your clothes.  They cling, they hang, they weigh.  And saturate skin, that feels parched with age, like wax in its melting, still and gone down.  You slow there.  Drudge, trudge, move (if you move) like a worm at its creep – that claustrophobic a wriggling.

Almost struggle, but lacking the fight.

A zeroing out – the observance of something undoing, with the added false pretense of fate.

Resemblance: tectonic.  Some slow, massive shifts, imperceptible morphing, glacial advances – a grind without wounding, pulverized and smothered with a winter wool blanket, a lowering lid made of iron.  And you sit there: gaze through the cracks at the drips from the eaves, life runneling away and absorbed.  Inconsequent with only replenishing leakage.  A purgatory.

As the greying deepens to charcoal.  Vision unhinges, becomes soft streaky fades, you were never looking at or out, your eyes simply open.  Somewhat.  Toward nowhere.

In full dissolution.  Not staring, not gazing, not perceiving – what to call it?  The mechanics are working, if asked.  There is a park, there are trees, there are children, playing in rain like a sprinkler.  The bars of equipment are red, green and blue, but really they’re grey, just not actually.

A world made of asphalt.  The windows, your flesh, the skein on your eyes.  Grey-gravelly sky without markings, just mottled.  Movement has slowed to match outlines of concrete, the grasses are cracks, and the trees, the trees and the trucks, buildings and cars – simply humps, objects unleveling the vastness of road.  The endless.  The nowhere.  A world made of asphalt – surely some ass’s fault.

And that’s where you are, granite soldier.  Sculpted in the belly of earth, steady to the line, so much of you crumbled to time, and yet faithful.  You take up the spaces you’re supposed to, supposing…what?  That there must be a reason you sat down.  Feel this way.  With capability only to stare.  Without seeing.

You wonder if something has come or has gone, like a season – expected but oft overlooked as it passes – until another takes place.  Like that.  Like waiting, without anticipation, there being there for which to wait.  Is that really waiting?

Endurance as endlessly patient.  But patience expects changes as well.  No change occurs here.  Here just continues, inconsecutively and vague.

The owl at its nightly watch.  The worm at work in its tunnels.  The mayfly at its twenty-third hour.  The one that never ends.  It goes on.

“In my room on 32nd Street…

…words dissolve as they’re spoken…”

with all that drizzle

and no intent.

If it were loss, you’d have lost something or had something to gain, but that is not so.  It continues.  Everything here, nothing to replace = now.  You bow your head slightly, just off to the left.  Your hand curls about the armrest.  At one point you swallowed a drink.  Your legs have crossed and uncrossed.  And that is all.  You wait without waiting.  The barn is so old but stays dry.  You probably just sit in your room, the barn imagined like memories.  Still you seem dry to the touch, though you feel drowned in a heavying damp.  You sit, you go on.  You look, it’s unclear.  It is dim.  It goes on.

N Filbert 2012

Untitled Prose

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing5 Comments

It wouldn’t be that way, not now, not conventional.  It would start itself, become, begone.  It would be something words couldn’t take aim for.

But it would not be absence, or if there was no escaping it, it would pressurize presence in such a way.  The idea of presence.  Feeling of it.  The desire for presence.

Where all the answers are the instant, but without trauma or utopia.  Not to exist, but to insist.  There’d be no describing it, it would lack presentation.

Knowing this is how it must be, fervently believing so, of course the questions come – doubt, the presence of absence.  Mortality.  The limitations of finitude.  These are not to rule.  Not to matter in the moment.

It would be no place to go, neither flight nor pursuit, homing nor escape.  It might scramble the senses, melt the categories.  Be without difference.

Not like that.  Not resemble.  Not the satisfaction of unknown longing.  Not quite immersion nor awareness exactly.  Not singular.

It might resemble flight, for a bird, without metaphor, without referent.  It will not resemble flight, for a bird.

Imagines a cloud.  It would not be various layers of sky, a gathering of imperceptible boundaries, no erasure or revision.  Or vision, as opposed to sight.  Sensorium replete without overwhelm, this sort of thing, perhaps.

Not identifiable but actual.  Not understood but occurring.  Without fear or hesitancy or remove.  Without expectation or excitement or joy.  It would not be saturation, then, nor separate.

It might be that it will be just what it is, yet without concept.  Without spectrum or speculation.  Unscaled, unmeasured.

What would be written after?

It would not be relief or knowledge.  Not revelatory, not banal.  Unnarrativized.  Without distinction, yet not indistinct.  Not like a circle of a circle or the warmth of sunlight.

It would not be written, informed inscription, not verbalized or sung.  Space, shape (time would lack duration?) would be difficult to reckon.  It would not “occur” then, without plottable end.  Unrecollected.

Not quite expressive, possibly impressive minus attention exactly.  Not like color fields or blankets.

There it would be without “it.”  And not “there” as another.  The questions would be undone without conclusion or solution.  Not like water as a solvent for dead things.  Repeat: unlike without unique.  Not vague or opaque: no into, out of, within.  No almost or already.  Not fulfillment or exclusion.

Neither all, every, nor of, nothing.  Not between.  Not point line or plane.  Not subject.  Without object.  Without lack, gap, distance.  Cognized without recognition maybe.  No reflection.  Embodied.  Not the same, though, without difference.

“one constantly attempts to say something that does not, and can never, touch the essence of the matter…But the tendency, the running up against, points to something”

–Ludwig Wittgenstein–

N Filbert

An Alter-Ars-Poetica

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing3 Comments

Alter-Ars-Poetica

It comes down to this – a “long walk in the dark” – all smeared in bear’s blood.  A hunger, a thirst, and a desperate exhaustion.  I grasp.  I hang on.  I plead.  I am breathing, I think.

And there in the blood is the soil.  The bitter, the oils and the ash.  I start to chew my breath.

It is then I begin with the dreams.  To hallucinate, I shout words and weep mumbles, which shape image, erupt forms, and I enter.  Kaleidoscopic hallways, enormous caverns and seas.  I refract and am drawn.  I am fragments.  I ray.

The world begins, or begins again, estranged and available.  Shattered thus and malformed, it readies.  A me.  I swoon, I step forth, I mutter and trace.  I become colors and fluids and I flow and I fill.  The world recedes in its changing – I give chase, and start seeing again.

Evoking desire of indifference-foes.

I stand up with a body, a medium (as if it mattered), and approach, thus affecting its molding of me.  I content.

Here is where the story goes, splotched along this trail.  Caught in weeds and nettles, drinking mud and rain.  Clay that shapes the tablets, work inscribed by bones.

The labor of erosion that brings the doubting truths to light.  The heaving lung and shriveled spleen, muscle scored by mind’s lightning.

The moment that the moment keeps occurring.

 

(this piece inspired by the following: Larry Levis’”Coda: A Word to the Wicked”; Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” and Phil Levine’s “They Feed They Lion”)

Writing Prompt

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Writing5 Comments

I have been attempting to take part in Madison Woods organized Friday Fictioneers which has been very enjoyable and a fantastic exercise – particularly to see the many figments of minds operating on a singular prompt – how various persons / how various world!  I came across this sentence standing on its own in the midst of a story by Lynne Tillman recently and it just will not leave my head.  I thought “a picture is worth a thousand words!?” – how about “these words are worth a billion pictures!?”  I’m sharing them here hoping they might also inspire in many of you reams of stories…And I’d love to receive links to the works that you create with/in/from them – any length, any time.  Here’s the sentence:

“In an embrace, something may be confirmed, avoided, or resolved.”

-Lynne Tillman from her story “Phantoms” in This is Not It–