Tag: creativity

Embraces

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing20 Comments

I didn’t get around to performing the Friday Fictioneers prompt-100-word-story this week…having gotten sidetracked by a prompt that has haunted me all week from the writings of Lynne Tillman…finally, something worked out of me related to this… as follows:

EMBRACE

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

-Lynne Tillman-

            A kind of “there was.”

Sinking into his arms, strong and coily, warm almost gruff.  The dusty smell of oil and denim.  She felt small, she felt memory.  She closed her eyes as in sleep, and allowed.  So much to confront and to question, perhaps to ignore, but now, just this now, this embrace.

He’d wounded her for years.  Secretly whittling strips from her heart with a scalpel.  Holding her mind under liquids and spells, the sky and its stars, overwhelming her with presence while silently working dissection.  His voice anesthetic, a narrative of dreams.  She was victim.

And part of her knew.  Wanted.  Would rather.  She with her own confused expectations, demands.  Her ownership.  Defiance.  Some part of her vision selected this blur.  Macroscopic.  Details out of focus, the essence of place.  Embrace.

***

She had shouted, threatened.  He had thrown.  She began her crumbled march as he grabbed her.  He corded her in arms, shackled her to his chest.  She, unable to move, to breathe.  A little dizzy.  Anger and fear.  Him holding.  Him safe.  He panicking.  It held.  The embrace.

She struggled, she sobbed.  She squirmed and struck out.  Refused.  He held.  He tightened.  As if in a last expiration, the lungs clinging life.  She stabbed and she stabbed and she stabbed.  He bled.  He held.  A braced embrace.

Eventually collapsing.  Exhaustion disabled the leaving, dismantled the stay.  Floor and furniture took them in and supported.  And held by receiving their burden.  Stasis.  Time, embraced.

***

That morning – the fog – the waves – all the greying of sands.  They’d wandered alone for solitude’s space.  To be lost.  Unbeknown.

A moist, briny chill had embraced him.  Swallowed him up.  Become him.  Immersed, he released.  Saturate, evaporate.  Began.  Unwinding like a mummy’s cloth he disrobed.  His anguish, his anger, his hope.  Dissolving out to sea in trails.  Emptied.  Cleaned with a salty sludge, he weighed.  He grew heavy.  He blended in with the mist.

Enough moisture to formulate drops, her tears joined the air.  Embracing herself through the wind off the water she shook and she stumbled, she clutched.  Unseeing, she fumbled along. Desperate.  Undone.  Like the thick cover of sky, her past and her present, her future combined and ran away down the rock.  She was hollow.  Held only by her arms, her hair keeping her head in its place.  She wept out her body until drained like a sieve.  The charcoal of sands embraced her.  Falling.

***

The hesitancy.  Two scarred bodies full of wounds, slowly exposing.  The want for another.  A crave and a care.  Some tendering need to devour.  They approach gently, allow touch, speaking perimeters.  A leg crosses over.  Eyes keep locking and unlocking with an almost audible click.  Food is had.  Hunger remains.  They move and they walk, learning hands and arms and shoulders.  They gaze.

Arriving at last at embrace.  Caressing the soreness of worlds.  They mate at their bruisings.  It becomes more.  Ravenous and fearful, they struggle.  Wrestling and huddling, they carefully voice every play.  The directions.  No pain is no gain.  And they gain.

Become more in the matching – four legs and eight limbs, doubling heartsize and brains, and they fitted.  They enter, they receive.  Exposing and sheltered.  In opening wounds they are bandaged.  They had not believed, they were doubt.  This, a healing embrace.  A beginning.

***

In death they are laid side by each.  Before long the roots will take over, a tendrilled combine.  The skin will grow lax and more fluid, the moss and the mold remedy.  Bones become ashen and dust.  Filtering one for another.  Transposed.  There will be one flesh, this earth, the conglomerate of bodies and beings with rain, moon and sunshine.  Planted there, embraced in all that will hold.

They take to the breeze like powder and spark.  Knuckles and teeth cackling the stones.  A huffed form of cloud, they merge, they seep.  Skein on the water, grain on the leaves, one and the other, the other again.  No one can tell.  Salt sugar sand shaken together and forever sifting.  Their love, their lives, its embrace.

N Filbert 2012

Writing Prompt

On By NW FilbertIn 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–

The Violation in Art

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

The Violation in Art

 

The trouble with artists, as I see it, is that they’re always breaking things.  Breaking out, breaking in.

As if their experience of the world (and in my opinion anyone might be an artist at any given time)…well, look at it like this…a human person develops perceptions and accumulates.  Artistry consists in these experiences transmuting, transforming and breaking out in alternate forms.

The world seeps, floods, sifts or bursts its way into the artist’s mechanisms of being, and their processing of said worlding breaks its way out, somewhere, somehow.  Often anywhere, anyhow!

Breaking in to us.

A person combined with their experience breaks out in a form through their hands or their vision, movements or mouth…the artifact then enters our perception, experience, breaking in to our own operations and proceedings…entering us.

Now you’ve a mingling of persons going on via artifact, motion or sound.

If you think about this, it’s threatening.  It’s criminal!  It’s viral.  And it can happen at great distances, even invisible, even in your sleep.  It may appear at first benign, even pleasurable, might mirror some part of ourselves (or so it seems) – because of its careless remove from identity toward object it feels safe and external…but how we take it in!

With anger or lusting or joy.  Voyeuristically, “privately,” or in a well-guarded institution.  Through literature, youtube, mp3s.  In deep thought or with staid attention, and passing glances or air-gathering ears.  No matter, there’s infusion, con-fusion, an intimate entwining going on.

And it is without-which-not on either side: construction/reception, speaker/hearer, writer/reader, dancer/audience.  We all become necessary and involved, creating ubiquitous perpetration.  And no one to accuse once it’s part of our experience, our (perhaps unwitting) invitation.

Like cancer or nutrients, an other-marked entity joins with our own joining to theirs in apprehension, a collusion of worlds and of persons.  An act in which all are responsible: reciprocal engagement of voyeuristic and combinatory intimacy, breaking open, breaking in,

breaking out

breaking through

a delicious and permissive crime.

Another Pause, Another Someday

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

“Words give clothing to hide our nakedness”

–Susan Howe–

“But a word is a bottomless pit”

–Lyn Hejinian–

And then it arrives, unexpectedly, another gap.  She sees a magician in bright jester’s garb, seated on a branch in a tree.  Amid the traffic.  Amid a swarm of bees, of thrumming crows and starlings.  A bat lies in labored breathing on the sidewalk.

Lightning- and Lady- bugs.

Like that, like both.

There is no goal to it in the beginning.  At first.  The seconds’ glow catches you off guard.  “What was that?” neon spot moving in the night.  Imperceptible polka-dotted red creeping carefully over your toe.  Structures pause.  Structures moment.  When realized, when you bring your own accident: awareness.

What pressures turns out to be necessity.  Of deadline, of assignment, of transactional fulfillment – relationship or vocation, even health.  Without apparent choice.  Or ever so long ago.  Why markings called parentheses are shields.  What gives pause.  And stays the pressuring.  For the moment.

An extended kiss.

A lapse in volume.

An ignored alarm.

You find yourself there : (YOU).

The rest of the world lining up, encroaching, exerting itself, themselves, your other selves, against the slender boundaries, the slick curving walls – they can’t be climbed, nor be toppled, only inverted )if you accept the pressures(, or erased as if they’d never happened.  Become brackets.  Prison versus asylum (in its native safety-seeking sense).

(YOU)?  )YOU(?  [YOU]?  ]YOU[?

            Now and then.  Another pause.  Another Sabbath.  A so-called rest.  Time is not the issue (as duration).  Time is at issue in its momentary absence.  Glancing the lightning-bug, bird-call, ladybug feeling out the stem.

“Another pause” with pressures all around.  Expectations or chores.  But no one calling, not this now.  Last week too, unexpected, unprepared, cage door left awry, or finding key in hand.  Parentheses.  And then you sleep that active way we call “rest.”  For a moment.  You make, for the joy of making, or not.  Either way is pleasure.  Or pleasant at the most.

Such as now, another pause, this day, another Someday that arrived.

Writing: the Margins

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Graphotos, Traces, Writing6 Comments

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Writing: the Margins

“All words run along the margins of their secrets”

– Susan Howe –

 

Now we are getting somewhere.  Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told.  If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.”  If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…

there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets?  Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.

That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets.  I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.

And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.

Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.

So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating.  That is, it is possible.  Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?

If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.

Therefore

“it is not infinite.  Even infinite is a term”

-Louis Zukofsky-

by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.

Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.

Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.

Perhaps and possibly.

N Filbert 2012

A Splendid Feel-Goodish Gift

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Uncategorized2 Comments

The wonderful watercolorist and incidental learner graced me with le 7X7 Award

wherein which one says 7 things about oneself

and then passes the award along to 7 further bloggers

helping us (I’m assuming) to know one another a little more communitarian-ly

Thank you Incidentallearner

And here goes…enjoys terrifically spicy foods; and though i’ve ceased drinking – vodka was my favorite; 7 amazing children; supergreatestartistspouse; arms full of tattoos of favorite authors and writers; prefer rain and diffuse light; prefers chilliness and cold

Passing the award onward to:

http://atelierscheune2012.wordpress.com/

http://nikmimms.wordpress.com/

http://pietownscroll.wordpress.com/

http://sweiv.wordpress.com/

http://lisathatcher.wordpress.com/

http://appropriatelyfrayed.wordpress.com/

http://erinloveart.wordpress.com/

Thanks for making such interesting things – tell us stuff – pass it on if you wish!

Writing: the Apparatus

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

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Writing: the Apparatus

“one can think of the work (of writing) as a dialogue between the two distinct demands bearing on it (the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible).  Or between its two poles (measured form, measureless disintegration) or between the embodiments of these two ‘centers of gravity,’ if you will: reader and writer…two come together in a place where neither can be found…One of them keeps dragging it into the light of day as a completed oeuvre, a realized whole, something that has actually taken form and come to be (read, that is, or, you could say, heard), while the other pulls it back into the dark whence nothing ever springs (but where there is a chance that, coming to pieces, something might come to be written or said)”

– Anne Smock, What is There to Say? –

-the demand of possibility, the demand of the impossible-

            The tools the writer possesses.

That there must be something to say…that it is impossible to completely say.  Finally, definitively, to have done with, saying experience.

What does one make of this?  With this?  Paradoxical demand, desire, exigency – imperative, self-generating, uncaused and ineffectual, drive?

Our tools:  awareness.  Attention.  Passion.  We observe and take note, feel-with, and seek to spell it out (for ourselves, for world).

Our tools:  available language, sound, gesture.  Entering the woven barrier and thoroughfare of what is shared, common, constitutive, we act, operate, select, arrange, choose, rearrange from this quilted information of the world, our saying of it.  Or singing, or stating, shouting or whispering and mumbles.

It seeks into fact.  We construct an object, made up of nothing, of airwaves, scratch-marks, designs.  Barely effable cues, hints, notions and signs.  We begin again with that.  With what it fails to say, to communicate or reveal.  We tinker with and tamper, excise and expand.  Ever the remainder.  Inexact invention.  Something there, some things not.

We pursue what is not.  What fell aside or seeped away.  The evaporate.  The unknown (here I adore the French: je ne sais quoi – that feeling that one knows it, and knows it so well and so deeply, and yet is unable to say what it is that one knows!).

Endless anticipation, expectation, a lusted desiring…

Endless frustration, falling short or to the side, inevitable (inherent even?) failing, shortcoming, irresolution.

These are the tools of the trade.  The writer’s apparatus.

 

A caveat:  from time to time I’ll wager to say we all of us take in some language or sound, vision or world that seems “just,” feels ripe, adequate, full and exact to the perception of our experience.  This is wondrous, thrilling, satiating, “ecstatic,” a moment’s completion, wholeness, perhaps.

Yet is it?  What does the masterful painting, the pregnant poem, the echoing song or fulfilling experience result toward?  Yes, toward, not “in.”  Not arrival but generation, bursts of multiplications of words, sounds, sights and movements now invigoratingly fueled and stimulated – fecund to go on…for more…fuller…richer…or even repeat!?

“Such then, would be my task, to respond to…speech that passes my understanding, to respond to it without having really heard it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak…To name the possible, to respond to the impossible.  I remember that we had designated in this way the two centers of gravity of all language…Why two to say one thing?  – Because the one who says it is always the other…”

– Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation –

So Rich and Rewarding in their Own Unique Ways!

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading3 Comments

Favorite sourcings of mine

and pleasures

both INTENSELY recommended for readers and thinkers alike

(are those one and the same?)

Experiential Ekphrasis

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Traces, WritingLeave a comment
Figures Seated in Mid-Air
by Holly Suzanne

Experiential Ekphrasis.

Hello dear followers – I can hardly thank you enough for taking time out of your lives to look at, read and engage things I am involved in the making of.  Your support and attention is a constant encouragement.  THANK YOU!  (and thank you for offering and creating your own!)…  I wanted to invite you (if you are interested) to visit/follow a couple of other blogsites I also create in/with –

www.ekphrastixarts.com and

www.spoondeep.wordpress.com

THANKS AGAIN!

A resonance in technical difficulties

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading2 Comments

“Writing is for me a means of modulating and organizing phenomenal and circumstantial information from all points of experience, a process I refer to as ‘tuning’ myself.  As I grow older and seemingly remove myself from unity with any singular, or even plural, socio-cultural environment, I seem more ‘on my own’ in a vast environment of internalized experience.  My approach to poetics has become the search for responses and behavioral modes relative to this experience, to surviving it as well as conditioning myself to it.  Constantly the effort seems to be away from any formalization of ideas or structure or definitive process and towards a rejuvenating line of ‘basics’, that mythical point where each process is fresh and new and wholly responsive to indigenous conditions…

“In a sense, I am trying to cope with the urge of poetry as opposed to the structure of it.  This urge seems to lie within the rooted and individual beginnings of the activity, centered on a meditative, self-encoded embrace of those issues and inclinations I find within my own humanness.  The intention therefore becomes the opening of experience toward a continual address of the self”

-Craig Watson-

in