Tag: creativity

Thoughts

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“No useless chatter, but a word of necessity face to face with itself.

With this word, I have written my books.

Word of sand.  Word of eternity.

Thoughts of shipwreck, but also of haven.”

“To approach silence before the silent sign.

To approach the book before the page.

To wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us.”

-Edmond Jabes-

“When a sparrow feels the freezing cold air, he puffs up his feathers and gathers his feet under his body;

he bears the surrounding cold by countering it with his inner warmth.

The writer, who is also warm-blooded, fights even harder”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“The bow’s harmony arises from the strained stick forced by the bow-string.

Subsequently, harmony resides in unity and contradiction.

It is kinetic energy that’s about to become dynamic energy.”

In Praise of Darkness

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“And those of us, never angels, who are verbal, who ‘on this low, relative ground’ write, those of us who lowly imagine that ascending into print is the maximum reality of experiences?  May resignation – the virtue to which we must resign ourselves – be with us.  It will be our destiny to mold ourselves to syntax, to its treacherous chain of events, to the imprecision, the maybes, the too many emphases, the buts, the hemisphere of lies and of darkness in our speech.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

Swarm. Absorb. (the words, pt. 2)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Photography, Poetry, Writing2 Comments

Swarm.  Absorb.

 

metaphor:  the entire discography of Mark Kozelek (+ Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) / each version of Max Richter’s “Haunted Ocean” on dizzying random repeat – this is the setting:  atmosphere.  environment.  “context.”

metaphor:  the Kansas sky in storm

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

            metaphor:  dealing with Ache.  (“being human”)

metaphor:  “Control without Hierarchy” by Deborah M. Gordon…on some page in a book called Swarm by Lucas Felzmann:

“A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something that people don’t know how to do: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer.  It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies…Life in all its forms is messy, surprising, and complicated.  It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy.  We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions.  Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs – without any person directing another, or having more power than another.  Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in nature.”

think of language.

            what is scattered widely or uniquely ubiquitous – call it “swarm.”

“I”…lost.

I know I cannot gather to a grown pillar of I-ness, something you might recognize, could “identify.”

I know I cannot be where I am as long as “time” and “space” function effectively in my frames of reference…

I spread.

I swarm.

“I-swarm”

(the “human” world-situation)

            Leaving that aside.

How might one (dependent on two or more in order to, well, in order to simply “be”)

how might that one (singular mark – “/”) handle (manage? survive?) “its” Ache?

“To be or not to be, that IS the question”

(o wise god)

            So I split…up…

I canvas the sky, the context, the landscape, the sitz im leben, in fragments.

I approach, engage, invade the world like shot scattered from the anguished burst of a wombgun.

I-particle.

I-swarm.

Absorb.

from “Swarm” by Lukas Felzmann

            Seminal-syllable words resound –

– Let their pulse reverberate your bodies like hymns –

God.  Void.  I.  You.  Song.  Life.  Death.  Love.  Real.  Being. (Not).

and so on…

all with no definition…

IS.  IT.  THIS.

nowhere near

where we mean to be.

Absorb.

Swarm.

from Swarm by Lukas Felzmann

            In this situation then,

of too much

of grave luck

(all that hope and final destitution)

I swarm.  I absorb.

I decenter.  I explode.

I desist in pretense

in sense

I spread.

One mark….thousands of pixels….without hierarchy

(a swarm of cells)

(a flock of birds)

(a fish in school)

I swarm.

I absorb.

[ – I love you – ]

 -for my wife

Some Stellar Instigations

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Writing3 Comments

“Multiple incompatible hypotheses are needed to provide an adequate account of any phenomenon – aesthetic, material or psychological… which of course means no explanation at all”

–Charles Bernstein–

“All literature, highbrow or low, from (at least) the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction…All novels are sequels; influence is bliss”

–Michael Chabon–

“You must talk with two tongues, if you do not wish to cause confusion”

–Wyndham Lewis–

“Unknowing does not come before knowing but very long after”
-Edmond Jabes-

“Human speech is made of words that have been created a long time ago; those words are preserved in dictionaries, but poets and writers change”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“I wanted to read.  Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.”

-Alan Jacobs-

And so it begins…again…beginning within…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Traces, Writing2 Comments

Starting Out

 

And so it begins, as it so often does, begun long ago.

With the tone of a quest – an inception, a conflict, a cure.  Anxieties of disillusionment and fear, inadequacy and doubt, peppering the path.  But hopes too, and promise – what seem like successes or substance occur ascend along the way.  Perhaps desire with approximations of love, and frustrations translated to passion or anger.  Always there is grief and loss, what marks out time, and makes our days memorable.  Why we attend at all, the keeping track and transformations, insistent process of our undoing.

For once arrived in the scene, what else is there but the variegated haul to a destined demise?  Is it, then, always the “same ol’” fresh story?  A posited entity, a series of markings – accruals and deletions – to the closure of cessation?  What else might be told?  To what purpose?

There are moments, you say, moments of pause or release, elation or tragedy that form knots in the threads.  These might be dislocated to some profit, no?  At least for the living?

Midstream, and in motion you might trace it, you say, inscribing what’s open, what opens…emergence itself.  The clutter that punctuates being – its in-forming and injury?

Perhaps.  To guide others along possible pitfalls or options; to preserve instants and subjects; to fuel or to warn.  Perhaps.  Or simply to dream, to escape the inevitable awhile – what’s wrong with that?  That we in the glory and grind take a break, imagined or not, and drift or pursue, engage or elope to some alternate, parallel course?

What is: possible.

All of it is.  The values are relative, individuated.  Personal.  There’s no accounting for taste or of preference to dwell.  The matter hardly matters, after all, can be apparently “explained” (see also – epigenetics, chaos, theory and the like).  How we journey or survive, become or desist is an isolate concern.  Effecting all.

And there’s the rub, this sense of pattern, of system, of interconnectivity.  The impression that all might belong.  It won’t be long.  Insufficient gravity and incommensurate propulsion.  And so we move, arrange, derange, seeking for forms like the banks, or directions like currents.  We flow.  And it begins again, beginning within, as it always does, begun so long ago…

N Filbert

Decompression: A Process

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

it goes on…this emptying search…

(Re)Assesments

 

At something of a loss, what feels like a “crossroads” except that perhaps nothing in existence is really either / or.

That was not a sentence.

Bewildered without anxiety, I approach a sort of noisy blank.  A surfeited absence.

I have the amorphous sensation of being entirely undone and woven up as a satchel of my everything.  Every instance of myself threads the material of an empty knapsack that is me, dangling from a stick over the shoulder of the world I inhabit.

That the bag, indeed, is empty.  No objects or trinkets in that wee darkness to finger or grasp, no spirits to set free, emotions to unstopper.  Nothing within to escape, not even air.

My entirety fabricated as an emptied bag.

 

All I’ve ever written, attempted, every action, thought, adventure or relation.  All my labors, abilities, acquisitions, emotions and dreams; every word or intuition, fear or blatant risk, all ongoing consequence(s)…EVERYTHING – internal, external; past-present-future: is the skin of a being, the form and the boundary, the grafted substance of an absent individuality.

 

I experience this neither as a blockage, nor an impasse; no meaninglessness, purposelessness or ennui – simply a vague, obvious experience that all I am as a being is my interface with the world within and around me, idenitifiable without essence.

Responsible, shaped, recognizable and devoid of identity – no narrative or plot, character or definitive name, just an inextricably meshed passel of experiences forming a pliable veneer around a vacant hollow.

That all will carry on, as such, until its end.  Experience upon experience, before experience, during and after experiences and experiments – weaving, threading, joining…this being-form, this walking thinking speaking shape, this perceptive living husk or porous shell, a wave and trajectory of experiencings.

To feign a purpose, an intention or choicy action as this reality requires some arbitrary groundwork – hypotheses and rudimentary organizational operations.  What might this handbag proffer?  Or emit?  What song might be huffed from this void?

 

This is where I seem to be.  Evaluate.  Assess.  No pillars, few givens, a smattering of beliefs and bones and hunches, a median vocabulary of gestures.  From this – what pretend to build?  What fabricate?  I find that I want to, have desire to, create.  Make out of what is woven – everything that forms me / allows me to be – but in what manner?  Open.  Free.

 

As if the absence is realized, the content in-formed, substance resulting from wafting motions and play.  Capacity for invention.  Something like soap bubbles – materials forming a translucent and wobbly funhouse mirror of shapes…leaking…nothing!  Yet capable of popping fragments like droplets or spittle, or words.

 

This seems to be where I am.  I know not what might emerge, but I’d like to leave some trace of the fabric experience has made of me.  Scraps or ephemeral stains, artifacts.

 

ex nihilo…to begin (crisis / catharsis)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing4 Comments

“So the books are waiting.  Of this you may be confident:  they’ll be ready when the whim strikes you.”

-Alan Jacobs-

Another opportunity – for collaborative creativity

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Photography, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

my spouse/partner etc. posted this this morning and I find it instigative – love to see/hear what comes of it for the rest of you!

http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/10/ekphrastic-opportunities/

(more pix to work from at post!)

2 Sources

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

Breathlessly discovering these treasure troves of inspiration and encouragement (and great thinking!):

M/E/A/N/I/N/G (particularly examine the essay by Lucio Pozzi – 12 Questions of Art – amazing!)

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

“Art, to me, is nothing but a testimony of a flow where order and disorder are interchangeable

and where the darkness of inspiration and desire fulfill unknown purposes within the appearance of space and time”

-Lucio Pozzi-

PRESS ON – Thank You

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing7 Comments

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted,

nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”

-Sir Francis Bacon-

“One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change…

ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”

-Harold Bloom-

“everything directly accessible to us (in reading) – except for the perceived characters (letters and symbols and space) – would be only our ideas, thoughts, or, possibly, emotional states”

-Roman Ingarden-

           

RUSH

I’m thinking storm-wind and flood.

The press and surge of words and images.

I’m thinking adrenalin and frenzy.

WORD:PRESS

                        It dawns on me today that blogging incites and anxiety to produce.  A pressing to keep up and create.

There’s a radiance to that.

On the one hand, to feel it.  That, even just here, at WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of creative human beings thinking, expressing, making…exponentially increasing my already over-saturated reading list.

RUSH

                        And I mean it, it’s downright EXCITING to view and ingest the enormous, surprising, sincere and ever-expanding activity of humans!  (There’s a thank-you in that to all of you I’ve found so far!)              WHOOSH!    RUSH!

On the other…frenetic.  If “all human beings are the same, but everyone is human in their own way” (Adler on Franz Kafka), then you all are as limited as I by time and space and finitude…i.e. face the anguish of not being able to give the people and things in your immediate surround let alone verbal and visual artifacts from around the world what seems to be their due attention.  To weigh and consider, to respond.

I spend a lot of time studying semiotics and theories of communication – how we, as humans, might “put in common,” “share” – “thoughts, information and opinions through speech, writing, images or signs” – “crafting passages between places and persons.”

Hundreds of thousands (actually many more) – passages made sensible, visible, right here with every click on WordPress, vimeo, Weebly, etc…

So long to fears re: death of reading, of art, culture, any such ‘thing.’

And there’s the ‘rub.’  Visiting “philosophy” pages today, I was significantly encouraged by so much sustained argumentation going on.  Persons thinking hard and working it out with signs and gestures.  Photographer’s sharing their eyes and the difficult work of seeing.  Artists shaping the world through the world’s materials and all their minds and bodies process into it.  Our poets, our healers, each of us shaping one another’s days/minds/experiences.

So thank you ALL for this thunderous RUSH.  For the challenge to take care, to work and enjoy, to weigh and consider who we are, who I am, what I do, what I intend to create, present and offer…

Press on…read in…find value.

“What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible?…

I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear…

what is the fear inside language?  No accident of the body can make it stop burning”

-Anne Carson-

“Behind, always behind the things in a hurry to be, you must search for what is”

-Edmond Jabes-