Tag: creativity

Scripture : Roots

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Language, Reflections, Writing8 Comments

Scripturient

“In the beginning was the word…”

“…and the word was god.”

Enigma.

My youth was spent immersed in a form of neo-fundamentalist, conservative, evangelical Christianity.  It would be difficult for me to estimate the number of bible readings, passages memorized, commentaries consumed, and sermons received during my first twenty-some years of life.

Twenty-some years later, libraries of world literature later, this particular phrase, passage, verbal construction remains like a haunting, a rule, a resonance and reverberation of the deepest sort – a kind of First Sentence that rises and echoes in me whenever I turn myself to writing.  A statement some whole of me attached to in presumptive belief and passion that constitutes, in its way, the work of my adult life.

In what “beginning” was the word?  And what was that word, are we to read this word as, literally, “god”?  Or are words themselves divine, godlike in their creativity and actionable functions?  In the full passage we read that the word is both “with” god and itself god…a quintessential meta-statement from whatever interpretive stance one selects.

“In the beginning was the word [in beginnings words become?  In words become beginnings?],

and the word was with god [words that are with] and the word was god [words that are].”

            Religiously:  when humans spoke “god,” gods became.  Conception creating realities.  Referentiality – a term is attached to an object, idea, relation…and the object, idea, relation begins to become that term (and vice-versa, through public practice).

Words epitomize co-creation, collusion.  I am a tiny human organism, an infant birthed into a community of persons.  This community attaches a term to me: “Nathan.”  I grow into that name, define and fill it with characteristics, behaviors, activities, experiences…and, for my communities (the others I relate to) that word “Nathan” comes to mean my specific organism in the world.

Words are beginnings, are like relational diagrams, invisible cross-hatchings and webbing throughout lived experience as humans – inceptions of internal and external possibilities and limitations via their activity as connective linkages, as references and realities.  Every term is metaphor – symbol, signal, object – requiring its interpretant.  The multi-sided act: language.

So what began with language?  Language that joins with and is?

I suggest meaning.  Conscious participation, co-mmunication, reflective relating.

Religiously:  posit Supreme Being and it posits world.  Speak reality and reality speaks.  All a matter of relating, relation…communication…language.

World becomes via collaboration, interaction – made possible through efforts of mutuality and distinction: gestures, intelligible utterances, multilogues, dialogues – communication.

Possible interpretation: A god languages “god” into being.  “Unicorn,” “fairy,” “truth,” “quark,” “molecule,” “consciousness,” – invisible, imperceptible “realities” language (WITH) and then become (ARE).  Subsequently the commerce and exchange of the universe alters…

Each utterance brings new relations and thereby new “things/realities” into concourse.

I can believe that what begins in language (or, communication/relation/collusion) is MEANING (such a word as “god” itself).

I find, trundling through countless notebooks, pages, typescripts, letters and journals, that at the head of any larger work or endeavor I attempt is inscribed this personally indelible takeaway from my youth’s indoctrination:

In the beginning is the word

a thing that creates in being constructed

always co-constructed WITH something else/Other

and becoming something else/Other in its utterance and collusion

organism + environment = meaning

all reality resides in relation

all of these also words, beginnings, possibilities

In beginnings are words

and in words begins begins begins

ever forging relations into realities into relations

tying things one to another to another to another

in concourse

en route as route

(IF) I am a storm. (IF) I am a blizzard.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Uncategorized, Writing4 Comments

FROM MY OLD NOTEBOOKS

It is beginning to appear that this Autumn-Winter season will not afford me many, if any, chances to compose writings or work beyond those necessary for school and work.  Gradually facing this fact – with reluctance and resistance – yet not wanting this forum simply to cease, I have decided to grab notebooks and loose pages stacked and scattered about my now-dusty attic writing cavern and cull them for writings I don’t feel ashamed of, and which would otherwise most likely never find opportunity to be engaged, read, criticized or perhaps even enjoyed.  As always, for what it’s worth… writings…

Dust-Bowl1-532x382

(IF) I AM A BLIZZARD

He/I/Writer hadn’t mentioned her (you/it/women) before, she had not factored in the memory because the hole was so deep there.  Like being from Kansas and not mentioning that you live on the planet Earth.  Constituent context.

His four-year-old used words like “conundrum” and “paradox;” said “I’m a particular kind of guy and I need my space.”

Literature, music and art invented Writer.

When snowing it had a way of being everywhere at once.

An infinity of points-of-view.  The angles of things.

 

Language like flakes, like droplets, ice forming on dust, on grains of sand.  Memories.  When they come back, as they came back, a fuzziness and quiet formed on everything.  Accrual of haze.  At times difficult to see through.  Uncertain.  Otherwise unknown.  Like prefacing everything with “I am finite and everywhere,” like mentioning (aside) that you are alive on planet Earth.

Like evaporation.  What seemed to be there just moments ago.

Concocting one way, then another.

Possible to build with what appear to be concrete blocks, distinct and limited, occupying a space with heft and hardness.  Or the voices of birds cawing out over air.  Vibrating, in motion, unlocatable like the dark, or “love,” or “fear,” or “joy.”

 

If I am a blizzard I occur over and across.  I extend and then fall (Winter might think).  (How “Writer” mimics “Winter”).

A “bird,” a “plane,” a dolphin leaping.  (Can/does anything really “leap” without legs?).

“Whiteout.”  Dust storm.  Memory.  History.

Writers’ progeny and progenitors.

Has anything ever really happened?  “Occurred”?

The Mimicking Birds are a Message to Bears.

So what (if anything) is known?

 

First thing, third thing, ninth.

 

Building a world from “facts” (shape, color, sound, size).  What the senses misrepresent or make guesses with: blowing wind.  Emotion.

 

In the midst of the blizzard.  What expulsions massive ambiguity.  As if blown from a mouth the size of a sun.  As if an arrangement that would craft The Great Depression and give birth to someone’s father.

As if Kansas, on planet Earth.

As if the word “me” ever even made a kind of sense.

 

The dark vacuum of “she,” “her,” “It,” “Other.”

Always an unsolved equation.  What holds pursuant consideration.  What moving from absence to presence might be like.  Things to consider and observe.  To take in.  Ruminate.  Decide.  Finitude and consequence (such fearsome things).

 

How a spoken word thuds a gargantuan typewriting arm onto air.  Like thunder.  How you are stuck with your language.  You open your mouth (Writer thinks) you are shoveling a grave.  The chink and thock of it.  The bite, the thrust, the throwaway.

 

The unlocking and the liftaway that sound and sense tend to be.  Spoonfuls of soil.

These are very small things.  Bitesize or microscopic.  Amino acids, molecules.

But we also possess imagination – webs and blankets.  Musics from spheres.  Scintillating overlays of networks and digitalia.  (What the mind can imagine! thinks Writer).

Let’s invent some All-Encompassing.  A Universal Meteor Shower, a Snow, a God.

((IF) I am a blizzard).

At times the word “love” feels this way.

Grandiose and miniscule.

 

  • Does it matter if we hasten our deaths – ?

 

Silly play of interaction.  Every single movement that person + person might be (is).

 

Writer lost in invention: what the mind is capable of: dream, memory, imagination, logic.

 

Spread it out.  Fly away.  Expand.  Contract.  Escape.  (Writer tells himself: “let go,” “set it/them free”).

Parachutes and sparrows.

 

There are scars on Writer’s hands.

And what of scars?

Below her ankle, beneath the eye, down the chest between her breasts, across the hip and back and thigh.  The hollows punched into the backs of knees (science must have named it),

How evaluate the residue of wounds?

 

If I forcibly spread her beautiful nakedest body out over this dining room table, askew and akimbo, that I might insert myself passionately inside her or press and pound into – (what does “physicality” mean?).

 

Flitting thoughts, mimicking birds, back and forth, to and fro – snow.

 

**** Interruption.  Interference.  Intrusion. ****

 

            A blizzard means static.  Windstorm.  Mindstorm.  Deletion and chaos.

 

Expectation.  Writer awaiting.  Awaiting letters in mail.  Music and language, experience.  To breathe is expectancy, anticipation.  Another child en route.

Something to live for.

A seven-mile-journey.

 

In the hopes that someone might read (some fine day) that someone might care, or, after encountering find that they “needed” (or something like it) to continue.  Art for the Writer:  discovery or uncovering of met needs never known until fulfilled and then absent = Art.

Things human people can give.

A blizzard (words, tones, and touches).

 

Blizzard – that we are, can be, may

 

  • an inherent isolation

“Person,” Writer thinks.

Person as inherent isolation (or Death again – the Unmattering – the Opposition to meaning).  The Void.

What haunts as forever, but actually is “never,” an End.

 

So go with it.  Flow.  And then die.

This brief burst of being.

With inevitable conclusion.

Children / Ideas / Actions / Creations / Labor / Life

What is: “Masterpiece” (Absence. Void. Boundary).

An insufficient multiplication.  An equation that will not figure.  We came.  We saw.  Deleted.  The system crash an accident.  Fini.  Sweet promise of tomorrow.

 

This is the arabesque, the frivolous gift.  The Enormance – beginning and end.  The all that in-between.  What is NOW.

All that “then” that is “now.”

 

Absorbency of blizzard.  Precipitate Earth.  6 billion lives falling like snow.  Beliefs and experiences, experiments, emotion, hatreds and loves.  Veritable shit storm with strange little gusts.  Enormity.

A blizzard.  A torrent.  A wind and a whiteout.

            A “blank.”

 

An ever-approaching storm…of void…

Finitude.  Fact.

Limitation.

 

To begin.

((IF) I am a storm.  (IF) I am a blizzard).

 07/09/2010

Black Blizzard

 

Reasons

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, Writing6 Comments

Reasons why a novel, memoir, or longer work may never be “FORTHCOMING!” from me: whenever I begin to write I get absorbed in the activity of writing. I seem unable (after all these years) to force myself to craft characters or plots or descriptions… The characters are LANGUAGE, the plot is made by LANGUAGE, and the LANGUAGE only seeks to inscribe itself…

ReMarking SelfAwareness

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, Writing1 Comment

Erasure

 

If I possessed the capability of remarking, I would.  Indeed, in that term resides my life’s work.  I am a Remarker.  I attend, scrutinize, mull and vacuum the world around me for occurrences, things, and events that are “remarkable,” and then I make every attempt to re-mark them.  Sometimes I succeed, and my re-marks trigger stimuli for re-marking in others; often I fail – both in the assessment of what (in fact – in a special – species/al – sense) is remarkable, and, in my ability to effectively mark something in relationship to itself.

Please Stand By…

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Reflections, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

…still working…

detail from "THERE IS A BOOK IN YOU" by Hallie Linnebur
detail from “THERE IS A BOOK IN YOU” by Hallie Linnebur

Writing: Impetus

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Language, Writing3 Comments

writing-unthinkable-workshop-web-550x367

 

It’s hypnotic.  Illogic.  You may recall genetic components – a sentiment, experience, curiosity or sensation…the fabrication begins its own spells.  That plane where you drift from expression or fractaling inquiry toward Medium.  When plot is played out and the voices keep talking.  Or some other member begs a word.

You are no longer quite “author.”  When it begins I’m usually puzzled or amazed.  A vague and shifty core obsesses and eludes me.  I ponder awhile, do research, spawn a dialogue or few with available others…but eventually turn to writing.  A word inscribed in secret not only leads to more, but ricochets through spacetime like a pinball.  The versions of the brain call out over the callosum:  “Felt anything like this before?  Have we had an experience that resonates?” / and / “Say – it seems I’m in the midst of something – check it out!  Any words in your concordance for such as this?”  To and fro – attemps to signify and symbolize, reify, rectify, making truce with our immersion.

The “language drill.”  As it burrows metaphor, it fragments and splinters dust around the edges.  Retrieving as it leads.  Recalling through invention.  I use my handwriting to find out.   To find out.  Searching something, spelunking expeditions, a nettling curiosity blind-feeling hunches and perceptions.  Pulling them towards words in attempts to trick them into trap.  Building tunnels, margins, stairwells to aim the lights at.  As if  broad enough term-corrals might lasso and then spiral, slowly cinching it round, whatever “it” is.

But whoa then, hold on!  Once a breadcrumb trail’s discerned, it forges.  Makes its rhinoceric way in accrual and erasure.  Constructing as you follow, conundrum’d and deleting.  A word – and sources cling like filaments.  None of them accurate and all informing.  History, culture – traditions.  Intimate pain and joy.  Perception, conception and query.  Discovering bewilderment.  Creating the unsaid.

Victim and perpetrator both, you, author, artist, song.  Skewing and distorting in equal measures.  Changing as you change it.  This is the making.  The being-made.  Creator and created both.  The artist in her medium.

There is no “having done.”  Failure or not, it virals and contaminates.  The path is incompletion.  “The Artist’s Way…”  Never through, until it’s through with you, coincident with a life.

Who do we say that we are?

exploring mystery

 

 

 

Creativity’s Luck

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing9 Comments

Last week I in fact took one day “off.”  Truly OFF.  It rained.  I read.  It rained.  I read.  I wrote…

heavy rainfall

Eight hours later, finally, I am drunk with language.  Like Kansas soil, I require such storms for the necessary surplus… for markings to begin to pool, swirl and confuse – for essential destabilization – undoing language from its conventional attachments and turning it toward an alchemy, a natural compound and resource, something to be stirred and sludged or steeped – allowing for aroma, skimming and residue.  Just language, less meaning – an additive experience, unknown potentials of letters combined by some strange combinatory activity of intuition, convention and accident.  Creativity’s luck.

There is a point to drunkenness – whether artificial, of language or pleasure or love, whether substance, experience or drug – it is to be estranged and immersed – in some sense undone.  Renewed.  Despoiled.  It slows and diffuses me enough to write beautifully again.  Instead of making words, to concentrate on shaping letters.  Forces to create.

It is a baffling and bewilderment – allowing us to require effort for focus, selection and choice – so discreet motions of bodies become both complex and marvelous again, the capacity for smell a wonder and delight, communication and gesture (at all) a mysterious gift.

Inebriation levels the field.  Returns to a source.  Baudelaire may have meant we are potential and solidarity at once – flounderers grasping at tools and beginnings, constructing, cooperating.  We are begun.

Perhaps, then, we drink to erase and begin.  We scramble ourselves toward infancy that we might make effort to grow, while minimizing automated meanings.  To struggle to learn, to be becoming rather than operative.  Innovative over automatic.  To develop and realize.

I love to form letters once drowned in the rain of them.

Flood everything to discover what’s possible.

Saturate in order to dredge, to pan, to anticipate.

pioggia-di-parole

The “Necessity” Notebook

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing1 Comment

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B4 Notebook EntryOn May the 22nd

ReWritten / ReWriting

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, WritingLeave a comment

accidentally opened a file from the past that seemed related…

reading-writing

The Pleasure of Reading

In other words (than what?  than which?) we all of us are readers, all of us writers.

That is a pleasure.

And all of us, always, doing both.  Simultaneously.

 

Speaking of my textbooks (were we?) – information sciences, developmental and behavioral psychology, reference services, librarianship / and the research to the side – physics, evolutionary biology, neuro- and cognitive sciences / my pleasures – novels, poems, stories, others’ blogs, visual, aural, literary artifacts / my relational – wife, children, family, friends, society, culture – gestures and vibes and dialogues and signs / my “self” – sensations, perceptions, formulations of these, reformulations, adjustments and maneuvers.

In other words, at all times, I am reading, even if only my lack of memorable dreams, or pulses and breaths.  And writing it all in actions, movements, responses, adjustments of speaking and writing and making.

It is a metaphor, obviously.  Perhaps.

 

Roman Jakobsen purported that “all meaning is a form of translation, and multiple translation (polysemy) is the rule rather than the exception.”  (I am translating his text just now into another con-text).

Wolfgang Iser’s (perhaps, anyway insofar as I am translating it here) concept of actual text (text as it is recorded by an author) and virtual text (actual text as read by a reader).

This is an aspect of the deep living pleasures of reading/writing for me.

 

An author/speaker/artist/scientist/mother/etc. has an urge or sensation – a possibility of action/behavior/message/idea (a virtual text) and translates it through multiple processes and levels of activity through some medium into an actual text/painting/utterance/experiment/recorded idea/sound, etc.  There it is in the real world – a physical artifact in time and space – added – if only for a moment.  Transforming (simultaneously) its maker into a recipient (translating a now existent text/sound/behavior/gesture/sculpture/experience for him or herself) and if any witness/participant/auditor/recipient or reader is in his or her environment they are simultaneously interacting (via translation through their own tools, language, perceptions, sensations, mood, etc) with the actual text, writing a virtual text (translating) of their own.

And it goes on.  And can be done innumerable times, this process, whether using an identical actual text over and over, or simply writing/reading life as it occurs, making it occur.

 

Paul Ricouer:  “stories are models for the redescription of the world.”  Possibly.  Or at least redescriptions (translations) of models for redescription.

Iser: “the relative indeterminacy of a text allows a spectrum of actualizations…literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves…the reader receives it by composing it.”

 

Language, action, behavior as possibilities rather than certainties.

So that I can encounter with all I’ve encountered/experienced an actual text by psychologist Jerome Bruner translating these very quotes and contents with all he has experienced and translate it with the multiple translations of family life and being a human organism and novels and pains, poems and stories, paintings and laws, translated with data and education, emotions and animals, translating with you and a computer, internet, digits and bits, translating into…

 

a great pleasure of reading is writing reading

or, “a writer’s (reader’s) greatest gift to a reader (writer) is to help him become a better writer (reader)” – Jerome Bruner (parentheses mine).

 

literary texts as “epiphanies of the ordinary”

-James Joyce-

You

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings14 Comments

Me.  We are that we are, how we are, when we are, who.  

What has gurgled in me throughout this week, and made it somewhat difficult to post much, is that I ran into these burls.  Grief, change, adaptation, struggle – they all push us up against, or cause us to deny or flee from, these knots, these boundaries, these fabrications of how things ARE, how we’d wish they were, or could be.  In myself, these evidence as anxieties, fears, verges of hopelessness.  With the help of others – my children and their presentness, their being-into (ecstasy), being-out, unique ways of being-with – my therapist, and many other well-intentioned voices and persons who want good for me… I come to see that MOSTLY it’s ME and these burls, these knots, these imagined borders and boundaries in myself – MY IDEAS OF HOW IT WOULD BE NICE FOR THINGS TO BE, my ideas of my “self/ves,” my organismic survival instincts and ancestral tactics – that dislodge me, silence me, THAT I UTILIZE (choose or select) to withhold and diminish and undo my opportunities to be-in, be-with, be-out, be-for the rest of you – the world, my children, my work, my self/ves.

So I’ve been termiting around in these burls.  Wondering how do I undo habit, instinct, ancient patterns of stanching, stoppering, limiting a potential flow of the world and my surround and my relationships and my knowledge and my emotions and my beliefs and my feelings and my thoughts and my dreams and my fears and my anger and my sorrow and my regret and my terror and my joy – work WITH those facts… and begin to erode my selections and choices of UNDOING and LIMITING and FEARING and DIMINISHING and instead tear or leap off these quantitative scales of evaluation, these assessments, these CVs and criteria – and JOIN.  JOIN.  OFFER.  GIVE.  BRING.  SHOW UP.  BE.

CHOOSE – slowly, granularly, deliberately, carefully, wildly – to INVITE the world (as it is) THROUGH, and OFFER the world (as it is) THROUGH…

ME

for…to…with…

YOU

…and All.

I don’t even have to reflect to be able to say that Synechdoche, NY – a film by Charlie Kaufman – is my favoritest made movie of my lifetime, or even of all time for my lifetime.  And as I burrow in these burls of grinding away at the resistances, the terrors, the wishes, and the ecstasies of being a human alive, stumbling across this short lecture of his has been an invaluable gift.  I do not know how to improve on it, so I let it pass THROUGH me… to you…

“Acceptance is nothing less

than the complete transformation

of what one has believed to be one’s self

and one’s reality.”

– Cheri Huber –