Tag: death

Impromptu

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Experience, grief, human, life, love, meaning, Poetry4 Comments

Death.

Abundance.

Extravagant generosity of depletion.

Lust with which the world gives way.

And life.

Things.

Prominence.

.

I have entered a world

in which I am

saddened

begladdened

nostalgic

and eaten away

.

It is “Today”

this world –

the realm, the sphere, the moment:

Now.

A time that’s never,

only almost

and a just-was.

.

Each beginning

what equals

another end.

That time.

What was.

What will be.

What I remember

and predict.

.

The first day

once again;

each possibly

the last

.

It is like this –

each time –

it is the present:

that attachment

that letting go.

Incessant welcome,

and its goodbye.

For (every?) New Year

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, family, holidays, hope, Journallings, Language, meaning, memoir, Reflections2 Comments

Greetings all.  I realize something now.  I realize (today), I realize, sitting in the sun of a Winter in Kansas, on my porch, in a rocker, alone, a side-effect, a remnant, remainder, myself… I realize that I have long dreamt of leaving some legacy, of making some mark, of contributing to the world – the natural world – the world as made up of plants, animals, landscapes, elements, humans… the world dizzied with combinations of atoms and molecules… and yet… and yet… I realize it was all about love – all about being realized by being loved, and realizing meaning in loving – NOT leaving a literary legacy, NOT producing interesting and intriguing offspring, NOT making art or language or objects that would outlast me – NO, no, no…  Simply recognizing that I exist, existed, am existing in the world of another, and that the world exists, existed, will exist for me – by my affection and attention to its nuances, details, and differences – its specificity of my attention, attraction and resolve:  LOVE.

I found this entry in an old journal, a blue oversized Moleskine soft-covered journal, and found (years later) that it still seemed to speak for me… but as I typed and edited it I realized that it has been outdone, realized, accomplished, in the FACT of BEING LOVED and BEING ENABLED TO LOVE… and so all the hopes remain, all the purposes and visions, all the projected communications and connections… but in a context rearranged, reapportioned, reinvented – that of MEANING derived from LOVING and being LOVED.  Thanks to my vibrant partner and accomplice, inspiration and reward – for taking the grave gravity of production and transforming it into action… the pinched acuity of competition and accomplishment into offshoot, accumulation and extraneous luxury – that the hopes, dreams and ideas / ideals of a human existence might be translated into freedom, grace, and potential benefit or gift – possibility rather than necessity; offering rather than identity; potentiality rather than desperation – a giving in distinction from a grasping : so I might still possess similar hoping without the fear and trembling, without a sense of pointlessness, without a perception of failure.  LOVING – intricate maneuvers of helping and healing, intimate operations of interaction and reciprocation, finely detailed activities of acceptance and reception – the sigh, the breath, the pulse of BEING… change me.  Change and change and change me.  As a parent, a man, a partner, a person.  Thank you dear love – a wonder, a woman, an incredible human – a person: full and becoming, so generous, so tender, so affirmative and kind, so rich and creative, inventive and becoming, so new – I love you.  The world is different now.  Its meaning, its point, its aim, its occasion.

This old and rediscovered writing has distinct meaning… because you, and life, and love, and… an evolving and differentiated “I.”

Jacobsen - thought series

I am using the blue notebook with a blue pen to complement.  Why?  Because you asked.  You said “everyone wants to know.”

In other words, if it’s going to count for what matters, it has got to be specific and special – set apart, somehow more final, more complete.  I’ll use it for the whole – for photos, drawings and more – all the blue notebook in blue ink – for you.  Because apparently, “everyone wants to know.”

Mom and dad ask in their roundabout, passive-regressive surreptitiously accusatory way, as is their fashion – kindly and quiet, ever with a look of care and concern, yet secretly shouting their “what is wrong with you!?” “What is wrong with US, that you…” and on and on and blah blah blah…

My memory isn’t like that the first five years of life…that I pretend to remember.  But all is mostly smells and sounds and light from there.  Trees and grass and dirt, how brightness gleamed and glanced and filtered through, with times of wind and rain.

Not that you care… I’m fairly certain that’s not what is being asked for, not by you, by my sibling, children, or lifetime of “friends” and “family” – whoever, wherever they’ve become.

You’re the livewire – and perhaps the children – perhaps they will want to know, at some point, perhaps not.  Perhaps everyone’s already figured my story – diagnosed and prescribed me.  Perhaps.

Be that as it may, I’ve thought long and hard, reviewing what I thought I knew, how I felt I felt, what it seems I’ve seen, and so on, and decided, for you, for you, really, and maybe a little of a bit for myself (curiously) and a percentage for my kids should they ever seek to know or wonder, or have need of psychological freedom, or give a shit about who or why… I decided to use this damned blue notebook with matching pen and try to learn just what I think about it all, mostly because, as you put it, “everyone wants to know” – (and WHO might this “everyone” be?).

Should I start with the hands, the head, or the heart?  I suppose the limbs and loins will come into play as well – god knows the guts and the goiter.

I remember an opening.  A time I was touched, in the rain, and my suddenly skin, my obvious self-enclosure – as opening, margin, and veil – a fabric of me, and a screen.

I wanted to make a difference, you see.  Make something, I don’t know, construct an element everyone could hold on to.  Take in hand, heart and head.  Keep or repeat as needed.  Something like that.  I knew I wouldn’t last, none of this, none of anything.  “The center cannot hold” sort of deal.

I ought not begin there.  They’re all wound up together like knots – the head looking down, arms wrapped around, concealing and revealing the heart, the guts, the loins and moving limbs.  I can’t take a one without other, thinking and feeling about it, my actions, ideas, and sensations all.

Perhaps I’ll pretend.  (Just what you’ve all loved so well about me – to discover pretense – how I’ve molded myself to imagined desires).  I’ll pretend I’m an aged man seated on a stiff wooden chair, children / grandchildren gathered all about me – a specimen or model – something to be taken apart and examined.  I lift off my shirt and my body is read – questions asked – we all get somewhere in this way.

jacobsen - thought series1

Let’s see – here – along the shoulder – a self-portrait by Egon Schiele (self-tormented asylum brother) and a snake that is eating its tail.  “Le Ouroborous,” I  hack out – “don’t you know it?”  Sign of doctors, ingenuity, medicine and art – creation, destruction intertwined round and round.  Self-devouring while birthing its form as it alters.  The mastication and regurgitation of “I.”

A young one might say “what’s that? – the curlicues and elaborate spiel?”  Garcia Lorca I’d sigh.  Yes.  The grand leaping bugger of light.  He’s yellow and lemons, crickets and birds!  You know the stuff that sends you!  Portal moments of sight or song and ‘wham!’  all the crap pelted into your brain and body get shaken and stirred together like surrealist still life.  Incongruity making sense.  Opposites attracting, no, better – look at your aging mother and I – a juxtaposed spectrum, paradox and carnival!

They say that you wanted to know.

Yes there’s Kafka, Blanchot, Cixous and Lispector.  Jabes and Beckett now seeped in my veins.  Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, Rilke.  Gods and angels, drink and demons all carved in the skin of their names.  Nietzsche and ridiculous happiness.  Wittgenstein and the torment of words, of meanings, of none.  I’d be a working inscription, at surface.

The corridors – head, heart and hands.

Are you sure anyone wanted to know?

The sounds of piano?  Coaxing the keys in steady patterns – mimicking rain; or poems – yes, we forget Giacometti’s “Man Falling” – a perpetual stumble on the back of my hand, hoping neither knew what the other was up to.  But they did and they do – I see that now – all parts of same body, stretched with same skin.  Poems as stripped-down sculptures, some essential chants or song – just a gaze or a wisp of caress.  Droppings of blood.  Miracles that something remains after we’re through with our twisting and grasping.

Is this what you wanted?  Does it explain – anything?  I doubt it.  Hardly think so.

Read on.

Here at the ribs.  The cracked and the lumpen.  There was a time.  Times I thought maybe risking and danger – a reach at euphoria – some panicking life – might make one feel much more alive.  How do you think you all got here?  Desperate plungings into the unknown, oh dear ones, like mad scientists messing around in the lab!  The edges of cliffs, clinging to limbs, insecure at wits’ ends, going for broke.

And break we did.

But just look at you fertile seedlings, good eggs.  I never meant to be rough with you all.  To risk what is fragile in you.  Ribs, here – cave and cage for the heart.

I can still breathe you.  Charred and chortled, this was one great pleasure – to know I was breathing, in-spired.  I know you all despised it, and it caused me to smell stale and rotting, but the rush of smoke down this pipe here into the bellows of slimy flesh…that let me know I was taking it in, not an automaton or senseless machine – no, I was hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling – BEING – I could feel it in my ashen lungs.  Sometimes it hurt.  What we ingest.  But it really goes in and visibly comes out – everything – for good or ill.  I needed to know it tangibly.

Why? you ask, why?

Look at the cranium stooped and weighed down.  That sucker was a burden of liquid fire.  All curled over like that the entirety of my life – looking in, at, in.  What’s there?  How does it work?  For “whom”?  When?  Is there even a why?  Examining, dreaming, recording and imagining – listen – say it back, say it forth, combine and copulate, shake it and stir – use that heavy weight, whirr whirr chrrr and whirr.  Profile the shape of some jagged question mark, dotted where the heart must be.

And look at it now, nearly buried into the chest.  It happens.  Weather-systems, signsponge, it all will run its course.  It once was aimed upwards and outwards, into fantasies, hopes and abstractions, and for years I kept it aimed straight ahead – horizontal, seeking directions – but slowly and surely its drug down toward the heart, pulsing muscle, plug for the cords.  Everything up and away, everything out there or behind, it’s all happening here – in the mix, filtering through, circulating the circuitry of head, heart and hands – latching up or breaking down in the system.

What was it you wanted to know?  Limbs and loins, head and heart, I’m acknowledging and exposing, affording view – I’m aware description does not explain a thing – the wonderful views of science still unable to explain…

The waste gets processed below, legs running away now knobby and stiff.  But there, clinging in its corner like a core – my erratic, agitated, beating beast.  Entire web of inexplicable drives and energy, fears and misery, desires and dread – my heart.  Does this explain it?  Does this explain anything?  What anyone wanted to know?

Gasping there like the mouth of a landed fish, pulsing purplish like an aroused member – my heart.  If I poke and coax it, tear at it or wring it onto this blue notebook in blued blood – will it explain?

Here, whomever, look.  Here it lies, cheats, and steals.  Here it gives and it aches and breaks.  Here it prolongs and stops itself short.  Pulpy mass of living meat – humana – the am therefore am.  Take it, read it, test it – heal it if you wish or can.  I’m open.

Is this what you wanted?

What everyone wanted to know?

Black Blizzard

“Not another word.”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, Writing3 Comments

“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it you can ever let anyone know…this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you.” – DFW.

I don’t know what to tell you. If this piece by DFW doesn’t resonate and “work” on you, well, ok. Perhaps he’s not for you.  Please give it a read, again, if you have…

DFW - Oblivion

click for link to “Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace

IN THE MIDST

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Philosophy, Reflections, Writing1 Comment

Moments: The reality of accrual and depletion, growth and diminishment

chicken-or-the-egg-550x550

“It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad things that form, persist and break up in its currents.”

Tim Ingold – Being Alive: Essays on knowledge, movement and description

            In the reading journal I keep, I record what I read each day in entries numbered according to my years.  For instance, today is Day 364 of 43.  Each day counts UP the days I have lived, simultaneously counting DOWN the days I have left.

If our weight in the world is conspired via our capacity for object-making, “perception,” – how we collate and identify active collective of particles, lending them shape and color, space and duration – in effect: “organize them according to our own purposes and facilities” – co-creating manageable entities with which we might interact and navigate life “sensibly” (body-minded)

then the “lightness” of vitality/movement/being comes from the constant (relatively frenetic) buzz and action of the unseen particles composing and constituting the scales we are able to perceive and conceive.

Does this sound workable?  I trust that I am a hive of vibrating, exchanging, bounding, colliding and connecting atoms/molecules/whatever, and that to certain interlinked bundles of material interactivities this can appear, be sensed, perceived, interacted with, as an apparently distinct “organism/being/organization of activities” constructing (or being constructed/perceived AS) almost a form, a differance, an “object.”

And likewise, and vice-versa.

Particles, drilled down or zoomed out in their interactivities and motion form ever-varying “wholes” (temporarily composed perceptible forms or variable entities).  Thus poets and scientists, thus Ovid and religions, philosophers…HUMANS…METAPHOR.  Taking various realities for another and one another, or, ALWAYS – in relation to.

Crossing and dipping, perceiving/conceiving, we are able to invent scenarios and subjects, conduits and concretions, whereby we are also able to communicate, invent, share, cognize imaginative possibilities for our temporary coagulates (or “life-forms,” ever active and morphing).  The tinier particles simply continue their trajectories and behaviors while their collaborated forms appear to be “born” (or formulated, occurring) and die (or dissolve, dismember, separate to join in other alignments, reactions and compounds).

Thinking is a lucky pleasure of our particular combo-formulations, as love, emotion, felt embodiment, enmindedness, entanglements…

I am grateful for all of it: lovely purposeful accidents to sense, perceive, grow, change, become, decease, connect and disconnect…attach and release…combine and unravel.

IN THE MIDST of which…and this is where the trembling, shifting, unstable, particularly and elaborately conditioned partial perception “I” initially chose (in languaging) to begin…”in the midst of…”

but then I realized that MIDST might beggar a belief-explanation (theory) as to what I was beginning in the midst of…ALWAYS…this strange living process…and so I diverted through the above contingent caveat.

i.e. EVERYTHING DEPENDS.  On context, formulations, occasions, circumstances, surroundings, kind, type, species, conditions composing NOW.

There is some longevity to “sticking together” (successfully? Symbiotically? Interactively linked or bonded for some formal survivable persistence) but it’s all quite temporary (the place-time from which an opinion is held or conceived, promulgated…changes slightly with each moment, more in an hour, a day, each “year,” each…occurrence).

To say: all is active and contingent.  I.e. DEPENDS – on multitudes of very specific things, unseen tiny things, enormous systemic things, situations, arrangements being…”the case.”

A Hal Hartley film or a novel by Dostoevsky, the face of my child or the sound waves of song; the body and voice of my beloved…won’t have any “effect” “meaning” “sense” when my particles realign and this particular arrangement is “dead,” “decayed,” “reorganized.”

Activity is a curious thing.

Although we experience “age,” “knowledge,” “experience,” as a kind of “growth” or accretion, it isn’t very long at all in our formulating as a human before we become profoundly aware that our “growth” is an indicator of cessation, “progress” a sign of our undoing…dismantling, shifting, and changing.

This central comprehension of human systems – paradoxical tension, momentary accretion/diminishment – likely fuels much of the emotion, trauma, passion, energy, delight, grief, disturbances and elations of our particular species instinctual cognitively embodied behaviors.

Angst, joy, terror, hope – perhaps all of these reside in this mysterious yin-yang of coming together / coming apart AT ONCE and ALWAYS.  Each addition is a removal, each connection another breakage, each revelation a forgetting.  Each next accrues a last and never.

NOW – the pivot point of addition/subtraction – for human living.

I crave, delight, wonder, rejoice, and find my survival with each NEXT while grieving, losing, aching, suffering, and ceasing with each movement as well.

There is no choice in the matter (that I can see) – it happens.  Everything we do effects and disaffects inherently.

Rising indeed IS falling.  Growing IS diminishing.  Living truly IS dying, while our dying is yet living for something else…Reciprocal, ongoing, continuous realignments.  Any departure is a novel thing joined.

And thus, simply process, simply going-on.  Not “us” but it.  Not you, I, we, but the particles and universal systems, arrangements.

And we, in the midst.

Perhaps.  That’s how I’m thinking it today.

As I count up and down the days.

ouroboros

Abroad – Notes from the Petrie Dish

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings8 Comments

Melancholy Musings

“Meaning, if there is such a thing, involves more than what there is.  Minimally, it involves a truthful assessment of what living a finite human life adds up to.”

-Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem–

“I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear”

-David Foster Wallace-

“You are – your life, and nothing else.”

-Jean-Paul Sartre-

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“That Spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to…” So begins Deborah Levy’s succinct “response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write,’ entitled Things I Don’t Want To Know.  It speaks to me.  Sentences like “Smoking cheap filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators.  There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way.”  And here I am in London, far from home, wandering scattered Lego streets, half of the time having an idea of where I am, where I might go.  Like life with children – the half provided that’s never lost – versus the “self:”

 

I am the sign, I am the letter,

I am the language that cannot be come to terms with.

I will go to my resting place

                                                and will not be born again.

I am what is scattered and cannot be gathered up.

I am small, I am silence,

                                                I am what is not found.

–Charles Wright

 

“It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him.”

-David Foster Wallace-

– that sort of thing, left to one’s own musings.  Levy speaks of her notebooks as “always gathering evidence for something I could not fathom.”  Dan Beachy-Quick speaks of the blank page as “one version of chaos…the movement outward and the movement inward are simultaneous…that we enter writing to threaten the security of the knowledge we possess before we read it…” knowledge that isn’t reason – “but the plank that, in reason, breaks.” (from Wonderful Investigations).

As a kind of practice, as it turns out, (Beachy-Quick also says “language offers a method of experiencing death without dying” and “Life, world: we die into it.  Words kill us.  We lose the tops of our heads.  Then we open our eyes.  Then we walk out of the poem into the world.”) I recently labored over messages to those significant to me (including myself) –

what would I want to say or have said if I were to leave the living?

Beachy-Quick suggests that “poetry is birthed from such awful realizations – a fact which denies the fact of one’s own being, that says the self, even the godlike self, is not sufficient unto itself.”

Here some parts from The Letter to Myself:

“I believe the world has had enough of me, and I of it.  Life is generous: overabundant with pain, surprise, people, noise, joy, danger, grandeur, poverty, tastes and sights, sounds and smells, anguish, glory and grief and their very complex mixtures.  As are we – individual organisms – capable, unique, agentive…

      We cannot capture life.  It is ‘more than.’  As mine ends, I find myself desperately wanting to summarize and somehow represent it, but I find no words to do so.

      Aside from the brevity of the fullest portion of my lived experience … with ease what I most grieve is not seeing my children shape and become themselves.  That is the question I most toil over – have my children had enough of me? 

      In the main I have experienced myself as a person whom others accommodate, adjust to, endure.  In classes, families, and communities of practice, even in friend groups, I’ve never FITTED – conjoined smoothly – BELONGED.

      My children have never known another father, so they might find me definitive, ‘right’ only, unique and special.  But my parents have known other children, spouses other partners and lovers, friends other friendships, teachers other students, bosses other employees and so on…and none would consider me ‘best’ or ‘only,’ definitive or unique.  No one has chosen or selected me as theirs.

      I know I’m not alone in this, nor do I need to be the BEST anything, but I would have loved to have been chosen, claimed, selected and pursued – not for being the best, or special, not for characteristics or qualities, talents or things I do well – but for being me, for the am I am.

      How “uniquely me” turned out was never quite enough for others, or not the ‘right’ enoughs.  I surely don’t blame others I‘ve encountered – no one was obligated to choose me, or owed me selection, I simply was not suited to my contexts.

 

      I hope that my children and loved ones are able to discover and co-generate contexts in which they thrive.

 

      I had my moments, my ‘times’ – the births of my children, my weddings, days of writing and travel, dialogues with friends and multitudes of sensations and aesthetic and enriching experiences – I do not lack,

            but it’s a struggle my organism is tired of. 

      I want to say that in my life with my love I realized it – I knew myself as a unique person with particular qualities, capacities, failures, weaknesses and strengths.  I accomplished and risked, expressed and developed more of myself during those years than perhaps the entirety of my life until then…

      …in the end it’s only rambling, ever trying to grasp something of experience…ever unable…

      Perhaps something, but not what I mean to.  Always less, never enough… I’m sorry.  Thank you for enduring me this wonderful long.”

 

“To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish.  We always hesitate when we wish for something…A hesitation is not the same as a pause.  It is an attempt to defeat the wish.  But when you are ready to catch this wish and put it into language, then you can whisper but the audience will always hear you.”

-Zofia Kalinska, quoted in Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know 

So speak up, practice, be gentle with yourself – “the story of this hesitation is the point of writing” – into and out of yourself…the activities where things con-fuse…

I wish to write.

I wish to parent.

I wish to love and be loved.

I wish to learn.

I am thankful the “I” is “what is not found,” for then we can keep searching (together), and in the searching, the interaction, perhaps begin a “truthful assessment of what a living finite human life adds up to” –

to matter and to mean.

Nourishment during a lunch break

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy, Writing2 Comments

Fynsk - Claim of Language“Here, I will observe simply that fundamental research (in the humanities) diverges from much theory in that it is always seeking the limits of its language in responding to that to which it seeks to answer: those dimensions of experience and symbolic expression that summon it (as a kind of exigency for thought) and to which no concept will ever be quite adequate.  Such research is impelled by its own neediness and its sense of being answerable, whereas theory, governed by the concept, proceeds with ever-expanding appropriations; fundamental research proceeds from encounter (always from a sense that something has happened to which it must answer), and it seeks encounter.  In theory, there are no encounters.”

– Christopher Fynsk – 

 

“Transductive Reading”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Reflections, Traces4 Comments

Warning:  an unfortunate side-effect of immersion in summer, family and graduate studies is the near-impossibility of crafting fragments of writing into art.  For the time being, then, if you choose to read this blog, it will consist primarily of recommendations, snippets, quotations and reflections with hopefully a weekly creative venture of flash fiction or a poem or two.  The following will fall under the “Reflections” category.

I mentioned “transductive” a few posts ago.  As defined by Gilbert Simondon, a transductive relationship is “a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituants: e.g. humanity and technics are indissociable” (from Bernard Stiegler, Technics & Time, vol 2: Disorientation).

I read books by piles.  From time to time I post an updated “currently reading” list, usually comprised of 50 or more books that I keep lined about my desk as a privacy barrier and womb-like conversational enclosure.  I dip in and out of these, ruled by something like mood or intuition – at times I sense exactly what voice or rhythm, style or subject I desire, crave, or need for some sort of equilibrium I lack, and slowly regain by engagement with these texts.  In other words, for my own sense of sanity, well-being, provocation or anticipated growth, I need a collective of minds and voices, styles and subjects to wake me, challenge me, inform me, soothe me, spur me on.  Here’s a smattering from each of the stacks surrounding me…

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What I recognized today, is that the way I read is transductive – each voice, style, subject, mind I engage is co-constitutive of the others I take in.  

For example, today I’ve been primarily soaking in Mark Taylor’s Field Notes from Elsewhere, and Roland Barthes‘ The Preparation of the Novel lectures.  Barthes describes the urge to change, to purpose singly, “to invest / disinvest / reinvest” as an experience of the “middle-of-the-journey” – an impossible location, but “nothing other than the moment when one realizes that death is real” and time changes, everything is re-evaluated, re-purposed, the familiar is questioned and made strange.  I think (transductively) what Taylor refers to as “Elsewhere“: “not so much a place as a condition that renders whatever had seemed familiar utterly strange…the axis of the world shifts, even if ever so slightly, and what passes for normal changes.”

These books are filled with insight, interest and intrigue (as are the whole swoop of titles in the slideshow), but today, today, I am revelling in the company and conversation these writings (surrounding me) construct and carry one, the opportunity I have to be in the midst of it, my mind like a circuit-operator, pushing buttons, pulling plugs, reconnecting, crossing wires, silencing…reading this way is kind of like the work of conducting a symphony – except the melding sounds occur only within the ampitheatrical shell of my own neuronally-linked brain…transductively.

These works co-constitute me, and come to co-constitute my transductive relationships with my loved ones, environment, world.  Taylor writes provocatively of all the betwixt and betweens of reality – “I am never sure whether light makes the mountains appear or the mountains make light visible…Darkness in the  midst of light and light in the midst of darkness…There is a texture to light that allows – no, requires – the tissue of vision to be constantly woven anew…”

“Paradoxes and contradictions form the very stuff of our lives…the challenge of teaching, writing, and, indeed, living is to join the abstract and the concrete in thinking about questions that truly matter” (Taylor).  

At this stage in my own biolography…I feel this acutely and persuasively.  The “before / after” of which Barthes writes so fluidly – that there is not enough time left to go on creating projects for the future, what lies behind has not achieved the “wanting-to-write” sufficiently…Elsewhere has been visited (or has visited)…and change, choice and directions must be purposed…

“To Want-to-Write‘ (Vouloir-Ecrire) = attitude, drive, desire, I don’t know what: insufficiently studied, defined, situated.  This is clearly indicated by the fact that there’s no word for this ‘wanting to’ – or rather, one exists, a delightful exception, but in decadent, late Latin: scripturire, used just once (in the fifth century) by Sidoine Apollinaire, the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand who defended Clermont against the Visigoths (major poetic work).  What I mean to say is: since a word exists in one language, albeit only once, it is wanting in all the others…

     Why?  Probably because underrepresented, or perhaps, in a more complex manner, because here the relationship between the drive and the activity is autonymical: wanting-to-write is only a matter of the discourse of someone who has written – or is only received as discourse from someone who has managed to write.  To say that you want to write – there, in fact, you have the very material of writing; thus only literary works attest to Wanting-to-Write – not scientific discourses…an order of knowledge where the product is indistinguishable from the production, the practice from the drive (and, in that case, belongs to an erotics) – Or, put differently again: writing is not fully writing unless there’s a renunciation of metalanguage; Wanting-to-Write can only be articulated in the language of Writing: this is the autonymy I referred to…”

-Roland Barthes-

I’m there.  Elsewhere.  Wanting-to-Write…

 

Another paradox (David Foster Wallace)

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

Another paradox (David Foster Wallace).

Set Screens

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing25 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers, March 15, 2013.

Copyright - Lora Mitchell

With age I come to see more clearly, through glaucoma and the cataracts.  Each layer beamed away, burning holes in cloudy veils.  Colors hardly remembered, bright edges that the world lends.  All that glitters can’t be told.  Even my hearing improves, as if long years of practice had taught me how to listen.  The paper of my skin whispers pages’ sound.  Dying’s process of deletion, dropping memories like scales.  Surgery after surgical procedure – removing the lens, installing; expanding tubes, constricting; bypassing and shunting – internal edits increasing my awareness that I’ve no idea how deep my set screens go.  I am yet to see this world, through the versions that I’ve filmed.

N Filbert 2013

The Nothingness of Symbols

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes10 Comments

a drowning.  a submersion.  a baptism (immersion)

I am drinking the arbitrary nothingness of symbols.

I am writing.

Writing is both a cry and a response.

Intuition / rationalization.

Nurtured and natural.

In the realm of symbols, I am safely between.  In the place of no safety.  The nowhere realm – a world of now here.

Where I am drowning.  Delirious.  Drunken on these symbols, arbitrary and well-developed, representative and unnecessary (?) signs.

I am alive.

Combining intellect to emotion to situation and its social constituents…I am writing, uttering, verbalizing –

– and, by chance, perhaps, you are here.

I am side-swiped.  Side-tracked.

In other words,

I set out to circumlocute on this very “subject” / “topic” / “matter”…yesterday…

resulting in a nothing of the kind.

Drowning in a limitation of symbols –

“composition,” we call it,

“For it is in the nature of language, as I have already noted briefly, that it is governed by the principle of ‘duality of functioning’,..to be more specific, the distinctive features of the sound system that constitute a language are determined by the limited set of phonemes employed in constructing the next unit up, morphemes.  And morphology is determined by the uses to which morphemes are put in forming lexemes or words.  Words, in their turn, are formally describable by the functions they perform in sentences.  Sentences, in turn, achieve their significance from the discourse in which they are embedded.  Discourse is governed by the communicative intentions of the speakers.  The communicative intentions of speakers, of course, are governed by the transactional requirements of the culture.  And along the way, there are further determinants of form that operate in this same way…”

-Jerome Bruner-

That sickness, that plenitude, those realistic illusions – as if one were totally absorbed in the unrealities of the human way of being-in-the-world.

“the world is not what we thought it was”

-Jim Harrison-

There will be a day my sons will die.

Hopefully I will be gone.

My spouse will die.

Hopefully I will be gone.

There is a word for things that hold too much (e.g. “things that can hold no more”)

Things at, or beyond, capacity.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.  They are drunk, drowned, saturate.

And still there are fresh occurrences.

There are also #s, codes, algorithms, symbols…

I like the idea of doing something that matters, of being someone that matters, of my strange happenstance of existing as an organism having some effect, making some verifiable difference in a larger web of existing things

liking the idea certainly doesn’t make it so

and yet, perhaps,

My intention had been to talk about the wonder…

…that out of 26 letters…

this many years (generations, eons)

and variety

had even occurred.

Was all.

that meaning, is interesting, is cool

that, to (lil’ ol’) me…

it’s amazing…!

in 26 letters

#s, symbols, diagrams

we keep constructing…