Tag: death
Mirrors & Shadows
“Ten times a day you must overcome yourself. You must want to burn yourself up in your own flame.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
“the lesson is clear: one is multiple, the same is different, the representation is the negative of the person…both original and copy, identical and different, they are the same and the other, interchangeable and monumental…In the dark room of his studio, Warhol develops himself. In so doing he ‘unmakes’ himself.”
-Victor Stoichita-
“Death follows artists around like their shadow and I think that’s one of the reasons artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and nothingness of life.”
-Francis Bacon-
Children singing choruses. Joyous chants and rhymes. Distant. Repetition forming memory.
Chasing shadows, or running from. Self-same body blocking sun. To be sought, to be feared. Identical and strange.
Known alone in traces and reflections.
I say that “I” was young once. That it’s only patterns of light, only the passing of time, only angles of vision.
I repeat myself.
Each day reassembling, developing, dissembling, to reassemble again. My body a gathering post.
Mirroring image has gone from the closest thing to self-awareness we might uncover to a flat reflective surface full of nothing. Ephemeral and changing by the second, dependent on the looker, a vacant mirage.
Shadow has proceeded from a designator of real presences to an outline of actual vacuity. From a measurable symbol of substance to a vague hint of objects passing.
Voices like a bag of small bells and grass. Something shaking and stirred. Snippets of a tune, the catchy parts.
What I can tell I read, observe, attend and consider, opening a dialogue of days. But I only get to see in glimpses and portions. A hand moving, holding an instrument here; flat feet from crossed legs there; a shoulder, some hair of a beard, the frames of glasses. I don’t see myself seeing, nor see myself as seen.
There’s the mirror and the shadow – intangible, eminently interpretable and malleable “things” – emphases of the transitory. Receptacles like language – merely signs or indices – pointing back at absence.
Moment, moment, moment…now then now then now…endless fantasies of dissection moving round the room, faster than shuttling clips of film. A self presenting / representing itself after again, appearances only, shimmering skein mingling veils of light…
While they sing like breezes dreaming – “Who sees?” and “What is seen?”
He who has ears let him hear,
bypassing illusion,
in marks and gestures
Drawing a Blank ________________ …
Okay, it really isn’t my preference to clutter you with personal information / process…but the month of July turning into August has been something of a whirlwind of large changes for our family. Traveling for three weeks and all the saturation that implies (very GOOD – but overwhelming for one like me who likes to control the pace and type and style and content of input 🙂 )…now registering everyone for school, gathering supplies, moving into new vocations or returning to vocation outside of our home studio…enduring a home burglary in which one of our children was assaulted and some irreplaceable valuables stolen…you get the picture. After spending most of yesterday trying to “touch base” with our home and our lives, I found a few moments personally directed. What I encountered felt like a Void. The last I’d recorded in my reading list journal was July 8. The last I’d written in my private journal was July 6. I couldn’t remember the projects I’d been in the midst of when we took to the mountains, the road, the lakes, the cabins. I was bewildered. I drew a blank…some empty fullness…and here is what tumbled out:
Drawing a Blank _________________ …
So that after long whiles, some sometimes, nothing
nothing left or right remembers stirs reminds
conjures therefore a kind of empty fullness emptied
of what seems everything but is nothing for we feel
pretty certain (what is called “knowledge”
i.e. “belief”) that nothing empties, nothing
moving nowhere neither expanding nor
retracting, not replete or depletable,
so to say a blank is begin, as you see it
__________________________ …
indicates (is a kind of sign) indexes you
elsewhere toward or away, that is, movement
what we might apply another sort of signifier
otherwise (a.k.a) simply known as “blank”
becomes arbitrarily a point of action (more
accurately a line) trail train of efforts
here, like god, as I understand the term,
to name without knowing or under-
standing: “begin.”
__________________________ …
empty trajectory boundary border
line emptied of nothing (not possible)
remains only to be filled with doing
which I’m doing, once a word like “god”
enters as a placeholder, rhythmic beat,
disregulating reorganizer that empty
fullness reveals itself full indeed
by which I mean synonyms collect
(as I experience them) through action
upon within the emptied track
(emptied of nothing, nonsensical)
or trace, that is, “god” =
_______________________ …
metamorphosing in my apparatus I
once perceived as empty, better
said “lost” or “chaos-crossed”
too full in a way to recognize it-
self until such a thud as god
should stir the matter like a magnet
drawing unto after it syllable
after syllable sounds sounding as
“death” as “human” what resounds
in my cranium with deity, but death
of which or both at once, such
emptied fullness I think, led by
__________________________ …
because I’d though how much humans
were like god in their deaths and invention
death like a horse dragging a sledge
without sleds grinding splinters shafts
“substances” to naught, limbs undone
what we thought were wholes – holes
skull shrinking withered of hopes
and fears, identity’s loss, how
death depurposes unknowns…all
the strenuous loves and desperate
frights I gave names and space and
time during life that were not
anything actual only possibilities
but words worries made them seem
death immediately deletes leaving
______________________ …
like character or personality, what
is memorable or terrifying even
unimaginable things we imagined
treating, relating to, engaged as
real entities death erased, again
the emptying, of nothing, no thing
to be rid of but a sound, a rhythm
a term – god, human, death –
superadditives, ideas, beliefs, myths
theories without basis no matter
observation perception interpretation
super-imposed on
________________________ …
emptied of nothing as nothing being
undiminishable death demons-
trates depurposing de constructions
we attribute fully to emptiness
what is unknown its own sort
of impossible excepting conjecture
consideration deleted at death
by death what life had spent
on deities and persons, ideas or myths
where nothing was, actually empty
but for matter beneath and slowly
ground back down toward away
emptying the nothing to fullness
_____________________ …
drawing a blank
N Filbert 2012
And yet
shuffling through my papers and bags from the “vacation”-ing, I found these pages…uncertain what more to do with them…
The Advance
In the looping that making is
swing back
tie around
and move forward,
if you make it through
you will stretch toward
if not
you will bunch up
stopped and
knotted,
held
somehow in a form;
The passing through –
the trick of things –
like camels
and eyes of needles
or coyotes
tricking their prey –
Not always,
but sometimes,
it works.
More prevalently
we create bonds
that only loosen
when undone
or serve
to strangle
Neither / nor
Either / or
a kind of be / have
if you will
you will feel
that you won’t
but no matter
Letters are made
for the unconscious
something akin to
shorthand,
symbols,
drawing
from metaphorical wells
their multi-meanings,
depending on
what’s growing there.
Here.
Now.
For instance
finding what you’ve put away
if not uncovered,
comes in snippets.
Like remembering
we advance
in casting back and forth
across a scene –
it’s only details
attention finds
and alters
with the looking
like a spy
proffers suspicion
or a guru
marking growth
it’s in our nature –
though we cannot know that –
in our nature too
the combination:
imagination
and desire,
a synonym
for knowledge
if we “get it.”
I don’t get it,
I be / have
and therefore lose
much of what I had coming
Alas, but it is day
and meaning rises
first one thing
and then another
by my measure,
inaccurately
distinct
and untoward;
we have our myths –
our dreams and visions –
our feeble truths
for what they’re worth,
a clumsy journeying
toward
death
when be and have
are one (none)
N Filbert 2012
Blurting : what WAS this?
Found this in my files…probably isn’t even worth posting, but something kinda fascinates me about it…I’ve never been a drug-user, but something had surely opened the gates of the dam on the day this came forth. Sometimes writings (by others) do this to me – I read and sort of get “drunk” I guess, with language and then somehow that stirs and stimulates whatever words fill up my cranium and then… well, for what it MIGHT be worth… here is What It IS
What it IS
is all of these things, trying to explain,
the trees, the flowers (dying), the grass (needing mown),
in line at the store, filling with gas, last nights’ remnant of dream (also the dreams from before, books read, voices heard/overheard/never heard), a multitude of feelings, the way she draws a heart, a star, what guilt feels like (now, then), the difficult struggle in parenting of love and direction, how language comes (or gesture, vocabulary or intonation), how silence, what we do with it, our decisions, who to love, where to live, how to say, what to smoke, when to fight, where to run, what to eat, why at all, what floating in a pool feels like (or a pond, a lake, the ocean), which music when, where, what we mean into it, the grades we make and receive, how we work, squirrels sounds and behaviours, what friendship is (might be), what is learned, absorbed, observed, what we touch, scents in closets (in bathrooms, at relatives, of genders or nationalities), associations, childhood, ambiguities, paintings and sculptures, religions or symphonies, taxes, liking to dance (or not), with people or alone, the postal service, how often, how much, your mother, who said so, aging,
trying to explain,
divorce, vocations, contradiction, philosophy, hunting, mountains, arrogance, wounds, broken bones (or hairline fractures), colors, fashion, changing the oil in the car (the mower, the boat), politics of oil of belief of emotions and opinions and genetics, diseases (like pleurisy and cancer and rust and decay), who family is, how you come by, sexuality, remorse, pleasure and pain and fences and institutions, architecture, advertising, electricity and electronics, pi, mohair, virtual and visual, palpable and “real,” poetry, names you can’t remember (but what is it you remember), can’t forget, incense, train rails, Marcia’s hair (shimmer and idealized clarity), meat, diapers, rain and humidity, historical “accounting,” memory theory money, mythology, facts and things like rocks and apples, pears science, bronze, doorways, “home” or houses, dead presidents, Casio, intuition, astrology, newspapers, rotations, reciprocation and differences, if anything is the same, what repeat might mean, definitions, experience, gasoline, yogurt, how fast you run, if you have arms or legs or are able to see or hear, clouds,
to try to explain this,
there is more here….
much more,
let’s see, hear, touch, smell, feel
wonder….
and death too…
to explain, include, describe
imagine
All my Words are Silent 