Tag: desire

“Now” “again”: or, desire in times of control

On By NW FilbertIn anxiety, desire, human, Language, Perception, Poetry, time, Writing3 Comments

The times are not easy.

Time never was.

Yet we insist

on enumerating

our lack of control,

unknowing…

.

“God,” we say, (in 3 digits)

“atom” at four, or the “facts” being five,

“knowledge” (as 9) over

“wisdom” – contrived in 6 letters

resembling “power” (which is slightly less-than) –

.

pretending we’re nearer

a “truth.”

Splintering this countless discourse

making babble –

pathways dividing again and again

.

Not to worry,

No-One,

least not here,

never there, nary hereing

we strive to forget –

.

the small fractions

we are,

even increments fail –

our instrumentation –

excrement turning to soil.

.

We say on,

calculating

in terms.

Splits on a dial

or bits switching voltage

to light

and/or sound –

inexplicably deafblind

we human – perceiving,

depleting, reduce.

.

The times never easy,

or real,

and all barely broken apart –

what we call the “fantastic”

(9 marks) nearly actual

.

what goes on

is a “now” and “again”

without ceasing…

a particle-waving

at sea

and to stars

.

an endlessness

born of its end.

On Thinking

On By NW FilbertIn being, creative writing, desire, dreaming, erotic, Experimenctes, grief, Language, Living, Poetry1 Comment

jackrabbit mind, dashing –

here thick grass of nothingness

there a frenzied masturbation –

to and fro, quick left, jab right,

the daydreams, grief,

and absence fore and aft.

It’s a wonder, this pondering

machine, unhinged

of its bearings, moorings,

bodies baring everywhere

and not a drop to think.

What drives desire?

Seems pushed and pulled

and craven.  Erotically

erratic, playing at its gloom

“it’s nothing,” says the mouth,

always caught between

the breathing and the axons

blood swelling pounding through.

The feral hind leaps out,

ruminate sparkle, devious

flux of concept, fact, or notion,

swimming in emotion,

nothing known.

Tapping at Windows of Words

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, desire, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, Traces, Writing7 Comments

The bestial want

is it ever more?

Evermore.

.

Ache beauty

its terrible

hunger

.

The voyeur

at what is not

“mine.”

.

What can be taken?

What “had”?

In the seeking,

the peeping,

the glimpse

or the glance –

its desire?

.

Such beastly want,

evermore,

grasping

.

forth or out

I reach –

a solid pane.

.

I am limited

constrained

delimited –

.

it would seem

I see clearly

but it cannot be

touched.

.

‘I’ is alone

with-out.

With-in

comes from ‘you.’

.

So ‘I’ scopes –

a feral yearn –

and gazes…

.

tapping at windows

of words.

All-ways

On By NW FilbertIn absence, creative writing, desire, eros, relation, Writing3 Comments

HE in the feeling of HER approach.  That syrupy abyss.  Unknowing.  Every anticipation and guess.

HER name.  A bird’s song.  Bird’s songs (all of them).

What other flesh is.

Any time you are enabled

to touch it.

We could imagine IT as HIM wanting.  Awaiting.

But there is no resemblance to wait for.

Only HER, the delicious, dilemma, unknown.

Loss of memory.  Hope of presence.

“Ecstasy” as commonly referred –

– the surprising rarety of ‘being-out-of’…

“HER,” “HE” calls it, names it, designates, conjures, conceives.  (Perhaps “HER” has a name?)

In the center a shrine a temple.  And no center exists, except by imagining, by metaphor, metonymy.  Delusional illusion of some living cartography.

The words “NOW,” “HERE”…continuously NO/WHERE.

He longs.  Desires.  Fantasizes.  Dreams.

This is urgency.

Each pressing and critical, earnest, persistent scenario and situation –

In-sistent.

It’s always coming.  In.  The status and singling.  Ever singing.

Sometimes shrieking.

NO/WHERE : NOW/HERE.  Same scintillating occurrence, occurring… per-sist-ence, pursuant and ins-is-isn’t-it?  Awaiting approaching.

HE/HIM/HIS – SHE/HER/HERS                                            (with)

[All-ways]

What might have been experienced as “LONGING” – that which is extended, strained toward…

SHE… a recoiling, a reconnaissance, some new emission.

HE laughs, as if capitulating, a surrender, a stab, asunder.

THEY… blend and weave inconceived.  Inconceivable.  Unknown.  Never any stasis.  Never NOW/HERE, never NO/WHERE.

In other words, too many… uncountable stories (may) have begun (begin)…

[All-ways]

How it is, part exponential

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Complexity, creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing6 Comments

We followed the arc of the diver, losing it in the fog, wishing to make it out clear.  I might have said this meant “philosophy.”

“Poetry,” he said, “is utilizing known language to invoke the unknown.”  Or certaintly uncertainty, or something like that, which I liked, and indicated by asking what is not uncertain?

Your hands, the music.  My desire, a naming for them.  I think of your waist as a séance.

What is it to be crippled?  I keep trying to use words.

Another asked about the “arc of the diver.”  How should I know?  All of my sentences should be read as questions.  I wonder how divergent questions or commands might be… as statements.

She said, “it falls between.  It has to go somewhere.”  I guess we pressed it there… were poietic… since we couldn’t find a name.  “Dis-appearance” might be one.  Like a guess that can’t be falsified.

We all hold a paper marker printed “You are here.”  Perhaps paper is too substantial.  But it still seems like an invitation I wish we had.

Maybe this is why Albahari inscribed “Words are something else.”  We leave it at that.  And are flummoxed as to what “that” refers to.

Still we look.

You move like flocks of birds that wheel.  I’ve never comprehended “swarm.”  Mathematics doesn’t cut it, though it certainly uncertainly tries.

The telephone Pictionary of ear-mouth-brain when we issue sound or gaze.  Don’t foibles equal actions?  Parts of us experience this as violence, as valence.

Relation as a struggle to balance victimhood and perpetration.  Uncertainly.

When or where does this infiltrate unknown?

He went on to say…

I thought (imagined?) your ankles, knees, elbows and knuckles as adroit sworls in swift mountain streams.

So also losing it in the fog, hoping to remember where the trees were.  Philosophy.  Or was it the forest?

Poetry as ocean surface between “known”/unknown?  So wavy, so heaving.  No one said that.

The richest respect he gave was his readiness to call me “Nobody.”  Or “Anybody.”  Carte blanche.

She said.

I can hardly perceive what’s in your head now.  Potentia?  An horizon of waves.  A place where words press images press events, the banal.  Perhaps.  Uncertain sphere of unknowing?  They say learning happens there.  Like a cell in a culture, animal in terrain.  Cacophony of dreams.

Each time we encounter.

Letter to a Lover – March 2018

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, being, desire, Experience, Language, love, Perception, relation, Writing5 Comments

The month of March, in Kansas, can be almost anything, like most of the other months of the year, almost.  Tonight it is moisty, breezy, there is wetness hovering like a redolent air, nearly a fog.  I am killing myself.  You are feeding me.  I sharpen your knives in the kitchen.  From the top of my throat toward deep in my belly is an acidic ruin caused by far too many liters of hard alcohol in far too much volume, too often, for too many hours of too many days over too many years to not be transforming my internal landscape into a ravaged terrain of destruction.  So though I’m unable to breathe, speak, lie down, or work without unignorable hurt, I am still useful.  I am sharpening your knives in your modest kitchen.  I am reading and writing sentences.  I am trying to keep myself from you.  You are preparing a meal for us, and I find it so difficult to stay away from you – to not breathe at your ear, kiss or nibble your neck, grasp at your bottom, finger your elbows, hover, caress, overwhelm.

Boundaries are reduced in mist and wind.  In motion it can be hard to tell where the lines that mark objects begin or end.  In cloaks of obscurity finding shapes or sounds, edges or entries, can be, well, con-fusing (over-mixed, blended, woven)… as perhaps any “thing” we try to think apart ‘in fact’ always is… “inscrutable,” “indivisible,” “unclear.”

If you extricate the ginger from the garlic from the cabbage from the chicken from the oil, the rice, the salt, the pepper, the lime and ancho, the butter, the liquids and oxygens, thicknesses and scents… where is the meal?  If you separate “me” out from “world,” relations, surround (like a theory, a concept, a logic…) how might I then live, or “be” what you presume me to be?  I will not, cannot, am not (removed from my surround) and so it goes… limbs and flesh and organs… dissect… to cells and fluids, molecules and motions, viscosity and energy… to atoms… to subatomic ‘particles’ and/or ‘waves’ – and at each dismantle you will have lost the entity you proposed or pursued.

Division does not equal.

You’ve quoted out of context – neither copied, reproduced, nor plagiarized.  Simply failed.  Missed.  Lost.

The burning rot, corrosive erosion of my body by the maladies of my preferences, pleasures, and habits…

…erasure of letters, terms, phrases, meanings…

…excision and surgery, atopic autopsying of…

…are things already dead, deceased once de-cised, as ‘identifiable portions or pieces, ‘things'”?

These written marks with definable shapes and spaces… yet if disjoined… no sense can be had…

What might “it,” “I,” be… apart-from?

I lay on a ground I cannot stand up without, cannot jump, move, fly or float away without…

I address you – impossibly – unless we’re inseparable… otherwise address and interaction cannot…

The gesture recognizes the necessary collusion as a dream of a fictive repartee, a figurative gap which – if there really were a break or breach – would have no effect or recognition – no reach, no contact…

Relation is repetition of conjoinment, actions without function if connectedness is not always already…

…as if drawing attention toward redundancy.

And so we kiss, we eat, we call out, we listen, as repercussions of contact… reassurances of inseparability.  You reach for your phone, I fall to sleep, unable to be undone or we would not be able to know

 

Deranger

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Complexity, creative writing, desire, Experience, Language, love, meaning, Writing2 Comments

Someday maybe, someone will say of me that I “tore up language,” made it useless.

Maybe, someday, someone will “feel” that.  That I destroyed something precious.  Something necessary.  Like oxygen, or water: something we could not live without.  And I ruined it.  Like meaning.

That would be something.  Something I could do, with nothing.

Simple undoing.  To sequester and burn.  Try or experiment.  Atomic bombing atoms.  Untangle into knots – vacuum emptiness, so to (un)speak.  Rather ask than say.  Rather ponder or wonder than postulate or state.  To query, not question.  Change, not challenge.

Disorder and dismember as an alternative to reordering and remembering.  Dissolute versus dissolve.  “Me.”

.

How significant that would be!  How real and present I might become!  How impossible to ignore!  Then ‘I’ might come, be-come, cum-cum… be undone, finally.

.

De-ranger opposing A-rRanger.  The chaos, disturbance, tremor and volatility… the tension pulling on the only bottom we can conceive… the bottomless.  Topless.  Beautiful that way.  Exposed.  Denuded.  Open.  Available.  A fresh take.  Lake.  Like.  Lack.  Unknowable.  Perhaps deep or infinite.  Perhaps uncontained.

.

Let’s say “language.”  Let’s say molecules, atoms, cells.  Let’s say “space” or “time.”  Let’s say “let us say.”  (i.e. let’s assume something).

.

Like hallucinogenetic drugs without purpose.  Instrumentalization.  Meaning.  Like feeling too cold or too warm.  Like grief or ecstasy – any of these experiences we don’t understand.

.

Disjunctive dysfunction.  The uncanny.  Morphology.  K would call it (maybe) “infinite possibilities of infinities without numeration – perhaps most of which are empty” – and how would we know (or be able to know) what that means?  Like this here = that.

.

Suppose you could “see” it (imagine – image-in) – I use language.  I’d use language.  I would.  To “see” it.  To image-in, to imagine the impossible…compossible.

.

To love.  To be.  To live.  To try.

.

Apparently (according to K) that doesn’t “do” anything – doesn’t instrumentalize or operationalize the unknown potential, even though I compare it with sound or dance or computers or nuclear war – as physical.

.

Whatever.  (Exactly!).  The vague potential of supposed infinite possibilities we cannot possibly comprehend, uncover, dis-cover, realize (as far as we know, at our scale of experiencing) – but how is it not part of these possibilities?  Actualized, instrumented (pen / paper / sign), operated-in or upon or with or for…

.

Whatever.

Exactly.

.

Here is your possible result: an 100th Monkey.

.

Water moved all over me – a bath, a shower, the rain… I broke my skin stumbling on a curb, and bled… a knife, a table… Ha!  I have a body.  Yes, there it is.  Maybe I’ll make love – what will be discovered then?  Yes, “we.”  I have a porous body.

.

Another reason writing is an instrumentalized “reason.”  Eat this.  Peace among worlds.  Going on a manhunt for a woman.  A particular ‘one.’  Watch me (if you want).

.

I can pull at the hair on my face.  I just gathered my child in an embrace (a ‘hug’ we called it).  Ha!  I have a body, it is porous.  Operationalized by “desire” (we call it).

.

Part II: Language (we call it).

.

Floor (feet feel).  Hair (hands hold, harry, hank).  Skin (sentences slit, suckle, sense, susurrate, sing).  Grass (gander, gaze, grab, grackle).  Oh the things you can do!  Meaningless, morbid possibilities.

.

To prove – ? What? – “I” hear?  “I” touch?  “I” see?  Taste?  Feel?  Encounter?  Interrupt?  Intrude?  Act with and upon?  To what purpose?

.

Proof of possibility?  Infinite (unknown) potentials?  What do “I,” am “I,” wanting?

.

“Desire” I wrote (instrumentalized) earlier.  Ha.  A word.  An action.  [I have a porous body].  “I” (what I call) “love.”

.

In other words, this was the day K hobbled away.  You wouldn’t understand.  [meanings].

.

I’ve written other words, even what might be called “assemblages” (markings in accord with other ‘possibilities’…infinitely (?) variable).

.

In other words… the spread of the tree.  This one sends its branches this way into the world… (porous)… this one yearns vertically… these at certain angles… sentences… reactions…

.

I am thankful for Kansas… for sex… for her… for elsewhere…

.

For Pakistan.  Where she first appeared… from California… I “love.”

.

It’s, she’s, notable.  Noteworthy.  I mark them.

.

The refrain: I love.  I have loved.  I will.  [“desire”]

.

“I” say “yes”

.

Yes, M.  Yes D.  Yes A, T, H, H, J, M, T, J, M, J, S, R, R, R… yes almost anyone almost anywhere… yes.

.

Yes.

.

Let us try this out: language.  Touch.  “Yesterday.”

.

And something becomes.  The unknown (unknkowable?) – K’s infinities paralleled and interwoven.  What is liminal.

.

The liquid between every book on my shelves, every line, the air and its waves, the light and hard matter.  [porous].

.

G, D, K, M, Lispector… what do we see?  Le spectre.  The specter.  What we see.  What can (not) be seen.

.

The visible and the touchable – “the Prose of this World.”

.

“You.”

.

Trees sprout branches slantwise.

.

Language.

Silence.

.

Whatever.

Exactly.

.

And there… the name “Steiner.”  A Viking.  A Spartan.  A Cherokee.  And there is “rain” (we call it).  And I: love.  And that can be its own end.  The German.  The Thai.  The Nubian.  Each native as The World Goes On in The Physics of Sorrow… selected, selected, selected…

.

Selah.

for LMK: Living Mitigates Knowing: the Sirens’ Song

On By NW FilbertIn being, desire, ecstasy, eros, Joy, Living, love, meaning, Other, Poetry, relation, Writing2 Comments

Birdcall.

Morning.

Activity-signal.

 

Somewhere day arrives.

 

We are in bed.

Day neither comes nor goes.

Neither night.

 

We inhabit a single chair.

A reciprocal rebellion.

Atemporal, atopos.

 

The other.

The relation.

The kiss

 

that undoes the you, the me,

joining any separation

as touch

 

along with bodies of skin,

skinned together,

indeterminable

 

without one, another

within, without each –

a combinatory beast

 

where components are absent,

extended, present-ly,

be-coming

 

birdcalls and signals

dependent on immanent surrounds;

nothing undone,

 

anything in their crafty work

and wrestling,

Eriegnis, evental –

 

a pleasure and desire

formulating forms

without priors –

 

echoed and originary;

unpredictable, unknown;

tandem happenings

 

we sometimes describe

 

as love.

Expectation

On By NW FilbertIn anxiety, creative writing, eros, Experimenctes, Fear, fiction, hope, relation, Writing4 Comments

“Whether it makes any difference what you say – whether there is any point in it anyway; whether there is any point in saying anything anyway.”

– Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein & the possibility of discourse

It was the mystery that found us, all the unknown buried beneath and beyond.

She said to me, or rather she offered her hand, or rather we made eye contact, well, she greeted me and held out her hand and we looked at or into one another’s faces.  Just the surface of the ocean.  Seas and skies are larger than our imagining.

Say skin, language, thought, or feeling are flexible bordering insides and outsides, contained and beyond.  Something like that I thought, unknowingly.

He spoke to me, then hugged me, with an asking.  I couldn’t know the question, but I understood the words.  We seemed friendly and respectfully embraced, hesitant and expressive at once.  There’s a cliff at the end of the trail.  Sometimes I don’t remember.

Sharp curves on roads in mountainous terrain.  That sort of thing, voids that look empty but allow plummet.

And whether it makes any difference, she said.

Difference is made, apparently.

Mother used to tell me, what was it?  Her voices are clear, kind of, almost, but the words are lost in others.  Deep waves are like that, it seems; hard to follow or find, prominent and obvious while rocking the boat, regardless the size.  Clouds.  Wind makes little sense of skies.  Everything is out there.

Inside, it’s raining.

I was asked for a cigarette and large trees moved above rooftops.  She offered her hand the way he hugs me, my son playing music on the piano while a cat escapes and someone’s doing homework.  They say the ground goes deeply down beneath us, compiled by potential millennia.  Nobody knows, though we have tools to measure by.  Whatever those tools measure.

I remember first times.  Every time.  Only it’s perplexing that they’re exactly the same.

Does anything repeat?

Father got on me again about irresponsibilities, my dreaminess.  If only I’d been military I’d be disciplined.  Different.  She offered her hand plus an ankle, a hip, a breast, a womb.  I’d have values. The crook of a knee, a neckline.  Take responsibility.  He wanted it in my mouth – that feels best, he said.

What do I know?

Surfaces of oceans.

She stops and reads books.  I do.  There is music and a din of dialogue.  Raucous.  Discomfort.  Anxiety is familiar, always the first time again.

I am afraid.  Usually.  Deep water disturbs me.  No one knows.  Many are afraid of flying.

Crying is its own thing.  How is an ocean made?  I won’t succeed.

Whether it makes any difference – saying anything anyway.  Someone speaks at me.  Eyes meet.  A brush of lips.  A grasp of hand.  What is the question?  Skies and oceans.  Earth’s depths.  What do I understand?  Always ending begins, beginnings.  What ends.  What has no end?  It begins.  Again.  Always first times.  Nothing.

Her breath tastes good, inhaled.  His muscle.  Seawater burn.  Heartloss.  So much fresh air.  The turn is sharp.

Saying anything anyway: the point is whether, weather, difference…its repetition.

The how and why of her.  Of him.  Of it and other.

There I must have been when I saw her or felt it or once again the beginnings.  Once again the first time.  Always again.  Begin.  While ending.  While ends.

He said so – whether there is any point in saying anything.  He said what felt best when he hugged me, kindly.

She offered.  Someone asked for something.  Like surfaces on oceans.  Horizon lines.  The ground beneath our feet, beneath that.  Differences.  The above.  I cut my skin.

 

 

Fragment: Brief Conversation

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, awareness, Confusion, desire, Fear, longing, relation, Writing4 Comments

“How come language (or drinking) makes the pain of language (or drinking, or relationships) go away, recede, soothe…and then becomes language (drinking, relation) and its pain…again?” he asks.

I smoke.  I look at him.  He is examining (with obvious pretend furtivity) my pale, smoothe legs, coming out of my singular light dress.  At my arms, my skin, my cheek and throat, my hair.  Lasciviously thoughtful, he.  Almost curious.  Almost authentic in his desire.

He is trying to daydream.

I am trying to be.

We are drinking now.

I am young, he less so.

Or neither.  We do not know.  Anyone can be so near their end.

So the story goes…

“The world smells good,” he says, and the delectability to the nostrils clearly depended on death: burning wood, smoking pig, a nostalgia of forests…

I knew not what I felt.  Mixtures.  Pleasures and sorrow.  Excitement and fear.  Doubt.  I did not respond, just masked placidly.  Pleasantly, I hoped.  Ambiguous.  And what does he sense?