Tag: Experience

the songs i do not know (iii)

On By NW FilbertIn being, communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, intimacy, Knowledge, Language, Other, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

Tell me the songs you don’t know

Dan Beachy-Quick, Of Silence and Song

Light…makes some things seen, makes some things invisible

-SIR THOMAS BROWNE, IN B-Q, OF SILENCE AND SONG

iii. inside the other

.

i walked

caves, hollows, holes

reaching in

wondering, wandering,

exploring

.

wherefore?

in whom?

this forest-stream-mountain

rain

cloud or animal

species

perhaps kind

world

.

else

.

eye, crotch, finger, part

leg, mouth, buttocks, cleave

begin

in prayer

darklight arithmetic

and and and

also

more

.

a line

emotion

an happening

or even

event

what is called

beginning

again

what feels like

entering, entrance

entry

way

.

fuel

to the opening

.

i walked

in prayer

singing

nothing

known

listening

still

to answer

.

call

response

(“Tell me,” she said)

of songs

you do

not know

(“i don’t,” i said

i do

.

begin

again

before

where now

already

a view from nowhere?

On By NW FilbertIn Alias Harlequin, awareness, Confusion, creative writing, Experimenctes, Language, Literature, Writing2 Comments

he can only be distracted by nothing (the reflection of everything), light uncontained or perceived, even though he cannot cease registering her flesh and its forms, thigh-lines, tone and texture, fluidity of folding and motion. Nothing refuses to contain it, and rather brings it back, and forth, or all at once space, always “this. this here. here.” Nothing missing mirror, his emptiness replete.

Bends and scent, nonsensed, indelible.

Him, there (here), composed observer, unable/disabling any view from nowhere. It is without a not…

our small lives are traversed by momentous movements, avalanches in the depths of the everyday

Knausgaard, Summer

How much longer still dreaming of a language

Not enslaved to words as it is today…

des forets, Poems of Samuel Wood

so we use words in order to go beyond words

Markides, Mountain of Silence

What constitutes unbounded in literature?

Knausgaard, My Struggle 6

…still she remains a remarkable beauty (how so easily contorted from inside?). If inner bodies resembled outer, how different life would be, observable reversed as well – cultural ugliness/fear/repulsion softens from inner loveliness, even as prettiness suffers its evils. That being said, the inner therefore rules the day for beauty, and earth must be divine.

Veins outstrip hand lotion. Wrinkles give the lie.

he depends on his non-mirror, and many come to light. Refractions, glints, unending activity – a world (or however you attempt to measure the imagined) exists as relation alone (all-one) – infinite interdependence ‘to be.’

slope, angle, apparent rest – the wrist, the knee, the curve to ankle, each knuckle and blade about the eye, how else to distinguish hair from head from air from skin from water – its relative.

all i do is sense and praise (that poorly) – relation, gratitude. Awareness – attention – all act. Calves, puppies, elbows, crooks – sway and struggle, chaos-strife, relations of same differences, now.

he calls out, a wave of vibrations; he smiles, a rippling fabric; looks (out or in at once) – “becoming” (some have spoken or written) – enacted, enbodied, at-once ‘taking place’ – now. Here it is, they are, him/her with in of. It goes. Nowhere but here (it comes in other words). his left, your right, his east, your west, up-down-other: relation. Occurs.

No else. No one. No thing. No where. Never. All depending, relating to this, us, that, here, now. Without which? Unknown, inconceivable, imperceptible, nonsensical…only possible.

A Womb-bomb Psalm

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, existence, grief, life, PoetryLeave a comment

Blessed be the name of the Lord –

sweet carrier of the womb –

fiery cauldron,

cold and dark

within the pit.

.

Blessed womb-bomb,

threatening peril,

life-giving

horror of wonders –

inside

.

that terrible cave

in the belly

the heart, the brain

like a virus,

a cancer,

a seed –

.

herewith do we praise thee –

our lives

and surround –

impenetrable everywhere,

blessed immersion

and thundering calm

.

go forth

quiet conquer

of light

veiled in darkness –

a pit, a cave,

o glorious sky!

With Out

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experience, Perception, Poetry, relation2 Comments

I never had to pay for words

yet how much my words have cost me

.

There is (there seems to be):

.

Experience.

.

I am insufficiently prepared

for it.

[how each beauty hurts so much in joy]

I am.

.

Ever unprepared:

.

Experiencing –

.

always sourced with outside

and ever without sides,

filled up, as is.

.

This is

.

Differing to ‘I am’

An other

Any

other

.

All thens

and equaling nows

complete without –

.

the wolf howls

bear bellows

in woods –

.

my lingering past –

.

with out.

.

somehow

I never learned what words are for

so

I begin

.

Again

almost

Deconstructing Definitions

On By NW FilbertIn absence, being, Confusion, desire, Experience, Language, meaning, Poetry4 Comments

Perhaps “work” means something must be done, regardless of desire,

and signifies felt effort.

If “to love’s” “unassailable affirmation,”

something verbal, and not only.

“Education” as “familiarity with thoughts of others” (K. O. Knausgaard),

entails “experience” as “familiarity with itself”?

And what of “wisdom”?

I wonder if “deaf” implies “not-listening,” or/and, “our forgetting of the body.”

and who defines “republic”?

Or “nowhere” and “now here” in all their differance?

Frere Jacques (yes, go and sing it)

suggests impossibility fuels valuation –

negation requiring its positive with –

terms all ways relative in their contexts,

indeterminate and groundless,

yet term-in-able, undecided, written-in.

I don’t know.

But I sense it’s indefinitive,

de- and con- structure something else,

like trace or foggy margin,

the space between the sounds

that continues (us and them).

Thickets

On By NW FilbertIn being, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, human, meaning, Perception, Questions, Uncertainty, WritingLeave a comment

Thicket

The world overgrown.  At least any accessible sector.  I’ve heard tale of open, of empty, of spacious, of dearth.  Not where I approach.  Even my own body – its in- or out-sides, its wherewithal.  Always where-with-all.

Tangled, almost briny, in some instances.  If able to determine a surround wherewith or whenwith to take a stance in.  Even thinking, even breath, even a pulse of bloodbeat.  Any sound we form toward music.  Any making-sensible.  For us.  Our kind.  Those within the overgrown – the untamable, reckless warp and weft.

To hunch there, immediately becomes here.  How different – if imagined?  To gather, to pre-tend.  To suppose a disposition, a presence somehow differentiated.  How-some?  To curl in, therefore (perchance? per theory?) “to find,” to be able to, to call, to be-in-g?  Yet how?  Or why?  Where is the for?  And what might the hole be suspected to fill?

Where is the gap between this and the other?  Between you and me, he or she, this-that-the-other, between…any/thing?  Something wishes to know, apparently… and this wishing/motion/decision/desire/activity/drive (whatever “  “) begins by implicating violence… bi-lining a world with borders, invented barriers, perceived traces, intuited splits, cuts and hacks that are not there until.  How un-till this supposed “soil” from which to distinguish, fabricate, or function?  From which to “operate.”  Surgeon-species.

What knowledge is expected by destroying?  Deconstructing (or constructing) – both requiring joints?  By suture and slice?  By taking life?  Prone to decompose.  What a trajectory.

What options?  Compelled…to con-fuse…confess…to communicate, express, enjoy, enjoin (what we find ourselves joined to) still even to de-scribe, in-scribe, in-voke, ex-tol, inter-act or en-gage provokes difference, demands separations, dismemberment.  To cleave.

To try to body.  To try to mind.  Attend.  Acknowledge.  Distortion.  To twist and torture an other, as the one or…alteration.  De-pict.

Impossible connection already seems to be.  Each, every add-ition a disconnecting, a cutting, a stitching seam according to a pattern.  Whose?  Whats?

Over, under, whelmed.  Where is the open, the undifferentiated, the is?  Always already be-fore.  All ways, all ready, be-for.  In other words…not possibly worded.  Prior to word.  Involving act (including language) but unincorporated (already corporal), defying design-ation (surprisingly? one would think ‘it’ [not] is at the end of de- or un-signing/signifying), erasure of description, all palimpsests equaling… perhaps (per-happening) – infinite, certainly uncountable, incalculable, without ordination, order, ordaining, without with-in or –out.  Only WITH, inconceivable, imperceptible (perception cuts), irretrievable (the rejection of any re-), disabused, disturbed perturb, a dreaming dreamed turbulence = a happen to be.

Still this thinks with.  Language.  Lost already, displaced and falsified by a tiny thread, an whole fabric, a world-veil at least whilst continuing as world…

Think again.  Dream.  Confuse.  Imagine.  Invent.  Art ducts (vents) for breath… further re-moves, com-pli-cations, furthering within, for fun?  A dance, a play, a re-morse (cryptic codification, surreptitious and additional) some native complicity to immeasurable complexity.  As is.  As if.  And so on…

How, the Owl

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, Questions, thinking, Writing2 Comments

Who – would I listen to, be remade among today?

And where from a resistance?

We always know (somewhere in our bodies or bones) that ‘to begin’ was begun

long before what ‘begins.’

It is raining.

We say, “the rain has begun.”  How long ago?

We say, “I am here, now.”  For -?

Where are we?  How much?

We ask.

We are there.  Continuously outstripping a here.

When?  Why?

And how?  How?  How indeed.

So what is it – that we are seeing?

What is it we think we see?

How?  Why?  Why that and not other(s)?

Propensity.  Proprioception.  Perspective.

When?  Where?

Always already before or begun?

From which?

I’ve written before (again and again

when I take up the pen):

“I set out.”

From where?  Why?  When?  and whom?

Still how?  How?  How, indeed.

He looks in.

Into what?  And from where?

How indeed.

We set out.

per language, per feeling, per sensational thought,

per activity, movement, receipt.

We set out.

Exscribing: a Process

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, being, Complexity, creative writing, Experience, notebooks, Perception, WritingLeave a comment

Image result for hand writing with pen on paper

How stories are written.

They are experienced.  They are felt, intimated, intuited and interpreted.

Sometimes spoken through or about.

They become body.

They are lived – if only imaginatively – they are invented (always).

If inescapable or unavoidable, the only way to “pass” them – find them, become in relation to them (i.e. ‘go on’) – is to expel, express them… put them outside the body, psyche, person: MAKE them, forge them, create with them…

“ex” (out-of) “term” (language) “in” (-scribe or –voke) “ate” (devourable form) them.

Stories are composed, inscribed, evoked, in order to ex-term-in-ate them.  To live on – through and past – to survive what marks/marked the person who must process and be rid of them in order to… go on experiencing (live).

.

Search those tales that traverse your body – its space, and over time. 

Watch what arises again and again – a trope, a chorus, a theme, a complaint.

Though memory (creative narrative), perhaps it holds a not-forgotten, an almost-permanence.  That which seems to stay with you, in you, may be of you – there’s story there.  Don’t worry truth.  Truth never worries.  And no stories are about it.  And constructs of “facts” – or, agreement of observations and perceptions – hardly tells as well.  Stories – good, real stories – lie in differences.

Perhaps difference is kind of true.

Practice synesthesia with what you uncover / discover: hear what you see; taste the sounds; feel what you smell; look deeply at all you touch; be something like a being – an organism whose senses are always combined in the perceiving and experiencing.  That you are is a thing unto itself, and can not be exhausted as long as.

.

And so to write, to exscribe.  In the beginning was… the true fact that you are, however doubting and unknowable.  This too is experiencing.  To be experiencing is to live.  Prepositions and propositions notwithstanding.

It writes.

.

And so it is said, a kind of exscription, a thinking-out-with.  As breath surges sound or even whispers.  To follow – not following – the forms of the objects (obstacles) – lungs and throat and palate, tongue and teeth and lips, not to mention faces and the movements of limbs and digits.  The lineation of terms and letters, vocables and consonants – exscription-with, even air, atmosphere.  And should the context change (and it is changing as you say, think, exscribe) – you write, you sound, you scribble, going-on-with…

Thus it is written.

.

And so it becomes.

Stories are an history of mortality.  Where it begins in first awareness that it ends.  And so memories, so comparisons – lessness and mostness and the little by little of forgetting.  How it’s made through its undoing, to the last.  We story only as we die.

What is it that was said?  You say?

Dusk becomes, and a sort of lost.

The first way in, being out.

Ex-scription.

The forth is all.  Experiencing.

.

Letting it air out.  This seems important though many might advise that writing is a matter of devotion, dedication, discipline.  Maybe it is?  What have I written in way of stories?  Much time is involved in the shaping of rivers’ courseways… and chance… and the continuous involvement of the with-out.

.

Re-membering that the activity and activist (one doing the activity – actor/actress?) are entirely muddled in the ‘between’ that equals: “Here.”  Forging or forcing ex-scription tends to falsify the act and turn it towards an in-scription of something – report or epitaph, confession, statement, fable, style, form.  But storying and writing, like living and all activity, are between formless and formed – taking form, forming.  We are not producing or conveying information, we are in formation through the activity of writing. To assume a stance, a stasis, a point-of-view or position or stake… authorial authority or control – is to leave the messiness of “here” and arbitrate a “there.”  No longer the presence-between sayer-and-saying, thinker-and-language, writing-and-written, imagining-and-inventing, feeler-and-feeling, etc… but reduced to a repetition of forms, ideas, concepts – borrowed, received, believed, or accepted (“in-formed”).  Composed verses composing; produced versus producing; almost a copyist versus a compositor (with com-posing and com-positing referring to making-with, viewing-with, creating-with complex multiplicities).

.

Con-, com-, con-.  With, with with- (these are the fields of ‘between’ where we are).  Ever, always, only – between – experiencing through exscribing – this stays on, vibrating in the lettering, arcs and tones of the writing…as activity going-on.  Experiencing.  Energy.  The forthness of creativity is its unknowable, indecipherable, inextricable withness.  Perhaps.

.

Authorial authority or control a sort of repetition of law, convention, acceded power, regime(n).  An attempt to step aside from the stream of experiencing and treat the activity of writing (or exscribing) not as an activity of being – alongside thinking, loving, believing, feeling, working, etc., – but something mechanical, technical, somehow outside the confluence of being, the flow of experiencing.  Feigning objectivity, knowledge, pre-cluded rather than preludic (decided-before versus approaching the play or dance or swim of activity in complexity).  Told versus happening.  Production versus process.  Untrue, or less or more than actual.  Mortality – dead letter – versus verbal occurring…as-is.

.

To return to ending – the beginning of story – our limits, death, and finitude – that which forces us to forge – to attempt memories, notate change as loss or gain, seek patterns, learn, sing, exscribe, act… imagine… dream… craft and create – the knowing, the reality, that experiencing is not endless.  Attend: it ends.

And so we story.

Exscribing…experiencing…what there is, while there is, along many modes of action.  What is perceived as happening and runnels through the body, swirling currents of memory, the staining of refrains… and the activity of exscribing it – of moving it out-with-in-to relation of world as compositing – not copying, stating, reporting – but ever keeping in mind that the activity of writing is also a live, indeterminate, and infinitely complex way of being-with-world… we are hardly machines translating experience, or computers spitting out data… everything we do so long as we’re living, is living – alive and uncertain, conformation-with everything that surrounds and drowns us.  Participation.  Being.

Exscribing as a process of being alive.

 

The Loop: Shite I keep writing

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, love, mathematics, thinking, thought, Writing3 Comments

because I haven’t posted anything in quite awhile, and because I have been writing, but because nothing has seemed publicly interesting or worthy.  And yet, some representative scrap-examples of the past couple months….

For any triangle, you can draw a circle that fits perfectly inside (the incircle) and also one that connects all its corners (the circumcircle). This shows the path of the centre of the incircle, as a triangle is shuffled around its circumcircle....

It happens to be quiet here, sunny and cool after a damp, cloudy day, nearing dusk, studying suicide(s) and languaging.  Thinking of my children and loves, family, my own strange trajectory, feeling flabby and less than optimally healthy, but not quite hopeless or dead.  The world has a certain, conspicuous fullness, after all.

We experience time without believing in it.  And it’s complicated to know what we believe.  I do not understand facts (so-called).  Events.  Places.  Persons.  Everything seems more motile than we think.  And finite, and brief, ephemeral.  Liquid, as it were.

I never encounter the same child, parent, lover, or friend.  Not “my” yard, home, car, path.  Even the rocks and books are changed, even the words and numbers.  We are never still.

Given Two Hours: A Potential Entry

or, My failures are easy to find.

or, I was never good at math (that includes geometry).

Kafka said: “Life is merely terrible…one or two hours for writing is not enough… ten hours would be perfect, but since perfection cannot be achieved one must at least come as close to it as possible, and not give a thought to sparing oneself…”

So, 10 minutes then, maybe half an hour, before inevitable intrusions or interruption: children calling “Dad!,” “I love you!,” “I need…,” or the coffee or vodka run out, or bladder, or laundry needs switching or a stranger waves or a parent calls or…

Also the bills need paid.

And now I’m tired.

Given two hours, and only 32 books to read today, and a fresh, blank, lined notebook… perhaps I should write in pencil today – what did I have in me so burning to get at, out, smoldering and smoking in there as if about to blow… and a limited window… and an urge, a compulsion really [“what kid!?!…yeah, that’s fine, go ahead” What? the phone rang?  Why say that to me?  The oven ding’d?  What!?  So what!?  What?  Why?]…where was I?

Oh yes, Beckett:  having nothing to write and desperately compelled to… in pencil?  No, too easy, too impermanent, erasable – which is why I can’t use these electric jobbies tapping at vanishing light – if a keystroke makes it disappear why choose a key at all?  No necessary difference, hardly any time or effort involved in devolution – what ‘correction’?  What where to correct?  Pen will serve fine, pen and paper, various inky colors, the muscles of my hand forcing lines into letters to words to phrases, perhaps meanings (from somewhere into otherwheres – ‘meanings’): the ache, the minutes, the struggle, the thoughts… writing.  “Ten hours would be perfect…” given that “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, together with the obligation to express…”

Well maybe not so many nothings, there is language after all (the little I know, and that always changing, unsteady, ambiguously loaded with history, culture, and a billion other author-ities… and billions yet to come upon any reading or hearing)…so maybe so many nothings after all…certainly the “from which” and the “is.”

Nevertheless, given two hours… (“ten would be perfect…”) maybe something will come of all the nothing confused in the effort and exercise, the obligation and chaos and chance of tangling with language indelibly, in pen, on paper, of matter.  Something to live with, on, against, work at, anyway.

The surprised way she says “I love you!” for instance.  Variable emphases, nearly uptoned into question, almost astonishingly emitted, as if amazed at admitting some sound-noun, naming an unknown representation – what evokes or revokes as experienced.  “Wah!?  I love you?!”  “Wha-?! I love you??” “Wait!? I love you?!” etc… varietous befuddlement presenting…nothing?!  Who knows.  But she says it, and with all the madness of disbelief and unbelieving wonder.  For what is there to believe?  Does anyone know?

Given two hours, perhaps will get somewhere.  I learned about it from language, and anything I’ve heard about it has come round that way as well.  Needless to say.  Yet each occasion, each her or him and subsequent emittance or pronouncement, promise or claim of expression, is never the same, nor often even that similar… “love” seems to have no stable referent, and yet apparently it is rife in the world, like violence or lying, or hate.

I’m trying to ‘think about it”… with the assistance of shaping something of material trace and difficult erasure.

“I love you!?!”

Intuitively (or habitually?) I perceive and interpret her intoned curiosity as all about me – solipsistically (intuitively, perceptually, and learned) – her astonishment must be that (of all humans) she discovers herself obscurely (the nature of the ‘love’-beast) loving “ME” (i.e. ‘you’ in the phrase) – me, the hardly lovable mishmash mess with large laundry lists of problems and unlikelihoods, aged and unattractive, mired in single-parenting, alcohol, odd literary obsessions and wildly improbable dreams and plans, thoughts and tastes… her surprise must be ALL ABOUT ME – what a wonder that such as she should find herself mystery-feeling toward this one!

But I was flummoxed as well… often when I can’t help saying the phrase of cliche’d madness, I too feel startled by the sound and urge of it: “I love you!?!”  And again I devour it all as having to do with ME.  (I never question HER lovability – youthful, beautiful, intelligent, copiously interesting and talented, sexy, etc.) – it seems a wonder that “I” – in my accruing age, multiple divorces, quatro children, ailing vitality, addictions, moderate learning, boring introverted and nearly solitary routines – might still find myself convinced there was no other term for this cynically skeptical ominous and overwhelming desire, this severe joy and delightful anguish I was experiencing toward this quite obviously deserving human specimen.  The alarm must be that “I” might be capable whatsoever of such an unlikely happening – wherewithal in my condition, situation, state-of-being (if such it could be called).  In whatever case, EGO is a whale, our largest mammal by far, even when proclaiming its undoing, inadequacy, or failure.

But she says it again, and again, and yet again, and continually wonder-full-y.  As do I find myself unable to cease exclaiming the phrase – at times in return or reply, and often uncalled-for, as if there where simply nothing else for it.  “It” – that untangleable knot of what we (similarly indecipherable to “love”) entitle “experience.”  And again.  And again.  As if repeating it coincides to making it ‘the case’ – some truth, a factual reality.  And we are concomitantly evolving a stress on the syllables “love” and “you.”  The phrase almost trinitarian or as necessarily pointed as ancient rules for a triangle.  I.e. without which (any point): NOT.  That started me thinking about the other nodes and angles beyond “I,” tectonically realizing how “I” was gobbling up both “love” and “you” as if they were all synonyms of a one-lined bar (“I”) rather than thoroughly separate shifters, depending on the context of saying.

Wait – could I really be a you and would love find its way to exist in both directions of the shape?  Why hadn’t I cared more about equations and Euclid as a youth – those so-called “abstract truths” that worked anytime anywhere and perhaps for any entities or numerals – “universals” as it were – independent of fallacious and fallible worlds (‘realities’)?  Perhaps I should be working on a PC – a light hand of erasure and displacement, easy correction, replaceability.

What if every I is also You, and You can be I sometimes and Love either way is what swervishly links and actively ties them into phrases, shapings, and being?  What if “I” is not my only or even predominant name?  What if I am equally you…or many times over a You – and only rarely and sparingly and minimally an “I”?  And what if Love is what invents and brings either pronoun to the clearing – crafts them perceptible – sets either up and out as ex-isting?  Ex-ist – to be ‘out of’ either ‘I’ or ‘You’ or both interchangeably in the contextual relation of the ‘world’?  Egad!  Suddenly, math.  The n or x factors – the ‘unknown-anys’ – the placeholders/integers – at any time filling an equational place worked out toward some solutions or remainders or unsolvables?  And where does infinity fit?  Sets?  Differentials and non-linears?  I was never good at math… Were you?  Was I/you?  Who loves?

Is it then x + y = n?  Where each is a variable struggling through maddening effort toward balance, equaling?  I/you + You/I = love?  Interchangeable probabilities if the integers work – remainders, powers, deficits, and all?  I’ll never understand, am incapable of working it out, and doubt computable laws anyway… and yet… I sense that we are variables and that love makes some surprising solutions to complex problems, no matter how simply or radically signified or symbolized.

In any case “I”‘m a “shifter” just like “You” and “love” seems to be a contextual identifier, a strange conundrum of situation that (at least momentarily) selects values for each unknown of the equation.  A clearing, a possibility, probability, hypothesis.  The fields where beings may appear, are called forth, identified, or occasionally ‘fit.’  What solves for Be.  Here.  or Now.  I/You + Love.  You/I.

Given two hours, and pen, and paper, something might come to matter, to be, to strive for x or render a variable triangle.