Tag: fiction
Excerpt from the Book of Living Words
Unspoken Fragments
Through someone else’s blog award list I recently discovered The Dream Journal Today – a remarkable blog straightforwardly recounting dreams. It has stimulated me to pay more attention to what my brain is doing in its “off-hours.” The post regarding my longing for knowledge of my father is such a result, as is the following post, gathered through the past night. I have the hunch my psychophysiology works over emotion when I’m out…something my waking mind deters. Whatever the case, I have found the ritual to be as intriguing as working with photo-prompts to dislodge other-conscious concerns, and recommend it to writers everywhere as a kind of exercise in translation.
Thrown on my back as from a jungle gym – panicked in the way of breath-smashed bodies. Helpless then, disempowered.
Lying next to you in our warm nest of bed, nose and right eye microscopically near the flesh of your chest – the sharp distinction of its tattoo’s inky night and the blemishless cream covering your major pectorals.
I see it falling, the exploding crush of a thick plate of glass the size of a small wall and maybe four inches thick – variegated and stained – slicing and dicing my face with the stories you don’t share.
The night is full of phrases. Intimacies shredded by the unspoken, the secrets. A literal compaction of my face in bloodied fragments – the world a shattered windshield.
Sleeping fitfully you deliver direct language through the dark. “This is wrong and this is wrong and this is wrong…with you.” I don’t remember details, only that I’m broken like a vase of porcelain on the floor of an empty manor.
The decompression and drainage, the fracturing damage of all you hold apart. Discommunication. What is withheld. The feeling of what happens when I supply the captions to your silence.
“What is fiction after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming?”
-Jonathan Franzen-
Words Living
“When we are not sure, we are most alive”
-Graham Greene-
In Living Memory
Not like there’s a whole lot there. It is what it is, my memory – glossy, apparently endless, and stripped bare. But there seem to be windows, areas the light creeps in, and doorways – entries to room after room of possibilities. If I could get in there, could move past this moment of glimpsing, find the courage to carry myself forward (or is it back?). Remains to be seen, here – me at the cusp, in full view, just on the verge, of remembering.
What just happened?
N Filbert 2012
this post created as participation in beloved weekly Friday Fictioneers – check it out! join!
Thank you : I don’t know what I am saying…
“Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed.”
-Maurice Blanchot-
“The world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both by the public motion and their own. Even constancy itself is no other but a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my object; ‘tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness; I take it as it is at the instant I consider it; I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.”
-Michel de Montaigne, 1580-
“Sincerity – it’s the insatiable process
of transition, of fluctuation…”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
I began one place, and become another.
Wallace remarked that the most difficult thing to teach young writers was the difference between expressive writing and communicative writing.
“Two utterances cling tightly to each other, like two bodies but having indistinct boundaries.” (Maurice Blanchot)
A notification informs me that today is the first anniversary of my experience of the blogosphere.
Humbled over 365 days.
And thank you.
.
I imagine many writers/artists start out, in the youth of their writing (or creative work) from a singular sense. There’s this “me” experiencing this “world,” it seems like – an I and a chaos, an identity and a multitude. When the I (or eye) feels full, it is like to burst. Things touch us, hurt us, impinge on our locus, our “self,” and it seems something must be done about it – we must exert – strike back, reach out, kiss, craft – exhibit our presence. Interact. The dualities are clear.
Are confused. Experience turns out to be very mixed, an impossibly confusing weave. As we begin to plunder these “moments,” we’re countered. Things that happened to us, we were there for, in all fairness, our activities encroach.
We begin perhaps to recognize our existence as agents – not only done to, but doing; not only recipients but respondants, reactive. The wrestle of expressing ourselves through materials (language, movement, matter or sound) teaches us this. The Other’s inextricably woven – what occurs and results is the same. Is unlike. We lose balance.
Conceiving the work as a subject toward object (our creating) deriving from object to subject (our experiences) – our investigations quickly expose this unclear. Attacked by requirements of how. Stubborn like marble or tricky as oils, even recalcitrant conventions, we begin to comprehend a falsity to working on, as a single direction, and realize it’s all a working with. And we struggle.
Even working with. The earth, or people, or bodies, or clay, things rarely abide our intentions. We set out to disburden ourselves, get incited to construct or create (to “use”) and find ourselves consistently foiled. Reality doesn’t care. We find precious little room for expression. Compromise and nuance, novelty or style – ineffective to the longings we exude.
Perhaps at this stage we lose faith in our voices or visions – what we seek we does not seem to obtain. This is fine. This is something no product can resolve. For there isn’t. There is no solution to life. We are IN it. And there is no replacement for death. Then we’re OUT.
Whether language or matter, movement or sound, our “I” never works on an Other. We are INsulated. INextricably. Communicative activity means cohabiting the spaces, simultaneous-ing the times. Realities – experiences – accord. Everything possessing the prefix co-. It’s admitting the reciprocal, the recursive – we’re not separate beings being, we are beings expressing ourselves commensurately. Perhaps control is adjusting to convention. Accepting agreements with place. Expression living IN and WITH, communication the word for the weave. That we’re behaving, creating, co-mposing in inseparable connectivity (inexpressible process) – transition, fluctuation, IN –
– attempting to paint its passage.
Thanks so much for reading, joining, my attempts.
N Filbert 2012
Pieces from the Book of the Dead
Roughing (ralphing) a Draft
Bare Bones and Synapses : Oscillating (a Story)
Feel like I’ve been out of the game…aside from Friday Fictioneers I haven’t had time for concocting, playing and revising original texts for awhile…feeling this time opening up a little bit I’ll be trying to finish up some long-term projects, while also working out some ideas that have been swaying to and fro in me cranium…here’s a gutturally wrenched structure that I barfed up today…we’ll see what becomes of it…
#1 perks up, signaling “it’s about time something truly great were written…at least what we’re capable of writing…the best we can do, right now.”
#2, energized by this, by the vibe that the entire gang might be on board, the whole shebang ready to summon resources and operate, sync up, as it were, breathlessly quivers, smiling shyly, eager
#3 promptly curls over and balks, doubts, folds under, clenches. Mostly afraid of failure, or of not having what it takes to see this thing through – concoct something “great” – shimmies and blocks out, switches off the snaps and veils the crackling lights in nearest hallways
#4 is feeling good, having been freed to excesses in the night, sensing the throbbing in the basement and burning like a reptile in the sun, pleased and exotic, inspiring
#7 with pleasurable visions of fantasies and victory. Floodlights on, matched to #4’s bask, but also pulling in air, rolling back shoulders and drawing up the chest while sucking in the tummy
#5 babbling away nondescript utterances, filterlessly spilling data, codes and equations of plots, prose and characters grabbed here and there from the crooks and crannies, gutterways and mushy sewage-scapes like pebbles stuck in gluey glia.
#1 now boisterous and bellowing, carried away in surges, blurting out hurrahs and coach-cliches, beckoning a kind of connective huddle
If #4 could think alone, he’d claim erotic inception for the will of #1, having woken aroused by images spun from #7 throughout their “sleeping” 8Hz
But #1 is wanting more and #3 isn’t giving or opening up
#6 and #7 providing soundtracks and scenarios, pressuring #4 to kick up the heartbeat, #2 to activate arms and hands
Four of the seven are joined, yawping and dipping, rippling a recursive wave – this group is on the move
#4 sends chills down the surface and tingles spine and loins
#2 adjusts all openings, focusing on bright lights and sparkly things, deep greens and muted blues
#4 pounds “approach” and “happy” buttons like timpani
#6 starts sweat and shuffles memory volts of breezes
#3 begins to forget as #5 yammers and badgers and #4 jacuzzies the mass in hot syrups
#1 commands #2 to to focus, clip and edit #5, while #6 and #7 distract with many-colored bouncing balls
Optimally they’ll link up and ride this wave in balance – each informing the other – shocking, supporting and inspiring the murky mass trapped in 22 inches of bone.
Spilling the Marbles
Spilling the Marbles
Which got me thinking (a process I’d describe as internal), about how we find things out when we act.
My wife was talking (a process I’d call external), about what occurs for her when she journals (with a physical pen or pencil on physical paper). Which she described as “internal processing,” (an activity I’d designate externalizing), whereby she mysteriously splits herself into observer and subject at once, providing case-notes or records of the interaction. (Did I listen well?). The arm a kind of thread-of-self arcing out to the needle of a writing instrument, jittering and inscribing its EKG-like “reading” onto the blank pages and looping back in for more. The self as inkwell?
My body hitched at this. Read: torso clinched and weather vane set spinning in grey matter. Like I might if someone told me “god told me to…”, or that they were “inspired by the Muse,” or “carried away by the spirit” and whatnot. A reaction remote from wife’s account – so what was happening for me? In other words, am I re-enacting her activity presently?
There’s the thinking part, surely. And then there’s the intention to find something out – observation, attention, inquiry – “why did I cinch up at that depiction?”, “what felt ‘off’ to me in that account (as related to my own experience)?”, “what was I ‘feeling’”?
I felt uncomfortable, that’s what. Squirmy, antsy, bothered. Was that chemically induced, like overall mood-disorder stuff, or related to her message? I thought about this, and now I’m writing about thinking about it – what’s the difference?
It leaves traces? It does. And so?
I’m making something of it? I suppose. Why? How? And – ?
Why? Hmmmm. It comforts me to write. Like organizing marbles on a tabletop. It diverts my attention.
To the marbles.
Ah, yes. That’s it, exactly.
That is to say (in this case silently with tangible markings), the reason I am unable to identify with my wife’s remarks about writing about thinking about her “self,” is that I get distracted. In my head, it’s a swirl of sounds and concepts, images and sensation-symbols or impulses infiltrating and becoming one another like smoke strands in an overturned glass. But transforming to paper it becomes language, marbles, metaphors.
Some whispering gap of translation. I wouldn’t have thought marbles on a tabletop or envisioned smoke swirling in an upside-down glass – what would be the point? Do I need to describe myself to myself? Could I even? Deceive myself so? But through a medium – a thick, loamy, granular medium like language – that’s cause for intention, apparatus of selection and choice, opportunities outside the body, drawn from the big wide world. That’s external, that’s INTERACTION with a history, a culture, and a society of humans that gave rise to its agreements and standards, components and flavors and rules.
Jolting out through the arm via muscle controllers and a mechanical tool, I’m participant far outside my finite organism – in contents and structures, systems and meanings way beyond my doing or the thinks I might think. The threads that I sew, the fabric I stitch in, the stylus, ink and letters I write are not mine – the pen, paper, leaves, spark, or smoke emitted into the clear crystal container all already exist, given or available, as it were, to me.
It’s hard to find the part I play in the process, or how the words relate to me – more like the words relate me – render me relatable – if I’m able to finagle myself to their categories and nuances.
So it is (for me) as if the movement to write is spilling the marbles – turning me out of myself into a world where language matters – discursive, discussive, dialogically or to some expressive purpose – catching at these rolling targets and corralling them toward some organizational assemblage (that, I suppose, being my part in the meaningful game). I pick the red one and set it there, not there. Or prefer the one with the chip in it next to the tiger’s eye, and so forth. (There’s no accounting for taste – is that “style”? (Really!?)).
So “what have I written?” I think, and I’m sure I don’t know, but thanks for the language and time, it’s a process – and now you have the bagful of marbles…
Happy Thanksgiving!!
All my Words are Silent 