Tag: fragments

Playing Writing: a Repetition

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, creative writing, Experimenctes, fragments, Language, loneliness, Other, relation, Writing5 Comments

(alas, the notebooks keep filling…but the time to type does not avail)

Deviser

If I.  If something stirred, was stirring.  The dying.  Any of us.  Were something stirring.  For me.  If I.  The lonely.  Any of us.  The longing.  The longing lonely.  Were something stirring.  Were I.  If I.

If only.  Could be any.  If one.  If only.  If I.  For me.  An other.  Any of us.  A stirring.  I, only dying lonely longing one.  If.  A stirring.  An other.  Someone to speak “we.”  To say “you.”  A whispered “us.”  For me.

If I.

–

What would I (if I, if other) say, if something stirred, if stirring an other, some other who, who might say “you,” “we,” whisper “us,” something stirring then, what would I say.  If I.  If you or we, I whisper “us,” stirring still, what would I say?

–

When might a story begin?  Who could start the unknown?  Only language.  Perhaps only language knows what can’t be said.  What is yet to exist.  Or may not.  Ever.  What is that to me?  If I.  If indeed that is what I do.

–

Touching other to make us.  If I.  If other.  Then a voice, a touch, an extra, an excess, we.  If you.  If I.  What is story to that?  How so?

–

From anywhere: impermanence.  If an other.  If I.  Some story’s beginning, how begun.  If there were a sound, as it were, so to speak.

10/30/2017

“The Dream’s Navel”: an adaptation

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fragments, Language, Perception, Semiotics, Writing1 Comment

…yet another example of negotiating tools and context.  The previous post it seemed natural, as if I reached into the surround in order to work through something, reveal or discover something I hunched toward.  For me this is often why reading, why conversation, why activity – in order for something to emerge, perhaps unsubmerge, for perhaps…

As I sat to write the other day, I recognized my reaching (a little more).  That because 4 colors of pen were available… because they fill my surround when I am annotating texts I read… more voices seemed to join the conversation.  Perhaps intoned by the colors, perhaps offering myself other conversations, altering access, even as the shape of the page contains my possibility.  Or evokes it.

Anyway… the notebook notions tincture now… and I – both follow and concoct…

Adaptation

“words are drying out” – Franco “Bifo” Berardi

                                                       …and for her,

whose face

I held in my hands

a few hours, whom I gave back

only to keep holding the space where she was,

–

I light

a small fire in the rain”

– Galway Kinnell

“Who will ever be able, in this heap of dust, to tell the words from their underpinnings of paper?”

– Edmond Jabes

“Life is the search for the impossible via the useless…no one truly knows how to know and thinking confuses everything.”

– Fernando Pessoa

“man has no other way of living ‘now’ at his disposition besides the possibility to realize it through the insertion of discourse in the world”

– Emile Benveniste

“…if philosophy can be defined at all…”

– Silvia Jonas

“THE DREAM’S NAVEL”

or, Troubling Abstraction

or, refusing reduction

or, peircing the generic

There was a fox with a beautiful tail.  And wondrously colorful.  Like a dream, but tangibly perceptible.

– A dream then, while you’re thick in it –

No, an actual.  Not a virtual.  An imagining.  Beauty.

And this, it is said, is philosophic thought… the questioning and caress of what is, unknown.

– Perhaps unknowable? –

What I do not know.  Have not experienced.  Know this way.

– Imagining. –

Experience.  Experiencing.  Almost like a dream, but languaged now, i.e. controlled, labeled, made discrete and symbolically communicable…signified.  Not that.

  • Again
  • An other
  • Anew

– Something, anyway.  Try again.  Become. –

To cross.  Trans-late.  Waver boundaries of meaning.  Only to continue discretely, or to discretely continue.  To work at the edge… both/and versus either/or versus verses… Weaving.  Text-ure.  

Ever again, always another other, anew, again… What is: difference, and repetition.  Never the same, almost, again

– What? –

Someone or something is living.  Is being.  Perhaps simply is.  Perhaps that… if only we knew.  If anyone could.

– Imagine –

Perhaps.

****

Someone (something?) said.  Set down, symbolized, spoke… suggested…

– Something to work with – from, into toward, away, perhaps. –

Perhaps.

Dip and scratch, gesture, limit, now one, now another, both?  The thread, the fox’s multi-colored tail.  Needle.  Point.  Pierce.  But the thread connects above/below, under/over, in/out, alike… just traversing, transforming, betweening, continuous.  Air, breath, blood, wave, particle, motion, fluid…  Almost a point-of-meeting, a multi-sided trace, not a touch.  Not touching, perhaps.  But touching’s not a point of contact.  Where do you feel the touch of your hand to a leaf?  The touch of your hand to yourself…?

Perhaps.

I’d imagined so.  I’d dreamt of thought.  Particularized continuity.  Cognizable flow…

– Something to work on… in… to be… come… –

Participate?  Renew?  Anew?  A gain?

There was a fox with a beautiful tail.  Like a dream, not quite limit or form or shape… potential, like beauty, like amost…AND…  Like a resonant word meaning this and more also, perhaps non-compliant, unresolved

– How “hate” = “love”, both and neither? –

What!?  I don’t know.

Adjoin.  A margin?  Where what, which, might be meeting – meets all ways?  Area?  Neither/nor, both/and, reciprocity?

– Someone spoke “transduction” –

The fox’s tail is never still, too many hairs to distinguish, melded, trembling in airy surround.  Sometimes the light seems colored, sometimes the fox’s tail.

I began

– Perhaps –

Always part question, regardless the notion, emotion, or statement.

May not have been a fox

– Every thing questions –

Such is our “stance”? – ever in motion

Only a question, questing, going-on/in/for/toward/away?

I saw colors in the light, or air, I “took” to be a fox.  I ex-tracted, ab-stracted, perceived… removed and oriented, made foreign, recognizable.  This woman is so beautiful.

– In other words, “desire,” an imagining –

Almost like a dream

What is?

– What IF?  What if we take back as we give, and offer as we reduce or remove?

Seams

Now one thing and another

And others more and more

– Only extension, addition?  To multiply? –

No.  Also…

Cuts that open and join… multiply and combine…

A fox with a beautiful tail, perhaps… flowing in forested light…

Anything, anywhere, and also

– And also not-this, not-that, not-quite, almost… else…

Perhaps.

What is?

 

 

Doing Undone

On By NW FilbertIn being, change, Confusion, creative writing, doing, Dying, Experimenctes, fragments, Language, Poetry, Uncertainty, Writing9 Comments

It would have to be fragmentary, partial

perhaps pointing, with hope,

like us, living things,

at any given moment:

 

saying things, not yet said,

ever in the midst of acts,

if there happens to be a real

it must be incomplete and full

of undoing and becoming,

of perhapses and oops

 

I had started out

at some point,

apparently ‘past,’

taking up this pen

and applying it to this

paper,

open screen, unknowable unknown,

had started out toward

an I

in order to write

“I had started out”

 

but all is different now

and now again,

again, again,

 

pointing hope

in fragments

assertions and insertions

of possible reals or facts,

some happenings of actuals

be-fore (in face of, in lieu)

words or some expression

 

impression

It stares out, staring in,

fractured and non-finished,

fetishized with objects

that stand for something else,

 

always something else

than what “is” or which has been,

unable otherwise,

simply is

-ing,

unfinished and hardly calculable,

impossible/compossible

and inexhaustibly exhaustible

perhaps

 

seemingly unfinished

and without beginning

(or we would ‘start’)

 

on a way then, in

midst of,

doing toward undone,

Cloud Fragments #2

On By NW FilbertIn change, communication, Complexity, creative writing, desire, Experience, fragments, holidays, Language, Writing5 Comments

oceanwaves.gif

What the whispers, wreathing wraithwords, wisp-whooshing ways, weave-unweaving willful wreckage.  Watery-unwound wrapping-about while unwrapping wishful rending renderings.  Wronged construals in warped wrestlings – reachings, wrenchings – resiliently resisting.  Wranglage, wronguage, writ.

Remains for re(sign)ation.  Re-as(sign)ment.  Relinquishing rest or rectitude.  Repentant writing.  Riddled and recoiling, recombinantly removeable recklessness.  A raucous rancor irregular, irrational, and ever ill-advised in its deviant devising.

Devastating detour: devouring the decrepit, dissimulate, divisable devisor of description.  Descry the dilettante, the decayed decoding at diminish.

Wrest a return: remandering mayhem, maladaptive remainder.  Roping radicals round reason – irrational redescription in rascally remorse.  Mismade and mismanaged.  Wranglage, wronguage, writ.

-toward the New Year

Out of the Woods

On By NW FilbertIn absence, being, change, desire, fragments, identity, Journaling, loneliness, longing, nature, Writing3 Comments

“Why did you come out of your place in the woods?” I was asked.

“I guess so,” I replied.

So what?

This I find I cannot answer.  It is irrational.  Perhaps to stir and sense?  Dis- or un-cover?  “Strife” (from Ancient conceptions of the term).  Turbulence.  That something rather than nothing?  Not to have one’s hands folded on one’s lap? (Dostoevsky).  How should I know?  It’s irrational.

Unreasonably, I’ve begun.

Of course beginning will destroy things:  my stasis, comfort, stillness.  Family roles, relationships, profession.  Any beginning changes everything before (prior) to it.  Friendships, rituals, schedules, habits.

To START (anything) means to RUIN.

And also…BEGIN.

In other words, if I (one) reach out – lash, swipe, caress, call, correspond, text, touch, encounter or engage – an Other (one)… all will be disturbed… it’s the nature of contact between living beings: landscapes, art, humans, animals, spaces, times, words, events.  Everything alters at encounter.  Period.

If I (or we) are available (or needy) and therefore present ourselves (vulnerably) to a reality (actuality, happenstance, opportunity, occurrence) everything changes.

Past.  History.  Future.  Meaning.  Understanding.

So “Why did you come out of your place in the woods?”

What was my ‘place in the woods’?

Repetition.  Familiarity.  Habitue.

Security?  Comfort?  Compatibility with my environs?

I must have desired DIFFERENCE.

And how to account for that?

This is something we just do.

Clothes, taste, touch, belief, surroundings, movement – variance, dissimilitude, change – this signals in some way to our mechanistic (apparently) methodology of ‘survival’ – that we’ve ‘still go it,’ still HAPPEN, to-be… we live.  Are a-live.  Existence.  (See how the noun – the naming/defining – kills it?  Stills and destroys it?).  Existing.

Out of the woods I desire – not to be “existing”, not to crave “existence.”  I do not want any THING.  SOMEthing. I am simply wanting to be-ing… indefinable, indescribable, occurring, happening, all-live – not staid enough, locatable or timed enough to be characterized, apportioned, described and named.  No!  I (for one) am wanting to be happenING, impossible to capture, occur-ING, become-ING, vital not repeatable, unique not typified, tabulated, calculated or classified.

And thus, and so, I change (again).  Again.

Again I come out of the woods.

I be-come.  Out from the woods.

I say, I write, I speak, I act.

I am.

Friends to Fall

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Dying, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, friendship, human, loneliness, seasons, Traces, Writing1 Comment

Elf says “ripe.”

Martin responds, wondering.  Curious as to that which it applies, or whom, or what.  Contemplating reference.  Filled with questions.  Martin says, “yes,” almost under his breath.

Elf shrugs.  Elf walks on.

Martin follows, thinking, looking at leaves falling into blades of grass, alerted by the shushing and darting of squirrels, saddened at the amplified pffft of cars passing by.  Wishing for silence.  Wondering if Elf will speak a further word or two.  Sensing like a dowsing rod for meanings.

Walks on.  Shuffles.  Walks on.

Martin, too.

There’s a relative silence from the two of them – these humans wandering across a concreted trail.  Sure there’s the sound of their footfalls, scuffles, even some noise in the pause of it.  Or the noise of the absence of noise.  But you’d have to be different to hear the breathing, the heart pulse, the slide of muscles and blood.  As far as humans-in-environs go, the pair presents retraction.

Hard to say for soil.  The squares composing sidewalk must suffer pressure, absorbed by the earth beneath and shared out through verberations for miles.  Hard to say for air.  Full-grown males, plodding forth like prows along a rickety line-of-motion has to be pushing particles around, making waves.  Nothing gives report.

Elf stops and sighs.

Martin responds, slowing, looking out, looking forward, looking round.  Lets his hands limp his sides.

Elf crouches down.

Martin scans the street, examines bark, follows trunks and branches, admires leaves and colors and movements.  Birds.

Elf.

Martin.

Alias and the World of Ten Thousand Things

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, Alias Harlequin, being, change, Confusion, Dying, fragments, Living, Loss, Perception, wisdom, Writing4 Comments

The basics of their story are as follows:

  • there was a wedding
  • nearly a year later, a honeymoon
  • followed by her father’s swift, surprising death
  • succeeded by the loss of a child

and the presence of a curious cat.

The basics of his story are as follows:

  • there is a woman
  • he has many sorrows and passions
  • there are children involved
  • he is poor
  • from a distance his life’s deemed “ideal”

the cat’s name is “Fractal” or “Luna,” a.k.a “Predicate Isabitch.”

His sorrow lay in the pace of things.  Both what there is, and what there is not.

No matter the fortunate outcomes, or happy resolutions, his reckoning turns it to grief [perhaps in the manner of Werther] – a “bent,” a “perception,” or “filter.”

Turns to literature and texts of all kinds, from the dead – in near religious belief [nigh Fundamentalist fashion] that they bring joy or consistent melancholy satisfactions.

Alias Harlequin is sick and he’s dying – he knows it.

He lies at the end of his rope.  STOP.

Impression alters there.  Import and significances warp.

Some things that seem pressing, dissolve.  Don’t matter the same, at the ends.

Will occur, and pass by, to negligible consequence.  Comparatively.

Other happenings seem to reveal profound differance.

True import (such an intimate, idiosyncratic affair).  Nothing true, yet perhaps only.

Alias sits at his perch on his porch, calculating.

What’s the matter (for the head, and the hand, and the heart)?

While Laramie stumbles at camp on a rock.  And he falls.

We don’t (always) know what we need when we’re down…but (sometimes) we know what we don’t…

Narrating Fragments

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Photography, Traces, Writing3 Comments
“And in life, meaning is not instantaneous.  Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development.  Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning.  Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning.  Facts can be fed into a computer and become factors in a calculation.  No meaning, however, comes out of computers, for when we give meaning to an event, that meaning is a response, not only to the known, but also to the unknown: meaning and mystery are inseparable, and neither can exist without the passing of time.  Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration: meaning is born of the two.  An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself.  When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.”

-John Berger, Another Way of Telling –

Paul Kenny -

it might be Autumn

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, seasons, Writing4 Comments

It might be Autumn.  It takes awhile to know (here).  In any case, the confusion is enormous, is bewildering, is sometimes stultifying.

Multiple persons – some who know me and some who seem like they do – all seem confident about it.  About the book.  About that “there is a book in me” just waiting to be born or written, composed or transcribed – however a “book” comes to be.  I am certain of none of it, excepting that I love books, in fact I crave well-connected letters as much as (although differently from) my desire for love, for intimacy (or “satisfaction” – itself a kind of surprise and delighted exhaustion), for meaningful connections (being understood, acknowledged, beloved, and so on).  Strange beasts, we.  I.  I-we.

The “I” is “we” if you take into account all the variance – the inconsistencies and variety and contextual divergences.  “Bewildering” is the word I most usually apply to this business or blessing of living… of being alive.

Maybe that’s what this is about, like birthdays.  The strange pivoting celebration of another year undergone or accomplished, simultaneous with its absence and cessation.  Living, dying – same thing?  The introduction that serves as farewell.  A tightly romance.

Does “paradox” indicate two apparently incompatible things being the case at once?  These are not flip-sides of a coin, but two things on the same surface, depending.  Living/dying, suffering/joy, love.  Now as before and after in the same instant, so to speak.  I will always be battling the incapacity of words as the only things capable.  Communicative paradox – language as, at once, in the same sphere/realm/scale/reality – that which reveals and conceals, says and does not say, speaks and remains silent, clarifies and obfuscates, signals and misleads…fails and succeeds.

So that every effort of greeting also grieves, and each introduction is yet another form of farewell.

 

I loved her.