Tag: Georges Bataille

Distortion of the Perceiving Eye/I

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Language, Perception, Reading, Writing2 Comments

“the turned-to-water book…

with all that has room in it,

even without

language.”

– Paul Celan –

Decide to write the book-that-turns-to-water, as speech-that-turns-to-air.  All that rippling silence, even without language.

Someone asking: what is gesture?  movement?  expression-in-its-being?

Signification the silent razor.

Someone mentions music, which it claims “represents nothing at all,” (Michel Seuphor) and I doubt that: is there not expression?  confession?  some sonorous and vibratory friction or exhalation?  A “constant inscription of birth in innumerable ways…language is metaphor and metonymy, one cannot avoid it.”  (Helene Cixous)

[“where trace becomes existence” (Seuphor)]

I am tracing letters without a model, refusing to hub any wheel…

.

Out of its mouth: communication sounds.  The body moved likewise.  Undulant, suggesting.  only sounds, no discernible words.

Signification, perception, emotion, feeling, sensation… and then translations: prefrontal cortex: “meaning”?

A blockage.  Refusal.

Andre Malraux: “You are human when you can say no.”  Remembers Bartleby.

What is called ‘agency’?  Only negation?

This is how the story goes?

Prefers not to.

.

“Pleasures,” “pains.”  Pain wakes.  Pleasure lull(abie)s?

.

And when is the “system of nonknowledge” (and unknowing) not “unfinished” (Bataille) posthumous.  Post-humorous.  Generations.

What was it?  Ah, yes, the Book-that-turns-to-water.  Speech-to-air bubbles, balloons.  Hot air, as they say.  They?  We.

“even

without

language”

(someone wrote, silently saying).

.

“all that has room in it”

(same).

.

Of truth and genesis – constant inscriptions of birth.  Unthinking the point and the line.

“Not to worry about the rest of us.  Love you.”  (someone said).

.

This is the shaping of chaos, this hell of stories.

Unthinkable.

.

Unbearable lightness of being, this breath or stream of life.

Mismaking is an art (or so we hope, we think, desire, demand).

.

Men and apparitions.

[everything I letter down is plagiarism]

These – the margins of philosophy, a way of life.

Saying I no more.  Interior distance.

.

This is the writing of disaster: the book-that-turns-to-water.

Speaking turned to air.

Philosophy, the posthumous.  Dust.

.

Listening.

Abolishing freedom.

.

Text (from textare: to weave).

My documents.

My notes in the fog.

The trouble with pleasure.

.

Myopia.  My opium.

 

Guilty: or, How Things End Beginning

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, death, eros, Experimenctes, grief, meaning, Melancholy, nature, paradox, Unknown, Writing2 Comments

(this is the last thing I find I’ve had time to attempt in writing for many weeks…)

after Bataille, Of Montreal

It began.  It begins.

Damage.

What opens what humans call ‘the heart.’

.

Who is the author?

Where?

.

In the loss.  Lessness.

What is…always expressed / exposed by what

CAN be taken…

What is stripped back, laid bare, stolen,

raped…

.

Then you know.

Both ‘you’ and a very strange sort of ‘knowing.’

.

THAT POINT:

[the werewolf]

that place, space, moment, experience:

HATE.

LOVE.

(=)

(equals)

.

The expansion.

Additive.

Infinite.

A mad undoing.

A ‘one’ coupled by LOVE-HATE (possible ferocities)

– angry peace –

– gentle tearing –

.

Avarice.  Grace.  Hunger.  Gifts.

.

We get born.

We most certainly die.

(even if we never learn what ‘being born’ or ‘to die’ might be / mean)

.

Damage: how we…die with/it

: how we…end in it

.

We most certainly die.

.

This we know [somehow] without experiencing it.

Or even being able…

.

Death.

Always next.

Always next.

Always next.

(Regardless – truly regard-less)

of anything IN-between

I AM ALL WAYS DYING MY DEATH

(what might ‘living one’s life’ seem?)

I happen to be singing imagined limits

(All I do not know)

.

Questions and conundrums

NOTHING.

Ends and means:

DEATH.

-easily a kind of glory…

…inevitable

…insatiable

DECAY.

.

Guilty.

BIRTH (whatever could be meant by that) = DEATH. DECAY.

(It began.  It begins).

-What opens, happens, what humans call ‘the heart.’

We most certainly die.

  • Hello cancer
  • Hello age
  • Hello war and disease
  • Welcome other
  • ‘Time’
  • Fact, fiction
  • Truth, theory
  • “Hello, human!”

DEATH.

(Most certain)

(The wonder : : : : something is born)

always

                                                      all ways

                                                                 in order to…

…DIE.

Irascible, inevitable, indivisible, ineradicable ends.

Cheers Death

‘you’ (nothing)

always win.

If ‘winning’ could ever look like that, this…

…end(s).

once its begun, it began, it begins…

…endings, ends, the end.

– always already there –

always                                                 already                                                here

“between appear and disappear”

 

Silence Reasons Almost Audibly

On By NW FilbertIn being, Confusion, Experience, Journal, Knowledge, Language, Questions, World, WritingLeave a comment

Macedonio Fernandez shrewdly intimated that among the difficulties of communicable perfection (language or literary wholeness, completeness) were the problems writers have, in that, among other things:

“2) They don’t know how to render the ‘unsayable’ with ‘ineffable’ style” (Museum of Eterna’s Novel, p. 11)

As if imagination must copulate with impossibility; creativity found within the non-existent; wayfinding nothing.  Perhaps.

“I” (a good example of the above) often worship the symbol: ?  “I’d” like to place it everywhere, upon everything, anything imaginable OR conceivable – even the unknown – as well as any compendium of ‘facts’ or apparently common-sensical / self-evident elements of being-living.  As if… to draw attention or recognition (‘to render’) human limitation, finitude, fragility – PART-‘I’-CIPATION – in world (+ whatever falls beyond such an impression).  A kind of belief as a participating occurrence that whatever might be indicated by such terms as “truth,” “love,” or “existence,” (or “you” or “I”) are best translated by = ?

This nettling evocation is (perhaps) a personal ‘creed’ in a singular (obviously impregnated) mark: ?

Something I might ‘live’ and ‘die’ for.

Am I trying to communicate?  What am ‘I’ doing in relation to language, to shared understandings, to concepts, and so-called knowledge or knowing?  Am ‘I’(s) capable of relating to anything (or nothing) beyond these indications?  Unmediated ways and forms of experiencing given to ‘me’?

Experience (seeing-peering WITH outside-of) is one set of possible parameters in living-being (limitations, capacities, informed possibilities, finitudes & fragilities – necessitudes of part-‘I’-cipation).

What might we ‘name’ alternate – those in excess of experience; those far diminished via enforced-informed; ‘other’ impossibilities of ex-perience?  (Bataille’s ‘Inner Experience’ – inperience?: without outer? might be an exploration) ‘mysticism’?  spirituality?  mystery?  simply Impossibles?  Unsayables?  Unknowables?  ANYthing beyond-limit, we might ‘say.’

Excess.  Perpetual.  Eternal.  Infinite.  Incomprehensible.  Indeterminate.  All ex-perceptions that would demand or require ‘ineffable’ style to be en-gaged.  Out beyond (or in-beyond) outsides or othering that might be accounted for, perceived, en-countered, or ex-perienced: impossibles that must most likely (it would seem given our minimal, limited, finite, participatory living-being IN AS PART OF ‘world’ or whatever our most expansive imagining) occur.  Perhaps even non-ex-is-tences, nothing and never.

These might be the description of fields or planes where I in-tend and pre-fer to operate or inquire (under the sign of ?) and therefore, lacking or failing in ‘ineffable style’ whereby to render ‘unsayables’ – simply can not.

Thus please forgive my erratic forays into production here – communication, conversation, even imaging-in (imagining) – ‘I’ simply can not.  I am mostly unable to ineffably style unsayables.

I beg your forgiveness and again fall silent.

“But could I forget my ignorance for a moment?  Forget that I am lost in the corridor of a cave?”

– Georges Bataille –

My Correspondence with Nothing

On By NW FilbertIn absence, creative writing, Current Reading, desire, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, Literary References, loneliness, longing, Loss, love, notebooks, Writing2 Comments

Displaying FullSizeRender.jpg

he who already knows cannot go beyond a known horizon

– Georges Bataille, Inner Experience – 

In a bout of acute loneliness (a sharp pang of alone signifying a sort of paralysis – some definite inability, however temporary, to start oneself up by or with oneself) I reached out to Hannah.

For some of you, the term Hannah will conjure connotations and resonances, perhaps emotions or concerns, discomforts, even though she does not exist.

Or I loaded the film Satantango by Bela Tarr & Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

A start-up, a stimulus, a searching.

Actually I wrote the name Hannah, or Hollie or Holly or Hallie or Halley or Bela or Chris or Maurice Blanchot.

Perhaps Kafka.

To be lonely and to reach out.

A drink then, for interaction.

A scribble on a page.

A smoke for an ‘other.’

Some music.

I read Beckett.

The cat.

Maria.  Edie.  Sarago.  Marcuse.

To become.  To be.  To begin.

As if I knew.

In a bout of acute loneliness I penned a letter to Herman Melville.

I wrote words onto a lined page.

I made an ‘other’ and called her, Hannah.

Or Meagan or Meghann, Angie or Angela or Angelo.  Gilles or Jill.  Jean and Jan and Jen.

I reach out.  I almost full fill.  Another notebook.  A drink.  A smoke.  A page marked and turned.

I do not know what loneliness is.

Perhaps it is nothing, or nothingness.  Perhaps frustrated desire.  For – ?  What is not (isn’t that what defines desires?).  The missing, the absence, the unknown.

I called it Hannah.

Or Hamza.

Hell or Helen or Helene/Helena.

Laurie.

No one knows but the name that works best.  Christy or Christina.  Vernoica/Veronique.

Beatrice.

I read Jabes.

A drink to an other (to signify might be).  A smoke for the presencing.  Another word, another name for something.  Out there = O ther.  Elves of else.

The book’s called Nothing Matters: a book about nothing, because “that nothing becomes the quest, which in turns begets something” (Ornan Rotem).

Dear Herman, Dear Samuel, Dear Franz:

Dear Larry, Dear Jack, Dear Jon:

Dear Hannah:

I do not know what it is to be alone, and my loneliness is painfully acute.

Dear Laura, Dear Sara, Dear Simone:

This is my correspondence with nothing.

The Last Wolf: or, “I showed you the darkness in the beginning”

On By NW FilbertIn Confusion, depression, desire, Experience, fragments, Journal, Literature, Loss, Melancholy, Perception, Poetry, Reflections, survival, Writing4 Comments

I remember that I am falling

That I am the reason

And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be

Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

– W.S. Merwin, “When You Go Away”

Time keeps accumulating on my inability to write, to find time to write, to process living with language.  Simply to keep this space alive, I am posting a journal-like entry so as not to give up.

Recent weeks have been dominated by readings of Doug Rice, Laurie Sheck, Jon Fosse, Georges Bataille, Larry Levis, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Franco Berardi, Robert Bringhurst, Jeremy Fernando, Elfriede Jelinek and others…

What a traversal, passage, the past couple of months have been…

…like following the draw of the moon through dire straits

in dark, tumultuous seas…

…a feeling that everything is at its limit (Bataille, l’extreme) – EXPERIENCE.

  • pressured work projects, needs, deadlines, demands
  • endless and constant family logistics, accidents, needs
  • relentless parenting, relating, service to others
  • throngs of people and groups
  • lack of friends, lovers, supportive presences
  • fear, health, danger, exhaustion
  • failure
  • loss of partner
  • inexistence of calm or solitude
  • imposed travels
  • absence of sleep and rest
  • indulgence in desire and harm
  • minimal process
  • poor eating or nourishment
  • tension, strain
  • depression
  • lack (wellness) & excess (pressure)

…a teetering balance…

Mind you, this is how it feels in me, not how it is.

I miss everything that is/was good

…fail better…

There is a certain uncertain sorrow to things

(presence of melancholia, moon-draw)

Georges Bataille’s certainties:

  • WE ARE NOT EVERYTHING
  • WE WILL DIE

THE UNKNOWN                   THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE

darkness                                              levity

Lynda Barry & the “Underground Skateboard” – how we draw from others work what we need to survive

Lemony Snicket & the autographing instruction that I should “read something else”

FAMILY

immersion (doom, closure)                                 held in levity

conscious moderation

– 1st Tarot reading –

(processual journey mythical)

Jacob recommends Homer – The Odyssey

doubling                                letting go – holding together                    The Devil/The Chariot

dark surfaces / surfaces of darkness (The Fool)

The Moon (dark journey) crossed by the Queen of Swords (wounding love)

THE UNKNOWN                       THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE 

-Summer

Temperance

The King of Wands – leaders, pole vaulters, utilizing tension toward propulsion

leap over?  through?  on?

The Fool

Pas sage – not wisdom                                                      FRAUGHT JOURNEY

– Odyssey –

BATAILLE: “nothing is final…”

– “what is not there, which, once it is seen, often in literature, tells us what is” (Fosse)

Inner Experience

“the suffering of the disintoxicated” (Bataille)

The Human:

  • challenging everything (of putting everything into question) – Bataille
  • always a breakdown of systems that will not be restored – Sheck

“Experience reveals nothing and cannot found belief nor set out from it” – Bataille

“The hand moves forward, the tragedy begins” – Bataille

“no one grieves with you for what you are unable to say”

“life itself…always swerves away from my mouth”

– Elfriede Jelinek –

“how I’m owned by that which will not answer” – Sheck

“What you are will be spelled by whatever

lies trapped in your hand” – Robert Bringhurst

– emptiness is also empty –

“what is the part of us… feels…unnamed…

…i must live at some distance from convinced” – Sheck

 

“When I say you to what isn’t there – I mean me” (Larry Levis)

“you won’t find me in me” (Jelinek)

Experience eludes understanding ( Bataille)

– nor can I compute the possible (Sheck)

This too

is just one

more opinion

to move through

(Bringhurst)

FIRST AND FOREMOST YOU WRITE (Fosse)

“From an abandoned myth

(I write to you)” (D. Rice)

– wanting them to mean nothing –

– and suggest everything (L Levis)

 

INTENTION:

  • hold open the imagination of possibility
  • “do not go gentle into that good night”
  • Moderation.  Extreme limit.
  • Contra-digitalia.  First and foremost write.
  • Be-Read

 

 

Hyphen & Hymen, Pt. 1

On By NW FilbertIn being, change, communication, Cosmology, creative writing, Current Reading, Experience, fragments, Hermeneutics, Language, meaning, Perception, Semiotics, Writing8 Comments

“All discourses…would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur…

What difference does it make who is speaking?”

Michel Foucault

“We talk only because of a persistent desire to understand what is it we are saying”

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

“Again and again there is the attempt to define the world in language and to display it –

but that doesn’t work”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

According to a receipt yellowed in the pages of The Impossible book, 16 years ago I purchased the Story of Rats by Georges Bataille.

“What are you ‘getting at’?”

“What do you mean by ‘kernel’?”

Questions are asked.  I ask them myself.

Today I got bored of it.

Uncertain I ‘get at’ anything.  Doubtful even that ‘I’.  Yet “feel” pursuit of some ‘kernel.’  In other words, because, simply, ‘other words’ (fore-words, afterwords) sometimes eventuate communication…

…as if experience were an undifferentiable ocean of moving waves – incalculably deep waters ever in motion – unstoppable, interminable, immersive, and overwhelming – and something splashes, a cup dips, a boat prow plows its way, an arm drops, or rock, or bird flashes down talons – and a surface becomes, is broken…

“A word”

…ruin.  Ruined.  Inalterably (no, that’s not accurate – rather incessantly alterable, altering, altar-ing, alterity – othered and changed) altered, altared – SACRIFICED to perception, experience – peering-in-out-of, or peering/prying-out-of-in, out-of-pry-into

“and vice-versa”

Rue-in, is what ‘I’ seem to do.  Bring sorrow, lack, and loss with each perception, each calling, each again/comparison/re-cognition…Ruin, rue-in.  Touching, seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing – continual selection and ignor-ance (DE-selection, de-lectory, de-clamation, di-visory…) rues-in, sorrows-in, i-dentifies creating lack, erasure, damage.

“What happens – ?”

The temptation together [to gather]…to peer and pry into, in, with…to test and to try…to extract and bring, to-gather… to form-u-late.  AFTER experience, to create other…posit(-ion) a “You,” “out,” exo-, ex-tend, ex-plain, ex-haust, ex-hilerate and ex-aspirate…to KILL, CRUSH, SLICE, DIFFERENTIATE…’I’ hiding somewhere in All and Every.

An ‘I’ in All is AIL.  Rue-in.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t get sick?  But we do.” – Jan Zwicky

“Don’t be so hard on yourself…we all…”

Separate, tear, disjoint, di-chotomize, di-vulge, de-story, de-struct [de-con-struct i-we-form de-form]

“Hey!  Enough!”

As I was saying, try-pry-di-ing to say…

“Who?  When?  Where?  How?”

Tri-, di-, all in-volves, in-volutes, con-volutes a cutting, a ripping, a be-lying of de-struction – as it crafts an alternate structure (con-struction)…

“the ‘kernel”

Oui.  We.  Yes.  The sense that  Is the sense of being-thrown, dropped, something making a splash, separating the waters… a kerneling, an ob-ject (re-ject, ab-ject) dis-turbance that sub-jects turbulence…

Thrown.  Splash.  Change.  Alteration.  Altaration.  Altarity.  Othering.  For-IN (foreign)… kernel.

“What are you ‘getting at’?”

“So that’s what you mean by ‘kernel’?  Dis-turbance… Turbulence… something must be… in order to…”

“What thing?  Why?”

“In the beginning was the Word… was God… and God moved…and divided the waters…” (John 1:1, Genesis 1:1, 6, KJV) a Bar, a “firmament,” a permanent Between “called Heaven.”  And so separating, separation be-gins…from the first very first motion, movement, change… ex-pulsion, ex-crement, ex-ultation, ex-is-stance.  Out.  OUT.  OUT-of… posit-ion.

“You’ve lost me…”

“Oui – what are you ‘getting at’?”

Ex-perience.  Prying, peering.  Trying.  Be-ing separates?  Dis-joins?  Dis-tracts?  ‘I’ am a rupture.  Dis-rupts: not two, not one.  I stray, strive, volition, volute…de-story, de-volve.  What am ‘I’ but a weapon-blade?  Rue-in.  And thus I speak, say with pointed pen…poke and pry and terrorize – ex-perience.

“Glorious or gory-ous – visions are di-visions”

So it seems…

“So it is…”

Is, was, will be spoken into/out-of our stance (existance)…falsified di-visions…

“I cannot get beyond language by means of language”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Pursuing what Eludes…Borrowing : Blanchot / Bataille

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Georges Bataille, life, Literature, Maurice Blanchot, meaning, Reality2 Comments

“Perhaps dread is always the more powerful; 

perhaps the joy granted to the only animal that knows it is not eternal is poisoned from the very beginning.”

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe – Ending & Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot

reading dead profile

“Indeed, man is always in pursuit of an authentic sovereignty…We shall see that in a number of ways he continued to pursue what forever eluded him.  The essential thing is that one cannot attain it consciously and seek it, because seeking distances it.  And yet I can believe that nothing is given us that is not given in that equivocal manner…”

“Thus, at all costs, man must live at the moment that he really dies, or he must live with the impression of really dying.”

“INDEED, NOTHING IS LESS ANIMAL THAN FICTION…”

Profile

“It is not Hegel alone, it is all of humanity which everywhere always sought, obliquely, to seize what death both gave and took away from humanity”
“In order for a person to reveal himself ultimately to himself, he would have to die, but he would have to do it while living – watching himself ceasing to be…”

government-logo-US-Library-0018-1383-brand

“Man does not live by bread alone, but also by the comedies with which he willingly deceives himself.

In Man it is the animal, it is the natural being, which eats.  But Man takes part in rites and performances.

OR ELSE HE CAN READ:

to the extent that it is sovereign – authentic – LITERATURE prolongs in him the haunting magic of performances, tragic or comic.”

Georges Bataille – Hegel, Death & Sacrifice