“You simply cannot learn and know at the same time,
and this is a frustration we all must bear.“
-Mary Ruefle-
Tag: hope
What a Story Looks Like to Me
The Trouble Is
He feels slow, tectonic, deeply submerged even, unable to act, not able to speak, disabled (apparently) to respond, incapable even of processing. Something seems to have happened.
She – is confused and confounded – experiencing a complex cocktail of distress and depression, pointless and pointed-out, sludged, sloughed and slathered, comatose and doomed, sad and angry in equal measures. A compound. A compound problem.
But she’s not. And he can.
And they will.
The trouble is.
Yes, the trouble is.
Not easily fitted. Because it is this time. Again, it is now. And now, again. The words were made from before, or for some last time, some other. Something foreign. Along with the categories, analysands and diagnoses. Along with the remedies: all for a potential future or other distinctively past.
But it is now. Yes, the trouble is. Is now.
Words of others. Ideas, aspects.
Always malappropriate and inadequate. Words are not it. Words are something else.
This is not discrete or verifiable. Simple. Is. Trouble.
Yes, the trouble is.
And the trouble is now.
She collapses. He freezes again. And this frozen is yearning. Something excruciating. Like her. Like where she is, now collapsing. Collapsible. Collapsed. That’s the trouble.
The trouble is.
He wishes and fumbles, at light-year’s remove, another era, disabled, catatonic, all too aware.
She breaks in and through her fall. He hitches and constricts.
She gurgles a sound, a horrible mutable sound, hardly audible in her destruction and dismantling, her infolding and coming undone. And he cries, cries out, a sort of bellow and howl of noiseless emission, helpless to keep up with time, incapable of presenting, shaped and occurring like shore-stones and wheat-seed.
She is done. He has yet to arrive. He will not get there. Too far ahead and far too behind, and she is in trouble, and the trouble is.
Yes, the trouble is. It is now.
Something has happened.
On Articulating Experience
“The more ways of articulating human experience one knows the better.”
– Eugene Gendlin
I would like very much to say/write something today. Something resonant and broad, something that would stimulate empathy, reflection, acute sensations, self-awareness and some renewed purposiveness toward what any reader might consider their own “good” and the larger “good” of the “world.” That would motivate us to be more fully, attentive to what we most value, what we most wish to value; that would tickle, trigger and activate that within each of our experiencings whatever it is in us that occurs in those sweet, heartbreaking and perception-exploding moments in which we feel like WE matter, that the WORLD we participate in matters, that meaning is worth, well, Life…and that Life as we are living it, we live together.
But I haven’t the first idea, concept or “hook” to know how to do that. I have nothing to say. I have urges, wishes, passions, dreams and a kind of crushing, yearning hope – that we might focus a little, shape ourselves, choose something for ourselves and one another and act with and toward ourselves, one another and the world in ways and fashions that could soothe, nourish, calm, comfort, extend and enhance our collective experience of being humans in a world full of so many other things we depend and inter-depend and co-depend on and with. Rather than our easy, disruptive, erratic, dissatisfying instinctual and common practice of reacting, responding, self-protecting, guarding, distancing, lashing out, closing in…separating, hurting and harming, frightened, cowardly and weak.
I don’t know where to start with that. I would that I could write the experience of others, could find synchrony and sympatico with my friends, family and acquaintances, could articulate the complexity and depth, mystery and reticulated implicit intricacies of their experiencings: their pains, joys, desires, griefs, knowings & doubts, wonderings and certainties, histories and prognoses, lusts and woundings… that I might be so much more tender to them, embracing, receptive, unthreatened and inclusive, gentle and comprehending.
I would like so desperately to be able to articulate the human experience of the world accurately…yet I am always wrong when I speak another, always deficient even when I speak myself…
other things articulate as well…
sciences, arts, histories, events, activities, gestures, accidents, philosophies, medicines, practices, rituals and religions
here are a few sounds (and in this order!) that have articulated my experience, today:
and
remarkable “accidental” or “fortuitous” articulations…
along with The Jerusalem Address by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
the sorrow and struggle of my love
the energy and delight of local biology professors to their craft and instruction
the events and experiencings of a day….
Here’s to us all
Writing Anyway
EVERY HUMAN LIFE IS A STORY THAT COMES TO AN END
selected fictions of self-pity
- INEVITABLE ENTROPY
Maybe this just is the gist of it.
I spend a good portion of my life (such as it is) – all of its waking and sleeping hours anyway – struggling to determine a meaning for it – its meaning (a concept? term? reference?) on its own that I may have very little luck determining or understanding.
This elusive compendium of thoughts/feelings (EXPERIENCE I’ve corralled with the sound/shape ‘meaning’) – how might it be described? explained? : What might it … ahem … ‘mean’?!
Were I to describe it – it would evoke and involve (were I to describe it well) a sense that I was necessary, useful, desired and desirable, of some merit and account, acknowledged, approved, purposive, poignant…whatever those (each) might also ‘mean.’
Something I happen to be “good” at that is also of benefit or boon throughout the world I’m wedded to, both near (intimate, familial, selected-for) and far (given, happenstance, environment).
But what I’m “good at” is “Depression.” The function of slowing and drag…exhibiting sorrow among happiness, erosion within emergence, noising up messages…despair contained in joys. Doubt, skepticism, intricate inevitable workings of what we agree to name ‘death’ intertwingled with what we call ‘life.’
Entropy. Sorrow. Failure. Defeat. Depression. Grief. Doubt.
Unlikeliness.
Unlikeableness.
Me.
Self-pitying, self-concerned, self-oriented, self-obsessed…at this I am quite ‘good’ – adept, astute, adroit, capable and facile – of smearing, marring, being sad in circumstances of beauty, of success, of benefit and chance…
My children are healthy, talented, innovative and beautiful. My wife is stunning, accomplished and accomplishing, intelligent, inventive, supportive, sexy and kind. Generous. I am employed in circumstances that suit my learning, commitments and goals. I inhabit relatively stable wards and routines. I am alive, middle-aged without illness, debility, war or threat of imminent dangers. Still expertly I can imbue and include a lowering, slowing, gravitational angst and fear into anything I encounter as ‘good.’
I am ‘good’ at dismantling ‘good.’
Which means (back to ‘meaning!’) I also despise, loathe, resent and regret myself and my operations. Representing wear and tear, unraveling and decoupling, erosion, rust and decay to what strives and conjoins, promises and grows. Somehow, somewhere, in some indisputable and unignorable way I am married to disorder.
When I strive to sing, express or communicate – what emits is disturbance and noise. When I construct, I create mayhem. When I combine – I fall apart.
Significant discoveries during my life-range – their exposition and documentation – include complexity, chaos, emergence, and entropy. These I represent, or so it seems.
Ever unable quite to take credit for accomplishment (chaos, complexity, evolution, emergence); never able to know – to sufficiently understand or trace (dynamic, processual, complex, systemic); yet acutely aware of dissonance and destruction, dis-pair and difference (entropy, chaos, noise). Viral, incipient, parasitic and accidental – I adapt, attach, alter and disrupt – change and undo.
Which makes me sorry in an unstoppable way. Unable, hesitant, terrified, dangerous and afraid. A soiled activity of ground. Questions beggaring and buggering replies. A kind of programmatic cancer, a hitch in the breath, a massage that makes sore.
I message – and fragments. I propose – and divide. Link up by pulling apart. With such yearning – an insatiability for connection and attachment that (frighteningly) never fails to strip, erode, scrape and shred that which it clings to.
Modus operandi: ENTROPY. Clutter, damage, foil. Complication and conundrum. Ant in sugar, weevil to wheat, cog in machinery, speculation to proof. Maxwell’s Demon, uncertainty on principle, the mouldering remainder: “I.”
I, entropy.
I, divorce.
I, disease.
I, confusion.
I, disruption.
I, doubt.
I, Descartes.
I the obscure.
complex, simple
unwanted, unwarranted, unsure
I the wobble precipitating break
I, depress.
You colour, I neutralize.
You shine, I dull.
If offered a peaceable end (thinking twice, thinking thousands) I’d accept it – unquestioningly.
New Topia.
**********************************
This is what he thought of it. What he thinks. This one, inextricable from a world, just like everyone else, part AND parcel, the becoming and become, apparent apparition, here-and-then-gone every one-in-the-many.
He thinks irreplaceably. Nothing without merit. Necessity emerges and occurs. Unstoppably. With(in) all its stoppage and its stopping.
He thinks: “what occurs occurs at once.”
He thinks: “being and nothingness is being in time.”
He thinks: “this is one way of thinking.”
He thinks: “thinking is process.”
Inevitable. And more-than, that.
Stop Making Sense happened at a time that makes sense, and continues to do so. Absorbed into machinery. The operations of ‘reality’ for each type, each kind, each species. And without.
“There does not seem to be a correlation,” he thinks. “Between this one and that, experience and experience (the dog, the tick, the grass; the human, the sun, the soil). A convergence of dependence without necessity.”
He thinks: HER
He thinks: THEM
He thinks in wishes.
He wishes his thoughts. Difference.
He (accidentally) dreams a New Topia.
In this New Topia, a difference. A sense-making, a motile trajectory. A structure to revolutions : convergence + emergence. A hope rather than. Such despair.
He thinks: he reaches, makes effort, attempts.
He wishes: he could do otherwise
He thinks: everything ends
He wishes: something might end in beginning
Because he is able to, he looks at ‘his’ eyes in a mirror. Glasses, no glasses. Hair, hair pulled back and away. Blue. Morose. Green. Avaricious. And blue-grey: Now. Now. Now.
He thinks: I should be brushing my teeth – and always regrets pronouns and possessives. Conventions.
He wishes: there was beyond
He thinks: I exist in my limits
He wishes: possibility
He thinks: organism. finitude.
He writes as he has learned to do so. Using words, made out of letters, infrastructures that – while scrambled and undone, reworked and reordered toward a sort of confusion or unsettling – are still the only means he has…toward anything.
He thinks: “anything resembling anything – these are my limits; and limits = usefulness, probability and possibility, constraints. My hope.”
He wishes: Re-inscribed. Remade. Novel. Capable. Composed. From one-to-one. For her. For them. For ‘It.’ (It: New Topia).
He divests. Dissects. Dissembles.
No one follows his ‘meaning.’
[Therefore it does not mean].
***********************************
Grown ever-so-tired of options. The limits, precursors, avail. Starts again, but never new.
This is an attempt to bind. To couple.
Writes to forge a chain.
Writes to create connection.
Writes to compose a real accordingly.
Fails.
The letters, marks, terms and expressions are borrowed, reworked or remade, still. Symbols wide open. Pre-filled, refilled, unmade.
Touch then. Touching nothing new. Touched before. Been touched.
“Nothing new under the sun.” New again under new sun, newly impossible, com-possible. Newly inadequate and all there is…adequate to the necessary task. Ever less. Ever more. Never quite. Never quite common enough. Human. All too human. Never quite common enough.
***************************
Dust. Ash. Dust. Ash. Dust. Ash. Dust. Ask.
Exploring the Interior
I am an outdoorsman of the indoors
-Heidi Julavits-
Maybe I’m meant to be a philosopher – one who asks, observes, thinks + wonders, ponders perspectives, theorizes potential generalities, hopes reports and reflections might “stick” somehow to a wider frame, might be shared, or sound true. Perhaps that’s sociology, or anthropology, or just the case of being a “social animal” – who could say?
I notice a title, er, there is a title I just saw on the spine of a book loaned to me by the library where I work, en-titled “Gesturing Toward Reality”…which, if we believed it, proves another spine in the pile: “The Primacy of Semiosis.” If.
Or as if. Azziff. As. If.
If that’s how-it-is.
(“How It Is” is also in the stack).
As If That’s How It Is
And So It Begins
Goes
“And so it goes.”
My house is cluttered. I seem to have a penchant for creators. Not artistes. Perhaps the kids wonder. I task and clean (hardly) in order to order what I can especially whenever anything or everything feels disordered (or I am), but I repeatedly conjoin with those whose vibrancy depends (or seems to) on mess, on possibility and potential, on emergence. Whilst I career about, disordered and emergent, clinging, striving, desperate for order: ordered thoughts, ordered words, ordered places, ordered life. None of which ever even remotely eventuate.
Except perhaps. Or, as if.
Still things settle quickly in me.
Crumble, toss, shred, pile or pack anything about, for, with, around me (even my self with my self, or selves) and it funnels, spirals, gathers – most amazingly efficiently! – in fact quite remarkably and chemical-reactiony to a bottom or base – a dredge, a sludge, a collection of chaos quickly finding its way to a murmur – a melancholy.
What would a writer do? A philosopher? Musician? Psychologist? Lover? Parent? Friend? Any, all of the roles I might enact as parts of my selves? Or…what would I do? What might an I made up of me(s) want to do?
That thing [being, organism]…in moments settled and gathered and overwhelmed – feeling steady, calm and helpless in the face of things – MELANCHOLY – “good” I guess (comparatively – a state in which the energy is gone for acting, for performing in the face, presence or need of another)…particularly:
- When the weather is ‘right’ for it (40s & raining)
- When there’s too much or too little to do
- When depleted from something taxing (performances, events, demands, others)
- When certain of scarcity and definite end
The thing wants particular music – “sad songs” (Mark Kozelek, Arvo Part, soundtracks, solo piano or cello); a stable table and sheaf of lined blank papers; a Bic Crystal medium ball-point pen in blue or black; 1-3 hours uninterrupted; endless drink equal parts vodka, tonic and 100% grapefruit juice; a cigarette or two; loose layered clothing; and an outside for the inside to poke around in I guess, to hazard (haphazardly).
That’s what I do.
Time and space, a melancholy, a setting…
or sex,
a vital moisty intimacy with (and only with) the one I love,
desperately (unfortunately) need, desire, crave, wish for…
So – to write.
To leak in a hesitant line. Ink.
To see if the liquid residue scraping looping shapes across light blue lines of snowy-white notebook pages might in-scribe, in-form, make my inchoate choate – make the amorphous and disordered shapely and full, meaningful, possible.
Whether I might accept, discern, agree with something that makes its journey through the networks and passageways that apparently compose me
that might result in something I recognize or comply with, if even only
– like these are the times I stare neither at the bush with its waving tendrils, nor the fence poles they move against, but somewhere in between –
if even only [syn. for withholding judgment] (my drafts are filled with these) to hear the unknown or misremembered word
nothing in focus but an unlabelable feeling
which I call (when required) – “melancholy” –
defining for me something calm, dank, pure, correct –
a sieved and all-accounted-for awareness –
before some crazed and passionate outburst or heat, some diversion of this otherwise apparent cold, wet, burn.
The word I can’t recall (that I need) begins with a “c.” Or perhaps an “a” or “ad-.”
Or maybe something else among its 26 options. 25 really, I use so few that begin with “z.”
**********************************
Lael asks for statistical proof of decreased attention spans while I get bored of expression, description, “tack”…change the color of my pen and wonder why the average popular song is 3-5 minutes long but novels normally run past 100 pages.
It would seem that we all just want to be and be loved, however we verbalize it.
I still haven’t remembered that word…and refuse to utilize thesauri or Google. Or any alternate synonym finder.
Our value lines seem so personal and arbitrary and irrational (philosopher? Anthro-socio-psycho-logist?).
I want to be intimate with my partner.
In such a way.
In such a way that she understands, comprehends, – EXPERIENCES – how significant, important, crucial, essential
she really (REALLY)
IS
to me
to ‘a’ “me.”
Being.
This rambling ridiculous writing
is all, actually, thoroughly,
another misguided attempt to communicate.
Truly or in reality
That I exist in order to be a “me” in relation to a “you.”
Quite simply.
It weighs nothing
bears no responsibility
It’s simply.
I marry you (again).
I am. A “folded clock.”
among billions.
If even only undeterminedly, undecided, uncertain, unsure, debatable, dubiously, [all synonyms for withheld judgments].
Not least among the spines arrayed before me: Complexity – My Struggle – The Erotic Phenomenon – Reviving the Living – Experiencing & The Creation of Meaning – Things Merely Are – Intertwingled – and Love.
**********************************************
It occurs to me in matters of most everything that I need / demand / require CONTINUAL PROOF for something – for me – to count as “true” or “actual” – things have to be perpetually evidenced.
Nothing is…but…well…that’s why I trust in death.
The crap that crumbles out…
Found…from the midst of a stressful week…
NO idea what that is.”
A Provisional Writing
He, frightened, uncertain, inexhaustible and weak, somehow mustered the strength to ask or act for what he wanted.
Perhaps she would not comply.
Or could not, and remain who she needed to be.
Yet there would always be response –
– even ignoring, diverting, pretending to sleep.
It hurt to ask. To attempt – its exposure – admission of lack and need – the venture, to try. The fear of undoing, of incompleteness, of rejection, impossibility.
Still he acted and asked.
The alternative grown unbearable over time – constructions and deconstructions, composition and erosion, the living through time and space.
Time approaches in which time isn’t worth it – without.
Without knowing and acknowledgment, honesty and rejection, awareness…
…until the response is given…isn’t there still chance?
Untoward, illusory, unlikely and so slim…and yet?
As if…
*******************************************************
Varieties of presence.
Certain opportunities of world.
Of doing. Being. Making.
As life runs out, so too the prospects of meaning, of experience.
Had begun to feel he must,
or never.
Discover, find out, uncover, unearth, reveal
at least for a moment.
This moment. The moment.
Nearing NOW.
But how? Who? And what sorts of whys were required?
What lent him the right and wherewithal, the luck, the chance, or desperation?
And why now? What for? How her?
Hesitates.
After all, perhaps?
Perhaps its merely panic, neuroses, a fracturing diminishing end?
What motivates? And why? And why this one? And this now? And here…in the midst of.
Always already in the midst of…and always already not-yet.
Between. Desiring a line to be drawn. As if the world depended on it. His world (perhaps theirs?). His life, his living, his NOW.
It remains to be seen.
Ever remains to be seen, evidenced, emergent,
Proven.
Can there be any proving? If things had been different, some slight change in the initial conditions, conditions so complex?
Could it be different?
He must, he has to, he is compelled to act / to ask.
What will she reply?
***********************************************************
The always begin. Begin, begun, always. Climbing the steps of his lack…behaving…becoming. Ever some begin – some something, something shifting, changing, altering, becoming something else, something altered and novel, new, not combined in quite this way before – submerged, emerged, converged…yet differently.
No?
Next?
With N (next) = Begin? +1, +1, +many + again, else, other…Equaling not before, prior, exact…NOT repetition but difference, remainder, chaos, complexity
Impossible,
seemed inexhaustible,
almost infinite,
not quite. Not remotely.
“He,” “She” will surely end (in a way)
as a form of beginning
As a form of
a form of
motion, movement, becoming.
Things happen, or happening produces things (at some scale, interaction, percept)
What becomes undoes becoming undoing
(and so on).
Uncertainty.
Mobility.
Activity.
Becoming.
Undoing.
Undone.
He becomes.
Unraveled enough, to a point (a seemingly certain threshold) he will risk,
wants risk,
feels compelled,
concerned,
for survival, needs, depends,
decides to act or ask for what he’s wanting (needing? lacking? desiring? believing?)
And where / who / what / why / is she?
And there and which and whom and when?
He will act, ask,
she will needs-be
in response to the violence of movement, address,
intruded perception, sensation,
respond.
In what way?
Spring Forward – Saving Daylight
Taken with a feeling of grandeur: a premonitory greatness arising with convergence. There are uncertainty principles and the bafflings of mathematics as one ranges across scales. Relationships over time and fictional emissions, philosophies, transpositions of experience…and sometimes, somehow, they inextricably and irreducibly link up, reciprocally foster…and generate moments of novelty. Perhaps this is indicated with the term emergence. There is music, too, and emotion.
A sense of sense. Of universal process in which one plays a micro-part, participation. For the time – being and becoming seem joined. There may be love, generation, sometimes even intuition of revelation. Simply processes – ongoing self-organization – of “selves,” and smaller and larger collective, complex, and dynamic systems.
Something like “meaning,” I suggest. Nobody gets what I mean.
Which represents entropy. Things falling apart even as they arise, conjoin…together.
Things I do not mind. Emergence / entropy … it’s all dynamic – which is what I’m thankful for in the now. “Alive” perhaps we’d call it, un-“dead,” – a state I’m thrilled to avoid.
****
Of course there’s a “Her,” and a “Them,” or “they,” – my spouse/partner/girlfriend/significance-of-Other … and the offspring numbering 1-4 – the “matterings that matter” in me… my hand and body, pen and paper, & the complicated processes between that emit some strange result.
Physics tells me “strange attractors” (at that relational scale), I suppose it’s literature’s “muse,” romance’s “one,” the what-fors and what-nots equaling “It,” equaling “unknown,” equaling “that to which things tend.” Optimization, in a sense (if only a fantastical one).
Depending on the color of the glasses. What hole is peered through, by whom, from what angle. Perspective. Outlook. Relation. Some mean free path I’m on. Perhaps now a ‘we.’
“I” feels uncomfortable, unnatural. The idea there might be a group-of-me consoles. If only one (other, more). If only a “you — too?!”
– Emily Dickinson
something like that.
Dancing like cancer survivors…
At least grateful we’re experiencing
That’s a sort of Spring-Forward, is it not?
Fits & Starts
What scribbles out the sides, longing for a place to go…
while I’m busy with other things
The sentences broke between them. Not twisting or scrambling, no encrypted script noising up communication; more like letter parts and chunks of words crumbling away before they even bridged the gaps. Sayings that collapsed on themselves as they emerged.
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************
At the point we begin imagining ourselves insane and institutionalized, conjuring car wrecks or dreaming deaths in the family to avoid our obligations…we are well-advised that something has gone wrong…
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Whenever what might be called an “encounter” occurred between them, everything else grew less pressing, less…significant or unsurvivable. She became a solution and a re-solution all at one go…
**********************************************************************************************************************************************************
fragments, in other words.
The days have to be enough…they’re all we have.
All my Words are Silent 