Tag: hope
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR – ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR – ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! – Constellation Web Shoppe.
such fiercely intelligent music (sound)
thank goodness
Sneak Post
Hey everyone – this is basically what i’m looking at for the next 8 days (and climbing). Happened in to town for groceries and water…and a cafe-created coffee (which happened to host wi-fi) – thanks for reading, for your comments and i’m sure your posts – i’ll get to as many of them as i can when i return next week for two days of Kansas’ hell-hot heat and then we’re off for another week until BOOM school/work/etc. starts!
I can tell you that thusfar feeling high-altitude breezes, looking at deer, marmots, chipmunks, rabbits, and an amazing variety of birds and flora – my mind is cruising into a calmly-breathing state I haven’t known in a very long time. Hopefully much will soothe and settle and i’ll notice something interesting or beautiful to share upon my return. For now, I’m resting, climbing, loving, and exploring these mountains 🙂
Thanks and happiness to all
Scribbling. Toward purpose.
Summer is quickly departing. In the next few weeks – school supplies, a trip to the Rockies to a rustic cabin, a trip to Branson with little children and wizened parents, work, deadlines, textbooks, and BAM! the “Fall” begins. I don’t know if I’m easily overwhelmed, perhaps so, I can say I am overwhelmed. I think I’m good at surviving things, at persistence, but in a rather melancholic way, steeled and a little removed.
I am not certain what will become of this blog as two years of a most incredible opportunity that cost us so much is coming to an end – the ability for Holly and myself to devote ourselves to our personal passions, our internal vocations: our families, our art. Enormous changes are afoot. I will be back to work and a full-time graduate student, Holly will practice more therapy and a little less creating artifacts, two high schoolers ever increasing their busyness, fullness; and two young ones growing ever so fast. Our older children are fairly self-sufficient, but also ever growing and expanding, and keeping up with all requires our hearts.
In a recent interview, my interviewer looked at me and addressed the cliche “Change is difficult.” Pause. I agreed all over my body. She resumed: “change is NOT difficult, it is always occurring, ALWAYS. What we experience as “difficult” during the endless changing is perspective.”
She was right. My mind and body were not. I create the difficulties by my approaches and interpretations. The difficulties themselves often becoming creative catalysts of change. “I am proud to be melancholic.” (see following quote). It is empowering to gradually claim responsibility for one’s self and one’s constant choices of outlook, intake, response, action. Thus I enter the ensuing flow.
This morning has been spent reflecting the feelings I’m having of loss in relation to this blog, more open time for reading/writing/composing, family-time, couple-time. The feeling that perspectival anticipation re: these ensuing shifts has slumped me, lessened my determination, devotion. I countered it with Lynne Tillman (as I often do), and read the following, from Madame Realism Lies Here (everything is intentional in her writings :)):
“In her waking life, as in her dreams, she concocted art that confronted ideas about art.
So life wasn’t easy; few people want to be challenged…
…Madame Realism’s work wasn’t her child. But, inevitably, it was related to her, often unflatteringly…
…what if art can’t tell the truth? What if it lies?…
…Art was a golem. It had taken over. It had a life of its own, and now she feared it was assessing her. What did it say about her?…
What I make is not entirely in my power, as conscious as I try to be. It’s always in my hands and out of my hands, too. I like to look at things, because they make me feel good, even when they make me feel bad. I’m proud to be melancholic. I like to make things, because they usually make me feel good. I am not satisfied with the world, so I add to it. My desires are on display. What I make I love and hate…
…She made a spectacle of herself from time to time, mostly in her work, trying to tell the truth and finding there’s no truth like an untruth. She kept pushing herself to greater and greater joys and deprivations, which were invariably linked. And like any interesting artist, who can’t help herself and is in thrall to her own discoveries, Madame Realism shocked herself most, over and over again.”
(from Lynne Tillman, This is Not It)
It’s like this. So onward I go. Be assured I will try to stay up with all of you wonderful creators. And I will (“can’t help himself”) keep making at each opportunity. And I thank you all so much for these past 8 months or so where I have had the inception of experiences of finding an audience, truly being read and responded to, a sort of community of creativity. It has greatly influenced my life and practice and confidence in keeping to my dreams. Thank you!
Be well everyone. Be well.
What once was here
Talk about “prompting” photos! If there aren’t thousands of stories in photos like these…the eye, the mood and the technique combine to provide worlds to discover and invent. Thankful for this work.
Places
The Essence of Place
“To record the essence of a place, so that it can be inhabited by something outside itself, is to start a story. This means searching for a language, one that we know intuitively but cannot spell out.”
-Lukas Felzmann, Landfall–
“The time has come to talk of whatever we want”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia–
“the work drives beyond promise, craving and time”
-Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions–
Sometimes there were birds there. They passed through in groups, in swoops.
I’ve seen people there too, but not swooping or grouping. It just isn’t that kind of place.
It felt large and open yet cloistered, contained. There were large trees all around and throughout. Somehow it seemed level.
I don’t recall there being water, but I believe it staid nearby. As if it were ready for when it was needed.
I’ve no memory of critters or pets, cycles or frogs. Only birds that might swarm like the leaves filling trees as they swayed.
Oh my, but the blur! The soft focus in apprehending! It rocks and it waves, it flows through you while sitting, I say!
I wonder the eyelids of storms. I leap lying down. I silently sing out the shrieking of birds. I love in this place. As wild or as calm as is needed, a respondent surround.
When I’m here I try to tell you, by searching for words or the making of pictures. That don’t capture.
Have you wandered here before? To the essence of a place?
Please do tell me or show me what’s yours…
N Filbert 2012
Friday Fictioneers – June 8, 2012
caveat: thrown together quickly! (Friday Fictioneers prompt – www.madisonwoods.wordpress.com)
Against the Day
And what was there to do?
High school now behind us, Frank’s dad dead, and no promise of college, work, or love; we were lost, angry, confused.
We’d all of us read Pynchon, we knew very well what to expect, and it wasn’t good.
And lots of it.
So much burned inside us.
At the city’s River Festival we spotted the blimp.
And somehow we knew.
We just knew.
Now, it begins.
N Filbert 2012
Such Great Heights
Such Great Heights: On Loving
“I wonder at vocalism’s ability to rephrase or reenact meaning and goodness even without the wished-for love. Can a trace become the thing it traces, secure as ever, real as ever – a chosen set of echo-fragments? … The still eye reflects a neutral ‘you’ that is me; and yet secret. Who can hold such mirroring cheap? It’s a vital aspect of marriage and of deep friendship.”
-Susan Howe-
These are things she told me:
She tells me she just needs to be held. Held and heard. And validated. That I understand how she feels, that I empathize. No need to agree with her or her feelings, no need to fix anything. Just pay attention (“be with me” she calls it), say some things back kind of like echoes so she can hear that I’m listening, knows I’ve “got” it, and nod and affirm. Saying things like “I hear how hard that is for you,” or “I can see this makes you angry” and the like. A safe place, a sounding board, a kind of mirroring…a world-the-size-of-arms or bodies in which it’s okay to be in process, to have your stuff, to be inaccurate, and be.
I tell her I just want to be loved for who I am, not what I do or how I perform, whether I make someone feel better or not, whether I’m useful or succeed, get stronger, am sensitive, smart or good-looking. I’m fine with being any of those things, but they will always feel like side-effects or attributes, things taken up from time to time, situation-contextually. I really want to be loved for who I am also, or otherwise, the self I do not know, am unaware of, except that it’s always changing. I’m wanting value as a being, I suppose, that it’s simply good enough, and matters, that I am. That someone would choose that.
She’d like to be appreciated for all of her efforts. All the pains she endures, compromises she makes, limitations she accepts in order to account for me, for my “neuroses” (read “personality”). ‘d like to hear a heartfelt “thank you” now and then for her services and sensitivities, considerations and workings toward dialogue, care and attention. She’d like to be recognized, feel wanted, feel loved and craved and adored.
I’d like to be loved with my spaces and misgivings. From a distance, and the distance loved too – the whole globe of me – my fears, paranoias and worries. My anxious body. Jealous narratives, fantastic brain. As an entity – yes – as a system or sphere, to be chosen, sought out and let be, even celebrated as this odd, unique and difficult human, just like all the others, but different too, in exactly the same ways we all of us are. A curious realm of unknowns and effects. Would like that cloud of debris I refer to as “me” to trigger charges in her, of desire, of respect, of wonder and intimate knowledge. A paradox really. To be known as unknown, loved dissimilarly, absolutely, and so on. Misplaced desires, but there all the same. I ask her to love indeterminacy and confusion.
She asks to be free of her past – not its effects but its definitions. That we encounter it together – our childhoods and children, our spouses and griefs, our risks and our failures, fulfillments and joys – not compared with the present, competitively, but engaged, encouraged, absorbed. That not everything “not-me” be a threat, not her job and its clients, her acquaintances, family and friends, past lovers our journeys, events – that they be welcomed and included as ours now – memories, sources, realities we bring to a NOW. Not as distractions, escapes, private holdings. That we invite each other whole and unprocessed. That we be a process for each. That I be here now with, see her moving toward me, being here, not fragment and dissect her into her pasts and the world.
I tell her I’d like to be ultimate, her be-all, end-all, preference and ideal. Chaos and all, that this mass of me be some divinity-like, awe-inspiring wonder of an incomparable glory she adore and pursue. I want to feel special, holy, set apart, unbelievably brilliant and beautiful – in short, spectacular – in all my grungy messy remedial ways and blundering battles. That it truly stun her how amazing I am all muddied up and crazy, insecure and inconsistent, incompatible and at serious odds with myself – that I be wonderful to her.
She told me she’d like it to be real. To be purposive and true. That we be brave and open, vulnerable and strong. Flexible and protective, guarded and unafraid. That we feel life securely and take great risks, be certain and unsure. That we trust and be trustworthy in every metamorphoses we move through. Tenderly powerful, gently fierce, insistent and forgiving, patiently intense. That we strive for balance, a balance I guess like nuclear fusion – unaccountable energies in a strangely held rest.
I said it all sounds good, sounds like love to me, and impossible. Which is fine as I’ve started as a failure, but heroic, and she’s a god arose from ashes. Hell, she’s died and lived again. We latch on, strap in and unwind. We are here. Here we go. These terrible chasms and such great heights.
These are things I tell myself.
N Filbert 2012
(couldn’t help but think of this – click for tunes)
All my Words are Silent 