perhaps you will be able to play this WHILE you read the linked entry below (as it was written)
Immunity (Writings from Everywhere)
Tag: human beings
‘Tis Merely Acting (?)
I’m in the process of reading Girl Imagined by Chance by Lance Olsen, and I am thinking about how easy it is to make up one’s life. Easy and hard, in different ways. Like making peanut butter-chocolate milkshakes.
We watched “The Joneses” (obviously a mainstream movie, in that way they have of being consistently predictable and disappointing) last night. Internet webs and informational glut, the redolence of media – its imagery and imaginings – makes lying very easy, and “soft.” In the sense of “white lies,” or possibly not malicious, not evil. Rather “stealthy,” “clever,” and “creative” manipulations, representations, (e.g. marketing).
I remember when Western Culture (particularly United-States-North-American) synonymed carpe diem with “invent yourself,” i.e. the militaries “be all you can be.” I was younger then.
Lying requires duplicity, which requires attention, which requires energy. Much like working outside of one’s home and having a family. Or some other role(s). What is called “position,” formerly called a “point-of-view.” Often borrowed from corporations or governments, churches or markets, movements or customers, and so forth. “White” lies. Duplicities. Now this, now that. Positioning.
Already multiple (syn. plural), our selves find it natural to lie and adapt and yet not to believe that it is lying. First one thing, then another; everything changes while remaining so similar. Enough. Apparently. In other words, subtle repositioning / shape-shifting: therapist foreground, wife background. Grunt foreground, husband back. Student, son, father, friend. Subtle shifts. Highlights. First one thing, then another, not exclusive (syn. deception).
Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Who associated these terms (“lie,” “deception,” “manipulation,” “duplicitous” and so forth) with something negative in the first place? Our histories, sciences, civilizations, arts, militaries, governments, religions, families and businesses are all based on them. At some point along every route, things are contradictory, duplicitous, compromised, untrue. What is evil about error? Efficiency? Multiplicity? Complexity?
So if an image suits your message, whatever claims necessity, doesn’t it belong? Whether “yours” or not, it’s resonant, it “fits.” Illustrates the story. Well, part of it, at least as viewed from this position, this point-of-view, whichever wherever whomever is being highlighted NOW.
It is as easy to invent yourself as to paste a collage or learn your native language. Complex organisms utilizing contexts for their survival and adapting (sort of thing). Lizards do it, plants do it, animals and insects do it – all stay alive by subtle shifts and adaptations, presenting themselves as somethings they’re not (perhaps) – representation, quotation, mimicry – all situationally based…
We tell each other certain things (stories altering emphases with each recounting, each invention), behave in particular ways in particular environs, accept and follow various rules at various times of our days, because we have no consistent center, we are relative – relatives all of us – one to another, to our world – shifting, adapting, multiplicitous…each lie leading toward some aspect of what we name truth, like sides of a liquid coin.
Our trouble is that we are unable to be there and not be there, as we’d like to think. It’s all responsibility. Our flexibility, agility, ability to respond…organism to context like a movie screen flickering now this, now that, hold focus, here blur, this angle, these lights, little more information, tone down the emotion, play up the cheer, empathize, stand firm, show authority, be gentle, shift shift shift shift…perspective position your point-of-view. Highlight, accent, select…
Carpe Diem. Seize this moment, this day, be all that you can be (you’ve no idea how expansive and various that is! Well, you must have some idea as we watch you change, grow, reveal, conceal, suppress, express, etc…) duplicitously, positionally, shiftily. It’s easy to make up our own lives, to invent ourselves…
…we’re doing it all the time, everywhere.
‘Tis merely act-ing (being/doing/living) in the world!
Writing: the Margins
Writing: the Margins
“All words run along the margins of their secrets”
– Susan Howe –
Now we are getting somewhere. Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told. If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.” If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…
there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets? Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.
That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets. I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.
And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.
Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.
So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating. That is, it is possible. Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?
If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.
Therefore
“it is not infinite. Even infinite is a term”
-Louis Zukofsky-
by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.
Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.
Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.
Perhaps and possibly.
N Filbert 2012
All my Words are Silent 