Tag: Human

Continuing Reading Writing

On By NW FilbertIn absence, creative writing, Language, life, Literature, meaning, Parapraxis, Philosophy, Samuel Beckett, Writing6 Comments

“an ‘absoluteness of absence’ if writing is to be possible” – Jacques Derrida

Certain works by Samuel Beckett eventuate an environment of silence for me.  For instance, the brief poem “What is the Word?”

What Is the Word

folly –

folly for to –

for to –

what is the word –

folly from this –

all this –

folly from all this –

given –

folly given all this –

seeing –

folly seeing all this –

this –

what is the word –

this there –

this this here –

all this this here –

folly given all this –

seeing –

folly seeing all this this here –

for to –

what is the word –

see –

glimpse –

seem to glimpse –

need to seem to glimpse –

folly for to need to seem to glimpse –

what –

what is the word –

and where –

folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where –

where –

what is the word –

there –

over there –

away over there –

afar –

afar away over there –

afaint –

afaint afar away over there what –

what –

what is the word –

seeing all this –

all this this –

all this this here –

folly for to see what –

glimpse –

seem to glimpse –

need to seem to glimpse –

afaint afar away over there what –

folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –

what –

what is the word –

what is the word

– Samuel Beckett

Perhaps the what where is always what we’re attempting to tell.  Perhaps that’s eternal recurrence / return.  The when is always known.  Always NOW.  The folly, truly folly, of our attempt to tell the what where that is our being, our being NOW, always being NOW, no when needed, no whom known, just what where presently…occurring.  Is this always what we are attempting to say?  To find words for?  To tell?  What where, now?  Always NOW – whether reading or writing, assailing past, present or future – it is NOW that it’s occurring, but what? where?  And what is the word?  What are the words for this what where we’re attempting to tell?  This is my writing, reading – in a way, it seems, the all of it – my folly.  Perhaps what where is unnameable.  

And so I also offer a reading – for even as soon as I re-read my own writing – I cannot remember the whom or what-where of the writing.  Because the reading is always right NOW.  This reading – a chapter from Mark C. Taylor’s book Tears (as both eye-leak or suffering and rift-split-rip-“tear”) entitled “How to do Nothing with Words”  (my own copy a rainbow of highlights and symbolized marginalia – like all that I read significance to). If this sort of thing – this philosophizing or wondering writing – is not of your interest – don’t bother.  But if it is kind of intriguing, or causes curiosity, I find this chapter a compelling and admirable attempt to descry the “what is the word?” tussle I constantly struggle and strive for enacting the telling what where.  

Tears

(click image for chapter, or here: How to do Nothing with Words)

And, after all that…here is neither, a short writing by Beckett to go on with…

neither

To and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither

as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again

beckoned back and forth and turned away

heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other

unheard footfalls only sound

till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other

then no sound

then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither

unspeakable home

– Samuel Beckett

Thank you for your time.  It goes on…

 

Writing Presence

On By NW FilbertIn being, Experience, human, identity, Philosophy, Semiotics, thinking, Uncertainty, Writing7 Comments

6zlZBil - Imgur_mobius

“The experimental dimension is precisely where thinking at its limit takes place, where the singularity of a given thought is being shaped…”

– Michel de Beistegui –

“the present is as long as a walk when I am walking”

– Chryssipe, quoted in Francois Jullien –

Or, “the present is as long as the sentence I’m composing…” the tune, the breath, the weather… the lunge, the gaze, the listen… the sex, starlight, heartbeat… presence determined, according to scale.

“…as long as the thought I am thinking…” that leads to the next, and the borrowed, the other, imagined.  The languages lent, or made new, bastardized, reconstructed, remingled…

Therefore [have I now ‘left’ present/-ce?] the present writing is present just as long as it presents itself?  Does this explain run-ons and magical realism?  The refusal to pause or to finish?  Avoidance of punctuation, cessation, or periods…in order to be writing?  (as long as it is writing…living written?).

I am drawn in writing presence.  And I aspire.  To be writing as often present-ly as possible (in all the senses of the terms you might conceive).  Working, present-ly, with presences that present themselves in the activity of writing – ages, layers, eons of language becoming toward these significations I am physically inscribing NOW with evolving, accumulative, adapting and erasured meanings over times and places, persons and presents/-ces.  This continuous bodily activity and operation marking whatever presently transpires on lines – between my organism, this instrument and matter of lined pages – creating a Mobius-like twisting endless loop of circuitry, a breathless action (almost afraid of interruption, disconnection, or cessation) as if it would disqualify present/-ce with unauthorized and arbitrary finite personal breakage.

Yet I know (or believe) the present/-ing will continue all the same whether I am writing or not – ever assailing with near-infinite (perhaps infinite) encountering and engagements…be-ing… regardless of my regard, participation, choice of action, and awareness.  Unconcerned by my present/-ce as I a grain of soil or blade of grass, singular molecules or mosquitos, the hairs dropped from our heads.  Matters of scale of what matters.  [To/for us.  ME.  At our scale, at whatever scale, DEPENDING].

Interruption occurs.  Into, inter-, enter: an eruption.  Anything that commands response.  A call from another, a locusts’ buzz, tonal or temperature flux.  Changing track and attention.  I plea for intervention versus interruption, that the breathless present/ce might go on, unintruded but intervened.  Eventuation, eventually, new contents entering  veins of the stream I am searching, spreading, scribing…at the limit of…

Intrusion.  Inter-eruption.  Or inter-vention, intra-venously… WILL OUR PRESENT PRESENCE all bound up with, knotted, wound and intersecting, inserted and inserting reciprocally or complicitly…go on, remain, continue?  Will it be dissipation or dissension, distension, desiccation or decay?  Can we have, swerve, welcome an irruption intravenously?  I hesitate, I turn.  A response.

Staccato desiccation.  I’ve been bombarded.  Like tragedy, untranceable.  Persistence and flow stuttering, gives way.  The stream of thought polluted, a turbulence assigned.  Coming undone, branch drying up, kindling, that is to say…

Yet if to say, that is – perhaps we’re crossing, coming-over, over-coming interruption as irruption.  Response-able, disabling, but hearing more, lines converging with complexity, a chaos, a banking flow…or spilling over and dispersing?…who could know.  What means – BECOME?

“the present is a write, as long as I am writing” – this presence fractured into fragments, presents, now, perhaps beyond deciphering.  The mode of ciphers, potent codes – standing for??  Standing for???  Which represents THIS…what you read.  Read in, read from, read into and out of.  We do not step into the same stream twice, it has been said, or three times, or even once, even, again.  We don’t know “same,” yet use it like a God, destructive hoping (“identity,” “non-contradiction,” even Truth(s) or Fact(s)) – that SOMEthing might not change.

NOT in this world, and we know no other.  Conjuring zeroes, ideals and myths, utopias (literally “no-places”) and lines of imaginings.  Hoping for control?  Security?  Continuance? – of what, of which…presence.  Scales to track the motions with, fallibly.  Attempts to stay the flow, stay with the flow, re-cognize, re-member, re-main.  What continues to fall apart and reassemble, ever ‘new’ but only partly, in its occurring, range of scales ever irrupting, erupting, interrupting as comings-to-be in all their goings, it’s going…a fragile now.

But I digress along the stream, exposing fragments, perhaps connected to a mouth, a trunk or mother.  Dispersive river, interminably con-fusing elements transgressing finitude.  Number, line and term.  Concept, law, or theory.  None of it works, and some of it seems to.  All may belong, depending on scale.

A matter of present/ce perhaps, and of movement.  Some matter of species, perception and dream.  Susurrate surround, full of disruption, riding waves, but not for long.

“the present is as long…as a singularity of thought is being shaped…”

– Chrysippe + de Beistegui –

(much later and rescaled)

The Empties

On By NW FilbertIn absence, being, creative writing, fiction, fragments, Friday Fictioneers, Loss, meaning, Science, Writing14 Comments

It has been a long time since I’ve participated in the stellar Friday Fictioneers writing challenge and consortium, hosted and enabled by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

Phriday Phictioneers Phone

In many times of my life, this simple challenge has kept my creative writing inertia active when seemingly the rest of my life-world was mitigating against it (such as currently).  I am happy to join this group again, and hopefully contribute small pieces of worth… and ensure my pen stays active.  Thank you Friday Fictioneers!

FFimage08_2016

The Empties

For ages, they spoke about ‘the Empties.’  Of everything, they said.  No emotion, no perception, no experience, or meaning.  No one would know.  Even absence would be left behind.  We imagined, but really hadn’t.  It must have come.  If/then occurred.  This be ‘the Empties.’  There is no knowing.  There is no happens.  There is no history or time.  Perhaps no space.  A strange again of Only Things.

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…

Not-Belonging, Chapters

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, Confusion, creative writing, Critical Thought, desire, fiction, fragments, identity, Language, Literature, longing, Melancholy, Philosophy, relationships, Self-Doubt, Traces, Writing3 Comments

I feel somewhat apologetic, but here is one more selection from my archives.  Another that when I re-read I am unable to see how I might do better, or how I ever got it done at all, yet all my work un-published or rejected, so I know it is not “good enough” per whatever the current cultural milieu would prefer.  “No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”  Perhaps.  In any case, it circles around for me like the tail-eating snake I am, in hopes it might engender something new, no, in hopes it might be put to rest.  For any who read it, I would be hard pressed to metaphor my astonishment, humility, gratitude and begging-of-patience, including a sheer and sharp ache of deep appreciation for your life’s time and likely unwarranted, gracious, attention.

does-not-belong-worksheet-worksheet

Chapters That Don’t Belong

(please click image or title for text)

many thanks

Let Me Get This Out of Your Way

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, Experience, human, identity, Image, relationships, Semiotics, Writing2 Comments

Intriguing stumble-upon.  Clearing an old flash drive for my daughter I ran across this – texts from my first and only public reading – featuring art by George Ferrandi and Laura Barbuto, which occurred in an interactive reading space with many assistants and much assistance a couple years ago.  Seemed like it belonged in this space.

space_ferrandi

  1. Sitting at table amid a narrative hum. No one speaks.

“Getting it Out of the Way: A Response”

(texts by Nathan Filbert; art/images Laura Barbuto/George Ferrandi)

 

Homo Scribus Attonbitus

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, identity, Language, Literary References, meaning, Philosophy, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

a text from the archives…ready again, relevant, near…

hand eye heart

Homo Scribus Attonbitus 

(2012?)

Interconnection and Autonomy

On By NW FilbertIn communication, family, identity, Knowledge, Language, love, meaning, relationships, Technology, Writing7 Comments

a personal note

I have long disliked and had an intense aversion to telephone calls.  Like televisions transmitting in shared or public spaces, they present inescapable interruption and intrusion.  One could be in thought, repose, intimacy, conversation, activity — in fact, whatever one is about when one is not on the telephone – and then suddenly must react to a demand.  A call.  But WHO is calling?  WHY?  Why now?  When my attention is demanded through interruption or intrusion, my body anticipates emergency.

Disembodied conversation shifts the burden of dialogue to the voice.  Therefore the natural indicators for “I’m thinking…” or “give me a moment,” nods, smiles, frowns or gestures that flow in face-to-face interaction, offering wholistic responses, are all pressured onto the mind and voice – forcing incessant reports and the trickiness and difficulty of translating bodily experience into language.  I require time to listen, consider, and respond.  Movement.  Silence.  Whether it’s a simple invitation, business matter, question or request – it always emerges as demand on the telephone.  Respond to this NOW.  (public or shared-space televisions – SEE this NOW).  You cannot escape, select, regulate or direct such importunities.

Global Communication Technologies, – our networks, internetworks and their myriad machines and devices – have provided some enormous benefits toward expanding our social lives outside of limited demographics and cultures, opening realms of activities and artifacts, information and resources that in any other time-period we may never have known about or encountered.  As these technologies proliferate into internets of things, ubiquitous (or pervasive / invasive) computing, and manifest the inherently linked realities of our world…simultaneously providing ambient findability (all of these terms and phrases as easily interpreted as violence or intrusion as well as opportunities or boon).

I’ve long preferred face-to-face interaction (in spare doses, they are taxing & rewarding) and textual communications (obviously, but also texting, emails, postal correspondence), because in the F2F we are offered and allowed appropriate cues to follow and respond to one another, and in textual discourse we are allowed the time and distance to craft and dictate our translations of experience, messaging intentions, and terminological tones.

Of late, however, I have noted a convergence of Call-Anxiety and Pervasive-Communications.  And am wondering about our levels of autonomy (if there even is such a thing for the human) or self-direction, any amount of governance we might preserve over our lives and activities and choices in a world populated with linked devices?

How much of our days – work time, supposedly “personal”/private time, play time, labor time, interpersonal time, family time, meal-times, chore-times, reading times, creative times, necessity times, and so on…- are steered and directed, controlled and dictated by the consistent, persistent, pervasive and invasive thoroughfare of MESSAGES from OUTSIDE?  If we consult our devices upon waking – how often are that day’s events passively designed around what we receive?  If we respond to text vibrations / updates / posts / SMS or IMs / emails – how much are they eroding self-governance and discipline or choice and instead simply ANNOUNCING (demanding?) direction and response?

How many swerves do we make in our causeways of living by our over-saturation with “friends,” our communicative reach far beyond our communities, our global information system versus our local work offices or families or few (actual) friends?  There have been plenty of studies from nearly every field of inquiry reporting that our safe or thrivable social capacities are quite limited – most studies indicate humans do best in consistent contact with 30 or less others.  Proffering sufficient opportunities to know, understand, interact and relate.  Yet any given Facebooker or tweeter or snappy-chatter may have exponentially larger engagements nearly every minute of their lives.

How different would my relationships with co-workers,  children, family, friends, BE if we weren’t including thousands of others in remote places, professional connections throughout the world, images and language and emotional reports and happenstances flooding like telephone calls and tele-visions and noise into our domains, habitats, domiciles, studies?  What might i NOT buy if it weren’t so easy?  How differently might I know books, movies, music, animals, persons – if they weren’t in virtually infinite supply?Do we preserve moments of choice and connection, safe from Call-demands or Pervasive/Invasive-communication-technologies?  Or do we simply escape or take breaks from time to time?  Going for a walk or having a dinner, camping, hiking or traveling once in a while without our devices?  What would it be like to lose them?  What would we know?  What kinds of knowing would we produce?  What sorts of makings?   What might be drawn or composed, felt or engaged, seen or heard if we were DISconnected to the hive of activity and input? How might we relate to those around us?  Where might we go?  Who might we be?

Well, that’s what I’m thinking about.  Pondering.  Wondering.  Queries of value and quality and meaning.  Stress-levels, anxiety, physical wear of being “on alert,” alarm, reactive, responsive to ubiquitous “Calls.”  Demands.  Invasions.

What if we saved intrusions for emergencies?  Took time to send only specific, relational-oriented, relevant and appropriate information to one another?  Thought critically?  Reflected?  Looked, touched, listened, and managed more wholistic presence with our immediate surrounds?

I don’t know.  I’m just wondering.

[The lucky piece for us at present is that, like pulling the phone line from the wall, our technologies are remarkably easy to dismantle and turn OFF, should we CHOOSE to]

Alias Alone

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, friendship, human, identity, Language, loneliness, longing, Loss, survival, Writing4 Comments

“it was neither the cradle nor the grave of anything whatever.  Or rather it resembled so many other cradles, so many other graves, that I’m lost.”

–Samuel Beckett-

The silence.  The separation.  The solitude.  This is not novel, not uncanny, not even irregular or unexpected.

Betwixt Alias & Laramie, in fact, it would not be unusual for 1-3 years to pass without interpersonal communication.

The interruption, irregularity, or stretching intermittence of intimate interaction (current parlance “intensive interaction” – what they’re calling genuine conversation these days – a sort of treatment or therapeutic method for the autistic or ‘disabled,’ – akin to the ‘Talking Cure’ of psychoanalytics past) wasn’t really odd or unexpected or otherwise for Alias…merely unfortunate…he accustomed to his cycles and wishes, routines and desires – never mated very well with the world-at-large…his surround.

Still somehow Laramie’s “off” was different.

Perhaps.

No matter.

Alias driven back to Kafka, Beckett, Jabes, and other authors of silences whom he’s long aspired to – wishing (not so secretly) that he might require only some genuine solipsism or solitude, a kind of retreat or reversal from the cultural logorrhea (social media posts, artist’s talks, professional blogs and listservs, tweets/tumbs/grams & feeds) –

incessant reports on one’s self

– disgusting yet enticing,

If other humans ever happened to ‘like’ or ‘follow,’ ‘share’ or ‘pin-it’ or – could it be – actually care?

Alias entering thickets alone.  Laramie “off” (in every way his ‘right’).  No human (living, warm, alive, and responsive).  Alias turns to the ‘mind’ (texts, images, memories, dreams, literature, language, art, thoughts) – in any case or scenario – some abstracted cerebral, cognitive-capacity, the Human Imaginary.  The Pretend.

Meaning.    God.    Religion.    Truth.    Santa.    Satan.     Logic.     Math.

His pet feline “Luna(tic)” and fractured Chihuahua “Gizmo” as company.  And printed literature.  Recorded music.  Playback audio-visual-cinematography.  Machinic animations.  Pornography.  Movie.  Television.  Photographs.  WHATEVER.  Virtual Realities in the place of persons.

Attempts to stay alive, carry on, delude oneself that meaning and reason and experience and expression had validity and representation, communication and comprehension, and so forth.

To “keep calm…& carry on.”

Breathe.

Or…whatever.

Laramie: “OFF”

and

Alias: (“ON”)?

never the twain shall meet?

well, occasionally

(he says, he thinks, he imagines, she says, someone hopes)

The HUMAN (Alias surmises) – ‘an interminable thinking-speech,’ Alias think-speeches, “surely I read/heard/saw/overheard that somewhere.”

It’s Alias alone…free(?), unfettered, allowed, supposedly “ON”

Laramie – “OFF,” Alias sighs.

(and therefore no way to ‘think through’)…

***********************************

Point is, Alias thinks as he murmurs and walks along, there is no meaning, purpose, or point to it all.  “Think-writing” Laramie once called it (re: Alias’ poetry) – “simply inscriptions of progress, er, process…languaging what happens in your miniscule portion of the world (as you know it).”

Think-writing, write thinking, “fuck you!” Alias thinks (writes).  “How can one think without someone or something to think ‘off’ of or ‘with’ or ‘in relation to’?”  Alias grumbles – “yet you’re ‘OFF,’ gone, along, beyond, and so remains me, it, this ‘against,’ ‘in relation to,’ this withless ‘with’ (all versions of the same) ANYthing, EVERYthing, NOThing.”

Something!

“OFF” said Laramie, he

said to Alias, “simply ‘OFF’” like a switch, a light, a life, a dream, a thought, an inception of memory, an hope, ON/OFF, ON/OFF, there/gone, here/gone, you/I, yes/no,…’OFF’ said Laramie, he said to Alias that day, that last day, that latest traversal, that…

…dream,

imagining, encounter, hope, wish, Alias imaginary…

———————————-

…because no one cares, and there is surely no reason to (Alias ruminates).

Having always wanted, desired, craved (it might even be said) to be some strange, unrepeatable and unique (or recognizable) combination of human/person/lover/writer/philosopher/musician/writer/virile male and sensitive, omniscient (no, not ‘omniscient,’ not ‘all-knowing’ but ‘all-considering,’ ‘all-comprehending’ and ‘-allowing,’ ‘understanding’) homo sapien.

There is never any reason (Alias considers) that he should (in any way) be special, “special,” and yet, and yet…

There’s no smidgen of doubt (Alias i. e. Harlequin, piecemeal patchwork of human male – a man, a father, son, parent, professor, laborer, home-owner, some-time partner, friend, teammate, band member, student, child-like adult, mature-seeming child, and so forth…animal, patron, caretaker & guardian, public, customer, businessman, blah, blah, blah, descriptor, descriptor, word, word, term…) that Alias i.e. Harlequin, in relation to Laramie James Backstagger, in relation to J, J, K, T, A, H, O, I, Sam, Franz, Helene, Clarice, mom, sister, dad, daughter, cat, dog, cow, instructor, stranger, landscape, realm, city, genre, language, world…

wanted, even craved (it might be said)

being “special.”

Alias Harlequin.

Alone.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

A thousand shades from cynical to fine…

…medium nor method, mechanism nor machine matters…

…it’s simply the persons involved…

…the choices they make…

….ways they behave…

…what is made of it…

….making and interpreting…

…given the day, the moment, the situation…

…without matter or evidence or reason.

The world happens.

And then we die.

And then world continues.

Happens (for us) (me) (Alias) (Laramie) (you)

No more.

The equations very, VERY simple.

Here & Gone

Heaps of trouble in between

Self-causation

-regulation

Autopoeisis

 

 

Alias (outside) – more from the notebooks

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, fiction, fragments, human, identity, Journal, Journaling, Writing1 Comment

harlequin-with-his-hands-crossed-jacinto-salvado-1923

Alias “boyfriend,” alias “daddy,” alias “instructor,” alias “friend.”  Alias “person.”  Alias “student,” alias “son;” alias “scholar,” alias “man.”

Alias “Alias.”  Always additional roles (or functions, behaviors, responses, and on…)

I.e. disciplines: philosophy, sociology, science.  Alias “arts” and “humanities” and “lover” and “partner” and “parent.”  Alias “human.”  Alias everyone.  I.e. no one.

Alias Ignatius Evgeny Harlequin, a simple human pattern, sample, example, i.e. so-far-survivor.  It’s nothing, really, but something enough to write.

“His” body distinct in the way of all bodies, but matching no cultural icon.  “His” mind above average – no matter.  Mattered/matters little, just a human.  Related to others in lieu of dependencies – that “human” is not a species that can live on its own.  Therefore at least elements of an immediate surround are, well, ALWAYS, essential.  Genuinely.  Utterly.  Whether air or land or water; people, chemicals, fuel.  No human exists without others.  Simply.

Therefore (i.e.) even the meaningless, unnoticeable Alias Harlequin could not survive without a surround.  But might his “surround” survive without him?  On this query, Alias’ presence (and present) is hung.