Tag: Human

Coming Bare

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, meaning, Writing5 Comments

head-silhouette-with-question-mark

In the interests of authenticity…

  • The fact or quality of being true or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness. Also (overlapping with sense) accurate reflection of real life, verisimilitude.  
  • Genuineness;
  • The quality of truthful correspondence between inner feelings and their outward expression; unaffectedness, sincerity.
  • A mode of existence arising from self-awareness, critical reflection on one’s goals and values, and responsibility for one’s own actions; the condition of being true to oneself.
  • The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014.)

Unveiling.  The action of reveal.  Is the “condition of being true to oneself” a possibility?

Recently my partner and love wrote me a revealing, unveiling, letter that blunted me with authenticity – a quality of herself that she was questioning in that very message.

Self-awareness.  Sincerity.  Something corresponding to actuality, reality.  Genuineness.

How often do we present or re-present ourselves authentically?  Do we all wish to?  What would it look like?  Sound like?  Would we lose friends?  Lovers?  Jobs?  If our outward expressions matched our inner feelings?

WHO AM I?

The complaint was compromise.  Pretense.  The wriggling falsities of “fitting in” or “being useful” or “surviving” in the world of humans.  In social groups and situations.  In life.  The feeling that what “works” or garners respect, interest, desire in the commerce of human beings is not authentic to who I actually am.  That what I am “liked” for is a misrepresentation, a partial product, a fabrication, a mixed message, does NOT “correspond to actuality, reality.”  And is it possible to undo that?  To live authentically in the variegated, unpredictable, situational and relative world of humans?  And is authenticity of an individual even a potential actuality / reality?

This has prompted me days of thought.  In effect it was relieving, releasing – my lover is exhausted of the “play of living” – the work of “fitting in,” “surviving with others,” “belonging” in ways that feel partial, inexact, false even, untrue, ALWAYS incomplete, inaccurate, inauthentic.

I felt freed to say my honesty.  When I father, I pretend to be a father.  I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what I should be doing.  I don’t know what it means to father children.  I love them, I care about them, I am frightened by them, I am exhausted by the responsibility, I gauge my activities based on parenting behaviors I DON’T feel comfortable with, or that I wished for…I act, I pretend I’m a man who knows how to love, instruct, “raise” children!  I do not know what I’m doing.  I feel inauthentic.  Like I’m reaching, practicing, experimenting, trying to be what I think a good “father” might be.

For years and years and years and years I have “feigned” being a writer, a musician, a scholar, an artist (it feels like).  Yes, I’ve read a lot. Yes, I’ve studied, I’ve practiced, I’ve performed.  Yes I think I “get” some things about the world and our human experience of it.  Yes I LOVE writing words, mixing them up, crafting phrases and sentences with them, attempting to mate them to my internal experiences, ideas, emotions… but I almost ALWAYS feel an impostor not an expert, like I’m trying out voices, expressions, characters, compilations to FIND OUT if that’s how I think, feel, imagine?!  So if ever I’m desired, complimented, responded to – I think it is an accident, a gratuitous kindness, a pitying.  That I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m simply trying, groping in language in a thorough darkness.

As a lover, a partner, I have simply tried to please.  To find out what is wanted and do, be, perform that.  How does an intimate relationship “work”?  I don’t know.  Everyone is different.  Nothing I learn to enact, behave, communicate, engage – is successfully effective in the next relationship (or, obviously, in the relationships ended before that!).  Could I BE whatever mucky morphing “self” “living human organism” I am (at any given moment) and be loved?  It seems so unlikely!  I don’t even know what that is (the mucky morphing living individual human organism) to express or represent to the Other one… – do they?  Does ANYone?

So do we ALL feel like we’re FAKING our way through being human?  Adapting “roles” and “styles” and “opinions” and behaviors in order to survive?  To be liked?  To fit in?  To feel good about ourselves?  To feel useful?  To BE?

Over decades, I have found that there are some things that steadily characterize me.  I like to drink and smoke and read and write.  I love to love and desire and be loved and desired.  All of those things share the “actuality” and “reality” of being activities that I don’t understand.  Things that seem to steady, nourish and keep me vital…and yet also damage, wound, hurt and make me vulnerable.  That wobble.  That trembling.

Identity

To my lover I responded theoretically.  That my understanding of a living organism is that its “identity” in fact is created and activated in every moment’s situation and surround.  That ALL of being a human is identifying oneself in relation to circumstance – a moment-to-moment relation and response to THOSE and THAT which constitutes its happening.  That “living” involves trying style, voice, behavior, activity, vocation, perception, interpretation, thought after another after another – quickly realizing that in EVERY instance the “fit” is partial, inauthentic, somewhat true (what feels good) and somewhat false (what is uncomfortable) – that BEING ALIVE is a wandering experimental trial of sorts.  That if we CHOSE or locked ourselves into an IDENTITY and attempted to be consistent in it – we would in fact deteriorate, become bitter – that the wisdom is NOT “I AM THAT” but “THAT IS PARTIALLY ME” for now, in this instance, at present…

????

The questions keep coming.  We bemoan that when we take a job, a position, a role, responsibilities… we tire of them as we feel the constraint of structured, required, or expected behaviors and activities.  When I compose a writing work – within pages I tire of its direction, its characters, its ethos – I can feel where a thing is going and whether it’s interesting to me or not, I tire of it – feel constrained by what’s created, feel fake in pushing it in another direction…even innovation and inventiveness feel PRETEND.

Perhaps LIVING = the tension of partiality.  Striving to “fit” to “belong” to “match” (be safe in, acknowledged, understood, allowed) means adaptation, alteration, invention, reciprocal construction, which would seem to inherently demand compromise, partiality, veiling and highlighting – what will seem / feel to be INAUTHENTIC, misrepresentation, “FAKE.”

And yet – it is through this wriggling tango that we also come to discover what “fits” us – what we enjoy, what our perspectives are, who/how/with whom we like to be, what feels “good” to us and what makes us afraid/uncomfortable/ and so on…

Cynical view: we’re ever pretending and untrue.  Hopeful view: we’re navigating and discovering, becoming.  And it seems that both are “real” and “actual.”  Authenticity (maybe?) equals partiality and pretense for humans?  Equals morphing and becoming?  Equals uncertainty and acting (adapting)?  Equals attempting to be?

Interstice – 6: the coupling

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, Language, meaning, relationships1 Comment

System Environment Coupling

– 6 –

And then the narrative runs away.  Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds.  We yield them occurrence in time.  Over time.  Across locations.  We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so.  Their occurrence is now.  The moment of happen.  And the telling is here just as well.  The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember.  The moment of happen, and never “again.”  “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.

Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles.  We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have.  Construct forms to obey.  She stumbled, or stuttered.  Appeared in a robe.  When it opened, she stayed.  For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.

Not undone.  No undoing – just fall shy.  Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.  An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change.  She (you) and he (I), it (us).  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.

See the couple coupling.  A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle.  Huffs and spurts and clawing.  The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure.  Bodies in command.  It’s grotesque.  Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal.  She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting.  He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake.  They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.

From inches of distance the movements are grueling.  A repetitive taking advantage.  These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need.  The fish flaps on dry ground.  In a terror.  A panic afraid that relief will not come.  Release.  In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.”  But there is an other.  He/she senses the lover’s retreat.  The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction.  They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor.  Asynchrony.  What needs, needs its doing, is done.  Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…

From one angle.

See the couple coupling as animals.  The dog, the bear, the wolf.  The bird or bee or dragonfly.  The distance.  The unawares.  What if the lion leaned into the neck?  What if the squirrel caressed?  If the snakes lay entangled.  The cats licking flanks.  The stories would pour into morphing.  What have we seen?  During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received.  Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving.  His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine.  Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again.  In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else.  Animals humping and huffing,  not by instinct alone, something more.  Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.

In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be.  From the feline receiving her guest.  There is more taking place through the need.  The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond.  Bodies converging in dialogue.  Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.  Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create.  The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace.  What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.

We muster.  We glyph.  We resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.

The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.

Invisible Man Chronicles, cont’d

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, relationships2 Comments

Click HERE for parts 1 and 2

2-xray handshake

III.

 

            Rattling bones, deep-falling diaphragm – through continuous sightings and encounters with “H” (“her”) these consistently occur – even over hours, days, and months.

            I might say that what characterizes our particular version of intimacy are curiosity and wonder and the ecstasy of discovery and finding – imbuing apparently abandoned spaces with vitality and imagination.

 

            A week later was a potluck for the visiting artist.  Small-talking with “her” in the kitchen – I felt inadequate to be occupying her time and “let her go” to mingle with the many I was certain were desirous of her indomitable and imaginative company.  I spoke with her partner, the farm-inhabiting-best-friend-artist-lady, and H sidled in.  There was much laughter (their minds are contagious and entertaining – as if the structures of adulthood and professional culture never quite ‘took’ or corralled possibilities)…around “her” my breath dissipates.  We’d both been hired as rural mail carrier associates with joint training to occur the week following; both commissioned to respond to this artist’s intimately relational performance work; both in love with abandoned places and their loss and decay – both committed to discovering lost or overlooked things. 

            There we were.

            I in poverty. 

            Day one of training sat us next to one another, her length and beauty, doodles and read-alouds from the training manual enthralling.  I worked to breathe and lived through my peripheral perception – registering her movements, hair, wrist, knee, hands, mouth pronouncing acronyms, quirky nervous habits, footwear, scent and clothing…

            She suggested (did she?) lunch together.  I’m quite certain that converged through a clumsy stumbling and fragmented semblance of conversation.  I had planned only banana and peanut butter on my budget – yet each day we went – for that amazing hour – somewhere I’d never been before in a city I’d spent over three decades in and around.  An abandoned hotel, a nature trail, small chain restaurants, of which one, perhaps, constituted a first “date,” as, after placing our orders, she removed to the restroom and I was left to pay the bill!  (Delightful things like that).

 

            Blessings.  I was gaining practice in “soaking in the good” – a strategy instructed through my therapy, and H was much better than I ever imagined, a remarkable alchemy of behaviors and body parts – co-constituting an unknown ‘ideal’ to my mind, sensations, experience and history.  I was dumbstruck, amazed, bewildered, befuddled – in other words – alive and in hope.

 

            I’d been asking her coterie of creator-friends to visit my home for fire or food or an art-making party – to no response or avail.  Everyone taking a read.  She agreed, then doubted, then declared she thought she might appear via an internet message.  Thus she arrived, of a Sunday afternoon in April, to my home.

             We parlayed and exchanged – art, family, friends, lives, plans, hopes, strategies, likes and dislikes, ideas and tears, meanings and lies and other truths.  I ached toward her – finding romance and desire and a periscope of loving peeking out, looking round, checking for safety.  It isn’t safe.  It’s unlikely, bizarre, fantastical : sixteen years between us and four marriages – her blossoming while I fade to grey, her popping with –larity, my struggling for place.  She asked me to sit next to her.

            The sides of our arms.  Legs.  Eventually fingers becoming entangled.  We talked staring straight ahead, caught in some astronaut training module machine, no gravity, no reference, dizzied and desirous, disbelieving and desirous, frightened and desirous, with just the right amount of belonging and estrangement, novelty to craft courage and excitement throughout our neural nets.

             We concocted funnel cakes of cinnamon and sugar, mustard, jalapenos and sausage.  They flopped and sickened, we laughed and she left.  I think perhaps we loved, even then, that day.  She left behind a bevy of hands from a book she created, by extraction.  Our hands were open, our minds and hearts, a letting-go, with patterns and a freeing, a dance: in common, in Kansas, in history, in hope, in commitments, in fears and neuroses.

             Letting-go.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Revisiting “I”-dentity

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, WritingLeave a comment

01-diagram-complexity-of-place-ID1

“I”-dentity: and/or “I” is a product of the Other and the Us

 

I wouldn’t know how to tell you my story, though life knows I try and have tried (as if someone cared).

 

What is it to you?  And “I”?  Is “we”?  When the parts are estranged, differentiated – unknown and uncertain?  If the question of being is YouMe + We?

 

My approach to myself as an Other and Us.

 

Thinking in time with the seasons – their perceptible growth and decay.  Their relations.

 

For all the world in the sheer ice of January the wheat crop is dead… but it rises late in the Spring.

The drizzling, chill fog is burned off by the Summer.

 

I succumb to grief, and then joy, but grief will come again (and then joy…and then grief… and then)…

 

Fall and its gradual dying: discoloration, departure.  What we experience as lengthening quiet.

 

I thought it was over (this “I”), again and again.  But it always turns out it is ready to bloom and express, given certain conditions (the “I” and what blooms, as well as conditions – differing every time).

 

Not quite fallow – apparently.  The seeds and resources are there (that’s the HUMAN) – called out by consortial action.

 

So “I” is the product of the Other and the Us.  Always more than one and all their relations.  Sea, land and sky, our cells and their content-rich contexts.

 

I’ve been abandoned and resumed without loss each mysterious gain.  I’ve betrayed and discovered new friends.  We don’t remember where to categorize pain: is it “bad” is it “good” – but then simply it is just like we and the other and the us.

 

“I” dent.  I am in-formed while in-forming.  When I move, lie or make, I am changed.

 

It’s not fault of an-other, an outside, an “external,” nor “me” in my body, my space and my time, but the “we” is the cause – the “us” in relation: all is com-pound, com-plex, and co-herent (“co-here-in-it”?).  Here together we change and are changed.  And thus love.

 

And our fear.  And we forecast by memory.

 

“I” am not “I” as “I” was.  Nor like the “I” “I” will be.  Which “I” cannot predict for all its co-dependence.  Which we labeled “dis-ease” and no wonder – it makes us uneasy being out of control.

 

Yet we’re only an “I” in a context.  A context of other and us.

 

When the “other”s keep changing (be coyote or mountain, NY or SF, literature, germ, snail or partner) the “I” also shifts and adapts, becomes “else,” becomes novel, strikes a balance with all that is “us.”

 

So give credit where credit is due (or a “cause”): whatever your “I” equals a me + a you – and is describable in manifold ways – as a god or the weather, a child or a feather, and is probably always ALL AND.

 

So no “OR.”  Choice is an additive move.

 

TV news brought us the phrase “and now this.”  Exponentialed via World-Wide-Web, and most probably true (or maybe it’s real).  Connections incalculable, meshwork beyond comprehension, impossible untangling deciphers…now this and now this and now this = “I” (and “you” and “us” and “we” and “world”).

 

Terms are confusing.

 

We Are.  Con-fused beyond knowing.

 

There is no other way (then/than) To Be.

 

“I” as a product of Other and Us.

Siegel - Neurobiology of We

SWARM: “Fly on… right through” … or, “Differentiation + Linkage = Integration”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Music9 Comments

lukas_felzmann_swarm_3

To write beautiful.

I knew where I was, momentarily.

The paradox: making awareness an habit.

By definition a habit, meditative or otherwise, becomes somewhat “automatic” and therefore something other than “awareness” or novel or differentiated… and yet…

Taking in the good… being lived…

“Implicitly, and more fundamentally, this practice means a relaxed opening into the love – in a very very broad sense – that is the actual nature of everything. Moment by moment, the world and the mind reliably carry you along. This isn’t airy-fairy, it’s real. Our physical selves are woven in the tapestry of materiality, whose particles and energies never fail. The supplies – the light and air, the furniture and flowers – that are present this instant are here, available, whatever the future may hold. So too is the caring and goodwill that others have for you, and the momentum of your own accomplishments, and the healthy workings of your body. Meanwhile, your mind goes on being, while dependably weaving this thought, this sound, this moment of consciousness.

It’s hard to sustain a felt knowing of this nature of everything. The brain evolved to keep our ancestors afraid to keep them alive. But if you look, and look again, you can see directly that right now, and in every now you’re alive, you’re cradled by the world and the mind like a child carried to bed by her mother. This cradling is a kind of love, and when you trust it enough to soften and fall back into it, there’s an untangling of the knots of fear and separation. Then comes both an undoing of the craving that drives suffering and harm, and a freeing and fueling love living through you and as you out into the world.

Imagine a single day in which you were often – not continuously, not perfectly – lived by love. When I try this myself, the events of the day don’t change much -but my experience of them, and their effects, improve dramatically. Consider this as a practice for a day, a week – or the year altogether.

More widely, imagine a world in which many people, enough people – known and unknown, the low and the mighty – were lived by love. As our world teeters on the edge of a sword – and could tip either into realistic prosperity, justice, and peace, or into growing resource wars, despotism, or fundamentalism – it seems to me that it’s not just possible for a critical mass of human hearts to be lived by love. It’s necessary.

How?

The essence of this practice is a yielding into all that lives you. This is a paradigm shift from the typical top-down, subtly contracted, moving-out-from-a-unified-center-of-view-and-action way of operating . . . to a relaxed receptive abiding, feeling supported by the ocean of causes creating each momentary wave of awareness. Then on this basis, there is an encouraging of love in all its forms to flow through you. The suggestions that follow are different ways to do this, and you can also find your own.

Soften and open in the heart. Notice that you are alright right now: listen to your body telling your brain that you are basically OK. Feel the fullness that is already here, all the perceptions and thoughts and feelings pop-pop-popping in this moment of consciousness. Feel the buoying currents of nature and life, waves of gifts from over 3 billion years of evolution on our blue and green pebble. Look around and see objects, including your own hands and body, and consider the unfailing generosity of the material realm, blossoming for over 12 billion years from a seed of light.

Be aware of the warmth and good will from others toward you. Sense your connecting to others, how you are supported by a net of relationships. They don’t have to be perfect. Some people do care about you. You are almost certainly loved.

Feel carried by consciousness, the effortless knowing of perception and thought. When stress, worry, pressure, or pain appear in the mind, see that the fabric of this suffering – the underlying operating of the mind – is itself fine, is always already fine.

Again and again making this little but profound shift, this giving over to the carrying cradling of mind and matter, you can afford to let your own love flow freely. Bring this down to earth: if you lived from love in your first encounter with another person today, how would you be, what would you do, how would you speak? What would a week, a year, be like in which you lived by love? How about trying this? Who knows, if enough people share in this practice, the world could become a much better place.”

– Rick Hanson, Just One Thing-

swarm_188-189_low - Felzmann

Differentiation

Linkage

Integration

Difference

Similarities

Meaning

Perception

Mayhem.  Chaos.  Disregulation.  Con-fusion.

Brokenness.  Openness.  Wounds.  Seeping.

Connecting.  Contaminating.  Communicating.  Constructing.

600x401xswarm02-31922478.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.hzJZzREh9d

In other words:  fly on… ride through.   Take note, make it a habit to take note.  Attend, automatically attend.  Love, freely, openly, love.

PARTICIPATE.

There is so very much good happening.  Arriving, passing through, departing… HAPPENING.

Don’t forget.  Don’t ignore.

Beauty.  Hands.  Hair.  Voices.  Language.  Gestures.  Meanings.

the PROCESS.

ENJOY.   DELIGHT.  LAUGH.  NOTICE.

Fly on.

Ride through.

Notice (differentiate, conceive, perceive, attend)

Link (conjoin, participate, connect, find similarity, solidarity)

Integrate (make meaning, story, intention, purpose, gratitude)

Novelty                                       Similacrum                                  Meaning

I have felt overwhelmed by meanings.  Flooded with good.  Surprised by kindness.  Taken off guard (guards unnecessary) by humans.  How much good there is — children discovering, struggling; coyotes chasing cars; peacocks squawking; handshakes and smiles; innovations and ideas; hopes and dreams; sounds and shapes; disappointments and losses; grief and gratitude; desire and refusal; romance and death…

BEING LIVED

a body materially exchanging, interacting, interoperating with all the materials that surround it

a consciousness, awareness alert to emotion, interpretation, possibilities and limitations

a being responsive to other being

LIVING

Felzmann - Swarmin the midst of

and with

alongside

and because of

interacting

exploring

interpreting

engaging

SWARMING

existence

BEING LIVED

-all images – Lukas Felzmann, Swarm; music – Coldplay, Ghost Stories

Ramblings…10,000 Words

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Music, Reflections, Writing4 Comments

First of all, let me apologize for not being very consistent or active here the past week or two.  And then apologize for the following length (somehow I felt it was okay, given the silence caused by entanglements of necessity and sustenance)…

            If I were a mountain.  This was my first thought, while reflecting on you, me, our children, planets and plants, birth, death, brains and bodies and societies of persons, nations, sciences and myths, plus at least 10,000 other things.  The effort to consider everything – a total picture – my limited whole with as many details as possible.  As if meanings were stars and knowledge all the darkness around them.

Taking time.  If I conjure everything I know – time-saving habits and fixes, sundry scientific theories, the feel of my children’s hair, the path of a bee, each lip that’s found its way against mine, every person, voice, place I remember in part, pancake recipes, varieties of soil I’ve walked over, tasted, smelled, languages living and dead…don’t worry, I won’t list 10,000 things and their changing nuances…

What is common for me, when not immediately struggling to make ends meet up, are these attempts at collocating and corroborating my experiences and knowledge to date…and it inevitably leads to profound sensations of brevity and minisculity (?).

If what I have experienced, lived-through and wended into my body and brain represented stars (those sometimes recognizable flickering points of light)…

…all I have not heard of, thought, experienced, lived-through or felt

would be represented by the gargantuan dark – the endless, perhaps infinite, space.

            My 43 years.  Books I have read, courses taken, jobs held, skills learned, places inhabited and endured.  Women I’ve loved, children I’ve borne and partially raised, persons I’ve met, objects and activities engaged and observed, skies, senses, stuff.

Pretend you are space.

A space that is full, perhaps something akin to our idea of atom.  Imagine your space, of space, in space.  In other words – your little flexible dynamic space is both made of space, contained in space, occupying and participating in space and spaces and shares its participatory space(s) with 10,000…10,000,000,000,000…uncountable space-forms and forms of space…

I, atom.  Barely a point in space-time, hardly formally recognizable, and from what angle or distance?  Limited space-form through limited space-times.  A flexible, dynamic, ever-morphing relatively microscopic or enormous form-ish space-ish thingy.

An atom bounding, ricocheting, trembling and changing throughout a little universe…a variable assemblage of atom-like moments transforming in particular ways of a sort addicted to accounting for and measuring itself and its surroundings (a way of distinguishing presence in these manners of matters).

Forms and Objects 

            If I were a mountain (that is, in relation to “you”) I’d likely be quieter, perhaps slower, present and patient – you might reference or measure yourself by me (I was thinking).  I might want less.  Not have the same desires and activities formally compressed into 70-80 “years…”

And then if you were a sky full of stars or dawn, an enormous canvas of clouds and colors, ubiquitous…and there was that mountain…

So very small, so very brief:  Me.

            Couple all of that to the profound affects felt (in and on me) by other malleable collectives of atoms we refer to as “us” – plus mountains, valleys, rivers and seas, weather, events, animals, places and things: at our scale, and between ever-so-many scales, we have significant import and effect, albeit almost nothing at all viewed fractionally and/or noticeably at minimally larger scales (I suppose that could be argued…)

Anyway, we exist for ourselves primarily at our own shared scale, imagining (or inventing) other scales in order that we might examine ourselves, potentially compare or evaluate…us.

But if I were a mountain…how different would our relation be?  I imagine it this way:  You in your human scale, and me as mountain.  In rain, ages, erosion and accretion, growing trees and dropping boulders…and you, briefly, tramping across me, perhaps admiring or photographing me, resting on me, using me as a direction or a landmark – always there, there, there.  Other things, people, events, experiences of your immediate scale rise and fall, come and go, attach and detach, begin and end, flux and alter…

            You as sky to me, and I – mountain.

            This thinking – that it might help me somehow to imagine life at other scales… Perhaps this is why…

Fiction

Science

Philosophy

Art

Religion

History

…what might we mean at another scale?  between scales?  Not simply as we are to ourselves, as we experience or live-through our brief experiences as space-forms in space-times, but from alternate frames and scalar perspectives?

Imagine…from the view of our constituent elements and systems…over large ranges of processes (“history,” “time”) or briefer ones (Mayfly, ant, daisy)…from tectonic or astronomical lenses…where we can’t even register as an entity, object or form…and by the time whatever activity we mustered – energy or noise we emitted in our being reached a distant planet or star we’d have been gone for thousands and thousands of our decades?!

As if, even at our scale, we are molecules shaking in a beaker.  Vibrating, jostling one another, coming together, splitting apart, sometimes bonding, sometimes break – but most often simply bouncing to and fro.  Jiggling.  Adapting and adjusting.

Mountain.  Sky.  Metaphors of import.

10,000 words on 10,000,000,000,000…things (or just the one)

“Ain’t it like most people?  I’m no different.

We love to talk on things we don’t know about.”

-Avett Brothers-

 

Mapping the Meanings – Semiotic Territories

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Reflections4 Comments

Guattari - emphatic umph

Semiotic Territories 

If the world were different, or its circumstances, so would he be – no use going down that avenue.  Where he’d gotten to, he’d arrived of his own doing – his own choices, interactions and responses to his surroundings – his opportunities and limitations – his very own and very shared, complex experiences.

The “way of looking at it” is always only one way of looking at it – that’s the case of it, even when viewed through “multiple perspectives” – if its delivered of a human, it’s the processing of singular machines, however plural their construction may be.

So change is curious, in that, when any element alters, the entire effect is unknown, is of incalculable scales that can only be measured in probabilities.  Probabilities, hypotheses, theories and beliefs have one tremendous thing in common: they are all of them uncertain.  You’ve heard it said (or he has) – “the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself,” no, that doesn’t sound quite right, “the only thing we know for certain is that everything’s uncertain,” no, people don’t use the word certain and its relatives that often.  “Change is truth, truth is change”?

She said: “A shared past isn’t forgotten even in change.”  That works for him, for what is memory but the continuous recording of change?

It’s grown easy to confuse himself, he thinks.

 

He notes:  “You find yourself in an encyclopedia of circumstance and then you wonder.”  He only wonders because to inquire or investigate would mean to revise the encyclopedia by looking at it – selecting, perceiving, and thereby focusing an entry to the ignorance of the rest.  A book-burning, a global apocalypse, a conflagration of reality.  Not what he wants.  So he sits and stews or simmers there.  But the limiting fact of existing at “there” annihilates great distances.  He can’t seem to avoid mass destruction.  He takes deep breaths.

 

Writing like thinking like moving – all of it creating a splintered prism of mirrors, warped and shattering windows on presence.  He loves her.  And others beside.  And himself.  And the strange fanatic gifts of the world.  People – “good,” “bad,” or otherwise – how can they not fascinate, be beautiful, in even their minimal capacities?  Where had he edited this part of himself, during?  How he loved her, benefit or ill.

 

He changes, along with everything about (or around) him.

 

Everything was changing (an enormous statement) and he along with it (the Everything).  Self, selves, other, others – why did all seem unavoidably personal?  Just what was this ‘person-ness’?  He feeds encyclopedias to flames, and entertains the questions.  Realizing that questions are the riddling workings of erasure.

 

His question swipes across its context, even when he’s asking of its context.  In other words (his words) “focus obliterates the unclear.”  And the unclear composes the context.  The too-much and more-than, some even say “Beyond.”  What’s not forgotten in the stylus of changing – our memory?  What shared past is present?  He looks at her photographs uniquely each time, each moment, each instance.  Even in-stance he’s not stable.

 

How could he hold position on a spinning globe?

He asks Siri, the plastic voice of a Global Positioning System:  “Where am I?”  Her reply obliterates the world in a profession of some arbitrary gridwork (abstract and unreal) of names and points, streets and latitudes, longitudes, disabling fabrications designed to throw him off course and locate him against the constant movement.  He remembers not to believe, that very re-membering dismembering the possibles.

 

Desiring connection – the security or perceived safety of a tightened weave, to be knotted in a tangle of threads – he spies squirrels and birds, fences and trees, a woman’s breast.  To sense substance pressed against another, as if interacting a location that might not give.  Or give precisely.  An event.

 

He can’t remember what is not being forgotten.  He wanted to, wanted to know what she didn’t forget, like a recipe or table of contents, a topographical map.  He couldn’t imagine what response she would give – what saying or writing, what sculpting or paint – as an answer.

 

He stops guessing as an act of nonviolence.  Most probably he lays down and opens his arms as a wishing and welcome.  That is his practice now: bewildered? confused? give greeting and welcome.  “Hello there, unclear and unknown, I am unable to re-cognize you or you would be known and familiar…and yet I am sensing a pattern,” he says.  A family resemblance of mystery, a remembering of is.  If no one’s written that, perhaps they should (he thinks – another act of violence).  Pronouncements.  Aphorisms.  Like paradox-bombs, parables leaving remains.

 

As a first, he senses he understands “absolute truth” – that rage and genocide that attempts to rid the world of itself – its reality, complexity, multitudes.  Truth the large red button signed “Do Not Press!”  Depression must be a result of pressuring some truth, excluding all else?

 

Confused, he feels at home.  Mismembering, bewildered, changing with change.  Con-fused – isn’t that what he on some scale desires?  To be fused-with, part-of, belonging and participant?

He’s in motion, there is music and breath and these thoughts – all things depending on change.

 

“…no longer a subjective bubble, but rather a limitless interface through which ontological or ‘pure’ relations and ‘becomings’ easily pass…Subjectivity is constitutively open, or has a being-toward, as do all relative beings…We are semiotic, existential territories rather than brains in vats, and these territories or ecologies are not contained within our physical anatomy, nor are they known only as immanent representations.  The question becomes this: Where does your cognition or subjectivity terminate if it is a suprasubjective process and not a stable substance?  The ‘self’ becomes a sign relation or interpretant rather than an unrelated, ontological entity…What is being constantly emphasized is a kind of semiotic ontology in which relations become crucial at every level of analysis and allow for the interweaving of corporeal and incorporeal factors.  Relations are an intrinsic dimension of being, and every being becomes the active center of a web of relations with other beings…beings that are nevertheless in mobile relationships…the ‘truth of the relative’ rather than the ‘relativity of truth.”

– Paul Bains, The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations –

ernst bloch - human

ReWritten / ReWriting

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

ReWritten

The Disappearance of Needs 

In any genre.  Writer becomes when the needs disappear – needs like expression or dialogue, understanding or inquiry.  The need to devise layers or multiples of perspective, to experiment or experience language or thought.  To love.

When these needs are expunged or exhausted, and a human puts pen or pencil to page, writing might begin.

 

These needs are not expunged.

Needs complexly relocate.

 

Maybe they find a more suitable object, event, or entity.  Writer attempts to construct love via language and page.  This is also dialogue.  But what is needed is resonance-WITH.  What is longed for are moments of positive resonance with an other of Writer’s same kind.  Where resonance would be acceptance, acknowledgment, empathy.  Comprehension, understanding, attunement with Writer’s barest, most authentic expressions – Writer’s openness and risk, Writer’s life-experiencing, meaning-making processes.

[NOTE: Obviously it is literature being addressed herein – not formulaic, hack, commissioned, business or “professional,” aesthetic or philosophical – domain-specific languages, entertainment or communication-purposed compositions.  Rather – writing that lays bare living – which can (also obviously) partake or occur within any and all of the above forms and kinds of inscriptions]

 

Writer, utilizing all accessible knowledge, craft and experience divulges (as best Writer can at this instant) Writer’s lived experience.  Writer loves her.  Writer grieves.  Writer imagines.  Writer pretends.  Writer co-constructs (borrowing from the everywhere that language, experience, emotion, sensation, cognition, DNA, biology, physiology, dimensions etc. comprise) trails of letters, incipient sounds, rhythms, definitions, analogies and metaphors, socio-cultural baggage, spatio-temporal perceptions, historical variety and habitudes, toward some sort of text, artifact, writing.

 

In other words, Writer writes.

 

And as Writer writes, Reader reads (they are one and the same initially) and that reading also co-constructs the divulgence and activity-experience the writing com-poses.

Posing-with =  Writing.  An individual, posing-with, everything-at-disposal (its affordances and limitations) through language-inscribed.

 

[NOTE: pose1 pōz/

1.  verb

1.

present or constitute (a problem, danger, or difficulty).

“the sheer number of visitors is posing a threat to the area”

synonyms: constitute, present, create, cause, produce, be More

2.

assume a particular attitude or position in order to be photographed, painted, or drawn.

“she posed for a swarm of TV cameramen“

synonyms: model, sit More

2.  noun

      1.

a particular way of standing or sitting, usually adopted for effect or in order to be photographed, painted, or drawn.

“photographs of boxers in ferocious poses“

synonyms: posture, position, stance, attitude, bearing More

      2.

a particular way of behaving adopted in order to give others a false impression or to impress others.

“the man dropped his pose of amiability“

synonyms: pretense, act, affectation, facade, show, front, display, masquerade,posture More

]

 

The needs remain because they’re needs.  Needs oxygen, needs community, needs interaction, needs movement.  Needs nutriments, needs love.  Needs habits and practices, processes and conventions.  Needs society, needs shelter, needs protection, needs…

As if folded-into.  As if woven.  As if inherent and intrinsic, automatic.

As of anything and everything, then, Writing is not solitary.  “To write” is TO-WRITE-WITH the universe-encyclopedia of said individual, “writing.”  Some languages verb this better than others, some will allow us to feign.

Writer will not feign, unless “to survive” necessitates “to feign.”

Writer intends to write-with, perhaps finally surpassing a former dream of being no one, no thing, instead edging toward and everything that one is, of necessity, Writing.

photo 2

“Determining Gapless Playback”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Reflections, Writing3 Comments

Might it indeed be we passing through world as world makes its way through us?

In other words, we walk along, and call it “moon,” but once we’ve passed it goes on in its nameless and momentous being?

Likewise “Holly,” “daughter,” “self,” … “being”?

And anything else to which we lend ideas?

If “lending” (for practical purposes)

is not dictation.

.

Incise.  Excise.  Decide. – a definition.

Who of you likes to be told what you are?

Who of us can be?  Even by our (many) selves?

 

On how I miss my therapist.

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Writing1 Comment

Please take the time to watch the video.