Tag: image
Thickets
The world overgrown. At least any accessible sector. I’ve heard tale of open, of empty, of spacious, of dearth. Not where I approach. Even my own body – its in- or out-sides, its wherewithal. Always where-with-all.
Tangled, almost briny, in some instances. If able to determine a surround wherewith or whenwith to take a stance in. Even thinking, even breath, even a pulse of bloodbeat. Any sound we form toward music. Any making-sensible. For us. Our kind. Those within the overgrown – the untamable, reckless warp and weft.
To hunch there, immediately becomes here. How different – if imagined? To gather, to pre-tend. To suppose a disposition, a presence somehow differentiated. How-some? To curl in, therefore (perchance? per theory?) “to find,” to be able to, to call, to be-in-g? Yet how? Or why? Where is the for? And what might the hole be suspected to fill?
Where is the gap between this and the other? Between you and me, he or she, this-that-the-other, between…any/thing? Something wishes to know, apparently… and this wishing/motion/decision/desire/activity/drive (whatever “ “) begins by implicating violence… bi-lining a world with borders, invented barriers, perceived traces, intuited splits, cuts and hacks that are not there until. How un-till this supposed “soil” from which to distinguish, fabricate, or function? From which to “operate.” Surgeon-species.
What knowledge is expected by destroying? Deconstructing (or constructing) – both requiring joints? By suture and slice? By taking life? Prone to decompose. What a trajectory.
What options? Compelled…to con-fuse…confess…to communicate, express, enjoy, enjoin (what we find ourselves joined to) still even to de-scribe, in-scribe, in-voke, ex-tol, inter-act or en-gage provokes difference, demands separations, dismemberment. To cleave.
To try to body. To try to mind. Attend. Acknowledge. Distortion. To twist and torture an other, as the one or…alteration. De-pict.
Impossible connection already seems to be. Each, every add-ition a disconnecting, a cutting, a stitching seam according to a pattern. Whose? Whats?
Over, under, whelmed. Where is the open, the undifferentiated, the is? Always already be-fore. All ways, all ready, be-for. In other words…not possibly worded. Prior to word. Involving act (including language) but unincorporated (already corporal), defying design-ation (surprisingly? one would think ‘it’ [not] is at the end of de- or un-signing/signifying), erasure of description, all palimpsests equaling… perhaps (per-happening) – infinite, certainly uncountable, incalculable, without ordination, order, ordaining, without with-in or –out. Only WITH, inconceivable, imperceptible (perception cuts), irretrievable (the rejection of any re-), disabused, disturbed perturb, a dreaming dreamed turbulence = a happen to be.
Still this thinks with. Language. Lost already, displaced and falsified by a tiny thread, an whole fabric, a world-veil at least whilst continuing as world…
Think again. Dream. Confuse. Imagine. Invent. Art ducts (vents) for breath… further re-moves, com-pli-cations, furthering within, for fun? A dance, a play, a re-morse (cryptic codification, surreptitious and additional) some native complicity to immeasurable complexity. As is. As if. And so on…
Hopeful Haiku
Even a blank page
can be beautiful, asking:
Who goes there? What? Where?
Self-Beckett Confessions
“I have only to go on, as if there were something to be done, something begun, somewhere to go. It all boils down to a question of words, I must not forget this… May one speak of a voice, in these conditions?… If only I knew what I have been saying… Bah, no need to worry, it can only have been one thing, the same as ever…”
“At no moment do I know what I’m talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how nor why”
“Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of…”
“I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m doing as I always did, I’m going on as best I can”
– Samuel Beckett –
Untitled Fiction III
III. “…with murderous care…”
Jon had said, to Jesse, about the fires.
So we persisted, Jon, Jesse, and I, and the deceased Beckett, with perhaps thousands of others, unbeknownst any to each around some mythical innermost.
“Fail better.” The worst times are the ones in which one simply wants to quit failing altogether. Unfortunately (literally) that necessarily entails a kind of “end of the world as one ‘knows’ [perceives, participates, experiences, or imagines] it” – either suicide, tragedy, ‘terminal’ illness – death of some sort. Maybe silence, but that’s not certain.
The game table is always already laid, you’re always simply ‘entering’ it (LW points out this fallacy in his collections of numbered critiques of anything anyone writes or says or claims) actually (as far as we know) always already there (where you ‘find’ – what?!? – your ‘self’ – what?!?) and (again, perhaps, literally, unfortunately – or at the very least extremely limitedly) you can only occupy one position at the table (or wherever the action happens to be) at a time, that, unfortunately, always involves the very delimited…well, YOU. These are the arrangements as they transpire.
Language can (and does), we surmised, go anywhere. I try to record, invent, notate, mark, initiate. It all seems unnameable. Or of far too many names, references, usages, subtexts and connotations, inferences and denotations, already implemented in order to represent anything undone, reconstructed, deconstructed, novel or ‘new.’ “There’s nothing new under the sun” was already a cliché at the beginning / in the earliest phases.
Fires and voids all imagined early. [Apeiron. Chora/Khora. Clinamen. Flux. Infinity. ABSENCE. The ‘Other.’]. I begin. Again. GWFH and Freud refer to this as “repetition.” A hopeless hope of emergence. As different or unique as it may seem, ever a plenitude of the pre-existing. The already-there.
Been there, done that, Beckett exhausts from his grave alongside. “He was found lying on the ground…a voice comes to one in the dark” Imagine. Imagine. Everything is already there. The table set and set again, arranged. Already there when you wake to it. World.
It hasn’t…apparently…been given up. Perhaps it is inexhaustible. Limited though we be, we seem to be teeming with it/them… efforts at the unsayable. Unnameable. How it is. What is the what. Lost in the labyrinth of the occurrence, experience, now with shoddy, partial, biased and over-specified or eccentrically particular maps, guides, or rulebooks. Ourselves.
Alias Harlequin – Identities
“To recognize yourself in… To multiply your likenesses”
-Edmond Jabes–
And what do you suppose it is to be a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” human? To be named? Alias Harlequin?
What do you suppose it might be like to be “Ida Sophia Lind Filbert”? “Jada Lynette Smith”? “Oliver Myshkin”?
“Hallie Noel Linnebur”?
“Tristan Rene Wells Filbert”? “Simon H. Lilly”? “Aidan Stafford”? “Herman Melville”? “Paul Feyerabend”? “Rachel S. Como”? “Paul O’Callahan”? “Meghan Miller”? “Jim H. Charles?” “Warren Charles Farha”? “Amanda Marie Lind”? “Fernando Pessoa”?
A cow. A particular cow – an Hereford – on a particular plot of land in Mitchell County, Kansas?
“Plato”? “Kathy Downes”? “Ortho Stice”? A Welsh Corgi “Tippy”? “Napoleon Bonaparte”? “Charles S. Peirce”? The clerk at the grocery store? “Christopher Fynsk”? That Forest Ranger? A pet hamster “Jacques”? “Claudius”?
WHY SHOULD ANY ONE HUMAN BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?
WHY SHOULD ANY ONE ORGANISM BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?
What means: “EFFECT”?
“William Shakespeare”? “Avital Ronell”? “God”? “John Wayne Gacy”? “Helena Bonham Carter”? “Microsoft”? A caterpillar (be specific)? “Mahatma Ghandi”? A sparrow? Molecules composing particular dust?
WHAT IS?
how are we able to ask that question?
WHAT ARE WE?
how might we be “WHOs”?
Starting local:
What might it be like – as a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (Nobody) – to BE a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (A body)?
I’m not sure HOW to answer that.
“Perhaps writing means overcoming all resemblances within the very heart
of resemblance, being finally like yourself, like nothing.”
- Edmond Jabes –
i.e. How that can be answered.
– WHO or WHAT answers – ?
WHAT MIGHT IT BE LIKE…TO BE?
(qualified to ANSWER)
can ANYthing “answer”?
does “answering” imply “language”?
WHAT IS AN ANSWER?
(in relation to – ?)
What is(?) Nathan Wayne Filbert, Alias Harlequin?
IS “Nathan Wayne Filbert”?
WHAT IS?
WHAT IS IS?
(how?)
WHAT IS A QUESTION? And WHY/HOW can a question be asked?
WHAT IS IT – are our – ideas? – To “IMAGINE”?
what are ideas?
What might it be to “conceive”?
“to generate concepts” (D&G)
framings of our world-experience
[WHY? HOW?
WHAT FOR?]
WHAT is a “person”? HOW? WHY? WHO?
Always and ever – HOW & WHY can we / do we ASK?
WHO QUESTIONS?
(WHAT)?
(HOW)?
Something begins
(in/with all this)
it would seem
(it seems)
it seems that something begins in/with questioning
Alias Harlequin, i.e.
– the one whom this effects, the one on whom this has effect, the one (same? No!) affected by him or her, by whom and it. By this. This. That. By Other, others, and therefore, Alias again, patchworked and quilted, becoming, undoing, altering. Alias.
“Presumably most writers have many more ideas than they are able to act on”
– Ivan Vladislovic, The Loss Library –
Alias Harlequin – identities – is as is affected, effects, effected with/by.
Alias, i.e. as effected by “Hallie Noel Linnebur”; as effected (generated? Co-composed-with-) “Pauline Margaret Kresin Filbert”; the St Bernard “Zorro”; a specific train on a particular journey at a particular time; that mountain in that moment; Dec. 16, 1997 – a flu; and so on…
Alias – as situated in moments – e.g. “each one.” Harlequin – the human surname quilted with environment (micro-to-macro) in concourse. “Alias” as the “name in shreds” – the fragmentary and provisional, pragmatically specifiable address.
Ambiguous and fluid (like “river” itself – capable of designation but inconsistently contained) transient yet locatable, in form…perhaps. Yet no. “Alias” perhaps the medium (in-between) of morphing form and varying substance – what nothing also is (is not).
Name/term/signal/sign (“Alias”) as related to HNL, Dr. K, Dostoevsky, rustled grass, these sounds, this space-time and its company (surround) and then again, these again (but never “again”) – designating “NOWs”. Perhaps. It depends.
What or Who, How “Alias Harlequin” ALWAYS depends on a totality of other dependencies, as it were (or is?) “As such.”
Alias Harlequin, representative? Not that can of worms. AND the “thing” itself? (network of momentary dependencies-in-relation)?
What might we call (it/him/etc.) then? And what would “calling” be/do – how?
WHO questions?
This Alias Harlequin.
“I am already so much the inscription of a divergence…What I was, if that could be described, was a whirlwind of tensions…”
–Helene Cixous–
“A word is binding and at the same time breaks our bonds.
To which of them shall I, one day, owe my freedom?”
“To one only. Your name in shreds.”
-Edmond Jabes, Book of Resemblances–
The Dual Activity of the Properties of Erosion
Having traveled 2000 miles: Wichita – to – Carlsbad, NM – to – Guadalupe Mountains Nat’l Park – to – Presidio, TX – to – Big Bend National Park – to – Wichita in the past few days, I was privy to the glories of erosion. What it builds, what it wears away.
My 10-year-old is studying erosion in 4th grade and reminds me that the current definition is simply the movement of material. What dwindles somewhere accretes in another…
and leaves or creates (absence or presence of absence?) some glorious ruins (or productions)…
In an accidental synchrony, we traveled the paths of a favorite album of mine – This Will Destroy You – This Will Destroy You, and the following clip has long moved me, perhaps as much as any music ever has…
…ever reminding me of how I’d like my living dying to go…the movements and decaying – its constructions – the thickened gradual swelling of the deep good of being alive, punctuated by weighty whiles of thriving and ecstasy, momentous significants of loss or gain, as materials move and their relations alter / evolve / generate and decompose. Its insistence and tocking inevitability. The (hopefully) delta-like depositing of the full lot, spreading throughout, in its end…
Here’s to our living-dying onlyness…and wishes toward beautiful erosion.
Anatomy & Physiology
-Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy –
One Way to Stop
Setting his tumbler down after a sweet, refreshing sip that burns and broils his gut, he gazes off the porch through Autumn morning. “Quit it,” he thinks, whispers silently harshly, inside his insistent brain.
“Stop smoking, stop drinking, stop thinking too much. It’s ruined,” repeating, “in ruins. You ruin.”
His hazy survey settles onto a sign always visible where he wonders, worries, and writes.
Well aware that it’s one way.
But it doesn’t stop.
Watching his father deteriorate. Among 7.3 billion (and counting) other inescapable dyings. Kills himself surely by living. Unidirectional and certain – that end. The End.
Living’s a one-way to death whatever one chooses. There’s no stopping that. Perhaps the street sign motors this daily train of thought with each morning cigarette. And love and forgetting; his children; conjured wishes, hopes and purposes blare redly to STOP! again, again,
and now his mind – himself against himself (against himself) screeing: “Quit it. Stop. Stop dying. Stop killing yourself. Stop ruin!”
But it’s one way. He knows it never stops.
Eros – acorn/oak – Identity – Desire
It occurs to me. Occurs to me that vocation / personal / public / private / occupation / romance / family / profession are not separate elements of some proposed “self” I might emerge with in day-to-day interactions / responsibilities / obligations / choices, but rather tangled and woven threads of the unitary multiplicity (singular-plural) that is “me”, or some continuously occurring/re-curring cursive/re-cursive individuated co-construction of living human life in the world.
So that: when I compose an essay, poem, article, research, letter, note, list, diary entry, story, etc…I am not precisely operative as one or another individuated-circumstance of my “self”, but rather a that one – individuated occurrence/happening/event – evincing/emerging via this vehicle/form/instance in this case.
Composing a letter to my beloved today, I found “I” was also addressing my own feeling for the circumstances of my living, perception and reflection of my beliefs and attitudes within it, and aims or desires associated with my experience. So I make it an “open letter” – a public enunciation – of my experience being such-that-I-am.
I love you, Hallie.
I love you in ways that are very difficult for me to express.
*
Each aspect, experience, element of my reality – loving you/relation with you – always seems just out of reach of conveying, communicating. Beyond.
*
My appreciation, joy, anticipation, lust, desire, want, ache, gratitude, reception, pleasure, pain, fear, confidence, courage, adventure, dread, need, fondness, appreciation, hurt, etc… all seem diminished by, or unequal to, somehow MISSED, INACCURATE to my attempts at expressing, representing, sharing…
*
Wishes, dreams, philosophy and poetry all live in this realm: ruled by the “well, NOT like THAT!” Or…always followed by a “what I MEAN is…”
*
Ambiguity, inexactitude, shortcoming, outstripping, seemingly hopeless and impossible – yet ALWAYS generating hope, desire, energy in the STRIVING and BELIEF.
*
Hopes, wishes, illusions, truth, reality, dreams, love, art, religion… all seem to depend on this strange commerce of energy.
*
discovered negatively, or via an absence or lack…Utopia – we only ever KNOW that “utopia”, “paradise”, is a sensed “longing”, a KNOWING-THAT-THIS-IS-NOT-IT.
*
Perfection. If perfection is experienced (instances of ecstasy? Joy?) we appear unable to express/share/tell it!
*
Utopia, perfection, hope and desire – are each revealed by their “lack” or “absence” – their “NOT-IS”
*
Everything “ultimate”, “perfect”, “totalizing”, “whole” or “outstanding” we experience as UNIQUE, DIFFERENT, distinct and incapable of analogy or metaphor.
*
UNLIKE. We know it negatively, according to what-it-is-not, and feel it positively – as something unprecedented, unexpected, novel, unique. Anything comparable we realize – IT IS NOT THAT. It is unknown, incomparable, we recognize it by it NOT being ANYthing else we have experienced – or only partially, tangentially, and contrastively (negatively)
THIS IS NOT THAT!
*
Which leaves us, then, in a realm unspeakable, unreferenceable, undrawable – a pure IS realm.
*
You, my beloved, ARE. And ARE the occurrence or happening, the experience of, the REALITY (signified, significant) of a realm, experience, event, relation that is EXPERIENCABLE but not EXPRESSIBLE.
*
An exquisite sort of heartache for one devoted to the crafts of “expressing the inexpressible”, “saying the unsayable”, and so on.
*
Philosophy, poetry, hopes, dreams – ALL draw their CONTENT from what we KNOW “it” is NOT. Attempt to use action, behavior, language, movement, thought and speech to draft original arrangements that might allow the unspeakably unique, unsayably novel, incomparably total or inexpressibly replete –
into the realm of expression, sayability, hint, token, trace, Reality, occurrence, activity, appearance or happening…
and yet it is defiant, recalcitrant, resistant and intractable.
*
You provide me a life of exertion and effort, a LIVING of ATTEMPT – impossible possibilities – or their interaction – irretrievable, unrepresentable happenings and events, experiences…
*
BEYOND…full, total, whole Real Experiences…
…LOVE, HOPE, FAITH, INTIMACY, RELATION, DESIRE…
*
NEED for a mad trust in Reality that never equals recognition, cognition, reflection or thought. Intransigent to language – ever DOES NOT EQUAL,
and THAT is how we know it –
*
that it is Beyond-experience experiencing
Beyond-saying expressibility
Beyond-comparison analogy & metaphor
IN ITSELF OF ITSELF BY ITSELF
AN IS EXPERIENCE
*
You ARE.
*
It is amazing to/for me. Unsettling, novel, inexpressible, unrepeatable, impossibly in-possible,
something total, whole and real
in ways that action / language / emotion and response can never be.
*
Such is my lot. Happily? Momentarily joyous, ecstatic, HOPE-fully…
so much “better” than all it readily-apparently is NOT.
*
And why I seek/work into poetics, philosophy, wishes and dreams…where experiencing surpasses expressibility…Reality surpasses its processing…love its ability to confess…
I love you beyond-this.
In some other-ing language.
I am. Yours.
“Nathan”
p.s. this is also a reason that these forms (philosophy, poetry, art, dreams, etc.) often read as “nonsense” or irrational – each an effort at translating totalities of experience versus “rational” expression or analogical/metaphorical transcriptions of experience. Dreams combinate Reality…converge and reproduce whole happenings as “veritable” mash-ups; philosophy and poetry ache to stretch language affordances, or mate expressibility to totality…quite possibly irrational, even an impossible urge, but compulsive/erotic/desirous and humanly nature-al nonetheless.
In other words – if you “know what we mean” without knowing the meanings…we are coming nearer “it.”
Polysemic Stupor 