Tag: journal

Rambling

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, change, Current Reading, family, Fear, hope, human, Journal, lifeLeave a comment

Fits and Starts

How oddly and uniquely our dear bodies exhibit the effects of stress.  For some days now, exhausted and craving rest, I wake ever-so-early in a kind of sleepless sleepiness.  Wanting only to burrow in, immerse in comfort and calm, be tenderly near the one I love, instead I toss, turn, disturb and achieve none of my wishes.

Is this another emerging effect of aging?

My parents soon will celebrate 50 years of marriage – an example of what Andre Gorz describes: “If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage.  Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations.  We will be what we do together.” (Letter to D)  

mom and dad wedding

which means that I also approach 50.

So there’s also that – a kind of nostalgia, melancholy, joy, awareness…

I’m one to search and seek and inquire without end.

One to wonder and ponder and interrogate my experience with hopes of understanding it – but increasingly I find that apparently my being simply wants to be SO ALIVE.  Sometimes I feel that is what is happening with my waking body – that it doesn’t want to miss.  Anything.  The presence of my beloved next to me in sleep (Gorz describes what I am experiencing in that regard very well also: “how love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them”), the particular quality and type of that morning time, house-sounds, obfuscated consciousness…I, one of those who have “just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine”…sometimes it feels…and that this particular kind of love slowly strips and erodes those away to the irreducible, undefinable reality of each ONE of us…

FITS & STARTS

I shoulda wrote a letter.  There are the griefs, the emotions mistrusted, the longings delta’d out, and a million wishes.  “The past is still the past : a bridge to nowhere.” And then there is SO MUCH NOW.  The children and their emerging, engrossing creating lives; my wonder/love – a thriving, amazing individual who loves me and has so much of her own; there are the animals, the leaves, the waters and the breezes.  The breaths, the touches, the thoughts.  The feel of it all.

The word/concept/term “Mashup.”

Perhaps that is what is going on in my sleepless sleepiness.  My habit of reading has always been to read 30 or more books from various fields, genres, authors, subjects, literatures in order that my mind would have to do it’s weird mysterious complexity/chaos/emergence/dynamic/creative adaptive process of making some new idiosyncratic sense of a kind of global dissonance – our inherent ability to be a Convergence Creator.  To not be caught obeying, devoting, under the sway of some authority or perception or ideology not a Mashup.  Perhaps the thickness of being alive to what is life, attempting to attend, note and notice, enthralls the entirety in a similar manner – experience is a Mashup – so many sources, so many responses, so many interactions, so many affects and effects, roles, obligations, identities, loves, fears, perceptions, interpretations…and perhaps I’m currently simply immersed in a particularly cogent nexus of complexity and chaos – the operation toward adaptive emergence and some temporary convergence being administered in clumsy and cluttery fits & starts…

Perhaps each now is realization & threshold.  And, as a friend recently pointed out…“hope is such a restless state”.

hope butterfly

I, Artifact, Anyone

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing2 Comments

Mt Hood

I and the Anyone Artefact.

 

Given the miniscularity and brevity…and, say, the import or apparent heft – foils of mountain, sea, sky, and other incremental gravities or scale-altering engagements…

…what boils down in my insignificant, barely mappable blip of a space-form “life-span”?

 

What do I want?  (Mountain. Man. Collective of actionable atoms.)

 

Or how about in another form:   I, mountain, atom, want to write, am writing,

leaving record (partly), making record (partly), finding record (partly),

recording (partly), imagining (partly), learning (partly), playing (partly),

wondering (partly), thinking (partly), providing (manufacturing) company (partly),

because I can and it makes living-through delightful, meaningful, poignant, aware, alert…

 

Simply…I accounted for happiness recently as reading, writing and forms of companionship, because reading and writing (inseparable companions, or perhaps two aspects utterly meshed and merged, inextricably joined) – experiencing them seems to me to be enhanced when compatibly shared, mutually valued, reciprocated and informed.

 

I want to write.  I want what I write to provide sustenance for my self and children and home.  I want to write whatever I have it in me to make out of language, not what people ask me to write or pay me to write or suggest that I write.

 

PART ONE:

There is a grand, iconic, snow-capped mountain – Kilimanjaro, Hood, Vesuvius – symmetrical-seeming mounds of earth that simply and irreducibly and undeniably say – silently and continuously – “I AM HERE.”

 

Part One:

I exist.  I mark.  I testify to and quarry that existence in my way.  I artefact.

 

[Write well.  Parent well.  Perhaps partner.]

 

“Companionship”: friendship, fellowship, closeness, togetherness, amity, intimacy, rapport,

camaraderie, brotherhood, sisterhood; company

 

[wants to be a writer.  writes.  AM a writer.  wants to support existence by doing that which it wants : to write]

“the intersection of talents and joys”

[wants to parent well.  to develop thoughtful, compassionate, productive child-persons of survivable health.  parents.]

 

To artefact (not for longevity or endurance [perhaps partly – a kind of sustenance surely]) but to quarry the systems and processes – the multitude of unknowns to living-through.

I artefact – consciously to be present, to offer, to be worthwhile, to further matter (to participate in generation, ongoing complexity, collaboration, coordination and collocation – co-being, co-construction with world).

 

Write.  Parent.  Relate. (therefore) I, artifact (make ‘art’ in ‘fact’).

[take in artefacts via world – learn, adopt, adjust, adapt, extend – and artifact this process out]

 

These are wonderful, benign, banal, investigations.

 

The Simply Difficult:  WHAT AM I?  WHO AM I?  WHY?  HOW? : The Questions of Living-Through. 

(I repeatedly note that life interests me insofar as I am querying WHY people think they exist and attending to HOW …)

What are your answers to these?  (my present mobile answers provided in parentheses)

  1. WHAT are you?  (a temporary and dynamic collection of active molecules idiosyncratically coupled and formed)
  2. WHO are you?  (a fluid and alterable co-depending individuated space-form reciprocally coupled to its perceptual and perceiving, cognizable surround)
  3. WHY are you?  (a form of life…to be)
  4. HOW are you?  (idiosyncracies=personhood: the fluctuating continuum of activities and behaviors between what I contain and what contains me…the marginal substance where uniqueness exhibits)

Or… I, Mountain / You, Sky. Ocean. Flock. Field. Plain.

Metaphor:  perhaps our primary mode of learning?  Posit, compare, examine, observe, revise, pretend, fabricate, manipulate, invent: “Make-sense”=”Knowledge / Learning”

 

All of this to say that every object(form) at every moment is responsible for the possibilities of meaning.

 

We could be anyone (and will be, have been, are, plus…) individually (or ‘uniquely’ ANYone).

 

IN OTHER WORDS:  I want to stop whatever this is and tell you.

 

Want to tell you I LOVE YOU.  I am personally thankful that you exist and am convinced the entire world would be different (no matter how miniscule or brief you may be) if there were not you (seems to be the way EVERYthing – systemically – IS).  So I am thankful (good or ill) that: ARE.  IS.

 

Say there is/was a child.  Mountain.  Hypothesis.  Arrangement.  Beginning.  Again.  Scenario.

ARTIFACT: Chance.  Atom.  Action.  Experience.  Being.

Pretend:  Sky crashes.

Mountain melts away.

All = nada.

And then “YOU”= WHO? WHAT? WHY? HOW? (WHERE is implicit)

 

p.s. someone will die in someone’s arms

p.p.s.  someone will write about it, remember

p.p.p.s. someone might sing

p.p.p.p.s.  someone will represent it in paint/clay/language/dance/sound

 

Mountain              Sky                Ocean               Trees                 Soil

diagram__transition_to_new_mining_areas

Word & Image

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings3 Comments

Words & Images 

In the game Telephone Pictionary, a group of people begin with a numbered stack of paper fragments and an idea.  The idea could be an action, a character, a concept, anything.  Each player writes their idea on the top paper scrap and slides the stack to the player next to them.  The next person depicts the words passed to them, placing the words at the bottom of the pile.  The next writes what they interpret the drawing to be, and so on, alternating write/draw until the pile goes full circle or back to the originator, the same place as the end.  Most usually the character, action, description, originating logos has changed dramatically through its person-to-person journey and return.  Yet also usually, on looking at the miniature picture book as a whole, from start to finish, you are able to find a thread or see a path and deviations leading to the end.

A journey made up of an originating construction, altered and transformed through interactions with persons full of words and images (culture and nature), sometimes simplified, sometimes extended, and coming to its end with traces of the original construction and much difference.  It’s an easy one – it’s like life, we think – but to say “life is like that” is redundant, for it is part of life, playing the game is life.  It’s why any metaphors are available, why all metaphors work at some level – metaphor-making is life, as are games, interpretations, comparisons, changing, being handled, encountering persons with all their languages and images and ideas, editing, revising, with our limited number of pages, years, days.  Yes, being an initial cluster of cells and passing through the cultures and natures of others is very like the way our life narratives come to be constructed, composed, altered, imagined and revised to their ends – their beginning places – clusters of cells.

I began in the hands of my parents and sister, formed by the words and images they surrounded and infused me with: a particular kind of Christianity, music, morals, travel, touch, a sense of gender, my name, and so much more.  I suppose they’d each have their own words and images about and for me as well.

How quickly we are passed through hand after hand full of words and images – persons, institutions, cultures, families, nations, teachers, peers, friends, enemies, lovers and so on…The language, the picture – the culture, the nature – the numbered days – and we, the originating cluster altering and morphing, editing and highlighting, adopting and dropping, blacking out images, underlining phrases – palimpsests of living artefacts by our end.

Co-created through an unknown trajectory characterized by the interplay of self (or organism) and other (or world).

A beautiful, horrible thing.

Currently Reading

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, JournallingsLeave a comment

Greetings and so many thanks for those of you who take the time to investigate my works here.  Our lives have been a bit topsy-turvy in the ekphrastic household – I’m adjusting back into another semester of Library & Information Science, Holly is busy practicing and painting and starting more graduate education in Expressive Arts Therapy, the kids are growing and struggling and succeeding and being beautiful young people in our world.  All that to say I haven’t had the open spaces for creative composition that function effectively for creating new verbal connections – I’m sure they’re happening, I just haven’t had the time to attend very closely and note them down.  I received a request to update my Currently Reading page, which I usually do 2 or 3 times a year, or as the books-at-hand protecting my desk/work area experience significant change.  My “To the Library” post offered a number of new (to me) books that I’m currently intently poring through, and here are a few more titles this week:

Frank by R.M. Berry

and I’ll work on a refresher of my Currently Reading page soon!

Identity & Flipping Numbers like Coins

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces10 Comments

What exactly is it about the arbitrary changing of numbers, parceling of time, divisions and subdivisions of existent moments, that prompts and wriggles us to consider change – feel obligated or massaged toward it – dream of it?  I can say that in all my dizzying thoughts about it – how society and culture (Petrie-dish like) inundate and stimulate individuated personal alterations – I cannot figure out why crossword-puzzle-like taxonomies and designations of life-fragments labeled by stick-systems of reference, mathematical calculations and so forth stimulate (simulate?) desires, wishes, regrets, metamorphic movements in the human gang…

Be that as it may, today is the first day of the first month of the year containing 0-1-2-3 (my wife comments what a delightful play that  must be for numerologists), and while my beloved is out signing up at the Y and beginning self-care with new devotion, I am denuding my desk, dusting and polishing its surface, taking revised stock of the pounds of books that weight its surface, reorganizing, selecting, making hard choices about what is necessary for me TODAY with some forward thinking.  The numbers have changed.  The game must be different, no?

In the process, I open a drawer I apparently haven’t for a very long time, coming across a miniature moleskine notebook, first entry dated January 2003!  A decade ago, how interesting!  I leaf through…and here are some of the things that capture my attention:

  • a quote from my son Aidan (he would have been 5 at the time) on being unable to remember something:  “it’s in my brain, I just can’t find the right aisle.”
  • and Steinbeck: “its inhabitants, as the man once said, ‘whore, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant everybody.  Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said ‘saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
  • Cixous: “it is this hunger for flesh and for tears, our appetite for living, that, at the tip of forsaken fingers, makes a pencil grow.”
  • Handke:  “in any case, I experienced moments of extreme speechlessness and needed to formulate them – the motive that has led men to write from time immemorial.”
  • “Books should not flatter our sense of self.  They should investigate it.  I read another person in order to get better at interrogating my own unexamined narrative” – Richard Powers

The last entry reads like this…”We used to always pick models or icons we wanted to be like: have what they had, whole persona and possessions – WHO would I want to be?  … When does it hit you that you only want to be you with some other life?”

Wonder where I was…a kind of number-flipping query…

further to go….2013

The Pleasures of Reading : An Aspect : Multiplying Translations

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy1 Comment

The Pleasure of Reading

In other words (than what?  than which?) we all of us are readers, all of us writers.

That is a pleasure.

And all of us, always, doing both.  Simultaneously.

 

Speaking of my textbooks (were we?) – information sciences, developmental and behavioral psychology, reference services, librarianship / and the research to the side – physics, evolutionary biology, neuro- and cognitive sciences / my pleasures – novels, poems, stories, others’ blogs, visual, aural, literary artifacts / my relational – wife, children, family, friends, society, culture – gestures and vibes and dialogues and signs / my “self” – sensations, perceptions, formulations of these, reformulations, adjustments and maneuvers.

In other words, at all times, I am reading, even if only my lack of memorable dreams, or pulses and breaths.  And writing it all in actions, movements, responses, adjustments of speaking and writing and making.

It is a metaphor, obviously.  Perhaps.

 

Roman Jakobsen purported that “all meaning is a form of translation, and multiple translation (polysemy) is the rule rather than the exception.”  (I am translating his text just now into another con-text).

Wolfgang Iser’s (perhaps, anyway insofar as I am translating it here) concept of actual text (text as it is recorded by an author) and virtual text (actual text as read by a reader).

This is an aspect of the deep living pleasures of reading/writing for me.

 

An author/speaker/artist/scientist/mother/etc. has an urge or sensation – a possibility of action/behavior/message/idea (a virtual text) and translates it through multiple processes and levels of activity through some medium into an actual text/painting/utterance/experiment/recorded idea/sound, etc.  There it is in the real world – a physical artifact in time and space – added – if only for a moment.  Transforming (simultaneously) its maker into a recipient (translating a now existent text/sound/behavior/gesture/sculpture/experience for him or herself) and if any witness/participant/auditor/recipient or reader is in his or her environment they are simultaneously interacting (via translation through their own tools, language, perceptions, sensations, mood, etc) with the actual text, writing a virtual text (translating) of their own.

And it goes on.  And can be done innumerable times, this process, whether using an identical actual text over and over, or simply writing/reading life as it occurs, making it occur.

 

Paul Ricouer:  “stories are models for the redescription of the world.”  Possibly.  Or at least redescriptions (translations) of models for redescription.

Iser: “the relative indeterminacy of a text allows a spectrum of actualizations…literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves…the reader receives it by composing it.”

 

Language, action, behavior as possibilities rather than certainties.

 

So that I can encounter with all I’ve encountered/experienced an actual text by psychologist Jerome Bruner translating these very quotes and contents with all he has experienced and translate it with the multiple translations of family life and being a human organism and novels and pains, poems and stories, paintings and laws, translated with data and education, emotions and animals, translating with you and a computer, internet, digits and bits, translating into…

a great pleasure of reading is writing reading

or, “a writer’s (reader’s) greatest gift to a reader (writer) is to help him become a better writer (reader)”

– Jerome Bruner (parentheses mine).

 

literary texts as “epiphanies of the ordinary”

-James Joyce-

For Example

On By NW FilbertIn JournallingsLeave a comment

Life is a Blur

July…wha-?  whe-?

I’m usually a fairly meticulous and ritualized journal-keeper…for the month of July 2012 I have ONE entry!

Like that.  Colorado…Missouri…enrolled and entering a first week of Master of Library & Information Sciences programs…

kids heading back to 1st grade / 3rd grade / freshman in HS! / JUNIOR in HS! –

wha-?  whe-?

I’m honestly working

at something

creatively

(I remember)

when I find it

it will appear

WordPress dynamos

I catch what I can!

“You Must Revise Your Life”, and, Kudos to You Excellent and Hard-Working Bloggers All

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing7 Comments

I’ve been sort of swirling in a kind of malconfident funk of late…performing exercises and blatherings just to keep the language flowing…today felt like a threshold…one of those – “if the flow don’t show – i’m constipated” sorts of things… many of my favorite bloggers have been moving toward a very free and open bursting of expression/language/image this summer and it’s really been fueling me, but i haven’t been able to open my own valves for some reason.  I want to say – wow – there are a bunch of really talented creative persons making stuff on WordPress – and the virtual company means more than I think (I think).  So thanks to all of you for working so hard to MAKE and BECOME – it’s inspiring – believe me…and whether you knew it or not – today you all conspired to inject or confront me with the Archaic Torso of Apollo – a magnificent accomplishment – and Rilke’s “you must revise your life” – a fine firm foot to me arse…

Instigating Change

And then things simply have to change.  Some blogger posted (today) that “this is a little silly” and “let the world tell you what you need to do” – but the world hasn’t said anything, and still it made felt sense.  Someone else (somewhere in the world) decided to go home for the very tawdry reasons that make anything profound, while another (clearly from another section of the globe) has been taken by the moon.

What does that tell you?

Things have got to change.  It’s not working.  You’re not working (but of course you are, (I am) which isn’t what I meant, what I mean being of very little effect).

There are the readings…

Plus all over the world (that is telling you nothing) there are people traveling and taking photographs – but those show, they don’t tell.

A friend did email to say ‘don’t give up’ from a far different location on the earth, but perhaps the “earth” is not the “world,” perhaps world is an elsewhere?  Or simply a voice I cannot hear, something divine.

I keep calling myself “you” as if that might make me other, but even I know you can’t escape yourself.

So I don’t.

I’m intrigued by folks who can write about themselves as if they were themselves and a part of world or simply made it so by writing.  That stuff moves me, true or not.

I spent my day designing characters.  Jim could never lie because he didn’t believe in language (or was it people?).  Leonhardt could always tell the difference but is unable to comprehend the same.  An author left an erotic drawing on his desk upon his death, causing great anxiety for his biographer, utterly incapable of fitting it into his knowledge of said subject.

Those aren’t me.  So something needs to change, you tell yourself.  You’re lost in language, but the labyrinth is becoming a pattern.

There’s a trove of “prompts” out there to help you find your way (is that the “world”?) but inspiration keeps feeling artificial.

You think it might just be the heat, a metaphorical dehydration, you read about a wife who tells her husband he should find someone else with whom to talk about nothing, and you heard echoes of the voices in your home.  Like the world saying things that almost register but you simply can’t believe.  It’s nothing, like that.

You challenged yourself this past year to ‘get personal’, if you wrote real near what hurts others might hurt too, and people like that – empathy, identity, a pingback from the world – but it never became interesting, the personal, you kept sounding like yourself.

And wrote these letters you called journals, out of some idea (I guess) that a world might be within you that could tell you what you need.  Or like Laurie Sheck said (she’s really in the world); that “skin has no choice but to converse with the world” – but does yours listen?

I guess what I am saying is that today brought clouds and wind (a welcome change) and those were world, and I heard something.

Stopping to think, or, “not finding my own words,” or, “something to uncommunicate” (Blanchot)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, Writing2 Comments

My Own Words

 

            Stopping to think, and using my tongue, a silent and plural speech, writing, how thinking does not stop.

There are clouds, many-layered in many motions, colluding, in sky.

I would see them, were I to face the outside.

Inside,  no difference.

Letting speech beyond.  No beyond, in part.

I had written, earlier, “so not finding my own words…”

A song was playing (is playing, NOW) in which a deep-voiced singer repeats “all thoughts are prey to some beast.”  He repeats the phrase enough times (so that it seems like more than enough) that I hear it: the phrase, his voice, drums and strings.

Earlier it was about trees and soil, beach and sea, which have no language.  I had thought perhaps I did.  “Not finding my own words,” alas.

It makes for quiet.  A banner fastened over the mouth: blood-red, pitch-black.

Begun before, though, the plural.

Taken outside by the hand.  Inside, outside – no difference.  “Not finding my own words,” as earlier.

B called it “weariness” and “infinite conversation,” requiring interruption.  Causing a silence (stubborn, sullen) and a listening (unavoidable, imposed).  Plurality.  “Not finding my own words,” I pilfer.

Dissemination.

The launch – erasing – opposite of launch.

Why I like the word “thrum” (“not finding my own words”) and “inscribe.”

Bent, crooked, stooped over a desk with a lamp of single bulb, I imagine “scribe” as “scholar.”  Inscription going both ways, like tying a knot requires both ends.  Binding.

Such physicality to the immaterial.

As easy as lying (also snatched from a spine).

Stopping to think on how thinking never ceases.

“Not finding my own words” I turn, reverting to the silent plural speech of my mouth’s hand.

I call it “writing,” not finding my own words, even for that.

N Filbert, 2012

A different sort of personal

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings3 Comments

Good day to all!

It’s a rare, propitious 48 degree morning in Kansas – thickly clouded, “chill” instead of “warm” or “mild” Spring day (comes like a gift).

I have some posts for the day, and they will follow, but am experiencing an initial gladness that I wanted to honor by saying.

Firstly, I don’t know that there is any other song I prefer to enter any day with than this:

Caspian: Epochs in Dmaj

thank you guys. (every day)

Secondly.  (more to come)