Tag: journal

Writer Neurosis…inevitable…dose of reality…purely journaling

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing1 Comment

This morning my horrorscope advised me not to begin new projects but to complete the ones underway.  We don’t put a lot of stock in the stars in my household, but I reflected on this one for awhile…jotting the following in my journal:

Projects piling up

pages and pages in manuscript

–          all of them –

 

my work sustains

only immaterial parts of myself –

Nothing, else

 

so stacks

and stacks

and stacks

of papers filled by pens

notebooks, journals, folders full

 

a wife, seven children

a house, utilities

a car, a yard, fuel

food, shelter, clothing

activities

 

no way to insure

no bartering fodder

just thought

and effort

and art

and thousands of books read, to read

 

what are these values?

what is my “system”?

beliefs?

 

I see a photograph

–          it becomes words

I view a painting

–          becomes words

hear music and speech

–          becomes text

feel emotions, bodies

–          become language

taste food or drink

–          and write

hope, dream, surmise

–          and write

read, learn, look & listen

–          for words

“as if the language itself could take us where it will never go”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

p.s. unfortunately,  I seem inherently averse to “submission” in any form… L  alas

p.s. – in Kansas it’s dreamy today!

On By NW FilbertIn Photography4 Comments

PRESS ON – Thank You

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing7 Comments

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“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted,

nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”

-Sir Francis Bacon-

“One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change…

ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”

-Harold Bloom-

“everything directly accessible to us (in reading) – except for the perceived characters (letters and symbols and space) – would be only our ideas, thoughts, or, possibly, emotional states”

-Roman Ingarden-

           

RUSH

I’m thinking storm-wind and flood.

The press and surge of words and images.

I’m thinking adrenalin and frenzy.

WORD:PRESS

                        It dawns on me today that blogging incites and anxiety to produce.  A pressing to keep up and create.

There’s a radiance to that.

On the one hand, to feel it.  That, even just here, at WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of creative human beings thinking, expressing, making…exponentially increasing my already over-saturated reading list.

RUSH

                        And I mean it, it’s downright EXCITING to view and ingest the enormous, surprising, sincere and ever-expanding activity of humans!  (There’s a thank-you in that to all of you I’ve found so far!)              WHOOSH!    RUSH!

On the other…frenetic.  If “all human beings are the same, but everyone is human in their own way” (Adler on Franz Kafka), then you all are as limited as I by time and space and finitude…i.e. face the anguish of not being able to give the people and things in your immediate surround let alone verbal and visual artifacts from around the world what seems to be their due attention.  To weigh and consider, to respond.

I spend a lot of time studying semiotics and theories of communication – how we, as humans, might “put in common,” “share” – “thoughts, information and opinions through speech, writing, images or signs” – “crafting passages between places and persons.”

Hundreds of thousands (actually many more) – passages made sensible, visible, right here with every click on WordPress, vimeo, Weebly, etc…

So long to fears re: death of reading, of art, culture, any such ‘thing.’

And there’s the ‘rub.’  Visiting “philosophy” pages today, I was significantly encouraged by so much sustained argumentation going on.  Persons thinking hard and working it out with signs and gestures.  Photographer’s sharing their eyes and the difficult work of seeing.  Artists shaping the world through the world’s materials and all their minds and bodies process into it.  Our poets, our healers, each of us shaping one another’s days/minds/experiences.

So thank you ALL for this thunderous RUSH.  For the challenge to take care, to work and enjoy, to weigh and consider who we are, who I am, what I do, what I intend to create, present and offer…

Press on…read in…find value.

“What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible?…

I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear…

what is the fear inside language?  No accident of the body can make it stop burning”

-Anne Carson-

“Behind, always behind the things in a hurry to be, you must search for what is”

-Edmond Jabes-

Stumbling Man

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing3 Comments

“This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief opportunities”

-Michel Serres-

            What I really want to ask, is where I am?  Implying already the question of an “I” to locate, whether or not there’s a who that could be.  I really DO wake into questions.

Pop over to my “currently reading” page/list.  It hasn’t changed a lot, perhaps gained a few pounds.  I set in this tribal circle, stacks of books like temple pillars, and feel like I’m made of shavings and fragments.  Some strange conglomeration of paper-thin shreds, filled with phrases and songs, floating in air.  Like using dust as a puzzle.

What sits in that center, bathed in blaring desk-light, really?

“a slapdash piece of [sometimes very hard] work, subject to the vagaries of time [its growth and its wear] and the [sometimes brilliant] blunders of brief opportunities”

That feels pretty accurate.  My parents, my sister, my Kansas.  My musical training.  Education, educators, friends.  Marriages and children, travel and work.  These words, this blogsite.  How “I” originates and am formed.  And thousands upon thousands of books, hours and hours of movies and song.

Then the dust and the shavings keep collecting: mountain climbs and ocean views, orchestras and art museums, foreign countries and people.  Slapdash, subject to vagaries, blunders of opportunities.

I’ve an urge to look closer (a terminal “illness” of mine).  For “slapdash” I find ‘things done hastily, carelessly,’ but I’ve often taken great pains over  much time with fervent investment – yet, yes, the results have definitely been ‘roughcast’ and ‘haphazard.’

And “vagaries” – ‘erratic, extravagant, or outlandish’ occurrences, ‘unexpected and inexplicable change.’  Admitted, time works this way, as (the dictionary suggests) the ‘variations of weather’ – a ‘wandering’ ‘fluctuation.’  I accept.

And what of ‘blunders,’ of blundering?  ‘Mistakes, usually serious, caused by ignorance and confusion.’  ‘Clumsily or blindly’ mannering forth.  However else could I proceed with this limited mind and body, space and shape, this miniscule duration (recalling ‘hastily’ – how much time, relatively, do we really have in a larger scheme?).  Yes, I am always walking into an unknown next, ‘blindly’ as it were, piecing together a ‘haphazard’ and ‘erratic’ assemblage of imagined/remembered experiences, ‘clumsily’ hauling them forward breath-by-breath.  Fair enough, ‘extravagant’ or ‘serious mistakes,’ I blunder.

Remains the “opportunities” to set it all aright.  These are described as ‘favorable or advantageous circumstances, or combinations of circumstances.’  ‘Suitable chances for progress or advancement.’  Possibles.  And this scattered smattered hollow or vortex, opens out again.

 

So – I’m here, and this – a clumsy blind wanderer stumbling through unexpected and inexplicable changes to haphazard and outlandish results; a con-fused combination of circumstances ever entering favorable and advantageous, suitable chances to progress and keep going…into the ever-possibles…

Voila.

I breathe and gaze.

I stumble on.

N Filbert 2012

What is there to say?

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing4 Comments

    

 
 

A book I am reading asks, in its title, What is there to say?  Another, next to it on its anticipating shelf, states “very little…almost nothing.”  Are they in conversation?

In completing Dust by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko for perhaps the ninth time, I come across a phrase I’ve starred and underlined in three colors: “We talk only because of a persistent desire to understand what is it that we are saying.”

            If someone took the time to calculate how many times the word “other,” used to refer to a subjective entity, occurs in philosophical texts post-Heidegger.

What is being?

 

I often experience the anomalous reality of hoping wildly in the midst of despair, a fervent belief in oxymorons – things like “Poetic Influence” and “Romantic Love.”

How music crafts melancholy and joy.

Perhaps someday we will concoct a system of chaos.

The weather is large enough.

 

I say “I love you” because I’d like to understand it.

 

Edmond Jabes has it that “the words of the book were trying, in vain, to say Nothing” (writing of sacred texts) or, in other words, some persistent and extravagant Babeling into Derrida’s vast abysme of origins and effects.  What is impossible.  “Our persistent desire.”  So Jabes asks “Is our relation to the world first of all a relation…to an expectation, a hope of world pregnant with all possible beginnings?”

            I ask myself, then, what is it I have to say?  The echoing answer “very little…almost nothing.”  Persistent desire.

The Garden of Selves, a thought-experiment

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Journallings, Photography, Poetry, Writing6 Comments
Garden of Selves
Robt. ParkeHarrison

Garden of Selves (unmasking, a thought-experiment)

“All my life I’ve heard one makes many”

-Charles Olson-

This is what I hear here.

Someone sitting up and looking round.

Someone peeking.

And one makes many.

How many?

 

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is what the others are doing.

When only one looks up as if to speak.

I am hearing “tend the garden”

I am hearing “heteroglossia”*

I am reading “every on their own Babel”*

 

Why are the many huddled in boxes, like seedpods?

Perhaps shriveling, or nearly dead?

What prompted the one?

I hear here one prompting many.

I hear the call “Rise up!”

A voice sounds singular.

 

Which is not the case.

A person is a chorus.

Something else pressures for soloists.

What if each their cadenza, in unison?

Who then, what then, how would we be?

This is what I see in this sea.

 

And why so many-yous asleep?

How we tranquilize and put under

Person – what have you done?

The space of a world we call web

is made for a show of hands

nothing is not connected…

 

Wake.

This is what I hear here.

Wake up.

You are not alone.

You are one many,

singularly plural.

 

Tend to the garden of selves.

Know the manufacturer’s labels on every packet of seed.

When it is yours you have chosen and planted

look up

join the chorus

shouting down the mummer’s call

N Filbert 2012

*M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the plurality of utterances and personhood

*from great British linguist J.R. Firth