Tag: language

The Sickening of Stories

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, fiction, Language, meaning, stories, Writing4 Comments

jose-parla-broken-language-exhibition-haunch-of-venison-recap-1

I am not certain why stories sicken me so.  By “sicken” perhaps I mean something closer to depletion or boredom, gluttedness or exhaustion.  By stories I mean shaped texts of language – narrative fictions, philosophical arguments, journals and declarations and ads.

“I don’t know why I told this story.  I could just as well have told another.  Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another.  Living souls, you will see how alike they are.”

– Samuel Beckett, The Expelled

It has something to do with that.  My own writings sicken me faster than others, but all writings, once entangled in plots, developing characters, or pursuing a narrative…tend me toward disgust.

The motion of “progress,” falsity of construction, illusion of meaning begins to fray as language gets “handled” or forced into order.  The squeezing and pressure and molding of shaped texts, especially as they develop into sections, seem bound to conform to the size of the creator.  Many texts start out wildly, with chaotic promise, almost infinite exploding potentials – but threads develop, and lines, sentences form, and shapes, causes and results, actions and repercussions, and ever so surely the mass is twisted to the size of a snake.  And then I’m tired, exhausted by “how alike they are.”  We are.  It is.

Language imploding and exploding.  This is what I want.  Language available like elements.  Language operative in a chaotic surround, like experiencing.  Language that doesn’t know next.  Language becoming, not necessarily or even especially something – just becoming within/without human.

So I read words, less to learn or be entertained, less to follow or empathize, less to argue or understand, and more to exist in a sea of potential communication and commerce, to respond, to be open and closed by each term and their relations, to go on.

As if language were oxygen, blood, water.  As if language were soil.  As if language were all these mystifying, crazy, strange, different and unknown others surrounding us everywhere.  As if language were environment.  Context.  Medium.  Not tool.  Not machinic.  Not discipline.  Not function.  Not at our service or in our control.

We know that it’s not.  It does indeed possess others – carries and transfers multitudes – times, cultures, histories, humans, vagaries of meanings.  It is untamed and unpredictable, available and unsolvable, like ourselves.  But we often use it for us rather than in or with us.  We often torment it into cages and patterns, (I’m doing it now) – forced representation, desiccated potentials – marks of expression or intention or persuasion or telling.

I declare.  I unravel.  I investigate.  I express.  I guess.  I wonder.  I commit a sound to form.  It leads.  I resist.  I say.  I listen.  It leads (each of us in particular ways).  I resist.  I ponder.  It takes shape.  Incites.  I want.  I resist.  I query.

Doing and undoing language becomes the only way to use it and avoid strangling it down to my size.  Persisting and resisting, experimenting and erasing, canceling / canceling-out, backwards, forwards, at the angular.  Listening to others.  Throwing in, throwing away.  Desist.  Insist.  Consist.  And delete.  Chaos and pattern.  Detangle, knot up.  Fracture.  Fragment.  Avoid.  A void.  Void and null and emergent.  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  The attempt to leave open.  It suffers to form.

Sickening me.

Laramie & Alias Conjure in the Woods

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, farming, identity, Language, Loss, Melancholy, Reflections, WritingLeave a comment

wordless wednesday-woods-trees-long-winding-road-dirt-road

Laramie and Alias followed the tree-lined road into the woods ostensibly seeking a lost calf trapped at the stream.   Lost and trapped.  Deciduous acres.  They shuffled the gravel in silence, which evolved to branches and leaves – a crackle and whisper.

Considering age and death, feeling lost and trapped – Alias.  Laramie pursuing a calf, something young.

“Sorrow is sorrow,” Alias vocalized in his head or his chest, his throat or his gut – wherever we hear ourselves.  “Aging – decay.  Watching one’s world erode.  Losing and trapped in the stream.”

Luckily alive after all of these years, Laramie felt hale and sturdy.  And the bluejays, the owls, finches and starlings.  The titmice.

Alias thought he might keep living each day “if I could think of at least one reason, event, thought or experience that justified enduring that day.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Laramie contributed, aware of Alias’ delimiting logic, “for you’re the only sanctioned arbiter in that case – fixing yourself to a very strange loop indeed.”

The trail of the calf, sunken hoofprints.  Age faltering for beauty, youth, and strength.  “someone refers to this as ‘an attachment to loss itself – a condition otherwise known as melancholy,” Alias intoned.

“For fuck’s sake Alias – is this how it’s gonna be?  The ‘apophatic’ way?  Via negativa? Only what isn’t there, what ya haven’t got – jabs at the pure potential?”

Fox, weevil, deer, cow.  “You’re only 54,” L declares.  “In a culture worshipping youth and perpetual childhood – the nubile and ageless and free – augmented and cyborg,” Alias retorts.  “Not me.”

“I told ya I choose ‘OFF’” Laramie chokes.

“I demand or command or beg of it,” he continued…”OFF.”

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

Alias the Conjurer

I drill and devour.

A storm, a tornado.

Construction.

Destruction.

WHO cares?

Effort.

A human with language.

HUMAN                                               LANGUAGE

Writers and speakers and singers and parents.  Wise men and theorists, children and fools.

LANGUAGE

SYMBOLOGY

DEATH (finitude) & LANGUAGE (infinite abstraction)

Grandiose and meaningless at one go

(not to overreach nor undersell).

It might matter

It might not

BEING

(we don’t know)

A bone.  A tomahawk.

Human creativity as, is, a war against death.

Fizzles & sparks.

Last ditch.                                                                                                                                                   Activity.

                                Efforts.                                                                                                                 Attempts.

LOVE

HOPE

ridiculous realities

MAINSTAYS

MAIN STAY(S)

In the main…

to stay.

ON

ON

ON

ON

To persist

Insist

Continue

                (against death)

Against death

Against death

– to act, to do, to create –

TO CONJURE.

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

Laramie rides.  OFF.

Alias goes further, deeper, further…on…(in)…

INSISTS                            PERSISTS                              CONSISTS

I, as human, consist as what I persist in insisting on.

= a composite “I.”

 

Laramie Poeticus

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, Art, being, Compromise, Experience, fiction, friendship, Language, life, meaning, nature, Poetry, Writing5 Comments

Laramie liked to think himself a poet.  One attuned, natural, native to his world(s).  He liked to think he had unique feelings, perhaps an “insight,” an acute attention – that maybe he saw just a little bit more than others saw.  And was able to say so.

A farmer-cowboy type from the upper Midwest, he played a lot of sports and performed muscled labor – at times enjoying the solitude of pasture rides and the company of large mammals.  He felt a “care,” not sure for what, suspect he’d call it a kind of “connection” – with crop growth, animals, the waters and the skies.  And felt he could say so.  And he could sing.  Musician, farmer, cowboy, son.  Husband, scientist, laboring man.  Father, friend, and “poet” (he might say).  Laramie James Backstagger, dearly known to Alias.

“When you’re making it – forming words or music – do you feel somehow that you’re ‘getting it’?” Alias might ask, as they ambled the fields chopping at thistles, remedying fence.  “Do words add to experience or just chop it up?  Diminish?  Reduce?” Alias chimed.

Laramie would go silent, plodding along, smelling and listening.  Looking.

At times they’d play basketball, tennis (this was all in their youth, Alias having blown out his knees at the pigskin).  And careful.

They both went on to cities: education, enlightenment, the ‘experience’ of cultural promises.  They still had their debts to pay.

“I mean, when you ‘see’ it, or ‘hear’ it, are immersed – it’s not seeing or hearing or sensing – am I right? It’s just being – and then – ?” Alias prodded, “and then – what happens?”  “You hear language, or find it or forge it, dream times or ‘intuit,’ you consider ways you’d be able to MARK it – note it down (letters or score) – recount or recreate it – even extend or rescind it – and that all seems like media to me: communication: expression or history or talk…but reduced.  Reduced to what YOU can comprise or compose – not the ‘same’ as the moments, trembling in the web, and borrowing, borrowing, borrowing – from the wind and the trees, weather and bees, family and learning, working and friends – and our culture! – all funneled and cored to some desiccated fraction of bone – eviscerated – ‘HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’: some words or an etude or painting.  Even action.  Even sowing or reaping or pruning or care…’HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’ – wow!  Really?!  Amazing!  One moment made this?!  AND WHAT CARES?  WHAT MATTERS?  WHAT PURPOSE OR POINT, BENEFIT OR CONSEQUENCE…the next ‘now’?!”

Alias could go on and on like this.  Often doing what he’d just described or decried.

And Laramie’d slow, maybe stop, often sit, and stare out.  Have a smoke (he didn’t smoke, but pretended – his children and wife didn’t like it).  And Alias would drink and get wiser.  A little calmer and sad.  And all might go quiet, save the world always humming.

Laramie Backstagger sighed.

“Well?  Whadda ya think?” challenged Alias – “how is it for you when you speak, feel or sing?”

And how would he know, ailing Laramie?  Been too many years of conflicting events and results and mixed feelings.  Too many miles that worked out without working, or failed for the working too much.  “I’m uncertain,” he said, “I’m uncertain.”  “But you’re pushing at something in me.”

By now Alias was off on his own like a mammal, had concocted a scent for to trail.  Maybe the ache was for sharing the thing they were sharing: agreement.  Maybe to get through the whole business at once, simultaneously.  Maybe to not be divided and different or just pieces of things – to be doubled or tripled or multiple?  Harlequin – pieceworked and patched, back then and now and some future.  An assemblage, a collage wanting melding.

“All uncertain,” Laramie said.  “I can’t know, just I do it and feelings will follow.  New ones.  Pains from smashed understandings, joys from promising starts, aches at the poorness I lend them – but something goes on, carries forth – it don’t end with the birds and the breeze.  The words have it too, and the voices.  The shapes and the meanings and lines.  Even tones.  It goes on, both the good and the ill, and I’m part, or it seems such.”

“How ‘bout you?” Laramie wants to know.  “Why do you carry on and keep blabbing,” he taunts.

“Just to borrow,” Harlequin murmurs.  “Just to steal.”  “To have something to say.  To keep silent.  To wish that it might carry on.”  “It’s what we’ve got, all these things.  Try as I might, I don’t know what else to do, and at times feel compelled, god dammit.  Like Foucault or Blanchot or Spinoza.  Or Buddha or Christ, Kafka or little Jane,” (little Jane was the crazy old lady – lived two miles from the Backstagger’s farm – she’d sparkle to company no matter the cause and just cackle and croon – mixing nonsense and stories, opinions and facts, just talking and talking and talking.  No one knew if it ceased when they left, it never stopped within range of the hearing).

“I hear you” said Laramie, “I see.”  To which Alias always replied “But you don’t – I don’t know that.  Have no method of saying it’s true.”  And they’d keep walking on…toward night.

 

Alias (inside) – a writing diary

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, death, fragments, friendship, human, identity, Journal, Journaling, Living, Loss, Melancholy, notebooks, Reflections, Uncertainty, Writing2 Comments

This is long, and really, perhaps, does not belong here.  Reading through notebooks to find references to Alias and Laramie in order to continue the trail or trace of them… I happened upon a set of pages that seemed like something under or inside the emergence of Alias and thought it might be interesting to some.  Or, just something to not lose to memory, but archive in this auspicious and fragile space.

Czech-Marionettes-wooden-joker-czech-marionette-puppet-3.7ac6

Do I think this is my last probable chance (at 45)?

If so

              (it’s undecided, presently)

then this would = my final

composition

                          (undecided)

What would I tell you – you few that have made the time worth being?

T, A, I, O, S, K, H, J, perhaps J.  Arvo Part, certainly Blanchot, Pessoa, Bronk, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Jabes, Cixous, Rilke, William James, Schiele, maybe MK.  Assuredly TWDY, Bach…well, too many to mention.

            Whom else?  Whom else, really?  Dad?  Mom?

In any case – the children, H – H because truly the past two years demonstrated an adult, freely-selected relationship in a way surpassing but only referenced by S, V, PJ, perhaps, no, perhaps J – what H has explored with me re: the world and life really I’d only imagined before.

Therefore – indecision (as ever).

IF the “best” experiences rise up out from the worst (often), out of ‘end(s)’ – beginnings surprise, then how can I know (as I age) if a better-yet does not exist?

It becomes a decision of ‘enough’ or not.

A personal decision.

If I can only imagine repetition with variation, and I’m already tired and starting to ‘ail’ – then the logical decision is to stop.  To peace.  To quiet.

As re: T, A, I, O (my children) – in EVERY case what lies ahead is far beyond repetition with variation – much unknown, much novel, much uncharted territory to experience.

As regards H, and adult self-selected relations of emotion/passion/intimacy – probably (seems to me) little could surpass…only possibly in elements, but – enough?

That is the question – always

Keep living?

Stop?

If “stop,” no more.  Yes it will effect, hurt, harm, perhaps enable – the others (T, A, I, O, M, D, J, H, etc.) but I won’t be aware of that anymore.  It’s just DONE.  OVER.  SIMPLY.

If “keep going” – then demonstrating a care/concern/attention for the others’ lives – T, A, I, O, etc…) that THEIR lives are worth staying alive to see, and that – who knows?! – maybe my own life still offers more truly worth experiencing.

Perpetual conundrum, weighing lives – my own little one versus a host (however small) of others – it would seem theirs count for more than mine (alone).

Hard to say.

I guess we’ll all find out tomorrow what “I” decide.  Not ambitious to keep working just to feed and pay bills.  I have little confidence I’m capable of making something world-enhancing.  But as a parent, a friend, etc., it doesn’t feel fair to make the decision without considering their preferences as well.

I like to think I don’t like to be selfish.

I would live in the country.  Woods, preferably, mountains not too far away.  And rain, plenty and regular rain.

There would be hours in the day.  Hours for loving, hours for reading, for working, for learning, for play.  Enough hours.  Hours to think about the hours, the learning, the loving, the play, and hours to think the hours writing.

I’m aging.  Hair, beard, muscles, flesh all going long.  Mind.  Long(ing).  Time, not so.  Seems shortening, shortened, fore-shortened…by the hour.  I wish for hours.  For time.  For children, partner, places, books.  For human.

She would be there.  Close, somewhere, sometimes.  We would wander, would work, would learn, play.  Would be there, away.

The children would come.  Would visit, report, eat, learn, work, play.  Sometimes we would laugh.  Sometimes perhaps weep or cry.  Contact.

Wood would be sawed.  Water drawn.  Yes it hurts now – knees, shoulders, joints, bones.  Slowed.  Steady, almost.  Still dark but peppered, frosted with gray.  I’m aging.  Tired.  Memory almost all made up already.  Thought always seems new, possible.  Touch.  Strength.  Sound.

Hours.  Gone ever so soon.  Thought, then paper, then feeling begins (or the other ways around?), then gone.

The pen.  The paper.  Lust.  Flesh.  Language.  Learning.  Where is the time?  Too much required for each daily need.

A joker, a harlequin.  Another, another.  Another other in the midst of me.  Mottled mangle, Alias.  Running out of time.  Running down the times, the memory, the full flesh of desires, its theory and knowledge, its aspects and affects.  So very many aspects.  Hand gains speed, cursive loops thin to lines.  Skimped satisfaction.

I like it to take time – loving, learning, working, play.  But the hours grow thin.  Shortcuts, swerves, abbreviations, tastes.  Hints now.  Breezes.  Nostalgia.

Growing monument – what cannot be said – will not – the ineffable – unsayable.  Ungrasped.

How though, to here?  Piecemeal person.  Farm labor, religion, sport, education, family.  Plains, harvest, accidents.  Mountains, Mexico, Europe, lists.  Music, poetry, philosophy – earliest companions – a few pets, kaleidoscope of selves, the river, the sky.

Deaths.  But no death here (yet).  Just on, scrappy, incisive, insecure, haphazard.  Books.  Remiss without mention of books and relentless ache for books and ‘broads.’  Women and words, the headstone says.  Women, words, wisdom(?).  Nature.

To explore.  Internal, external, outward, inward bound.  Sciences and arts.  Creativity and logic.  Psychology, anthropology, complexity and chaos, nihilism.  Literature and lust.  Words and women.  Matter and mind.

I’d have quiet mostly.  No mouths to feed, no herds or pets or things to tend.  Nothing to care for.  Hours.  Hours to tend.  With mind intact, a library, papers and pens.  And lonely land, mostly cloudy, cool, drizzly, wet.  And legs to stand on, arms to haul.  Eyes to see, please keep these eyes a-seeing – yes they’ve heaps of assistance – but please not a final fail.  Not the inner darkness, nor colorless clouds.  Hearing first, before vision.  If the vision is gone – ?

Breath.  Biosemiosis.  The sign and signal of being – a body for meaning.  Complex.  Confused.  Barely contained.  Unspecified.  Though wobbling to, fro, sound, precept, percept, interpret, sense.  Hope.  Hope of vision, of sex, of knowledge, health – something, something – beyond, more, still…

Alias sighs.  Perhaps beautiful still, but soiled and tired.  Undone.  Who is this one?  Which one?  How.  Who this be?  Alias i. e. Harlequin.  Unnameable, the attempt to name, creating traces of not-these.

“man is but a patched fool”

-Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, scene i

Laramie & Alias

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, awareness, being, creative writing, fragments, friendship, meaning, Melancholy, Writing11 Comments

Nobody

Laramie and Alias play ball.  Laramie or Alias.  Alias, Laramie.  What game are we playing?

Riven, desiccated, they lag.  Every day there is more to it.  More and less to them.  Laramie, Alias, friends as long as they can remember, or markers of memory and experience for one another that initiated chronos, now an aeon, now all of what they know.

Laramie falls behind.  Laramie, a little hoarse from laughing, spits out a “hold back!”

“C’mon you little horse,” Alias decries.

What are they playing at?

Long enough that when Laramie commands “Alias Harlequin!,” at this age,  the same mixture of guilt and fear, defensiveness and shame, defiance and harshly judged helplessness Alias feels when seriously called out by parents or lovers shivers his body.  Occupies his mind.  Why?  Why are these things in me, Alias looks down and away.

There is no ball.  It wasn’t a game.  Laramie and Alias walk and wander.  In woods, on paths, through fields.  They try to think together.  Alias has always wondered who he was, or is, or might be.  Laramie never knew, but did it anyway.  Somehow together they were themselves, or felt that way, felt like nothing at all, just present and curious and comforted.  Like learning, Alias thought.  I feel like I’m learning with Laramie.  Always learning something neither of us know.  They talk together.  They call this thinking.  Many refer to it as a game.

Laramie’s butt is on a bench.  He is smoking.  He doesn’t smoke.  His wife doesn’t like it.  His kids don’t like it.  His body, even, has begun to finally recoil.  Alias takes a drink.  Leans against the bench, still guilty, still staring into the trees.  He doesn’t want Laramie to die.  He doesn’t like death much.  It scares him, and it seems simple and true – unavoidable – simply ruinous.

Alias Harlequin sighs.

And Laramie asks what he is thinking.  Or feeling.  Or what is going on, at that moment, for him.

Alias is silent.  How could he know?  If he reaches in, or pays attention to any part – a limb, his gut, the sithering language slithering in what seems like his head – he’ll be inaccurate.  He can only tend to fragments.  Figments of experiencing.  But he doesn’t want the game to be like that.  He’d always hoped someone might know.  Like maybe Laramie knows and is just waiting to see what aspect Alias would select.  Might know something else about Alias’s present that comes from outside of him, that can observe him as a whole, that looks in another direction.

“What do you think?” Alias says.

“Nostalgic,” Laramie reports.  “Some sort of melancholy in lots of places at once.”  “A wend, a bundle, an amorphous pool of forms.”  “This is how it comes and goes at our age,” he breathes.

Nothing.  No response.  Not now.  But it’s an infinite conversation.

Laramie and Alias

Ecriture – ‘I write’ – Why write?

On By NW FilbertIn Art, being, Compromise, creative writing, death, ecstasy, Experimenctes, Language, Melancholy, Writing6 Comments

ecstasy - st therese

Nihilism – Melancholy – Language – Silence

No meaning (no matter)

                                            Sorrow (fail again)

                                                                                Speak (try again)

                                                                                                             Silence (fail better?)

A darkness.  Immersion.  This life.  The living it.  Ever to and toward a pointless death (again, another, also).  To be.  To be (as human).  To wish.  To wish for otherwise(s).  To IMAGINE.

Music.  Vision.  Feeling.  Sound ~ Meaning.

I am (one) capable of crafting a fine sentence.

And so – ?

She sings, birdlike, wind-like, tree-like, animal, a hiss of land.

He cavorts shapes, models, architecture – opportunities of space – perhaps, perhaps not yet, perhaps becoming.  In progress…

That one strikes a chord: says.  Plays.  Possible resonance.  Possible possible.  Manufacturing potential.

I am forlorn.  Shorn.  Shriven, stricken, silent.

Working within the arranging of existing things – without vision – mathematician with its figures, logician with axioms, linguist syllabic syntagms.  Utilizing signs.  Pre-existing me – letters and language – scratches and symbols – touches and sights – emotions and thoughts and exhaust…

Minima Philologica

“Very little…almost nothing”

A signal, a marking, a shape inferring sound

(above some hopeful/hopeless void)

And yet…

Organism ~ orgasm.  Biologically an entity capable of immersive ecstasy.  What can, might, has the potential to be – la petite mort – weakening of consciousness, swoon, a likening unto death.  This life.  The living it.  Ever to and toward a pointless death (again, another, also).  To be.  To be (as human).  To wish.  To wish for otherwise(s).  To IMAGINE.

As much or as often as possible.  Regardless of structure, import, complexity, complication or difficulty, even desire – BODILY – as organism ~ orgasm FEELS whole, full, exceptional.  Pain, lack, abuse, obtrusion, power, inequality, mystery, vanish, abandon…and yet… the body in orgasm is ecstatic – a weakening of consciousness, swoon, a likening unto death.  Ecriture.

Without meaning

Without import

Without portent

Without purpose

Try (again), ask for (fail again), achieve (fail better)

Anyway, anyhow, silence.

THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH TIME!

The rest go hang – come undone – fail, fall, try harder, wish, hope, imagine – make sense, sensibility, concept, meaning – IN ANY CASE: organism ~ orgasm – more pain and more pleasure will come, will follow upon, will remember, remain – time and consequence – a weakening, a swoon, a likening unto death.

Orga(ni)sm doesn’t care.  All impact an add-on.  Intellect / emotion / sensation / cognition / perception – derivative, invented – and yet – orgasm is an organismic moment.  La petite mort.  Ecriture.

Generative?  Reproducing (or not).  Informative (or not).  Act, study, behave (or not).  And then…NOT.  Organismic gathering toward totality for a moment.  There is living, there is dying (and death) and they (in fact) are indistinguishable.  This life.  The living it.  Ever to, in, toward pointless death (again, another, also).  To be.  To be (as human).  To wish.  To wish for otherwise(s).  To IMAGINE.  Being orgasmically.

To live.  To die.  (breathe out).

It is windy.

The Neutre Becoming : Untitled Writing

On By NW FilbertIn Art, being, creative writing, Current Reading, desire, Experimenctes, Hermeneutics, identity, Language, Maurice Blanchot, Writing5 Comments

“the writer must expose himself to his exteriority”

-William Brogan-

twombly_untitled

In the process of inscription, I am neutral.  Ambiguously being.  Neutered.

Existing via language that has not yet been written opens a sort of potential – possible becomings, as yet unknown, unidentified – possible positings of the impossible – WRITING enaction.  I am unspecified before the letters which commence demonstrating what / who / how as It (this human) encounters them – imagines, recalls, learns, selects, experiments and undoes, chooses and deletes.  Engaging with the sea.  With hearsay and learning, words read or perceived, borrowing, borrowing, sifting and hybridizing.

From wherever, therefore, whomever, toward knows-not-what…IN THE MIDST…WRITING: activity, action, attempt…Everything trying.

A human.  A person.  Acting.  Toward what ends?  Perhaps to say.  To express.  To communicate.  To discover.  Invent.  Investigate.  Imagine.  To play.  To die.  Not to die.  Becoming / evincing / composing / traversing ‘knows-not-what.’  Anything.  Nothing.  Living…to Death.

This is why.  This is why my own ‘need-to-write.’  To become.  To try.  To live on.  To keep going.  Living toward, forward, into… perhaps.

Not-knowing I do not know.  At the edge, or a limit.  Searching a way.  To say.  To discover.  To hear.  To emerge.  Wanting to express, to find out, to dialogue – capable of expressing “Very little…almost nothing,”  I “try again.  Fail again,” and hopefully (but “no matter”) “fail better.”

The internal urgency to write rather than speak, or to speak writing or even write speaking arising when I don’t know the words with which to.

‘The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words.”

-Maurice Blanchot-

Selecting the pen, scribbling into the paper when there are no words (that I know) for that which (before words) I experience an urgency toward.

Therefore…working and playing – experiment and effort – name-changing and changeling – It commences.  Exploring.  Expeditions into letters and language.  Into sounds, mouths and breaths.  Into indeterminate dreams and dubious memories.  Desires and wishes and hopes.  To connect or converge.  To speak or hear back.  To know by finding out.  WRITING: to learn by failing.

“becom[ing] the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges”

-Maurice Blanchot-

Melancholy (Lispector, Pessoa, Beckett, Jabes, Kafka, Blanchot?) and ecstatic (Rilke, Mallarme?, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Cixous?) human activity/task/capacity.  “Need.”

“That there is language.”

Begin.  Again.

at the point at which nothing can be done with words

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

I attempt to express the extent of my experience of love…

Endeavor to language particular beauty…

Strive to tell you how I… try to say…

Make effort to describe my children, the cheek/lip/ankle/voice/presence of my beloved, the eye contact and thought-contact of a friend, paw of a kitten, core of a concept, element of a scent, a breeze, a trace, a view…

Venture some new construction, a world, characters, possibilities…directions and directives…

Ache to communicate…

Will to connect…

Crave to continue…

WRITING: TO LEARN (something?) BY FAILING

perhaps

“the attempt to open a space for the unsayable”

-maurice blanchot-

to fail…

A Literary Manifesto after the end of Literature and Manifestos – by Lars Iyer

On By NW FilbertIn Books, Critical Thought, culture, Current Reading, Literature, Maurice Blanchot, WritingLeave a comment

Iyer post

NUDE IN YOUR HOT TUB, FACING THE ABYSS (A LITERARY MANIFESTO AFTER THE END OF LITERATURE AND MANIFESTOS)

by Lars Iyer

worth reading!

Harlequin piecing it together

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, Confusion, creative writing, Experience, family, fiction, identity, Journaling, memory, Writing2 Comments
the_seated_harlequin_1923
The Seated Harlequin 1923 Painting by Pablo Picasso

The Harlequin can’t remember.  Harlequin patchworks a quilt.

  • RR 1 Box ?? Clearwater, Kansas
  • ???? Independence – Wichita, Kansas
  • Jerusalem, ISRAEL (dorms)
  • ??? Ash – Hays, Kansas
  • 2505 Cardinal Drive – Wichita, Kansas
  • Penndel (Langhorne?), Pennsylvania (apartment complex)
  • 5711(?) N. Athenian – Wichita, Kansas
  • Glen Elder, Kansas
  • Heidelberg, GDR
  • Somewhere near Orme & Edgemoor – Wichita, Kansas
  • Portland, Oregon
  • Sellwood, Oregon (duplex)
  • 11?? Willow Drive – Wichita, Kansas
  • 508 N. Belmont – Wichita, Kansas (son & daughter born)
  • ???? (house) – Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • ???? Cornell – Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • L—– Switzerland
  • Alt—- UK
  • 1151(?) Hermitage – Grand Rapids, Michigan (son born)
  • 350(?) S. Clifton – Wichita, Kansas (son born)
  • New Hope, Pennsylvania
  • 3028 E 2nd N – Wichita, Kansas

In no particular order.  Revisits.  Can’t remember much.  Side streets, neighborhoods – nothing is familiar.  More apt to recall where friends or lovers lived than “self.”  Makes a list:

-Baxtrom – Welch – Kremenak – Kruse – Evans – Lathrop – Keil – Allen – Erickson – Welch – Rose – Martha – Neel/Franklin – Krieger – Fall – Bond – Franz – Jones – Hartig – Russell – Griffin – O’Callahan – Farha – Goldbarth – Coleman – Harder – Reffner – calls them “foundational relations” – friends and lovers slewn together.

May as well include family – origins – surnames:

Alberts * Fishers * Kresins : Filberts * Foos’s * Deutsches

And those with whom he converged DNA: Wells / Grovers ^ Linds / Zogelmans

Or those with whom he co-habited: Lathrop – Beckman – Linnebur

Considers the places stitched in/with:

CO, CA, NY, MA, MS, VA, FL, KY (Berry), AR, OR, TN, NC, SC, AL, OK, TX, NM, UT, AZ, ID, NE, WY, MT, WA, DC, WV, ME, CT, NH, DE, PA, MI, IL, MN, NJ, NH (Hall), VT (Buechner), NV, MO, GA, KS : Switzerland, GDR, Hungary, Holland, Syria, Egypt, Italy, Mexico, UK, France, Canada, Czechoslovakia (no more), Austria, Lebanon

the co-created organisms: Tristan, Aidan, Ida, Oliver

and domesticated mammals: Cracker, Andromeda, Nicodemus, Gizmo, Zorro, Tippy, Freddy, Indigo, Scarlet, Max, Zazie – probably more…

self-selected (!?) identities:

Dostoevsky, Giacometti, Kafka, Lispector, Cixous, Blanchot, Nietzsche, Jabes, Beckett, Wm. James, CS Peirce, Lorca, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Pessoa, Schiele, DF Wallace, Kozelek, Musil, Fernandez…and those lying in wait: This Will Destroy You, Vila-Matas, Marcus…Harlequin has inscribed in his flesh.

Might be useful to make a story.

The way things are – with everything falling apart, coming undone, wearing down or out, dwindling in function – calls for such measures – i.e. fitted to new purposes, given new life, repurposed, renamed, remixed, restored.

Making lists against memory.  Visiting / revisit.  Trying.

It’s coming apart.

He’s worked long in this manner.

Something breaks or dies, goes defunct…fix it with change.

Washing machine, body parts, relationships, parents.  Tools or appliances, activities and paths… rather than forcing some obedience to its past or presence – alter the context (as large as it needs to be – micro to macro) round about it, until its usefulness is assuaged or established, regained or reconstructed.  Until it makes sense – AS-IS-NOW.

“Presently” includes all of above.  His body – losing ‘shape,’ gaining aches, kinks, and torsions; doorways and windows, paint and light fixtures; machines and vehicles grinding down – leaking, cracking, and broken; dwindling desires of his partner; increased independence and mystery of his offspring…nothing quite capable of ‘control.’  Employer threats of performance and reviews; family tensions of politicized faiths; stamina shot as both parent and friend; patient lover and male…

…all it requires a new mythology – some new scaffolding – structure and content and aim.

What story is.  What languaging is for.  Imagine – abstraction and dream.  What neuroses.  Subject and author and plot.  Continuous revision – the edit and pulp and rewind.  We cut and paste and press ‘new.’  File, document, folder, image: LIFE.

We rename.

There is story and language and code.  Writing and saying and message.  Harlequin’s not the first to say “I think by writing” and perhaps he will not be the last.  Some perspective invented, some objective fabrication, some construction of a feeling of reflection, recount.  Grappling after what is getting lost.  A dream that a ruling, an external, can be seen or encountered, manipulated and tested.  If an accounting exists, there is material (reality) AGENCY to work WITH, THROUGH and ON.

Harlequin forms words.

Yet there are none that he ‘makes’ – just borrows, revises.  Uses, shapes, and arranges.  Gives place.  Inscribes in some ancient tradition – it’s “writing” – using marking or code in conventions.  Absorbing idiosyncracies into generalities.  Depending on a community that shares such signs – can lend, agree, and interpret.  It’s fragile.  Insecure and uncertain.  There’s no meaning.  Like the earth – writing just IS.  To be taken and changed, charged and made and appropriated.  Dis-card-ed.

What was a ‘card’ but token carrying message or code?  In-formation – letters arranged.  Who knew – and why – and how?  Doesn’t matter.  Undone.  Broken and over and through.  Electronic currency now – if this you can even decipher (decode).

Letters, stories, and language.  Harlequin marks on a page – sets of signals.  The cells, the emotions, the organs – signals and signs.  Tired and old and afraid – always dying.  Since day one, always dying – fearfully.  How It Is.  He remembers and prays (in a way) – a communication with the dead – mediated – to the Beckett, the Kafka, the Dostoevsky.  David Foster Wallace, Hegel and Marx.  Maybe Nietzsche, Deleuze or Blanchot.  And the ladies: Lispector, Cixous and Dickinson.  Doesn’t matter.  For Harlequin, all a part of the same realization – it comes, it ages, it goes, and it’s gone.  Human living.  Human life.  Just what is: How It Is.

Labor, relation, and trial.  What is being?  Labor, relation, and trial.

He succumbs.  Is succumbing.  Is tearing apart.

A story makes of it what it will.

You can have your knowledge – facts or theories, experiences and concepts – but the stories reason and resemble them.  Lend them ambiguity and occasional senses.  Possibilities.

Perchance they go together like this.  Or like that.  Or another way.  Stories.  Sanity.  Something.

Something becoming – a linked set of symbols in an ecological order.  Stories try experience on for fittings.  Until it fits.  Until it tatters, or is otherwise overused or outgrown.

Becomings and undoings.  Compositions and deletes.  All the edits (on the fly).  Survival.

And bowls of cereal are not allowed.

Ida_Cereal
found sign created by daughter

 

Someone is Writing for Something to Happen

On By NW FilbertIn being, creative writing, Language, Living, Loss, love, Writing2 Comments

Someone is writing.

Writing a long story never told.  Never entire, always undone, elaborate and fabricated, once begun.

Tubes, nerves, roots and vessels.  Pathways.

Encounters, experiences, events.  Relations.

scribbles

*

Language is part of it.  Emotion.  Thought.  A strange logic (situational ordering, a kind of management of complexity, sometimes called ‘chaos’).

A rhizome, a network, a knot.

There are inputs and outputs, sources/emissions, but never clean, nary discreet.

Recursive, redundant, asymmetrically reciprocal.  Untold and untellable, it’s writing, written, writing on…

Over, through, attempting…beyond, become, a traversing or explore.  An assay.  Interactive.  Emerging.  To eventuate.

*

Someone is writing for something to happen.  To participate in occurrence, to entangle in becoming.  To begin, continue, hoping toward an unknowable end.  Writing.

Like loving, eating, dreaming, or survival – one of many ways.

Laughing, weeping, inventing, desiring,

to be…