Writing: Impetus

On June 20, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Language, Writing3 Comments

It’s hypnotic. Illogic. You may recall genetic components – a sentiment, experience, curiosity or sensation…the fabrication begins its own spells. That plane where you drift from expression or fractaling inquiry toward Medium. When plot is played out and the voices keep talking. Or some other member begs a word.

You are no longer quite “author.” When it begins I’m usually puzzled or amazed. A vague and shifty core obsesses and eludes me. I ponder awhile, do research, spawn a dialogue or few with available others…but eventually turn to writing. A word inscribed in secret not only leads to more, but ricochets through spacetime like a pinball. The versions of the brain call out over the callosum: “Felt anything like this before? Have we had an experience that resonates?” / and / “Say – it seems I’m in the midst of something – check it out! Any words in your concordance for such as this?” To and fro – attemps to signify and symbolize, reify, rectify, making truce with our immersion.

The “language drill.” As it burrows metaphor, it fragments and splinters dust around the edges. Retrieving as it leads. Recalling through invention. I use my handwriting to find out. To find out. Searching something, spelunking expeditions, a nettling curiosity blind-feeling hunches and perceptions. Pulling them towards words in attempts to trick them into trap. Building tunnels, margins, stairwells to aim the lights at. As if broad enough term-corrals might lasso and then spiral, slowly cinching it round, whatever “it” is.

But whoa then, hold on! Once a breadcrumb trail’s discerned, it forges. Makes its rhinoceric way in accrual and erasure. Constructing as you follow, conundrum’d and deleting. A word – and sources cling like filaments. None of them accurate and all informing. History, culture – traditions. Intimate pain and joy. Perception, conception and query. Discovering bewilderment. Creating the unsaid.

Victim and perpetrator both, you, author, artist, song. Skewing and distorting in equal measures. Changing as you change it. This is the making. The being-made. Creator and created both. The artist in her medium.

There is no “having done.” Failure or not, it virals and contaminates. The path is incompletion. “The Artist’s Way…” Never through, until it’s through with you, coincident with a life.

Who do we say that we are?

Communication : Calibration

On June 8, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Philosophy, Reflections8 Comments

Perhaps we join in a wooded area, wander about, espying for foxes and deer, or bunnies.

Maybe we just use our eyes.

Sometimes we use the term-containers – words of our languages – bring varieties of ourselves, our experiences, our learning, our responses to syllables and sounds, and craft new spaces whereby the potentials echo.

I raise my hand, you respond in kind. A nod, a wave, a shake.

Perhaps the fuzzy boundaries of ourselves engage – we hug, we kiss, we make sounds one to another…

Both leaping over the log. Both scrambling the scaffold.

Gazes infiltrating one another on the river, on the Van Gogh, on the sculpted heap.

“You heard that too?”

Footfalls.

Whispers.

Suppose we take up space. Suppose we are compositions of compositions that make a kind of interactive boundary – both for ourselves and that which surrounds us. The same, but different. Suppose all that spins around me gives me a sort of “area.” Suppose I lend the air, the water, the sound and ground a similar sort of “area” by my own buzzing, my own movements. Call me color. I am “blue.” But when I engage you in my blustering – you, “yellow” – we don’t end up making stripes…

WE, are “green.”

I breathe…my compositions of compositions exchange and interchange – some re-inhaled, some new and distinct, some left to re-compose. I enter you. I lend a boundary. I find I do not dissolve. And yet, exchange.

Our voices, carried by term-containers, expand, swell, contract, until there is a blend of meanings, intentions.

Maybe we only inflect.

Our fuzzy, buzzing boundaries.

Engage, exchange, co-constitute.

You move. You lend me form. I respond. I interact in kind.

Fuzz, buzz, calibrate.

You said. I replied. I summarized. You disagreed. Partially. Edit, recompose.

If “I” am a composition. I am composed of compositions – recognizable. Body. Organs. Veins. Plasma. Neurons. Molecules. Clusters. DNA. Synapses. Atoms….

You, composition of compositions…a composition within compositions : surround, situation, “space” (is there such thing?). Space, time – any emptied space to occupy? No. Displacement, exchange. Calibrate.

Table. A/C. Drink glass. Water. Music. Each element, action, “happening” altering, vibrating, co-creating the rest…

Calibrating BEING.

OCCURRING.

THIS.

Co-composing…compositions made of compositions made of…within compositions of compositions…making…

We calibrate.

I enter you. We correlate. Calibrate. Collaborate. Co-create.

I recede.

You, though different, remain.

How intimate it can be…and yet.

We lend and are lent. Gift and are gifted.

Our fuzzy, buzzing borders.

Ever-exchanging. Ever-engaging.

We climb. We calibrate.

We dance, we speak, we respond, we laugh, we play, we swim…

We dream, we sleep, we breathe…

WE CALIBRATE…

…and become.

This is mysterious to me. Mysterious and wonderful. How I tend to think I “know” I am made of the same miniscule moving structures as you, as air, as mountain, as stream… And yet I retain a form… maintain an autopoietic and dynamic interchange and existence (for a time) as a cognizable (humanly) and dynamic “organism” or form of life. Like a language, a rock, a helix, an artwork, an idea. That I “know” these elemental spaces composed of tinier spaces making up larger spaces are all active, are full, are constantly coming and going, interacting and recombining, becoming and altering, editing and con-forming… and yet we identify, recognize, perceive…and do it again – come together, and calibrate…

Action. Language. Presence. Exchange.

Remain. Begin. Engender. Preserve.

BECOME.

Each of it: action, communication, gesture, touch, sense, perception, behavior, belief,

OPPORTUNITY and ENACTMENT of CALIBRATION…

COMMUNICATION

hello.

Creativity’s Luck

On May 28, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing9 Comments

Last week I in fact took one day “off.” Truly OFF. It rained. I read. It rained. I read. I wrote…

Eight hours later, finally, I am drunk with language. Like Kansas soil, I require such storms for the necessary surplus… for markings to begin to pool, swirl and confuse – for essential destabilization – undoing language from its conventional attachments and turning it toward an alchemy, a natural compound and resource, something to be stirred and sludged or steeped – allowing for aroma, skimming and residue. Just language, less meaning – an additive experience, unknown potentials of letters combined by some strange combinatory activity of intuition, convention and accident. Creativity’s luck.

There is a point to drunkenness – whether artificial, of language or pleasure or love, whether substance, experience or drug – it is to be estranged and immersed – in some sense undone. Renewed. Despoiled. It slows and diffuses me enough to write beautifully again. Instead of making words, to concentrate on shaping letters. Forces to create.

It is a baffling and bewilderment – allowing us to require effort for focus, selection and choice – so discreet motions of bodies become both complex and marvelous again, the capacity for smell a wonder and delight, communication and gesture (at all) a mysterious gift.

Inebriation levels the field. Returns to a source. Baudelaire may have meant we are potential and solidarity at once – flounderers grasping at tools and beginnings, constructing, cooperating. We are begun.

Perhaps, then, we drink to erase and begin. We scramble ourselves toward infancy that we might make effort to grow, while minimizing automated meanings. To struggle to learn, to be becoming rather than operative. Innovative over automatic. To develop and realize.

I love to form letters once drowned in the rain of them.

Flood everything to discover what’s possible.

Saturate in order to dredge, to pan, to anticipate.

To be continued…

On May 19, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, LanguageLeave a comment

“Yet if language gives no words for what happens…it nevertheless gives itself”

-Christopher Fynsk-

“Communication is the awareness of a chain of meaning of which every speaker and interpreter is part”

-Renate Lachmann-

“Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence”

-Mikhail Bakhtin-

All Points

On May 9, 2014May 12, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings1 Comment

Let me get this out of your way

The way they occupy space

All Points

If it were a point

if form and object were combined

SCENARIO

You know there was a particular kind of sorrow that came with confusion, or a certain feeling of being flustered.

She said: Between Point A and Point B is epic poetry, the pathways of taxis, the flights of birds and bees…the shortest distance…follows the molecule

She was surprised by what she saw, she said, I remember.

I don’t remember how to make stories, or ever tell what happens. I hardly remember the words.

Someone said they’d like to write like that, like me, that they would feel good about it. Maybe so. I don’t remember. I just place the words hoping one way or another they might end up meaning.

Something needs to shake, shake up, quiver and tremble.

I need to be rolled dice.

I am troubled (at times) by the absence of narrative. My impatience. Describe what you want, embellish the action and details, characters and plots – I’ll be reading for the meaning, watching for it to happen – we rarely need the bells and whistles.

Like a good poem might be – line after line – meaning.

Potentially.

Facts are of little use unless we doubt them. Without gaps we’ve nowhere to move.

I don’t know what to tell you, I want to write, and my brain rattles like a busted engine.

What if there were desire – if I wanted something, faced conflict, suffered,

instead

instead – what? I want to want.

If this.

ReWritten / ReWriting

On April 7, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, WritingLeave a comment

accidentally opened a file from the past that seemed related…

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-

Revisiting Aspects of Writing

On April 3, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

to see if there might be some positive resonances yet….

Aspects of Writing.

(please click image or title to link)

Erosion, continued: “What Begins as I, Ends as It”: A Form of Fiction (explicit)

On March 24, 2014March 24, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing6 Comments

MEANING from EXPERIENCE: “What Begins as I, Ends as It”: A Form of Fiction

“Every movement resonates with its preacceleration and its overarticulation, active in a contagion of speeds and slownesses”

-Erin Manning, Always More than One–

The erosion would be complete (or very nearly) now. What had once seemed an “inner life” or “personal experience,” perhaps “individuality” or some such, (as far as could be sensed) was wholly in absentia. No happening, event, or perception – let alone interpretation or meaning.

Now it was only something thesauri’d as anguish – maybe migraine, maybe ennui.

The emptying and erasure, incessant deterioration. Taking it back to the cells.

Movement.
Terror.
Survival.

Formulating a system. Psychology and reflection not necessary. Systems in relation for persistence. An added instant. Another day.

Flefzzhat, remune, it sounded like, and signifying nothing. Activity is all. Behavior. Quieted, plastic, rearranged. Emotion in hiding or exile. It would not be decease, and he could not seem to help it.

It was cold. Began to chill. Unable, apparently to warm itself. Something gave it liquid, which, though iced cold, seemed to flush it warm. Reaction, not response.

Activity observed, not intention. It shivered. A scribbling, not a mark. A murmur, not a sound. It seemed deflated. Otherwise.

Not like a rodent, really: not furtive or purposeful. How to describe it?

A wrapped tree or scarecrow – if the scarecrow was broken and crook’d. What would survival mean, without love for words, without relish? Without desire – is it pro-cess?

Dead crow in flannel. No future envisioned, no breathing to count by.

II.

Room after room over months all displacing. Pieces at a time – chair here, sock there, key, sign, and implement. A picture. Emptiness synonymed, a variant from loss. Loss implies gone; emptied – gone away. The figure shuffling toil devolves the way of water – seamless evisceration – an evaporate.

The labor worked like cancer on its host – a devouring accretion. Humans call it grief – the impression of depression. Unable to relate, all signs a bag of Scrabble tiles. A tick will move toward warmth, grass stems trigger to the sun. Scarecrow? – merely flux. Perhaps the wind.

At one time it forayed. The worlds of animals and humans. Would have named systemic processing: “living.” Drill down deep enough, or extend exponentially – the vitality recedes.

Vitality recedes.

Sonic elements, sense. Beyond the psychosocial, even basic physics began un-mattering.

Another room, another artifact, another particle of dust duly removed. The figure now a beach – sand devolving slowly toward rock.

Rock: elemental, unfeeling, simply there. Simply there, in its flux. Taking space by making it. Stupid, muted, dumb. Pointilism sans points – that sort of thing. The figure itself an oxymoron, an elision. Not illusion. From outside this is really happening.

From within, it’s only time. The songs of Orpheus, collected as poems. Dalliance in extinction, without a puffin’s reward or a dinosaur’s drama. Just scarecrow – a covered tree – limbing in almost dark.

Prime example of nearly. Nearly being, nearly attached, nearly meaningful – nearly perceived. Nearly alive – another way of saying (in a scientist’s tongue): NOT.

III.

If a statement of faith is “always more than one” then here we have a really hard problem: no statement, no faith, and ever only one…Beckett’s dissolution… How It Is.

“how last how last”…”vast tracts of time”

IV.

It echoes. The emptying room. A hollow. Blowing stiffly enough, some would say it howls. If a howl, then a cry. If a cry, a reaching out. Scarecrow doesn’t cry. But the drink kills the migraine, whites out the angst.

Wrapped tree in snow. You know it’s there.

It, without life or blood or brain. It now alone, now diminished, now slowly stripping bare.

Call it the Passenger Pigeon, the Ibex, Orpheo rising from the dead.

Call it Nothing and No-one.

Please do not call it at all.

Someone said meaning was the sticky point. Point dislodged. Evaporate. Another: “this is love.” Love fucked and raped in eye socket, armpit, ass – then abandoned.

Another room cleared by the scarecrow. More bark removed from the tree, even while the burlap clings.

Life would astonish the gods – an elegy owed. It’s worse than that. It’s autopsy alive – with light everywhere. A copyist’s error.

Branches clack, and make impressions. That is all.