It will have to be something new, you think to yourself, beginning. What’s been done before is already present. All the brief and poignant things gathered. Already processed and past-eurized.
Heroes are made, families described. Every aberration. Otherwise we wouldn’t know, would we? So much sex and images, and the inner lives of children. Histories and sciences, and the nothing that affords, beyond.
New probably just means different, you say, using old words already. If it’s a word it’s definitely been done. Or an action. Dreams and thinking too. Which leaves you with little, if not naught.
You once composed a text of tinntinnabuli – it was fascinating to you. Also a fugue of sorts, even a classical symphony, all in words, one in the twelve-tone scale. Little matter with a missing orchestra. Fit snugly into your drawers.
The series of anthropomorphic fruit. What they felt and how they perceived, from rind to seed. Even the veins in their fleshes, bruises, and each distinct and delicious juice. Cycles of life, inevitability of change, sprout to rot.
Who cares?
Yet it’s what you do. Identify moments and make them stories to exist. Wrapped in the tangles of problems, sentence-wriggle-thread your way elsewhere. A place that looks like knowledge. And sometimes feels.
Like mathematicians with their unknown variables – it’s the ocean you swim, an amoeba almost.
You sought after mastery but found it banal. Meaning didn’t make any sense. You turned to hypotheses, but not the wilder the better. You had to squeeze through gaps, hoping for openings. A friend called it spelunking, and it did seem dank and cold and blind. Often.
Restatement is not what you’re after. Nor refining. If thinking is digestion, you order an autopsy and strange foreign parts. Intake as transplant.
Distinctive takes a while, but quickly regurgitates style, and you’re back to remarking, remembering…remorse.
Today you’re dissecting an Else. Not again, or if\then, or more, but the Else. What else? you say. You don’t know. But it lies here dismembered, deconstructed on your desk. It’s pretty messy. The pieces aren’t going to fit, even though you’ve studied jigsaws and puzzles. Inventing new ones feels like metaphor or code, a twiddling thumb to decipher, something no one has time for even if they wish they did.
It will have to be something new to count as satisfaction, you consider. And you take up the large eraser.
Lost in an inscrutable world and running out of time. Always running out of time – don’t you feel it?
We try to describe it to each other – what we experience, perceive, how we learn to survive. We call this – in varying levels – relationship. Depending on the amount of explanation and exposure, cataloguing “acquaintance,” “stranger,” “family,” “friend,” “lover,” and the like. A kind of measure. Recognizable connection or estrangement.
But the world is inscrutable, as are we, thus we name ourselves “lost.” “At least we’re lost together,” some said, but others thought we’d find out more apart, in other words “split up and look for clues.”
What would the clues be for? From whence this idea of “clues” to be searched? I wonder this. Did someone somewhere “find” something indicative of something really “else”? Other than this world and we in it?
I meet one of us who “has a feeling.” She has this “sense,” she says, that there really is an Other – something or someone truly outside of this barely discernible world we (at least) found ourselves and other things in. I ask her to describe the feeling and her ensuing language reminds me a lot of feeling-collections I also have gotten from time to time. Without, I might add, ever considering them Other-worldly. What is to account for this? These are the sorts of discussions we wanderers have.
How might I recognize a clue? Where did the idea/referent/template for such a signifier originate? Martin found an interesting, that is, noticeable pattern on the shell of a turtle. It appeared roughly to resemble little squarish shapes of wood we use to count by or play games with, sometimes even to carve on and trade for fruit or grasses. Martin thinks this might indicate that the shape we use for wood was natural – inherent in the world – purposeful. Not coincidence or accident, but a sign or clue about “the way things are.” There were 16 of these rectangular shapes on the turtle’s back.
“Why would you think that, Martin?” I asked. It is curious and fun to find similarities in the world – between people, smells, shapes, sounds and colors – all sorts of things – but why wouldn’t we notice like or familiar things in new situations? To make it feel, well, less inscrutable? That way we could learn about the unlike, describe the difference. This, at root, was what I understood by the word we used, or called – “learning.”
I ponder the projection that making things seem more uniform might help us feel less “lost” or confused in our surrounding world. So I might be expected to gravitate toward humans of the same height, weight, or hair color; that make the same sounds as me, recognize the same shapes, eat the same objects, and so forth. Somehow this practice strikes me as less interesting, ever running out of time (as we all agreed, once we’d broken our existence up into increments) and with so much unexplored and perhaps unknowable world still surrounding us all.
I take on the habit of investigating difference – I discover that finding similarities in my surroundings comes rather easily, nearly automatically, but aspects that are unique or defamiliar tend to more efficiently further my familiarity with the world. It becomes a strategy not of looking for clues or surfaces pointing to something else, but simply finding else everywhere. Even in the same “place.” There appears to be no end to variance (even in myself) and therefore no static “same.” I find myself always finding, discovering other in every moment, the differences forever expanding my knowledge of, but also maintaining my ignorance level of, the world I find myself in.
“I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it…[I want to write] stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.”
-David Foster Wallace-
That sense that the moon is obscure – cracked or marred in some indefinable way. That it might never rain. That parenting equals living with people you helplessly love.
Or marriage as painting, but you can’t control the medium, or even learn to think in it. You’ll never be wood, cloth, pigment or oils. I was never good at math, chemistry or geometry. For making a masterpiece, my chances are slim. Manic-depressive’s “in love” – like playing chess with marbles and confusing the rules of the games.
It seems possible that people who age wish they were young – tighter, unwrinkled, new-made. I don’t know – people don’t seem satisfied, somehow. You get the feeling, sometimes, I don’t know…I get the feeling sometimes that people wished they weren’t people. You know, that, like, they wished they were simple or something. Simple scientifically. Not complex, elaborate organisms, you know? But more like a single cell or an amoeba – something with apparent purpose or sort of unified mission. That they knew what to do. Or would – if they could just pull everything together, into line.
I think that’s what people mean by “making sense”? Something like that. Something like inventing God, some unified theory, some golden thread, some identity, some narrative. People are weird like that, but it makes for a fascinating species – the Storytelling Species – ingenious and fantastic, often unbelievable – the lengths to which these collectives will go to spin a yarn. Fit experience.
They’ll use numbers and actions and colors. Matter or energy and form. Inventing for anything a space and a duration. It looks like fighting with nature, but it’s kinda not – ‘cause it’s also how they perceive it. People.
With these enormously intricate mechanisms for constructing order, fabricating texture and variation and difference. To mash it all back together uniquely – imprinted, as it were – some new amalgam and full of traces – shadows and whispers of origins. Con-fused. Remade. Undone.
I used to think that was a purpose – to give meaning. Now I see it as a condition. A convention of rare and specific animals. At least we convene. We wouldn’t do well isolate – craving a single-cell or elemental type existence. We’re collectives – conventional conceptions. People! (said with a huff-sigh of air and exhausted incredulity).
You gotta love ‘em! ‘Cause if you’re reading this – “making sense” of these frenetic marks and spaces, light and shadow – then you’re one of them, and it does you no good to resist or despise yourself. Your own kind. Though people can, and many do.
Funny (peculiar) how you’ll find people that want to be much greater, grander than the mysterious incalculable beings they are, and then a bundle that wish they were less, tinier, singular things, and then the incredible bulk of people who somehow conflate the two: believing simplicity to be grandeur, the one – the all, everything/nothing, unity/diversity same difference and so on – go figure! (Really, try it).
Let’s choose a pinnacle example: say unpack “God” or the workings of atoms and molecules, hell, even protoplasm – seems we could learn an awe-full LOT from each of these straightforward messages we uncover: “I am that I am.”
I am telling you a simple story. A simple story of simple things and full of details. I will be telling it the rest of my life.
Details.
detail – Anselm Kiefer
tree bark
age and character
Take time.
It takes time to develop the details, these simple stories. Bear with me.
This year I stopped smoking. I began “vaping” e-cigarettes on Father’s Day, a reciprocal gift from my family, ostensibly FOR my family: my health – their comfort and security.
I had thought of my habit as an addiction and pleasure – it’s satisfactions including (but not limited to) the occupation of my body and sense so my mind might generate more freely – an item in the hand and oral fixative, the beautiful tedium of packing and rolling, the scents of tobaccos and sweet crackling of flame to thin paper, the distinctive clink of a Zippo. And there was the intake – that onrush of Other-air against the back of the throat, the lung’s recognition that breath is substantial – has meaning and purpose. A matter of routine, comfort, psychophysiology and control. Among other things. Fine insofar as it goes. Pieces of detail. Replacement sufficed.
Last week I contracted a version of the flu [please be patient – the process goes roughly as follows: details accumulate but require time to coalesce and organize toward a meaning – our lives as cabinets of curiosities]. Out of character for me – this was the real deal – an incapacitating sick. Associated with it was the scent and flavor, the electric verve of the nicotine-drop-oils that crackle and pop when my ecig works its vaporous magic. Compounding the problem (if illness is a “problem” per se – perhaps more appropriately “discomfort”) – my comfort no good to me.
In early October, due to an oversight in my timing (hang on – gather ingredients, let them simmer and stew, the feast is ahead), I depleted my store of these essential oils without backup, amidst a time of unusual stress. As a stop-gap measure and to avoid hurt or offense (a grouchiness and malaise isolating those around me) I purchased a package of “all-natural” tobacco cigarettes to get me by until my liquids were refilled. The cigarette had changed – no, it was I who now found it insufficient and distasteful – acrid and smelly – inconvenient and inferior to my system. So I squirreled them away – in case of emergency.
Emergency! (well, hardly, but still): slowly recovering from flu, sore and exhausted, wife away on a ten-day journey to faraway climes, two naughty puppies causing trouble, and tending and taxiing four active, hungry children, one of them herself quite ill – at day two without nicotine (happy pill / support / community / God / alcohol / touch / solitude / nature / music / food – whatever one’s personal representation/manifestation of “comfort” might be)…details…
while my daughter lay napping, the others at school, in a moment of relative quiet…I ferreted out one of those “Natural American Cigarettes,” by now all dried up and crispy, months opened and old, and slipped out to the porch…
Voila!
Except not, really.
Not a sudden revelation – but an accumulation of details taking particular shape.
Not an enlightenment – but light swollen and fractured to specific degrees.
Not momentous insight – but a lens crafted and ground, melted and curved to a singular clarity.
Bic schicks. A flame. A crackle. I inhale. Nothing special to the taste, nothing tremendous for throat or lung. Just a smoky draft of air – as from the belchings of a campfire in the mountains, or a compound conflagration of a family reunion bonfire in the late of night (but it isn’t!) when the kids are down and the adults unwind (but I’m not)…
A detail I’d overlooked about smoking (amassed over more than two decades – stay with me now) was precisely that. Looking things over. Smoking drove me outside and it stopped me. For the length of a cancer stick’s burn in this anti-smoking campaign of a culture, I would be isolated from friends and family, house or home, commerce or eatery, and would be situated somewhere where all there was to do was look over and listen. My hands and mouth, neck and torso occupied – eyes and ears thus freed, for a few minutes, to simply wander and attend. Caught by details.
Like these:
a Jetstream, held in a pale sky, contrasted by solid starkly swaying Winter branches, juxtaposed with the sturdy steel of a streetlight. And the dirtying yellow of late Autumn’s surprise bloomings held in some final tangled stubborn greens among deceasing leaves and grasses. Cracking boards, peeling paints and muted hues of dust in sunlight’s shadows – a vibrant puppy, warm and dark – our lives – amassing details – collating and collecting.
[Cigarettes are unnecessary for this] (a mere detail).
When my wife/partner/spouse/friend/coworking companion and lover is away, a part of me gets excited – when the children are busy with school or their moms – it portends to offer me a kind of working solitude – a something I’m forever whining about – idealizing, anticipating, “requiring,” in its absence. A chance to be temporally isolated with my brain, my body, and language – to think (ostensibly) without limit, read or write to my little heart’s content, to create or conspire with no active consciousnesses to account for but mine – no schedules to sync, no dinners to heed, the only limitations my own (and those sweet blasted puppies – a significant detail!), but still: abnormally free to dig and delve, explore and enjoinder, experiment and invoke reveries without feeling selfish…
but, the details, amassed in this way, exposed something quite different…
Jetstream, streetlamp, sky and tree. Angle of roof, discolored paint, fragmenting light – the nature of materials.
I’m at a loss for what to search or explore, discover, uncover…from what vantage point or perspective? Me? – in relation to – Me? Set out from an entire illusive fabrication? An emptiness without basis?
A point as a map is a nowhere unless there’s something surrounding. Unless there’s another point…somewhere. Me pushing through (the details profess) is a movement nowhere, without reference to something or someone outside, different, Other.
My wife is my primary referent (and “wife” is too small, as grand as it is). My person, my artist, my human. The being attached to me – not really mine at all, but for her purposings toward me. Our children, our puppies, our things. Habitat. “Econiche.” World. What I “relate” to equals me, enables me, crafts me into someONE, someWHERE, doing someTHINGS…which otherwise would NOT be…
Co-dependence? Inter-dependence? I like IN. IN-dependence – in depending, attaching, choosing and evaluating ourselves in our Others – we ARE.
Jetstream, streetlamp, color and line
background, foreground, texture, time
space and matter, energy, form
Details.
The details accrue and accrue, and with time…combine, reformulate, convene – which can feel new and curious and true, but simply go on gathering more, detailing to no end, as they relate, interact, recombine – can feel revelatory, enlightening, even profound – perhaps they all are – but they all are and ongoing…
amass and revise, amass and renew, accumulation and attention, awareness and incremental adjustments of relation…
Without Life in Relation (both the active reality, and the her that makes, with me, an us), I have little where or whom to set out from or toward
Most human flu is a non-pandemic flu that is slightly different from the main human flus that existed in last year’s flu season period. This type of flu is also called “common flu” or “seasonal flu” or “annual flu”. It causes yearly flu epidemics that are generally not deadly except to the very old or very young.
Human flu symptoms usually include fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches, conjunctivitis and, in severe cases, severe breathing problems and pneumonia that may be fatal. The severity of the infection will depend to a large part on the state of the infected person’s immune system and if the victim has been exposed to the strain before, and is therefore partially immune.
All of these symptoms are characteristic of numerous infectious agents, so many that most diagnoses of human influenza technically are diagnoses of influenza-like illness (ILI) and most cases of ILI are not due to influenza.
in a fluey oblivion – that weakness and stingy tingly skin surface of hurt while the bones diseasing ache and organs rot following torrential attack of the virus. Just that sort of glaucous gaze, while wishing I could be contributing meaningful language into the world of humans, duly rearranged toward some import, feeling the passage of a bright cold day filled with wealthy hours bulging with productive possibilities, eyes stung unable to tighten to focus or move without sand, arrow along anywhere, body bereft of batteries soughing along, draped, crumpled, wrenched, deflated here and there throughout the house, asking again and again like a cyclone of pencil marks – sentencing – within a gluey glaze of cranium bathed repletely in symptom-smattering chemicals scrambling and defracting synaptic sparks – “what do we think we’re doing when we want to – write/paint/draw/dialog – express/describe/inscribe/communicate?” “When we want to?” Why do the hours pain so when they disappear in illness or hurt, confusion or despair, inability?” “What have we proposed to ourselves or one another that we might be offering were we not undone?” Whirling conflation of such creamy viscous thoughts like mumbling mush, crossed inquiries, towers of babbling echoes just seeping stains, unable to vomit or defecate, trapped between intestinally sluicing back and forth as if clarity or some stint of reason could make sensible hope and power, as if, on a normal day with faculties and physiology aligned I might dialogically inscribe some arrangement/re-arrangement of terms and rhythms, sounds and sense that would change, remake, foster, enable or disable to some extent deemed important – but would I? Have I? When? How? In the ocean of stories, atomically-termed universe, paltry chicken feed of the barnyard of my pen on paper – what difference outside of me has any word meant lined up just so next to this on or that how it pieces my own world together like a context the two tiniest slits of my perspective, shaping and giving shape to all the data or input, experience or information swilled together like steel shavings to an electromagnet brushing a factory floor – what difference though – really – to spouse or children, you or universe, god or war? Absent depression or dismay because virus + medication is muffled even beyond apathy adding discomfort not soured in the brain but citrus mixed with dairy curdled without complaint what is it I think would have been made if sick days didn’t intervene, interfere, intrude, interrupt, would it have been better than this – this nothing but record of viral mania reformed by terminal translation : linguistics, semiotics, indices and signs available in repressed unhinged layerings of smoke across the pages?
Which got me thinking (a process I’d describe as internal), about how we find things out when we act.
My wife was talking (a process I’d call external), about what occurs for her when she journals (with a physical pen or pencil on physical paper). Which she described as “internal processing,” (an activity I’d designate externalizing), whereby she mysteriously splits herself into observer and subject at once, providing case-notes or records of the interaction. (Did I listen well?). The arm a kind of thread-of-self arcing out to the needle of a writing instrument, jittering and inscribing its EKG-like “reading” onto the blank pages and looping back in for more. The self as inkwell?
My body hitched at this. Read: torso clinched and weather vane set spinning in grey matter. Like I might if someone told me “god told me to…”, or that they were “inspired by the Muse,” or “carried away by the spirit” and whatnot. A reaction remote from wife’s account – so what was happening for me? In other words, am I re-enacting her activity presently?
There’s the thinking part, surely. And then there’s the intention to find something out – observation, attention, inquiry – “why did I cinch up at that depiction?”, “what felt ‘off’ to me in that account (as related to my own experience)?”, “what was I ‘feeling’”?
I felt uncomfortable, that’s what. Squirmy, antsy, bothered. Was that chemically induced, like overall mood-disorder stuff, or related to her message? I thought about this, and now I’m writing about thinking about it – what’s the difference?
It leaves traces? It does. And so?
I’m making something of it? I suppose. Why? How? And – ?
Why? Hmmmm. It comforts me to write. Like organizing marbles on a tabletop. It diverts my attention.
To the marbles.
Ah, yes. That’s it, exactly.
That is to say (in this case silently with tangible markings), the reason I am unable to identify with my wife’s remarks about writing about thinking about her “self,” is that I get distracted. In my head, it’s a swirl of sounds and concepts, images and sensation-symbols or impulses infiltrating and becoming one another like smoke strands in an overturned glass. But transforming to paper it becomes language, marbles, metaphors.
Some whispering gap of translation. I wouldn’t have thought marbles on a tabletop or envisioned smoke swirling in an upside-down glass – what would be the point? Do I need to describe myself to myself? Could I even? Deceive myself so? But through a medium – a thick, loamy, granular medium like language – that’s cause for intention, apparatus of selection and choice, opportunities outside the body, drawn from the big wide world. That’s external, that’s INTERACTION with a history, a culture, and a society of humans that gave rise to its agreements and standards, components and flavors and rules.
Jolting out through the arm via muscle controllers and a mechanical tool, I’m participant far outside my finite organism – in contents and structures, systems and meanings way beyond my doing or the thinks I might think. The threads that I sew, the fabric I stitch in, the stylus, ink and letters I write are not mine – the pen, paper, leaves, spark, or smoke emitted into the clear crystal container all already exist, given or available, as it were, to me.
It’s hard to find the part I play in the process, or how the words relate to me – more like the words relate me – render me relatable – if I’m able to finagle myself to their categories and nuances.
So it is (for me) as if the movement to write is spilling the marbles – turning me out of myself into a world where language matters – discursive, discussive, dialogically or to some expressive purpose – catching at these rolling targets and corralling them toward some organizational assemblage (that, I suppose, being my part in the meaningful game). I pick the red one and set it there, not there. Or prefer the one with the chip in it next to the tiger’s eye, and so forth. (There’s no accounting for taste – is that “style”? (Really!?)).
So “what have I written?” I think, and I’m sure I don’t know, but thanks for the language and time, it’s a process – and now you have the bagful of marbles…
“I am someone who tries to write, who right now more and more seems to need to write, daily; and who hopes less that the products of that need are lucrative or even liked than simply received, read, seen…why I’m starting to think most people who somehow must write must write. The need to indite, inscribe – be its fulfillment exhilerating or palliative or, as is more usual, neither – springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads. On one side – the side a philosopher’d call ‘radically skeptical’ or ‘solipsistic’ – there’s the feeling that one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the big Exterior of life on earth…The need to get words & voices not only out – outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them – but also down, trusting them neither to the insusbstantial country of the mind nor to the transient venue of cords & air & ear – a necessary affirmation of an outside, some Exterior one’s written record can not only communicate with but inhabit…the textual urge, the emotional urgency of text as both sign and thing. The other side of the prenominate 2-bind – … – is why people who write need to do so as a mode of communication. It’s what an abstractor like Laing calls ‘ontological insecurity’ – why we sign our stuff, impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed. “I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing – & all good writing…
what must the world be like if language is even to be possible?”
All my Words are Silent 