Tag: language

Putting Together

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings5 Comments
here it comes

So I’ve struggled a bit the past week or so with a plethora of projects: personal, family, parenting, school, commission work… mostly good things, deep rewarding things, and yet leaving me with a feeling that I have had very little time to simply create.  My wife challenges me often with the categories I concoct for myself between art and life, relation and solace, pleasure and responsibility, and by and large I agree that an artist’s life, a creative life, is a creative life, not a creative this-or-that, segregated activity.  And yet, nothing quite compares to a blank page not full of pre-existing questions or directions; an impulse externally unnecessary; a mark or word uncalled for.  It sometimes helps to think of things as stages, the “for now” syndrome that hope parasites.  But ultimately, I don’t quite feel “okay,” or balanced, somehow settled in my world, until time is available to sit at my desk, in my chosen or gathered surroundings, undirected but by what might rise from within.  Today I have plugged away seven hours or more at schoolwork, and granted myself an hour swept clear of such things.  The piece below is the result (click title or picture for text)

Putting Together

Hermes

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes22 Comments

for madison-woods’ Friday Fictioneers

Hermes

If he’s bringing messages, they cut both ways, rather than thread between or stitch together.  Fleet and agile in both worlds, and neither.  They call him “the Translator,” a metaphor embodied.  He melodies one thing and harmonies another.  “Of two minds” they say of the quicksilver poet with a two-sided brain.  No one knows how he listens, but it’s clear his flight is circular.

It’s been asked if he ever stops for love, ever rests his fluid motion.  There’s never been a verdict.  First one thing, and then another.  His reaching out, a curling in.  His language an escaping capture.

N Filbert 2012

…and more…

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings2 Comments

Wichita Public Library – our “home” family hearth – answers to the ESU expedience with the following!!!:::

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beyond me wildest dreams!

and what timing!

Your Own Story

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces5 Comments

For over a month I have faced the following on my desk:

created for me and delivered with a a sheaf of empty pages and a stapled complete story by my precious daughter Ida, aged 8:

Ida aged 8

 

I am passing it along to each of you…as I struggle with the task…

“One needs to have wandered a lot, to have taken many paths, to realize, when all is said and done,

that at no moment one has left one’s own…

…To forget in order to know; to know in order to fill up the forgotten, in its own time.”

-Edmond Jabes-

 

Three Vigorous Recommendations

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

from this weeks reading…

3 wholistic recordings of the lived experience

and its entagled entailments

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else”

-Emilry Dickinson-

Grammaring Perseverance

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

Grammaring Perseverance

“A grammar is an on-going system of relationships…a system which is always in the process of articulating itself – not simply changing, but actually making itself up as it goes along”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

            My hand trembles when I move to write.  Time changes.  What is called perseverance, equals age.

As beautiful to me now, she.  More.

I refuse her loss on any terms.  In any context.

I investigate the language of inquiry.  Always a difference of relation.

Never expect to be heard.  Nor heeded.

Language makes itself up…and it goes along…articulating itself…again.

With this hand, along the incalculable curve of her hip, my palm records cellularly, but never repeats.

Lef hand entangled, her thick head of hair, tomorrow otherwise, should it work its way out.  Or ever want to.

The side of my knee prepositions her thigh, slides into a phrase, shaping a passage, not as if the surface is ever the same, yet no doubt it belongs, only, to her.

My ankled feet, like bony whips, eager to explore, inadvertently pain – the slope of the pedal, bolt of the swivel and up the liquid skin and calf.

It will leave its bruise, its passioned impression.

Everything becomes an aching to know.  Everything is on-going process.

Systems of relations.

When perseverance oppresses.  Again, again, not emptying the land, but altering it.  To cause the seeking, redundancy, both the wanted and the wanting wear.  Tools whittling down, different structures, various nerves, must learn again, of course the surfaces having changed.

My thigh registers her buttocks, elbow in her neck held by shoulder.  For lips to memorize her ear, only that moment.  I rely on her contours similarity hour to hour, so that details are not lost, just renewed.

An eroding resource, yet we are layered, and wrinkled through the timing.  What preserves?  Naught but the process itself, for which our charts are made.  Remade.

The motion does not cease.

As the curves to the apple, subjective object of measurement.  Objecting a subject to a sensual scrutiny.  Not unlike remembering, or illusion.  Information, an obvious verb.  Whether coming undone or accruing.

That began in the perseverance of my quivering hand.  Once connected, steadied by context, the grid of associations and leaps.  The world is a boundary to trace, to follow along, diverting the dots and the dashes, the lines and the colors, reenacting the tracks.

A stumble is anything but halting, more like surge and accident and a reaching out to stay.  My fingers tend to fumble through the filaments – those once vocabulary now a tangling stitching of signs.

To be decoded, recoded, as it were, what hollow mouth or aural labyrinth does not effect?  We know of no recipients, no audience, only sometimes, luckily, co-conspirators, co-creators of a co-event, called (sometimes) knowing, (sometimes) conversation, (sometimes) simultaneity.

I’ll reach out, my hand tremored right down to its core, its code, its quarks or its atoms,

and find a steadying or pattern, metaphors of richer entanglements that may not be explained

my qualia, slight blue lines on pallid vacant surfaces, directing possibilities.

In-formation – that everything that is, in its multiplied becomings, as discrete as my flesh traversing yours.

A continuous severing enabling us knowing – our grammaring, our ongoing, its enclosure.

“At the ‘inmost heart of each thing’ is an ongoing process, an unfolding which is its identity”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

 

“Communication”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces2 Comments

“Communication”

We, in our world, have a theory, a process really, that we call “communication.”  In various states of profundity it might also be referred to by “love.”

“Communication” is the process of signaling/decoding; saying/listening; writing/translating; touching/feeling by which we become aware of one another, about one another, of one another.

All things considered, “communication” is pretty important for us, though not necessarily to us.  While appearing more complex and refined than single cells or parts of cells vibrating under a microscope; more elaborate and extensive than a swarm of birds or school of fish, it hardly works as well.  As if certain sharp things and certain dull things cancel one another out.

Pitch, tone, palate and respiration.  Vocabulary, grammar, syntax.  Associations occurring in the brain, the glands, the organs, the body.  I’ve always thought of our existence as “fraught” and it never ceases to amaze me!

Amaze and astound, in no particular order.  As if “stound” were past-tense for “stand.”  Stopped-in-tracks-reeling-backwards.

There’s nothing to it really, we all do it, all of the time, innately, it would seem, given we could not survive without it.  And yet.  “Innate” wouldn’t be the right word.  Maybe “potential” as if capacities and possibilities surround every cell toward response.  And then.  What becomes.  Responsibility.  Of that interstellar stuff moving and extra-anatomical stuff too.  Kind of equals.

So we’re not necessarily “good” at it, and hardly possess a measure, everyone on equal footing at some point, depending on the context, depending on construction (of the possibles) and so forth.  It’s often accurately called “fuzzy” or “messy” – an entanglement of sorts in no sense negative.

I always liked William James – the jumble-up of him.  “Rich thicket of reality” he called it, a passage to get caught up in, sometimes snared, sometimes struggling, but ever in its midst, I suppose.

Lyn Hejinian once pronounced it “inexhaustible.”

I just wanted to mention…

“The argument would go something like this: reality exists; it is independent of what we think though it is the only thing we can think; we are a part of reality but at the same time consciousness of this fact makes us separate from it; we have a point of reentry (a ‘centrique happinesse’), which is language, but our reentry is hesitant, provisional, and awkward”

-Lyn Hejinian-

Minding the Gaps in the Membranes: A perforation, an hiatus, a foramen

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings3 Comments

Intermission.

It is likely you will experience “an interruption in the intensity or amount of something.”

Quite probable, in fact.  Possibly certain.

I might say that a human being is a process consisting of a body and a situation in constant flux and adaptation…dialogue of inescapable intersubjectivity.

Now I have.

Lyn Hejinian has said that “‘aboutness’ (in writing, but, I would argue, also in life) is transitional, transitory,” and that,

“language is a medium for experiencing experience…of inquiry…writing is a process of improvisation within a framework (form) of intention…”

like consciousness, self, and all of its constitutive surround…

i.e. being (or becoming) human.

In the midst of which…otherness, the unknown, openness in the structure

– a gap, a leap, a hiatus, an abatement –

For instance, this blog.

Having been fortuitously enabled to devote considerable amounts of time and effort to it this past year, it has changed and moved, grown and altered me beyond my expectations – experimenting in language with experience and painstakingly risking and studying, following passions and trails, ideas and stories – always attempting to language the knowing – has been a phenomenal (literally) vocation for me.

The contexts are shifting…whatever I am is being differently situated – times, spaces and surrounds…requiring temporary suspensions to my efforts here at manoftheword.

I will work seriously to keep up with at least 100 words of fiction per week (thank you for the promptings Madison-Woods and Friday Fictioneers) and any poetic bursts or artifacts that get me along in my experiences; images or residual thought-projects that are not necessary to my schoolwork, family or professional life I purpose to share in this forum and spoondeep mag or gypsy wall.  My wife and I are currently committing ourselves to a larger multi-media project over the next year or so, but will also attempt to freshen Ekphrastix Arts as time allows, at least with updates.  My own creative efforts are being redirected to my studies at SLIM, some exciting articles for an upcoming art exhibition in Wichita, Kansas (stay posted with Lux Fisch Haus Exhibition and related links) as well as a longer project I’m committing my sanity (or its loss) to – currently denoted in myself as Qualia, probable connected fragment-instants of subjective experience which also may leave some effluvia worth commending to you here.

All of this to say a ginormous THANK YOU and KUDOs to the incredible world of WordPress bloggers and visitors – please continue to follow and check on us – I promise at LEAST weekly there will be new content here – your support and attention mean such a great deal to me/us.  And I will certainly continue to read and view what I can in the interstices of my goings-on.  I genuinely appreciate everyone’s efforts, creativity and artifacts here.

“[language]…is denotatively social…but not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgment – and that constitutes a sort of unknowing.  To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness (i.e., the unknown and perhaps unknowable).  [Writing] undertakes acknowledgment as a preservation of otherness – a notion that can be offered in a political, as well as an epistemological, context.

This acknowledging is a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on…”

(Lyn Hejinian)

THINK ON.  MAKE ON.  BLOG ON!

Drawing a Blank ________________ …

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

Okay, it really isn’t my preference to clutter you with personal information / process…but the month of July turning into August has been something of a whirlwind of large changes for our family.  Traveling for three weeks and all the saturation that implies (very GOOD – but overwhelming for one like me who likes to control the pace and type and style and content of input 🙂 )…now registering everyone for school, gathering supplies, moving into new vocations or returning to vocation outside of our home studio…enduring a home burglary in which one of our children was assaulted and some irreplaceable valuables stolen…you get the picture.  After spending most of yesterday trying to “touch base” with our home and our lives, I found a few moments personally directed.  What I encountered felt like a Void.  The last I’d recorded in my reading list journal was July 8.  The last I’d written in my private journal was July 6.  I couldn’t remember the projects I’d been in the midst of when we took to the mountains, the road, the lakes, the cabins.  I was bewildered.  I drew a blank…some empty fullness…and here is what tumbled out:

Drawing a Blank _________________ …

 

So that after long whiles, some sometimes, nothing

nothing left or right remembers stirs reminds

conjures therefore a kind of empty fullness emptied

of what seems everything but is nothing for we feel

pretty certain (what is called “knowledge”

i.e. “belief”) that nothing empties, nothing

moving nowhere neither expanding nor

retracting, not replete or depletable,

so to say a blank is begin, as you see it

__________________________ …

indicates (is a kind of sign) indexes you

elsewhere toward or away, that is, movement

what we might apply another sort of signifier

otherwise (a.k.a) simply known as “blank”

becomes arbitrarily a point of action (more

accurately a line) trail train of efforts

here, like god, as I understand the term,

to name without knowing or under-

standing:  “begin.”

__________________________ …

empty trajectory boundary border

line emptied of nothing (not possible)

remains only to be filled with doing

which I’m doing, once a word like “god”

enters as a placeholder, rhythmic beat,

disregulating reorganizer that empty

fullness reveals itself full indeed

by which I mean synonyms collect

(as I experience them) through action

upon within the emptied track

(emptied of nothing, nonsensical)

or trace, that is, “god” =

_______________________ …

metamorphosing in my apparatus I

once perceived as empty, better

said “lost” or “chaos-crossed”

too full in a way to recognize it-

self until such a thud as god

should stir the matter like a magnet

drawing unto after it syllable

after syllable sounds sounding as

“death” as “human” what resounds

in my cranium with deity, but death

of which or both at once, such

emptied fullness I think, led by

__________________________ …

because I’d though how much humans

were like god in their deaths and invention

death like a horse dragging a sledge

without sleds grinding splinters shafts

“substances” to naught, limbs undone

what we thought were wholes – holes

skull shrinking withered of hopes

and fears, identity’s loss, how

death depurposes unknowns…all

the strenuous loves and desperate

frights I gave names and space and

time during life that were not

anything actual only possibilities

but words worries made them seem

death immediately deletes leaving

______________________ …

like character or personality, what

is memorable or terrifying even

unimaginable things we imagined

treating, relating to, engaged as

real entities death erased, again

the emptying, of nothing, no thing

to be rid of but a sound, a rhythm

a term – god, human, death –

superadditives, ideas, beliefs, myths

theories without basis no matter

observation perception interpretation

super-imposed on

________________________ …

emptied of nothing as nothing being

undiminishable death demons-

trates depurposing de constructions

we attribute fully to emptiness

what is unknown its own sort

of impossible excepting conjecture

consideration deleted at death

by death what life had spent

on deities and persons, ideas or myths

where nothing was, actually empty

but for matter beneath and slowly

ground back down toward away

emptying the nothing to fullness

_____________________ …

drawing a blank

N Filbert 2012

Altitude

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings1 Comment

Altitude

 

“A proposition is only a pretext to go over the limits of what’s proposed…A man in a room does not have strict boundaries until the moment when something forces him to take up one or another activity…

…I don’t have to write all this to be convinced that what is written exists.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“Don’t blame me.  I measure the shadow of the shadow with the shadow,

signifying here.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees” (Paul Valery)

 

I hear a bewildering variety of birds – singing, cawing, chirping, saying.  It exists whether I say so or not.  Some things exist because I say so.

Like dolumbritz and community.

The steps being easy and difficult between.

They leave shadows.  Sometimes.

Metaphor avoids this.

 

If we got to the bottom of it all, we would fall.  Perhaps upward, if direction had anything to do with it (it doesn’t).  So we say “alas.”  Which once was short for the bottom – a-ha! “at last!” there is (here is) THIS.  But now is code for sigh.

She said so, and I heard her, at last.  I sigh.

“I have the feeling that the meaning of things will never be sorted out” is a paraphrase of a poet.  Alas.

Like philosophy: the sequence of excitable sighs, then exhaustion.

 

I am here (wherever that is).  I could describe it and become able to forget, having given it you.  But once described, something else, and then poetry – “always something else.”  Metaphor.  Not likeness but difference.

I am here.

I would know this insofar as it were validated – verified : affirmed.  But that would change and then unknown.  I reach out as like to open without a demonstration, only signs or their perceivers.  Senseless gestures filled with sense.  First one and then another “like meanings smashing each other (I don’t say metaphor)” (Dragomoshchenko).

 

A family of deer just walked in front of me, led by the elder, stopping to curiously stare (extending their field) – a simultaneity.  I gazed back and added noise to which a tail flap and head cock, followed by a smile and a welcoming.  While you notice people on the street, in the office, over lunch.  And a child hears a fairy’s call.  What is and what is not need each other to exist.

“Imagination differs from fantasy as the form ‘is’ from the form ‘if.’  The scope of my imagination is no less than the scope of desire” (Dragomoshchenko).  If he seems to make more sense or to express it is because I provide a context and steal a fragment, thus expanding what it is by what it’s not, which also is if only ‘if’ therefore as written.

“I do not have to write all this to be convinced…”

In fact an opposite’s expanding here…

N Filbert, Pike’s Peak CO, 2012