Tag: language

Michel Foucault: “Speech Begins After Death”

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, being, Complexity, Compromise, Confusion, creative writing, Critical Thought, Current Reading, Experimenctes, fragments, Language, Literature, MIchel Foucault, paradox, Questions, Reality, sign, thinking, Writing3 Comments

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..does the pleasure of writing exist?  I don’t know.  One thing I feel certain of is that there’s a tremendous obligation to write.  This obligation to write, I don’t really know where it comes from.  As long as we haven’t started writing, it seems to be the most gratuitous, the most improbable thing, almost the most impossible, and one to which, in any case, we’ll never feel bound.  Then, at some point – is it the first page, the thousandth, the middle of the first book, or later?  I have no idea – we realize that we’re absolutely obligated to write.  This obligation is revealed to you, indicated in various ways.  For example, by the fact that we experience so much anxiety, so much tension if we haven’t finished that little page of writing, as we do each day.  By writing that page, you give yourself, you give to your existence, a form of absolution.  That absolution is essential for the day’s happiness.  It’s not the writing that’s happy, it’s the joy of existing that’s attached to writing, which is slightly different.  This is very paradoxical, very enigmatic, because how is it that the gesture – so vain, so fictive, so narcissistic, so self-involved – of sitting down at a table in the morning and covering a certain number of blank pages can have this effect of benediction for the remainder of the day?  How is the reality of things – our concerns, hunger, desire, love, sexuality, work – transfigured because we did that in the morning, or because we were able to do it during the day?  That’s very enigmatic.  For me, in any case, it’s one of the ways the obligation to write is manifested.

This obligation is also indicated by something else.  Ultimately, we always write not only to write the last book we will write, but, in some truly frenzied way – and this frenzy is present even in the most minimal gesture of writing – to write the last book in the world.  In truth, what we write at the moment of writing, the final sentence of the work we’re completing, is also the final sentence of the world, in that, afterward, there’s nothing more to say.  There’s a paroxysmal intent to exhaust language in the most insignificant sentence.  No doubt this is associated with the disequilibrium that exists between speech and language.  Language is what we use to construct an absolutely infinite number of sentences and utterances.  Speech, on the contrary, no matter how long or how diffuse, how supple, how atmospheric, how protoplasmic, how tethered to its future, is always finite, always limited.  We can never reach the end of language through speech, no matter how long we imagine it to be.  This inexhaustibility of language, which always holds speech in suspense in terms of a future that will never be completed, is another way of experiencing the obligation to write.  We write to reach the end of language, to reach the end of any possible language, to finally encompass the empty infinity of language through the plenitude of speech.

Another reason why writing is different from speaking is that we write to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing.  We write so that the life around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes and which we control.  Writing is a way of trying to evacuate, through the mysterious channels of pen and ink, the substance, not just of existence, but of the body, in those minuscule marks we make on paper.  To be nothing more, in terms of life, than this dead and jabbering scribbling that we’ve put on the white sheet of paper is what we dream about when we write.  But we never succeed in absorbing all that teeming life in the motionless swarm of letters.  Life always goes on outside the sheet of paper, continues to proliferate, keeps going, and is never pinned down to that small rectangle; the heavy volume of the body never succeeds in spreading itself across the surface of paper, we can never pass into that two-dimensional universe, that pure line of speech; we never succeed in becoming thin enough or adroit enough to be nothing more than the linearity of a text, and yet that’s what we hope to achieve.  So we keep trying, we continue to restrain ourselves, to take control of ourselves, to slip into the funnel of pen and ink, an infinite task, but the task to which we’ve dedicated ourselves.  We would feel justified if we no longer existed except in that minuscule shudder, that infinitesimal scratching that grows still and becomes, between the tip of the pen and the white surface of the paper, the point, the fragile site, the immediately vanished moment when a stationary mark appears once and for all, definitively established, legible only for others and which has lost any possibility of being aware of itself.  This type of suppression, of self-mortification in the transition to signs is, I believe, what also gives writing its character of obligation.  It’s an obligation without pleasure, you see, but, after all, when escaping an obligation leads to anxiety, when breaking the law leaves you so apprehensive and in such great disarray, isn’t obeying the law the greatest form of pleasure?  To obey an obligation whose origin is unknown, and the source of whose authority over us is equally unknown, to obey that – certainly narcissistic – law that weighs down on you, that hangs over you wherever you are, that, I think, is the pleasure of writing…

…I’m not an author.  First of all, I have no imagination.  I’m completely uninventive.  I’ve never even been able to conceive of something like the subject of a novel…I place myself resolutely on the side of the writers [in distinction – Roland Barthes – from authors] those for whom writing is transitive.  By that I mean those for whom writing is intended to designate, to show, to manifest outside itself something that, without it, would have remained if not hidden at least invisible.  For me, that’s where, in spite of everything, the enchantment of writing lies…I’m simply trying to make apparent what is very immediately present and at the same time invisible…I’d like to reveal something that’s too close for us to see, something right here, alongside us, but which we look through to something else…to define the proximity around us that orients the general field of our gaze and our knowledge…

So, for me, the role of writing is essentially one of distancing and of measuring distance.  To write is to position oneself in that distance that separates us from death and from what is dead…I’m in the distance between the speech of others and my own…In exercising my language, I’m measuring the difference with what we are not, and that’s why I said to you earlier that writing means losing one’s own face, one’s own existence.  I don’t write to give my existence the solidity of a monument.  I’m trying to absorb my own existence into the distance that separates it from death and, probably, by that same gesture, guides it toward death…

I’dd add that, in one sense, my head is empty when I begin to write, even though my mind is always directed toward a specific object.  Obviously, that means that, for me, writing is an exhausting activity, very difficult, filled with anxiety.  I’m always afraid of messing up; naturally, I mess up, I fail all the time.  This means that what encourages me to write isn’t so much the discovery or certainty of a certain relationship, of a certain truth, but rather the feeling I have of a certain kind of writing, a certain mode of operation of my writing, a certain style that will bring that distance into focus…

Foucault saisi par la révolution - Vacarme | Michel Foucault | Scoop.it

Cloud Fragment #3

On By NW FilbertIn being, Blogging, change, communication, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Experience, Language, Loss, memory, Photography, time, Traces, Uncertainty, Writing6 Comments

cloudswirl.gif

To swirl.  There.  He said it, stated intention, directly.  To be lost, languishing (anguish is in there), full of lose and seeking, squirming, rutting, snuffling about.  Scent search of what?  Or not what quite, but how, now?  The unknowable, uncertain, which lies beyond perhaps, inaccessible, indeterminate, resistant to decipher, discretion, or decode.  He plies.  Ruin of movement, beyond conceit and loosely bound, tearing terror of graspage.  An infinity of words, or if not, many disordered magnitudes more compossibly complex than he –wrecked in kind with troubles of time, reductions of selection.  What means, all knotted in already-known.  A scumble then, without, arms treading, legs a-flutter, cognition confused in the mass, mess, unaccommodated, arranged re-arranging, affective and effecting, assaying never fully, nor enough, insufficient temporals and scope, shortfall of finitude, unbecoming, irrealized, incomputable surround.  To swirl or swoon perhaps – intends eccentric excentricity, without with-in, within outside and othering.  Immersed, submerged, tumbling almost-struggle, almost-drift, thoroughfare and passaging, limning swaths of runnels, channels, margins.  Copiously coping, how would he go?  What are the  motions lesser than stir and more absorptive?  And what of the when?  Who now, where now, how when?  Confusion, then – confusion, swooning and swirl.  A wriggling receipt, some commingling transference transmitting, attention intending undoing, origins ever receding, irremediable in rot and excess, dismembered invention – begin – excise and evince, glide of erasure and uncover, indiscernible activity of process, waving particles, particular waves, currents and tropes, passively permeable patterning passageways [not that!] imperceptible part-i-cipatory breakage and shatter, dispersion deconstructing refusal.  He ruins, inevitably.  That stands – there.  Unworking integration every angle or approach, from inside, decay, a desiccate and undone doing.  Mismade by allowance, a scribbling palimpsest or correction – be cognized, be written, be spoken, transcribed – he wails into unruly, disruptive, erupting fluid floodings of voiding, of nothing.  Not afloat, asail, aswim.  Neither drowning nor submerged.  Nearly saturate with swallow and exhale, a lineament on empty, some faulty trace.

Unstillable

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Current Reading, existence, fragments, Language, meaning, Questions, Samuel Beckett, Semiotics, thinking, Writing7 Comments

scribbling

“Pangs of faint light and stirrings still.  Unformable graspings of the mind.  Unstillable”

– Samuel Beckett –

Let’s loiter about here a little, as if language were lakelike, locatable, alive enough to lollygag loose within.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps it is nearly always just-becoming.  Perhaps nearly all, nearly always, is thus: just-becoming – liminal lineaments languishing-then-livened, languishing-then-livened, “again” we might say, designating (de-term-ining) a balance to enlivened.  How so?  Why so?  By what author(ity)?

Unstillable.

“In the madhouse of skull and nowhere else” (– Samuel Beckett).  Is that so?

“Skin has no choice but to converse with the world…thin, ignorant borderland of skin…myself all trespass, misunderstanding, translating, translating…” (-Laurie Sheck).  Is that so?

If words were invented with sense.  To “make sense” between one and an ‘other.’ 

What if words ARE THAT?  Connective contours between.

I am inebriated, my willingness loosened to expression, though it might ruin me (like language) and I stare (Dostoevsky – ‘Myshkin’) “intently” into Mikhail Bakhtin’s face, his specific eye-gaze, and say:

“Is it the case that words are ‘meant,’ are ‘formed,’ are breathed, are…constructed, are…utilized, to be tissue woven between ‘me’…and ‘you’?”

Do we… speak, say, expire back and forth… to become?  To string and weave lines, flows, strands, threads, that might forge or invent co-respondence, texture, significations combining you and myself into WE?

But Bakhtin is dead, and cannot answer.  Mikhail Bakhtin does not have the capacity to co-respond.

…like Beckett, Blanchot, Plato, Montaigne, Pessoa, Pascal, Wallace or Euclid, Bulgakov, Heraclitus, or Celan (as with any and all dead!) he emits traces (tracings) with which I can consider, decipher, and interrogate in and within my ‘selves’ but not between…

What might this ‘mean’ – between anyone?  Nothing.

It can not, has no opportunity to, delineate or circumscribe, draft, figure or shape any relation.

Sign emitted, call evoked, death, and then text as silent partner.  Prognostic retrograde delineation.

Bankrupt, impassible, impossible, communique.

The decoding of words as communication, connection?  An imaginary.  A handling of terms.  Inventing, devising, originary.  With whom?  Where?  How?   Hint and vestige, remnant and sketch, scheme and fabrication, inkling and outline.

Unstillable. Unformable graspings of the mind.  Is that so?

If we’re limning the liminal now, let’s loosen the letters and slacken the sieves.  Lasso and lounge, scatter and scrape, together (to gather) – a scintillate sense – sporadic sparks, succulent scenarios – exist for enlivening language, whatever limited lust lies therein – if language is locatable and not merely modal mechanics?  A modicum of music then, some scrap of sonority, some lingual litmus ‘making sense.’  Whatever.  Possibility, potential, particible particulars…

“THE TEST IS COMPANY”

“If there may not be no more questions let there at least be no more answers”

– Samuel Beckett, Company –

“We must not die: kindred spirits will be found”

– Viktor Shklovsky –

 

Cloud Fragments #2

On By NW FilbertIn change, communication, Complexity, creative writing, desire, Experience, fragments, holidays, Language, Writing5 Comments

oceanwaves.gif

What the whispers, wreathing wraithwords, wisp-whooshing ways, weave-unweaving willful wreckage.  Watery-unwound wrapping-about while unwrapping wishful rending renderings.  Wronged construals in warped wrestlings – reachings, wrenchings – resiliently resisting.  Wranglage, wronguage, writ.

Remains for re(sign)ation.  Re-as(sign)ment.  Relinquishing rest or rectitude.  Repentant writing.  Riddled and recoiling, recombinantly removeable recklessness.  A raucous rancor irregular, irrational, and ever ill-advised in its deviant devising.

Devastating detour: devouring the decrepit, dissimulate, divisable devisor of description.  Descry the dilettante, the decayed decoding at diminish.

Wrest a return: remandering mayhem, maladaptive remainder.  Roping radicals round reason – irrational redescription in rascally remorse.  Mismade and mismanaged.  Wranglage, wronguage, writ.

-toward the New Year

Cloud Fragments 1

On By NW FilbertIn Complexity, Confusion, Experience, Experimenctes, fragments, Image, Language, nature, Perception, Traces, Writing2 Comments

cloudysky.gif

Within the lip and loom of limbo.  Limb lazy, almost unperturbed, but living still, slightly shaken, a subtle stir.

Difference scarcely scored, imperceptible is not worth mention.  A canny kind of collude.  There (might be) this, (might be) that – too hard to say, and who could do it?  Only one driven to be wrong, reductive, defining.  Only one agitated or alarmed by the way of things – that there were no way.

Indiscernibles.  Indeterminate.  Impossible to compute: is how it is.  These signs erase, and we are there.  As if in front with, as if of face and gaze.  As if event.  As if participant and become.  As if no one might tell apart.

Why tell apart?

Wrangled together in wrestle, why choose?  If breath must mingle to say, why delegate, select?  Cloud moves over, under and through, toward, into, and away – to no one’s noticeable chagrin.  Why we?

Tender spots trace gentle rain, in river, barrel, lake, exempt of rage or reason.  Only a sprinkle, a feed and possible weal, so glance and touch, brush and care, a slightly stumble, a cell’s conceive.

Misremembered, but no mind, flavor, sight, the wind through trees.  Nothing is without.  Nothing alone, should it perchance to be.  Mysterious, illogical motive of undoing.  Prepositional violence.  Pre-positions, a tearing apart.

Muscle, scent, and fur.  The various forms of water – cloud, drizzle, flow.  Flesh with flesh and whispered angles.  Breath with sound and ear.  A thought.

Inseparability and subterfuge.  Had never been, may not be, unstill it is…the way….questionally unquestioned, sifting in drift, conjunctions of convergence, some impossible begin.

Wink of I

On By NW FilbertIn change, communication, Complexity, Confusion, Experimenctes, family, friendship, Writing6 Comments

I close one eye as a hint or signal.  Almost-gesture of complicity, alliance.  Miniscule nod of knowingness.  Nearly clandestine.  We are accomplice.

Subtlety.  In the colors of sunsets are moments.  Light in trees, precipitation, breeze and wind.  Occasions, occurrences.  A brush, a jolt, a catch, or slip.  Just there, just then, just whom.

Sum of an enormous fund of letters, sounds, marks, and inferences composing a confused and compossible khora of language actuated haphazardly in discourse, and conversation, a dated letter, an exclamation or response… one might say the signsea winks or glimmers.  A squinch or sparkle  of potential affinities and conflicts, affiliations and consorts.  Then gone.  A breath.  A…

Glance.  A glimpse shuttered quickly, asymmetrically.  What does it mean?  Something.  Something of nothing.  Like accident, collision, like misreckoning, mistake.  Like harmony, accord, or intercourse.

“in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, as a trumpet sound… the dead shall be raised, and we shall be changed”…(I Cor 15:52, changed).

Happenings, emergence, inceptions, conceptions, decisions, decease…moments, blinks, glints, such tiny gestures…

…and all shall be changed.

Picture, if you can, if you will, a spill of sonority, funneled through lung, through throat, whirling the mouth cavity, battened by teeth, and leaving the lips as a word… now whispering air as  smoky exhalation… mingling and woven in the voice of another… such breaths, these terms, these inscriptions… how they collide and collude, coalesce and caress, commingle and pass on…

Moments, instants, mishaps or miracles…and all shall be changed…or so it is written, supposed, and declared…

In the Wink of an I, there is difference.

for Jean Lee

Haunted Man: I am: the possession

On By NW FilbertIn Confusion, creative writing, Experimenctes, fragments, identity, Language, Other, Perception, Semiotics, Writing6 Comments

“quiet field without possession”

Laurie Sheck, Captivity

wavewords

I am an ocean of signs.  Of a womby surround – undulate, viscous, discombobulate, obscure.  Tremulous quarks of murky markings and inference, connotative particles, confused, ill-defined, and indifferent.  Instigative convolutions, a potentia of concatenation and combine, cations and anions, dispersive attract.

Filled with words.  Prescriptive, disruptive, chaotic, coherent.  A turbulence transposing subjects, predicatively morphing, an aqueous slurrage of verb, vim and weave.  Compositive, foreign, constitutive terms.  Not-I.  Of Other.  As shapes and colors, sounds, concepts, any all perceived – no idgit of me, all permeable outside – Otherness, environ, cocoon – borrowed, received (or rejected?), an elusive collude.

Signifiers swarm me.  Inherited meanings, genetic loom of semiotic loops and swirls.  Who begins?  No ex nihilo.  All arrange, revise, adapt.  We’re composed.  I of an ocean of signs.  Language and impulses, instincts and codes.  Ellipses and notions imposed.  Undifferentiate, senseless, stirred by experience – a cacophonous chorus of bones to my suture.

Oral, aural, textured and gestured, I swim and I sink, flux in the float.  Fragments and fractures, compounds and bonds, links and erasures.  Malformations.  Dis-ease.  Some viral, some blocked, unusable and ill-conceived, undone, or aborted.  Indisposition. Swim on, slurry substance, amalgam of shreds, resist and desist, copy and swallow.  I choke.  I chortle.  What makes “mine”?  Just a word, (yet another), from whence and from where we don’t know, but not “us” (neither that, nor this keystroke, this breathy design, dasein, without ownmost).  Even a name is built upon countless.  Other.

Epi-, meta-, arche-, unknown and unknowing, interpreted through mediated mattery fracas, encompassing commotion, tempestuous din, innately ordained.  But not-I, freak iota, insignificant smallest, author of none.  No one.  No thing.  No not-I.

Quavery, wavering, components of signs, my birth-sea and umwelt, disjoiner and fabricate mush.

This become, in this swelter, this wrap and unravel.  Efface and inveigle a ubiquitous unique.  I am drowning, a seaway of signs.

A Possible Paradox for Ida

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, Experience, Language, Logic, mathematics, meaning, paradox, Paul Valery, Writing4 Comments

“To tell the truth” always requires a certain amount of fabrication!  Lying is natural, comes of itself”

-Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste-

Enough is known to know I will not know it.  Know what?, I am able to ask.  What I don’t know.  Enough is known to know that.

That’s leaving aside the forgetting and confusion.  The shaky content of what I barely, and rarely, know (retain or recall) of what supposedly I “know” already.  Ever slipping, fragmenting, recombining, sieving in and out of my “experience.”  All mostly a matter of hearsay, of reading and listening, of the saying-so of others, of instruction, of my own perception and interpretive intrigue.  Nothing known for certain, only “known” in certain ways, at certain times, simply operable and opportunistic, happenstance conflagrations, bastardized convergences.  My “knowledge.”

On occasion, per occasion, one might say I “know” something.  I must “know” to utilize paper and pen, a share in the language to be scribbling these terms, an awareness of others who might recognize them – words and marks to read and write, perhaps to say…

…on occasion.

Per occasion, it sometimes seems to function – these words, these sounds, these marks and referents, inventions – at times, in places… per occasion.

Enough to know there is not much known, and that, occasionally.

In many situations even what is written above would be to no effect.  Unknown or unknowable, misunderstood and mis-taken, discombobulating.

On occasion I have thought that I was coming to know.  A thing or two.  (“When the mind has put a thing through a certain number of transformations, it can only let go of it.  A ‘thing’ is that which can undergo such treatments without becoming unrecognizable.” – Paul Valery).  Some equation, expression, a certain order of words or section of world, apparent communicable system or game, even familiarity with so-signified “facts.”

Enough to know I did not know what I thought I knew.  Per occasion.

Contradiction.  Non-transference.  Con-fusion.  My “knowing” as some idiosyncratic amalgam of language and what is called “experience,” or moving about and within an environment, participant, (of which language constitutes such large part – whether gestures, ideas, dialect, signs or names – yet apparently also extending beyond and outside of language – the ‘unsayable’ – or so it is said – “We can do something to what does not exist: we can name it” – Valery), all of which, when tested by or combined with further, other, subsequent and/or prior language + experience… dissolves into significant doubt and is put into question (experience), per occasion.

In other words, what appears to be “knowledge” is a continuous process of revision, correction, and extension, according to occasions or events.

An example: a “fact” is announced: “2+2=4.”  Ocean & mountains + Nathan & raft = 4.  Ida & Oliver + Dad & home = 4.  A snake & a number + a planet & drought = 4.  A dead horse & winter storm + a beard & a fire = 4.  Each designation unequal.  Two persons, two environments, two numbers, two perspectives, two experiences (and so on…) 4 wildly differing worlds (experiences, occasions).  Any pair of designated elements + any pair of anything else = factually four diverse realities.  Experience and language are uncountable, as every portion abstracted to “count” or “measure” is untrue.  The facts are counterfactual.  It is said that in some realm or practice designations may be calculated as torn from experiences and occasions and language – as abstract systems.  But in what “realms?”  What realms do not arise in messy, fuzzy, occasional experience?  In fact, there are no accounts, records, calculations, or reports – all such verbs and activities necessitating “occasions” and/or “experiencing” – to be.

It tempts me to say “nothing is known” (for certain) but that reads a lot like a statement of knowledge.

Dear daughter of paradoxes: is this a paradox?  “If I have certain knowledge it is the knowledge that I know nothing for certain”?  or, “It is certain that knowledge is uncertain”?

I am not sure.

“That’s it, weave, weave” – Samuel Beckett

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, human, Language, meaning, Perception, Reality, Samuel Beckett, Writing6 Comments

Image result for hofstadter strange loop

“THAT’S IT, WEAVE, WEAVE”

Samuel Beckett

What she set out to do, she did not achieve.  Intention and realization went un-joined.

Which in no wise implies that beauty was lacking.  Or interest.  There were still trees, efforts, water running here and there, struggles, many other animals, emotions, scenes.  Nothing, really, was lost in failure.  But what could be?  Nothing that might potentially eventuate (from action, intention, emotion, or hope) is ever known, therefore where could failure lie?

Ice is its own phenomenon and occurrence, regardless.  Such strange wet-dry thing, fluid and solid becoming-unbecoming.  The sound of a voice – perhaps of an “inside” impossible without “outside.”  Many “things” are in-between.  Ever on the way to something, ever proceeding from.

He found it all incalculable, without appropriate measure.  Which was not what she intended, not what she set out to do.  Yet could not be called a failure.  For who or what might measure that?  What thermometer, rod, or calculating machine might tally such “results”?  In relation to what when where?  And how might “results” be defined?

The term for an idea or concept named “beauty” being interesting in itself.  Apparently something pertaining only to them (these so-called “human subjects”).

She intended to express, or so it seemed to him.  Set out to communicate an experience with her surround,  a something she was hoping to say, to give voice to.  This experience was such that she perceived it as something transpiring for her in such fashion as to not be readily apparent to others, nor easily translatable (even observable) to those arrayed around about her – both those with whom she valued attachment and reciprocal relations, and any “others” – in this case whom (a human kind of self-referencing versus what or how) – might be capable of demonstrating care, comprehension, or attention to what (or how) she was “experiencing” (i.e. having a felt-living-sense with and within her environment).

He (perhaps the proposed recipient of her attempt of expression) found all of it incalculable, and without appropriate measure.  He, in his own idio-specific way (or relation) to whatever (whomever, however he considered his ‘surround’) was entrenched in his own meticulous (incalculable and immeasurable – at present time of writing – by ‘science’ or current ‘arts of knowing’) particularities of being-with / affecting / effecting / participating in his perceived environment [what, as a sort of short-hand, might be termed his Umwelt (look it up!)]: what happens to matter for him.

Some have called it ‘sense-making’; others’ ‘making-sense.’  Many (in some strange-impossibly proposed ‘objectivity’ – a falsified, imaginary distancing involving a blind delusion of “as if” they were NOT in fact WHAT they are – a kind of ‘sense-making-sense’ (in two senses of the word “sense”)): in other (no…in MORE) words: an ‘human’ account-possibility of its proceptive, perceptive, immersive and recursive experience WITHIN its surround AS IF it were not.  I.e., fiction, or fantasy.  So far as he or she have been able to uncover – NO ACCOUNTS of human experiencings have been proposed, recorded, or proffered by other-than-human ‘beings’ that any human has been able to perceive, understand, or translate…therefore there are no ‘objective’ (distanced other) reliable sources for measuring, calculating, analyzing, reporting on, under-standing or evaluating the experiences of the human ‘he’ and ‘she.’  At present THERE IS NO OTHER with which this kind (‘human’) might informatively and effectively communicate, learn, argue, or confer…only itself.

[Which may be the situation of all cells, plants, animals, stars, etc…but humans can’t know…being all too human, after all].

None of this was her intent.  No content recorded concerns what she set out to do.  But this in no wise indicates MIS-take, for there is no future in advance which one might con-fuse, err, or malfunction toward.  The next simply is, just like any number of things before.  All options extremely limited according to case, kind, and percipient.

In the case of this writing – ‘human’ (so-self-called) KIND, as PERCEIVED and PROCESSED by itself only – with (thusfar) no other constituent or contributor except as designated and defined by its own self-kind-case.

The ‘human’ has NOWHERE to turn for what it considers ‘knowledge’ (he thinks) excepting NOW HERE and AS ITSELF (he thinks) while perceiving in ways it already has experienced to be variegated, faulty, and vague.

(Perhaps all living things) he thinks (but certainly all human-kind) affords no outside source or viewing, perception, communication, expression, or understanding/interpretation of itself.  It only confers with itself and its surrounding (as experienced according to itself and slight variations of itself over time).  No human could be considered “reliable” – if re-liable were intended to re-fer to “reality” – taken to signify THE CASE OR STATE OF THINGS beneath, before, pertaining to, and beyond THE HUMAN BEING AS IT EXPERIENCES ITSELF ‘to be,’ he thinks.

“A pointless matter,” he vocalizes in response to her ‘expression’ and ‘intention.’  “Even among our own kind, sort, and communicable compatriots – we ‘humans’ as we call ourselves,” he states, “’I’ cannot know whether or what you’re referring to, and whether or what of it corresponds to my own ‘human’ experiencing (as we say and apparently agree, confer).”

She cries a little.  Wishes something.  Or so it seems to him, in his NOW HERE.  She intended other-wise.  Goes quiet (from a ‘human’ – so-self-called, ‘perspective’).

It is quiet.  Perhaps from many perspectives.  ‘Human’ science (arts of knowing) claim that snakes (so-humanly-called) can’t ‘hear,’ nor the clocks humans have made, nor cats, nor dogs, days nor plants, nor wood, nor dirt – whatever else ‘humans’ are able to notice and create or differentiate in any given perceptive scenario.

Between like kinds, this is NOT what she set out to do, nor intended…and only the ‘humans’ (“so far as we know,” he says) might even be capable of de-signifying, de-coding, com-prehending (perceiving-together) these sounds, marks, signals, gestures, movements, motions between them.

And here you (perhaps) are … reading (de-coding, de-signifying, transposing, translating) … “IT” (according to your NOW HERE).

What she set out to do she did not achieve, nor he.  But of course the proposed possible, capable, or potential of ‘setting out to’ is not known… so WHO knows?

The intention and realization have not joined… or have they?  Who or what might measure (and when and how) calculate, evaluate, or demonstrate that?  “They” seem left / bereft purely to themselves.  If a lion could speak, apparently we would not be able to understand it.

And so ‘he’ and ‘she’ make sounds, motions, and varieties of contact (according to ‘human’ perceivings) on a ‘porch,’ in a ‘house,’ through various ‘rooms,’ ‘spaces,’ ‘surfaces,’ and so on.  Birds chirp (according to the ‘hearing’ of ‘humans’), clouds drift, squirrels chitter, grass wavers, and so on all the same (according to ‘human’ sense-making-sense)… ‘he’ sets out, intends, struggles, interacts, and feels with ‘his’ surround (NOW HERE), as does ‘she’… neither achieving their ‘goals,’ neither controlling nor creating any realizations they intend – albeit with NO knowledge of what they might actually be able to evince or conjure – all having not yet occurred.

It would appear (to the ‘humans’) that many many ‘things’ (stars, genes, planets, soil, weather, corporations, arachnids, societies, viruses, equations, materials, activities, and so on and so on…) just carry on their various “natural” (according to their kind) ways regardless, in spite of, in ANY case, in accord with… with no ‘concern’ for ‘hers’ or ‘his’ intentions or settings-forth or out to do.

And so it goes.  And so it goes… on… apparently.

Still, what she set out to do she did not achieve…whatever that may have been.

see also:

Immediacy and the Impossible Poetic by Robert Lumsden

notes

On By NW FilbertIn absence, awareness, depression, desire, Experience, fragments, grief, Journal, loneliness, Loss, meaning, Questions, Writing3 Comments

Why not call it magic, this unsettling alloy of grief and anger we experience when shunted by anxiety, disappointment, depression, or loss?

We cannot deny that we crave!  That we are struck through – bolted with fervent desire (all that which we experience as, well, unsettlingly – disturbingly – vital, ALIVE, active, possessive, in us) – when we are crushed, smushed, squelched, or helpless, hopeless, dismayed – how else could we be?

Without the vital, fierce passions – the damage is to no effect/affect.  Depression must press against something.  Must be pressing something down.

“Am I at the right house?” the internet-technology-installer asked from my gate.

“How can I know?” I responded, “it would depend on the future.”

He checked the numbers and moved away.

Now how will we ever know?

Isn’t this what every human encounter re/presents?

So de-pression presses something down in us.  Anxiety stirs.  Sorrow re-cognizes meanings.  No negative without its positive charge.  To be noticeable.  And what is it that is noticeable?  (able-to-be-noticed)?  ONLY DIFFERENCE.  Only time and space and whatever it is those veil, uncover, hide, or displace.

O-ppressed, DE-pressed, what are these SU-ppressing?  Accentuating?  Calling to attention, to activity, awareness, task?

Grief, loss, de-tachment and longing: what do these expose in order to occur? 

Is anything ever lost?

She passes by with a friendly, perhaps even loving and happy wave.  What reality is evoked in the pain of the passed-by, passed-over, un-preferred?  What does it render actually present?

Is it possible that in the “missing” nothing is lost?  Some present is heightened?  Something even added to the present?

In losing a struggle don’t we gain what the effort was for?  Clearly?

Does surrender underscore the sub-ject, the value, the relational ob-ject-ive given over?  Adding acknowledging import?

Difference demonstrates value.  Matter(s).  Sign-if-i-can-ce.  Without difference nothing would know.  Indistinguishable = pure repetition.  (Doesn’t matter).

Passed-over, passed-by, passed-on.  De-pressed, su-ppressed, o-ppressed.  Lost, lossed, re-moved, de-tached, re-apportioned.  ALL LOSS ACCENTUATES HAVE.  ALL DIS-POSSESSION EXPOSES POSSESS.

Difference de-scribes=in-scribes OURSELVES.  What we are constructed from, contain, proffer, offer, obsess, possess, ARE.  What we ARE (have and do).

Our com-position, con-stitution, con-struction are most clearly expressed in difference, ex-posure, de-struction, de-pression, o-ppression, loss.

In de-composition, we know and learn what composes us.

The question beggars: what have we to lose?  What can we lose that in losing its learning is not gained?  What have we to lose?  And how do we know without losing?