Tag: Life

To Advance

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing25 Comments

This week’s feeblish attempt at Friday Fictioneers 100-word stories…

It was never difficult to see the way, it’s the getting there that problems.  The paths unique to our movements.  We tend to think it’s the setting out – that getting going  presents the obstacle – but we’re always going somewhere.  The millions of streets and alleys, those are what throw us, what keep us from the end.  How do we know, in constant diversion?  Oh I see a way, but not the destination.  I’ll move as I see fit.  As will you.

Consider, then choose.  But always keep moving.  There’s no other way.  Keep your eye on the opening.

N Filbert 2012

Help along the way

On By NW FilbertIn Traces2 Comments

Lifecycling Parenthood

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

For those of us with children.

How different the meaning of “precious.”  Also “alive.”  What the self rearranges.

There was a time.

In the beginning, the excitement of puppies.  That generosity.  The concept of dependence revised.

A dawning recognition involving hope and helplessness – their power.  Sheer organism.  Complexity.  Alive, mobile, emerging.  What wears away, gets broken.  What heals, what hardens.  Your part in it.

The changing nature of survival, and terms like “health,” “okay,” and “wellness.”

An awareness of trajectories: expansion versus maintenance, collage versus carve, assembling as opposed to mending.  The children, the parent.

What persons are.  Attachments.  Difference.  Freedom.  Control.

The blowing snow left in their absence.  The ways they vanish, into themselves, their people, cracks in the world, airstreams and oceans.

How control rarely changes hands, nearly always remains invisible, what no one grasps.

The erratics of growth, the scale of unexpected development, of motives, of attention.

Intention and the noise inherent in communication.  The stage of sighs – their nuances.

We age.  Our eyes grow joy and sorrow, and both look like pride coupled to grief.

Randomness of adulthood.  Vagaries of time and consequence.  Learning curves like tangled thread.

Inevitable dismissal.

N Filbert 2012

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

“As usual, nothing superfluous”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings9 Comments

SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

AS USUAL, NOTHING SUPERFLUOUS (a document)

Approximately

On By NW FilbertIn JournallingsLeave a comment

my particular wind of has been active

approximately 374,400 hours; 22,464,000 minutes, 1,274,840,000 seconds…42 years & 9 months

hmmmm

Another Turn around the sun

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings2 Comments

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-

 

The Graces

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces9 Comments

as in “unexpected blessing,” or surprising gifts.

Words that Flow like Water

has nominated me for another Lovely Blog award!

Surprising, I suspect, because I oft don’t find my own voice “lovely.”

I am very thankful some find it so, or something about the overall content here.

THANK YOU!

(rules of the game attached to the logo)

1.  My real name is not Nathaniel.

2.  My favorite authors/artists are embedded in my flesh.

3.  I am pursuing a vocation in Information Sciences.

4.  I am drawn to large white rectangles.

5.  I don’t believe in “spiritual.”

6.  I enjoy laughter.

7.  I deeply desire to travel in Russia, Nepal and Portugal.

For the nominees I’d like to pass the award along to (bon chance!) I will post the list that proved exorbitantly long for the rules last week, as follows:

in the library with a lead pipe

Words that Flow Like Water
The Language we Speak

art unraveling
Appropriately Frayed
Ute Schatzmuller
Madison Woods (for keeping us all busy and honest)

A Philosopher’s Take
Careful for Isa 
The Artsy Forager
Writing with Water
Anton Jarrod
Photography of Nia
and, of course, my beloved (even if time doesn’t allow, I read whatever arrives :))
Life in Relation to Art

simplified structure of entailment (Gordon Pask)

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!