Tag: Life

Passing Thoughts

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces, Writing5 Comments

Passing Thoughts

“People don’t always understand what they see…it’s always better with a few verses”

-Henri Rousseau-

“I don’t understand it.  The injustice of it, the random, unpatternable thing life is, feels like guilt, at first, and then matures (thought the verb is obscene in the context) into sorrow.”

-Larry Levis-

            I often feel something that must be near sorrow when I pretend for a moment that I am able to reflect or observe my own life.

Usually this occurs a few minutes after everyone that inhabits the home in which I live have tottered off to their beds or their dreams or wherever it is that they go when they’re alone.  I pour myself a cup of coffee, take on cigarette out of its case, and swing gently on the porch in the night’s dark.

At first, I simply listen.  For the trees, the breeze, my breath.  Then I let my eyes  gaze.  Neither here nor there but some middle-distance that never asks to focus.  Three or four puffs in, two or three sips of day-old reheated coffee, and I begin to feel.  My body reports its day.  How long it has been awake, what muscles have been used, what nutrients processed (or wasted).  I start to find emotions.  Perhaps lodged in the elbows or neck, gut or temples or knees.  Places they sneak off to in the day’s demands.  I gain what feels like a sense of things.  A “this is what you’ve enjoyed, endured, has transpired in your waking.”

And I breathe.  The smoke, exhaling, tells me so.  And the knowing the days that remain are smaller.  And that the days that compose me stretch out.  And I wonder.  “I don’t understand it.”  It baffles me so.

I have the impression throughout my aging frame, that so many places, engagements, and events that require all of me should not feel so dangerous, such threatening.  That the places we spill for one another, on one another – where we come forth – why do we fear so deeply? and try so hard? – why don’t they give rise to elation rather than wound?

I see moments, occasions, and encounters that have scared me to my silent howls – but from here, now, look like people in love giving themselves or trying to – declaring, expressing, vulnerably opening.  Why the fullness of human persons should overwhelm and frighten us so, when we are also one of them – why is this?

Why do I not feel I can hold my own in another’s anger or grief, sorrow or fear?  What is so uncomfortable about difficulty and complexity and unknowns?

The haunting guilt of finitude, of insufficiency, eventually levels out toward a universe of conundrum peopled with questions, and a kind of sorrow and grace seeps in.

By now my smoke has gone out, the coffee has cooled, and it is high time I join my spouse in our final accord.  The waves rise, they wash out.  They rise again.  There is a passing, and some passage, it is ephemeral and sure, and it goes on.

All these passing thoughts, and days.

I don’t understand what I see, but it’s usually better with a few verses…

“I have the suspicion that the meaning of things

will never be sorted out”

-Denis Johnson-

 

(click image for musical accompaniment to the text:

“Broken” by S. Carey)

(it’s worth listening to even if not reading all the text)

The Bewildered Bewildering (attempts toward clear thinking)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

Searching for truth(s)

As one attempts to come nearer to one’s existence as a human – its systems, structures and functions – from mental imaginative realms down to cellular genetic levels – the complexity and confluences involved can be bewildering.

Are bewildering.

It is easy to get one’s self “lost” as a human being.  On literally billions of levels we participate in constant (and I mean unceasing) input and output of information, movement, form, energy and so on.  It’s more than we can individually handle.  Yet we are made to.

In other words, it is we as individual humans – our bodies, our minds and experiences – doing the bewildering we find bewildering.  Perhaps this is my first noble truth: consciousness means being aware of and bewildered by our bewilderment.

How to proceed?  There are a bewildering amount of possibilities and processes for us bewildered humans to bewilder our way into.  We can study, forge purposeful relationships, work, play, think, dream, parent, fight or flee our bewilderment.  Opened up, we do not know the options or capabilities, the extent our bewilderment can reach.

Everything is strange.  If this were my second noble suggestion, it would imply that with each moment of our existence we are encountering the unknown.  We recognize our existence by dissimilarity, non-identity, difference.  This makes all things new.  We literally have never been where we are in space, time or living at any instant, before.  We do not re-live, we are ever living-into.  The contents of the past can become part of our structuring and processing, but nothing repeats, everything “enters.”  Each no-time now is brand new experience of unknown reality, experienced, imagined, interpreted, perceived and felt by us in incalculable ways through a vortex of communications and processes we have very little control over.

We, the producing products.  Perhaps this is noble human notation number 3.  What happens in our bewilderment of presentness is that our individuality opened out ubiquitously functions to produce experiences which are products of our experiencing.  In other words we are unceasing experimentors producing experiences as our products.  It all applies; it all exports.  There are no deletions, erasures or extractions – only new experiences, new dissimilar moments of ongoing processing.

There is no exit from this process.  Form 4: NO EXIT.  Imagined observation, fabricated explanation, hypothetical objectivity, invented theories, meanings, interpretations of sense – none of these removes us from our experiencing or transfers us to any other point-of-view from our individual field.  Bewildering in our bewildering surround.  Semblances, “insights,” knowledge and so on are just pieces of the ongoing differentiation in bewilderment.  How we exist, perhaps not the ant or paramecium or tree cell.  But, then again, perhaps so!

If a lion spoke we wouldn’t understand them, Wittgenstein proffered.  Another way of saying we’re us, bewildered and bewildering beasts, forging into the unknown.  Our access limiting in its unlimitedness (i.e. finitude); systematically mind-blowing and ecstatically depressing in an awe-full or awe-some(?) way.

Be human.  Be glad for it.  Be wilder.

N Filbert 2012

Fathers Voices

On By NW FilbertIn Poetry, Traces, Writing4 Comments

With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach

By William Stafford

 

We would climb the highest dune,

from there to gaze and come down:

the ocean was performing;

we contributed our climb.

 

Waves leapfrogged and came

straight out of the storm.

What should our gaze mean?

Kit waited for me to decide.

 

Standing on such a hill,

what would you tell your child?

That was an absolute vista.

Those waves raced far, and cold.

 

“How far could you swim, Daddy,

in such a storm?”

“As far as was needed,” I said,

and as I talked, I swam.

 

see also, Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares

 

 

 

The Howl and The Whisper

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Poetry, Writing1 Comment

Howling is a buried feat

epigenetic

leaking everywhere

Howling is done with the body

in terror

 a raging fear

imagine the reddened and purpling frame

a six-month-old baby left

naked on a hardwood floor

arching back

jerking tremors

piercing wail

flailing, throttling, choking at air

it will not stop

it is vulnerable.

Say the father rushes it

say he scoops it into his arms

whispers and cradles

The infant fits in the fathers’ large hands

held close to his cheek

ear-brushed lips

the father coos

infant trembling revolts

feeling its death

the father rocks it gently

kisses its skin

sniffing the child

while the infant howls.

He says “leave it to me.  Everything will be alright”

on repeat

says “I know we are vulnerable”

as the shuddering

comes to cease.

Let the infant howl

raise it up

bring it near

hold it close

that is all.

I, an infant’s father.

note:

I have had many incidents of late in which I howl at the dreaded prospect of losing my wife (to others, to distance, to death, to herself).  These have come out slantwise:  as anger or jealousy, criticism and challenge.  It is physiological.

A therapist recently suggested some alternate meanings.  When my body convulses in paranoia and terror, what might its messaging be?  Might it be saying that something or someone is terribly important to me, as significant as my own life and that I might well feel utterly helpless at that vulnerability?  He suggested that my body is indeed feeling real-life threat…and that the left side of my brain whooshes in hoping to rescue (“SuperMeaningMan”) to concoct a story to match, to account for the tremors and heartbeat and anxious breaths.  Things like: “I must not be good enough for her.  She must be cheating.  See how she dresses?  See how she is tired when she looks at me?  See how she keeps leaving the house?” and so on, or any number of scenarios…

When in possible fact I’m a flailing infant desperate for assurance and comfort, for a tender voice near.  Which made a world of sense.

He said:  supply it.

This is part of that work.

N Filbert

ALL MIXED UP

Mark Kozelek

Borrowed, but WOW! BAM! (and I’ll regale you no more!)…

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

“‘The omniscient observer,’ Dala said continuing for them out of another day, ‘reads from the first word to the last with great care for the spaces between them so they are unframed by enthusiasts or detractors”

-Louis Zukovsky, from Little“

MAY WE ALL READ THIS WAY!

New Arrivals…New Invaluables

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Photography, Poetry, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

“meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we’d become from the language toxin…

The know-it-alls are always the last to know.  Everyone’s a diagnostician, and everyone’s wrong…”

-Ben Marcus-

“As is usual with me I would not go on with the rest of the story and come back to the difficult sentence later.  With others it may be different – but when I am that far in a work the story must exist in each word or I cannot go on…”

-Louis Zukofsky-

-Lukas Felzmann-

I know….there’s a LOT of envy fuming out of you readers eyes!

(use your local library!)

This is Water

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

I found myself in a fairly uncommon (for me) setting this morning, my son was performing a Double Concerto of Bach‘s at a Methodist Church.  I happened to be there (reading Larry Levis) on “graduation Sunday,” so the message/sermon/interpretation of texts was geared toward the cultivation of wisdom.  As I listened to the suggestions/advice of a “spiritual authority” figure, to our young/privileged/promising…I was struck again by my personal favorite commencement address I’ve ever come across/heard/read and thought given the Spring of things perhaps it was time to push it out toward eyes and ears wherever I could, again.

Here it is…by a personal hero David Foster Wallace… (and therefore in his honor as well)

THIS IS WATER

The following stories…

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

Lifewordthread

“Life evolves in a thread of knots that get more and more tangled.

The narrative segments are intentionally dislocated and rearranged,

so the knots become the characters, as it were.”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

            The impression like a manual typewriter’s arm – thunk! – left in either hemisphere… (they say)

begins knotting and tangling

as additional – thwap! – embossings are left.

“Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous”

-George Oppen-

 

The following story.

 

Not that the answers were handled judiciously (judgmentally?) or even weighed or considered.

No answers given to evaluate or direct…

The question(s) already condemned.

Thwak!

“Shouldn’t be –“  “Too young – “ “Can’t handle – “

“STOP ASKING!!”

-(Pastor. Parent. Teacher. Friend.)-

But not books, not texts, not words…

…these welcomed them…

…welcomed me…

Words seem to love being dislocated and rearranged and then marked into question.

In fact, for the reader, each word of a sentence or phrase, exposed on a page, seems to wonder itself!

As if language were a query.  Inquiry.

Something to begin with.

 

The following story.

Aged 12.

“Your reasoning’s wrong” (some voice, any voice, whap!, it stuck)

Awry.  Twisted.  Disfigured.  Maimed.

“That’s not the right question…ought not be questioned at all…!”

“Thus saith the Lord (a.k.a. the “Word”)

(to which I added my mark – “?” :

– is it the Word?  What Word? and Whose? let alone How?

and ever the too many “Whys?”

(those have quieted now)

But I devoted myself to fashioning questions,

so that even descriptions or

statements of fact…question themselves

as if essential, inherent to this medium,

of its nature

Smack! –

?

Out of the Cave

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing2 Comments

I really don’t know what these things are I’ve been writing (“Ideas of Home”, this one…).  Seem to be open ramblings.  I apologize if they waste time for any readers, I think I’m trying to open up channels inside of me with less self-conscious shaping and imposition of some pre-formed concepts of style, order, characterization, plot, even poesy.  Opening veins, trying to allow swollen connections between pockets of my body and brain that otherwise occur only in dreams or infrequently heightened states.  Not sure what’s going on, just writing.

 

In the Depression, A Cavern

 

The outlook that prides its common sense (for those who bear it)

“I cannot comprehend our attachments to beings”

-E.M. Cioran-

Airtight logic.  Closed circle of belief.

The end is doom and oblivion, i.e. “end.”

Therefore, “I cannot comprehend attachment” –

to things?  Well, perhaps, for personal endurance, a comfort while still understanding their nature (“truth”: “things fall apart, the center cannot hold”)

that all become, belong to silence (no total comprehension, understanding) all is constant change, therefore ephemeral, ridiculous to trust or develop dependence – everything changes, and then you die…

that, well that does not seem to alter much.  Perhaps it wavers.

As all things wobble and waver, are insecure, uncertain.

Well, but maybe not “ends” and “loss” – almost certain, almost absolutely so,

but then not everything has happened, as far as we know.

Hold on to joy’s illusions – real experiences – and why not?

Embrace.

Let go.

You better let go

or it will be taken, suffocated, crushed.

Smile, but don’t forget to cry, there are many truths.

And much matter(s) to perceive (momentarily)

But then there’s that: the individuality of perception

and the fact that that capacity will cease.

Heightened moments, erasing duration,

fictions of time and space.

Self and other.

World.