Tag: Life
I, for Instants, inevitable infinity
Attempts at Auto-bio-graphy, or, self-life-writing, or, the inevitably ineffable
longitude
lassitude
aberrations of pain
with twisting serpents
origin: absence
defined by failure and loss
the inevitably ineffable
so say it
I do not love myself
nor find a self to love
and it’s nobody’s fault
but mine
(who?)
a descent of crows
inevitable,
ineffable,
undone
and scoring marks
into a void
of absence
and solitude
without a solo
no validation
no remorse
an abyss of ontology
and chaos of course
vocation
fashioning masks
of contexts
and stories
aberrations
of hypotheses
blind, deaf
and dumb
insurmountable
point
Borges’ Aleph
all,
if
uncertain
promise
trial and error
errantly
possible
within, without
and unlikely
unless
I do not love myself
and find no self to love
and it’s nobody’s fault
but mine
(whose?)
unless
undone
inevitably
ineffable
I say
Being Ourselves – an active ontology
BEING OURSELVES
an active ontology
To be, so they tell me, at least mostly fluid. How to be that, too, in the other kind of way? Beyond “fact”?
Water (or blood), being good for that, because it can be inside and outside at once, leaving and filling a vessel. That is, it can be spilling out while going in.
As if ‘the other kind of way’ were metaphor. But it’s unlike. In fact, for us, it’s exactly the same, just different.
Therefore, rigid as I might “seem,” this is not actual-factual, I am mostly liminal.
Which could (factually) explain the constancy of change, or, how we identify effects of wind, e.g. fluctuation; i.e. the rippling of emotions or mood.
My faith in these “facts” alters, like my beliefs about most everything else, including my self.
That would be “natural” then, if by “natural” we meant “according to widely accepted notions of facts.” (For example.)
Be that as it may, I’ve heard talk about a collusion between professed “facts” and perpetually mystifying “reality” as some instance of joinder (called, perhaps “knowledge”? or “wisdom”? – an alignment of facts with reality – a “truth”?). What some might describe “accord” or “harmony”? A sort of “peace.” Akin to the “angle of repose”?
Would that be being in multiple ways? At once, of course.
To synthesize: the purveyors of fact inform me that I am mostly fluid (even as my knee pops when I rise, and I’ve a hard time rotating my neck). If, in fact, I am fluid (mostly) I am asking how it is that I am being fluid in another way (from another perspective, i.e. do humans multiply being?).
A viscous question.
“And how is the riddle of thinking to be solved? – Like that of flame?”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
In other words.
Find a liquid view. For instance – rolling in a bathtub or sharktank in heavy rain. Feel water, see through watery eyes, taste saliva, breathe liquid in (mostly). What else do you think you are? Grab a bone, a lock of hair and some of your own flesh. Hold. If you’ve a mind or soul, thoughts or theories – liquefy them, put them through a juicer until they’re at least 70% fluid – pour them in.
What does he mean “the mind is the great slayer of the real” (Benjamin Lee Whorf)?
Or the poet – “there is nothing in life except what one thinks of it”… and “I am what is around me” (Wallace Stevens)?
So, mostly fluid, with watery eyes, drenched or submerged – logically, like a porpoise or whale – we would be bringing “fact” and our “reality” to a closer accord in the “actual.” 60-80% fluid inside, 60-80% immersed outside, working our imaginations and thoughts, self-perceptions and beliefs toward a more indivisible, continuous flow…
What sorts of things do we wring from such “harmony”? “That reality is continuous, not separable, and unable to be objectified. We cannot stand aside to see it” (Robert Creeley). We cannot be submerged in water and watching ourselves swim at the same time, we would (presumably) have to exit the flow and look at a still or moving picture of ourselves (doubling time?) while “reality” and “facts” kept flowing, moving, going on (including the “unreal” activity of watching ourselves swim).
The trees blur into the sky as if they share a surface, as road to carlights, to earthen shoulder, grass, flower, again to tree: “reality is something transitory, it is flow, an eternal continuation without beginning or end; it is denied authentic conclusiveness and consequently lacks an essence as well…it is not evaluable” (Mikhail Bakhtin). Abstracting and division put us in the realm of the unreal, while the activity (of abstracting and perceiving difference) is, in fact, really occurring.
Submerged, blurry, inseparable and flowing…constantly and continuously…
to be and not to Be…
Dive.
Leap.
Swim.
Drift.
Flow…
and finally…to drown…dissolve…
N Filbert 2012
PRESS ON – Thank You
“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted,
nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”
-Sir Francis Bacon-
“One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change…
ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”
-Harold Bloom-
“everything directly accessible to us (in reading) – except for the perceived characters (letters and symbols and space) – would be only our ideas, thoughts, or, possibly, emotional states”
-Roman Ingarden-
RUSH
I’m thinking storm-wind and flood.
The press and surge of words and images.
I’m thinking adrenalin and frenzy.
WORD:PRESS
It dawns on me today that blogging incites and anxiety to produce. A pressing to keep up and create.
There’s a radiance to that.
On the one hand, to feel it. That, even just here, at WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of creative human beings thinking, expressing, making…exponentially increasing my already over-saturated reading list.
RUSH
And I mean it, it’s downright EXCITING to view and ingest the enormous, surprising, sincere and ever-expanding activity of humans! (There’s a thank-you in that to all of you I’ve found so far!) WHOOSH! RUSH!
On the other…frenetic. If “all human beings are the same, but everyone is human in their own way” (Adler on Franz Kafka), then you all are as limited as I by time and space and finitude…i.e. face the anguish of not being able to give the people and things in your immediate surround let alone verbal and visual artifacts from around the world what seems to be their due attention. To weigh and consider, to respond.
I spend a lot of time studying semiotics and theories of communication – how we, as humans, might “put in common,” “share” – “thoughts, information and opinions through speech, writing, images or signs” – “crafting passages between places and persons.”
Hundreds of thousands (actually many more) – passages made sensible, visible, right here with every click on WordPress, vimeo, Weebly, etc…
So long to fears re: death of reading, of art, culture, any such ‘thing.’
And there’s the ‘rub.’ Visiting “philosophy” pages today, I was significantly encouraged by so much sustained argumentation going on. Persons thinking hard and working it out with signs and gestures. Photographer’s sharing their eyes and the difficult work of seeing. Artists shaping the world through the world’s materials and all their minds and bodies process into it. Our poets, our healers, each of us shaping one another’s days/minds/experiences.
So thank you ALL for this thunderous RUSH. For the challenge to take care, to work and enjoy, to weigh and consider who we are, who I am, what I do, what I intend to create, present and offer…
Press on…read in…find value.
“What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible?…
I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear…
what is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning”
-Anne Carson-
“Behind, always behind the things in a hurry to be, you must search for what is”
-Edmond Jabes-
Waking into Questions
“It is already late when you wake up inside a question” -Anne Carson-
It takes some prodding. Prodding and probing. You must have set out, been triggered or poked or otherwise disturbed. In the first place: to ask.
So something, anything, disturbs you. Annoys, feels good, causes you to move out of a way, or adjust. Friction. Something like pain or a sharp thrill, label it fear, designate desire. In any case – unrest, discomfort, necessity.
There’s the rub. A displacement of sorts, like an involuntary glance, or tripping on sidewalks. Awareness. I have legs. Eyes. An elbow. Breath. A need for a restroom, that kind of thing. Self/other; here/there; now/now. Force, motion, mass enter the vicinity. You become aware.
To right yourself, “get your bearings,” “take stock” and what-not usually begins in some knee-jerk instinctual mannered-reaction, as it were. Pierce-poke – wince and recoil. Delight – magnetism and submission. You are not awake, only slightly coming-to. Displaced, disturbed, floundering for shore.
An experience is occurring and senses churn, mind starts mapping, here and now are tired of hiding – regardless of the fun of the game. You startle and seek, calling things names deep in your head, listening for echoes that mate. Radar of accounting and imagination, disjunctively it gradually becomes “all systems go.”
Go where?
And how do these systems “go”?
Who is it that’s waking?
The entire propensity expanding the proverbial “What the – ?!”
Whether infant or sage, and all of us, after all, somewhere in between.
And so it goes, ever waking in questions…
(What could be more exciting?
More repetitively strange?)
Two Helpmeets Today (extended quotations for the journeying)
1. From Georgi Gospodinov’s And Other Stories:
“And our personal stories are the only moves, the only moves that help us postpone, at least for a while, the predetermined ending to our game. And even though we are going to lose the game from the strategic point of view, the idle moves of our stories always postpone the end. Even if they are stories about failure.”
2. From Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights
The Hammock
When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and kindergarten
once each morning and once each afternoon
.
I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.
.
When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:
Do his father’s kisses keep his father’s worries
from becoming his? I think, Dear God, and remember
there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:
They have so far to arrive. Amen,
I think, and I feel almost comforted.
.
I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.
.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am
by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what’s it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.
All my Words are Silent 