Tag: Life

The Death of Knowledge – Complicit Communication

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, desire, Language, love, meaning, pain1 Comment

The Complicity of Communication: The Death of Knowledge

Death Knowledge

Perhaps we talk what we “know” to death.  Is that in the definition “to know”?  To shrink, reduce, fit-to-one’s-size, assimilate?

Is communication inherent complicity?  The effort at taking a complex and messy, wholistic, excessive, leaky, mysterious and comprehensive lived-experience and rat-tat-tatting away at it with letters and sounds, symbols and utterances toward some acceptance, some convergence of ‘meaning’ necessarily equaling its crucifixion, its disappearance, its waste?  If we manage to twist and contort it to language have we wrung it of reality?  Making a different one?  A communicable one?  A humanly manageable one?

I know (for one) that when I seek to inscribe, assay, proclaim or declare “what happens” – as soon as some assent or understanding seems achieved I sense the evisceration of the expression.  Whether it’s descriptive, imaginative, poetic, academic or pragmatic…forcing it, wrenching it, seducing and eliciting it (sentencing it) into vocabulary, into dialogue, into verbiage…leaves me with a variant experience than the one I sought to transfer.

I mean this…we arrive at…this.  I feel, perceive, desire this…it comes out hackneyed and damaged.  Holy crap!…this occurred! – Can I just say?  Will you let me tell? – and then…what proceeds is an entirely different occasion…a wounded, striated, cut and assembled collage that never equals the issue.

Convergence.  Its own beautiful, extravagant phenomenon.  But not quite expression.  Not quite translation.  Not quite… Always saying more than I intended and less than I meant.  Always saying less than I intended and different from what I meant.  Language.  Open, flexible, ambiguous, gargantuan…and limited, boundaried, sensible, requiring…

I try, tried, keep trying.  And never.  Each utterance a signing off.  Each proclamation death-sentencing its sensation.  Each squeezing toward the dictionary, no matter how scrambled and undone, redone, invented, inverted, still wringing the beauty to beast.

I said I love you.  It came out conditioned.  Assented to.  Agreed.  & Compromised.

I said I want you.  Interpreted “if…”

I said I am… emitting particulars and contradictions.

I said I wish… conditioning demands.

I wanted to say.  To sing.  To whisper.

Vocabling calm and certain and saturation.

Sounding like need and fear and some small evil.

Echoing an anxious desperation.

There is this……..which verses that……and do not equal.

So I am alone

As are you

and then this

between

and same

and different

mix –

some third business –

contorted angle

wound and rendered

wrapped about

and wriggled

writhing

&

struggling

to be

near

what it

is

I love you.

The ’45: Considering Complexities – On Plasticity of Identity

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, Complexity, desire, identity, meaning, Philosophy, Plasticity, Science, Writing5 Comments

floyd merrell diagram

On Plasticity: Being Ourselves, Able to be Ourselves

 

My birthday recurred.  Post-40 in a thriving family of 6, there are not many days deemed “special” that end up being about oneself as the father, caretaker, partner, provider, no matter how small the scope of the surround.  Soccer games and music lessons; feeding times and laundering; all keep going on – birthday or no.  The exhaustion continuous activity and felt responsibility breeds seems to increase in proportion to the numbers signifying one’s years upon earth.

But there are flourishes and touchings – like small miracles – proffered patience, generosity and deference gifted one’s way as the children mature.  I received momentously considered and thoughtfully creative presents and offerings from my brood, including the effort of travel (a 5-hour drive for a 3-hour meal), some self-deferrals of wants and demands for a day, shared and repurposed objects and much love and affection.

In the midst of which my brother-in-law texted: “And what have YOU done for YOU today?”

***********************************************************************

Isn’t nearly everything we do for ourselves in some way? I thought.  Caring for those we love, providing for their needs and responding to their living feeds our hope that we might be valuable partners and parents.  Enabling others’ satisfactions or play, achievements or events provides a goodness and gladness to our sense of identity.  WHAT DO I (or would I) WANT?  [If things revolved around ME? – What would I select for MYSELF, my TIME, my ACTIVITIES, were my surround and environment conducive, supportive, adaptive and compliant – attuned to MY wishes and feelings, desires and preferences – as its Center and Hub?]

This engendered heavy pause.  Followed by weeping.  Since my youth I’ve pleased people.  Especially those I crave being pleasing to.  Ever considering: if I find them, serve them, fuel them, tend to their whims and their moods and their wants and don’t fail them – they’ll have NO REASON not to accept and acknowledge me, enjoy and delight in me…perhaps even come to NEED and to LOVE me!

Still most of these persons have come and then gone – not needing an enthusiastic audience-of-me, my support systems or enthralled amour, cooking skills, cab driving, housekeeping, therapeutic attunement, nursing or cock…so much as an “Other,” I suppose.  An other alike with mixed needs, wants and cares, fears, doubts and preferences…uncertainties.

WHAT WOULD I WANT?

Being malleable, self-deprecating, at-your-service and adaptive in order to eventuate my longed-for (but not fully realized) purposes of belonging, chosenness, appreciation, acceptance and love, predisposed me to the Phenomena of Plasticity.

That organisms jostle and interact, adjust, emerge, revise and alter in accord with their environments and one another toward an imagined maximum survivability came as no surprise to me.

That my brain and body bend and twist, reconfigure and rework themselves toward perceived pleasures, building likewise to avoid potentially death-dealing pains, forms an accurate metaphor of my experience.

Do this, try to be that, retrain the brain, assimilate languages, nuances, behaviors and tastes, become parent and scholar, musician and lover, friend and coworker to an enormous variety of persons, places, and things (or situations).

Sounds desirable!  After all, we’re fascinated and entangled in networks and viruses, Renaissance-personages and extensive applications and sites – world seems participatory, fluid, collaborative and self-responsive – play-doh, silly putty, plastics, rubber and earth.  Water, air, flesh and fire.  Living would seem to be a plastic rather than static affair – examine a corpse! (and observed long enough, even then we’re not done and prove pliable and transforming).

************************************************************

Yet for me came a hitch as I pondered all this.  A lifetime spent adapting, responding and recursiving change for results that never quite arrive in a reality where even those chances will cease…

WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR YOURSELF?

When the question is put to me:  “What is it, right now, you prefer?” it turns out, among many acknowledgedly diverse and contradictorily complex cognitive-affective responses – I USUALLY KNOW WHAT I’D PREFER.  Very few options taste best to me in any given moment, and their range and scope are slim!

And then there’s the fact that I feel great admiration towards those who speak their mind and express their desires in a direct manner!  They still may compromise and adapt, but both adults and children who proclaim what they feel and want, prefer or need, ever impress me.  I (on the other hand) tend to try constantly to guess and anticipate what those around me prefer or desire before asking into my own – as if to say – if there’s room or time after all of you…I’d sure like to…but by then I’m too tired.

***********************************************************

So how plastic are we?  How multiple, really?  Since age 7 or 8, 12 or 15, my core desires have been pretty consistent:  Read.  Write.  Love.  Sex.  Explore.  Make.  At any given moment, regardless of conditions or surround, regardless of the options even, my litany of WHAT I WOULD DO FOR MYSELF usually boils down to this brief list.  In addition to which, I usually have a good idea of who, where, what, when, and sometimes how I’d go about each of the same – if conditions, environment and possibilities were dependent on ME.

I’ve definite tastes and predilections, ways I like to feel in what venues, activity-biases and condition proclivities (even though those nearest me often say they’d never know it by my choices).

Maybe the Phenomenon of Plasticity hypothesis runneling its now-scientific way through the cosmos and further than cells is a living CAPACITY but not necessarily a QUALITY?  Accident not essence?  Perhaps plasticity suits the powers-that-be, our politico-socio-cultural nowthen (STEM disciplines, Markets, Politics & Capital, Networks & Technologies) that would love for us adapt and adjust, go-along and “flow” as if its “natural,” “observable” and “scientific fact”?  (At the moment).

I’m not disputing it’s COOL – our abilities to change and flex, evolve and habituate, refashion and conform – and indeed it’s often necessary for our survival – but there’s a gap, hesitation, incompleteness to the story.  It doesn’t “FIT” to experience, or only partially so.  Something’s being assumed underneath.

And what is that?  Why have I preferred preferring others to my own, yet not ceased having my own all these years?

How would I be if I believed ALL were equally plastic?  That it wasn’t my job to adjust to everyone, remake to everything around me, instead insisting upon their/its relative capacity to reshape and orient to me as well?

WHAT WOULD I WANT if I could “be myself” (express my consistent biases and longings, behaviors and thought-trajectories, mood-palette and drives) in environments in which I was enabled/able to be/do so?  A surround that exercised the capacity of plasticity in relation to ME?

NOT EITHER/OR

Granted, some do, (those that stick around or don’t realize a choice) and in varying degrees, but I seldomly bank on that and announce or convey myself…usually I hedge against abandonment or rejection – fear of pains winning out over hopes of pleasure.

That’s “natural” too, the disciplines say – but there are so many counter-examples: ones who openly state their “I would prefer not tos” or “I would prefers…”  What have they got on me in this plasticized universe?

**************************************************************

There’s expression:  I prefer finding questions.  Ferreting unknowns.

FOR myself – there, I’ve done it.  At least once today.

09.22.2015

The Living Dead: a Reflection

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Dying, family, Journal, Living, meaning, Philosophy8 Comments

“Dad, are you living or dead..ing?” son asks at dinner (aged 9).

Characteristic pause…”Well, both,” I reply.

sad skeleton

How could it be otherwise?  I’ve stayed the course, exercised my body, prepared a meal, feeling fine, alone, aware…and comes the call:  “Living or dead..ing?”  Parental response – stop.  [Why is he asking?  What is he thinking?  How is he feeling?  Bodily signs?   Follow the language – “living or dead…dead..ing…dying.”  What is called for here?]  He thinks the living dead a lot,  so I respond directly:  “Well, both, and how could it be otherwise?  I couldn’t very well be dying if I wasn’t alive, no?  And the process of dying is constructed of living, yes?  So it’s all in one moment I s’pose.”

We move on.

But I don’t.  Not so much.  It’s a good question.

It reminds me why I’m a philosopher, a poet.  Why we tend toward the same, differently.  We watch for the shared, the communal in our experience, anywhere.  We work the same queries.  In a living ruled by science, by probabilities and hypothetical cause, by vague notions of what-might-happen-next given conditions and dynamically complex systems…philosophers, poets and artists tend to seek out what’s certain – what is nevertheless the case: we feel, we think, we live, we die, a world is there – the details change with the order of the day.  Or night.  The language or discipline.  The methods or culture, practice or beliefs.  Depending on the questions.  Who’s asking and how.

We happen – become – and unhappen.

Because my dad, almost 80, evinces this.  Because I’ll be half-90 in 48 hours.  What I asked for is called Cosmic Pessimism, which says something.  I happen…vary…and stop happening that way.  How that occurs, what and who and when and why change nearly as quickly as we do.  Should I say, what we think or believe occurs?  Rationalization of experience.

Reminds me of this, of the action of writing.

I still can’t do it “live.”  Can’t inscribe it as a “post” or a “tweet” or a “message.”  I’ve got to get some static.  IN-scribe is a physical act of scratching, digging, carving in clay.  ON-scribing is more what we do – laying down ink, pounding down letters, playing with light.  Writing with materials like paper and ink relatively makes something stay put for awhile.  So we can revise.  Perhaps that’s all Rilke meant – give yourself the opportunity to edit, erase, respond to your action before you present it.  Is revision revivification?  Stay something, pause.  Apply yourself to your living and choose an occurrence.  Does this wrinkle the union of living and dying?

At work I’m struggling with teaching the methods of multi-disciplinary research.  How to template a strategy of awareness to potentially everything?  We’re living and dying and attempting to know, understand, RATIONALIZE something about that.  Literally ANYthing applies, or may nourish, correct, influence or direct that essential inquiry (and DOES!).  How does one know where to look?  How does one know how to live it?  How does one know what one needs?  To synthesize rationalizations from multiple fields and methods and practices.  To compare all the answers or theories or thoughts?  To differentiate results and observations coming from various humans and schools and materials and tools and contexts and set-ups and the myriad messiness of living/dying organisms in relations beyond our control?

“You must revise your life” (Rainer Maria Rilke).

Revising your dying.  Is it possible to live moments in such a way that they outstrip the correlative dying?  To live more than die?  Once in awhile?  I think we have experiences, moments, in which we feel more alive than in others.  “Are you living or dead…ing” he asks.  Well, waking into a maze to traverse every day – cleaning and feeding and playing the roles (father, lover, employee, friend, son, writer, scholar, blogger, house-owner, house-keeper, cook, playmate, librarian, instructor, male, man, person, reader, and so on), shopping and feeding and listening and nourishing and working and running to tire – feels a bit more like “dead…ing.”  But there are moments!  Times.  “Events,” we call them (I guess).  Twistings and turnings and something like gathered occurrences, Being + Well-Being, Whitehead might say.  A more spectacular death I suppose.  Perhaps elevated experiences of living just heighten the jouissance of death?

I don’t know.

We happen – become/unbecome – and unhappen.

The marks left from that – our inscriptions, palimpsests and paths.  Veined.  Seared-in.  Scored.  In some cases, welded – some cases cancelled, erased, blotted out.  Living-dead…ing.  Vice versa?

To edit, revise, pause – is it possible?  What did he mean?  What might it mean?    Curving back doesn’t alter the time.  Going over is still going forth.  We wend and wind and whirl and reveal we are living and dying.

Short essay on Venice Biennale experience – Summer 2015

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Image, meaning, Perception, Philosophy, Travel, Writing2 Comments

Glimpse of Lightness : Venice Biennale 2015

Maggi - Drawing Machine

Marco Maggi – “Drawing Machine” – Uruguay Pavilion, Venice 2015

            How does art “happen”?  What is a work of art in an age of reproduction?  Who, where, what, and how are we in relation to composition, construction, collage, creation, craft… encountering “art” as a strange “zone of indistinction”, an “undecidable”[1], perhaps an interference, or intervention – at the renowned Venice Biennale 2015?  What lightness might we glimpse in such immersion, inundation, veritable floundering and bewilderment among “works of art” – the touted greats within the most prestigious cultural institution in the world.[2]

In a deep cleft of Agamben and Heidegger, physical and mental exhaustion, a set of European Graduate School students (which gratefully included myself) set out to engage “art” in the context of the famed Venice Biennale Exposition, assigned to look for “glimpses of lightness” – something “having little weight…alleviating…demonstrating ease or agility…mirth, levity…and a graceful slenderness”[3] OR – “lit brightly, illuminated, illuminating”.[4]  The day began hefty and hot with prospects of 89 national participations, 44 collateral events in the Giardina della Biennale plus an additional “more than 136 artists from 53 countries” at the Arsenale.[5]  We set out.

The 2015 Biennale was filled with many ambiguous / ambivalent / open works that, depending on the perspective of the observer, might be engaged with levity, mirth and playfulness or burdened by art-extraneous political, moral and conceptual communiqués and paraphernalia.  I found myself wondering if art was happening in such a context – a deluge and glut of politics, morality and economy.  I began looking at things curious if messages could be untangled, read past and through, passed by: emotional, commercial, personal, national, site-specific – querying – “what here is ‘being raised, set forth, set up’? (Heidegger).  ARTing: can we come to art through artists and artworks and exhibitions?[6]

Considering art as Riss – rift – an outline, sketch, drawing and marking setting into relief a “moment” or “space,” a new relation hard to distinguish, perhaps undecidable, opportunities of encounter with encountering-itself, being – itself – being, in relation to.  A passage.  Something beyond good and evil (ethics); beyond division, calculation and measure of perception (subject/object, this/that, here/there) (ontology); beyond narcissism (me/you, us/them, him/her) (epistemology); beyond laws and institutions and individuality (ours/theirs, who/what, when/where) and so on… Toward activation – activity + occurrence, an awareness, a-tension at/of/with/in NOW? [ultimate zone of indistinction and undecidability].  Play?  Lightness?  Resisting the urge to pronounce, proclaim, propose; swerving past strife, through strife – holding open? – Art…as Being…an open question?  Some undoing in its doing, some common toggling call to a present, re-present, encounter?  Are we able to tear up a world in an activity of mending, assembling and combining it (rift)?  To set up a world in an activity of revealing (veiling/unveiling) as a poet might do (oscillating signs) with a semiotic semantic, ex-hibit-ing, exposing, en-light-ening – making lines instead of following them, opening spaces rather than closing, becoming in difference to became?  I wondered what might result if we scrambled the sites/sights on some randomizing algorithm of names/nations/pavilions or scrambled the labels and ‘statements’ according to same.  To undo in order to Art.

So what rends?  What can tear through the amalgams and overlays we bring to each encounter with one another, with the world?  What might cause a rift to occur in my own perceptions, predispositions, cares, concerns, propensities?  Where do the potentialities lie?  What will bring me to the open?  Below are a few works I encountered in the heat and dust and exhaustion of 2015’s 56th La Biennale di Venezia that re-oriented me, turned me into at least two sides of a chasm, illuminated a seeing-space, a being-space for me – provided me with glimpses of lightness.

“Blind Spot.”[7] The first work that woke me, intervened, destabilized and shifted my course was Blind Spot by Mykola Ridnyi (Ukraine) located in the Arsenale.  Working from the ophthalmologic  analysis of scotomas – areas of partial alterations or degenerated acuity in our normal fields of vision that are surrounded by normative and well-preserved views.  We all have them, aspects we never see clearly – biologically, culturally, psychologically and personally.  Scotoma is not a condition to be overcome, but to be aware of.  As I engaged the Biennale, I recognized that artists, nations, participants and audiences all live their existences with “Blind Spots.”  The effortful work to account for them only serves to expose further areas where “things disappear on us.”[8]  Accompanied by C-prints painted with various exemplars of scotomic affect, Ridnyi’s installation ripped an awareness into me that opened my emotional reactivity to nation-state pavilions and exhibits, artists compromises to culture and fame, my own dear lack of self-critique and clear-sightedness, and the ever open question of how and what we engage in our being-alive, relating, and “reading”/”seeing” the world.

Not far beyond “Blind Spot” resided Ricardo Brey’s “Every life is a fire (2009-ongoing,.”[9] intricate, redolent boxes opening out in glass cases – the layers, complex details and labyrinthine qualities of our coagulating, webbing construction of idiosyncratic interpretations of the world.  “The box is our head,” he notes, “the box is the cave… is the attic… is the memory and the world.” The boxes are an attempt to represent the intensifications of internal modes and their relationships in spatial terms; and what results is a “hermeneutics of the soul” that creates “a topography of the mind.” Articulated like a labyrinth or mandala, Brey considers the box-mind compound the “most metaphysical project” he has attempted, nothing less than “a workshop to produce the invisible” or “the countless” that is also “the way out and the jail.”[10]  The attempt to articulate the inarticulable, visualize the unseen, expose blind spots through elaborate archiving and representation and obsessive care and attention also ripped into my own desperate strivings for self-awareness, knowledge and authenticity.

And finally, yet in retrospect to my Biennale’d day, an early return…Marco Maggi’s Global Myopia (Pencil + Paper) (Uruguay Pavilion) and, particularly, his piece at the entrance to the show: “Drawing Machine (nine possible starting points)” (image above).  Options.  Beginnings.  Openings.  In what direction will the “drawing” move?  From what emphases and characteristics?  What intricacies of our histories and culture, memories and desires, experiences and imaginations will direct the ensuing mark of us in relation to our world, ourselves, our perception, one another?  Maggi reports, powerfully, that “ the only subject of Global Myopia is drawing.”[11]  Lines begun – a movement, a glance, a word, a new distinction.  Rifts and rendings, gaps and site-specificities, we inscribe – blindly, collectively, collaboratively, actively and in elaborate idiosyncratic ways both laden and illuminating – glimpses of lightness outlining our crossings, traversals and conduct through All the World’s Futures.[12]

References

Agamben, G. (1993). The coming community. Minneapolis : Minneapolis :

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer. Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford, Calif. :

Agamben, G. (1999a). Potentialities : collected essays in philosophy. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford, Calif. :

Agamben, G. (1999b). The man without content. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1999.

Agamben, G. (2004). The open man and animal. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford, Calif. :

Blind spot – Mykola Ridnyi. (2015). Retrieved August 30, 2015, from http://www.mykolaridnyi.com/works/blind-spot

Every life is a fire. (2015). Retrieved August 30, 2015, from http://www.ricardobrey.com/every-life-is-a-fire.html

Every life is a fire. (n.d.). Retrieved August 30, 2015, from http://www.ricardobrey.com/every-life-is-a-fire.html

Heidegger, M., & Heidegger, M. (1977). Basic writings from Being and time (1927) to The task of thinking (1964) (1st ed). New York: Harper & Row.

Heimo Zobernig at the Austrian Pavilion, Venice Biennale / MOUSSE CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE. (2015, May 13). Retrieved August 30, 2015, from http://moussemagazine.it/zobernig-austrian-venice-2015/

La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Arte 2015: All The World’s Futures. (2015). Retrieved August 30, 2015, from http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/news/05-03.html

La Biennale di Venezia – History of the Venice Biennale. (2015). Retrieved August 30, 2015, from http://www.labiennale.org/en/biennale/history/

La Biennale di Venezia – Home. (2015). Retrieved August 30, 2015, from http://www.labiennale.org/en/Home.html

lightness, n.1. (2015). OED Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://www.oed.com.proxy.wichita.edu/view/Entry/108230

lightness, n.2. (2015). OED Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://www.oed.com.proxy.wichita.edu/view/Entry/108231

Welcome. (2015). Retrieved August 30, 2015, from http://www.marcomaggi.org/welcome/

 

[1] (Agamben, 1993, 1999a, 1999b)

[2] (“La Biennale di Venezia – History of the Venice Biennale,” 2015)

[3] (“lightness, n.1,” 2015)

[4] (“lightness, n.2,” 2015)

[5] (“La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Arte 2015: All The World’s Futures,” 2015)

[6] (Heidegger & Heidegger, 1977)

[7] (“Blind spot – Mykola Ridnyi,” 2015)

[8] (“Blind spot – Mykola Ridnyi,” 2015)

[9] (“Welcome,” 2015)

[10] (“Every life is a fire,” 2015)

[11] (“Welcome,” 2015)

[12] (“La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Arte 2015: All The World’s Futures,” 2015)

Librarian & Litterateur…

On By NW FilbertIn Art, human, identity, Knowledge, Library, Literature, meaning, Philosophy6 Comments

Makeover Day

I am not a scholar.  I know that now.

I am middle-aged.

I have pursued no discipline, field, or “area of knowledge” to its limits.

“Core literature.”

Librarian.  “Litterateur” (awful sound).  These.

Exploring fields: science, literature, philosophy, history, critical thought – through the “core literature” – the Canons of the Field.

Only so far.

Not to the ends.

What a novelist needs.  Knowledge a little beyond average, a little obsessive, a little “never satisfied.”

A librarian: able to discourse with “Scholars” in any field – enough terminology, vocabulary, “core knowledge.”

“Jack of all trades, king of none.”

Yes, that.

Librarian.  Litterateur.  (I don’t know what else to call it).

Me.

Degrees in Classical Music, Theology, Philosophy, Information Science, Art & Critical Thought.

It’s something.

But not “scholarship”.

Core Knowledge.

Trying to be human.

Trying to know what I need to know to be that.

Trying to be.

Secret 2

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Books, communication, creative writing, Experience, identity, Journaling, Self, WritingLeave a comment

i want never to encounter work I wish to edit

A little secret

On By NW FilbertIn being, change, communication, Complexity, identity, Journaling, life, meaning, Self2 Comments

i hope all that goes into keeping me alive, is worth it

In a word…

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, Blogging, Complexity, Experience, meaning, Philosophy, thinking, Writing7 Comments

Emporia profile

Someone (some voice in my head) recently asked me this question:  “If you had only one word to describe human existence, from your experience, knowledge, and present perspective: what would that word be?”

I heard living…being…survival…I thought – “What I think (I think, at least presently) is that you will never know, or be able to imagine, how you will survive.”  The jobs you will have, the people you will grow close to or far from, the ‘successes’ or ‘failures’ your path will exhibit, struggles or ecstasies you will sustain, what you will achieve or create or ignore or forget…you cannot predict, cannot forecast, how it will actually play out.  Loves, griefs, happinesses, sorrows, places, events, connections, schisms, likes/dislikes, preferences/abhorrences, and so on…

Looking back…one day…attempting to recount, account for, surmise or shape what happened!? in your life/lifetime/process – it will be surprising.  Unpredictable, unaccountable, unREcountable – a lot of “who would have imagined that!?”  Or that that would lead to that with her or him or them, and then that – who could have known?

SURPRISE!

Sure there are tendencies, “natural draws” as it were.  I’ve continually been uncomfortable with authority, laws, sunlight, loud noises and hot weather.  I’ve been consistently upset by imbalances of power, by crowds, by presuppositions and arbitrary assertions.  I’ve always been a touch distressed by the power of emotions and the weakness of will/intentions.  There are characteristics that appear contiguous – I’ve long been drawn to classical music / melodic / spare & melancholic sounds; I’ve always been invigorated by the rain; I’ve noticed a penchant for solitary spaces and human-less environments; a taste for progressive/reflective/informed/ intelligent culture (recognizing each of those as highly contested terms, i.e. – a fascination with communication – language, words, expressions, conventional meanings and gestures; a distaste for popularity & fame / ‘pop culture’/ mass effects; a distrust of temporary desire; an emaciated self-esteem and expansive self-concern; a craving for passion / romance / intensity of human encounter; and so on.  I’ve always moved toward cool colors, particularly in the fields of grey, stormy blue, dusty browns and pine-needle green; always distrusted people who shout, yell or preach – drama, makeup, surface effects.  Hell when we search for things consistent from birth to death, our lists could run quite long…and yet…

How’d we get here?  What if we look at the events, the people, the places, the feelings, interactions and all the ways we recall them (at specific instances, in particular situations)?

What if we look at what we do?  Whether we drink or smoke or not, get angry more or less, the ways we engage strangers / friends / family?  What we read, listen to, pay attention, are distracted by (same thing), are pulled to observe, think about, and why?  How much we touch?  When no one needs us?  When we’re alone?  Or falling to sleep?  Or have slipped out of the stream, have “free time,” traveling, assumed to be otherwise engaged?

If Mormons came to your door and asked “Do you believe in God?”  And you, after shuffling your feet, considering your day, pondering whether you wanted to spend part of it talking with religious strangers, checking in with your dependents (in this case, 4 children that are your human charge & devotion), zipping the past through your education, upbringing, familial ties & traditions, behaviors, relationships, responsibilities, concerns, and so forth, responded “No, no, I do not find myself believing in God.”  And then these polite young men said – “Well then, what do you believe in, if you don’t mind us asking?”

SURPRISE!

More shuffling, pondering, internal argument and gentleness, patience, consideration, critical inquiry…(i.e. politeness)…and “hmmmm!  I haven’t been asked that directly in quite some time!”  (Is it that no one wants to hear?  Know?  That I divert it?  Don’t know? Is “care” involved?).  I said something in the order of Meaning.  Something to the tune of – “Well, pardon me, but I guess I must believe/think (in Wittgenstein these are inseparable), that from our atoms & cells to our bodies, relationships, labor, behaviors, emotions, environment, world, ‘cosmos’ – trying to know as much as I can about each aspect of my being a human being – I think/believe that perhaps we each try to assemble, account for, respond, act, engage, construct experiences that give a shape to, a confluence, a medium, rationale, tone that feels satisfactory to our breathing, being, seeing, feeling, happening…making meaning, I guess.  Including, but oddly outstripping, simply surviving.  Much that seems unnecessary (tastes, preferences, selections, refusals).  Religions, philosophies, teams, employment, families, nations, entertainments, cultures and interests – all these might provide some larger structuring for our shaping, and all, no doubt, influence how we piece it together, make a kind of sense, provide potential “fits” for our choices, responses, activities and emotions…but we each also fashion all this living, this experiencing, this acting and being in apparently very idiosyncratic ways…”

“I guess I believe that this is the sort of thing we do.  I guess I think/believe that…at this moment.”

???

I think when these considerate young men return, and to the voice in my head that constantly interviews me…next time I might just respond:

SURPRISE!

I believe that life is surprising.  Unbelievable, astonishing, revelatory, frightening, sometimes shocking and amazing, astounding, uncanny and a pain/joy/ache/pleasure/exhaustion/stimulus to be wondered at.

My answer today, in one word…

Life is – surprise.

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The crap that crumbles out…

On By NW FilbertIn hope, Journal, love, meaning, thoughtLeave a comment

Found…from the midst of a stressful week…

Diary

NO idea what that is.”

WRITING YOU

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, life, love, meaning, Poetry5 Comments

What I should do is phone; the circuitry

is there and we’re both somewhere in the circuitry.

I need to talk.  What should I find to say?

You know how it is: it rings; you answer; no click;

no dial tone.  Hello?  Hello? No word.

Not even goodbye – I couldn’t give you that.

.

Listen to this: to write you requires a scheme,

subtends an apparatus, such that here

be an I, you be he there, space

discerns the entities , depicts them such

as the scheme requires.  Are you lost?  I am.

I want to be not lost.  I write even so.

.

Tell me what to do.  I want to show.

Schemelessness.  Undress.  To speak from that.

I want the secrecy; I want it said.

To speak from wordlessness.  There are certain things

that happen and we don’t know: proteins meet

and shape each other.  We are the husk of this.

.

Whatever happens happens in some such wise,

under attention.  I hate all huskiness.

Let me be where it happens, let me be the hidden cells

and silent if silence is all there is to say.

I want to talk though.  I want to talk to you.

I despair of what to say.  Goodnight.  Goodnight.

– William Bronk

WRITING MEANS CLIMBING THE STEPS OF OUR LACK

– as if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come..”

– Edmond Jabes –