We start. We start out. We dance into a light. We are seen. We have become. We are embodied.
This is how it begins for us. We are noticed as a being, as a living, as living beings. Addressed.
Some one, some thing, is aware of “us.” We become. Something. Someone.
I am born. I have…”be-come.” And that, a result…a result, resolution, resolublution, happenstance, happening of cum. Plus. Cum (sperm, spermatazoa, DNA transport system) PLUS egg (potentia, potentiality, amorphous stew – DNA resourcing, inchoate, unpredictable, predictable)
CUM + EGG = possibility
A be-cumming. A chance, a shot, a gumbo – ME.
And then I AM.
And that “I am” is a simply recognition, a simply acknowledging, acknowledgment, an awareness, a “noticing” – a THAT – THERE IS – a “There is: That.”
A “Nathan.”
A nothing be-cums (in collusion with egg) a “Nathan” – named, cognized, acknowledged, noticed and noted: Nathan is NOT a Nothing, but is a Some Thing… a “Being,” a “human,” a “boy,” a “creature,” even…a “Person.”
And I become. We. Become. A combination of things cognizable in individuality and commerce. A singularity in multiplicity…
THIS combination of possibilities = Nathan
= THIS one
= ??????
this ITEM is accounted, is sensed, perceived, listed, catalogued – BECOME.
And so, we start out. Cells of a particular way. Become. Noted, recognized, be-come, be-came, be-CAUSEd. IT. THIS. YOU. (ME).
Held. Cooed. Coddled. Nursed. Murmured and whispered as an “I,” a “You,” an “It,” a “They,” an “A,” a “Him.”
I am a Definite Article.
A/The Some Thing. Being. Organism. Combinatory intricate systemic reality object of cellular operations – genetic, bio-logical(?), “existent,” “happening/happenstance,” as… THIS ONE, THING, REALITY.
And so, we begin.
I try to go back there. To the beginning, that initial “noticing.” (“Honey, I think I might be pregnant”). Effect. A. The. This one. Son. Boy. He. It. Him. Here: a coagulation of cells.
“I” began. By being accounted for. Taken note of. Recognized. Attached or detached from. Signaled, symbolized, named and noted.
Here comes a new “One.” (that is, Many). – A “Person.” Awkward, precedented (unprecedented) amalgam equaling a “You” “It” “He/She” “Being” “Person” “Human” “Child.”
NAMED (accounted for and acknowledged, reported AS…)
“Nathan Wayne Filbert”
A-ha! So – thisone! That, right there…different from and the same as this other kind…
An observable being, a kind of individual sample, remarkable and marked down, documented, evidential data…A, The, It, An…
“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it you can ever let anyone know…this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you.” – DFW.
I don’t know what to tell you. If this piece by DFW doesn’t resonate and “work” on you, well, ok. Perhaps he’s not for you. Please give it a read, again, if you have…
click for link to “Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace
Rattling bones, deep-falling diaphragm – through continuous sightings and encounters with “H” (“her”) these consistently occur – even over hours, days, and months.
I might say that what characterizes our particular version of intimacy are curiosity and wonder and the ecstasy of discovery and finding – imbuing apparently abandoned spaces with vitality and imagination.
A week later was a potluck for the visiting artist. Small-talking with “her” in the kitchen – I felt inadequate to be occupying her time and “let her go” to mingle with the many I was certain were desirous of her indomitable and imaginative company. I spoke with her partner, the farm-inhabiting-best-friend-artist-lady, and H sidled in. There was much laughter (their minds are contagious and entertaining – as if the structures of adulthood and professional culture never quite ‘took’ or corralled possibilities)…around “her” my breath dissipates. We’d both been hired as rural mail carrier associates with joint training to occur the week following; both commissioned to respond to this artist’s intimately relational performance work; both in love with abandoned places and their loss and decay – both committed to discovering lost or overlooked things.
There we were.
I in poverty.
Day one of training sat us next to one another, her length and beauty, doodles and read-alouds from the training manual enthralling. I worked to breathe and lived through my peripheral perception – registering her movements, hair, wrist, knee, hands, mouth pronouncing acronyms, quirky nervous habits, footwear, scent and clothing…
She suggested (did she?) lunch together. I’m quite certain that converged through a clumsy stumbling and fragmented semblance of conversation. I had planned only banana and peanut butter on my budget – yet each day we went – for that amazing hour – somewhere I’d never been before in a city I’d spent over three decades in and around. An abandoned hotel, a nature trail, small chain restaurants, of which one, perhaps, constituted a first “date,” as, after placing our orders, she removed to the restroom and I was left to pay the bill! (Delightful things like that).
Blessings. I was gaining practice in “soaking in the good” – a strategy instructed through my therapy, and H was much better than I ever imagined, a remarkable alchemy of behaviors and body parts – co-constituting an unknown ‘ideal’ to my mind, sensations, experience and history. I was dumbstruck, amazed, bewildered, befuddled – in other words – alive and in hope.
I’d been asking her coterie of creator-friends to visit my home for fire or food or an art-making party – to no response or avail. Everyone taking a read. She agreed, then doubted, then declared she thought she might appear via an internet message. Thus she arrived, of a Sunday afternoon in April, to my home.
We parlayed and exchanged – art, family, friends, lives, plans, hopes, strategies, likes and dislikes, ideas and tears, meanings and lies and other truths. I ached toward her – finding romance and desire and a periscope of loving peeking out, looking round, checking for safety. It isn’t safe. It’s unlikely, bizarre, fantastical : sixteen years between us and four marriages – her blossoming while I fade to grey, her popping with –larity, my struggling for place. She asked me to sit next to her.
The sides of our arms. Legs. Eventually fingers becoming entangled. We talked staring straight ahead, caught in some astronaut training module machine, no gravity, no reference, dizzied and desirous, disbelieving and desirous, frightened and desirous, with just the right amount of belonging and estrangement, novelty to craft courage and excitement throughout our neural nets.
We concocted funnel cakes of cinnamon and sugar, mustard, jalapenos and sausage. They flopped and sickened, we laughed and she left. I think perhaps we loved, even then, that day. She left behind a bevy of hands from a book she created, by extraction. Our hands were open, our minds and hearts, a letting-go, with patterns and a freeing, a dance: in common, in Kansas, in history, in hope, in commitments, in fears and neuroses.
The times have been odd and I’ve been at pains to record them. Here is a series I began recently in attempts to account for my life over the past 6 months or so… for what they’re worth. In this current apparent “season” of ongoing stress related to surviving I am culling old notebooks for substance and will begin posting as I find time to type them. \
Invisible Man Chronicles
Six months ago, things were different. I found myself unable to breathe, in England, windswept and drowned out in a kind of panicked grief – a she had proficiently evacuated my life, my home, a marriage… a business, a practice… The weather was cold and drizzly – melancholy, hibernatory, reflexive. One might say: “Winter.” My return would be to four children, now employment, no sustenance, no inner strength, little support and a home hardly emptied of her artifacts. She had literally flown away.
Seasons in Kansas are cyclically exemplary. Summer – hell-hot, a dry blowing flame, readings often surpassing 100. Winter is a subzero freeze – bitter blizzards and veils of ice – both producing post-apocalyptic land. Autumn, as is idealized, a gradual and colorful falling away – temperatures, foliage and field – a clear and moist sarcophagus. And Spring. Spring is explosive – blustery, redolent – a balmy turbulence of expansion and growth.
Some have suggested that landscapes, climates and geographies form the tangible shape to our thoughts and personalities and beliefs. It makes many kinds of sense.
When we experience loss we consider to be great, we often find it inexplicable, and it may exhibit many qualities in common with fallow fields of Kansas Winters. Clinging to cold and dark uncannily, as if depressive states were somehow desirable. As if persisting in sorrow might validate what grew there before. What cannot repeat (we think) – bumper crops and windfalls – the decay of which we experience as hopelessness, helplessness, a ruin. Plumbing gone bad, a roof worn away, the appliances failed. Eyesight, blood pressures and flesh. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold – wisely penned, and yet the Seasons.
When a wheat crop fails to a Summer’s drought and burn – there is thorough discoloration and a withering. The rusty dun of a malpracticed rain dissolved by menacing sun seems a sign of things gone wrong, things never to be the same. And it is so. In some various version of “now” – growth is undone, production waylaid, and a pestilent edition of dying appears to have its way. We cherish that in our bemoaning. Misfortunes as notches on a belt that signify toward some later date: “We survived.” “We survive.”
Certainly not forever, but perhaps another season. Another cycling of the clock. We sleep and we wake, and “every day begins the same.” Every week and month and year.
That apparently demolished – scarred and furrowed stillborn field, however, hasn’t lost capacity, only a season’s fruit, a momentary harvest.
I shackled myself to determined grief. Treating my earth with lyme. Still its soil didn’t die. Flowers and grasses were never erased, only unsung and silent, covered, eventually, by a type of ashen snow – very difficult to see.
The lesson I find ever-so-hard to incorporate is that the responsibility of flourishing or dearth lies not on the soil, the weather, or farmer – wind, sun, rain or seed – not even diligence, care or quality. Rather, its growth or despoiling depends on the entire orchestra of factors.
What blooms for a term, given other conditions, even ever-so-slightly adjusted, may miserably deteriorate, may “fail to thrive” or “take.” Human infants, ant colonies, milo crops and butterfly paths, wildlife populations and the microscopic advance of forests all share this cosmic weather – growth and decay depend on convergence.
A determined depression, a strange and celebrated joy – can be deranged by simple sounds or gestures, weathers or tastes.
Helplessness altered towards hope by some unexpected “yes.”
I was contacted to compose a responsive work for a miniscule fee in relation to a visiting artist. I was given employment, extremely part-time it appeared – as a rural mail carrier ‘associate’ – filling in for regular carriers days off. And yet they were SOMEthing, a shift in the breeze, a change in barometric pressures, percentages of precipitation, doors opened with smiles.
A bonfire had been planned at a farm to forge acquaintance with the visiting artist – two weeks of work from Brooklyn, NY. In my selected sorrow I avoided meeting people or mingling in groups, even contacting more than a handful of friends (often reaching out and then canceling in efforts to conserve energy for survival). Yet work (survival) was serious business and necessitated uncomfortable measure. I went to the farm and the fire, and from there began a new history. New season. Dying seeds split toward open…(to be continued…)
If I possessed the capability of remarking, I would. Indeed, in that term resides my life’s work. I am a Remarker. I attend, scrutinize, mull and vacuum the world around me for occurrences, things, and events that are “remarkable,” and then I make every attempt to re-mark them. Sometimes I succeed, and my re-marks trigger stimuli for re-marking in others; often I fail – both in the assessment of what (in fact – in a special – species/al – sense) is remarkable, and, in my ability to effectively mark something in relationship to itself.
Another “aside” – writings that happen in the meantimes…
Boomerang
I consider myself ‘straight as an arrow’ that swerves like a boomerang. In other words, I ruminate clear sensations, desires, opinions – consider, and then revise. It all comes back to me.
When I was a child, I thought as a child, behaved as a child…but now…now that…well, I’ve put away the childish things. Now I’m just a fucked-up adult. It’s hard for me to tell from what’s coming or going.
She’s cumming. Now she’s going.
I saw a coyote the other day. I was driving in the country, speeding along a gravel road. A grey coyote, large, apparently healthy, came streaming through the corn or wheat or soybeans pacing my van like a dog. These things surprise me. And happen.
Now she’s going.
Like a coyote I set out to pace her, run alongside, track and trace her. She’s cumming, I’m breakneck, I’m hungry, I’ve got her, I’m with her, we’re “in” as it were…
She’s going.
I run straight and fast and hard and she knows it. I’m honest. I can’t tell truth from lies. She loses me, I parallel, and now we’re neck-and-neck, side-by-side, and sprinting, I’ve got her, she’s stretching, I’m on her, she’s spreading, I’m ravenous, she’s daunting, I fear, I crave, on point, in flight, the Caravan has nothing on me.
If I were a sailor. An aardvark. A policeman. I am none of these. But I love her, she outpaces me, I can’t catch, and she looks back, and she’s cumming, and now going.
I wish.
And that would be how it would end, with my wishing, her being, my envisioning and inventing and conspiring, but there’s more. And the coyote, and the rabbit, and the hawk and howling wind. And the mountain and the river and the ocean and breezy glade. And there’s life – yes, there’s that, and we’re here, or somewhere, and everything rushes, and to be honest I don’t know deception from reality, my perceptions and illusions are the same, but I dream. And a coyote, and a boy. And a human and a male. And she’s a lady and a wolf, a rodent and a scream, and we tossle and we fight, and devour and delight, and it’s all a simple game – a complex, coordinated, disjunctive weather of dance that never quite syncs up, and that’s okay, because the coyote thrives in run, and the owl lives for the hunt…the mouse delights in escape, and the thought its incompletion…
And I straight as an arrow, swerving like a boomerang.
By definition a habit, meditative or otherwise, becomes somewhat “automatic” and therefore something other than “awareness” or novel or differentiated… and yet…
Taking in the good… being lived…
“Implicitly, and more fundamentally, this practice means a relaxed opening into the love – in a very very broad sense – that is the actual nature of everything. Moment by moment, the world and the mind reliably carry you along. This isn’t airy-fairy, it’s real. Our physical selves are woven in the tapestry of materiality, whose particles and energies never fail. The supplies – the light and air, the furniture and flowers – that are present this instant are here, available, whatever the future may hold. So too is the caring and goodwill that others have for you, and the momentum of your own accomplishments, and the healthy workings of your body. Meanwhile, your mind goes on being, while dependably weaving this thought, this sound, this moment of consciousness.
It’s hard to sustain a felt knowing of this nature of everything. The brain evolved to keep our ancestors afraid to keep them alive. But if you look, and look again, you can see directly that right now, and in every now you’re alive, you’re cradled by the world and the mind like a child carried to bed by her mother. This cradling is a kind of love, and when you trust it enough to soften and fall back into it, there’s an untangling of the knots of fear and separation. Then comes both an undoing of the craving that drives suffering and harm, and a freeing and fueling love living through you and as you out into the world.
Imagine a single day in which you were often – not continuously, not perfectly – lived by love. When I try this myself, the events of the day don’t change much -but my experience of them, and their effects, improve dramatically. Consider this as a practice for a day, a week – or the year altogether.
More widely, imagine a world in which many people, enough people – known and unknown, the low and the mighty – were lived by love. As our world teeters on the edge of a sword – and could tip either into realistic prosperity, justice, and peace, or into growing resource wars, despotism, or fundamentalism – it seems to me that it’s not just possible for a critical mass of human hearts to be lived by love. It’s necessary.
How?
The essence of this practice is a yielding into all that lives you. This is a paradigm shift from the typical top-down, subtly contracted, moving-out-from-a-unified-center-of-view-and-action way of operating . . . to a relaxed receptive abiding, feeling supported by the ocean of causes creating each momentary wave of awareness. Then on this basis, there is an encouraging of love in all its forms to flow through you. The suggestions that follow are different ways to do this, and you can also find your own.
Soften and open in the heart. Notice that you are alright right now: listen to your body telling your brain that you are basically OK. Feel the fullness that is already here, all the perceptions and thoughts and feelings pop-pop-popping in this moment of consciousness. Feel the buoying currents of nature and life, waves of gifts from over 3 billion years of evolution on our blue and green pebble. Look around and see objects, including your own hands and body, and consider the unfailing generosity of the material realm, blossoming for over 12 billion years from a seed of light.
Be aware of the warmth and good will from others toward you. Sense your connecting to others, how you are supported by a net of relationships. They don’t have to be perfect. Some people do care about you. You are almost certainly loved.
Feel carried by consciousness, the effortless knowing of perception and thought. When stress, worry, pressure, or pain appear in the mind, see that the fabric of this suffering – the underlying operating of the mind – is itself fine, is always already fine.
Again and again making this little but profound shift, this giving over to the carrying cradling of mind and matter, you can afford to let your own love flow freely. Bring this down to earth: if you lived from love in your first encounter with another person today, how would you be, what would you do, how would you speak? What would a week, a year, be like in which you lived by love? How about trying this? Who knows, if enough people share in this practice, the world could become a much better place.”
I have felt overwhelmed by meanings. Flooded with good. Surprised by kindness. Taken off guard (guards unnecessary) by humans. How much good there is — children discovering, struggling; coyotes chasing cars; peacocks squawking; handshakes and smiles; innovations and ideas; hopes and dreams; sounds and shapes; disappointments and losses; grief and gratitude; desire and refusal; romance and death…
BEING LIVED
a body materially exchanging, interacting, interoperating with all the materials that surround it
a consciousness, awareness alert to emotion, interpretation, possibilities and limitations
All my Words are Silent 