Tag: Literature

Nebulous Thoughts

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing6 Comments


But what if we went right on ahead?

If we charged like bulls bellowing our mysteries?

When I think of you, think about us, I want to.  That’s exactly what I want to do: be done with mysteries, be one in fact.

But when I look at you, when I touch, taste, smell and listen you, I cannot conceive it.  Can’t even imagine comprehending all that’s unknown, inexplicable.  And I’m afraid to.  That too, I’m frightened of some unfathomable overwhelm.

Yet from a distance, I mean, from here, now, it feels plausible.  To declare all mysteries, one to another, in song or verse or gesture.  Enaction.  To enact our mysteries and imperceivables all at once in some enormous chaotic unison, unashamed.  What is there to be ashamed of?  Secrets are not mysteries, only their private signs.  What forges them is larger and unclear.  Diversity and variation – these we celebrate – no?

Step out of your houses and enact your whole selves!

We will bewilder one another – not such a bad catharsis!

Running, perhaps amok, perhaps silenced to a shuddering ball – who knows?  It’s a mystery!

Perhaps we’d shout in brand new languages – delighting everyone’s ears!  Perhaps we’d alter the surface of the earth, its environments?

Would that we were one expressive impressive cacophonous voice!

Would that we were?

I’d split into a willow tree dropping language-boulders from my fragile limbs.  I’d erupt a perfect mountain steaming as a cold clear lake.  I’d mud.  I’d sprout as a milky pasture of weeds.

You’d Sousaphone in primary colors woven as a world-shawl.  You’d be all the quiet stars, glimmering in their conflagration.  You’d whisper through grain and aspen, moving through air like helium.

We’d crash without injury, fomenting monuments of grandeur.  Melding our mysteries.  You-topia.  Humana-topia.  “Other”-worldly.

Perhaps.

Perhaps a universal dancing, a carnival of beauty so trouncing our balancing globe as to shatter it, sitting afloat or casting about – some atmospheric inferno.  Perhaps a gaseous stench would burst forth, a deadly poison.  Perhaps disaster.  Apocalypse of  invisible revealed.

We could surely say “we know not what we do” living mysteries, eh?

“Off the hook” even as it gores us.

Earthquaking order in riotous glee.

The maniac’s laugh.

A universe of blindness and flare.

Breaking the eggs, precarious shells.

No wonder veneers.  Elaborate mechanisms.

Flexible and porous, rigid and finely tuned.

It wears  out, the strain and stress: containing, defending.

What if we went right on ahead?

Plunged up out of deep waters, rocketing down from our skies?

Going through with our propensities: explosion/implosion?

What do you imagine?  The beginning?  The end?

A flood, a conflagration?  Some perfect balance?

We hardly know ourselves, one another…

secrets give way to hiding, large blank territories blocking the unseen, from ourselves, one another…

equilibrium-fear

we call eco-system, survival, “life.”

Undoing?

From here, right now, I want to release, to channel and broadcast – to expose without imposition, sing that I might hear, dance that I might see, enact in order to know…become some inward/outward thing, supernova and black hole at once…

nothing escaping, nothing withheld.

Who (what) are we?

Begin.

Adding it up

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Philosophy, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Reading, Writing – the ‘Rithmetic

You know, I honestly don’t know why I think of the many things I think of.  “About” usually, yes, usually I can surmise why I stick to a thinking project – it might be something that troubles or worries me, maybe it involves something about which I care deeply or enjoy – then I’ll ruminate around on the subject or object for awhile, attempt to figure or follow the thinks, arrange some digits or sounds, contents, feelings or symbols until I make fit or get lost in the simple joy of tinkering.

But then other times, and really quite often, I can’t locate the instigative trail or balancing of reason for why (or how) items pop into or swish by my apprehending (apprehensive?) brain.

For instance, just now (and it’s precisely the unknowing that prompts me to write about it, to squeeze it through language), I was sitting quietly to desk after a very full day of soccer games, bicycle rides and birthdays, perusing Ron Loewinsohn’s Goat Dances, Anne Carson’s plainwater, Jon Anderson’s The Milky Way and Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays – a very normal way I have of grounding myself, discovering a location by mapping found paths, when sploosh! across the internet of my mind zipped:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”

            And then I stopped.  Closed the books, slid them aside, rested my chin in my hand and gazed toward nowhere, wondering what question that sounds-like-an-answer phrase was responding to or anticipating.

Why would I think that?

Lost in language like dancing and syllables, stars and night skies, withs and relation and choros, why would my only clear thought (recognizably anyway) be:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”?

            When something stops me like that, and I already hear a rhetorical response, but no answers satisfy and questions only multiply exponentially…

I grab loose blank notebook pages and a ball-point pen…

and begin doodling, dabbling, and “showing my work.”

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” (implied automatic resonant answer: because it does) leads precisely (in this case, given all the contingencies and conditions) to the chicken-scratching rambling preceding this period.

In other words, not to a solution, or perhaps even a working equation or problem, but simply to activity.  Reading, writing, thinking it out in lines, shapes and signs.

Now during all this scribble-sketching around the inceptive phrase, my bodymind has been mantra-ing responsorials:  “because it really does,” “because I’m not even aware of things happening until verified in language,” “because life just occurs and I don’t know about it until I manifest the experience some way – bounce it off of a counterpart or internal funhouse mirror (other’s words) to learn what it is and isn’t” and so on…so-called “reasons” I guess?  Hypothetical rationales for the random (apparently) phrase having typed itself in my nervous wirings?

The only “fact,” as I experience them, is that this phrase: “I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” clearly spat itself across the innards of my cranium while I was going about the very normal activity of recovering, soothing, pausing and nourishing myself on books at hand, wishing somewhere it hadn’t taken me all day to reach this quiet, wishing somewhere that all conversations went like this listening, wishing somehow I had something that felt like it needed to be written down, wishing somewhere that I understood myself.

And alas: a baffling sentence in response to no one silently carves and engraving on my consciousness:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depends on it”

My entire body replying: “well…YEAH!  It does!  It’s the only way YOU know that there’s possibly LIFE at all, and not just sensations, emotions, thinkings and dreams; reactions, responses and stimuli!  Without reading about it or writing words out I personally have no concrete object to sound my experience against, to test a happening – everything else out there from spouse to “god” is always moving, shifting, adapting, changing…just like me.”

“I guess I always read and write BECAUSE my ‘life’ depends on it”

Waking into Questions

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Photography, Writing3 Comments

“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?)

Intimacy

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, WritingLeave a comment
photo by ParkeHarrison

Intimacy

“People really understand very little of one another”

-Anne Carson-

            You might say we studied one another through a thick fog.  Or learned one another in the dark, guessing, reaching, feeling our way.

For many years.

We were determined.

Recording nuances, memorizing beats, mimicking rises and falls.  Taking fingerprints with our bodies, collecting snapshots for official documents.  We created and invented artifacts together in order not to know – who was who and which was which.  We merged as often as we could, and more than often asked.

We still remember general shapes and movements – tones, colors, outlines.  Each a sort of negative of the other – surfaces accepting imprints, continuous translations.

You could say we were scholars and specialists.  At times we counted hairs, many times while splitting them.  From observation it is hard to tell bodies tangled in fighting from those wrestling in love.  Unfettered laughter from convulsive wails.  We learned to do so by watching them changing one to another and back again.  Momentary gradients.  We were able to dance on thin lines.

In earnest we catalogued vocabularies by rote, genetics, neuroses, causes and effects, our marriage a lab of research and experiment.  Encycopedic and replete.

Through interference of weather and evolution’s inexplicable leaps we adapted apparati for morphing data, constructing theses.  Compared and bickered notes and conclusions, matters and intention.  Interpretations varied.

More astrology than –onomy, more alchemy than chemistry, we carried forth our quest.  Meteorology, geology, archaeology we sought of one another, growing compendiums of analyses and flow, catalysts and katharses.

Our distance became cosmically microscopic, mythological and rite.  You might say we were studying one another in a great fog.  We kept on receiving each other in the dark.

Two Helpmeets Today (extended quotations for the journeying)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing2 Comments

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.

Two Continuations….

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Photography, Uncategorized, Writing4 Comments

(click Can You Imagine below for full text)

#1.  “Can you imagine?”…and so it is

Can you imagine
ParkeHarrison Photo

and #2: “Outwide…” (outward)

(click Outwide below for full text)

Outwide

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The Structure of this Blog (“Totalife”)

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

Imagine:

The Novel:

“Vaguely we knew each other, also almost ourselves, among other things”

N Filbert  2012

The Fool

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings10 Comments
The Fool

Ah, April 1.  And I had been breathlessly preoccupiedly waiting the work day to begin…today I begin a journey into The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson, after a gentling scan into The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom, both of which “just happened” to arrive at my local library yesterday – arbitrary arrivals from my Interlibrary Loan list of “wants”.  Fool or not, nose in book, pack on back, and harried by wolves, it is what I do (am?).  Here I go!  (no fooling) 🙂 (why have I not seen so many cliffs and falls just ahead?)

Making Words

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing6 Comments

Action: Writing

 

Woven in the circles of making, I felt and I thought, I wrote (I thought) “What is called writing?”

An action, a process, a braiding of becoming.

In that way it is like breathing, sensing, walking.

Also not.

 

I wouldn’t, for instance, “do it anyway” – wasn’t born with the instinct of muscle and nerve to be verbal, textual.  I needed other people for that, and the whole history of the world, and the tiny stories of my community and location.  All those things, all those “others” – elements and entities NOT me trained me to language.  Taught me to “mean’ something with a sound or a gesture, out of an enormity of possible sounds and motions, infinite and miniscule in their variety.  So that I utter and behave as a Kansas boy raised in the 1970s in the United States of America; I can say “what” about forty different ways, but not like someone from Tokyo, Moscow or Bangladesh.

Clearly I went along with it, became, developed my own versions of signification and cadence, intonation and grammar.  Working well enough when among the great pool of English-speakers who read literature, philosophy, poetry or know something about parenting, divorces, theology or art.

Outside of that I suspect I’m a foreigner.  A penguin squawking and waddling about.

Given the breathing, perceiving, pulsing, walking thing, I can usually find my way among other humans anywhere, but not without a strangeness and suspicious curiosity about the way I do it, and why.

Likewise.

Words written are things.  Objects to collage, cut and paste, assemble/dissemble, rearrange.

That’s what I love to do.  I like very much listening to their silences, their potential precision and fluid spillage and wash.  I love finding shapes there and rhythms.  After all, music isn’t about the melody, but all of its sounds and silences together.  But writing isn’t music, it’s writing.

Stories aren’t histories, expressions or truths – they’re words.  Lists aren’t tasks performed or groceries, notes aren’t emotions or commands – they’re words.  A painting of a mountain isn’t a mountain.  It’s a painting.

So my blog, my work, my play, my joy my grief my desire and delight is this puzzling and fiddling about with this (for all practical finite purposes and aptitude) infinite galaxy of lettered objects.

What it might “mean” or “say,” “express” “communicate” or “intend” and so on – I guess that’s up to you – making your own creative use of my arrangements from your very own culture of sounding signing and gesturing.

A happy medium, as far as I’m concerned.

N Filbert 2012

Dialogic project

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Poetry, Writing2 Comments
Tentative

Tentative