“Not another word.”

On October 30, 2014October 30, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, Language, Writing3 Comments

“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

“The Conflux of Floods” : an Imagined Interview

On October 17, 2014October 17, 2014 By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Journallings, Language, WritingLeave a comment

In a recently daydreamt interview (I realize these may be narcissistic, but they have occurred all through my life, and come to function as ways to take account of myself) – in which I had composed writings that earned critical acclaim AND garnered popular and commercial success (crazy, right?!) – I was being astutely questioned (after all, I am both interviewer and interviewee – it’s a daydream), and pressured to account for both the critical acclaim and the mass consumption of the tangled materials of my celebrated novelistic-poetic-essaying (some multi-genred hodge-podge and hurly-burly’d collaging of human inscription). [Which is also, obviously, occurring in this everyday attempt at its retelling]. For better or worse.

By any account, each time I endeavored to formulate an answer to reckon for the apparent realities under fantasized questioning, I was foiled – ultimately unable to appropriately language ANYthing I strove to express – for the fundamental reason that the shared social convention of language – the available (or known) English nouns, verbs, structures, phrases, vocabulary, ontologies, etymologies, forms, content and context seemed false to my meaning as soon as I spoke them.

I would begin to assay a response, and each available term (even though utilizing an extensive and deft, adept English vocabulary) – each word I was choosing – would seemingly cancel itself. I was caught in pregnant pauses – an author seeking a term – and the accessible signs and sounds of an encyclopedic dictionary all clanged untrue – inaccurate, incomplete and implausible – incorrect!

The interview proceeded (notably un-entertainingly and un-interestingly) with solid and well-considered queries posed from the history of human making, reflection and inquiry…followed by prolonged silences as I contemplated what might be honest, authentic replies…resulting in the beginnings of obsessive-compulsive, over-thought, manically scrutinized hesitations – cancelled out and undone, revised and corrected, taken back or erased as soon as they were spoken. Simultaneously to becoming aware of their possible interpretations – conventionalized meanings gassing the atmosphere – the breath and air of their saying and hearing.

For example: “Well, I think that authors…how could I speak for others…it seems to me…no that’s not right,” or, “It is my intuition, sense of things…my felt experience… no, that’s not quite it.” “As the mind processes the body’s…wait…what is not body about the mind? Our language presents a splitting of the two that was never there…I mean…no, no, this is inadequate…” and so on. Nothing being said.

“Ever try. Ever fail. No matter.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

-Samuel Beckett-

The failure of the interview eventually came around to the following… a couple responses that might represent something almost accurate, maybe. May communicate a touch of something authentic, honest. It has stuck with me for a few days, and yet I can’t quite be sure…

A question arose concerning what I might have done, or be doing if I had fathered less children, were not bound to sustaining a family, and so on… I reflected awhile… and soon realized that I am unable to imagine my life without offspring. Nearly half of my existence has been lived as a father, and I cannot think of experiences or expressions that they do not co-create in some way. If any of it were taken back – the struggles and fears, broken marriages, anxiety, joys and determination to survive, regular interactions with their development, activities, quizzings and personalities… I only feel impoverished.

The illusional interview concluded with a large catch-all question, something along the lines of: “Your writings have profoundly moved some readers, yet you consistently express discontent – revising, beginning again, evading – even disappointment in your faltering, hesitant works. Can you talk about this experience? How do you account for your dissatisfaction in light of your readers reported satisfaction?”

My reply: “The only way I can think to address this right now is in terms of a conflux of flood waters. I, the writing one, have a flood of experience that I wish to understand, interact with, relate to somehow, attempt to comprehend. I utilize the methods, marks and systems that we, as a species over time, have collaborated and devised with which to communicate – with ourselves, with others – and I attempt, attempt, attempt to forge some accord between the vast swarming flood that my life-experience ever is – as an organism embedded in world – and the means and methods we have for making sense of, imagining, and transcribing such total experiential flow.”

“The resulting expression is always more-than, distinct and different-from the felt experience I have of the flood (as the medium borrows from far beyond my own individual abilities or thoughts, capacities – an enormous fund of expressions, vocabulary and species-deep conventionalized experiences I could not possibly evince on my own) AS WELL AS less-than, deficient, incapable and variant from (not equal to) the ubiquity of my experienced flood. I am left simultaneously hoping the conventions of language will prove adequate, and despairing they never will be. What results from this tangle is a writing – a text, document, artifact – of my individual attempts to process the flood of my human experience in conventionalized signs.”

“From the other side of the markings comes the flood of each individual reader’s human experience. As they (or we, I’m describing my reading experiences) engage the verbal expressions the writer selects to represent or elicit their own flood, the reader’s flood rushes through, around, with, into these written expressions. When what is deciphered via these conventional funds of language feels apropos, accurate or apt to the reader’s experiential living flood – we are moved, feel met, acknowledged and represented, almost comprehended and understood, and we may feel that this collection, order, expression of language we have discovered in reading actually writes us, so to speak. Which is why you may hear readers say such things as “I couldn’t have said this better…” or “I can’t imagine this expressed any other way…let me read it to you” (the thrust of quotation). The section of text, general outlook, sound, rhythm or content of the artifact feels almost miraculously adequate and accurate to our own flood of experience. Of course, often it does not – in which cases we revise or repurpose our readings toward knowledge or entertainment, something partial or other than full-flood experiencing, holistic (as nearly as possible) communication.”

“We know, as readers, no Other’s experience can be identical to our own, but in lucky moments it feels so. Feels possible that our experience of the living flood is shared, understood, that our individuality, solipsism is not a locked room, or impassable barrier. This is the “magic,” if you will, of human social conventions as mediums for individual experiences: they enable or facilitate our joinings, our cooperation, solidarity, convergence.”

“So neither the writer nor the reader are responsible for authoring profound writings, or rather BOTH are: multiple floods of experience crash through the arranged signs and symbols, separated by time and space and differences, but still possible violent confluences – depending on both, or all. Living experiencings rushing the sign-sets enabling some felt sympathy, intimacy, accord between the floodings and the expressions: conflux.”

“Otherwise it simply doesn’t ring true – might be appreciated for its artistry or ingenuity, ideas, craft, imagination – but NOT an occasion for profound felt accord, convergence, a totalizing feel of representation/expression.”

“Floods in conflux: right now this seems to me the opportunity that care and attention, effort and awareness of our socially species-al co-creating mediums of communication (art, music, technologies, labors, habitudes, languages, modes of inquiry, etc…) allow for, offer us, in moments of fortunate concord.”

“Does that answer your question in any way?”

Tape ends.

Difficulties & Pronouncements

On June 11, 2014June 10, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

What happens when I avoid “required texts”…

Difficulties & Pronouncements

For this is what I do.

When facing difficulties, Harlan makes pronouncements. Conundrums = hypotheses. “Yes, I love you, consistently,” he might say, but does not think, for Harlan does not think, he behaves, that is, he acts habitually.

Sometimes I think I am a writer.

For instance, Harlan might be confused or confounded by the behavior of others, particularly those with whom he shares his life, interacts with daily, corresponds. He might find himself baffled, able to find no explanation or solution for a “problem” – (situation in which he does not know what to do) – and therefore announce that which he considers a “reality.” E.g. – when happening upon his children bickering and unable to agree on peaceable courses of action, he might state: “it is common for people to consider the ‘ways they do things’ as the “correct” ways TO DO things…but when such consideration involves more than one family, group or person, there is often conflict, i.e. – ‘what should be done?’” Thereby solving nothing, nor finding any resolution, only offering up his own feelings of helplessness as a catalyst.

He looks at her.

Sometimes I look at you.

Sometimes I think I am a writer.

For instance, Harlan might find himself bewildered by mixed emotions (a “difficulty” in his habit-of-being) and, instead of naming the mixed emotions and going from there, instead might pronounce – “humans are complex interfusions of emotion and reason, biology and philosophy/psychology – we aren’t yet quite sure what con-spires to activate and animate us.” Thereby solving nothing, nor finding any resolution, only offering up his own feelings of helplessness, his own uncertainties, as a potential catalyst to reason.

Reason fails.

Reason is insufficient.

Harlan speaks to me about the insufficiency of reason: “Say, you know how we often try to make lists of what we ought or need to do? You know, IF we (perhaps) performed the following activities, accomplished the following feats, we might feel some sense of order in our lives, some sense that we were possessed of a direction, a purpose, a…modus operandi, and therefore felt that LIVING made a kind of SENSE?” I nodded. Sometimes I think I am a writer, and therefore listen carefully.

Anyway, plans are confusing because so regularly undone.

He looks at her. They gaze. I (also) look at you, but your eyes are closed. Still I look, and look again, and look more (at you, wistfully – imaginatively ‘into’ you) and just am looking. Harlan and Meribeth are actually looking AT, perhaps ‘toward’ or ‘con-spicuously’ WITH one another. I’m just borrowing, observing, wishing, and longing-for.

Harlan says – (there is difficulty) – “isn’t she beautiful?” (a sort of backwards pronouncement – he thinks, well, not ‘thinks,’ rather ‘feels’ [or whatever] she is beautiful) – often we respond out of habitus, instinct, notion – I keep looking at you, hoping I’m, well, wishing (sometimes believing) that I’m a writer, after a fashion, of sorts, perhaps or probably…

Harlan states the obvious obscurely when faced with problematics. Harlan is attracted to Meribeth, and Meribeth to Harlan, but such a combination of lives, of persons, of families, of children, of burdens and complexities = DIFFICULTY… and difficulty (for Harlan) stimulates the regurgitation of flimsy “absolutes” – or conventional, accepted “Truths” – therefore Harlan simply states – “I love her Nathan, god knows – or Whomever – or No one – that I desire and adore and wish for and ache in relation to that lady, Meribeth.” I know that, I say, being acute and observant, sometimes thinking I am a writer and therefore privileged to description and awareness.

The kids cry. The movie’s over and it’s far beyond ‘bedtime’ on the absolute clock of shoulds and woulds (for “good” parenting). Harlan says – “Brush ‘em and orchestrate [they don’t know that word, but clearly understand what it means, unlike machines or ‘predictive text’] yourselves for nighty-night!” Harlan looks at Meribeth – the sort-of ‘fun aunt’ or ‘older girl cousin’ or ‘delightful female guest’ the kids have been curious about this evening and attempted to entertain or woo or utilize to their own purposes THIS evening – with a kind of drunken swooning, a kind of animal desire, a kind of helpless confusion and bewilderment – and Meribeth looks back at him with a kind of “Am I all that? Am I really distinct, different, unique-in-the-world, exceptional?” look… and the kids begrudgingly and grumblingly rumble off toward the bathroom because Harlan’s voice has a certain gruff, man-like edge to it (a growling of a different sort of desire from authority – the older ones might tick it the ‘daddy-voice’). I notice all these things because I consider myself a ‘writer’ – a person attuned to the subtle realities of human-animalness, quirks of idiosyncratic behaviors – someone predisposed to inventing or discovering or collaging words from language into odd combinations of metaphors that might shake loose emotions related to the ways our particular species behaves (NOT thinks or reasons, or rather AND thinks and reasons) in this world – and Harlan exhibits clear, semi-drunk desire for Meribeth, and Meribeth mirrors a kind of dumb, flattered and pretend-complimentary bewilderment to Harlan’s aching want, and I jot scribbly notes into a little travel notebook with sketches of London on its cover, and people are confused and want each other [or SOMEone] and I chuckle at the ingenuity of children, and wonder at the difficulties and pronouncements that accompany the rest of us.

“It’s a boatshitload,” Harlan says.

I, Artifact, Anyone

On May 12, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing2 Comments

I and the Anyone Artefact.

Given the miniscularity and brevity…and, say, the import or apparent heft – foils of mountain, sea, sky, and other incremental gravities or scale-altering engagements…

…what boils down in my insignificant, barely mappable blip of a space-form “life-span”?

What do I want? (Mountain. Man. Collective of actionable atoms.)

Or how about in another form: I, mountain, atom, want to write, am writing,

leaving record (partly), making record (partly), finding record (partly),

recording (partly), imagining (partly), learning (partly), playing (partly),

wondering (partly), thinking (partly), providing (manufacturing) company (partly),

because I can and it makes living-through delightful, meaningful, poignant, aware, alert…

Simply…I accounted for happiness recently as reading, writing and forms of companionship, because reading and writing (inseparable companions, or perhaps two aspects utterly meshed and merged, inextricably joined) – experiencing them seems to me to be enhanced when compatibly shared, mutually valued, reciprocated and informed.

I want to write. I want what I write to provide sustenance for my self and children and home. I want to write whatever I have it in me to make out of language, not what people ask me to write or pay me to write or suggest that I write.

PART ONE:

There is a grand, iconic, snow-capped mountain – Kilimanjaro, Hood, Vesuvius – symmetrical-seeming mounds of earth that simply and irreducibly and undeniably say – silently and continuously – “I AM HERE.”

Part One:

I exist. I mark. I testify to and quarry that existence in my way. I artefact.

[Write well. Parent well. Perhaps partner.]

“Companionship”: friendship, fellowship, closeness, togetherness, amity, intimacy, rapport,

camaraderie, brotherhood, sisterhood; company

[wants to be a writer. writes. AM a writer. wants to support existence by doing that which it wants : to write]

“the intersection of talents and joys”

[wants to parent well. to develop thoughtful, compassionate, productive child-persons of survivable health. parents.]

To artefact (not for longevity or endurance [perhaps partly – a kind of sustenance surely]) but to quarry the systems and processes – the multitude of unknowns to living-through.

I artefact – consciously to be present, to offer, to be worthwhile, to further matter (to participate in generation, ongoing complexity, collaboration, coordination and collocation – co-being, co-construction with world).

Write. Parent. Relate. (therefore) I, artifact (make ‘art’ in ‘fact’).

[take in artefacts via world – learn, adopt, adjust, adapt, extend – and artifact this process out]

These are wonderful, benign, banal, investigations.

The Simply Difficult: WHAT AM I? WHO AM I? WHY? HOW? : The Questions of Living-Through.

(I repeatedly note that life interests me insofar as I am querying WHY people think they exist and attending to HOW …)

What are your answers to these? (my present mobile answers provided in parentheses)

WHAT are you? (a temporary and dynamic collection of active molecules idiosyncratically coupled and formed)
WHO are you? (a fluid and alterable co-depending individuated space-form reciprocally coupled to its perceptual and perceiving, cognizable surround)
WHY are you? (a form of life…to be)
HOW are you? (idiosyncracies=personhood: the fluctuating continuum of activities and behaviors between what I contain and what contains me…the marginal substance where uniqueness exhibits)

Or… I, Mountain / You, Sky. Ocean. Flock. Field. Plain.

Metaphor: perhaps our primary mode of learning? Posit, compare, examine, observe, revise, pretend, fabricate, manipulate, invent: “Make-sense”=”Knowledge / Learning”

All of this to say that every object(form) at every moment is responsible for the possibilities of meaning.

We could be anyone (and will be, have been, are, plus…) individually (or ‘uniquely’ ANYone).

IN OTHER WORDS: I want to stop whatever this is and tell you.

Want to tell you I LOVE YOU. I am personally thankful that you exist and am convinced the entire world would be different (no matter how miniscule or brief you may be) if there were not you (seems to be the way EVERYthing – systemically – IS). So I am thankful (good or ill) that: ARE. IS.

Say there is/was a child. Mountain. Hypothesis. Arrangement. Beginning. Again. Scenario.

ARTIFACT: Chance. Atom. Action. Experience. Being.

Pretend: Sky crashes.

Mountain melts away.

All = nada.

And then “YOU”= WHO? WHAT? WHY? HOW? (WHERE is implicit)

p.s. someone will die in someone’s arms

p.p.s. someone will write about it, remember

p.p.p.s. someone might sing

p.p.p.p.s. someone will represent it in paint/clay/language/dance/sound

Mountain Sky Ocean Trees Soil

Scrambling… Scattering Notes

On May 7, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings7 Comments

Scattered experience. Over the past 90 days my life has been characterized by necessities. Scrambling to find sustainable work, scrambling to keep up with coursework. Scrambling to assist as best I can in the psychological health and stability of my family, children. Scrambling to keep my head above water in grief, loss, confusion, self-care and healing.

In these currents – their exhaustion, their novelty, their large and compounded emotions of helplessness, anger, frustration, anguish and fear, their realms of bewilderment – my last ditch scramble has been to note, feel, soak and pay attention to as much as I can, filling notebooks full of journalings, lists, to-dos, scenarios, something like prayers or wishes, something like tomes of notes intended for bottles and no one / anyone. My best last chance seemed to be to try to MAP things – maintain access to whole regions of variant experience, conflicts, desperations and strengths, plans and disappointments, resumes and rejections, therapy appointments and dependents-events, multiple employment schedules and deadlines, and so on…SCRAMBLING…but at least with some scattered semblance of shapes and places and events…

Recently reading through Joshua Cohen’s Four New Messages, I encountered a story in which the story is being drafted simultaneous to the story being the story of the difficulty of its drafting, messages to mother or father about how stuck and stunted the process of managing multiple lives (or roles), composing fiction, processing life, and maintaining the presence of mind to embody created worlds and encountered worlds...living.

It is curious to me that the intention of “Opening the Hand” : (“All of this is to say that I plan a series of posts that will be intensely personal, self-revelant, my own way of reaching toward my experience, my being, and selecting language with which to mark it down – for re-memory, re-cognition, observation, reception, attention, account. These are journal entries, frankly. They are what I have to write. I am calling them “Mapping the Meaning.” Since I know very few of you personally, in your whole presence, I expect confession, inquiry, and its self-circular expression to genuinely interest or benefit very few of you. For me, it is writing with an open hand“). should end up resulting in the very scrambled scatter that, indeed, my current lived experience is. Where I had hoped constructing, reflecting, composing and attending might result in some fabricating shape – some possibly effective mapping that might help me feel a “place” or “terrain” in which I am existing – provide a possible view of a larger whole.

It hasn’t worked out that way. As I’ve delved into depths of my history, experience, perceptions as cracked open by the recent grief, loss and confusion; as I’ve purposed more presentness with my children and family and friends; as I’ve filled my days with job searches – statements of my identity, skills, education and worth; as I’ve learned new labor and institutions and expectations; as I’ve rewritten survivable budgets, forged opportunities to keep some semblance of self-care about what I want to be about (art, literature, learning, meaning); as I’ve sought to stay fit, attend to my body; as I’ve filled pockets of moments with music and writings that nurture or comfort me… things have NOT found any design… but are scrambled, scattered, disparate, paradoxical, bewildering. For the notebooks of language I have emitted during these months… there is hardly a snippet that makes literary sense, is bloggable, expresses. Thus the erratic entries, the confusing sentiments, the uncertainty and unknowing…

For now… here are the texts I’m hanging on…

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Hopefully something will form… for now, scattered blurbs and reports, survival and bewilderment… SCRAMBLING…

ReWritten / ReWriting

On April 5, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

ReWritten

The Disappearance of Needs

In any genre. Writer becomes when the needs disappear – needs like expression or dialogue, understanding or inquiry. The need to devise layers or multiples of perspective, to experiment or experience language or thought. To love.

When these needs are expunged or exhausted, and a human puts pen or pencil to page, writing might begin.

These needs are not expunged.

Needs complexly relocate.

Maybe they find a more suitable object, event, or entity. Writer attempts to construct love via language and page. This is also dialogue. But what is needed is resonance-WITH. What is longed for are moments of positive resonance with an other of Writer’s same kind. Where resonance would be acceptance, acknowledgment, empathy. Comprehension, understanding, attunement with Writer’s barest, most authentic expressions – Writer’s openness and risk, Writer’s life-experiencing, meaning-making processes.

[NOTE: Obviously it is literature being addressed herein – not formulaic, hack, commissioned, business or “professional,” aesthetic or philosophical – domain-specific languages, entertainment or communication-purposed compositions. Rather – writing that lays bare living – which can (also obviously) partake or occur within any and all of the above forms and kinds of inscriptions]

Writer, utilizing all accessible knowledge, craft and experience divulges (as best Writer can at this instant) Writer’s lived experience. Writer loves her. Writer grieves. Writer imagines. Writer pretends. Writer co-constructs (borrowing from the everywhere that language, experience, emotion, sensation, cognition, DNA, biology, physiology, dimensions etc. comprise) trails of letters, incipient sounds, rhythms, definitions, analogies and metaphors, socio-cultural baggage, spatio-temporal perceptions, historical variety and habitudes, toward some sort of text, artifact, writing.

In other words, Writer writes.

And as Writer writes, Reader reads (they are one and the same initially) and that reading also co-constructs the divulgence and activity-experience the writing com-poses.

Posing-with = Writing. An individual, posing-with, everything-at-disposal (its affordances and limitations) through language-inscribed.

[NOTE: pose¹pōz/

1. verb

present or constitute (a problem, danger, or difficulty).

“the sheer number of visitors is posing a threat to the area”

synonyms:

constitute, present, create, cause, produce, be More

assume a particular attitude or position in order to be photographed, painted, or drawn.

“she posed for a swarm of TV cameramen“

synonyms:

model, sit More

2. noun

a particular way of standing or sitting, usually adopted for effect or in order to be photographed, painted, or drawn.

“photographs of boxers in ferocious poses“

synonyms:

posture, position, stance, attitude, bearing More

a particular way of behaving adopted in order to give others a false impression or to impress others.

“the man dropped his pose of amiability“

synonyms:

pretense, act, affectation, facade, show, front, display, masquerade,posture More

]

The needs remain because they’re needs. Needs oxygen, needs community, needs interaction, needs movement. Needs nutriments, needs love. Needs habits and practices, processes and conventions. Needs society, needs shelter, needs protection, needs…

As if folded-into. As if woven. As if inherent and intrinsic, automatic.

As of anything and everything, then, Writing is not solitary. “To write” is TO-WRITE-WITH the universe-encyclopedia of said individual, “writing.” Some languages verb this better than others, some will allow us to feign.

Writer will not feign, unless “to survive” necessitates “to feign.”

Writer intends to write-with, perhaps finally surpassing a former dream of being no one, no thing, instead edging toward and everything that one is, of necessity, Writing.

In the Sea above the Sea: transitory reflections from above the Atlantic

On February 23, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Reflections2 Comments

Look at things, see them exposed

in their metaphysical innocence

unsure of their existence.

…

When do paintings shrug off

the painter, when will this same material

become a new idea? The evening mist crept over

the lawn, drowning the avenue, the fountain,

the house.

Music, the splash of oars.

Someone turns on the light, someone

doesn’t believe in dusk.

The unanswerable question drifts

past the window.

-Cees Nooteboom, Cauda

As I make my way back over the Atlantic from the nominally United Kingdom to the (equally nominally) United States, I am considering what things most prominently infected me. Partly “I think I wanted to get lost to see what happens next” (Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know) and partly I wanted to know what to do – my coursework and library visitations – to anchor my lostness while providing anonymity and foreignness in which to search for peace and move through grief.

nobody

More and more the invisible was named,

the blind man grew mightier.

How he wandered and called out to his echo!

which called back with the screech of gulls.

He is still searching among flags and vistas

for that same statue.

Sounds blow to the far side of the river.

Nobody is standing there.

Nothing takes shape. Newspapers melt,

photos fade. The stone is made of wax,

the notebook of ash, time takes itself

and repeats the appearance

until his life becomes a mirror

in which he disappears and appears,

but nobody looks at himself,

because nobody can see himself.

-Cees Nooteboom

my “self” photographed in front of Gerhard Richter’s “painting” Grey Mirror

-Tate Modern, London-

I noted how clear the signage. Clear and direct with no soft-pedaling of consequences stated. Mind the gap, way out (and way in), “moving through these doors may result in death or injury” (on the Underground), smoking kills. The ubiquity of concern for mental health – that Bibliotherapy is not just a bookseller’s or librarians metaphor of expertise – but is in fact a prescriptive cure – scripts are written by doctors for BOOKS! (hundreds a week, one library reported). Along the same culture-historic lines, perhaps influenced by the longevity and prevalence of hundreds to thousands year-old architecture and artefacts, traditions, and tangible evidence of time and identities – the apparent insistence on QUALITY – of life, of drink, of service – of literature and art and purposes. So while everything costs about twice as much as the USA, the options often doubled the quality. A local pub on every corner, small grocers, fresh markets – in the miles I walked I only spotted a handful of McDonald’s, Krispy Kremes or other international chains (and only in heavily touristed areas) – aside from Starbucks. I saw 3 gas stations.

And the bookstores!!! Sometimes 3 or 4 in a block, flush to the gills – but hardly a bestseller, a romance, or fluff! Amazing – perhaps the most profound difference between the USA and UK that I noticed: their stores FEATURED literary quality, and only sometimes provided mass appeal items that could be had anywhere online – in many stores 80% of the stock I encountered did not have an eBook format – the books were books meant to be books in the purpose of books – to be engaged with the body and mind and retained and gone back to – like the architecture, museums and galleries – not disposable pleasures – but necessary cultural artifacts made from the human condition and accessed repeatedly for its benefit.

Of course there are the “places”: Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, the British Library and British Museum, the Tate, Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Tower of London and on and on…walking over 15 miles a day, finding “oldest churches” in every nook and alley, colleges and universities every other block, London is a place swamped with culture and continuity, the high and the low, and great gaps to mind in between.

So with those great anchors securing me, I tried to see myself. In the reflections of great art and architecture, thousands of years of history and culture, thousands of languages in cosmopolitan streets, thousands of unknown faces and voices, habits and practices and sayings…my “life became a mirror in which he disappears and appears,” but, of course, “nobody looks at himself, because nobody can see himself.”

What did I see? Well by looking through others that I could see, I found “I wasn’t sure my skeletal system had found a way of walking freely in the Societal System” and the need “to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which I have been put together by the Societal System in the first place” including the “many delusions of my own”…”it’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject – it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer” (Deborah Levy).

And I thought of how, like the forest and the trees – it often seems we are unable to see reality for our experiences. So many of us semi-automatically equate our experience with reality – rather than note how small our perceptual bubble really is. Just try using the “Powers of 10” idea – start anywhere – with your pain, your fingernail, your happiness. Now imagine IN a power of 10 – you’re into the cells, into one strand of what’s causing you pain, into a moment eliciting joy. 10x more and you’ve gone beyond atoms and quarks – matter and energy ill-defined and inexplicable and ALWAYS dynamic. Imagine OUT a power of 10 – you’re viewing a street full of private perceptual experiences very different from your own – and trees and birds and squirrels and buildings. X 10 and you see miles and miles of earth – filled up with all kinds of creatures and systems, connectors and wonders and weathers and mountains and rivers – x 10! and you’re out in the galaxy of planets much larger than our own, stars much bigger than our sun, and still more galaxies to go…

Either way you go there is gargantuan forest – and our experience, our body – barely a branch…yet we evaluate so often from that individual outlook – incredibly distorting bubble of lens – with a minimal scope – not engaging the forest, absorbing the forest, wandering and listening and looking and opening – so that “the unanswerable question drifts by” and “unsure of its existence” can “become a new idea…” the beginnings of subject-ivity – a particle in relation from within and without – from mattering energy to butterflied effects…an individual instancing of human.

Be mindful. Be curious. Be patient. Don’t know, and enjoy your hands. Be generous, take refuge, find strength. Be grateful, keep going, be glad. Respond, don’t react. Slow down and forgive. Let go, accept limits, and do what you can. Take in the good, relax, have compassion. Feel safer, fill holes, and love.

-all chapter titles from Rick Hanson’s just one thing

It’s okay. Be human – the extremely hard, most natural thing.

cheers!

an added and unexpected catharsis – on the night I tried British telly due to trouble falling asleep – Synechdoche, NY – a remarkable example of how complex and generative our perceptive bubble can be…and yet how barrier’d from the world outside of that bubble…forests and trees / reality and personal experiences – beautiful drops in the sea… (and perhaps my favorite movie to date)..

February 23, 2014

What David Said…

On February 21, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Writing1 Comment

-David Foster Wallace interview

An Ultimate Prompt

On February 4, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Writing11 Comments

What “prompts” us?

A pain. A joy. Surprise. Loss, meaning, something that crashes, crushes, alerts or in some way causes blurts or blasts to our system that create cross-connections – surge energy / electricity / pulsings between links and channels that otherwise run their own course. Unexpected. Expected. SIGNIFICANCE.

I am intrigued by what “catches” us, “moves” us, CHANGES us. As many times askance as head on. What gathers and whispers behind us. What we are confronted with. Explosive, erosive, evolutional. You could call them “shocks to the system.” Sometimes cumulative, sometimes immediate. But they effect change, and attention. Design, and process.

I’m thinking of them as prompts.

There are a few works of literature and art, throughout my life, that ALWAYS “prompt” me. A few authors. A few painters, sculptors, musicians. I do not know why this is, but it is so – some voices, some styles, some appearances and sounds unfailingly “move” me, by which I mean continuously change my orientation to the world. Often subtly, sometimes radically, but surely.

Macedonio Fernandez is one such creator.

His writings NEVER FAIL to alter me.

I could query my analytics to find how many times I have quoted him, referenced his “first good novel”

and today I am passing the PROMPT that this novel is – and IS contained in it – on to you… from Fernandez himself – I have lived with it, considered it, dreamt of it… a prompt he left us that haunts and inspires me… an ultimate sort of prompting….

“everything gives way, opens up, flows out, flows back, flecks…”

On November 21, 2013November 20, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing2 Comments

“I am in words, I am made of words, of the words of others, what others, this place too, the air too…”

–Samuel Beckett–

As the semester’s projects begin to disintegrate into final clumps of submission…my innards yawn and stretch and struggle awake, expressing a yearning to search…spill forward instead of re-searching…explore and extend…

to construct and create without resources – to invent from the miscellaneous stockpiles of information and data accrued through intense weeks of devouring and ingesting…

This essay, from Maurice Blanchot, regarding Samuel Beckett – “Where Now? Who Now?” – captures that no-place of beginning – amid a chaos of signs and sensations – knowledge and ignorance – words and emotions concocted from immersion in information sources and recorded knowledge that constitutes “higher learning”…

please engage!