Tag: living

Ecriture – ‘I write’ – Why write?

On By NW FilbertIn Art, being, Compromise, creative writing, death, ecstasy, Experimenctes, Language, Melancholy, Writing6 Comments

ecstasy - st therese

Nihilism – Melancholy – Language – Silence

No meaning (no matter)

                                            Sorrow (fail again)

                                                                                Speak (try again)

                                                                                                             Silence (fail better?)

A darkness.  Immersion.  This life.  The living it.  Ever to and toward a pointless death (again, another, also).  To be.  To be (as human).  To wish.  To wish for otherwise(s).  To IMAGINE.

Music.  Vision.  Feeling.  Sound ~ Meaning.

I am (one) capable of crafting a fine sentence.

And so – ?

She sings, birdlike, wind-like, tree-like, animal, a hiss of land.

He cavorts shapes, models, architecture – opportunities of space – perhaps, perhaps not yet, perhaps becoming.  In progress…

That one strikes a chord: says.  Plays.  Possible resonance.  Possible possible.  Manufacturing potential.

I am forlorn.  Shorn.  Shriven, stricken, silent.

Working within the arranging of existing things – without vision – mathematician with its figures, logician with axioms, linguist syllabic syntagms.  Utilizing signs.  Pre-existing me – letters and language – scratches and symbols – touches and sights – emotions and thoughts and exhaust…

Minima Philologica

“Very little…almost nothing”

A signal, a marking, a shape inferring sound

(above some hopeful/hopeless void)

And yet…

Organism ~ orgasm.  Biologically an entity capable of immersive ecstasy.  What can, might, has the potential to be – la petite mort – weakening of consciousness, swoon, a likening unto death.  This life.  The living it.  Ever to and toward a pointless death (again, another, also).  To be.  To be (as human).  To wish.  To wish for otherwise(s).  To IMAGINE.

As much or as often as possible.  Regardless of structure, import, complexity, complication or difficulty, even desire – BODILY – as organism ~ orgasm FEELS whole, full, exceptional.  Pain, lack, abuse, obtrusion, power, inequality, mystery, vanish, abandon…and yet… the body in orgasm is ecstatic – a weakening of consciousness, swoon, a likening unto death.  Ecriture.

Without meaning

Without import

Without portent

Without purpose

Try (again), ask for (fail again), achieve (fail better)

Anyway, anyhow, silence.

THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH TIME!

The rest go hang – come undone – fail, fall, try harder, wish, hope, imagine – make sense, sensibility, concept, meaning – IN ANY CASE: organism ~ orgasm – more pain and more pleasure will come, will follow upon, will remember, remain – time and consequence – a weakening, a swoon, a likening unto death.

Orga(ni)sm doesn’t care.  All impact an add-on.  Intellect / emotion / sensation / cognition / perception – derivative, invented – and yet – orgasm is an organismic moment.  La petite mort.  Ecriture.

Generative?  Reproducing (or not).  Informative (or not).  Act, study, behave (or not).  And then…NOT.  Organismic gathering toward totality for a moment.  There is living, there is dying (and death) and they (in fact) are indistinguishable.  This life.  The living it.  Ever to, in, toward pointless death (again, another, also).  To be.  To be (as human).  To wish.  To wish for otherwise(s).  To IMAGINE.  Being orgasmically.

To live.  To die.  (breathe out).

It is windy.

The Dual Activity of the Properties of Erosion

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, change, Complexity, desire, Dying, eros, Journaling, Loss, time, Travel, Writing6 Comments

Having traveled 2000 miles: Wichita – to – Carlsbad, NM – to – Guadalupe Mountains Nat’l Park – to – Presidio, TX – to – Big Bend National Park – to – Wichita in the past few days, I was privy to the glories of erosion.  What it builds, what it wears away.

My 10-year-old is studying erosion in 4th grade and reminds me that the current definition is simply the movement of material.  What dwindles somewhere accretes in another…

IMG_0896

and leaves or creates (absence or presence of absence?) some glorious ruins (or productions)…

IMG_0911

In an accidental synchrony, we traveled the paths of a favorite album of mine – This Will Destroy You – This Will Destroy You, and the following clip has long moved me, perhaps as much as any music ever has…

…ever reminding me of how I’d like my living dying to go…the movements and decaying – its constructions – the thickened gradual swelling of the deep good of being alive, punctuated by weighty whiles of thriving and ecstasy, momentous significants of loss or gain, as materials move and their relations alter / evolve / generate and decompose.  Its insistence and tocking inevitability.  The (hopefully) delta-like depositing of the full lot, spreading throughout, in its end…

Here’s to our living-dying onlyness…and wishes toward beautiful erosion.

 

The 44th Turn

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Poetry, Reflections3 Comments

You ache.

You are older,

and beautiful,

in the way piles of gravel

surprise you

along the turnpike.

 

Those gathered around you

are increasingly less –

less in years, less in words,

and less in common –

saving the uncommon

tastes and thoughts and talents.

 

You still have books

and a dimming light

and more than enough love.

You eat, you drink, and make merry.

Some things you remember together,

almost

 

almost the necessary ones,

say a child, a lover, a poem.

There are gifts, a few –

those given you yourself

and to others –

“the allowance” –

 

allowing

care and celebration,

some sweet welcoming,

some join.

 

It’s alright,

she is here, beside you,

they are sleeping in their beds,

are scattered to the days,

are bleeding, are breathing

 

so much talk of labor

in our culture –

piles of effort

for finding peaceful paths,

to the country,

the cabin,

toward some freedom

to live.

 

We live.

Our days adding up

while counting down,

in strange measures –

now in years,

by the hours,

in moments.

Erosion, take two

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing13 Comments

II.

This is the story of how I began telling the truth.  The truth I defined as “two truths and at least one lie.”  The truth of my experience.

Poets often carry sorrow in their sockets – some underlying angst influencing attention.  There’s sclera, iris, pupil, and a deepening mirror of perceived pain…or seared “ego.”  Grief or grudge – and difficult to distinguish.

As much as there is to learn or to know, some simple patterns give the slip.  Once you figure a composing context, the information is derived.  Look out for what might constitute survival for each respective entity.  Aim your inquiry there.

Parents hurt as much as heal.  As do love and risk and wisdom (or well-being).  All that is given in life is also taken away – exactly when it is given.

Everyone canvasses sorrow.  The surgeons in their trembling hands, the librarians in their order.  The therapist’s reflective stance, architect’s angles, businessman’s mettle.  We all know that we’re going to die.  Celebrities in their acclaim, the athletes in their strength, and whores in their affection.  Everything is risk.

truthlies

What = Now

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Music, WritingLeave a comment

EROSION

“to change patterns…expose the wounds…”

– Charlie Kaufman – 

1.  Truth is…truth was…truth is… 

And this was the daily game of Reality-Telling…two truths with at least one lie.  A morning-midday-evening list-assembling of continuous is-was-ises.  Spilled coffee, set aright, sopped with towel.  Triples.  Thing – thing – relation.  So many relations revising so many “things.”  Complicating, co-creating, is-was-is.

“Change is never lossless,” it was written.  Once comforted by the is of experience – that no matter the grief or anguish, no matter the disaster or rift, the poverty or destruction – experience kept accruing.  “Experience is additive even in reduction.”  Even deletion adds to experience.  Isn’t it nice to know that regardless of what or who or how – for every living thing – at least something accumulates?  Grows richer, more varied, expands?

But how calculate that every addition is reductive?  That the raw fact of everything adding up = losing?  At least this is one way of working the figures.  An instant added is an instant taken away.  “The Lord giveth…”

The very momentariness, unquantifiability of what happens seems to attest to this.  Two precisely equal processes, or hands.  The one inviting and offering, delivering; the other letting-go, sweeping aside, and waving goodbye.  Moment in, moment past.  Experience added, one less experience to have.

Life as a riverbank – new deposits and constant erosion.

            The truth is: experience

            The truth was: experience brought exactly what it took away

            The truth is: experience

(therefore): NOW =

            And thus it is known that living is equal to dying and “He who would save his life will lose it” is just a simple fact.  Dying is equal to living.  It all happens in the same instant.  One step further = one step nearer to something else.

Sometimes people smile when they’re together.  Sometimes they don’t.  And sometimes other things happen.

DFW

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings2 Comments

“In Infinite Jest, for instance, Wallace provides a long list of lessons and exotic facts that one acquires from hanging around a “Substance-recovery facility,” a list that goes on for four pages. You will learn, he writes:

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do.

That most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

A few pages later he sneaks in the line:

That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”

-Laurie Winer, https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/choosing-not-to-be-on-david-foster-wallace

On Perturbations (Transformations)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings7 Comments

Maturana-Varela - co-relations

I learned today that I am an “operationally closed system.”

Essentially – a living multicellular organism with no “inside” or “outside” (as far as that system or the environment is concerned) – a set of dynamically and reciprocally interconnected cells with remarkably complex, diverse, and plastic (transformable, adaptable) abilities interacting continually to fluctuations, pressures (or lack thereof), movements (perturbations) of a molecular milieu.  That what you interpret (are “perturbed” by) as my “behavior” (you observers, you) is “a view of the dance of my internal relations” – part of “the dynamics of interactions of this organism in its environment” (and vice-versa).

Each of us, adapting, CONSTANTLY, “modified by every experience” in our efforts to maintain “effective correlation, compatibility” between our “selves” (organismic structural possibilities) and our environment (that which we are structurally coupled to…momentarily).  Always effecting, always effected by.  A thoroughfare of thorough-going perturbations/ transformations…i.e., ALIVE.

I’m sorry if “I” offend and/or disturb (as I am bound to) in my attempts and efforts to maintain compatibility (to SURVIVE!) with/IN my environment – I realize that every action, vibration, movement I express or perform = a perturbance for you, which will (sometimes) resonate, but unfailingly structurally couple us, if we are to live-on… yes, I’m talking to you – squirrel, leaf, fly, spouse, air particle, plant, piano, atmosphere…  Down to our electrons and quarks we effect.  And that effect is on entire systems, without observable (or measurable) end.

In other words – respons-ability.

This began to dawn on me as I was considering (perhaps unwarranted) my hopes, desires, expectations.  As realities (perceived/ interpreted) perturbed these (my situational, contextual constraints and affordances)…I “thought/felt” (who knows which – synapses) that many of my most (felt/thought) agitating (interpreted) perturbances (transformations) are ANTICIPATED more than encountered/lived-through.  In other words – I’m experiencing my anticipations – my internal dynamics – as perturbations – NOT my organisms’ “environment.”

In other words – my “operationally closed system” anticipates change as potential threat or danger – when actually I would (most likely) – am operationally equipped to – maintain my structural inter-relations compatibly with the ongoing interactivities / relations of my environment.

Our kind of being is fantastically diverse and adaptable (with unimaginable flexibility and complexity) to vast fluctuations / perturbations / transformations – we are plastic to our cells.  It takes a LOT to “disintegrate” us, in our “ongoing structural drift” (that which transforms and develops and differentiates us moment-to-moment as the organism we are).

Our cellular behavior:  a sensory surface, a motor surface and a system of coordination dynamically related in never-ending change (until disintegration).  And ALL in co-relation.  No movement, sensation, quiver, thought, emotion, pulse or charge that is not CO-RELATION with activities and molecules making up our “milieu” (the middle, the surround – BOTH/AND).

Maturana-Varela - co-relations

The swirling circle is me with my organismic operational closure always moving and changing in relation to its components – equally effecting and effected by – you / air / “matter” / “energy” (the wavy line) as reciprocal “perturbations.”

it’s complicated…

sensational…

ecstatic…

Reality (for the likes of moi): “I” might be much  more “naturally” compatible with an enormous diversity of environments and situations (others) than I internally coordinate myself to be (at least biologically, operationally, cognitively speaking).  Ahem.  Alas.  My organismic systemic co-relations often get the best of me.

apologies nearest and dearest…

Maturana-Varela - Realitydiagrams and conceptual perturbations compliments of:

 

Nourishment during a lunch break

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy, Writing2 Comments

Fynsk - Claim of Language“Here, I will observe simply that fundamental research (in the humanities) diverges from much theory in that it is always seeking the limits of its language in responding to that to which it seeks to answer: those dimensions of experience and symbolic expression that summon it (as a kind of exigency for thought) and to which no concept will ever be quite adequate.  Such research is impelled by its own neediness and its sense of being answerable, whereas theory, governed by the concept, proceeds with ever-expanding appropriations; fundamental research proceeds from encounter (always from a sense that something has happened to which it must answer), and it seeks encounter.  In theory, there are no encounters.”

– Christopher Fynsk – 

 

In Living Memory

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes39 Comments

Copyright-Rich Vosa

Not like there’s a whole lot there.  It is what it is, my memory – glossy, apparently endless, and stripped bare.  But there seem to be windows, areas the light creeps in, and doorways – entries to room after room of possibilities.  If I could get in there, could move past this moment of glimpsing, find the courage to carry myself forward (or is it back?).  Remains to be seen, here – me at the cusp, in full view, just on the verge, of remembering.

What just happened?

N Filbert 2012

this post created as participation in beloved weekly Friday Fictioneers – check it out!  join!

Enough about Writing…

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment

 

Came across this article…seems to jibe with many blog discussions/posts floating about out there just now…thought I’d like to share it.  It’s a bit dated in places, but the overall concept seems worth your ruminations….

Introduction:
Why Books?
LIBRARIES 2000
Libraries 2000, a seminar to re-examine the function and future
development of libraries in Alberta, was held in 1983. A committee
consisting of representatives of Alberta Culture, the Alberta Library
Board, the Alberta Library Trustees Association, the Library Association
of Alberta and the Learning Resources Council of the Alberta
Teachers Association was set up to look into ways of following
up on the suggestions arising out of the seminar. This is the second
booklet commissioned as a result of these discussions.
Public libraries have long attempted to fulfil many functions and
roles in our society. As financial and human resources have become
harder to obtain, librarians and library trustees have had to give
more attention to examining these roles and assessing their relative
worth. In recent years, there has been increasing discussion of the
public library as an information provider, but less discussion of the
more traditional view of library service.
Sam Neill is a professor at the School of Library and Information
Science at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario.
This booklet is based on a speech delivered at the Ontario Library
Association Conference, Ottawa, 1984, entitled “The Role of a
Traditional Library in an Age Bludgeoned by Information.” The
opinions and ideas expressed are those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the view of Albe11a Culture, or the Alberta
Library Board. The assistance of the Alberta Library Board in editing
and printing this booklet is gratefully acknowledged .

Why Books? by Sam Neill

(click for full article, please)

dove-tailing ever-so-nicely with another book I stumbled across in the library (which also contains a fine consideration of David Foster Wallace in one of the chapters), and considers, I think, the same sorts of issues of humaneness and being alive meaninfully: