Tag: loneliness

Alias and the Ants

On By NW FilbertIn Alias Harlequin, death, depression, fiction, life, loneliness, longing, Writing2 Comments

trailofants

Alias observes the ants in his bathroom.  Each Spring.  Spring or Fall, no matter his warfare – treating / trimming / grooming the perimeter of ‘his’ home – no difference (or differance) – Spring and Fall, a trail, a train, a miniscule “army” (whether ‘Army Ants’ or no, he could not say) of tiny insects crossing his counter from sink rim to (nonexistent) god-knows-where and back again, doing god-and-perhaps-scientist knows what…traversing, infesting, conquering, appearing, occurring…

…Alias is unattended…

Observing ‘his’ (not-his) ants.  A collective of interminable insects roving to and fro between a Lilliputian crack along the paint of his lavatory wall (an outside boundary of ‘his’ ‘home’), the cylindrical rim involving ‘his’ ‘vanity’ (does he still possess any of that?) sink, his children’s toothbrushes (the “family” so wishes the infestation undone) and wherever they might journey over the surface’s edge, the drainage holes, the drawers…

Ants.

Alias composes both paste and powder of Boric acid and particled sugar.  A supposed deadly mix for puny pests.  Like “life” for him.  Murderous moments of sweetness colluded with deathly compounds: vodka, cigarettes, illicit sex; bacon, buttery-fried flour, altitude…

Responsibility (instinct) and desire (impulse).

Alias is alone.  Most definitely that.  Solo and (interpretively) forsaken.

His ‘kids’ are grown.  His loves (clearly) outworn.  His ‘friendships’ recursive, reductive, assumptive, routine.  But the weed-trees, the weather and wear, the spiders, the crickets, termites, and dust…and ants, carry on in a differently (and differantly) incessant way.

Indefatigable.  Undefeatable.  (Like death.)

That within succulent sweetness, luscious limnings of love, lie poisons and trace, exposures – never a joy without risk, no ecstasy lacking its peril, no thriving without its decease.  Positives all laced with negatives, happiness balanced in depress.

Alias gazes.  He stares.  Isolated, trimming at an untrimmed beard over a sink he did not install, looking (and failing to see at all) into a mirror replicating demise…above a trail of ants he’s fed sugary poison for weeks, which appear to be active and thriving, in differance to his own ‘self’ – choking and chortling on pleasures that keep resulting in pains, experiments emerging as monstrous, efforts destroying their ends.

He sighs, does Alias.  However he seeks a team and a trail it leads him to toxin, bane eroding his chance.  Considers Laramie, Lucy (his wife), and each child.  Ruminates purpose or promise or hope.  Wonders how relief repulses its reasons.  Why remedy acts against cure.  How ants insist on their patterns.  Why exultation evinces in ruin.

 

 

Alas, Alias

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Alias Harlequin, depression, fiction, grief, Language, loneliness, memory, Perception, Writing8 Comments

kitty-litter

“Cat litter,” the last thing said, and something about that abandoned bicycle, a child’s bike, deep red, repainted, left askew on their lawn for days.

Those were the last things.  The last things she said.  And so he’d begun to move about much more carefully.  Timidly some might say, an amalgam of caution and care.  Ever tender, aware that things break, or tear, spill, or fall apart.  End.

But then Laramie, his sister, mother, the kids – some entities seem to persist, so few and so stubborn, inexplicably, threatening almost, as if an accumulating disaster, an heavier withdrawal.  He doesn’t know what to make of it.

Abandonment crushes all scales and statistics – but pebbles and dust, foundations and roots still remain.  Persistent.  Resilient.  Irrational.

Like a sloth he repaired to his desk, as delicate and slow.  He took up a pen with his head in his hand.  He was lonely, alone but for quiet, sweet silence, and branches and birdsong and wind, autos and dogs.  Not quite quiet.  Not quite alone.  But abandoned, far as he could surmise.

He wrote.  Rather drew.  Looping lines that were shaky on paper.  Tried to make his operation more smooth.  It failed.  He shakes now, does Alias, from drinking and smoking, aging and grief.  From perspective.  His perspective.

A rattling undone, an erosion.  He sighs.

A bike, and “cat litter,” then gone.  Others had left for much more and much less.  Litanies of reasons of wrongs are so easy with humans involved, never mind the ‘weight of the good.’  Can’t compete.  Won’t compute. There are mistakes, and effort involved – both are failures, no matter the theories or talk, no matter their universality.  He was wrong and a failure, which equals abandon no matter the words they produced.

Alas, Alias.  A depression.  An outlook that colors the field, but it’s charcoal.  No matter the ‘whom’ it will bleed, run them dry, and disfigure.  No one’s withstood it for long, for all of his kindness and passion (devised to distract from the swallowing dark, or the primer – his base coat is death).  He’s alone.

Not a Laramie, mother, or kin.  Without doubt there’s no lover, no friend.  Just a man and his books and incessant grey thoughts, and a pen.

He begins, looping lines…forming “Cat litter,” the last thing she said…

Bike

Without Criteria: Laramie

On By NW FilbertIn Alias Harlequin, Art, creative writing, death, desire, fiction, identity, Travel, WritingLeave a comment

Picasso - don quixote

Laramie shoots and kills.  Laramie loves and captures.  Catches and release.

Riding along the ridge, singing, swearing, singing.  This journey’s a long time coming.

The need to get away.  For autonomy.  To be self-called.  To begin after all of this and that.  Recall and resound.  Taking stock.

He’s always been this way – a little undomesticated.  A touch of untamed wild.  Never finding a place.  Never quite belonging.

Boundaries forged by relation and response (-ability) all forwarding to limits, cages, toward constraints or restraint he can not abide.  Each vocation or program, discipline or field, replete with vocabularies and methods, praxis and behaviors misfitting to degrees he finds it hard to accept.  A ‘lone wolf,’ ‘self-made man,’ a patent failure or ‘with no name.’  Renegade?

He rides.  The shuffling flanks feel heavy under him, providing awareness of his own weight.  Considers Alias, and thinks how both do not belong.  How adamant and vehement he himself cries freedom, how Alias skinnies and wriggles past the gates.

How neither could ever be said to have ‘succeeded.’  How both (in his mind) would never have failed.  How neither and both are alike.  Neither and both are so different.  Neither and both alive.

Rides on.  Too old for all this but he’ll camp out tonight.  To prove to himself that he’s old both and wild.  Yet.  That he aches to be tamed and untame.  Yearns to belong, independently.  The want for a self that is selfless.  The urge for a course without banks.

Laramie wants to be world, alive.  Wants to be fertile and virile, viral, untrained.  Wants claimed and confessed-for, wants derided and praised.

“We’re the renegade scholars,” sometimes he would say, “learning the lingo and undoing like acid its heart.”  “We master and tell of its weakness, expert novitiates in all.”  “We unwind and unravel.  Travel and root.  We are rhizome,” he says, “drawn out from anywhere.  We absorb and vituperate, ingest and expel.”

He rides, and he rides, in love with the muscling flanks.  The wind tearing through hair and beard, blistering cheeks, stinging his eyes.  There are tears.  Laramie swallows.  The sorrow and joy are one.  Life and its death copulating…heaving and sweating, oily and dry to the bone.  He is brittle.

Laramie is needing to stop, and he feels it.  His body is singing – pain tells.  Time is ripe.  There’s an end.  It is coming.  Unrolling his pack…here it goes…

Alias Impassive

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Alias Harlequin, depression, Experience, fragments, loneliness, longing, Loss, Melancholy, Uncertainty, Writing8 Comments

10380970_1451619841776520_7727485160186058295_n

Alias awakens to disquiet.  Comprehension out of joint.  The motions, the motions, but nothing complies.  He does not feel so he touches the knee of his son.  Yes, he seems to be there.  Words with their sayings and tellings aren’t meaning.  Perhaps he hears.  Feels he doesn’t have pants on, but perceivably they’re there.  Goes to bathroom, masturbates, conjuring images of his love.  Disconnect.  He is not sure that he is here.  Or where it is he is.

Not the trees, not the road, not his car.  Many things are missing.  Not his thoughts.  Not pets, not postal service, not sky.  He’s come unfastened.

The motions, the motions, he makes coffee.  The motions, the motions, he showers.  But did he use shampoo?  Deodorize his pits?  Remember the drop of cream?  Are those his feet?  Walking into work they all take notice.  Is he bleeding?  Checks his hair, his face, his clothing.  Is he stinking unawares?  Deactivated and decoupled, unable to correlate.  He’s in his chair.

He’ll go for water.  He’ll check again.  He’ll look through letters, notes, to-dos, he’ll use his fingers.  He seems inoperable, confused.  They’re noticing.  He hasn’t spoken.  He puts on music.  Sits again.  He looks at language, hears some sounds.  He’s not authorial, nothing gives direction, nothing issues commands.    Disjointed and isolate.

He tries to sleep.  The dreams don’t follow, the eyes don’t rest.  He is confused.  He is detached.  He looks at pictures, attempts a memory.  Everything is near and quite intangible.  Everything is distant.  He cannot cry.  He cannot feel it.  He isn’t thinking anymore.  Something is unhinged.

The motions slow, the motions blur.  Not conscientious.  No recognize.  It seems there are duties.  It seems related.  It seems forgotten or never begun.  He’s too much there and not enough.  Unavoidable and out of sorts.  He cannot hide and there are others.  He tries the motions, and the motions, and they’re still without sound.  He can’t compute.  Head in his hands on his desk.  His eyes are burning.  He can’t find pain, locate discomfort.  No ability to take account.

He pushes objects.  Cuts his palm.  He walks again.  The motions, the motions.  There is no wind.  The sun pervasive.  He sees some plants.  They are not there.  They have not grown.  He is alone and everything knows this.  Dissociated.  He’ll try again.  What will he try?  He’ll try the motions, he’ll try the motions.

Alias motions with his hand.  It comes undone, it does not signal, there is no shadow.  Too much shadow.  He looks around.  There are the others.  They seem to wince, to look too much, to look away.  There is no commerce.  There is no passage.  He sits again.  He hears a sound.  He thinks the hearing.  He tries his luck.  There is no luck.  He wants to realize.  Anything.  Something.  Perhaps.  Maybe.  Motions, motions, motions.  He is not moving.  Things are vacant.

Alias impassive.  He tries to speak.  No one to speak with.  He works at thoughts.  All misremembered.  He’ll try again, he’ll try the motions, keep at the motions, the motions.  All the motions he will try.  He has no purpose.  The motions fail.  Vacuous and without intention.  Was only trying, was just to see.  He cannot see it.  The motions fail.  He moves again.  Things are dissolving.  Disestablished.  Without relation.

He calls the dog, he has no voice.  There’s no response.  He is within a vast alone.  He is not happy.  He is not sad.  He’s unaffected.  He tries the motions.  He tries again.  After all he will stop trying.  Sometime later he’ll give up, but now he tries.  He tries the motions.  He tries again.  He is disquiet, and without end…

Laramie begs “OFF,” or, what happens is parting

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, communication, fragments, friendship, identity, loneliness, relationship, Writing2 Comments

What happens is parting…

The incommensurable does not lie outside of language.  It is language.

– Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica –

“Off” bothered Alias.  It aggravates Alias that Laramie only and simply, states and declares the term “off.”

Strikes him as unfair.  Short-shrift.   Foregone.  An easy conclusion.  A self-imposed or autocratic EXIT.  Cheap escape.

Conversation (that day) silenced (muted) and dulled.  It soured.  When participants elect not to speak their minds or piece, peace or conflict, new tensions are introduced.  Silence [chosen, selected, fought for (or against), willed] intentional silence effects scenarios like speech.  Withdrawal.

Alias tells him; ‘Refusal to speak equals a sort of speaking.  We are both ‘in it.’”

“Off.” Laramie repeated, simply, only, just “off.”  And, “the switch can be binary, non-complex, Alias, simply a choice – ‘I love you,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘I would prefer not to,’ – ‘no,’ – OFF – please allow me that.  I am tired.  You are my friend.  All is well.  It is good.  Life is hard.  Love is pain…OFF.”

The large, long, horizony cosmic swath of atmosphere containing and surrounding human interaction (in this case, in any case) snaps.  It fractures.  The environment (in this case, with the pronunciation of ‘OFF’) simply breaks.

There is quiet (as in) silent (as in) absence of sound, stillness of action, stasis of communion, of commerce, connection –

VACUUM.  REFUSAL.  A plea and a begging to STOP.  QUIT.  CEASE.  To not continue, to NOT go on.  A demanding request for an end.

Laramie states, speaks, invokes, complains, retorts, confesses, professes, declares and pleads and laments, quite simply, to his dearest, nearest and closest confidante, companion, friend and interlocutor – “OFF.”

Laramie chooses.

Alias wants to honor…

grieves, requests, rescinds,

carries on…

evoking ambiguity, anonymity, fiction and untruth.

The calf.

The finch and bluejay and weasel.

Deer, cow, pasture, thistle.

Friends and morning-glories.

The sun, the air; clouds and mid-day.

Company.

Revoked.

 

Intolerable Vulnerabilities – the fictions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing3 Comments

Intolerable Vulnerabilities – fictions

lonely old man

I.

There comes a time when being referred to as “sir” by 100% of an establishment’s wait-staff is no longer over-polite and ironic respect, but simply a pronouncement that in these contexts you have no peers.

Eventually you’ll be skeletal, perhaps before too long the way things are going, you’ve never been difficult to avoid.

And it’s never been easy to know what you want – are you being selfless or self-protective in the attention you pay toward your lovers?  Are your emotions inaccessible (some stunted empathy) or over-attuned in such a way as to pay your own processes no mind?

Whatever the case, you’re threatened.

 

And now you are old, sir, and alone.  And both nothing and everything is safe, because you are no one to lose.  And any potential of personal contact – some sort of opening – would inevitably create leakage, exponentially multiplying your probabilities of loss.

If only it could be viewed as sport – this frolicking across the page.  (It’s not).

 

Who lays the trail

in the white sand

of the page?

 

Who explains it?

-Cees Nooteboom

            You.  Not you.  Here.  Not here.  Ever trapped in beginnings because of so many ends.  At this age, sir, you must force it.  Opportunity becomes a consolation called survival.

No one is fooled, particularly not you, sir.

But she reminds you of something, probably someone, which is no help to you, just an increase in the accumulated weight of what’s past.  You’ll go on, because why not? – You are nothing to lose.

Toronto

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes9 Comments

Friday Fictioneers, August 31, 2012

Toronto

How well I remember the day, injured, sharp pain in every step, alone and far, hoping for once the rain might hold.  That solid, turbulent sky.  Street smells of rot and iron, bodies and fuels.  All muffled for me in the reasons – what sense and thinking does – that thick overlay of shiftings and emotion.

It was here, right here, looking up for bearings, that I knew all was doubtful.  Doubtful I’d find my way, doubtful my body would hold up, doubtful anyone would wait or notice.  Particularly not the distant.

Of course I knew what to do.

And what about the rain?

N Filbert 2012

Passing Thoughts

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces, Writing5 Comments

Passing Thoughts

“People don’t always understand what they see…it’s always better with a few verses”

-Henri Rousseau-

“I don’t understand it.  The injustice of it, the random, unpatternable thing life is, feels like guilt, at first, and then matures (thought the verb is obscene in the context) into sorrow.”

-Larry Levis-

            I often feel something that must be near sorrow when I pretend for a moment that I am able to reflect or observe my own life.

Usually this occurs a few minutes after everyone that inhabits the home in which I live have tottered off to their beds or their dreams or wherever it is that they go when they’re alone.  I pour myself a cup of coffee, take on cigarette out of its case, and swing gently on the porch in the night’s dark.

At first, I simply listen.  For the trees, the breeze, my breath.  Then I let my eyes  gaze.  Neither here nor there but some middle-distance that never asks to focus.  Three or four puffs in, two or three sips of day-old reheated coffee, and I begin to feel.  My body reports its day.  How long it has been awake, what muscles have been used, what nutrients processed (or wasted).  I start to find emotions.  Perhaps lodged in the elbows or neck, gut or temples or knees.  Places they sneak off to in the day’s demands.  I gain what feels like a sense of things.  A “this is what you’ve enjoyed, endured, has transpired in your waking.”

And I breathe.  The smoke, exhaling, tells me so.  And the knowing the days that remain are smaller.  And that the days that compose me stretch out.  And I wonder.  “I don’t understand it.”  It baffles me so.

I have the impression throughout my aging frame, that so many places, engagements, and events that require all of me should not feel so dangerous, such threatening.  That the places we spill for one another, on one another – where we come forth – why do we fear so deeply? and try so hard? – why don’t they give rise to elation rather than wound?

I see moments, occasions, and encounters that have scared me to my silent howls – but from here, now, look like people in love giving themselves or trying to – declaring, expressing, vulnerably opening.  Why the fullness of human persons should overwhelm and frighten us so, when we are also one of them – why is this?

Why do I not feel I can hold my own in another’s anger or grief, sorrow or fear?  What is so uncomfortable about difficulty and complexity and unknowns?

The haunting guilt of finitude, of insufficiency, eventually levels out toward a universe of conundrum peopled with questions, and a kind of sorrow and grace seeps in.

By now my smoke has gone out, the coffee has cooled, and it is high time I join my spouse in our final accord.  The waves rise, they wash out.  They rise again.  There is a passing, and some passage, it is ephemeral and sure, and it goes on.

All these passing thoughts, and days.

I don’t understand what I see, but it’s usually better with a few verses…

“I have the suspicion that the meaning of things

will never be sorted out”

-Denis Johnson-

 

(click image for musical accompaniment to the text:

“Broken” by S. Carey)

(it’s worth listening to even if not reading all the text)

All I Have is All

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

this writing inspired by the National – their song “Think You Can Wait”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx3PW1mqadA

All I Have is All (after The National: “Think You Can Wait”)

 

On the bench at the temple, he sits.  Bushel-barrel of apples and a large Igloo cooler out front of his legs.

Uncertain if he’s there or not.

Hair and clothes disheveled and dirtied, his movements:  head in hands, fingers troubling beard as eyes gaze at sky.

It’s all he has.

 

And a convoluted memory.

Her voice, near the end, shushing “today makes yet another day without perfect love; one more irreparable day.”

The old man on the bus – listening, responding: “No, perfect love lasts an eternity.”

They’ve been away from the baby way too long.

A good night gone.

 

Now this: drifting, crying, seeking some island.

He’s slipping under with a firm grasp on a devil.

The clouds send him messages, he mumbles:

“Out of my mind,” “way off the line,”

“All I have is all.”

He doesn’t sleep.

 

Handing an apple to the child, he tries.

The exits are gone.

Though harried by guards at the museum and park, he doesn’t make trouble.  Rolls his produce down alleyways, freshens his water from the public tap.

He tries.

 

The memories.

His mother: “You’ll never get better.”

Clouds: “it’s all you have is all.”

“Did I?” he murmurs, “did I?”

No street finds the child.

No door opens love.

 

Memory: her smile.

“perfect love…”

He tries.

“Think you can wait?” he says

to the nothing

and  no one.