This Autumn has found very little time for sustained reading and writing, resulting therefore in meager offerings here. But I am finding jottings, thoughts, and notations in scattered journals that have somehow happened anyway. Please accept these little offerings as efforts to remain in dialogue…
Journal Entry
Why do we (at least some percentage of us) take such pleasure (or at least seem to relish) in dark and heavy sorrow, like longing? Grief, hopelessness – is it finitude and mortality that cause us to feel so at home in it? Our drowning womb, begun from a watery coffin?
The sweet, rebellious, anarchy of loving, passion, writing, painting, music…sex – whatever it is we do that works our death deeper in us, through ecstatic bursts that we respond to like life.
We all ways dying…from that first launch…that initial spark of convergence – our long elimination.
(alas, the notebooks keep filling…but the time to type does not avail)
Deviser
If I. If something stirred, was stirring. The dying. Any of us. Were something stirring. For me. If I. The lonely. Any of us. The longing. The longing lonely. Were something stirring. Were I. If I.
If only. Could be any. If one. If only. If I. For me. An other. Any of us. A stirring. I, only dying lonely longing one. If. A stirring. An other. Someone to speak “we.” To say “you.” A whispered “us.” For me.
If I.
–
What would I (if I, if other) say, if something stirred, if stirring an other, some other who, who might say “you,” “we,” whisper “us,” something stirring then, what would I say. If I. If you or we, I whisper “us,” stirring still, what would I say?
–
When might a story begin? Who could start the unknown? Only language. Perhaps only language knows what can’t be said. What is yet to exist. Or may not. Ever. What is that to me? If I. If indeed that is what I do.
–
Touching other to make us. If I. If other. Then a voice, a touch, an extra, an excess, we. If you. If I. What is story to that? How so?
–
From anywhere: impermanence. If an other. If I. Some story’s beginning, how begun. If there were a sound, as it were, so to speak.
“How come language (or drinking) makes the pain of language (or drinking, or relationships) go away, recede, soothe…and then becomes language (drinking, relation) and its pain…again?” he asks.
I smoke. I look at him. He is examining (with obvious pretend furtivity) my pale, smoothe legs, coming out of my singular light dress. At my arms, my skin, my cheek and throat, my hair. Lasciviously thoughtful, he. Almost curious. Almost authentic in his desire.
He is trying to daydream.
I am trying to be.
We are drinking now.
I am young, he less so.
Or neither. We do not know. Anyone can be so near their end.
So the story goes…
“The world smells good,” he says, and the delectability to the nostrils clearly depended on death: burning wood, smoking pig, a nostalgia of forests…
I knew not what I felt. Mixtures. Pleasures and sorrow. Excitement and fear. Doubt. I did not respond, just masked placidly. Pleasantly, I hoped. Ambiguous. And what does he sense?
“Penelope remembers having read that of all the liquids and fluids produced by the human body – sweat, semen, vaginal fluid, saliva – tears are the only one without any trace of DNA… Impossible to identify someone from their tears, we’re all identical when we weep despite the many different reasons we have for weeping, something like that. Unlike unhappiness, tears don’t set us apart, they make us the same.”
Rodrigo Fresan, “The Invented Part”
Last week I spent with my four offspring at a cabin on the Pikes Peak Massif in Colorado. Mostly I register grief and loss in my experience of living… but interestingly enough, the first entry of my vacation journal begins with the simple sentence “I’m happy.” Unqualified, that’s it – myself + my offspring + a rich world reeking of “no service” and untellable beauty… “I’m happy.” Here are some notes I made throughout the week:
Simple things innerheard during cabin stay:
The stars: “We can’t tell the difference: between light or dark, death or what remains.”
The streams: “Where have we come from, where are we going? / Where we have come from, where we are going.”
Growing things (grass, moss, wildflowers, mushrooms, wild berries, etc…): “Not yet, not yet. Who knows?”
The rocks, the boulders: “Once upon a time. Now.”
The mountain(s): “Maybe. May Be.”
The cabin: “Us. Here. We. With. Hold.”
Phrases of my children:
“It’s good to live this way once in awhile.”
“Why do we leave here, ever? I never want to. What is have to?”
“Dad, everything here is your ‘favorite‘.
And me:
“Nothing is like this. Nothing… Belonging, I belong. Time changes, it’s different here. As if there isn’t. THIS PLACE IS ‘BEAUTY’ TO ME. THIS PLACE IS WORTH MY LIFE.”
on climbing: “I’m a dad: we ALL make it, or none of us really do.”
on love: “If I say ‘I love you’ – please don’t hear it as worship, as inordinate. In love we see the ‘too much‘ of the other – that which is always beyond our own reach, the ‘too much’ in each of us we struggle with, and seem to be unable to assimilate or observe in mirrors of our own. Perhaps this is one of the reasons the conundrum we call ‘love’ exists?
Addresses to my children and loved ones:
To T: “Always beware of logic – our fabricated things. What we may wish toward but doesn’t make matter.”
To A: “Recall. There are differences. Beware. There are openings for more life.”
To I: “You have it. You carry your own water. Your own dreams. Your own beginnings.”
To O: “Heroes also may shrink you, diminish, contain. You are deeply your own.”
To H: “Never mind. I am not the one who can conquer it in you. I believe someone will.”
To ?: “I love you. Like literature: the possible of life. Impossible.”
Thank you mountains, rocks, growing things, streams….
“Thoughts constituted by non-uttered words…This monologue always – ‘I speak’”
Paolo Virno – Word Became Flesh
“its thisness, then, cannot be fully articulable since any such articulation would require the articulation of a complete context, which in all cases is the world…often the experience includes an awareness of not being able to give an account of the this”
Jan Zwicky – Wisdom & Metaphor
“457. Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone”
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations
“…I wept up to a great age, never having really evolved in the fields of affection and passion, in spite of my experiences”
Samuel Beckett – Malone Dies
“to frame the unsayable, & mute the sayable… he was the singing and the no one there…”
Larry Levis – The Darkening Trapeze
“All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel – or rather by several characters”
Roland Barthes – Roland Barthes
*****************
– I believe I told them that “all language was like a metaphor” in several characters.
I heard nothing, I said to myself, as if nothing were something that might be heard.
Still I stroked her ankle, index-finger-pad to delicate-bird-bone. And lip. Finding textures and surfaces with lips and tongue. Precarious…it never lasts. Taste and touch are like that [metaphor] immediate.
Am I speaking when I write?What is happening now?
Several characters.
– “often the experience…includes an awareness of not being able…” (J. Zwicky)
She tasted of…
“…to give an account of the this…” (Zwicky)
…coffee grounds, sandalwood, humidity, and turquoise…
I left off my exploring.
What is it like [metaphor] to…?
I told them that ‘I speak’ is a metaphor…as is indeed all the rest having to do with language.
(consolations of philosophy)
I hear nothing when I talk with myself. [metaphors].
The sounds of flying a kite.
It’s rare that I am naked. But “yes: meaning is like going up to someone” (L.W.)…some sort of connection is made (some convergent affect) and a resolution leaks open…resonance…endlessly (perhaps).
“I wept up to a great age”…by which we always mean the aggregate…which seems quite less than my ‘great age’, if ever there was one.
What is ‘great’ like?[metaphor]
Once I was younger…
– Always wished you’d known –
Are photographs metaphors?
I said that ‘nothing made is like.’
(“in spite of my experience”)
“Did I say I only say a small proportion of the things that come into my head?” (ontology of perception) (Samuel Beckett)
I intended to quote: “It is a pretty little object, like a – no, it is like nothing” (Samuel Beckett)
But what is ‘nothing’ like? A “pretty little object”?
We know what he means (“like going up to someone”) … I was naked, I tasted.
You know the story… “I wept up to a great age.” I touched, I tried, I felt.
What do you see?
Hardly ever the point. Perception + Reflection = Imagination (perhaps) I told them – it’s a metaphor – a “crossing-over,” some traversal. The trace of sweat behind her knee just above the calf.
Once I was alive.
I crossed over.
Several characters: ‘I speak.’
“Affection. Passion.” I said. (what I had thought it was ‘to learn’ [metaphor]).
– “in spite of my experience” –
Perhaps language wasn’t made for speaking.
Someone. Somewhere. Maybe. Here. Now.
That thing that words do [metaphor].
The “experience of this”…”non-uttered words.” Non-utterable? Perhaps, this. (I traced the swerve of her, its curvature, hair-smell and sounding…’I speak,’ non-uttering…)
What is writing?
I believe I was speaking of metaphor…
Something crossed-over.
Nothing.
“Yes,” I said, “yes…” “it’s always alright to weep.”
What “good”? “Good” for what, and in relation to? Diffuse, azure atmosphere of oncoming dusk. Chilly, not cold. Nearly pleasant, yet crisp enough for shiver and grip. Unsteady, trembling grasp of pen, a striving for control mated to its lack.
Hardly daylight. Liminal.
I would like to express. What I do not know, perhaps am even unable to.
This is why I approach a page – blank, blind, lined, empty – in “good” light and confusion.
Fusion-with, what? Chemistry, alchemy, biosphere, organism, complexity, surround. Others’ emotions, experience. Possibilities not actualized, each swarming potential of vocabulary, gesture, signification – line, sign, mark, motion – converging formulation, conveying contrivance / re-cognition. What is not, hovering about each “is.” To write. To write (only) this. When…
Once begun. Light, terms, cursive. Blue Bic ball-pointed pen. Moleskine substitution and human and language and in- and ex- perience and some =, some theorized equation of functions and results.
January 29, 2017. Nathan Wayne Filbert. 5:44 pm according to a Centrally Standardized Timepiece, an Apple product, arranged amidst pages from many centuries and sources, composed music sounding from the last, temperatures…”actualities”?…amid vast, incomputable com-possibilities.
If Nathan had not been “this one,” had not begun with a “T” or a “T + h + e” in this light, in this almost comfortable, discomfiting condition, in this notebook, with this pen and its ink at this time on this bastardized quality of paper, among such circumstances and scenarios, amid these relations as a father, a student, librarian, scholar, male – of this certain (arbitrarily standardized mandatory and countable) age, intimately (accordingly – to strata not set by either) coupled to- caring for-, concerned with-, worried by-, wishing for-, happy about-, and so on…
this word or letter at this time in this space with these extremely idiosyncratic and unlikely determinate positions and scenes in a surround incrementally rare and unreckonably accidental…
“The light is good. I am confused” leading itself its own very peculiar particular wave way toward each next and next co-dependent with innumerable constituents and counterparts yet occurring here, now, 5:54 pm CST in Wichita, Kansas in United (are they?) States of America (wha-? why? how? when?) 2017 (by what calendar and whose and wherefore?) at an intersection outside of a centuries-old and decrepit “house” it calls “home” (why? wherefore? from whence toward and…?)…
Indeterminate. Indecipherable. Unreasonable and incalculable. Not accountable or even conceivable…but IS (apparently). Simply IS, what is written, at this time, in this place, by this organism, of these relations, in this surround, at this moment, occasion, “actuality”…
I didn’t come back. Something stayed on in the far. Apart from the wires and the noise, “connections” and net-works. Somewhere away. No mistaking it was I who drove home, unlocked doors, and arrived. I who functioned and served as a placeholder. Yet I’d stayed in the cold and remote, the far reaches. Away. I haven’t returned, though something sure did – no one noticed but me.
It’s alright, there is room. Space to breathe and to think, space to listen. Apace like beyond or forgotten, the lost, misremembered – like that I was left or retained. On I wandered, as wondered; I pondered and roamed, but I did not come back, that I know, not this time – too much risk without safety to “be here.” I don’t want to – not here – no where, no now, no sure thing – not “that.” I’d like to be other, undone, in the wild, separate, immersed, and another. Not me. Not this. Not here. Not now.
So I stayed and I didn’t come back. No one noticed. Alone, I began to combine and consider. Correspond and co-question the side of the world the world was on. Difference side, or an other, not a me or an ours or an us. Just a world. I renamed there, all one, even while I returned and took care of. I escaped. Not me, only them, not I, just the others, who cares? – perhaps no one, not me and not them and not elsewise. I am gone. Gone unnoticed. It’s okay, for who cares? As long as I’m holding my place, and fulfilling – a father, a worker, a lover, a friend – no one cares if I never came back from the forest and sky or the wind and the cold. The dark places. No one knows, no one cares, nor do I, just I know, that is all, that I didn’t. Return. Rejoin or sync up. No, not I. I’ve stayed far even while it’s my body or figure that fills up the places and manners I was. I am not. And it’s fine, doesn’t matter, why would it?
I blink with the breeze o’er the road. Lodged in swift crannies and caves, dropped in canyons, and spread through the clouds. Now I’m rain, it’s okay, now it’s snow, no one knows, no one cares, reconsidered: as long as someone is caring for them (or apparent) no one cares where the person has gone – that including – the spaces the person has gone – no one knows neither cares, nowhere for nothing – simply not – sweetened absence – of care or concern – just a void, a caesura, an erasure, amiss, like palimpsest or scrimshaw or paste, and a cut.
I am cut. Paste anything there. They won’t notice, not them or there or any thing or one. There’s no matter, no wave, energy or particle, there is nothing – that’s any and every for them – what they need, that is all, what they need. What they want. I’m not here, for
I didn’t come back, from the cold, the remote, and the silence, the spaces, the less. It’s okay, no one noted, but me, for I functioned, appeared, held a place – however emptied – of me. It’s okay. I am cut. Paste anything here.
I have not returned. No one knows this (but you now, and I – keep a secret). It’s an absence I will not reveal.
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All my Words are Silent 