Tag: loss

Cabin Reflections

On By NW FilbertIn being, desire, Experience, family, Gratitude, grief, Journaling, Loss, love, meaning, Photography, Reflections, Writing3 Comments

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“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.”

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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.”

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Thank you mountains, rocks, growing things, streams….

3 Short Poems

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, creative writing, Experimenctes, family, grief, hope, Living, longing, Melancholy, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

for the weekend…

ARE YOU

I don’t think I have a question;

yet I seem to be

an asking

.

This one?  This one?

Is it here?

Are you?

.

The breeze is not silent

as many things

that are not

.

Still I do not understand –

Are you here?

Am I?

.

It goes unanswered

along with the riddle

I am

.

Are we here?

Are you?

 

READY FOR SADNESS

I’m often ready to be sad.

Why is this?

What holes are excavated by living?

What sifts through?  Falls out?  Runs away?

.

It goes nowhere

Or anywhere,

Everywhere.

Still it goes

.

where I am not

welcoming

through all these openings

a peeking-back

 

[addendum]

Instead I seal them shut

I try to stuff them

full of rags

that reek of sin and toxic

.

What can I do –

will I –

in this cell

that seems my own?

 

AGING

What does one do?

Reducing teeth

or sight

or hearing

.

How does one choose

what’s worth

repair

when all is failing,

.

ailing,

come undone?

he asks his father –

buys a car

.

replacing failure:

another thing

that’s bound

to fail.

I see nothing

On By NW FilbertIn being, Confusion, desire, Experimenctes, Language, meaning, Nothing, Perception, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

“The sky would have to be inside me for my words to have the brilliance of stars”

– Edmond Jabes, “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book”

“Dasein means: being held out into the nothing”

– Peter Sloterdijk, “The Art of Philosophy”

“Even when nothing / replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing”

– Jack Gilbert, “Collected Poems”

I was driving in the dust of this planet while wondering how I knew the sky was not inside me.

After all, there are theories.

But my words do not have “the brilliance of stars.”

–

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber concocted The Enigma of Reason… and I want to say …of Reasons.

–

For after all.

After all (i.e. “in the beginning”), where we set out from seems to be an enigma of reasons.  The proffering of theories (the art? of fabricating reasons?).  The urgency to describe or define, explicate or explain, ‘make sense’ of things like her glance, or my illness; the weather, or wear (time), something felt or imagined, desired.  Each engendering theories.

–

We call that engendering the imagination.  Using language and sensing, others and other, an-experience-in-the-world to … give reasons.  And why?

There are theories.

–

No bottom.

Haven’t we begun everywhere?  With urges and instincts, desire and relation, observation and interpretation, and so on… and yet it’s only ever ‘mine’ or ‘ours,’ – a giving of reasons and investigation that is human – no, not quite.  Not even that.

–

We incorporate ‘earth’ in it.  And many things nobody owns or created.  Language and sense, and earthy-othery tools: microscopes, telescopes, instruments, numerals, metals and plastics and paper.  Electricities.  Motion.

–

Anything to wrap ourselves in and around… and give reasons.

–

That experiencing: when one aches for a knot or a kernel, a key or a gem.

Mine might be the Texts for Nothing.  A nothing I never can reach (and I knew it).  Don’t we all begin once we discover we can’t?  After it’s all already begun?  In the midst of?

Why why?

–

Mystic-scientists propose an only-what.  Eschew reasons.  The lock of the rational derive.  Sense or no, this is what we observe in conditions.  Phenomenology.  The human (“observer”) limited experiencing.  Only that.  Being-there.

But the tekne collaborates and alters.  There never is only.

–

Reportage.  Disinterested.  Impersonal.  Facts and accuracies.

–

A reason:

I pursue nothing because I know I can’t find it.  Will not find it until I am not.

Even then?

So I err at desire.

Like a theory.

–

A digression.  Transgression.  Omission-emission.

–

A longing for order?  For sense transcribed into reason?  For nothing to give rise to all and these everythings to foment continuing?

But we know don’t we?  Deeper down, without bottom?  Don’t we know we’re a tiniest book?  Carried in the arm of a world-without-end?  Of further reaches?

No, we don’t.

–

We don’t know.  We make ‘knowing’ or ‘knowledge’ – a description – a typification (a logic, a rationality, i.e. a reason, a theory).  Floating in infinite perhaps.

–

They say we share common elements we’ve devised observationally.  So the sky might be inside of me.  But words aren’t stars, are they?  Theories.  Experience.  Ours.

–

We’ve come to experience not-knowing as a kind of ‘humility’, ‘valor’, and ‘honesty.’  But why?  We don’t know.  If that’s so, we can’t know we don’t know.  And life is a loop of inquiry, perception… that leads to the giving of reasons and the making of sense.  Beginning ourselves from began.

–

Things ‘ring true,’ resonate, and we follow… on… seeking reasons, making sense (where there is none?).

Posit ‘God.’  Posit ‘Method.’ And we’re caught in the crevice of crafting for reasons.

–

“Even when nothing / replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing.”

The Last Wolf: or, “I showed you the darkness in the beginning”

On By NW FilbertIn Confusion, depression, desire, Experience, fragments, Journal, Literature, Loss, Melancholy, Perception, Poetry, Reflections, survival, Writing4 Comments

I remember that I am falling

That I am the reason

And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be

Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

– W.S. Merwin, “When You Go Away”

Time keeps accumulating on my inability to write, to find time to write, to process living with language.  Simply to keep this space alive, I am posting a journal-like entry so as not to give up.

Recent weeks have been dominated by readings of Doug Rice, Laurie Sheck, Jon Fosse, Georges Bataille, Larry Levis, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Franco Berardi, Robert Bringhurst, Jeremy Fernando, Elfriede Jelinek and others…

What a traversal, passage, the past couple of months have been…

…like following the draw of the moon through dire straits

in dark, tumultuous seas…

…a feeling that everything is at its limit (Bataille, l’extreme) – EXPERIENCE.

  • pressured work projects, needs, deadlines, demands
  • endless and constant family logistics, accidents, needs
  • relentless parenting, relating, service to others
  • throngs of people and groups
  • lack of friends, lovers, supportive presences
  • fear, health, danger, exhaustion
  • failure
  • loss of partner
  • inexistence of calm or solitude
  • imposed travels
  • absence of sleep and rest
  • indulgence in desire and harm
  • minimal process
  • poor eating or nourishment
  • tension, strain
  • depression
  • lack (wellness) & excess (pressure)

…a teetering balance…

Mind you, this is how it feels in me, not how it is.

I miss everything that is/was good

…fail better…

There is a certain uncertain sorrow to things

(presence of melancholia, moon-draw)

Georges Bataille’s certainties:

  • WE ARE NOT EVERYTHING
  • WE WILL DIE

THE UNKNOWN                   THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE

darkness                                              levity

Lynda Barry & the “Underground Skateboard” – how we draw from others work what we need to survive

Lemony Snicket & the autographing instruction that I should “read something else”

FAMILY

immersion (doom, closure)                                 held in levity

conscious moderation

– 1st Tarot reading –

(processual journey mythical)

Jacob recommends Homer – The Odyssey

doubling                                letting go – holding together                    The Devil/The Chariot

dark surfaces / surfaces of darkness (The Fool)

The Moon (dark journey) crossed by the Queen of Swords (wounding love)

THE UNKNOWN                       THE UNSOLVABLE                       THE POSSIBLE 

-Summer

Temperance

The King of Wands – leaders, pole vaulters, utilizing tension toward propulsion

leap over?  through?  on?

The Fool

Pas sage – not wisdom                                                      FRAUGHT JOURNEY

– Odyssey –

BATAILLE: “nothing is final…”

– “what is not there, which, once it is seen, often in literature, tells us what is” (Fosse)

Inner Experience

“the suffering of the disintoxicated” (Bataille)

The Human:

  • challenging everything (of putting everything into question) – Bataille
  • always a breakdown of systems that will not be restored – Sheck

“Experience reveals nothing and cannot found belief nor set out from it” – Bataille

“The hand moves forward, the tragedy begins” – Bataille

“no one grieves with you for what you are unable to say”

“life itself…always swerves away from my mouth”

– Elfriede Jelinek –

“how I’m owned by that which will not answer” – Sheck

“What you are will be spelled by whatever

lies trapped in your hand” – Robert Bringhurst

– emptiness is also empty –

“what is the part of us… feels…unnamed…

…i must live at some distance from convinced” – Sheck

 

“When I say you to what isn’t there – I mean me” (Larry Levis)

“you won’t find me in me” (Jelinek)

Experience eludes understanding ( Bataille)

– nor can I compute the possible (Sheck)

This too

is just one

more opinion

to move through

(Bringhurst)

FIRST AND FOREMOST YOU WRITE (Fosse)

“From an abandoned myth

(I write to you)” (D. Rice)

– wanting them to mean nothing –

– and suggest everything (L Levis)

 

INTENTION:

  • hold open the imagination of possibility
  • “do not go gentle into that good night”
  • Moderation.  Extreme limit.
  • Contra-digitalia.  First and foremost write.
  • Be-Read

 

 

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, Complexity, creative writing, Dream, Experimenctes, Language, Loss, Writing1 Comment

“This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown…”                  – Jan Zwicky, Alkibiades’ Love

“the dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought… So, too, philosophy.  So, too, the gestures through which we bind, and let go of, our lives.” – Jan Zwicky, Alkibiades’ Love

“…readiness is all…” – William Shakespeare

neuron gif

On our way down above the below, recognition dwindling through each swerve, turn, and curve.  Uncertain of finding, finding uncertainty.

What began in fantastic.  Unanticipated.  Such sights, indescribable, feels.  Sirening sounds, whooshing and whining; colors and tones past belief, perhaps, unless of course you’ve been there…I had thought that you were?  We followed by following, relentless, directionless openings, vague paths.

Kaleidoscope world of liminal pinwheels, whirring musics of future and past, tinged with voices we wish that we knew, and we did.  It seemed you were there…?

Where have we been?  Where are we going?

Navigations that spiral – we wind and knot, unwind, become.  And over again – yet nothing is ever not new.  Or so nearly, almost.

I, if indeed it was I looking out (or in) kept distracting desires (and extracting) ~ wanting this way and that, akin to imagine, hungrily, wily, and wild.  As effects of strong wishes might be – subterranean, subsumed, leveraged like magnets and threats.

I stumbled, turned ‘bout, perhaps even flew, there were times that I ran – indistinguishable voices undoubtedly precious, familiar, like realizing wants tended constant as fuse…dangerously sparked to go off…

…now this and this and this…fierce purpling red, liquid breasts and svelte buttocks, elbows and shins, calves and thighs (ah! sweet the ankles and knees, wrists and shoulders, the lips, the hair, and the eyes… I love bodies! I crave!) the serpents, the birds, the language and leaves flung like banners… where were you?  I had thought you were there… and you… and you… and many others of Is beside…

Darkening greens.  What gathers and whispers in pleasure, awareness acute, we We again in these margins and loops.  We reach and we blend, wrestle and harm, struggle and rush, and we mend.  We are bound and unbounded, boundlessly shaped in our flight.

Constrained in the thickets, the azures, the blood.  I choke and cry out (do you strangle?)… we are veining, okay, seeming ever en route, all approachings and wanders from here.

I (if it’s ‘I’) I am there, by which I must mean, “it is here,” diving downward or in to the out and the others, another, anew.  We’ve become and we’re far more than we – both generic and common – and burning, aflame, each of ever a kind, made of ice and so crystalline, clear, so…

…unknown and still further… along, further on, further out and away, further in, indecipherable and never forewarned…

“There is IT!”

“There is IS!”

And our readings surround as do laughter or tears, streamings of verbiage, mellifluous notes, and you and I and countless of we, and no matter, we happen, or are, happening, or become, as we come, as we enter, reveal, as we’re reaching…

I had thought you were here –

Where are we?

Confusion : Fusion-with

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, being, Blogging, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Experience, family, intimacy, Journaling, Loss, Perception, Reflections, seasons, Writing4 Comments

azure-liminal-sky

The light is good.  I’m confused.

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”…

…as it happens… as if

“The light is good.  I am confused.”

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Cloud Fragment #3

On By NW FilbertIn being, Blogging, change, communication, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Experience, Language, Loss, memory, Photography, time, Traces, Uncertainty, Writing6 Comments

cloudswirl.gif

To swirl.  There.  He said it, stated intention, directly.  To be lost, languishing (anguish is in there), full of lose and seeking, squirming, rutting, snuffling about.  Scent search of what?  Or not what quite, but how, now?  The unknowable, uncertain, which lies beyond perhaps, inaccessible, indeterminate, resistant to decipher, discretion, or decode.  He plies.  Ruin of movement, beyond conceit and loosely bound, tearing terror of graspage.  An infinity of words, or if not, many disordered magnitudes more compossibly complex than he –wrecked in kind with troubles of time, reductions of selection.  What means, all knotted in already-known.  A scumble then, without, arms treading, legs a-flutter, cognition confused in the mass, mess, unaccommodated, arranged re-arranging, affective and effecting, assaying never fully, nor enough, insufficient temporals and scope, shortfall of finitude, unbecoming, irrealized, incomputable surround.  To swirl or swoon perhaps – intends eccentric excentricity, without with-in, within outside and othering.  Immersed, submerged, tumbling almost-struggle, almost-drift, thoroughfare and passaging, limning swaths of runnels, channels, margins.  Copiously coping, how would he go?  What are the  motions lesser than stir and more absorptive?  And what of the when?  Who now, where now, how when?  Confusion, then – confusion, swooning and swirl.  A wriggling receipt, some commingling transference transmitting, attention intending undoing, origins ever receding, irremediable in rot and excess, dismembered invention – begin – excise and evince, glide of erasure and uncover, indiscernible activity of process, waving particles, particular waves, currents and tropes, passively permeable patterning passageways [not that!] imperceptible part-i-cipatory breakage and shatter, dispersion deconstructing refusal.  He ruins, inevitably.  That stands – there.  Unworking integration every angle or approach, from inside, decay, a desiccate and undone doing.  Mismade by allowance, a scribbling palimpsest or correction – be cognized, be written, be spoken, transcribed – he wails into unruly, disruptive, erupting fluid floodings of voiding, of nothing.  Not afloat, asail, aswim.  Neither drowning nor submerged.  Nearly saturate with swallow and exhale, a lineament on empty, some faulty trace.

Haunted Man

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, dreaming, identity, Language, Literary References, Literature, love, Melancholy, memory, thought, Writing4 Comments

[from a crumpled writing found under a car seat among additional trash, transposed to typing as a record of a mind’s mayhem and mistakes]

“Deliver me, prays the haunted man.  Therefore…”

Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

I am Dostoevsky and I am Beckett.  I am Hegel and Heidegger and Holderlin.  I am Kafka.

I am not good enough for any of you.  I do not merit your time nor your attention, affection, sensibilities, your human talents, or your care… no conceivable reason to mention “love.”

But I love you.  I am the one who loves you.  The one who writes.  Who writes these words.  The haunted one, the Reader, the Librarian; the Lover, Scholar, I am me.  I love you.  I am haunted.  Words runnel through me, and with them thoughts, and with them feelings, and with them meanings, which means…nothing.  No matter, no space, no time.

The “haunted man” is a passage, a passing, a ‘type.’  Of no import, little reality, barely occurrence.

*

I am Blanchot, am Homer, am divine Scriptures, and Shakespeare.  Simply, small-ly, in my own way, this very general way, I am what humans do with language.  For one another, with one another, to one another, as.

*

Yards and houses, flesh and voices, signs and symbols, marks and sounds, music and rhythyms and gestures, as attempts to conjoin – join and connect – survive, discover, endure, be, become, in-volve… With no idea.  Or ideas that continually prove false and faulty.  Elaborate records of revision, perhaps better inscribed as simple songs of effort.  Urges only TO BE, and that, TO BE CONNECTED.

But what do I know?  I’m Pythagoras, call me Ishmael or Ahab, Everyman or Whatever.  I’m out-dated.  Assign me a number.  I don’t really care.  I really care.  I am here, and I, (at least) re-present, or present again, or presence, a sort of being.  Such as it is… with no “REAL” way to evaluate, estimate, “tell,” or “express.”

*

Satan, then, Jesus, Joyce, Proust, Alexander.  No matter, no space, no time, only IS.

A “tradition” (as it were, in our own words).  We.  Its + That + This.  US.  Humans strangely (apparently) in environments.  These ways of thinking, of being, of behaving and operating, of supposedly surviving (but with what evidence?  WHO or WHAT might know?).

How might elements arranged thus & so, survive?  I am Nebuchadnezzar, Mohammed, Hammurabi and Ishtar.  I am ab-original.

I am Nothing.  Everything.  No one.  Me.

Each time.

Each press of the pen: “Hello – ‘here’”

*

As simply as I can construct it (all of it, any of “it”) it goes something like this: accidents occur, accidents are weird, and accidents give way.

I, like all other(s), an accidental novel.  Occasional and Whatever.

WHAT HAPPENS TO BE… at any given point-of-measurement (i.e. as far as we have a capacity to render, sunder, and effect – “Reality” (for us)).  Some quirky, unlikely, ridiculous, painstaking, odds-massively-against, and over-dramatic assessment of a certain sort of being-in, being-with, co-occurrence, happen-stance, we fabricate “human.”

TO BE SOMETHING

(organism, constituent, element, participant, activity)

*

In many other words (for the sake or ability of ‘them,’ ‘it,’ ‘all’) I may as well be.  Be Hallie or Ollie or Aidan or Rhesus.  Chief Joseph or Samson or Ghandi or Jordan.  Be you or Sara or Maya or Jimmy John.

“no matter.  Try again.  Fail again…” no matter.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

“the venom of the serpents were within him”

Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

HOW SHOULD I KNOW?

*

And so what if I were Bernhard or Bach, Napoleon, Attila, Montaigne or Dorothy Parker?  If I had the ammunition or energy (and weaponry?) – the rhetoric, the nerve, or the madness.  L. Sterne, Nagarjuna, Hafiz, JL Borges?

“No matter.  Try again.  Fail again…”

Titian, Beethoven, Plato/Socrates, Palestrina.  Michelangelo, V. van Gogh, and Chuang Tzu.  You.

“No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.”

(hardly Beckett)

Badlands #1

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, creative writing, Experience, Journey, loneliness, Melancholy, nature, reclusion, Travel, Writing4 Comments

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.

There is wind.

There is no one.

“It is hard to seize what is” -Laurie Sheck

notes

On By NW FilbertIn absence, awareness, depression, desire, Experience, fragments, grief, Journal, loneliness, Loss, meaning, Questions, Writing3 Comments

Why not call it magic, this unsettling alloy of grief and anger we experience when shunted by anxiety, disappointment, depression, or loss?

We cannot deny that we crave!  That we are struck through – bolted with fervent desire (all that which we experience as, well, unsettlingly – disturbingly – vital, ALIVE, active, possessive, in us) – when we are crushed, smushed, squelched, or helpless, hopeless, dismayed – how else could we be?

Without the vital, fierce passions – the damage is to no effect/affect.  Depression must press against something.  Must be pressing something down.

“Am I at the right house?” the internet-technology-installer asked from my gate.

“How can I know?” I responded, “it would depend on the future.”

He checked the numbers and moved away.

Now how will we ever know?

Isn’t this what every human encounter re/presents?

So de-pression presses something down in us.  Anxiety stirs.  Sorrow re-cognizes meanings.  No negative without its positive charge.  To be noticeable.  And what is it that is noticeable?  (able-to-be-noticed)?  ONLY DIFFERENCE.  Only time and space and whatever it is those veil, uncover, hide, or displace.

O-ppressed, DE-pressed, what are these SU-ppressing?  Accentuating?  Calling to attention, to activity, awareness, task?

Grief, loss, de-tachment and longing: what do these expose in order to occur? 

Is anything ever lost?

She passes by with a friendly, perhaps even loving and happy wave.  What reality is evoked in the pain of the passed-by, passed-over, un-preferred?  What does it render actually present?

Is it possible that in the “missing” nothing is lost?  Some present is heightened?  Something even added to the present?

In losing a struggle don’t we gain what the effort was for?  Clearly?

Does surrender underscore the sub-ject, the value, the relational ob-ject-ive given over?  Adding acknowledging import?

Difference demonstrates value.  Matter(s).  Sign-if-i-can-ce.  Without difference nothing would know.  Indistinguishable = pure repetition.  (Doesn’t matter).

Passed-over, passed-by, passed-on.  De-pressed, su-ppressed, o-ppressed.  Lost, lossed, re-moved, de-tached, re-apportioned.  ALL LOSS ACCENTUATES HAVE.  ALL DIS-POSSESSION EXPOSES POSSESS.

Difference de-scribes=in-scribes OURSELVES.  What we are constructed from, contain, proffer, offer, obsess, possess, ARE.  What we ARE (have and do).

Our com-position, con-stitution, con-struction are most clearly expressed in difference, ex-posure, de-struction, de-pression, o-ppression, loss.

In de-composition, we know and learn what composes us.

The question beggars: what have we to lose?  What can we lose that in losing its learning is not gained?  What have we to lose?  And how do we know without losing?