Tag: loss

Alias (inside) – a writing diary

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, death, fragments, friendship, human, identity, Journal, Journaling, Living, Loss, Melancholy, notebooks, Reflections, Uncertainty, Writing2 Comments

This is long, and really, perhaps, does not belong here.  Reading through notebooks to find references to Alias and Laramie in order to continue the trail or trace of them… I happened upon a set of pages that seemed like something under or inside the emergence of Alias and thought it might be interesting to some.  Or, just something to not lose to memory, but archive in this auspicious and fragile space.

Czech-Marionettes-wooden-joker-czech-marionette-puppet-3.7ac6

Do I think this is my last probable chance (at 45)?

If so

              (it’s undecided, presently)

then this would = my final

composition

                          (undecided)

What would I tell you – you few that have made the time worth being?

T, A, I, O, S, K, H, J, perhaps J.  Arvo Part, certainly Blanchot, Pessoa, Bronk, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Jabes, Cixous, Rilke, William James, Schiele, maybe MK.  Assuredly TWDY, Bach…well, too many to mention.

            Whom else?  Whom else, really?  Dad?  Mom?

In any case – the children, H – H because truly the past two years demonstrated an adult, freely-selected relationship in a way surpassing but only referenced by S, V, PJ, perhaps, no, perhaps J – what H has explored with me re: the world and life really I’d only imagined before.

Therefore – indecision (as ever).

IF the “best” experiences rise up out from the worst (often), out of ‘end(s)’ – beginnings surprise, then how can I know (as I age) if a better-yet does not exist?

It becomes a decision of ‘enough’ or not.

A personal decision.

If I can only imagine repetition with variation, and I’m already tired and starting to ‘ail’ – then the logical decision is to stop.  To peace.  To quiet.

As re: T, A, I, O (my children) – in EVERY case what lies ahead is far beyond repetition with variation – much unknown, much novel, much uncharted territory to experience.

As regards H, and adult self-selected relations of emotion/passion/intimacy – probably (seems to me) little could surpass…only possibly in elements, but – enough?

That is the question – always

Keep living?

Stop?

If “stop,” no more.  Yes it will effect, hurt, harm, perhaps enable – the others (T, A, I, O, M, D, J, H, etc.) but I won’t be aware of that anymore.  It’s just DONE.  OVER.  SIMPLY.

If “keep going” – then demonstrating a care/concern/attention for the others’ lives – T, A, I, O, etc…) that THEIR lives are worth staying alive to see, and that – who knows?! – maybe my own life still offers more truly worth experiencing.

Perpetual conundrum, weighing lives – my own little one versus a host (however small) of others – it would seem theirs count for more than mine (alone).

Hard to say.

I guess we’ll all find out tomorrow what “I” decide.  Not ambitious to keep working just to feed and pay bills.  I have little confidence I’m capable of making something world-enhancing.  But as a parent, a friend, etc., it doesn’t feel fair to make the decision without considering their preferences as well.

I like to think I don’t like to be selfish.

I would live in the country.  Woods, preferably, mountains not too far away.  And rain, plenty and regular rain.

There would be hours in the day.  Hours for loving, hours for reading, for working, for learning, for play.  Enough hours.  Hours to think about the hours, the learning, the loving, the play, and hours to think the hours writing.

I’m aging.  Hair, beard, muscles, flesh all going long.  Mind.  Long(ing).  Time, not so.  Seems shortening, shortened, fore-shortened…by the hour.  I wish for hours.  For time.  For children, partner, places, books.  For human.

She would be there.  Close, somewhere, sometimes.  We would wander, would work, would learn, play.  Would be there, away.

The children would come.  Would visit, report, eat, learn, work, play.  Sometimes we would laugh.  Sometimes perhaps weep or cry.  Contact.

Wood would be sawed.  Water drawn.  Yes it hurts now – knees, shoulders, joints, bones.  Slowed.  Steady, almost.  Still dark but peppered, frosted with gray.  I’m aging.  Tired.  Memory almost all made up already.  Thought always seems new, possible.  Touch.  Strength.  Sound.

Hours.  Gone ever so soon.  Thought, then paper, then feeling begins (or the other ways around?), then gone.

The pen.  The paper.  Lust.  Flesh.  Language.  Learning.  Where is the time?  Too much required for each daily need.

A joker, a harlequin.  Another, another.  Another other in the midst of me.  Mottled mangle, Alias.  Running out of time.  Running down the times, the memory, the full flesh of desires, its theory and knowledge, its aspects and affects.  So very many aspects.  Hand gains speed, cursive loops thin to lines.  Skimped satisfaction.

I like it to take time – loving, learning, working, play.  But the hours grow thin.  Shortcuts, swerves, abbreviations, tastes.  Hints now.  Breezes.  Nostalgia.

Growing monument – what cannot be said – will not – the ineffable – unsayable.  Ungrasped.

How though, to here?  Piecemeal person.  Farm labor, religion, sport, education, family.  Plains, harvest, accidents.  Mountains, Mexico, Europe, lists.  Music, poetry, philosophy – earliest companions – a few pets, kaleidoscope of selves, the river, the sky.

Deaths.  But no death here (yet).  Just on, scrappy, incisive, insecure, haphazard.  Books.  Remiss without mention of books and relentless ache for books and ‘broads.’  Women and words, the headstone says.  Women, words, wisdom(?).  Nature.

To explore.  Internal, external, outward, inward bound.  Sciences and arts.  Creativity and logic.  Psychology, anthropology, complexity and chaos, nihilism.  Literature and lust.  Words and women.  Matter and mind.

I’d have quiet mostly.  No mouths to feed, no herds or pets or things to tend.  Nothing to care for.  Hours.  Hours to tend.  With mind intact, a library, papers and pens.  And lonely land, mostly cloudy, cool, drizzly, wet.  And legs to stand on, arms to haul.  Eyes to see, please keep these eyes a-seeing – yes they’ve heaps of assistance – but please not a final fail.  Not the inner darkness, nor colorless clouds.  Hearing first, before vision.  If the vision is gone – ?

Breath.  Biosemiosis.  The sign and signal of being – a body for meaning.  Complex.  Confused.  Barely contained.  Unspecified.  Though wobbling to, fro, sound, precept, percept, interpret, sense.  Hope.  Hope of vision, of sex, of knowledge, health – something, something – beyond, more, still…

Alias sighs.  Perhaps beautiful still, but soiled and tired.  Undone.  Who is this one?  Which one?  How.  Who this be?  Alias i. e. Harlequin.  Unnameable, the attempt to name, creating traces of not-these.

“man is but a patched fool”

-Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, scene i

Laramie & Alias

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, awareness, being, creative writing, fragments, friendship, meaning, Melancholy, Writing11 Comments

Nobody

Laramie and Alias play ball.  Laramie or Alias.  Alias, Laramie.  What game are we playing?

Riven, desiccated, they lag.  Every day there is more to it.  More and less to them.  Laramie, Alias, friends as long as they can remember, or markers of memory and experience for one another that initiated chronos, now an aeon, now all of what they know.

Laramie falls behind.  Laramie, a little hoarse from laughing, spits out a “hold back!”

“C’mon you little horse,” Alias decries.

What are they playing at?

Long enough that when Laramie commands “Alias Harlequin!,” at this age,  the same mixture of guilt and fear, defensiveness and shame, defiance and harshly judged helplessness Alias feels when seriously called out by parents or lovers shivers his body.  Occupies his mind.  Why?  Why are these things in me, Alias looks down and away.

There is no ball.  It wasn’t a game.  Laramie and Alias walk and wander.  In woods, on paths, through fields.  They try to think together.  Alias has always wondered who he was, or is, or might be.  Laramie never knew, but did it anyway.  Somehow together they were themselves, or felt that way, felt like nothing at all, just present and curious and comforted.  Like learning, Alias thought.  I feel like I’m learning with Laramie.  Always learning something neither of us know.  They talk together.  They call this thinking.  Many refer to it as a game.

Laramie’s butt is on a bench.  He is smoking.  He doesn’t smoke.  His wife doesn’t like it.  His kids don’t like it.  His body, even, has begun to finally recoil.  Alias takes a drink.  Leans against the bench, still guilty, still staring into the trees.  He doesn’t want Laramie to die.  He doesn’t like death much.  It scares him, and it seems simple and true – unavoidable – simply ruinous.

Alias Harlequin sighs.

And Laramie asks what he is thinking.  Or feeling.  Or what is going on, at that moment, for him.

Alias is silent.  How could he know?  If he reaches in, or pays attention to any part – a limb, his gut, the sithering language slithering in what seems like his head – he’ll be inaccurate.  He can only tend to fragments.  Figments of experiencing.  But he doesn’t want the game to be like that.  He’d always hoped someone might know.  Like maybe Laramie knows and is just waiting to see what aspect Alias would select.  Might know something else about Alias’s present that comes from outside of him, that can observe him as a whole, that looks in another direction.

“What do you think?” Alias says.

“Nostalgic,” Laramie reports.  “Some sort of melancholy in lots of places at once.”  “A wend, a bundle, an amorphous pool of forms.”  “This is how it comes and goes at our age,” he breathes.

Nothing.  No response.  Not now.  But it’s an infinite conversation.

Laramie and Alias

To 2016

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, awareness, being, Blogging, change, Confusion, creative writing, death, Experience, Journal, Loss, love, Melancholy, Writing6 Comments

I am uncertain why I am sharing this, it comes from a personal email response to a friend, but as I was writing it, things that were coming up resonated profoundly in me.  Composition just does this for me.  I suppose I want it on public record for my own remembering.  That I learn things about me, that change is possible, that decay is transformative.  Okay then I am posting a personal reflection for myself – to declare it more widely in lieu of a personal social group.

chrysalis

“leaning upon nothing because nothing offers support”

-Maurice Blanchot-

The following is a response to a scholarly conversation regarding philosophy, science, cognition and so on…entirely out of place or sync, but seemed a personal confession on the passage of time and what it reveals…

Greetings —-.  It is good to hear from you.  I’ve been inundated per usual with family activities – good and tiring – and disorienting to my habits of reflection to some extent.  Feeling a bit bewildered re: semester start-up and the madness it brings, and yes, missing ANY considered interaction and dialogue.  I feel lucky to have encountered you.

Wee, random breaks and work-from-home days incite my nostalgia and bodily recall of creating creative work in language.  I ache for it.  Loss of its regularity is a depletion that changes me.  But then I read, “the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay” from a book about butterflies.  And “we have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning” from a commentary on it by Rebecca Solnit, a fine book – A Field Guide to Getting Lost that I like to read while traveling.

I suppose as the library is closed and our work quiet and insect-like on research, curriculum, and admin reports back here…my sociality turns to the work of being open and refusing stress in interacting with my beautiful children.  Which clicks onward into the ever-insistent questioning I face regarding whether there are adult relationships that can be predominately nourishing or reciprocally intimate.  Do we offer one another boon?  Any of us?  Our interactions have consistently done so, and I am very thankful to you for that.  So much conversation wears on me with the subterfuge and maneuvering to get anywhere near meaningful discourse.  I suppose I am tired, and perhaps in a strain of melancholy.  The wishing I could sit back with a drink and listen to intelligent talk without necessity of defense or critical acumen.  Just enjoying that we can.  Imagine and inform one another as humans.  I want this to mean something for me.  To mean I go about things variantly, shy from exhaustion and welcoming to possibilities.  From where does this determination to endure come from?  To “make the most of” idle repartee, body language, archaeology of behaviorisms and attitudes, – supplying too much (or inordinately) in order to learn in situations.  I dream of the luxury of perception and interpretation without analysis.  Reception.  Or where analysis co-creates itself.  Mutuality.  Enjoyment versus labor.  Or an effortless labor to enjoy.  Ahem.  Off-track and losing…

All this, I suppose, to apologize for my lack of acumen in the dear and full emails you and —- have provided…and probably an explanation of my messages of links rather than thought.  Others’ works as hopefully substantial stand-ins for my intellectual lack or confusion.  I do not know where the path is at present.  Just spinning in a lot of literature and activity.  Confession.

Trying to view decay in a hopeful manner.  The slow tears in relationality that introduce distances.  From friends, to partners, to ‘self’ – the flux of it all.  Many seem to have a greater capacity than I for working thematically regardless of internal/external context.  More flexible beings, I suppose, less bound by circumstance and scenario.  Ah well, this is no relevant response to your missals.  Apologies.  They enliven me – simply that thought and invention are going on around me – so please share them all as they arise – it is a great matter of hope for me to watch thought and process in others.  A stay against loneliness.  Thank you.  As I age along, some confusions do seem to dissipate…particularly confusions of my own blindnesses.  What nourishes me: intimacy (emotional, intellectual and physical), the thought and imaginative work of others, people striving to process experience on multiple levels, quiet & rest & reflection.  The commerce of ideas and bodies – entangled minds and bodies – passion and gentleness and reflection.  When these dissipate or decay or are absent in some strange idiosyncratic equilibrium, life is just harder for me to insist on.  And how terribly crucial the activity of writing is for me in my own ability to process my experiencing.  A weird alchemical embodied activity for me that seems to bring forth learning, feeling, imagination and all those characteristics I would like to take root in myself, to be me.  I am better when I write.  Better when I love.  Better when I rest.  Better with meaningful dialogue.  All sounds simple and general, but revealed ever more insistently to me as my epidermis thins.

Another turn of the wheel, bellows to the desire to thrive before the end.

To 2016 then.  And hope.

Something better soon.Kockelman_Figure 9, BSTCSG

Temporality: or, “in your absence I dwindle, I diminish…’I’ disappears”

On By NW FilbertIn Cosmology, Language, life, Loss, meaning, Philosophy, Poetry2 Comments

for Hallie

(please read in pace with tune below)

absence

I.

Feel.

Profoundly.

Meaning

–

(less).

On By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Experience, Journal, life, Writing4 Comments

Losing

Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness.  Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again.  Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand.  Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind.  Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins.  Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind.  One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.

– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –

Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991. 

For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.

Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.

Reading.  Writing.  Reading.  Writing.  Reading.  Writing.  Thinking.

Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,

the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,

grew redundant with desire…

…desire for language to do some certain things,

…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:

to write the ambiguities.

Repeatedly:  to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal.  Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear.  That light in which even our shadows go unseen.

Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,

encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,

my writing desire grows more active,

toward the active,

and its happening,

writing verbally,

writing living:

to write losing.

Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity. 

Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.

TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING

to loose losing

…perhaps to lose it…

…face to endlessness…

will he make it?

Invisible Man Chronicles, continued

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, relationships, Writing2 Comments

These consist of my attempts to account (to myself mostly) for the past 6 months of my somewhat turbulent season…

Read part 1 HERE: 

Kansas Ruins

 

II.

 

“Dying seeds split towards open…”

 

            “I was about to ask you to speak to me stories of how we met,” she murmured as we waited for sleep, “I never tire of them, how they change as we go, all our perspectives…”

            And we begin.

            “How was it for you when I entered that kitchen?” I ask, for what occurred in me I am still – four months later – unable to give voice to, just as I was unable then.

            What I can say is that I entered anxious, uncertain, afraid and filled with grief – but knowing I must begin somewhere, try, introduce, extend myself, my life, beyond the coil I’d created of children, survival, and pain.

             An old yellow farmhouse replete with water pump, out-buildings, repurposed windmill-like sculptures, abandoned well, mannequin-legs lined windows, rust, piles of parts, cats and kittens, bunnies and snakes.  The home of two lively artists, the wife soon to be known to me as “her” best friend.  Corn and wheat fields with their fences and rows, tall prairie grasses, birds of prey, and heat and wind is what I stepped out of my car toward this April Kansas day.

            I carried a backpack of notebooks, pens and books, a small cooler with two wrapped bratwurst, a liter of vodka and TexSun grapefruit juice cans (my armory against strangers and surprises, perhaps against myself) toward the homestead’s screened-in porch.

            Opened the door to a greeting androgynous mannequin and a doorway to the kitchen.

             I turned the latch with an apologetic and nervous smile as if to express “None of you will know me and will probably wonder why I turned up here in your home.”  The lady of the house greeted me and quickly introduced me to a workspace full of smoking hams, tossing salads, and baking grains.  At the island stood…and here I blank out.

             My torso, from lowest throat through loin-bottom, floods with feeling, with absence, with amazement and hunger.  The first sheer drop of a roller coaster.  Catching air off the road.  Losing your hold on the side of a mountain.  What seemed so certain – a mountain of absence and grief, a path of sorrow, loss and regret, misplaced footing, and fright like a life-ending fall… or life-fulfilling…

             All I remember was a brain flushed with “who IS that creature?” – large glasses, Dukes of Hazard or Wild Western clothes – a button shirt tied just under the breasts, long and limby body, mass of hair the color of ripe dusty wheat – long like the Kansas horizon.  I nodded politely to each, walked through three rooms and out the front door into air.  I had lost all my breath for that journey.

             Confused and baffled by the overthrow of my reason and will to be a severe and grieving abandoned invisible man, I set off to examine the property, to photograph remnants, to see as far as I could see and let the wind blow this internal combustion away.

             Part of me knew I’d survived.  What undid me was turning out not to be mortal.  Perhaps I maintained the resilience and adaptation of a child with a little less flexibility and imagination, but the floods and droughts had not burned me fallow.  It frightened me.

             Eventually I conversed most of the evening away with “her” young, thoughtful boyfriend, engaged the generous and open artist-in-residence and made more plans to enjoy this group of hopeful, resourceful humans… while “she” moved about like the grass and the wind, the trees bending, swaying – each too large to comprehend, each farther than the eye knew how to see.

             One learns a landscape by living in and with it over time…

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Invisible Man Chronicles – Pt. 1

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, Writing5 Comments

The times have been odd and I’ve been at pains to record them.  Here is a series I began recently in attempts to account for my life over the past 6 months or so… for what they’re worth.  In this current apparent “season” of ongoing stress related to surviving I am culling old notebooks for substance and will begin posting as I find time to type them. \

Kansas Ruins

Invisible Man Chronicles

            Six months ago, things were different.  I found myself unable to breathe, in England, windswept and drowned out in a kind of panicked grief – a she had proficiently evacuated my life, my home, a marriage… a business, a practice… The weather was cold and drizzly – melancholy, hibernatory, reflexive.  One might say: “Winter.”  My return would be to four children, now employment, no sustenance, no inner strength, little support and a home hardly emptied of her artifacts.  She had literally flown away.

Seasons in Kansas are cyclically exemplary.  Summer – hell-hot, a dry blowing flame, readings often surpassing 100.  Winter is a subzero freeze – bitter blizzards and veils of ice – both producing post-apocalyptic land.  Autumn, as is idealized, a gradual and colorful falling away – temperatures, foliage and field – a clear and moist sarcophagus.  And Spring.  Spring is explosive – blustery, redolent – a balmy turbulence of expansion and growth.

Some have suggested that landscapes, climates and geographies form the tangible shape to our thoughts and personalities and beliefs.  It makes many kinds of sense.

When we experience loss we consider to be great, we often find it inexplicable, and it may exhibit many qualities in common with fallow fields of Kansas Winters.  Clinging to cold and dark uncannily, as if depressive states were somehow desirable.  As if persisting in sorrow might validate what grew there before.  What cannot repeat (we think) – bumper crops and windfalls – the decay of which we experience as hopelessness, helplessness,  a ruin.  Plumbing gone bad, a roof worn away, the appliances failed.  Eyesight, blood pressures and flesh.  Things fall apart, the center cannot hold – wisely penned, and yet the Seasons.

When a wheat crop fails to a Summer’s drought and burn – there is thorough discoloration and a withering.  The rusty dun of a malpracticed rain dissolved by menacing sun seems a sign of things gone wrong, things never to be the same.  And it is so.  In some various version of “now” – growth is undone, production waylaid, and a pestilent edition of dying appears to have its way.  We cherish that in our bemoaning.  Misfortunes as notches on a belt that signify toward some later date: “We survived.”  “We survive.”

Certainly not forever, but perhaps another season.  Another cycling of the clock.  We sleep and we wake, and “every day begins the same.”  Every week and month and year.

That apparently demolished – scarred and furrowed stillborn field, however, hasn’t lost capacity, only a season’s fruit, a momentary harvest.

I shackled myself to determined grief.  Treating my earth with lyme.  Still its soil didn’t die.  Flowers and grasses were never erased, only unsung and silent, covered, eventually, by a type of ashen snow – very difficult to see.

The lesson I find ever-so-hard to incorporate is that the responsibility of flourishing or dearth lies not on the soil, the weather, or farmer – wind, sun, rain or seed – not even diligence, care or quality.  Rather, its growth or despoiling depends on the entire orchestra of factors.

What blooms for a term, given other conditions, even ever-so-slightly adjusted, may miserably deteriorate, may “fail to thrive” or “take.”  Human infants, ant colonies, milo crops and butterfly paths, wildlife populations and the microscopic advance of forests all share this cosmic weather – growth and decay depend on convergence.

A determined depression, a strange and celebrated joy – can be deranged by simple sounds or gestures, weathers or tastes.

Helplessness altered towards hope by some unexpected “yes.”

I was contacted to compose a responsive work for a miniscule fee in relation to a visiting artist.  I was given employment, extremely part-time it appeared – as a rural mail carrier ‘associate’ – filling in for regular carriers days off.  And yet they were SOMEthing, a shift in the breeze, a change in barometric pressures, percentages of precipitation, doors opened with smiles.

A bonfire had been planned at a farm to forge acquaintance with the visiting artist – two weeks of work from Brooklyn, NY.  In my selected sorrow I avoided meeting people or mingling in groups, even contacting more than a handful of friends (often reaching out and then canceling in efforts to conserve energy for survival).  Yet work (survival) was serious business and necessitated uncomfortable measure.  I went to the farm and the fire, and from there began a new history.  New season.  Dying seeds split toward open…(to be continued…)

Lessons Learning in Metaphors

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography, Reflections, Writing11 Comments

1-photo 2-002

HERE.  Abandoned places fall apart.  Decay to exposure.  We, bereft.  We, grieving.  In the absence of care… Upkeep.  Keeping up.  Often when significant change occurs, we do not bother “keeping up.”  Rather things, people, places, seem to hold on as long as possible to what is familial / familiar / to what seems known, as long as they can.  Perhaps this marks some difference between survival and thriving.  Maintenance versus development.  Preservation versus advance.  Enclosing versus opening.

But time.  Molecules move and shake around; synapses shift, come undone, frackle, rewire…adjust.  Adapt.  There are new conditions.  The movement of beings, of the world, continuously alters our context, alters ourselves.  When they left, or something seemed lost, other inhabitants, presences, qualities, realities fill the perceptive interoperable surround…some constraints are increased, some loosened, restraints, license, “competition”:  wind, rodents, weather, routine… The primary structuring relationships morph.  Continually.

Now wife.  Now wife and children.  Now certain finances.  Now no finances.  Now surety, stability, now uncertainty, hazard, CHANGE.  CHANGE (never not occurring) ALWAYS EQUALS OPPORTUNITY (for living things), ALWAYS EQUALS DIFFERENCE.

Now no wife.  Now children.  Now no job.  Now scrapping for sustenance.  Now certain friendships.  Now the absence of certain friends.

Now different care.

What will the winds do?  The rain, the sun, the heat, the ice?  Critters?  What new sounds will my structure make – interactions – given the changes in conditions, in surround?  WHAT ARE WE NOW?  The same.  Structurally – a form made for interaction, a part of the world, interlocked and interwoven, a bundle of functions and processes, intentions and conditions – exposed by happening in a world.

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“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”

(Great!  How else…life?)

And how beautiful the potencies of change.  How messy.  How easy to attribute – “good” “bad” “difficult” “help” “harm” “ease”…

But is what’s happening to the homestead, the barn now – in lieu of human use and care – less easy?  Less beautiful?  Does not every context surrounding and composing a structure of forms – both help and harm of a sort?

Would it be false to say this erosion, this abandonment to other interests and types of care, this shifting of primary interactions, reciprocating attachments, looks like loss?  With all that light pouring through?  All the redolent air and wheezing whistling and rattle?  Has the new (ever-altering) context of comings-and-goings helped or harmed this structure…or, perhaps mostly…BOTH?  Just like the previous and every future one?

We.  I.  You.  Crafted ever-so-intricately in contexts we are unable to adequately identify (comprehensively) or evaluate – for they ARE the context that is co-creating (in-forming) our identifications and evaluations.  We interpret – according to the context we are enmeshed in/with.

CHANGE CONTEXT – CHANGE PERCEPTION, INTERPRETATION, IDENTIFICATIONS, EVALUATIONS…change even what we look for…

A breaking, a leaving, an abandonment, some loss…(simply, really, change) – do they not equal a kind of damage, a kind of harm, so full of openings, exposure, new perspectives granted the initializing structures that we truly DO NOT KNOW what living is for?  But this? – TO LIVE?!

The rent places let the outside in in novel ways, creating coevally novel openings for the inside to emerge.  The wear co-creates other structural stresses and reliefs, new releases and new enclosures, novel shapes and textures, colors perhaps we never knew were possible to begin with.  Never a potential until the context came that facilitates and allows, enacts and enables.

Always interacting, we change.  Always changing (along with our entire surround) defines INTER-ACTION.  Barn: Enter, Action.  Always.

NOW…this…

1-photo 2

Experiences confoundingly rendered with these sound contexts:

From the Notebooks… a poem perpetually in progress…

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Poetry, Writing3 Comments

Untitled (In Progress)

The poem linked above I pushed out last week… and marked it as “in progress” because for some reason it is one that the process of making, unmaking, forging and revising it (still feels “off” as published at above) has intrigued me.  Here are the pages of notebook from which it hails, perhaps this is of interest, perhaps not, for better or worse…

We are working on an exhibition of new media for June at Wichita’s Fisch Haus, and have been battling over how to show process and creation when exhibiting technologically enabled and activated art.  Perhaps that is why I’ve been more conscious of my own processes of making and revising.  In any case, here is a little trail through the notebooks as a piece is coming to be…

edited drafts

In Progress….

 .

I am thankful for this loosening quiet,

your slackening ties of dusk.

Though often shackled by a fear of loss

in love, I may open toward a growing –

 .

possibilities of a learning, as in youth,

less about the being something

than, profoundly, just to be…

that which relaxes and allows

 .

like a cow caught up in weather,

or warm engagements with a child,

with the blossom, and make-believe.

Empowered when our symbol’d systems –

 .

confused by what is happening –

begin to sign that loss

(a form of death) ensures the safety

of our risks.  That harm and haven

 .

are our home – the same as truth:

what’s loved is lost –

and thus we come to love.

Wisdom undoing opposites

 .

in terms of life.

I amt ridiculed by youth –

it’s how I know that many lessons

come unlearned,

 .

that “completeness is

a process of revision”

as they say,

and that our closures

 .

are what open

every day.

.

The above was an editing of the following…which is why it’s still “In Progress…”

child, the blossom, the make-believe

And

 .

And then I want to say

that I am thankful

for this loosening

 .

I want to say

And then I want to say

that I am grateful/thankful

in/for this loosening quiet

for its / and the slackening of ties

 .

perhaps we’d once been shackled by

the fear of loss in love

 .

leaving space for other and tenderness and availability,

freed of the shackling fear of loss

in love

not in the order of other pursuits

thus fencing a truth again

or forging some identity –

burned and brandished iron –

 .

but that we might allow

the finding, its discovery –

all the safeties that arrive with risk –

in all directions

whether in the child, the blossom, or the make-believe

 .

the will to love and to enjoy

our engagement

with world and things and persons

 .

unraveling the expectations

of hurt and damage

parenting ourselves to freedom

 .

the assurance we are looked after,

at least by ourselves,

as well the plenteous others –

our families, our species, our friends

 .

we will probably survive,

unless we do not

and then no matter

death was here from the start

 .

nor had it intention or opportunity

not to be

attachment and loss

and room for growth

 .

so we begin, so we will be

the template that stifles

symbolic structures

learned of experience

 .

in certain ways

 .

do not ask permission

but simply deceive

they are not truthful

 .

Look at your child,

your pet, your mother –

you would not have them

to be a certain thing

 .

an object, tool or concept

but to live and change and grow

until they die and thus dissolve

which is not damage so much

so much as change

 .

thus let it be,

it is quiet

the ties are slackened

the noose loosened

 .

around your heart.

we are here –

the squirrel, man and mountain,

every weather, part and parcel,

as are you

 .

It is begun

we are resolved

to open and allow

for your enjoyment

for your experience

should you engage

 .

and cease to fear

cease to fit to your equation

to whatever maths you assent and ascribe

and start to scribble

doodle, sketch

 .

to select potential

over priority

exception(al) over rule

dynamic in place of determined

 .

and friendship more than fact

 .

perhaps you were meant to be

over being

to selve more than self

 .

for “we were not meant to survive,

only to live.”

 .

*********************

 .

We thank you for the loosening quiet

We are the slackened ties of dusk

 .

I am grateful to this the loosening quiet,

the darkness and this its slackening of ties…

what is once was shackled by the fear of loss

in love, now opened may open toward a growing –

 .

possibilities – a learning, as in youth,

that it is much less about being something

as than it is, profoundly, just to be

that which relaxes and allows

 .

the squirrel (cow) caught up in weather,

our warm engagement with the child,

the blossom, or the make-believe,

empowered when our symbol’d systems

 .

can be get confused with awareness by what is happening,

and when we are able to see that loss,

a form of death, ensures the safety

of our risks.  That harm and heaven haven

 .

are the same – our home as truth

what’s loved is lost

and thus we get come to love.

Wisdom undoing opposites

 .

in the terms of life

I am get ridiculed by youth

it’s how I know that lessons

are get unlearned,

 .

that “completeness

is a process of revision”

as they say, and that a that our closures

opens every day.

 .

“TO SPEAK SO AS NOT TO MEAN, BUT TO BE”

-Dan Beachy-Quick-

 

 

 

 

Scrambling… Scattering Notes

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings7 Comments

note in a bottle

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…

Locations on the Map of Meaning

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.

Cohen - Four New Messages

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.

Jumbled Language

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…

photo 2-001