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Tag: love
Swarm. Absorb. (the words, pt. 2)
Swarm. Absorb.
metaphor: the entire discography of Mark Kozelek (+ Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) / each version of Max Richter’s “Haunted Ocean” on dizzying random repeat – this is the setting: atmosphere. environment. “context.”
metaphor: the Kansas sky in storm
metaphor: dealing with Ache. (“being human”)
metaphor: “Control without Hierarchy” by Deborah M. Gordon…on some page in a book called Swarm by Lucas Felzmann:
“A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something that people don’t know how to do: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer. It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies…Life in all its forms is messy, surprising, and complicated. It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy. We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions. Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs – without any person directing another, or having more power than another. Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in nature.”
think of language.
what is scattered widely or uniquely ubiquitous – call it “swarm.”
“I”…lost.
I know I cannot gather to a grown pillar of I-ness, something you might recognize, could “identify.”
I know I cannot be where I am as long as “time” and “space” function effectively in my frames of reference…
I spread.
I swarm.
“I-swarm”
(the “human” world-situation)
Leaving that aside.
How might one (dependent on two or more in order to, well, in order to simply “be”)
how might that one (singular mark – “/”) handle (manage? survive?) “its” Ache?
“To be or not to be, that IS the question”
(o wise god)
So I split…up…
I canvas the sky, the context, the landscape, the sitz im leben, in fragments.
I approach, engage, invade the world like shot scattered from the anguished burst of a wombgun.
I-particle.
I-swarm.
Absorb.
Seminal-syllable words resound –
– Let their pulse reverberate your bodies like hymns –
God. Void. I. You. Song. Life. Death. Love. Real. Being. (Not).
and so on…
all with no definition…
IS. IT. THIS.
nowhere near
where we mean to be.
Absorb.
Swarm.
In this situation then,
of too much
of grave luck
(all that hope and final destitution)
I swarm. I absorb.
I decenter. I explode.
I desist in pretense
in sense
I spread.
One mark….thousands of pixels….without hierarchy
(a swarm of cells)
(a flock of birds)
(a fish in school)
I swarm.
I absorb.
[ – I love you – ]
-for my wife
Ideas of Home
Hello everyone! For whatever reason (I’m not always a bigger believer in a source for reason!), a few days ago between cargo-ing children to and fro from all the places they must be S. Carey’s song “We Fell” came through my stereo and the weather was Spring-ish cool and the air was nice and I was overwhelmed with feelings, I guess you’d call them, (sentiments?) of being home. As I pulled in the drive the light struck the deteriorating garage and trampoline movingly, and I took a few shots that matched my feeling. Then throughout the past days I’ve just been letting those feelings/sentiments/ideas swirl about in my head thinking they’d find an organization they wanted. They didn’t. So today I’m just going to post the notes I jotted down the way they tangled and fumbled out of me…In my mind they go with S. Carey’s song and always Mark Kozelek’s tunes (his music often is my home)…
oh, here are the lyrics to “We Fell”
The consonance of drone
And love sounds its own
Your arms wrapped around home
All the in-betweens
Lay so blue beside me
We fell
More than skin and bones
No we’re not alone
We fell
Like stones
Between
S. Carey
And here follow my photos and ramblings:
(click to read text)
THANK YOU!
The Unknown and Unnamed recalculates and barrels on…
“& knowing from
the look of the others
that a panic has come
into your own eye
to know yourself only
as an instance”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
Am I indeed no/w/here – is this a place to founder?
Are you here too? Now? And what might that mean? (Or is that already to abstract, extract, exit to a changing no/w/here?)
I have my concepts. I have my doubts.
I am unidentifiable, no/w/here.
If you happen to find me (or dis-cover?) would you please point me out? Just a gesture will do.
You can use the simplest sign, that concept, just a dash, a briefest line – “/”.
Or a slapdash curly loop to momentarily contain it all in, all of that malleable nothing with thousands of experiences passing through: .
Loop-the-loop-de-loop go the organs and wires, the pores of the flesh, the nerves and the neurons, the veins and cells…
I am bewildered.
I think I am a concept. (I thought I was a verb).
I get the joke! “I think” – I am a verb.
So runs the conception.
Selah.
The ?/’I’ Barrels On…(the Unknown and Unnamed recalculates)
Empty concept or full flow, he advances (advances?) – he verbs.
Verbalizes.
He acts. The marking concept, the tiny scratch – ‘/’ – goes on, regardless (of my regarding).
No/w/here.
This is IT. (was IT and becomes so again) as ‘/’ act.
This unknown, unnamed subject/object absent presence moves like a filter screen being swished through a tub of air always tagged “IT,” (if this were a game). Is IT?
Beginning from no/w/here and heading there too, and always at once…
it’s downright unsettling! (literally – there is no settling or pause!)
I find (without actually locating a thing, even a speck or a fragment, not “conceived”) I am always no/w/here, and that no-place is always (ALWAYS) changing, moving, different(ly).
Unknown(-able?) Unnamed(-able?) Unlocated(-able?)
Homo Scribus (homo-anything!) – person-as-verb – erases as it writes, deletes as it constructs, falsifies as it truths, acts in its passivity,
ever equaling the equation at zero!
(no/w/here)
I’ve gotta steer clear of math, of physics…I don’t compute!
New Ekphrastic Works from myself and Holly Suzanne!
New verbal/visual work from our studio at home!
Unknown and Unnamed Undoing: the swoon and the swarm (a kind of mathematics to be continued in rain)
Unknown and Unnamed experiences: the swoon and the swarm
I hadn’t remembered it like this (trying not to remember). That all of it got into you. That all of it came out!
Immersion. Enthrallment. Ecstasy – words that come, to mind.
That if en-joined, then out-sourced. Becoming indecipherable – like epistemology.
A moment’s rush, for example. I encounter – which encountering looks like insertion and abstraction on me. I move toward, feel it out, then back off and observe. Active, passive; a swing, a rocking boat.
This is different. Inundation, a flood. Unable to say what’s mine, what’s not; who’s me, who’s you. Unable, frankly, to say, at all. Only be.
Motion, reception; injunction and release.
Think sky-diving: that decision to jump, trusting something, someone will hold together as form in all that air. Like diving the deep blue sea, compression surround, that some element will remain intact without ground or solidity.
It works that way. Give and take, see and saw, this uncanny to and fro of body, perceptions, breath. Eyes contact then fog to some self between. Fleshes – distinct and specific – now con-fused. Who’s sweat? Who’s secretions? It’s sticky, yes, like that – a gluey bond.
Then the wave, the distended moment – incalculable clockwork – where all borders and boundaries seem lost, some extended and mutual sigh or moan within which the voice is other and the same without identity.
The swoon of it. The swarm.
Dizzying rush of blood as warmth or wind; eyes roll back, also in, but not to my darkness. As if limbless or prosthetically invented, my body grows – grows yours or ours or contracts to another covering, but inside-out.
As if leap or let go were no longer options, but instinct.
As if hot and cold – undifferentiated – some something that must define pleasure –
as in emptiness, fullness
the yin, the yang
a cellular entanglement
The swoon, the swarm
emerge
But what? Or whom?
And what occurs in the median?
Who were that? What was those?
The swoon, the swirl, the swarm.
No one effecting. Effected. What does that indicate?
Nothing, essential to event – if nothing, than an absence utterly imbued.
A radiance, evocation,
like a sleeping brain on dreams…
with-you, the unknown gets no/w/here.
Whatever the constants, coefficients and variables, given the operator as convergence, the equation = whole,
where the w stands for we,
without which none – (“hole”).
Affecting substance…no one gains currency…necessity (no 1, but at least 2)… and then – ?
No one, unknown, unnamed, no/w/here as 0+O
where O stands for other
in this case, you
O requiring as much as I
inferring – ?
you can’t have 1 without anOther
but where anOther occurs must be at least 1 (other)
even if unknown, unnamed
in order to be lost and found in the joining
the immersion and enthrallment
the ecstasy
I, in instances of jell-o
I, in instants, divested
Let me put it this way: I find mysterious pockets of habitual thinking functioning like cradles of jell-o.
Say couple’s therapy is called for: I consciously feel gung-ho, pro-choice, empowered by trust and intention and reciprocal hope. Our determination, our hope. But the rear half of my skull, the scape my subject lands in, I realize is slicky, silently and squishily snuggling into a jello-y bed of “there’s something wrong with me. I’ve got the problems. We’re really trying to figure out why I’m so hard to live with; how my moods impede relational success and happiness; my fears – intimacy. If the truth were told, my spouse is acting graciously and sacrificially in order to get me help.” It’s as natural as instinct for me to believe I’m a burden, a difficulty, a special case.
The endless desires of youth. Our adolescents seem never to be satisfied (perhaps aren’t even “meant” – biologically, psychologically, socially, developmentally – to be), rarely “up” for family events or participation in chores, games or outings. Seem preoccupied with themselves and their wants and preferences, shifts and swerves. Rationally – I sense the raging hormones; the violent ego-mania seeking a code, a reflection, its own DNA; the psychoses of self/other, boy/girl, love/lust and so forth – upheaval and growth! But my torso is wiggling and sliding itself into the slushy comfort of “I have no idea how to guide these kids! Who am I to parent and protect, encourage and inspire? I’m just as fragmented, uncertain, conflicted, aroused and cynical as these guys! No way I’m good enough, strong enough, wise enough, and so on… unqualified to father, even at directing myself!”
The list goes on – as reader, writer, artist. As male, friend, laborer. As handyman, citizen, spouse. As mind, as body, as conglomerate selves:
How does it come so natively to cuddle in, automatically, unself-consciously and familiarly into negative perceptions, fraught with inadequacy, victimhood and failure, with no perpetrator(s) to blame?
Ideologically, philosophically, linguistically, aesthetically, psychologically, and so on, I can adapt party lines and mottos of health, truth, justice, fallibility and courage; equality and imperfection; becoming and process,
but wherever this social solidarity is not called-for or aimed at, this prompting to blend toward community or “normalcy,” my actual mind-body-complex demonstrates an incredible proclivity to nestle and burrow into a gooey surround of personal suspicion and doubt, misgivings and cynicism…like a worm to mud, or a fossil its imprint.
What the I/eye prefers.
How we see what we see.
How something – something – (but what is it?!)
contradicts mind’s understanding and body’s sensation/perception/evidence and goes its own hellbent way in whatever direction it selects!?
I-cipher.
I-estrangement.
I-observer,
for instants,
for instance.
I, the infinite? instants…
I, Gelaftimus
A jumble of words. A spasm, a syndrome. The spraying of a passing fancy, designation.
You don’t know where I got these words, nor do I, or only rarely. A voided origin, a lifetime suffering verbs and the masks of nouns.
Experience: feels like something moving forward, somethings breaking and tumbling about it. “Feels like.”
A kind of perceptual first instance, shaped by everything before, altered by everything after.
At the limit then, boundary-lip, threshold. Moving, and that ceaselessly. Colliding.
A poet, after committing suicide in his youth, now festering under the ground, is found to have remarked that “a tree grows upward…the path of least resistance.” So most of us.
Whatever “us” might mean, a jumble of words, perhaps a spasm, unconscious and involuntary instinct, so carefully and meticulously learned: to say.
Gelaftimus is what I feel today, this moment, my wife sitting and stewing on her couch, me (whatever “me” might mean) crabbing over my desk, this white paper, with a ball-point pen, scribbling – “a jumble of words, a spasm. A syndrome.” Perhaps. But it is gelaftimus, I tell you that.
Early on I was assigned this particular label: “Nathan,” only later coming to find that “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context. In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.” (V.N. Volosinov, et. al.) “Feels like” experience.
Needless to say, “I” have struggled with defining the cluster of words “I,” “Nathan,” “man,” “boy,” “me,” “son,” “husband,” “father” and so on in their perpetually altered contexts, circumstances and situations, ever re-de-term-in-ing their possible meanings.
A jumble of words. A spasm and syndrome. Instinct and accomplishment (accomplice-ment?)
My wife, last night on the swing, beside me, in the dark, on the porch, spoke of “not being allowed to say” as a child – so very many experiences “not to talk about” – frozen (perhaps) in their places or processed without knowledge dementedly deep underground (out of sight, out of mind, and so forth).
Contextually, she was addressing the decades-old infancy of “figuring out the world around me and my relation in and to it.”
“Reality works in overt mystery”
which I found (what she said) to feel like truth (as in actuality) – the jumble of words, the spasms and syndromes of “making words fit.” The odd difficulty we sometimes name “maturity,” i.e. beginning and growth.
I would confuse myself in this (were I to find me).
Alas it floats on the crest of the wave, breaks and spreads on the shore, regathers in a reflective pool, drifts away and starts again in fragments and particles.
Poised on a threshold, hardly poised. Rather in the breeze, a metaphor passing hands.
This jumble of words. Syndromes and spasms. Accumulated masterfully and haphazardly over ages and accidents. Feels like, experience.
Gelaftimus, today.
“A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; [or making it fit with prefabricated words? –N.F.] and in writing [that babble at the crest of the wave –N.F.] one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) [?! –N.F.] and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, [ever creating more waves – N.F.] it makes words to fit it [or fits it to words which recognize? – N.F.]”
All my Words are Silent 