Tag: love

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….

Working Around the Void

On By NW FilbertIn desire, Experience, meaning, Poetry, Unknown, Writing6 Comments

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve whittled away at my brain toward a poem…  I’m not sure that’s what this is, but it’s fresh effort:

Working Around the Void

How can we have

such clear impressions

of what is not?

 

Absence

Silence

Nothing

 

maybe God,

Santa Claus,

or meaning.

 

Things

lacking evidence,

experience

 

I believe I dream

and vice-versa,

as a doubt-drenched thinker

 

As long as we’re using language

for these –

what is our perception of love?

 

Imagination?

Is it?

Time?

 

Between appear and disappear.

Articulate desire.

 

Unstillable

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Current Reading, existence, fragments, Language, meaning, Questions, Samuel Beckett, Semiotics, thinking, Writing7 Comments

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“Pangs of faint light and stirrings still.  Unformable graspings of the mind.  Unstillable”

– Samuel Beckett –

Let’s loiter about here a little, as if language were lakelike, locatable, alive enough to lollygag loose within.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps it is nearly always just-becoming.  Perhaps nearly all, nearly always, is thus: just-becoming – liminal lineaments languishing-then-livened, languishing-then-livened, “again” we might say, designating (de-term-ining) a balance to enlivened.  How so?  Why so?  By what author(ity)?

Unstillable.

“In the madhouse of skull and nowhere else” (– Samuel Beckett).  Is that so?

“Skin has no choice but to converse with the world…thin, ignorant borderland of skin…myself all trespass, misunderstanding, translating, translating…” (-Laurie Sheck).  Is that so?

If words were invented with sense.  To “make sense” between one and an ‘other.’ 

What if words ARE THAT?  Connective contours between.

I am inebriated, my willingness loosened to expression, though it might ruin me (like language) and I stare (Dostoevsky – ‘Myshkin’) “intently” into Mikhail Bakhtin’s face, his specific eye-gaze, and say:

“Is it the case that words are ‘meant,’ are ‘formed,’ are breathed, are…constructed, are…utilized, to be tissue woven between ‘me’…and ‘you’?”

Do we… speak, say, expire back and forth… to become?  To string and weave lines, flows, strands, threads, that might forge or invent co-respondence, texture, significations combining you and myself into WE?

But Bakhtin is dead, and cannot answer.  Mikhail Bakhtin does not have the capacity to co-respond.

…like Beckett, Blanchot, Plato, Montaigne, Pessoa, Pascal, Wallace or Euclid, Bulgakov, Heraclitus, or Celan (as with any and all dead!) he emits traces (tracings) with which I can consider, decipher, and interrogate in and within my ‘selves’ but not between…

What might this ‘mean’ – between anyone?  Nothing.

It can not, has no opportunity to, delineate or circumscribe, draft, figure or shape any relation.

Sign emitted, call evoked, death, and then text as silent partner.  Prognostic retrograde delineation.

Bankrupt, impassible, impossible, communique.

The decoding of words as communication, connection?  An imaginary.  A handling of terms.  Inventing, devising, originary.  With whom?  Where?  How?   Hint and vestige, remnant and sketch, scheme and fabrication, inkling and outline.

Unstillable. Unformable graspings of the mind.  Is that so?

If we’re limning the liminal now, let’s loosen the letters and slacken the sieves.  Lasso and lounge, scatter and scrape, together (to gather) – a scintillate sense – sporadic sparks, succulent scenarios – exist for enlivening language, whatever limited lust lies therein – if language is locatable and not merely modal mechanics?  A modicum of music then, some scrap of sonority, some lingual litmus ‘making sense.’  Whatever.  Possibility, potential, particible particulars…

“THE TEST IS COMPANY”

“If there may not be no more questions let there at least be no more answers”

– Samuel Beckett, Company –

“We must not die: kindred spirits will be found”

– Viktor Shklovsky –

 

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)

The Perpetual Proposal

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, fiction, hope, intimacy, longing, love, relationship, Writing4 Comments

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Alias Thinks Back…On…

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Alias Harlequin, awareness, creative writing, death, desire, Experience, Journaling, Language, loneliness, longing, Loss, love, Melancholy, time, Uncertainty, Writing6 Comments

“To bring a work to ‘a conclusion,’ as Picasso said, is like putting an end to a bull – to kill it.”

-Francois Jullien-

diaries

from the diaries…

Woke this morning with a particular feeling.  I’ve never been one to believe people could name their emotions or feelings.  The best we can say are parts.

Words like a parts catalog: indicating pieces and components, but never the working, not the operative whole.  Machines are full of mystery.  What’s hidden.

They say you cannot know.  As you age.  Cannot know if it’s the end, exactly.  Perhaps they’re right – I’ve surely been surprised in middle age, believing everything was lost, doomed, downhill and erosive, some slow and steady depleting – and then WOW!  Who could have known or imagined!  This luck, this place, this woman or experience!  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  But maybe we do.  Maybe we really know, once twilight settles.  I’ve never trusted “them” – the “experts,” the “scholars” and “scientists,” “politicians” or “leaders” or “doctors,” the “speakers for” and “authorities”…i.e. privileged observers (an illusion or delusion or both – no one ever gets to be ‘outside’ existence, any more than any other).

What with Laramie gone, and a birthday round the corner, and language just a parts catalog – my experience.

I woke with a particular feeling.  That things were near their ends.  That I am nearing ends.  Work, love, breathing, will.  That the stories I’m involved with are dwindling in pages, thin and wearing out.  These ‘particular feelings,’ “somehow we just know,” kinds of things: lay down, close your eyes, cross your hands over your chest and hope things are in order.  Or not.  Depends on inclination and values, I suppose.  What one cares about, or for.  Perhaps.  “They” say you cannot know.

I’ve been surprised.  Even wildly.  Much I’ve never been able to believe and yet it seems: my children – engendered by me and of such promise; this beautiful woman that loves me; that I’m still alive.  One never knows (is what they say).  So who knows what?  And how do “they” know that?

I think I do, what with Laramie gone, and my faulty parts catalog, and this particular way that I feel.  I’ve worked too long and too much.  Tried too failingly.  Never quite trusted or believed.  Never found my worth.  Maybe now I know.  Maybe now I’m certain of something.

The end is coming – for me – always concerned and consternated by beginnings – how to start, where to set out – and now, here (nowhere) the path, it dwindles away.  What have I done?  What did I mean to?  What did I wish?  Why didn’t I?

I wanted to write a scholarly work about something that truly obsessed me.  Something I’d spent my life searching.  Something that likely doesn’t even exist, but no matter – because Scrabble, because poems, because science.  Unscramble (by scrambling) the letters – you’ll see: it can almost be said, almost anything – existent or not – almost.  Parts constructing strange wholes and plugged in, eventual malfunctions, repairs – and yet “no matter, try again, fail again, fail better” (Sam Beckett – I’ve read and I’ve taught far too long).

And one solid work of fiction and some poems.  That’s all.  That’s what I wanted to do.

So I studied, and traveled and loved.  Raised children, made music, pushed learning and literature publicly, worked and worked, and drank and drank.  Took in stragglers and strays, made it work where I could, doubted and doubted, desired.  Everything but what I wanted – that’s how you perpetuate desire.

I woke today with a particular feeling, though “they” say you cannot know.  Cannot know for certain, that things are yet to surprise you, yet to get better.  I will not argue.  Perhaps.  But what with Laramie gone, and all that’s undone, maybe I know, maybe we do.  Maybe we’re aware when our endings are coming.  Who could know?  Who could tell us?

My ends are coming.

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on.

(still more from Beckett)

Related: Alias Harlequin

We are. Are we not.

On By NW FilbertIn absence, desire, Experimenctes, identity, Language, love, Other, Poetry, relationships, Uncertainty, WritingLeave a comment

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Beginning this way, I have jettisoned my goal.

No one is able to say precisely when it will rain, until it is raining.  Not this one.  Nor…

At times it is raining.

 

When will I be here? Or, better, perhaps – When am I here?  (Already?  Again?)  How?

Am I when and where I love you?  And how?  Forego why, too complicated.

 

Say “I am this one who loves you” now and now and now again.  As if a presence on repeat, differently again.  Registers and tones; layers, levels, circumstance; sense/nonsense and the liquid continuum between.

Who are you?

Say “you are the one this one loves.”  Or the many.  Or the one this one loves in relation to I.  Or the other-than-one loving other-than-one, here, now, again, again, differently.

When is this love?  And how?  Dropping why in the craggy abyss, as it dissipatively floats, up and away.  Where is this love?

I begin.  It is raining.  Say that you are.  If I say that you are, or how, when, or why, I have failed what I set to inscribe (you).  Say now.  I just missed it.  Say love, saying what?

I’m aware of your absence with pain I can’t tell.  I say “love.”  I say “miss.”  I say “yearn.”  Goal discarded.

Please say that you are.  I will be that relation.  Will not.  And I am.

It is raining.  What it?  Say I am and you are.  Less than one and still more, it’s becoming.  Undone.  The suture begins in the cut.  We are we.  We might be, when we are.  Now and now, say now, and is differently.

We’re unfound in this you and this I inter-change.  Inter-change-able as we.  And we’re not.  Either you or an I as these two, but not quite, there’s an extra: BETWEEN.

Which is nothing, like water in air, molecules known by connections.  Re-cognized.  Understanding might pull them apart, separate, while reason(s) constructs some assemblage.

Say I love you, as this one to this.  Say it’s so, without knowing, ‘cause with.  In between, together; understanding, a part; reasoning a sort of equation.

Where am I?  I appear in this with.  Who are you?  This one forming between.  When now comes it is raining, again, again different.  Some of the notion we are.

Discursive Tangles

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, communication, Complexity, Journaling, Language, Living, Reflections, relationships, Samuel Beckett, Writing13 Comments

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Increasingly I find myself filled with the desire of simply saying what I think about.  To some generative effect.

“We live.  We die.  We wish the living mattered.”

But “that’s too simple,” you say.  “Everyone knows that.”

And you’re right, again, and it’s the best that I can do.

Not that I don’t do other things, in living.  I hold jobs and work for pay (at nearly ANYthing) to keep a home, feed and educate my children, and attempt to convince them to try to try.

And then there’s the dynamo of desire.  Urges and drives, lusts and obsessions simply to have someone who will allow me to be close to them – to touch them and smell, listen and taste, copulate and serve and talk back and forth.  I don’t expect them to love me.  I’ve long given up being wanted or desired.  Can’t imagine I’ve ever considered myself necessary to someone or something.  For connection – to world, to literature and art, to thoughts and conversations, to knowledge and nature.

“No matter,” He says, “Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better,” He says.

I cannot.  Oh I try.  I try.  I try again.  But never imagine proximity of others not involving pity, and my failure seem ever further from their marks.  Not better.  I’m 45 now!  Or 80!  No matter.

No matter, indeed.

No matter, at all.  Perhaps.  I know this, that, some other stuff.  No matter. So I crave and wish and hope.  Failing further, and worse, never better.

Long hours of days pleasing others (or trying).  No matter.  Family and employers, students and friends.  No matter.  Perhaps?

But to say something simply.  How that?  I feel caught in a tangle of discourses.  What language to say in?  What field?  How to be heard, perhaps evaluated, to “count” or to “matter.”  I read something years ago by Nathalie Sarraute comparing the dreams or demands of Dostoevsky and Kafka to be recognized…no, acknowledged  (“From Dostoevsky to Kafka” in The Age of Suspicion). To matter.  Appear.  Have a voice.

Said simply:

“We live.  We die.  We wish the living mattered.”

Selah.

Fierce Splittings

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, Alias Harlequin, Complexity, death, desire, Journey, longing, nature, relationships, Writing10 Comments

Teton-Range

Mountains.

At the base of them, miles and miles into Montana, lay Laramie.  Laramie’s horse Sensei is uncertain what to do.  A storm is rolling in.

Lucy knocks at Alias’ door.  “Going for a walk,” she says, “you okay?  Need anything?”  Alias ponders.  “I’ll be taking the dog,” she adds to the nerve-troubled silence.  “You’re welcome to join.”

The fierce splittage that occurs.  Rife.

  1. I always want to go, and madly.  Tromp nature, move our bodies in time, together.  Hear you, explore, see the muscles work your thighs, your calves, their clench and stretch.  Peer at what your eyes respond to, share what registers in your ears.  Be privy to what physicality, adventure, novelty and motion unwind and unravel in you.  Want you as much as myself.  Want to touch and observe, share and protect you.  Crave you.
  2. I need to stay with these thoughts, stick at these questions, interrogate myself, my loneliness, my ecstasy, my want.  I am remiss, longing, wishing.  Forever turning aside for another (spouse, friend, vocation, pet, children) – NO! – I must stay here with myself, plumb some illusory depth, a hell, potential potency.  Must keep scribbling, keep ‘taking up and reading,’ until the moment occurs that seems revelatory, meaningful, significant.

YES                   /                     NO

Silence.                                                                          She goes.

And Laramie’s lain still, a long while.

Sensei turns and trots, after houghing along his body.

Lucy goes.  Exchanging kisses and assurances, both of them wishing, both of them aware, both of them happy and sad.

Alias moves to the piano.

Wanting to extrapolate a sense – but there are far too many senses and sensings.  Children: infants to adults, jettisoned and on.  Sensual aches and lustings – the million maneuvers to orgasm at every angle and scale.  Big Pictures and Miniscule Mundane all wrapped up.  A blooming iris.  Pregnant decisions.  Salivation for vodka, for book, for solitude and quiet.  Augmented chords, then rolled, then extended, then simply a single note.  Promised to language, yet full of sound and fury.

He plays, he drinks, he writes, he doubts, he fears, he wishes.

As if it were imperative.

As if fierce splittings of rationality or cognition and confused whelmings of senses and emotions were condemned toward disruption.  As if it were unknowable.  Could not be known.  Could not be said (or written).  Could not be true.

Human axis.  Axis of being.  Overloaded and irreducible.

A swoon, a swarm, an agony and ecstasy.  A finite loop and laugh.  A tangle.

Alias loves and longs his Lucy, Laramie, children and books.  Alias loves and longs a self that makes sense.  He loves and loathes that it does not.

Lucy goes.  Dog in tow.  At the mercy of externals.  The risk of world and other.  She heads to the Outside.

Alias turns in.

Laramie’s turned in.  On himself.  On the world.  On ‘in.’  Plumbing the depths.  A hell.  Of ending.  Of being.  Of moments and instances.

Sensei breaks to a gallop.

There are the mountains.  Fierce splittings.  Here we go.  Everyone at the mercy of.  Inside/outside.  Too many tenses and senses.  Everyone and the mountains, or for some it might be sea.  Or both, or any.  What happens there.

Lucy in woods with dog.  Alias at desk in plains.  Laramie lying at the foot of the mountains, still.  And everyone else at their everywhere.

 

Not-Belonging, Chapters

On By NW FilbertIn awareness, Confusion, creative writing, Critical Thought, desire, fiction, fragments, identity, Language, Literature, longing, Melancholy, Philosophy, relationships, Self-Doubt, Traces, Writing3 Comments

I feel somewhat apologetic, but here is one more selection from my archives.  Another that when I re-read I am unable to see how I might do better, or how I ever got it done at all, yet all my work un-published or rejected, so I know it is not “good enough” per whatever the current cultural milieu would prefer.  “No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”  Perhaps.  In any case, it circles around for me like the tail-eating snake I am, in hopes it might engender something new, no, in hopes it might be put to rest.  For any who read it, I would be hard pressed to metaphor my astonishment, humility, gratitude and begging-of-patience, including a sheer and sharp ache of deep appreciation for your life’s time and likely unwarranted, gracious, attention.

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Chapters That Don’t Belong

(please click image or title for text)

many thanks