The Supposed

On March 17, 2015March 17, 2015 By NW FilbertIn Aging, Art, being, Experience, life, love, meaning2 Comments

“God-shaped hole”?

the sensation that no matter how well or how much I am loved

I can not believe I am lovable simply because I exist…

and how it seems that if I could (simply believe I was lovable),

so many difficulties might be solved, resolved, dissolved…

how many things entangled in this vacuum…

in the mirror I note the shirt I am wearing

is it as simple as that?

Grrrrrrrrrrr

Impromptu

On February 6, 2015February 6, 2015 By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Experience, grief, human, life, love, meaning, Poetry4 Comments

Death.

Abundance.

Extravagant generosity of depletion.

Lust with which the world gives way.

And life.

Things.

Prominence.

I have entered a world

in which I am

saddened

begladdened

nostalgic

and eaten away

It is “Today”

this world –

the realm, the sphere, the moment:

Now.

A time that’s never,

only almost

and a just-was.

Each beginning

what equals

another end.

That time.

What was.

What will be.

What I remember

and predict.

The first day

once again;

each possibly

the last

It is like this –

each time –

it is the present:

that attachment

that letting go.

Incessant welcome,

and its goodbye.

To 2015, then

On January 19, 2015January 19, 2015 By NW FilbertIn change, creative writing, Image, life, motion, Poetry, wisdom2 Comments

“Great changes in life are always a help…”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky-

A STEP AT A TIME

Now one eye daylight

and one not

there was a lifetime

before they flew

their true colors

but I must have known

the moment I was born

the pans of the balance

swinging along with me

always two poles

with the seasons rocking

between them

and the familiar the unexplored

the city the country

abroad almost at home

and home never quite there

just the way it was before

left foot right foot

on the same way

my own way

of finding and losing

and in my own time

coming to one

love one place

day and night

as they came to me

but the knowing and the rain

the dream and the morning

the wind the pain

the love the burning

it seems you must let them come

so you can let them go

you must let them go

so you let them come

– W. S. Merwin

Celldom (continuation)

On December 21, 2014December 21, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, identity, Language, love1 Comment

(click image for previous content)

Unwittingly, I suspect, you or they have begun encouraging me to fantasize, concoct alternate realities, to record what “self-awareness” I might possess – in effect, to make art. To use artifice. Pretend.

As they frustrate with my mind, I sense them agitate, they request I try again to inscribe ‘emotional states or fluctuations’… what I hear is: “Be delusional! Pretend you can be other than yourself and fabricate observations or reports of what you find! Write for us from a realm of your imaginings!”

I write: “Magenta with a violet, a blackened green, a touch of white and several mixtured hues of blue.” One morning simply “ultramarine.” The view up is amazing from the window when I wake – another problem – what is waking, what is not.

At this point I begin to draft single-lined wriggles and ovals (as near to circles as I am able) – day after day – delivering these gestures as my only possible responses of non-delusional self-observation / “awareness.”

They transport me somewhere. “Some place quieter, restful, pastoral and with the sound of water,” they say. My only hope is thunderstorms.

Thunderstorms shake me through and through somehow. I profess rainfall to be cleansing, charming, enervating and distracting, but thunderstorms really tear me away from things toward some other beauty. I draw an oval filling the page (as much as possible given the argumentative shapes) with emptiness. Is this what is desired? Am I approaching an “expression” with this instrument?

Another day I attempt a square and rectangle, even triangles – all with single lines and full of nothing, but none of these standardized and recognizable forms seem accurate. No self-portrait (is this what you’re after?) could be so distinct. Perceivable. “Only bits and fragments appear common among ‘selves,’” I say (regrettably), “unless there be love.”

They (you?) pounce on this – “love! Ah! Might you tell us, write” (very different things of course) “more about what you mean by this?”

“Don’t get hung up on words,” I whisper, and I’m off again to silence.

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

There seems to be no library here, yet if I request books they arrive from somewhere. All a matter of electricity, buttons and money. As long as they last, I suppose. And at higher costs each year, I think.

Thunderstorms, then, in lieu of the other unknown (“love”). Something about their breadth and depth, the long slow accumulation of elements from such vast distances and sources: the implausibility of their construction, the buildup…composition…complexity…the billions of collisions that activate the enormous releasings. Thunderstorms suggest the miraculous in nature, the dangerous prospect of entities coming together…some awe-full beauty.

Provenances, directions, blusters and still points, specific conditions, temperatures, “fronts,” uncountable molecules, atoms, producing just this dynamic event/effect…

This day I make a spiral down the page.

Biologies, psychologies, humors and pleasures, emotions and moods, habits, likes, dislikes, abhorrences, opinions – these seeking common spaces, manufacturing convergent territories…a prisming trap. Love must be a fantasy or delusion like self-awareness…circles within circles…lapping, overlapping, twisting round, across and through. A wovenness. A magnetism, I think I meant earlier – a lust of imagination – would not knowing another be as futile as knowing oneself? I think. Learning by observation, interaction, what you cannot but effect, cannot become separate from?

A woman reads to me at night.

Interstitial

On November 5, 2014December 20, 2017 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

part two of a rambling….

– 2 –

Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone. Suspect I can’t believe them.

I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that. Won’t even attempt “within reason.” Suggest.

There’s no “let me explain” to this.

– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly?”

The point, I would say, exactly, or nearly precise – that there isn’t. I don’t know. But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) – we’re dis-missed. Or not missed – how to say it? There’s a meeting. It seems. In a margin, or more.

Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap? I don’t know. I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer. Longer. It’s a fight against death, that small word. Simply, longer. With you.

Am I clear? Making sense? I don’t know.

– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying” she says, “near ‘exactly’.”

I don’t know. It’s unwise.

And I hum when the words sound just so.

– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.

Interaction. Locution. Between. (I am thinking).

“Interstitial,” I say. Interstitially? I wonder. How could I know. It’s all susceptible to the mark. The mark of the question. I think about changing my name. Did before. I like titles. It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music. I would be Mark, Remarking. The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved to a point, on everything : ? “My point, exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark. (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind…anything).

It’s okay. I’m familiar. Not that you’re worried. There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction. It’s just so (so it seems). “Just-So Stories,” he wrote, long ago, relatively – they’re alike and akin, episodic. We describe.

Neither here and/nor there. Interstitial. In-between. What I wanted to tell her, to say. And I would have, had I known.

– “Known what, exactly?” she’d once said, and I’d stopped, for the meanings were lost, non-existent. Just so.

“That’s just how it is” I had said. And don’t know, was surmising. The world hypothetical and inspired (I’d thought, at the time) – simply possible. I was wrong (perhaps). But she stayed (temporarily). The words lose their meanings.

I hum. To myself.

I write: “This is what I wanted to do.”

All that’s required is a ‘trigger’…a rule.

Neuroses : or, why not begin again….?

On October 29, 2014October 29, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

Neuroses: or, Dynamite Walls Contain Us

– a self-help novel (what great novel isn’t?) –

They said he, well, those who knew him said. Really it should be “they” – not “ him.” Inclusive. “They” (neurobiologists) say neuroses can increasingly be viewed and investigated as ancient and useful survival strategies for our race. Perhaps misapplied. (Fragment, consider revising).

How does one decide between active and passive? Betwixt present, future, past when creating, recounting or telling stories? You’d think future, past, present, accordingly. But there’s the aversion. Aversion to active and present because it’s “suggested” : by programs – institutional and academic, technical and authoritative – software, hardware, “officiated.” Machinated and conventional. In stead, he’s drawn (attracted to, magnetized, compelled) toward past and passive – the un-recommended and untoward. Why? “They” – the humans. The neurotics. The ones that qualify. Can qualify. Will, do qualify. Neuroses = something humans can (be/do/are).

The “they.” Contained by equal and opposite neuroses: when this is evident, maybe we (or it) is called: “love.” The balance of tension. The incorporate. I don’t like the rules. I am predisposed. (Fragment, reconsider). I’m aware of my predisposition. Therefore.

She. He. They. Dynamite walls…contain us. Or not. (Fragments, reconsider). The sentence/sentencing tells you – active, passive, future.

I want to tell a story in this way: sometimes it happened; sometimes it happens; sometimes it keeps happening; sometimes it might happen; sometimes it will. Pause, breathe. You are human – you never can tell. There will always (perhaps) be too many contingencies, contexts, effects, probabilities, possibilities, variables.

A friend addresses the “four fundamentals of metaphysics” (oxymoron) – the Known-Known; the Known-Unknown; the Unknown-Known, and the Unknown-Unknown. Makes sense. Doesn’t. Think about it: we are possible, we are already, we have…

She was like, he said. I said. The 4^th-grader wrote exactly what the adult said “in his head.” Who could I be? Perhaps the “he” – to contradict the known – (of the 4^th grader). She/it/he was correct. I/you/we – were/are/will-be – exposed…via empathy, familiarity – the all that’s strange and true.

We are. We were. I am. She is. She will have been was. As I. As you, as we, will be, have been, was.

And LOVE. And BE. And. And. And. This will ALWAYS be a NOVEL (i.e. some timeless combination of the known and unknown – what is, was, could be – living realities unknown as realities).

The she, the he, the they. The you, the I, the us. Love. Hope. Despair. Being. (Fragments – consider revising).

Dynamic walls contain us –

And how dynamic those walls! Which shows the self-helping nature of understanding : knowledge comprehended and integrated…assists. Assists insofar as efforts are being made at (or toward) making sense. In other words – when each “individual” comes to realize that the containers are dynamic and uncertain (i.e. active and inter-, ex-changing permeable moment-to-moment[1] – altering apparent boundaries) – it will help “make sense of” why an individual’s “identity” is experienced as so very fluid and variable and shifty.

“Just the facts ma’am.” Precisely. (Perhaps).

In fact, no one knows the facts any more than we understand the properties or structures of fluids…of water…[2] [There’s no footnote there – just a fascination by the conventional procedure of indicating a foot[3] by an elevated marking]. Public agreements – methods for maneuvering a world in concord, together – a gathering-space – endlessly intriguing).

I gesture. You acknowledge. (Fragments, reconsider – some conventional-mutual agreements {keep writing “arguments” where “agreements” supposedly goes}, commands/suggestions/authorizings). I look longer. Then am hooked. You ARE curious, novel, strange, fascinating, unique. AND familiar, recognizable, similar, probable, regular/regulated, assimilable, banal. Strange AND familiar, novel AND banal, fascinating AND tiresome, conventional AND innovative – all at one go (when I pay attention). I love you. I am tired, not tired.

And so it is – the story goes – a familiar plot made interesting via details of circumstance and style. The story goes (fragment, considered).

I am drawn to you. BY you, in relation to. Dynamite walls created interactively, actively, intertwined. Intermingled and intertwined – intermingling (via gaze, touch, sound and sense) intertwining (via molecules, atoms, particles and waves, genes, movement) particles thereof, actions of particles of particles of = Intertwingled (-ing). So to “speak.”

Traditionally (convention + repetition over time and selection (“history”)) “neuroses” have been publicly agreed to be “pathologies” – that is “disease-words,” irregularity-actions, abnormality-beliefs. No longer! NOW (perhaps?) the disease-describing (INscribing) words are themselves mutual banalities (thank you social sciences, relativism, anthropology + archaeology coupled to psychology/art/philosophy/biology/chemistry/medicine and…

“Inter-“ is useful for this – disciplinary/-mingled/-twingled/-spersed.

As the story goes: actively, passively, possibly.

She + He + It. Sheheit…excrement with a Southern drawl. The allure of things. (Fragment reconsidered). The taboo and grotesque, the extreme and revolting – and we’re right back to the banal.

Everyday. The other, (the one eminently important to me, the neurotic) expressed emotion, attachment, attraction and bondedness toward (with) me.

A story began (in this case – BEGINS)

I -too-experienced (felt, dealt, smelt) interest toward / investment in – “her” strangeness (uniqueness and novelty, surprise and specificity) and familiarity (comfort, belonging, accord, comprehensibility) – THEREFORE – neuroses in reaction (alchemy, chemistry, biology, engineering, imagination) – RELATION – “love.”

Successful (“effective”?) interaction – an experience some call “power”(ful) [syn. compatibility, attraction, lust, desire, intimacy, connectivity – convergence – (relationship)]. WORDS.

We have yet to surmise, investigate, explore, hypothesize LANGUAGE ITSELF (i.e. modes or methods of conventional [publicly, mutually agreed] interactive, SHARED expression/impression tactics, activities, gestures, contexts and contents).

Now I stop (writing) in order to read (engage recognition + innovation – “learn”).

Sex is central. Sex and perspective (in other words, “desire” and “belief”).

Easy to dub it all doublespeak, excepting that it’s the somewhat singular communicative way we humans go about storying our experiences…via dialogue, convention and sensation (conversation) – through one mediated path or another.

[1] -10 to the 10^th power

[2] Footnote

[3]note

The Lovers Encyclopedia: or, Notes Toward Unlimited Signs

On October 8, 2014October 8, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Philosophy, Reflections, Writing2 Comments

Notes on an Encyclopedia of Signs: or, Limited Vocabularies, Limitless Meanings

“Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.”

“All entities move and nothing remains still”

“Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream”

-Heraclitus of Ephesus-

“No man ever steps in the same river twice.” No man ever steps the same into a river. I believe that everyone, from time to time, aches to express what they mean. We have experiences and we want to communicate them, and we experience a kind of veritable torment when nothing sounds, feels, expresses what we “mean” “quite right” (or adequately, authentically, completely, correctly).

How often this happens with joy, pleasure, desire, love. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. We shuffle and arrange them, add and delete, realign and recompose, punctuate and intone, mark-up, highlight, capitalize, emphasize, crescendo/decrescendo, lilt, shout, whisper the sounds and shapes we have mediated them through in this wild, often urgent attempt to forge understanding BETWEEN, comprehension, connection… MEANINGS (whole-person exchanges) betwixt ourselves and others, and world.

Our bodies have limited surfaces. Certain numbers of organs, neurons, veins, muscles – motions, sensations, pulses, breaths, hums and groans. We TOUCH to forge BETWEEN. Caresses, grasps, pushes, pulls and entanglings. WE ACHE TO GET ACROSS – adequately, authentically, comprehensively, fully.

“I love this pizza.” “I have never seen anything like this!” “OMG – watch that sky as it changes, explodes, implodes, whirls, colors!” “I have never experienced love like this.” “You are the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.” “This is my favorite song.” “You are incomparable.” “You are incomparable.” Our experiences – each – are in some very real sense… INCOMPARABLE.

And space. And time. Matter and energy, or material / apparently immaterial. Emotion and sensation. Cognition and affect. We are ALWAYS (all of us) stepping in the river, and the river is always (all of it) flowing. EVERY instant is our constant moving IN and WITH the constant moving of the world.

It hurts. I look at, listen to, interact with, FEEL toward, receive from, snuggle, caress, kiss, desire, weep, converse with my current romantic partner – aching every time to express how additive, emergent, unique, INCOMPARABLE these NOW-experiences WITH her vary from, extend, surprise, fulfill, astound, affect, estrange from any other – and bewilder my ability to communicate them… because I have said “I love this pizza” a million times. I have lost my breath at the views from a hundred mountain-tops. I have gasped at four crashing oceans. I have whimpered from the all-over expenditure of orgasm many times. My fingers have disbelieved themselves and been overwhelmed by a life of plants, animals, surfaces and human fleshes. “My favorite pie” has happened again and again and again – never the same me, never the same pie. Down to my cells, my molecules, my quarks.

My love and I have imagined a new symbology. Each time we ache to speak our love we will scramble new squiggles, letters, symbols, scratchings in order to designate: THIS IS NOT LIKE BEFORE – I know I said it moments ago – BUT THIS IS SOMETHING MORE/OTHER/ PARTICULATED and specific from that. This is NOW-LOVE, new and familiar, distinct and embodying all the particles prior. There are not enough symbols. Not enough sense.

Mikhail Bakhtin and any number of other thinkers, artists, poets, anthropologists (von Uexkull, Heidegger, William James, Charles Peirce, Paul Bains, Erin Manning, John Poinsot, John Deely, Paul Kockelman, Humberto Maturana, etc. etc. etc.) have attempted to unpack this strange tangle. Poets and writers throughout history (as witnessed via Heraclitus at the start of this little assay), musicians, painters, explorers, historians – HUMANS have suffered, hurt, ached at this paradox of limitation and adequacy for expressing WHAT I MEAN / WHAT’S HAPPENING FOR ME NOW / throughout the life of our species.

The gist of it: our bodies and vocabularies are VERY limited in relation to the never-ending changing and flood and flow of our relation to the world and others. 26 letters and 20 digits, a circumscribable surface of skin, a rate of cognition, a dictionary of emotions… never the same human stepping in never the same river. This is where Bakhtin, et. al. assist us. What language we’ve agreed on, what musical forms and sounds, what movements we are capable of, what gestures, groans, inflections, pressures of touch, coos and growls, whispers and howls – YES they are woefully limited to represent the vast variations of each NOW experience – with THIS person, THIS landscape, THIS particular food, THIS hearing of a song, THIS sunset, THIS ocean, THIS child, THIS reading – we repeat and repeat and repeat (in a kind of repulsive ad nauseum). We proclaim our love as powerfully as we know how… and find we wrote the same thing to another person in a letter 15 years ago. We massage and wriggle and lick and devour in lovemaking in a way we mean to be so particular to THIS passion, THIS relation, THIS other – and it mimics our gripping and caressing and kissing and intercourse of many other times, other passions, other relations, other others. It hurts.

Bakhtin et. al. indicate that the MEANING is limitless. That in order to communicate, each BETWEEN must be understood in the Heraclitean sense – WE ARE NOT IDENTICAL to ourselves – ever – and THIS EXPERIENCE being had is NOT IDENTICAL to any other – ever – our means of expression, our vocabularies for communication, our bodily capacities and emotive apparatus ARE LIMITED… but the meanings we create interacting with the world are not. The MEANINGS ONLY OCCUR BETWEEN and AS we (ever-unique and different) participate, interact, engage one another and world (ever-unique and changing) … To comprehend the sometimes repulsive, apparently restrictive and woefully repetitive MEANS OF EXPRESSION we have and its FELT INADEQUACY to the new, unique, differentiated EXPERIENCE WE ACHE TO EXPRESS – would rely on the mutual understanding that EACH EXPRESSION WITH COMPOSES NEW MEANING.

Our efforts, compulsions, desires, tastes, affections, pleasures, joys, hurts – EXPERIENCE – IS AUTHENTIC and GENUINELY NEW and DIFFERENT every moment – the means we have of COMMUNICATING, EXPRESSING, CONNECTING these experiences IS LIMITED and REPETITIVE – but we need not doubt the LIMITLESS CAPACITY FOR MEANING SOMETHING FRESH, AUTHENTIC, GENUINE, TRUE that each of those repeated words, phrases, emotions, gestures, interactions have… because…

“Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.”

“All entities move and nothing remains still”

“Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream”

-Heraclitus of Ephesus-

We are a species of limited vocabularies, a constrained encyclopedia…

in a world of limitless meanings

let us trust one another.

-for Hallie

it might be Autumn

On October 4, 2014 By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, seasons, Writing4 Comments

It might be Autumn. It takes awhile to know (here). In any case, the confusion is enormous, is bewildering, is sometimes stultifying.

Multiple persons – some who know me and some who seem like they do – all seem confident about it. About the book. About that “there is a book in me” just waiting to be born or written, composed or transcribed – however a “book” comes to be. I am certain of none of it, excepting that I love books, in fact I crave well-connected letters as much as (although differently from) my desire for love, for intimacy (or “satisfaction” – itself a kind of surprise and delighted exhaustion), for meaningful connections (being understood, acknowledged, beloved, and so on). Strange beasts, we. I. I-we.

The “I” is “we” if you take into account all the variance – the inconsistencies and variety and contextual divergences. “Bewildering” is the word I most usually apply to this business or blessing of living… of being alive.

Maybe that’s what this is about, like birthdays. The strange pivoting celebration of another year undergone or accomplished, simultaneous with its absence and cessation. Living, dying – same thing? The introduction that serves as farewell. A tightly romance.

Does “paradox” indicate two apparently incompatible things being the case at once? These are not flip-sides of a coin, but two things on the same surface, depending. Living/dying, suffering/joy, love. Now as before and after in the same instant, so to speak. I will always be battling the incapacity of words as the only things capable. Communicative paradox – language as, at once, in the same sphere/realm/scale/reality – that which reveals and conceals, says and does not say, speaks and remains silent, clarifies and obfuscates, signals and misleads…fails and succeeds.

So that every effort of greeting also grieves, and each introduction is yet another form of farewell.

I loved her.