“Internal Monologue” (Virno)

On June 6, 2017June 28, 2017 By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, Language, meaning, Perception, Semiotics, Writing5 Comments

“Thoughts constituted by non-uttered words…This monologue always – ‘I speak’”

Paolo Virno – Word Became Flesh

“its thisness, then, cannot be fully articulable since any such articulation would require the articulation of a complete context, which in all cases is the world…often the experience includes an awareness of not being able to give an account of the this”

Jan Zwicky – Wisdom & Metaphor

“457. Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone”

Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations

“…I wept up to a great age, never having really evolved in the fields of affection and passion, in spite of my experiences”

Samuel Beckett – Malone Dies

“to frame the unsayable, & mute the sayable… he was the singing and the no one there…”

Larry Levis – The Darkening Trapeze

“All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel – or rather by several characters”

Roland Barthes – Roland Barthes

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

– I believe I told them that “all language was like a metaphor” in several characters.

I heard nothing, I said to myself, as if nothing were something that might be heard.

Still I stroked her ankle, index-finger-pad to delicate-bird-bone. And lip. Finding textures and surfaces with lips and tongue. Precarious…it never lasts. Taste and touch are like that [metaphor] immediate.

Am I speaking when I write? What is happening now?

Several characters.

– “often the experience…includes an awareness of not being able…” (J. Zwicky)

She tasted of…

“…to give an account of the this…” (Zwicky)

…coffee grounds, sandalwood, humidity, and turquoise…

I left off my exploring.

What is it like [metaphor] to…?

I told them that ‘I speak’ is a metaphor…as is indeed all the rest having to do with language.

(consolations of philosophy)

I hear nothing when I talk with myself. [metaphors].

The sounds of flying a kite.

It’s rare that I am naked. But “yes: meaning is like going up to someone” (L.W.)…some sort of connection is made (some convergent affect) and a resolution leaks open…resonance…endlessly (perhaps).

“I wept up to a great age”…by which we always mean the aggregate…which seems quite less than my ‘great age’, if ever there was one.

What is ‘great’ like? [metaphor]

Once I was younger…

– Always wished you’d known –

Are photographs metaphors?

I said that ‘nothing made is like.’

(“in spite of my experience”)

“Did I say I only say a small proportion of the things that come into my head?” (ontology of perception) (Samuel Beckett)

I intended to quote: “It is a pretty little object, like a – no, it is like nothing” (Samuel Beckett)

But what is ‘nothing’ like? A “pretty little object”?

We know what he means (“like going up to someone”) … I was naked, I tasted.

You know the story… “I wept up to a great age.” I touched, I tried, I felt.

What do you see?

Hardly ever the point. Perception + Reflection = Imagination (perhaps) I told them – it’s a metaphor – a “crossing-over,” some traversal. The trace of sweat behind her knee just above the calf.

Once I was alive.

I crossed over.

Several characters: ‘I speak.’

“Affection. Passion.” I said. (what I had thought it was ‘to learn’ [metaphor]).

– “in spite of my experience” –

Perhaps language wasn’t made for speaking.

Someone. Somewhere. Maybe. Here. Now.

That thing that words do [metaphor].

The “experience of this”…”non-uttered words.” Non-utterable? Perhaps, this. (I traced the swerve of her, its curvature, hair-smell and sounding…’I speak,’ non-uttering…)

What is writing?

I believe I was speaking of metaphor…

Something crossed-over.

Nothing.

“Yes,” I said, “yes…” “it’s always alright to weep.”

Hyphen & Hymen, Pt. 2

On April 21, 2017 By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, Embodiment, Experience, Experimenctes, Language, meaning, Writing6 Comments

“Philosophy is the hyphen and the hymen of Being, and difference is the trait that cuts across and unites the twofold side of Being [mathematic-genetic / poematic-epiphanic; or in-itself / for-us-in-it]”

– Michel de Beistegui, Truth & Genesis –

“each word, need no more words, we don’t need words about words, each word enough with its excess and insufficiency, proliferation and paucity, problematics and production, each term inevitable blunder and surprise, miscarriage and gratuity”

– N Filbert, journal entry –

Everything that is not linguistic is absurd

– Vilem Flusser, Philosophy of Language –

I have no story.

Wherever I occur in the tangled, incalculable threading we might call “existing” or “being” or “living” I can make out no beginnings nor endings, only enigmatic, complicated “is.” Slight, partial, imperfect.

I have trouble with memory.

But we needn’t any other words. Or more words. Or words about words. Any word is enough.

There’s no story not made of inadequate and superfluous words. These words that might tremble any direction of the webbed and indecipherable, indeterminate and knotted operations that co-construct now, or whatever happens to be (for-us, with-us, in-us, with-out).

Stories like struck and resounding tones.

A vibration might seem harmonic or cacophonic, dull or brash. Violent, vanishing, or barely perceptible in the noise.

There’s no story in this. But many words, perhaps.

Wiggling, vague, offensive, bold, hardly visible, ephemeral words. Terms (demands?), language (lingual?), weaving darts between – inventive, fabulating, reductive, constraining – unknown syllables, shapes, referents (irreverent) toward and away from…

Vocables of happening. In-script-ions. Tyrannical and uncertain.

Accidents and rules.

My body of words. Limbs, organs, “hyphen and hymen” of being. My body of words – taste, touch. What passes un-sign-if-i-cant?

Accidents and rules.

Birdsong. Heard. “Bird” “song” “to hear.” This body of words. No note without notation. No recognition without cognition. Any one word enough enigma.

Grass, caress, event: embodying words, wording embodied. Tapestries or electrons – flood, immersion, surround within. Languaging: gesture, groan, gelatinous. Language.

Say “in-term-in-able.” Say “de-term-in-ed.”

Hyphen. Hymen. Accident. Rule. Deceptive measurements. Siphons, conduits, ex-press-in-g im-press-ions.

One is enough to sense there’s no story here.

Always more-than-one. All ways.

Perhaps what is called “experience” [what is it called “experience”? – one word is enough – think “love” or “fact,” “me” or “real,” even “tomato” to be made well aware of difference, ambiguity – of wobbling kinds pressed toward inauthentic and inaccurate generalities. Uniformity. Accidents and rules that hardly, so slightly, pertain].

Experience: inexpressible? In-term-in-able?

What is the story here? The trial and always (all ways) error. Errant words. Insufficient to their purposes (supposed). Perhaps.

Purpose being?

The questioning.

Our voices and gestures.

Enigma.

Irresolvable, over-determined. Language.

Systems like molds, scopes of lenses, structuring grids, abstract proofs and theorems: rules and measures, melodies, diagrams – not mirroring, mirage.

I have no story to tell.

Untelling. Moving back against the words with a “not.” Unworking. Unravel. Erase.

Toward?

Experience: to test, try; to feel, to undergo. Knowledge gained by repeated trials. Risk. Out-of. Try. To get handy at.

To undergo. Gone under.

The Drunken Brain: Ending it all one word at a time.

In-term-in-able trials. “Everything that what is isn’t” (Jan Zwicky).

“There is yet a way of speaking that leaves room for what can’t be said”

– Jan Zwicky –

Is there?

I’d like to language that way. Move, sound, gesture, touch. Word, waver, delete.

Try.

From the midst. In the midst of. Within. Risk, trying “out,” Feel, undergo. Words.

I have no story either, no narrative or narrator. I forget, I re-member, invent. Wherever, whenever I am (is it “I”?) – multiplicity, indiscretion. A-static. No beginning, no ends, -ing, -ing, -ing. Repeatedly, differently.

I think language pre-tends experience.

What is tried-out, already de-term-in-ed.

Oh to break.

To start.

To begin – become – be.

I have no story.

“I cannot get beyond language by means of language”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein –

Hyphen & Hymen, Pt. 1

On April 16, 2017April 16, 2017 By NW FilbertIn being, change, communication, Cosmology, creative writing, Current Reading, Experience, fragments, Hermeneutics, Language, meaning, Perception, Semiotics, Writing8 Comments

“All discourses…would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur…

What difference does it make who is speaking?”

Michel Foucault

“We talk only because of a persistent desire to understand what is it we are saying”

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

“Again and again there is the attempt to define the world in language and to display it –

but that doesn’t work”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

According to a receipt yellowed in the pages of The Impossible book, 16 years ago I purchased the Story of Rats by Georges Bataille.

“What are you ‘getting at’?”

“What do you mean by ‘kernel’?”

Questions are asked. I ask them myself.

Today I got bored of it.

Uncertain I ‘get at’ anything. Doubtful even that ‘I’. Yet “feel” pursuit of some ‘kernel.’ In other words, because, simply, ‘other words’ (fore-words, afterwords) sometimes eventuate communication…

…as if experience were an undifferentiable ocean of moving waves – incalculably deep waters ever in motion – unstoppable, interminable, immersive, and overwhelming – and something splashes, a cup dips, a boat prow plows its way, an arm drops, or rock, or bird flashes down talons – and a surface becomes, is broken…

“A word”

…ruin. Ruined. Inalterably (no, that’s not accurate – rather incessantly alterable, altering, altar-ing, alterity – othered and changed) altered, altared – SACRIFICED to perception, experience – peering-in-out-of, or peering/prying-out-of-in, out-of-pry-into

“and vice-versa”

Rue-in, is what ‘I’ seem to do. Bring sorrow, lack, and loss with each perception, each calling, each again/comparison/re-cognition…Ruin, rue-in. Touching, seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing – continual selection and ignor-ance (DE-selection, de-lectory, de-clamation, di-visory…) rues-in, sorrows-in, i-dentifies creating lack, erasure, damage.

“What happens – ?”

The temptation together [to gather]…to peer and pry into, in, with…to test and to try…to extract and bring, to-gather… to form-u-late. AFTER experience, to create other…posit(-ion) a “You,” “out,” exo-, ex-tend, ex-plain, ex-haust, ex-hilerate and ex-aspirate…to KILL, CRUSH, SLICE, DIFFERENTIATE…’I’ hiding somewhere in All and Every.

An ‘I’ in All is AIL. Rue-in.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t get sick? But we do.” – Jan Zwicky

“Don’t be so hard on yourself…we all…”

Separate, tear, disjoint, di-chotomize, di-vulge, de-story, de-struct [de-con-struct i-we-form de-form]

“Hey! Enough!”

As I was saying, try-pry-di-ing to say…

“Who? When? Where? How?”

Tri-, di-, all in-volves, in-volutes, con-volutes a cutting, a ripping, a be-lying of de-struction – as it crafts an alternate structure (con-struction)…

“the ‘kernel”

Oui. We. Yes. The sense that Is the sense of being-thrown, dropped, something making a splash, separating the waters… a kerneling, an ob-ject (re-ject, ab-ject) dis-turbance that sub-jects turbulence…

Thrown. Splash. Change. Alteration. Altaration. Altarity. Othering. For-IN (foreign)… kernel.

“What are you ‘getting at’?”

“So that’s what you mean by ‘kernel’? Dis-turbance… Turbulence… something must be… in order to…”

“What thing? Why?”

“In the beginning was the Word… was God… and God moved…and divided the waters…” (John 1:1, Genesis 1:1, 6, KJV) a Bar, a “firmament,” a permanent Between “called Heaven.” And so separating, separation be-gins…from the first very first motion, movement, change… ex-pulsion, ex-crement, ex-ultation, ex-is-stance. Out. OUT. OUT-of… posit-ion.

“You’ve lost me…”

“Oui – what are you ‘getting at’?”

Ex-perience. Prying, peering. Trying. Be-ing separates? Dis-joins? Dis-tracts? ‘I’ am a rupture. Dis-rupts: not two, not one. I stray, strive, volition, volute…de-story, de-volve. What am ‘I’ but a weapon-blade? Rue-in. And thus I speak, say with pointed pen…poke and pry and terrorize – ex-perience.

“Glorious or gory-ous – visions are di-visions”

So it seems…

“So it is…”

Is, was, will be spoken into/out-of our stance (existance)…falsified di-visions…

“I cannot get beyond language by means of language”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Already Alone – Norway, October, 2016

On October 5, 2016October 5, 2016 By NW FilbertIn absence, being, existence, human, Image, Language, loneliness, meaning, nature, reclusion, Reflections, time, Wittgenstein, Writing7 Comments

wittgensteinskjolden — Wittgenstein’s Cabin – Skjolden, Norway

ALREADY ALONE

Norway, October, 2016

Far from.

As near as I can be, as near as I can tell, I am far.

Far from. And already alone.

So long I dreamt this cabin, this hovel, this cave.

Some safety, a distance – ‘solitary’ space.

Who ever would I be – were I alone?

What am I – alone?

Where is one – alone?

Silence quickly transforms into noise. One’s ‘self.’

Alone.

These window cubes, cut from concrete.

These thick and stony walls.

Such noisy fire.

I am far.

Far from.

So very long – already alone.

And yet I’ve just arrived again.

It is cold.

Often, always, winter.

Sheer, spare, space.

Hardened, austere, edges, boundaries, shapes.

We are separated. Blocked. Reaching…

I am. Here. Alone.

Always.

Already.

Alone.

But not really quite.

Not really quite – all one.

Alone, never seems to actually equal – all-one.

Even though it’s used as stand-in.

Words.

I write.

Here in this far-removed, distance-sequestered solitude.

I AM.

Yet I only AM…

…in relation to.

I am not, not ever, NEVER ‘ALL-ONE,’ ‘AL-ONE,’

‘I’ am all-ways, al-ways, IN-RELATION-TO

in order…to BE…even ONE. Even singular

demands plurality.

And so forth, and so on…

I…am UN-ABLE to ‘BE’ without an-Other, another,

TO-BE-IN-RELATION-TO –

a note, a chord, a color…

a line, a shape, a term…

some weather

‘Language’ as we’ve come to consider, think, imagine…it…

‘simplified’: NOT ONE BIT W/O THE OTHER.

NOT ONE BIT W/O THE OTHER

My youngest son (10 years old) has heard

a strange, elaborate, convoluted and contested myth/story/fiction/fantasy (hypothesis)

about the “Origin of the World”

involving particles, waves, heat, light, sub-sub-sub quantum symbols & movement –

all sorts of scientific (& notably human) inventions

from Professor(s) AZIFF…

“as if”

these might declare, or describe, inscribe or explain

SOMEthing, ANYthing

about…EXISTENCE…EXISTING… (EX-is-tence, EX-is-ting…’out of’)

I heard stories as well (as-if)

that A god (or many) breathed, touched, loved, crashed

SOMEthings, ANYthings into be-ing…

that there ‘likely’ (or MAY HAVE BEEN – according to human conjure)

a “Big Bang”

another Big Daddy of heat…of particles…of waves…of sub-stance…of light…

or MORE,

or LESS

Wavesparticlessomethinginmotionimplosionsexplosions WORDS

InthebeginningasfarasWE’reconcernedwastheWORDlogossymbolmarksign

SOMEthingOTHER-thanwhatIS-AZIFF-asifperhaps

[how might it be ANYthing other than ANYone’s guess, among us, pray tell? WHO or WHAT might qualify – among US – as arbiters or judges, experts or prophets – and by what measures or standards (or WHOSE?) as each of us species-specifically WE?]

inotherWORDSinod,bow,listen…WHOtellsthestorythatMOSTaccordswithME?

andsoitgoes…WORDS

and it alters – it changes – the stories – generation to generation

depending on the rulers, the beliefs, the ‘logics,’ the ‘sciences,’ the ‘mathematics,’

the tools, the techniques…

and it alters…from season to season…

depending on the ‘outlook’ or ‘prognosis,’ ‘fellow-feeling’ or ‘concern,’ – survival needs

Some call Physics, others Philosophy, some Religion, others S.T.E.M. or art or politic or publicsocialpolicy…some Business (nearly all)…das capital

Each and every DIFFERENT time

a ‘this is how it is,’ a ‘this is what we know’

i.e., a ‘THIS WE BELIEVE.”

Our creedal species.

And I…

I say…

Some say…

“No Matter,”

“No Substance,”

“No Essence”

…”WHATEVER.”

Always a begin – always a play of language (nigh-universal) and power (universal). PERHAPS –

And so it goes (or so ‘I’ imagine…or ‘so it seems’ to – ‘ME’) and so forth, and so on…

…the playing field remaining species-equal betwixt athlete and artist, philosopher, scientist, politician and doctor, worker and ruler and indigent intelligent…so far as ‘I’ can tell of it…

HERE NOW I. NOWHERE ME. Language – experience – meaning – species: HUMAN.

“All the Same?”

Equalists all, at fundament.

Inequalists all, at experience.

Thus: equations.actions.creations.obstructions.thoughts.languages.behaviors.codes.might.

“Might”…a PERHAPS…a possibility…a WE (species-specifically): DON’T KNOW.

It is thus I invent and inscribe.

Posit.

Create.

Detract. Distract. Distrust. Conjure. Conspire.

Attempt a BE-come…becoming…convergence.

Attempting to BE.

And another is able to write “Why the World does not Exist”

And another “Being and Time” and still more “Being and Nothingness” and still more

all kinds of SOMEthings and SOMEones and ANY’s…

with their WORDS.

and mine, and ours, and we

I write.

Far from.

As near as I can be, as near as I can tell, I am far.

Far from. And already alone.

wittgensteincabin

Untitled Fiction III

On September 30, 2016September 30, 2016 By NW FilbertIn fiction, Jon Fosse, life, Literary References, Literature, meaning, Philosophy, Samuel Beckett, Semiotics, Wittgenstein, Writing7 Comments

III. “…with murderous care…”

Jon had said, to Jesse, about the fires.

So we persisted, Jon, Jesse, and I, and the deceased Beckett, with perhaps thousands of others, unbeknownst any to each around some mythical innermost.

“Fail better.” The worst times are the ones in which one simply wants to quit failing altogether. Unfortunately (literally) that necessarily entails a kind of “end of the world as one ‘knows’ [perceives, participates, experiences, or imagines] it” – either suicide, tragedy, ‘terminal’ illness – death of some sort. Maybe silence, but that’s not certain.

The game table is always already laid, you’re always simply ‘entering’ it (LW points out this fallacy in his collections of numbered critiques of anything anyone writes or says or claims) actually (as far as we know) always already there (where you ‘find’ – what?!? – your ‘self’ – what?!?) and (again, perhaps, literally, unfortunately – or at the very least extremely limitedly) you can only occupy one position at the table (or wherever the action happens to be) at a time, that, unfortunately, always involves the very delimited…well, YOU. These are the arrangements as they transpire.

Language can (and does), we surmised, go anywhere. I try to record, invent, notate, mark, initiate. It all seems unnameable. Or of far too many names, references, usages, subtexts and connotations, inferences and denotations, already implemented in order to represent anything undone, reconstructed, deconstructed, novel or ‘new.’ “There’s nothing new under the sun” was already a cliché at the beginning / in the earliest phases.

Fires and voids all imagined early. [Apeiron. Chora/Khora. Clinamen. Flux. Infinity. ABSENCE. The ‘Other.’]. I begin. Again. GWFH and Freud refer to this as “repetition.” A hopeless hope of emergence. As different or unique as it may seem, ever a plenitude of the pre-existing. The already-there.

Been there, done that, Beckett exhausts from his grave alongside. “He was found lying on the ground…a voice comes to one in the dark” Imagine. Imagine. Everything is already there. The table set and set again, arranged. Already there when you wake to it. World.

It hasn’t…apparently…been given up. Perhaps it is inexhaustible. Limited though we be, we seem to be teeming with it/them… efforts at the unsayable. Unnameable. How it is. What is the what. Lost in the labyrinth of the occurrence, experience, now with shoddy, partial, biased and over-specified or eccentrically particular maps, guides, or rulebooks. Ourselves.

Abysmal

On July 24, 2016 By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Language, Mapping, meaning, Philosophy, Semiotics, Wittgenstein, Writing5 Comments

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein –

“The silent spaces between words often speak louder than the words themselves”

-Gunnar Olsson –

2 Things in absence of composition

On October 24, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces4 Comments

My maker-wheels or whatever complex machinery sometimes con-fuses to generate documents of creative writing are apparently on the fritz. In lieu of some relatively originary textual flow (idiosyncratic dip into the semiotic waters of the resource of language) I forward along a poem that stands out to me from this weeks’ readings, and a plea that interest-piqued readers immerse themselves in a particular book regarding our co-creation and involvement with the rest of the world and one another…

First, the poem – from Bob Hicok‘s “Elegy Owed” – a fine collection:

and second a plug for a compelling study by Ian Hodder – “Entangled: An Archaeology of the relationships between humans and things”

Processing Change

On February 17, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, TracesLeave a comment

‘How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action’

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel –

“CERTAIN NOVELS NOT ONLY cry out for critical interpretations but actually try to direct them . This is probably analogous to a piece of music that both demands and defines the listener’s movements , say like a waltz. Frequently, too, those novels that direct their own critical reading concern themselves thematically with what we might consider high brow or intellectual issues — stuff proper to art, engineering, antique lit., philosophy, etc. These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef. When they fail, as my own first long thing did, they’re pretty dreadful. But when they succeed, as I claim David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does , they serve the vital & vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach & grasp, for making heads throb heartlike , & for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life , transcendent truth -seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion & entertainment-marketing seem increasing consummatable only in the imagination”

-David Foster Wallace, The Empty Plenum-