Tag: Macedonio Fernández

Silence Reasons Almost Audibly

On By NW FilbertIn being, Confusion, Experience, Journal, Knowledge, Language, Questions, World, WritingLeave a comment

Macedonio Fernandez shrewdly intimated that among the difficulties of communicable perfection (language or literary wholeness, completeness) were the problems writers have, in that, among other things:

“2) They don’t know how to render the ‘unsayable’ with ‘ineffable’ style” (Museum of Eterna’s Novel, p. 11)

As if imagination must copulate with impossibility; creativity found within the non-existent; wayfinding nothing.  Perhaps.

“I” (a good example of the above) often worship the symbol: ?  “I’d” like to place it everywhere, upon everything, anything imaginable OR conceivable – even the unknown – as well as any compendium of ‘facts’ or apparently common-sensical / self-evident elements of being-living.  As if… to draw attention or recognition (‘to render’) human limitation, finitude, fragility – PART-‘I’-CIPATION – in world (+ whatever falls beyond such an impression).  A kind of belief as a participating occurrence that whatever might be indicated by such terms as “truth,” “love,” or “existence,” (or “you” or “I”) are best translated by = ?

This nettling evocation is (perhaps) a personal ‘creed’ in a singular (obviously impregnated) mark: ?

Something I might ‘live’ and ‘die’ for.

Am I trying to communicate?  What am ‘I’ doing in relation to language, to shared understandings, to concepts, and so-called knowledge or knowing?  Am ‘I’(s) capable of relating to anything (or nothing) beyond these indications?  Unmediated ways and forms of experiencing given to ‘me’?

Experience (seeing-peering WITH outside-of) is one set of possible parameters in living-being (limitations, capacities, informed possibilities, finitudes & fragilities – necessitudes of part-‘I’-cipation).

What might we ‘name’ alternate – those in excess of experience; those far diminished via enforced-informed; ‘other’ impossibilities of ex-perience?  (Bataille’s ‘Inner Experience’ – inperience?: without outer? might be an exploration) ‘mysticism’?  spirituality?  mystery?  simply Impossibles?  Unsayables?  Unknowables?  ANYthing beyond-limit, we might ‘say.’

Excess.  Perpetual.  Eternal.  Infinite.  Incomprehensible.  Indeterminate.  All ex-perceptions that would demand or require ‘ineffable’ style to be en-gaged.  Out beyond (or in-beyond) outsides or othering that might be accounted for, perceived, en-countered, or ex-perienced: impossibles that must most likely (it would seem given our minimal, limited, finite, participatory living-being IN AS PART OF ‘world’ or whatever our most expansive imagining) occur.  Perhaps even non-ex-is-tences, nothing and never.

These might be the description of fields or planes where I in-tend and pre-fer to operate or inquire (under the sign of ?) and therefore, lacking or failing in ‘ineffable style’ whereby to render ‘unsayables’ – simply can not.

Thus please forgive my erratic forays into production here – communication, conversation, even imaging-in (imagining) – ‘I’ simply can not.  I am mostly unable to ineffably style unsayables.

I beg your forgiveness and again fall silent.

“But could I forget my ignorance for a moment?  Forget that I am lost in the corridor of a cave?”

– Georges Bataille –

An Ultimate Prompt

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Writing11 Comments

What “prompts” us?

A pain.  A joy.  Surprise.  Loss, meaning, something that crashes, crushes, alerts or in some way causes blurts or blasts to our system that create cross-connections – surge energy / electricity / pulsings between links and channels that otherwise run their own course.  Unexpected.  Expected.  SIGNIFICANCE.

I am intrigued by what “catches” us, “moves” us, CHANGES us.  As many times askance as head on.  What gathers and whispers behind us.  What we are confronted with.  Explosive, erosive, evolutional.  You could call them “shocks to the system.”  Sometimes cumulative, sometimes immediate.  But they effect change, and attention.  Design, and process.

I’m thinking of them as prompts.

There are a few works of literature and art, throughout my life, that ALWAYS “prompt” me.  A few authors.  A few painters, sculptors, musicians.  I do not know why this is, but it is so – some voices, some styles, some appearances and sounds unfailingly “move” me, by which I mean continuously change my orientation to the world.  Often subtly, sometimes radically, but surely.

Macedonio Fernandez is one such creator.

MacedonioHis writings NEVER FAIL to alter me.

I could query my analytics to find how many times I have quoted him, referenced his “first good novel”

Museum of Eterna's Novel

and today I am passing the PROMPT that this novel is – and IS contained in it – on to you… from Fernandez himself – I have lived with it, considered it, dreamt of it… a prompt he left us that haunts and inspires me… an ultimate sort of prompting….

Recommending Brilliance

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

Today I am thinking of that particular mysterious and mind-blowing talent that a very few writers have done well throughout history, beginning perhaps with Cervantes or Sterne? perhaps Ovid…that amazing capacity to seamlessly, compellingly involve myriad levels of reality in each paragraph.  The containment and development of Reader, Writer and Character or Language without distracting or abstracting any of us from the propulsion and enchantment of the written work!  I strive toward this – that the reality that an experience of art is – is fully presented in each work of art – its requirement of relationship – of a maker, a recipient and a form – to give all of it its due – but so few succeed in this masterfully.  Here are those I am recommending today:

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) by Macedonio Fernandez

On the cover of this book rests the self-reflexively ironic blurb “The best novel since both it and the world began – Macedonio Fernandez)

Fun as that is…as my life goes on and my bodies acquisition of literature expands…I am honestly compelled to agree with that!

 

the works of Cees Nooteboom – and there are many others –

again, brilliant incorporation of story/character/reader/writer/event seamlessly woven for our engagement

Raymond Federman – works and writings…these are my favorites, but many others also accomplish this reality-making-presenting that literature makes possible on so many levels.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

I could throw in Fernando Pessoa, Ronald Sukenick, Lance Olsen, Lynne Tillman, Homer, Shakespeare, Alejandro Zambra and many others…such a wonderful experience to read…but for today – seek these!!!!

Mark Marking Marks

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, WritingLeave a comment
Cy Twombly

Mark Marking Marks

“oh it’s working, it’s magic, each word lifts me up, takes me away from here,

from this nothing; I feel…I am…speak always, Maybegenius.”

–Macedonio Fernandez–

Writing as the ‘Talking Cure’

As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, – ?

WHAT IS REAL?

            As long as I keep talking to myself, even better the inscribing, using matter somewhat foreign to myself, like this plastic pen, this sheet of paper, this blue ink…I am providing myself with evidence.  A humming continuity, a series of marks, a silent sounding breathed into air.

But when unable?

As long as I keep telling myself these stories, Mark thinks, – ?  then what – ?  why – ?

There is evidence that I am here, he says to himself, marking it down.  Marks make Marks, he supposes, I am, at least as far as the reach of this pen, and I stay, at least longer than my thoughts, he thinks.

Mark got tattoo’d.  He did so for evidence, a permanence.  They said it could not be undone.  So he had them spit into his skin the names of those who had changed him, affected.  As if to say, to go on and on saying, these, these existed for me, in and on me, these folks made impressions that made impressions on me, therefore I must, yes, it logically follows, here – you can see them can you not – ?, it logically follows that I must exist – to have these names, these titled and organized and permanent woundings of names, of those who existed (it’s attested by many), so it follows, it must, with them pierced in my arms, that I, too…

If it all keeps on talking, these whispering names, the sound of my voice, the terms in my head, and if I work to make it real, as an object, if I chisel or stencil or ink it to the world, then surely it must testify on my behalf – I was here!  I am here!  I’ve left my Mark!  Mark marking Mark – a declare!

Or so he is thinking through his days, through his life or lives, through his odd and self-imposing tormenting sort of fear, of worry.

Am I?

To no effect?  he wonders – ?

Mark often fears he’s interchangeable.  Or worse.  Perhaps another boy would have been a better son, left a fuller name, a more remarkable mark than – ?.  Another man a truer spouse and more sensitive or empathetic, more evolved or more mature than his straggly droopy heavy brain of a – ?.  A more substantial father with clearer love and direction, firmer hands, readier tears – ?.  Mark was aware they were out there.  They’d been fellow students, inhabited stories and novels and other people’s lives.  Why were his people stuck with the – ?.  His nagging mark, so often read right over as innocuously as a comma or period.  Weren’t they looking for content not a pause or an absence?  A man marked by inquiry?

But if I leave here some trail strewn round my desk, this floor all these cupboards, perhaps at some point they will see I was here!  I am!  And I was watching and listening, loving and feeling them all.  Spending myself and my worries in this strange attempting to trace and to hold, to keep and remember their details, their effects, my responding.

Someday shuffling through or perhaps clearing out, maybe they’ll stop, pause, question and wonder.  Who was this man?  Where was he?  When?  How?  Why?

What did he do think make say?  And perhaps they’ll find these markings.  Perhaps they won’t have burned or mouldered away, and all these messaging reports, all these processings and accounts will come to mean, to have significance, these bird-routes of scratches and marks, dashes dots lines, this pouring forth of constructing an identity against with the world…

As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, possibly –

– ? –