Tag: meaning

Accidents changing our lives

On By NW FilbertIn Language, life, love, meaning, mystery, uncanny, unthinkable2 Comments

And how “by accident” it all turns out to be, to seem.  When impossible to parse the “whys” and details.  Circumstancing great scales of complexity.

*Why that was the season, the night, the event, some almost-invitation, I was compelled, felt a should in my organs and limbs, an unreasonable reason or needling urge-fit lasting just long enough, despite all of my fight and resistance, attempts at desistance, assailing with vodka and fears, yet I made myself go, or uncannily managed it, testing a public event… …and there YOU.

*Why today, remote reference occurs, through a link, through bibliography of an article mentioned in a webinar, as an aside, distant source, finally triggering [how was I free of obligation, conversation, some due project?] memory, intrigue and drive, a cumulative motive to step out and climb stairs, find LOC Hs, glance up (searching Garfinkel, his Relations in Public) and catch sight of Sarraute, her Uses of Speech, slender and black and pre-unknown to me, on a shelf up above and reach up and retrieve it and read it and breathlessly change…

Only so many persons and books after whom one is never the same (yes, that’s arguable), but those moments you know it somehow, at first sight, as it happens, within during, something you only can say is “profound” and “uncanny,”  inexplicably so, and indelible – beyond which no returning – and it’s you and this book among others

When we cannot describe, explicate…

And we wonder and shudder…

*

And we cannot remain…

Inexplicable

“Once-occurrent uniqueness or singularity cannot be thought of,

it can only be participatively experienced or lived through.”

-Mikhail Bakhtin-

from the Ruled Writing Tablet

On By NW FilbertIn architecture, communication, creative writing, Language, meaning, relationshipsLeave a comment

ruled writing tablet

Interstitial

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.”

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

Exactly the point, I would say, 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 dismissed.  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 any 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?  How could I know.  It’s all susceptible to the mark.  The mark of the question.  I think of changing my own name.  Have 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 with a point…on everything = ?

“My point exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark.  (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind, anything).

interstitial

It’s okay.  I’m familiar.  Not that you 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, 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 once said, and I stopped, for the meaning was lost, nonexistent.  Just so.

“That’s just how it is” I had said.  And don’t know, was surmising.  The world hypothetical and inspired ( I 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.”

Temporality: or, “in your absence I dwindle, I diminish…’I’ disappears”

On By NW FilbertIn Cosmology, Language, life, Loss, meaning, Philosophy, Poetry2 Comments

for Hallie

(please read in pace with tune below)

absence

I.

Feel.

Profoundly.

Meaning

–

(less).

from the Ruled Writing Tablet

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Language, love, meaning, Philosophy, Self-DoubtLeave a comment

ruled writing tablet

Interstice

I told her that I would have told her, had I known.

-“Known what, exactly?” she said, “Really!?” she said.

Yes, I said, yes, I would have explained what I felt I understood – about the “interstice” – what I felt I understood, I would have said.

As usual, the sighs, the diverted glances, the “I-don’t-knows.”

It’s alright.  I’m pretty used to it, not that it no longer hurts, or squashes some part of me, but familiarity breeds…and it’s not contempt, at least for me.  More like resolve, or, well, I don’t know.

Still I would have conversed about the “interstice.”  Or its plural.  No one can know what we’re talking about (in my opinion) – that’s why we talk (in my opinion).  But I do like to look at her.  And sometimes keep talking so that I can look at her longer.

Thus I would have explained – or attempted to – about the “interstice”… had I known, I tell her.

– “Known what, exactly?” she asked, “Really!?”

It’s ok.  I’m pretty used to it – exasperation.  It’s a sort of fatigue that settles on my interlocutors – my family, my friends, my lovers, my children – as I triple/quadruple/undendingly (exponentially?) second (meaningless term in this context) guess whatever it is (emotion, idea, memory, event) I attempt to convey.

I find I do not trust a thing as long as it might be questioned, and I have yet to discover something unquestionable.  I like inventing titles though.

She’s looking at me – softly, sadly, gently.  Sometimes she strokes my hair and lets me rest my head (the physical part).  It helps.  But the rest doesn’t rest.

Fair enough, for the most part, I’m used to it.  It’s “me” (as we are wont to say) – what I’m accustomed to.  It doesn’t matter, or does in unquantifiable ways, but I keep at it.  Anyway.  I can’t help it.  Well, some things do – vodka, sex, sleep – but only temporarily.

Things are only temporary.

That’s the sort of idea that keeps me alive.  Temporarily.  And second-(exponentially)-guessing.

Interstices1

She’s still there, here, though.  Hence the interstice.  I try to explain.

*

As if “interstice” possessed a meaning, a definition, beyond the moment I activated or utilized it.  As if it indicated.  Meant – convergence-point (limitless above and below and around) of time and space conventions in a realm that felt (seemed) shared.  Held in common.  Nothing is “held,” or only temporarily.  Changed with its containment.  It seems.  I don’t know.  It’s certainly questionable – is it, ‘certainly’?

I don’t know.  Which I thought, or think, is the entry to wisdom, but even that – I don’t know.

She’s still here.  And I question – Who is it?  Who is still here?  And what for?  How? Why?

And where is the vibrating “here”?  And what for, how &/or why?  I can wonder.

– “Wonder what, exactly?” she inquires.

I don’t know.  I’m a human.  An odd conundrum of pieces and parts that correspond or reciprocate in hold-together activities for a while…call it “organism,” there’s that, it would seem, but seem only, digging in it is hard to convince or confirm – a location, identity, consistency, avocation or being.  It’s just so – apparently – temporarily.

Exasperation.  You see?  You dig?  What I mean!?  That’s what we’re after (together, I think) what it means.  But what that means is uncertain, I think or surmise.  We don’t know, it would seem, we’re uncertain.

We ask.

Old Ruled Writing Pad

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, grief, Journal, love, meaning, memory, time, WritingLeave a comment

Old Ruled Writing pad

today, searching for paper to make notes on for work…I grabbed a used “ruled writing tablet” of mine, last written in in 2014…and read…

“I am an educated writer who loves a lot of things.  I love language, I love learning, I love relationships – to partners, children, nature, arts, literature, and ideas – to “world.”  I love to study.

By “love” I mean that I choose and enjoy expending my available energy on these things.

I like very much to reflect and consider, experiment with and actualize what seems meaningful for living as a human individual.

That is what I know of myself, besides the facts which are unruly, shifting and so very difficult to capture or recount with accuracy.  All the terms (‘born,’ ‘lived,’ ‘married,’ ‘completed,’ ‘received,’ ‘produced,’ ’employment,’ ‘accomplishments,’ ‘age,’) and their explications are far to vague to be useful here.”

The Death of Knowledge – Complicit Communication

On By NW FilbertIn Art, communication, creative writing, desire, Language, love, meaning, pain1 Comment

The Complicity of Communication: The Death of Knowledge

Death Knowledge

Perhaps we talk what we “know” to death.  Is that in the definition “to know”?  To shrink, reduce, fit-to-one’s-size, assimilate?

Is communication inherent complicity?  The effort at taking a complex and messy, wholistic, excessive, leaky, mysterious and comprehensive lived-experience and rat-tat-tatting away at it with letters and sounds, symbols and utterances toward some acceptance, some convergence of ‘meaning’ necessarily equaling its crucifixion, its disappearance, its waste?  If we manage to twist and contort it to language have we wrung it of reality?  Making a different one?  A communicable one?  A humanly manageable one?

I know (for one) that when I seek to inscribe, assay, proclaim or declare “what happens” – as soon as some assent or understanding seems achieved I sense the evisceration of the expression.  Whether it’s descriptive, imaginative, poetic, academic or pragmatic…forcing it, wrenching it, seducing and eliciting it (sentencing it) into vocabulary, into dialogue, into verbiage…leaves me with a variant experience than the one I sought to transfer.

I mean this…we arrive at…this.  I feel, perceive, desire this…it comes out hackneyed and damaged.  Holy crap!…this occurred! – Can I just say?  Will you let me tell? – and then…what proceeds is an entirely different occasion…a wounded, striated, cut and assembled collage that never equals the issue.

Convergence.  Its own beautiful, extravagant phenomenon.  But not quite expression.  Not quite translation.  Not quite… Always saying more than I intended and less than I meant.  Always saying less than I intended and different from what I meant.  Language.  Open, flexible, ambiguous, gargantuan…and limited, boundaried, sensible, requiring…

I try, tried, keep trying.  And never.  Each utterance a signing off.  Each proclamation death-sentencing its sensation.  Each squeezing toward the dictionary, no matter how scrambled and undone, redone, invented, inverted, still wringing the beauty to beast.

I said I love you.  It came out conditioned.  Assented to.  Agreed.  & Compromised.

I said I want you.  Interpreted “if…”

I said I am… emitting particulars and contradictions.

I said I wish… conditioning demands.

I wanted to say.  To sing.  To whisper.

Vocabling calm and certain and saturation.

Sounding like need and fear and some small evil.

Echoing an anxious desperation.

There is this……..which verses that……and do not equal.

So I am alone

As are you

and then this

between

and same

and different

mix –

some third business –

contorted angle

wound and rendered

wrapped about

and wriggled

writhing

&

struggling

to be

near

what it

is

I love you.

The ’45: Considering Complexities – On Plasticity of Identity

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, being, Complexity, desire, identity, meaning, Philosophy, Plasticity, Science, Writing5 Comments

floyd merrell diagram

On Plasticity: Being Ourselves, Able to be Ourselves

 

My birthday recurred.  Post-40 in a thriving family of 6, there are not many days deemed “special” that end up being about oneself as the father, caretaker, partner, provider, no matter how small the scope of the surround.  Soccer games and music lessons; feeding times and laundering; all keep going on – birthday or no.  The exhaustion continuous activity and felt responsibility breeds seems to increase in proportion to the numbers signifying one’s years upon earth.

But there are flourishes and touchings – like small miracles – proffered patience, generosity and deference gifted one’s way as the children mature.  I received momentously considered and thoughtfully creative presents and offerings from my brood, including the effort of travel (a 5-hour drive for a 3-hour meal), some self-deferrals of wants and demands for a day, shared and repurposed objects and much love and affection.

In the midst of which my brother-in-law texted: “And what have YOU done for YOU today?”

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

Isn’t nearly everything we do for ourselves in some way? I thought.  Caring for those we love, providing for their needs and responding to their living feeds our hope that we might be valuable partners and parents.  Enabling others’ satisfactions or play, achievements or events provides a goodness and gladness to our sense of identity.  WHAT DO I (or would I) WANT?  [If things revolved around ME? – What would I select for MYSELF, my TIME, my ACTIVITIES, were my surround and environment conducive, supportive, adaptive and compliant – attuned to MY wishes and feelings, desires and preferences – as its Center and Hub?]

This engendered heavy pause.  Followed by weeping.  Since my youth I’ve pleased people.  Especially those I crave being pleasing to.  Ever considering: if I find them, serve them, fuel them, tend to their whims and their moods and their wants and don’t fail them – they’ll have NO REASON not to accept and acknowledge me, enjoy and delight in me…perhaps even come to NEED and to LOVE me!

Still most of these persons have come and then gone – not needing an enthusiastic audience-of-me, my support systems or enthralled amour, cooking skills, cab driving, housekeeping, therapeutic attunement, nursing or cock…so much as an “Other,” I suppose.  An other alike with mixed needs, wants and cares, fears, doubts and preferences…uncertainties.

WHAT WOULD I WANT?

Being malleable, self-deprecating, at-your-service and adaptive in order to eventuate my longed-for (but not fully realized) purposes of belonging, chosenness, appreciation, acceptance and love, predisposed me to the Phenomena of Plasticity.

That organisms jostle and interact, adjust, emerge, revise and alter in accord with their environments and one another toward an imagined maximum survivability came as no surprise to me.

That my brain and body bend and twist, reconfigure and rework themselves toward perceived pleasures, building likewise to avoid potentially death-dealing pains, forms an accurate metaphor of my experience.

Do this, try to be that, retrain the brain, assimilate languages, nuances, behaviors and tastes, become parent and scholar, musician and lover, friend and coworker to an enormous variety of persons, places, and things (or situations).

Sounds desirable!  After all, we’re fascinated and entangled in networks and viruses, Renaissance-personages and extensive applications and sites – world seems participatory, fluid, collaborative and self-responsive – play-doh, silly putty, plastics, rubber and earth.  Water, air, flesh and fire.  Living would seem to be a plastic rather than static affair – examine a corpse! (and observed long enough, even then we’re not done and prove pliable and transforming).

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

Yet for me came a hitch as I pondered all this.  A lifetime spent adapting, responding and recursiving change for results that never quite arrive in a reality where even those chances will cease…

WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR YOURSELF?

When the question is put to me:  “What is it, right now, you prefer?” it turns out, among many acknowledgedly diverse and contradictorily complex cognitive-affective responses – I USUALLY KNOW WHAT I’D PREFER.  Very few options taste best to me in any given moment, and their range and scope are slim!

And then there’s the fact that I feel great admiration towards those who speak their mind and express their desires in a direct manner!  They still may compromise and adapt, but both adults and children who proclaim what they feel and want, prefer or need, ever impress me.  I (on the other hand) tend to try constantly to guess and anticipate what those around me prefer or desire before asking into my own – as if to say – if there’s room or time after all of you…I’d sure like to…but by then I’m too tired.

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

So how plastic are we?  How multiple, really?  Since age 7 or 8, 12 or 15, my core desires have been pretty consistent:  Read.  Write.  Love.  Sex.  Explore.  Make.  At any given moment, regardless of conditions or surround, regardless of the options even, my litany of WHAT I WOULD DO FOR MYSELF usually boils down to this brief list.  In addition to which, I usually have a good idea of who, where, what, when, and sometimes how I’d go about each of the same – if conditions, environment and possibilities were dependent on ME.

I’ve definite tastes and predilections, ways I like to feel in what venues, activity-biases and condition proclivities (even though those nearest me often say they’d never know it by my choices).

Maybe the Phenomenon of Plasticity hypothesis runneling its now-scientific way through the cosmos and further than cells is a living CAPACITY but not necessarily a QUALITY?  Accident not essence?  Perhaps plasticity suits the powers-that-be, our politico-socio-cultural nowthen (STEM disciplines, Markets, Politics & Capital, Networks & Technologies) that would love for us adapt and adjust, go-along and “flow” as if its “natural,” “observable” and “scientific fact”?  (At the moment).

I’m not disputing it’s COOL – our abilities to change and flex, evolve and habituate, refashion and conform – and indeed it’s often necessary for our survival – but there’s a gap, hesitation, incompleteness to the story.  It doesn’t “FIT” to experience, or only partially so.  Something’s being assumed underneath.

And what is that?  Why have I preferred preferring others to my own, yet not ceased having my own all these years?

How would I be if I believed ALL were equally plastic?  That it wasn’t my job to adjust to everyone, remake to everything around me, instead insisting upon their/its relative capacity to reshape and orient to me as well?

WHAT WOULD I WANT if I could “be myself” (express my consistent biases and longings, behaviors and thought-trajectories, mood-palette and drives) in environments in which I was enabled/able to be/do so?  A surround that exercised the capacity of plasticity in relation to ME?

NOT EITHER/OR

Granted, some do, (those that stick around or don’t realize a choice) and in varying degrees, but I seldomly bank on that and announce or convey myself…usually I hedge against abandonment or rejection – fear of pains winning out over hopes of pleasure.

That’s “natural” too, the disciplines say – but there are so many counter-examples: ones who openly state their “I would prefer not tos” or “I would prefers…”  What have they got on me in this plasticized universe?

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

There’s expression:  I prefer finding questions.  Ferreting unknowns.

FOR myself – there, I’ve done it.  At least once today.

09.22.2015

The Loving(?) [dis]Organization of Fire

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, desire, Experimenctes, Literature, love, meaning, PowerLeave a comment

for lispector

“and it came, with its long passageways without end”

-Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm –

and then again, the words, the words they came, presently, fluently, astonishingly as miracles, your body, the languid haunches – temptations, always – your breasts – these letters, formed in the hands…you, you, you, all of you, and I want/ed, I want, I am wanting to grapple, devour and subsume, consume (no, never!) you, but utterly – to the end – to everything – a swallow and fire and drowning and drought – to eviscerate, desiccate, absorb – to thorough you. I want to thorough.  I want to you, thoroughly.  Yes, that is what.  That is the who what am I?  The always when and every how – I want you thoroughly, but not you as realized by or digested in or taken or given or experienced thoroughly (without remainder) but rather

What I am saying (without remainder) What I mean is, what I am saying, shouting, quite silently shrieving, shrieking, screeing, WHAT I CRAVE REVEALING ENTIRELY BY RAVAGING TO END…

I WANT TO YOU.

And I want you to want to me, as mad, as madly, as terribly and

I am ravenous now, each instant and you for starving for me (I’d like that – have me)

but yes and I am having taking giving receiving AND YOU.

I do not understand.

It maddens, controls,

frees.

And this is what I mean.

In hopes that I was born for this…

for Hallie

The Living Dead: a Reflection

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Dying, family, Journal, Living, meaning, Philosophy8 Comments

“Dad, are you living or dead..ing?” son asks at dinner (aged 9).

Characteristic pause…”Well, both,” I reply.

sad skeleton

How could it be otherwise?  I’ve stayed the course, exercised my body, prepared a meal, feeling fine, alone, aware…and comes the call:  “Living or dead..ing?”  Parental response – stop.  [Why is he asking?  What is he thinking?  How is he feeling?  Bodily signs?   Follow the language – “living or dead…dead..ing…dying.”  What is called for here?]  He thinks the living dead a lot,  so I respond directly:  “Well, both, and how could it be otherwise?  I couldn’t very well be dying if I wasn’t alive, no?  And the process of dying is constructed of living, yes?  So it’s all in one moment I s’pose.”

We move on.

But I don’t.  Not so much.  It’s a good question.

It reminds me why I’m a philosopher, a poet.  Why we tend toward the same, differently.  We watch for the shared, the communal in our experience, anywhere.  We work the same queries.  In a living ruled by science, by probabilities and hypothetical cause, by vague notions of what-might-happen-next given conditions and dynamically complex systems…philosophers, poets and artists tend to seek out what’s certain – what is nevertheless the case: we feel, we think, we live, we die, a world is there – the details change with the order of the day.  Or night.  The language or discipline.  The methods or culture, practice or beliefs.  Depending on the questions.  Who’s asking and how.

We happen – become – and unhappen.

Because my dad, almost 80, evinces this.  Because I’ll be half-90 in 48 hours.  What I asked for is called Cosmic Pessimism, which says something.  I happen…vary…and stop happening that way.  How that occurs, what and who and when and why change nearly as quickly as we do.  Should I say, what we think or believe occurs?  Rationalization of experience.

Reminds me of this, of the action of writing.

I still can’t do it “live.”  Can’t inscribe it as a “post” or a “tweet” or a “message.”  I’ve got to get some static.  IN-scribe is a physical act of scratching, digging, carving in clay.  ON-scribing is more what we do – laying down ink, pounding down letters, playing with light.  Writing with materials like paper and ink relatively makes something stay put for awhile.  So we can revise.  Perhaps that’s all Rilke meant – give yourself the opportunity to edit, erase, respond to your action before you present it.  Is revision revivification?  Stay something, pause.  Apply yourself to your living and choose an occurrence.  Does this wrinkle the union of living and dying?

At work I’m struggling with teaching the methods of multi-disciplinary research.  How to template a strategy of awareness to potentially everything?  We’re living and dying and attempting to know, understand, RATIONALIZE something about that.  Literally ANYthing applies, or may nourish, correct, influence or direct that essential inquiry (and DOES!).  How does one know where to look?  How does one know how to live it?  How does one know what one needs?  To synthesize rationalizations from multiple fields and methods and practices.  To compare all the answers or theories or thoughts?  To differentiate results and observations coming from various humans and schools and materials and tools and contexts and set-ups and the myriad messiness of living/dying organisms in relations beyond our control?

“You must revise your life” (Rainer Maria Rilke).

Revising your dying.  Is it possible to live moments in such a way that they outstrip the correlative dying?  To live more than die?  Once in awhile?  I think we have experiences, moments, in which we feel more alive than in others.  “Are you living or dead…ing” he asks.  Well, waking into a maze to traverse every day – cleaning and feeding and playing the roles (father, lover, employee, friend, son, writer, scholar, blogger, house-owner, house-keeper, cook, playmate, librarian, instructor, male, man, person, reader, and so on), shopping and feeding and listening and nourishing and working and running to tire – feels a bit more like “dead…ing.”  But there are moments!  Times.  “Events,” we call them (I guess).  Twistings and turnings and something like gathered occurrences, Being + Well-Being, Whitehead might say.  A more spectacular death I suppose.  Perhaps elevated experiences of living just heighten the jouissance of death?

I don’t know.

We happen – become/unbecome – and unhappen.

The marks left from that – our inscriptions, palimpsests and paths.  Veined.  Seared-in.  Scored.  In some cases, welded – some cases cancelled, erased, blotted out.  Living-dead…ing.  Vice versa?

To edit, revise, pause – is it possible?  What did he mean?  What might it mean?    Curving back doesn’t alter the time.  Going over is still going forth.  We wend and wind and whirl and reveal we are living and dying.

One Way to Stop

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, creative writing, death, Experimenctes, fiction1 Comment

            Setting his tumbler down after a sweet, refreshing sip that burns and broils his gut, he gazes off the porch through Autumn morning.  “Quit it,” he thinks, whispers silently harshly, inside his insistent brain.

“Stop smoking, stop drinking, stop thinking too much.  It’s ruined,” repeating, “in ruins.  You ruin.”

His hazy survey settles onto a sign always visible where he wonders, worries, and writes.

blog photo

            Well aware that it’s one way.

But it doesn’t stop.

Watching his father deteriorate.  Among 7.3 billion (and counting) other inescapable dyings.  Kills himself surely by living.  Unidirectional and certain – that end.  The End.

Living’s a one-way to death whatever one chooses.  There’s no stopping that.  Perhaps the street sign motors this daily train of thought with each morning cigarette.  And love and forgetting; his children; conjured wishes, hopes and purposes blare redly to STOP! again, again,

and now his mind – himself against himself (against himself) screeing: “Quit it.  Stop.  Stop dying.  Stop killing yourself. Stop ruin!”

But it’s one way.  He knows it never stops.