Troubling Identity in Writing – What Scribbling Does

As an addendum and prequel to writing anything/everything I wanted to share a couple of terrific essays on the strange elimination (or difficulty of perceiving) a “self” or “personality” or “identity” or any of those socially constructed concepts relating to human individuals.  Prompted by the scribbling exercise of last week (see previous post) – the conundrum has long fascinated me and seems to be so well presented in texts like Jorge Luis Borges‘ The Nothingness of Personality (also perhaps available here) and this tremendous first essay – relating to Maurice Blanchot‘s writings – in Anne McConnell’s Approaching Disappearance – (click image to read)

McConnell - Approaching Disappearance

all help me to understand better why it often seems hard for writerlies to formulate or maintain “strong senses of self” – as the practice of entering language in such a way seems to dissolve the separations that might preserve that artificial construction.

Related…

“Yet if language gives no words for what happens…it nevertheless gives itself”

-Christopher Fynsk-

“Not to discover – not to be able to discover – the solution, is the general tragedy of all writing”

“To try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life are one and the same thing”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

“Reality works in overt mystery”

-Macedonio Fernandez-

Scribbling – Formless Thing Things Form Being in Motion Exploring Complexity – week of 9/7/2013

Scribbling

Formless Thing Things Form   Being in Motion   Exploring Complexity

            In the first place (after a letter to Seth and moving and thinking and painting with wife and a few hours of homework – reviewing Management and Organization Theory and Design no less) the first thing to do is to write.  To simply write by hand, being in motion, that is, setting into motion, and all that follows, which usually happens (like today) first – after folding laundry, washing dishes, required reading, getting kiddos fed, dressed, off to school, checking email and phone messages and new assignments, touching base with wife, drinking (making and drinking) coffee, homework, family, tasks, events, chores, responsibilities, choices – after that the first thing to do is to write, after somehow quieting the buzziness of busyness, at the desk, reading something slow and singular like poems, philosophy, science, or art – something chosen, maybe a walk, maybe music, maybe a task, and then, oh then, the first thing to do is be in motion, set into motion, set being in motion at my desk with a ball-point pen (Bic) and blank, clean, beautiful, hungry, precious, anxious (anticipatory, aroused) lined notebook paper in a loose, forgiving stack, ready, ready, ready…

…for the first thing.

            Which is not to say I was an object before, or that anything was ever a thing, or still (static) prior to pen + paper by my hand – no – Formless Things were Thinging Forms in all the other ways of motion, movements, relationships between tools and water, emotions, skin, utensils and hands and mouths and sounds and voices and contact continuous through air, always movement, humming being in motion beings forming thingless things forming formlessness, changing motion swerves and stoops, bends and helps listening to movements vibrations tones noticing shapes and lines and particling waves of substances moving moving attaching disseminating shapes, sequencing, paces, difference all pointing out where everything connects to everything else – the joining nature of boundaries – what is always next to – observe how the line works:

ι

ι

ι

 

before which space was “empty” but now it holds together, walls like stitches, buildings like blocks stuck together so things stay gathered, movements, lines, dance, breeze, blood, noises, gluing, gluing, gluing every to-gether, difference repetition pattern

Categories.  To keep things adjoined, combined.  Lists, minutes, days, tasks, timelines, hours, keeping thingless things attached in their movements – different ways of sameness – being in motion – and so forth  →

→ Forth toward firstly, to write.  Being in motion, set in motion, slowly faster, faster by slowly, by hand instead of tapping, fluid choices – typing is stop-motion, discreet, discontinuous – comparatively faster but less efficient, slower (by hand) efficacy thinking images or imaginary thinking now less critical (embedded critique): fluid.  I stop.  Breathing continues with hand thought memory hope – NOW –

A kind of yearning motion movement in letters read as words, phrases, meanings, less representative more relational – unnatural to this and this and that and other.  Confusing writing, drawing, space and time, concept object sign symptom, doodle.

To communicate.  Being in motion together if sequentially the linking looping line (by hand) tracing where we meet, are joined, in movement against/with, with, with one another – here is where we meet, inadvertent/advertently.

Being in motion, set in motion by hand – to draw writing – an advert for connection, to construct lines to bring things together, to notice.  Exploring complexity through being in motion.  Reading is movement.

            We are.

 

A Real-ization?

A Real-ization(?)

“…And here begins my despair as a writer”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph

 

I should say, “began.”  And not “as a writer,” per se, or even primarily, no, I should more accurately portray the experience “…and so began, and ever continues to begin, my despair as a human.”

For experiences, no matter where or when, in full matter of where and when, are multitude that begin such despair.  They are occurrences of a process we call variously “knowing,” “comprehending,” “understanding” – encounters with unlimited and unnecessary contents we might describe as “revelatory,” “visionary,” or “true.”  We describe their feeling and fumble with content.

For they seem to circumscribe an everything – as contained and opening out – well-metaphored by the scientifically religious Big Bang, an un-caused cause or some like.  Experiences we couch in the babbles of mystery: synchronicity, omniscience, omnivorous, omnipotent and omnipresent.  We feel them like an orb or spiral, a series of looping waves without succession.

A.k.a “convergence,” simultaneity and emergence coming together at now and here.

I write “as a human” because I cannot be anything else.  And a human, as a living being, is characterized by limitations and potentials.  Although kinds of things never exhaust their potentials (as far as we know) – thereby always altering what might constitute affordances and constraints lists – nevertheless, in order to be unique (or anything at all – “what –so-ever”) humans must be limited, those limitations providing the very contexts for exploring potentials and potency.

One such environment or niche is the operation of our living processes in space and through time.  I.e. a simultaneous occurrence of everything cannot be processed, cannot be shared, as such.  It must needs be dissected and dismembered via many spaces and over time in order to be perceived by such an animal as we – re-membered and imaged-in (imagined) according to our nature (our processes and practices in our environments).

This is why moments we might re(in)fer to as “transcendent” or “wholistic” perhaps “encapsulating” or “converging” – compressing and expanding (synonymously) some happening that seems “total” generate despair for our kind or species.

I am unable to deny what comes to experience, but with labels and descriptions (interpretation) must take care.  One often turns to symbols or metaphors: icons that serve to absorb a variegated but comprehensible share of human experiences.  Accrued via descriptions and depictions over time, these symbols resonate and traverse times and boundaries in order to gather experiences of a kind.  Take for example the term “hunger,” or a drawing of an eye.  Mirrors, or a resolving I-IV-V progression.  These activities of reference and participation, renewal and recognition, present and re-present for us experiences that seem to extend or equal (again, synonymously) us.

Despair comes in the desired specificity each individual of the species wishes to convey (form of convergence – communicate meaning for our kind can be spotted by our use of the prefix co-).  That experience (in itself necessarily co-), in order to have meaning(humanly speaking) must be shared – we find that telling/singing/dancing/painting/acting/writing/ filming/making/working/sculpting/creating/crafting or any combination of them all and the human-specific processes this entails are unable to re-present such “totalizing” experiences, except at certain angles, perspectives, fragments, over time.

Yet, were it otherwise, we would have no need of any of our abilities – for we would know.  The relations, practices, potentials and processes depend on this inability (limitation) to be.  For us to be, as humans, what and whom, where and when, we are.

Unity would undo this.  In fact, we have no evidence that ANY living entity “shares alike” – reciprocates perfect understanding or replication (or reproduction, ex-ist-ing) exactly…down beyond our cells…there is difference, mis-matching, variation.  In fact, all the co-operations that provide con-vergence and co-mmunity, me-and-ing (meaning) depend on the disjunctions we strive to come over or through in order to express, be understood, known, “as one.”

So, though never “of the same mind,” perspective, or feeling, even when we experience me-and-ing together (gathered) – – this is also how we are.

Perhaps then, less despair than real-ization?

 

Please Stand By. Restructuring. Thank You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEq-Y8-vZF4

Thank you.  And I mean that.

The years of blogging, developing manoftheword/The Whole Hurly Burly have been life-changing.  Blogging has enabled me to learn to share my work, to discover what resonates in my work with whom and what sorts of interests.  Blogging has given me courage, most definitely helped me discover my voice, and linked me to an amazing community of creators and thinkers.  In that way it has given me hope.

I appreciate everyone who has visited (or will visit) these pages, who has taken the time to interact, comment, critique, challenge and question my process, my content, my style.

Thank You

It has been a significant mode of expression in which I have felt that I mattered, have been heard, seen, can contribute something to a large and complex world.

I am unsure of my intentions with a caesura, apart from feeling profoundly that the time and energy I put toward this is needed in other areas of my life right now.  The Whole Hurly Burly of life has its ways and effects.

As in brief breaks before (beginning grad school again, starting a business with spouse, children home for summer and the like) – should something worthy come forth I will share it, but for a time will be unable to consistently interact in this medium.

It has been a great pleasure – both “followers” (I hope not!) and those I “follow” – to become acquainted with your works, your gifts and talents, your ideas and artefacts – and truly – to have been offered a context that feels safe for experimencting mine.  THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

I cannot predict the time I will need for this restructuring, but I can assure you this experience and network and relation has been profound and meaningful in my life.

Here’s to WordPress

Wordpress

and to all of YOU who make it worth pressing.

TO LIFE!

Nathan W Filbert

8th segment

’cause I don’t have to stop.  ’cause it doesn’t.

experience anyway cover

8

            And now “I” am different, again.  Change.  Is how I would “put it.”  What with the whip of atoms calling “I” ever-coupling to the Itself that the “I” calls “world,” really, when one gets down to it, in it (always), the distance is elusive (is “illusion”).  And so “I” changes at the rate of the wind “I” is sharing; of the sea “I” is seeing; of the matter (volatile shivering).

It is Here.  We are.  Since we cannot claim a territory, we strain for modes to re-fer (de-fer?).  Differ.  We’re attuned to it.  The rhythm of our tune is differance.  There is no reason that suffices.  We are in it.  It.

A live.

In vocalizing, movement sounds (for humans).  Or in gesture – perceptible matter (always suited to the version capable).  It is always a matter of moving around, shuffling space with time.  I cry, there is movement.  The air and the chemical sea.  I look – things displace, replace, are placed by my gaze – an interactive mechanism – part of a NEVER discontinuous train.

We touch, because sound, because cell, because particles and waves (as both) – because movement.  Because “separate” is an aberrant traction (abs-traction).  A practical folly.

I love you – re-cognition that borders are empty, margins erased.  That “you” and “I” intersperse (wind, sea, light) molecules.  Movement.  Alive.  I love a live.

Because live doesn’t noun an “f.”  Life.  Life is a period, an arbitrary stop.  Imposed.  But a “v” simply vibrates.  We are a-live.  We are the living.  Even the “the” can’t contain it.  It rushes the punctual, overcomes it.  We are us and I love you (us).

Perhaps we need little realms to find out.  To discover.  Acting networks to re-member (to sew, to put back together) what’s dismembered convention.  “The way it is” – what we’re impressed to “get by” (“survive”).

This, It, is NOT the survival of fittest, a live is the fittest and cannot be dismembered, “I’s” just being particled Lifes – and those not really – except in that most human of ways (itself a “not really” invented by us).  It is more complex than that (call it “what’s live” or Enaction), and can’t be reduced to its “parts.”

Nor combined in a “whole” (another punctuated word).  It’s not final, complete, but just changing (rates of wind, of sea of weather; of stones and planets, emotions and plants) – if we could dissect it (and we try) the variation of paces “seem” astounding…but It’s chock full of seams like two sides of paper – not different but same save the semes that are perceptible.

These semes are intended for motion:  I love you.  My so-called chapters and segments to “say” – we are us, there’s no other, and we’ve little idea of that.

“I” lean back, am exhausted, and rest (always moving).  “I” don’t see the difference in sleep.

Today is different – Selections

inspiration from Lynda Barry

Arriving today + Reflections

Jakobson - On Language

…and wonderings about language as a tool and an abstract medium.  Wondering if in the endless bewilderment of experience – of living – rife with woundings and joys – we move to shared media, providing communally devised realms in which to re-vision, simultaneously creating new life, wherewith and wherein to investigate and inquire, to dig and dig and…

Language as constructed or agreed-upon and functional (tool) medium.

Then there’s this full of resonances and also contributing to the reflections – required text of a current course:

Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles

…and I quote:

“As the reader gropes the stacks – lifting books and testing their heft, appraising the fall of letterforms on the title page, scrutinizing marks left by other readers – the more elusive knowledge itself becomes.  All that remains unknown seems to beckon from among the covers, between the lines.  In the library, the reader is wakened from the dream of communion with a single book, startled into a recognition of the word’s materiality by the sheer number of bound volumes; by the sound of pages turning, covers rubbing; by the rank smell of books gathered together in vast numbers…the physicality of the book is strongest in libraries, where the accumulated weight of written words seems to exert a gravity all its own.”

“So the library is a body, too, the pages of books pressed together like organs in the darkness…[in libraries] I can fool myself that the universe is composed of infinite variations of a single element – the book – that I, too, am made of books, like the person in Giuseppe Arcimboldo‘s painting The Librarian

Archimboldo - the Librarian

“…a person made of books; his is not a single book but a whole library”

“I have the distinct impression that the millions of volumes may indeed contain the entirety of human experience: that they make not a model for but a model of the universe.”

“…texts, fabrics to be shredded and woven together in new combinations and patterns…”

“everything in the world exists to end up in a book” (Stephane Mallarme)

“With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words – books are an amalgam of [Roger Bacon‘s] three classes of substance capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal”

“For any question, the library offers no hope of a definitive answer…unlimited and cyclical”

“Together they tell us stories that they could not tell alone”

library pic

“In many places, the volumes are thick with dust, pocked with the holes left by insects,

which are almost as hungry for books as I

-all quotes except where noted – Matthew Battles Library: An Unquiet History

And somehow I can’t help but think the interface and interstice of languaging matter in this way – a way that provides comfort and the slightest skin of distance from the raw inside of skin – inseparable recursions – but mediated immediately – kind of like magic; a LOT like alchemy; always experience – but less abrasive or intrusive than “direct.”  Perhaps paint, light, cameras and brushes, clay, etc – any art that borrows matter outside the body – similarly provides a soluble, gentled, media through which to live forward…

…in other words…are our preferences for embodiment a part of what define us as artists in the societal mesh?  The media through which we most naturally express or experience or embody indicative?  Textuality as embodiment for the writer; clay, stone, marble, etc. for the sculptor; movement for the dancer; oil, pigment, brush, etc. for the painter; lines for the draughtsman and so on…

 

Experience, anyway. (parts 6 and 7 are new)

This work is a slow-grower.  I think it wants to be read that way as well.  Slow accretions of interaction and recursively referent.  Not sure where it will continue.  Click the title page to investigate.  Comments are welcome.

experience anyway cover

Seriously Mimicking Birds

combined with Bach, Beethoven, Brahms…

if I had to select an album from my lifetime….

perhaps?

De-Presses

“What a joke it is to read or hear—as I have read or heard more times than I can count—that writers ‘see more clearly’ or ‘feel more deeply’ than non-writers. The truth of the matter is that writers hardly ‘see’ or ‘feel’ at all. The disparity between a writer’s works and the world per se is so great as to beggar comment. Writers who arrange their lives so as to ‘have experiences’ in order to reduce them to contemptible linguistic recordings of these experiences are beneath contempt.”

—Something Said, by Gilbert Sorrentino

Dalkey Archive

Via strange twists of events, connections that could only be re-constructed through fantastic imagination, I have been moved back into perusing publishers for work that inspires, raises and extends one’s ideas of what “art,” “literature,” “human” are.

While most publishers must infuse their catalogs with books that will sell, there are still a few presses that are simply committed to grandeur – to works that express and challenge what humans are capable of making, thinking, expressing, creating – works that assess and challenge our condition of being.

Two presses I’d like to promote – that continually provide works that surprise and engage (fully) and elastically foment my boundaries of concept and possibilities – with bewildering form and content – in other words, publishers from whom you might randomly purchase titles and ALWAYS be made richer, better, exponentially more humane – (THIS IS A REMARKABLE THING):

 

please visit them and order…ANYTHING…

your life will be BETTER.