Cloud Fragments 1

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Within the lip and loom of limbo.  Limb lazy, almost unperturbed, but living still, slightly shaken, a subtle stir.

Difference scarcely scored, imperceptible is not worth mention.  A canny kind of collude.  There (might be) this, (might be) that – too hard to say, and who could do it?  Only one driven to be wrong, reductive, defining.  Only one agitated or alarmed by the way of things – that there were no way.

Indiscernibles.  Indeterminate.  Impossible to compute: is how it is.  These signs erase, and we are there.  As if in front with, as if of face and gaze.  As if event.  As if participant and become.  As if no one might tell apart.

Why tell apart?

Wrangled together in wrestle, why choose?  If breath must mingle to say, why delegate, select?  Cloud moves over, under and through, toward, into, and away – to no one’s noticeable chagrin.  Why we?

Tender spots trace gentle rain, in river, barrel, lake, exempt of rage or reason.  Only a sprinkle, a feed and possible weal, so glance and touch, brush and care, a slightly stumble, a cell’s conceive.

Misremembered, but no mind, flavor, sight, the wind through trees.  Nothing is without.  Nothing alone, should it perchance to be.  Mysterious, illogical motive of undoing.  Prepositional violence.  Pre-positions, a tearing apart.

Muscle, scent, and fur.  The various forms of water – cloud, drizzle, flow.  Flesh with flesh and whispered angles.  Breath with sound and ear.  A thought.

Inseparability and subterfuge.  Had never been, may not be, unstill it is…the way….questionally unquestioned, sifting in drift, conjunctions of convergence, some impossible begin.

The Moment Suspended (a “free-write”)

This constitutes a “free-write” – as I understand the phrase it is an allowance one gives oneself to just make language, unedited, unplanned, in a “spirit” of ex-pression…i.e. a “press(ur)ing- out.” [see suspend

Spillage, in other words.

And…”in other words,” always, from the first word.

At its release – like an arm movement; a choice of caress, breath, or handhold; a motivation to swerve, or bend, sit, or rise; nigh-automated intention to breathe… a beating of heart, or functioning of organ; lighting a match; attention.

Release a word.  Some oddly shaped sound, emitted complexly from the nerves, the brain, the belly.  Bellowed air up the windpipe, wending the throat, curling the cavity of mouth, (you can almost feel air in the eyes – perhaps you can!), a scent is involved, a tongue roving weirdly, a tapping of teeth and positioning of jaw…

Or… the combination of organs and neurons, plasma and plastics, rutting a body in accord with a world, activating…firing and sliding, acting re-acting, trans-mitting… and a tension in shouldered muscle begins to stir, roiling down “arm,” triggering the delicate tendons and tissue of “hand,” fingering pencil…and con-script-ed together, they “write…”

And from the first word it is other.

EX-press-ion.

Pressed into and out of the body.  Im-pression, re-sponse, and in-tension.  (You see the looping?).  Out of, into, and back out without measure.

Mathematically speaking, the first term, generates an uncomputable, undecidable, indeterminate and infinite universe of possibilities.  Simultaneously foreclosing the same.

Which is why the Moment’s of import.  And why statistically, it is inane.

“Spillage” set into motion.  “, in other words.”  For this organism, now.

Out of infinite potential, a violent reduction to that: “Spillage, in other words.”

In other words, from the first word, an infinity ruled out.  By my finitude.

In other words, from the first word, an infinity opened up.  By language, and you, all the times, and the spaces.

Pressed in, it moves out.  Pressed out, moving in.  Always moving.

A “moment” cannot exist.

We switch on.  (We do not.)

***

Then what are we “meaning” by “free”?

A “free-write” I inscribed, but it’s not – bound by me, my experience, education, now here.  By my body-environment mesh.  By this medium, this sign-system (language), this trial.

And why do then?  Why mingle, behave, interact, or respond?  Why continue?

continue (v.) Look up continue at Dictionary.commid-14c., contynuen, from Old French continuer (13c.), from Latin continuare “join together, connect, make or be continuous,” from continuus “uninterrupted,” from continere (intransitive) “to be uninterrupted,” literally “to hang together” (see contain). Related: Continued; continuing.

(“Online Etymology Dictionary,” 2016)

How could I “make continuous” what is never discrete?  And why are our actions and terms bent on negation / separation (discretion)?

What do we wish to “clarify” by pulling-apart, setting-forth, ripping of context, of living?

We humans have so many re-‘s.  As if we do it again, and ourselves (WHAT is THAT?) we might own it or know it, or even come cause.  How absurd.

We’re participant.  To speak is to join.  To move is WITH-IN.  To think and to act are to fuse with surround.  As much caused as its causing, ground and ideal, this is living.  To be fluidly unidentifiable, continuously as such.

What IS (chasing ‘essence’) is futile.  What IS (what’s ‘existing’) is all.

How might I write in this way?  Write to join?  Say to be?  The mouth and the ass as the same?  I breathe and I shit; I grab and release; take in and give out…unrestrained.  Without end or cessation (as far as we know at our miniature range)…

…goes on…

and

…goes on…

WITH and withOUT “us”

Perhaps.

Here we are.

Discontinue Discontinuity

Happy Holidays

Wink of I

I close one eye as a hint or signal.  Almost-gesture of complicity, alliance.  Miniscule nod of knowingness.  Nearly clandestine.  We are accomplice.

Subtlety.  In the colors of sunsets are moments.  Light in trees, precipitation, breeze and wind.  Occasions, occurrences.  A brush, a jolt, a catch, or slip.  Just there, just then, just whom.

Sum of an enormous fund of letters, sounds, marks, and inferences composing a confused and compossible khora of language actuated haphazardly in discourse, and conversation, a dated letter, an exclamation or response… one might say the signsea winks or glimmers.  A squinch or sparkle  of potential affinities and conflicts, affiliations and consorts.  Then gone.  A breath.  A…

Glance.  A glimpse shuttered quickly, asymmetrically.  What does it mean?  Something.  Something of nothing.  Like accident, collision, like misreckoning, mistake.  Like harmony, accord, or intercourse.

“in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, as a trumpet sound… the dead shall be raised, and we shall be changed”…(I Cor 15:52, changed).

Happenings, emergence, inceptions, conceptions, decisions, decease…moments, blinks, glints, such tiny gestures…

…and all shall be changed.

Picture, if you can, if you will, a spill of sonority, funneled through lung, through throat, whirling the mouth cavity, battened by teeth, and leaving the lips as a word… now whispering air as  smoky exhalation… mingling and woven in the voice of another… such breaths, these terms, these inscriptions… how they collide and collude, coalesce and caress, commingle and pass on…

Moments, instants, mishaps or miracles…and all shall be changed…or so it is written, supposed, and declared…

In the Wink of an I, there is difference.

for Jean Lee

Haunted Man: I am: the possession

“quiet field without possession”

Laurie Sheck, Captivity

wavewords

I am an ocean of signs.  Of a womby surround – undulate, viscous, discombobulate, obscure.  Tremulous quarks of murky markings and inference, connotative particles, confused, ill-defined, and indifferent.  Instigative convolutions, a potentia of concatenation and combine, cations and anions, dispersive attract.

Filled with words.  Prescriptive, disruptive, chaotic, coherent.  A turbulence transposing subjects, predicatively morphing, an aqueous slurrage of verb, vim and weave.  Compositive, foreign, constitutive terms.  Not-I.  Of Other.  As shapes and colors, sounds, concepts, any all perceived – no idgit of me, all permeable outside – Otherness, environ, cocoon – borrowed, received (or rejected?), an elusive collude.

Signifiers swarm me.  Inherited meanings, genetic loom of semiotic loops and swirls.  Who begins?  No ex nihilo.  All arrange, revise, adapt.  We’re composed.  I of an ocean of signs.  Language and impulses, instincts and codes.  Ellipses and notions imposed.  Undifferentiate, senseless, stirred by experience – a cacophonous chorus of bones to my suture.

Oral, aural, textured and gestured, I swim and I sink, flux in the float.  Fragments and fractures, compounds and bonds, links and erasures.  Malformations.  Dis-ease.  Some viral, some blocked, unusable and ill-conceived, undone, or aborted.  Indisposition. Swim on, slurry substance, amalgam of shreds, resist and desist, copy and swallow.  I choke.  I chortle.  What makes “mine”?  Just a word, (yet another), from whence and from where we don’t know, but not “us” (neither that, nor this keystroke, this breathy design, dasein, without ownmost).  Even a name is built upon countless.  Other.

Epi-, meta-, arche-, unknown and unknowing, interpreted through mediated mattery fracas, encompassing commotion, tempestuous din, innately ordained.  But not-I, freak iota, insignificant smallest, author of none.  No one.  No thing.  No not-I.

Quavery, wavering, components of signs, my birth-sea and umwelt, disjoiner and fabricate mush.

This become, in this swelter, this wrap and unravel.  Efface and inveigle a ubiquitous unique.  I am drowning, a seaway of signs.

Haunted Man

[from a crumpled writing found under a car seat among additional trash, transposed to typing as a record of a mind’s mayhem and mistakes]

“Deliver me, prays the haunted man.  Therefore…”

Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

I am Dostoevsky and I am Beckett.  I am Hegel and Heidegger and Holderlin.  I am Kafka.

I am not good enough for any of you.  I do not merit your time nor your attention, affection, sensibilities, your human talents, or your care… no conceivable reason to mention “love.”

But I love you.  I am the one who loves you.  The one who writes.  Who writes these words.  The haunted one, the Reader, the Librarian; the Lover, Scholar, I am me.  I love you.  I am haunted.  Words runnel through me, and with them thoughts, and with them feelings, and with them meanings, which means…nothing.  No matter, no space, no time.

The “haunted man” is a passage, a passing, a ‘type.’  Of no import, little reality, barely occurrence.

*

I am Blanchot, am Homer, am divine Scriptures, and Shakespeare.  Simply, small-ly, in my own way, this very general way, I am what humans do with language.  For one another, with one another, to one another, as.

*

Yards and houses, flesh and voices, signs and symbols, marks and sounds, music and rhythyms and gestures, as attempts to conjoin – join and connect – survive, discover, endure, be, become, in-volve… With no idea.  Or ideas that continually prove false and faulty.  Elaborate records of revision, perhaps better inscribed as simple songs of effort.  Urges only TO BE, and that, TO BE CONNECTED.

But what do I know?  I’m Pythagoras, call me Ishmael or Ahab, Everyman or Whatever.  I’m out-dated.  Assign me a number.  I don’t really care.  I really care.  I am here, and I, (at least) re-present, or present again, or presence, a sort of being.  Such as it is… with no “REAL” way to evaluate, estimate, “tell,” or “express.”

*

Satan, then, Jesus, Joyce, Proust, Alexander.  No matter, no space, no time, only IS.

A “tradition” (as it were, in our own words).  We.  Its + That + This.  US.  Humans strangely (apparently) in environments.  These ways of thinking, of being, of behaving and operating, of supposedly surviving (but with what evidence?  WHO or WHAT might know?).

How might elements arranged thus & so, survive?  I am Nebuchadnezzar, Mohammed, Hammurabi and Ishtar.  I am ab-original.

I am Nothing.  Everything.  No one.  Me.

Each time.

Each press of the pen: “Hello – ‘here’”

*

As simply as I can construct it (all of it, any of “it”) it goes something like this: accidents occur, accidents are weird, and accidents give way.

I, like all other(s), an accidental novel.  Occasional and Whatever.

WHAT HAPPENS TO BE… at any given point-of-measurement (i.e. as far as we have a capacity to render, sunder, and effect – “Reality” (for us)).  Some quirky, unlikely, ridiculous, painstaking, odds-massively-against, and over-dramatic assessment of a certain sort of being-in, being-with, co-occurrence, happen-stance, we fabricate “human.”

TO BE SOMETHING

(organism, constituent, element, participant, activity)

*

In many other words (for the sake or ability of ‘them,’ ‘it,’ ‘all’) I may as well be.  Be Hallie or Ollie or Aidan or Rhesus.  Chief Joseph or Samson or Ghandi or Jordan.  Be you or Sara or Maya or Jimmy John.

“no matter.  Try again.  Fail again…” no matter.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

“the venom of the serpents were within him”

Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

HOW SHOULD I KNOW?

*

And so what if I were Bernhard or Bach, Napoleon, Attila, Montaigne or Dorothy Parker?  If I had the ammunition or energy (and weaponry?) – the rhetoric, the nerve, or the madness.  L. Sterne, Nagarjuna, Hafiz, JL Borges?

“No matter.  Try again.  Fail again…”

Titian, Beethoven, Plato/Socrates, Palestrina.  Michelangelo, V. van Gogh, and Chuang Tzu.  You.

“No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.”

(hardly Beckett)

A Possible Paradox for Ida

“To tell the truth” always requires a certain amount of fabrication!  Lying is natural, comes of itself”

-Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste-

Enough is known to know I will not know it.  Know what?, I am able to ask.  What I don’t know.  Enough is known to know that.

That’s leaving aside the forgetting and confusion.  The shaky content of what I barely, and rarely, know (retain or recall) of what supposedly I “know” already.  Ever slipping, fragmenting, recombining, sieving in and out of my “experience.”  All mostly a matter of hearsay, of reading and listening, of the saying-so of others, of instruction, of my own perception and interpretive intrigue.  Nothing known for certain, only “known” in certain ways, at certain times, simply operable and opportunistic, happenstance conflagrations, bastardized convergences.  My “knowledge.”

On occasion, per occasion, one might say I “know” something.  I must “know” to utilize paper and pen, a share in the language to be scribbling these terms, an awareness of others who might recognize them – words and marks to read and write, perhaps to say…

…on occasion.

Per occasion, it sometimes seems to function – these words, these sounds, these marks and referents, inventions – at times, in places… per occasion.

Enough to know there is not much known, and that, occasionally.

In many situations even what is written above would be to no effect.  Unknown or unknowable, misunderstood and mis-taken, discombobulating.

On occasion I have thought that I was coming to know.  A thing or two.  (“When the mind has put a thing through a certain number of transformations, it can only let go of it.  A ‘thing’ is that which can undergo such treatments without becoming unrecognizable.” – Paul Valery).  Some equation, expression, a certain order of words or section of world, apparent communicable system or game, even familiarity with so-signified “facts.”

Enough to know I did not know what I thought I knew.  Per occasion.

Contradiction.  Non-transference.  Con-fusion.  My “knowing” as some idiosyncratic amalgam of language and what is called “experience,” or moving about and within an environment, participant, (of which language constitutes such large part – whether gestures, ideas, dialect, signs or names – yet apparently also extending beyond and outside of language – the ‘unsayable’ – or so it is said – “We can do something to what does not exist: we can name it” – Valery), all of which, when tested by or combined with further, other, subsequent and/or prior language + experience… dissolves into significant doubt and is put into question (experience), per occasion.

In other words, what appears to be “knowledge” is a continuous process of revision, correction, and extension, according to occasions or events.

An example: a “fact” is announced: “2+2=4.”  Ocean & mountains + Nathan & raft = 4.  Ida & Oliver + Dad & home = 4.  A snake & a number + a planet & drought = 4.  A dead horse & winter storm + a beard & a fire = 4.  Each designation unequal.  Two persons, two environments, two numbers, two perspectives, two experiences (and so on…) 4 wildly differing worlds (experiences, occasions).  Any pair of designated elements + any pair of anything else = factually four diverse realities.  Experience and language are uncountable, as every portion abstracted to “count” or “measure” is untrue.  The facts are counterfactual.  It is said that in some realm or practice designations may be calculated as torn from experiences and occasions and language – as abstract systems.  But in what “realms?”  What realms do not arise in messy, fuzzy, occasional experience?  In fact, there are no accounts, records, calculations, or reports – all such verbs and activities necessitating “occasions” and/or “experiencing” – to be.

It tempts me to say “nothing is known” (for certain) but that reads a lot like a statement of knowledge.

Dear daughter of paradoxes: is this a paradox?  “If I have certain knowledge it is the knowledge that I know nothing for certain”?  or, “It is certain that knowledge is uncertain”?

I am not sure.

“That’s it, weave, weave” – Samuel Beckett

Image result for hofstadter strange loop

“THAT’S IT, WEAVE, WEAVE”

Samuel Beckett

What she set out to do, she did not achieve.  Intention and realization went un-joined.

Which in no wise implies that beauty was lacking.  Or interest.  There were still trees, efforts, water running here and there, struggles, many other animals, emotions, scenes.  Nothing, really, was lost in failure.  But what could be?  Nothing that might potentially eventuate (from action, intention, emotion, or hope) is ever known, therefore where could failure lie?

Ice is its own phenomenon and occurrence, regardless.  Such strange wet-dry thing, fluid and solid becoming-unbecoming.  The sound of a voice – perhaps of an “inside” impossible without “outside.”  Many “things” are in-between.  Ever on the way to something, ever proceeding from.

He found it all incalculable, without appropriate measure.  Which was not what she intended, not what she set out to do.  Yet could not be called a failure.  For who or what might measure that?  What thermometer, rod, or calculating machine might tally such “results”?  In relation to what when where?  And how might “results” be defined?

The term for an idea or concept named “beauty” being interesting in itself.  Apparently something pertaining only to them (these so-called “human subjects”).

She intended to express, or so it seemed to him.  Set out to communicate an experience with her surround,  a something she was hoping to say, to give voice to.  This experience was such that she perceived it as something transpiring for her in such fashion as to not be readily apparent to others, nor easily translatable (even observable) to those arrayed around about her – both those with whom she valued attachment and reciprocal relations, and any “others” – in this case whom (a human kind of self-referencing versus what or how) – might be capable of demonstrating care, comprehension, or attention to what (or how) she was “experiencing” (i.e. having a felt-living-sense with and within her environment).

He (perhaps the proposed recipient of her attempt of expression) found all of it incalculable, and without appropriate measure.  He, in his own idio-specific way (or relation) to whatever (whomever, however he considered his ‘surround’) was entrenched in his own meticulous (incalculable and immeasurable – at present time of writing – by ‘science’ or current ‘arts of knowing’) particularities of being-with / affecting / effecting / participating in his perceived environment [what, as a sort of short-hand, might be termed his Umwelt (look it up!)]: what happens to matter for him.

Some have called it ‘sense-making’; others’ ‘making-sense.’  Many (in some strange-impossibly proposed ‘objectivity’ – a falsified, imaginary distancing involving a blind delusion of “as if” they were NOT in fact WHAT they are – a kind of ‘sense-making-sense’ (in two senses of the word “sense”)): in other (no…in MORE) words: an ‘human’ account-possibility of its proceptive, perceptive, immersive and recursive experience WITHIN its surround AS IF it were not.  I.e., fiction, or fantasy.  So far as he or she have been able to uncover – NO ACCOUNTS of human experiencings have been proposed, recorded, or proffered by other-than-human ‘beings’ that any human has been able to perceive, understand, or translate…therefore there are no ‘objective’ (distanced other) reliable sources for measuring, calculating, analyzing, reporting on, under-standing or evaluating the experiences of the human ‘he’ and ‘she.’  At present THERE IS NO OTHER with which this kind (‘human’) might informatively and effectively communicate, learn, argue, or confer…only itself.

[Which may be the situation of all cells, plants, animals, stars, etc…but humans can’t know…being all too human, after all].

None of this was her intent.  No content recorded concerns what she set out to do.  But this in no wise indicates MIS-take, for there is no future in advance which one might con-fuse, err, or malfunction toward.  The next simply is, just like any number of things before.  All options extremely limited according to case, kind, and percipient.

In the case of this writing – ‘human’ (so-self-called) KIND, as PERCEIVED and PROCESSED by itself only – with (thusfar) no other constituent or contributor except as designated and defined by its own self-kind-case.

The ‘human’ has NOWHERE to turn for what it considers ‘knowledge’ (he thinks) excepting NOW HERE and AS ITSELF (he thinks) while perceiving in ways it already has experienced to be variegated, faulty, and vague.

(Perhaps all living things) he thinks (but certainly all human-kind) affords no outside source or viewing, perception, communication, expression, or understanding/interpretation of itself.  It only confers with itself and its surrounding (as experienced according to itself and slight variations of itself over time).  No human could be considered “reliable” – if re-liable were intended to re-fer to “reality” – taken to signify THE CASE OR STATE OF THINGS beneath, before, pertaining to, and beyond THE HUMAN BEING AS IT EXPERIENCES ITSELF ‘to be,’ he thinks.

“A pointless matter,” he vocalizes in response to her ‘expression’ and ‘intention.’  “Even among our own kind, sort, and communicable compatriots – we ‘humans’ as we call ourselves,” he states, “’I’ cannot know whether or what you’re referring to, and whether or what of it corresponds to my own ‘human’ experiencing (as we say and apparently agree, confer).”

She cries a little.  Wishes something.  Or so it seems to him, in his NOW HERE.  She intended other-wise.  Goes quiet (from a ‘human’ – so-self-called, ‘perspective’).

It is quiet.  Perhaps from many perspectives.  ‘Human’ science (arts of knowing) claim that snakes (so-humanly-called) can’t ‘hear,’ nor the clocks humans have made, nor cats, nor dogs, days nor plants, nor wood, nor dirt – whatever else ‘humans’ are able to notice and create or differentiate in any given perceptive scenario.

Between like kinds, this is NOT what she set out to do, nor intended…and only the ‘humans’ (“so far as we know,” he says) might even be capable of de-signifying, de-coding, com-prehending (perceiving-together) these sounds, marks, signals, gestures, movements, motions between them.

And here you (perhaps) are … reading (de-coding, de-signifying, transposing, translating) … “IT” (according to your NOW HERE).

What she set out to do she did not achieve, nor he.  But of course the proposed possible, capable, or potential of ‘setting out to’ is not known… so WHO knows?

The intention and realization have not joined… or have they?  Who or what might measure (and when and how) calculate, evaluate, or demonstrate that?  “They” seem left / bereft purely to themselves.  If a lion could speak, apparently we would not be able to understand it.

And so ‘he’ and ‘she’ make sounds, motions, and varieties of contact (according to ‘human’ perceivings) on a ‘porch,’ in a ‘house,’ through various ‘rooms,’ ‘spaces,’ ‘surfaces,’ and so on.  Birds chirp (according to the ‘hearing’ of ‘humans’), clouds drift, squirrels chitter, grass wavers, and so on all the same (according to ‘human’ sense-making-sense)… ‘he’ sets out, intends, struggles, interacts, and feels with ‘his’ surround (NOW HERE), as does ‘she’… neither achieving their ‘goals,’ neither controlling nor creating any realizations they intend – albeit with NO knowledge of what they might actually be able to evince or conjure – all having not yet occurred.

It would appear (to the ‘humans’) that many many ‘things’ (stars, genes, planets, soil, weather, corporations, arachnids, societies, viruses, equations, materials, activities, and so on and so on…) just carry on their various “natural” (according to their kind) ways regardless, in spite of, in ANY case, in accord with… with no ‘concern’ for ‘hers’ or ‘his’ intentions or settings-forth or out to do.

And so it goes.  And so it goes… on… apparently.

Still, what she set out to do she did not achieve…whatever that may have been.

see also:

Immediacy and the Impossible Poetic by Robert Lumsden

“All I know is the text” – Samuel Beckett

“A voice comes to one in the dark.  Imagine.

…Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself.  Deviser of himself for company.  Leave it at that.  He speaks of himself as of another.  He says speaking of himself, He speaks of himself as of another.  Himself he devises too for company.  Leave it at that.  Confusion too is company up to a point.  Better hope deferred than none.  Up to a point.  Till the heart starts to sicken.  Company too up to a point.  Better a sick heart than none.  Till it starts to break.  So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being, For the time being leave it at that” – Samuel Beckett, Company

“The words spoke by themselves.  The silence entered them, an excellent refuge, since I was the only one who noticed it.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day

So, speaking of himself, I only noticed it.

The small furry animal, almost humming in its purr, he had chance, so he thought, to please, to comfort, with a pet, a scratch, an acknowledgment, tender, while it butted and marked itself against him.  The illusion.  A kind of company in itself (or to).

The ungrammaticality of occurrences.  Of happening.  What happens to be.  Or is not.  When speaking to himself.  Without voice.  I was the only one, as far as I am able to tell – if in fact this is telling – who noticed it.  It seems words speak of themselves.  From elsewise and through whom.  He says, speaking of himself (or to).  Without voice.

Devising.  Illusion.  I devise, he says, speaking to himself, of himself, without voice.  Seeking – is he? – Am I? – Seeking…company?

A small child (another illusion, devised) passes by, walking a young dog and waving a nod of sorts – I don’t remember which, he says, but I returned a gesture and obtained a moment of calm in the chilly Autumn breeze.  There was a sun full of color due to the leaves in their change, and fall, and flutter (due to the nothing-shaped wind).  But what seemed a moment of warmth, of calm, devised by a child with a dog and a friendly (fearful) gesture, he thought (speaking of himself without voice), I was the only one who noticed it.

I take to reading then – others speaking of themselves without voice (or beyond it) – in order to devise… company? he wonders of himself, to himself.  For when reading, it surely seems the words are speaking only of themselves, no matter who pens them.  Such the character of the texts he chooses (I thought of myself, to myself, or an other I devised as myself, like puppets).  And in part read and read for the experience or feeling that I alone notice it.  That I might in fact provide the company I devise, yet hardly able to tell since I have not penned the words but merely notice – borrow, listen? (there are no voices) – the words seem to speak of themselves.  Without voice.  (He said of himself, devising).  Something like company.  Perhaps.

Even in the color-filled sunlight of Autumn days, I at times experience myself as being quite deeply in dark, he says speaking of himself, myself, devising voices, soundless, out of words that seem to be speaking only of themselves and their variegated histories and usages, and billions of potential speakers and hearers and interpreters – creators and devisers – filled with ambiguity and application.  Here with me on shavings of dead trees, providing stark living contrast to Winter’s day-night.  I get confused, he says speaking of himself.  Confusion too is company devised, up to a point, I suppose.  Obviously “fusion-with” implies an other, perhaps enough, I said, speaking to myself, without voice, here on dead leaves in black scars.  In mutilation.  Transgression.  Inscription.  Perhaps the words will speak of themselves and some other “I” will claim to be the only one that notices.

A strange delusion of company indeed.  He says speaking of himself, devising a voice, its hearer, and an himself as participant and therefore a company to keep.

Reading: “only a detour is adequate” (Agamben), and “in pursuing meaning we are pursuing our limits” (Allen), and was perhaps meaning a synonym or metaphor, simile or metonymy for company he thought, speaking to himself, without voice.  But with an illness, diagnosed by doctors – those scientific political powers responsible for providing facts or devising happenings, pronouncing occurrences – so in any case he is not alone, being-with his illness, I thought, speaking to myself in an absence of sound.  The words spoke by themselves.

Other things as well: the furry animal, its humming purr, its actions; the trees, the leaves, the wind, the light.  The child, the dog, the gestures.  The books, the authors, the words themselves.  Divisors of voices, of hearers, of selves.  Sick hearts, confusion, and company.  Am I the only one who notices? he says speaking of himself, speaking of himself as another.

So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being, For the time being leave it at that.” – Samuel Beckett

 

 

Out of the Woods

“Why did you come out of your place in the woods?” I was asked.

“I guess so,” I replied.

So what?

This I find I cannot answer.  It is irrational.  Perhaps to stir and sense?  Dis- or un-cover?  “Strife” (from Ancient conceptions of the term).  Turbulence.  That something rather than nothing?  Not to have one’s hands folded on one’s lap? (Dostoevsky).  How should I know?  It’s irrational.

Unreasonably, I’ve begun.

Of course beginning will destroy things:  my stasis, comfort, stillness.  Family roles, relationships, profession.  Any beginning changes everything before (prior) to it.  Friendships, rituals, schedules, habits.

To START (anything) means to RUIN.

And also…BEGIN.

In other words, if I (one) reach out – lash, swipe, caress, call, correspond, text, touch, encounter or engage – an Other (one)… all will be disturbed… it’s the nature of contact between living beings: landscapes, art, humans, animals, spaces, times, words, events.  Everything alters at encounter.  Period.

If I (or we) are available (or needy) and therefore present ourselves (vulnerably) to a reality (actuality, happenstance, opportunity, occurrence) everything changes.

Past.  History.  Future.  Meaning.  Understanding.

So “Why did you come out of your place in the woods?”

What was my ‘place in the woods’?

Repetition.  Familiarity.  Habitue.

Security?  Comfort?  Compatibility with my environs?

I must have desired DIFFERENCE.

And how to account for that?

This is something we just do.

Clothes, taste, touch, belief, surroundings, movement – variance, dissimilitude, change – this signals in some way to our mechanistic (apparently) methodology of ‘survival’ – that we’ve ‘still go it,’ still HAPPEN, to-be… we live.  Are a-live.  Existence.  (See how the noun – the naming/defining – kills it?  Stills and destroys it?).  Existing.

Out of the woods I desire – not to be “existing”, not to crave “existence.”  I do not want any THING.  SOMEthing. I am simply wanting to be-ing… indefinable, indescribable, occurring, happening, all-live – not staid enough, locatable or timed enough to be characterized, apportioned, described and named.  No!  I (for one) am wanting to be happenING, impossible to capture, occur-ING, become-ING, vital not repeatable, unique not typified, tabulated, calculated or classified.

And thus, and so, I change (again).  Again.

Again I come out of the woods.

I be-come.  Out from the woods.

I say, I write, I speak, I act.

I am.

Friends to Fall

Elf says “ripe.”

Martin responds, wondering.  Curious as to that which it applies, or whom, or what.  Contemplating reference.  Filled with questions.  Martin says, “yes,” almost under his breath.

Elf shrugs.  Elf walks on.

Martin follows, thinking, looking at leaves falling into blades of grass, alerted by the shushing and darting of squirrels, saddened at the amplified pffft of cars passing by.  Wishing for silence.  Wondering if Elf will speak a further word or two.  Sensing like a dowsing rod for meanings.

Walks on.  Shuffles.  Walks on.

Martin, too.

There’s a relative silence from the two of them – these humans wandering across a concreted trail.  Sure there’s the sound of their footfalls, scuffles, even some noise in the pause of it.  Or the noise of the absence of noise.  But you’d have to be different to hear the breathing, the heart pulse, the slide of muscles and blood.  As far as humans-in-environs go, the pair presents retraction.

Hard to say for soil.  The squares composing sidewalk must suffer pressure, absorbed by the earth beneath and shared out through verberations for miles.  Hard to say for air.  Full-grown males, plodding forth like prows along a rickety line-of-motion has to be pushing particles around, making waves.  Nothing gives report.

Elf stops and sighs.

Martin responds, slowing, looking out, looking forward, looking round.  Lets his hands limp his sides.

Elf crouches down.

Martin scans the street, examines bark, follows trunks and branches, admires leaves and colors and movements.  Birds.

Elf.

Martin.