Tag: memory

Deep and Wide in Kansas

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings1 Comment

meant to be read to the accompaniment of Ben Howard’s “Highland Drifting” which was playing as we flew

Safe in smooth salt from a Permian sea.  

  wide land preserve us.

Dizzying dreams.

The hum, the rumble, the altering sky.

things get stirred up

family dozing, off the horizon

you listen.  to nothing.  to all.

  a sense is made of comparisons with  sea

the winds.  the open.  the variable border between land and sky.  its permeable skin marked by  few trees.

and memory.

how i only hold names and not faces.

language whispers while images fade.

family.  friends.  relations.

at some time I was young.

now diffusing.

it goes on.

it is Spring.

we were there.

we are here

Minds as Museums

On By NW FilbertIn TracesLeave a comment

woke up with this fed from memory…

The zany mind of Stanislaw Szukalski

Mirrors & Shadows

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings5 Comments

“Ten times a day you must overcome yourself.  You must want to burn yourself up in your own flame.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

The Shadow, Andy Warhol
The Shadow, Andy Warhol

“the lesson is clear: one is multiple, the same is different, the representation is the negative of the person…both original and copy, identical and different, they are the same and the other, interchangeable and monumental…In the dark room of his studio, Warhol develops himself.  In so doing he ‘unmakes’ himself.”

-Victor Stoichita-

Shadows, Andy Warhol
Shadows, Andy Warhol

“Death follows artists around like their shadow and I think that’s one of the reasons artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and nothingness of life.”

-Francis Bacon-

Children singing choruses.  Joyous chants and rhymes.  Distant.  Repetition forming memory.

Chasing shadows, or running from.  Self-same body blocking sun.  To be sought, to be feared.  Identical and strange.

Known alone in traces and reflections.

I say that “I” was young once.  That it’s only patterns of light, only the passing of time, only angles of vision.

I repeat myself.

Each day reassembling, developing, dissembling, to reassemble again.  My body a gathering post.

Mirroring image has gone from the closest thing to self-awareness we might uncover to a flat reflective surface full of nothing.  Ephemeral and changing by the second, dependent on the looker, a vacant mirage.

Shadow has proceeded from a designator of real presences to an outline of actual vacuity.  From a measurable symbol of substance to a vague hint of objects passing.

Voices like a bag of small bells and grass.  Something shaking and stirred.  Snippets of a tune, the catchy parts.

What I can tell I read, observe, attend and consider, opening a dialogue of days.  But I only get to see in glimpses and portions.  A hand moving, holding an instrument here; flat feet from crossed legs there; a shoulder, some hair of a beard, the frames of glasses.  I don’t see myself seeing, nor see myself as seen.

There’s the mirror and the shadow – intangible, eminently interpretable and malleable “things” – emphases of the transitory.  Receptacles like language – merely signs or indices – pointing back at absence.

Moment, moment, moment…now then now then now…endless fantasies of dissection moving round the room, faster than shuttling clips of film.  A self presenting / representing itself after again, appearances only, shimmering skein mingling veils of light…

While they sing like breezes dreaming – “Who sees?” and “What is seen?”

He who has ears let him hear,

bypassing illusion,

in marks and gestures

Question

Family is Fiction, part two

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing8 Comments

FAMILY: A FICTION, PT. 1

Family 1

2

            Quick to give up, or in, to description.  Sidelong glances, or enough periphery, and it’s known – they are there.  Are here.  Which is firstly what needs be established.  Shaggy in-turned male and self-consciously-nondescript-as-a-waged-war-within-herself – are here – whether explicitly denoted or not, for that is not what this story’s about.  And all of their children – as if we’re in shadows – near presences felt.

If the man were currently reading (he is reading now), and is sitting at his desk, surrounded by more words, words bound up to burst and licking the chops of their leafy lips, prepared to murmur and shout.  It seems to him.

And she would be (read “is”) pushing a broken body into limited stress-inducing motions purposed to loosen and tighten.  Laying on a mat on a floor watching women on a screen count and stretch and breathe, mimicking them with her own limbs and torso. Accentuating her “core,” strengthening her “self” for this losing battle.

The children are learning and eating, playing and working – whatever it is youth do to fend for themselves and their futures – their shadow-dance with age.

Unable to say it as is – the is too complete and far from attainable – in segments and particles, or a falsified whole from great distance.  Oh nature.  Oh being.  Because of the facts, we have to just enter, and being recursive it matters only slightly where or when – inception/conclusion are unrecognizable to a decentralized everywhere, connective and mobile.

Some are known by their doings, some by their fathers’ or mums’; others according to their works or the times.  Some hardly known of at all.  To speak of them is to personally encounter –  as if face-to-face – an intersubjectivity of optimal expressivity.

Or not.  Language gets carried away.  When we search for a meaning or some explanation is it not because we already believe it is there?  Something already imagined?  What remains is a tying together in  idealized systems like logic – building a case or crafting a theory, replete with supporting cast of regulatory theorems.  Which demonstrates little but our ability to make science out of anything.  Exercise in closing the systems.  While all remain open.

The rugged male shifts from his papers, given possibilities, which it turns out rhymes everything.  She teases her hair nonchalantly (she hopes) and attempts to forget her over-calculations by delving into them – representing them – externalizing image and textures.  Viewed askance not head-on, but in outlines and shades or peered at and through, as we’d envision a form from behind.  Anything to remove the scrutiny of mere appearance – incorporate more and defraggle illusions of skin.

She scribbles it onto used papers,  ready surfaces already marred, turning scarrings and blots into figures and wounds; while he accentuates the peculiar, alarmed by specifics and seeking connective similitude.  If a thought comes queer, he tattoos it with ink until it sounds available.

Both, in a way, finding commerce, a transaction with others engaging/avoiding themselves.  Feeling so like and unlike.  A pestilence of the species, er, human condition – overwhelming similarities of form with infinite intricacies of difference.  Everything related – never one without another – a closed system of incalculable possibilities.  They labor in.

Male smells sour in just a few days, not accustomed to shouldering public, perhaps what allows for his mess.  Adapting  to the threat of her attention, though in the absence of comprehension.  She allows him his comforts till they confront and offend.  Peaceable enough – this arrangement – and duly provocative:  they enhance and combine, stimulate and remind one another in a struggling intimacy – they love.  Not without precedents or fear, but they love.

And in their sleep, the gears will turn.

He writes off stuck places – the uncanny processes of dreams.

The children behave like loosely arranged magnets, at times slamming close, or sullenly repelled.  Usually vibrating, tensely, between.  The volatility of past and a future reacts in young bodies as now.

Viewed collectively – it’s an inter-&-co-dependent mechanism, sketchy and atomically diagrammed – similarly potent (at least potentially) in its splittings and pressures.

Live things best metaphor themselves.

Identity & Flipping Numbers like Coins

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Traces10 Comments

What exactly is it about the arbitrary changing of numbers, parceling of time, divisions and subdivisions of existent moments, that prompts and wriggles us to consider change – feel obligated or massaged toward it – dream of it?  I can say that in all my dizzying thoughts about it – how society and culture (Petrie-dish like) inundate and stimulate individuated personal alterations – I cannot figure out why crossword-puzzle-like taxonomies and designations of life-fragments labeled by stick-systems of reference, mathematical calculations and so forth stimulate (simulate?) desires, wishes, regrets, metamorphic movements in the human gang…

Be that as it may, today is the first day of the first month of the year containing 0-1-2-3 (my wife comments what a delightful play that  must be for numerologists), and while my beloved is out signing up at the Y and beginning self-care with new devotion, I am denuding my desk, dusting and polishing its surface, taking revised stock of the pounds of books that weight its surface, reorganizing, selecting, making hard choices about what is necessary for me TODAY with some forward thinking.  The numbers have changed.  The game must be different, no?

In the process, I open a drawer I apparently haven’t for a very long time, coming across a miniature moleskine notebook, first entry dated January 2003!  A decade ago, how interesting!  I leaf through…and here are some of the things that capture my attention:

  • a quote from my son Aidan (he would have been 5 at the time) on being unable to remember something:  “it’s in my brain, I just can’t find the right aisle.”
  • and Steinbeck: “its inhabitants, as the man once said, ‘whore, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant everybody.  Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said ‘saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
  • Cixous: “it is this hunger for flesh and for tears, our appetite for living, that, at the tip of forsaken fingers, makes a pencil grow.”
  • Handke:  “in any case, I experienced moments of extreme speechlessness and needed to formulate them – the motive that has led men to write from time immemorial.”
  • “Books should not flatter our sense of self.  They should investigate it.  I read another person in order to get better at interrogating my own unexamined narrative” – Richard Powers

The last entry reads like this…”We used to always pick models or icons we wanted to be like: have what they had, whole persona and possessions – WHO would I want to be?  … When does it hit you that you only want to be you with some other life?”

Wonder where I was…a kind of number-flipping query…

further to go….2013

Writing the Prompts

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

All that Remains (inspired by Josh Kramer, for Simon H. Lilly)

In the silence that becomes now, it was undeniably clear – there had been things we considered precious.  Recalling faces, moments, landscapes.  Evenings.  Not like nights or day, but poignant equilibria.  These felt like memories, or nostalgia, even tinged with griefs or longings, but mother said the past lacks such power – that we were feeling presently.  Simon says.  Says “grasping after full resonances” by losing them, turning them to language, participant only always in passing.  Says “left side.”  “Right side.”  “Simon says.”  I, at least remember.  Forgetting, and then the buckled alarm.  The tacking it on at the end.  Too lately.  But not quite.  So that all that remained was the grasping.

please feel free to create responses with this music – visual or verbal or otherwise

In Living Memory

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes39 Comments

Copyright-Rich Vosa

Not like there’s a whole lot there.  It is what it is, my memory – glossy, apparently endless, and stripped bare.  But there seem to be windows, areas the light creeps in, and doorways – entries to room after room of possibilities.  If I could get in there, could move past this moment of glimpsing, find the courage to carry myself forward (or is it back?).  Remains to be seen, here – me at the cusp, in full view, just on the verge, of remembering.

What just happened?

N Filbert 2012

this post created as participation in beloved weekly Friday Fictioneers – check it out!  join!

Of Inquiry (Inquiring)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy6 Comments

Of Inquiry (Inquiring)

“Inquiry, then, is more like running around a circle and back and forth between different points on it than walking in a straight line”

-Stephen Littlejohn / Karen Foss-

Theories of Human Communication

            And yet whoever thought of it otherwise?

Still sometimes we use logic, as diversion, among the so-called “points,” letting it go.  Circular, perhaps, in that way.  Much as we’d like to, never quite constructing a web.  For capture.  Or a moment to observe, re-flect.  Rather, more de-flect.

If you get their picture.

Would be something like this:

 

“Intention provides the field for inquiry and improvisation the means for inquiring”

-Lyn Hejinian-

The Language of Inquiry

That is, I assume, if for “improvisation” we substitute some creatively imagining wandering – the wonderings of intention or querying of some inceptive experiencing?  After a fashion.

I’m prone to argue the “point.”  I.e., “What/where/when/how – a ‘point’?”  Inconceivable for me.  As my understanding of ‘point’ is like my comprehension of ‘god’ or ‘time,’ ‘truth’ or ‘being’ – concepts as moving targets without definite characteristics – indefinable insubstantials.  E.g., the falsity of my diagram.

It wouldn’t surprise me if I thought of inquiry as motricity.  When we intend to inquire we’re moving (point-less) and inquiry moves us (point-less) among (therefore, obviously) moving things (thereby point-less), if only in relation to us.  The denial of a dead present.  Pointedly.

No stasis for the living.  Life (logic leads), as, literally, pointless.

 

So how do we refer?  Index?  Sign?  “Point” to – in all this motion?  Commotion?

Language levies us these lies.  These helpful and distorting machinations and maps of partial, hazy truths.  Like mathematical “laws” providing invisible scaffolding in which to graphically refer.  To question and inquire into falsely stable invisible objects.  Creative and imaginative markers.  Hypothetical space-time convergences – true experientially – but unlocatable save for the traces in ongoing movement – unstoppable, uncharitable, unrecordable – each stoppage (representation), chart or reading of ‘reality’ being an-Other, a deflection, an improvisation and wandering (i.e. a new experiencing)…

…dropping the term “experience” as blatantly false.

…retaining till death “experiencING.”

Not, then, “to question,” but questionING, one and same with observING, evaluatING, inquirING, seekING, readING, creatING, fabricatING the impossibility of a truthful past tense.

…running round and round and back and forth,

not between points,

simply, actually, between.

 

N Filbert 2012

 

Myopia

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes18 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers, November 9, 2012.

 

How to describe it?  The grief is heavy, distinctly.  Regret, fear, and misgivings.  The experience is prominent, yet so difficult to explain.  Actuality gives way to traces, as if patterned into nature, something that should have been known all along, but not possible to identify.  This mix of things – complexity – the oversight of choices.  Myopia, like scales, and the fracturing, the cloud.  Peering and peering, inside and out, straining for meaning, for reasons.  Dimly opaque, only powerful suggestion, like lace over frost.

N Filbert 2012

Writing Exorcise?

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing6 Comments

The Textures of Other

Whatever your age when reading this, I’m asking you to remember.

It’s an experiment beggaring proof.

Find a comfortable position and setting – a favorite chair and drink, your all-time essential musical accompaniment, the woods, a mountain, a porch.  Wherever it is, whatever the surround that most allows you to relax, let go, and drift.

Don’t think, exactly, just breathe and attend.  Float or lie down.  Allow your torso to lead.  Feel your legs, your shoulders, the back of your head – sense them with your mind.

Once all of you feels reprieve, you’re under no specific pressures, these moments are free and they belong to you.  You’re not dead yet, not needed anywhere, whatever pains you feel are truly part of your reality, NOW.  Close your eyes, gently.  Hear the air traveling into your nose, and quietly, slowly, exhale.

Be soft.  Be silent.  Be held.  NOW.  Notice a finger curled on a cup, an ankle or toe moving to or fro – give them a break, let them stop awhile.  Be still.  Allow your lungs, your heart, to keep time alive.

Good.  Stay.  Just be – you – sitting/lying/leaning/standing, wherever you are, hearing what you hear, touching where you touch, smelling, feeling your mouth with your tongue… rest.

Now drift: float over, stroll, swim, whatever is easiest for you, carefully, openly, gently back into your years.  Begin here or with your earliest memories…anywhere…

What are they made of?

Colors?  Sounds?  Sights?  Faces?  Places?  all of these?  Examine on, calmly.  Are they combinatory?  An edge of a counter in a childhood kitchen, your mother’s back at sink or stove, a glinting sun through a window?  The weight of your first tiny child in your lap, your forearms and fingers cradling its downy skull?  The tumult of a raft on rapids, against boulders, rush and foam?  The excited terror of walking the steps to preschool, or path to college dorm?  Your grandfather pale in coffin?

Where do you go?  What comes?  Do you still hear earth-thudding booms of ammunition?  Wails of the bleeding faces dying?  A friend’s laughter, your own, good tears?  Slaps of fists, warmth of hugs, wet of kisses?

How many bare arms caress your naked body?  Whose?  Can you smell their skin?

First mountain-view.  First foreign city.  First flown kite.  First Christmas recalled.  A sibling.  A parent.  A pet.  Be there, each where and when, touch in.

Where are they?  Can you hear voices?  Whispers?  In moments you were celebrated – does your chest still jitter?  Play favorites.  Go for good.  Relive, as it were, whatever you consider joy.

What’s it like?

What are you viewing?  What do you “feel”?  What might it “mean”?

Remember.

Stay relaxed if you can.  Walk the empty morning pasture alone.  Recall bonfires, ocean winds, swingsets, music.  Dream revisitations.

I’d love to know what you’re finding, how you are.  Take your time – these are yours.

Reach into the textures.  The moments belong.

 

Now hope.

And renew.

We get to.