The following stories…

Lifewordthread

“Life evolves in a thread of knots that get more and more tangled.

The narrative segments are intentionally dislocated and rearranged,

so the knots become the characters, as it were.”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

            The impression like a manual typewriter’s arm – thunk! – left in either hemisphere… (they say)

begins knotting and tangling

as additional – thwap! – embossings are left.

“Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous”

-George Oppen-

 

The following story.

 

Not that the answers were handled judiciously (judgmentally?) or even weighed or considered.

No answers given to evaluate or direct…

The question(s) already condemned.

Thwak!

“Shouldn’t be –“  “Too young – “ “Can’t handle – “

“STOP ASKING!!”

-(Pastor. Parent. Teacher. Friend.)-

But not books, not texts, not words…

…these welcomed them…

…welcomed me

Words seem to love being dislocated and rearranged and then marked into question.

In fact, for the reader, each word of a sentence or phrase, exposed on a page, seems to wonder itself!

As if language were a query.  Inquiry.

Something to begin with.

 

The following story.

Aged 12.

“Your reasoning’s wrong” (some voice, any voice, whap!, it stuck)

Awry.  Twisted.  Disfigured.  Maimed.

“That’s not the right question…ought not be questioned at all…!”

“Thus saith the Lord (a.k.a. the “Word”)

(to which I added my mark – “?” :

– is it the Word?  What Word? and Whose? let alone How?

and ever the too many “Whys?”

(those have quieted now)

But I devoted myself to fashioning questions,

so that even descriptions or

statements of fact…question themselves

as if essential, inherent to this medium,

of its nature

Smack! –

?

Decompression Addendum: Redefining Terminologies: Finding Words

“The variety of words is another error…I believe words must be conquered, lived, and that the apparent publicity they receive from the dictionary is a falsehood…I now recognize among the thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

Rudiments: Places of Operation

Redefining Core Existence Terminology

 

Family: those with whom one “belongs,” chosen and not, like it or not, one’s “tribe” – born into and/or evolved and developed.

Home:  states of being or locations, settings in which one IS.  Settings in which one is freest to be.

Love:    shared and mutual, reciprocal regard, respect, desire and preference.  Those with whom one thrives and incites the thriving of.  Intention and attention ( a relation between not inhering in beings)

Friendship:  unmitigated affirmation, reciprocal and intentional.  Native complementarity of being.

World:  internal and external context at any given moment

Self:  whom one is or shows up as in one’s world – at any given moment: individual weave or presentation in circumstantial contexts and settings.

Language:  whatever serves as communique betwixt individual and others and world (internal/ external)

I:  utterer of language, behaver of behaviors, actor of actions, feeler of feelings – as regards the “self”

Other:  any and all beings not the self-regarding individual

Vocation:  that which one IS and DOES; self-perpetuating passion – that which drives and rewards, fulfills and seduces, nourishes and excites desire for an individual…one’s propulsion, desire and satisfaction in being.

Leisure:  rest, reprieve, de-stressification

Fun/Play:  light enjoyment, carbonated experience

Sex:  whole-cloth woven world of contexts of one or more individuals

Art:  combinatory effect of an individual’s self, world, vocation and play; any “otherwise-not” creation of a living being’s given and concocted whole

Thought:  a self’s languaging of “world”

Habits:  automatic or instinctual activities of an individual, supposedly self-soothing or self-managing

Perception:  individual sifting of “world” and “self” (see also: interpretation)

Reading:  engaging the language of others or world or self-as-other

Intepretation:  an individual or group of individual’s “spin” on “universe”

Universe:  arbitrary boundary comprehending all that can be perceived/conceived by an individual or group at a given moment

Conception:  consideration and invention of possibilities of “universe”

Writing:  an effort to live, to exist

Out of the Cave

I really don’t know what these things are I’ve been writing (“Ideas of Home”, this one…).  Seem to be open ramblings.  I apologize if they waste time for any readers, I think I’m trying to open up channels inside of me with less self-conscious shaping and imposition of some pre-formed concepts of style, order, characterization, plot, even poesy.  Opening veins, trying to allow swollen connections between pockets of my body and brain that otherwise occur only in dreams or infrequently heightened states.  Not sure what’s going on, just writing.

 

In the Depression, A Cavern

 

The outlook that prides its common sense (for those who bear it)

“I cannot comprehend our attachments to beings”

-E.M. Cioran-

Airtight logic.  Closed circle of belief.

The end is doom and oblivion, i.e. “end.”

Therefore, “I cannot comprehend attachment” –

to things?  Well, perhaps, for personal endurance, a comfort while still understanding their nature (“truth”: “things fall apart, the center cannot hold”)

that all become, belong to silence (no total comprehension, understanding) all is constant change, therefore ephemeral, ridiculous to trust or develop dependence – everything changes, and then you die…

that, well that does not seem to alter much.  Perhaps it wavers.

As all things wobble and waver, are insecure, uncertain.

Well, but maybe not “ends” and “loss” – almost certain, almost absolutely so,

but then not everything has happened, as far as we know.

Hold on to joy’s illusions – real experiences – and why not?

Embrace.

Let go.

You better let go

or it will be taken, suffocated, crushed.

Smile, but don’t forget to cry, there are many truths.

And much matter(s) to perceive (momentarily)

But then there’s that: the individuality of perception

and the fact that that capacity will cease.

Heightened moments, erasing duration,

fictions of time and space.

Self and other.

World.

Ideas of Home

Hello everyone!  For whatever reason (I’m not always a bigger believer in a source for reason!), a few days ago between cargo-ing children to and fro from all the places they must be S. Carey’s song “We Fell” came through my stereo and the weather was Spring-ish cool and the air was nice and I was overwhelmed with feelings, I guess you’d call them, (sentiments?) of being home.  As I pulled in the drive the light struck the deteriorating garage and trampoline movingly, and I took a few shots that matched my feeling.  Then throughout the past days I’ve just been letting those feelings/sentiments/ideas swirl about in my head thinking they’d find an organization they wanted.  They didn’t.  So today I’m just going to post the notes I jotted down the way they tangled and fumbled out of me…In my mind they go with S. Carey’s song and always Mark Kozelek’s tunes (his music often is my home)…

oh, here are the lyrics to “We Fell”

The consonance of drone

And love sounds its own

Your arms wrapped around home

All the in-betweens

Lay so blue beside me

We fell

More than skin and bones

No we’re not alone

We fell

Like stones

Between

S. Carey

And here follow my photos and ramblings:

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Ideas of Home

(click to read text)

THANK YOU!

Additional Instants of “I”…I think

“We spontaneously obey and follow an inner voice because we know it to be personal. 

What would we say if we learned that in descending into ourselves to find our solitary voice we meet an alien one,

the voice of words?”

-Edmond Jabes-

Wonderful World of Texts!

Mystery Text #1: Of Origins and Ends

 

Many have participated – untranslatable translations and definitions undefined – signals of the ineffable.

Speaking of texts…writings and utterances, organizations of alphabets.

Writingreading, readingwriting – with an existing text – pray tell me the difference?

 

On the one hand – anyone.  On the other – the same.

Between = a text.

Words on a page are a circle.

No origin, no conclusion.

 

Who writes this?  Is it me?  Who is “me”?  Was it you?  Who were “you”?

Who deciphers?  Is it me?  And when “I” read again – is it the same “me”?  Later this evening in the quiet?  Saturday at the cafe?  In bed while a movie plays?  Is it you?

Reading as continual rewriting in the same alphabets, same words and phrases.  But the content?  Denotation(s)?  Connotation(s)?  Connections?  Disjunctions?  Referents?  References?

Who leads?  What follows?  Who follows?  What leads?

 

I venture to commend the signs of the text are the subject, the object we observe and receive, perceive and interpret.

 

Who authors?  And what is authored by that who?

Author following, adapting, borrowing and conceiving the text’s arrangement.  Or reader authoring the significations, meanings, referents(-ces) and possibilities of thusly arranged words?

 

Double absence.  Absence of the one constructing the text, absence of the possible recipient.  Anyone (or no one) at the origin, no one / anyone at the end.  Text(s) of no closure and of ever-questionable intent.

Text as ever-ready presents(-ations), like letters – always between the past, the void of dead, or the future, the empty potential and the unformed future, unknowable recipient.

 

Remarkable, to me, to be capable of participation in such a vital and energetic, ever-evolving and malleable, yet lifeless matter – able to be as stable as an inscription in marble –

the artifact:  word or image, painting, photograph, text: gestures of the dead or the missing, yet constantly enlivened, resurrected with each encounter!  This is passing strange!  Out of the unknown, toward the unknown and lifeless in-between!

 

Ever a-rising out of no-more and availing the not-yet:  unnecessary necessity of authorial entities – the necessary unnecessary of receipt.  The still spinning wheel of lifeless matter on a page… in potentia.

A marvelous mystery to behold


It rains…complicating equations, understand? (for the Unknown Unnamed)

[please bear with these ramblings…they are taking shape…and each stumbling advance leads…i promise…:)]

Standing in rain.  Under rain.  Understand.

Unknown, unnamed, still wet.  Still cleansed.  Garnering names…

One.  Other.  Wet one.  Lost one.  Un-one.  More.

Hearing one.  The replier.  Seeing one, seems, seams, semes.

No/w/here: under rain, understanding some thing(s).

The wet can flood and drown, or cleanse and caress.

Can surround, come down, or buoy and uphold.

Understanding rain.

One water-name, countless individuals.

Unknown infinity, possibly.

Unnamed – an incalculable number of names – possibly.

The Writing One and the One Who Reads.  The One-Standing-Under-Rain and The One Rain Falls Upon.

The One Reaching the Other and The Other Receiving One.  A One Necessary Other for joinder and boundary, their rift and cleft, the possibilities.

If “to understand” counts as knowledge, he is many-known and many-named as he engages, encounters no/w/here.

[if w always presents we]

so that without w there is no-here and no now.

N/amed

O/ther

W/e

+/= here.  now here.  how here.  now here.

He realizes this direction is constantly unknown, even at its end.  If he can know it is raining, he cannot know how many.  And whenever it ceases, the water will be elsewhere, other-wise.

The Thinking One.  Confused Other.

He is unable to inscribe or translate even a fraction of his names in a single no/w/here…which are not singular, ever.

Names rain when he looks, listens, feels.  Attends.

Ecstatic One.  Diluted Other.  Watery One.  Solid Other.

Who?

Unknown and unnamed begins to understand, standing under (and in) no/w/here’s rain.

Muchly known, muchly named, ennui

in-we

he goes on…

standing under rain,

in the middle of,

no/w/here.

a rambling meditation

Composure

Unknown and Unnamed Undoing: the swoon and the swarm (a kind of mathematics to be continued in rain)

Unknown and Unnamed experiences: the swoon and the swarm

 

I hadn’t remembered it like this (trying not to remember).  That all of it got into you.  That all of it came out!

Immersion.  Enthrallment.  Ecstasy – words that come, to mind.

That if en-joined, then out-sourced.  Becoming indecipherable – like epistemology.

A moment’s rush, for example.  I encounter – which encountering looks like insertion and abstraction on me.  I move toward, feel it out, then back off and observe.  Active, passive; a swing, a rocking boat.

This is different.  Inundation, a flood.  Unable to say what’s mine, what’s not; who’s me, who’s you.  Unable, frankly, to say, at all.  Only be.

Motion, reception; injunction and release.

Think sky-diving: that decision to jump, trusting something, someone will hold together as form in all that air.  Like diving the deep blue sea, compression surround, that some element will remain intact without ground or solidity.

It works that way.  Give and take, see and saw, this uncanny to and fro of body, perceptions, breath.  Eyes contact then fog to some self between.  Fleshes – distinct and specific – now con-fused.  Who’s sweat?  Who’s secretions?  It’s sticky, yes, like that – a gluey bond.

Then the wave, the distended moment – incalculable clockwork – where all borders and boundaries seem lost, some extended and mutual sigh or moan within which the voice is other and the same without identity.

The swoon of it.  The swarm.

Dizzying rush of blood as warmth or wind; eyes roll back, also in, but not to my darkness.  As if limbless or prosthetically invented, my body grows – grows yours or ours or contracts to another covering, but inside-out.

As if leap or let go were no longer options, but instinct.

As if hot and cold – undifferentiated – some something that must define pleasure –

as in emptiness, fullness

the yin, the yang

a cellular entanglement

The swoon, the swarm

emerge

But what?  Or whom?

And what occurs in the median?

Who were that?                                                                                                       What was those?

The swoon, the swirl, the swarm.

            No one effecting.  Effected.  What does that indicate?

Nothing, essential to event – if nothing, than an absence utterly imbued.

A radiance, evocation,

like a sleeping brain on dreams…

with-you, the unknown gets no/w/here.

Whatever the constants, coefficients and variables, given the operator as convergence, the equation = whole,

where the w stands for we,

without which none – (“hole”).

Affecting substance…no one gains currency…necessity (no 1, but at least 2)… and then – ?

No one, unknown, unnamed, no/w/here as 0+O

where O stands for other

in this case, you

O requiring as much as I

inferring – ?

you can’t have 1 without anOther

but where anOther occurs must be at least 1 (other)

even if unknown, unnamed

in order to be lost and found in the joining

the immersion and enthrallment

the ecstasy

The Unknown and Unnamed Hears and Replies

Running into Melodies, Lyrically

(the unknown and unnamed hears and replies)

 

Or picture it this way: a runner yearning to the tape.

Arms flung back as if flagged by a gale, chin and neck making way for the shoulders – a pure strive.

And rushing against, past and around…force and flow.  Learning the body by all that surrounds, through which it hums and throbs.

The air is full of waves.  The waves are full of particles – particles agitating, dancing.  Or the fragments are waving, threading this way and that – streaming and winding – I feel it.

Over the curves of my shoulders, the chorus.  Deep in my belly – the bass and the drum – caverns of mind.  The ticking, the singing, the whispers and thrums.  Brass flowers into blooming curlicues, echoing labyrinths – my ears.

In such a wind the eyes will close, and the legs will strive and stride.  No matter my position, in the medium of music, I am always moving forward, setting forth – possibly sailing, possibly struggling with every ounce – but making progress.

It glances off the elbows, reverberates the bones.  Fills the mouth, stuffs the nostrils – can make it hard to breathe.  Sound.  Shuddering loins and quaking knees, a tremor-massage, a tumbling.  A sleep.

I lean in.  Becoming a shaping of waves – reaching, aching and out of breath.  Receiving the blast and caress.  The force and the flow.  I listen, I feel.  I am drowning, aware of each inch of my skin.  I am falling in flight, my organs engorged.  I am musically shaped as a man.