Tag: novel

Neuroses : or, why not begin again….?

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

Neuroses: or, Dynamite Walls Contain Us

– a self-help novel (what great novel isn’t?) –

            They said he, well, those who knew him said.  Really it should be “they” – not “ him.”  Inclusive.  “They” (neurobiologists) say neuroses can increasingly be viewed and investigated as ancient and useful survival strategies for our race.  Perhaps misapplied.  (Fragment, consider revising).

How does one decide between active and passive?  Betwixt present, future, past when creating, recounting or telling stories?  You’d think future, past, present, accordingly.  But there’s the aversion.  Aversion to active and present because it’s “suggested” : by programs – institutional and academic, technical and authoritative – software, hardware, “officiated.”  Machinated and conventional.  In stead, he’s drawn (attracted to, magnetized, compelled) toward past and passive – the un-recommended and untoward.  Why?  “They” – the humans.  The neurotics.  The ones that qualify.  Can qualify.  Will, do qualify.  Neuroses = something humans can (be/do/are).

The “they.”  Contained by equal and opposite neuroses: when this is evident, maybe we (or it) is called: “love.”  The balance of tension.  The incorporate.  I don’t like the rules.  I am predisposed.  (Fragment, reconsider).  I’m aware of my predisposition.  Therefore.

She.  He.  They.  Dynamite walls…contain us.  Or not.  (Fragments, reconsider).  The sentence/sentencing tells you – active, passive, future.

I want to tell a story in this way:  sometimes it happened; sometimes it happens; sometimes it keeps happening;  sometimes it might happen; sometimes it will.  Pause, breathe.  You are human – you never can tell.  There will always (perhaps) be too many contingencies, contexts, effects, probabilities, possibilities, variables.

A friend addresses the “four fundamentals of metaphysics” (oxymoron) – the Known-Known; the Known-Unknown; the Unknown-Known, and the Unknown-Unknown.  Makes sense.  Doesn’t.  Think about it:  we are possible, we are already, we have…

She was like, he said.  I said.  The 4th-grader wrote exactly what the adult said “in his head.”  Who could I be?  Perhaps the “he” – to contradict the known – (of the 4th grader).  She/it/he was correct.  I/you/we – were/are/will-be – exposed…via empathy, familiarity – the all that’s strange and true.

We are.  We were.  I am.  She is.  She will have been was.  As I.  As you, as we, will be, have been, was.

And LOVE.  And BE.  And.  And.  And.  This will ALWAYS be a NOVEL (i.e. some timeless combination of the known and unknown – what is, was, could be – living realities unknown as realities).

The she, the he, the they.  The you, the I, the us.  Love.  Hope.  Despair.  Being.  (Fragments – consider revising).

  • Dynamic walls contain us –

And how dynamic those walls!  Which shows the self-helping nature of understanding : knowledge comprehended and integrated…assists.  Assists insofar as efforts are being made at (or toward) making sense.  In other words – when each “individual” comes to realize that the containers are dynamic and uncertain (i.e. active and inter-, ex-changing permeable moment-to-moment[1] – altering apparent boundaries) – it will help “make sense of” why an individual’s “identity” is experienced as so very fluid and variable and shifty.

“Just the facts ma’am.”  Precisely.  (Perhaps).

In fact, no one knows the facts any more than we understand the properties or structures of fluids…of water…[2]  [There’s no footnote there – just a fascination by the conventional procedure of indicating a foot[3] by an elevated marking].  Public agreements – methods for maneuvering a world in concord, together – a gathering-space – endlessly intriguing).

I gesture.  You acknowledge.  (Fragments, reconsider – some conventional-mutual agreements {keep writing “arguments” where “agreements” supposedly goes}, commands/suggestions/authorizings).  I look longer.  Then am hooked.  You ARE curious, novel, strange, fascinating, unique.  AND familiar, recognizable, similar, probable, regular/regulated, assimilable, banal.  Strange AND familiar, novel AND banal, fascinating AND tiresome, conventional AND innovative – all at one go (when I pay attention).  I love you.  I am tired, not tired.

And so it is – the story goes – a familiar plot made interesting via details of circumstance and style.  The story goes (fragment, considered).

I am drawn to you.  BY you, in relation to.  Dynamite walls created interactively, actively, intertwined.  Intermingled and intertwined – intermingling (via gaze, touch, sound and sense) intertwining (via molecules, atoms, particles and waves, genes, movement) particles thereof, actions of particles of particles of = Intertwingled (-ing).  So to “speak.”

Traditionally (convention + repetition over time and selection (“history”)) “neuroses” have been publicly agreed to be “pathologies” – that is “disease-words,” irregularity-actions, abnormality-beliefs.  No longer!  NOW (perhaps?) the disease-describing (INscribing) words are themselves mutual banalities (thank you social sciences, relativism, anthropology + archaeology coupled to psychology/art/philosophy/biology/chemistry/medicine and…

“Inter-“ is useful for this – disciplinary/-mingled/-twingled/-spersed.

As the story goes: actively, passively, possibly.

She + He + It.  Sheheit…excrement with a Southern drawl.  The allure of things.  (Fragment reconsidered).  The taboo and grotesque, the extreme and revolting – and we’re right back to the banal.

Everyday.  The other, (the one eminently important to me, the neurotic) expressed emotion, attachment, attraction and bondedness toward (with) me.

A story began (in this case – BEGINS)

I -too-experienced (felt, dealt, smelt) interest toward / investment in – “her” strangeness (uniqueness and novelty, surprise and specificity) and familiarity (comfort, belonging, accord, comprehensibility) – THEREFORE – neuroses in reaction (alchemy, chemistry, biology, engineering, imagination) – RELATION – “love.”

Successful (“effective”?) interaction – an experience some call “power”(ful) [syn. compatibility, attraction, lust, desire, intimacy, connectivity – convergence – (relationship)].  WORDS.

We have yet to surmise, investigate, explore, hypothesize LANGUAGE ITSELF (i.e. modes or methods of conventional [publicly, mutually agreed] interactive, SHARED expression/impression tactics, activities, gestures, contexts and contents).

Now I stop (writing) in order to read (engage recognition + innovation – “learn”).

Sex is central.  Sex and perspective (in other words, “desire” and “belief”).

Easy to dub it all doublespeak, excepting that it’s the somewhat singular communicative way we humans go about storying our experiences…via dialogue, convention and sensation (conversation) – through one mediated path or another.

[1] -10 to the 10th power

[2] Footnote

[3]note

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

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

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

Potent Selections from Vacation Reading

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

“I wondered what indeed it meant about me that I was so set against the notion of convention that I should attack it.  So, I replaced the dream with the novel, stripping the stories of my dreams of any real meaning, but causing the form of them to mean everything.”

“…the gap between the subject of enunciation and the subject of enunciating not only failed to appear to me as a place of entry, but also failed to register as something I might elide.  For me, there was no gap, as there is no gap for anyone.”

P Everett 1

“…generally, people are only inclined to speak of the past with those they believe will somehow not only share some commonality, but who will also be disposed to exhibiting sympathy.”

“Is a photograph always present tense?  I described them so…better, let the question be, is what is in the photograph always in the present, without a before, without an after?  Of course, it is.  And isn’t that actually you in the picture?”

ennuyeux

“On Ludwig Boltzman’s tombstone is carved: S=k. LogW.  S is the entropy of a system, k represents Boltzman’s Constant, and W is a measure of the chaos of a system, essentially the extent to which energy is dispersed in the world.  This equation meant little to me as I read of it the first time, but as I considered it I grew excited.  The space between S and W is the space between the living thing in front of me and stuff hidden inside beyond my observation and comprehension.  It raises the question:  How many ways can the parts of a thing be rearranged before I can see a difference?  How many ways can the atoms and molecules of my hand move and recombine before I realize that something is wrong?  Thinking about it scared me.  Certainly, I understood that natural events symbolize collapse into chaos and that events are motivated by dissolution, but the idea of such subversive and invisible change moved me.  I likened it to observing the minds of others.”

P Everett 2

ootheca

“Ezra Pound said, ‘Every word must be charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’  Let it be the case then.  But words need no help from anyone.  Bet thew ords kneeknow hellip freeum heinywon.  Context, story, time, place – don’t these work like Bekins men, packing the words like so many trunks?  But finally, words are not cases to be packed at all, but solid bricks (and, of course, like a brick, even a word’s atoms are not motionless).”

“We do not give the creature reality enough credit, choosing to see it sitting out there as either a construct of ours or an infinitely regressing cause for the trickery of our senses.  But I claim here that the most important thing I have learned is that reality has a soul, reality is conscious of itself and of us, and further is not impressed by us or our attempts to see it.  In fact, we see it all the time and don’t know it, perhaps can’t.  It is like love in that way.”

-all quotes by Percival Everett

from his novel, Glyph

Glyph - Everett

Experience, anyway. sector 4

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following being part 4 of the growing mycelium that happens when I’m alone…

if interested, to-date is accreted here
Escher

4

 

Relatively speaking, it will all be over soon.  For some sooner than others, but soon all the same.

 

I’ve seen a lake filled with upright sticks and trees.

 

What’s written on the body dies with it.

 

There are reasons to stay alive.

 

A mysterious pressure arrives with “real.”

 

To think of recounting, embellishment.  A pressure to remain “true.”  Wherefrom do these come?  If I transcribe only facts as they are agreed to – collaborated – I do not accord with “real,” for imagination is always active and participant.  It would be like deleting affect.

Emotion.

And yet.  To consciously create a re-telling – devise a version – something’s different from experiencing’s bricolage.  The positing of author, I-collage, selection of pieces.  The pieces also selecting – opportunities for perception.

Only another experience.  Another form of framing.  A novel utility.

 

I write – construct a world – at times aiming for mimesis, but, as it happens, the interaction required between resources and agency = experience anyway.

 

Telling of my son is never writing him, it’s composing MY.  Which in no way obviates the Other off whom I riff.  Only keeps him discrete from my perception and activates subjectivities for us.  Unless I seek to define or contain – to account for him – ab-straction, object-ify.  Caesura of love: to falsify.

 

Whatever one takes as “real” exerts pressures of false.

 

Demands one set one’s course for “proof” as opposed to “truth” – a demonstration.

 

It’s experience, either way, and a variant sort – the staking-of-real or searching-for-proof sort – joining a demonstration – no less fabric of experiencing than any other, no less interactive or “real,” ever unique.

 

Categories falsify.  And enable.  No matter, still they matter.  I relate to them as things.  As limits and opportunities.  It equals changes.  Equaling experience, anyway.

 

To look toward wife and perceive.  To co-orient agreements.  Perchance to be/have experience to-gether (to gather).  Align what we share in kind.

 

“Real” being what we organize of reality, changing each moment’s notice (before-during-aft each the moment itself) – unlocatable present.  As I collage it (now past tense).

 

I listen to your story, constructed-on-the-run, as it were.  Me too.  Co-being.  I agree as I edit and reform.  Agreements forming knots, not points or solid nodes.  Tangles of perceptions, cast, re-cast, and still wet clay.  The surface never hardens.  When it “seems” there are still seams – a thoroughfare.

 

How we know that we’re alive, or better, “living” – curse the verbal nouns.  There are no steady states – but constructed patterns.  Sane inventions.  At times.  Experience, anyway, “experiencING” – seamingly changeless change.

 

The urge, in writing, to stay.  To thwart or channel flow.  Progression of narrative – a pressure.  Another experience:  the tension of process and now.

 

Why inscribing haunts us with false.  Telling or speaking too.  Even in song, something occurs.  The fluidity cripples and hardens.  We strive to trick it loose.  Account for dangling threads at every touch, but even the threads are intangible.  Change is a force of form.

 

I recall.  To vocalize back or again.  The loop a seductive model.  And I fragment.  The attempt to be impartially partial (or “real”) winds its way through every act.  Acts don’t start and finish, English-infernal-nouning.  To name is to kill it is said.  To stop up beING.  But it seams another example of change, going-on, the ever-activity experiencing.  Why fight back (wards)?

 

Recall: back words?  Assembling experience anew?  Only different (our noticing change) – i.e., experience, anyway.

 

To loop is false, such lovely model.

 

 

 

 

New Fiction: “Experience, anyway.”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing9 Comments

For some time I have been lacking for representation.  Processes and patterns go on, no doubt, but nothing materializes save scattered words, informed thoughts, scholarly papers, and so on.  Spouse says of self: “I need something to shoot for, develop toward, to propel…otherwise I stagnate, repeat…” and I agree with her – I’ve been itching for fiction – a larger project – something to belong to and build while fulfilling responsibilities, learning, parenting, husbanding, being “professional.”  But the pages have been blank.  This morning I began, and it started like this:

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

Experience, anyway.

            And stared at the head of Buddha.  As if literature were whatever could be fitted to symbols.  There were experiences anyway.  Complex goings-on.

He started.  As if starting were the only thing he could do.  He, she, self, other, organism – whatever.  It had begun.  If there were a god, it might know where, but they – for the life of them – could not figure it.  Not literature.

And for all the anyway-experiences, also.

In other words.

They stitched and thatched and wove, tore through, ripped out, clipped and pasted and tagged.  For all the cross-hatching and shading, foregrounding and back-, no image came through.  Or if it did, it never matched.

Representation.  Representamen – for a more mystical suggesting.  Arcane.  Obtuse.  That which is metaphor’d.  That which signals, indices, or forms.  That which functions.  Which can be acted on, or with, within, without.  Functioning ephemera.  To latch.

And undo.  It passes.  Lock on – decipher.  Pass around the room.  Agreeing by argument, it becomes.  Difference.  Evaporate.

The head of the Buddha is shaped out of stone.  More likely poured, cast.  More likely art – official.  What is artificial? – But human construction of world.  That radical deflect.  That begin.  In symbol.

At a certain time (constructed, invent), cross-purposes : experience.  Anyway, perceived.  So aroused – appreciation, cognition, desire, belief – purchased (bought, fallen-for, faith-in) : acquired.  Experience, anyway – head in corner on bookshelf knick-knack antiques, money (that wasn’t there), and taken away.

Evaluation = meaning.  Interpretation.  Somewhere whereabouts and how, or when – experience, anyway.  Action occurs.  It’s started.

Writing’s Toxin

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing2 Comments

Barthes - Novel

“Is it possible to make a Narrative (a Novel) out of the Present?  How to reconcile – dialecticize – the distance implied by the enunciation of writing and the proximity, the transportation of the present experienced as it happens?  (The present is what adheres, as if your eyes were glued to a mirror).  Present: to have your eyes glued to the page; how to write at length, fluently (in a fluent, flowing, fluid manner) with one eye on the page and the other on ‘what’s happening to me?'”

“The novelistic ‘drive’ (the love of the material) is not directed toward my past.  It’s not that I don’t like my past; it’s rather that I don’t like the past (perhaps because it rends the heart), and my resistance takes the form of the mist i spoke of – a kind of general resistance to rehearsing, to narrating what will never happen again (the dreaming, the cruising, the life of the past).  The affective link is with the present, my present, in its affective, relational, intellectual dimensions = the material I’m hoping for (cf. ‘to depict whom I love’).”

“This is actually to go back to that simple and ultimately uncompromising idea that ‘literature’ (because, when it comes down to it, my project is ‘literary’) is always made out of ‘life.’  My problem is that I don’t think I can access my past life; it’s in the mist, meaning that its intensity (without which there is no writing) is weak.  What is intense is the life of the present, structurally mixed (there’s my basic idea) with the desire to write it.  The ‘Preparation’ of the Novel therefore refers to the capturing of this parallel text, the text of ‘contemporary,’ concomitant life.”

“Now, although at first glance making a novel out of present life looks difficult to me, it would be wrong to say that you can’t make writing out of the Present.  You can write the Present by noting it – as it ‘happens’ upon you or under you (under your eyes, your ears) – In this way, we at last come in sight of the double problem, the key to which organizes the Novel – on the one hand, Notation, the practice of ‘noting’: notatio.  On what level is it situated?  The level of ‘reality’ (what to choose), the level of the ‘saying’ (what’s the form, what’s the product of Notatio)?  What does this practice involve in terms of meaning, time, the instant, the act of saying?  Notatio instantly appears at the problematic intersection between a river of language, of uninterrupted language – life, both a continuous, ongoing, sequenced text and a layered text, a histology of cut-up texts, a palimpsest – and a sacred gesture: to mark life (to isolate: sacrifice, scapegoat, etc.)”
“On the other hand, how to pass from Notation, and so from the Note, to the Novel, from the discontinuous to the flowing (to the continuous, the smooth)?  For me, the problem is psychostructural because it involves making the transition from the fragment to the nonfragment, which involves changing my relationship to writing, which involves my relationship to enunciation, which is to say the subject that I am: fragmented subject (=a certain relationship) or effusive subject (a different relationship)…a Novel-Fragment…”

The Heart and its Branches

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces2 Comments

“I do not want to know about the human heart.  I do not desire to speak at all about those indwelling, intimate reaches of the heart in which anguish is an undiminishing personal interrogation, much less to analytically enfetter those reaches.

I have the sense, the good sense, the decency, to have nothing to say.”

“Sick of all the you be’s?  Well, what do you say, you be you and I’ll be me?  What do you say?  We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead.  We can sleep while an old woman twangs away on a bad piano while rain keeps time in the empty street.  We can listen to and count the closings of a child’s fist as he tries to catch a fruit fly.  We can listen to the whistling of the bombs.  We can listen to each other.

I do not want to know about the human heart.”

“I am not a man of science.  I am not proficient in any branch of nature study.  I do not know the difference between an amphibian and a reptile.  I have no yearning for hard knowledge about the hard world.  And yet I have no affinity for anything spiritual.  In fact, I have a pronounced, conspicuous, and striking absence of an affinity for anything spiritual.

I know but one hard thing about the hard world and it is this:  from the sum of all theories, as arranged in accordance with ascertained facts, we make a few assumptions, that we have actually ascertained facts, that we are actually here to ascertain them, and that there is actually a here.”

-Percival Everett-

A Complexity of Signs

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces4 Comments

“I had another friend who was so certain that the only way he could identify himself was through language and further by losing himself as object within language that he lost his mind, possibly within language as well, but I never knew what the hell he was talking about.”

– Percival Everett by Virgil Russell-

and highly recommended