wandering through my own writings, and stumbling on things that surprise me. This seems (to me) to be some of the best writing I’ve ever done, something I can’t imagine being able to do, something I’m not sure I ever did – the bewilderments – something I can’t imagine doing again. Thought I’d share…I wonder who/what I might be.
Scattered experience. Over the past 90 days my life has been characterized by necessities. Scrambling to find sustainable work, scrambling to keep up with coursework. Scrambling to assist as best I can in the psychological health and stability of my family, children. Scrambling to keep my head above water in grief, loss, confusion, self-care and healing.
In these currents – their exhaustion, their novelty, their large and compounded emotions of helplessness, anger, frustration, anguish and fear, their realms of bewilderment – my last ditch scramble has been to note, feel, soak and pay attention to as much as I can, filling notebooks full of journalings, lists, to-dos, scenarios, something like prayers or wishes, something like tomes of notes intended for bottles and no one / anyone. My best last chance seemed to be to try to MAP things – maintain access to whole regions of variant experience, conflicts, desperations and strengths, plans and disappointments, resumes and rejections, therapy appointments and dependents-events, multiple employment schedules and deadlines, and so on…SCRAMBLING…but at least with some scattered semblance of shapes and places and events…
Recently reading through Joshua Cohen’s Four New Messages, I encountered a story in which the story is being drafted simultaneous to the story being the story of the difficulty of its drafting, messages to mother or father about how stuck and stunted the process of managing multiple lives (or roles), composing fiction, processing life, and maintaining the presence of mind to embody created worlds and encountered worlds...living.
It is curious to me that the intention of “Opening the Hand” : (“All of this is to say that I plan a series of posts that will be intensely personal, self-revelant, my own way of reaching toward my experience, my being, and selecting language with which to mark it down – for re-memory, re-cognition, observation, reception, attention, account. These are journal entries, frankly. They are what I have to write. I am calling them “Mapping the Meaning.” Since I know very few of you personally, in your whole presence, I expect confession, inquiry, and its self-circular expression to genuinely interest or benefit very few of you. For me, it is writing with an open hand“). should end up resulting in the very scrambled scatter that, indeed, my current lived experience is. Where I had hoped constructing, reflecting, composing and attending might result in some fabricating shape – some possibly effective mapping that might help me feel a “place” or “terrain” in which I am existing – provide a possible view of a larger whole.
It hasn’t worked out that way. As I’ve delved into depths of my history, experience, perceptions as cracked open by the recent grief, loss and confusion; as I’ve purposed more presentness with my children and family and friends; as I’ve filled my days with job searches – statements of my identity, skills, education and worth; as I’ve learned new labor and institutions and expectations; as I’ve rewritten survivable budgets, forged opportunities to keep some semblance of self-care about what I want to be about (art, literature, learning, meaning); as I’ve sought to stay fit, attend to my body; as I’ve filled pockets of moments with music and writings that nurture or comfort me… things have NOT found any design… but are scrambled, scattered, disparate, paradoxical, bewildering. For the notebooks of language I have emitted during these months… there is hardly a snippet that makes literary sense, is bloggable, expresses. Thus the erratic entries, the confusing sentiments, the uncertainty and unknowing…
For now… here are the texts I’m hanging on…
Hopefully something will form… for now, scattered blurbs and reports, survival and bewilderment… SCRAMBLING…
I am become a Rural Carrier Associate for the U.S. Postal Service.
I pursued employment with the USPS thinking it might provide some security of longevity, tradition (over 200 years of continuous service, public benefit, innovation and survival), government benefits and programs…a service and income that might meet the needs my children and I have developed for something like stability and sustenance.
I was wrong about most of those things.
I’m almost guaranteed one day of work a week (or whenever the regular carrier is unable to work) – no benefits, guaranteed abuse and damage to our one essential family vehicle, grave limitations on supplemental work (not supposed to seek employment with anyone that is a client of USPS – in other words, anyone that purchases postage – greatly delimiting the options / NOR taking any work between the hours of 6 AM and 6 PM when I might be needed to fill in) – and, a grand service NOT supported or secured by the US Government since 1970 (no tax dollars toward USPS!).
On the other hand. It clearly satisfies core ethics and values I have carried through my entire life and its pursuits – Meaning. Relationships. Communication. Tangible Information. The Betweens:
Music. Poetry. Religion. Philosophy. Psychology. Bookselling (bibliotherapy). Marriages. Research and reference. Parenting. Writing. Anthropology. Semiotics. Neuroscience. Embodiment. Systems Theory. Language. Ekphrasis. Communications. Information Science…
what (it seems) has fueled them all has been a passion, fascination, curiosity and intense desire to search into, understand, sense
HOW HUMAN BEINGS MAKE AND SHARE MEANING
NOW: I’m a tangible link in the chain. A node or circuit in the web of transmission.
Divorce summons, a lover’s plaint, news of a long-lost classmate or childhood friend, money for a meal, Christmas gifts for grandchildren, links between parents and children, carrier of bills and obligations that alter our lives – invitations to weddings, announcements of deaths, retirements, coupons and births, biological specimens and literary manuscripts, art works, seeds, music, books, clothes and toys…
from here to there, there to here
how often I have rushed to the mailbox,
how often I have posted letters,
how often the holding of a living personal document has made a difference in my life…
These are what I think of as I dig through bins, collocate numbers, sort and file, casing mail, and rattle and drag my way through any weather, mood or condition to securely, confidentially and certainly deliver the mail…
In a great meanwhile…
…after three years working from home like a dream – researching, academics, creative writing and art-making; love with a tremendous spouse, and a generous and flexible availability to my amazing children…
it is now turning into months of spouse-lessness, unemployment, harried by survival efforts, sustenance, hours upon hours of therapy, grief, anger, puzzlement, bewilderment, and wonder…
CHANGE
A sustained period of invaluable interactions and dad-ness will be swallowed up bouncing wash-boarded gravelly roads placing packages and envelopes in sturdy boxes of farms. Fighting for moments with children, opportunities to claim that I am here for them. To study. To write. To read or rest or be…to grocery and launder, housekeep, to play.
Relocating yet again a sense of home.
For our part – four kiddos, their mothers (and their partner/spouses) and I (and mine) – we have survived, adapted, adjusted and altered much in the past two decades. Time/little time, retail/academia/schlepping/poverty/art – proven resilient, pliable, innovative, possible – committed or interdependent on one another and have formed and become, ached and angered, wept and worried, laughed and lost, suffered and rejoiced and survived and thrived…
…continued…(“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”)
and we’re a pretty wonderful, remarkable, heart-stopping, difficult bunch!
A biological, literate, artistic, psychological, cultural, spiritual, relational, musical, playful, emotional, terrified, successful, wounded, smart, creative, clinical, authentic, unusual, “awkward,” bunch of “weirdies” (kids’ favorite terms)
and I hope and I trust
SURE OF ONE ANOTHER
…ever subject to change…
but together.
link to previous:
suggest reading accompanied by : Home Again by Keith Kenniff
“we live in accumulations of the actual / with so little understanding”
I believe that it is possible to make stories out of anything, with words. Even wordless ones.
Stories on the move, within movement, perhaps even moving.
Accumulation and erosion, not addition and subtraction, multiples or divides – not mathematics, simply or complex.
In relations – part of related systems of relations, related further on, in, out – there are no statics, numbers, letters – even hypothetically. When you fix one you’ve simply entered another system of relations relating to other fixed (or agreed-upon) relations, lifeless but for you. Until employed. Then your letter, number, static sign or symbol dissolves right back into what it came from – the roiling motion of temporal patterns and relations – change processing itself.
The meanings meander through like liquids. Each part spilling its own glass. Watch it flow, divert, tumble and pool. Percolate. Evaporate. Stories.
Describing them, no matter how many points of view or entry, how many semiotic systems employed, internal or external – observation is evaluation, almost objectively subjective – merely mean a story, embodying an absorbing and evaporative spilling of change. Eddies a bit, branches and drips, absorbs here and there, ever morphing form and content.
I can only ever tell you – in this system of systems of relations, this language – what I do not know.
The fathers, the mothers, their partners and pasts, the living of nine children to this moment – refuse to be snap-shotted still, photographed, imagined, or defined. They are unknowns, rife with variables, and related. Related to relations and related systems of relations related further out, in, on…
Genuinely incomprehensible. Evaporating almost as soon as precipitate, incalculable with options and openness – far more than this system can relate.
The fathers love their wives and women, their sons and their daughters, and sometimes it’s even perceived that way. The women, mothers, partners, also love – and everyone’s love is conditioned and conditional. Givers, receivers, assertive, supportive, neglectful, abusive, indulgent, and free at a price. Relational acts in related systems of relations – addressors and addressees, perceived and perceiving, at once.
Each its own glass spilling. Each its own refilled. The sharing of endless waters.
Shagg dribbles fluid ice-cold onto a young one’s burn. Rather than soothe it stings. Recoils. Mother in attempting to quench a thirst, drowns it instead. A child spills that all might see, might hear, might feel. Instead it’s absorbed deftly and quickly – instinctively – by inanimate terry cloth, a dish-towel, a bathrobe.
A possiblitiy of endless supply, of infinite, is foreign to all but dreams. We know nothing unpolluted or immeasurable. We must not write what we know. Nothing there but an emptying glass.
Instead, perhaps, to offer and receive – these fluids, this language – of unknown origin and imperceivable limit – spilling together compounding toward stories. Even as it spills. Even uncontrollable and ill-perceived.
Families of stories. Write what you do not know.
The story to now…
and part the sixth…
6
“I propose description as a method of invention and of composition. Description…is phenomenal rather than epiphenomenal, original, with a marked tendency toward effecting isolation and displacement, that is toward objectifying all that’s described and making it strange…Description then is apprehension, ‘the act or power of perceiving or comprehending’ and a motivating anticipatory anxiety, expectant knowledge…the very writing down seems to constitute the act of discovering it…but also and problematically an act of interpreting it.”
-Lyn Hejinian-
Hybrids.
What is “normal” or “traditional,” what forms remain (for long) in a universe of chaos ever emerging and expending? Convergences, then. Bloodline here, bloodline there, cross it through and pull it taut. Cultural collage.
The parents lead the way, though not as masters, more experiments – of brother linked to sister linked to brother step toward brothers veined by half with sister same as brother. Not personal or by choice until fixed in the same installation. Could be called art, called family.
Other halves and steps by three with partners of their own yet bleeding half their blood. Where are they? A sitcom cast of lesbians and addicts, the wealthy and the poor, the liberal, constrained. Kaleidoscoping styles and beliefs – “it takes a village” – and they’ve settled one.
Working well enough – a jalopy needing constant tinkers. It most assuredly breaks down. Imagine society. Or the size of it, extended. How many grandparents can a child acquire? Its fine for rituals like births and holidays – multiplying spoils – but where does one belong? With whom? Family-by-affinity? Reunions become a game of pick-up-sticks or jacks and marbles (except with persons). Arbitrary circles depending on usable space.
The family tree she drew for therapy’s a forest. Cottonwoods and pines, baobab, bonsai. An oak thrown in for measure, and barely identified shrubs. What base is there to touch?
Parliament versus monarchy, troubling the court of appeals. With manager-types and generals, gurus, debaters and clowns. Stir in deconstruction and some faith for emotive stew. It’s a kinky chain of command, yet all are bound by it. Children vying a vote.
And if infected by the peacemaker-pleaser-gene, the torsion becomes a complicated interpretive dance. A surplus of baggage with all the due fees. A lot to saddle on young.
They’re resilient. Navigating democracy and other octagonal squares -awkward parallelograms – never quite losing site of Atlantis. Lost kingdom, utopian, buried deep under vast emotional sea, at times nearly glimpsing a spire. At least some strange stirring. Dreams of a large enough house. Solving nonsymmetrical fusion equations. These children are smart.
If an artist paints the picture she performs mixed-media collage with inks and clay and dozens of paints, incorporates cloth and wire and found objects with hopes enough resin or wax will contain it. Hold it all fast. And still let everything – everyone – be seen. The composer creates an erratic symphony – arrhythmic with regular dissonance, whelming moments dramatic with harmony and occasional measures of quiet resolutions. The scientist keeps figuring on emergent chaos, open-ended systems like weather and complexly variable algorithms. Author writes it down and edits, erases as much as inscribes, constantly losing track.
Each makes their own scribbled lines, overlaid. Its sketchy and messy and thick. Kids jumping ropes, fingering string figures, string theory, Spiderman-webs. It gets made.
to browse the gist of things…a little where-its-coming-from-where-its-going, start here:
otherwise, here’s the newest particles:
5
There being always more sides to the stories.
Building blocks of broken bones.
Families at bone-splintering nearness. Whether abusive or conditional; assertive, supportive, overindulgent or neglectful. The pressures in an atom wiggle and hum, each entity squeezed and redirected into another, without foregoing elemental ingredients.
Why drawing so close hurts so much, compounding all the bruisings.
Take seven shattered anatomies and circle them into a hug. Ouch, oof, shrieks and tears. Sounding like sport or war. Ahem. The game is designed to figure out where it’s safe to rest and heal. Together. Every press accentuates wound, but may also set the fracture.
The littered trail. Fragments, chips, and joints. Ankles, ribcage, skulls. The longer held together, dwindles the percentage unharmed. Increases deformation, reformation, and strength in the bindings. History makes the call. Families get made this way.
Alpha male’s left-side stress-fractures filigree – he brings them in close to the mama. Pain ensues globally, harder gripping cuts and tears her. Dislodging hip and rib, she wails back, threatening to come undone, wrapping and withholding fragile loins. Glass-cracked between the eyes evincing wince, he lumbers to the bottle – an anesthetic, fog-inducing ICU.
Boys pummel and cling on trampoline. Superheroes blasting at their foes, setting right the world. Divine ninja tricksters, eluding all blows, fending sacred space from viral intrusion. Morphing Jekyll into Hyde. Two-against-one turns to three-on-three, searing yelps and hollered rage compound the fractures and spread the lesions until a fuming heap of shame remains.
Emotion rivers throughout a system. Elaborate table-game of chance, every draw altering rules. And conditions. One discretion cheats them all.
Resistance (fear) and just revenge. Creating hypotheses – infinite dis-ease.
Tuck them in with tender warmth. Dabbing sores with salve. Reconnoitre, reassemble, holding court, calling assembly. The luxury is not repeating childhood, home is not a corridor of labs. Parent positioned now as doctor; infected all the same.
Blood is issue, possible transfusion, tearing tissues. Don’t ignore, curing is a share. having invented them in this inventive world, they must also be wriggled through. Calls for help, from any corner, equate a demand.
The family as quarantine.
To serve and protect.
Seek. Assist.
Quarantine.
Sanctuary.
Sanitarium.
Touch base.
Proceed.
Pieces that precede can be read in order here: FAMILY: A FICTION
section three closing thus….
They build a monument, calling it travel. Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum. Humans tend to revert to familiar. Habitude of experience. With no experience, alteration comes to bear. Predictable as weather.
No one’s leaving home.
Other words coming to mind.
4
Resistance.
There is, it seems, in families, this propensity.
Whatever is said, corrected, even when agreed.
Existing to clarify his spouse – to illuminate and exhibit. In turn, she elucidates him. Providing bases or cause – extrapolates. Siblings arguing each other, united they stand, all as deserters. Seven eventual versions of the parental wake-up blare: AWOL.
It’s good to be king. Graph the assassination attempts – looks like innards of clocks. A searing clap of surprising betrayal each time. Unlike the spurned and necessarily nutrient mother. Shagg proclaiming the law (as devised and developed by nature – read lifegiver/lawgiver “mom” – female coupling nurture and structure within dependency). He handles rebellion, warding attacks and spying the skirmishes, she breeding resentment from ongoing need.
These are general patterns, biologically driven, no symphony the same. With eight keys plus a half, on a twelve-tone scale, the songs recognizable according to differing orders. Typify and characterize. Declare it false.
Scraggydad is nurturing, allowing/confirming resistant responses and recumbent emotions, shame-shirking under her gaze. In other words – as one of them – a remedial complicity. Which she echoes into her drama – the leadership, the guilt, the collapse.
Each wanting to be cradled – rock, paper, scissors style – with an occasional simultaneous Bingo. However unlikely, it’s what probability’s for.
Thus every level its lingo. Select a word (sex or heaven, death or boy) and provide a taxonomy of related meanings from the eldest parent through littlest child. It comes clear. There are altering thesauri of usage.
Family as a game of Scrabble on the board of Life, each settling Catan. With beeps and whistles and a slew of avatars.
A technique known as mapping provides lay of the land, similar to a geneologist’s tree applied to the present. A thing to be explored or verified. Corrected through each journey. In several dictions.
The family edition.
“all attempts at interpretation must abandon any pretence at direct understanding and concentrate on second degree understanding.”
-Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow-
FAMILY A FICTION (the story to now)
Section 3:
3
Girl-princess-daughter, her experience as only. Not quite true collectively, there being also steps- and halves- another, older, never cohabitant, but still. The members were stacked. Against or for, another matter. Depending.
The younger, caged one, doesn’t eat. Is self-restricting. Flutters like a bird. Her brain engulfs her self, a genetic trait. Possessed also, in some measure, top-down. Each with their own rendition. One definition of family.
Cohabitants. Genetics. Affinities. Their opposite. Relations. Some, after all, being half-habitants, some post-, some occasional-, some rare-. Or endangered. Or in transitions.
If there is a nucleus, it is Scraggly and Self-aware, both co- and in-habitants constantly, at least according to them. In the minds of their children. Whenever they were. Adding an unknowable “if.”
The grown and growing exhibit it. The three on their own. Three nearly capable, at least two of which: disinterested. This is not about them, not a descriptive analysis. Maybe more like a song, composing a fugue: each line for itself replete with recurring variations, cringes of dissonance and harmonic highlights. Something like a family, a novel, a history, religion.
Oscillations that swivel near a truth, only to loop and to veer into something more real. Being actual. That is to say, is happening.
Inopportune call and subsequent jail time. Jealousies and rivalries, differentials of power. Stirred with a paste of abuse and traces of –isms. Coupled to all the unpredictably brave accomplishments. That sort of thing. The life of a species.
With no one sure how to tell it. Who solos, who’s chorus. And when. Where hardly matters in webs. Or does it? Authoritative nights at the table, father propounding to a coven of illumined and down-turned faces – forged not of incantations, but synergies of private networks. Ubiquitous strands of escape. Virtual tunneling. Not to mention insolence. Or simply vanishing within. Daddy lost in thought. Or mum diagnosing (she doesn’t like to think it that way). Seldom either/or.
They build a monument, calling it travel. Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum. Humans tend to revert to familiar. Habitude of experience. With no experience, alteration comes to bear. Predictable as weather.
No one’s leaving home.
Other words coming to mind.
Okay, here goes. I’ve been diddling my way into another attempt at a longer go of writing, and today have decided, (largely by the courage of company – Tocksin has also begun posting portions of a novelistic go) to post a few rudimentary fragments. Up until yesterday the working title was simply FICTION. I’ve written 3-5 chapters over the past month or two and in seeking an orientation for the work certain symbols and recurrences have led to an inquiry. “Write about what you want to know” Lance Olsen says, and I can see I’m searching after something in these words. The epigraphs that shoot me on are the following…
“Reality is the motif”
-Wallace Stevens-
“The universe was the glue that held him together”
-Jonathan Lethem-
“I only care about fiction that raises the question of what fiction is…”
-R. M. Berry-
“The line is only a shadow cast by one (memory or fiction) over the other (fiction or memory). Once I place memory into language, memory becomes a rumor that makes room for uncertainty. Memory slips into fiction but then fiction becomes memory once again in an/other way…It is difficult to separate fiction from memory, which is different from separating truth from lying.”
-Doug Rice-
and so it begins…
For Orthodox Christian Men Discerning A Vocation
Capturing Moments in Life Infrequently Since 1995
Fine Artist
output
An Independent Non-Discriminatory Platform With No Religious, Political, Financial, or Social Affiliations
Gospel Word Gardening in the Age of Decay
Polysemic Stupor 