Tag: peace

An Opinionated Review

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Uncategorized6 Comments

Eat.  Pray.  Love.

 

On a wonderful jaunt to our public library yesterday, my wife spotted a movie based on a mega-bestselling memoir that she’d been curious to see since its release a couple of years ago.  We checked it out and viewed it last night in hopes of a light, relaxing fare to happy us toward slumber.

It was excruciating.  My first reaction was – can a person’s biography truly resemble such a cliché’d American self-realization mythology?  Basically a woman goes on a journey away from her responsibilities to others to “find” or “heal” herself, in the process (and apparently justifiably since it delivers her to a goal of peace, happiness, pleasure and love with a seasoning of spirituality) wrecking others’ lives and forgiving herself for it, ending in the arms of a handsome foreigner on a tropical island with some standard religious “truths” in tow.

Here are things I realized about myself:

I am suspicious of personal pleasure that causes others pain.

I am oh-so-glad and grateful that I grew up in a reserved Western culture with Continental philosophy and theologies at its roots.  I much prefer battling to wisdom and calm through the frenetic and anxiety-ridden vertigo of a convoluted mind ferociously doubting and investigating than through some “be here now” philosophies of higher unities and cosmic accord.  Rather interrogate now than “let go” and “let be.”  I am attached to the workings of our brains and our languages, pestering perception and scrutinizing sense experience with imaginative and skeptical rationales.

I radically doubt “gurus,” “prayer,” “saviors,” and other spiritual or “wholistic” practices of “balance” that accomplish “goals.”  Outcome-based anything feels totalitarian and programmatic and therefore facile to me, as if there were a form or behavior we might fit ourselves to that would lessen the struggle or suffering of “to be.”

The film’s story took a year’s time, replete with life-changing habits of mind and body and some claimed resultant growth.  As if wisdom came from Apple or McDonald’s.  The past was hardly processed, responsibilities released like thoughts during Zen, and no effort to apologize or repair any damage or hurts the main character had caused those close to her along the way (thank goodness no children were involved!).

It was the time-tested failure of the American Dream: do what you want to get yourself comfortable in your own skin (whatever beliefs, illusions and experiences that might seem to require) and everything will be alright in your world.

I simply don’t buy it.  And I won’t.  If we are socially constructed realities (and my point-of-view on the cosmos supports this) then final import is not in a self, but in a system.  Not toward results but a how of processing.  Not a personal calm or pleasantness but a social accord.

The film made me terrifically thankful for scrutiny and doubt, fervent self-questioning in light of surroundings, and the “wisdom of no escape.”  It just goes on.

For what it’s worth,

here lies a steaming pile of my opinions.

N Filbert 2012

Another Pause, Another Someday

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

“Words give clothing to hide our nakedness”

–Susan Howe–

“But a word is a bottomless pit”

–Lyn Hejinian–

And then it arrives, unexpectedly, another gap.  She sees a magician in bright jester’s garb, seated on a branch in a tree.  Amid the traffic.  Amid a swarm of bees, of thrumming crows and starlings.  A bat lies in labored breathing on the sidewalk.

Lightning- and Lady- bugs.

Like that, like both.

There is no goal to it in the beginning.  At first.  The seconds’ glow catches you off guard.  “What was that?” neon spot moving in the night.  Imperceptible polka-dotted red creeping carefully over your toe.  Structures pause.  Structures moment.  When realized, when you bring your own accident: awareness.

What pressures turns out to be necessity.  Of deadline, of assignment, of transactional fulfillment – relationship or vocation, even health.  Without apparent choice.  Or ever so long ago.  Why markings called parentheses are shields.  What gives pause.  And stays the pressuring.  For the moment.

An extended kiss.

A lapse in volume.

An ignored alarm.

You find yourself there : (YOU).

The rest of the world lining up, encroaching, exerting itself, themselves, your other selves, against the slender boundaries, the slick curving walls – they can’t be climbed, nor be toppled, only inverted )if you accept the pressures(, or erased as if they’d never happened.  Become brackets.  Prison versus asylum (in its native safety-seeking sense).

(YOU)?  )YOU(?  [YOU]?  ]YOU[?

            Now and then.  Another pause.  Another Sabbath.  A so-called rest.  Time is not the issue (as duration).  Time is at issue in its momentary absence.  Glancing the lightning-bug, bird-call, ladybug feeling out the stem.

“Another pause” with pressures all around.  Expectations or chores.  But no one calling, not this now.  Last week too, unexpected, unprepared, cage door left awry, or finding key in hand.  Parentheses.  And then you sleep that active way we call “rest.”  For a moment.  You make, for the joy of making, or not.  Either way is pleasure.  Or pleasant at the most.

Such as now, another pause, this day, another Someday that arrived.

THANK YOU AND AWARDS FOR ALL – it’s long, but please read – it’s directed at YOU!

On By NW FilbertIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Acknowledgement and Re-cognition

Lately there’s been a rash of occasions in which I’ve been requested to tell things about myself (my wife would immediately note the choice of nouns as descriptor and tack on “well, that’s one way to look at it” i.e. as irritant, possible disease, discomfort – a “rash”).

I’ve noticed that discomfort.  Say I’m elated to have a poem accepted somewhere, or receive these lovely and encouraging blogging awards in WordPress, each joy arriving along with these little nettles: “please provide two paragraphs of biography,” or “tell us about yourself,” “list seven things about yourself your readers probably don’t know” and so on.

And I desire to tackle it all poetically, as fiction, an invention (which perhaps I think it actually is : “self-perspective” blah blah blah)…

…and yet…

Why are we writing or sharing recipes or art in the first place?  What is that urge?

To express, perhaps – we feel aburst with something and want relief, to press it out…into where?  why viewable?  readable?  hearable? physical?  For whom?

For ourselves, we might say, some more objective, ab-stracted processing of what goes on in us as we struggle to live?  Okay.  But, again, why do we share it?  Click the keys and hit “send” or “publish” or “post”?  Why not leave it all on our desks, in our journals, our notebooks, as undeveloped film and private files?

 

Maybe we write to discover, to create, pass along information, simply verbalize…I agree.  But also – why not just read?  We’ll never compass it all, even without adding another jot or image.  And if we’re paraphrasing experience as an exercise in knowing – echo – why share it?  Why book?  Why picture?  Why avail?

My guess is that, whether I like it or not (about myself, about being a social human critter, about existing) we all of us make/use signs, marks and gestures in order to engage.  In fact we must and we need to.  To acknowledge and be acknowledged; to process and join the process;  to have our being validated, even to ourselves, which still requires another.

I find that many of the blogs and their creators I have come so much to value are likewise reticent, withdrawn, coiled in a very unique, particular and special veil of language and machinery, cybernetic cyberspace…a safety of at least felt and imagined control over what re-presents us in our world, an edited voice, or bodiless pattern of thought.  Where we feel some level of risk-management and damage-control.

My wife was recently bullied in a small claims court case.  Last year one of my children was bullied on a walk home from school.  In both cases, I was enraged.  Almost uncontrollably vehement at what I perceived as injustice, depersonalization, predatory victimization, intimidation and abuse of power (etc.) I quickly activate into activist, I do things, strike back, strike out, and defend.  As she talked me down through this recent event, my beloved spouse asked me what it might feel like to come to my own defense in that way?  To be incensed at being ignored as a person, a voice, a being?  To say “no, you don’t get to do that to me” as if I were just as valuable as her, as our children?

WHAM.

I could hardly imagine such a scenario.  My instincts have defended me in fright or danger.  I’ve escaped, avoided or saved myself in andrenalin-rushed bravado or terror, but never really exhibited courage for myself, or because of my personally estimated worth.  Billions of graves, agnosticism, “life-happens-and-then-you-die” awareness along with saturations of accounts of wars and their rumors, poverty, destitution, abuse, genocide and all the etceteras have left me pretty humble around complaint, as if “first-world problems” didn’t count as “problems,” after all.

I haven’t figured all that out, but I’m willing to say that in whatever world, we all of us actually matter, and would do well to respect ourselves at least as much as we must all these others we care about, visit or “like,” protect or take the time to read.

I may never know any of you in a fully personal way, that is, embodied and face-to-face or voice-to-voice, but I am learning that whatever we do is personal, for the simple fact that we are persons doing whatever however whyever whenever we do.

So thank you – EVERYONE.  Whether you’re disguised behind an invented gravatar, code-name or handle, some fictional aspect of yourselves – it doesn’t matter – I believe it’s originating with a person, that’s important to me, and so are you.  Thank you each for whatever it is you provide to this vast and wriggling system of signs.

A “Person Award” to you all – as in recognition, not as bestowal.

THANK YOU

 

 

Writing: the Margins

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Graphotos, Traces, Writing6 Comments

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Writing: the Margins

“All words run along the margins of their secrets”

– Susan Howe –

 

Now we are getting somewhere.  Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told.  If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.”  If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…

there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets?  Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.

That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets.  I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.

And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.

Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.

So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating.  That is, it is possible.  Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?

If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.

Therefore

“it is not infinite.  Even infinite is a term”

-Louis Zukofsky-

by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.

Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.

Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.

Perhaps and possibly.

N Filbert 2012

Blurt

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

Blurt

 

We have to hold still.  To take care.  To look at each other.  To remember what we’ve never quite understood: the value of one another.  Which we’ve never really comprehended, nor, finally, are we quite able to.

I suggest the exercise:  Pretend-Everything-Depends-On-It, that is, on The Other, i.e. even within yourself.  See how far it goes, if it chances to keep you alive, or defends the rights of another, imaginary or not.

Luckily, the always perhaps.  Perhaps, to a point.  To the point – what is possible – tell me who might be the one deciding that?  (or the many?).  I’m listening.  This is where God lies.  The possible.  Irreducible without end, fortunately.  And how.

Go on then, practice, live, throw yourself into it – see what becomes.  At least you will.  Forget about it!  There’s always until.  What has that to do with us?  Very little, finally, it’s something we will never experience, we cannot process or reflect upon.  So get to it now, then.  That’s all I’m saying.  Pretend, provoke, prevent and process.  There’s nothing to it.

Defend the other with your life.