Tag: perception

Disjunctive Cartography – Our Propensities, Asking after the Nature of Nobody, cont’d

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

“The map is not the territory.  That’s an expression which  means

the world does not match the picture in our heads”

-Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions, vol. 1–

            It thinks.  It considers that it has not done with it.  It reasons that I will know more tomorrow.  Its hope of reading, of selecting and organizing, of patterning and arranging toward some partial whole, toward an item, an element, a concept or thought (any Other) that it might also become (or have been, an “I”).

In other words, it requires difference.

Yesterday I played soccer with  my son, it concocts.  I was the Other experiencing, moving, tripping-shouting-laughing – discretely – other than the ball or grassy ground, other than the leafy trees and wind, the boy (the one I called son), it was anOther yesterday, and therefore it may refer to that example of human-in-a-context (a surround of not-it) by a meaningful (adequately functional) pronoun (name-toward), namely “he” or “I.”

I gained definition by my surroundings, it conjures.  Any object will do (it’s perceiving assorted matter and energy, its limbs rest on some as “desk,” the 10” fence as “books” and the process of sensing, transforming to perception as “time” and mediates “it” as separate-though-connected – of the same stuff (matter) but in motion and of a unique form (relating to) – and names its organized system “self,” “me,” “I”).

It meditates (categorizes, classifies, identifies, compares and contrasts) on these sensations/percpetions/affectations and wonders.  “It was I,” it hears without sound – a confession aimed at a photo of a boy-child near against an aged man I knew as “grandpa.”  I looked so different – of different cells and height and weight, blood pressure and vision, facial contours, bones, hair and skin – so very different (it looks at a reflection) – how is it the “same” (identical to) “I” it is now?

Or might be tomorrow – through an utterly unknowable future of events, weather, interactivities, sensations, affectations and cognitions.  Will it be me tomorrow?  It wonders how identity can withstand such difference – variance, change, even replacement and erasure – and still meaningfully or validly considered “same”?

It places its’ head on its’ wrists.  It writes these words (is writing) in order to create (or craft) a recognizable trace, an effect, communally learned, socially agreed-upon marks that construct a momentary reflexivity its’ own existence.  A sort of extrinsic, partial it, to feel like also an I, at a moment.

It in-scribes in a medium, borrowed from others – borrowed, acquired, manipulated, stolen – a kind of proof to it that it is, and is unique, separatively connected, yea, conjoined seamlessly, molecularly, and yet… distinguishable… therefore I-able.  Referable.  Nominal.

It senses discomfort in parts labeled (categorized, classified, i.e. generalized and lumped indiscriminately/arbitrarily or learned) “head” and “neck” and “shoulders.”  It shuts its eyes.  I slept well last night, that is, I woke refreshed, my discomforts (aches) diminished.  It remembers I went to bed dry-eyed and suffering allergic responses to Springtime.  It drinks coffee.  It is not the same.

This is a portion of a map that does not represent the territory.  There are, perhaps, moments – instances – in which I fit with my surround – but usually it is organizing a mapping conference of sensation, affect, percept and infinite inputs coupling to pre-formed acquired categories and classes, fuzzy generalizations to stencil lines and rivers, mounds and fissures with very little correspondence to the world.

It writes this as “my world,” or “the world that I in-habit.”

-Becoming Human: Asking after the Nature of Nobody pt. 1

We Make Art

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Journallings9 Comments

We Make Art: A Query toward Perceptive Extension

paper snowflakes by Holly & children
paper snowflakes by Holly & children

Waking reminded –

I’ve been working over things in my sleep.  Parenting issues, marriage.  Vocation deadlines, assignments.  Logistics and payments and scheduling.  Improbable care of the self.

– that overwhelm is inevitable, inherent.

Everything we know (or surmise) about anything indicates vast beyonds unknown and ignored.  In order to see, to breathe, to speak, to hear, to feel, to think, to live.  We filter and avoid.  Press the vast majority of the world’s availability into a void.  So of course we can’t manage our world, or comprehend, even minimally control.  We can barely deal with even a relatively microscopic set of variables, and those only enough to survive.

Reminded, awake then, that overwhelm is constant and inevitable.  Inherent to the systems of which we are and are a part.  Living is processing vastness.  Essentially unscalable.  And we thought bacteria were small!

            So it comes as no surprise that at times we feel oppressed, drowned, immersed – helpless, confused and at loss.  Pretend for a moment that we have to-dos that seem important + unforeseen and substantial grief + illness + snow days (which = a house full of ecstatic children, active and noisy and eager to be entertained) + inclement weather shuffling schedules and doctors, activities and possibilities around + limitations of time, energy and internal resources + anxiety or mood ‘disorders’ + love and high hopes + responsibilities and intentions + fears and deep hurts + a body (bodies) mind (minds) to feed and nourish +…

Too Much Information, a saturated context for the human organism.  The black box crashes.  The connections run slow.  The screen jerky and fuzzy.  Head aches, breath thickens or shallows, noise is incommensurate – the signals scramble…

At first breach, first sign of imperturb…we check in, acknowledge – perhaps argue or fight or make love (i.e. signify our overwhelm and our intensity), sit still, register what we can…

and wake up, reminded:

WE MAKE ART.

            Once ground is touched, we go in (or out) – “seventh direction perception” – we begin to consciously process/perceive.

 

 

The query that sprouted is as follows: might the activity of art-a creative dialogic relation of index-sign-symbol, signifier-signifiant-and interpreter, i.e. “becoming-forth” – expand our perceptive capacities/processing?

In other words, in enacting the relationship of making, creatively, holistically, might we draw on more of the world’s availability – perceived and “dismissed” – a fuller context of experience less limited by intentional activities of categorical aims and constraints, thereby opening more of us to more of it in an open reciprocal dynamic interrelation, thereby sort of processing in “lump sums” – a gulping digestion of overwhelm?

We set aside prescribed roles, beliefs and opinions and work out, work into, an arbitrary generalized conventional (safe) medium…we fog our normalized paradigms and strictures of interpretive alertness – mores, values, expectations and censorship – we reach out gathering in.  Interact.  It seems something larger is carried, is moved – more than the medium, more than ourselves, more of a context, a world.

Does art extend our perceptive capacities?  Our scope of perception – to process, to be?  A kind of open-boundaried passage of experiencing between organism and world?

works in progress by Holly Suzanne
works in progress by Holly Suzanne

Signs of Love

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing2 Comments

“sheer curiosity is even more universal and compelling than lust…”

-Nelson Goodman-

Our Similarities are Different, our Differences so very Alike

            I tell him he’s gotta grant she’s pretty much the same as the last one – skin all over, shoulder-length hair, fingernails and eyeballs.  Her insides must resemble too – veins and nerves, capillaries and molecules, organs and structural bones.  Her life can’t be that much different – born of a woman spent with a man, fluctuating assemblage of persons and animals, a fair share of good times and bad, events and arrangements all occurring in particular times at particular places.  Spoken to and speaking, looked at and looking, heard and hearing, nurtured and natured.  Surely a sign for something.  A sign for herself.

“But she’s so god-damned different man!” he says.  “One in 7+billion!  ‘Like’ no other creature I’ve known!  Her thoughts are anomalous.  She sentences words her-uniquely, her habits, nuances, quirks.  I tell you there’s no one else ‘like’ her!” he insists.

I point out that there are great similarities to her differences – we all of us with particularized habits, specified modes of talk, no two bones alike and what have you – but they’re bones, flesh and language all the same.  She falls within the mean – income and weight, literacy, height, okay.

“But there’re so many differences in those similarities, you dig?” he whines.  “It’s like everybody’s riffing and she’s got my groove!”

            And Johnson has a theory of perspective.  “TOP” he calls it.  He’ll listen to you gloat or bemoan and respond with his “that’s the TOPs!” as if he’s settled the foundations.  I try to get at what he means.

            The undergrads recently requested that I speak to them of love, and I told them all this story (it conveniently being Valentine’s Day).  I read through the roll call, through Margaret, Mary, Toby and Frank.  Through Matilde and Jason and Luzanne and Lars.  Some fat, some skinny, but most in-between, each exhibiting some marker – for instance, their names.  We need those tags to tell us apart, do we not?  We’re all so darn much the same.  Autopsies, biopsies, EKGs, X-rays and cardiograms – most of our differences are ever so slight.  Some flesh here, hair here or not, coloring, dialect, language, inches either way.  However, what we notice – are attracted to or struck by, occasionally enthralled or repelled by – in other words, whatever catches your attention – will lie in those mini-borders of difference.

We’re programmed that way, it’s a survival skill bred in the chemicals – be aware of the unexpected, the variant, the things that are unique – sights, shapes, sounds or energy – locate, isolate, focus – survive it.  Use your limited energy and resources for that – ignore the enormous other.

So every time you’re swept by lust or fall in love – there really IS a difference to that bloke or blonde – IN that gendered entity – you’ve perceived it.  Now comes the process of fitting it to YOUR life.  Your self, habits, knowledge and activities, groups and quirks and ways.  “Normalizing” – becoming “intimate” with those astounding specificities – familiar.

Accommodate, adapt, survive.

By now you’re holding hands or marrying.  Waking up next to.  Joining your bodies and your mealtimes, work and pleasure, daily rounds – and it turns out your partner’s much the same as all the rest (without losing any of their uniquenesses you first attuned to – in fact at this point you’ve uncovered many many more – including a surprising set of facets regarding yourself) – fitting and squeezing and torqueing them into their “signs,” incorporating it all into your own.

They fight, they cry, they talk and fear.  They’re selfish and sweet, funny and sour.  Relatively weak and strong, smart and dumb, kind and cruel.  What did you expect?

Yet having become part of your world, seaming into your point of view, you’re never so alert to them as first you were when they were strange to you and un-experienced, unless you’re threatened or faced with change.  Your energy and perception (remember, by instinct) are set to trigger differences, out-of-the-ordinary readings and measures – the defamiliar.

So although your partner’s arse is golden – or curved similarly to any other – your eyes lock elsewhere.  On unknowns.  Untoucheds.  It’s not adventure or risk that you seek – not exactly – although your senses could be called “restless” in their fearful jitterings and scans – you’re tuned to locate difference – unconsciously filing all that registers “recognize” as same.

As if the world were a line-up and your senses are always on call at the station.

And so on.

We all know (by now) that we’re all fundamentally, formally, the same.  We’re of genus and species and kind.  A school of fish, a hoard of bees.  Excited by difference (spelled “possible danger”) and presumptive of same (spelled “familiar”).

“What’s love got to do with it?” a spritely student asks.

What “love” has to do with it is to shape perception intentionally.  To recognize and remember the vastness of similarity (choosing to ignore many limbic cries over slight variations – the unreasonable feelings of attraction, shazaam, lust and novelty) and cultivating attention to the differences of the familiar.  The creative work of defamiliarization.

A cloud is a cloud is fine droplets of liquids and gas, pressures and waves, particles in patterns and puzzles and billions of babbling atoms…OR…sketchy shapes of oceans, mountains, camel-backs or breasts.  A cloud.  If you dissect your partner’s thumb or knee, spine or brain, or even examine an eyelash or bead of sweat close enough – you’ll enter world upon world of mystery and minute difference…similar to everyone else.  They’re individual entity’s shaped roughly like gorillas or aliens with less hair.  Or angels.  But they don’t think, walk, breathe, sleep, talk, dream, feel, sweat, laugh, stumble, fear, mimic, grieve, complain, remember, hope or anything else “like” ANY OTHER human in the world, not now, not past, not future.  Tune to that – you’ll never ever exhaust it – as you’ll never come to the end of yourself.

“Love” or “attachment,” “personal relations” or whatever we refer to it by – orients and trains our perception through attention (intentional perception).  Keeping in mind and check the reality of mass similarities (with all their exhilarating differences) and fixing determinedly on the magnitudes of distinctive, unrepeatable, specifics and uniquities of this one chosen familiar.

            Anyway, that’s a version of Johnson’s TOP:  “it all depends on how you’re looking at it.”

Gallery of Linguistic/Semiotic Hero(in)es

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces6 Comments

How many do you know?  How many do you “love”?

“…We know we can never be anything but parallel

And proximate in our relations, but we are linked up

Anyway in the sun’s equation, the house from which

It steals forth on occasion, pretending, isn’t

It funny, to pass unnoticed, until the deeply shelving

Darker pastures project their own reflection

And are caught in history,

 

Transfixed, like caves against the sky

Or rotting spars sketched in phosphorous, for what we did.”

-John Ashbery, from The Sun-

Other Worlds / Our World … as conceived by a Semiotic Animal

On By NW FilbertIn Philosophy, TracesLeave a comment

The following is, again, a fairly dense essay, but I find the content so fascinating and very well presented.  The concepts and observations herein form a central core of what I desire to use language to explore – signs upon signs within signs over signs – living in the specificity of our species – and attempting to discover what/where/how that specificity (namely language) might lead/take/auto-generate itself forward.  If these sorts of things interest you as well, i encourage you to lend Deely’s writing your time.

(click here for essay) – Umwelt by John Deely

The Unfinished

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

The Unfinished.

(click on title to get to content)

Inscribing Beauty : A Portrait of My Wife

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

On Beauty: A Portrait of My Wife

If I don’t write it, what reality does it possess?  What substance or content are a memory or vision?  Sound?  Fleeting concatenations – experiences.  Which is why I ask.  Like Dante or Cervantes, Homer or Herodotus, does not here a duty lie?

If no one inscribes remarkable things – they will not be remarked, thus no further remarkable.  But is writing a re-mark?  Are we indeed marked by perceptions – jumbled, edited and collated into what we call experience – do they leave some discernible trace like magnets in the guts of a computing machine – that might be recalled, rebooted, reformatted and marked again?  Or is that creation?  New traces born of the old?  What similarity – what identity – obtains?

If the scribe exists to codify – to translate vanishing occurrences into a relatively more stable domain – how should he select?  What criteria?  Whose testimony?  Should he, as artists of old, gather the evidence and forge, in his matter of medium, some combinatory new myth?  Take account of as many angles of appearance or observation as he is able, to contain and collage them into space like Cubists?

We call it “re-presentation” but we are crafting something new, something else.  The eye is not a camera.  Seeing, hearing, what we taste and feel are highly selective pro-activities – never catching a solid snippet or observing still life.  We develop according to what we expect.  Intuitive anticipation.

The façade of a building – you’ve already supplied it with volume.  Unseen.  The photo of your child – gains dimension and sound, perhaps even smell and sense.  Context invested.  Invented.  We cannot stop the alchemy from going on.  Nor would we really want to.  And yet – what might we preserve?

Suggestions?

This began as a portrait of my wife.  An impossible thing.  It will end still farther from its goal.  I meant to remark what has marked me profoundly, filled me of scars and traces, redirected my nerves and my blood, and I am left with the unexpressed, and these scribbled words of a man.

“What does it mean, to know it and not be able to say it?”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

An Equation

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

I’m running through files trying to organize things and adjust to a new computer.  Once in a while I stumble on something I hardly remember making but still feel a deep accord with.  This was one of those things.  I think it stands for.  Still.  What.

(i only wish it were still freezing)

Here goes:

Moment: Airy

(being an experiment, in theory

a result)

 

It is hard.

It is hard and it is cold.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.  Well below the freezing point.  But his gloves staid on, his lips held a cigarette, and he boxed.

He could box that paper.  That paper-thin page.  Already beaten to a pulp.

 

Him with a theory.

The theory a sort of equation.

The equation as follows:

 

ALL (whatever a person is, has, does) + ALL (a person’s skill, effort, strength, talent, knowledge and ability)

= Appearance of Art (momentarily)

Notation:  A + A = AA

An utter mystery to him.

So he sat in the freezing cold, a pen in his hand, the ink sludging slow, paper on a desk, digging/ exposing / exploring himself, believing / composing / revising language,

oh, and the catalyst necessary to the actual experimentation of this theory – (he writes) – MAKING

One had always to be making (working, acting, writing, performing) with ALL (of him or herself) and ALL (of one’s capacities, faculties and tools) to carry out this experiment, i.e. to test the hypothesis.

Catalyst: (he notes) making (out of/into/with/toward)

Source and goal (purpose, intent) unnecessary, indifferent

Any action requires an energy source.  In this case: living organism possessing capacities, perhaps even proficiencies, and coffee, and cigarettes.

No specified laboratory or station or constituents (conditions) to each his own [marginalia]

 

Quite a simple test really.

Requiring no great funding, no special services or permissions, few qualifications, variant supplies.

Simply vast amounts of time and consistent (persistent) and enormous amounts of effort. (As he saw it).

 

Reviewing centuries of other experimentations and practitioners of this simple eternal test led him to observe : “results in momentary airy results”

(often discovered in different places at different times dependent on observer – even in same test results – thus airy, ephemeral moments)


 

Feeling he had yet to produce an AA.  A momentary Appearance of Art, he was compelled to introduce a compendium of criteria – identifiable attributes – whereby to justly analyze resultant artifacts and actions.

Again the qualities boiled down quite simply:  put the equation into reverse for the observer or verifying assistant:

an Appearance of Art results through the remaking process or catalyzation of the observer,

requiring as a result, ALL of the observer’s person and ALL of the observer’s capacities,

faculties, abilities.

Notation: criteria for AA to be AA:

AA = (must equal) A + A

He practiced this experiment from both sides of the equation – attempting to verify Appearances of Art by engaging / observing / remaking results that demanded enormous effort, large amounts of time and all of his experience and capacities, and as the performer of the experiment – devoting vast amounts of time, energy and effort of his total self to the making of Appearances of Art.

 

It wasn’t going well.

It is hard (extremely difficult)

And it happens to be very cold (causation: weather in Winter)

 

He’d read of other conditions explicated by practitioners before him: contingencies such as warmth, geographical position, silence, wealth, solitude, suffering (the Ss came up quite often); specific environments, times or places, assistant substances or particular tools or resources, even difficulty itself had been recorded – but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason, certainly no agreement, in fact, very often direct and incommensurable contradictions between one catalystic experimentor of A + A = AA and the next, which led to his marginal note (copied above): “to each its own”

 

He carried on, in spite of the grave difficulties, confusions and multivalent referents of the equation’s elements.  Once in awhile he believed he had discerned a momentary result – an appearance of art in his own private performances of the experiment; unfortunately he could not obtain verification of his tests from contemporary scholars/students/or adepts of the ancient and cryptically-clear equation.

He had no trouble himself verifying most attested AAs, given sufficient time and effort, but, as he progressed in his work, identification became more efficient yet verification demanded more and more of him, devouring his time, energy and effort, interfering with and greatly complicating his own experiments and test cases from the equation’s other end.

He began to understand why past personages were led to choose to practice and perform the experiment from one side or the other.

 

It is hard.

It is cold.

And there is only so much time and effort.

There is only so much living organism to be had.

Limitations began to seem insurmountable.

But by now he had come too far.

There was only to go on.

 

It is hard, he wrote.

It is hard and it is cold, he recorded.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.

But my gloves stay on, he wrote, and my lips still hold a cigarette, right to the end.

His gloved hand fighting the pages.

There is only so much life.

 

 

 

N Filbert 2012

 

 


The Violation in Art

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

The Violation in Art

 

The trouble with artists, as I see it, is that they’re always breaking things.  Breaking out, breaking in.

As if their experience of the world (and in my opinion anyone might be an artist at any given time)…well, look at it like this…a human person develops perceptions and accumulates.  Artistry consists in these experiences transmuting, transforming and breaking out in alternate forms.

The world seeps, floods, sifts or bursts its way into the artist’s mechanisms of being, and their processing of said worlding breaks its way out, somewhere, somehow.  Often anywhere, anyhow!

Breaking in to us.

A person combined with their experience breaks out in a form through their hands or their vision, movements or mouth…the artifact then enters our perception, experience, breaking in to our own operations and proceedings…entering us.

Now you’ve a mingling of persons going on via artifact, motion or sound.

If you think about this, it’s threatening.  It’s criminal!  It’s viral.  And it can happen at great distances, even invisible, even in your sleep.  It may appear at first benign, even pleasurable, might mirror some part of ourselves (or so it seems) – because of its careless remove from identity toward object it feels safe and external…but how we take it in!

With anger or lusting or joy.  Voyeuristically, “privately,” or in a well-guarded institution.  Through literature, youtube, mp3s.  In deep thought or with staid attention, and passing glances or air-gathering ears.  No matter, there’s infusion, con-fusion, an intimate entwining going on.

And it is without-which-not on either side: construction/reception, speaker/hearer, writer/reader, dancer/audience.  We all become necessary and involved, creating ubiquitous perpetration.  And no one to accuse once it’s part of our experience, our (perhaps unwitting) invitation.

Like cancer or nutrients, an other-marked entity joins with our own joining to theirs in apprehension, a collusion of worlds and of persons.  An act in which all are responsible: reciprocal engagement of voyeuristic and combinatory intimacy, breaking open, breaking in,

breaking out

breaking through

a delicious and permissive crime.

Remarking Mark…Part the Second

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing3 Comments

Mark Marking Questions

“Man is a riddle.  Our complex relation to others may also be affected by our fascination with this riddle…Origin means, perhaps, question”

–Edmond Jabes–

 

“Writing as the ‘talking cure’

he thought, thinking in language what he thought language might do.  Be doing.  To him.

He heard “why?,” a term learned early in order to learn, and thenceforward laid over nearly everything he read, encountered, overheard or stumbled across, as if it were his placeholding destiny in some infinitely progressing equation simplified “world.”

He’d read he needed other persons and things, places and times to know his own.  – “Why?”

He’d heard “until others acknowledge or teach you your shape, your ideas, what you see what you feel what you taste or speak or hear, your perceptions and scope, you won’t be aware of a thing.  You’ll have no ideas or sensations per se, you’re essentially Nothing without Them.”

Arching his back and shrieking a sound at an absence of breast: “why?”

“I guess I’m just punctuated that way,” he came to think, as he adapted vocabulary.  “My role in a sequence is: – ?”

“And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was…” well, maybe – ?

“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao…” well, maybe –  ?

“1 + 1 = 2,” well….maybe – ?

“You are Mark, a male form of a human animal, replete with these working organs, the English language, and certain beliefs.  These are your parents, your sibling, your probable friends.  Here are some feelings, some expressions and thoughts.  Here are your words.”  Well.  Maybe – ?

Shaped with letters and numbers and sounds.  Voices and touchings and feels, he became, slowly, surely, puttied toward a recognizable form – perceptible to others, acknowledged, even affirmed or engaged from time to time.

“Why?” propelled the lengthening problem of life but never grew toward solutions.

He read elaborate explanations and descriptions as he borrowed more languages.  Spiritual terms, medical terms, words scientific, political, philosophical and intimate.  Thick reams of median symbols asking to be joined or embraced, understood or imbibed.

Mark enjoyed these fabrics, and found a belonging among them.  Layers and theories, emotions and dreams – he simply need append his simple gesture – ?

 

Trouble, in the form of discomfort or pain, of disjunction, arose when agreement was desired.  Explicitly or implicitly, this undermined his form.  In situations where reciprocation or statement, some firm relation was called out for, his questioning mark failed to serve.  Choices, commitments, integrities or beliefs turned to drizzle around his definitive (self-identified) symbol.

“I love you,” she wooed.  “-?-“ he replied.  “I cannot know what you mean, what your language portends, I am unable to verify why?” he’d respond.  To collapse and retreat.

Even thoughts and decisions were questioned and split open on his sharp weapon of a mark.  He was not trusted or deemed trustworthy as doubt was perceived an anomaly.

He remained uncertain.

Self-perceivably, he reliably questioned, he’d respond and then take it away with his mark, his “signature move” as it were, his undoing.  “Yes I will…” “This I think…” “I am…” always followed by his -?- (which sounded like “why?” in the air) and found no rationale that could not be further put to query.

The world was unstable as well as a “self” for him.  All under the branding shadow of “why?”  This Mark never outgrew in all his adaptations, acquisitions, mutations and metamorphoses.  His certain core of uncertainty.  His permanent doubt.  His oxymoronic reality of being, not-being -?-

They perceive him – they really do – but as full of content with no substance; as possible and capable yet a great risk; as veritably human but unnamed from within.  Without “identity.”  This is true even of his wife and his children, parents and friends, all unsure who or what they are relating to, marked with the sign of the -?-  The indeterminate one, the questionable and uncertain, the duplicitous and vague, are various ways he is read and conceived – standing there as he does on his tiny spot of here, long-legged and stooped as in prayer, or inquiry – ? –