Tag: philosophy

Grammaring Perseverance

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

Grammaring Perseverance

“A grammar is an on-going system of relationships…a system which is always in the process of articulating itself – not simply changing, but actually making itself up as it goes along”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

            My hand trembles when I move to write.  Time changes.  What is called perseverance, equals age.

As beautiful to me now, she.  More.

I refuse her loss on any terms.  In any context.

I investigate the language of inquiry.  Always a difference of relation.

Never expect to be heard.  Nor heeded.

Language makes itself up…and it goes along…articulating itself…again.

With this hand, along the incalculable curve of her hip, my palm records cellularly, but never repeats.

Lef hand entangled, her thick head of hair, tomorrow otherwise, should it work its way out.  Or ever want to.

The side of my knee prepositions her thigh, slides into a phrase, shaping a passage, not as if the surface is ever the same, yet no doubt it belongs, only, to her.

My ankled feet, like bony whips, eager to explore, inadvertently pain – the slope of the pedal, bolt of the swivel and up the liquid skin and calf.

It will leave its bruise, its passioned impression.

Everything becomes an aching to know.  Everything is on-going process.

Systems of relations.

When perseverance oppresses.  Again, again, not emptying the land, but altering it.  To cause the seeking, redundancy, both the wanted and the wanting wear.  Tools whittling down, different structures, various nerves, must learn again, of course the surfaces having changed.

My thigh registers her buttocks, elbow in her neck held by shoulder.  For lips to memorize her ear, only that moment.  I rely on her contours similarity hour to hour, so that details are not lost, just renewed.

An eroding resource, yet we are layered, and wrinkled through the timing.  What preserves?  Naught but the process itself, for which our charts are made.  Remade.

The motion does not cease.

As the curves to the apple, subjective object of measurement.  Objecting a subject to a sensual scrutiny.  Not unlike remembering, or illusion.  Information, an obvious verb.  Whether coming undone or accruing.

That began in the perseverance of my quivering hand.  Once connected, steadied by context, the grid of associations and leaps.  The world is a boundary to trace, to follow along, diverting the dots and the dashes, the lines and the colors, reenacting the tracks.

A stumble is anything but halting, more like surge and accident and a reaching out to stay.  My fingers tend to fumble through the filaments – those once vocabulary now a tangling stitching of signs.

To be decoded, recoded, as it were, what hollow mouth or aural labyrinth does not effect?  We know of no recipients, no audience, only sometimes, luckily, co-conspirators, co-creators of a co-event, called (sometimes) knowing, (sometimes) conversation, (sometimes) simultaneity.

I’ll reach out, my hand tremored right down to its core, its code, its quarks or its atoms,

and find a steadying or pattern, metaphors of richer entanglements that may not be explained

my qualia, slight blue lines on pallid vacant surfaces, directing possibilities.

In-formation – that everything that is, in its multiplied becomings, as discrete as my flesh traversing yours.

A continuous severing enabling us knowing – our grammaring, our ongoing, its enclosure.

“At the ‘inmost heart of each thing’ is an ongoing process, an unfolding which is its identity”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

 

“Communication”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces2 Comments

“Communication”

We, in our world, have a theory, a process really, that we call “communication.”  In various states of profundity it might also be referred to by “love.”

“Communication” is the process of signaling/decoding; saying/listening; writing/translating; touching/feeling by which we become aware of one another, about one another, of one another.

All things considered, “communication” is pretty important for us, though not necessarily to us.  While appearing more complex and refined than single cells or parts of cells vibrating under a microscope; more elaborate and extensive than a swarm of birds or school of fish, it hardly works as well.  As if certain sharp things and certain dull things cancel one another out.

Pitch, tone, palate and respiration.  Vocabulary, grammar, syntax.  Associations occurring in the brain, the glands, the organs, the body.  I’ve always thought of our existence as “fraught” and it never ceases to amaze me!

Amaze and astound, in no particular order.  As if “stound” were past-tense for “stand.”  Stopped-in-tracks-reeling-backwards.

There’s nothing to it really, we all do it, all of the time, innately, it would seem, given we could not survive without it.  And yet.  “Innate” wouldn’t be the right word.  Maybe “potential” as if capacities and possibilities surround every cell toward response.  And then.  What becomes.  Responsibility.  Of that interstellar stuff moving and extra-anatomical stuff too.  Kind of equals.

So we’re not necessarily “good” at it, and hardly possess a measure, everyone on equal footing at some point, depending on the context, depending on construction (of the possibles) and so forth.  It’s often accurately called “fuzzy” or “messy” – an entanglement of sorts in no sense negative.

I always liked William James – the jumble-up of him.  “Rich thicket of reality” he called it, a passage to get caught up in, sometimes snared, sometimes struggling, but ever in its midst, I suppose.

Lyn Hejinian once pronounced it “inexhaustible.”

I just wanted to mention…

“The argument would go something like this: reality exists; it is independent of what we think though it is the only thing we can think; we are a part of reality but at the same time consciousness of this fact makes us separate from it; we have a point of reentry (a ‘centrique happinesse’), which is language, but our reentry is hesitant, provisional, and awkward”

-Lyn Hejinian-

In-Shadows

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

In-Shadows

“The Artist, he who even takes the shadows of things in hand…”

-Macedonio Fernandez-

“He who imagines will never know non-being.”

 

A morass of shadows.

A repletion of blips and flashings.

An absence : I understand.

 

I swipe my hand through the shadows.  I sense disturbance, but my palm returns empty, save the moisture of fog in dark woods.  If even.  There has been dust.

I stir the ashes.  I kindle the fire.  The brain a roadmap of chaos.  And intricately precise.  Subject to accident and lesion and a cross-pollination of impulses and energies beyond present calculations.  Not withstanding infinity, of course, which hardly makes sense, given the matter.

A squalor of shadows.

Currents of whispering air, of motion.

A ubiquity that trembles.

I open my mouth to the world.  I emit and inhale.  Shouting resonant within, because I have ears.  Equipped with particulars.  Apparatus.  Other cells stay quiet but do not cease, I lack the equipment to hear.  Stone, lizard, mushroom.  Light in its veils.  I cry out.  Echo =, tree hardly cares.  I’m remiss and listen myself for response.

Breathing the smoke.  I stink and I cough and I smell.  My hand passes through without ashes or mist.  I am not everywhere.  I do not know my ends.  If a melody came through like a sight or a sound, I would not name it.  I am emptying full.

 

As shadows thicken and disperse.

Objects as subjects and objects again.

Something live in the darkness.

 

That is darkness for me, not the night owl or mouse, salamander or bat, not the tree.  No, it is me, I, we, that conjure the “darkness” as difference from “light,” however similar, however same.  As if emitting symbols.  As if meaning to manufacture.  I construct a sign and call it poem, collaborate a you and a me.  We converse.  I begin.

If doubt incites a thought, thought conspires doubt to further action.  As if shadows were transparent.  And meaningless was choice.  Eye – mouth – hand : open to the world, the world opens.  I begin in signs and gestures, a collaborative entanglement, reentered.

 

In dispersion shadows reconvene.

Clearly thickened by old growth.

Body minding nets.

 

Would I make a “here” it would be “we.”  A desire for presents is relation.  What its plural ought to be (“presence”).  I unwrap unable to view the gift.  Tell me of it, will you?  “Inside” is lost in shadows.  What’s perceptible from “there”?  Tree, raven, sky.  Plastic object pulsed in heartbeat or emotion: what could I learn from “there”?

What isn’t simultaneous?  And how like the infinity we are constrained not to absorb?  Enclose me.  Lend me a form, a border, a threshold.  Entangle.  Experience may come.

“the silence of the page allows us to hear the writing”

-Octavio Paz-

 

Pre-qual(ia): A sort of introduction: What Language: &

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

            We happen in a substantial liquid.  A surround we effect.  Are affected by.  We move, it moves.  It moves, we are moved.  Moving it.  Being moved by.  Each, all.  What’s between.  Those spaces.  Empty and full, of course.

You know what I mean.  You breathe.  Hearing silently what is written.  You see.  Thinking the emptiness between, what fills.  Is filled by.  Is full.  Before it thinks empty.  Feels.

Liquid, permeable as skin, as mobile, as inseparable.  The thought, the body of that thinking.  Or, a “body of text.”  Such liquid air.  Insubstantiated emptiness without which we would not.

Happen in that liquid/not-liquid.  Like particles and waves.  Either-ors reduced to ands.  Themselves.  With which is struck a chord.  Male/female, yes/no, self/other, you/me, hot/cold: variations of permeable boundaries, without borders, like overlapping zones, difficult transparencies.

We grew out of, becoming, precedented, pro-perceptive/re-perceptive.  Remember.  Without parts, but designated.  You hear.  You see.  You taste.  You feel.  You, thinking emotion, feeling in brain, mind matterless matter…mem(e)brane(-ain).  Liquidy occur.  Movement.

The leaf.  Exhaust.  Intake.  A wave.  A particle.  Re-perception.  Mem(e)ory.  Or me.

You know the drill.  Acting.  Play.  A wobble, a quiver.  We tremble.  We hum.  We happen.  It’s a wonder.  Every it.  Unknown, unknowable knowledge experienced.  I-qualia.

Sense-making.  What is.  In essence nonsensical.  Incommunicable between.  Inescapable intersubjectivity.  Either parts public, private.  Neither/nor.  This boundary, porous.  And.  As conscious would not be a thing but a process, more definitively.  Noun/verb.  And.  Shared structures of DNA, destructured and oscillate.  Me/you.  Either and or.  Bubble pierced with raindrops.  A fashioning.  A possibility that.

Existence.  IS.  Co-existence.  AND.

I being either noun and verb or neither.

As liquid is not.

So a border a threshold, a line, a triangle.

AND.

“that silk is stitching our lungs”

-Christina Mengert-

“In order for my specific subjectivity to fill the general slot of the first person pronoun, that word must be ‘empty’:  ‘I’ is a word that can mean nothing in general, for the reference it mines can never be visualized in its consummated wholeness…it is a general token of absence that can be filled in any particular utterance.”

-Michael Holquist-

Humanity & Change

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces1 Comment

“Humanity moves in contradictions…through the palpability of change, 

the change of systems, the change of functions in old rituals and social constructs.

Humanity moves and consciousness changes.

The history of literature is a record of the change in consciousness.

We witness the creation of the world in the change of consciousness.”

– Viktor Shklovsky –

Defining Spaces

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings1 Comment

August 14, 2012, the first day (DAY) of rain in Kansas that I am able to recall for a very long time.  Not a passing windy thunderstorm, but a wet dripping sky holding temperatures in the 60s.  A genuine “rainy day.”

We are home.  Inhabiting a structure we have designed and filled up with ourselves, each one, and altogether.  It’s been awhile.

For days we’ve struggled to catch up: reports, bills, groceries, supplies, dust, papers, books, photographs, laundry, enrollments, business, correspondence, maintenance, rest.

Organization as definition.

Definition as form, parameter, boundary.

Defining a space (reorganization) to find or enable content.

Rearranging contents to formulate new space.

Needing the space…drawing the blanks___________…to manipulate a safety, a breathing, an empty, to allow.

In chaos I write, as if pinning down terms could needle a swarm of locusts to a board for inquiry and examination.

In emptiness I build by finding blocks to set: my lover’s eyes, my children’s sounds and bodies and play, a coffee cup, clear desk, blank paper…then Jabes, Shklovsky, Wittgenstein, Blanchot.  Wallace Stevens, Dragomoshchenko, Montale, Bakhtin.

Fencing a fallow field.

I check my pockets for seed.

I’ve been an astronaut.

I can’t remember rain.

I am what I am reported to have said.  As are those around me, if only in our heads or dreams or passion or anger or fear.

Opening an old notebook I am stunned by a page lacquered in heavy charcoals and dark pastels.  I make out in fierce giant letters “WE WILL DIE!”, then scribbled around it, hard to decipher in the noise of the marks, the names of each one in my family.

I think “so begin.”

Stop.  Locate a space.  Breathe.  Then move.

Movement is beginning.

Connectives of  meaning or purpose may follow the following of orders or order the following connections of meaning.

I begin with my body, following my fingers as they formulate form, defining the spaces with words…

“if the meaning-connexion can be set up before the order, then it can also be set up afterwords”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“each is no more or less than the words he is reported to have said”

-Richard Stamelman, of Edmond Jabes’ rabbis

Edmond Jabes

Drawing a Blank ________________ …

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

Okay, it really isn’t my preference to clutter you with personal information / process…but the month of July turning into August has been something of a whirlwind of large changes for our family.  Traveling for three weeks and all the saturation that implies (very GOOD – but overwhelming for one like me who likes to control the pace and type and style and content of input 🙂 )…now registering everyone for school, gathering supplies, moving into new vocations or returning to vocation outside of our home studio…enduring a home burglary in which one of our children was assaulted and some irreplaceable valuables stolen…you get the picture.  After spending most of yesterday trying to “touch base” with our home and our lives, I found a few moments personally directed.  What I encountered felt like a Void.  The last I’d recorded in my reading list journal was July 8.  The last I’d written in my private journal was July 6.  I couldn’t remember the projects I’d been in the midst of when we took to the mountains, the road, the lakes, the cabins.  I was bewildered.  I drew a blank…some empty fullness…and here is what tumbled out:

Drawing a Blank _________________ …

 

So that after long whiles, some sometimes, nothing

nothing left or right remembers stirs reminds

conjures therefore a kind of empty fullness emptied

of what seems everything but is nothing for we feel

pretty certain (what is called “knowledge”

i.e. “belief”) that nothing empties, nothing

moving nowhere neither expanding nor

retracting, not replete or depletable,

so to say a blank is begin, as you see it

__________________________ …

indicates (is a kind of sign) indexes you

elsewhere toward or away, that is, movement

what we might apply another sort of signifier

otherwise (a.k.a) simply known as “blank”

becomes arbitrarily a point of action (more

accurately a line) trail train of efforts

here, like god, as I understand the term,

to name without knowing or under-

standing:  “begin.”

__________________________ …

empty trajectory boundary border

line emptied of nothing (not possible)

remains only to be filled with doing

which I’m doing, once a word like “god”

enters as a placeholder, rhythmic beat,

disregulating reorganizer that empty

fullness reveals itself full indeed

by which I mean synonyms collect

(as I experience them) through action

upon within the emptied track

(emptied of nothing, nonsensical)

or trace, that is, “god” =

_______________________ …

metamorphosing in my apparatus I

once perceived as empty, better

said “lost” or “chaos-crossed”

too full in a way to recognize it-

self until such a thud as god

should stir the matter like a magnet

drawing unto after it syllable

after syllable sounds sounding as

“death” as “human” what resounds

in my cranium with deity, but death

of which or both at once, such

emptied fullness I think, led by

__________________________ …

because I’d though how much humans

were like god in their deaths and invention

death like a horse dragging a sledge

without sleds grinding splinters shafts

“substances” to naught, limbs undone

what we thought were wholes – holes

skull shrinking withered of hopes

and fears, identity’s loss, how

death depurposes unknowns…all

the strenuous loves and desperate

frights I gave names and space and

time during life that were not

anything actual only possibilities

but words worries made them seem

death immediately deletes leaving

______________________ …

like character or personality, what

is memorable or terrifying even

unimaginable things we imagined

treating, relating to, engaged as

real entities death erased, again

the emptying, of nothing, no thing

to be rid of but a sound, a rhythm

a term – god, human, death –

superadditives, ideas, beliefs, myths

theories without basis no matter

observation perception interpretation

super-imposed on

________________________ …

emptied of nothing as nothing being

undiminishable death demons-

trates depurposing de constructions

we attribute fully to emptiness

what is unknown its own sort

of impossible excepting conjecture

consideration deleted at death

by death what life had spent

on deities and persons, ideas or myths

where nothing was, actually empty

but for matter beneath and slowly

ground back down toward away

emptying the nothing to fullness

_____________________ …

drawing a blank

N Filbert 2012

Collecting Fragments : The Engineer of Himself

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Poetry5 Comments

Posting an ongoing project, a long(ish) poem(-tic) reflexive effort to at least hear myself if not understand.

The Engineer of Himself

The Engineer of Himself: A Poem

“Thinking is willing you are wild

to the weave not to material itself”

Susan Howe

“a new music of verse stretching out into the future…”

William Carlos Williams on Louis Zukofsky

 

I.

I have tried to tell this story time and time again.

I’ve set out to tell this story.

This one story.  This one, apparently, mine.

 

This story takes all of my life, as do all of the stories that go deep in the mines.

Mole’s holes without boundaries – forward and back equal speed – ever the hunting, never the full.

We develop our routes in this way.

Creating patterns.

We forget so many channels and tunnels and homes.

 

Will I ever find the subject

When asked what I am writing? Continue reading “Collecting Fragments : The Engineer of Himself” →

Altitude

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings1 Comment

Altitude

 

“A proposition is only a pretext to go over the limits of what’s proposed…A man in a room does not have strict boundaries until the moment when something forces him to take up one or another activity…

…I don’t have to write all this to be convinced that what is written exists.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“Don’t blame me.  I measure the shadow of the shadow with the shadow,

signifying here.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees” (Paul Valery)

 

I hear a bewildering variety of birds – singing, cawing, chirping, saying.  It exists whether I say so or not.  Some things exist because I say so.

Like dolumbritz and community.

The steps being easy and difficult between.

They leave shadows.  Sometimes.

Metaphor avoids this.

 

If we got to the bottom of it all, we would fall.  Perhaps upward, if direction had anything to do with it (it doesn’t).  So we say “alas.”  Which once was short for the bottom – a-ha! “at last!” there is (here is) THIS.  But now is code for sigh.

She said so, and I heard her, at last.  I sigh.

“I have the feeling that the meaning of things will never be sorted out” is a paraphrase of a poet.  Alas.

Like philosophy: the sequence of excitable sighs, then exhaustion.

 

I am here (wherever that is).  I could describe it and become able to forget, having given it you.  But once described, something else, and then poetry – “always something else.”  Metaphor.  Not likeness but difference.

I am here.

I would know this insofar as it were validated – verified : affirmed.  But that would change and then unknown.  I reach out as like to open without a demonstration, only signs or their perceivers.  Senseless gestures filled with sense.  First one and then another “like meanings smashing each other (I don’t say metaphor)” (Dragomoshchenko).

 

A family of deer just walked in front of me, led by the elder, stopping to curiously stare (extending their field) – a simultaneity.  I gazed back and added noise to which a tail flap and head cock, followed by a smile and a welcoming.  While you notice people on the street, in the office, over lunch.  And a child hears a fairy’s call.  What is and what is not need each other to exist.

“Imagination differs from fantasy as the form ‘is’ from the form ‘if.’  The scope of my imagination is no less than the scope of desire” (Dragomoshchenko).  If he seems to make more sense or to express it is because I provide a context and steal a fragment, thus expanding what it is by what it’s not, which also is if only ‘if’ therefore as written.

“I do not have to write all this to be convinced…”

In fact an opposite’s expanding here…

N Filbert, Pike’s Peak CO, 2012

The Secret(s). The Key(s). For Everyone. The Next One.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

“He opens Nothing, with a nothing key” (Macedonio Fernandez)

 (Arkadii Dragomoschenko) “Everything begins as an error of vision…”

 

            Time.  How it fluctuates.  The excruciating and seemingly eternal wait…and that which occurs suddenly.  Whether it exists or not, we live on its terms.  Experienced, as with everything, to varying intensities.

Interruption.

Arrival.

Topical, temporal, terms.

Age-old commonplace: does movement (spatial) fragment a continuum (temporal)? or does some urge toward continuance (temporal) spawn diverse actions (spatial)?  Chicken or egg?  Or chicken in egg withwhile an egg in the chicken?  Choose your poisons.  Or not.  The terms preside.

 

When are we most apt to accede to the passage (spatial) that is (of) time?  Alternately referred to as “aging,” “progress,” “growth,” “erosion,” “deterioration,” “process” and so on.  Some quote/unquote “motion” variously rendered (perspectivally perceived).

Serial designations.  Arbitrarily “first,” “second,” “third,” “last.”  “Beginning,” “middling,” “end” (-ing).  Sounds and rhythms (consonant-verb syllables) tick-tock du-thrum heartbeat breath clock gesture

Everything marking something.  But what?

“Signs kill things” (Fernandez).

I hold a nothing key.

It’s a sign.

It unlocks the mysteries.

The secret heart of being.

All those questions.

 

If you’d like to know, I can begin writing them down for you.  For my duration here.  Or find them yourself (the keys, the mysteries, the secrets at the heart of existing) – simply add a question mark to every thought, dream, emotion, hunch, word, sight, sound, sense or reason that occurs to you.

Which will leave you with.  In.

Smackdab in the center of it all.  Ever-presently.  At always.

 

WITH/IN will synonym you, so that you will be.  Always.

– ? –

            The wise are correct when they say that everyone has access to the (nothing) key.  The slender cracks in the thresholds doors, available indiscriminately.  Received the same way you take language.  Inbreathed.  Freely (you have been given) freely (you receive).

 

From knee-crease tracing the calf to the fine-pointed ankle bones is a passage, preferably a smooth and easy one, knowing age and growth.

As she departs, time stretches into space; when she arrives all compresses.  Only machines are regulated (for a time).  Heart’s skip, muscles seize, organs expand and contract.  Movement is erratic.  Composed.  Fluid.  Harmony and dissonance make melody.  A sentence.  A phrase.  Selah.  Gaps.  Seams.  A nothing key.

 

– ? –

            Do you get my meaning?  Meaning is an interrogative juncture.  Is all.  The nothing key to open it.

 

We tell by our surroundings, i.e. specific spaces at particular times (or vice-versa), i.e. contexts and structures that hold us…allow us recognition, description, difference.

In other words, hiking in the Rockies is not taking dictation at an office desk.  But both mark something, at varying tempos.

There are no true clocks.

Or standard times, any more than we all may inhabit the same location.

Or enter the same stream.

 

Only meaning to say I am hoping to open a door with my simple key.  A possibly operative threshold.

Into the secret heart of things…

– ? –

“why does an intense mental state happen?  Why does it pass on to others?

These ‘whys’ do not exist: this is how it happens, and that’s all.”

-Macedonio Fernandez-