Tag: philosophy

Continuing Reading Writing

On By NW FilbertIn absence, creative writing, Language, life, Literature, meaning, Parapraxis, Philosophy, Samuel Beckett, Writing6 Comments

“an ‘absoluteness of absence’ if writing is to be possible” – Jacques Derrida

Certain works by Samuel Beckett eventuate an environment of silence for me.  For instance, the brief poem “What is the Word?”

What Is the Word

folly –

folly for to –

for to –

what is the word –

folly from this –

all this –

folly from all this –

given –

folly given all this –

seeing –

folly seeing all this –

this –

what is the word –

this there –

this this here –

all this this here –

folly given all this –

seeing –

folly seeing all this this here –

for to –

what is the word –

see –

glimpse –

seem to glimpse –

need to seem to glimpse –

folly for to need to seem to glimpse –

what –

what is the word –

and where –

folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where –

where –

what is the word –

there –

over there –

away over there –

afar –

afar away over there –

afaint –

afaint afar away over there what –

what –

what is the word –

seeing all this –

all this this –

all this this here –

folly for to see what –

glimpse –

seem to glimpse –

need to seem to glimpse –

afaint afar away over there what –

folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –

what –

what is the word –

what is the word

– Samuel Beckett

Perhaps the what where is always what we’re attempting to tell.  Perhaps that’s eternal recurrence / return.  The when is always known.  Always NOW.  The folly, truly folly, of our attempt to tell the what where that is our being, our being NOW, always being NOW, no when needed, no whom known, just what where presently…occurring.  Is this always what we are attempting to say?  To find words for?  To tell?  What where, now?  Always NOW – whether reading or writing, assailing past, present or future – it is NOW that it’s occurring, but what? where?  And what is the word?  What are the words for this what where we’re attempting to tell?  This is my writing, reading – in a way, it seems, the all of it – my folly.  Perhaps what where is unnameable.  

And so I also offer a reading – for even as soon as I re-read my own writing – I cannot remember the whom or what-where of the writing.  Because the reading is always right NOW.  This reading – a chapter from Mark C. Taylor’s book Tears (as both eye-leak or suffering and rift-split-rip-“tear”) entitled “How to do Nothing with Words”  (my own copy a rainbow of highlights and symbolized marginalia – like all that I read significance to). If this sort of thing – this philosophizing or wondering writing – is not of your interest – don’t bother.  But if it is kind of intriguing, or causes curiosity, I find this chapter a compelling and admirable attempt to descry the “what is the word?” tussle I constantly struggle and strive for enacting the telling what where.  

Tears

(click image for chapter, or here: How to do Nothing with Words)

And, after all that…here is neither, a short writing by Beckett to go on with…

neither

To and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither

as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again

beckoned back and forth and turned away

heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other

unheard footfalls only sound

till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other

then no sound

then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither

unspeakable home

– Samuel Beckett

Thank you for your time.  It goes on…

 

Writing Presence

On By NW FilbertIn being, Experience, human, identity, Philosophy, Semiotics, thinking, Uncertainty, Writing7 Comments

6zlZBil - Imgur_mobius

“The experimental dimension is precisely where thinking at its limit takes place, where the singularity of a given thought is being shaped…”

– Michel de Beistegui –

“the present is as long as a walk when I am walking”

– Chryssipe, quoted in Francois Jullien –

Or, “the present is as long as the sentence I’m composing…” the tune, the breath, the weather… the lunge, the gaze, the listen… the sex, starlight, heartbeat… presence determined, according to scale.

“…as long as the thought I am thinking…” that leads to the next, and the borrowed, the other, imagined.  The languages lent, or made new, bastardized, reconstructed, remingled…

Therefore [have I now ‘left’ present/-ce?] the present writing is present just as long as it presents itself?  Does this explain run-ons and magical realism?  The refusal to pause or to finish?  Avoidance of punctuation, cessation, or periods…in order to be writing?  (as long as it is writing…living written?).

I am drawn in writing presence.  And I aspire.  To be writing as often present-ly as possible (in all the senses of the terms you might conceive).  Working, present-ly, with presences that present themselves in the activity of writing – ages, layers, eons of language becoming toward these significations I am physically inscribing NOW with evolving, accumulative, adapting and erasured meanings over times and places, persons and presents/-ces.  This continuous bodily activity and operation marking whatever presently transpires on lines – between my organism, this instrument and matter of lined pages – creating a Mobius-like twisting endless loop of circuitry, a breathless action (almost afraid of interruption, disconnection, or cessation) as if it would disqualify present/-ce with unauthorized and arbitrary finite personal breakage.

Yet I know (or believe) the present/-ing will continue all the same whether I am writing or not – ever assailing with near-infinite (perhaps infinite) encountering and engagements…be-ing… regardless of my regard, participation, choice of action, and awareness.  Unconcerned by my present/-ce as I a grain of soil or blade of grass, singular molecules or mosquitos, the hairs dropped from our heads.  Matters of scale of what matters.  [To/for us.  ME.  At our scale, at whatever scale, DEPENDING].

Interruption occurs.  Into, inter-, enter: an eruption.  Anything that commands response.  A call from another, a locusts’ buzz, tonal or temperature flux.  Changing track and attention.  I plea for intervention versus interruption, that the breathless present/ce might go on, unintruded but intervened.  Eventuation, eventually, new contents entering  veins of the stream I am searching, spreading, scribing…at the limit of…

Intrusion.  Inter-eruption.  Or inter-vention, intra-venously… WILL OUR PRESENT PRESENCE all bound up with, knotted, wound and intersecting, inserted and inserting reciprocally or complicitly…go on, remain, continue?  Will it be dissipation or dissension, distension, desiccation or decay?  Can we have, swerve, welcome an irruption intravenously?  I hesitate, I turn.  A response.

Staccato desiccation.  I’ve been bombarded.  Like tragedy, untranceable.  Persistence and flow stuttering, gives way.  The stream of thought polluted, a turbulence assigned.  Coming undone, branch drying up, kindling, that is to say…

Yet if to say, that is – perhaps we’re crossing, coming-over, over-coming interruption as irruption.  Response-able, disabling, but hearing more, lines converging with complexity, a chaos, a banking flow…or spilling over and dispersing?…who could know.  What means – BECOME?

“the present is a write, as long as I am writing” – this presence fractured into fragments, presents, now, perhaps beyond deciphering.  The mode of ciphers, potent codes – standing for??  Standing for???  Which represents THIS…what you read.  Read in, read from, read into and out of.  We do not step into the same stream twice, it has been said, or three times, or even once, even, again.  We don’t know “same,” yet use it like a God, destructive hoping (“identity,” “non-contradiction,” even Truth(s) or Fact(s)) – that SOMEthing might not change.

NOT in this world, and we know no other.  Conjuring zeroes, ideals and myths, utopias (literally “no-places”) and lines of imaginings.  Hoping for control?  Security?  Continuance? – of what, of which…presence.  Scales to track the motions with, fallibly.  Attempts to stay the flow, stay with the flow, re-cognize, re-member, re-main.  What continues to fall apart and reassemble, ever ‘new’ but only partly, in its occurring, range of scales ever irrupting, erupting, interrupting as comings-to-be in all their goings, it’s going…a fragile now.

But I digress along the stream, exposing fragments, perhaps connected to a mouth, a trunk or mother.  Dispersive river, interminably con-fusing elements transgressing finitude.  Number, line and term.  Concept, law, or theory.  None of it works, and some of it seems to.  All may belong, depending on scale.

A matter of present/ce perhaps, and of movement.  Some matter of species, perception and dream.  Susurrate surround, full of disruption, riding waves, but not for long.

“the present is as long…as a singularity of thought is being shaped…”

– Chrysippe + de Beistegui –

(much later and rescaled)

Free to Write

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Confusion, creative writing, Experimenctes, identity, Language, meaning, Semiotics, Writing6 Comments

Wobbly

With the freedom and challenge of writing nothing, with nothing to write.

An assemblage without shape, a conditioned concoction…constrained by language, by individuality, by knowledge and finitude.  Dependent on what it is that “I” am, the funds of culture, genes, society and cells “I” am able to access and “person-al” (!?) abilities or capacities to operate, utilize, actuate, participate in/with.

Writing veritable nothing(s) seems easy, suddenly.  (When viewed from perspective of self-reference – envisioned this way it almost feels inevitable).

Perhaps I am incapable of writing SOMEthing, some THING.  Perhaps I am unable to create a fact-of-artifice, an object, an artifact.  Something-being-on.  Perhaps I can neither begin work, nor complete it…perhaps “I” is always the EXCLUDED MIDDLE.  The liminal divisor, the limit-of-being-this, the present/presence of this particular effort, happening, this action-in-its-taking-place…ALWAYS AFTER and ALWAYS BEFORE.  Event?  Never quite NOW, excepting AS the action, but EVER precipitate and EVER resulting.

I write.  Neither conclusively nor originary.  Verb-al.

Skirting this void (where there might have been nothing, no thing such as THIS – these letters) “I” scribble known (“shared?”) language…marks meaning…something…almost.  Meaning SOME things to SOME persons, never unambiguous, never decisive or clear, not quite agreed.  This is language, these letters, these symbols, these marks.  May be scrambled, assembled, undone, recombined – but still marks – recognizable to SOME, and processed through “me,” significance is what is in question.

Understandability, inter-pretation, com-munication, con-course (of the stream of inking letters onto a page to in-scribe knowable triggers…to refer, to signify, to re-mind, to com-pose, to make happen, avail-able, IN-BE-TWEEN: to split BE-ing as shared or con-joined).  To joinwith by posing, positing, offer-ing marks formed toward potentially recognizable inscriptions as con-constructed / – accepted words toward meaning.  Con-fusing.

Yes it involves effort.  Yes it depends on unlike-ness and emptiness or faith.  Yes it seems un-like-ly (NOT like-able, not able-to-be-liked) and yet I give it, construct (co-construct) and offer up (sacrifice) what “I” com-pose (set out for sight – with) “YOU” (other) in order.

In order to…?  for…?

Assembling identifiable language sets, verbal Lego blocks, so that…?

(an “I” might be posed? seen? heard? recognized? present-ed?)

Meaning, writing nothing – “having nothing to write, and lacking the means to write it, and the extreme compulsion to keep writing” (Beckett) and not to get in your way…

Perhaps this is near what I’ve done,

  • a waste
  • a con-fusion
  • a voiding an ab-sense
  • a disruption…

…getting it out of the way (my desire) perhaps I’ve writ nothing of note but a circling, a dawdling, an hesitation, dis-traction and trip-stumble-fall…

…a fragment and faltering, figment frustration.

Nothing of worth, of no value, sign-if-icance, just words.

Perhaps THIS is nothing of note.

What “I’ve” done with the freedom and challenge…the time, urge, and ability:

NOTHING

Seasons

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, Books, change, Critical Thought, Current Reading, Education, European Graduate School, Hermit, Knowledge, Library, Literature, Reading, research, Writing1 Comment

What’s happening now…and why I’m not writing much – reading, teaching, librarying, parenting…

Addenda of sorts

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Complexity, Current Reading, Language, Mapping, meaning, Semiotics, Writing7 Comments

Gunnar Olsson

“…in the universe of the sign there are no clear-cut identities, only delayed differences.  Never a dead end, always an already-but-not-yet; never a genuine original, always an imperfect copy.  Language is a simulacrum of simulacra, the privileged hiding-place of the psychoanalyst’s repressed supplement.

“Pushed to its own limits, the difference between identity and difference is that in the world of the former everything sticks to itself, while in the heaven of the latter everything escapes from itself.  Comparison rests on a foundation of difference, for once a sign is interpreted it no longer is what it used to be.  And exactly therein lies the crux of the matter, for it is well established that the structure of language itself makes perfect translation impossible.  It follows that reality is never what it is said to be, for reality and language are never one and the same, a painful lesson…

“The conclusion is straightforward: although word and object are always related, they are never identical.” – Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal

Abysmal

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Language, Mapping, meaning, Philosophy, Semiotics, Wittgenstein, Writing5 Comments

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein –

“The silent spaces between words often speak louder than the words themselves”

-Gunnar Olsson – 

Recycling…in retrospect

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, identity, Language, Literary References, Literature, longing, notebooks, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Two variations of older, longer works…trying to remember possibilities…

Words Gestures Order

Fragments

Words & Gestures

 

Report: Beginning from the Endless End: A Community of Thinking: The Experience of the European Graduate School

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, being, Complexity, Current Reading, Education, European Graduate School, Experience, fragments, Journaling, Loss, Maurice Blanchot, Melancholy, Philosophy, Samuel Beckett, Writing5 Comments

Apply Now: Begin your MA/PhD this Summer 2016 in Saas-Fee, Switzerland

Report: Beginning from the Endless End: A Community of Thinking: The Experience of the European Graduate School

“the center of thought is that which does not let itself be thought”

– Maurice Blanchot

Perhaps a community. 

A community “risking a fragile resilience” (Philip Beesley).

“Distinguishing the indistinguishable.”  “Compatible Incompatibilities.”  “The Origin is Empty.”  “The path to truth is truth itself.”  “More than 1, less than 2.”  We are always with without. 

I feel rich, calm, a sense of belonging.  And loss.  In my second year of a PhD program at the European Graduate School, nestled far and away in the Swiss Alps, in the canton of Saas-Fee.  It is June, it is chilly, high, quiet, separate.  Far from the searing plains of Kansas.  Far from my employment, my partner, my children.  Far from domestic duties and sustaining (endless) chores.  Removed, set apart, drawn up to the mountains, the rivers, the snow.  Another language, an other culture, a situation of difference.

Mladen Dolar, following many great others, tells us we must “slow our temporality.”  That we can “only do philosophy if we pretend to have all the time in the world.”  How could this be done within the everyday?

It feels monastic almost.  30-40 humans from all over the world gathered to hear, speak, inquire and reflect.  Many silences.  All impassioned by the above – the difficult work, accidental work, error-filled work of “distinguishing the indistinguishable” finding “compatible incompatibilities,” facing the “empty origins,” and setting onto the path that has no end, in the risk of a “bad infinity” – of selecting or creating or imagining impossible tasks and eternally postponing them, finding no conclusions, resolutions, foundations – everything put into question, everything problematized, intervened – “the truth is mediation, a passage.”  The happening, the process, of thinking.  So we believe.  And so we gather.  With eminent leaders, guides, mentors (for example, this session: Slavoj Zizek, Helene Cixous, Philip Beesley, Christopher Fynsk, Mladen Dolar, Jean-Luc Nancy, Keller Easterling, Chris Kraus, Alenka Zupancic, Benjamin Bratton, Werner Hamacher, Anne Carson…and more…).  We hear from them, we question, we think with them, think FOR other thought drawn toward us (Hegel, Aristotle, Plato, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Freud, Deleuze, Blanchot, Spinoza, Holderlin, Goya, Beckett, and on…).  What lives, what continues in our seemingly endless end.  What might in-form and unsettle us, what might disturb and enliven us, how we might change-in-relation, again and again and again…

To “take all the time in the world” for 30 days.  To read closely.  To be overwhelmed.  To exhaust.  To end again and again, to fail in hopes to fail better.  To “start in a bad way, in order to arrive in the good.”  The process and problems.  Our “selves” in becoming, the one and the two and the many – always with lack.  Negativity, absence.  “Nothing is identical to itself.”  The “greatest order and disorder exist as one.”  “Constancy is slipperiness and change.”  How do we dwell there and evince.  How do we act to find out?  There is always the other, another, a lack that we seek.  That is nothing, just lack.  Drives and desires and neuroses.  The community of thinkers.

Some of us question “what is wrong with us?”  Why a surplus enjoyment of troubling existence?  Why identities founded on nothing?  “Philosophy always arrives too late” (Hegel).  We can only begin at the ends.  Against nothing.  Yet toward.  And it is here I feel valued.  Here recognized.  Here is a home.  I belong.  In a timelessness of knowing in time.  An everywhere of nobodies anywhere.  Senses replete with mountains and rain.  Clear air and short breaths.  An absence of tasks.  Singular tasks.  Monumental tasks (for me).  That need all of the time in the world.  Are all of the time of the “world”.  Senseless letters.  Turbulent being.  In media res – in the middle of things – when outside already inside, inside where something’s always left out.

My collegiate journals from decades ago are riddled in their margins with: “to be the writer of loss,” “to be the philosopher of grey,” “to compose absence.”  A longing for empty origins since thinking began.  Repetition.

I walk for the body to process.  I dream of sharp thorns in my feet, of lost items, of absence and language and two shades of grey.  Rain comes through the clouds in the fog.  “The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on,” “My mistakes are my life,” – Samuel Beckett.  And so, and yet, I go on.  Intensively, demandingly, having “nothing to write, having no means to write it, and being forced by an extreme necessity to keep writing.” – Maurice Blanchot.

I miss those I hold nearest.  And I love them – how indecipherable the term – further description annuls it.  To say the unsaid or unsayable.  I am confused and elated.  Inspired and exhausted.  Drawn forward through despair.  And I love this experiencing.  It belongs.

“If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

 

On Being Other

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experience, family, friendship, Heidegger, identity, longing, Melancholy, mystery, nature, Philosophy, Poetry, Traces, Writing4 Comments

On Being Other

(after Heidegger, on Holderlin)

 

Broken off from origin: gods, family, homeland.

Early switched direction – turning back, against, since.

No belonging.  No church, no community of mortals.

Reliant on the peaks and the abyssal.

No lasting love, but efforts toward convention –

when giving up –

even offspring, domesticity,

varietous employment,

almost friends.

No lasting commerce, always in-between,

feeling resistance and restraint,

constraints of discipline and need,

of longings, love, and lust.

Searching Other

fueled by others – across the times –

creators of the peaks and their abysses.

Oscillation.

Not yet rational, it commences –

undone in the unknowing, uncertain constant flow

generates turbulence toward an opening

or a gap, some kind of fold –

“run up hard against the unsayable.”

the closing line is a quotation from Heidegger’s

lectures on Holderlin’s poems “Germania” & “The Rhine”