How can I not?
Tag: Poetry
Going Back, Going Forward
I hastily grabbed a notebook of primarily blank pages as I whooshed the children off for a swim. I needed to study and make notes while they splashed about and played and require pen & paper for the process. It turned out that the pages containing my writing dated some 15 years ago – journaling from a 4-day solo hike I had made in the Colorado mountains. Included was this me-of-20-something’s poem:
The whole notebook was nostalgic for me – my youthful vibrant concerns for solitude and justice, freedom and nature and virtue. What struck me about this little number was how consistent (or persistent) the concerns and interests worded here have been (obviously) throughout most of my life. Seeking purpose, expression, control – recognizing somehow that once language is entered, is invoked, everything changes. Our purposes, searches, availabilities, capacities, expressions, knowledge, – all gets reworked and revised as we engage in the broader activity of language.
If, as John Canfield theorizes, “in language we never leave the sphere of the social” and that “language is a vague concept with unclear boundaries,” in part because it “grows as more language-games are added to the mix, and as existing ones are enriched in various ways,” that, fundamentally “language is a set of customs in which words play a role, a set of patterned, culturally determined modes of interaction..” so that with “increasing cultural complexity come increasing complexity of our patterns of interaction” then my lifelong hunches that I’ll never get a handle on it, or master its use, or turn it explicitly to my purposes are a matter of course.
Which is also what fascinates, compels and rewards its use. Again, with such a limited arsenal of units – (take a look at your keyboard and consider for a moment to what gargantuan and variable use we put those 100 keys or so) – every engagement with the tool is interactive, reciprocally shaping and shaped by us, and unfailingly externalizing for our organism – the medium thrusts and immerses us into our society and culture and history and possible futures, as well as all the “thinks you can think” and more!
On the right day, then, my bewilderment in the face of language as my vocational practice gets to be an adventure of constant discovery, novelty, and learning – immersing me in some infinite-like context, warping and woofing my organism into a universe of threads…
all quotations from John Canfield’s Becoming Human: The Development of Language, Self and Self-Consciousness
Another day filled with the thickness of love
for my wife on Valentine’s
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread
–William Stafford
The Life of the Mind (or, Reading World)
Perambulating
Sickened and soothed by symbols, I set out.
Signals come and I perceive, I respond.
The I forms to the action.
With enough exercise, tissues tighten:
there are knots and strains and sprains
that need unraveling, massage.
I turn to music
buried deep within the signs
a way to loosen and undo
the stressing strands.
I unalign
and gain relief
spread out through many pathways,
any selves
allowed to wander their own ways
beginning at the edges of their ends,
filling margins,
taking borders,
easing outward
to become.
N Filbert 2012
PRESS ON – Thank You
For some reason this old post was on my stats page today…I opened it and browsed through and it says things again that I continue to experience:
thank you persistent workers and players of WordPress!
(click on image or title for past post)
The Family of Fiction – 6
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.
Aspect of Architecture
“A well-crafted sentence overturns the notion that thought is distinct from thinking. A well-crafted sentence enacts the sense it makes rather than representing it. The result of writing well-crafted sentences is that your reader will have the most vivid sense that something is happening to him or her and with the irresistible urgency of their own dreams.”
“Dedicate yourselves to reading most energetically that which you don’t immediately understand. Read with a special attention to the prospect that what doesn’t appear to make sense matters most because of the possibilities of sense-making that are portended in it.”
taken from:
“It’s always a question of beginnings”
Another year. The title of this post comes from Helene Cixous’ introduction to Clarice Lispector’s The Stream of Life, both books being part of the tight reliable necessities of each of my own repeated beginnings. No matter how I try otherwise, when the first of a calendrical year comes around with its socio-cultural aura-like atmospheric influence of the idea of new beginnings…I find myself tracking to the shelves for these few cellular texts like the body seeks to breathe. This has been my inalterable habit for so many years now, that I can not avoid recommending them (with the highest deepest forms of loving attachment), to all of you.
“evoking the incommunicable realms of the spirit,
where dream becomes thought,
where trace becomes existence…
I write you because I do not understand myself…
it is always a question of beginnings.”
“And for many years I have been writing,
borne by writing,
this book that book;
and now, suddenly, I sense it:
among all these books is the book I haven’t written;
haven’t ceased not to write.”
and additionally, today:
“What I mean is, if you have ink in your blood it’s hard to get it out of your hands…
Our reputation for excellence is unexcelled, in every part of the world.
And will be maintained until the destruction of our art in some other art which is just as good but which,
I am happy to say, has not yet been invented.”
“Samuel Beckett: Try again. Fail again. Fail better…
to conceive of writing as a possibility space where everything can and should be considered, attempted, and troubled.”
May your 2013 be filled with incredible texts and integral growth and development!
The Nourishing Silence
In the midst of busy, sometimes harried, rhythm-bashing holidays, Holly and I find our first day of quiet self-direction, spending a full day of her sketching, submitting images, reading… and myself completing an essay and Ida’s blank notebook and polishing on some poems…and, probably most nourishing of all (for me)…input. Here are the sumptuous nuggets I’ve been sampling today:
All my Words are Silent 