Grammaring Perseverance

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-

 

In-Shadows

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: &

            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-

It happens

mist

            It would happen.  The things approach us.  We feel them in our horizons.  Extending out behind us.  A sort of fullness.  A swelling, sweltering cool.  Billowing possibility.  Stand and stare, even in our movement, unseeing.  We blindly gaze.  Caught short, upended, the rhythm is certainly sea.  We are dry.  We will happen.  We are bound to.  Look out.

Remote murmur.  You know.

Not trauma.  Distant thrumble.

You speak.

Echo absorbs.

It would happen.  Consider.

It will happen.  Just you wait.

A world is a kind of ode.

Your body a stylus.

We are here.

N Filbert 2012

for Friday Fictioneers, August 24, 2012

Locating my mind

Nothing is the force / that renovates the world.

-Emily Dickinson-

Please read the following conversation between poets Christine Hume and Rosmarie Waldrop (pp.76-88, click on image for text)

Rosmarie Waldrop

Waldrop has always been a heroine of mine, and I’ve been struggling again with “Who am I?” “What do I do?” “How am I?” – questions of identity and difference that come up in times where we are suffused in roles – students, parents, spouses, artists, employees, gendered, and so on…In insular places where I feel safe I am able to theoretically conjure a kind of flow, that these aren’t choices but movements, that things and actions do not exist, only ‘occasions”, “relations,” but under stress I quickly find myself wishing I knew who/what/where/when/how I am.  Today I received this book through inter-library loan, and kept opening to the Waldrop chapter… apparently for good reason.  I share many of her points of view, and would like to share them with whomever finds themselves interested.

I think of the ‘between’ more in terms of both, and of extending the gray zone between the black/white in the direction of multivalence. ‘The yes and no in everything.’

-Rosmarie Waldrop-

The Light Ekphrastic

I’m very honored and happy to be a part of this fine journal – “The Light Ekphrastic”!!

See my work and read many others HERE!

Thank you!

Drawing a Blank ________________ …

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

And yet

shuffling through my papers and bags from the “vacation”-ing, I found these pages…uncertain what more to do with them…

The Advance

 

In the looping that making is

swing back

tie around

and move forward,

if you make it through

you will stretch toward

if not

you will bunch up

stopped and

knotted,

held

somehow in a form;

 

The passing through –

the trick of things –

like camels

and eyes of needles

or coyotes

tricking their prey –

Not always,

but sometimes,

it works.

 

More prevalently

we create bonds

that only loosen

when undone

or serve

to strangle

Neither / nor

Either / or

a kind of be / have

if you will

you will feel

that you won’t

but no matter

 

Letters are made

for the unconscious

something akin to

shorthand,

symbols,

drawing

from metaphorical wells

their multi-meanings,

depending on

what’s growing there.

Here.

Now.

 

For instance

finding what you’ve put away

if not uncovered,

comes in snippets.

Like remembering

we advance

in casting back and forth

across a scene –

it’s only details

attention finds

and alters

with the looking

like a spy

proffers suspicion

or a guru

marking growth

 

it’s in our nature –

though we cannot know that –

in our nature too

the combination:

imagination

and desire,

a synonym

for knowledge

if we “get it.”

I don’t get it,

I be / have

and therefore lose

much of what I had coming

 

Alas, but it is day

and meaning rises

first one thing

and then another

by my measure,

inaccurately

distinct

and untoward;

we have our  myths –

our dreams and visions –

our feeble truths

for what they’re worth,

a clumsy journeying

toward

death

when be and have

are one (none)

N Filbert 2012

Collecting Fragments : The Engineer of Himself

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”

Here and There

Threw this one together quickly…not sure it can be kept up with in its leaps.  Apologies.  But I made something.  Thanks always Friday Fictioneers

grapevine

Blue Walls & Vines

The blue of the walls was brighter than sky, made peaceful by children’s playthings.  The Other was far.  Another place, other time.  Among grapevines and meadows.

Both worlds had clouds.  I remember.  It takes time to conjure this up.

Her sky and those vines reminded me where I was – in a room full of chatter, chaotic with toys.  One is peace; one is peaceful.  Both are fraught.  Both are ripe.  There’s a difference.

We had hoped that it wouldn’t be great, but would carry.  And it does, in its longing, its loss.

Both are fraught, both are ripe.  Both are lovely.

N Filbert 2012