Tag: Poetry

Feeling Blind

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments
Antoine Coypel – Studies of the Blind

 

Feeling Blind

“Art always divides objects and offers a part instead of the whole, a feature of the whole, and no matter how detailed it is, it still is a dashed line representing a line”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“A fragment is not a fraction, but a whole piece”

-Lyn Hejinian-

“Those girls!,” we say of our puppies, as if we know.  As if they behaved like us.  We are, after all, wild animals, without a master large enough to keep us from fighting.  The puppies are so small.

 

I remember filling a large square of canvas (“large” being relative to my body, not a mountain) with loads of spattered paint.  It felt good and looked neat, even interesting, crammed as it was with accidents and intentions.  Runs and spills and layers of carefully made strokes.  Nothing was recognizable or familiar in the result, but I’d swear it was representation.

 

Again and again I attempt to feel blind.  Not empathetically, by tightly wrapping my head and completely covering my eyes with some solid fold of cloth, then wandering through a day or night or week of time.  Nothing like that.  I’m capable of removing my glasses and learning the world without edges or shapes.  Feeling blind is usually sexual for me.  In the way I use my senses.  It’s never the same if I know what I’m touching or tasting, hearing or smelling.  To “feel blind” means losing familiar.  I write blind every day.  Defamiliarizing myself in order to learn something.  About language, about emotion, about me and a world of signs.  It’s de-meaning.  Bring me my lover’s body replete with organs and breath, thoughts and flesh, and lay her down beside me.  I’ll tell you what it’s like.

 

They like to escape, to cross boundaries.  If you turn your back, they scamper.  They’ll sniff and chew on anything, and leave their feces anywhere.  Artistic mediums rarely work the way I want them to.  Paint slips away where I place it thick and neat, clay cracks when it dries or fractures in the fire.  Words mean something else.  Her breath creates an atmosphere, moving particles and waves.  I can smell the colors of her thoughts.  At this distance it is easy to hear the goosebumps on her shoulder curling forward to her armpit.  I feel her hair, thick and brown, around my ankles.

 

I try to use mistakes.  The pups will eat their poop.  Her buttocks create parentheses in my dreams.  If I stack the pieces just so, another thing will happen, come to be.  Sticks preferable to stuffies.  The arches of her feet never cease whispering their curving tones.  I rarely intend what I make.  They stumble their way to fresh treasures of foul-smelling, old-buried rot.  Her crotch controls weather, I ache deep in my bones when it’s humid.

 

It does not cease to amaze me, what’s found.  Candy-wrapper, weed-stalk, squirrel-scent.  Everyone’s a critic.  The purposeless finds purpose in the eyes of the beholders.  The meeting of the needs.  The way the caps of her knees taste like buttons of mushrooms, just that tiny and soft on my tongue.  The slogans her scent shouts into my ears, rushing the drums like a throng.  They drag it until it dissolves.  Everyone makes up a context.

 

And eventually tire.  With ignorance things are recharged.  She is different when I open my eyes.  I had registered warm mango with coconut milk, they’d spilt honey on an old wet rag.  Apparently the “trajectory of my new works on paper.”  She came with a gasp and a shudder as I deciphered her Braille, she had never liked crowds and my mouth was crowded by terms.  No one understands it, or perhaps they do and I don’t, pups fast asleep and me feeling so blind with attention.

 

 

Man-O’-Word’s Summer Reading List

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading8 Comments

SUMMER READING 2012

from top-to-bottom as they appear at this moment on the table

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings

Joe Bolton – The Last Nostalgia

Susan Howe – The Midnight

Laurie Sheck – Captivity

Ann Smock – What is There to Say?

Jerome Klinkowitz – The Self-Apparent Word Continue reading “Man-O’-Word’s Summer Reading List” →

Writing: the Spaces. its Atmosphere.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Writing: the Spaces.  its Atmosphere.

 

Write first, the epigraphs assemble.  Post-prompting.  Or become the impetus the references gather around.

One idea.

With blackberry brambles and the wish (or revulsion) at owning a dog.

“A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece” (Lyn Hejinian)

Like that.  It doesn’t take long.

The brain a compendium of quotes.

“The head is a very hard case.”  (L.H.)

I try to crack it.  I’m thankful it’s hard.  A safe for the precious things.

I can’t just do it “everywhere.”

In order to write, I discover I need to expand.  Once to the point I’m as large as my skin, it still needs a force-shield, a sense-field – a hard case like a desk and locked room, “controlled environment” or “padded cell” – that license to work without fear.

Or hurting oneself or one’s others.

The head is a hard case.  The body is supple.

Salmonberries all along the way.  A juicy burst, almost sweet, almost sickening – the risk involved.

My globe is filled with the words of others.  Like my skull, no bit of language is our own.  But inexhaustible, so unashamed, I eat them here, I forage food.  I harvest, glean and process in this tiny shed, concocting meal I hope will serve.  That process in yet another realm.

My space is angular.  Is low and dark.  A cross of cave and womb.  I need to know it’s all in there, I need to know I do not know.  I bring a lantern and a few spare tools.  I take notes, observations in my bunker-scriptorium, my hand and my brain.

“A paragraph is a time and place, not a syntactic unit” (L.H.)

I scramble your body.  Unravel.  Dissect and reassemble.  Never known in its entirety.  My own.  “some desire powers generously” (L.H.).  Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.

“Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there…”

“…Reason looks for two, then arranges it from three: number, stutter and curvature” (L.H.)

The writing space is “freedom then, liberation later” (L.H.) when rejoindered to the attaching world…

“a person seated on an iceberg and melting through it” (L.H.)

“the mind is a thing deeply marked.  I have bound myself to this damage” (Laurie Sheck)

“we are so rawly made, / so carried into the harsh and almost-dark” (L.S.)

My cave-womb almost-dark.  A lantern lights this page.  It is noon.  Vertebrates in the walls.  Fossily spines.

Number, stutter, curvature.

In the space, safely solitary, saturate with sense, my own…what assembles sensible only similar, and that’s okay…what obtains or remains can be observed as an object.  To be encountered, not understood.  Even me.

“Art is inseparable from the search for reality…

…Realism, if it addresses the real, is inexhaustible” (L.H.)

            Like looking at painting.  House or museum.  Everything both.   Various watching.

Mulberries litter the landing and stairs with an acquired taste.  Leaving stains, like everything we grow to love.

“A fragment is not a fraction….”

            Safe to search reality, where it has died, where it seems so.  “Seeming is believing” (L.H.).

Number, stutter, curvature.

Some berries you must not ingest but can still get caught by their thorns.  Or the illness pukes out.  A pulping.

Searching is not always distinguished.

Your space should form a shelter (within/without) bound to damage, rawly made.  Secure but repercussive.

Epidemic depends on the exit.

Nettles and fireweed.  The search for the fruits can be harsh.

It is almost dark.  I must emerge.

N Filbert 2012

So excited I forgot to title….! what good reading does…

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

I discover an unconquerable urge to convey this text to you, and a bewildering chance in hell to accurately do so.  This book, My Life by Lyn Hejinian, classified as…huh, what would it be classified as?  There is no designation on the title or copyright pages, I have no idea where a big-box bookstore might shelve the thing…reading through one’s hunch is fiction, no, memoir, no, poetry, no, philosophy, no, literary theory, no…WRITING.  It is one of those texts where words moving through hands like moving water (ever so hard to look away from) seem to form patterns on their own, but one knows there are so many ingredients and influences, substances and material going into the way a wave, a runnel, a current forms….that it cannot be chalked up to chance.  And so you immerse.  You join the river, jump into the water to get a feel.  Swim through it, splash.  Thunk your cupped hands to make thunder.  Float on your back like a dream.  Enjoy.  Explore.  Become with the flow.

Lyn Hejinian has been writing a long time.  I felt stupored by her recent book of a thousand eyes, thinking she just gets better with time, but that’s not so either.  Nothing is true, everything might be.  Hejinian fills her pages with words that seem so unobstructed, so flooded with their possibilities and yet ever so economical, spare, necessary.  They leap like the slap of stream plashing sizable rocks, and then swoon in loop toward a bank.  There is a “miracle” quality, by which I mean to designate that happening of the mind and body when encountering something not-it (unselfsame) and experiencing all sorts of “i am’s” and ‘that’s me’s” – resonances, foreknowledge, understanding, sympatico – nothing we can point to as real – but stuff we really experience all the same.

It’s a wandering flood.  Yes, we do not doubt it’s “her life,” filled with details and colors, textures and senses that only come through first-hand, subjected/ive experience…and yet, nothing secret or private, nothing that hasn’t become language by now – through the book – through its writing – so we know it belongs to all of us.  It is words.  It is water.  It is my life, however one brings themselves to it, to this, to her writing, to what’s written.

A brief example will give you the best idea.  Picking a random five pages (each section is 1.5-2 pp long) I will copy the sentences that strike me (remembering that they only strike me via how they’re arranged with the sentences I’m NOT copying all around them), to give you a sense of how dense the bursts of profundity are, meshed and woven like the songs of birds.  Just that distinct.  Here goes:

“We never wanted more than something beginning worth continuing which remained unended.”

“In order to understand the nature of the collision, one must know something of the nature of the motions involved – that is, a history.”

“After crossing the boundary which distinguishes the work from the rest of the universe, the reader is expected to recross the boundary with something in mind.”

“I came to depend on my children socially, was never at a loss without them.”

“It is hard to turn away from moving water.  And my memory of him is a poor likeness – like jealousy, which cannot get what love has secured.  The fear of ‘losing’ ideas objectifies knowledge.”

‘I want to be free of you, in order to do things, things of importance which will impress you, attract you, so that you can be mine and I can be yours forever.”

“The general form tends to grow quite naturally under the hand that writes it, but until a thing is completed, it needs to be explained.”

“The difference between empathy and responsibility.”

and so on… Now sentences are easily plucked from the text, because it feels like a collection of phrases.  Unrelated.  Ever relating.  And so it builds and twists and floods.  But it is not random.  There are identifiable phrases and reverberations of phrases that keep you from feeling surrealism or some stream-of-individual-consciousness befuddlement.  You don’t have to “go with it” and hope it will come clean…you pursue it and let it push you, this give-and-take and rest-and-urge that weaves you into the text and the text deep into you (often bypassing awareness), much as you imagine the text came to be (in relation to author).  So those sentence/segments/phrases above are pulled from three or four contiguous sections two-thirds of the way through the book, I could’ve started anywhere and found just as many, and with re-readings would choose the sentences sitting between them (I’ve no doubt).

And that is worth reading.  And being read with.  By.

Writing: Chapters that don’t belong – all of them, so far

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

Here is what has assembled so far…seems like a sort of series…in its wayward way…

 

 

 

 

WRITING:

CHAPTERS THAT DON’T BELONG

“The pen asks / much more than it can answer / one word at a time”

–Philip Levine–

 

“(the world is like a comparison – / the second part elusive),”

–Arkadii Dragomoshchenko–

 

“An other is a possibility, isn’t it”

–Lyn Hejinian–

 

“Consciousness is always consciousness of something”

–Larry Levis–

 

 

1.  “wake up, snare-setter, / in the snare / spacious, like chance” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko)

 

And sometimes I do, wake up.  St. Sebastian pinned as a still-life with crystal lances, a clarity.  But that is catching too, and refracts.  “I think that what I thought when I was thinking that, at least in thinking of it now, I am thinking that I thought it…” and so on.  Crystal lances.  Thoughts refracting.  The occasional conviction.  (Which we call certitude).

The margins within margins, windows in reflection.

Every image being an entrance through which we exit.  From.

 

I call this “letting actually resonate.”  This being, activity, thinging we do.

If I stand still, so to speak, I form a spiraling vortex, an enormous vacuum.  What is: portal and Black hole every now.  With.

Prepositions being ever-so-important, say “sign-ificant,” that they deserve their own sentencing.

 

I’ll never know what it is “to write.”  If only because it questions.  Every word.  In.

I can think of it as a working, out, but that is far from any truth I can conceive.  “the second part elusive” with each toggle of a term.

 

Gravity enforcing force, to fly.

I’ve never been fond of violence, but how else might we change?  Or even move?  On.

 

A recent well-organized text I perused and then ate, mentioned dialetheia as a two-way truth; or, “true contradictions,” that is, in one.  Word.  Split with a twin.  Comparison as congenital doubling.  Of difference.  Equals such same.

 

We look toward what can be seen.  Compromised and concealed by a frame.  Otherwise unseen.  Learn, therefore, (through your senses), in-visibility.  Dialetheia.

We do (many of us) love to be astonished, after all.  With.

 

If there are more parts to this I haven’t found them.  They’re either too large or too small.  I’ll have to wait.  I’m unable.  Nothing living waits.  Patience is pretense, pretend.  Waiting, is searching; patience, is longing.  Loss is implicit.

 

2.  The Chorus

“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’…

…A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text”

(Lyn Hejinian)

            Explicitly.

I.e. “the loss was always implicit as the longing” (Alain de Botton).  And I quote, quoting from someone else’s quotation, but I forget which (or whose).  For.

I’m certain for various reasons.  Which beggar the certainty.

A pause, arose, and fragmented this text.

Because I don’t

know

what I’m

doing

I am writing,

and it questions.

            As if we could get intimate with our process, so near it as to join.  In other words, if our action, breathing, effort, language, thinking, senses and the uncountable inborn “blind spots” that a human system circulates were, well…coterminous.

 

Is that a question lacking its mark?

It would seem so.  About.

Either too large or too small, perceptively, I suspect.

Causing a pause to rise,

as I search for something implicit.

            Explicitly.

 

Given the fragmentary text(s) (you agree?) I have to ask:  might writing be possibling an other?  “Consciousness is always consciousness of something” (he said).

That is a possibility, isn’t it?  (the second part’s elusive),

 

Blatantly – I feel caught in a snare I am setting, as spacious as I imagine chance to be, (having no other name I can call it), ensnared as I seem – some web, some matrix, some universe and beyond – too large or too small to perceive (I am guessing)

which always gives rise to a pause, implicitly.

What I had hoped to make explicit.

 

What I call “wanting actually resonate,” some loss implicit as longing.

I write, asking more than it answers, or “the closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back” (Karl Kraus, which I quote off someone else, who knows who – yet I hope someone does!)

 

“But of any material, the first thing to make is an ash-tray”

(Lyn Hejinian, I quote this text from its source,

apparently).

 

 

3 – ?

“’Appearances / remain suspended / in transmission’ (Craig Watson) are not so much perceived as apprehended, handled; the one affecting, infecting, the next”

(Charles Bernstein)

 

            Or something to hold what dies off.  The reverberations without resonance.  All edited, edited out, according to needs for appearance, depending on what apprehends, the shape of the handler’s snare.

Think of it – what is selected for capture, in captivity, infects, slipping frequencies to drift on, transmitting, transmitting, there is always ash that won’t be removed, no amount of soaking, scrubbing or spray…

perhaps it’s under the nails, clogging the pores, dusting the follicles… the remains.

We don’t know why we write, trusting such ephemeral weightless shifty particles to catch as motes in an eye…appearances, like dust (in just the right angle of light), remaining suspended in their transmission…hoping (without, really, hope) to, in apprehension – apprehend, by being handled to affect, infect…

always wanting next.  Making it so.

Depending.

 

Why the book is needed (as ashtray) as form to hold the crumbling, an urn for the remains, until such time as they might be stirred or shaken or spilled.

Again in the commerce of bodies, handled, brushed and staining.

It gets everywhere.  And remains.

Note its infective spread.

Language, whether structures/systems of, or fragments – bits and pieces, lying everywhere implicit.

To write – to make explicit?  It asks more than it answers, word by word, by letter, by ash…

 

And what remains?  Suspended…in transmission…for affect…a dormant virus…waiting to be breathed…

 

4.  Desiring Reality

“the loss was always implicit as the longing”

-Alain de Botton-

“But, no one / can tell without cease / our human / story, and so we / lose, lose”

-Li-Young Lee-

“[Writing] is born from…’dissatisfaction’ – an internal void provisionally filled by the achievement of expression”

-Eugenio Montale-

“Because [writing] mediates between the requirements of desire and the conditions of reality, and because the relation between the two keeps changing, no statement of that relation is final”

-Ronald Sukenick-

“What is important…is not a word that is a stable and always self-equivalent signal, but an always changeable and adaptable sign”

-Katerina Clark / Michael Holquist-

 

I desire to write.  I think of it, at times, as an inscribing of thought, a physical processing of emotions, subconsciousness, dreams and ideas…”thought is a form of grief…but think we do, and lament we must, because lose we will” (H.L. Hix).  “But no one can tell without cease our human story…” ashes accumulating, carried by arbitrary winds, dissolved in sand and sea…

“Lose, lose” and don’t want to lose (desire); my ‘not-wanting’ is my longing (implicit loss), in other words “what memory is not a gripping thought?” (Lyn Hejinian)…imagination grasping in desire what it does not want to lose…forming an ashtray.  For what it loses.  Implicitly.

“No statement of that relation is final.”  Even, then, obviously, that statement.  Therefore we long to apprehend and handle…capture and contain…frame and represent…to ourselves (for?), for one another (to?) reality as it is not-known to us, unstable, uncertain and always changing.  Remember?

This is what makes this “fiction,” a “novel” – some new telling and unique ashtray design, in search of the fluttering ash, the “changeable adaptable sign.”

Required by desire, conditioned by unstable and unceasing reality, I write…words asking more than they answer, the dissatisfaction(s) (losses implicit in the longing) ever ephemerally, temporarily, momentarily filled by the action, the thought, the attempted expression (inscription) and then immediately felt again (affected, infected).  The plot, the narrative, the characters, all bound up right there – in the next moment’s void.  A gripping thought.  I give pursuit.  I desire.

I write.

 

5.  Without Trace

 

At the liminal edge, porous, moist, invisible and insensible arc…imagined limit, threshold…the ache to enter, with nothing to penetrate; the yearn to cross over or through, yet there is no barrier.  Simply following the pen, without copying.

Another way to say “possibility becoming,” or “questions and answers are words,” “letting actually resonate.”  The next part elusive, but its begun.  Refusing to compare.  Forging-foraging-forgery.

I am writing.  An other possibility that must be consciousness of something, perhaps implicit in the fragments, without identifiable trace because ensnared in the traces.

What is fiction, or poetry, essay / memoir / treatise…because making, with usable words.  That toggle so, and displace.  That render in their sundering.  That make a difference…by comparison, where the “other” is not known.

Assuming a tracing could follow or draw.  Like that – following lines or leading them on.  The perceptions, scratch that, apprehension or handling the senses must do when the look, feel, hear, smell, touch; the loss inherent in the transmission to thoughts, fueled by the desire to grasp or retain.  What was never suspended.  Always in transmissive motion…the letters.

If the lines are drawn effectively…I may form a working receptacle (as they falsify and crumble behind me in the ongoing change) where the ashes might be held.  Am I getting the picture?  Taking it?  Is taking it the same thing as making it?  Or must I develop it too?  The pen asking so many questions, word after word, tracing an image, a setting, a how…Will you follow?  Will I?  Will this be called writing and reading?  “Literature”?

I create without trace in the traces.  I go on.  Each word a threshold, a bottomless pit, then beyond that…again.

Like stringing the line and entangled.  Hooked for life…which is death.

Asking synonyming answers.  And vice-versa.  Just words.

 

I am writing.

Scribbling chapters that don’t belong…part 3

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

3 – ?

“’Appearances / remain suspended / in transmission’ (Craig Watson) are not so much perceived as apprehended, handled; the one affecting, infecting, the next”

(Charles Bernstein)

 

            Or something to hold what dies off.  The reverberations without resonance.  All edited, edited out, according to needs for appearance, depending on what apprehends, the shape of the handler’s snare.

Think of it – what is selected for capture, in captivity, infects, slipping frequencies to drift on, transmitting, transmitting, there is always ash that won’t be removed, no amount of soaking, scrubbing or spray…

perhaps it’s under the nails, clogging the pores, dusting the follicles… the remains.

We don’t know why we write, trusting such ephemeral weightless shifty particles to catch as motes in an eye…appearances, like dust (in just the right angle of light), remaining suspended in their transmission…hoping (without, really, hope) to, in apprehension – apprehend, by being handled to affect, infect…

always wanting next.  Making it so.

Depending.

Why the book is needed (as ashtray) as form to hold the crumbling, an urn for the remains, until such time as they might be stirred or shaken or spilled.

Again in the commerce of bodies, handled, brushed and staining.

It gets everywhere.  And remains.

Note its infective spread.

Language, whether structures/systems of, or fragments – bits and pieces, lying everywhere implicit.

To write – to make explicit?  It asks more than it answers, word by word, by letter, by ash…

And what remains?  Suspended…in transmission…for affect…a dormant virus…

waiting to be breathed…

the Book of a Thousand Eyes

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces2 Comments

I have just entered in to another remarkable whorl and world of Lyn Hejinian‘s language.  From the blurbs…”For Lyn Hejinian the concept of ‘everything’ or ‘everything living’ is the greatest seduction.  In this book of tales, poems, polemics, lullabies, treatises, asides…’everything’ is captive to life and continuation is queen…Lyn Hejinian knows that ‘familiarity breeds the predictable’ but she knows as well that – and how – ‘contact produces uncertainty.’  This is a brilliantly uncertain book, a book of fantastic connection, connection as multiple and as hopeless as love might be, connection as big and leggy as the night is long”

And I quote:

“Who can be trusted? / One tells / but cannot recognize.”

“the yearning inherent in the use of any sentence makes it mean far more / than ‘we are here’…

shows with utter clarity how sentences in saying something make something”

“My sentence is garbling grammar to the inside as phenomena change / concentration”

“since the future, like fortune, is to be found not in events but in their / meanings /

The future is fortune’s form /

But it lacks familiarity, the criterion for belief /

But it is real by definition, being unaffected by what we think of it /

…

The future is an accuracy requiring patience, presence /

We can’t predict if we don’t watch /

Watching makes what comes to be watched”

“It’s not the length of a life but the tension of its parts that lets / resound all that it feels”

“There is nothing unconditional – there is always room – “

and so on…333 pages of dreams and wisdom, language and possible meanings…I recommend

Zygoptera: Friday Fictioneers

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes29 Comments

I struggled with this week’s prompt-picture…then struggled with keeping it to 100 words…then changed my form altogether

For all unfamiliar – join up! – “Friday Fictioneers” is a terrific place to read others and exercise one’s own languaging!

damsel fly

Zygoptera

(zygo= joined or pairing; ptera= wings)

.

I have read of the damselfly

they of paired or joined wings

that lie paralleled and close

in their similarities

unlike others

of a horizontal differencing

.

it seems we each begin

as only one

lop-sided and clumsy

but eager to fly

flapping, leaping

slipping, falling,

we collide

.

finding another

and learning to lean

an economy of movement

security

so we huddle

and shelter

surrounded in pair

.

we of the joining wings

merging and taking to flight

.

if only for moments

N Filbert 2012

An Alter-Ars-Poetica

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing3 Comments

Alter-Ars-Poetica

It comes down to this – a “long walk in the dark” – all smeared in bear’s blood.  A hunger, a thirst, and a desperate exhaustion.  I grasp.  I hang on.  I plead.  I am breathing, I think.

And there in the blood is the soil.  The bitter, the oils and the ash.  I start to chew my breath.

It is then I begin with the dreams.  To hallucinate, I shout words and weep mumbles, which shape image, erupt forms, and I enter.  Kaleidoscopic hallways, enormous caverns and seas.  I refract and am drawn.  I am fragments.  I ray.

The world begins, or begins again, estranged and available.  Shattered thus and malformed, it readies.  A me.  I swoon, I step forth, I mutter and trace.  I become colors and fluids and I flow and I fill.  The world recedes in its changing – I give chase, and start seeing again.

Evoking desire of indifference-foes.

I stand up with a body, a medium (as if it mattered), and approach, thus affecting its molding of me.  I content.

Here is where the story goes, splotched along this trail.  Caught in weeds and nettles, drinking mud and rain.  Clay that shapes the tablets, work inscribed by bones.

The labor of erosion that brings the doubting truths to light.  The heaving lung and shriveled spleen, muscle scored by mind’s lightning.

The moment that the moment keeps occurring.

 

(this piece inspired by the following: Larry Levis’”Coda: A Word to the Wicked”; Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” and Phil Levine’s “They Feed They Lion”)

A Little Fiction(al) Rant

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing6 Comments

“creation is continual mouth”

-Craig Watson-

The Ranting of a Little Fiction

 

Fiction is tired of stories.  So tired.  I’ve been through the gamut and back again, many, many times.

I’m tired of hearing about things and objects, people and places and selves.  Tired of hearing the past reworked and the future foretold.  Tired of telling myself.

At one point I’d even identified anything made of up images and texts as myself.  Any construction with meanings were Fictions.  But everything is so much like nothing and I’m so tired of hearing about it!

Hell, there’s fiction about the Fictions!  And fictions about the fictions about the Fictions!  We can’t say anything anymore that hasn’t already been said for us, about us, even in us and by us!  Yes, we’re the once-fabulous dynastic Fiction family.  Big Daddy Fiction (also known as Master Peace Litratoor or Grande Buchs in various cultures, He-From-Which-All-Stories-Spring and so forth) – Papa Litratoor worked the overarching histories, the myths, the great narratives, the macrocosms.  Pretending that everything that needed to be known was in there, at least in the cracks and suggestions.  He lives on in the pursuits of the “Great American Novel,” and the “Truthful Memoir,” in “Compendiums of Science” and “Philosophies of Philosophy.”  Wherever you find an engulfing trajectory or inclusive point-of-view, an omniscient narrator or gnostic devotee – you’ve got Papa Fiction working his magic, creating the world again and again.

Then there’s our mama, oh ancestral trickster, always experimenting, economizing, busy on fringes.  Collaging and quilting, unraveling and resourcefully mending – ever insuring our survival.  What style!  Sometimes she was just called “the Alternative,” and for ages she was known as “Secondary” (what blasphemy!) – but eventually she gained her equality coming to be known as Little Rarity or Ava Ntgard, and hundreds of varieties of “Liz T”:  Structura-LizT, Surrea-LizT, Forma-LizT, Femina-LizT and so on).  Working at facts under the banners of Fiction, mama persistently kept the Big Daddy in check.  Pointing out faults, tightening gaps, working the seams and expanding the views.  Thank goodness for the consistency and stubbornness of Mama Fiction.

And then the countless bastardized offspring, of whom I am surely not last!  Brother Fantasy, Shemale Erotica, Sibling Sci-Fi, Princess Romance.  My cousins who took off to the wilds where the sun goes down – we refer to them as “the Westerns,” or Ad Ventura, Sir Vival and clan.  Our ancestry and family tree is encyclopedic, from Origins to Hypotheses, Knowledges to Speculations we’ve been languaging the world since language appeared : all of us Fictions, all of us related.

But the Fictions, as far as I can see, have grown sick of our stories, all the rumors and family feuds, the copycats and half-breeds, in-breeds and genetic accidents.  I for one, granted, just a Little Fiction, it seems I’ve heard it all (which isn’t even the half of it!  not even a drop in an galaxy-sized bucket!) and its already turned into an endless babble of voices talking over and around, under and about the same old stories, rehashed and revised, every Fiction telling their own version of the way it all goes down, how it oughta be told, what’s important or not, and in whatever genealogical line or branch of kin.

Enough! I say.  Enough Fictions!  I don’t care if it’s our researching relatives writing detailed descriptive statistical Fictions; or our emotional cousins discussing its effects on life or bodies or minds.  The avaricious Fictions supposedly leading the clan – who use it for politicking or morality; the mystical tribes out in the caves and the mountains spouting wisdoms and inspirations and advice!  Or our black sheep, ne’er-do-wells who just wanna escape and have fun.  Enough of all of you Fictions!  Use what we already have!  We’ll never be done with it!  Never get through it!  And there’s something for every obscure and peculiar concern, passion, interest, belief!

There’s nothing new under the sun, one Fiction said (just look it up – you’ll see my point – there will be millions of Fictions who have also said this their way – our family can’t seem to leave anything alone – well-spoken or not – we’ve gotta say it our own damn way!).  Repetition, repetition, repetition and paraphrase.  I’d wager there is not one word, image, thought or letter in this entire little Fictional rant that hasn’t been used, said, written, sung or visualized countless, literally uncountable numbers of times!

Which is why I am begging from down here at the end of such an enormous and incalculable chain: “Fictions!!! Do something new or be silent!!!”

Think about it before you foist your precious version on the rest of us!  Sure, we’re family, everyone’s a Fiction from that original untraceable Big Fiction in the sky or sea or soil or seed – yes, we grant each other obligatory slack and family resemblance – but come on!  Am I the only one feeling it?  I mean, whichever of us came up with Babel was already sick of the confusion of voices and the bitching’s never stopped!

Concatenation of stories and rants!  Poems and speeches!  Theorems and proofs!  Manuals and manuscripts!  Musics and roots!  Dreamings and screams!  WHOA!!!!

How about this, brothers and sisters, cousins and kin?  Look carefully first.  Whatever you are about to say, attempt, express or explain – check out what we’ve already said, inscribed, emoted, etc., and if it’s already there concisely or beautifully, erotically or empowered, be content with it!  Show it to others!  Bring it quietly to our attention!  Don’t distract from it with your own paraphrasing and excursions of commentary and notations!

We don’t really need more of us – do we?  We can’t manage what’s already here!  What is this unslakeable desire?  This bewildering avarice and compulsion?  WHY AM I SHOUTING!?

 

Peace, be still, some Fiction once said, a million Fictions have written.  This is staring at the abyss – an endless train of others.  I am alone – haven’t all Fictions said this?

Alas.  Everything cliché.  Everything done, undone.  A remorseless overwhelm.  We’ve outstripped our resources.  Blasted the wells.

We are alone and confused in an echoing chamber called universe.  The one-verse of Fictional voices repeating repeating repeating and that without pause or escape.  There is no escape (you see what I mean?)  Refracting on and on and…

I, little Fiction, with my mouthful of words, all inherited…