Decompression Addendum: Redefining Terminologies: Finding Words

“The variety of words is another error…I believe words must be conquered, lived, and that the apparent publicity they receive from the dictionary is a falsehood…I now recognize among the thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

Rudiments: Places of Operation

Redefining Core Existence Terminology

 

Family: those with whom one “belongs,” chosen and not, like it or not, one’s “tribe” – born into and/or evolved and developed.

Home:  states of being or locations, settings in which one IS.  Settings in which one is freest to be.

Love:    shared and mutual, reciprocal regard, respect, desire and preference.  Those with whom one thrives and incites the thriving of.  Intention and attention ( a relation between not inhering in beings)

Friendship:  unmitigated affirmation, reciprocal and intentional.  Native complementarity of being.

World:  internal and external context at any given moment

Self:  whom one is or shows up as in one’s world – at any given moment: individual weave or presentation in circumstantial contexts and settings.

Language:  whatever serves as communique betwixt individual and others and world (internal/ external)

I:  utterer of language, behaver of behaviors, actor of actions, feeler of feelings – as regards the “self”

Other:  any and all beings not the self-regarding individual

Vocation:  that which one IS and DOES; self-perpetuating passion – that which drives and rewards, fulfills and seduces, nourishes and excites desire for an individual…one’s propulsion, desire and satisfaction in being.

Leisure:  rest, reprieve, de-stressification

Fun/Play:  light enjoyment, carbonated experience

Sex:  whole-cloth woven world of contexts of one or more individuals

Art:  combinatory effect of an individual’s self, world, vocation and play; any “otherwise-not” creation of a living being’s given and concocted whole

Thought:  a self’s languaging of “world”

Habits:  automatic or instinctual activities of an individual, supposedly self-soothing or self-managing

Perception:  individual sifting of “world” and “self” (see also: interpretation)

Reading:  engaging the language of others or world or self-as-other

Intepretation:  an individual or group of individual’s “spin” on “universe”

Universe:  arbitrary boundary comprehending all that can be perceived/conceived by an individual or group at a given moment

Conception:  consideration and invention of possibilities of “universe”

Writing:  an effort to live, to exist

Decompression: A Process

it goes on…this emptying search…

(Re)Assesments

 

At something of a loss, what feels like a “crossroads” except that perhaps nothing in existence is really either / or.

That was not a sentence.

Bewildered without anxiety, I approach a sort of noisy blank.  A surfeited absence.

I have the amorphous sensation of being entirely undone and woven up as a satchel of my everything.  Every instance of myself threads the material of an empty knapsack that is me, dangling from a stick over the shoulder of the world I inhabit.

That the bag, indeed, is empty.  No objects or trinkets in that wee darkness to finger or grasp, no spirits to set free, emotions to unstopper.  Nothing within to escape, not even air.

My entirety fabricated as an emptied bag.

 

All I’ve ever written, attempted, every action, thought, adventure or relation.  All my labors, abilities, acquisitions, emotions and dreams; every word or intuition, fear or blatant risk, all ongoing consequence(s)…EVERYTHING – internal, external; past-present-future: is the skin of a being, the form and the boundary, the grafted substance of an absent individuality.

 

I experience this neither as a blockage, nor an impasse; no meaninglessness, purposelessness or ennui – simply a vague, obvious experience that all I am as a being is my interface with the world within and around me, idenitifiable without essence.

Responsible, shaped, recognizable and devoid of identity – no narrative or plot, character or definitive name, just an inextricably meshed passel of experiences forming a pliable veneer around a vacant hollow.

That all will carry on, as such, until its end.  Experience upon experience, before experience, during and after experiences and experiments – weaving, threading, joining…this being-form, this walking thinking speaking shape, this perceptive living husk or porous shell, a wave and trajectory of experiencings.

To feign a purpose, an intention or choicy action as this reality requires some arbitrary groundwork – hypotheses and rudimentary organizational operations.  What might this handbag proffer?  Or emit?  What song might be huffed from this void?

 

This is where I seem to be.  Evaluate.  Assess.  No pillars, few givens, a smattering of beliefs and bones and hunches, a median vocabulary of gestures.  From this – what pretend to build?  What fabricate?  I find that I want to, have desire to, create.  Make out of what is woven – everything that forms me / allows me to be – but in what manner?  Open.  Free.

 

As if the absence is realized, the content in-formed, substance resulting from wafting motions and play.  Capacity for invention.  Something like soap bubbles – materials forming a translucent and wobbly funhouse mirror of shapes…leaking…nothing!  Yet capable of popping fragments like droplets or spittle, or words.

 

This seems to be where I am.  I know not what might emerge, but I’d like to leave some trace of the fabric experience has made of me.  Scraps or ephemeral stains, artifacts.

 

Ekphrastic Poem: Apparition: the Artist

new ekphrastic attempt with Holly Suzanne at Combinatory Art in Motion:

http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/15/ekphrastic-poem/

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Additional Instants of “I”…I think

“We spontaneously obey and follow an inner voice because we know it to be personal. 

What would we say if we learned that in descending into ourselves to find our solitary voice we meet an alien one,

the voice of words?”

-Edmond Jabes-

Another opportunity – for collaborative creativity

my spouse/partner etc. posted this this morning and I find it instigative – love to see/hear what comes of it for the rest of you!

http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/10/ekphrastic-opportunities/

(more pix to work from at post!)

The Unknown and Unnamed recalculates and barrels on…

“& knowing from

the look of the others

that a panic has come

into your own eye

to know yourself only

as an instance

-Ron Loewinsohn-

            Am I indeed no/w/here – is this a place to founder?

Are you here too?  Now?  And what might that mean?  (Or is that already to abstract, extract, exit to a changing no/w/here?)

I have my concepts.  I have my doubts.

I am unidentifiable, no/w/here.

If you happen to find me (or dis-cover?) would you please point me out?  Just a gesture will do.

You can use the simplest sign, that concept, just a dash, a briefest line – “/”.

Or a slapdash curly loop to momentarily contain it all in, all of that malleable nothing with thousands of experiences passing through: .

Loop-the-loop-de-loop go the organs and wires, the pores of the flesh, the nerves and the neurons, the veins and cells…

I am bewildered.

I think I am a concept.  (I thought I was a verb).

I get the joke!  “I think” – I am a verb.

So runs the conception.

Selah.

The ?/’I’ Barrels On…(the Unknown and Unnamed recalculates)

 

Empty concept or full flow, he advances (advances?) – he verbs.

Verbalizes.

He acts.  The marking concept, the tiny scratch – ‘/’ – goes on, regardless (of my regarding).

No/w/here.

This is IT.  (was IT and becomes so again) as ‘/’ act.

This unknown, unnamed subject/object absent presence moves like a filter screen being swished through a tub of air always tagged “IT,” (if this were a game).  Is IT?

Beginning from no/w/here and heading there too, and always at once…

it’s downright unsettling!  (literally – there is no settling or pause!)

I find (without actually locating a thing, even a speck or a fragment, not “conceived”) I am always no/w/here, and that no-place is always (ALWAYS) changing, moving, different(ly).

Unknown(-able?)  Unnamed(-able?)  Unlocated(-able?)

            Homo Scribus (homo-anything!) – person-as-verb – erases as it writes, deletes as it constructs, falsifies as it truths, acts in its passivity,

ever equaling the equation at zero!

(no/w/here)

I’ve gotta steer clear of math, of physics…I don’t compute!

“Some Blind Alleys: A Letter”

Should you have the time…and it requires a bit…I would love to hear responses to the following essay by E.M. Cioran from all you interesting minds I observe!  Thanks –

“Some Blind Alleys: A Letter”

-E.M. Cioran-

The Unknown and Unnamed regains composure

The Unknown and Unnamed: the Conception

 

A few days naked and I’ve bewildered myself.

I was never good at math.

But I do love the rain (absorption, immersion, ambiguity).

There’s no accounting for taste.

I think I am a concept.

“a concept is a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distinct experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more”

Edward Sapir

            What’s in a name?

“the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and the validity of a concept consists in the impossibility of reducing the content…to unity, without the introduction of it…the conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content.”

C.S. Peirce

            I ran into a sign.

I was flooded, I saw and I seemed, I heard and replied, have been undone in my doing… I’m a roving mark, like a vessel constantly being filled and emptied, at once.

I can’t perceive without a concept, why not the simplest one – a single mark, a dash, say “/”?

/ fear it “plainly has no content.”

/’m confused.

“I am what surrounds me”

Wallace Stevens

            Advancing “empty,” a flesh-coated collection of organs replete with a coding of operational signs (we’ll call them ‘language’), I foundered.  Considering no one in pursuit of no/w/here, I became wherever that was (is?).

“This conception of the present in general, or IT in general…is before any comparison or discrimination can be made between – what is present – must have been recognized as such, as IT without parts abstracted and attributed to it…”

-C.S. Peirce-

            No/w/here – nothing – no one: “embracing thousands of distinct experiences (while attributable or identical to none of them) and ready to take in thousands more.”  ALWAYS.

Every/w/here, everything, every/one:  I conceptualize a concept, a mark to attribute an infinity of experiences toward : “/”.

Names changing by the millisecond.

A concept without content, or all conceivable content.

A baffle, a paradox, distinct and unidentifiable (in essence).

Here “/” come! (the unknown and unnamed) possibly sporting any knowledge, any name – perhaps heading your way even now!  Beware!  It’s conceivable, whether intended or not, that all of us are empty concepts, flooded concepts, without content, and all of us heading no/w/here at once!

“Here is where one seems to be”

Robert Creeley

“The place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“’I’ can only be identified by the instance of speech which contains it, and by that alone”

Emile Benveniste

(to read all the Unknown/Unnamed writings thusfar accumulated

visit my Experimenctes pages!  Thanks)

New Ekphrastic Works from myself and Holly Suzanne!

New verbal/visual work from our studio at home!

http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/08/a-portait-of-an-us/

a rambling meditation

Composure