Tag: present

Old Ruled Writing Pad

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, grief, Journal, love, meaning, memory, time, WritingLeave a comment

Old Ruled Writing pad

today, searching for paper to make notes on for work…I grabbed a used “ruled writing tablet” of mine, last written in in 2014…and read…

“I am an educated writer who loves a lot of things.  I love language, I love learning, I love relationships – to partners, children, nature, arts, literature, and ideas – to “world.”  I love to study.

By “love” I mean that I choose and enjoy expending my available energy on these things.

I like very much to reflect and consider, experiment with and actualize what seems meaningful for living as a human individual.

That is what I know of myself, besides the facts which are unruly, shifting and so very difficult to capture or recount with accuracy.  All the terms (‘born,’ ‘lived,’ ‘married,’ ‘completed,’ ‘received,’ ‘produced,’ ’employment,’ ‘accomplishments,’ ‘age,’) and their explications are far to vague to be useful here.”

“The Creators Curse” – a raw deal – and everything is practice

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections11 Comments

When I stood up from the couch I thought.  I’m tired of everything being practice.  Each character sketch, each poetic fragment, each novel attempt, each theory, each relationship, each parenting moment, each breath.  All participated in as if the engagement might provide benefit, as if the pain will promote healing, as if the mistakes will prove corrective, as if fitness might improve health.  “Lifelong learning” – how nice it sounds, how endless.

But learning for what – ?  There’s just more life until… and then it’s probably simply (well, complexly) variantly continued – one situation hardly informs another – for the next now the context has changed, as well the elements, the matter, the flow.

So then I think again – perhaps it’s fear.  That lifelong learning, or anything meta- entails a splitting off – a doing WITH the observation; and thinking WITH  reflection; the subject’s objectification.  A remove.  And so it feels like practice rather than NOW.  

Earlier today (apologies – I’m really just rambling this post – no pre-write, no consideration or filtering) my son shared this with me:

Cyanide Happiness Creators Curse

 

– The “Creators Curse” from Cyanide & Happiness.  In our making we extend and become in the risking required to attempt…to craft… to work… so it cannot end, for if we grow or move or change (which we will) the work will need to go farther, be finer, account for those fluctuations… ever stepping into new, fresh, dynamic, complex realities… PRACTICE IS IMPOSSIBLE.

But if we turn and try to bring the effort up to speed, in that turning, that editing, that effort, nothing stops.  Nothing stops moving into that next moment, next ream of realities, heart-beat’s context, juggling atoms and muscles and breath…  “Improvement”?  Who knows.  But different for sure.  And even if we reach and stretch toward the work we imagine versus the work we are capable of…it all changes in kind…as change.

In optimistic moments this is cause for hope.  The possibility that something might improve, benefit may come, a temporary health could be achieved.  But not achieved only altered.  And not altered only changing.  I’ve argued before that we must lose our tenses to be honest to living – everything must become verb.

But I don’t want anything to be practice anymore…rather maybe process – doing, making, saying thinking in or with … everything.

I’m very tired of the hesitation, illusory gap, the pretend-vision of seeing our seeing, or feeling our feeling; loving our loving, writing our writing, thinking our thinking our  thinking…

I want to be : living, writing, parenting, loving, doing, making, saying, thinking NOW and HERE as IS.  

Becoming Human: Asking after the Nature of Nobody

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes14 Comments

“What, in summary, is the nature of the singular entity referred to by the word ‘I’ in judgments like ‘I am in pain’?  Answer: since those uses of ‘I’ do not refer, the question is nonsensical.  One might as well ask after the nature of Nobody.”

-John Canfield-

“The ‘main point’ is rarely extricable from the digressions.  Every section spills into every other… [he] no longer knows what he was talking about.”

-R. M. Berry-

            It grows hair.  It remembers things differently.  It is singing as if in a mumbling voice.  Yesterday I got angry.

It thinks, but after talking with the child I was upset with, it revises its conception, taking into account that she said I exhibited joy.  Yesterday I was happy.

This glassy essence.

“I will need to accomplish a task tomorrow,” it thinks, in a manner different from image, music or text.  It can almost see me doing it – in a situated context – surrounded by people (other ones), objects, time and space.  Not essentially.  Well, maybe.

It calls to mind (read fabricates) what I was like two decades ago.  I was climbing mountains then, most often alone (i.e. not in the company of additional humans), still it is able to consider me there.  There where?  It imagines Long’s Peak in Colorado (in neither image, language nor feeling – it cannot recall particulars well enough to reconstruct)…it senses I was there.  It is reading in a diary.

Does this make it me?  The same as the I who wrote it, camping somewhere along the Eastern slope of Long’s Peak in 1995, apparently gladly absent of friend, foe, spouse or tamed animal counterpart?

I had a pack full of peanut butter and potatoes, a couple jugs of water, a tent, a cloak, a knife, an assortment of pens, books and blank journals.  It roughly remembers some of that.

It reflects (not to itself – that doesn’t even make sense) – must be a sort of nuanced synonym for thinking – (with itself? of itself? nonsense, it simply reflects) – I’m sitting cross-legged on a small clearing near a frothy crystalline stream within a circle of baby pines, trying to read philosophy texts packed in for the purpose of uninterrupted, or it could be me yet-to-come as distinguished by Swiss mountains and an understood language barrier protecting my solitude along with evident (it imagines) distance (and therefore time) between whatever residents might exist and I.  It (hypothetically) notices that (well, enough to pick out an “I” on the Jungfrau or Matterhorn).

But that has happened too.  Does the case that it conceives me thus proscribe an identity?   It isn’t sure, but there are similarities of some variety.  It isn’t saying for certain (the fact is it could say “for certain” but what might that establish as regards me?) – the appearance and accidents, character and behavior are in many ways inexact and altered – but for pragmatic and discriminatory purposes – it would designate me “me” (if it were in conversation or thinking extrinsically).

Could it really say, most definitely, that I was there?  Any more than that I will be?  It is uncertain, entirely possible.

This glassy essence.

It remains, for now.

Thinking of the time I was writing this (nearly now but just before).  It is writing, but not this, I have written this, it is aware, but only just before or just after – that it is I.

It writes.

“…man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.”

-Shakespeare, Measure for Measure–

Conjoined Semiosis – A Valentine

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Traces3 Comments

HERE:

Conjoined Semiosis – A Valentine for my wife

Amassing contexts and histories barely constitute beginnings.  Relations between entities are potentially infinite and full of traces.  Somehow, occasionally, they equal: an identity – identities – by what’s between.  Continuous dynamic variables.

By chance each of our indefinite immensities meshed boundaries.  Bodies permeable as minds, and vice-versa.  Reciprocity – reality and dream.  Kisses channeling deep into veins, correspondence shipped and received – held gently in the hands while splicing ripples through craniums.  Made of margins we, venturing portals and hallways one of another.  Each an entourage, an army, and its festival.

Bound by genuine threads.  Wrapping rocks and trading rings, patchworking children toward tapestry.  Our eyes – microscoping telescopes, telescoping memories.  We are wheres and whens, whos and whats – and how!  No wonder why receives no answers, only possible descriptions.

We search for language with our bodies.  Attempting to define the terms and parse the verbs together: love, trust, respect and honesty.  We have said “you are my person,” communication requiring the whole shebang – dismembered pasts and potential futures – all we do not know mustered toward a truth, collaborating is.

If we were to withhold what we cannot show, “whereof which we cannot speak” (as Ludwig tells) avoiding formal pseudo-propositions, we would only telegraph senses, dropping our abstracting frames and their symbol’d referents.

But we are artists – metaphors ourselves – infusing nonsense into world, creating kinds of sense, some of it illuminative.  Morphing forms and casting doubts to converge in content.

I love you.  I am so glad

WE ARE HERE

We / Holly Suzanne

Spontaneous Reduction

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings7 Comments

ink and touch

Then I dropped my voice – BOOM – right onto the sidewalk.

A glitter, a spritzing, a spark.  A diffusion and ooze.  It runs out.

Watch it pour along the surface, draining toward sewage.

Voice.  A voice.  My voice.  Sploosh.

 

All the books I want are priceless.

Those I need – they cost too much.

I am a writer who learns.

I am a learner who writes.

I am a failure that loves.

I am a lover that fails.

It becomes apparent: Yes, I am.  A parent.

The book I am not reading –

Emotions and Understanding

caught in a withdrawal.

That is, boundaried from writing.

Between abstraction, and empathy.

There lies a void, inevitably.

You can’t trust silence.

We rush to fill.

(That distant sound).

Therefore,

I read for conversation.

But Writer says I’m “vague”

(don’t fulfill responsibilities)

Attention.  Integrity.  Inquiry.  Response.

(-ability)

I simply tripped, a clumsiness

[I dropped my voice]

but I am here.

Enmeshed in words but unable.

(metadata lacking)

I’m no librarian.

Vague because I say so.

(my human apparatus little equipped for the overwhelm of data)

Ant in a kingdom

-of words-

of signifiers.

Less than that.

I wrap my brain around it.

Waving goodbye to body.

My voice drops.

Alberto Giacometti sketch of Diego Giacometti