Tag: process

Any Story

On By NW FilbertIn absence, desire, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, Language, Reading, Writing4 Comments

AnyStory

Don’t start reading.  The writing always stops when there’s something to read.

There’s always something to read.

Somethings you really, really want to read.

Avoiding frustration.

–

Urges.

You want, gutturally – in the stomach of your heart – she’s ill, she’s suffering, the phone, to text, just text, “still love you”, like that, she must need care, she must (perhaps not, perhaps she’s been more than cared for, is ecstatically happy, relieved, content, unbothered – it was she who chose to leave, who left, after all).

Divert.

Text someone else, another, one who maybe wants you to love her, who misses.  Avoid frustration.

No.  Write it.  Write about the urges, the diversion, the avoidance.  Read a little first, get a taste, a feel for what letters, what language, might do…

Avoid frustration.

Write.

Take a drink (an attempt to frustrate frustration, avoiding satisfactions, short-circuiting risks with another), no texting, follow your fears, note your diversions, attend your avoidance, but act elsewhere.  Write.

Fear.

–

Could start anywhere, and none a satisfaction, only inscriptions or actions of frustration – to read, to write, to love the one who doesn’t want it, who’s trying to get away (has gotten away, but also wants to leave it behind), to contact one who might or who does want to hear from you (but you don’t, don’t know, just want love, some response) – want to write…

…for ANYone, any SOMEone, perhaps yourself, perhaps all the opportunities lying about you wanting to be read – no, you want to read them…

Avoid frustration, settle for imagined response, even address, to be called – the words in the books rarely fail in calling you, addressing you, which for you feels like response, like being wanted, almost needed, like a text from ANYone, any SOMEone, who invites your love.

Take a drink, frustrate frustration, move into fear, toward satisfaction (or one of its bastard offspring).

Just write.

Don’t check that phone.  Don’t even touch it.  Leave it in another room.  Turn it off, power it down.

See the words come easy when you simply write them out instead of fracturing them, spreading them thin through a network, splaying them across pages and phones and emails and…

Write.

–

I read.

I drink.

It floods.

Another day.

Any story.

Alias (inside) – a writing diary

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, death, fragments, friendship, human, identity, Journal, Journaling, Living, Loss, Melancholy, notebooks, Reflections, Uncertainty, Writing2 Comments

This is long, and really, perhaps, does not belong here.  Reading through notebooks to find references to Alias and Laramie in order to continue the trail or trace of them… I happened upon a set of pages that seemed like something under or inside the emergence of Alias and thought it might be interesting to some.  Or, just something to not lose to memory, but archive in this auspicious and fragile space.

Czech-Marionettes-wooden-joker-czech-marionette-puppet-3.7ac6

Do I think this is my last probable chance (at 45)?

If so

              (it’s undecided, presently)

then this would = my final

composition

                          (undecided)

What would I tell you – you few that have made the time worth being?

T, A, I, O, S, K, H, J, perhaps J.  Arvo Part, certainly Blanchot, Pessoa, Bronk, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Jabes, Cixous, Rilke, William James, Schiele, maybe MK.  Assuredly TWDY, Bach…well, too many to mention.

            Whom else?  Whom else, really?  Dad?  Mom?

In any case – the children, H – H because truly the past two years demonstrated an adult, freely-selected relationship in a way surpassing but only referenced by S, V, PJ, perhaps, no, perhaps J – what H has explored with me re: the world and life really I’d only imagined before.

Therefore – indecision (as ever).

IF the “best” experiences rise up out from the worst (often), out of ‘end(s)’ – beginnings surprise, then how can I know (as I age) if a better-yet does not exist?

It becomes a decision of ‘enough’ or not.

A personal decision.

If I can only imagine repetition with variation, and I’m already tired and starting to ‘ail’ – then the logical decision is to stop.  To peace.  To quiet.

As re: T, A, I, O (my children) – in EVERY case what lies ahead is far beyond repetition with variation – much unknown, much novel, much uncharted territory to experience.

As regards H, and adult self-selected relations of emotion/passion/intimacy – probably (seems to me) little could surpass…only possibly in elements, but – enough?

That is the question – always

Keep living?

Stop?

If “stop,” no more.  Yes it will effect, hurt, harm, perhaps enable – the others (T, A, I, O, M, D, J, H, etc.) but I won’t be aware of that anymore.  It’s just DONE.  OVER.  SIMPLY.

If “keep going” – then demonstrating a care/concern/attention for the others’ lives – T, A, I, O, etc…) that THEIR lives are worth staying alive to see, and that – who knows?! – maybe my own life still offers more truly worth experiencing.

Perpetual conundrum, weighing lives – my own little one versus a host (however small) of others – it would seem theirs count for more than mine (alone).

Hard to say.

I guess we’ll all find out tomorrow what “I” decide.  Not ambitious to keep working just to feed and pay bills.  I have little confidence I’m capable of making something world-enhancing.  But as a parent, a friend, etc., it doesn’t feel fair to make the decision without considering their preferences as well.

I like to think I don’t like to be selfish.

I would live in the country.  Woods, preferably, mountains not too far away.  And rain, plenty and regular rain.

There would be hours in the day.  Hours for loving, hours for reading, for working, for learning, for play.  Enough hours.  Hours to think about the hours, the learning, the loving, the play, and hours to think the hours writing.

I’m aging.  Hair, beard, muscles, flesh all going long.  Mind.  Long(ing).  Time, not so.  Seems shortening, shortened, fore-shortened…by the hour.  I wish for hours.  For time.  For children, partner, places, books.  For human.

She would be there.  Close, somewhere, sometimes.  We would wander, would work, would learn, play.  Would be there, away.

The children would come.  Would visit, report, eat, learn, work, play.  Sometimes we would laugh.  Sometimes perhaps weep or cry.  Contact.

Wood would be sawed.  Water drawn.  Yes it hurts now – knees, shoulders, joints, bones.  Slowed.  Steady, almost.  Still dark but peppered, frosted with gray.  I’m aging.  Tired.  Memory almost all made up already.  Thought always seems new, possible.  Touch.  Strength.  Sound.

Hours.  Gone ever so soon.  Thought, then paper, then feeling begins (or the other ways around?), then gone.

The pen.  The paper.  Lust.  Flesh.  Language.  Learning.  Where is the time?  Too much required for each daily need.

A joker, a harlequin.  Another, another.  Another other in the midst of me.  Mottled mangle, Alias.  Running out of time.  Running down the times, the memory, the full flesh of desires, its theory and knowledge, its aspects and affects.  So very many aspects.  Hand gains speed, cursive loops thin to lines.  Skimped satisfaction.

I like it to take time – loving, learning, working, play.  But the hours grow thin.  Shortcuts, swerves, abbreviations, tastes.  Hints now.  Breezes.  Nostalgia.

Growing monument – what cannot be said – will not – the ineffable – unsayable.  Ungrasped.

How though, to here?  Piecemeal person.  Farm labor, religion, sport, education, family.  Plains, harvest, accidents.  Mountains, Mexico, Europe, lists.  Music, poetry, philosophy – earliest companions – a few pets, kaleidoscope of selves, the river, the sky.

Deaths.  But no death here (yet).  Just on, scrappy, incisive, insecure, haphazard.  Books.  Remiss without mention of books and relentless ache for books and ‘broads.’  Women and words, the headstone says.  Women, words, wisdom(?).  Nature.

To explore.  Internal, external, outward, inward bound.  Sciences and arts.  Creativity and logic.  Psychology, anthropology, complexity and chaos, nihilism.  Literature and lust.  Words and women.  Matter and mind.

I’d have quiet mostly.  No mouths to feed, no herds or pets or things to tend.  Nothing to care for.  Hours.  Hours to tend.  With mind intact, a library, papers and pens.  And lonely land, mostly cloudy, cool, drizzly, wet.  And legs to stand on, arms to haul.  Eyes to see, please keep these eyes a-seeing – yes they’ve heaps of assistance – but please not a final fail.  Not the inner darkness, nor colorless clouds.  Hearing first, before vision.  If the vision is gone – ?

Breath.  Biosemiosis.  The sign and signal of being – a body for meaning.  Complex.  Confused.  Barely contained.  Unspecified.  Though wobbling to, fro, sound, precept, percept, interpret, sense.  Hope.  Hope of vision, of sex, of knowledge, health – something, something – beyond, more, still…

Alias sighs.  Perhaps beautiful still, but soiled and tired.  Undone.  Who is this one?  Which one?  How.  Who this be?  Alias i. e. Harlequin.  Unnameable, the attempt to name, creating traces of not-these.

“man is but a patched fool”

-Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, scene i

Between the Spheres

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, fiction, Image, Neuroscience, thought, Uncertainty, WritingLeave a comment

sketch by Hallie Linnebur

This is what it looks like, in the one hand

Between the Spheres

I try to wrap my mind around it.

An attempt to connect the two – a keen accomplishment (perhaps unique to all the world of humans) – of right knowing what left is doing, and vice-versa.

Lost along the way.

I describe it as a process – indicating neither beginning nor end-directing goal, but rather recursive procedural motions.  Realm of natural orders?  Reversible time?  Or indifferent to?

Can’t tell one from the other – hypothesize function – track trace with technology.  Pretend data.  Posit interpretation as theory.  Wind up again.

Variously termed reentry.  Autopoiesis.  Self-organization, containment, production.  Ouroborous.  Infinite regress.

Middle is muddle.  Diversely called.  Corpus Callosum.  Hermeneutics.  Subjective objectivity. The observer effect.  Confusion.

Fusion-with.  Heads and tails are absent, or amount to the same.  Keeping an eye (I) on the eye (I), so to speak.  There are no levels of perception, simply additive, truly more of the same.  No stacking, just tangle.  Alongside, underneath, around, beside, below and through, but ever bound by hemispheres.

Imagine dynamo-balls – activated collectives of interdependent energized cells humming, buzzing or otherwise functioning according to their wired connective wholes-in-part.  Betwixt the vibratory masses some buffery twingled transmission zone irrepressibly attempting translation of pulse-sorts, glyph-types, data blips…circuitously globe-to-globe.

I try to wrap my mind around it.

Wrapping, coiling, carrying…sire-wires…another organizational knottage of wattage…behavioral systems, courier-tropes, internal/infernal communications rife with all the residual, syntactical, emergent and scumbling give-and-take, mis-interpretation and noise.

Submarines and warships, encryption and decoding, fuzzily idiosyncratic as love or larger loops.  Chaos all the way down or ‘round.  Patterning bottom’s-up or through.

This is what it looks like, in the one hand.

Writing: Impetus

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Language, Writing3 Comments

writing-unthinkable-workshop-web-550x367

 

It’s hypnotic.  Illogic.  You may recall genetic components – a sentiment, experience, curiosity or sensation…the fabrication begins its own spells.  That plane where you drift from expression or fractaling inquiry toward Medium.  When plot is played out and the voices keep talking.  Or some other member begs a word.

You are no longer quite “author.”  When it begins I’m usually puzzled or amazed.  A vague and shifty core obsesses and eludes me.  I ponder awhile, do research, spawn a dialogue or few with available others…but eventually turn to writing.  A word inscribed in secret not only leads to more, but ricochets through spacetime like a pinball.  The versions of the brain call out over the callosum:  “Felt anything like this before?  Have we had an experience that resonates?” / and / “Say – it seems I’m in the midst of something – check it out!  Any words in your concordance for such as this?”  To and fro – attemps to signify and symbolize, reify, rectify, making truce with our immersion.

The “language drill.”  As it burrows metaphor, it fragments and splinters dust around the edges.  Retrieving as it leads.  Recalling through invention.  I use my handwriting to find out.   To find out.  Searching something, spelunking expeditions, a nettling curiosity blind-feeling hunches and perceptions.  Pulling them towards words in attempts to trick them into trap.  Building tunnels, margins, stairwells to aim the lights at.  As if  broad enough term-corrals might lasso and then spiral, slowly cinching it round, whatever “it” is.

But whoa then, hold on!  Once a breadcrumb trail’s discerned, it forges.  Makes its rhinoceric way in accrual and erasure.  Constructing as you follow, conundrum’d and deleting.  A word – and sources cling like filaments.  None of them accurate and all informing.  History, culture – traditions.  Intimate pain and joy.  Perception, conception and query.  Discovering bewilderment.  Creating the unsaid.

Victim and perpetrator both, you, author, artist, song.  Skewing and distorting in equal measures.  Changing as you change it.  This is the making.  The being-made.  Creator and created both.  The artist in her medium.

There is no “having done.”  Failure or not, it virals and contaminates.  The path is incompletion.  “The Artist’s Way…”  Never through, until it’s through with you, coincident with a life.

Who do we say that we are?

exploring mystery

 

 

 

From the Notebooks… a poem perpetually in progress…

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Poetry, Writing3 Comments

Untitled (In Progress)

The poem linked above I pushed out last week… and marked it as “in progress” because for some reason it is one that the process of making, unmaking, forging and revising it (still feels “off” as published at above) has intrigued me.  Here are the pages of notebook from which it hails, perhaps this is of interest, perhaps not, for better or worse…

We are working on an exhibition of new media for June at Wichita’s Fisch Haus, and have been battling over how to show process and creation when exhibiting technologically enabled and activated art.  Perhaps that is why I’ve been more conscious of my own processes of making and revising.  In any case, here is a little trail through the notebooks as a piece is coming to be…

edited drafts

In Progress….

 .

I am thankful for this loosening quiet,

your slackening ties of dusk.

Though often shackled by a fear of loss

in love, I may open toward a growing –

 .

possibilities of a learning, as in youth,

less about the being something

than, profoundly, just to be…

that which relaxes and allows

 .

like a cow caught up in weather,

or warm engagements with a child,

with the blossom, and make-believe.

Empowered when our symbol’d systems –

 .

confused by what is happening –

begin to sign that loss

(a form of death) ensures the safety

of our risks.  That harm and haven

 .

are our home – the same as truth:

what’s loved is lost –

and thus we come to love.

Wisdom undoing opposites

 .

in terms of life.

I amt ridiculed by youth –

it’s how I know that many lessons

come unlearned,

 .

that “completeness is

a process of revision”

as they say,

and that our closures

 .

are what open

every day.

.

The above was an editing of the following…which is why it’s still “In Progress…”

child, the blossom, the make-believe

And

 .

And then I want to say

that I am thankful

for this loosening

 .

I want to say

And then I want to say

that I am grateful/thankful

in/for this loosening quiet

for its / and the slackening of ties

 .

perhaps we’d once been shackled by

the fear of loss in love

 .

leaving space for other and tenderness and availability,

freed of the shackling fear of loss

in love

not in the order of other pursuits

thus fencing a truth again

or forging some identity –

burned and brandished iron –

 .

but that we might allow

the finding, its discovery –

all the safeties that arrive with risk –

in all directions

whether in the child, the blossom, or the make-believe

 .

the will to love and to enjoy

our engagement

with world and things and persons

 .

unraveling the expectations

of hurt and damage

parenting ourselves to freedom

 .

the assurance we are looked after,

at least by ourselves,

as well the plenteous others –

our families, our species, our friends

 .

we will probably survive,

unless we do not

and then no matter

death was here from the start

 .

nor had it intention or opportunity

not to be

attachment and loss

and room for growth

 .

so we begin, so we will be

the template that stifles

symbolic structures

learned of experience

 .

in certain ways

 .

do not ask permission

but simply deceive

they are not truthful

 .

Look at your child,

your pet, your mother –

you would not have them

to be a certain thing

 .

an object, tool or concept

but to live and change and grow

until they die and thus dissolve

which is not damage so much

so much as change

 .

thus let it be,

it is quiet

the ties are slackened

the noose loosened

 .

around your heart.

we are here –

the squirrel, man and mountain,

every weather, part and parcel,

as are you

 .

It is begun

we are resolved

to open and allow

for your enjoyment

for your experience

should you engage

 .

and cease to fear

cease to fit to your equation

to whatever maths you assent and ascribe

and start to scribble

doodle, sketch

 .

to select potential

over priority

exception(al) over rule

dynamic in place of determined

 .

and friendship more than fact

 .

perhaps you were meant to be

over being

to selve more than self

 .

for “we were not meant to survive,

only to live.”

 .

*********************

 .

We thank you for the loosening quiet

We are the slackened ties of dusk

 .

I am grateful to this the loosening quiet,

the darkness and this its slackening of ties…

what is once was shackled by the fear of loss

in love, now opened may open toward a growing –

 .

possibilities – a learning, as in youth,

that it is much less about being something

as than it is, profoundly, just to be

that which relaxes and allows

 .

the squirrel (cow) caught up in weather,

our warm engagement with the child,

the blossom, or the make-believe,

empowered when our symbol’d systems

 .

can be get confused with awareness by what is happening,

and when we are able to see that loss,

a form of death, ensures the safety

of our risks.  That harm and heaven haven

 .

are the same – our home as truth

what’s loved is lost

and thus we get come to love.

Wisdom undoing opposites

 .

in the terms of life

I am get ridiculed by youth

it’s how I know that lessons

are get unlearned,

 .

that “completeness

is a process of revision”

as they say, and that a that our closures

opens every day.

 .

“TO SPEAK SO AS NOT TO MEAN, BUT TO BE”

-Dan Beachy-Quick-

 

 

 

 

8th segment

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

’cause I don’t have to stop.  ’cause it doesn’t.

experience anyway cover

8

            And now “I” am different, again.  Change.  Is how I would “put it.”  What with the whip of atoms calling “I” ever-coupling to the Itself that the “I” calls “world,” really, when one gets down to it, in it (always), the distance is elusive (is “illusion”).  And so “I” changes at the rate of the wind “I” is sharing; of the sea “I” is seeing; of the matter (volatile shivering).

It is Here.  We are.  Since we cannot claim a territory, we strain for modes to re-fer (de-fer?).  Differ.  We’re attuned to it.  The rhythm of our tune is differance.  There is no reason that suffices.  We are in it.  It.

A live.

In vocalizing, movement sounds (for humans).  Or in gesture – perceptible matter (always suited to the version capable).  It is always a matter of moving around, shuffling space with time.  I cry, there is movement.  The air and the chemical sea.  I look – things displace, replace, are placed by my gaze – an interactive mechanism – part of a NEVER discontinuous train.

We touch, because sound, because cell, because particles and waves (as both) – because movement.  Because “separate” is an aberrant traction (abs-traction).  A practical folly.

I love you – re-cognition that borders are empty, margins erased.  That “you” and “I” intersperse (wind, sea, light) molecules.  Movement.  Alive.  I love a live.

Because live doesn’t noun an “f.”  Life.  Life is a period, an arbitrary stop.  Imposed.  But a “v” simply vibrates.  We are a-live.  We are the living.  Even the “the” can’t contain it.  It rushes the punctual, overcomes it.  We are us and I love you (us).

Perhaps we need little realms to find out.  To discover.  Acting networks to re-member (to sew, to put back together) what’s dismembered convention.  “The way it is” – what we’re impressed to “get by” (“survive”).

This, It, is NOT the survival of fittest, a live is the fittest and cannot be dismembered, “I’s” just being particled Lifes – and those not really – except in that most human of ways (itself a “not really” invented by us).  It is more complex than that (call it “what’s live” or Enaction), and can’t be reduced to its “parts.”

Nor combined in a “whole” (another punctuated word).  It’s not final, complete, but just changing (rates of wind, of sea of weather; of stones and planets, emotions and plants) – if we could dissect it (and we try) the variation of paces “seem” astounding…but It’s chock full of seams like two sides of paper – not different but same save the semes that are perceptible.

These semes are intended for motion:  I love you.  My so-called chapters and segments to “say” – we are us, there’s no other, and we’ve little idea of that.

“I” lean back, am exhausted, and rest (always moving).  “I” don’t see the difference in sleep.

The Joy of Incompleteness

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment

“By Godel’s theorem the following statement is generally meant:

  • In any formal system adequate for number theory there exists and undecidable formula – that is, a formula that is not provable and whose negation is not provable
  • A corollary to the theorem is that the consistency of a formal system adequate for number theory cannot be proved within the system”

–Rebecca Goldstein–

“…there can be neither a first nor a last meaning; [anything that can be understood] always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, which in its totality is the only thing that can be real.  In historical life this chain continues infinitely, and therefore each individual link in it is renewed again and again, as though it were being reborn…”

-M.M. Bakhtin-

“And so the world is interior to our mind, which is inside the world.  Subject and object in this process are constitutive of each other.  This doesn’t lead to a unifying and harmonious vision; we can’t escape from a generalized principle of uncertainty.  In the same way that as in microphysics, the observer disturbs the object, which disturbs the perception, in the same way the notions of object and subject are profoundly disturbed each by the other: each opens a crack in the other.  There is, we will see, a fundamental, ontological, uncertainty in the relation between the subject and the environment…a new conception emerges both from the complex relation between the subject and the object, and the insufficient and incomplete character of the two notions.  The subject must remain open, deprived of all decidability in itself; the object itself must remain open toward the subject and toward its environment, which, in turn, necessarily opens and continues to open beyond the limits of our understanding…

All this incites us toward an open epistemology…Epistemology is not pontifical nor judiciary.  It is the place of both uncertainty and dialogics.  In fact, all the uncertainties we have raised must confront and correct each another; there must be dialogue, without, however, hoping to stop the ultimate crack with an ideological Band-Aid.

“If this gap is recognized, then the gap becomes an opening of one toward the other, opening toward the world, opening toward a possible surmounting of the either/or alternative, toward a possible progress of knowledge…”

–Edgar Morin-