Tag: prose

Unstillable

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Complexity, Confusion, creative writing, Current Reading, existence, fragments, Language, meaning, Questions, Samuel Beckett, Semiotics, thinking, Writing7 Comments

scribbling

“Pangs of faint light and stirrings still.  Unformable graspings of the mind.  Unstillable”

– Samuel Beckett –

Let’s loiter about here a little, as if language were lakelike, locatable, alive enough to lollygag loose within.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps it is nearly always just-becoming.  Perhaps nearly all, nearly always, is thus: just-becoming – liminal lineaments languishing-then-livened, languishing-then-livened, “again” we might say, designating (de-term-ining) a balance to enlivened.  How so?  Why so?  By what author(ity)?

Unstillable.

“In the madhouse of skull and nowhere else” (– Samuel Beckett).  Is that so?

“Skin has no choice but to converse with the world…thin, ignorant borderland of skin…myself all trespass, misunderstanding, translating, translating…” (-Laurie Sheck).  Is that so?

If words were invented with sense.  To “make sense” between one and an ‘other.’ 

What if words ARE THAT?  Connective contours between.

I am inebriated, my willingness loosened to expression, though it might ruin me (like language) and I stare (Dostoevsky – ‘Myshkin’) “intently” into Mikhail Bakhtin’s face, his specific eye-gaze, and say:

“Is it the case that words are ‘meant,’ are ‘formed,’ are breathed, are…constructed, are…utilized, to be tissue woven between ‘me’…and ‘you’?”

Do we… speak, say, expire back and forth… to become?  To string and weave lines, flows, strands, threads, that might forge or invent co-respondence, texture, significations combining you and myself into WE?

But Bakhtin is dead, and cannot answer.  Mikhail Bakhtin does not have the capacity to co-respond.

…like Beckett, Blanchot, Plato, Montaigne, Pessoa, Pascal, Wallace or Euclid, Bulgakov, Heraclitus, or Celan (as with any and all dead!) he emits traces (tracings) with which I can consider, decipher, and interrogate in and within my ‘selves’ but not between…

What might this ‘mean’ – between anyone?  Nothing.

It can not, has no opportunity to, delineate or circumscribe, draft, figure or shape any relation.

Sign emitted, call evoked, death, and then text as silent partner.  Prognostic retrograde delineation.

Bankrupt, impassible, impossible, communique.

The decoding of words as communication, connection?  An imaginary.  A handling of terms.  Inventing, devising, originary.  With whom?  Where?  How?   Hint and vestige, remnant and sketch, scheme and fabrication, inkling and outline.

Unstillable. Unformable graspings of the mind.  Is that so?

If we’re limning the liminal now, let’s loosen the letters and slacken the sieves.  Lasso and lounge, scatter and scrape, together (to gather) – a scintillate sense – sporadic sparks, succulent scenarios – exist for enlivening language, whatever limited lust lies therein – if language is locatable and not merely modal mechanics?  A modicum of music then, some scrap of sonority, some lingual litmus ‘making sense.’  Whatever.  Possibility, potential, particible particulars…

“THE TEST IS COMPANY”

“If there may not be no more questions let there at least be no more answers”

– Samuel Beckett, Company –

“We must not die: kindred spirits will be found”

– Viktor Shklovsky –

 

Cycling

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing7 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers – 19 July 2013

Copyright -Anelephantcant

Cycling

Round and round and round it goes.  You get used to the cycles.  Daily, monthly, every 3 weeks, whatever, humans are good with patterns.  And adapting.  In fact, if it happens regularly enough over enough years, you’ll cease noticing changes, lose track of effects, especially on others.  You begin to think of it all as yourself.  The way of things.  Shouldn’t we all be used to it by now?  The sun, the seasons; the menstruals, the hours, the moods.  But sometimes they don’t seem to go anywhere.  Hi-jacked, hung-up.  Wheels refusing to turn, or spinning around in one place.

N Filbert 2013

“The literary word resembles a person who roams at will” – Robert Musil

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing2 Comments

“The sentence not only derives its meaning from the words: the words derive their meaning from the sentence, and the relationship between page and sentence, whole work and page, is no different…the embracing and the embraced develop their meaning mutually out of each other, and the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it…”

“One can only explain that it is from all the details taken together, and through their mutual interpenetration, that the whole arises in a way that remains mysterious…a transformation of sense that eludes logic…but the meanings are related to each other, and when one grasps one meaning the others peep through beneath it…”

-Robert Musil – “Literati & Literature” –

The Writer: a context out of context

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes7 Comments
author sketch by Holly Suzanne
author sketch by Holly Suzanne

.

Faced with the blank page, Writer runs.

Confronting the white spaces, Writer enters.

Emptiness indicating gaps.  The writer attempts to cross.

In theory this is “bridging” – the ability to construct a bridge.

In practice, Writer uses words like rope.

Without them he would fall.

Plummet.

.

In the presence of what infers silence, Writer hears patterns and rhythms.

Sometimes also sees.

Constructing shapes of nothing, this is sometimes called.

Creatio ex nihilo referring to no context.

In absence of recognizable sound – the infinite conversation.

Writer holds there and eavesdrops.

Writing is a device.

.

Responsibility ends where opportunity begins, which invokes responsibility.

Writer fills the margins.

Working at the edge of labor.

.

If the tracks are laid, Writer composes rails.

The network is for nothing – conversation going on.

Creatio in contextus refers to complex emergence, a result of adaptation

and leftovers causally unexplained.

Writer is compelled into absence.

Children skipping cracks, stuntmen leaping canyons.

.

Writer is friend to correspondence

ecstatic moments

the distance in between

threading disconnections

shooting gaps.

.

Setting aside is opening doors

in land without land a Writer’s building.

Writing represents a reference

context woven out of context

Writer spins.

.

Portrayal is errant copy.

Narrative a fabrication.

Sentencing – destruction.

Every symbol plugs the whole

cluttering conduits

Writer can’t escape.

.

Writing is abiding time.

Never yet, always almost.

Writer leaps

with nothing there

into now + here

which equals…..

 N Filbert 2013

 

Friday Fictioneers – March 29, 2013

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing19 Comments

Lamps

The body as a field where many battles rage.  Strife of ideal fathering, strafed with spousal passion and demands.  The infantries advance – toward occupational worth – stealth sweeping the rewards.  Childhood plans of freedom and grandeur – the risk and adventure – hits from guerilla flanks.  The will to heroic power and injured survival.  Biology of age.  Maproom of surrender and negotiating borders.  Where the surge will be.  Today.  Rigorous advance of death.  Waging to forge something like a home, a country, an interdependent territory.  All of it leaving its marks.

It is time to sit down and write.  Time, as measured by flame.

It has to be burning.

N Filbert 2013

 

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–

Aspect of Architecture

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading4 Comments

“A well-crafted sentence overturns the notion that thought is distinct from thinking.  A well-crafted sentence enacts the sense it makes rather than representing it.  The result of writing well-crafted sentences is that your reader will have the most vivid sense that something is happening to him or her and with the irresistible urgency of their own dreams.”

“Dedicate yourselves to reading most energetically that which you don’t immediately understand.  Read with a special attention to the prospect that what doesn’t appear to make sense matters most because of the possibilities of sense-making that are portended in it.”

author Alan Singer

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