Tag: prose

The Unknown and Unnamed regains composure

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, TracesLeave a comment

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)

FYI

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

In attempts to make following/reading easier…particularly for pieces and fragments of ongoing series…I’m adding new pages under “Experimenctes” page, a miscellaneous…a fetal gathering of “I, for Instants” posts…. and sections of the work-in-progress “Unknown and Unnamed” and images that inform them…

thanks always, all, for reading

it means a lot

N

I, the infinite? instants…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

I, Gelaftimus

 

A jumble of words.  A spasm, a syndrome.  The spraying of a passing fancy, designation.

You don’t know where I got these words, nor do I, or only rarely.  A voided origin, a lifetime suffering verbs and the masks of nouns.

Experience: feels like something moving forward, somethings breaking and tumbling about it.  “Feels like.”

A kind of perceptual first instance, shaped by everything before, altered by everything after.

At the limit then, boundary-lip, threshold.  Moving, and that ceaselessly.  Colliding.

A poet, after committing suicide in his youth, now festering under the ground, is found to have remarked that “a tree grows upward…the path of least resistance.”  So most of us.

Whatever “us” might mean, a jumble of words, perhaps a spasm, unconscious and involuntary instinct, so carefully and meticulously learned: to say.

Gelaftimus is what I feel today, this moment, my wife sitting and stewing on her couch, me (whatever “me” might mean) crabbing over my desk, this white paper, with a ball-point pen, scribbling – “a jumble of words, a spasm.  A syndrome.”  Perhaps.  But it is gelaftimus, I tell you that.

Early on I was assigned this particular label: “Nathan,” only later coming to find that “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context.  In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.”  (V.N. Volosinov, et. al.)  “Feels like” experience.

Needless to say, “I” have struggled with defining the cluster of words “I,” “Nathan,” “man,” “boy,” “me,” “son,” “husband,” “father” and so on in their perpetually altered contexts, circumstances and situations, ever re-de-term-in-ing their possible meanings.

A jumble of words.  A spasm and syndrome.  Instinct and accomplishment (accomplice-ment?)

My wife, last night on the swing, beside me, in the dark, on the porch, spoke of “not being allowed to say” as a child – so very many experiences “not to talk about” –  frozen (perhaps) in their places or processed without knowledge dementedly deep underground (out of sight, out of mind, and so forth).

Contextually, she was addressing the decades-old infancy of “figuring out the world around me and my relation in and to it.”

“Reality works in overt mystery”

–Macedonio Fernandez–

which I found (what she said) to feel like truth (as in actuality) – the jumble of words, the spasms and syndromes of “making words fit.”  The odd difficulty we sometimes name “maturity,” i.e. beginning and growth.

I would confuse myself in this (were I to find me).

Alas it floats on the crest of the wave, breaks and spreads on the shore, regathers in a reflective pool, drifts away and starts again in fragments and particles.

Poised on a threshold, hardly poised.  Rather in the breeze, a metaphor passing hands.

This jumble of words.  Syndromes and spasms.  Accumulated masterfully and haphazardly over ages and accidents.  Feels like, experience.

Gelaftimus, today.

 

“A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; [or making it fit with prefabricated words? –N.F.] and in writing [that babble at the crest of the wave –N.F.] one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) [?! –N.F.] and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, [ever creating more waves – N.F.] it makes words to fit it [or fits it to words which recognize? – N.F.]”

–Virginia Woolf–