Tag: reality

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

Gallery of Linguistic/Semiotic Hero(in)es

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces6 Comments

How many do you know?  How many do you “love”?

“…We know we can never be anything but parallel

And proximate in our relations, but we are linked up

Anyway in the sun’s equation, the house from which

It steals forth on occasion, pretending, isn’t

It funny, to pass unnoticed, until the deeply shelving

Darker pastures project their own reflection

And are caught in history,

 

Transfixed, like caves against the sky

Or rotting spars sketched in phosphorous, for what we did.”

-John Ashbery, from The Sun-

Umwelt

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, WritingLeave a comment

“Language is a thing: it is a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist.”

Maurice Blanchot

umwelt

Composition

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes6 Comments

shadow composition

Approach the page with no idea.  No secondness of reality or facts.

See what the words will do.  Like spontaneous sex with your lover.

What happens next.  If you’re lucky.

What words will come?

Look closely.  Draw the pen near the paper.  Remember, you’ve no idea, like what I’m writing.  Language finding synonyms making thoughts.  Perception in the body.

Something already in the clear, or on it.  Never clear.  Do you see it?

Don’t let the first mark frighten you, it is already done, everything coming after you can edit: crossing out, crossing over.

See the line?  To chase or avoid, either way, impossible to capture or erase.

Look again – do you see it?  Hover but don’t inscribe, what is it waiting there?

I’m not being mischievous or rhetorical, facetious or mystical.  I want you to see what is always already there, predividing your canvas, filtering the open before you engage.  What you cast out around you, the shadow of your general ‘self.’

See it there gathered at point of pen, shading back toward your physical hand and pooling around it?  The absence of your presence forming incorporeality.

You are visiting here.  Your shadow is the record.  What you make out you make up.  But it’s never the first word or the beginning line.  Reality comes before you and spreads out, interfering and refracting the light you wish to use.

At times a bulky blot, at others barely discerned, evidence nonetheless that you are, in fact, tracing.  Operating in a kind of cloud of substance, adding lines and loops, particles, threads.

They say art (and representation) began in shadows, with shadows – recognition of other and presence and beyond.  Likely a myth that is true.

For starters, notice the outline, letting it outline itself/yourself, the visible ghost informing your are…

Now, since you’ve already overshadowed what’s next, begun what’s begun, press down and press forward, press on…

Vicente Carducho, tabula rasa. engraving, 1633

Emissions from the Helmet of Horror, novel mythology-cognitive-science-literature-art

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy3 Comments

“no one realised that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same…”

-Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths-

[as leaked from the skull stuck to Victor Pelevin]

“…progress is a propulsion technique where we have to constantly push ourselves away from the point we occupied a moment ago…the funny thing is that the concept of progress has been around for so long that now it has all the qualities of a myth.  It is a traditional story that pretends to explain all natural and social phenomena.  It is also a belief that is widespread and false.”

“If a mind is like a computer, perhaps myths are its shell programs: sets of rules that we follow in our world processing, mental matrices we project onto complex events to endow them with meaning.  People who work in computer programming say that to write code you have to be young.  It seems that the same rule applies to the cultural code.  Our programs were written when the human race was young – at a stage so remote and obscure that we don’t understand the programming language any more.  Or, even worse, we understand it in so many different ways and on so many levels that the question ‘what does it mean?’ simply loses sense.”

Ariadne:  “…The diagram was called ‘the helmet of horror’ — it was written in big letters above the drawing.  The main body of the machine was shaped like a helmet.  And there was an identical helmet standing on the demonstration table — an ancient bronze headpiece, and underneath it a visor with holes in it curving back inside…Its lower section ran back inside the helmet through a slit in the middle of the face.  And there were some kind of side plates too — everything was very old, green with age.  It looked like a Roman gladiator’s helmet — like a bronze hat with a visor.  Only this one had horns as well.  They came out of the upper section of the helmet and curved backwards…the helmet of horror consisted of several major parts and a lot of secondary ones.  The parts had strange names: the frontal net, the now grid, the separator labyrinth, the horns of plenty, Tarkovsky’s mirror and so forth.  The largest element consisted of the now grid and the frontal net.  It had two parts that were sometimes fused into a single unit.  Its external part, the net, looked like a visor with holes in it, and its internal part, the grid, divided the helmet into an upper section and a lower one, so there was no way you could squeeze even the smallest head into it…the now grid separates the past from the present, because it is the only place where what we call ‘now’ exists.  The past is located in the upper section of the helmet, and the future in the lower section…The helmet’s operating cycle had no beginning, so it can be explained starting from any phase.

“…start by imagining the gentle glow of a summer day caressing your face.  That’s precisely how the frontal net, heated by the action of the stream of impressions falling on it, transmits heat to the now grid.  The grid sublimates the past contained in the upper section of the helmet, transforming it into vapour, which is driven up into the horns of plenty by the force of circumstances.  The horns of plenty emerge from the forehead, curve around the sides of the helmet and intertwine to form the occipital braid, which descends into the base of the helmet.  There, below the now grid, the bubbles of hope that arise in the occipital braid are ejected into the region of the future.  As they rise, these bubbles burst against the now grid, generating the force of circumstances, which induces the stream of impressions in the separator labyrinth.  And the stream of impressions, in turn, is shattered against the frontal net, heating the now grid and renewing the energy of the cycle.

“It’s not always hope at all, it’s more likely to be fear and apprehension, suspicion and hate, all sorts of nonsense, in fact any of the cud that is chewed with such habitual stupidity…technically speaking it is correct to call them bubbles of the past.  They are called bubbles because their constant tendency is to expand and occupy the entire volume of the helmet, preventing anything else from appearing in it and leaving no space or opportunity for the recognition of what is actually happening…since past is enriched exclusively with more past, the bubbles of hope consist entirely of past, they are simply past in a different state…

“The separator labyrinth is the most important part of the helmet of horror.  It’s the place where everything else is produced out of nothing, that is, the place where the stream of impressions arises.  And it’s also the place where the past, present and the future are separated.  The past moves upwards, the future moves downwards, and the present, in the form of the stream of impressions, falls on to the outer surface of the frontal net, generating the cycle’s passionate desire to recur, so that it becomes a kind of perpetuum mobile…”

“That means that it’s past that decomposes into past, present and future?  In actual fact the whole cycle is simply the circulation of now in various states of mind, in the same way that water can be ice, or the sea, or thirst.”

“…the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ have no existence in themselves.  They are generated by the separator labyrinth by the force of circumstances and from there they enter the horns of plenty, where they enrich the past, transforming it into the state of bubbles of hope.  But since there is no ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ anywhere except in the horns of plenty, the stream of impressions can quite easily arise inside the helmet and fall on to it from the outside.  And the same applies to everything else as well…never under any circumstances regard anything as real.  The entire phenomenon is induced, like the electromagnetic field in a transformer…as far as I could understand it, the horns of plenty operate like enrichment units in a chemical plant.  When it’s driven through them by the force of circumstances, past gets mixed up with everything else, becoming richer and acquiring value, with the result that bubbles of hope are produced in the occipital braid, go gurgling through the region of the future, are reflected in Tarkovsky’s mirror and perceived as the novel freshness of a brand new day.”

“In real life what you see depends on where you look…the word ‘change’ has no meaning…where you’re looking depends on what you see.  Is that clear?”

“The future is produced from the past, so the further we go into the future, the more past is required to produce it.”

“Free will.  Life’s like falling off a roof.  Can you stop on the way?  No.  Can you turn back?  No.  Can you fly off sideways?  Only in an advertisement for underpants specially made for jumping off roofs.  All free will means is you can choose whether to fart in mid-flight or wait till you hit the ground.  And that’s what all the philosopher’s argue about.”

“Always the way when you feel you’re just about to understand something important.  It’s like the whistle of a bullet or the roar of an aeroplane.  If you can hear them, it means they’re already zooming past you.”

“…a labyrinth comes into being in the course of any discussion with yourself or others, and for that period of time each of us becomes either the Minotaur or his victim.  Although there is nothing we can do with this…there’s nothing we can do without it either…even the discourse itself can only come into being within the discourse.  But the paradox is that, although the entirety of nature arises within it, the discourse itself is not encountered anywhere in nature and was only developed quite recently…Basically a labyrinth comes into being when you have to choose between several alternatives, and the alternatives are a set of our possible preferences, conditioned by the nature of language, the structure of the moment and the specific features of the sponsor.”

“Perhaps that’s the whole point.  Not to think about where the way out is, but to realise that life is the crossroads where you’re standing at this precise moment.  Then the labyrinth will disappear as well.  After all it only exists as a complete whole in our  minds, and in reality there is nothing but a simple choice — which way to go next…We’ve all got dead-ends.  Only it’s not obvious straightaway, it just takes a little while.”

“The helmet of horror fractionates the one thing that is, into the multitude of things that are not.  But since the helmet of horror is in no way the one thing that is, it is also one of the multitude of things that are not.  And the things that are not may enter into every possible conceivable and inconceivable kind of relationship, since these relationships do not in any case exist anywhere except in the helmet of horror, which does not actually exist itself…An individual by the name of A may be a part of the helmet of horror worn by B, and an individual by the name of B may at the same time be a part of the helmet of horror worn by A.  This is the final infinity in both directions, and often both of them are quite nice people.”

“The means by which for many millennia he has attempted to make himself real are terrible and foolish, like all the mysteries of his world.”

A remarkable new mythology from Victor Pelevin

(all above quotations arise from!)

What Happens (with a semblance of truth): A True Story (that is never true)

On By NW FilbertIn Philosophy, Writing1 Comment

Many things might have happened, indeed, could have happened.  It is impossible to tell until it happens.  Whatever happens.  And so it goes.

Recollection subjects what happens to interpretation, a puzzling assemblage of memory (embodied brains in changing circumstances) and occurrences (embodied brains in specific situations), making it impossible to tell what happens, when it happens, or after it happened, save from a very particularized attention and intention, point-of-view, disposition and enmeshment (the factors being relatively endless).

And so we call histories, scientific observations, statistical reports, etc. al., “stories;” journalism, research, theories or assays (essays), “fictions;” and personal memoirs, dialogue, descriptions or statements – “fantasy.”

Everything that happens or happened is what might have happened.

Let’s theorize that an author or reader, group or individual, has a concern for “truth” – something being what it seems to be – who or what has total and essential access?  The only truth in human expression that I can surmise is that it is truly “made up.”

An individual may have something approximating total and essential access to a thought or feeling, personal experience or idea, but insofar as it actually occurred according to an experiencer, there are already multiple points of view, ranging from molecular to cosmic, matter/energy to cultural.  To say nothing of the complicating fabrics incumbent on expression – whether a grimace or a novel, a shriek of pain or a tally mark on a chart – it has entered uncertain and collaborative interpreted ground.

All to say “experience” is utterly specific and solipsistic (non-transferable “truly”) and is an enabled product of embedded participation in significant (if identifiable as an “event” or “occasion,” “moment” or “intuition” – any feeling, sensation or awareness) surroundings, expanding niches of existing things with variant points of view.

This is how I can guarantee that nothing I show you or tell you is “true.”

It may be more or less accurate to my experience or understanding of it (depending also on your experience/understanding of my presentation of it) but it will in no wise be what it is or was, in truth.  I assume truth to be as impossible as god.  It would require omnipresence, omniscience, boundary less experience (which could not accord with our experience, or a grain of sand, or an ocean) and would be immediately foiled by the omni-ability (omnipotence?) those other necessary qualities would demand.  One could not be absolutely enmeshed or identical-with and entirely and completely objectively separate or alien-from at once.  At always.  That is not a paradox but a contradiction.  If imaginable, incommunicable.

So we speak of a “semblance of truth” or a “truth-seeming” quality to account for our realities and desires (our want for security, to grow order in chaos, to know, to choose or act with less fear or uncertainty).  Things like our ages, census reports, laws and principles (grammar, mathematics, semantics, processes and methods, etc.) a creepage over toward what we think of as “facts” – majority-mutually-agreed-upon-interpretations/perceptions/hypotheses.  These can hold for a long time because they’re held by so many, so widely.  But they most assuredly change over time, again, from atomic behaviors to the shape of the earth and its relation to elsewhere, from what constitutes pain to what gets moniker’d “god.”

What counts as fact does so by being open and shared.  Semblance of truth comes by corroboration, conversation and multiplying points-of-views and expressions of experience.

Perhaps this is one reason we blog.  To try “it” out on everyone, potentially.  If our expressions resonate with others, perhaps they have a semblance of truth, or contribute toward creating it.  Enough “I know, right?’s” and we’re on our way to a fact.  But no amount of data or language, materials or activity makes it so…it rests on agreement and compromise, observation and interaction shared most widely, coagulations of interpretations, accretions of experiencing – fabrication.

Make then, express.  Hypothesize and share your experience – we ask for your two-cents worth – we’re accumulating a fund.

The Secret(s). The Key(s). For Everyone. The Next One.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

“He opens Nothing, with a nothing key” (Macedonio Fernandez)

 (Arkadii Dragomoschenko) “Everything begins as an error of vision…”

 

            Time.  How it fluctuates.  The excruciating and seemingly eternal wait…and that which occurs suddenly.  Whether it exists or not, we live on its terms.  Experienced, as with everything, to varying intensities.

Interruption.

Arrival.

Topical, temporal, terms.

Age-old commonplace: does movement (spatial) fragment a continuum (temporal)? or does some urge toward continuance (temporal) spawn diverse actions (spatial)?  Chicken or egg?  Or chicken in egg withwhile an egg in the chicken?  Choose your poisons.  Or not.  The terms preside.

 

When are we most apt to accede to the passage (spatial) that is (of) time?  Alternately referred to as “aging,” “progress,” “growth,” “erosion,” “deterioration,” “process” and so on.  Some quote/unquote “motion” variously rendered (perspectivally perceived).

Serial designations.  Arbitrarily “first,” “second,” “third,” “last.”  “Beginning,” “middling,” “end” (-ing).  Sounds and rhythms (consonant-verb syllables) tick-tock du-thrum heartbeat breath clock gesture

Everything marking something.  But what?

“Signs kill things” (Fernandez).

I hold a nothing key.

It’s a sign.

It unlocks the mysteries.

The secret heart of being.

All those questions.

 

If you’d like to know, I can begin writing them down for you.  For my duration here.  Or find them yourself (the keys, the mysteries, the secrets at the heart of existing) – simply add a question mark to every thought, dream, emotion, hunch, word, sight, sound, sense or reason that occurs to you.

Which will leave you with.  In.

Smackdab in the center of it all.  Ever-presently.  At always.

 

WITH/IN will synonym you, so that you will be.  Always.

– ? –

            The wise are correct when they say that everyone has access to the (nothing) key.  The slender cracks in the thresholds doors, available indiscriminately.  Received the same way you take language.  Inbreathed.  Freely (you have been given) freely (you receive).

 

From knee-crease tracing the calf to the fine-pointed ankle bones is a passage, preferably a smooth and easy one, knowing age and growth.

As she departs, time stretches into space; when she arrives all compresses.  Only machines are regulated (for a time).  Heart’s skip, muscles seize, organs expand and contract.  Movement is erratic.  Composed.  Fluid.  Harmony and dissonance make melody.  A sentence.  A phrase.  Selah.  Gaps.  Seams.  A nothing key.

 

– ? –

            Do you get my meaning?  Meaning is an interrogative juncture.  Is all.  The nothing key to open it.

 

We tell by our surroundings, i.e. specific spaces at particular times (or vice-versa), i.e. contexts and structures that hold us…allow us recognition, description, difference.

In other words, hiking in the Rockies is not taking dictation at an office desk.  But both mark something, at varying tempos.

There are no true clocks.

Or standard times, any more than we all may inhabit the same location.

Or enter the same stream.

 

Only meaning to say I am hoping to open a door with my simple key.  A possibly operative threshold.

Into the secret heart of things…

– ? –

“why does an intense mental state happen?  Why does it pass on to others?

These ‘whys’ do not exist: this is how it happens, and that’s all.”

-Macedonio Fernandez-

 

Ghost-Love-Coherence

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

Ghost-Love: Natives of a Dwindled Sphere

 

“If it cohered,

cohered to you, if you were there, to say,

‘Oh, it is not the way we say it is,

not that.  Oh no; that way isn’t the way.’”

–William Bronk-

“We keep coming back and coming back

To the real…

…straight to the word,

Straight to the transfixing object.”

–Wallace Stevens-

“Fleeting,

they look for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke-

“No, we had come too far for that belief

and saw ourselves as ghosts against the real,

and time and place as ghosts; there is the real.

It is there.  Where we are: nowhere.  It is there.”

–William Bronk-

 

            If the real continued.  Continues, without us.  Without.  Tree, bird, house, river.  If.  As if.

 

If it cohered.  To you.  But for a moment, now here, where we are, if you and I cohered, making what is between us, what is real.

Eyes and what’s seen.  Hands and their touch.  Ears and the music, the noise (the silence).  And so on.  The real.  It is there.

You called?

I called.  Call.  Am calling.

“If it cohered, cohered to you, if you were there, to say,”

Where we are: nowhere.

Not the way we say.  I say.  You say.  Not the way it is.

There is the real.

We say to the angel.  The halfling.  The between.

“House. Pond. Flower. I. You. Platypus.”

“Oh, it is not the way we say it is, not that. Oh no,” you say.

But the word is.  There.  Transfiguring angel.  Figure marking the between, made between.  Nowhere.

Fleeting, transfixing object, what you say we say I say, what we write.

Straight to the object.

“that isn’t the way,” we say, “not the way we say it is”

But it is there.

We keep coming back and coming back

As if it cohered

We

To things.  Transfixing objects.  You.  Words.  Fleeting.  Now here.

We say to the angel, the between, “is it there?”

Half-cohere, half-cohere, wholly transfixed by the object, fleeting, in-between, being made?  You.  I.  It is there.

Is it there?  Where we are?  Now here.  Nowhere.

Half, tri-partite even.  Thus now then.  As if.

 

The fly is bothering me.  It lands.  I am thirsty.  It is gone.

 

You made an object.  It is there.  I am looking.  While I am looking there is paint, form, shape, rectangular, drips strokes runs splotches.  From here I imagine texture.  With my fingers, it is there.  Where I am.  If it coheres.  Between, meeting point, figuring angel.  Ghost of the real.

I smell.  I smell you.  Between my nose and you and me.  Nowhere.  The connective stroke between w and h is awkward, unmatched.  We have to make it.  Make it work.  Cohere.  Happen.  Fleeting.  Fabricate.

It is there.  Between my eye and the page: “wh” “Nowhere” is there.  Cursive broken.  Either way.  Visual puzzle.  Ancient.  Reader supplying breath breaks tone punctuation.  Reader punctuating piercing, when I listen, ears to your lips, to your voice, I perforate, puncture, separate, we make.  It is there.  Angel.  Between.  As if it cohered, me to you, if you were there, to say “Oh it is not that way” as I punctured it, broke it down, chewed to fragments.  Fragments (fleeting) it is there.  Hands, voices, bodies, where we are, suture, stack, come back and come back, house.  Conversation.  Fence.  Pool.  Kiss. Nowhere.  As if.  Angel.

In a perfect world…”Oh it is not the way we say it is, not that”

“No, we had come too far for that belief”

Fleeting fleeting fleeting and coming back coming back

here

 

 

There is no coming back, either to nowhere or now

But the word.  Transfixing object.  Painting.  House.  Yard.  Bed.

 

Squirrel on the trunk, I swallow, skitters away.  Not there.  It is not the way I say it is, not now.  Except this: if you go straight to the word, it is there.

 

Painting, photo, body, voice – transfixing objects – if it cohered, cohered to you, if you were there

If I was, I am, now here.

You are not.  Now you are.  Words, the real, I keep coming back and coming back, writing

You are.  You are.  You are.

 

I hold the page close.  I look.  Youareyouareyouare, I puncture, punctuate, I wonder if it coheres, cohered, if you were there, will be, the words are, the page, a barely thing, ghost of a horizon line held straight to the eye, nothing between eye and edge, very little, almost nothing, but I see, see something

It is not the way we say it is, oh no, not that,

but we keep coming back, coming back, saying again, each time new, different, again, same words, written they are there, angel, we are, we are, we are, nowhere, now here, if it cohered.

In Praise of Darkness

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“And those of us, never angels, who are verbal, who ‘on this low, relative ground’ write, those of us who lowly imagine that ascending into print is the maximum reality of experiences?  May resignation – the virtue to which we must resign ourselves – be with us.  It will be our destiny to mold ourselves to syntax, to its treacherous chain of events, to the imprecision, the maybes, the too many emphases, the buts, the hemisphere of lies and of darkness in our speech.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-