Tag: recommended reading

Remembering What Happens

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Reflections5 Comments

It is very difficult to know what the “right” memory might be.  Everything is actually:  how it felt, how it seemed, what happened, in fact ALL of it is WHAT HAPPENS, and continues changing with each instant.

So I’m stuck selecting, revising, innovating, adapting – re-membering – we call it.  The continuous process of limitedly attending to our experiences from as many angles and aspects as we are made of, and assembling them according to each moment’s need, or, our felt need to make new senses of being ongoingly alive.

However, not “stuck,” but rather tremendously active, pulsing, vibrating, jittering and triggering – “flowing” it seems to some – adjusting, adapting, regulating, surviving – ever re-membering my present.  WHAT HAPPENS.

beachy-quick

“Emerson thought the mind’s nature was volcanic…A rock falls into the eye and becomes molten in the mind and memory cools it back into the rock first seen.  It alters when it reemerges, but one cannot tell the difference.  It looks the same but we are imagining it.  Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one’s life, mountains’ forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one’s own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded sometime must feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms.”

– Dan Beachy-Quick-

Mechanics and Meaning

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Reflections3 Comments

Flow2

Grief.

I suspect this is an emotion with which we are all familiar.  It connects to longing and sorrow like Siamese siblings sharing bodies.

Evidently I am able to conjure it at a moment’s notice, on a whim.

How we initiate suffering.  Designate and signify it.

  • Creating separations and distinctions in order to perceive
  • Attempting to maintain stability, regularity, balance and order
  • Envisioning opportunities and instinctively avoiding threats (real or imagined)

While what we have collectively learned about our world, its fluidity of matter and energy, its processes – subatomic to galaxian – would seem to infer that

  • Everything is connected
  • Everything keeps changing
  • Opportunities routinely lose their luster or remain unfulfilled and most true threats are inescapable (aging, death, loss, etc.)

Metabolizing Change

“Grief,” “longing,” “sorrow” and the like seem often to highlight where triggered survival mechanisms (boundaries, maintenance of balance or stability, and bias toward perceiving dangers or threats) ratchet and crackle, kink and stumble in the flow of change.

I would like to open to the inferences.  Soothe and calm survival mechanisms, more effectively metabolize connectivities and change.  Participate in life’s process from smaller and larger perspectives of mechanics and meaning, measures and movements.

Flow

ideas stimulated by Rick Hanson, in – Hanson - Buddha's Brain

Influence : Fragments from the Introduction : “Nothing is quite as real as nothing”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces3 Comments

I am currently reading Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution by Pascale Casanova, introduced by Terry Eagleton

Casanova

Beckett has always been a favorite of mine – for economy, humor, profundity, examination and exploration.  The following exemplify elements of this – quotations from simply the Introduction (by Eagleton) of this study…

“His work, in short, presents us with the scandal of a literature which no longer depends on a philosophy of the subject”

“every sentence of his writing keeps faith with our sense of powerlessness”

“nothing is quite as real as nothing”

“sublimity includes that which is barely visible as well as the immense and immeasurable, since both are equally ungraspable”

“there is no more truly historical phenomenon in art than form – which is quite as much saturated in social signification as so-called content”

Beckett presents “questions addressed by texts to themselves, queries about their own procedures and conditions of possibility”

“clear-eyed attempts at an exact formulation of the inarticulable…the extreme scrupulousness with which it sculpts the void”

“writing itself becomes for Beckett the very signifier of the failure which so gripped his imagination”

“places the very impediment to writing at the center of his writing, transforming the question of failure into the very form of his art, telling incessantly of the failure to tell”

Beckett

Thanks Samuel.

 

2 Things in absence of composition

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces4 Comments

My maker-wheels or whatever complex machinery sometimes con-fuses to generate documents of creative writing are apparently on the fritz.  In lieu of some relatively originary textual flow (idiosyncratic dip into the semiotic waters of the resource of language) I forward along a poem that stands out to me from this weeks’ readings, and a plea that interest-piqued readers immerse themselves in a particular book regarding our co-creation and involvement with the rest of the world and one another…

First, the poem – from Bob Hicok‘s “Elegy Owed” – a fine collection:

Hicok - Poem

 

and second a plug for a compelling study by Ian Hodder – “Entangled: An Archaeology of the relationships between humans and things”

Hodder - Entangled

 

And finally…poems

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry10 Comments

I recognize that I hunger for poetry – periodically I canvas new poetry books and the old on my shelves to be STRUCK – to be wakened – charged – re-membered – into some leaping alive sensibility awareness delight sorrow grief ecstasy – that the vividness and risk of well-made poems incite…

for me, anyway.

Thus, the Bolano.  A beginning.

Thus, returning to Nooteboom, a certainty.

Thus, the new arrivals shelf – Wichita Public Library.

and then…today…BOOM.

Bob Hicok, tested favorite, “new arrival,” Elegy Owed

the jump-start.

the activation.

something like recognition and instigation at once.

what poetry does.

and having no idea where to begin to share it with you

to recommend

to commend to you

I’ll just offer the opening poem:

Pilgrimage - Bob Hicok

and the closer…

Good-bye

Hicok - Good-bye

and to tell you that everything in between is every bit as good

and some even better….

Good-bye

 

Small white church at the edge of my yard.

A bell will ring in a few hours.

People who believe in eternity will sing.

I’ll hear an emotion resembling the sea from over a hill.

One time I sat with my back to the church to give their singing

to my spine, there’s a brown llama you can watch

while you do this in a field if you’d like to try.

I don’t think even calendars believe in eternity.

Beyond the church is a trail that leads to a bassinet in a tree.

Someone put it there when the oak and sky were young.

I’m afraid to climb the tree.

That I’ll find bones inside.

That they’ll be mine.

I want to be with  my wife forever but not as we are.

She’ll become a bear, I a season: Kodiak, spring.

Part of loving bagpipes haunting the gloaming is knowing

the bloodsinging will stop.

Beyond the church I pulled a hammer from the river.

What were you building, I asked its rust, from water and without nails?

This is where I get self-conscious about language,

words are love affairs or séances or harpoons, there isn’t a sentence

that isn’t a plea.

This is where I don’t care that I’m half wrong when I say everything

is made entirely of light.

This is where my wife and I hold hands.

Over there is where our shadows do a better job.

– Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed

New Arrivals, with poetry and music

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Music, Poetry7 Comments

Submerged in due dates.

Here’s what’s arrived in the center of (my) radar:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

and then, from Roberto Bolano

DON’T WRITE POEMS BUT SENTENCES

Write prayers that you will whisper

before writing those poems

you will think you never wrote

Bolano - Unknown University

Strange gratuitous occupation    To go losing your hair

and your teeth     The ancient ways of being educated

Odd complacency     (The poet doesn’t wish to be greater

than others)     Not wealth or fame or even just

poetry     Maybe this is the only way

to avoid fear     Settle into fear

like one inhabiting slowness

Ghosts we all possess    Simply

waiting for someone or something in the ruins

and finally,

MY LITERARY CAREER

Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also

            from Alfaguara,

Mondadori.  A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino… All

            the publishers… All the readers

All the sales managers…

Under the bridge, while it rains, a golden opportunity

to take a look at myself:

like a snake in the North Pole, but writing.

Writing poetry in the land of idiots.

Writing with my son on my knee.

Writing until night falls

with the thunder of a thousand demons.

The demons who will carry me to hell,

but writing.

all poem like creatures – Roberto Bolano

A Kind of Credo : Intertextuality : “Art is Difficult” : Manifesto?

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Reflections, Writing9 Comments

“perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point”

-Anne McConnell, Approaching Disappearance–

But then there is a reality to writing – the unexpected, the making-up, emergence and invention.  I believe in it, in spite of my theories, in spite of acquired knowledge.  Something like the terms of paradox.  Little matter, much substance (not really).

For fun, let’s say (in the manner of a credo):

  •  “I believe…

that language is a socially constructed resource recursively constituting and innovating meaning potential

  • “I believe…

‘the notion of meaning potential can be characterized as a heterogeneous totality of knowledge of conventionalized patterns of normatively correct situated verbal behavior which manifests itself and emerges from social practices of a given social community’ (-Mika Lahteenmaki)

  • “We believe…

that actual meanings are emergent from meaning potentials – are jointly created – recursively and interactively dependent – in their situatedness and perspectivity, unique and irreducible

  • “We believe…

‘reality works in overt mystery’ (-Macedonio Fernandez, via JL Borges)

  • “We believe…

that to live ‘is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed’ (-Gilles Deleuze)

  • “We believe…

that living occurs via the ‘conservation of autopoiesis and the conservation of adaptation – a constant and mutual structural coupling of continuous transformations betwixt organisms and environments (envorganisms)’ (-Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Paul Kockelman)

  • “We believe…

in complexity and meaning, difference and repetition, redundancy and novelty, structures and contingencies, openness and change

Measures of reality (situated and perspectival…partial and relative to) – our As-if-oscope and Toxic spoon-deep.  A hurly-burly and chaotic entanglement – intertwingled – adjoined in movements (writing of writing) to use an outdated metaphor:  textuality and trace.

  • “We could believe…

that ‘texts record the meanings we make: in words, pictures and deeds…shaping and shaped by our social relationships, politically, as individuals as members of social groups’ (-Jay Lemke)

That no effect is not mutual, recursive, intermingled and intertwined.  Life is ambient, writing of writing.

In other words.

  • “We believe…

that ‘Art is difficult’ (-Viktor Shklovsky) and meanings dialogic/multilogic / multimodal/multivalent (-Mikhail Bakhtin, Gunther Kress, Bruno Latour, semiosis)

Empiricism regarding ourselves is impossible (the situation and perspective necessary are not available) so we rely.  i.e. we need one another and beyond.  Envorganisms, we.  We believe (we could say.  I might).

“When we leave each other, we leave.”

–Henrik Nordbrandt–

A text composed is intertexuality – an Irish monk illuminating a copy; a modern blogger mashing-up – bricolage, meaning – I write, WITH.

To say I instantiate a social practice.  It becomes.

Thank you.  And welcome.

-a glyph is a hunt for optimism-

Slideshow of works cited:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Excerpts of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry3 Comments

Ideal
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
1

I did not know beforehand what would count for me as a new color. Its beauty is an analysis
of things I believe in or experience, but seems to alter events very little. The significance of a bird
flying out of grapes in a store relates to the beauty of the color of the translucency of grapes.
There is a space among some objects on a table that reminded her of a person, the way the bird reminded her,
a sense of the ideal of the space she would be able to see. Beauty can look like this around objects.
A plastic bag on a bush, moving slightly, makes an alcove, a glove or mist, holding the hill.
Time can look like this. The plane of yourself separates from the plane of spaces between objects,
an ordered succession a person apprehends, in order to be reminded.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Red Quiet, Section 3
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Our conversation is a wing below my consciousness, like organization in blowing cloth, eddies of water, its order of light on film with no lens.

A higher resonance of story finds its way to higher organization: data swirl into group dreams.

Then story surfaces, as if recognized; flies buzzing in your room suddenly translate to “Oh! You’re crying!”

So, here I hug the old person, who’s not “light” until I embrace him.

My happiness at seeing him, my French suit constitute at the interface of wing and occasion.

Postulate whether the friendship is fulfilling.

Reduce by small increments your worry about the nature of compassion or the chill of emotional identification among girlfriends, your wish to be held in the consciousness of another, like a person waiting for you to wake.

Postulate the wave nature of wanting him to wait (white space) and the quanta of fractal conflict, point to point, along the outline of a petal, shore from a small boat.

Words spoken with force create particles.

He calls the location of accidents a morphic field; their recurrence is resonance, as of an archetype with the vibration of a seed.

My last thoughts were bitter and helpless.

Friends witnessing grief enter your consciousness, illuminating your form, so quiet comes.

berssenbrugge red quiet

A Reading of Red Quiet