Tag: relationship

I-Native Writing: Attempt at a Self-Portrait

On By NW FilbertIn Art, identity, Language, meaning, Self-Doubt, sign, symbol, Writing3 Comments

Ouroboros

Things one realizes about oneself when one is “partnered” or loved well.  That seems to be the theme for me of late.  The differences between “automatic” self-recrimination when the Other speaks of an annoyance or a threat to useful relating vs. a kind of awareness and curiosity about one’s own behaviors that opens up understanding and attention related to the same habitual practices…

For instance.  For years, the only tattoo I got that was not an author or artist’s name / signature / or self-portrait, was a whim of “…and then there’s me…”: and I had a simple Ouroboros inked into my shoulder.  The snake eating its own tail.  Sign of health, sign of destruction.  Sign of…

What’s in a “sign?”  A fundamental query ruling the bulk of my waking hours, and carried over from my sleep.

Ouroboros2

THIS NIGHT.  Reading others’ words it dawns on me…”My biography is my catalog.  But the man who was there before I decided to become a reader is missing.  I, in short, am missing.” [Vila-Matas – Dublinesque]

I, in short, am missing.  So long accustomed to defining and describing myself in relation to world, others, children, parents, education, travels, experiences, friends…roles, behaviors, actions, theories, ideas, feelings…and so on…

Each scenario, event, surround, circumstance, company : co-creating WHO / WHAT I am – with no idea what “I” might be stripped of literature, philosophy, family, knowledge, accomplishments, relationships, language, interpretations, and so on…

I had marked myself with “signs” of who I “am” for my children postmortem.  OTHERS.  Read these people, look at these artists, think about these things…and you will have some idea of who your father “was” – Nathan Filbert – a bibliography.

Infinite Ouroboros

Hmmmm.

I AM what I am related to.  Never being able to come to the end of it…I do not know what/who I am.

I can say something of the how…which felt like a revelation on me of why the most off-handed permanent mark I requested to be inscribed into my body has come to feel most adequate / representative / apt / true?

The how is like this.  I recognize in intimacy and dialogue with a loving other (my partner) over time habits of mind: annoyances, arrogancies, logorrhea, unwise knowledge-sharing (always borrowed)…INSECURITY, self-doubt, terror, UNCERTAINTY.

In most seconds of my awakeness two things are tangled, wound, immediate, simultaneous, recursive and self-devouringly going on: WHAT AM I DOING/WHAT AM I? and WHY?

My children run in, blast a request that feels like a demand – at the kitchen counter I: what am I hearing?  What am I feeling about what I’m hearing?  Why am I feel-hearing that?  What should I do?  Why do I think ‘should’?  How should I respond?  Why do I think there’s a ‘should’-how to respond?

On the porch reading with coffee:  Why do I cross my legs?  Why do I like coffee?  What am I looking at?  Why does a squirrel catch my eye?  Why did I choose these glasses?  Why am I thinking about these things?  Is this what others think about?  What ‘should’ I be thinking about?  Why ‘should’?  How should I work?  How should I think?  Why do I think I should have a way of thinking?  Why do I think about the way that I sit?  What kind of being thinks about the way it sits when it thinks on a porch and is distracted by a squirrel?

WHAT AM I?/WHAT AM I DOING?  and WHY? leading to HOW?

What am I doing?  Looking at letters on a screen.  Why do I look at these letters on a screen?  Why does language move me, draw me, resonate?  What is resonating?  Why?  Should other things be resonating?  I enjoy looking at my love.  Am I looking in the ‘right’ way?  Why do I enjoy looking at my love?  How should I look at my love?  Why do I look at my love?  What kind of thing is drawn to gaze at his love?  What is love?  Why do we love?  How should we love / might we love?  Why do I hold books certain ways.  How do I hold them?  How might I hold them?  Why?  What kind of thing thinks about how and why and what he holds?  What was that tone?  Why that tone?  What kind of being uses that tone?

And so on.  Moment after moment.  I get a drink.  Why did I get a drink.  Why was I thirsty.  What does it mean that I was thirsty.  How should I vary what I drink to my thirst?  Why?

Rarely do I consider “Who” does these things.  It’s too far removed.  Too unknowable – beyond any what/why/how I can even begin to contemplate.

But constantly constantly constantly WHAT AM I DOING?  WHAT AM I? (in this situation, this situation, this situation) and WHY?  HOW?

tangled ouroboros

And this is how my days pass.  Finding myself moving, teaching, listening, talking, drinking, eating, loving, avoiding, forgetting, imagining, smelling, saying, wishing, regretting, ashamed, confused, uncertain, unknown…but always searching, observing, inquiring, scrutinizing…

WHAT AM I DOING?  WHAT AM I that DOes such things?  WHY am I doing them?  HOW ‘should’ I do them and where/why/what/who thinks of ‘should’?  WHY?

And finding nothing but infinite tangles, recursive spiraling production and reduction, endless context surrounding every moment that is constructed only of questions and hypotheses…

I chose a good tattoo.

Permanently self-devouring and regurgitant.

Self-Imitations of Myself. (Gordon Lish)

doubleourobors

perhaps shed light on through an-other?

“A single voice raises the clamor of being”

Gilles Deleuze

Item Found in Archival Tangle – “Jim”

On By NW FilbertIn communication, fiction, Language, meaning, relationshipsLeave a comment

Author by Hallie

jim

Jim p1 Jim p2

A Provisional Writing

On By NW FilbertIn being, change, creative writing, fiction, life, love, relationships3 Comments

He, frightened, uncertain, inexhaustible and weak, somehow mustered the strength to ask or act for what he wanted.

Perhaps she would not comply.

Or could not, and remain who she needed to be.

Yet there would always be response –

– even ignoring, diverting, pretending to sleep.

It hurt to ask.  To attempt – its exposure – admission of lack and need – the venture, to try.  The fear of undoing, of incompleteness, of rejection, impossibility.

Still he acted and asked.

The alternative grown unbearable over time – constructions and deconstructions, composition and erosion, the living through time and space.

Time approaches in which time isn’t worth it – without.

Without knowing and acknowledgment, honesty and rejection, awareness…

…until the response is given…isn’t there still chance?

Untoward, illusory, unlikely and so slim…and yet?

As if…

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

Varieties of presence.

Certain opportunities of world.

Of doing.  Being.  Making.

As life runs out, so too the prospects of meaning, of experience. 

Had begun to feel he must,

or never.

Discover, find out, uncover, unearth, reveal

at least for a moment.

This moment.  The moment.

Nearing NOW.

But how?  Who?  And what sorts of whys were required?

What lent him the right and wherewithal, the luck, the chance, or desperation?

And why now?  What for?  How her?

 

Hesitates.

 

After all, perhaps?

Perhaps its merely panic, neuroses, a fracturing diminishing end?

What motivates?  And why?  And why this one?  And this now?  And here…in the midst of.

 

Always already in the midst of…and always already not-yet.

 

Between.  Desiring a line to be drawn.  As if the world depended on it.  His world (perhaps theirs?).  His life, his living, his NOW.

 

It remains to be seen.

Ever remains to be seen, evidenced, emergent,

Proven.

 

Can there be any proving?  If things had been different, some slight change in the initial conditions, conditions so complex?

 

Could it be different?

 

He must, he has to, he is compelled to act / to ask.

What will she reply?

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

The always begin.  Begin, begun, always.  Climbing the steps of his lack…behaving…becoming.  Ever some begin – some something, something shifting, changing, altering, becoming something else, something altered and novel, new, not combined in quite this way before – submerged, emerged, converged…yet differently.

No?

Next?

With N (next) = Begin?  +1, +1, +many + again, else, other…Equaling not before, prior, exact…NOT repetition but difference, remainder, chaos, complexity

Impossible,

seemed inexhaustible,

almost infinite,

not quite.  Not remotely.

“He,” “She” will surely end (in a way)

as a form of beginning

As a form of

a form of

motion, movement, becoming.

Things happen, or happening produces things (at some scale, interaction, percept)

What becomes undoes becoming undoing

(and so on).

Uncertainty.

              Mobility.

                          Activity.

                                    Becoming.

                                                   Undoing.

                                                                Undone.

He becomes.

Unraveled enough, to a point (a seemingly certain threshold) he will risk,

wants risk,

                                          feels compelled,

                                                                   concerned,

                                                                                                for survival, needs, depends,

decides to act or ask for what he’s wanting (needing?  lacking?  desiring?  believing?)

And where / who / what / why / is she?

And there and which and whom and when?

He will act, ask,

she will needs-be

in response to the violence of movement, address,

intruded perception, sensation,

respond.

In what way?

BECOMING: A Something-Writing …Provisionally (cont’d)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, being, creative writing, Experience, fiction, human, identity, Language, meaning1 Comment

Say it – “Mikhail!”, say it “Lover,” “son,” or “dad.”

Give me a robe, a title, anything,

let me to be,

yet call me “Person.”

(same as you).

Just like with all our difference.

Generic sets.

And without cease.

What’s inexhaustible

and finite.

Here We Be.

Call us “Person(s)”

In order to get by, to get along, to carry on, I invade your body as if planned.  Swapping breath and sounds and fluids.  Making more.  A “he” a “she.” A “husband,” “wife.”  A “muse” and “lover.”  We pretend in our pretense and we become.

Call us Person(s).

We raise the dead and name it “memory,” name it “history,” name it “god.”

We start to drown, but we’ve become, and name it “family,” name it “nation,” name it “state” or “land” or “friendship.”

We disperse.

We send out tracts: “PLEASE CALL US PERSON(S)!”

No response.

And we become what we will be.

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

I scream your name for I am helpless, “I” am hopeless without you.  And so I grasp and shape your body, your behavior, your aplomb.  I demand answer for my question is the telling and I need to be an I: “Call me Person!”

It begins.

And it is reckless, it is violent and warm. 

I am coddled, moisty, fragile.  I need purchase(d).  I need won.

You are one, and there are many.

We begin.

“Mother.”  “Lover.”  “Child.”

Call me Person.

Call me something.

We grow limbs and we grow hair.  We swap shapes and alter presence.  We emerge and we invade.

I am Ishmael, I am

Allah, I am Sam.

You are giant, you are troll, you are fairy.

I can’t tell but for the asking (as if same, as if identical) – simple call.

Call me Person.

We begin.

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

 In some ways our job [for survival] is simply to affirm one another.

To provide response (which is a call) to a call (a form of response).

I affirm you (which affirms I) by telling you (asking back) when you ask (telling me you are – where?).

Co-respondence is affirmation – positive or negative (each a both/and) [as with most things living].

You there –where?—ask me, I will acknowledge – thereby telling “you” –

both of us thereby affirmed, established…

…Being…

Thusly, there are Varieties of Presence.

I am Stephen K. Plato, Laurell H. Hardy, John

Quincy Locke,

call me “Person.”

“We” will therefore become via our calling, our response,

-mutually constituted identities

-for the moment.

Johann Sebastian Souza strikes a note

Federico Garcia Chopin hears that tone,

thereby constituting,

no, co-constituting…

…sound.

Sound, press of fingerpads on forearm, shoulder, buttocks, calf,

breast, or clay,

each,

each each,

resonance, difference, identification,

-a becoming, become-

Affirmation.

Compliance.

What might seem

passive, active, passing to-and-fro, creating “We,” “Us,” “People,” “Person(s)”

Trolls beneath the bridge.

Knocking, knocking.

We.  Are.  There.

(Which is “Here” for NOW).

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

Being.  and Time.

                                 (one might say)

Call me Friedrich, Ortega, Alfred.

or:  Being + Event.

                                 Address me Giorgio, Alain, Ricky G.

Actor, actant, the motion of bodies.

Ludwig Joycenstein;

                                   rejoice in time;

Osip, Anna, the noise of time.

Being.                                    Event.

kairos

“it is Time”

fullness.

redolent.

predilective.  propicient.  promising.  proclamative.

 

NOW.

In the Beginning, the wormy End.

Every Ending a Begin.

Transference.  Transmission.  Translation.

It is love.

Call.                                               Response.

Affirm

Telling                                           Asking

Achieve.

Archive.

WE ARE

You/I         a          He/She

(not long before combine, breed, be/have)

–BE-COME–

 

WE.

 

“I” was lost, until you found me…

…in other words…

…varieties of presence.

bumping into brambles,

slipping into sea,

hearkening to shriek,

Ask                                                Tell

yay/nay,

                  no matter,

                                          what matters?

                                                                  too much, too little?

near enough

 

Begin.

Become.

just BE.

 

Be.  Be.  Bee.

1. B. 2. C. D.

Dee Harvey Osmont.

Olivia Newton jaunt.

Wolfgang Adolf Heisman.

Prince Albert Nobel.

 

Call “me” “Person.”

 

Julio W. G. Sebold.

Sign on page,

                              raised to the eye,

                                                                  digited “touch,”

BECOME.

 

Vocable.  Insignia.  Etching.  Stroke.  Motion.

 

WE.

 

Call us Person(s).

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

“The pen asks / much more than it can answer /

one word at a time”

-Philip Levine-

Everyman logo

WRITING YOU

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, life, love, meaning, Poetry5 Comments

What I should do is phone; the circuitry

is there and we’re both somewhere in the circuitry.

I need to talk.  What should I find to say?

You know how it is: it rings; you answer; no click;

no dial tone.  Hello?  Hello? No word.

Not even goodbye – I couldn’t give you that.

.

Listen to this: to write you requires a scheme,

subtends an apparatus, such that here

be an I, you be he there, space

discerns the entities , depicts them such

as the scheme requires.  Are you lost?  I am.

I want to be not lost.  I write even so.

.

Tell me what to do.  I want to show.

Schemelessness.  Undress.  To speak from that.

I want the secrecy; I want it said.

To speak from wordlessness.  There are certain things

that happen and we don’t know: proteins meet

and shape each other.  We are the husk of this.

.

Whatever happens happens in some such wise,

under attention.  I hate all huskiness.

Let me be where it happens, let me be the hidden cells

and silent if silence is all there is to say.

I want to talk though.  I want to talk to you.

I despair of what to say.  Goodnight.  Goodnight.

– William Bronk

WRITING MEANS CLIMBING THE STEPS OF OUR LACK

– as if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come..”

– Edmond Jabes –

Velocity and Friction

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, Fear, fiction, love, relationships, Self-Doubt, Writing2 Comments

This uncovered writing has parts that feel like 16-year-old wordplay mixed with the aging man…sigh.

FROM THE 9 NOTEBOOKS

desert driving

Velocity and Friction

Provisionally, some fiction

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Current Reading, dreaming, Experimenctes, fiction, meaning1 Comment

PROVISIONALLY

– a novel? –

We untiringly construct the world in order that the hidden dissolution, the universal corruption that governs what ‘is’ should be forgotten [Death, or its refusal] in favor of a clear and defined coherence of notions and objects, relations and forms…

-Maurice Blanchot-

Thought and writing weave an apprenticeship…

…it will not hold, meaning and words, it will not hold.

-Dan Beachy-Quick & Matthew Ghoulish-

our limited mode of access to reality

-Laurie Scheck-

The novel hurled to the ground breaks into verse and achieves a perfect synthesis

-Ben Lerner-

each page a fractured, beating thing

-Laurie Scheck-

He woke far too early, and could not back to sleep.  Even slumber.  Broken into verse.  Eyes needled with discomfort, asking for their closing, refusing to stay shut.  And her.  Her, the one pushing away, the one who woke him, the one asking him to ‘please move farther’ when there is no room.  And so he enters a deep – after a fashion, or of a sort – a sleepy sleepless land, an engagement like great fiction.

Without synthesis and not unbroken, but scattered in its way, as insomnia might be, like stars, like sky, the bewilderment of travel.  An apprenticeship in weaving.  The dreaming in the waking.  Age-old questions, rich and beautiful: unanswered.  The meaning and the words continue refusing to hold.  Something “like” that, unlikably.

our words are so light that they keep opening out into questions…

…when you affirm, you still question

-Maurice Blanchot-

Coming Bare

On By NW FilbertIn Experience, human, identity, Journallings, meaning, Writing5 Comments

head-silhouette-with-question-mark

In the interests of authenticity…

  • The fact or quality of being true or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness. Also (overlapping with sense) accurate reflection of real life, verisimilitude.  
  • Genuineness;
  • The quality of truthful correspondence between inner feelings and their outward expression; unaffectedness, sincerity.
  • A mode of existence arising from self-awareness, critical reflection on one’s goals and values, and responsibility for one’s own actions; the condition of being true to oneself.
  • The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2014.)

Unveiling.  The action of reveal.  Is the “condition of being true to oneself” a possibility?

Recently my partner and love wrote me a revealing, unveiling, letter that blunted me with authenticity – a quality of herself that she was questioning in that very message.

Self-awareness.  Sincerity.  Something corresponding to actuality, reality.  Genuineness.

How often do we present or re-present ourselves authentically?  Do we all wish to?  What would it look like?  Sound like?  Would we lose friends?  Lovers?  Jobs?  If our outward expressions matched our inner feelings?

WHO AM I?

The complaint was compromise.  Pretense.  The wriggling falsities of “fitting in” or “being useful” or “surviving” in the world of humans.  In social groups and situations.  In life.  The feeling that what “works” or garners respect, interest, desire in the commerce of human beings is not authentic to who I actually am.  That what I am “liked” for is a misrepresentation, a partial product, a fabrication, a mixed message, does NOT “correspond to actuality, reality.”  And is it possible to undo that?  To live authentically in the variegated, unpredictable, situational and relative world of humans?  And is authenticity of an individual even a potential actuality / reality?

This has prompted me days of thought.  In effect it was relieving, releasing – my lover is exhausted of the “play of living” – the work of “fitting in,” “surviving with others,” “belonging” in ways that feel partial, inexact, false even, untrue, ALWAYS incomplete, inaccurate, inauthentic.

I felt freed to say my honesty.  When I father, I pretend to be a father.  I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what I should be doing.  I don’t know what it means to father children.  I love them, I care about them, I am frightened by them, I am exhausted by the responsibility, I gauge my activities based on parenting behaviors I DON’T feel comfortable with, or that I wished for…I act, I pretend I’m a man who knows how to love, instruct, “raise” children!  I do not know what I’m doing.  I feel inauthentic.  Like I’m reaching, practicing, experimenting, trying to be what I think a good “father” might be.

For years and years and years and years I have “feigned” being a writer, a musician, a scholar, an artist (it feels like).  Yes, I’ve read a lot. Yes, I’ve studied, I’ve practiced, I’ve performed.  Yes I think I “get” some things about the world and our human experience of it.  Yes I LOVE writing words, mixing them up, crafting phrases and sentences with them, attempting to mate them to my internal experiences, ideas, emotions… but I almost ALWAYS feel an impostor not an expert, like I’m trying out voices, expressions, characters, compilations to FIND OUT if that’s how I think, feel, imagine?!  So if ever I’m desired, complimented, responded to – I think it is an accident, a gratuitous kindness, a pitying.  That I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m simply trying, groping in language in a thorough darkness.

As a lover, a partner, I have simply tried to please.  To find out what is wanted and do, be, perform that.  How does an intimate relationship “work”?  I don’t know.  Everyone is different.  Nothing I learn to enact, behave, communicate, engage – is successfully effective in the next relationship (or, obviously, in the relationships ended before that!).  Could I BE whatever mucky morphing “self” “living human organism” I am (at any given moment) and be loved?  It seems so unlikely!  I don’t even know what that is (the mucky morphing living individual human organism) to express or represent to the Other one… – do they?  Does ANYone?

So do we ALL feel like we’re FAKING our way through being human?  Adapting “roles” and “styles” and “opinions” and behaviors in order to survive?  To be liked?  To fit in?  To feel good about ourselves?  To feel useful?  To BE?

Over decades, I have found that there are some things that steadily characterize me.  I like to drink and smoke and read and write.  I love to love and desire and be loved and desired.  All of those things share the “actuality” and “reality” of being activities that I don’t understand.  Things that seem to steady, nourish and keep me vital…and yet also damage, wound, hurt and make me vulnerable.  That wobble.  That trembling.

Identity

To my lover I responded theoretically.  That my understanding of a living organism is that its “identity” in fact is created and activated in every moment’s situation and surround.  That ALL of being a human is identifying oneself in relation to circumstance – a moment-to-moment relation and response to THOSE and THAT which constitutes its happening.  That “living” involves trying style, voice, behavior, activity, vocation, perception, interpretation, thought after another after another – quickly realizing that in EVERY instance the “fit” is partial, inauthentic, somewhat true (what feels good) and somewhat false (what is uncomfortable) – that BEING ALIVE is a wandering experimental trial of sorts.  That if we CHOSE or locked ourselves into an IDENTITY and attempted to be consistent in it – we would in fact deteriorate, become bitter – that the wisdom is NOT “I AM THAT” but “THAT IS PARTIALLY ME” for now, in this instance, at present…

????

The questions keep coming.  We bemoan that when we take a job, a position, a role, responsibilities… we tire of them as we feel the constraint of structured, required, or expected behaviors and activities.  When I compose a writing work – within pages I tire of its direction, its characters, its ethos – I can feel where a thing is going and whether it’s interesting to me or not, I tire of it – feel constrained by what’s created, feel fake in pushing it in another direction…even innovation and inventiveness feel PRETEND.

Perhaps LIVING = the tension of partiality.  Striving to “fit” to “belong” to “match” (be safe in, acknowledged, understood, allowed) means adaptation, alteration, invention, reciprocal construction, which would seem to inherently demand compromise, partiality, veiling and highlighting – what will seem / feel to be INAUTHENTIC, misrepresentation, “FAKE.”

And yet – it is through this wriggling tango that we also come to discover what “fits” us – what we enjoy, what our perspectives are, who/how/with whom we like to be, what feels “good” to us and what makes us afraid/uncomfortable/ and so on…

Cynical view: we’re ever pretending and untrue.  Hopeful view: we’re navigating and discovering, becoming.  And it seems that both are “real” and “actual.”  Authenticity (maybe?) equals partiality and pretense for humans?  Equals morphing and becoming?  Equals uncertainty and acting (adapting)?  Equals attempting to be?

NANOWRIMO Reminds: Any Excuse to Write

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, Writing2 Comments

THE INTERSTICE

I told her that I would have told her, had I known.

-“Known what, exactly?” she said, “Really!?” she said.

Yes, I said, yes, I would have explained what I felt to be true – about the “interstice” – what I felt I understood, I would have said.

As usual, the sighs, the diverted glances, the “I-don’t-knows.”

It’s okay.  I’m pretty used to it, not that it still doesn’t hurt, or squash some deep part of me – annihilate, erase – but familiarity breeds, and it’s not contempt, at least not for me.  More like resolve, or, well, accustom, I don’t know.

Still I would have conversed about the interstice.  Or its plural.  No one can know what we’re talking about (in my opinion) – that’s why we talk (in my opinion).  But I like to look at her.  Very much.  So sometimes I keep talking so that I can look at her longer.

Thus I would have explained – tried to – about the Interstice…had I known, I tell her.

-“Known what, exactly?” she asks, “Really?!”

It’s okay.  I’m used to it – exasperation.  It’s a sort of fatigue that settles on my interlocutors – my family, my friends, my lovers – as I triple/quadruple/unendingly (exponentially?) second-(meaningless term in this accounting)-guess whatever it is (emotion, idea, memory, event) I attempt to convey.

I don’t trust a thing as long as it’s questionable, and I’ve yet to discover something unquestionable.  I like inventing titles though.

She’s looking at me – softly, sadly, gently and quiet.  Sometimes she strokes my hair with her hands and lets me rest my head (the physical part) in her lap.  It kind of helps.  But the rest doesn’t rest.

It’s okay, for the most part, I’m used to it.  It’s “me” as they say, as it were – what I’m used to.  It doesn’t matter, or does in unquantifiable ways, but I keep at it.  Anyway.  I can’t seem to help it.  Well, some things do – like vodka, sex, sleep – but only temporarily.

Things are only temporarily.

That’s the sort of idea that keeps me alive.  Temporarily.  And second-(exponentially)-guessing.

She’s still there.  Here.  Though.  Hence the interstice.

I try to explain.

As if “interstice” possessed meaning – definition beyond the moment activated or utilized.  As if it indicated.  “Meant” – a convergence-point (limitless above and below and abroad) of conventions of time and of space – a realm that felt (seemed) shared.  Held in common.  Nothing is “held” – or that temporarily.  It seems.  I don’t know.  It’s certainly questionable – is it – “certainly”?

I don’t know.  Which I thought, or I think, is the entry to wisdom, but even that – I don’t know.

She’s still here.  And I question – who is it?  Who is still here?  And what for and/or why?  And where is this trembling “here”?  I can wonder, after all.

-“Wonder what, exactly?” she queries.

I don’t know.  I’m a human.  Some odd conundrum of pieces and parts that cohere, correspond or reciprocate in hold-together activities for awhile…call it “organism,” there’s that, it would seem, but seem only, digging in it is hard to convince – a location, identity, consistency, avocation or being.  It’s just so – apparently – temporarily.

Exasperating.  You see?  You dig?  What I mean?  That’s what we’re after (I think) – what it means.  But what that means is uncertain, I think or surmise.  We don’t know, it would seem, we’re uncertain.

We ask.

Let me describe this – the interstice…

Neuroses : or, why not begin again….?

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

Neuroses: or, Dynamite Walls Contain Us

– a self-help novel (what great novel isn’t?) –

            They said he, well, those who knew him said.  Really it should be “they” – not “ him.”  Inclusive.  “They” (neurobiologists) say neuroses can increasingly be viewed and investigated as ancient and useful survival strategies for our race.  Perhaps misapplied.  (Fragment, consider revising).

How does one decide between active and passive?  Betwixt present, future, past when creating, recounting or telling stories?  You’d think future, past, present, accordingly.  But there’s the aversion.  Aversion to active and present because it’s “suggested” : by programs – institutional and academic, technical and authoritative – software, hardware, “officiated.”  Machinated and conventional.  In stead, he’s drawn (attracted to, magnetized, compelled) toward past and passive – the un-recommended and untoward.  Why?  “They” – the humans.  The neurotics.  The ones that qualify.  Can qualify.  Will, do qualify.  Neuroses = something humans can (be/do/are).

The “they.”  Contained by equal and opposite neuroses: when this is evident, maybe we (or it) is called: “love.”  The balance of tension.  The incorporate.  I don’t like the rules.  I am predisposed.  (Fragment, reconsider).  I’m aware of my predisposition.  Therefore.

She.  He.  They.  Dynamite walls…contain us.  Or not.  (Fragments, reconsider).  The sentence/sentencing tells you – active, passive, future.

I want to tell a story in this way:  sometimes it happened; sometimes it happens; sometimes it keeps happening;  sometimes it might happen; sometimes it will.  Pause, breathe.  You are human – you never can tell.  There will always (perhaps) be too many contingencies, contexts, effects, probabilities, possibilities, variables.

A friend addresses the “four fundamentals of metaphysics” (oxymoron) – the Known-Known; the Known-Unknown; the Unknown-Known, and the Unknown-Unknown.  Makes sense.  Doesn’t.  Think about it:  we are possible, we are already, we have…

She was like, he said.  I said.  The 4th-grader wrote exactly what the adult said “in his head.”  Who could I be?  Perhaps the “he” – to contradict the known – (of the 4th grader).  She/it/he was correct.  I/you/we – were/are/will-be – exposed…via empathy, familiarity – the all that’s strange and true.

We are.  We were.  I am.  She is.  She will have been was.  As I.  As you, as we, will be, have been, was.

And LOVE.  And BE.  And.  And.  And.  This will ALWAYS be a NOVEL (i.e. some timeless combination of the known and unknown – what is, was, could be – living realities unknown as realities).

The she, the he, the they.  The you, the I, the us.  Love.  Hope.  Despair.  Being.  (Fragments – consider revising).

  • Dynamic walls contain us –

And how dynamic those walls!  Which shows the self-helping nature of understanding : knowledge comprehended and integrated…assists.  Assists insofar as efforts are being made at (or toward) making sense.  In other words – when each “individual” comes to realize that the containers are dynamic and uncertain (i.e. active and inter-, ex-changing permeable moment-to-moment[1] – altering apparent boundaries) – it will help “make sense of” why an individual’s “identity” is experienced as so very fluid and variable and shifty.

“Just the facts ma’am.”  Precisely.  (Perhaps).

In fact, no one knows the facts any more than we understand the properties or structures of fluids…of water…[2]  [There’s no footnote there – just a fascination by the conventional procedure of indicating a foot[3] by an elevated marking].  Public agreements – methods for maneuvering a world in concord, together – a gathering-space – endlessly intriguing).

I gesture.  You acknowledge.  (Fragments, reconsider – some conventional-mutual agreements {keep writing “arguments” where “agreements” supposedly goes}, commands/suggestions/authorizings).  I look longer.  Then am hooked.  You ARE curious, novel, strange, fascinating, unique.  AND familiar, recognizable, similar, probable, regular/regulated, assimilable, banal.  Strange AND familiar, novel AND banal, fascinating AND tiresome, conventional AND innovative – all at one go (when I pay attention).  I love you.  I am tired, not tired.

And so it is – the story goes – a familiar plot made interesting via details of circumstance and style.  The story goes (fragment, considered).

I am drawn to you.  BY you, in relation to.  Dynamite walls created interactively, actively, intertwined.  Intermingled and intertwined – intermingling (via gaze, touch, sound and sense) intertwining (via molecules, atoms, particles and waves, genes, movement) particles thereof, actions of particles of particles of = Intertwingled (-ing).  So to “speak.”

Traditionally (convention + repetition over time and selection (“history”)) “neuroses” have been publicly agreed to be “pathologies” – that is “disease-words,” irregularity-actions, abnormality-beliefs.  No longer!  NOW (perhaps?) the disease-describing (INscribing) words are themselves mutual banalities (thank you social sciences, relativism, anthropology + archaeology coupled to psychology/art/philosophy/biology/chemistry/medicine and…

“Inter-“ is useful for this – disciplinary/-mingled/-twingled/-spersed.

As the story goes: actively, passively, possibly.

She + He + It.  Sheheit…excrement with a Southern drawl.  The allure of things.  (Fragment reconsidered).  The taboo and grotesque, the extreme and revolting – and we’re right back to the banal.

Everyday.  The other, (the one eminently important to me, the neurotic) expressed emotion, attachment, attraction and bondedness toward (with) me.

A story began (in this case – BEGINS)

I -too-experienced (felt, dealt, smelt) interest toward / investment in – “her” strangeness (uniqueness and novelty, surprise and specificity) and familiarity (comfort, belonging, accord, comprehensibility) – THEREFORE – neuroses in reaction (alchemy, chemistry, biology, engineering, imagination) – RELATION – “love.”

Successful (“effective”?) interaction – an experience some call “power”(ful) [syn. compatibility, attraction, lust, desire, intimacy, connectivity – convergence – (relationship)].  WORDS.

We have yet to surmise, investigate, explore, hypothesize LANGUAGE ITSELF (i.e. modes or methods of conventional [publicly, mutually agreed] interactive, SHARED expression/impression tactics, activities, gestures, contexts and contents).

Now I stop (writing) in order to read (engage recognition + innovation – “learn”).

Sex is central.  Sex and perspective (in other words, “desire” and “belief”).

Easy to dub it all doublespeak, excepting that it’s the somewhat singular communicative way we humans go about storying our experiences…via dialogue, convention and sensation (conversation) – through one mediated path or another.

[1] -10 to the 10th power

[2] Footnote

[3]note