Tag: relationships

Interstices – continuing in between

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Experimenctes, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

more sections arriving from the Beginnings and the Second

– 3 –

Message being – she looked at me, incredulously.

– “What and/or Who – are you?” she requests.

I don’t know.  No one knows, I said, half-joking, persisting, prolonging, staying alive.

Longing = staying alive.  Longing = I’m still alive.  And I look at her, longer.  Which means: if only I knew.  The interstice (according to me).  We converge.  A gaze.  I must go.

That’s what I wanted.  The choice.  The decision.  A godlike thing for a fragile, finite boy.  The both of them: god – a fragile, finite boy.

No one owns.

When I returned, I could have said “My love, I am not present with you now.  I am in a future predicted by a possible past.  I am afraid.  I am not here.”

She might have responded: “I see and hear and understand that you are not here with me.  I too will retreat, remove, go away, until you return to me – here, to here.”

I babble on.

But I don’t say “Hello, my love.  I am not present.”  No, what I speak instead is a muddled report of my feelings and fears, my ideas – my present experiencing – a gummy wad of future and past, uninformed by where I am (with you) or who I am with (you) or when (now).  Constructed instead by where I believe I have been (past), where I think we are heading (future), and how I feel about that (afraid).

She recoils.

“I’m going away now” she says.  Which is not where I am.  Not with me.

But I meant.  I meant to say (once I figure out where I actually am): “Hello love.  I am afraid.  I am past and future.  I am absent.”

To which she replies: “Good to know.  Tell me when you arrive, here.  With me.”

Here now.  Or, Nietzschean-ly now/here, is that, and “exactly” : unlocatable.  Nowhere.  NOW + HERE…present.  It can only be lived, not thought.  Thought is too slow.  Lags ahead, leaps behind.

Oh you, I might have said.  And she may have recognized me.  Perhaps.  Now.  Here.  Presently – in the nowhere – the between – the “Interstice.”  Where what occurs, occurs.

“Hello.  I love you.”

– 4 –

Finite, fragile boy.  The fragility and finitude are true, I suppose, but not unquestioned.  However they withstand (the questioning).  They withstand the questioning.  Because I don’t know, and it is not wisdom, this cloud of unknowing, it is finitude, and I am fragile, not only because it’s true.

I am fragile because not all the branches hold.  When climbing.

– “What is it we are speaking of?” she asks (she – the you – asks me – the I).

Past and future, I might have answered.  The unknowing.  But did not.  Instead said – “unreliable.”  Rises, passes away.  Novel-to-familiar.  First one thing then another, desire fades.  I am not stimulus.  Enough.  For no reason.

I, illogical.

You, burdened.  And thus you sigh.  (She sighs her burden, a question).

And I retort.  “No.”  Or, “don’t go.”  But you might, because I have gone (or didn’t arrive, not HERE, not NOW, but somewhere else made of cobbled up pasts and unpredictable aheads).

“I love you.”

But how can that be?

It can’t.  Yet it is.

Perhaps.

I don’t know.  But it is not wisdom.

Interstitial

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, meaning, Writing1 Comment

part two of a rambling….

visual fields

– 2 –

            Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone.  Suspect I can’t believe them.

I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that.  Won’t even attempt “within reason.”  Suggest.

There’s no “let me explain” to this.

– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly?”

The point, I would say, exactly, or nearly precise – that there isn’t.  I don’t know.  But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) – we’re dis-missed.  Or not missed – how to say it?  There’s a meeting.  It seems.  In a margin, or more.

Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap?  I don’t know.  I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer.  Longer.  It’s a fight against death, that small word.  Simply, longer.  With you.

Am I clear?  Making sense?  I don’t know.

– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying” she says, “near ‘exactly’.”

I don’t know.  It’s unwise.

And I hum when the words sound just so.

– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.

Interaction.  Locution.  Between.  (I am thinking).

“Interstitial,” I say.  Interstitially?  I wonder.  How could I know.  It’s all susceptible to the mark.  The mark of the question.  I think about changing my name.  Did before.  I like titles.  It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music.  I would be Mark, Remarking.  The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved to a point, on everything : ?   “My point, exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark.  (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind…anything).

It’s okay.  I’m familiar.  Not that you’re worried.  There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction.  It’s just so (so it seems).  “Just-So Stories,” he wrote, long ago, relatively – they’re alike and akin, episodic.  We describe.

Neither here and/nor there.  Interstitial.  In-between.  What I wanted to tell her, to say.  And I would have, had I known.

– “Known what, exactly?” she’d once said, and I’d stopped, for the meanings were lost, non-existent.  Just so.

“That’s just how it is” I had said.  And don’t know, was surmising.  The world hypothetical and inspired (I’d thought, at the time) – simply possible.  I was wrong (perhaps).  But she stayed (temporarily).  The words lose their meanings.

I hum.  To myself.

I write: “This is what I wanted to do.”

All that’s required is a ‘trigger’…a rule.

We

“The Conflux of Floods” : an Imagined Interview

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Journallings, Language, WritingLeave a comment

two-rivers-colliding-geneva-switzerland-rhone-and-arve-rivers_2

            In a recently daydreamt interview (I realize these may be narcissistic, but they have occurred all through my life, and come to function as ways to take account of myself) – in which I had composed writings that earned critical acclaim AND garnered popular and commercial success (crazy, right?!) – I was being astutely questioned (after all, I am both interviewer and interviewee – it’s a daydream), and pressured to account for both the critical acclaim and the mass consumption of the tangled materials of my celebrated novelistic-poetic-essaying (some multi-genred hodge-podge and hurly-burly’d collaging of human inscription).   [Which is also, obviously, occurring in this everyday attempt at its retelling].  For better or worse.

By any account, each time I endeavored to formulate an answer to reckon for the apparent realities under fantasized questioning, I was foiled – ultimately unable to appropriately language ANYthing I strove to express – for the fundamental reason that the shared social convention of language – the available (or known) English nouns, verbs, structures, phrases, vocabulary, ontologies, etymologies, forms, content and context seemed false to my meaning as soon as I spoke them.

I would begin to assay a response, and each available term (even though utilizing an extensive and deft, adept English vocabulary) – each word I was choosing – would seemingly cancel itself.  I was caught in pregnant pauses – an author seeking a term – and the accessible signs and sounds of an encyclopedic dictionary all clanged untrue – inaccurate, incomplete and implausible – incorrect!

The interview proceeded (notably un-entertainingly and un-interestingly) with solid and well-considered queries posed from the history of human making, reflection and inquiry…followed by prolonged silences as I contemplated what might be honest, authentic replies…resulting in the beginnings of obsessive-compulsive, over-thought, manically scrutinized hesitations – cancelled out and undone, revised and corrected, taken back or erased as soon as they were spoken.  Simultaneously to becoming aware of their possible interpretations – conventionalized meanings gassing the atmosphere – the breath and air of their saying and hearing.

For example:  “Well, I think that authors…how could I speak for others…it seems to me…no that’s not right,” or, “It is my intuition, sense of things…my felt experience… no, that’s not quite it.”  “As the mind processes the body’s…wait…what is not body about the mind?  Our language presents a splitting of the two that was never there…I mean…no, no, this is inadequate…” and so on.  Nothing being said.

“Ever try.  Ever fail.  No matter.

Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”

-Samuel Beckett-

            The failure of the interview eventually came around to the following… a couple responses that might represent something almost accurate, maybe.  May communicate a touch of something authentic, honest.  It has stuck with me for a few days, and yet I can’t quite be sure…

A question arose concerning what I might have done, or be doing if I had fathered less children, were not bound to sustaining a family, and so on… I reflected awhile… and soon realized that I am unable to imagine my life without offspring.  Nearly half of my existence has been lived as a father, and I cannot think of experiences or expressions that they do not co-create in some way.  If any of it were taken back – the struggles and fears, broken marriages, anxiety, joys and determination to survive, regular interactions with their development, activities, quizzings and personalities… I only feel impoverished.

The illusional interview concluded with a large catch-all question, something along the lines of: “Your writings have profoundly moved some readers, yet you consistently express discontent – revising, beginning again, evading – even disappointment in your faltering, hesitant works.  Can you talk about this experience?  How do you account for your dissatisfaction in light of your readers reported satisfaction?”

My reply:  “The only way I can think to address this right now is in terms of a conflux of flood waters.  I, the writing one, have a flood of experience that I wish to understand, interact with, relate to somehow, attempt to comprehend.  I utilize the methods, marks and systems that we, as a species over time, have collaborated and devised with which to communicate – with ourselves, with others – and I attempt, attempt, attempt to forge some accord between the vast swarming flood that my life-experience ever is – as an organism embedded in world – and the means and methods we have for making sense of, imagining, and transcribing such total experiential flow.”

“The resulting expression is always more-than, distinct and different-from the felt experience I have of the flood (as the medium borrows from far beyond my own individual abilities or thoughts, capacities – an enormous fund of expressions, vocabulary and species-deep conventionalized experiences I could not possibly evince on my own) AS WELL AS less-than, deficient, incapable and variant from (not equal to) the ubiquity of my experienced flood.  I am left simultaneously hoping the conventions of language will prove adequate, and despairing they never will be.  What results from this tangle is a writing – a text, document, artifact – of my individual attempts to process the flood of my human experience in conventionalized signs.”

“From the other side of the markings comes the flood of each individual reader’s human experience.  As they (or we, I’m describing my reading experiences) engage the verbal expressions the writer selects to represent or elicit their own flood, the reader’s flood rushes through, around, with, into these written expressions.  When what is deciphered via these conventional funds of language feels apropos, accurate or apt to the reader’s experiential living flood – we are moved, feel met, acknowledged and represented, almost comprehended and understood, and we may feel that this collection, order, expression of language we have discovered in reading actually writes us, so to speak.  Which is why you may hear readers say such things as “I couldn’t have said this better…” or “I can’t imagine this expressed any other way…let me read it to you” (the thrust of quotation).  The section of text, general outlook, sound, rhythm or content of the artifact feels almost miraculously adequate and accurate to our own flood of experience.  Of course, often it does not – in which cases we revise or repurpose our readings toward knowledge or entertainment, something partial or other than full-flood experiencing, holistic (as nearly as possible) communication.”

“We know, as readers, no Other’s experience can be identical to our own, but in lucky moments it feels so.  Feels possible that our experience of the living flood is shared, understood, that our individuality, solipsism is not a locked room, or impassable barrier.  This is the “magic,” if you will, of human social conventions as mediums for individual experiences: they enable or facilitate our joinings, our cooperation, solidarity, convergence.”

“So neither the writer nor the reader are responsible for authoring profound writings, or rather BOTH are: multiple floods of experience crash through the arranged signs and symbols, separated by time and space and differences, but still possible violent confluences – depending on both, or all.  Living experiencings rushing the sign-sets enabling some felt sympathy, intimacy, accord between the floodings and the expressions: conflux.”

“Otherwise it simply doesn’t ring true – might be appreciated for its artistry or ingenuity, ideas, craft, imagination – but NOT an occasion for profound felt accord, convergence, a totalizing feel of representation/expression.”

“Floods in conflux: right now this seems to me the opportunity that care and attention, effort and awareness of our socially species-al co-creating mediums of communication (art, music, technologies, labors, habitudes, languages, modes of inquiry, etc…) allow for, offer us, in moments of fortunate concord.”

“Does that answer your question in any way?”

Tape ends.

 

The Lovers Encyclopedia: or, Notes Toward Unlimited Signs

On By NW FilbertIn Philosophy, Reflections, Writing2 Comments

Gilbert Quote

Notes on an Encyclopedia of Signs: or, Limited Vocabularies, Limitless Meanings

“Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.”

“All entities move and nothing remains still”

“Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream”

-Heraclitus of Ephesus-

“No man ever steps in the same river twice.”  No man ever steps the same into a river.  I believe that everyone, from time to time, aches to express what they mean.  We have experiences and we want to communicate them, and we experience a kind of veritable torment when nothing sounds, feels, expresses what we “mean” “quite right” (or adequately, authentically, completely, correctly).

How often this happens with joy, pleasure, desire, love.  There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.  We shuffle and arrange them, add and delete, realign and recompose, punctuate and intone, mark-up, highlight, capitalize, emphasize, crescendo/decrescendo, lilt, shout, whisper the sounds and shapes we have mediated them through in this wild, often urgent attempt to forge understanding BETWEEN, comprehension, connection… MEANINGS (whole-person exchanges) betwixt ourselves and others, and world.

Our bodies have limited surfaces.  Certain numbers of organs, neurons, veins, muscles – motions, sensations, pulses, breaths, hums and groans.  We TOUCH to forge BETWEEN.  Caresses, grasps, pushes, pulls and entanglings.  WE ACHE TO GET ACROSS – adequately, authentically, comprehensively, fully.

“I love this pizza.”  “I have never seen anything like this!”  “OMG – watch that sky as it changes, explodes, implodes, whirls, colors!”  “I have never experienced love like this.”  “You are the most beautiful person I’ve ever known.”  “This is my favorite song.”  “You are incomparable.”  “You are incomparable.”  Our experiences – each – are in some very real sense… INCOMPARABLE.

And space.  And time.  Matter and energy, or material / apparently immaterial.  Emotion and sensation.  Cognition and affect.  We are ALWAYS (all of us) stepping in the river, and the river is always (all of it) flowing.  EVERY instant is our constant moving IN and WITH the constant moving of the world.

It hurts.  I look at, listen to, interact with, FEEL toward, receive from, snuggle, caress, kiss, desire, weep, converse with my current romantic partner – aching every time to express how additive, emergent, unique, INCOMPARABLE these NOW-experiences WITH her vary from, extend, surprise, fulfill, astound, affect, estrange from any other – and bewilder my ability to communicate them… because I have said “I love this pizza” a million times.  I have lost my breath at the views from a hundred mountain-tops.  I have gasped at four crashing oceans.  I have whimpered from the all-over expenditure of orgasm many times.  My fingers have disbelieved themselves and been overwhelmed by a life of plants, animals, surfaces and human fleshes.  “My favorite pie” has happened again and again and again – never the same me, never the same pie.  Down to my cells, my molecules, my quarks.

My love and I have imagined a new symbology.  Each time we ache to speak our love we will scramble new squiggles, letters, symbols, scratchings in order to designate:  THIS IS NOT LIKE BEFORE – I know I said it moments ago – BUT THIS IS SOMETHING MORE/OTHER/ PARTICULATED and specific from that.  This is NOW-LOVE, new and familiar, distinct and embodying all the particles prior.  There are not enough symbols.  Not enough sense.

Mikhail Bakhtin and any number of other thinkers, artists, poets, anthropologists (von Uexkull, Heidegger, William James, Charles Peirce, Paul Bains, Erin Manning, John Poinsot, John Deely, Paul Kockelman, Humberto Maturana, etc. etc. etc.) have attempted to unpack this strange tangle.  Poets and writers throughout history (as witnessed via Heraclitus at the start of this little assay), musicians, painters, explorers, historians – HUMANS have suffered, hurt, ached at this paradox of limitation and adequacy for expressing WHAT I MEAN / WHAT’S HAPPENING FOR ME NOW / throughout the life of our species.

The gist of it:  our bodies and vocabularies are VERY limited in relation to the never-ending changing and flood and flow of our relation to the world and others.  26 letters and 20 digits, a circumscribable surface of skin, a rate of cognition, a dictionary of emotions… never the same human stepping in never the same river.  This is where Bakhtin, et. al. assist us.  What language we’ve agreed on, what musical forms and sounds, what movements we are capable of, what gestures, groans, inflections, pressures of touch, coos and growls, whispers and howls – YES they are woefully limited to represent the vast variations of each NOW experience – with THIS person, THIS landscape, THIS particular food, THIS hearing of a song, THIS sunset, THIS ocean, THIS child, THIS reading – we repeat and repeat and repeat (in a kind of repulsive ad nauseum).  We proclaim our love as powerfully as we know how… and find we wrote the same thing to another person in a letter 15 years ago.  We massage and wriggle and lick and devour in lovemaking in a way we mean to be so particular to THIS passion, THIS relation, THIS other – and it mimics our gripping and caressing and kissing and intercourse of many other times, other passions, other relations, other others.  It hurts.

Bakhtin et. al. indicate that the MEANING is limitless.  That in order to communicate, each BETWEEN must be understood in the Heraclitean sense – WE ARE NOT IDENTICAL to ourselves – ever – and THIS EXPERIENCE being had is NOT IDENTICAL to any other – ever – our means of expression, our vocabularies for communication, our bodily capacities and emotive apparatus ARE LIMITED… but the meanings we create interacting with the world are not.  The MEANINGS ONLY OCCUR BETWEEN and AS we (ever-unique and different) participate, interact, engage one another and world (ever-unique and changing) … To comprehend the sometimes repulsive, apparently restrictive and woefully repetitive MEANS OF EXPRESSION we have and its FELT INADEQUACY to the new, unique, differentiated EXPERIENCE WE ACHE TO EXPRESS – would rely on the mutual understanding that EACH EXPRESSION WITH  COMPOSES NEW MEANING.

Our efforts, compulsions, desires, tastes, affections, pleasures, joys, hurts – EXPERIENCE – IS AUTHENTIC and GENUINELY NEW and DIFFERENT every moment – the means we have of COMMUNICATING, EXPRESSING, CONNECTING these experiences IS LIMITED and REPETITIVE – but we need not doubt the LIMITLESS CAPACITY FOR MEANING SOMETHING FRESH, AUTHENTIC, GENUINE, TRUE that each of those repeated words, phrases, emotions, gestures, interactions have… because…

“Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.”

“All entities move and nothing remains still”

“Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream”

-Heraclitus of Ephesus-

We are a species of limited vocabularies, a constrained encyclopedia…

in a world of limitless meanings

let us trust one another.

-for Hallie

 

Invisible Man Chronicles – Pt. 1

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, Writing5 Comments

The times have been odd and I’ve been at pains to record them.  Here is a series I began recently in attempts to account for my life over the past 6 months or so… for what they’re worth.  In this current apparent “season” of ongoing stress related to surviving I am culling old notebooks for substance and will begin posting as I find time to type them. \

Kansas Ruins

Invisible Man Chronicles

            Six months ago, things were different.  I found myself unable to breathe, in England, windswept and drowned out in a kind of panicked grief – a she had proficiently evacuated my life, my home, a marriage… a business, a practice… The weather was cold and drizzly – melancholy, hibernatory, reflexive.  One might say: “Winter.”  My return would be to four children, now employment, no sustenance, no inner strength, little support and a home hardly emptied of her artifacts.  She had literally flown away.

Seasons in Kansas are cyclically exemplary.  Summer – hell-hot, a dry blowing flame, readings often surpassing 100.  Winter is a subzero freeze – bitter blizzards and veils of ice – both producing post-apocalyptic land.  Autumn, as is idealized, a gradual and colorful falling away – temperatures, foliage and field – a clear and moist sarcophagus.  And Spring.  Spring is explosive – blustery, redolent – a balmy turbulence of expansion and growth.

Some have suggested that landscapes, climates and geographies form the tangible shape to our thoughts and personalities and beliefs.  It makes many kinds of sense.

When we experience loss we consider to be great, we often find it inexplicable, and it may exhibit many qualities in common with fallow fields of Kansas Winters.  Clinging to cold and dark uncannily, as if depressive states were somehow desirable.  As if persisting in sorrow might validate what grew there before.  What cannot repeat (we think) – bumper crops and windfalls – the decay of which we experience as hopelessness, helplessness,  a ruin.  Plumbing gone bad, a roof worn away, the appliances failed.  Eyesight, blood pressures and flesh.  Things fall apart, the center cannot hold – wisely penned, and yet the Seasons.

When a wheat crop fails to a Summer’s drought and burn – there is thorough discoloration and a withering.  The rusty dun of a malpracticed rain dissolved by menacing sun seems a sign of things gone wrong, things never to be the same.  And it is so.  In some various version of “now” – growth is undone, production waylaid, and a pestilent edition of dying appears to have its way.  We cherish that in our bemoaning.  Misfortunes as notches on a belt that signify toward some later date: “We survived.”  “We survive.”

Certainly not forever, but perhaps another season.  Another cycling of the clock.  We sleep and we wake, and “every day begins the same.”  Every week and month and year.

That apparently demolished – scarred and furrowed stillborn field, however, hasn’t lost capacity, only a season’s fruit, a momentary harvest.

I shackled myself to determined grief.  Treating my earth with lyme.  Still its soil didn’t die.  Flowers and grasses were never erased, only unsung and silent, covered, eventually, by a type of ashen snow – very difficult to see.

The lesson I find ever-so-hard to incorporate is that the responsibility of flourishing or dearth lies not on the soil, the weather, or farmer – wind, sun, rain or seed – not even diligence, care or quality.  Rather, its growth or despoiling depends on the entire orchestra of factors.

What blooms for a term, given other conditions, even ever-so-slightly adjusted, may miserably deteriorate, may “fail to thrive” or “take.”  Human infants, ant colonies, milo crops and butterfly paths, wildlife populations and the microscopic advance of forests all share this cosmic weather – growth and decay depend on convergence.

A determined depression, a strange and celebrated joy – can be deranged by simple sounds or gestures, weathers or tastes.

Helplessness altered towards hope by some unexpected “yes.”

I was contacted to compose a responsive work for a miniscule fee in relation to a visiting artist.  I was given employment, extremely part-time it appeared – as a rural mail carrier ‘associate’ – filling in for regular carriers days off.  And yet they were SOMEthing, a shift in the breeze, a change in barometric pressures, percentages of precipitation, doors opened with smiles.

A bonfire had been planned at a farm to forge acquaintance with the visiting artist – two weeks of work from Brooklyn, NY.  In my selected sorrow I avoided meeting people or mingling in groups, even contacting more than a handful of friends (often reaching out and then canceling in efforts to conserve energy for survival).  Yet work (survival) was serious business and necessitated uncomfortable measure.  I went to the farm and the fire, and from there began a new history.  New season.  Dying seeds split toward open…(to be continued…)

Abracadabra Cliches

On By NW FilbertIn Poetry2 Comments

“The outcome belongs to nobody,

the approach, however,

depends entirely on us.”

-Edmond Jabes-

 

The temple always crumbles,

this is not a complication.

The birds arrive from here and there, departing.

A canvas is made from canvas

composed of canvas still beyond.

 .

I’m writing words

knowing they are fashioned without meaning

until read by you or me

or still something further in,

between,

 .

making all of us disciples

and messiahs

in our gleaning expeditions

with embodied repetitions

re-membering in minds…

 .

recapitulations with their novelty

of time and place and person(hood).

 .

And our present filled by abracadabra’d clichés:

yet let’s meet there – (here) –

with wonder and amazement

and a just amount

of what’s familiar…

 .

to you and I and all of us

in now.

Revisiting “I”-dentity

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, WritingLeave a comment

01-diagram-complexity-of-place-ID1

“I”-dentity: and/or “I” is a product of the Other and the Us

 

I wouldn’t know how to tell you my story, though life knows I try and have tried (as if someone cared).

 

What is it to you?  And “I”?  Is “we”?  When the parts are estranged, differentiated – unknown and uncertain?  If the question of being is YouMe + We?

 

My approach to myself as an Other and Us.

 

Thinking in time with the seasons – their perceptible growth and decay.  Their relations.

 

For all the world in the sheer ice of January the wheat crop is dead… but it rises late in the Spring.

The drizzling, chill fog is burned off by the Summer.

 

I succumb to grief, and then joy, but grief will come again (and then joy…and then grief… and then)…

 

Fall and its gradual dying: discoloration, departure.  What we experience as lengthening quiet.

 

I thought it was over (this “I”), again and again.  But it always turns out it is ready to bloom and express, given certain conditions (the “I” and what blooms, as well as conditions – differing every time).

 

Not quite fallow – apparently.  The seeds and resources are there (that’s the HUMAN) – called out by consortial action.

 

So “I” is the product of the Other and the Us.  Always more than one and all their relations.  Sea, land and sky, our cells and their content-rich contexts.

 

I’ve been abandoned and resumed without loss each mysterious gain.  I’ve betrayed and discovered new friends.  We don’t remember where to categorize pain: is it “bad” is it “good” – but then simply it is just like we and the other and the us.

 

“I” dent.  I am in-formed while in-forming.  When I move, lie or make, I am changed.

 

It’s not fault of an-other, an outside, an “external,” nor “me” in my body, my space and my time, but the “we” is the cause – the “us” in relation: all is com-pound, com-plex, and co-herent (“co-here-in-it”?).  Here together we change and are changed.  And thus love.

 

And our fear.  And we forecast by memory.

 

“I” am not “I” as “I” was.  Nor like the “I” “I” will be.  Which “I” cannot predict for all its co-dependence.  Which we labeled “dis-ease” and no wonder – it makes us uneasy being out of control.

 

Yet we’re only an “I” in a context.  A context of other and us.

 

When the “other”s keep changing (be coyote or mountain, NY or SF, literature, germ, snail or partner) the “I” also shifts and adapts, becomes “else,” becomes novel, strikes a balance with all that is “us.”

 

So give credit where credit is due (or a “cause”): whatever your “I” equals a me + a you – and is describable in manifold ways – as a god or the weather, a child or a feather, and is probably always ALL AND.

 

So no “OR.”  Choice is an additive move.

 

TV news brought us the phrase “and now this.”  Exponentialed via World-Wide-Web, and most probably true (or maybe it’s real).  Connections incalculable, meshwork beyond comprehension, impossible untangling deciphers…now this and now this and now this = “I” (and “you” and “us” and “we” and “world”).

 

Terms are confusing.

 

We Are.  Con-fused beyond knowing.

 

There is no other way (then/than) To Be.

 

“I” as a product of Other and Us.

Siegel - Neurobiology of We

Eradicating Borders

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing1 Comment

A work in progress…

if i build it…perhaps it will come.

Ramblings…10,000 Words

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Music, Reflections, Writing4 Comments

First of all, let me apologize for not being very consistent or active here the past week or two.  And then apologize for the following length (somehow I felt it was okay, given the silence caused by entanglements of necessity and sustenance)…

            If I were a mountain.  This was my first thought, while reflecting on you, me, our children, planets and plants, birth, death, brains and bodies and societies of persons, nations, sciences and myths, plus at least 10,000 other things.  The effort to consider everything – a total picture – my limited whole with as many details as possible.  As if meanings were stars and knowledge all the darkness around them.

Taking time.  If I conjure everything I know – time-saving habits and fixes, sundry scientific theories, the feel of my children’s hair, the path of a bee, each lip that’s found its way against mine, every person, voice, place I remember in part, pancake recipes, varieties of soil I’ve walked over, tasted, smelled, languages living and dead…don’t worry, I won’t list 10,000 things and their changing nuances…

What is common for me, when not immediately struggling to make ends meet up, are these attempts at collocating and corroborating my experiences and knowledge to date…and it inevitably leads to profound sensations of brevity and minisculity (?).

If what I have experienced, lived-through and wended into my body and brain represented stars (those sometimes recognizable flickering points of light)…

…all I have not heard of, thought, experienced, lived-through or felt

would be represented by the gargantuan dark – the endless, perhaps infinite, space.

            My 43 years.  Books I have read, courses taken, jobs held, skills learned, places inhabited and endured.  Women I’ve loved, children I’ve borne and partially raised, persons I’ve met, objects and activities engaged and observed, skies, senses, stuff.

Pretend you are space.

A space that is full, perhaps something akin to our idea of atom.  Imagine your space, of space, in space.  In other words – your little flexible dynamic space is both made of space, contained in space, occupying and participating in space and spaces and shares its participatory space(s) with 10,000…10,000,000,000,000…uncountable space-forms and forms of space…

I, atom.  Barely a point in space-time, hardly formally recognizable, and from what angle or distance?  Limited space-form through limited space-times.  A flexible, dynamic, ever-morphing relatively microscopic or enormous form-ish space-ish thingy.

An atom bounding, ricocheting, trembling and changing throughout a little universe…a variable assemblage of atom-like moments transforming in particular ways of a sort addicted to accounting for and measuring itself and its surroundings (a way of distinguishing presence in these manners of matters).

Forms and Objects 

            If I were a mountain (that is, in relation to “you”) I’d likely be quieter, perhaps slower, present and patient – you might reference or measure yourself by me (I was thinking).  I might want less.  Not have the same desires and activities formally compressed into 70-80 “years…”

And then if you were a sky full of stars or dawn, an enormous canvas of clouds and colors, ubiquitous…and there was that mountain…

So very small, so very brief:  Me.

            Couple all of that to the profound affects felt (in and on me) by other malleable collectives of atoms we refer to as “us” – plus mountains, valleys, rivers and seas, weather, events, animals, places and things: at our scale, and between ever-so-many scales, we have significant import and effect, albeit almost nothing at all viewed fractionally and/or noticeably at minimally larger scales (I suppose that could be argued…)

Anyway, we exist for ourselves primarily at our own shared scale, imagining (or inventing) other scales in order that we might examine ourselves, potentially compare or evaluate…us.

But if I were a mountain…how different would our relation be?  I imagine it this way:  You in your human scale, and me as mountain.  In rain, ages, erosion and accretion, growing trees and dropping boulders…and you, briefly, tramping across me, perhaps admiring or photographing me, resting on me, using me as a direction or a landmark – always there, there, there.  Other things, people, events, experiences of your immediate scale rise and fall, come and go, attach and detach, begin and end, flux and alter…

            You as sky to me, and I – mountain.

            This thinking – that it might help me somehow to imagine life at other scales… Perhaps this is why…

Fiction

Science

Philosophy

Art

Religion

History

…what might we mean at another scale?  between scales?  Not simply as we are to ourselves, as we experience or live-through our brief experiences as space-forms in space-times, but from alternate frames and scalar perspectives?

Imagine…from the view of our constituent elements and systems…over large ranges of processes (“history,” “time”) or briefer ones (Mayfly, ant, daisy)…from tectonic or astronomical lenses…where we can’t even register as an entity, object or form…and by the time whatever activity we mustered – energy or noise we emitted in our being reached a distant planet or star we’d have been gone for thousands and thousands of our decades?!

As if, even at our scale, we are molecules shaking in a beaker.  Vibrating, jostling one another, coming together, splitting apart, sometimes bonding, sometimes break – but most often simply bouncing to and fro.  Jiggling.  Adapting and adjusting.

Mountain.  Sky.  Metaphors of import.

10,000 words on 10,000,000,000,000…things (or just the one)

“Ain’t it like most people?  I’m no different.

We love to talk on things we don’t know about.”

-Avett Brothers-

 

A Guarded Narrative

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

Theories exist that propose a process for primary and profound attachments.  That as these attachments proceed, they will inevitably expose (or reach, come up against) individual limitations.  As humans intermingle with increased intimacy and time, eventually the darker reaches, safer holdings in us (traumas, repression, grave fear or terror, shame) will be engaged and something will ensue – usually either openings or closures.  The following was composed as an attempt at a relational account of this…

Alfred Hitchcock Doors

 

We Open Doors

We struggle.  We stumble forth.  We reach, we ramble, we run.  We learn to walk.  We tumble and waver, we stride.  We overhear, we listen, we engage.  We greet what we encounter, we welcome and inquire.  We reciprocate.  We open doors.

We gaze, we laugh, we remember and rejoinder.  We wander, we wonder, we happily agree.  We chide and we dispute, we recommend and reason, we exclaim.  We open doors.

We step forth, step through, we open chambers.  We confess.  We beg, we plead, we rest and bless.  We sing.  We join, we sway, we dance.  We kick and scream and wriggle.  We resonate.  We hurt and we forgive, we open doors.

We whisper while we shout, we worship and succumb.  We praise and denigrate, argue, negotiate, we push and we budge. We hesitate.  We wrestle with the locks, we suppress and unremember, we fabricate, we lie.  We pry the doors.

We change the stories.  We imagine.  We concoct and recreate.  We design a thread and tell a tale, we corroborate with doubt and love.  We fear and we recall.  We reassure.  We swoon, we falter and we soothe.  We open doors.

We enter dungeons.  We smell the dark.  We trigger mines.  We panic and react.  We flee aimless and return, we grasp and seek and hope.  We lift the doors.

We reach the wetlands.  Cross the plains.  We clamber mountains holding onto rope.  We knot and we undo.  We disrobe and arm ourselves.  We bleed.  We heal.  We stack the rocks.  We open doors.

We attach and we press on.  We scab and suffer.  We get lost.  We recover.  We holler, we recoil, we respond. We widen cracks and we expose.  We grope, we censor, we divide.  We rage and we varnish, we forget.  We ask and refuse the answer.  We testify, profess.  We strain and crawl.  We collapse.  We guard the doors.

We collaborate.  We weave and tear and shape.  We invent.  We threaten cores.  We gird our hearts and steel our minds, we clasp our hands.  We jump and weep and fly.  We grieve.  We repose, we dialogue, we alchemize.  We sear.  We use our weight.  We bolster.  We open doors – they slam us.

We protect.  We damage and arrange.  We repair.  We gossip with our notions.  We theorize, we enter forests.  We drown and cradle rocks, we float and we resign.  We hear the latches, we peer downstairs, we take our steps and count the beats.  We’re keeping time.  We feel the tremors, we sense the snap, we open doors.

We break them down.  We tremble.  We contract.  We slither, wriggle, wind.  We explode, we come undone, we disappear.  We hear the lock.  We search the key.  We gather, we conspire, we close in.  We close doors.  We seal, we paint, we turn.  We shrink, explore, thin out.  We look away, look forward, look about.  We separate and margin. We barrier and bind.  We open doors.

We pause, we blind, we wish.  The doors shut tight on what we’ve opened.