Tag: relationships

The Pleasures of Reading : An Aspect : Multiplying Translations

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy1 Comment

The Pleasure of Reading

In other words (than what?  than which?) we all of us are readers, all of us writers.

That is a pleasure.

And all of us, always, doing both.  Simultaneously.

 

Speaking of my textbooks (were we?) – information sciences, developmental and behavioral psychology, reference services, librarianship / and the research to the side – physics, evolutionary biology, neuro- and cognitive sciences / my pleasures – novels, poems, stories, others’ blogs, visual, aural, literary artifacts / my relational – wife, children, family, friends, society, culture – gestures and vibes and dialogues and signs / my “self” – sensations, perceptions, formulations of these, reformulations, adjustments and maneuvers.

In other words, at all times, I am reading, even if only my lack of memorable dreams, or pulses and breaths.  And writing it all in actions, movements, responses, adjustments of speaking and writing and making.

It is a metaphor, obviously.  Perhaps.

 

Roman Jakobsen purported that “all meaning is a form of translation, and multiple translation (polysemy) is the rule rather than the exception.”  (I am translating his text just now into another con-text).

Wolfgang Iser’s (perhaps, anyway insofar as I am translating it here) concept of actual text (text as it is recorded by an author) and virtual text (actual text as read by a reader).

This is an aspect of the deep living pleasures of reading/writing for me.

 

An author/speaker/artist/scientist/mother/etc. has an urge or sensation – a possibility of action/behavior/message/idea (a virtual text) and translates it through multiple processes and levels of activity through some medium into an actual text/painting/utterance/experiment/recorded idea/sound, etc.  There it is in the real world – a physical artifact in time and space – added – if only for a moment.  Transforming (simultaneously) its maker into a recipient (translating a now existent text/sound/behavior/gesture/sculpture/experience for him or herself) and if any witness/participant/auditor/recipient or reader is in his or her environment they are simultaneously interacting (via translation through their own tools, language, perceptions, sensations, mood, etc) with the actual text, writing a virtual text (translating) of their own.

And it goes on.  And can be done innumerable times, this process, whether using an identical actual text over and over, or simply writing/reading life as it occurs, making it occur.

 

Paul Ricouer:  “stories are models for the redescription of the world.”  Possibly.  Or at least redescriptions (translations) of models for redescription.

Iser: “the relative indeterminacy of a text allows a spectrum of actualizations…literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves…the reader receives it by composing it.”

 

Language, action, behavior as possibilities rather than certainties.

 

So that I can encounter with all I’ve encountered/experienced an actual text by psychologist Jerome Bruner translating these very quotes and contents with all he has experienced and translate it with the multiple translations of family life and being a human organism and novels and pains, poems and stories, paintings and laws, translated with data and education, emotions and animals, translating with you and a computer, internet, digits and bits, translating into…

a great pleasure of reading is writing reading

or, “a writer’s (reader’s) greatest gift to a reader (writer) is to help him become a better writer (reader)”

– Jerome Bruner (parentheses mine).

 

literary texts as “epiphanies of the ordinary”

-James Joyce-

Help along the way

On By NW FilbertIn Traces2 Comments

Webbings

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes18 Comments

spider web

Clotted knots over darkness, what it had all become, and barely holding on.  Together?  I couldn’t say.  I had thought it was my innards: veins, nerve endings, cells.  Suspended precariously over bleak.  Clinging.  Trembling in a void.  I had thought it was existence.  An only way to survive.  Just hanging on.  In.  But then you’d said it was “us.”  The precarious thing, the tendentious, the threatened.  You said our attachments were thin, and weakening, our threads hardly visible anymore.  But look!  Look at us love!  We’re all woven together – we connect at many points – we form a pattern!  We are webbed things.  Oh don’t detach a filament, no don’t detach a one, beloved.  Oh say it won’t come undone this way?

N Filbert 2012

Minding the Gaps in the Membranes: A perforation, an hiatus, a foramen

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings3 Comments

Intermission.

It is likely you will experience “an interruption in the intensity or amount of something.”

Quite probable, in fact.  Possibly certain.

I might say that a human being is a process consisting of a body and a situation in constant flux and adaptation…dialogue of inescapable intersubjectivity.

Now I have.

Lyn Hejinian has said that “‘aboutness’ (in writing, but, I would argue, also in life) is transitional, transitory,” and that,

“language is a medium for experiencing experience…of inquiry…writing is a process of improvisation within a framework (form) of intention…”

like consciousness, self, and all of its constitutive surround…

i.e. being (or becoming) human.

In the midst of which…otherness, the unknown, openness in the structure

– a gap, a leap, a hiatus, an abatement –

For instance, this blog.

Having been fortuitously enabled to devote considerable amounts of time and effort to it this past year, it has changed and moved, grown and altered me beyond my expectations – experimenting in language with experience and painstakingly risking and studying, following passions and trails, ideas and stories – always attempting to language the knowing – has been a phenomenal (literally) vocation for me.

The contexts are shifting…whatever I am is being differently situated – times, spaces and surrounds…requiring temporary suspensions to my efforts here at manoftheword.

I will work seriously to keep up with at least 100 words of fiction per week (thank you for the promptings Madison-Woods and Friday Fictioneers) and any poetic bursts or artifacts that get me along in my experiences; images or residual thought-projects that are not necessary to my schoolwork, family or professional life I purpose to share in this forum and spoondeep mag or gypsy wall.  My wife and I are currently committing ourselves to a larger multi-media project over the next year or so, but will also attempt to freshen Ekphrastix Arts as time allows, at least with updates.  My own creative efforts are being redirected to my studies at SLIM, some exciting articles for an upcoming art exhibition in Wichita, Kansas (stay posted with Lux Fisch Haus Exhibition and related links) as well as a longer project I’m committing my sanity (or its loss) to – currently denoted in myself as Qualia, probable connected fragment-instants of subjective experience which also may leave some effluvia worth commending to you here.

All of this to say a ginormous THANK YOU and KUDOs to the incredible world of WordPress bloggers and visitors – please continue to follow and check on us – I promise at LEAST weekly there will be new content here – your support and attention mean such a great deal to me/us.  And I will certainly continue to read and view what I can in the interstices of my goings-on.  I genuinely appreciate everyone’s efforts, creativity and artifacts here.

“[language]…is denotatively social…but not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgment – and that constitutes a sort of unknowing.  To know that things are is not to know what they are, and to know that without what is to know otherness (i.e., the unknown and perhaps unknowable).  [Writing] undertakes acknowledgment as a preservation of otherness – a notion that can be offered in a political, as well as an epistemological, context.

This acknowledging is a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on…”

(Lyn Hejinian)

THINK ON.  MAKE ON.  BLOG ON!

Tying Knots

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings7 Comments

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“To tie knots, not decipher them”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

 

Thinking again of my father.  Which wends its way to thinking of my friends, my nearest family, my mother, sister, sibs-in-law.  Children.

Mainly I’ve been thinking of my father.  For decades now.

(Rewritten 41 times).

 

I keep trying to decipher.  In fact in yesterday’s version I described my desire lacking the keys to its secrets, and declared us all impossible to descry.

If that’s the word for it.

Forty-one years using letters for rope.  That is fraying.

 

I’ve said that I want to be known better than I can know myself.  By him.  By which I meant differently.

I’m sure that’s correct.

Otherwise not being possible.

And vice-versa.

Such knotted things.

 

Unfortunately I deciphered it, thereby fancying a code of simplifications and falsity.  Reading something like this: ta TAH ta TAH ta TAH / de dum de dum de dum dum dum.

Sounding better than the truth I never hear.

 

In other words, by desiring my desire (to comprehend it – synonym: “fit it into my small frame”) I laid it out in lines of script as on a butcher’s table.  And looked for patterns.

xxxx— I want to be known better (elsewise) than I know myself —xxxx

by:       +@+@+@ my spouse; -/-/- my siblings; o][o my friends; ~!~~!~ my children; ^*_= my parents…

and likewise inter-pret them

forever crafting spies sniping through tiny keyholes

one another.

 

The dimensions are not vast enough.

We don’t possess the organs (apparently).

I’m not sure any of this has much to do with knowledge (though I keep on using those terms).

 

It was about knotting ropes or threads, veins or limbs, ideas.  Tangling memories, blending emotions, and cross-narrations.

 

I tried actions (working-with, snuggling, fighting, conversation and more).  I tried history (genealogy, geology, agriculture, politics, religion and so on).

Think of these as ropes or twine.

Perhaps tied is a better word than tried here.

I tied performing, misbehaving, more languages and themes.  I tied sickness and health, better and worse for this knowing, this desire.  These persons.

to no avail

What was I expecting?

Transparency.

Demystification.

Understanding.

Deciphered companions.

 

What have I got?

Unclear, confused and knotty, my hands can’t pass through them.

I can’t wrap my brain around it/them/us, nor define.

At a loss as to explanation (a probable gain).

Father-cipher.  Mother-cipher.  Spouse-cipher.  Family and friend-ciphers.

 

Something substantial.

 

Recently Recovered

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

Another story I found from a number of years back…still has some oomph I hope….

A Series of Stories about Love

 The first thing that comes to mind is all the breathless tugging.  At clothes, at skin, in her mouth.  The way you squeeze into it, the wiggle and dance, and then you drown.

She told me of her life-dreaming last night, lying in bed.  How she just knew, she really knew, at fifteen or sixteen, her skin first licked by flames, all her dizzy hopes, her victimized newness, those first irisy smelling blooms in her flesh, that she would always love in such a way that men would eat at her, chew her to blood and spit her out.

It didn’t happen this way.  She bought a blender.

And every time, at just the right (or very wrong) time, she stuffed them in, ground them to pulpy bits, and poured them down the drain.  This is my wife we’re talking about.

The blender is out.  The blender sits on the counter.  It’s been four years.

First the sun rises.  Everything warms, your legs glow into coals.  Arms flush with melanin, forehead beading sweat.  Her ears are red.  Your mouth gasps and gulps at the air of the others language.  Someone lights your fuse.  The booster rocket burns away.  A holocaust of flames.

She’s never stayed friendly with a man for so long she says.  She makes a list of what’s necessary to her life.  Your name is not included.  I wonder if the blender is still working.  The right very wrong time is past.  We are nowhere.

I consume alcohol like fields do liquid in drought.  I smoke like an oil field already spent.  I caress and fondle a fuzzy June-bug in my palm.  With my lips.  I tossle my son’s hair.  I cry.  I love everything one way.  Addiction.  Obsession.  My love is a jet turbine (I say), a swallowing vortex, a whale.  My love is neuroses.  You’ve got the wrong each other, the weather says.

First there are nine kinds of electricity.  One for each of the senses.  And they all get plugged in at once.  Except mine were never unplugged.  Rain-powered, blood-powered, keeps going and going and…

I would not have your name tattooed on my body, she says.  Only permanent things, she says.  Like zodiac.  Like turtles.  Like signs for god.

Everything hurts, but we knew that already.

This is my wife we’re talking about.

I have a lazy eye.  It wanders about and falls asleep at random.  Its dreams are split away from the rest of my body.  I blow lightly on the spiders.  I stroke her calf.  I read a line of words down a page and get inappropriately, inexplicably charged.  Most things turn me on.  The turbine has only one speed.  It’s what makes the planets move.  It hurls the moon’s stones.  It fills stars.

The glance of fingertips on arm while walking one night: first strawberry in the mouth.

Strips of fresh mango: her first song.

She will not be overcome.  She fiddles with the blender’s buttons.

We have made children together…

I love mountains.  The sight, smell, rocks of them.  High, cold streams.  I love temperate woods.  The tall soft spike of giant firs.  The drape and droop of their large limbs.  And mermaids.  Salt on liquid skin.  I suffer from addictions.  Rituals.  Habits.  Gas for the turbine.  Sight.

Shoulder.  Tattoo’d calf.  Waistline.  Ankle.

Knuckles on a hand.  Hair over neck, down between shoulder-blades.  Belly buttons.  Crotch.  Wrist.  Veins at the back of the thigh.

Fuel for the turbine.  Touch.  Smell.  Thinking.  Dreaming.

I hear the blender in the kitchen grinding frozen fruit and yogurt.  Bones.  Blood.  I shiver.

“I could not be intimate with you if I didn’t care,” she says.  “It’s 50/50 my like and dislike, my hope and depression.  I want to be in love again, but not out of love again, so I stay.”

(This is my wife we’re talking about.)

“But you should be loved like an engine too,” she says.

Just let the engine run, baby, I say.

Love for a woman is systemic.  Like cancer.

The blender is like chemotherapy.  No one really knows how much it destroys.

Love will destroy you, she implies.

Like alcohol.  Like war.  Like fire.

Maybe we shouldn’t own guns.

But that first day at the range.  The charge of the buckling of your shoulder.  The loudness of the rifle’s shout.  Those sudden bursts.  The sheer power and speed.  You fire, again and again.  You conceal it in your hand.  They live and fill your pockets.

We possess many weapons.

A person is an armory.

She is a turtle mostly, she says.  She carries it all on her back, she says.  She can retract at any time.  Be saved from the flow of hot wind, the battering of sound, and the flood of all at once, if she needs to, she says.

The turbine spins (it’s the size of government buildings), it blows, rages, floods.

We draw letters in the mud.  It dries, cakes, molders.

We set these things in concrete stamps.

We yell permanence.

(The blender is whirring in the kitchen).  Even rock will ground down.

“I have the sense that the meaning of things will never be sorted out,” the poet says.

There is no hope.

The Blank Page

On By NW FilbertIn Art10 Comments

or, it matters what you do with it.

The following are papers made by my children for me for Fathers Day 2012 –

they knew what to do with it!

(hopefully I will learn!)

Writing: the Margins

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Graphotos, Traces, Writing6 Comments

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Writing: the Margins

“All words run along the margins of their secrets”

– Susan Howe –

 

Now we are getting somewhere.  Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told.  If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.”  If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…

there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets?  Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.

That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets.  I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.

And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.

Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.

So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating.  That is, it is possible.  Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?

If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.

Therefore

“it is not infinite.  Even infinite is a term”

-Louis Zukofsky-

by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.

Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.

Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.

Perhaps and possibly.

N Filbert 2012

Such Great Heights

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing9 Comments

Such Great Heights: On Loving

“I wonder at vocalism’s ability to rephrase or reenact meaning and goodness even without the wished-for love.  Can a trace become the thing it traces, secure as ever, real as ever – a chosen set of echo-fragments? … The still eye reflects a neutral ‘you’ that is me; and yet secret.  Who can hold such mirroring cheap?  It’s a vital aspect of marriage and of deep friendship.”

-Susan Howe-

            These are things she told me:

She tells me she just needs to be held.  Held and heard.  And validated.  That I understand how she feels, that I empathize.  No need to agree with her or her feelings, no need to fix anything.  Just pay attention (“be with me” she calls it), say some things back kind of like echoes so she can hear that I’m listening, knows I’ve “got” it, and nod and affirm.  Saying things like “I hear how hard that is for you,” or “I can see this makes you angry” and the like.  A safe place, a sounding board, a kind of mirroring…a world-the-size-of-arms or bodies in which it’s okay to be in process, to have your stuff, to be inaccurate, and be.

I tell her I just want to be loved for who I am, not what I do or how I perform, whether I make someone feel better or not, whether I’m useful or succeed, get stronger, am sensitive, smart or good-looking.  I’m fine with being any of those things, but they will always feel like side-effects or attributes, things taken up from time to time, situation-contextually.  I really want to be loved for who I am also, or otherwise, the self I do not know, am unaware of, except that it’s always changing.  I’m wanting value as a being, I suppose, that it’s simply good enough, and matters, that I am.  That someone would choose that.

She’d like to be appreciated for all of her efforts.  All the pains she endures, compromises she makes, limitations she accepts in order to account for me, for my “neuroses” (read “personality”).  ‘d like to hear a heartfelt “thank you” now and then for her services and sensitivities, considerations and workings toward dialogue, care and attention.  She’d like to be recognized, feel wanted, feel loved and craved and adored.

I’d like to be loved with my spaces and misgivings.  From a distance, and the distance loved too – the whole globe of me – my fears, paranoias and worries.  My anxious body.  Jealous narratives, fantastic brain.  As an entity – yes – as a system or sphere, to be chosen, sought out and let be, even celebrated as this odd, unique and difficult human, just like all the others, but different too, in exactly the same ways we all of us are.  A curious realm of unknowns and effects.  Would like that cloud of debris I refer to as “me” to trigger charges in her, of desire, of respect, of wonder and intimate knowledge.  A paradox really.  To be known as unknown, loved dissimilarly, absolutely, and so on.  Misplaced desires, but there all the same.  I ask her to love indeterminacy and confusion.

She asks to be free of her past – not its effects but its definitions.  That we encounter it together – our childhoods and children, our spouses and griefs, our risks and our failures, fulfillments and joys – not compared with the present, competitively, but engaged, encouraged, absorbed.  That not everything “not-me” be a threat, not her job and its clients, her acquaintances, family and friends, past lovers our journeys, events – that they be welcomed and included as ours now – memories, sources, realities we bring to a NOW.  Not as distractions, escapes, private holdings.  That we invite each other whole and unprocessed.  That we be a process for each.  That I be here now with, see her moving toward me, being here, not fragment and dissect her into her pasts and the world.

I tell her I’d like to be ultimate, her be-all, end-all, preference and ideal.  Chaos and all, that this mass of me be some divinity-like, awe-inspiring wonder of an incomparable glory she adore and pursue.  I want to feel special, holy, set apart, unbelievably brilliant and beautiful – in short, spectacular – in all my grungy messy remedial ways and blundering battles.  That it truly stun her how amazing I am all muddied up and crazy, insecure and inconsistent, incompatible and at serious odds with myself – that I be wonderful to her.

She told me she’d like it to be real.  To be purposive and true.  That we be brave and open, vulnerable and strong.  Flexible and protective, guarded and unafraid.  That we feel life securely and take great risks, be certain and unsure.  That we trust and be trustworthy in every metamorphoses we move through.  Tenderly powerful, gently fierce, insistent and forgiving, patiently intense.  That we strive for balance, a balance I guess like nuclear fusion – unaccountable energies in a strangely held rest.

I said it all sounds good, sounds like love to me, and impossible.  Which is fine as I’ve started as a failure, but heroic, and she’s a god arose from ashes.  Hell, she’s died and lived again.  We latch on, strap in and unwind.  We are here.  Here we go.  These terrible chasms and such great heights.

These are things I tell myself.

N Filbert 2012

(couldn’t help but think of this – click for tunes)

Experiential Ekphrasis

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Traces, WritingLeave a comment
Figures Seated in Mid-Air
by Holly Suzanne

Experiential Ekphrasis.

Hello dear followers – I can hardly thank you enough for taking time out of your lives to look at, read and engage things I am involved in the making of.  Your support and attention is a constant encouragement.  THANK YOU!  (and thank you for offering and creating your own!)…  I wanted to invite you (if you are interested) to visit/follow a couple of other blogsites I also create in/with –

www.ekphrastixarts.com and

www.spoondeep.wordpress.com

THANKS AGAIN!