Tag: relationships

Content’s Dream

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

“The essential aspect of writing centered on its language is its possibilities for relationship, viz, it is the body of ‘us’ness, in which we are, the ground of our commonness, 

Language is commonness in being, through which we see & make sense of  & value.  Its exploration is the exploration of the human common ground.  The move from purely descriptive, outward directive, writing toward writing centered on it wordness, its physicality, its haecceity (thisness) is, in its impulse, an investigation of human self-sameness, of the place of our connection: in the world, in the word, in ourselves.”

-Charles Bernstein-

Telling Our Stories

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography, Writing3 Comments

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Telling Our Stories

After all, it is language, this story.  This telling of you, of me, of our feelings and years, whatever we’ve done.  We are just speaking, really, creating from language our world and our children, our works and our actions as if we remembered.

I can’t see the harm in it.

I say I remember, here looking at you, that first time in your eyes, whether 18 or 40, when we may have sat facing each other or entwined, as if we’d first met and must absorb everything.  How large they seemed, how blue and soft as rain, how far I could swim there as if building a nest.

I don’t see the danger in using our language to say so.  In making up stories, alone or together, about us; our world and our selves, what we think.

After all, it is language we share.  As you bend at your work, your collar reveals a fresh sentence, your skirt a painting of terms, in your flesh all these stories I study to learn.  Of your breast and your elbow and hair.  The nape of your neck exclaims and your scars everywhere.  What the poet said, also with words, combining verbs and adverbs and nouns: “Your body is a book of thoughts that cannot be read in its entirety.”  Just words, but I keep them and sing them again, I can’t see the harm in the trying.

I love you with terms of my body.  I sign them to you when it’s dark.  It is language, oh yes, and you hear me.  We read with our skin.  Typography refers to impressions.  You impress me, even as I Braille what I need.  How else might we weave what is we without terms and strokes or gestures?

Only language, after all, that we borrow, I get it.

But where is the frailty in trying?

I read and I read and I read what you tell, ever growing a Talmud of comment.  I notate, I argue, I vent.  Then repeat.  I praise and I question and soothe.  You likewise make of my verbiage a stream; a spring from far peaks that dissolves to a delta.  What should we call what we do?  Relat-ivity?  Our capacity to engage and to meet – to relate?  Communication?  Always co-, ever with, filling munitions and messaging, our vocation?

To say, to listen, to hearken, to spell.  Here we tumble and thicken and age.  Her we interpret, reply and enrage.  Here we bind ourselves, it is language we keep using, keep finding, continue to tell…

“………………..Even in sleep

our bodies seek each other, your face the moon

lighting my dreams.  And by day, scenes beyond

untanglement.  Tell me my story, love;

how could I know it, we are such knotted things?

-Philip White, from Aubade

Heroes Ringing True

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Robert Musil

On “the writer type”:

“One can describe this type as the person in whom the irredeemable solitude of the self in the world and among people comes most forcefully to mind:  as the sensitive person who is never given his due;  whose emotions react more to imponderable reasons than to compelling ones; who despises people of strong character with the anxious superiority a child has over an adult who will die half a lifetime before he will; who feels even in friendship and love that breath of antipathy that keeps every being distant from others and constitutes the painful, nihilistic secret of individuality; who is even able to hate his own ideals because they appear to him not as goals but as the products of the decay of his idealism.  These are only isolated and individual instances, but corresponding to all of them, or rather underlying them, is a specific attitude toward and experience of knowledge, as well as of the material world that corresponds to it.”

On the writer’s region (“nonratioid”):

“There is no better way to characterize this region than to point out that it is the area of the individual’s reactivity to the world and other individuals, the realm of values and valuations, of ethical and aesthetic relationships, the realm of the idea…in this region facts do not submit, laws are sieves, events do not repeat themselves but are infinitely variable and individual…there is in the writer’s territory from the start no end of unknowns, of equations, and of possible solutions.  The task is to discover ever new solutions, connections, constellations, variables, to set up prototypes of an order of events, appealing models of how one can be human, to invent the inner person…which then nevertheless branches out somewhere into a boundless thicket, although not without somehow fulfilling its purpose…”

These quotes come from his exceptional small essay Sketch of What the Writer Knows

which I desperately wanted to reproduce here…

if it “rings true” for you – please find a mentor and friend in Robert Musil:

Signs

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing7 Comments

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Signs

 

“We wanted love.  This sentence has no meaning outside a sentence.  We wanted a multitude of words.  Love was to become the quarrying of ourselves, emerging from a completely different side of the narrative…Representing ourselves to ourselves was an unmanageable task from the beginning.  To continue being a reality while simultaneously becoming its sign that dissembles nothing, only relentlessly elevates itself in a continuous shadow – “

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

 

There was no doubt we wanted.  What it was that we wanted, exactly, was another matter.  We wanted love?  Perhaps.  Love made from words and signs and gestures.  From the beginning we had trouble representing ourselves.  Being a reality while also signifying it and being its addressee – inveigled us in a continuous loop.  We needed another view.  From a completely different side of the narrative.

Maybe we wanted to drink reality to its dregs.  We wanted love.  Someone who could read the being and its signs and comprehend its address.  Someone to help interpret the loop, quarry the signs, chart and map the shadowy spiral.  We wanted a multitude of words.  Words we’d never thought of.  Never heard before.  Synonyms and antonyms to set apart our signs, that we might, perchance, see who we are.  Learn, not just be.  We wanted love.

Loving ourselves was clinging to continuous shadow.  Ourselves always just ahead of us, being, quarrying experience, fabricating new signs, dissembling nothing.  We didn’t know, anything.  We wanted love and a multitude of words, of gestures – significations of action and matter – we wanted to be real.

Your side was completely different.  There you were – being, assembling signs, dissembling words I thought I knew into paradoxical meanings.  I’d see a sign that seemed familiar but the language was foreign, the reference obscure, of exotic materials.  Where were you quarrying?  I was stunned and fascinated – we could make such similar things of our surround and within – yet pointing in apparently opposite directions!  How could this be?

We wanted love.  I followed your signs, tried to tell you what they meant.  We wanted for multitudes of words.  You sought to explain, what with the being, the source, the signs and address,  indicating your shadow, not mine.  I, forever chasing the shade of your dress.

We wanted for love and showed each other signs.  We gestured and addressed our bodies and songs, put on shows of ourselves for each other.  Here are my banners and pennants.  Here my consistent mottoes.  Here the images we keep – representations of ourselves like lost memories.  Here our directions and contents, graphics and readings.  Signs, signs, and a multitude of words.

We began telling one another their stories as we read.  Replete with new words, new signs and misreadings.  This did not often go well.  With each sign that we made we were reading the last.  We couldn’t keep up, swimming in continuous shadow.

A multitude of loving and words.  We believed we wanted reality.  We decided to quarry together – our insides working into a shared surround.  We disagreed on its representation and agreed to post personal options.  We grew confused and crowded with signs and gestures.  Grabbing some of these, we started swinging, thinking ours might outlast the others, might prove “right,” win out, or be “true.”

Our signs began to shatter as our words and gestures dissembled.  We established picket lines and separate camps.  We fashioned more signs with blazoned slogans of ourselves and our views, losing them inside our shadows.  We decided to climb.  Perhaps a view from afar, or you’ll be off on expedition.  We located a guide.  Who seemed to think all of our signs were true.  We looked again and could read that we wanted for love.  Our valley was riddled with signs.  Our guide interpreted gestures the same.  Words of pain, words of fear, a multitude of words.  All quite similar but in our own languages.

We wanted love, he said.

Someone to read our beings, our signs and receive their address.  Someone to help interpret our loops, quarry new signs, and map our spiraling stories.  We wanted multitudes of words and we had them.  Words we’d never thought of nor read.  Words replete with variant meanings and references.  Synonyms, antonyms distinguishing our signs, redirecting our shadows.  If we listened and looked, and with care, he said, perchance we might see who we are, being.  And learn how to be.  If we wanted for love, we had it, he said.  Just look at the signs.

The Cleaving

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, Photography, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“Connection is the recognition of the  intimacy of a division…

to make a division is to give substance form”

–Madeline Gins–

“Therefore shall a person leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto another

and they shall be as one flesh”

Genesis 2:24

The Cleaving

 

How do we come to know, believe or accept this ancient concept?  It has mited its way to the deepest reaches of Being (Dasein): Heidegger’s rift, linguistics address, each individual body’s pulse or breath or tremor.  That only the separateness may truly join.  Only the differences are recognized as similar.  Only the rifts require a bridge.

I do not know.  It is a reality I feel with as much pain as hope or joy.  That cleaving is both the splitting apart, the splintering wood and severing rope, AND their clinging together, their sealing and sealant.  It undoes me.  As a metaphor, concept or signification it rings true and carried dark howls and bright screams out of the depths of me.

And yet it comes so naturally.  Fight or flight.  Attack, retreat.  The extremities of the urges to join and drive to cease.  In the utterly intimate action of cleaving, we expose and unite – right in the most susceptible, vulnerable, life-threatening places.

 

The “cutting out,” “cutting off” – to cleave – you know what I’m referring to – when that which is most important to you becomes unreachable.  That impression that you are being “given up on,” that someone is “letting go,” even actively removing themselves or casting you away, chopping the cord – the umbilical torn, gushing, pulsing, the infant left writhing and wailing in the dumpster or thorny woods, a closet or dark alley.  Cleft.

In truth:  that severing of relationship, whether momentary or fatal, is a life-threatening, death-dealing blow.  Abandonment.  The dawning that you are at the front and there will be no reinforcements, you are cut from the supply train.  There is shock, there is scream and then a canyon of void with no other side.  It is we at our most disastrous, mortally dependent state.

We in the face of absence.  We without response – no face in a mirror, no echo of sound, NO THING.  Cleft.

Individual, alone, solitary entity.  Facing the reality:  we are insufficient to our needs, incompetent to our existence, impossible to self-sustain.  We in our fragility.  Our valid, appropriate, ontological FEAR.

Whack!  In anger, in grief, in silence, in bruise, we are severed, ultimately exposed, whether through small offense or enormous rejection – we have been cut.  Past the bone.  The reverberations tumble and crumble out far and wide, seemingly ubiquitously, regardless of the specific instant’s severity.  This is “the cleaving” done as much to us as by us in our madness to survive, to be real, to be verified and validated.

 

In the “drawing near,” in the “clinging” of to cleft, on the other hand, we are born.  We become.  As another reflects or responds to our raw broken mortally wounded finitude and fragility, we get glued to the vitality of these limited lives we have in us.  As these fearsome exposures are clasped, bonded, covered by another – transfused and salved, bandaged and wrapped or dressed by another – we know we are possible, we feel we exist and we matter, we join toward world and its being, brief though it is.

These are our chances and capacities: to effect, to mean, to act, create or be.  It is in the drawing near that what life there may be is acknowledged, fostered, affirmed.  Con-firmed.  Cleft – grafted into the ongoing reality of things, parting through wholes, participating and enhancing of semiotic systems.  As if life does not really belong to us, but we must belong to it, by belonging with one another.

“Leaving,” “cleaving.”  The leaf cleft from its branch will not survive, but cleft or grafted to another stem or soil or root may for awhile yet, live on, grow, produce, change and become.

We continuously leave and cleave to varying extents, and these just may be the principal elements of our thriving.  Cleft we perish, shrivel, die away.  Cleft we heal, nourish and grow life.  Both options/realities occurring in the cuts, the core places, the sources.

Here we panic, here we rejoice.  Here we suffer, here we love.  Here we become, and here we cease to be.

 

This mysterious activity necessitates both significations, counter-intuitive though it seem.  The need to be cleft exposes the places needing cleft.  Awareness of the sources for supply determines the crucial treasure, dependency, and gifts of supply.

We are chopped to the truth of death

and joined to the reality of life

Cleft.

Baffling Wisdom (really a long roundabout babble aimed towards my wife)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing1 Comment

Going back through the writings that have been piling up on, around and near my desk over the past few days working out the hoped-for verbalization of whatever it is that’s been stirring around in my brain I ran across a few more pages that seemed interesting / to the purpose…

“I am looking for words….”

Baffling Wisdom

i.e. thinking things through

Debility

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

Debility.

Visual Mathematics: an experiment, an equation, an hypothesis

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing2 Comments

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Playing with Numbers

(click title for text – thanks!)

Systems Theory

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Graphotos, Journallings, Writing5 Comments
synapses

Regulating Relationships

From most points of view, life is a system.  Enormous and elaborate interlacing activities keep it going on.  Biology, physics, religion, mathematics and logic; semiotics, psychology, aesthetics and history; chemistry and health, poetry and politics, philosophy and fame – all intricate reverberant systems of night (and possibly?!) infinite interconnections – visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious.

I feel it all the time.  I’m “affected.”

Hubbub over sports, havoc of war, hullabaloo of cosmology and genetics.  Tentacles of memory, omens from the past, illnesses and love.  My own aches and pains.  Allergies, anxiety, pleasure and joy.  Tastes, values.  All of/in these indecipherably interlocking worlds of living things, views, theories, events and conundrums.  Words, images, feelings.  Wires, energy, matter.  Signals, symbols.

I feel it.  I’m “affected.”  Always.

All ways.

An hypothetically infinite ganglia or swarm of influences and infections  — a finite and mortal middle-aged male inhabiting a very small space made of receptors, pores, nerves, cells and liquids: constantly thrumming, sloshing, snap-crackling, emoting and perceiving a cosmos of effects/affects.

This is why I keep saying: I get it, I’m totally “a/effected.”

The situation is perhaps similar to a paramecium channeling a bolt of lightning.  Most likely the little sucker survives in some fashion – but what the – ?

How do we manage?

No wonder we blitz out, dull, “veg,” “pass out,” sleep.  Drugs, fantastical entertainments, thrills, spills and crack-ups…anything to direct/divert the universe-sized charges incessantly overwhelming us.

Something struck me today.  In our growing history of surviving, perhaps even thriving, how have humans as a species often overcome overwhelming difficulties?  Well sure, all of the ways mentioned above: escape, denial, “tuning out,” apathy, ignorance, fantasy, insanity or violence, danger and so on, but when we are perceived (perceive ourselves) to “advance” “progress” or “grow” – what is the method?  (When we can interpret one apart from “accident” or “effect”?)

Have we not repeatedly immersed ourselves in our reality (“the way things are”) and used them to our benefit rather than detriment?  Technology, science, arts and beliefs – the seeking of the facts, turning them to our interests or needs, finding fulfillment and challenge – furtherance – survival.

What snapped in me today (I’ve had years of “managing” my “e/affectedness” thorugh alcohol, isolation or the dependence of my children) is this:  if our inquiries and theories by and large agree/propose that “life” is one phenomenal, inescapable and gargantuan set of layered and inter/intra-relational systems, then “relating/relationships,” their process(es) and effects are precisely where the work, the living, the surviving (perhaps thriving) emphases ought to be engaged.

That balancing, recharging, nourishing, coping, diversion and awareness might be best figured out right where it happens – in systems of relationships.  That where we are “affected” and what “effected” by is precisely where our greatest opportunity to “effect” must be.   Our process of relating, our relationships with/in the cosmos of possibilities, is our living.  What we know or think seems to tell us – our attention, our “solutions,” our being belongs there: in relationship.

Energy
Linguistic diagram

Thank you Holly (my wife), Scott (my dearest friend), children (all of you, my charges) – and others – you truly regulate me in this world.