Tag: Samuel Beckett
Ends – the Means to Get There; or, Laramie says “OFF.”
I drill. I devour.
Kafka, Blanchot, Derrida, Bartleby. Pessoa, Nietzsche, Jabes, Beckett.
Into the absence of hope.
Of language.
Of body.
I drill and I devour.
Myself.
Vitality.
Capacity.
I try to think my end(s).
I want to get there.
I would like to make it to the end.
I would like to make the end.
I think. I serve. I love. I ask.
I care. I touch. I say. I listen.
I am not fulfilling.
I am never quite what is wanted.
I have never been “right” for a situation.
I am a person who tries very hard to be what is wanted.
I am a person who tries very hard to offer what is “good”.
How would I know?
– what is wanted?
– what is good?
I do not.
I am incapable.
But I DO know:
I AM NOT THAT.
(do not) BE HERE NOW.
simply : do not.
“I would prefer not to.”
“I will not”
No reason.
No anwer.
We are just humans.
Animals.
Purposeless.
Pointless.
Without reason(s).
Without meaning(s).
Without.
Still we go on
(for now)
Still we keep on
Still
On
On
On
OFF
(he said, said Laramie to Alias. “OFF.” He said, said Laramie to Alias. And then he was gone. Really. Gone.)
Sometimes it happens this way.
Sometimes.
OFF
Simply, over.
[Often, in my case and experience. They come, they go. There is a rush of blood to the brain and the loins. There is something I assume the others refer to as “hope,” – some reason to live, to go on, to pertain. Then OFF. Binary. Digital. Technology. Culture. Beings-in-relation. ON/OFF. Lights. ON/OFF. Progress. ON/OFF. Will. ON/OFF. Love. ON/OFF. Value. ON/OFF. Need. ON/OFF. Mood. ON/OFF. Everything binary. Irrational. Abstract. Illogical. Happenings, events, occurrences. ON/OFF. ON/OFF. Life. ON/OFF. Life. ON/OFF. Life. ON/OFF.
Life.
ON/OFF.
We are coming to an end.
I am coming to end.
We each come, to end.
The End.
Writing Anyway
EVERY HUMAN LIFE IS A STORY THAT COMES TO AN END
selected fictions of self-pity
- INEVITABLE ENTROPY
Maybe this just is the gist of it.
I spend a good portion of my life (such as it is) – all of its waking and sleeping hours anyway – struggling to determine a meaning for it – its meaning (a concept? term? reference?) on its own that I may have very little luck determining or understanding.
This elusive compendium of thoughts/feelings (EXPERIENCE I’ve corralled with the sound/shape ‘meaning’) – how might it be described? explained? : What might it … ahem … ‘mean’?!
Were I to describe it – it would evoke and involve (were I to describe it well) a sense that I was necessary, useful, desired and desirable, of some merit and account, acknowledged, approved, purposive, poignant…whatever those (each) might also ‘mean.’
Something I happen to be “good” at that is also of benefit or boon throughout the world I’m wedded to, both near (intimate, familial, selected-for) and far (given, happenstance, environment).
But what I’m “good at” is “Depression.” The function of slowing and drag…exhibiting sorrow among happiness, erosion within emergence, noising up messages…despair contained in joys. Doubt, skepticism, intricate inevitable workings of what we agree to name ‘death’ intertwingled with what we call ‘life.’
Entropy. Sorrow. Failure. Defeat. Depression. Grief. Doubt.
Unlikeliness.
Unlikeableness.
Me.
Self-pitying, self-concerned, self-oriented, self-obsessed…at this I am quite ‘good’ – adept, astute, adroit, capable and facile – of smearing, marring, being sad in circumstances of beauty, of success, of benefit and chance…
My children are healthy, talented, innovative and beautiful. My wife is stunning, accomplished and accomplishing, intelligent, inventive, supportive, sexy and kind. Generous. I am employed in circumstances that suit my learning, commitments and goals. I inhabit relatively stable wards and routines. I am alive, middle-aged without illness, debility, war or threat of imminent dangers. Still expertly I can imbue and include a lowering, slowing, gravitational angst and fear into anything I encounter as ‘good.’
I am ‘good’ at dismantling ‘good.’
Which means (back to ‘meaning!’) I also despise, loathe, resent and regret myself and my operations. Representing wear and tear, unraveling and decoupling, erosion, rust and decay to what strives and conjoins, promises and grows. Somehow, somewhere, in some indisputable and unignorable way I am married to disorder.
When I strive to sing, express or communicate – what emits is disturbance and noise. When I construct, I create mayhem. When I combine – I fall apart.
Significant discoveries during my life-range – their exposition and documentation – include complexity, chaos, emergence, and entropy. These I represent, or so it seems.
Ever unable quite to take credit for accomplishment (chaos, complexity, evolution, emergence); never able to know – to sufficiently understand or trace (dynamic, processual, complex, systemic); yet acutely aware of dissonance and destruction, dis-pair and difference (entropy, chaos, noise). Viral, incipient, parasitic and accidental – I adapt, attach, alter and disrupt – change and undo.
Which makes me sorry in an unstoppable way. Unable, hesitant, terrified, dangerous and afraid. A soiled activity of ground. Questions beggaring and buggering replies. A kind of programmatic cancer, a hitch in the breath, a massage that makes sore.
I message – and fragments. I propose – and divide. Link up by pulling apart. With such yearning – an insatiability for connection and attachment that (frighteningly) never fails to strip, erode, scrape and shred that which it clings to.
Modus operandi: ENTROPY. Clutter, damage, foil. Complication and conundrum. Ant in sugar, weevil to wheat, cog in machinery, speculation to proof. Maxwell’s Demon, uncertainty on principle, the mouldering remainder: “I.”
I, entropy.
I, divorce.
I, disease.
I, confusion.
I, disruption.
I, doubt.
I, Descartes.
I the obscure.
complex, simple
unwanted, unwarranted, unsure
I the wobble precipitating break
I, depress.
You colour, I neutralize.
You shine, I dull.
If offered a peaceable end (thinking twice, thinking thousands) I’d accept it – unquestioningly.
New Topia.
**********************************
This is what he thought of it. What he thinks. This one, inextricable from a world, just like everyone else, part AND parcel, the becoming and become, apparent apparition, here-and-then-gone every one-in-the-many.
He thinks irreplaceably. Nothing without merit. Necessity emerges and occurs. Unstoppably. With(in) all its stoppage and its stopping.
He thinks: “what occurs occurs at once.”
He thinks: “being and nothingness is being in time.”
He thinks: “this is one way of thinking.”
He thinks: “thinking is process.”
Inevitable. And more-than, that.
Stop Making Sense happened at a time that makes sense, and continues to do so. Absorbed into machinery. The operations of ‘reality’ for each type, each kind, each species. And without.
“There does not seem to be a correlation,” he thinks. “Between this one and that, experience and experience (the dog, the tick, the grass; the human, the sun, the soil). A convergence of dependence without necessity.”
He thinks: HER
He thinks: THEM
He thinks in wishes.
He wishes his thoughts. Difference.
He (accidentally) dreams a New Topia.
In this New Topia, a difference. A sense-making, a motile trajectory. A structure to revolutions : convergence + emergence. A hope rather than. Such despair.
He thinks: he reaches, makes effort, attempts.
He wishes: he could do otherwise
He thinks: everything ends
He wishes: something might end in beginning
Because he is able to, he looks at ‘his’ eyes in a mirror. Glasses, no glasses. Hair, hair pulled back and away. Blue. Morose. Green. Avaricious. And blue-grey: Now. Now. Now.
He thinks: I should be brushing my teeth – and always regrets pronouns and possessives. Conventions.
He wishes: there was beyond
He thinks: I exist in my limits
He wishes: possibility
He thinks: organism. finitude.
He writes as he has learned to do so. Using words, made out of letters, infrastructures that – while scrambled and undone, reworked and reordered toward a sort of confusion or unsettling – are still the only means he has…toward anything.
He thinks: “anything resembling anything – these are my limits; and limits = usefulness, probability and possibility, constraints. My hope.”
He wishes: Re-inscribed. Remade. Novel. Capable. Composed. From one-to-one. For her. For them. For ‘It.’ (It: New Topia).
He divests. Dissects. Dissembles.
No one follows his ‘meaning.’
[Therefore it does not mean].
***********************************
Grown ever-so-tired of options. The limits, precursors, avail. Starts again, but never new.
This is an attempt to bind. To couple.
Writes to forge a chain.
Writes to create connection.
Writes to compose a real accordingly.
Fails.
The letters, marks, terms and expressions are borrowed, reworked or remade, still. Symbols wide open. Pre-filled, refilled, unmade.
Touch then. Touching nothing new. Touched before. Been touched.
“Nothing new under the sun.” New again under new sun, newly impossible, com-possible. Newly inadequate and all there is…adequate to the necessary task. Ever less. Ever more. Never quite. Never quite common enough. Human. All too human. Never quite common enough.
***************************
Dust. Ash. Dust. Ash. Dust. Ash. Dust. Ask.
Exploring the Interior
I am an outdoorsman of the indoors
-Heidi Julavits-
Maybe I’m meant to be a philosopher – one who asks, observes, thinks + wonders, ponders perspectives, theorizes potential generalities, hopes reports and reflections might “stick” somehow to a wider frame, might be shared, or sound true. Perhaps that’s sociology, or anthropology, or just the case of being a “social animal” – who could say?
I notice a title, er, there is a title I just saw on the spine of a book loaned to me by the library where I work, en-titled “Gesturing Toward Reality”…which, if we believed it, proves another spine in the pile: “The Primacy of Semiosis.” If.
Or as if. Azziff. As. If.
If that’s how-it-is.
(“How It Is” is also in the stack).
As If That’s How It Is
And So It Begins
Goes
“And so it goes.”
My house is cluttered. I seem to have a penchant for creators. Not artistes. Perhaps the kids wonder. I task and clean (hardly) in order to order what I can especially whenever anything or everything feels disordered (or I am), but I repeatedly conjoin with those whose vibrancy depends (or seems to) on mess, on possibility and potential, on emergence. Whilst I career about, disordered and emergent, clinging, striving, desperate for order: ordered thoughts, ordered words, ordered places, ordered life. None of which ever even remotely eventuate.
Except perhaps. Or, as if.
Still things settle quickly in me.
Crumble, toss, shred, pile or pack anything about, for, with, around me (even my self with my self, or selves) and it funnels, spirals, gathers – most amazingly efficiently! – in fact quite remarkably and chemical-reactiony to a bottom or base – a dredge, a sludge, a collection of chaos quickly finding its way to a murmur – a melancholy.
What would a writer do? A philosopher? Musician? Psychologist? Lover? Parent? Friend? Any, all of the roles I might enact as parts of my selves? Or…what would I do? What might an I made up of me(s) want to do?
That thing [being, organism]…in moments settled and gathered and overwhelmed – feeling steady, calm and helpless in the face of things – MELANCHOLY – “good” I guess (comparatively – a state in which the energy is gone for acting, for performing in the face, presence or need of another)…particularly:
- When the weather is ‘right’ for it (40s & raining)
- When there’s too much or too little to do
- When depleted from something taxing (performances, events, demands, others)
- When certain of scarcity and definite end
The thing wants particular music – “sad songs” (Mark Kozelek, Arvo Part, soundtracks, solo piano or cello); a stable table and sheaf of lined blank papers; a Bic Crystal medium ball-point pen in blue or black; 1-3 hours uninterrupted; endless drink equal parts vodka, tonic and 100% grapefruit juice; a cigarette or two; loose layered clothing; and an outside for the inside to poke around in I guess, to hazard (haphazardly).
That’s what I do.
Time and space, a melancholy, a setting…
or sex,
a vital moisty intimacy with (and only with) the one I love,
desperately (unfortunately) need, desire, crave, wish for…
So – to write.
To leak in a hesitant line. Ink.
To see if the liquid residue scraping looping shapes across light blue lines of snowy-white notebook pages might in-scribe, in-form, make my inchoate choate – make the amorphous and disordered shapely and full, meaningful, possible.
Whether I might accept, discern, agree with something that makes its journey through the networks and passageways that apparently compose me
that might result in something I recognize or comply with, if even only
– like these are the times I stare neither at the bush with its waving tendrils, nor the fence poles they move against, but somewhere in between –
if even only [syn. for withholding judgment] (my drafts are filled with these) to hear the unknown or misremembered word
nothing in focus but an unlabelable feeling
which I call (when required) – “melancholy” –
defining for me something calm, dank, pure, correct –
a sieved and all-accounted-for awareness –
before some crazed and passionate outburst or heat, some diversion of this otherwise apparent cold, wet, burn.
The word I can’t recall (that I need) begins with a “c.” Or perhaps an “a” or “ad-.”
Or maybe something else among its 26 options. 25 really, I use so few that begin with “z.”
**********************************
Lael asks for statistical proof of decreased attention spans while I get bored of expression, description, “tack”…change the color of my pen and wonder why the average popular song is 3-5 minutes long but novels normally run past 100 pages.
It would seem that we all just want to be and be loved, however we verbalize it.
I still haven’t remembered that word…and refuse to utilize thesauri or Google. Or any alternate synonym finder.
Our value lines seem so personal and arbitrary and irrational (philosopher? Anthro-socio-psycho-logist?).
I want to be intimate with my partner.
In such a way.
In such a way that she understands, comprehends, – EXPERIENCES – how significant, important, crucial, essential
she really (REALLY)
IS
to me
to ‘a’ “me.”
Being.
This rambling ridiculous writing
is all, actually, thoroughly,
another misguided attempt to communicate.
Truly or in reality
That I exist in order to be a “me” in relation to a “you.”
Quite simply.
It weighs nothing
bears no responsibility
It’s simply.
I marry you (again).
I am. A “folded clock.”
among billions.
If even only undeterminedly, undecided, uncertain, unsure, debatable, dubiously, [all synonyms for withheld judgments].
Not least among the spines arrayed before me: Complexity – My Struggle – The Erotic Phenomenon – Reviving the Living – Experiencing & The Creation of Meaning – Things Merely Are – Intertwingled – and Love.
**********************************************
It occurs to me in matters of most everything that I need / demand / require CONTINUAL PROOF for something – for me – to count as “true” or “actual” – things have to be perpetually evidenced.
Nothing is…but…well…that’s why I trust in death.
Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness. Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again. Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand. Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins. Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind. One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.
– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –
Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991.
For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.
Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.
Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Thinking.
Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,
the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,
grew redundant with desire…
…desire for language to do some certain things,
…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:
to write the ambiguities.
Repeatedly: to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal. Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear. That light in which even our shadows go unseen.
Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,
encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,
my writing desire grows more active,
toward the active,
and its happening,
writing verbally,
writing living:
to write losing.
Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity.
Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.
TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING
to loose losing
…perhaps to lose it…
…face to endlessness…
will he make it?
Subject to Change
I am become a Rural Carrier Associate for the U.S. Postal Service.
I pursued employment with the USPS thinking it might provide some security of longevity, tradition (over 200 years of continuous service, public benefit, innovation and survival), government benefits and programs…a service and income that might meet the needs my children and I have developed for something like stability and sustenance.
I was wrong about most of those things.
I’m almost guaranteed one day of work a week (or whenever the regular carrier is unable to work) – no benefits, guaranteed abuse and damage to our one essential family vehicle, grave limitations on supplemental work (not supposed to seek employment with anyone that is a client of USPS – in other words, anyone that purchases postage – greatly delimiting the options / NOR taking any work between the hours of 6 AM and 6 PM when I might be needed to fill in) – and, a grand service NOT supported or secured by the US Government since 1970 (no tax dollars toward USPS!).
On the other hand. It clearly satisfies core ethics and values I have carried through my entire life and its pursuits – Meaning. Relationships. Communication. Tangible Information. The Betweens:
Music. Poetry. Religion. Philosophy. Psychology. Bookselling (bibliotherapy). Marriages. Research and reference. Parenting. Writing. Anthropology. Semiotics. Neuroscience. Embodiment. Systems Theory. Language. Ekphrasis. Communications. Information Science…
what (it seems) has fueled them all has been a passion, fascination, curiosity and intense desire to search into, understand, sense
HOW HUMAN BEINGS MAKE AND SHARE MEANING
NOW: I’m a tangible link in the chain. A node or circuit in the web of transmission.
Divorce summons, a lover’s plaint, news of a long-lost classmate or childhood friend, money for a meal, Christmas gifts for grandchildren, links between parents and children, carrier of bills and obligations that alter our lives – invitations to weddings, announcements of deaths, retirements, coupons and births, biological specimens and literary manuscripts, art works, seeds, music, books, clothes and toys…
from here to there, there to here
how often I have rushed to the mailbox,
how often I have posted letters,
how often the holding of a living personal document has made a difference in my life…
These are what I think of as I dig through bins, collocate numbers, sort and file, casing mail, and rattle and drag my way through any weather, mood or condition to securely, confidentially and certainly deliver the mail…
In a great meanwhile…
…after three years working from home like a dream – researching, academics, creative writing and art-making; love with a tremendous spouse, and a generous and flexible availability to my amazing children…
it is now turning into months of spouse-lessness, unemployment, harried by survival efforts, sustenance, hours upon hours of therapy, grief, anger, puzzlement, bewilderment, and wonder…
CHANGE
A sustained period of invaluable interactions and dad-ness will be swallowed up bouncing wash-boarded gravelly roads placing packages and envelopes in sturdy boxes of farms. Fighting for moments with children, opportunities to claim that I am here for them. To study. To write. To read or rest or be…to grocery and launder, housekeep, to play.
Relocating yet again a sense of home.
For our part – four kiddos, their mothers (and their partner/spouses) and I (and mine) – we have survived, adapted, adjusted and altered much in the past two decades. Time/little time, retail/academia/schlepping/poverty/art – proven resilient, pliable, innovative, possible – committed or interdependent on one another and have formed and become, ached and angered, wept and worried, laughed and lost, suffered and rejoiced and survived and thrived…
…continued…(“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”)
and we’re a pretty wonderful, remarkable, heart-stopping, difficult bunch!
A biological, literate, artistic, psychological, cultural, spiritual, relational, musical, playful, emotional, terrified, successful, wounded, smart, creative, clinical, authentic, unusual, “awkward,” bunch of “weirdies” (kids’ favorite terms)
and I hope and I trust
SURE OF ONE ANOTHER
…ever subject to change…
but together.
“everything gives way, opens up, flows out, flows back, flecks…”
“I am in words, I am made of words, of the words of others, what others, this place too, the air too…”
As the semester’s projects begin to disintegrate into final clumps of submission…my innards yawn and stretch and struggle awake, expressing a yearning to search…spill forward instead of re-searching…explore and extend…
to construct and create without resources – to invent from the miscellaneous stockpiles of information and data accrued through intense weeks of devouring and ingesting…
This essay, from Maurice Blanchot, regarding Samuel Beckett – “Where Now? Who Now?” – captures that no-place of beginning – amid a chaos of signs and sensations – knowledge and ignorance – words and emotions concocted from immersion in information sources and recorded knowledge that constitutes “higher learning”…
please engage!
Influence : Fragments from the Introduction : “Nothing is quite as real as nothing”
I am currently reading Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution by Pascale Casanova, introduced by Terry Eagleton
Beckett has always been a favorite of mine – for economy, humor, profundity, examination and exploration. The following exemplify elements of this – quotations from simply the Introduction (by Eagleton) of this study…
“His work, in short, presents us with the scandal of a literature which no longer depends on a philosophy of the subject”
“every sentence of his writing keeps faith with our sense of powerlessness”
“nothing is quite as real as nothing”
“sublimity includes that which is barely visible as well as the immense and immeasurable, since both are equally ungraspable”
“there is no more truly historical phenomenon in art than form – which is quite as much saturated in social signification as so-called content”
Beckett presents “questions addressed by texts to themselves, queries about their own procedures and conditions of possibility”
“clear-eyed attempts at an exact formulation of the inarticulable…the extreme scrupulousness with which it sculpts the void”
“writing itself becomes for Beckett the very signifier of the failure which so gripped his imagination”
“places the very impediment to writing at the center of his writing, transforming the question of failure into the very form of his art, telling incessantly of the failure to tell”
Thanks Samuel.
All my Words are Silent 