So, I followed Flickr Comments “amusing” journey into being “typealyzed” by algorithms,
and here were my results (thank you, Flickr for the prompt)
pretty much guilty as processed!
and yet….
We Are What We Write?
Tag: self-awareness
Mirrors & Shadows
“Ten times a day you must overcome yourself. You must want to burn yourself up in your own flame.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
“the lesson is clear: one is multiple, the same is different, the representation is the negative of the person…both original and copy, identical and different, they are the same and the other, interchangeable and monumental…In the dark room of his studio, Warhol develops himself. In so doing he ‘unmakes’ himself.”
-Victor Stoichita-
“Death follows artists around like their shadow and I think that’s one of the reasons artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and nothingness of life.”
-Francis Bacon-
Children singing choruses. Joyous chants and rhymes. Distant. Repetition forming memory.
Chasing shadows, or running from. Self-same body blocking sun. To be sought, to be feared. Identical and strange.
Known alone in traces and reflections.
I say that “I” was young once. That it’s only patterns of light, only the passing of time, only angles of vision.
I repeat myself.
Each day reassembling, developing, dissembling, to reassemble again. My body a gathering post.
Mirroring image has gone from the closest thing to self-awareness we might uncover to a flat reflective surface full of nothing. Ephemeral and changing by the second, dependent on the looker, a vacant mirage.
Shadow has proceeded from a designator of real presences to an outline of actual vacuity. From a measurable symbol of substance to a vague hint of objects passing.
Voices like a bag of small bells and grass. Something shaking and stirred. Snippets of a tune, the catchy parts.
What I can tell I read, observe, attend and consider, opening a dialogue of days. But I only get to see in glimpses and portions. A hand moving, holding an instrument here; flat feet from crossed legs there; a shoulder, some hair of a beard, the frames of glasses. I don’t see myself seeing, nor see myself as seen.
There’s the mirror and the shadow – intangible, eminently interpretable and malleable “things” – emphases of the transitory. Receptacles like language – merely signs or indices – pointing back at absence.
Moment, moment, moment…now then now then now…endless fantasies of dissection moving round the room, faster than shuttling clips of film. A self presenting / representing itself after again, appearances only, shimmering skein mingling veils of light…
While they sing like breezes dreaming – “Who sees?” and “What is seen?”
He who has ears let him hear,
bypassing illusion,
in marks and gestures
Our Mysterious Callings, er, befuddling vocations
continuing qualia…
{eliminating parts of speech and tense(-ing)s}
Where we began, and when, was next-to-nothing. How must have been something, and the what bears repeating. Complex and variegated channels, ganglia alike to beans taking root, nutty and filigreed.
The event is conception and all its pertinent involve (where-when-events) – resultant growth of hairy little what-hows.
What is a theme-and-variations composition, melodies often scarce to trace, but certainly music! Thrumming drumming subtle, with irregulating tremors, shushing swinging bellowed strings, replete with punctuations. A human is a riffing thing, something of artist’s collage coupling biological systems and common laws relatively, referred to as patterns.
Person is an unstaid element, living requiring stimulation and acknowledgements, enough continuity to be. Elaborate contexts of nurturing structures and their vice-versas. Cells swimming fluids, objects in umwelts, mini-beasts scuttling a globe, as seen from various distances (perspectives not visibly limited).
Existences like screens full of mimeographed transparencies layered and colored by hands. Bewildering tangles of syrup and string. Odd combos when mirrored by mirrors, as mirroring means. Two-sided at least. Reflected subjectivities / subjective reflections, sort of spinning things set on a gyro turning tilting.
Nurturing structures of what-hows commons: language, culture, environment and arts. Structuring nurture of sustaining nourishment, awareness (attention) and semblance of security.
And there you have a person (a what-how) and a world (where-when-event); synonymously person-making-world, er, world-making-person toggling looping recursive spirals adjusting discontinuous connectivities…
Perhaps each and overall what-how’s where-when-events all beggar why (i.e. remain puzzling) at which point (or somesuch of the like) there probably arises a who. Who and why as yet unknown, being conjectured derivatives only from how-what in where-when-events.
All demanding further potentially endless inquiry and study and inventive erasures of conventional grammars and parts of speech.
Fathers & Sons
Seeking My Father
I’m stumbling about in a vast field of corn or wheat (mostly stubble) – for the requisite difficulty I want to say stalks of maize – but most likely it is wheat (author living in Kansas), though the sharp starkness of the dying shoots suggest otherwise. There may be snow, it’s that bleak. I’m lugging, perhaps draggling (yes – dragging a straggling weight – I do that) a shovel – nothing unusual about the tool except that it feels abnormally heavy and the iron parts are particularly cold (reminding me of the processings of my brain). A book is open on my lap (I’m sitting in an airport) to ward off any attempts at conversation and indicate a desire to be left alone, so I might continue my dreaming. I’m using the shovel to dig for my dad. Like – to find him. The field is a veritable landscape, not a “quarter” or even thousands of acres, but more like a steppe – some foreboding Russian prairie-plain – but clearly cultivated and almost fallow, or otherwise undone.
So I’m trudging through, eyeing the horizon, searching for some limiter, some possible landmarks that could clue me or direct me toward a where to dig. Every once in awhile I stoop or coil and plunge the blade into the cloddy frozen soil, strung up in tares and straw and grasses. I guess I’m expecting a thunk or an explosion of stars or something, because I never dig for long in one place, and soon pull up and move along. How do I know that he’s here? It’s as if something told me so. A sensation a helluva lot like intuition, or premonition. It’s a thankless task, I’ll tell you that, with the approaching holidays and stuck like this waiting on delayed Winter flights. What hope is there for me? It is already dusk and the field’s enormous. I’m alone, you know. Out here trying to find my father. Trying to find my way.
Afterword
Ever since I’ve been nearly-adult, or as long as I distinctly remember thinking about things like this – like death or family or meaning – I’ve wished I knew my father. In college I thought it might be a matter of vocabulary – that we didn’t possess the correct vehicle for exchanging emotion and memories and hopes – so I studied America’s westward movement (the paths of our ancestry), studied land management and read farmer-writers like Wendell Berry and William Kloefkorn, Larry Woiwode, William Stafford, Robert Bly and ilk. Trying to forge a connection now that sports and God had run their course, for me. As my own children arrived I turned to movements like Men and the Water of Life, the Iron John sort of thing – searching what is my heritage – of gender, of blood – what the hell does “manly”(ness) mean beyond observation and nurture? Now with sons. Hunting for metaphors or language that might serve as derricks plumbing wells – that might draw out my father and myself and somehow blend us together. Poem after poem, story by letter asking intimacy. Sometimes I’d gain the courage for a lunch or an outing to interrogate him directly about how he felt about things and what were his stories. I gifted my mother and he with a book of great questions and a blank notebook so they might fill out their inner-info when they felt like it, “for their grandchildren,” I’d said, “for posterity.” Simply wanting to know. As far as I know, it’s still empty.
Why is it so hard for fathers and sons? How many of us wish we really knew – our parents from the inside out? Believe that somehow knowing more than their strategies of being would offer us a clearer, fuller sense of ourselves? Unburden. Invite. Be near. As my father and I both age, I find myself anticipating his stages – frustrations, weariness and increasing losses. I find myself encountering bewilderments I saw him endure, and still I constantly wonder what he would say – if he said – not regarding politics or basketball or weather or cars, but about me. About him. About being a father and a man, a husband and a laborer, a person, a friend. About humor and music and art, about culture and meaning. He studied much and has lived long, lost so many, traveled and loved and he’s beautiful. As with my sons – toward whom I try to be so open and true – the conundrum of unknowing and uncertainty related to those closest to us is a mystery that hurts. The above piece is one of a life of installments. A kind of cry.
Excerpt from the Book of the Dead – Jabes (replete with traces)
“Why render that experience through fiction? First, because we are only fiction.
We are only the idea we have of ourselves.”
-Edmond Jabes-
Intimacy as Art
Intimacy as Art
“A way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being”
“that ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being’… was what fiction was for. ‘A way out of loneliness’…”
Jonathan Franzen, on David Foster Wallace
“If the novel were able ‘to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves,’ it opens the potential that she might, as a result, feel ‘less alone inside’”
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, on David Foster Wallace
My son and I arguing about the nature of things – is there anything we can agree on? mutually believe? are we similar? – in what began as an attempt (on my part) to soothe obvious hurt and confusion (on his part). He kept pointing to (referencing) his mirror, his bedside table, in an effort at agreement, at a meeting-point that might be solid, be reliable, be “correct,” or “true.” Some relatively stable collection of roving and vibrating molecules we might sharingly recognize, might hold, attend, or unite around – together.
Throughout my life I’ve attempted to comprehend – to make a symbol for myself – what works of art, particular pieces of music, specific phrases or pages of literature, momentary glimpses of nature, dollops of emotional experience DO. How they work. Why they “feel” – move us, take an occasional effect we might call “profound.” Why, even if they shatter us, cause us to weep, provoke in us the enormous courage required to change, we also somehow still feel safe, often empowered, somewhere beyond “okay” (ecstatic? – out of ourselves?)?
Although often evoking experiences I’d describe as most completely, totalizingly personal, I always felt their effectiveness, their possibilities of success and individuated power, came precisely because they were not (personal). That what intimacy they provided – what outlet or spillage, what expression they represented or evinced – was contextually impersonal, through matter and energy uniquely organized, mediated.
In other words, we could throw all of ourselves into, at, toward or away from them (works of art, formal arrangements of world) without the danger or threat, anxiety or fear, of influence. We wouldn’t hurt, harm, embarrass, shame, offend or be misunderstood by a cornflower, a collective of strokes of paint, a recording of sound waves, moving molecules. No direct hits of miscommunication, misinterpretation. Perfect, variable, flexible presentations of world, of other, that we might release ourselves in relation to, without fear.
Existent things, moments, that genuinely represent otherness from ourselves but without direct exposure, without a being’s inquiry, possible scrutiny, judgment or evaluation. Interpretation. Many-sided, borrowed perhaps, but mediated via only one person – me. I could not fail, fall short, be inadequate to, or otherwise mess up a novel, poem, composition or film, and if I experienced myself as any of those things – it was my own judgment, assessment. Mediated.
After years of such exposure, why do I still choose sides, entrench myself in arguments of logic, when I mean to comfort, soften and heal? Alone, later, I sat and asked myself over and over – IF I have changed, grown, matured in any fashion in my 42 years of life, IF I have learned anything to the point of conscious belief, what might it be? – what might I say that I know?
I don’t know.
What I scribbled into the margin of my journal was simply that my fundamental belief about the world and life in it was that – at the core of things – “Everything is essentially messy.” By which I (at least partially) meant (intended) was incomplete, mobile and complex.
Nothing “fixed.” Staid, finished, whole.
Throughout years of journaling, as I’ve grown to understand how deeply I desire “intimacy” (which I suppose I would describe as “shared personhood” or “met experience”? Co-events?) I have repeatedly diagramed what seems to me an only possible means between humans:
Using Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbits to represent whatever we happen to perceive ourselves as, and “Art” on an easel representing anything as a mediated format outside of our “selves” (themselves, I surmise, also likely a constructed medium for experiencing world), to or in which multiple human persons might invest all they experience themselves to be, without necessary personal organism-survival fears, and, possibly, perhaps, occasionally MEET via that medium in toto (or as nearly as possible): experience intimacy, mutuality. No longer isolated as a being, alone, but finding a common, a sharing-realm, co-perceiving, co-experiencing.
If it be so, that, in fact, as human organisms, all of our entity-type experience is, truly, mediated – through various organizations of mobile and voluble matter and energy – never identifiable as a stasis or final form, if we might begin to see it (us) as such – might we become able to experience direct, person-to-person (experientially) intimacy? Co-being? This is where I have turned effort (driven by desire) with my wife, my children. What if we became safe mediums for one another to experience through?
That would be another entry altogether.
Locating my mind
Nothing is the force / that renovates the world.
-Emily Dickinson-
Please read the following conversation between poets Christine Hume and Rosmarie Waldrop (pp.76-88, click on image for text)
Waldrop has always been a heroine of mine, and I’ve been struggling again with “Who am I?” “What do I do?” “How am I?” – questions of identity and difference that come up in times where we are suffused in roles – students, parents, spouses, artists, employees, gendered, and so on…In insular places where I feel safe I am able to theoretically conjure a kind of flow, that these aren’t choices but movements, that things and actions do not exist, only ‘occasions”, “relations,” but under stress I quickly find myself wishing I knew who/what/where/when/how I am. Today I received this book through inter-library loan, and kept opening to the Waldrop chapter… apparently for good reason. I share many of her points of view, and would like to share them with whomever finds themselves interested.
I think of the ‘between’ more in terms of both, and of extending the gray zone between the black/white in the direction of multivalence. ‘The yes and no in everything.’
-Rosmarie Waldrop-
Collecting Fragments : The Engineer of Himself
Posting an ongoing project, a long(ish) poem(-tic) reflexive effort to at least hear myself if not understand.
The Engineer of Himself
The Engineer of Himself: A Poem
“Thinking is willing you are wild
to the weave not to material itself”
Susan Howe
“a new music of verse stretching out into the future…”
William Carlos Williams on Louis Zukofsky
I.
I have tried to tell this story time and time again.
I’ve set out to tell this story.
This one story. This one, apparently, mine.
This story takes all of my life, as do all of the stories that go deep in the mines.
Mole’s holes without boundaries – forward and back equal speed – ever the hunting, never the full.
We develop our routes in this way.
Creating patterns.
We forget so many channels and tunnels and homes.
Will I ever find the subject
When asked what I am writing? Continue reading “Collecting Fragments : The Engineer of Himself”
Why I Write (?)
What Occurs : What Prompts : Whatever
I’m prepared to admit that I am moody…(significant others would readily attest this). My range of expression is evolving. Formerly I drank vodka so as to physically present a Zen-like kindness and placidity. My family didn’t fall for it. Many other medications have been recommended me wherewith to alter my individual chemistry and be a finer, better human. Different. Okay. It’s almost two years now since I’ve drank with regularity for balance. (Imbalance). Almost two months since I’ve managed on a braid of nicotine and tar. I’m at the mercy of the winds. In me.
I’m moving, frighteningly, toward “what you see is what you get” – some reckless combination of a voracious and highly informed neurotic intellect, strange aesthetically, theory-laden embodiment, and a high-voltage bundle of emotional attachment needs…a kind of human specimen to myself…and whatever literature I imbibe and an incredibly courageous family that somehow stays around me, thusfar regardless of…
If pressed, I would say I survive by language. By art. Whether visual, musical, or literary, I always feel (believe?) that there’s some place for me, some haven to inhabit, in the tremendous world of frivolous human invention/concoction/creation. Though there is overwhelming evidence from my spouse, children and immediate/extended family and friends that I’m safe and accepted as the crazy creature I am, that’s a slow-growth root for relative paranoia (or shame).
All that, to highlight a miniscule moment that accentuated an obvious stimulant to my own commitments to compositions in whatever media or form.
A mood obtains. Like clothing, I often feel surrounded and represented by my emotional states. When this occurs, I look for “matches.” Things in the world to mirror or affirm me – that I might maintain some sense of individuality and worth – i.e., “self.”
Something happens that I don’t pretend to understand, shifting my contextual fabric of existence into a new whereabouts/whatabouts/howabouts, and I look at the literatures that I saturate my living spaces with, the sounds I ensure are in queue, and images / persons / environments (etc.) arranged so as to secure or anchor me, and I ask for resonance, reflection, validation.
That isn’t fair.
I see that.
Thus I relate, to what’s around me.
Not so subtly (as my whomabouts can attest) I seek what mates with my singular in-sperience.
Not fair.
I see that.
It’s what I do.
Often there is very little in my surround “feeling WITH me.” I.e. identical to myself. Therefore, bigotedly, I feel alone. And seek.
Today – in some combination of emptiness (moving away from four children and ‘home’ to be with two other children and beautiful mountains) and rich anticipation (my beloved ONLY flying back to me from another country – my spouse, my dearest deepest friend, my survivor); grief (two years of self-directed study and creation drawing to a close); irritation (growing consecutivity of 3-digit temperatures and a scalded environment – these Midwestern plains); an only partially confirmed/verified confidence (in mental avarice and aptitude, linguistic and theoretical comprehensions and abilities); excitement (of movement, vacation, escape, in-drawal with significant others); terror (maturing independence of children, un-necessity as parent, annoyance, superfluity, archaism); erotic desire (days spent apart from spouse + discipline + commitment + theory + desire); hope (renewed relationships, devotion to integrity, celebration of fidelities); melancholy (death is always the next thing); pride (I’ve managed thusfar); luck and sorrow (the ridiculous imperilments of tragedies)…
I’m realizing as I write that this list is a quick abyss of connections and trajectories. Life is endlessly sourced and indiscriminately smeared…
In this molten, cumulative state I perused my essential companions – literary, musical, and visual…and…NO MATCHES!!! All so far beyond me in each of their strengths – stretching, compelling, inductive… but not “mating”/”conflating”/”reflecting” to my own present presence…
and so…
…I write…
…seeking what I need…
…to create it…
And one day?
To find?
‘Tis Merely Acting (?)
I’m in the process of reading Girl Imagined by Chance by Lance Olsen, and I am thinking about how easy it is to make up one’s life. Easy and hard, in different ways. Like making peanut butter-chocolate milkshakes.
We watched “The Joneses” (obviously a mainstream movie, in that way they have of being consistently predictable and disappointing) last night. Internet webs and informational glut, the redolence of media – its imagery and imaginings – makes lying very easy, and “soft.” In the sense of “white lies,” or possibly not malicious, not evil. Rather “stealthy,” “clever,” and “creative” manipulations, representations, (e.g. marketing).
I remember when Western Culture (particularly United-States-North-American) synonymed carpe diem with “invent yourself,” i.e. the militaries “be all you can be.” I was younger then.
Lying requires duplicity, which requires attention, which requires energy. Much like working outside of one’s home and having a family. Or some other role(s). What is called “position,” formerly called a “point-of-view.” Often borrowed from corporations or governments, churches or markets, movements or customers, and so forth. “White” lies. Duplicities. Now this, now that. Positioning.
Already multiple (syn. plural), our selves find it natural to lie and adapt and yet not to believe that it is lying. First one thing, then another; everything changes while remaining so similar. Enough. Apparently. In other words, subtle repositioning / shape-shifting: therapist foreground, wife background. Grunt foreground, husband back. Student, son, father, friend. Subtle shifts. Highlights. First one thing, then another, not exclusive (syn. deception).
Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Who associated these terms (“lie,” “deception,” “manipulation,” “duplicitous” and so forth) with something negative in the first place? Our histories, sciences, civilizations, arts, militaries, governments, religions, families and businesses are all based on them. At some point along every route, things are contradictory, duplicitous, compromised, untrue. What is evil about error? Efficiency? Multiplicity? Complexity?
So if an image suits your message, whatever claims necessity, doesn’t it belong? Whether “yours” or not, it’s resonant, it “fits.” Illustrates the story. Well, part of it, at least as viewed from this position, this point-of-view, whichever wherever whomever is being highlighted NOW.
It is as easy to invent yourself as to paste a collage or learn your native language. Complex organisms utilizing contexts for their survival and adapting (sort of thing). Lizards do it, plants do it, animals and insects do it – all stay alive by subtle shifts and adaptations, presenting themselves as somethings they’re not (perhaps) – representation, quotation, mimicry – all situationally based…
We tell each other certain things (stories altering emphases with each recounting, each invention), behave in particular ways in particular environs, accept and follow various rules at various times of our days, because we have no consistent center, we are relative – relatives all of us – one to another, to our world – shifting, adapting, multiplicitous…each lie leading toward some aspect of what we name truth, like sides of a liquid coin.
Our trouble is that we are unable to be there and not be there, as we’d like to think. It’s all responsibility. Our flexibility, agility, ability to respond…organism to context like a movie screen flickering now this, now that, hold focus, here blur, this angle, these lights, little more information, tone down the emotion, play up the cheer, empathize, stand firm, show authority, be gentle, shift shift shift shift…perspective position your point-of-view. Highlight, accent, select…
Carpe Diem. Seize this moment, this day, be all that you can be (you’ve no idea how expansive and various that is! Well, you must have some idea as we watch you change, grow, reveal, conceal, suppress, express, etc…) duplicitously, positionally, shiftily. It’s easy to make up our own lives, to invent ourselves…
…we’re doing it all the time, everywhere.
‘Tis merely act-ing (being/doing/living) in the world!
All my Words are Silent 