Tag: self-awareness

Where Am I?

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

Where Am I?

“Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time; we’re forever meeting people who have watches, very seldom people who have compasses.  We always need to know what time it is (who still knows how to deduce it from the position of the sun?) but we never ask ourselves where we are.  We think we know…”

-Georges Perec-

 

            Feeling displaced, it seemed like the time had come to ask into it.

Judging by the quilted charcoal sky, this must have occurred in the hours between night and day or that malleable period in which what’s bright becomes the dark.

I discovered that I was uncertain as to where, indeed, I was.

 

I cast about, but given the diffuse and myopic atmosphere, my bearings were difficult to draw.

My question just grew longer.

 

Within the nondescript what seek we to describe?

 

My whereabouts.  For even about can provide a circumference of radial lines, fashioned carefully.

It seemed to me that I must have been partway.  Having begun some time ago, though ill-remembered, I must have set out in some direction, making this a point along that plane or trajectory, on the way to the someplace I am going.  But where?  Whereto?  And wherefrom?  (the brain adds wherefore?)

I’m uncertain.

Most people do certain things at certain times, so time must be a deed, I guess.  Needing neither to eat, nor to relieve myself, it must not be too early or late, nor a mealtime.  The dim and the greys, they confuse me.

The ground being solid, but whether a road or a path or a field lying fallow, I could not say.  A fogging has thickened and the chalky gravel pierced with grasses and weeds does not provide location.

The best I can wager is midst.  I appear to be in the midst of things:  of my life, of this land, of my journey and day (or evening) – beyond this it just is not clear.

 

By the look of my hands and my feet – we say “character” – it would seem I am no longer “young.”  Hair has grown dark in places, I have visible veins, and numerous scarrings and wrinkles.  I never expect them to grow and they haven’t for many years, yet they can’t be called webbed with their linings, nor aged.  The skin is tanned and supple, not spotted, the knuckles aren’t gnarly or constricted.  Improvement or beauty I do not anticipate, but it appears I am not quite undone, not decrepit.

I’d guess I am “over the hill,” as they say, but still in reach of my prime.  A certain flair or panache, but the style of the action requires more will.  And attention.  Strong, yet not powerful.  Active, not quite agile.  Competent, not convincing.

 

I sit down.  The weeds and the grass are grey-green, grown in tufts.  The gravel is packed and yet dusty.  The stones are not worn but all small.

I trace my palms over the surface.

My legs feel the pain of my back.

I rise up.

I would find it much easier to lean.

I step forth.

 

I smell no particular smells – almost rain, dusty remnants, a particular quality of air, but what?  (From where?)  Neither salted nor briny exactly, I must not be near to the sea.  Not fuelly or floral, musty nor pale, I scratch off city and countryside, forests or plains.  And not fertile.  The air is just as you’d imagine it wherever the sky meets the land – in the absence of obvious effects (are they causes?) – just me.

 

It hasn’t grown lighter, nor darkened.

I breathe.

From the sound of it (silent) and its fullness, my lungs must be doing their job, performing their roles without much complaint.  As also my heart and my brain, liver and plumbworks.  I think I may have heard insects or birds, but the distance so vast I’d fail to call the sense knowledge.  And I mentioned I cannot see far.  These conditions.

 

I’d say it’s uncanny – to find myself here – but that’s exactly what I cannot find.

 

I reach out.

I step forth.

I breathe in.

 

Where am I?

 

If my memory served, as to where I’d last been, such info would greatly assist me.  But the best I remember is “home,” and that has been so many places.

I spread my arms and slowly spin, they cut the air like freedom.  I feel like a ray of light or drop of rain, something passing quickly, staying still.  As if I belonged…

belonged just here…

but where…

…am I?…

 

(How long do I have?)

Inception

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

He with the mind meandering like the great rivers – those that function metaphorically for whole cultures and histories – the Taiga and Thames, Amazon, Euphrates, Danube, the Mighty Mississipp, and so on – along with all of the tributaries and streams, springs far removed, deltas and falls…

In that his mind has assimilated, absorbed particles of eons of blood, trash and shit, death and being born, creatures and passengers, landscapes and strata, wars and rumors of wars, nations and races and species…

he was the written word as a river, knowledge as a catch-all, depository, wealth and waste and millions of miles to tangle

the body being like this as well – billions of cells, some relatively foreign to others, some of entirely different types, all connected and held together somehow; “body” of water, of work, of being: arteries, capillaries, aminos, neurons, stems, DNAs, whole worlds of rivers, lakes and creeks.

Heidegger pictured it a hell of a journey through thickest forest – rivers do this – sometimes underground, the earth is filled with reservoir – to traverse the “open,” coming to a clearing, a stream wending its way in dry desert, mountain meadow, steppes and prairies…the surround is still denser than dense,

his mind become so, with awareness of the body, or mind as body, also mind matter stuff, indecipherable, inexplicable, barely described.

Yet all, so far, inscribed?  What little of all could be held.  Infinitessimal.  Finite.  In the face of infinity…relation.

Derrida’s abysme – a feeling, an unknowing, almost a certainty that “things will never be sorted out…” that the tiny wiggles over the mapped surfaces can never all be traced, all the planes, there is not time nor capacity, to follow thoroughly even an arbitrarily chosen segment of a smallest stream, constant movement from and toward, through, up and down, over, under, behind, before…abysme.

Untraceable traces.  Mind, emotion, sense, soul, causality discombobulated and befuddled beyond cognizance or comprehension, indeed – of what comprehension consists.

“Know thyself,” cruel riddle, as if spoken by a genuine god – something entirely Other, outside, impossible and impassible…the knowing cannot be known, or who knows it?  Is knowing it now, and then now?

The rivers do not know, they flow, happen.  God cannot know or not be a self/person in any way that corresponds with us – without not-knowing or abysming in endless spirals centrifugal and –tripetal.

Bakhtin sees the picture of us seeing pictures of what we do not see…all together…but we’re never all together and imagining is only one way to correspond.

It would require a miracle, yet it already is, he thinks – inexplicable, unprecedented, unaccounted for…kenotic theory, Forms and Chaos, quarks and atoms – nothing explained, ever re-described, only resolved in irresoluble faith – in theory, in truth.

And so on…mapping these rivers.

Oceans and the pooling of eyes, vast landscapes of fleshes, fragile impossible organs, tenuous and tenaciously flowing on, through drought, through death, flood and

“all things come about through opposition, and the universe flows like a river”

(Heraclitus)

                He with the mind meandering like great rivers and their effluvia…

Ghost-Love-Coherence

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

Ghost-Love: Natives of a Dwindled Sphere

 

“If it cohered,

cohered to you, if you were there, to say,

‘Oh, it is not the way we say it is,

not that.  Oh no; that way isn’t the way.’”

–William Bronk-

“We keep coming back and coming back

To the real…

…straight to the word,

Straight to the transfixing object.”

–Wallace Stevens-

“Fleeting,

they look for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke-

“No, we had come too far for that belief

and saw ourselves as ghosts against the real,

and time and place as ghosts; there is the real.

It is there.  Where we are: nowhere.  It is there.”

–William Bronk-

 

            If the real continued.  Continues, without us.  Without.  Tree, bird, house, river.  If.  As if.

 

If it cohered.  To you.  But for a moment, now here, where we are, if you and I cohered, making what is between us, what is real.

Eyes and what’s seen.  Hands and their touch.  Ears and the music, the noise (the silence).  And so on.  The real.  It is there.

You called?

I called.  Call.  Am calling.

“If it cohered, cohered to you, if you were there, to say,”

Where we are: nowhere.

Not the way we say.  I say.  You say.  Not the way it is.

There is the real.

We say to the angel.  The halfling.  The between.

“House. Pond. Flower. I. You. Platypus.”

“Oh, it is not the way we say it is, not that. Oh no,” you say.

But the word is.  There.  Transfiguring angel.  Figure marking the between, made between.  Nowhere.

Fleeting, transfixing object, what you say we say I say, what we write.

Straight to the object.

“that isn’t the way,” we say, “not the way we say it is”

But it is there.

We keep coming back and coming back

As if it cohered

We

To things.  Transfixing objects.  You.  Words.  Fleeting.  Now here.

We say to the angel, the between, “is it there?”

Half-cohere, half-cohere, wholly transfixed by the object, fleeting, in-between, being made?  You.  I.  It is there.

Is it there?  Where we are?  Now here.  Nowhere.

Half, tri-partite even.  Thus now then.  As if.

 

The fly is bothering me.  It lands.  I am thirsty.  It is gone.

 

You made an object.  It is there.  I am looking.  While I am looking there is paint, form, shape, rectangular, drips strokes runs splotches.  From here I imagine texture.  With my fingers, it is there.  Where I am.  If it coheres.  Between, meeting point, figuring angel.  Ghost of the real.

I smell.  I smell you.  Between my nose and you and me.  Nowhere.  The connective stroke between w and h is awkward, unmatched.  We have to make it.  Make it work.  Cohere.  Happen.  Fleeting.  Fabricate.

It is there.  Between my eye and the page: “wh” “Nowhere” is there.  Cursive broken.  Either way.  Visual puzzle.  Ancient.  Reader supplying breath breaks tone punctuation.  Reader punctuating piercing, when I listen, ears to your lips, to your voice, I perforate, puncture, separate, we make.  It is there.  Angel.  Between.  As if it cohered, me to you, if you were there, to say “Oh it is not that way” as I punctured it, broke it down, chewed to fragments.  Fragments (fleeting) it is there.  Hands, voices, bodies, where we are, suture, stack, come back and come back, house.  Conversation.  Fence.  Pool.  Kiss. Nowhere.  As if.  Angel.

In a perfect world…”Oh it is not the way we say it is, not that”

“No, we had come too far for that belief”

Fleeting fleeting fleeting and coming back coming back

here

 

 

There is no coming back, either to nowhere or now

But the word.  Transfixing object.  Painting.  House.  Yard.  Bed.

 

Squirrel on the trunk, I swallow, skitters away.  Not there.  It is not the way I say it is, not now.  Except this: if you go straight to the word, it is there.

 

Painting, photo, body, voice – transfixing objects – if it cohered, cohered to you, if you were there

If I was, I am, now here.

You are not.  Now you are.  Words, the real, I keep coming back and coming back, writing

You are.  You are.  You are.

 

I hold the page close.  I look.  Youareyouareyouare, I puncture, punctuate, I wonder if it coheres, cohered, if you were there, will be, the words are, the page, a barely thing, ghost of a horizon line held straight to the eye, nothing between eye and edge, very little, almost nothing, but I see, see something

It is not the way we say it is, oh no, not that,

but we keep coming back, coming back, saying again, each time new, different, again, same words, written they are there, angel, we are, we are, we are, nowhere, now here, if it cohered.

Writing: the Blocks

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing5 Comments

Writing: the Blocks

“and everything here like an incomprehensible explanation”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

 

There are those times of overwhelm.  Edit?  Create?  Organize?  Submit?  Wander about (for “inspiration”)? or sit and stare (“meditation”)?

There are those times.  So much written, nothing sold.  Years of working, thinking, learning, feeling…orphaned.  Turned away.  Left out.  Sent back.

Rejection.

Here’s the open field and some more ever-uncertain time.  Feels fragile.  I feel I should be making, arranging words toward unknown meanings or inferences, but I’m also drowning in them – so many of my own, millions of others as well.  Approved words, theirs, successful words, words now “bound,” where mine (I try the positive) are “free,” “independent,” “loose”… not owned by any other hands or minds.

But the words seem to want it.  They emit their own desires.  For partners, for dances, for strolls.  Attachment.  They even like to work!  Anything at all – they just want to be, active.

Mine aren’t.  They jimmied their way around my emotions and spleen; infested every nook, cranny and fold of my brain; strained my throat and cramped my hand…but once I’d rid myself of them – sealed them between the bars of blue lines, they began to wither and starve.  Atrophy.  My words – these voiceless victims.

They’ve got plenty of company all lined up and folded together – hell, they’re stacked on top of each other…but they need human parts for life.  Need eyes and mouths, lungs and ears, hands and minds, perceptors, receivers and nerves.  I look down on them all like leaves from last winter, or hidden away in mausoleum-like drawers.  I feel sorrow.

There are zillions of others – exactly the same as mine but for their order – speeding all over the world – through wires and lights – through voices, canals – held gently in hands – slick and shiny on mags – proclaimed on billboards and signs.  But not mine.  Not these innumerable identical versions but for my script, my experience, my faulty manipulation.

What gives?

What gives at these moments, these gulag-ish terms of withholding and stasis?

A letter or email perhaps.  A talk with my wife or my sons or my daughter.  A glance at a spine or a page.  Some music with lyrics.  A friend.  They are moving, alert.  Every-ready for use.  In use.  Wording their function.  My continued submissions might be jail-breaks for them.  My blogs and my posts and my readings.  The phone calls.  We could try it?  See how they still work?

Or even something like this.  This query of what do they want?  Working them into myself.  Materializing them.

I don’t know.  I don’t know if it helps.  I can’t tell at this moment.  They seem stuck.  And yet not.  Here they are, ever coming, ever becoming, nothing.

Like us.  Maybe I’m stuck.  Becoming nothing (inevitably) but becoming nonetheless, all the while.

I guess I’m suggesting that there’s really no such thing as stasis or block in living beings.  Regardless what or who or how, we’re becoming (the 5 Ws all taken care of).  Now & Here all five essential questions are active whether I write down answers or not.  As long as we breathe.  Work is going on.

And words, so eagerly activated.

N Filbert 2012

Writing: the Characters

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Writing1 Comment

Writing: the Characters (1)

 

Not beginning from anywhere but here.

Here being where I am looking for a character, a someone, and specific, with a mind, a body, and particular knowledge and actions, whom I might observe and record.  On whom I might test out my language.  Whom I create.

Exercise in perception, then.  To see what I could see, perhaps, if I looked a certain way, at or into a certain person.  What I might hear, and how to say it.  What would be felt and its work of translation.  The smells and the tastes and the histories, for both of us.  Or perhaps even all.  No, that’s too far.

Right here, though, investigating perception, that preform vehicle, formed by our surroundings – imagination – the multiplex of learning structures allowing me to sense, to perceive.  That also, is here.

Imagination and perception – their invention we call world, and a character, a subject/object like my hand I might observe, hold aside of me while attached by nerves and cells, tissues and blood, by life, its embodiment.

Non-abstract abstracted – that conundrum – here.  The truthfulness of experiencing becoming honest lies.  The words, the print of hand, what tells (or who), and how.

Perhaps another thinks this way?  Well, not exactly, but shares concerns with idiomatic nuances?  Perhaps his education (or hers) was difficult, or pleasurably a breeze, they mastered information like a large and thirsty sponge?  Absorbed and were absorbed in such interstitial structures.  Or not.  Not at all.

An uneducated person with adaptive gifts for resonance.  A mimicking trickster riddling what is heard into naïve and complex wisdoms?  That would be fun.

Perhaps another world – country, continent, planet?  Someone observed for years suddenly inserted in a strange context, situation.  How do they behave, react, manage and survive?  I could use myself in a planet of clouds, or the tunnels of worms, what would characterize me?  How would I change?  What might I effect?  If I were made of clay or had a thousand lovers in a desert?

The only edge to possibility is what experience brings.

 

But pretending to begin right now, I see him clear.  There is a woman he is watching he finds beautiful.  When she works he sees the curve of her small breast which he desires.  He is ruddy yet refined, of middling age.  He’d like to court her but fears all pain that can’t be bandaged.  He’s afraid of words and their millions of ropes and anchors.  Reality feels like conflict, for him, a continual coming-against, and adjustment.  Adaptation he experiences as loss.  Of unrealized ideals.  And so he walks, spinning narratives in his head.

 

Here, that possible visitor handmade.  But who?  And how would I know him?  And where was he from?  How was he formed?  Who does he belive?  And so forth…

One way to be here.

One way to press your hand against the wall.

 

 

 

An Opinionated Review

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Uncategorized6 Comments

Eat.  Pray.  Love.

 

On a wonderful jaunt to our public library yesterday, my wife spotted a movie based on a mega-bestselling memoir that she’d been curious to see since its release a couple of years ago.  We checked it out and viewed it last night in hopes of a light, relaxing fare to happy us toward slumber.

It was excruciating.  My first reaction was – can a person’s biography truly resemble such a cliché’d American self-realization mythology?  Basically a woman goes on a journey away from her responsibilities to others to “find” or “heal” herself, in the process (and apparently justifiably since it delivers her to a goal of peace, happiness, pleasure and love with a seasoning of spirituality) wrecking others’ lives and forgiving herself for it, ending in the arms of a handsome foreigner on a tropical island with some standard religious “truths” in tow.

Here are things I realized about myself:

I am suspicious of personal pleasure that causes others pain.

I am oh-so-glad and grateful that I grew up in a reserved Western culture with Continental philosophy and theologies at its roots.  I much prefer battling to wisdom and calm through the frenetic and anxiety-ridden vertigo of a convoluted mind ferociously doubting and investigating than through some “be here now” philosophies of higher unities and cosmic accord.  Rather interrogate now than “let go” and “let be.”  I am attached to the workings of our brains and our languages, pestering perception and scrutinizing sense experience with imaginative and skeptical rationales.

I radically doubt “gurus,” “prayer,” “saviors,” and other spiritual or “wholistic” practices of “balance” that accomplish “goals.”  Outcome-based anything feels totalitarian and programmatic and therefore facile to me, as if there were a form or behavior we might fit ourselves to that would lessen the struggle or suffering of “to be.”

The film’s story took a year’s time, replete with life-changing habits of mind and body and some claimed resultant growth.  As if wisdom came from Apple or McDonald’s.  The past was hardly processed, responsibilities released like thoughts during Zen, and no effort to apologize or repair any damage or hurts the main character had caused those close to her along the way (thank goodness no children were involved!).

It was the time-tested failure of the American Dream: do what you want to get yourself comfortable in your own skin (whatever beliefs, illusions and experiences that might seem to require) and everything will be alright in your world.

I simply don’t buy it.  And I won’t.  If we are socially constructed realities (and my point-of-view on the cosmos supports this) then final import is not in a self, but in a system.  Not toward results but a how of processing.  Not a personal calm or pleasantness but a social accord.

The film made me terrifically thankful for scrutiny and doubt, fervent self-questioning in light of surroundings, and the “wisdom of no escape.”  It just goes on.

For what it’s worth,

here lies a steaming pile of my opinions.

N Filbert 2012

A Parable

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

A Parable

Perhaps one day you will ask for something that you want but do not need, or even need but don’t quite understand.  On a lark, let’s say, out of a “why not?” not exactly exasperation nor as fueled as curiosity, almost a simple value, who knows, but perhaps you do.

How will they respond to your free request (a spontaneity without expectation) now having burdened them with options?  You had thought it a gift, an eruption, a “no harm done,” “nothing to lose,” but of course, in the world, there is more.

So your request floats out, on the air, like a streamer, swaying and curving, rippling past the subjects to which it’s addressed.  For some it’s a slap, for others a trial, still others just dodge it and head for silent hills.

You had thought it a good, an offering of joy, a connection and possibility, not something to wind or to bind.  Never something so knotty.  A kind of safe enclosure that’s open, a meadow of sorts, where gentle counterparts might convene when they wanted or needed and whomever appeared could relate.

But in order to appear each required a turn, of attention, of glance, of an ear – to surmise and to meet, to attend.  Bodies incapable of severance.  Could they send an arm, an eye, a knee or other organ, they happily would, provided it would not be missed any elsewhere (their “here”) – and this proved impossible.

One respondent, upon lending a hand, was not able to help his young son tie his shoes.  Another offered her hair only to find herself fired from her workplace.  Each was affected by your generous request while you were left with dismembered parts in your park.

Unintentional, no doubt, you found as well that it was not spare fragments you were needing for your want.  The severed hand grew stiff and cold under your knees; the hair like strands of sand in the night on your chest.  The smells were changing.  The eyes you’d assembled were distracted, neither here nor there the parts were failing.

In an awkward flashing of a dream a teacher’s voice arrived with cliché: “be careful what you wish for.”  You’ve been waking to that for awhile.

So Rich and Rewarding in their Own Unique Ways!

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading3 Comments

Favorite sourcings of mine

and pleasures

both INTENSELY recommended for readers and thinkers alike

(are those one and the same?)

Mark Marking Marks

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, WritingLeave a comment
Cy Twombly

Mark Marking Marks

“oh it’s working, it’s magic, each word lifts me up, takes me away from here,

from this nothing; I feel…I am…speak always, Maybegenius.”

–Macedonio Fernandez–

Writing as the ‘Talking Cure’

As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, – ?

WHAT IS REAL?

            As long as I keep talking to myself, even better the inscribing, using matter somewhat foreign to myself, like this plastic pen, this sheet of paper, this blue ink…I am providing myself with evidence.  A humming continuity, a series of marks, a silent sounding breathed into air.

But when unable?

As long as I keep telling myself these stories, Mark thinks, – ?  then what – ?  why – ?

There is evidence that I am here, he says to himself, marking it down.  Marks make Marks, he supposes, I am, at least as far as the reach of this pen, and I stay, at least longer than my thoughts, he thinks.

Mark got tattoo’d.  He did so for evidence, a permanence.  They said it could not be undone.  So he had them spit into his skin the names of those who had changed him, affected.  As if to say, to go on and on saying, these, these existed for me, in and on me, these folks made impressions that made impressions on me, therefore I must, yes, it logically follows, here – you can see them can you not – ?, it logically follows that I must exist – to have these names, these titled and organized and permanent woundings of names, of those who existed (it’s attested by many), so it follows, it must, with them pierced in my arms, that I, too…

If it all keeps on talking, these whispering names, the sound of my voice, the terms in my head, and if I work to make it real, as an object, if I chisel or stencil or ink it to the world, then surely it must testify on my behalf – I was here!  I am here!  I’ve left my Mark!  Mark marking Mark – a declare!

Or so he is thinking through his days, through his life or lives, through his odd and self-imposing tormenting sort of fear, of worry.

Am I?

To no effect?  he wonders – ?

Mark often fears he’s interchangeable.  Or worse.  Perhaps another boy would have been a better son, left a fuller name, a more remarkable mark than – ?.  Another man a truer spouse and more sensitive or empathetic, more evolved or more mature than his straggly droopy heavy brain of a – ?.  A more substantial father with clearer love and direction, firmer hands, readier tears – ?.  Mark was aware they were out there.  They’d been fellow students, inhabited stories and novels and other people’s lives.  Why were his people stuck with the – ?.  His nagging mark, so often read right over as innocuously as a comma or period.  Weren’t they looking for content not a pause or an absence?  A man marked by inquiry?

But if I leave here some trail strewn round my desk, this floor all these cupboards, perhaps at some point they will see I was here!  I am!  And I was watching and listening, loving and feeling them all.  Spending myself and my worries in this strange attempting to trace and to hold, to keep and remember their details, their effects, my responding.

Someday shuffling through or perhaps clearing out, maybe they’ll stop, pause, question and wonder.  Who was this man?  Where was he?  When?  How?  Why?

What did he do think make say?  And perhaps they’ll find these markings.  Perhaps they won’t have burned or mouldered away, and all these messaging reports, all these processings and accounts will come to mean, to have significance, these bird-routes of scratches and marks, dashes dots lines, this pouring forth of constructing an identity against with the world…

As long as I keep speaking, Mark thinks, possibly –

– ? –

Remarking Mark…Part the Second

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing3 Comments

Mark Marking Questions

“Man is a riddle.  Our complex relation to others may also be affected by our fascination with this riddle…Origin means, perhaps, question”

–Edmond Jabes–

 

“Writing as the ‘talking cure’

he thought, thinking in language what he thought language might do.  Be doing.  To him.

He heard “why?,” a term learned early in order to learn, and thenceforward laid over nearly everything he read, encountered, overheard or stumbled across, as if it were his placeholding destiny in some infinitely progressing equation simplified “world.”

He’d read he needed other persons and things, places and times to know his own.  – “Why?”

He’d heard “until others acknowledge or teach you your shape, your ideas, what you see what you feel what you taste or speak or hear, your perceptions and scope, you won’t be aware of a thing.  You’ll have no ideas or sensations per se, you’re essentially Nothing without Them.”

Arching his back and shrieking a sound at an absence of breast: “why?”

“I guess I’m just punctuated that way,” he came to think, as he adapted vocabulary.  “My role in a sequence is: – ?”

“And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was…” well, maybe – ?

“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao…” well, maybe –  ?

“1 + 1 = 2,” well….maybe – ?

“You are Mark, a male form of a human animal, replete with these working organs, the English language, and certain beliefs.  These are your parents, your sibling, your probable friends.  Here are some feelings, some expressions and thoughts.  Here are your words.”  Well.  Maybe – ?

Shaped with letters and numbers and sounds.  Voices and touchings and feels, he became, slowly, surely, puttied toward a recognizable form – perceptible to others, acknowledged, even affirmed or engaged from time to time.

“Why?” propelled the lengthening problem of life but never grew toward solutions.

He read elaborate explanations and descriptions as he borrowed more languages.  Spiritual terms, medical terms, words scientific, political, philosophical and intimate.  Thick reams of median symbols asking to be joined or embraced, understood or imbibed.

Mark enjoyed these fabrics, and found a belonging among them.  Layers and theories, emotions and dreams – he simply need append his simple gesture – ?

 

Trouble, in the form of discomfort or pain, of disjunction, arose when agreement was desired.  Explicitly or implicitly, this undermined his form.  In situations where reciprocation or statement, some firm relation was called out for, his questioning mark failed to serve.  Choices, commitments, integrities or beliefs turned to drizzle around his definitive (self-identified) symbol.

“I love you,” she wooed.  “-?-“ he replied.  “I cannot know what you mean, what your language portends, I am unable to verify why?” he’d respond.  To collapse and retreat.

Even thoughts and decisions were questioned and split open on his sharp weapon of a mark.  He was not trusted or deemed trustworthy as doubt was perceived an anomaly.

He remained uncertain.

Self-perceivably, he reliably questioned, he’d respond and then take it away with his mark, his “signature move” as it were, his undoing.  “Yes I will…” “This I think…” “I am…” always followed by his -?- (which sounded like “why?” in the air) and found no rationale that could not be further put to query.

The world was unstable as well as a “self” for him.  All under the branding shadow of “why?”  This Mark never outgrew in all his adaptations, acquisitions, mutations and metamorphoses.  His certain core of uncertainty.  His permanent doubt.  His oxymoronic reality of being, not-being -?-

They perceive him – they really do – but as full of content with no substance; as possible and capable yet a great risk; as veritably human but unnamed from within.  Without “identity.”  This is true even of his wife and his children, parents and friends, all unsure who or what they are relating to, marked with the sign of the -?-  The indeterminate one, the questionable and uncertain, the duplicitous and vague, are various ways he is read and conceived – standing there as he does on his tiny spot of here, long-legged and stooped as in prayer, or inquiry – ? –