Tag: self-awareness

The Bewildered Bewildering (attempts toward clear thinking)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

Searching for truth(s)

As one attempts to come nearer to one’s existence as a human – its systems, structures and functions – from mental imaginative realms down to cellular genetic levels – the complexity and confluences involved can be bewildering.

Are bewildering.

It is easy to get one’s self “lost” as a human being.  On literally billions of levels we participate in constant (and I mean unceasing) input and output of information, movement, form, energy and so on.  It’s more than we can individually handle.  Yet we are made to.

In other words, it is we as individual humans – our bodies, our minds and experiences – doing the bewildering we find bewildering.  Perhaps this is my first noble truth: consciousness means being aware of and bewildered by our bewilderment.

How to proceed?  There are a bewildering amount of possibilities and processes for us bewildered humans to bewilder our way into.  We can study, forge purposeful relationships, work, play, think, dream, parent, fight or flee our bewilderment.  Opened up, we do not know the options or capabilities, the extent our bewilderment can reach.

Everything is strange.  If this were my second noble suggestion, it would imply that with each moment of our existence we are encountering the unknown.  We recognize our existence by dissimilarity, non-identity, difference.  This makes all things new.  We literally have never been where we are in space, time or living at any instant, before.  We do not re-live, we are ever living-into.  The contents of the past can become part of our structuring and processing, but nothing repeats, everything “enters.”  Each no-time now is brand new experience of unknown reality, experienced, imagined, interpreted, perceived and felt by us in incalculable ways through a vortex of communications and processes we have very little control over.

We, the producing products.  Perhaps this is noble human notation number 3.  What happens in our bewilderment of presentness is that our individuality opened out ubiquitously functions to produce experiences which are products of our experiencing.  In other words we are unceasing experimentors producing experiences as our products.  It all applies; it all exports.  There are no deletions, erasures or extractions – only new experiences, new dissimilar moments of ongoing processing.

There is no exit from this process.  Form 4: NO EXIT.  Imagined observation, fabricated explanation, hypothetical objectivity, invented theories, meanings, interpretations of sense – none of these removes us from our experiencing or transfers us to any other point-of-view from our individual field.  Bewildering in our bewildering surround.  Semblances, “insights,” knowledge and so on are just pieces of the ongoing differentiation in bewilderment.  How we exist, perhaps not the ant or paramecium or tree cell.  But, then again, perhaps so!

If a lion spoke we wouldn’t understand them, Wittgenstein proffered.  Another way of saying we’re us, bewildered and bewildering beasts, forging into the unknown.  Our access limiting in its unlimitedness (i.e. finitude); systematically mind-blowing and ecstatically depressing in an awe-full or awe-some(?) way.

Be human.  Be glad for it.  Be wilder.

N Filbert 2012

The Howl and The Whisper

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Poetry, Writing1 Comment

Howling is a buried feat

epigenetic

leaking everywhere

Howling is done with the body

in terror

 a raging fear

imagine the reddened and purpling frame

a six-month-old baby left

naked on a hardwood floor

arching back

jerking tremors

piercing wail

flailing, throttling, choking at air

it will not stop

it is vulnerable.

Say the father rushes it

say he scoops it into his arms

whispers and cradles

The infant fits in the fathers’ large hands

held close to his cheek

ear-brushed lips

the father coos

infant trembling revolts

feeling its death

the father rocks it gently

kisses its skin

sniffing the child

while the infant howls.

He says “leave it to me.  Everything will be alright”

on repeat

says “I know we are vulnerable”

as the shuddering

comes to cease.

Let the infant howl

raise it up

bring it near

hold it close

that is all.

I, an infant’s father.

note:

I have had many incidents of late in which I howl at the dreaded prospect of losing my wife (to others, to distance, to death, to herself).  These have come out slantwise:  as anger or jealousy, criticism and challenge.  It is physiological.

A therapist recently suggested some alternate meanings.  When my body convulses in paranoia and terror, what might its messaging be?  Might it be saying that something or someone is terribly important to me, as significant as my own life and that I might well feel utterly helpless at that vulnerability?  He suggested that my body is indeed feeling real-life threat…and that the left side of my brain whooshes in hoping to rescue (“SuperMeaningMan”) to concoct a story to match, to account for the tremors and heartbeat and anxious breaths.  Things like: “I must not be good enough for her.  She must be cheating.  See how she dresses?  See how she is tired when she looks at me?  See how she keeps leaving the house?” and so on, or any number of scenarios…

When in possible fact I’m a flailing infant desperate for assurance and comfort, for a tender voice near.  Which made a world of sense.

He said:  supply it.

This is part of that work.

N Filbert

ALL MIXED UP

Mark Kozelek

Remarking Mark Remarking

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing5 Comments

Greetings readers.  I’ve been in a bit of a swirl or “swarm” of information, activity, relation and language of late, nothing wrong with it really, but its producings have seemed a bit ephemeral, inchoate, more wisps than winds.  Yesterday as I sat to work, a new character introduced himself to my scribbling hand…here’s a sort of mock-up or intro to that relation.  I’d love to hear what you think?  Is he interesting?  Are his thoughts?  Should he live?  🙂

Thank you SO much, each viewer and reader for taking time out of your lives which must be as busy as the rest of us, to listen and look at my blog and my work.  This community has significantly grown my courage.

Remarking Mark Remarking

(please click on title for full text – thanks!)

Borrowed, but WOW! BAM! (and I’ll regale you no more!)…

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

“‘The omniscient observer,’ Dala said continuing for them out of another day, ‘reads from the first word to the last with great care for the spaces between them so they are unframed by enthusiasts or detractors”

-Louis Zukovsky, from Little“

MAY WE ALL READ THIS WAY!

New Arrivals…New Invaluables

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Photography, Poetry, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

“meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we’d become from the language toxin…

The know-it-alls are always the last to know.  Everyone’s a diagnostician, and everyone’s wrong…”

-Ben Marcus-

“As is usual with me I would not go on with the rest of the story and come back to the difficult sentence later.  With others it may be different – but when I am that far in a work the story must exist in each word or I cannot go on…”

-Louis Zukofsky-

-Lukas Felzmann-

I know….there’s a LOT of envy fuming out of you readers eyes!

(use your local library!)

Swarm. Absorb. (the words, pt. 2)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Photography, Poetry, Writing2 Comments

Swarm.  Absorb.

 

metaphor:  the entire discography of Mark Kozelek (+ Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) / each version of Max Richter’s “Haunted Ocean” on dizzying random repeat – this is the setting:  atmosphere.  environment.  “context.”

metaphor:  the Kansas sky in storm

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

            metaphor:  dealing with Ache.  (“being human”)

metaphor:  “Control without Hierarchy” by Deborah M. Gordon…on some page in a book called Swarm by Lucas Felzmann:

“A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something that people don’t know how to do: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer.  It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies…Life in all its forms is messy, surprising, and complicated.  It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy.  We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions.  Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs – without any person directing another, or having more power than another.  Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in nature.”

think of language.

            what is scattered widely or uniquely ubiquitous – call it “swarm.”

“I”…lost.

I know I cannot gather to a grown pillar of I-ness, something you might recognize, could “identify.”

I know I cannot be where I am as long as “time” and “space” function effectively in my frames of reference…

I spread.

I swarm.

“I-swarm”

(the “human” world-situation)

            Leaving that aside.

How might one (dependent on two or more in order to, well, in order to simply “be”)

how might that one (singular mark – “/”) handle (manage? survive?) “its” Ache?

“To be or not to be, that IS the question”

(o wise god)

            So I split…up…

I canvas the sky, the context, the landscape, the sitz im leben, in fragments.

I approach, engage, invade the world like shot scattered from the anguished burst of a wombgun.

I-particle.

I-swarm.

Absorb.

from “Swarm” by Lukas Felzmann

            Seminal-syllable words resound –

– Let their pulse reverberate your bodies like hymns –

God.  Void.  I.  You.  Song.  Life.  Death.  Love.  Real.  Being. (Not).

and so on…

all with no definition…

IS.  IT.  THIS.

nowhere near

where we mean to be.

Absorb.

Swarm.

from Swarm by Lukas Felzmann

            In this situation then,

of too much

of grave luck

(all that hope and final destitution)

I swarm.  I absorb.

I decenter.  I explode.

I desist in pretense

in sense

I spread.

One mark….thousands of pixels….without hierarchy

(a swarm of cells)

(a flock of birds)

(a fish in school)

I swarm.

I absorb.

[ – I love you – ]

 -for my wife

This is Water

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy, Traces, WritingLeave a comment

I found myself in a fairly uncommon (for me) setting this morning, my son was performing a Double Concerto of Bach‘s at a Methodist Church.  I happened to be there (reading Larry Levis) on “graduation Sunday,” so the message/sermon/interpretation of texts was geared toward the cultivation of wisdom.  As I listened to the suggestions/advice of a “spiritual authority” figure, to our young/privileged/promising…I was struck again by my personal favorite commencement address I’ve ever come across/heard/read and thought given the Spring of things perhaps it was time to push it out toward eyes and ears wherever I could, again.

Here it is…by a personal hero David Foster Wallace… (and therefore in his honor as well)

THIS IS WATER

Some Stellar Instigations

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Writing3 Comments

“Multiple incompatible hypotheses are needed to provide an adequate account of any phenomenon – aesthetic, material or psychological… which of course means no explanation at all”

–Charles Bernstein–

“All literature, highbrow or low, from (at least) the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction…All novels are sequels; influence is bliss”

–Michael Chabon–

“You must talk with two tongues, if you do not wish to cause confusion”

–Wyndham Lewis–

“Unknowing does not come before knowing but very long after”
-Edmond Jabes-

“Human speech is made of words that have been created a long time ago; those words are preserved in dictionaries, but poets and writers change”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“I wanted to read.  Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.”

-Alan Jacobs-

And so it begins…again…beginning within…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Traces, Writing2 Comments

Starting Out

 

And so it begins, as it so often does, begun long ago.

With the tone of a quest – an inception, a conflict, a cure.  Anxieties of disillusionment and fear, inadequacy and doubt, peppering the path.  But hopes too, and promise – what seem like successes or substance occur ascend along the way.  Perhaps desire with approximations of love, and frustrations translated to passion or anger.  Always there is grief and loss, what marks out time, and makes our days memorable.  Why we attend at all, the keeping track and transformations, insistent process of our undoing.

For once arrived in the scene, what else is there but the variegated haul to a destined demise?  Is it, then, always the “same ol’” fresh story?  A posited entity, a series of markings – accruals and deletions – to the closure of cessation?  What else might be told?  To what purpose?

There are moments, you say, moments of pause or release, elation or tragedy that form knots in the threads.  These might be dislocated to some profit, no?  At least for the living?

Midstream, and in motion you might trace it, you say, inscribing what’s open, what opens…emergence itself.  The clutter that punctuates being – its in-forming and injury?

Perhaps.  To guide others along possible pitfalls or options; to preserve instants and subjects; to fuel or to warn.  Perhaps.  Or simply to dream, to escape the inevitable awhile – what’s wrong with that?  That we in the glory and grind take a break, imagined or not, and drift or pursue, engage or elope to some alternate, parallel course?

What is: possible.

All of it is.  The values are relative, individuated.  Personal.  There’s no accounting for taste or of preference to dwell.  The matter hardly matters, after all, can be apparently “explained” (see also – epigenetics, chaos, theory and the like).  How we journey or survive, become or desist is an isolate concern.  Effecting all.

And there’s the rub, this sense of pattern, of system, of interconnectivity.  The impression that all might belong.  It won’t be long.  Insufficient gravity and incommensurate propulsion.  And so we move, arrange, derange, seeking for forms like the banks, or directions like currents.  We flow.  And it begins again, beginning within, as it always does, begun so long ago…

N Filbert

Writing Rejections (on the rejection of several more submissions)

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing11 Comments

Self-Soothing

 

The drudgery of dawning – sometimes so elegant and enlightening, sometimes belabored and torturous impatience – always the heavy friction of waves.  Of particles as they place and displace in their constant rearrangement, the permanent battle of hope and resignation.  Rising up, coming down.

How I write about disappointments – the very act of writing an urgent inking of the sky, even while it fades or darkens, glares or washes out.

Of rejections – their steady dismissal, the missed sunrise/sunset – a glory of chance forever undone.  Overlooked.  “Wrong place at the wrong time.”

In other words, again.  That waves and particles eons-old rumble and bumble about around and against one another, often contrary impulses and contents dislodging, jockeying, a kind of dance seen from extremely close or far enough away, making out of blue or black a purpled-grey tinged greenish pink and orange; or a bleeding scrape of burgundy’d magenta replete with yellowing sears.

Straining can produce glorious things.

The continuous waffling betwixt bright and ominous, stars glittering through their winky charms, or a saturate void.  White dreaming pale translucence or deeper colors leaking through.  It never stops, the gradients without lines.  So I continue in the way that I flow, waves and particles of me assembling/reassembling and what results is what the friction sparks – disappointments and the hope to write them out.