Tag: self

Light, as a feather

On By NW FilbertIn Art, creative writing, friendship, Image, Perception, Photography, Traces, Writing5 Comments
Lee_Light Feather 2018
unfixed photographic print of a feather – gift from Summer Lee

How seeing depends… opacity, clarity… foggy horizons between tumultuous sea and sky…

Light, as a feather – the dawn in darkness, or the hoping carrying despair.

What is seen, then?  What fore- or back- grounds an image?  How?  In mist, in motion.  In a dream that waking brings.

In which direction, grounding?  And wherefore?  Lightness limning itself again, again, in midst of darker swells and slighter traces.

How seeing depends… on light, the eye, the stimmung – the stemming of mood – and graver swirls… beg-ins and sets-out from.  Within.  Without.  Finding curious concord.  Even when there’s barely there.  Either.

Deepens, depends, opens out, away, in deep ends, hollow holing, turbulent tunnels, seeing unseen, a groping for/in light where none.  Peering is something, as the closing of the eyes – telescopic blindfold.

Perhaps dawn is down, where despair is rising.  Hope precipitating beyond eithers, or… differences imperceptible save the seeing…

How seeing depends… and deepens with what is searched for, what wants, who opens,  what feels, within each where-when, becoming there-thens, seeing how.

It begins, then, all seeing, between.  Bounding back-forth in light and light and any weighted things, ever shifting seeing-sea and emptied sky, re-membering differences to seamlessness, with opaque clarity, as such your “I.”

Lee Letter 2018
Text included with photograph – Summer Lee 2018

“Internal Monologue” (Virno)

On By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, Experimenctes, fiction, fragments, Language, meaning, Perception, Semiotics, Writing5 Comments

“Thoughts constituted by non-uttered words…This monologue always – ‘I speak’”

Paolo Virno – Word Became Flesh

“its thisness, then, cannot be fully articulable since any such articulation would require the articulation of a complete context, which in all cases is the world…often the experience includes an awareness of not being able to give an account of the this”

Jan Zwicky – Wisdom & Metaphor

“457. Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone”

Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations

“…I wept up to a great age, never having really evolved in the fields of affection and passion, in spite of my experiences”

Samuel Beckett – Malone Dies

“to frame the unsayable, & mute the sayable… he was the singing and the no one there…”

Larry Levis – The Darkening Trapeze

“All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel – or rather by several characters”

Roland Barthes – Roland Barthes

*****************

– I believe I told them that “all language was like a metaphor” in several characters.

I heard nothing, I said to myself, as if nothing were something that might be heard.

Still I stroked her ankle, index-finger-pad to delicate-bird-bone.  And lip.  Finding textures and surfaces with lips and tongue.  Precarious…it never lasts.  Taste and touch are like that [metaphor] immediate.

Am I speaking when I write?  What is happening now?

Several characters.

– “often the experience…includes an awareness of not being able…” (J. Zwicky)

She tasted of…

“…to give an account of the this…” (Zwicky)

…coffee grounds, sandalwood, humidity, and turquoise…

I left off my exploring.

What is it like [metaphor] to…?

I told them that ‘I speak’ is a metaphor…as is indeed all the rest having to do with language.

(consolations of philosophy)

I hear nothing when I talk with myself. [metaphors].

The sounds of flying a kite.

It’s rare that I am naked.  But “yes: meaning is like going up to someone” (L.W.)…some sort of connection is made (some convergent affect) and a resolution leaks open…resonance…endlessly (perhaps).

“I wept up to a great age”…by which we always mean the aggregate…which seems quite less than my ‘great age’, if ever there was one.

What is ‘great’ like? [metaphor]

Once I was younger…

– Always wished you’d known –

Are photographs metaphors?

I said that ‘nothing made is like.’

(“in spite of my experience”)

“Did I say I only say a small proportion of the things that come into my head?” (ontology of perception) (Samuel Beckett)

I intended to quote: “It is a pretty little object, like a – no, it is like nothing” (Samuel Beckett)

But what is ‘nothing’ like?  A “pretty little object”?

We know what he means (“like going up to someone”) … I was naked, I tasted.

You know the story… “I wept up to a great age.”  I touched, I tried, I felt.

What do you see?

Hardly ever the point.  Perception + Reflection = Imagination (perhaps) I told them – it’s a metaphor – a “crossing-over,” some traversal.  The trace of sweat behind her knee just above the calf.

Once I was alive.

I crossed over.

Several characters: ‘I speak.’

“Affection.  Passion.” I said.  (what I had thought it was ‘to learn’ [metaphor]).

– “in spite of my experience” –

Perhaps language wasn’t made for speaking.

Someone.  Somewhere.  Maybe.  Here.  Now.

That thing that words do [metaphor].

The “experience of this”…”non-uttered words.”  Non-utterable?  Perhaps, this.  (I traced the swerve of her, its curvature, hair-smell and sounding…’I speak,’ non-uttering…)

What is writing?

I believe I was speaking of metaphor…

Something crossed-over.

Nothing.

“Yes,” I said, “yes…” “it’s always alright to weep.”

Alias Harlequin – Identities

On By NW FilbertIn Art, being, Complexity, creative writing, Experience, Experimenctes, family, fiction, fragments, identity, Language, relationship, Self, Semiotics, Uncertainty, Writing3 Comments

Picasso_Harlequin sketch

“To recognize yourself in… To multiply your likenesses”

-Edmond Jabes–

And what do you suppose it is to be a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” human?  To be named?  Alias Harlequin?

What do you suppose it might be like to be “Ida Sophia Lind Filbert”?  “Jada Lynette Smith”?  “Oliver Myshkin”?

“Hallie Noel Linnebur”?

“Tristan Rene Wells Filbert”?  “Simon H. Lilly”?  “Aidan Stafford”?  “Herman Melville”?  “Paul Feyerabend”?  “Rachel S. Como”?  “Paul O’Callahan”?  “Meghan Miller”?  “Jim H. Charles?”  “Warren Charles Farha”?  “Amanda Marie Lind”?  “Fernando Pessoa”?

A cow.  A particular cow – an Hereford – on a particular plot of land in Mitchell County, Kansas?

“Plato”?  “Kathy Downes”?  “Ortho Stice”?  A Welsh Corgi “Tippy”?  “Napoleon Bonaparte”?  “Charles S. Peirce”?  The clerk at the grocery store?  “Christopher Fynsk”?  That Forest Ranger?  A pet hamster “Jacques”?  “Claudius”? 

WHY SHOULD ANY ONE HUMAN BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?

WHY SHOULD ANY ONE ORGANISM BE ANY MORE INTERESTING THAN ANOTHER?

What means: “EFFECT”?

“William Shakespeare”?  “Avital Ronell”?  “God”?  “John Wayne Gacy”?  “Helena Bonham Carter”?  “Microsoft”?  A caterpillar (be specific)?  “Mahatma Ghandi”?  A sparrow?  Molecules composing particular dust?

WHAT IS?

how are we able to ask that question?

WHAT ARE WE?

how might we be “WHOs”?

Starting local:

What might it be like – as a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (Nobody) – to BE a “Nathan Wayne Filbert” (A body)?

I’m not sure HOW to answer that.

“Perhaps writing means overcoming all resemblances within the very heart

of resemblance, being finally like yourself, like nothing.”

  • Edmond Jabes –

i.e. How that can be answered.

– WHO or WHAT answers – ?

WHAT MIGHT IT BE LIKE…TO BE?

(qualified to ANSWER)

can ANYthing “answer”?

does “answering” imply “language”?

WHAT IS AN ANSWER?

(in relation to – ?)

What is(?) Nathan Wayne Filbert, Alias Harlequin?

IS “Nathan Wayne Filbert”?

WHAT IS?

WHAT IS IS?

(how?)

WHAT IS A QUESTION? And WHY/HOW can a question be asked?

WHAT IS IT – are our – ideas?  – To “IMAGINE”?

what are ideas?

What might it be to “conceive”?

“to generate concepts” (D&G)

framings of our world-experience

[WHY?  HOW?

WHAT FOR?]

WHAT is a “person”?  HOW?  WHY?  WHO?

Always and ever – HOW & WHY can we / do we ASK?

WHO QUESTIONS?

(WHAT)?

(HOW)?

Something begins

                                          (in/with all this)

                                                                                          it would seem

(it seems)

it seems that something begins in/with questioning

Alias Harlequin, i.e.

– the one whom this effects, the one on whom this has effect, the one (same? No!) affected by him or her, by whom and it.  By this.  This.  That.  By Other, others, and therefore, Alias again, patchworked and quilted, becoming, undoing, altering.  Alias.

“Presumably most writers have many more ideas than they are able to act on”

– Ivan Vladislovic, The Loss Library –

Alias Harlequin – identities – is as is affected, effects, effected with/by.

Alias, i.e. as effected by “Hallie Noel Linnebur”; as effected (generated?  Co-composed-with-) “Pauline Margaret Kresin Filbert”; the St Bernard “Zorro”; a specific train on a particular journey at a particular time; that mountain in that moment; Dec. 16, 1997 – a flu; and so on…

Alias – as situated in moments – e.g. “each one.”  Harlequin – the human surname quilted with environment (micro-to-macro) in concourse.  “Alias” as the “name in shreds” – the fragmentary and provisional, pragmatically specifiable address.

Ambiguous and fluid (like “river” itself – capable of designation but inconsistently contained) transient yet locatable, in form…perhaps.  Yet no.  “Alias” perhaps the medium (in-between) of morphing form and varying substance – what nothing also is (is not).

Name/term/signal/sign (“Alias”) as related to HNL, Dr. K, Dostoevsky, rustled grass, these sounds, this space-time and its company (surround) and then again, these again (but never “again”) – designating “NOWs”.  Perhaps.  It depends.

What or Who, How “Alias Harlequin” ALWAYS depends on a totality of other dependencies, as it were (or is?)  “As such.”

Alias Harlequin, representative?  Not that can of worms.  AND the “thing” itself? (network of momentary dependencies-in-relation)?

What might we call (it/him/etc.) then?  And what would “calling” be/do – how?

WHO questions?

This Alias Harlequin.

“I am already so much the inscription of a divergence…What I was, if that could be described, was a whirlwind of tensions…”

–Helene Cixous–

“A word is binding and at the same time breaks our bonds.
To which of them shall I, one day, owe my freedom?”

“To one only.  Your name in shreds.”

-Edmond Jabes, Book of Resemblances–

 

I-Native Writing: Attempt at a Self-Portrait

On By NW FilbertIn Art, identity, Language, meaning, Self-Doubt, sign, symbol, Writing3 Comments

Ouroboros

Things one realizes about oneself when one is “partnered” or loved well.  That seems to be the theme for me of late.  The differences between “automatic” self-recrimination when the Other speaks of an annoyance or a threat to useful relating vs. a kind of awareness and curiosity about one’s own behaviors that opens up understanding and attention related to the same habitual practices…

For instance.  For years, the only tattoo I got that was not an author or artist’s name / signature / or self-portrait, was a whim of “…and then there’s me…”: and I had a simple Ouroboros inked into my shoulder.  The snake eating its own tail.  Sign of health, sign of destruction.  Sign of…

What’s in a “sign?”  A fundamental query ruling the bulk of my waking hours, and carried over from my sleep.

Ouroboros2

THIS NIGHT.  Reading others’ words it dawns on me…”My biography is my catalog.  But the man who was there before I decided to become a reader is missing.  I, in short, am missing.” [Vila-Matas – Dublinesque]

I, in short, am missing.  So long accustomed to defining and describing myself in relation to world, others, children, parents, education, travels, experiences, friends…roles, behaviors, actions, theories, ideas, feelings…and so on…

Each scenario, event, surround, circumstance, company : co-creating WHO / WHAT I am – with no idea what “I” might be stripped of literature, philosophy, family, knowledge, accomplishments, relationships, language, interpretations, and so on…

I had marked myself with “signs” of who I “am” for my children postmortem.  OTHERS.  Read these people, look at these artists, think about these things…and you will have some idea of who your father “was” – Nathan Filbert – a bibliography.

Infinite Ouroboros

Hmmmm.

I AM what I am related to.  Never being able to come to the end of it…I do not know what/who I am.

I can say something of the how…which felt like a revelation on me of why the most off-handed permanent mark I requested to be inscribed into my body has come to feel most adequate / representative / apt / true?

The how is like this.  I recognize in intimacy and dialogue with a loving other (my partner) over time habits of mind: annoyances, arrogancies, logorrhea, unwise knowledge-sharing (always borrowed)…INSECURITY, self-doubt, terror, UNCERTAINTY.

In most seconds of my awakeness two things are tangled, wound, immediate, simultaneous, recursive and self-devouringly going on: WHAT AM I DOING/WHAT AM I? and WHY?

My children run in, blast a request that feels like a demand – at the kitchen counter I: what am I hearing?  What am I feeling about what I’m hearing?  Why am I feel-hearing that?  What should I do?  Why do I think ‘should’?  How should I respond?  Why do I think there’s a ‘should’-how to respond?

On the porch reading with coffee:  Why do I cross my legs?  Why do I like coffee?  What am I looking at?  Why does a squirrel catch my eye?  Why did I choose these glasses?  Why am I thinking about these things?  Is this what others think about?  What ‘should’ I be thinking about?  Why ‘should’?  How should I work?  How should I think?  Why do I think I should have a way of thinking?  Why do I think about the way that I sit?  What kind of being thinks about the way it sits when it thinks on a porch and is distracted by a squirrel?

WHAT AM I?/WHAT AM I DOING?  and WHY? leading to HOW?

What am I doing?  Looking at letters on a screen.  Why do I look at these letters on a screen?  Why does language move me, draw me, resonate?  What is resonating?  Why?  Should other things be resonating?  I enjoy looking at my love.  Am I looking in the ‘right’ way?  Why do I enjoy looking at my love?  How should I look at my love?  Why do I look at my love?  What kind of thing is drawn to gaze at his love?  What is love?  Why do we love?  How should we love / might we love?  Why do I hold books certain ways.  How do I hold them?  How might I hold them?  Why?  What kind of thing thinks about how and why and what he holds?  What was that tone?  Why that tone?  What kind of being uses that tone?

And so on.  Moment after moment.  I get a drink.  Why did I get a drink.  Why was I thirsty.  What does it mean that I was thirsty.  How should I vary what I drink to my thirst?  Why?

Rarely do I consider “Who” does these things.  It’s too far removed.  Too unknowable – beyond any what/why/how I can even begin to contemplate.

But constantly constantly constantly WHAT AM I DOING?  WHAT AM I? (in this situation, this situation, this situation) and WHY?  HOW?

tangled ouroboros

And this is how my days pass.  Finding myself moving, teaching, listening, talking, drinking, eating, loving, avoiding, forgetting, imagining, smelling, saying, wishing, regretting, ashamed, confused, uncertain, unknown…but always searching, observing, inquiring, scrutinizing…

WHAT AM I DOING?  WHAT AM I that DOes such things?  WHY am I doing them?  HOW ‘should’ I do them and where/why/what/who thinks of ‘should’?  WHY?

And finding nothing but infinite tangles, recursive spiraling production and reduction, endless context surrounding every moment that is constructed only of questions and hypotheses…

I chose a good tattoo.

Permanently self-devouring and regurgitant.

Self-Imitations of Myself. (Gordon Lish)

doubleourobors

perhaps shed light on through an-other?

“A single voice raises the clamor of being”

Gilles Deleuze

The Intolerable Vulnerability of beginnings…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing3 Comments

I am desperately vulnerable to being unable to move beyond beginnings….as witnessed by the following attempts…Lengle - VulnerabilityINTOLERABLE VULNERABILITIES

I.

When we begin – anything – we begin with.  We start out already always somewhere as some one, some thing.  Some entity or element among others.  There are no, is no, such thing as a ‘fresh start,’ as a living organism.

From our particular inceptions we are loaded and formed with genetic baggage – our cells and context shaped by conditions far beyond and external to ourselves.  And nary a freedom is advanced.  Sure we participate in the shaping and construction and continuance of us, but we are never extricated, abstracted, or independent from an environment, a shared and shaping surround – it’s the contingency for existing: Other(s).

A world not formed by us.  A plural existence, NEVER a solitary, isolated or uniform one.

Many find these ever-initiating constraints intolerable.  That one is unable EVER, to start from scratch, re-invent, re-formulate, or create ex nihilo.  Nothing, absence, void, simply – is not.

Therefore, ever existing in the already-established, already formulating, already-begun, we come together and transform.

Cells and genes, energy, matter and air conscribe to carry on in ripples and subject/objects of being.  Including, colluding us – we, you, me, I.

Wholly integrated (smoothly or with great difficulty) into the ongoing flux and flow of languages, practices, thoughts and behaviors of a very large and intricate, complex and dynamic world – we arise – conditioned, constrained and subject to our sort of organization – make-up, culture, circumstance, arrangement, perception, emotion, body, reason, available resources, types, renditions of being A being in this possible world.  A world, impossibly, that is just this way.

And the task is (always has) already begun – how will/does this particular, unique combination and configuration of elementary particles (a living, bounded, active, exchanging system/organism) adapt, effect, adjust, infect, evolve with its environment?

An environment of people, places, activities and things ALWAYS ALREADY begun, and also always already NOT-YET…awaiting, accepting, adapting, adjusting with US.

Our configurations, energy, activities and behaviors.  Nothing the same with us.  Nothing without.

Incalculable.

You, me, we make all the difference – along with EVERYthing else.

Some call this a paradox.  If you did not begin, it would make no difference.  If you do, it makes all difference.  Both, always, true.

Nothing is the same with you.  Nothing would be the same without you.

The world is a situation = both / and / more.  A complex and indiscernible system that just seems to work this way.  Call it “Butterfly Effect,” “Creation” or “Evolution,” “Chaos,” “Order,” “Life” – it all makes NO difference AND ALL the difference to actual experience.

And it is so.

Thus we begin – embedded, embodied, and extended – in an environment always long established, ongoing and begun: constrained, constructed, collaborated, and free.

I begin.  I beg – “let me start over”, fully incorporated, already begun – I: in.

Found Object/Subject: Self-Portrait

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Reflections, Traces1 Comment

Inundated in end-of-semester bewilderment and projects….I riffle through book stacks and this catches my eye again…
lines - ingold

 

and I quickly recognize myself in the mirror:

Self-Portrait of Mind – July 2013

lines

Fictions of Family, pt. 10

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

the developing words:

FAMILY A FICTION

Family 1

and part 10:

10

It taking so long to figure it out.  What it’s “about.”

Discombobulates like sporadic noise.  The fragments living are.

 

Four decades, seven children from three wives until he recognizes relation.  Which changes things.  Significantly.

It is the third wife (times charm) – out three strikes she staid on.  Stays on.  The difference between things.

In relation to one another.  Evolving perception.  The what-not, call it “aboutness.”  Or in relation to…

 

This in relation to that is about this much this high this far.  Or else nothing at all.  In itself.  By itself.

By himself, barely amount, insignificant cipher, plus three plus seven plus anything adding up, er, becomes.

Alone is less than one, or, not a number.  It takes 1 to know 1, in other words, all-one really means no 1.  Unless distinguished from something else, another 1, an other.

 

This he could tell.  The third wife, the difference between.  The aboutness.  Differing shapes entirely, nearer still, at this distance.

1 cannot equal.  Impossible equation.  Might as well be naught, be 0 – a 1 wrapped around itself (turned-in) – revealing just a hole, something seen through.  Looked straight through.

Telescope, microscope, still substance unseen, a looking at, really, looking for.  Simply looking, opened at both ends.  Perhaps a simple function.  What an organism is, alone.

 

She calls out, in fact pursues him halfway across.  As if to say she sees something, peering through her self-same circularity – that he is there.  He begins experience, begins to get it – something else must be looking, another 1, for him to be seen, to hear of himself.

In what she tells him.

 

Multiple inputs introduce noise (read chaos, read being), make possibilities, provide things to figure out.  With all the variables it takes a lot of time (to get what it’s about).

Composition

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes6 Comments

shadow composition

Approach the page with no idea.  No secondness of reality or facts.

See what the words will do.  Like spontaneous sex with your lover.

What happens next.  If you’re lucky.

What words will come?

Look closely.  Draw the pen near the paper.  Remember, you’ve no idea, like what I’m writing.  Language finding synonyms making thoughts.  Perception in the body.

Something already in the clear, or on it.  Never clear.  Do you see it?

Don’t let the first mark frighten you, it is already done, everything coming after you can edit: crossing out, crossing over.

See the line?  To chase or avoid, either way, impossible to capture or erase.

Look again – do you see it?  Hover but don’t inscribe, what is it waiting there?

I’m not being mischievous or rhetorical, facetious or mystical.  I want you to see what is always already there, predividing your canvas, filtering the open before you engage.  What you cast out around you, the shadow of your general ‘self.’

See it there gathered at point of pen, shading back toward your physical hand and pooling around it?  The absence of your presence forming incorporeality.

You are visiting here.  Your shadow is the record.  What you make out you make up.  But it’s never the first word or the beginning line.  Reality comes before you and spreads out, interfering and refracting the light you wish to use.

At times a bulky blot, at others barely discerned, evidence nonetheless that you are, in fact, tracing.  Operating in a kind of cloud of substance, adding lines and loops, particles, threads.

They say art (and representation) began in shadows, with shadows – recognition of other and presence and beyond.  Likely a myth that is true.

For starters, notice the outline, letting it outline itself/yourself, the visible ghost informing your are…

Now, since you’ve already overshadowed what’s next, begun what’s begun, press down and press forward, press on…

Vicente Carducho, tabula rasa. engraving, 1633

ELSE – Aziff : Prompted by Comments

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

(a continuation of Else  – Erasure : Beginnings)

Aziff : Prompted by Comments

Once begun, and begun in You-ness, though perhaps not – indeed probably not in any way! – in Newness, you take leave in the middle.  Or if not the middle of this brief engagement, somewhere, alas, in its midst, you set out.

“The place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now” Ludwig Wittgenstein said, which you almost remember, and in any case you think of now, triggered by its inscription among the paper scraps scattered over your writing desk.

Already you’re sick of it.  The You-ness you hijacked in hopes of Newness.  Your playabout with something Else.  Attempting to trip or trick yourself into some place else, somewhere other than where you “must already be at now” – the Else you set about pursuing, by dissecting and deconstructing it on your desk.

You come up short.  Feel foiled.  A stray comment from some other immediately exposing a cheap and shoddy sleight-of-hand you yourself could not perceive.  The danger of others, of else.  The dangers of self-encounter in dialogue.

In any case, you create, or you go on making with all that is already tired and old.  Namely, yourself, and whatever is at your easy disposal, fearing in advance what might be required to move.  Toward what could be New, into the unknown of the Else.

You tackle the pieces, a limited arena of shuffled scraps – quotations, emotions, experiences – in hopes a pattern emerges, an inventive cohesion.  Unlikely, or forced.  The banality of meaning – a fundamentalist smallness of purposes or cause.  You vomit.

It’s a discomfort – as if from some trauma stored throughout your body and brain – a fear of what you cannot identify, having experienced it (“suffered” is how you put it, and “endured”) as an unspecified complexity of connectivities too slender to hold or locate – the incomprehensible self – that atomistic and invisible dot-point in a universe of flickering.

Whereas you are able to imagine others and else as substantial – entities with agency – in all the vastness.  What you can observe with less participation, seeming more real to you, somehow.

Else – you just get lost in the dissection.  Labyrinthine traces of fact upon facts, ad nauseum infinitum…  The searching for cause and impact in a loop within a web caught in a net stranded among strands inextricably interlocuted in endless structures and systems imperfectly operational.  And so forth, you consider the sources.  Always coming up missing or bereft.

Cease.  And breathe like a statue.  It doesn’t.  You don’t.  Else.

Not what you thought you were looking for.

New probably just meaning something different, you repeat yourself, something Other, something Else.

You set out.