Tag: self

“Bless Babel.”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces5 Comments

Below I am going to share with you an essay that I promise is worth every hour or two you lend your attention to each paragraph.

It is written by this person:

(Donald Barthelme)

and it is called: “Not Knowing“

from his collection of the same name.

it contains statements like the following:

“Any work of art depends upon a complex series of interdependences”

“tear a mystery to tatters and you have tatters, not mystery”

“What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation.  Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree to which it remains, after interpretation, vital – no interpretation or cardiopulminary push-pull can exhaust or empty it”

“The combinatory agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.”

“Art is a true account of the activity of mind”

“The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world”

and so forth.

Please understand me, if you maintain a blog, take photos, love your children, think about your self or the world you live in, dialogue with books or pictures or animals or people or movements…

take a little time to read this

Thank you.

  Not Knowing

                            

In-Shadows

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

In-Shadows

“The Artist, he who even takes the shadows of things in hand…”

-Macedonio Fernandez-

“He who imagines will never know non-being.”

 

A morass of shadows.

A repletion of blips and flashings.

An absence : I understand.

 

I swipe my hand through the shadows.  I sense disturbance, but my palm returns empty, save the moisture of fog in dark woods.  If even.  There has been dust.

I stir the ashes.  I kindle the fire.  The brain a roadmap of chaos.  And intricately precise.  Subject to accident and lesion and a cross-pollination of impulses and energies beyond present calculations.  Not withstanding infinity, of course, which hardly makes sense, given the matter.

A squalor of shadows.

Currents of whispering air, of motion.

A ubiquity that trembles.

I open my mouth to the world.  I emit and inhale.  Shouting resonant within, because I have ears.  Equipped with particulars.  Apparatus.  Other cells stay quiet but do not cease, I lack the equipment to hear.  Stone, lizard, mushroom.  Light in its veils.  I cry out.  Echo =, tree hardly cares.  I’m remiss and listen myself for response.

Breathing the smoke.  I stink and I cough and I smell.  My hand passes through without ashes or mist.  I am not everywhere.  I do not know my ends.  If a melody came through like a sight or a sound, I would not name it.  I am emptying full.

 

As shadows thicken and disperse.

Objects as subjects and objects again.

Something live in the darkness.

 

That is darkness for me, not the night owl or mouse, salamander or bat, not the tree.  No, it is me, I, we, that conjure the “darkness” as difference from “light,” however similar, however same.  As if emitting symbols.  As if meaning to manufacture.  I construct a sign and call it poem, collaborate a you and a me.  We converse.  I begin.

If doubt incites a thought, thought conspires doubt to further action.  As if shadows were transparent.  And meaningless was choice.  Eye – mouth – hand : open to the world, the world opens.  I begin in signs and gestures, a collaborative entanglement, reentered.

 

In dispersion shadows reconvene.

Clearly thickened by old growth.

Body minding nets.

 

Would I make a “here” it would be “we.”  A desire for presents is relation.  What its plural ought to be (“presence”).  I unwrap unable to view the gift.  Tell me of it, will you?  “Inside” is lost in shadows.  What’s perceptible from “there”?  Tree, raven, sky.  Plastic object pulsed in heartbeat or emotion: what could I learn from “there”?

What isn’t simultaneous?  And how like the infinity we are constrained not to absorb?  Enclose me.  Lend me a form, a border, a threshold.  Entangle.  Experience may come.

“the silence of the page allows us to hear the writing”

-Octavio Paz-

 

Fathers Voices

On By NW FilbertIn Poetry, Traces, Writing4 Comments

With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach

By William Stafford

 

We would climb the highest dune,

from there to gaze and come down:

the ocean was performing;

we contributed our climb.

 

Waves leapfrogged and came

straight out of the storm.

What should our gaze mean?

Kit waited for me to decide.

 

Standing on such a hill,

what would you tell your child?

That was an absolute vista.

Those waves raced far, and cold.

 

“How far could you swim, Daddy,

in such a storm?”

“As far as was needed,” I said,

and as I talked, I swam.

 

see also, Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares

 

 

 

In Praise of Darkness

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“And those of us, never angels, who are verbal, who ‘on this low, relative ground’ write, those of us who lowly imagine that ascending into print is the maximum reality of experiences?  May resignation – the virtue to which we must resign ourselves – be with us.  It will be our destiny to mold ourselves to syntax, to its treacherous chain of events, to the imprecision, the maybes, the too many emphases, the buts, the hemisphere of lies and of darkness in our speech.”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

ex nihilo…to begin (crisis / catharsis)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing4 Comments

“So the books are waiting.  Of this you may be confident:  they’ll be ready when the whim strikes you.”

-Alan Jacobs-

Out of the Cave

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

I really don’t know what these things are I’ve been writing (“Ideas of Home”, this one…).  Seem to be open ramblings.  I apologize if they waste time for any readers, I think I’m trying to open up channels inside of me with less self-conscious shaping and imposition of some pre-formed concepts of style, order, characterization, plot, even poesy.  Opening veins, trying to allow swollen connections between pockets of my body and brain that otherwise occur only in dreams or infrequently heightened states.  Not sure what’s going on, just writing.

 

In the Depression, A Cavern

 

The outlook that prides its common sense (for those who bear it)

“I cannot comprehend our attachments to beings”

-E.M. Cioran-

Airtight logic.  Closed circle of belief.

The end is doom and oblivion, i.e. “end.”

Therefore, “I cannot comprehend attachment” –

to things?  Well, perhaps, for personal endurance, a comfort while still understanding their nature (“truth”: “things fall apart, the center cannot hold”)

that all become, belong to silence (no total comprehension, understanding) all is constant change, therefore ephemeral, ridiculous to trust or develop dependence – everything changes, and then you die…

that, well that does not seem to alter much.  Perhaps it wavers.

As all things wobble and waver, are insecure, uncertain.

Well, but maybe not “ends” and “loss” – almost certain, almost absolutely so,

but then not everything has happened, as far as we know.

Hold on to joy’s illusions – real experiences – and why not?

Embrace.

Let go.

You better let go

or it will be taken, suffocated, crushed.

Smile, but don’t forget to cry, there are many truths.

And much matter(s) to perceive (momentarily)

But then there’s that: the individuality of perception

and the fact that that capacity will cease.

Heightened moments, erasing duration,

fictions of time and space.

Self and other.

World.

The Unknown and Unnamed recalculates and barrels on…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

“& knowing from

the look of the others

that a panic has come

into your own eye

to know yourself only

as an instance”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

            Am I indeed no/w/here – is this a place to founder?

Are you here too?  Now?  And what might that mean?  (Or is that already to abstract, extract, exit to a changing no/w/here?)

I have my concepts.  I have my doubts.

I am unidentifiable, no/w/here.

If you happen to find me (or dis-cover?) would you please point me out?  Just a gesture will do.

You can use the simplest sign, that concept, just a dash, a briefest line – “/”.

Or a slapdash curly loop to momentarily contain it all in, all of that malleable nothing with thousands of experiences passing through: .

Loop-the-loop-de-loop go the organs and wires, the pores of the flesh, the nerves and the neurons, the veins and cells…

I am bewildered.

I think I am a concept.  (I thought I was a verb).

I get the joke!  “I think” – I am a verb.

So runs the conception.

Selah.

The ?/’I’ Barrels On…(the Unknown and Unnamed recalculates)

 

Empty concept or full flow, he advances (advances?) – he verbs.

Verbalizes.

He acts.  The marking concept, the tiny scratch – ‘/’ – goes on, regardless (of my regarding).

No/w/here.

This is IT.  (was IT and becomes so again) as ‘/’ act.

This unknown, unnamed subject/object absent presence moves like a filter screen being swished through a tub of air always tagged “IT,” (if this were a game).  Is IT?

Beginning from no/w/here and heading there too, and always at once…

it’s downright unsettling!  (literally – there is no settling or pause!)

I find (without actually locating a thing, even a speck or a fragment, not “conceived”) I am always no/w/here, and that no-place is always (ALWAYS) changing, moving, different(ly).

Unknown(-able?)  Unnamed(-able?)  Unlocated(-able?)

            Homo Scribus (homo-anything!) – person-as-verb – erases as it writes, deletes as it constructs, falsifies as it truths, acts in its passivity,

ever equaling the equation at zero!

(no/w/here)

I’ve gotta steer clear of math, of physics…I don’t compute!

“Some Blind Alleys: A Letter”

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing6 Comments

Should you have the time…and it requires a bit…I would love to hear responses to the following essay by E.M. Cioran from all you interesting minds I observe!  Thanks –

“Some Blind Alleys: A Letter”

-E.M. Cioran-

The Unknown and Unnamed regains composure

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, TracesLeave a comment

The Unknown and Unnamed: the Conception

 

A few days naked and I’ve bewildered myself.

I was never good at math.

But I do love the rain (absorption, immersion, ambiguity).

There’s no accounting for taste.

I think I am a concept.

“a concept is a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distinct experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more”

–Edward Sapir–

            What’s in a name?

“the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and the validity of a concept consists in the impossibility of reducing the content…to unity, without the introduction of it…the conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content.”

–C.S. Peirce–

            I ran into a sign.

I was flooded, I saw and I seemed, I heard and replied, have been undone in my doing… I’m a roving mark, like a vessel constantly being filled and emptied, at once.

I can’t perceive without a concept, why not the simplest one – a single mark, a dash, say “/”?

/ fear it “plainly has no content.”

/’m confused.

“I am what surrounds me”

–Wallace Stevens–

            Advancing “empty,” a flesh-coated collection of organs replete with a coding of operational signs (we’ll call them ‘language’), I foundered.  Considering no one in pursuit of no/w/here, I became wherever that was (is?).

“This conception of the present in general, or IT in general…is before any comparison or discrimination can be made between – what is present – must have been recognized as such, as IT without parts abstracted and attributed to it…”

-C.S. Peirce-

            No/w/here – nothing – no one: “embracing thousands of distinct experiences (while attributable or identical to none of them) and ready to take in thousands more.”  ALWAYS.

Every/w/here, everything, every/one:  I conceptualize a concept, a mark to attribute an infinity of experiences toward : “/”.

Names changing by the millisecond.

A concept without content, or all conceivable content.

A baffle, a paradox, distinct and unidentifiable (in essence).

Here “/” come! (the unknown and unnamed) possibly sporting any knowledge, any name – perhaps heading your way even now!  Beware!  It’s conceivable, whether intended or not, that all of us are empty concepts, flooded concepts, without content, and all of us heading no/w/here at once!

“Here is where one seems to be”

–Robert Creeley–

“The place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now”

–Ludwig Wittgenstein–

“’I’ can only be identified by the instance of speech which contains it, and by that alone”

–Emile Benveniste–

(to read all the Unknown/Unnamed writings thusfar accumulated

visit my Experimenctes pages!  Thanks)

It rains…complicating equations, understand? (for the Unknown Unnamed)

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

[please bear with these ramblings…they are taking shape…and each stumbling advance leads…i promise…:)]

Standing in rain.  Under rain.  Understand.

Unknown, unnamed, still wet.  Still cleansed.  Garnering names…

One.  Other.  Wet one.  Lost one.  Un-one.  More.

Hearing one.  The replier.  Seeing one, seems, seams, semes.

No/w/here: under rain, understanding some thing(s).

The wet can flood and drown, or cleanse and caress.

Can surround, come down, or buoy and uphold.

Understanding rain.

One water-name, countless individuals.

Unknown infinity, possibly.

Unnamed – an incalculable number of names – possibly.

The Writing One and the One Who Reads.  The One-Standing-Under-Rain and The One Rain Falls Upon.

The One Reaching the Other and The Other Receiving One.  A One Necessary Other for joinder and boundary, their rift and cleft, the possibilities.

If “to understand” counts as knowledge, he is many-known and many-named as he engages, encounters no/w/here.

[if w always presents we]

so that without w there is no-here and no now.

N/amed

O/ther

W/e

+/= here.  now here.  how here.  now here.

He realizes this direction is constantly unknown, even at its end.  If he can know it is raining, he cannot know how many.  And whenever it ceases, the water will be elsewhere, other-wise.

The Thinking One.  Confused Other.

He is unable to inscribe or translate even a fraction of his names in a single no/w/here…which are not singular, ever.

Names rain when he looks, listens, feels.  Attends.

Ecstatic One.  Diluted Other.  Watery One.  Solid Other.

Who?

Unknown and unnamed begins to understand, standing under (and in) no/w/here’s rain.

Muchly known, muchly named, ennui…

in-we

he goes on…

standing under rain,

in the middle of,

no/w/here.