“The Balloon” by Donald Barthelme
Tag: short story
Brave New World
part of our weekly practice of participation in the lively community prompted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields Friday Fictioneers – I encourage all to join!
Brave New World
Assembling for the task, we began. Each in our strengths conspiring. Tristan executed calculations which were pinpoint. Ida concocted the sounds and the language we could use, boxing up the requisite books and emotions. We counted on mama for the overall surround, a global view of the society – espousing natural characteristics and roles. Oliver modeled the world and placed it on a bucket. Everything was ready – needing only performative passion – a unified desire. We waited for Aidan, lugging the chains that would keep us on course, to hold back entropy’s risk. Leaving me to chronicle this family’s brave new world.
N Filbert 2012
Elaborate Organisms (for my wife)
My response to this week’s Friday Fictioneer prompt (thanks Rochelle for the weekly work)
Her Body a Beehive
She lives. She parents. She paints.
She has pain.
She walks. She sees. She loves.
She speaks and she reaches. She sleeps. She weeps.
Occasionally, she laughs.
She thinks. She feels. She moves. She listens.
She eats and drinks. She works and worries.
She falls. She goes on. She fears. She insists.
.
You ask me, “how? – all this!”
“Her body is a beehive of batteries – an intricate electrical network flipping switches and adapting to surge, wearing down, sparking up – each neuron, each pulse, each collective oscillation crafting her unique motricity powered with chemicals of emotion, an elaborate and interactive field of energy, an organism.”
She is.
N Filbert 2012
To Advance
This week’s feeblish attempt at Friday Fictioneers 100-word stories…
It was never difficult to see the way, it’s the getting there that problems. The paths unique to our movements. We tend to think it’s the setting out – that getting going presents the obstacle – but we’re always going somewhere. The millions of streets and alleys, those are what throw us, what keep us from the end. How do we know, in constant diversion? Oh I see a way, but not the destination. I’ll move as I see fit. As will you.
Consider, then choose. But always keep moving. There’s no other way. Keep your eye on the opening.
N Filbert 2012
Hermes
for madison-woods’ Friday Fictioneers
Hermes
If he’s bringing messages, they cut both ways, rather than thread between or stitch together. Fleet and agile in both worlds, and neither. They call him “the Translator,” a metaphor embodied. He melodies one thing and harmonies another. “Of two minds” they say of the quicksilver poet with a two-sided brain. No one knows how he listens, but it’s clear his flight is circular.
It’s been asked if he ever stops for love, ever rests his fluid motion. There’s never been a verdict. First one thing, and then another. His reaching out, a curling in. His language an escaping capture.
N Filbert 2012
Webbings
Clotted knots over darkness, what it had all become, and barely holding on. Together? I couldn’t say. I had thought it was my innards: veins, nerve endings, cells. Suspended precariously over bleak. Clinging. Trembling in a void. I had thought it was existence. An only way to survive. Just hanging on. In. But then you’d said it was “us.” The precarious thing, the tendentious, the threatened. You said our attachments were thin, and weakening, our threads hardly visible anymore. But look! Look at us love! We’re all woven together – we connect at many points – we form a pattern! We are webbed things. Oh don’t detach a filament, no don’t detach a one, beloved. Oh say it won’t come undone this way?
N Filbert 2012
ca. 1843
from the Journals of the Claxton Brothers, ca. 1843.
After experiencing what we’d come to call “the Plunge,” we traveled the familiar creekbed back toward our cabin. On departing for the hunt the water flowed strong, securing our wagon deep in its tow. It was dry now, the entire wagon missing. And our homestead, hewn of stone, carefully plugged and plastered, now displayed gaps and cracks, with dust and moulder monitoring its decay. Having left just hours ago at the tail-end of night, how could things have altered so? As if ages and drought, plunder and wear all visited here meanwhiles. Window given over to darkness, the entrance as open and vague as a ghost.
Toronto
Friday Fictioneers, August 31, 2012
Toronto
How well I remember the day, injured, sharp pain in every step, alone and far, hoping for once the rain might hold. That solid, turbulent sky. Street smells of rot and iron, bodies and fuels. All muffled for me in the reasons – what sense and thinking does – that thick overlay of shiftings and emotion.
It was here, right here, looking up for bearings, that I knew all was doubtful. Doubtful I’d find my way, doubtful my body would hold up, doubtful anyone would wait or notice. Particularly not the distant.
Of course I knew what to do.
And what about the rain?
N Filbert 2012
Pre-qual(ia): A sort of introduction: What Language: &
We happen in a substantial liquid. A surround we effect. Are affected by. We move, it moves. It moves, we are moved. Moving it. Being moved by. Each, all. What’s between. Those spaces. Empty and full, of course.
You know what I mean. You breathe. Hearing silently what is written. You see. Thinking the emptiness between, what fills. Is filled by. Is full. Before it thinks empty. Feels.
Liquid, permeable as skin, as mobile, as inseparable. The thought, the body of that thinking. Or, a “body of text.” Such liquid air. Insubstantiated emptiness without which we would not.
Happen in that liquid/not-liquid. Like particles and waves. Either-ors reduced to ands. Themselves. With which is struck a chord. Male/female, yes/no, self/other, you/me, hot/cold: variations of permeable boundaries, without borders, like overlapping zones, difficult transparencies.
We grew out of, becoming, precedented, pro-perceptive/re-perceptive. Remember. Without parts, but designated. You hear. You see. You taste. You feel. You, thinking emotion, feeling in brain, mind matterless matter…mem(e)brane(-ain). Liquidy occur. Movement.
The leaf. Exhaust. Intake. A wave. A particle. Re-perception. Mem(e)ory. Or me.
You know the drill. Acting. Play. A wobble, a quiver. We tremble. We hum. We happen. It’s a wonder. Every it. Unknown, unknowable knowledge experienced. I-qualia.
Sense-making. What is. In essence nonsensical. Incommunicable between. Inescapable intersubjectivity. Either parts public, private. Neither/nor. This boundary, porous. And. As conscious would not be a thing but a process, more definitively. Noun/verb. And. Shared structures of DNA, destructured and oscillate. Me/you. Either and or. Bubble pierced with raindrops. A fashioning. A possibility that.
Existence. IS. Co-existence. AND.
I being either noun and verb or neither.
As liquid is not.
So a border a threshold, a line, a triangle.
AND.
“that silk is stitching our lungs”
-Christina Mengert-
“In order for my specific subjectivity to fill the general slot of the first person pronoun, that word must be ‘empty’: ‘I’ is a word that can mean nothing in general, for the reference it mines can never be visualized in its consummated wholeness…it is a general token of absence that can be filled in any particular utterance.”
-Michael Holquist-
It happens
It would happen. The things approach us. We feel them in our horizons. Extending out behind us. A sort of fullness. A swelling, sweltering cool. Billowing possibility. Stand and stare, even in our movement, unseeing. We blindly gaze. Caught short, upended, the rhythm is certainly sea. We are dry. We will happen. We are bound to. Look out.
Remote murmur. You know.
Not trauma. Distant thrumble.
You speak.
Echo absorbs.
It would happen. Consider.
It will happen. Just you wait.
A world is a kind of ode.
Your body a stylus.
We are here.
N Filbert 2012
All my Words are Silent 