Greetings all – thank you for continuing to visit, care, find, read the polysemic stupor this site has been for me. I have felt that I should respond to my extended quiet and lack. As with everyone, much transpires within-without always/all ways… for now I can report that after years of PhD studies into the concept of “nothing”, an ever-expanding and extending fertile void…
Has drawn me toward pondering more intensely what silence might evoke or emit… I should like to say that I have been interactive, con-fused, com-municative, alive/immersed in much (empty-full) space(s). Here’s a card of greeting, thanksgiving, and hello again:
Words of Silence
…dreamt to hush you,
like “now”
or some othered ‘then,’
“here” “you” “?”
It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit among the flux of happenings.
Something had pestered me so much I thought my heart would break. I mean, the mechanical part.
I went down in the afternoon to the sea which held me, until I grew easy.
About tomorrow, who knows anything. Except that it will be time, again, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit.
Swimming, One Day in August – Mary Oliver
“Most of the time, to give oneself to language is to abandon oneself.”
–Maurice Blanchot–
“A word’s reach extends a speaker’s grasp, or what’s a language for?”
Martin responds, wondering. Curious as to that which it applies, or whom, or what. Contemplating reference. Filled with questions. Martin says, “yes,” almost under his breath.
Elf shrugs. Elf walks on.
Martin follows, thinking, looking at leaves falling into blades of grass, alerted by the shushing and darting of squirrels, saddened at the amplified pffft of cars passing by. Wishing for silence. Wondering if Elf will speak a further word or two. Sensing like a dowsing rod for meanings.
Walks on. Shuffles. Walks on.
Martin, too.
There’s a relative silence from the two of them – these humans wandering across a concreted trail. Sure there’s the sound of their footfalls, scuffles, even some noise in the pause of it. Or the noise of the absence of noise. But you’d have to be different to hear the breathing, the heart pulse, the slide of muscles and blood. As far as humans-in-environs go, the pair presents retraction.
Hard to say for soil. The squares composing sidewalk must suffer pressure, absorbed by the earth beneath and shared out through verberations for miles. Hard to say for air. Full-grown males, plodding forth like prows along a rickety line-of-motion has to be pushing particles around, making waves. Nothing gives report.
Elf stops and sighs.
Martin responds, slowing, looking out, looking forward, looking round. Lets his hands limp his sides.
Elf crouches down.
Martin scans the street, examines bark, follows trunks and branches, admires leaves and colors and movements. Birds.
“an ‘absoluteness of absence’ if writing is to be possible” – Jacques Derrida
Certain works by Samuel Beckett eventuate an environment of silence for me. For instance, the brief poem “What is the Word?”
What Is the Word
folly –
folly for to –
for to –
what is the word –
folly from this –
all this –
folly from all this –
given –
folly given all this –
seeing –
folly seeing all this –
this –
what is the word –
this there –
this this here –
all this this here –
folly given all this –
seeing –
folly seeing all this this here –
for to –
what is the word –
see –
glimpse –
seem to glimpse –
need to seem to glimpse –
folly for to need to seem to glimpse –
what –
what is the word –
and where –
folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where –
where –
what is the word –
there –
over there –
away over there –
afar –
afar away over there –
afaint –
afaint afar away over there what –
what –
what is the word –
seeing all this –
all this this –
all this this here –
folly for to see what –
glimpse –
seem to glimpse –
need to seem to glimpse –
afaint afar away over there what –
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –
what –
what is the word –
what is the word
– Samuel Beckett
Perhaps the what where is always what we’re attempting to tell. Perhaps that’s eternal recurrence / return. The when is always known. Always NOW. The folly, truly folly, of our attempt to tell the what where that is our being, our being NOW, always being NOW, no when needed, no whom known, just what where presently…occurring. Is this always what we are attempting to say? To find words for? To tell? What where, now? Always NOW – whether reading or writing, assailing past, present or future – it is NOW that it’s occurring, but what? where? And what is the word? What are the words for this what where we’re attempting to tell? This is my writing, reading – in a way, it seems, the all of it – my folly. Perhaps what where is unnameable.
And so I also offer a reading – for even as soon as I re-read my own writing – I cannot remember the whom or what-where of the writing. Because the reading is always right NOW. This reading – a chapter from Mark C. Taylor’s book Tears (as both eye-leak or suffering and rift-split-rip-“tear”) entitled “How to do Nothing with Words” (my own copy a rainbow of highlights and symbolized marginalia – like all that I read significance to). If this sort of thing – this philosophizing or wondering writing – is not of your interest – don’t bother. But if it is kind of intriguing, or causes curiosity, I find this chapter a compelling and admirable attempt to descry the “what is the word?” tussle I constantly struggle and strive for enacting the telling what where.
Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone. Suspect I can’t believe them.
I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that. Won’t even attempt “within reason.” Suggest.
There’s no “let me explain” to this.
– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly?”
The point, I would say, exactly, or nearly precise – that there isn’t. I don’t know. But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) – we’re dis-missed. Or not missed – how to say it? There’s a meeting. It seems. In a margin, or more.
Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap? I don’t know. I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer. Longer. It’s a fight against death, that small word. Simply, longer. With you.
Am I clear? Making sense? I don’t know.
– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying” she says, “near ‘exactly’.”
I don’t know. It’s unwise.
And I hum when the words sound just so.
– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.
Interaction. Locution. Between. (I am thinking).
“Interstitial,” I say. Interstitially? I wonder. How could I know. It’s all susceptible to the mark. The mark of the question. I think about changing my name. Did before. I like titles. It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music. I would be Mark, Remarking. The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved to a point, on everything : ? “My point, exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark. (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind…anything).
It’s okay. I’m familiar. Not that you’re worried. There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction. It’s just so (so it seems). “Just-So Stories,” he wrote, long ago, relatively – they’re alike and akin, episodic. We describe.
Neither here and/nor there. Interstitial. In-between. What I wanted to tell her, to say. And I would have, had I known.
– “Known what, exactly?” she’d once said, and I’d stopped, for the meanings were lost, non-existent. Just so.
“That’s just how it is” I had said. And don’t know, was surmising. The world hypothetical and inspired (I’d thought, at the time) – simply possible. I was wrong (perhaps). But she stayed (temporarily). The words lose their meanings.
Through someone else’s blog award list I recently discovered The Dream Journal Today – a remarkable blog straightforwardly recounting dreams. It has stimulated me to pay more attention to what my brain is doing in its “off-hours.” The post regarding my longing for knowledge of my father is such a result, as is the following post, gathered through the past night. I have the hunch my psychophysiology works over emotion when I’m out…something my waking mind deters. Whatever the case, I have found the ritual to be as intriguing as working with photo-prompts to dislodge other-conscious concerns, and recommend it to writers everywhere as a kind of exercise in translation.
Thrown on my back as from a jungle gym – panicked in the way of breath-smashed bodies. Helpless then, disempowered.
Lying next to you in our warm nest of bed, nose and right eye microscopically near the flesh of your chest – the sharp distinction of its tattoo’s inky night and the blemishless cream covering your major pectorals.
I see it falling, the exploding crush of a thick plate of glass the size of a small wall and maybe four inches thick – variegated and stained – slicing and dicing my face with the stories you don’t share.
The night is full of phrases. Intimacies shredded by the unspoken, the secrets. A literal compaction of my face in bloodied fragments – the world a shattered windshield.
Sleeping fitfully you deliver direct language through the dark. “This is wrong and this is wrong and this is wrong…with you.” I don’t remember details, only that I’m broken like a vase of porcelain on the floor of an empty manor.
The decompression and drainage, the fracturing damage of all you hold apart. Discommunication. What is withheld. The feeling of what happens when I supply the captions to your silence.
“What is fiction after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming?”
“No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions”
-Rene Char-
“There was something tragic in fighting the borders, the heroism of shortcomings, the panic of passion”
-Bruno Schulz via Jonathan Safran Foer-
It may be raining, very gently, while whispering its verdant perfume, just behind me, just outside my open window. If it’s not, I’m pretending it is, and the world is agreeable.
I’ve been reading an older essay by Susan Sontag entitled “The Aesthetics of Silence,” an article from which I feel a chiding exposure of invented artistic double binds, a renewed challenge for integration and expression (the ways rain shares), and primarily the pleasure of yet another perspective.
Like “the heroism of shortcomings” from Bruno Schulz as carved out of pages by Jonathan Safran Foer in The Tree of Codes – the powers of self-negation and its failure in the likes of Kafka and Kleist, Jabes and Joubert, Artaud and Rimbaud, Blanchot and Beckett and so on. Those great unsilent successes of botched commitments to silence.
As emptiness might only occur in a context of fullness.
Being so glad that I am writing this by hand, as I do with every document I create, usually quite uncertain of what is inside each letter until the systems of nervous muscles begin to work. The quotes above, for instance, copied from handwritten notecards copied from marginal notes and underlines copied from the midst of other authors reworked texts, and then copied again here with the proviso that perhaps in forming it yet another time, by hand, something missed before gains another change to arise.
I am thankful that writing is quiet.
Although I used to use the typewriter’s beat to edit my lines of poetry.
And I’m sure the background music, passing cars, and sounds of squirrels and wind and children all have their effect.
I also appreciate seeing the whole page, battling mood-related or arthritically scribble script versus partial views on-screen and standardized formations of fonts. I enjoy those bloggers who scan their manuscripts and writings but don’t trust your powers of vision compared to the particular words I end up selecting by the time I reach the machine. No need to add difficulty to difficulty, in this case.
Still, you’d probably know something more (or at least differently) were you opening up an envelope gathered from your mailbox with this folded up inside.
Like silence or a thicket of questions, rain or a grumbling stomach, everything comes round to context. Persons embodied, embedded in an active variable surround expressing through media, tools, machines, to wherever, whomever, however you are reading, deciphering, translating, decoding, interpreting, creating yet again in another contextual universe of another time.
Such a dynamic endeavor. Our artifacts, messages, calls and displays.
Panicked passion, tragic fighting of borders, heroic shortcomings these. Aesthetics of silence. All.
All my Words are Silent 