Tag: Susan Howe

Another Pause, Another Someday

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

“Words give clothing to hide our nakedness”

–Susan Howe–

“But a word is a bottomless pit”

–Lyn Hejinian–

And then it arrives, unexpectedly, another gap.  She sees a magician in bright jester’s garb, seated on a branch in a tree.  Amid the traffic.  Amid a swarm of bees, of thrumming crows and starlings.  A bat lies in labored breathing on the sidewalk.

Lightning- and Lady- bugs.

Like that, like both.

There is no goal to it in the beginning.  At first.  The seconds’ glow catches you off guard.  “What was that?” neon spot moving in the night.  Imperceptible polka-dotted red creeping carefully over your toe.  Structures pause.  Structures moment.  When realized, when you bring your own accident: awareness.

What pressures turns out to be necessity.  Of deadline, of assignment, of transactional fulfillment – relationship or vocation, even health.  Without apparent choice.  Or ever so long ago.  Why markings called parentheses are shields.  What gives pause.  And stays the pressuring.  For the moment.

An extended kiss.

A lapse in volume.

An ignored alarm.

You find yourself there : (YOU).

The rest of the world lining up, encroaching, exerting itself, themselves, your other selves, against the slender boundaries, the slick curving walls – they can’t be climbed, nor be toppled, only inverted )if you accept the pressures(, or erased as if they’d never happened.  Become brackets.  Prison versus asylum (in its native safety-seeking sense).

(YOU)?  )YOU(?  [YOU]?  ]YOU[?

            Now and then.  Another pause.  Another Sabbath.  A so-called rest.  Time is not the issue (as duration).  Time is at issue in its momentary absence.  Glancing the lightning-bug, bird-call, ladybug feeling out the stem.

“Another pause” with pressures all around.  Expectations or chores.  But no one calling, not this now.  Last week too, unexpected, unprepared, cage door left awry, or finding key in hand.  Parentheses.  And then you sleep that active way we call “rest.”  For a moment.  You make, for the joy of making, or not.  Either way is pleasure.  Or pleasant at the most.

Such as now, another pause, this day, another Someday that arrived.

Sunday Sustenance

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, UncategorizedLeave a comment

conversations with my wife (www.lifeinrelationtoart.wordpress.com & www.ekphrastixarts.com)

and all accompanied by:

Sigur Ros’ relatively new “Valtari” album

hope your day is great!

Writing: the Margins

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Graphotos, Traces, Writing6 Comments

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Writing: the Margins

“All words run along the margins of their secrets”

– Susan Howe –

 

Now we are getting somewhere.  Now we can go ahead and believe in telling and in being told.  If “every word runs along the margins of its secrets.”  If so, (and it feels truthful, even if untrue) then…

there might be other margins, or perhaps every margin limns its contents and its secrets?  Perhaps, then, our senses, and every limit of our perceptions “run along the margins of their secrets,” like our cells and bodies do.

That “perhaps” means here “possible” – an enormous margin full of stuff and secrets.  I.e. seen and unseen, known and unknown, believed and unbelievable, etc.

And if “Limits/are what any of us/are inside of” is truthful of Charles Olsen to utter, then we might be everywhere up against the margins of the limitless.

Speaking practically, a margin is variable, and bodies and language (synonyms of a sort) are more variable than variables.

So to say, we may indeed (in our actions of doing and making, saying and thinking – signing and gesturing) be communicating.  That is, it is possible.  Words running along their margins of secrets, senses apprehending along their own secret margins, the boundaries porous and variable: something might be meeting there, might be weaving, might be, as it were, com-prehended (apprehended together in some so-called secret way)…co-mmunication?

If language, in its way, defines the social, our context, like skin, for participation in world…connectivity, sharing in common, is not only possible, but necessary, and the secrets, the ineffables, the private, what we thought of as incommunicable, is clinging there, infused with the margins, the borders where we interact, transact, have (as it were) our being.

Therefore

“it is not infinite.  Even infinite is a term”

-Louis Zukofsky-

by which I mean all our words signifying –lessness: limitless, timeless, meaningless, objectless, and so forth, limn their mysteries as much as the constant traction we enact with our names.

Lines wide enough for all of us to traffic in, and obviously very thin, perhaps transparent – we are dancing here.

Feet and minds, hands and mouths ever each right where they seem to be and also where they’re not…marginal movements…co-here-ence, always presently together, secret and exposed.

Perhaps and possibly.

N Filbert 2012