Tag: thoughts

Remarking Mark…Part the Second

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing3 Comments

Mark Marking Questions

“Man is a riddle.  Our complex relation to others may also be affected by our fascination with this riddle…Origin means, perhaps, question”

–Edmond Jabes–

 

“Writing as the ‘talking cure’

he thought, thinking in language what he thought language might do.  Be doing.  To him.

He heard “why?,” a term learned early in order to learn, and thenceforward laid over nearly everything he read, encountered, overheard or stumbled across, as if it were his placeholding destiny in some infinitely progressing equation simplified “world.”

He’d read he needed other persons and things, places and times to know his own.  – “Why?”

He’d heard “until others acknowledge or teach you your shape, your ideas, what you see what you feel what you taste or speak or hear, your perceptions and scope, you won’t be aware of a thing.  You’ll have no ideas or sensations per se, you’re essentially Nothing without Them.”

Arching his back and shrieking a sound at an absence of breast: “why?”

“I guess I’m just punctuated that way,” he came to think, as he adapted vocabulary.  “My role in a sequence is: – ?”

“And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was…” well, maybe – ?

“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao…” well, maybe –  ?

“1 + 1 = 2,” well….maybe – ?

“You are Mark, a male form of a human animal, replete with these working organs, the English language, and certain beliefs.  These are your parents, your sibling, your probable friends.  Here are some feelings, some expressions and thoughts.  Here are your words.”  Well.  Maybe – ?

Shaped with letters and numbers and sounds.  Voices and touchings and feels, he became, slowly, surely, puttied toward a recognizable form – perceptible to others, acknowledged, even affirmed or engaged from time to time.

“Why?” propelled the lengthening problem of life but never grew toward solutions.

He read elaborate explanations and descriptions as he borrowed more languages.  Spiritual terms, medical terms, words scientific, political, philosophical and intimate.  Thick reams of median symbols asking to be joined or embraced, understood or imbibed.

Mark enjoyed these fabrics, and found a belonging among them.  Layers and theories, emotions and dreams – he simply need append his simple gesture – ?

 

Trouble, in the form of discomfort or pain, of disjunction, arose when agreement was desired.  Explicitly or implicitly, this undermined his form.  In situations where reciprocation or statement, some firm relation was called out for, his questioning mark failed to serve.  Choices, commitments, integrities or beliefs turned to drizzle around his definitive (self-identified) symbol.

“I love you,” she wooed.  “-?-“ he replied.  “I cannot know what you mean, what your language portends, I am unable to verify why?” he’d respond.  To collapse and retreat.

Even thoughts and decisions were questioned and split open on his sharp weapon of a mark.  He was not trusted or deemed trustworthy as doubt was perceived an anomaly.

He remained uncertain.

Self-perceivably, he reliably questioned, he’d respond and then take it away with his mark, his “signature move” as it were, his undoing.  “Yes I will…” “This I think…” “I am…” always followed by his -?- (which sounded like “why?” in the air) and found no rationale that could not be further put to query.

The world was unstable as well as a “self” for him.  All under the branding shadow of “why?”  This Mark never outgrew in all his adaptations, acquisitions, mutations and metamorphoses.  His certain core of uncertainty.  His permanent doubt.  His oxymoronic reality of being, not-being -?-

They perceive him – they really do – but as full of content with no substance; as possible and capable yet a great risk; as veritably human but unnamed from within.  Without “identity.”  This is true even of his wife and his children, parents and friends, all unsure who or what they are relating to, marked with the sign of the -?-  The indeterminate one, the questionable and uncertain, the duplicitous and vague, are various ways he is read and conceived – standing there as he does on his tiny spot of here, long-legged and stooped as in prayer, or inquiry – ? –

Heroes Ringing True

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Robert Musil

On “the writer type”:

“One can describe this type as the person in whom the irredeemable solitude of the self in the world and among people comes most forcefully to mind:  as the sensitive person who is never given his due;  whose emotions react more to imponderable reasons than to compelling ones; who despises people of strong character with the anxious superiority a child has over an adult who will die half a lifetime before he will; who feels even in friendship and love that breath of antipathy that keeps every being distant from others and constitutes the painful, nihilistic secret of individuality; who is even able to hate his own ideals because they appear to him not as goals but as the products of the decay of his idealism.  These are only isolated and individual instances, but corresponding to all of them, or rather underlying them, is a specific attitude toward and experience of knowledge, as well as of the material world that corresponds to it.”

On the writer’s region (“nonratioid”):

“There is no better way to characterize this region than to point out that it is the area of the individual’s reactivity to the world and other individuals, the realm of values and valuations, of ethical and aesthetic relationships, the realm of the idea…in this region facts do not submit, laws are sieves, events do not repeat themselves but are infinitely variable and individual…there is in the writer’s territory from the start no end of unknowns, of equations, and of possible solutions.  The task is to discover ever new solutions, connections, constellations, variables, to set up prototypes of an order of events, appealing models of how one can be human, to invent the inner person…which then nevertheless branches out somewhere into a boundless thicket, although not without somehow fulfilling its purpose…”

These quotes come from his exceptional small essay Sketch of What the Writer Knows

which I desperately wanted to reproduce here…

if it “rings true” for you – please find a mentor and friend in Robert Musil:

Signs

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing7 Comments

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Signs

 

“We wanted love.  This sentence has no meaning outside a sentence.  We wanted a multitude of words.  Love was to become the quarrying of ourselves, emerging from a completely different side of the narrative…Representing ourselves to ourselves was an unmanageable task from the beginning.  To continue being a reality while simultaneously becoming its sign that dissembles nothing, only relentlessly elevates itself in a continuous shadow – “

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

 

There was no doubt we wanted.  What it was that we wanted, exactly, was another matter.  We wanted love?  Perhaps.  Love made from words and signs and gestures.  From the beginning we had trouble representing ourselves.  Being a reality while also signifying it and being its addressee – inveigled us in a continuous loop.  We needed another view.  From a completely different side of the narrative.

Maybe we wanted to drink reality to its dregs.  We wanted love.  Someone who could read the being and its signs and comprehend its address.  Someone to help interpret the loop, quarry the signs, chart and map the shadowy spiral.  We wanted a multitude of words.  Words we’d never thought of.  Never heard before.  Synonyms and antonyms to set apart our signs, that we might, perchance, see who we are.  Learn, not just be.  We wanted love.

Loving ourselves was clinging to continuous shadow.  Ourselves always just ahead of us, being, quarrying experience, fabricating new signs, dissembling nothing.  We didn’t know, anything.  We wanted love and a multitude of words, of gestures – significations of action and matter – we wanted to be real.

Your side was completely different.  There you were – being, assembling signs, dissembling words I thought I knew into paradoxical meanings.  I’d see a sign that seemed familiar but the language was foreign, the reference obscure, of exotic materials.  Where were you quarrying?  I was stunned and fascinated – we could make such similar things of our surround and within – yet pointing in apparently opposite directions!  How could this be?

We wanted love.  I followed your signs, tried to tell you what they meant.  We wanted for multitudes of words.  You sought to explain, what with the being, the source, the signs and address,  indicating your shadow, not mine.  I, forever chasing the shade of your dress.

We wanted for love and showed each other signs.  We gestured and addressed our bodies and songs, put on shows of ourselves for each other.  Here are my banners and pennants.  Here my consistent mottoes.  Here the images we keep – representations of ourselves like lost memories.  Here our directions and contents, graphics and readings.  Signs, signs, and a multitude of words.

We began telling one another their stories as we read.  Replete with new words, new signs and misreadings.  This did not often go well.  With each sign that we made we were reading the last.  We couldn’t keep up, swimming in continuous shadow.

A multitude of loving and words.  We believed we wanted reality.  We decided to quarry together – our insides working into a shared surround.  We disagreed on its representation and agreed to post personal options.  We grew confused and crowded with signs and gestures.  Grabbing some of these, we started swinging, thinking ours might outlast the others, might prove “right,” win out, or be “true.”

Our signs began to shatter as our words and gestures dissembled.  We established picket lines and separate camps.  We fashioned more signs with blazoned slogans of ourselves and our views, losing them inside our shadows.  We decided to climb.  Perhaps a view from afar, or you’ll be off on expedition.  We located a guide.  Who seemed to think all of our signs were true.  We looked again and could read that we wanted for love.  Our valley was riddled with signs.  Our guide interpreted gestures the same.  Words of pain, words of fear, a multitude of words.  All quite similar but in our own languages.

We wanted love, he said.

Someone to read our beings, our signs and receive their address.  Someone to help interpret our loops, quarry new signs, and map our spiraling stories.  We wanted multitudes of words and we had them.  Words we’d never thought of nor read.  Words replete with variant meanings and references.  Synonyms, antonyms distinguishing our signs, redirecting our shadows.  If we listened and looked, and with care, he said, perchance we might see who we are, being.  And learn how to be.  If we wanted for love, we had it, he said.  Just look at the signs.

The Cleaving

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Graphotos, Photography, Traces, Writing1 Comment

“Connection is the recognition of the  intimacy of a division…

to make a division is to give substance form”

–Madeline Gins–

“Therefore shall a person leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto another

and they shall be as one flesh”

Genesis 2:24

The Cleaving

 

How do we come to know, believe or accept this ancient concept?  It has mited its way to the deepest reaches of Being (Dasein): Heidegger’s rift, linguistics address, each individual body’s pulse or breath or tremor.  That only the separateness may truly join.  Only the differences are recognized as similar.  Only the rifts require a bridge.

I do not know.  It is a reality I feel with as much pain as hope or joy.  That cleaving is both the splitting apart, the splintering wood and severing rope, AND their clinging together, their sealing and sealant.  It undoes me.  As a metaphor, concept or signification it rings true and carried dark howls and bright screams out of the depths of me.

And yet it comes so naturally.  Fight or flight.  Attack, retreat.  The extremities of the urges to join and drive to cease.  In the utterly intimate action of cleaving, we expose and unite – right in the most susceptible, vulnerable, life-threatening places.

 

The “cutting out,” “cutting off” – to cleave – you know what I’m referring to – when that which is most important to you becomes unreachable.  That impression that you are being “given up on,” that someone is “letting go,” even actively removing themselves or casting you away, chopping the cord – the umbilical torn, gushing, pulsing, the infant left writhing and wailing in the dumpster or thorny woods, a closet or dark alley.  Cleft.

In truth:  that severing of relationship, whether momentary or fatal, is a life-threatening, death-dealing blow.  Abandonment.  The dawning that you are at the front and there will be no reinforcements, you are cut from the supply train.  There is shock, there is scream and then a canyon of void with no other side.  It is we at our most disastrous, mortally dependent state.

We in the face of absence.  We without response – no face in a mirror, no echo of sound, NO THING.  Cleft.

Individual, alone, solitary entity.  Facing the reality:  we are insufficient to our needs, incompetent to our existence, impossible to self-sustain.  We in our fragility.  Our valid, appropriate, ontological FEAR.

Whack!  In anger, in grief, in silence, in bruise, we are severed, ultimately exposed, whether through small offense or enormous rejection – we have been cut.  Past the bone.  The reverberations tumble and crumble out far and wide, seemingly ubiquitously, regardless of the specific instant’s severity.  This is “the cleaving” done as much to us as by us in our madness to survive, to be real, to be verified and validated.

 

In the “drawing near,” in the “clinging” of to cleft, on the other hand, we are born.  We become.  As another reflects or responds to our raw broken mortally wounded finitude and fragility, we get glued to the vitality of these limited lives we have in us.  As these fearsome exposures are clasped, bonded, covered by another – transfused and salved, bandaged and wrapped or dressed by another – we know we are possible, we feel we exist and we matter, we join toward world and its being, brief though it is.

These are our chances and capacities: to effect, to mean, to act, create or be.  It is in the drawing near that what life there may be is acknowledged, fostered, affirmed.  Con-firmed.  Cleft – grafted into the ongoing reality of things, parting through wholes, participating and enhancing of semiotic systems.  As if life does not really belong to us, but we must belong to it, by belonging with one another.

“Leaving,” “cleaving.”  The leaf cleft from its branch will not survive, but cleft or grafted to another stem or soil or root may for awhile yet, live on, grow, produce, change and become.

We continuously leave and cleave to varying extents, and these just may be the principal elements of our thriving.  Cleft we perish, shrivel, die away.  Cleft we heal, nourish and grow life.  Both options/realities occurring in the cuts, the core places, the sources.

Here we panic, here we rejoice.  Here we suffer, here we love.  Here we become, and here we cease to be.

 

This mysterious activity necessitates both significations, counter-intuitive though it seem.  The need to be cleft exposes the places needing cleft.  Awareness of the sources for supply determines the crucial treasure, dependency, and gifts of supply.

We are chopped to the truth of death

and joined to the reality of life

Cleft.

The Bewildered Bewildering (attempts toward clear thinking)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

Searching for truth(s)

As one attempts to come nearer to one’s existence as a human – its systems, structures and functions – from mental imaginative realms down to cellular genetic levels – the complexity and confluences involved can be bewildering.

Are bewildering.

It is easy to get one’s self “lost” as a human being.  On literally billions of levels we participate in constant (and I mean unceasing) input and output of information, movement, form, energy and so on.  It’s more than we can individually handle.  Yet we are made to.

In other words, it is we as individual humans – our bodies, our minds and experiences – doing the bewildering we find bewildering.  Perhaps this is my first noble truth: consciousness means being aware of and bewildered by our bewilderment.

How to proceed?  There are a bewildering amount of possibilities and processes for us bewildered humans to bewilder our way into.  We can study, forge purposeful relationships, work, play, think, dream, parent, fight or flee our bewilderment.  Opened up, we do not know the options or capabilities, the extent our bewilderment can reach.

Everything is strange.  If this were my second noble suggestion, it would imply that with each moment of our existence we are encountering the unknown.  We recognize our existence by dissimilarity, non-identity, difference.  This makes all things new.  We literally have never been where we are in space, time or living at any instant, before.  We do not re-live, we are ever living-into.  The contents of the past can become part of our structuring and processing, but nothing repeats, everything “enters.”  Each no-time now is brand new experience of unknown reality, experienced, imagined, interpreted, perceived and felt by us in incalculable ways through a vortex of communications and processes we have very little control over.

We, the producing products.  Perhaps this is noble human notation number 3.  What happens in our bewilderment of presentness is that our individuality opened out ubiquitously functions to produce experiences which are products of our experiencing.  In other words we are unceasing experimentors producing experiences as our products.  It all applies; it all exports.  There are no deletions, erasures or extractions – only new experiences, new dissimilar moments of ongoing processing.

There is no exit from this process.  Form 4: NO EXIT.  Imagined observation, fabricated explanation, hypothetical objectivity, invented theories, meanings, interpretations of sense – none of these removes us from our experiencing or transfers us to any other point-of-view from our individual field.  Bewildering in our bewildering surround.  Semblances, “insights,” knowledge and so on are just pieces of the ongoing differentiation in bewilderment.  How we exist, perhaps not the ant or paramecium or tree cell.  But, then again, perhaps so!

If a lion spoke we wouldn’t understand them, Wittgenstein proffered.  Another way of saying we’re us, bewildered and bewildering beasts, forging into the unknown.  Our access limiting in its unlimitedness (i.e. finitude); systematically mind-blowing and ecstatically depressing in an awe-full or awe-some(?) way.

Be human.  Be glad for it.  Be wilder.

N Filbert 2012

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

 

 

 

Baffling Wisdom (really a long roundabout babble aimed towards my wife)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing1 Comment

Going back through the writings that have been piling up on, around and near my desk over the past few days working out the hoped-for verbalization of whatever it is that’s been stirring around in my brain I ran across a few more pages that seemed interesting / to the purpose…

“I am looking for words….”

Baffling Wisdom

i.e. thinking things through

Remarking Mark Remarking

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing5 Comments

Greetings readers.  I’ve been in a bit of a swirl or “swarm” of information, activity, relation and language of late, nothing wrong with it really, but its producings have seemed a bit ephemeral, inchoate, more wisps than winds.  Yesterday as I sat to work, a new character introduced himself to my scribbling hand…here’s a sort of mock-up or intro to that relation.  I’d love to hear what you think?  Is he interesting?  Are his thoughts?  Should he live?  🙂

Thank you SO much, each viewer and reader for taking time out of your lives which must be as busy as the rest of us, to listen and look at my blog and my work.  This community has significantly grown my courage.

Remarking Mark Remarking

(please click on title for full text – thanks!)

Thoughts

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

“No useless chatter, but a word of necessity face to face with itself.

With this word, I have written my books.

Word of sand.  Word of eternity.

Thoughts of shipwreck, but also of haven.”

“To approach silence before the silent sign.

To approach the book before the page.

To wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us.”

-Edmond Jabes-

“When a sparrow feels the freezing cold air, he puffs up his feathers and gathers his feet under his body;

he bears the surrounding cold by countering it with his inner warmth.

The writer, who is also warm-blooded, fights even harder”

-Viktor Shklovsky-

“The bow’s harmony arises from the strained stick forced by the bow-string.

Subsequently, harmony resides in unity and contradiction.

It is kinetic energy that’s about to become dynamic energy.”

Swarm. Absorb. (the words, pt. 2)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Photography, Poetry, Writing2 Comments

Swarm.  Absorb.

 

metaphor:  the entire discography of Mark Kozelek (+ Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) / each version of Max Richter’s “Haunted Ocean” on dizzying random repeat – this is the setting:  atmosphere.  environment.  “context.”

metaphor:  the Kansas sky in storm

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            metaphor:  dealing with Ache.  (“being human”)

metaphor:  “Control without Hierarchy” by Deborah M. Gordon…on some page in a book called Swarm by Lucas Felzmann:

“A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something that people don’t know how to do: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer.  It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies…Life in all its forms is messy, surprising, and complicated.  It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy.  We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions.  Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs – without any person directing another, or having more power than another.  Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in nature.”

think of language.

            what is scattered widely or uniquely ubiquitous – call it “swarm.”

“I”…lost.

I know I cannot gather to a grown pillar of I-ness, something you might recognize, could “identify.”

I know I cannot be where I am as long as “time” and “space” function effectively in my frames of reference…

I spread.

I swarm.

“I-swarm”

(the “human” world-situation)

            Leaving that aside.

How might one (dependent on two or more in order to, well, in order to simply “be”)

how might that one (singular mark – “/”) handle (manage? survive?) “its” Ache?

“To be or not to be, that IS the question”

(o wise god)

            So I split…up…

I canvas the sky, the context, the landscape, the sitz im leben, in fragments.

I approach, engage, invade the world like shot scattered from the anguished burst of a wombgun.

I-particle.

I-swarm.

Absorb.

from “Swarm” by Lukas Felzmann

            Seminal-syllable words resound –

– Let their pulse reverberate your bodies like hymns –

God.  Void.  I.  You.  Song.  Life.  Death.  Love.  Real.  Being. (Not).

and so on…

all with no definition…

IS.  IT.  THIS.

nowhere near

where we mean to be.

Absorb.

Swarm.

from Swarm by Lukas Felzmann

            In this situation then,

of too much

of grave luck

(all that hope and final destitution)

I swarm.  I absorb.

I decenter.  I explode.

I desist in pretense

in sense

I spread.

One mark….thousands of pixels….without hierarchy

(a swarm of cells)

(a flock of birds)

(a fish in school)

I swarm.

I absorb.

[ – I love you – ]

 -for my wife