Tag: thoughts
Unknown and Unnamed Undoing: the swoon and the swarm (a kind of mathematics to be continued in rain)
Unknown and Unnamed experiences: the swoon and the swarm
I hadn’t remembered it like this (trying not to remember). That all of it got into you. That all of it came out!
Immersion. Enthrallment. Ecstasy – words that come, to mind.
That if en-joined, then out-sourced. Becoming indecipherable – like epistemology.
A moment’s rush, for example. I encounter – which encountering looks like insertion and abstraction on me. I move toward, feel it out, then back off and observe. Active, passive; a swing, a rocking boat.
This is different. Inundation, a flood. Unable to say what’s mine, what’s not; who’s me, who’s you. Unable, frankly, to say, at all. Only be.
Motion, reception; injunction and release.
Think sky-diving: that decision to jump, trusting something, someone will hold together as form in all that air. Like diving the deep blue sea, compression surround, that some element will remain intact without ground or solidity.
It works that way. Give and take, see and saw, this uncanny to and fro of body, perceptions, breath. Eyes contact then fog to some self between. Fleshes – distinct and specific – now con-fused. Who’s sweat? Who’s secretions? It’s sticky, yes, like that – a gluey bond.
Then the wave, the distended moment – incalculable clockwork – where all borders and boundaries seem lost, some extended and mutual sigh or moan within which the voice is other and the same without identity.
The swoon of it. The swarm.
Dizzying rush of blood as warmth or wind; eyes roll back, also in, but not to my darkness. As if limbless or prosthetically invented, my body grows – grows yours or ours or contracts to another covering, but inside-out.
As if leap or let go were no longer options, but instinct.
As if hot and cold – undifferentiated – some something that must define pleasure –
as in emptiness, fullness
the yin, the yang
a cellular entanglement
The swoon, the swarm
emerge
But what? Or whom?
And what occurs in the median?
Who were that? What was those?
The swoon, the swirl, the swarm.
No one effecting. Effected. What does that indicate?
Nothing, essential to event – if nothing, than an absence utterly imbued.
A radiance, evocation,
like a sleeping brain on dreams…
with-you, the unknown gets no/w/here.
Whatever the constants, coefficients and variables, given the operator as convergence, the equation = whole,
where the w stands for we,
without which none – (“hole”).
Affecting substance…no one gains currency…necessity (no 1, but at least 2)… and then – ?
No one, unknown, unnamed, no/w/here as 0+O
where O stands for other
in this case, you
O requiring as much as I
inferring – ?
you can’t have 1 without anOther
but where anOther occurs must be at least 1 (other)
even if unknown, unnamed
in order to be lost and found in the joining
the immersion and enthrallment
the ecstasy
The Unknown and Unnamed Hears and Replies
Running into Melodies, Lyrically
(the unknown and unnamed hears and replies)
Or picture it this way: a runner yearning to the tape.
Arms flung back as if flagged by a gale, chin and neck making way for the shoulders – a pure strive.
And rushing against, past and around…force and flow. Learning the body by all that surrounds, through which it hums and throbs.
The air is full of waves. The waves are full of particles – particles agitating, dancing. Or the fragments are waving, threading this way and that – streaming and winding – I feel it.
Over the curves of my shoulders, the chorus. Deep in my belly – the bass and the drum – caverns of mind. The ticking, the singing, the whispers and thrums. Brass flowers into blooming curlicues, echoing labyrinths – my ears.
In such a wind the eyes will close, and the legs will strive and stride. No matter my position, in the medium of music, I am always moving forward, setting forth – possibly sailing, possibly struggling with every ounce – but making progress.
It glances off the elbows, reverberates the bones. Fills the mouth, stuffs the nostrils – can make it hard to breathe. Sound. Shuddering loins and quaking knees, a tremor-massage, a tumbling. A sleep.
I lean in. Becoming a shaping of waves – reaching, aching and out of breath. Receiving the blast and caress. The force and the flow. I listen, I feel. I am drowning, aware of each inch of my skin. I am falling in flight, my organs engorged. I am musically shaped as a man.
I, the infinite? instants…
I, Gelaftimus
A jumble of words. A spasm, a syndrome. The spraying of a passing fancy, designation.
You don’t know where I got these words, nor do I, or only rarely. A voided origin, a lifetime suffering verbs and the masks of nouns.
Experience: feels like something moving forward, somethings breaking and tumbling about it. “Feels like.”
A kind of perceptual first instance, shaped by everything before, altered by everything after.
At the limit then, boundary-lip, threshold. Moving, and that ceaselessly. Colliding.
A poet, after committing suicide in his youth, now festering under the ground, is found to have remarked that “a tree grows upward…the path of least resistance.” So most of us.
Whatever “us” might mean, a jumble of words, perhaps a spasm, unconscious and involuntary instinct, so carefully and meticulously learned: to say.
Gelaftimus is what I feel today, this moment, my wife sitting and stewing on her couch, me (whatever “me” might mean) crabbing over my desk, this white paper, with a ball-point pen, scribbling – “a jumble of words, a spasm. A syndrome.” Perhaps. But it is gelaftimus, I tell you that.
Early on I was assigned this particular label: “Nathan,” only later coming to find that “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context. In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.” (V.N. Volosinov, et. al.) “Feels like” experience.
Needless to say, “I” have struggled with defining the cluster of words “I,” “Nathan,” “man,” “boy,” “me,” “son,” “husband,” “father” and so on in their perpetually altered contexts, circumstances and situations, ever re-de-term-in-ing their possible meanings.
A jumble of words. A spasm and syndrome. Instinct and accomplishment (accomplice-ment?)
My wife, last night on the swing, beside me, in the dark, on the porch, spoke of “not being allowed to say” as a child – so very many experiences “not to talk about” – frozen (perhaps) in their places or processed without knowledge dementedly deep underground (out of sight, out of mind, and so forth).
Contextually, she was addressing the decades-old infancy of “figuring out the world around me and my relation in and to it.”
“Reality works in overt mystery”
which I found (what she said) to feel like truth (as in actuality) – the jumble of words, the spasms and syndromes of “making words fit.” The odd difficulty we sometimes name “maturity,” i.e. beginning and growth.
I would confuse myself in this (were I to find me).
Alas it floats on the crest of the wave, breaks and spreads on the shore, regathers in a reflective pool, drifts away and starts again in fragments and particles.
Poised on a threshold, hardly poised. Rather in the breeze, a metaphor passing hands.
This jumble of words. Syndromes and spasms. Accumulated masterfully and haphazardly over ages and accidents. Feels like, experience.
Gelaftimus, today.
“A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; [or making it fit with prefabricated words? –N.F.] and in writing [that babble at the crest of the wave –N.F.] one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) [?! –N.F.] and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, [ever creating more waves – N.F.] it makes words to fit it [or fits it to words which recognize? – N.F.]”
Anthropophobia: or, the Trouble with Misanthropy
Anthropophobia: or, the Danger of Others
Let’s face it: our primary threat is the Other.
Those alive and breathing, in need.
Replete with sense and emotions, desires.
Thoughts, feelings, and dreams.
Con-fused.
Instinct and culture,
Learning and language,
and bodies:
physiques requiring space,
ears, eyes, limbs and digits,
the nerve!(s) and bellies and hearts.
Brains complete with mind and will,
Choice and intent,
the capability to discern.
Sexual organs,
Breath-pollution.
Stealing glances –
the lechery of looking –
what they plunder to hear.
This multitude of selves and their interests,
their tumultuous clamor to survive
and their ubiquity:
disruption of personhoods and presence
leaving The Exit as the only escape.
Most dangerous, Other:
the contact, connection,
and ability to attach.
Insidious deception –
a paradox of similarity,
of kind –
some others so like
as to be indistinguishable,
from our selves.
Living Traces – Paul Valery
“In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life with as much care, passion and persistence as if one’s life depended on them…there we find what is called ‘living.'”
-Paul Valery-
I, for Instants: the writer question
I the Question; I the Answer That Does Not Satisfy
“I am both wound and knife”
“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river;
it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger;
it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
“The question inaugurates a type of relation characterized by openness and free movment; and what it must be satisfied with closes and arrests it. The question awaits an answer, but the answer does not appease the question, and even if it puts an end to the question, it does not put an end to the waiting that is the question of the question.”
“all things oscillate round me, and I with them, an uncertainty unto myself.
All for me is incoherence and change. All is mystery and all is meaning…”
I am the writer. Am I also what is written?
Both wound and knife.
I am the husband? What the husband does.
I am their father. Am I also their fathering?
I am the writer. Not the writer I believe I am, want to be, imagine. Am I the writer? What is written does not appease, does not satisfy. I am waiting, asking, waiting in openness for possibility. I am the answering I do not desire.
Am I what is written? Partial answers. Fragments pieced together forming questions. I wait. Am I the one who waits? While writing?
I love. Do I love? I answer by loving. I am dissatisfied by my loving – it is not what I had hoped, was waiting toward, believed possible. I am not the lover I asked for.
I feel I am the open, the possibility – the questioning. My answering closes, arrests, delimits me. I am neither satisfied nor appeased.
I am the human. Am I human? If I answer for that I am dissatisfied, given the question, the possible replies.
I write I am the writer, the one writing, this phrase of the question. Its answer never satisfies, leaves me waiting, asking again, anew. The questions.
“the anarchist keeps watch within us and opposes our resignations”
E.M. Cioran
The Temptation to Exist
“’I am both wound and knife’ – that is our absolute, our eternity”
“the idolatry of becoming”
“blasted joys and jubilant despair”
The Temptation to Exi(s)t
We’ve got our words all backwards. Ever trapped in what we deny. Our escape = net.
Space. Time.
If we say it is all relative, yet act. “Choose.” Freedom is nothing. The words, then, are all backwards, you see, we “mean” our opposites.
Desire.
Could cumulate as the evil. But still – you see? Hope for understanding, for wisdom, knowledge, some trivial insight. Log of shipwreck: cling.
Desire.
Another enemy: “intensity.” Synonym “passion,” carpe diem. Opposite: freedom.
In-tense-ity. State of inhabiting tension, clinging to stress, to invite suffering (“jubilant despair”). Opposite: being. freedom.
A blasted joy. (Suffering). Opposite of freedom: want. Making antonyms by definition: “to be.”
If we seize, choose, behave, acquire, reach, speak, move…”the idolatry of becoming” – antonym? = freedom.
Kingdom equals freedom. Queendom. Selfdom. “To be”-dom. Backwards words. Backwords.
Opposite of intense: rest, quietude : thought and action one : in-sane. Opposite of want, greed : poverty : possession-less, without, without within : beggar.
Freedom : opposite : control. Self-, other-, environmental-, habitation-, security-.
Be/have : to exist is to grab, to steal, to do violence. Being + having : system : be/have. Opposite: freedom.
Say it backwards. We say it backwards.
I shout “freedom” driving the blade into my throat, bloody want. Cannot “have.” Are (are NOT = desire to become – false worship – be/having).
Religion : human organization to be/have. Become. To be. Religion as an argument for (against) existence.
Already ARE. Before “being,” prior to “having.” No need : freedom. “Meaning” the opposite of what we say.
We’ve got our words backwords.
Backwards: have-been. There it is clear.
The temptation of the system, the race or kind, was “to be” as something to have, to get, to come into, be-come…that existence was a goal, something to arrive at, achieve, seizing the days, the moments,
Synonyms: act, will, intent, purpose, do.make.say.think. to mean
Synonym: be/having
Opposite: freedom.
Existence having been from the first.
Having been = at the last.
Synonym : freedom : nothing.
Clothing – an ultimate ekphrasis?
Costume as Metaphor
We dress ourselves in certain clothes, change our hair and faces in order to look some way we think to look. Appearance changes us and it need not be dissembling. Indeed, what are we? Are we anything? Sometimes, we become what we look to be which we have thought to be. And, on further thought, this may be nothing also though, for the time, it looked to be something. Other times, our dissembling seems wrong in its particular, as a contradiction of another identity as though we had that identity and an assumed one could contradict it. We want to be something: whatever we really are, whatever we could hope to be. But, ‘What we really are is a mystery, and what we could hope to be has only such value as our hope assigned it. Our aspirations are blind and arbitrary and their success is only their own.
Children dress in scraps of costume and play at being what the scraps suggest. They try it and let it go. Later, our commitments are sometimes fuller and the letting go isn’t so easy when our interest wanes as it may. We hedge it with other interests on the side, secret selves or contradictory clothes which protest the real me, so that anyone’s person may well be multiple and all the multiples tentative and exploratory as children’s are. The space remaining for definition – so wide for children, or so it seems – becomes narrow and limited and definition farther and farther off and we accept what we were as if it were what we are or even what we had meant to be. But it isn’t. We know so.
When we ask who someone is we get places and ages for answers, occupations and antecedents, what times and places someone has occupied or what other external has occupied them, as though we were all blanks and had no shape or nature except by possession. Our need to possess and our need to be possessed proclaims this. If we really were something in ourselves, could we need anything? Could anything possess us? Possessions hardly satisfy us. They must have been not our need.
But, whatever our need, they must in some sense have been wrong and we sense the wrong not by contrast with some other possession though it must often seem so: the apparent greenness of other pastures or even this same pasture in the approach of some spring. We have hopes for projected futures, for what may someday be in spite of all. In spite of all. In the light of all. How impressive the all is: the endless possibilities whose indefinite endlessness makes absurd any one. How hopeless it is to pose in any particular costume when all we are is limitless and costume denies that, limits us in a role.
What can we ever be if the limitlessness of the all is truly our quality? We can as little be anything as we could if we were nothing as also it seems we are. It is hard to decide; and the decision whether we are all or nothing, based as it is on the same premise, produces the same result; we cannot ever be anything. Though we dress however forcefully or fancifully we will, it is always pretension though the pretense may have its successes, even for a long time.
What of the world? Though there may seem to be nothing outside ourselves, there is a sense in which we observe and the object, as though it were, of our observation we call the world. This is absurd because the world is as little as we are.
And yet the language has its declensions and its conjugations. If we speak at all we speak in the structure of the language and what we say, whatever it is, may matter far less than our accession to the way the structure of the language divides experience in terms of person and tense so as to say we are (or were, will be), so as to say what was or could, what is, who is the first or second or third person, what is singular or plural, that there are or could have been, that there still might be, certain actions, certain reactions. We speak in tongues however prosaic our speech may be. The boldness of language supervenes our actual experience. It means to say what we don’t know. It creates the world as if the world were. Its whole necessity is metaphor.
And language need not be verbal; that is to say our postures and houses, our laws and landscapes, our science and public buildings, share the character of language. They are metaphor also: creations of desire.
Forgive the world, however terrible it is. We dream of horror, impelled by what we don’t know, and the world seems to contain it; but it is not a real world and nothing requires our belief.
That we believe in nothing is a hard requirement because we want to believe in something: some political theorem, say, or religious creed or, sparing these, some unevaluated strength of our own as though in our person we might prevail and that prevalence had the salience of some proof. For what? For our dying? Because we do. Unable to think of ourselves this way, think instead of someone ten thousand years from us one way or another who will have or had a name, a place and costume no more and as much as we have. And who is he? Even so far as we know, it is a pretense of knowing. Abandon that.
Belief in nothing is a positive belief apart from relieving us of partialities; and, even in that respect, it is a liberation. The world is not partial. Nothing is all and the world is nothing as we are. What should we say? Nothing to say of ourselves and the world tells us nothing. The world is a silence. But we talk of it and to it.
We know nothing of the world and will never know. All we say is metaphor which asserts at once our unknowing and our need to state in some language what we don’t know. How we love clothes; plain clothing or even our nakedness, speaking the silence of the world, or fanciful costume in which we praise some aspect of the world we mean to praise. Clothing as metaphor, not to dress ourselves nor to say what the world is if we knew but to praise that world however it might be. Rich fabrics and fine leathers, ruffles and satin, silver and lace, glorious colors and the fragile purities of clean whites: none of these is the world nor are they all together the world. Songs only that sing its praise, the earnest entreaties and importunities of our desire.
William Bronk
from Vectors and Smoothable Curves
“Over there, it is raining…”
I’ve spent many years proclaiming, exclaiming, disputing and evangelizing my love of rain.
More intimately, for decades my journals and diaries are soaked through with ink and reflections of agonizing effort to verbalize just what it is, exactly, that the circumstance of raining represents, evokes, fulfills or actualizes in and for me.
I’ve written of fog and dusk, how they soften the edges, blur the inessential, provide a veil of connectedness and symbiosis of what is perceivable, in keeping with my sense and belief about selves, things, world.
I’ve written of smoke, the ephemerality of moments, a texturing for the fragility of what’s present.
I’ve noted how the greying of cloud, runnels and droplets heighten other colors like green, rather than glaring them out in the brightness of sun. We filter everything – visible precipitation provides the physical opportunity of “seeing” that.
Or what is blocked and distorted (rain on glasses, windows, drops on an eye or a lash) – how choosy and minutely invested our visions are – what we choose to see, shape, create and how multitudinous what we skew, block out and deny.
Also its comfort – the blanketing, softening and quieting of snow and rain on atmosphere and mood. Like a muting and subtlety; a gentling and slowing of a pace. I’ve always felt I can curl up in rain, in fog, in mist and drizzle – cloaked, protected, respected, wombed.
And nourished. How birds, soil, plants, trees, worms, flowers, sand crave and delight in the generosity and equanimity of rainfall. How it blesses all regardless. Helps me feel part, wholed, valuable and real. I can stand in rain, clean in rain, play in rain, drink rain – without wealth or beauty, intelligence or strength, position or power.
What struck me today was how the pattering of rain – patterned and random, distinct while flowing together – was in perfect accord with my inner world – how my thoughts and feelings go, move, through, pool, form streams, gather, swell, evaporate.
The porosity. The feeling that rain both permeates and respects boundaries, wets without drowning, soaks without penetrating. Gives and gives and gives. Inward, outward; saturate but rarely flood; joins without binding.
The list goes on. What I find I repeat most often, having no words to explain it, is that the condition of rain (like the music of Mark Kozelek), of all the world most closely approximates my own fullest experiences or feeling of myself.
Somehow feeling that if someone “gets” the joy and glory, protection and soothing of rain, they’re a long way toward “getting” me, or me toward being known,
or at least somehow related.
All my Words are Silent 