Tag: thoughts

Stopping to think, or, “not finding my own words,” or, “something to uncommunicate” (Blanchot)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, Writing2 Comments

My Own Words

 

            Stopping to think, and using my tongue, a silent and plural speech, writing, how thinking does not stop.

There are clouds, many-layered in many motions, colluding, in sky.

I would see them, were I to face the outside.

Inside,  no difference.

Letting speech beyond.  No beyond, in part.

I had written, earlier, “so not finding my own words…”

A song was playing (is playing, NOW) in which a deep-voiced singer repeats “all thoughts are prey to some beast.”  He repeats the phrase enough times (so that it seems like more than enough) that I hear it: the phrase, his voice, drums and strings.

Earlier it was about trees and soil, beach and sea, which have no language.  I had thought perhaps I did.  “Not finding my own words,” alas.

It makes for quiet.  A banner fastened over the mouth: blood-red, pitch-black.

Begun before, though, the plural.

Taken outside by the hand.  Inside, outside – no difference.  “Not finding my own words,” as earlier.

B called it “weariness” and “infinite conversation,” requiring interruption.  Causing a silence (stubborn, sullen) and a listening (unavoidable, imposed).  Plurality.  “Not finding my own words,” I pilfer.

Dissemination.

The launch – erasing – opposite of launch.

Why I like the word “thrum” (“not finding my own words”) and “inscribe.”

Bent, crooked, stooped over a desk with a lamp of single bulb, I imagine “scribe” as “scholar.”  Inscription going both ways, like tying a knot requires both ends.  Binding.

Such physicality to the immaterial.

As easy as lying (also snatched from a spine).

Stopping to think on how thinking never ceases.

“Not finding my own words” I turn, reverting to the silent plural speech of my mouth’s hand.

I call it “writing,” not finding my own words, even for that.

N Filbert, 2012

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Philosophy, Photography, Traces3 Comments

for instants!

J Walters's avatarCanadian Art Junkie

The Scribbled Line Portraits of illustrator Ayaka Ito and programmer Randy Church began as a class assignment before the stunning digital photography innovation came to public attention at a Toronto FITC workshop.

The series showing shredded human bodies integrated 3D and programming for a project with a three-day deadline while the two were at the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Ito and Church “put their models through the shredder” using a custom Flash drawing tool, HDR lighting, Cinema4D and Photoshop.

The project began as a class assignment and grew into a fully realized series which won an Adobe Design Achievement Award and has been featured in 3D World Magazine and Communication Arts Magazine.

A post from DesignBoom with more technical detail on the process, here.

NOTE: This is from the Art Junkie archives, 2012.

View original post

Being Ourselves – an active ontology

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

BEING OURSELVES

an active ontology

 

            To be, so they tell me, at least mostly fluid.  How to be that, too, in the other kind of way?  Beyond “fact”?

Water (or blood), being good for that, because it can be inside and outside at once, leaving and filling a vessel.  That is, it can be spilling out while going in.

As if ‘the other kind of way’ were metaphor.  But it’s unlike.  In fact, for us, it’s exactly the same, just different.

Therefore, rigid as I might “seem,” this is not actual-factual, I am mostly liminal.

Which could (factually) explain the constancy of change, or, how we identify effects of wind, e.g. fluctuation; i.e. the rippling of emotions or mood.

My faith in these “facts” alters, like my beliefs about most everything else, including my self.

That would be “natural” then, if by “natural” we meant “according to widely accepted notions of facts.”  (For example.)

Be that as it may, I’ve heard talk about a collusion between professed “facts” and perpetually mystifying “reality” as some instance of joinder (called, perhaps “knowledge”? or “wisdom”? – an alignment of facts with reality – a “truth”?).  What some might describe “accord” or “harmony”?  A sort of “peace.”  Akin to the “angle of repose”?

Would that be being in multiple ways?  At once, of course.

 

To synthesize:  the purveyors of fact inform me that I am mostly fluid (even as my knee pops when I rise, and I’ve a hard time rotating my neck).  If, in fact, I am fluid (mostly) I am asking how it is that I am being fluid in another way (from another perspective, i.e. do humans multiply being?).

 

A viscous question.

 

“And how is the riddle of thinking to be solved? – Like that of flame?”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

            In other words.

 

Find a liquid view.  For instance – rolling in a bathtub or sharktank in heavy rain.  Feel water, see through watery eyes, taste saliva, breathe liquid in (mostly).  What else do you think you are?  Grab a bone, a lock of hair and some of your own flesh.  Hold.  If you’ve a mind or soul, thoughts or theories – liquefy them, put them through a juicer until they’re at least 70% fluid – pour them in.

 

What does he mean “the mind is the great slayer of the real” (Benjamin Lee Whorf)?

Or the poet – “there is nothing in life except what one thinks of it”… and “I am what is around me” (Wallace Stevens)?

 

So, mostly fluid, with watery eyes, drenched or submerged – logically, like a porpoise or whale – we would be bringing “fact” and our “reality” to a closer accord in the “actual.”  60-80% fluid inside, 60-80% immersed outside, working our imaginations and thoughts, self-perceptions and beliefs toward a more indivisible, continuous flow…

What sorts of things do we wring from such “harmony”?  “That reality is continuous, not separable, and unable to be objectified.  We cannot stand aside to see it” (Robert Creeley).  We cannot be submerged in water and watching ourselves swim at the same time, we would (presumably) have to exit the flow and look at a still or moving picture of ourselves (doubling time?) while “reality” and “facts” kept flowing, moving, going on (including the “unreal” activity of watching ourselves swim).

The trees blur into the sky as if they share a surface, as road to carlights, to earthen shoulder, grass, flower, again to tree: “reality is something transitory, it is flow, an eternal continuation without beginning or end; it is denied authentic conclusiveness and consequently lacks an essence as well…it is not evaluable” (Mikhail Bakhtin).  Abstracting and division put us in the realm of the unreal, while the activity (of abstracting and perceiving difference) is, in fact, really occurring.

Submerged, blurry, inseparable and flowing…constantly and continuously…

to be and not to Be…

Dive.

Leap.

Swim.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Drift.

Flow…

 

and finally…to drown…dissolve…

 

N Filbert 2012

The Open

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing2 Comments

“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?

Choose, why choose?”

-J.M.G. LeClezio-

“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know'”

-Robert Creeley-

“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”

-Michel Serres-

Nebulous Thoughts

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing6 Comments


But what if we went right on ahead?

If we charged like bulls bellowing our mysteries?

When I think of you, think about us, I want to.  That’s exactly what I want to do: be done with mysteries, be one in fact.

But when I look at you, when I touch, taste, smell and listen you, I cannot conceive it.  Can’t even imagine comprehending all that’s unknown, inexplicable.  And I’m afraid to.  That too, I’m frightened of some unfathomable overwhelm.

Yet from a distance, I mean, from here, now, it feels plausible.  To declare all mysteries, one to another, in song or verse or gesture.  Enaction.  To enact our mysteries and imperceivables all at once in some enormous chaotic unison, unashamed.  What is there to be ashamed of?  Secrets are not mysteries, only their private signs.  What forges them is larger and unclear.  Diversity and variation – these we celebrate – no?

Step out of your houses and enact your whole selves!

We will bewilder one another – not such a bad catharsis!

Running, perhaps amok, perhaps silenced to a shuddering ball – who knows?  It’s a mystery!

Perhaps we’d shout in brand new languages – delighting everyone’s ears!  Perhaps we’d alter the surface of the earth, its environments?

Would that we were one expressive impressive cacophonous voice!

Would that we were?

I’d split into a willow tree dropping language-boulders from my fragile limbs.  I’d erupt a perfect mountain steaming as a cold clear lake.  I’d mud.  I’d sprout as a milky pasture of weeds.

You’d Sousaphone in primary colors woven as a world-shawl.  You’d be all the quiet stars, glimmering in their conflagration.  You’d whisper through grain and aspen, moving through air like helium.

We’d crash without injury, fomenting monuments of grandeur.  Melding our mysteries.  You-topia.  Humana-topia.  “Other”-worldly.

Perhaps.

Perhaps a universal dancing, a carnival of beauty so trouncing our balancing globe as to shatter it, sitting afloat or casting about – some atmospheric inferno.  Perhaps a gaseous stench would burst forth, a deadly poison.  Perhaps disaster.  Apocalypse of  invisible revealed.

We could surely say “we know not what we do” living mysteries, eh?

“Off the hook” even as it gores us.

Earthquaking order in riotous glee.

The maniac’s laugh.

A universe of blindness and flare.

Breaking the eggs, precarious shells.

No wonder veneers.  Elaborate mechanisms.

Flexible and porous, rigid and finely tuned.

It wears  out, the strain and stress: containing, defending.

What if we went right on ahead?

Plunged up out of deep waters, rocketing down from our skies?

Going through with our propensities: explosion/implosion?

What do you imagine?  The beginning?  The end?

A flood, a conflagration?  Some perfect balance?

We hardly know ourselves, one another…

secrets give way to hiding, large blank territories blocking the unseen, from ourselves, one another…

equilibrium-fear

we call eco-system, survival, “life.”

Undoing?

From here, right now, I want to release, to channel and broadcast – to expose without imposition, sing that I might hear, dance that I might see, enact in order to know…become some inward/outward thing, supernova and black hole at once…

nothing escaping, nothing withheld.

Who (what) are we?

Begin.

Adding it up

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Philosophy, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Reading, Writing – the ‘Rithmetic

You know, I honestly don’t know why I think of the many things I think of.  “About” usually, yes, usually I can surmise why I stick to a thinking project – it might be something that troubles or worries me, maybe it involves something about which I care deeply or enjoy – then I’ll ruminate around on the subject or object for awhile, attempt to figure or follow the thinks, arrange some digits or sounds, contents, feelings or symbols until I make fit or get lost in the simple joy of tinkering.

But then other times, and really quite often, I can’t locate the instigative trail or balancing of reason for why (or how) items pop into or swish by my apprehending (apprehensive?) brain.

For instance, just now (and it’s precisely the unknowing that prompts me to write about it, to squeeze it through language), I was sitting quietly to desk after a very full day of soccer games, bicycle rides and birthdays, perusing Ron Loewinsohn’s Goat Dances, Anne Carson’s plainwater, Jon Anderson’s The Milky Way and Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays – a very normal way I have of grounding myself, discovering a location by mapping found paths, when sploosh! across the internet of my mind zipped:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”

            And then I stopped.  Closed the books, slid them aside, rested my chin in my hand and gazed toward nowhere, wondering what question that sounds-like-an-answer phrase was responding to or anticipating.

Why would I think that?

Lost in language like dancing and syllables, stars and night skies, withs and relation and choros, why would my only clear thought (recognizably anyway) be:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”?

            When something stops me like that, and I already hear a rhetorical response, but no answers satisfy and questions only multiply exponentially…

I grab loose blank notebook pages and a ball-point pen…

and begin doodling, dabbling, and “showing my work.”

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” (implied automatic resonant answer: because it does) leads precisely (in this case, given all the contingencies and conditions) to the chicken-scratching rambling preceding this period.

In other words, not to a solution, or perhaps even a working equation or problem, but simply to activity.  Reading, writing, thinking it out in lines, shapes and signs.

Now during all this scribble-sketching around the inceptive phrase, my bodymind has been mantra-ing responsorials:  “because it really does,” “because I’m not even aware of things happening until verified in language,” “because life just occurs and I don’t know about it until I manifest the experience some way – bounce it off of a counterpart or internal funhouse mirror (other’s words) to learn what it is and isn’t” and so on…so-called “reasons” I guess?  Hypothetical rationales for the random (apparently) phrase having typed itself in my nervous wirings?

The only “fact,” as I experience them, is that this phrase: “I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” clearly spat itself across the innards of my cranium while I was going about the very normal activity of recovering, soothing, pausing and nourishing myself on books at hand, wishing somewhere it hadn’t taken me all day to reach this quiet, wishing somewhere that all conversations went like this listening, wishing somehow I had something that felt like it needed to be written down, wishing somewhere that I understood myself.

And alas: a baffling sentence in response to no one silently carves and engraving on my consciousness:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depends on it”

My entire body replying: “well…YEAH!  It does!  It’s the only way YOU know that there’s possibly LIFE at all, and not just sensations, emotions, thinkings and dreams; reactions, responses and stimuli!  Without reading about it or writing words out I personally have no concrete object to sound my experience against, to test a happening – everything else out there from spouse to “god” is always moving, shifting, adapting, changing…just like me.”

“I guess I always read and write BECAUSE my ‘life’ depends on it”