Tag: travel

Abroad – Notes from the Petrie Dish

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings8 Comments

Melancholy Musings

“Meaning, if there is such a thing, involves more than what there is.  Minimally, it involves a truthful assessment of what living a finite human life adds up to.”

-Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem–

“I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear”

-David Foster Wallace-

“You are – your life, and nothing else.”

-Jean-Paul Sartre-

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“That Spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to…” So begins Deborah Levy’s succinct “response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write,’ entitled Things I Don’t Want To Know.  It speaks to me.  Sentences like “Smoking cheap filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators.  There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way.”  And here I am in London, far from home, wandering scattered Lego streets, half of the time having an idea of where I am, where I might go.  Like life with children – the half provided that’s never lost – versus the “self:”

 

I am the sign, I am the letter,

I am the language that cannot be come to terms with.

I will go to my resting place

                                                and will not be born again.

I am what is scattered and cannot be gathered up.

I am small, I am silence,

                                                I am what is not found.

–Charles Wright

 

“It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him.”

-David Foster Wallace-

– that sort of thing, left to one’s own musings.  Levy speaks of her notebooks as “always gathering evidence for something I could not fathom.”  Dan Beachy-Quick speaks of the blank page as “one version of chaos…the movement outward and the movement inward are simultaneous…that we enter writing to threaten the security of the knowledge we possess before we read it…” knowledge that isn’t reason – “but the plank that, in reason, breaks.” (from Wonderful Investigations).

As a kind of practice, as it turns out, (Beachy-Quick also says “language offers a method of experiencing death without dying” and “Life, world: we die into it.  Words kill us.  We lose the tops of our heads.  Then we open our eyes.  Then we walk out of the poem into the world.”) I recently labored over messages to those significant to me (including myself) –

what would I want to say or have said if I were to leave the living?

Beachy-Quick suggests that “poetry is birthed from such awful realizations – a fact which denies the fact of one’s own being, that says the self, even the godlike self, is not sufficient unto itself.”

Here some parts from The Letter to Myself:

“I believe the world has had enough of me, and I of it.  Life is generous: overabundant with pain, surprise, people, noise, joy, danger, grandeur, poverty, tastes and sights, sounds and smells, anguish, glory and grief and their very complex mixtures.  As are we – individual organisms – capable, unique, agentive…

      We cannot capture life.  It is ‘more than.’  As mine ends, I find myself desperately wanting to summarize and somehow represent it, but I find no words to do so.

      Aside from the brevity of the fullest portion of my lived experience … with ease what I most grieve is not seeing my children shape and become themselves.  That is the question I most toil over – have my children had enough of me? 

      In the main I have experienced myself as a person whom others accommodate, adjust to, endure.  In classes, families, and communities of practice, even in friend groups, I’ve never FITTED – conjoined smoothly – BELONGED.

      My children have never known another father, so they might find me definitive, ‘right’ only, unique and special.  But my parents have known other children, spouses other partners and lovers, friends other friendships, teachers other students, bosses other employees and so on…and none would consider me ‘best’ or ‘only,’ definitive or unique.  No one has chosen or selected me as theirs.

      I know I’m not alone in this, nor do I need to be the BEST anything, but I would have loved to have been chosen, claimed, selected and pursued – not for being the best, or special, not for characteristics or qualities, talents or things I do well – but for being me, for the am I am.

      How “uniquely me” turned out was never quite enough for others, or not the ‘right’ enoughs.  I surely don’t blame others I‘ve encountered – no one was obligated to choose me, or owed me selection, I simply was not suited to my contexts.

 

      I hope that my children and loved ones are able to discover and co-generate contexts in which they thrive.

 

      I had my moments, my ‘times’ – the births of my children, my weddings, days of writing and travel, dialogues with friends and multitudes of sensations and aesthetic and enriching experiences – I do not lack,

            but it’s a struggle my organism is tired of. 

      I want to say that in my life with my love I realized it – I knew myself as a unique person with particular qualities, capacities, failures, weaknesses and strengths.  I accomplished and risked, expressed and developed more of myself during those years than perhaps the entirety of my life until then…

      …in the end it’s only rambling, ever trying to grasp something of experience…ever unable…

      Perhaps something, but not what I mean to.  Always less, never enough… I’m sorry.  Thank you for enduring me this wonderful long.”

 

“To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish.  We always hesitate when we wish for something…A hesitation is not the same as a pause.  It is an attempt to defeat the wish.  But when you are ready to catch this wish and put it into language, then you can whisper but the audience will always hear you.”

-Zofia Kalinska, quoted in Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know 

So speak up, practice, be gentle with yourself – “the story of this hesitation is the point of writing” – into and out of yourself…the activities where things con-fuse…

I wish to write.

I wish to parent.

I wish to love and be loved.

I wish to learn.

I am thankful the “I” is “what is not found,” for then we can keep searching (together), and in the searching, the interaction, perhaps begin a “truthful assessment of what a living finite human life adds up to” –

to matter and to mean.

Arrivals (cont’d, crossed over the Atlantic)

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings1 Comment

Isles from the air

Arrivals

“We may ask of our destinations, ‘Help me to feel more generous, less afraid, always curious.  Put a gap between me and my confusion; the whole of the Atlantic between me and my shame.’ Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.”

-Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport–

I must have slumbered, unattractively and fitfully, for the plane windows were open and it was very very bright in the sky.  My glasses had fallen, my head scrunched under an arm rest, legs tightly angled and restrained from the aisle by the arm rest just one seat away.  And below, there were moments of Ireland.

I finished the book, thinking de Botton’s observations might make the arrival more profound.  But Rick Hanson’s Just One Thing helped me more.  “Find beauty, take in the good, be compassionately for yourself.  Breathe out long and the intentions (little by little) will seep out around you” (a paraphrase).  As we circled London, having skewed our arrival from delay, the clouds thickened and soon we were scuttling through the wet and the grey.

I thought: ‘Experience is like this’ (of course it is, it is my experience!) – most of it a thickened ambiguity – the swirl and swoon of our passing – when the winds are right you can make something out – particles of cloud, the edge of the wing, sometimes even a reflection.  That was the moment – clouds surrounding the wing, the wing itself, and the reflection of the scumbling clouds on the wing:  world, ourselves, and occasions where we catch our perception – our experience.

And then we touched down, wet splashing the plane, 21 hours and 41 minutes (by the clock) since I’d set out on this journey.  Customs went smoothly, my luggage arrived, and I tunneled by train to my host.  Now I’m in place at my window as the city becomes squares of lights.  de Botton states it thus: “I returned to my room at three in the morning, struck by a sense of our race as a peculiar, combustible mixture of the beast and the angel.” Assessing out from myself and this view of the city, I agree.

“We forget everything: the books we read, the temples of Japan, the tombs of Luxor, the airline queues, our own foolishness.  And so we gradually return to identifying happiness with elsewhere:  twin rooms overlooking a harbor, a hilltop church boasting the remains of the Sicilian martyr St Agatha, a palm-fringed bungalow with complimentary evening buffet service.  We recover an appetite for packing, hoping and screaming.  We will need to go back and learn the important lessons of the airport all over again soon…”

It’s good to have help on the way.  Thanks to Alain de Botton, Rick Hanson, Cees Nooteboom and David Foster Wallace for “a kind of writing that could report on the world while still remaining irresponsible, subjective, and a bit peculiar” – moving me (little by little) from a here to a there.

view from hotel window

view from hotel window

15 February 2014

 

 

 

 

 

Over the Atlantic

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Music, Writing4 Comments

I apologize in advance and beggar your patience regarding the length of the following post.  It is not often that I have over 10 hours straight of anonymity and limited distractions to read, study and write.  I spent yesterday and last night flying from Wichita to London for a week-long course examining over 10 specialty libraries there.  For the course I must keep a diary online, and while not about “library business” per se, this is about the journey…

de botton - heathrow

Over the Atlantic

I have no idea what time it is.  I have been airborne for perhaps four hours, having left Houston around 7:35 PM after an hour of mechanical fix-its, preceded by departure from Wichita at 3:36 PM earlier this same afternoon.  We seem to be flying fast enough that my electronics are scrambled and I haven’t worn a wristwatch since high school.  I’ve been lucky enough to have booked onto an half-full flight, allowing me the pleasure and benefit of a two-seated section all to myself.  Almost a work-cubby – two tray tables stacked with books and an empty seat for sundry supplies.

At all times I pursue readings that might deepen and expand both my abstract and subjective life – I’m certain that could be stated better – perhaps that challenge and enhance my lived experience.  Most honestly: that cause me to think, help me make sense, prompt change and give me pleasure.  Writings that move me, would be another way of saying it.  In the cabin I have arranged Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, Elegy Owed by Bob Hicok, Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky and Wonderful Investigations by Dan Beachy-Quick, Light Everywhere – Cees Nooteboom, Buddha’s Brain and Just One Thing by Rick Hanson, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Art as Therapy with  A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton.  Which could be explained in so many ways.

Traveling internationally, one is limited for selection – in fact it’s by far the most difficult portion of packing – which books will I need – not knowing how the movement and context will affect me?  So I choose:

  • fresh books by authors that have earned my confidence (my top choice for this trip was Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus –  missed in the mail by a day);
  • books that I know meet my needs on departure (many my third or fourth reading); and
  • books I long to swim in but rarely have time with the insistent daily needs and benefits of home. 

Whenever I’m struggling with depression, I reach for Wallace and books of wisdom – on staying present, taking steps, coping skills, the breath and body.  Reality therapy, as it were.  Poetry helps as well, with its attention to detail and sensual triggers.  Books that remind me that I’m alive, regardless of  felt experiences or circumstance.

I will finish A Week at the Airport on this flight, I’m almost there – or maybe I won’t, saving the “Arrivals” chapter for that moment in my journey.  It is the account of de Botton’s stint as writer-in-residence at London’s Heathrow Airport (my immediate destination), and in his inimitable and typical fashion – exposing those human universals embedded in the familiar, or overlooked, or hardly spoken.  What he asks from other writers, he provides (and I quote): “I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”  Maybe that is my true criteria – “those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange” – for the books I end up digesting do just that.

Here are some of the portions I have highlighted:

Departures

  • “Entry into the vast space of the departures hall heralded the opportunity, characteristic in the transport nodes of the modern world, to observe people with discretion, to forget oneself in a sea of otherness and to let the imagination loose on the limitless supply of fragmentary stories provided by the eye and ear…to sense viscerally, rather than just grasp intellectually, the vastness and diversity of humanity”
  • on the parting of lovers: “We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having such a powerful motive to feel sad.  We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let alone in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio.  If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognize this as one of the high points in her life.”  – (I know this feeling and need this distance)
  • on taking ourselves with us:  “There is a painful contrast between the enormous objective projects that we set in train, at incalculable financial and environmental cost – the construction of terminals, of runways and of wide-bodied aircraft – and the subjective psychological knots that undermine their use.  How quickly all the advantages of technological civilization are wiped out by a domestic squabble.  At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologize for our tantrums?”
  • on unfamiliar workspaces:  “Objectively good places to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studies have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming.  Original thoughts are like shy animals.  We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.” 

Airside

  • “Despite the many achievements of aeronautical engineers over the last few decades, the period before boarding an aircraft is still statistically more likely to be the prelude to a catastrophe than a quiet day in front of the television at home.  It therefore tends to raise questions about how we might best spend the last moments before our disintegration, in what frame of mind we might wish to fall back down to earth…”
  • Or, as a “Terminal Priest” expressed to him: “The thought of death should usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us; it should lend us the courage to pursue the way of life we value in our hearts.” 

need I go on?

Yet on I fly…listening to and “Gustavo” from the new Sun Kil Moon album Benji on repeat; performing breathing exercises while silently repeating blessings on those I love to the quivering thrum of this airborne albatross; catching glimpses of “Before Midnight” on face-sized screens where perhaps mirrors should be; and reading and reading and reading and trying to conceive…

stories imagined and rejected

in which the yachtsman drowns

in a remembered winter

and exists as a poem,

.

but the last thought is of

her, the woman who disappeared,

who everything was about, the yachtsman, the bay,

the poet.  The air it all breathed

is the loftiest fabrication, a life

possible now it’s no longer

possible.

-from Cees Nooteboom’s poem penobscot

and worrying about “how modest and static a thing a book would always be next to the chaotic, living entity that was a terminal,” our relationships, our lives.

14 February 2014

Birthday Wishes!!!

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Music, Photography4 Comments

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY INCREDIBLE SPOUSE

AND HER TWIN!

twins-birthday

To my dearest and most beloved : Holly Suzanne – I confess, profess, announce, sing, display, proclaim that my life is altered, changed, extended, enhanced, enriched and “reciprocally molded” by yours!  Thank you!  I love you!  Words really do not do justice to what I yearn to express in this matter.  So – Happy Birthday!

And what joy to have your lifelong twin, your originary “reciprocal molder” with us on this day!  Happy Birthday (of course!) to you too – Heidi!  Thank you so much for journeying to be with us in Kansas this year – and to both of you for allowing the nation to celebrate your wonderful existences with such pomp and blast!

Twinning.  It boggles my mind to consider an Other with whom all one’s existing moments have been shared in some genetic and psycho-somatic physio-biological manner.  We all arise from “families of origin” – known or unknown.  Sets of DNA/RNA, environments, contexts, socio-political realities all conjoin to formulate and tweak, morph and develop us along our passing journeys of existence.  With that come difficulties and joys.  Traumas and opportunities.  Constraints and affordances.  Over decades so much of our environment embeds in us it can be hard to discover/uncover/observe/revise the functions and effects of it all.  But this is also a great freedom we have.  The difficult work of digging and awareness, discovery and revision – “unworking” patterns and pains, “automatic” responses and flinches to the world that have been threaded into us from our own “time immemorials.”

Not having composed this song, all the words surely don’t belong – but the tone, and sister-sentiment – “the story goes…” – and the urging to excise and unpack the “demons,” afflictions, griefs, traumas and so forth – that you two have shared from fertilization and beyond – is my wish for you – together and individually (is that possible with twinning?) …

HERE’S TO YOUR LIVES!!!

how glad I am that they entwine with mine!

Summertime

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Music, Reflections8 Comments

In our realm, Summer busies – schedules, rituals and rhythms deconstruct and a verve of freedom and compulsion arises in our children.  And there are vacations and visitors and spontaneous events.  The weather withers me, people are drawn to the outside, in all – Summer discomforts me.

And yet…this week expect the visits of my wife’s twin, her aunt, and a long-time friend and his family, AND we’ll celebrate these dear twins birthday with wild national hoopla (July 4 – precious to me because she entered the world, but I’m happy to have help in the celebrating at this level!).

What gathers and whispers…or shouts and plays…runs and claps…talks and snuggles…HOME…those precious to us, invaluable, incalculable,

Yesterday eve we were enjoying a particularly (abnormal) gentle, cool Kansas Summer eve on our porch and listening to the music of Keith Kenniff – placed here as a celebration of Summer’s affordances – dislocated time, gatherings, visitations and travels – favorites – family, friends, nests…

Keith Kenniff - Branches

Keith Kenniff – Branches

Experience, anyway. Empty, the space of life. (page 3)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

“To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I…

…A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds…

…There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made…

…A book exists only through the outside and on the outside.”

– gilles deleuze & felix guattari –

3

“My relation to others is staggered all the way to the infinite;

from the bottom up, never horizontally, the distance from here to there…

…what you call ‘distance’ is but the time of breathing in, of breathing out.

All the oxygen man needs is in his lungs.

Empty, the space of life.”

-Edmond Jabes-

            Passage to and fro.  Fore and aft.  Passing through.  So many streams of signs and symbols, sounds, referents – in some pores and out from others.  A long and endless middle.

If photons, neither particles or waves (or both) – packs of energized events.  Here, then there, everything on its way.  As if life (the verb) is journey.  Booking passage in a network of traces.  Slug-lines.  Marking, evaporate, recombinant maps.

Convergences – sense/perception/neurons and quanta.  Convergences – weather and molecules and thises and thats (write “I” and “you”) and light and air, ground and other conjoining disjunctive matters.  Convergences – roving planets in orbital trajectories, distances sustained by what is near, all the kinds and classifications.

Descriptions and errors.  Adapt, adjust, revise.  And err.  Trial err trial err, survive.  For now.  Temporarily.  This way.  The always-conditioning clause: Now.  If.

A stone Buddha, or just its head, being drawn by an artist.  A trace, remark, a transcription – transformation – another form.  For now.  And then…

Tracing convergences – our qualia – as events describe – the meeting and meshwork of lines, of motions, of pathways and bendings in travel, of stars and their dust.  Refraction, reflection, sharing directions, constraints.  Opportunities for pulse, for pattern, for wave.

To journey then, to map.  Now, if.  The long and ever-ending middle always already begun.  Trajectories and knots, unravel.

Experience, anyway.  Breathe in, breathe out, the trace.  The empty plenitude, the pregnant space, and timing’s distance.  We join.

The Return

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, JournallingsLeave a comment

Within the hallowed halls of Powell’s Books in Portland, OR with a next-to-nothing budget is not an easy thing to be for book-cravers.  But it also picques the selectional impulse somewhere thrumming in our genetic bands.  Survival of the “fittest” given current conditions and some self-observation through excruciating choice.

What came back with me:

what did not , purely due to economic constraints, and set aside at the last possible moment (at closing):

equivalency finds for my wife:

mary frank Richter - Lines

now to prepare pictures of those immaterial experiences – the fleeting profounds – that happen as we go

to be posted soon

Excursion

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings6 Comments

we’re heading off to visit children and family in the Pac-NW for a week +…not sure how often I’ll “get back again” to ze blog, but aside from my amazing wife, I’m taking these….

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Happy Trails….

To Grow

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Photography3 Comments

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try driving through the Flint Hills in Kansas

with accompaniment

And yet

On By NW FilbertIn PoetryLeave a comment

shuffling through my papers and bags from the “vacation”-ing, I found these pages…uncertain what more to do with them…

The Advance

 

In the looping that making is

swing back

tie around

and move forward,

if you make it through

you will stretch toward

if not

you will bunch up

stopped and

knotted,

held

somehow in a form;

 

The passing through –

the trick of things –

like camels

and eyes of needles

or coyotes

tricking their prey –

Not always,

but sometimes,

it works.

 

More prevalently

we create bonds

that only loosen

when undone

or serve

to strangle

Neither / nor

Either / or

a kind of be / have

if you will

you will feel

that you won’t

but no matter

 

Letters are made

for the unconscious

something akin to

shorthand,

symbols,

drawing

from metaphorical wells

their multi-meanings,

depending on

what’s growing there.

Here.

Now.

 

For instance

finding what you’ve put away

if not uncovered,

comes in snippets.

Like remembering

we advance

in casting back and forth

across a scene –

it’s only details

attention finds

and alters

with the looking

like a spy

proffers suspicion

or a guru

marking growth

 

it’s in our nature –

though we cannot know that –

in our nature too

the combination:

imagination

and desire,

a synonym

for knowledge

if we “get it.”

I don’t get it,

I be / have

and therefore lose

much of what I had coming

 

Alas, but it is day

and meaning rises

first one thing

and then another

by my measure,

inaccurately

distinct

and untoward;

we have our  myths –

our dreams and visions –

our feeble truths

for what they’re worth,

a clumsy journeying

toward

death

when be and have

are one (none)

N Filbert 2012