Tag: Writers Resources

Character Sketches, cont’d…”The Jealous Husband”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

A Series of Stories of Love, by a Husband

 

Searching for subjects, I began writing the stories of my wife and each of her lovers, as I imagine them, having all dissipated before I was truly “on the scene.”  Still they are here.  Current as histories are.  Not mine (of course), or only when I want it to be.

 

The stories go like this:  with exotic names and muscular bodies; wealth and infectious intellects; and of course style…whatever things I lack I desire…they all possess in spades.  Like spontaneity.  Torture and foreknowledge = learning from the past.  I’m no gardener.

By which I mean to say I lack certain skills possessed by each lover, each “other” – from youth to culture and their quality of independence coupled to vocation (so I tell it).  Spontaneity (I feel like I’ve written that before, being a creature of habit and repetition, of comfort, of fear).

 

The stories play out like this in my head and I’m hoping to inscribe them here – thus trapping them outside, cutting off munitions and supply – exorcising them like literature, something benign and contained.  Easily misplaced, forgotten or overlooked.  A measure of control and indifference – not the “these are flesh of her flesh, she has ridden their bones” instead a collection by Grimm or some sacred treasury – a set of frights and fairy tales to engage as horrid dreams and improbable possibilities.  Child’s play.

 

Which bothers me.  For if I’ve learned anything from writing, it’s the profligacy of error.  The obsessive-compulsive drive to adjust, rearrange, endlessly edit and correct.  And never end.  Stuck in a locking swirl, just so, very like unto a toilet – to revise and submit, revise and submit, then regret.  The opening of doors.  An idea expressed becomes thing, and a thing is let loose in the world (the real one).

 

The stories are like this – embodiments of emotions and fears in an effort to be real, meaning actual, which is usually banal, like she says, but not enshrined.  Words work as predictive preservers.  Untamed and so tangled.  I’m unable to let them go.  Thus they spawn compendiums – thousands upon thousands of hallucinatory nights (in shining armors) – perpetrating my bride, but not against her will, which sets in motion.  Multiplying false realities, now true  (being actual).  Histories – open to view, corroborations or denials, like the facts.

 

So I keep on writing these stories, like this, with the yearn to expunge, to transform doubt into trust by its emptying.  But keep finding it full, to the brim, and still filling.  In the absence of reliable witnesses, (they all being human and involved in the tales – inherently duplicitous), like words.  Serving double purposes, like bridges made for both coming and going, and never knowing which.

 

Life is like this, which is why I write these stories, in this way, feebly uncertain and wildly provoked.  If it didn’t go down like I say, how was it really, then?  Oh I see!  So the stories keep changing, suited to their purposes!  Revision, submit; revision, submit; then regrets.

 

If more persons knew, would the truths wriggle out like perspectives?  My idea in writing these tales – make something concrete to chisel and sculpt.  Together, perhaps.  As a team, like this, retelling the stories according to need – like lying – so we’ll never be sure.  And then I’m also causing effects.  This is what happens in writing these stories, the truth, with all of its possible endings.

 

I digress.  The stories are like that – my wife and her loves – digressions, diversions and facts.  I’ll get to their bottoms and be done with them all!  (I hope, if they don’t get to her bottom first!).  My stories of anger and loving, my stories of panic and lack.

The Underlying Theory

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

The Underlying Theory

What we found on his desk was a drawing.  A very lightly penciled sketch of a woman from stomach to throat, as if seen from above to the side, one arm flung out in the viewer’s direction and her breasts provocatively displayed.  Underneath were the words “underlying theory.”

Our work was to plunder his study.  An author, famed for fiction and poems and writings on art, had died suddenly, and his wife had contacted us to go through his things, evaluate its worth and preserve for posterity.  There were boxes of manuscript pages, notebooks and loose-leaf, letters and typescripts, recipe cards full of quotations.  The library was extensive, each book filled with scribbles and markings, a signifying system of importance and reference for use in his various projects.  His mind was displayed like a trail left in woods.  Here the path to food, here the one to water, here the building nest, here the safety hideout.  It overwhelmed us.

I had written numerous critical studies on this man and reviewed professionally most of his books.  He’d written extensively in philosophy and aesthetics, with compendiums of writings on particular artists and particular works.  He’d produced over a dozen literary novels and twenty or more books of poetry.  He was prolific and known for the depth and acumen of his thought, the cavalier ways he used language, and the breadth of his interests and knowledge.  No one knew he made visual art.  None would have tagged him “erotic.”

I wondered what this drawing might “mean.”  What did it refer to?  Was it drawn from a picture?  An image from memory?  Was the subject herself the underlying theory, or was it something about representation?  Desire?  And what theories did this mean to evoke or give rise to?  His wife did not recognize the sketch – not the body, nor an artist her husband might have copied – and it was interestingly tucked beneath blank open sheets, at the middle of the desk – the ones always ready when he came to compose.  It was worn, wrinkled, as if indeed, it underlay everything inscribed above it and served as inspiration or focus, an impetus to his work.

I’ll note that the form seems composed, not a doodle.  It appears to be representative.  No one knows of him having a model or lover, in fact no other drawings exist from his hand.  Perhaps he had need of a form to describe, an image to imagine, some desire to propel.  The figure is finely proportioned, both busty and lithe, fleshy yet thin and shaped like the currents of rivers.

I’m not certain what draws me to this.  In an office literally stuffed with fine books and odd trinkets, paraphernalia of printing, and stacks of diaries and drafts.  Among paintings and stones and figurines of the Buddha, historical writing utensils, family photos and legal documents dating throughout his life.  There is so much to uncover and know.  But “underlying theory”?  That grabs me.

As I’ve mentioned before, this author was a reader of depth.  Fiction, philosophy, poetry, science; criticism, essays and cultural studies.  There are tall shelves of monographs of particular artists, but nothing gives hint to this sketch.  I am struck by this rendering – baffled by image and text.  An erotic drawing is always of interest, all other concerns of this man are abstract.  It beggars the biographers “who/what/when/where” yet the text writ along the arch of her back stirs me in a different direction.  “Underlying theory.”  What the hell?  What’s it for?

A theory is made for a function, something “underlying” proposes a cause.  This drawing, these words must explain something, but what?

Is it cosmic?  Like what drives human vocation is desire?  Or epistemological?  Ethical?  Aesthetical?  Metaphorical for apprehension of form?  I can only guess at this point but am open to ideas – I’d love to find some consensus for the book I’m contracted to write.

I ask you – how would you piece this together?  I’ll share a scan of the drawing and request that you submit your hypotheses below as comments.  I thank you so much for your thoughts.

Sincerely –

Leonhardt Conspiguous

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

Leonhardt Conspiguous

 

Leonhardt Conspiguous would have known the difference.  Between, say, BWV 161 and BWV 173; or a trunk or tail if he’d been born a blind mouse.  LC always knew the differences.  But he found similarities difficult to trace.

In conversation Leonhardt once encountered a man who’d read the entirety of his library, (the titles so resembling his own as to appear indistinguishable), drawing the same conclusions as LC in the shared vocabulary.  LC was unable to devise a category or designation for this phenomenon.  It was like looking in Leona’s eyes.

A concave lens forms a sphere of reflection, and hers – of grey of green of blue – mimicked Leonhardt’s so completely both in color and tone, that he’d instantly felt something farther back, back behind, any place he’d ever felt before.  In himself or another.  As time went on and her desire gained in details – their fancies so colluded he could not decipher whose were which – not in content nor expression.  The similarities baffled him.  And frightened.

But Hunter Green from Forest?  LC would know even the percentages and numbers.  Like every kind of sparrow, every human’s skin.

Leonhardt believed that what we come to know is inherently unique, but that same is imperceptible.  What startles us in those with whom we feel alike, is not the magnitude of what we hold in common, but how specifically each possesses it.  “To see eye to eye,” in Leona’s case, made visceral sense to him, but could not be understood.  “To see in or around” is what he labeled “comprehension.”

LC could see no further “in” to his cherished love Leona, than he could see within himself.  Which to some seemed deftly nuanced and unusually deep, but that was due to fierce attention and lots of time and mass filigrees of distinctions, not, Leonhardt insisted, to understanding.  “To analyze parts and fragments, was not to know a whole,” he was fond of telling himself, “and our lives are composed of fragments.”  Like arranging jigsaw pieces, separating by color and cut and number, and believing that they might fit, still never solved a puzzle, where new pieces are added all the while.

LC believed there was no whole, as far as humans perceived, just incalculable myriads of pieces arranged, rearranged, created/forgotten, damaged or lost in their fires.

He could never explain Leona.  Or synchronicity.  “Terms such as these synonym mystery,” he would say, “and should be kept in careful silence.”

LC despised religion.  The compulsion of the concocting of names, he called it.  A disease, an impatience, an anxiety of what is unknown.  Shuffling a hat full of vowels and consonants we look for what sounds as strange as our experience and assign it that – that which is odd to our senses, things we describe can’t explain.  A crapshoot or fancy, an oracle of chance.  Presuppositions he heartily derided.

 

We were left with description, he thought.  Of Leonard (his friend of shared library and thought) LC reported the odd sensation of someone other speaking words that more nearly matched one’s own ideas than the terms oneself could find.  And Leona, well, Leona.  Leonhardt preferred to call her by her body parts or textures, her language or beliefs, “Leona” ringing to him of the mystically unexplained, uncomfortable talisman, as if he were mumbling “YHWH” or “Zeus,” “Santa” or “Satan” or “Venus.”

(to be continued?  you decide…)

Writers Resources

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

“Chekhov in his letters to his brother wrote: ‘Start writing from the second page.'”

“He was more blunt in conversations: ‘Tear out the first half of your story; you’ll only have to change a few things in the beginning of the second half and the story will be perfectly clear.'”

“The unity of a composition is not based on whether it has a beginning, a middle and an end, but whether it creates a unique interrelation between its parts.”

“The concept of unity (the whole) is historically changing.”

“Aristotle wrote in Poetics (Chapter 8):

‘Unity of plot does not, as some people think, consist in the unity of the hero.  For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.'”

[all quotations from Bowstring by Viktor Shklovsky]

Jim

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

Jim

Jim is unable to utter a lie.  He simply cannot believe them.

 

Jim, sitting with friends around a hotel pool, once said: “I think every word says something about its author.”

After overhearing a tasteless joke, Jim no longer spoke with Darrell.

 

Jim disbelieved everyone.  His boss and his pastor, his spouse and his children; in fact, he found it impossible to trust humans (including himself) to know what they were talking about.  And yet he believed what they actually said.  The words they used.

Every statement or exclamation, every question, harrumph or faux-pas, he deciphered.  Jim doubted each “slip of the tongue.”  He said he believed in our languages.

 

Jim’s work was in “managing waste,” a lie that he knew they believed.  He spent most of his time in the noisy outdoors.  Chaotic, due to the mind-grinding sounds of the vehicular beasts they crept the city streets in, feeding them trashy fuel and guarding their grueling mastication.  Loud and smelly as well.  Rotten food, molded carpets, all manner of grotesque and disfigured things.  Jim saw what was hidden, discarded.  What most of us keep covered up.

 

His coworkers primarily proffered profanity.  He believed them.  But branching to politics or domestic intricacies, Jim only trusted their language.  It didn’t really matter what content spilled forth (he would say), the words that they chose and the ways they were delivered provided the confessions they “meant.”  “I’m afraid my wife no longer loves me” often intended its opposite, for instance, and nearly always equaled “I’m unhappy.”  Words worked like that, held Jim, worked all around one another.  “Assume the people are lying and the words will speak for themselves.”

Jim’s wife called this the “double bind,” or his “contra-contra-diction.”  And “paranoia” in worser moods.  “If you don’t believe in people,” she’d say, “and always think they lie, particularly to themselves…then say you believe their ‘language,’ but never what they actually say – really Jim – what have you?!”  “You’ve got nothing!” she’d complain, “no substance, no content, no motive – just a jumble of words that you (one of them!) reassemble…what else can that be but the rattling workings of your garbage-compactor of a mind, Jim?”  And Jim heard: “I don’t like the way you think.  It’s not practicable.  It’s egomaniacal and unfair.”  How Jim reads an utterance, with faith in the language, between all the lines, “it’s relation,” he’d say.

 

“I can’t speak for somebody else, dear,” Jim replied, “I just translate what I hear, or apprehend.”  “You say tomahtuh, I say tomaytoe, sort of a thing.  That’s paying attention.”  How words wrestle around and decompose, what parts go first, or crumble, get smashed.  What words stick out, slide easy, remain.  “And watch out for the oily and slime,” Jim would say, “that’s the trickiest danger to ‘manage.’”

 

“You’re not dealing with garbage here,” his boss declared, “I’m giving you straightforward instructions.  There’s nothing to sift through or weed out, Jim.  I need you to perform this task,” and on he would speak, accustomed to Jim’s sorting appraisal of words.

For Jim it was all the same.

 

Words were some overused and available aggregate, he thought.  People picked them out according to habits and taste, “nature and nurture,” he’d cliché, and then bandy them about until they felt understood, or relieved, or just plain empty.  But the resemblance was rarely precise.  Jim believed that most people simply grabbed at terms and sounds, gestures and winces without much a thought for precision.  “Think what all could be covered in silence,” he’d say, holding a field guide to transportational signage, or fingering the moves of sign language.

Most people just want to make contact, he’d hold forth, to be heard or effect something – a playing of power, a quest to convey – but not given much thought or concern.  “I basically rummage through all their crap,” Jim continued, “with an eye out for volatile substances, wounded heirlooms or inadvertent mistakes they rid themselves of, and put a pretty clear picture together.  Of their values and style, relations and status, family, religion and work.”

Joan (Jim’s wife) often speaks of what she deems Jim’s “arrogance.”  “How can he suppose to know,” she’d decry, “a person’s life story or intentions, education or political beliefs from a talk about weather or baseball or drinks?”  “It’s hypocritically bigoted, as if truth were the eye of beholding, each person’s puzzle to piece.  Unaware of themselves, Jim presents some ‘true meaning’ – its Gnostic, religious, a myth,” she’d complain.

Yet Jim was resoundingly insightful and most often correct, which simply buggered them more.  It seemed people really were giving something away when they opened their mouths, no matter what language they used.

“Words are functions,” Jim stated, “where text and image collide in a complex silence or sound.”  “Nothing escapes, really, just gets alternatively pressured and squeezed, mangled and reformed, mashed into a mushed conversation.”  “Every talker a monologue, every listener too, for the most part,” he said,  “a dialogue running oneself, a wrecked chorus, I listen for pauses and patterns, I try to decipher the breathing of noise.”

“These are just Jim’s thoughts,” snarled Joan, “things he puts into words like nonsense.”

 

(to be continued?  you decide…)

“You Must Revise Your Life”, and, Kudos to You Excellent and Hard-Working Bloggers All

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing7 Comments

I’ve been sort of swirling in a kind of malconfident funk of late…performing exercises and blatherings just to keep the language flowing…today felt like a threshold…one of those – “if the flow don’t show – i’m constipated” sorts of things… many of my favorite bloggers have been moving toward a very free and open bursting of expression/language/image this summer and it’s really been fueling me, but i haven’t been able to open my own valves for some reason.  I want to say – wow – there are a bunch of really talented creative persons making stuff on WordPress – and the virtual company means more than I think (I think).  So thanks to all of you for working so hard to MAKE and BECOME – it’s inspiring – believe me…and whether you knew it or not – today you all conspired to inject or confront me with the Archaic Torso of Apollo – a magnificent accomplishment – and Rilke’s “you must revise your life” – a fine firm foot to me arse…

Instigating Change

And then things simply have to change.  Some blogger posted (today) that “this is a little silly” and “let the world tell you what you need to do” – but the world hasn’t said anything, and still it made felt sense.  Someone else (somewhere in the world) decided to go home for the very tawdry reasons that make anything profound, while another (clearly from another section of the globe) has been taken by the moon.

What does that tell you?

Things have got to change.  It’s not working.  You’re not working (but of course you are, (I am) which isn’t what I meant, what I mean being of very little effect).

There are the readings…

Plus all over the world (that is telling you nothing) there are people traveling and taking photographs – but those show, they don’t tell.

A friend did email to say ‘don’t give up’ from a far different location on the earth, but perhaps the “earth” is not the “world,” perhaps world is an elsewhere?  Or simply a voice I cannot hear, something divine.

I keep calling myself “you” as if that might make me other, but even I know you can’t escape yourself.

So I don’t.

I’m intrigued by folks who can write about themselves as if they were themselves and a part of world or simply made it so by writing.  That stuff moves me, true or not.

I spent my day designing characters.  Jim could never lie because he didn’t believe in language (or was it people?).  Leonhardt could always tell the difference but is unable to comprehend the same.  An author left an erotic drawing on his desk upon his death, causing great anxiety for his biographer, utterly incapable of fitting it into his knowledge of said subject.

Those aren’t me.  So something needs to change, you tell yourself.  You’re lost in language, but the labyrinth is becoming a pattern.

There’s a trove of “prompts” out there to help you find your way (is that the “world”?) but inspiration keeps feeling artificial.

You think it might just be the heat, a metaphorical dehydration, you read about a wife who tells her husband he should find someone else with whom to talk about nothing, and you heard echoes of the voices in your home.  Like the world saying things that almost register but you simply can’t believe.  It’s nothing, like that.

You challenged yourself this past year to ‘get personal’, if you wrote real near what hurts others might hurt too, and people like that – empathy, identity, a pingback from the world – but it never became interesting, the personal, you kept sounding like yourself.

And wrote these letters you called journals, out of some idea (I guess) that a world might be within you that could tell you what you need.  Or like Laurie Sheck said (she’s really in the world); that “skin has no choice but to converse with the world” – but does yours listen?

I guess what I am saying is that today brought clouds and wind (a welcome change) and those were world, and I heard something.

Writing: the Spaces. its Atmosphere.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes5 Comments

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Writing: the Spaces.  its Atmosphere.

 

Write first, the epigraphs assemble.  Post-prompting.  Or become the impetus the references gather around.

One idea.

With blackberry brambles and the wish (or revulsion) at owning a dog.

“A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece” (Lyn Hejinian)

Like that.  It doesn’t take long.

The brain a compendium of quotes.

“The head is a very hard case.”  (L.H.)

I try to crack it.  I’m thankful it’s hard.  A safe for the precious things.

I can’t just do it “everywhere.”

In order to write, I discover I need to expand.  Once to the point I’m as large as my skin, it still needs a force-shield, a sense-field – a hard case like a desk and locked room, “controlled environment” or “padded cell” – that license to work without fear.

Or hurting oneself or one’s others.

The head is a hard case.  The body is supple.

Salmonberries all along the way.  A juicy burst, almost sweet, almost sickening – the risk involved.

My globe is filled with the words of others.  Like my skull, no bit of language is our own.  But inexhaustible, so unashamed, I eat them here, I forage food.  I harvest, glean and process in this tiny shed, concocting meal I hope will serve.  That process in yet another realm.

My space is angular.  Is low and dark.  A cross of cave and womb.  I need to know it’s all in there, I need to know I do not know.  I bring a lantern and a few spare tools.  I take notes, observations in my bunker-scriptorium, my hand and my brain.

“A paragraph is a time and place, not a syntactic unit” (L.H.)

I scramble your body.  Unravel.  Dissect and reassemble.  Never known in its entirety.  My own.  “some desire powers generously” (L.H.).  Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.

“Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there…”

“…Reason looks for two, then arranges it from three: number, stutter and curvature” (L.H.)

The writing space is “freedom then, liberation later” (L.H.) when rejoindered to the attaching world…

“a person seated on an iceberg and melting through it” (L.H.)

“the mind is a thing deeply marked.  I have bound myself to this damage” (Laurie Sheck)

“we are so rawly made, / so carried into the harsh and almost-dark” (L.S.)

My cave-womb almost-dark.  A lantern lights this page.  It is noon.  Vertebrates in the walls.  Fossily spines.

Number, stutter, curvature.

In the space, safely solitary, saturate with sense, my own…what assembles sensible only similar, and that’s okay…what obtains or remains can be observed as an object.  To be encountered, not understood.  Even me.

“Art is inseparable from the search for reality…

…Realism, if it addresses the real, is inexhaustible” (L.H.)

            Like looking at painting.  House or museum.  Everything both.   Various watching.

Mulberries litter the landing and stairs with an acquired taste.  Leaving stains, like everything we grow to love.

“A fragment is not a fraction….”

            Safe to search reality, where it has died, where it seems so.  “Seeming is believing” (L.H.).

Number, stutter, curvature.

Some berries you must not ingest but can still get caught by their thorns.  Or the illness pukes out.  A pulping.

Searching is not always distinguished.

Your space should form a shelter (within/without) bound to damage, rawly made.  Secure but repercussive.

Epidemic depends on the exit.

Nettles and fireweed.  The search for the fruits can be harsh.

It is almost dark.  I must emerge.

N Filbert 2012

So excited I forgot to title….! what good reading does…

On By NW FilbertIn Current ReadingLeave a comment

I discover an unconquerable urge to convey this text to you, and a bewildering chance in hell to accurately do so.  This book, My Life by Lyn Hejinian, classified as…huh, what would it be classified as?  There is no designation on the title or copyright pages, I have no idea where a big-box bookstore might shelve the thing…reading through one’s hunch is fiction, no, memoir, no, poetry, no, philosophy, no, literary theory, no…WRITING.  It is one of those texts where words moving through hands like moving water (ever so hard to look away from) seem to form patterns on their own, but one knows there are so many ingredients and influences, substances and material going into the way a wave, a runnel, a current forms….that it cannot be chalked up to chance.  And so you immerse.  You join the river, jump into the water to get a feel.  Swim through it, splash.  Thunk your cupped hands to make thunder.  Float on your back like a dream.  Enjoy.  Explore.  Become with the flow.

Lyn Hejinian has been writing a long time.  I felt stupored by her recent book of a thousand eyes, thinking she just gets better with time, but that’s not so either.  Nothing is true, everything might be.  Hejinian fills her pages with words that seem so unobstructed, so flooded with their possibilities and yet ever so economical, spare, necessary.  They leap like the slap of stream plashing sizable rocks, and then swoon in loop toward a bank.  There is a “miracle” quality, by which I mean to designate that happening of the mind and body when encountering something not-it (unselfsame) and experiencing all sorts of “i am’s” and ‘that’s me’s” – resonances, foreknowledge, understanding, sympatico – nothing we can point to as real – but stuff we really experience all the same.

It’s a wandering flood.  Yes, we do not doubt it’s “her life,” filled with details and colors, textures and senses that only come through first-hand, subjected/ive experience…and yet, nothing secret or private, nothing that hasn’t become language by now – through the book – through its writing – so we know it belongs to all of us.  It is words.  It is water.  It is my life, however one brings themselves to it, to this, to her writing, to what’s written.

A brief example will give you the best idea.  Picking a random five pages (each section is 1.5-2 pp long) I will copy the sentences that strike me (remembering that they only strike me via how they’re arranged with the sentences I’m NOT copying all around them), to give you a sense of how dense the bursts of profundity are, meshed and woven like the songs of birds.  Just that distinct.  Here goes:

“We never wanted more than something beginning worth continuing which remained unended.”

“In order to understand the nature of the collision, one must know something of the nature of the motions involved – that is, a history.”

“After crossing the boundary which distinguishes the work from the rest of the universe, the reader is expected to recross the boundary with something in mind.”

“I came to depend on my children socially, was never at a loss without them.”

“It is hard to turn away from moving water.  And my memory of him is a poor likeness – like jealousy, which cannot get what love has secured.  The fear of ‘losing’ ideas objectifies knowledge.”

‘I want to be free of you, in order to do things, things of importance which will impress you, attract you, so that you can be mine and I can be yours forever.”

“The general form tends to grow quite naturally under the hand that writes it, but until a thing is completed, it needs to be explained.”

“The difference between empathy and responsibility.”

and so on… Now sentences are easily plucked from the text, because it feels like a collection of phrases.  Unrelated.  Ever relating.  And so it builds and twists and floods.  But it is not random.  There are identifiable phrases and reverberations of phrases that keep you from feeling surrealism or some stream-of-individual-consciousness befuddlement.  You don’t have to “go with it” and hope it will come clean…you pursue it and let it push you, this give-and-take and rest-and-urge that weaves you into the text and the text deep into you (often bypassing awareness), much as you imagine the text came to be (in relation to author).  So those sentence/segments/phrases above are pulled from three or four contiguous sections two-thirds of the way through the book, I could’ve started anywhere and found just as many, and with re-readings would choose the sentences sitting between them (I’ve no doubt).

And that is worth reading.  And being read with.  By.

Writing: Chapters that don’t belong – all of them, so far

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Here is what has assembled so far…seems like a sort of series…in its wayward way…

 

 

 

 

WRITING:

CHAPTERS THAT DON’T BELONG

“The pen asks / much more than it can answer / one word at a time”

–Philip Levine–

 

“(the world is like a comparison – / the second part elusive),”

–Arkadii Dragomoshchenko–

 

“An other is a possibility, isn’t it”

–Lyn Hejinian–

 

“Consciousness is always consciousness of something”

–Larry Levis–

 

 

1.  “wake up, snare-setter, / in the snare / spacious, like chance” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko)

 

And sometimes I do, wake up.  St. Sebastian pinned as a still-life with crystal lances, a clarity.  But that is catching too, and refracts.  “I think that what I thought when I was thinking that, at least in thinking of it now, I am thinking that I thought it…” and so on.  Crystal lances.  Thoughts refracting.  The occasional conviction.  (Which we call certitude).

The margins within margins, windows in reflection.

Every image being an entrance through which we exit.  From.

 

I call this “letting actually resonate.”  This being, activity, thinging we do.

If I stand still, so to speak, I form a spiraling vortex, an enormous vacuum.  What is: portal and Black hole every now.  With.

Prepositions being ever-so-important, say “sign-ificant,” that they deserve their own sentencing.

 

I’ll never know what it is “to write.”  If only because it questions.  Every word.  In.

I can think of it as a working, out, but that is far from any truth I can conceive.  “the second part elusive” with each toggle of a term.

 

Gravity enforcing force, to fly.

I’ve never been fond of violence, but how else might we change?  Or even move?  On.

 

A recent well-organized text I perused and then ate, mentioned dialetheia as a two-way truth; or, “true contradictions,” that is, in one.  Word.  Split with a twin.  Comparison as congenital doubling.  Of difference.  Equals such same.

 

We look toward what can be seen.  Compromised and concealed by a frame.  Otherwise unseen.  Learn, therefore, (through your senses), in-visibility.  Dialetheia.

We do (many of us) love to be astonished, after all.  With.

 

If there are more parts to this I haven’t found them.  They’re either too large or too small.  I’ll have to wait.  I’m unable.  Nothing living waits.  Patience is pretense, pretend.  Waiting, is searching; patience, is longing.  Loss is implicit.

 

2.  The Chorus

“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’…

…A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text”

(Lyn Hejinian)

            Explicitly.

I.e. “the loss was always implicit as the longing” (Alain de Botton).  And I quote, quoting from someone else’s quotation, but I forget which (or whose).  For.

I’m certain for various reasons.  Which beggar the certainty.

A pause, arose, and fragmented this text.

Because I don’t

know

what I’m

doing

I am writing,

and it questions.

            As if we could get intimate with our process, so near it as to join.  In other words, if our action, breathing, effort, language, thinking, senses and the uncountable inborn “blind spots” that a human system circulates were, well…coterminous.

 

Is that a question lacking its mark?

It would seem so.  About.

Either too large or too small, perceptively, I suspect.

Causing a pause to rise,

as I search for something implicit.

            Explicitly.

 

Given the fragmentary text(s) (you agree?) I have to ask:  might writing be possibling an other?  “Consciousness is always consciousness of something” (he said).

That is a possibility, isn’t it?  (the second part’s elusive),

 

Blatantly – I feel caught in a snare I am setting, as spacious as I imagine chance to be, (having no other name I can call it), ensnared as I seem – some web, some matrix, some universe and beyond – too large or too small to perceive (I am guessing)

which always gives rise to a pause, implicitly.

What I had hoped to make explicit.

 

What I call “wanting actually resonate,” some loss implicit as longing.

I write, asking more than it answers, or “the closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back” (Karl Kraus, which I quote off someone else, who knows who – yet I hope someone does!)

 

“But of any material, the first thing to make is an ash-tray”

(Lyn Hejinian, I quote this text from its source,

apparently).

 

 

3 – ?

“’Appearances / remain suspended / in transmission’ (Craig Watson) are not so much perceived as apprehended, handled; the one affecting, infecting, the next”

(Charles Bernstein)

 

            Or something to hold what dies off.  The reverberations without resonance.  All edited, edited out, according to needs for appearance, depending on what apprehends, the shape of the handler’s snare.

Think of it – what is selected for capture, in captivity, infects, slipping frequencies to drift on, transmitting, transmitting, there is always ash that won’t be removed, no amount of soaking, scrubbing or spray…

perhaps it’s under the nails, clogging the pores, dusting the follicles… the remains.

We don’t know why we write, trusting such ephemeral weightless shifty particles to catch as motes in an eye…appearances, like dust (in just the right angle of light), remaining suspended in their transmission…hoping (without, really, hope) to, in apprehension – apprehend, by being handled to affect, infect…

always wanting next.  Making it so.

Depending.

 

Why the book is needed (as ashtray) as form to hold the crumbling, an urn for the remains, until such time as they might be stirred or shaken or spilled.

Again in the commerce of bodies, handled, brushed and staining.

It gets everywhere.  And remains.

Note its infective spread.

Language, whether structures/systems of, or fragments – bits and pieces, lying everywhere implicit.

To write – to make explicit?  It asks more than it answers, word by word, by letter, by ash…

 

And what remains?  Suspended…in transmission…for affect…a dormant virus…waiting to be breathed…

 

4.  Desiring Reality

“the loss was always implicit as the longing”

-Alain de Botton-

“But, no one / can tell without cease / our human / story, and so we / lose, lose”

-Li-Young Lee-

“[Writing] is born from…’dissatisfaction’ – an internal void provisionally filled by the achievement of expression”

-Eugenio Montale-

“Because [writing] mediates between the requirements of desire and the conditions of reality, and because the relation between the two keeps changing, no statement of that relation is final”

-Ronald Sukenick-

“What is important…is not a word that is a stable and always self-equivalent signal, but an always changeable and adaptable sign”

-Katerina Clark / Michael Holquist-

 

I desire to write.  I think of it, at times, as an inscribing of thought, a physical processing of emotions, subconsciousness, dreams and ideas…”thought is a form of grief…but think we do, and lament we must, because lose we will” (H.L. Hix).  “But no one can tell without cease our human story…” ashes accumulating, carried by arbitrary winds, dissolved in sand and sea…

“Lose, lose” and don’t want to lose (desire); my ‘not-wanting’ is my longing (implicit loss), in other words “what memory is not a gripping thought?” (Lyn Hejinian)…imagination grasping in desire what it does not want to lose…forming an ashtray.  For what it loses.  Implicitly.

“No statement of that relation is final.”  Even, then, obviously, that statement.  Therefore we long to apprehend and handle…capture and contain…frame and represent…to ourselves (for?), for one another (to?) reality as it is not-known to us, unstable, uncertain and always changing.  Remember?

This is what makes this “fiction,” a “novel” – some new telling and unique ashtray design, in search of the fluttering ash, the “changeable adaptable sign.”

Required by desire, conditioned by unstable and unceasing reality, I write…words asking more than they answer, the dissatisfaction(s) (losses implicit in the longing) ever ephemerally, temporarily, momentarily filled by the action, the thought, the attempted expression (inscription) and then immediately felt again (affected, infected).  The plot, the narrative, the characters, all bound up right there – in the next moment’s void.  A gripping thought.  I give pursuit.  I desire.

I write.

 

5.  Without Trace

 

At the liminal edge, porous, moist, invisible and insensible arc…imagined limit, threshold…the ache to enter, with nothing to penetrate; the yearn to cross over or through, yet there is no barrier.  Simply following the pen, without copying.

Another way to say “possibility becoming,” or “questions and answers are words,” “letting actually resonate.”  The next part elusive, but its begun.  Refusing to compare.  Forging-foraging-forgery.

I am writing.  An other possibility that must be consciousness of something, perhaps implicit in the fragments, without identifiable trace because ensnared in the traces.

What is fiction, or poetry, essay / memoir / treatise…because making, with usable words.  That toggle so, and displace.  That render in their sundering.  That make a difference…by comparison, where the “other” is not known.

Assuming a tracing could follow or draw.  Like that – following lines or leading them on.  The perceptions, scratch that, apprehension or handling the senses must do when the look, feel, hear, smell, touch; the loss inherent in the transmission to thoughts, fueled by the desire to grasp or retain.  What was never suspended.  Always in transmissive motion…the letters.

If the lines are drawn effectively…I may form a working receptacle (as they falsify and crumble behind me in the ongoing change) where the ashes might be held.  Am I getting the picture?  Taking it?  Is taking it the same thing as making it?  Or must I develop it too?  The pen asking so many questions, word after word, tracing an image, a setting, a how…Will you follow?  Will I?  Will this be called writing and reading?  “Literature”?

I create without trace in the traces.  I go on.  Each word a threshold, a bottomless pit, then beyond that…again.

Like stringing the line and entangled.  Hooked for life…which is death.

Asking synonyming answers.  And vice-versa.  Just words.

 

I am writing.

Scribbling chapters that don’t belong…part 3

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

3 – ?

“’Appearances / remain suspended / in transmission’ (Craig Watson) are not so much perceived as apprehended, handled; the one affecting, infecting, the next”

(Charles Bernstein)

 

            Or something to hold what dies off.  The reverberations without resonance.  All edited, edited out, according to needs for appearance, depending on what apprehends, the shape of the handler’s snare.

Think of it – what is selected for capture, in captivity, infects, slipping frequencies to drift on, transmitting, transmitting, there is always ash that won’t be removed, no amount of soaking, scrubbing or spray…

perhaps it’s under the nails, clogging the pores, dusting the follicles… the remains.

We don’t know why we write, trusting such ephemeral weightless shifty particles to catch as motes in an eye…appearances, like dust (in just the right angle of light), remaining suspended in their transmission…hoping (without, really, hope) to, in apprehension – apprehend, by being handled to affect, infect…

always wanting next.  Making it so.

Depending.

Why the book is needed (as ashtray) as form to hold the crumbling, an urn for the remains, until such time as they might be stirred or shaken or spilled.

Again in the commerce of bodies, handled, brushed and staining.

It gets everywhere.  And remains.

Note its infective spread.

Language, whether structures/systems of, or fragments – bits and pieces, lying everywhere implicit.

To write – to make explicit?  It asks more than it answers, word by word, by letter, by ash…

And what remains?  Suspended…in transmission…for affect…a dormant virus…

waiting to be breathed…