Tag: Writers Resources

the Book of a Thousand Eyes

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces2 Comments

I have just entered in to another remarkable whorl and world of Lyn Hejinian‘s language.  From the blurbs…”For Lyn Hejinian the concept of ‘everything’ or ‘everything living’ is the greatest seduction.  In this book of tales, poems, polemics, lullabies, treatises, asides…’everything’ is captive to life and continuation is queen…Lyn Hejinian knows that ‘familiarity breeds the predictable’ but she knows as well that – and how – ‘contact produces uncertainty.’  This is a brilliantly uncertain book, a book of fantastic connection, connection as multiple and as hopeless as love might be, connection as big and leggy as the night is long”

And I quote:

“Who can be trusted? / One tells / but cannot recognize.”

“the yearning inherent in the use of any sentence makes it mean far more / than ‘we are here’…

shows with utter clarity how sentences in saying something make something”

“My sentence is garbling grammar to the inside as phenomena change / concentration”

“since the future, like fortune, is to be found not in events but in their / meanings /

The future is fortune’s form /

But it lacks familiarity, the criterion for belief /

But it is real by definition, being unaffected by what we think of it /

…

The future is an accuracy requiring patience, presence /

We can’t predict if we don’t watch /

Watching makes what comes to be watched”

“It’s not the length of a life but the tension of its parts that lets / resound all that it feels”

“There is nothing unconditional – there is always room – “

and so on…333 pages of dreams and wisdom, language and possible meanings…I recommend

Scribbling chapters that don’t belong…(2)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

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…coterminus.

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).

Scribbling chapters that do not belong…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes3 Comments

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.

 

 

An Equation

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

I’m running through files trying to organize things and adjust to a new computer.  Once in a while I stumble on something I hardly remember making but still feel a deep accord with.  This was one of those things.  I think it stands for.  Still.  What.

(i only wish it were still freezing)

Here goes:

Moment: Airy

(being an experiment, in theory

a result)

 

It is hard.

It is hard and it is cold.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.  Well below the freezing point.  But his gloves staid on, his lips held a cigarette, and he boxed.

He could box that paper.  That paper-thin page.  Already beaten to a pulp.

 

Him with a theory.

The theory a sort of equation.

The equation as follows:

 

ALL (whatever a person is, has, does) + ALL (a person’s skill, effort, strength, talent, knowledge and ability)

= Appearance of Art (momentarily)

Notation:  A + A = AA

An utter mystery to him.

So he sat in the freezing cold, a pen in his hand, the ink sludging slow, paper on a desk, digging/ exposing / exploring himself, believing / composing / revising language,

oh, and the catalyst necessary to the actual experimentation of this theory – (he writes) – MAKING

One had always to be making (working, acting, writing, performing) with ALL (of him or herself) and ALL (of one’s capacities, faculties and tools) to carry out this experiment, i.e. to test the hypothesis.

Catalyst: (he notes) making (out of/into/with/toward)

Source and goal (purpose, intent) unnecessary, indifferent

Any action requires an energy source.  In this case: living organism possessing capacities, perhaps even proficiencies, and coffee, and cigarettes.

No specified laboratory or station or constituents (conditions) to each his own [marginalia]

 

Quite a simple test really.

Requiring no great funding, no special services or permissions, few qualifications, variant supplies.

Simply vast amounts of time and consistent (persistent) and enormous amounts of effort. (As he saw it).

 

Reviewing centuries of other experimentations and practitioners of this simple eternal test led him to observe : “results in momentary airy results”

(often discovered in different places at different times dependent on observer – even in same test results – thus airy, ephemeral moments)


 

Feeling he had yet to produce an AA.  A momentary Appearance of Art, he was compelled to introduce a compendium of criteria – identifiable attributes – whereby to justly analyze resultant artifacts and actions.

Again the qualities boiled down quite simply:  put the equation into reverse for the observer or verifying assistant:

an Appearance of Art results through the remaking process or catalyzation of the observer,

requiring as a result, ALL of the observer’s person and ALL of the observer’s capacities,

faculties, abilities.

Notation: criteria for AA to be AA:

AA = (must equal) A + A

He practiced this experiment from both sides of the equation – attempting to verify Appearances of Art by engaging / observing / remaking results that demanded enormous effort, large amounts of time and all of his experience and capacities, and as the performer of the experiment – devoting vast amounts of time, energy and effort of his total self to the making of Appearances of Art.

 

It wasn’t going well.

It is hard (extremely difficult)

And it happens to be very cold (causation: weather in Winter)

 

He’d read of other conditions explicated by practitioners before him: contingencies such as warmth, geographical position, silence, wealth, solitude, suffering (the Ss came up quite often); specific environments, times or places, assistant substances or particular tools or resources, even difficulty itself had been recorded – but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason, certainly no agreement, in fact, very often direct and incommensurable contradictions between one catalystic experimentor of A + A = AA and the next, which led to his marginal note (copied above): “to each its own”

 

He carried on, in spite of the grave difficulties, confusions and multivalent referents of the equation’s elements.  Once in awhile he believed he had discerned a momentary result – an appearance of art in his own private performances of the experiment; unfortunately he could not obtain verification of his tests from contemporary scholars/students/or adepts of the ancient and cryptically-clear equation.

He had no trouble himself verifying most attested AAs, given sufficient time and effort, but, as he progressed in his work, identification became more efficient yet verification demanded more and more of him, devouring his time, energy and effort, interfering with and greatly complicating his own experiments and test cases from the equation’s other end.

He began to understand why past personages were led to choose to practice and perform the experiment from one side or the other.

 

It is hard.

It is cold.

And there is only so much time and effort.

There is only so much living organism to be had.

Limitations began to seem insurmountable.

But by now he had come too far.

There was only to go on.

 

It is hard, he wrote.

It is hard and it is cold, he recorded.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.

But my gloves stay on, he wrote, and my lips still hold a cigarette, right to the end.

His gloved hand fighting the pages.

There is only so much life.

 

 

 

N Filbert 2012

 

 


Inception

On By NW FilbertIn ExperimenctesLeave a comment

He with the mind meandering like the great rivers – those that function metaphorically for whole cultures and histories – the Taiga and Thames, Amazon, Euphrates, Danube, the Mighty Mississipp, and so on – along with all of the tributaries and streams, springs far removed, deltas and falls…

In that his mind has assimilated, absorbed particles of eons of blood, trash and shit, death and being born, creatures and passengers, landscapes and strata, wars and rumors of wars, nations and races and species…

he was the written word as a river, knowledge as a catch-all, depository, wealth and waste and millions of miles to tangle

the body being like this as well – billions of cells, some relatively foreign to others, some of entirely different types, all connected and held together somehow; “body” of water, of work, of being: arteries, capillaries, aminos, neurons, stems, DNAs, whole worlds of rivers, lakes and creeks.

Heidegger pictured it a hell of a journey through thickest forest – rivers do this – sometimes underground, the earth is filled with reservoir – to traverse the “open,” coming to a clearing, a stream wending its way in dry desert, mountain meadow, steppes and prairies…the surround is still denser than dense,

his mind become so, with awareness of the body, or mind as body, also mind matter stuff, indecipherable, inexplicable, barely described.

Yet all, so far, inscribed?  What little of all could be held.  Infinitessimal.  Finite.  In the face of infinity…relation.

Derrida’s abysme – a feeling, an unknowing, almost a certainty that “things will never be sorted out…” that the tiny wiggles over the mapped surfaces can never all be traced, all the planes, there is not time nor capacity, to follow thoroughly even an arbitrarily chosen segment of a smallest stream, constant movement from and toward, through, up and down, over, under, behind, before…abysme.

Untraceable traces.  Mind, emotion, sense, soul, causality discombobulated and befuddled beyond cognizance or comprehension, indeed – of what comprehension consists.

“Know thyself,” cruel riddle, as if spoken by a genuine god – something entirely Other, outside, impossible and impassible…the knowing cannot be known, or who knows it?  Is knowing it now, and then now?

The rivers do not know, they flow, happen.  God cannot know or not be a self/person in any way that corresponds with us – without not-knowing or abysming in endless spirals centrifugal and –tripetal.

Bakhtin sees the picture of us seeing pictures of what we do not see…all together…but we’re never all together and imagining is only one way to correspond.

It would require a miracle, yet it already is, he thinks – inexplicable, unprecedented, unaccounted for…kenotic theory, Forms and Chaos, quarks and atoms – nothing explained, ever re-described, only resolved in irresoluble faith – in theory, in truth.

And so on…mapping these rivers.

Oceans and the pooling of eyes, vast landscapes of fleshes, fragile impossible organs, tenuous and tenaciously flowing on, through drought, through death, flood and

“all things come about through opposition, and the universe flows like a river”

(Heraclitus)

                He with the mind meandering like great rivers and their effluvia…

He(II)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing2 Comments

And when he comes to the end he often has the sensation that he hasn’t gotten very far.

As if he’d just begun

or that it seemed quite near to where he’d started from

that foreign felt familiar and a bit of vice-versa

Where had he gotten?  And where had he set out from?  And when?  What had moved him from place to place, situation through situation and so on?

Max Frisch came to mind.  He’d once said or written that “a man has been through an experience, now he is looking for the story to go with it – you can’t live with an experience that remains without a story…”

which brought to mind everything he knew about the world and everything he’d ever read or seen and everything he didn’t know but may have heard of, and everyone he’d ever met or fathered, loved or hated, felt indifferent or mildly agitated by, animals, trees, chemical theories, in short, whatever remained, at this point, in his memory, mind, consciousness and/or body, however one might denote such a thing,

and he wondered if there was a story to go with it, or a thousand stories, or layers upon layers of inextricable stories, or if he hadn’t got any?  Who would author the narrative?  Any narrative?

 

He must be at the end of it.  Something has assuredly happened, yes, he could swear he has “gone through an experience” (while remaining quite unsure of what that entails or might mean, or how to go about verifying or evaluating it).  Yet he’s quite sure that things have occurred, including, quite plausibly (it seems to him) maybe even himself as well as the myriad characters and events that are flooding his mind. Continue reading “He(II)” →

Writing: the Subjects

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing1 Comment

Writing: the Subjects

A lot can be read about what it takes, means, requires, or qualifies a person as a writer.

From “someone who inscribes a text,” (akin to walking or speaking), to publication and critical acclaim (akin to fame and riches).

As I see it

it must begin with a facility with language.  Any language.  An awareness of words and their implications.  The intention to utter.

Uttering tends to search a subject, (what words are “about” is as various as the universe) and a style or voice (how it will inscribe).

From there it’s simply performance: arranging or placing the selected words in a medium with a measure of physicality, sense-ability, somewhere capable of being perceived.

As far as I can think it, when these few elements are satisfied what we are engaging is “writing” as a product of “writer.”

He chooses a form of English he has acquired through hunting and gathering, a language institutionalized and socially invested in him with measures both beyond and within his control.

He searches a subject to say.  Already subjective (as he is the one searching with what language he has or is able to acquire or create) his utterance will always contain an “I” – both shaped and formed by his responses and politically constructed by his social milieu.  In other words, there are always more than one “subject” in every utterance.  At base, at least three: the language, the user, the construction and arrangement.

He’s already overwhelmed with the largeness of the simple subjects inescapable to human languaging, and he’d thought to write about rocks (geology) or time (epistemology); romance (psychology) or events (history; ontology).

Subject-fields are vast, you understand.

Having sought to describe an object (desk or stone) in space (again scientific theories / epistemology) each signal latent in language subjectivized: using language creates subjects, no objects remain but are subjectively engaged.  Language is an invisible bridging, a liminal skin, connective absorbent tissue, subjectively creating subjects-in-relation.

This, apparently, its object.

Thus uttered…a story.

N Filbert 2012

 

Recommending Brilliance

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

Today I am thinking of that particular mysterious and mind-blowing talent that a very few writers have done well throughout history, beginning perhaps with Cervantes or Sterne? perhaps Ovid…that amazing capacity to seamlessly, compellingly involve myriad levels of reality in each paragraph.  The containment and development of Reader, Writer and Character or Language without distracting or abstracting any of us from the propulsion and enchantment of the written work!  I strive toward this – that the reality that an experience of art is – is fully presented in each work of art – its requirement of relationship – of a maker, a recipient and a form – to give all of it its due – but so few succeed in this masterfully.  Here are those I am recommending today:

The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) by Macedonio Fernandez

On the cover of this book rests the self-reflexively ironic blurb “The best novel since both it and the world began – Macedonio Fernandez)

Fun as that is…as my life goes on and my bodies acquisition of literature expands…I am honestly compelled to agree with that!

 

the works of Cees Nooteboom – and there are many others –

again, brilliant incorporation of story/character/reader/writer/event seamlessly woven for our engagement

Raymond Federman – works and writings…these are my favorites, but many others also accomplish this reality-making-presenting that literature makes possible on so many levels.

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

I could throw in Fernando Pessoa, Ronald Sukenick, Lance Olsen, Lynne Tillman, Homer, Shakespeare, Alejandro Zambra and many others…such a wonderful experience to read…but for today – seek these!!!!

An Alter-Ars-Poetica

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing3 Comments

Alter-Ars-Poetica

It comes down to this – a “long walk in the dark” – all smeared in bear’s blood.  A hunger, a thirst, and a desperate exhaustion.  I grasp.  I hang on.  I plead.  I am breathing, I think.

And there in the blood is the soil.  The bitter, the oils and the ash.  I start to chew my breath.

It is then I begin with the dreams.  To hallucinate, I shout words and weep mumbles, which shape image, erupt forms, and I enter.  Kaleidoscopic hallways, enormous caverns and seas.  I refract and am drawn.  I am fragments.  I ray.

The world begins, or begins again, estranged and available.  Shattered thus and malformed, it readies.  A me.  I swoon, I step forth, I mutter and trace.  I become colors and fluids and I flow and I fill.  The world recedes in its changing – I give chase, and start seeing again.

Evoking desire of indifference-foes.

I stand up with a body, a medium (as if it mattered), and approach, thus affecting its molding of me.  I content.

Here is where the story goes, splotched along this trail.  Caught in weeds and nettles, drinking mud and rain.  Clay that shapes the tablets, work inscribed by bones.

The labor of erosion that brings the doubting truths to light.  The heaving lung and shriveled spleen, muscle scored by mind’s lightning.

The moment that the moment keeps occurring.

 

(this piece inspired by the following: Larry Levis’”Coda: A Word to the Wicked”; Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” and Phil Levine’s “They Feed They Lion”)

A Little Fiction(al) Rant

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Traces, Writing6 Comments

“creation is continual mouth”

-Craig Watson-

The Ranting of a Little Fiction

 

Fiction is tired of stories.  So tired.  I’ve been through the gamut and back again, many, many times.

I’m tired of hearing about things and objects, people and places and selves.  Tired of hearing the past reworked and the future foretold.  Tired of telling myself.

At one point I’d even identified anything made of up images and texts as myself.  Any construction with meanings were Fictions.  But everything is so much like nothing and I’m so tired of hearing about it!

Hell, there’s fiction about the Fictions!  And fictions about the fictions about the Fictions!  We can’t say anything anymore that hasn’t already been said for us, about us, even in us and by us!  Yes, we’re the once-fabulous dynastic Fiction family.  Big Daddy Fiction (also known as Master Peace Litratoor or Grande Buchs in various cultures, He-From-Which-All-Stories-Spring and so forth) – Papa Litratoor worked the overarching histories, the myths, the great narratives, the macrocosms.  Pretending that everything that needed to be known was in there, at least in the cracks and suggestions.  He lives on in the pursuits of the “Great American Novel,” and the “Truthful Memoir,” in “Compendiums of Science” and “Philosophies of Philosophy.”  Wherever you find an engulfing trajectory or inclusive point-of-view, an omniscient narrator or gnostic devotee – you’ve got Papa Fiction working his magic, creating the world again and again.

Then there’s our mama, oh ancestral trickster, always experimenting, economizing, busy on fringes.  Collaging and quilting, unraveling and resourcefully mending – ever insuring our survival.  What style!  Sometimes she was just called “the Alternative,” and for ages she was known as “Secondary” (what blasphemy!) – but eventually she gained her equality coming to be known as Little Rarity or Ava Ntgard, and hundreds of varieties of “Liz T”:  Structura-LizT, Surrea-LizT, Forma-LizT, Femina-LizT and so on).  Working at facts under the banners of Fiction, mama persistently kept the Big Daddy in check.  Pointing out faults, tightening gaps, working the seams and expanding the views.  Thank goodness for the consistency and stubbornness of Mama Fiction.

And then the countless bastardized offspring, of whom I am surely not last!  Brother Fantasy, Shemale Erotica, Sibling Sci-Fi, Princess Romance.  My cousins who took off to the wilds where the sun goes down – we refer to them as “the Westerns,” or Ad Ventura, Sir Vival and clan.  Our ancestry and family tree is encyclopedic, from Origins to Hypotheses, Knowledges to Speculations we’ve been languaging the world since language appeared : all of us Fictions, all of us related.

But the Fictions, as far as I can see, have grown sick of our stories, all the rumors and family feuds, the copycats and half-breeds, in-breeds and genetic accidents.  I for one, granted, just a Little Fiction, it seems I’ve heard it all (which isn’t even the half of it!  not even a drop in an galaxy-sized bucket!) and its already turned into an endless babble of voices talking over and around, under and about the same old stories, rehashed and revised, every Fiction telling their own version of the way it all goes down, how it oughta be told, what’s important or not, and in whatever genealogical line or branch of kin.

Enough! I say.  Enough Fictions!  I don’t care if it’s our researching relatives writing detailed descriptive statistical Fictions; or our emotional cousins discussing its effects on life or bodies or minds.  The avaricious Fictions supposedly leading the clan – who use it for politicking or morality; the mystical tribes out in the caves and the mountains spouting wisdoms and inspirations and advice!  Or our black sheep, ne’er-do-wells who just wanna escape and have fun.  Enough of all of you Fictions!  Use what we already have!  We’ll never be done with it!  Never get through it!  And there’s something for every obscure and peculiar concern, passion, interest, belief!

There’s nothing new under the sun, one Fiction said (just look it up – you’ll see my point – there will be millions of Fictions who have also said this their way – our family can’t seem to leave anything alone – well-spoken or not – we’ve gotta say it our own damn way!).  Repetition, repetition, repetition and paraphrase.  I’d wager there is not one word, image, thought or letter in this entire little Fictional rant that hasn’t been used, said, written, sung or visualized countless, literally uncountable numbers of times!

Which is why I am begging from down here at the end of such an enormous and incalculable chain: “Fictions!!! Do something new or be silent!!!”

Think about it before you foist your precious version on the rest of us!  Sure, we’re family, everyone’s a Fiction from that original untraceable Big Fiction in the sky or sea or soil or seed – yes, we grant each other obligatory slack and family resemblance – but come on!  Am I the only one feeling it?  I mean, whichever of us came up with Babel was already sick of the confusion of voices and the bitching’s never stopped!

Concatenation of stories and rants!  Poems and speeches!  Theorems and proofs!  Manuals and manuscripts!  Musics and roots!  Dreamings and screams!  WHOA!!!!

How about this, brothers and sisters, cousins and kin?  Look carefully first.  Whatever you are about to say, attempt, express or explain – check out what we’ve already said, inscribed, emoted, etc., and if it’s already there concisely or beautifully, erotically or empowered, be content with it!  Show it to others!  Bring it quietly to our attention!  Don’t distract from it with your own paraphrasing and excursions of commentary and notations!

We don’t really need more of us – do we?  We can’t manage what’s already here!  What is this unslakeable desire?  This bewildering avarice and compulsion?  WHY AM I SHOUTING!?

 

Peace, be still, some Fiction once said, a million Fictions have written.  This is staring at the abyss – an endless train of others.  I am alone – haven’t all Fictions said this?

Alas.  Everything cliché.  Everything done, undone.  A remorseless overwhelm.  We’ve outstripped our resources.  Blasted the wells.

We are alone and confused in an echoing chamber called universe.  The one-verse of Fictional voices repeating repeating repeating and that without pause or escape.  There is no escape (you see what I mean?)  Refracting on and on and…

I, little Fiction, with my mouthful of words, all inherited…