Found…from the midst of a stressful week…
NO idea what that is.”
The crap that crumbles out…
Found…from the midst of a stressful week…
NO idea what that is.”
Tag: Writing
“Whereof one cannot speak…” More Writings Unearthed
this repeated event of searching for blank pages only to find potential fertility in those already filled…
entries uncovered from March 2015
“WHEREOF ONE CANNOT SPEAK, THEREOF ONE MUST BE SILENT”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
HO SCIENCES, LOGICS, TECHNO-LOGICS AND MATHEMATICIANS!
PROGRAMMERS, DOCTORS, PHILOSOPHERS & ANALYSTS!
You have your discourses and discoveries, practices and spheres of operability!
You designate your domains through terms and definitions –
What is allowed and disallowed.
Vowed and disavowed.
Then silence.
EXPERIENCE
Whoever’s drawing lines of this and that, of here or there, of yes and no.
Whomever feeds the fuel of contradiction, against the singing speaking styles.
Whoever revels in dichotomy, clarity and divisions –
DIVERGE and then stay silent.
In complexity you must not speak,
on recursion and convergences be still,
traversing intersects and margins,
knotting nexuses and networks,
these zones your symbols will not call,
fringes disciplined discourses unable to name, locate, determine (undermine?)
WE UNDERLINE
AND HIGHLIGHT
HERE
REVEAL in complex approach – our work of ambiguity – perplexing and puzzling, unfathomable and obscure – in-determinate we sing, in language hard to cipher, discourse discomposing and dispossessed, polyphonious and multi-vocal, holding harmonies in dissonance
sing-speaking over/under/with
**********************************
Whereof can I speak?
I speak of pie. Fruit pies. My mother’s. Yet I cannot speak, for I have never figured out how they can be the way they are.
I sing to love. Great love. Experiences and events so totalizing in kind that one fears one will not survive them. And then does. Yet I cannot speak to it because I am unable to account for it, explain it, or…
WRITING MEANS CLIMBING THE STEPS OF OUR LACK
-Edmond Jabes-
as if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as launching pad for reading the writing to come
I-Native Writing: Attempt at a Self-Portrait
Things one realizes about oneself when one is “partnered” or loved well. That seems to be the theme for me of late. The differences between “automatic” self-recrimination when the Other speaks of an annoyance or a threat to useful relating vs. a kind of awareness and curiosity about one’s own behaviors that opens up understanding and attention related to the same habitual practices…
For instance. For years, the only tattoo I got that was not an author or artist’s name / signature / or self-portrait, was a whim of “…and then there’s me…”: and I had a simple Ouroboros inked into my shoulder. The snake eating its own tail. Sign of health, sign of destruction. Sign of…
What’s in a “sign?” A fundamental query ruling the bulk of my waking hours, and carried over from my sleep.
THIS NIGHT. Reading others’ words it dawns on me…”My biography is my catalog. But the man who was there before I decided to become a reader is missing. I, in short, am missing.” [Vila-Matas – Dublinesque]
I, in short, am missing. So long accustomed to defining and describing myself in relation to world, others, children, parents, education, travels, experiences, friends…roles, behaviors, actions, theories, ideas, feelings…and so on…
Each scenario, event, surround, circumstance, company : co-creating WHO / WHAT I am – with no idea what “I” might be stripped of literature, philosophy, family, knowledge, accomplishments, relationships, language, interpretations, and so on…
I had marked myself with “signs” of who I “am” for my children postmortem. OTHERS. Read these people, look at these artists, think about these things…and you will have some idea of who your father “was” – Nathan Filbert – a bibliography.
Hmmmm.
I AM what I am related to. Never being able to come to the end of it…I do not know what/who I am.
I can say something of the how…which felt like a revelation on me of why the most off-handed permanent mark I requested to be inscribed into my body has come to feel most adequate / representative / apt / true?
The how is like this. I recognize in intimacy and dialogue with a loving other (my partner) over time habits of mind: annoyances, arrogancies, logorrhea, unwise knowledge-sharing (always borrowed)…INSECURITY, self-doubt, terror, UNCERTAINTY.
In most seconds of my awakeness two things are tangled, wound, immediate, simultaneous, recursive and self-devouringly going on: WHAT AM I DOING/WHAT AM I? and WHY?
My children run in, blast a request that feels like a demand – at the kitchen counter I: what am I hearing? What am I feeling about what I’m hearing? Why am I feel-hearing that? What should I do? Why do I think ‘should’? How should I respond? Why do I think there’s a ‘should’-how to respond?
On the porch reading with coffee: Why do I cross my legs? Why do I like coffee? What am I looking at? Why does a squirrel catch my eye? Why did I choose these glasses? Why am I thinking about these things? Is this what others think about? What ‘should’ I be thinking about? Why ‘should’? How should I work? How should I think? Why do I think I should have a way of thinking? Why do I think about the way that I sit? What kind of being thinks about the way it sits when it thinks on a porch and is distracted by a squirrel?
WHAT AM I?/WHAT AM I DOING? and WHY? leading to HOW?
What am I doing? Looking at letters on a screen. Why do I look at these letters on a screen? Why does language move me, draw me, resonate? What is resonating? Why? Should other things be resonating? I enjoy looking at my love. Am I looking in the ‘right’ way? Why do I enjoy looking at my love? How should I look at my love? Why do I look at my love? What kind of thing is drawn to gaze at his love? What is love? Why do we love? How should we love / might we love? Why do I hold books certain ways. How do I hold them? How might I hold them? Why? What kind of thing thinks about how and why and what he holds? What was that tone? Why that tone? What kind of being uses that tone?
And so on. Moment after moment. I get a drink. Why did I get a drink. Why was I thirsty. What does it mean that I was thirsty. How should I vary what I drink to my thirst? Why?
Rarely do I consider “Who” does these things. It’s too far removed. Too unknowable – beyond any what/why/how I can even begin to contemplate.
But constantly constantly constantly WHAT AM I DOING? WHAT AM I? (in this situation, this situation, this situation) and WHY? HOW?
And this is how my days pass. Finding myself moving, teaching, listening, talking, drinking, eating, loving, avoiding, forgetting, imagining, smelling, saying, wishing, regretting, ashamed, confused, uncertain, unknown…but always searching, observing, inquiring, scrutinizing…
WHAT AM I DOING? WHAT AM I that DOes such things? WHY am I doing them? HOW ‘should’ I do them and where/why/what/who thinks of ‘should’? WHY?
And finding nothing but infinite tangles, recursive spiraling production and reduction, endless context surrounding every moment that is constructed only of questions and hypotheses…
I chose a good tattoo.
Permanently self-devouring and regurgitant.
Self-Imitations of Myself. (Gordon Lish)
perhaps shed light on through an-other?
“A single voice raises the clamor of being”
Gilles Deleuze
A Provisional Writing
He, frightened, uncertain, inexhaustible and weak, somehow mustered the strength to ask or act for what he wanted.
Perhaps she would not comply.
Or could not, and remain who she needed to be.
Yet there would always be response –
– even ignoring, diverting, pretending to sleep.
It hurt to ask. To attempt – its exposure – admission of lack and need – the venture, to try. The fear of undoing, of incompleteness, of rejection, impossibility.
Still he acted and asked.
The alternative grown unbearable over time – constructions and deconstructions, composition and erosion, the living through time and space.
Time approaches in which time isn’t worth it – without.
Without knowing and acknowledgment, honesty and rejection, awareness…
…until the response is given…isn’t there still chance?
Untoward, illusory, unlikely and so slim…and yet?
As if…
*******************************************************
Varieties of presence.
Certain opportunities of world.
Of doing. Being. Making.
As life runs out, so too the prospects of meaning, of experience.
Had begun to feel he must,
or never.
Discover, find out, uncover, unearth, reveal
at least for a moment.
This moment. The moment.
Nearing NOW.
But how? Who? And what sorts of whys were required?
What lent him the right and wherewithal, the luck, the chance, or desperation?
And why now? What for? How her?
Hesitates.
After all, perhaps?
Perhaps its merely panic, neuroses, a fracturing diminishing end?
What motivates? And why? And why this one? And this now? And here…in the midst of.
Always already in the midst of…and always already not-yet.
Between. Desiring a line to be drawn. As if the world depended on it. His world (perhaps theirs?). His life, his living, his NOW.
It remains to be seen.
Ever remains to be seen, evidenced, emergent,
Proven.
Can there be any proving? If things had been different, some slight change in the initial conditions, conditions so complex?
Could it be different?
He must, he has to, he is compelled to act / to ask.
What will she reply?
***********************************************************
The always begin. Begin, begun, always. Climbing the steps of his lack…behaving…becoming. Ever some begin – some something, something shifting, changing, altering, becoming something else, something altered and novel, new, not combined in quite this way before – submerged, emerged, converged…yet differently.
No?
Next?
With N (next) = Begin? +1, +1, +many + again, else, other…Equaling not before, prior, exact…NOT repetition but difference, remainder, chaos, complexity
Impossible,
seemed inexhaustible,
almost infinite,
not quite. Not remotely.
“He,” “She” will surely end (in a way)
as a form of beginning
As a form of
a form of
motion, movement, becoming.
Things happen, or happening produces things (at some scale, interaction, percept)
What becomes undoes becoming undoing
(and so on).
Uncertainty.
Mobility.
Activity.
Becoming.
Undoing.
Undone.
He becomes.
Unraveled enough, to a point (a seemingly certain threshold) he will risk,
wants risk,
feels compelled,
concerned,
for survival, needs, depends,
decides to act or ask for what he’s wanting (needing? lacking? desiring? believing?)
And where / who / what / why / is she?
And there and which and whom and when?
He will act, ask,
she will needs-be
in response to the violence of movement, address,
intruded perception, sensation,
respond.
In what way?
BECOMING: A Something-Writing …Provisionally (cont’d)
Say it – “Mikhail!”, say it “Lover,” “son,” or “dad.”
Give me a robe, a title, anything,
let me to be,
yet call me “Person.”
(same as you).
Just like with all our difference.
Generic sets.
And without cease.
What’s inexhaustible
and finite.
Here We Be.
Call us “Person(s)”
In order to get by, to get along, to carry on, I invade your body as if planned. Swapping breath and sounds and fluids. Making more. A “he” a “she.” A “husband,” “wife.” A “muse” and “lover.” We pretend in our pretense and we become.
Call us Person(s).
We raise the dead and name it “memory,” name it “history,” name it “god.”
We start to drown, but we’ve become, and name it “family,” name it “nation,” name it “state” or “land” or “friendship.”
We disperse.
We send out tracts: “PLEASE CALL US PERSON(S)!”
No response.
And we become what we will be.
**************************************************
I scream your name for I am helpless, “I” am hopeless without you. And so I grasp and shape your body, your behavior, your aplomb. I demand answer for my question is the telling and I need to be an I: “Call me Person!”
It begins.
And it is reckless, it is violent and warm.
I am coddled, moisty, fragile. I need purchase(d). I need won.
You are one, and there are many.
We begin.
“Mother.” “Lover.” “Child.”
Call me Person.
Call me something.
We grow limbs and we grow hair. We swap shapes and alter presence. We emerge and we invade.
I am Ishmael, I am
Allah, I am Sam.
You are giant, you are troll, you are fairy.
I can’t tell but for the asking (as if same, as if identical) – simple call.
Call me Person.
We begin.
**********************************************************************
In some ways our job [for survival] is simply to affirm one another.
To provide response (which is a call) to a call (a form of response).
I affirm you (which affirms I) by telling you (asking back) when you ask (telling me you are – where?).
Co-respondence is affirmation – positive or negative (each a both/and) [as with most things living].
You there –where?—ask me, I will acknowledge – thereby telling “you” –
both of us thereby affirmed, established…
…Being…
Thusly, there are Varieties of Presence.
I am Stephen K. Plato, Laurell H. Hardy, John
Quincy Locke,
call me “Person.”
“We” will therefore become via our calling, our response,
-mutually constituted identities
-for the moment.
Johann Sebastian Souza strikes a note
Federico Garcia Chopin hears that tone,
thereby constituting,
no, co-constituting…
…sound.
Sound, press of fingerpads on forearm, shoulder, buttocks, calf,
breast, or clay,
each,
each each,
resonance, difference, identification,
-a becoming, become-
Affirmation.
Compliance.
What might seem
passive, active, passing to-and-fro, creating “We,” “Us,” “People,” “Person(s)”
Trolls beneath the bridge.
Knocking, knocking.
We. Are. There.
(Which is “Here” for NOW).
*******************************************************************
Being. and Time.
(one might say)
Call me Friedrich, Ortega, Alfred.
or: Being + Event.
Address me Giorgio, Alain, Ricky G.
Actor, actant, the motion of bodies.
Ludwig Joycenstein;
rejoice in time;
Osip, Anna, the noise of time.
Being. Event.
kairos
“it is Time”
fullness.
redolent.
predilective. propicient. promising. proclamative.
NOW.
In the Beginning, the wormy End.
Every Ending a Begin.
Transference. Transmission. Translation.
It is love.
Call. Response.
Affirm
Telling Asking
Achieve.
Archive.
WE ARE
You/I a He/She
(not long before combine, breed, be/have)
–BE-COME–
WE.
“I” was lost, until you found me…
…in other words…
…varieties of presence.
bumping into brambles,
slipping into sea,
hearkening to shriek,
Ask Tell
yay/nay,
no matter,
what matters?
too much, too little?
near enough
Begin.
Become.
just BE.
Be. Be. Bee.
1. B. 2. C. D.
Dee Harvey Osmont.
Olivia Newton jaunt.
Wolfgang Adolf Heisman.
Prince Albert Nobel.
Call “me” “Person.”
Julio W. G. Sebold.
Sign on page,
raised to the eye,
digited “touch,”
BECOME.
Vocable. Insignia. Etching. Stroke. Motion.
WE.
Call us Person(s).
*********************************************
“The pen asks / much more than it can answer /
one word at a time”
-Philip Levine-
WRITING YOU
What I should do is phone; the circuitry
is there and we’re both somewhere in the circuitry.
I need to talk. What should I find to say?
You know how it is: it rings; you answer; no click;
no dial tone. Hello? Hello? No word.
Not even goodbye – I couldn’t give you that.
.
Listen to this: to write you requires a scheme,
subtends an apparatus, such that here
be an I, you be he there, space
discerns the entities , depicts them such
as the scheme requires. Are you lost? I am.
I want to be not lost. I write even so.
.
Tell me what to do. I want to show.
Schemelessness. Undress. To speak from that.
I want the secrecy; I want it said.
To speak from wordlessness. There are certain things
that happen and we don’t know: proteins meet
and shape each other. We are the husk of this.
.
Whatever happens happens in some such wise,
under attention. I hate all huskiness.
Let me be where it happens, let me be the hidden cells
and silent if silence is all there is to say.
I want to talk though. I want to talk to you.
I despair of what to say. Goodnight. Goodnight.
– William Bronk
WRITING MEANS CLIMBING THE STEPS OF OUR LACK
– as if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come..”
– Edmond Jabes –
Spring Forward – Saving Daylight
Taken with a feeling of grandeur: a premonitory greatness arising with convergence. There are uncertainty principles and the bafflings of mathematics as one ranges across scales. Relationships over time and fictional emissions, philosophies, transpositions of experience…and sometimes, somehow, they inextricably and irreducibly link up, reciprocally foster…and generate moments of novelty. Perhaps this is indicated with the term emergence. There is music, too, and emotion.
A sense of sense. Of universal process in which one plays a micro-part, participation. For the time – being and becoming seem joined. There may be love, generation, sometimes even intuition of revelation. Simply processes – ongoing self-organization – of “selves,” and smaller and larger collective, complex, and dynamic systems.
Something like “meaning,” I suggest. Nobody gets what I mean.
Which represents entropy. Things falling apart even as they arise, conjoin…together.
Things I do not mind. Emergence / entropy … it’s all dynamic – which is what I’m thankful for in the now. “Alive” perhaps we’d call it, un-“dead,” – a state I’m thrilled to avoid.
****
Of course there’s a “Her,” and a “Them,” or “they,” – my spouse/partner/girlfriend/significance-of-Other … and the offspring numbering 1-4 – the “matterings that matter” in me… my hand and body, pen and paper, & the complicated processes between that emit some strange result.
Physics tells me “strange attractors” (at that relational scale), I suppose it’s literature’s “muse,” romance’s “one,” the what-fors and what-nots equaling “It,” equaling “unknown,” equaling “that to which things tend.” Optimization, in a sense (if only a fantastical one).
Depending on the color of the glasses. What hole is peered through, by whom, from what angle. Perspective. Outlook. Relation. Some mean free path I’m on. Perhaps now a ‘we.’
“I” feels uncomfortable, unnatural. The idea there might be a group-of-me consoles. If only one (other, more). If only a “you — too?!”
– Emily Dickinson
something like that.
Dancing like cancer survivors…
At least grateful we’re experiencing
That’s a sort of Spring-Forward, is it not?
Rambling
How oddly and uniquely our dear bodies exhibit the effects of stress. For some days now, exhausted and craving rest, I wake ever-so-early in a kind of sleepless sleepiness. Wanting only to burrow in, immerse in comfort and calm, be tenderly near the one I love, instead I toss, turn, disturb and achieve none of my wishes.
Is this another emerging effect of aging?
My parents soon will celebrate 50 years of marriage – an example of what Andre Gorz describes: “If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage. Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations. We will be what we do together.” (Letter to D)
which means that I also approach 50.
So there’s also that – a kind of nostalgia, melancholy, joy, awareness…
I’m one to search and seek and inquire without end.
One to wonder and ponder and interrogate my experience with hopes of understanding it – but increasingly I find that apparently my being simply wants to be SO ALIVE. Sometimes I feel that is what is happening with my waking body – that it doesn’t want to miss. Anything. The presence of my beloved next to me in sleep (Gorz describes what I am experiencing in that regard very well also: “how love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them”), the particular quality and type of that morning time, house-sounds, obfuscated consciousness…I, one of those who have “just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine”…sometimes it feels…and that this particular kind of love slowly strips and erodes those away to the irreducible, undefinable reality of each ONE of us…
FITS & STARTS
I shoulda wrote a letter. There are the griefs, the emotions mistrusted, the longings delta’d out, and a million wishes. “The past is still the past : a bridge to nowhere.” And then there is SO MUCH NOW. The children and their emerging, engrossing creating lives; my wonder/love – a thriving, amazing individual who loves me and has so much of her own; there are the animals, the leaves, the waters and the breezes. The breaths, the touches, the thoughts. The feel of it all.
The word/concept/term “Mashup.”
Perhaps that is what is going on in my sleepless sleepiness. My habit of reading has always been to read 30 or more books from various fields, genres, authors, subjects, literatures in order that my mind would have to do it’s weird mysterious complexity/chaos/emergence/dynamic/creative adaptive process of making some new idiosyncratic sense of a kind of global dissonance – our inherent ability to be a Convergence Creator. To not be caught obeying, devoting, under the sway of some authority or perception or ideology not a Mashup. Perhaps the thickness of being alive to what is life, attempting to attend, note and notice, enthralls the entirety in a similar manner – experience is a Mashup – so many sources, so many responses, so many interactions, so many affects and effects, roles, obligations, identities, loves, fears, perceptions, interpretations…and perhaps I’m currently simply immersed in a particularly cogent nexus of complexity and chaos – the operation toward adaptive emergence and some temporary convergence being administered in clumsy and cluttery fits & starts…
Perhaps each now is realization & threshold. And, as a friend recently pointed out…“hope is such a restless state”.
All my Words are Silent 