Tag: Writing

Left to Say

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Experimenctes, Language, Poetry, relationships, Writing8 Comments

felzmann-swarm

What she said was.

And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.

What she said was

I…

To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.

Even I’d be overwhelmed.  Why with the even?

What she said was

It is too much.

I…

But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.

Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…

I cannot.

.

Think of where that leads!

She said

She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.

I cannot.

Is what she said.

She says.

I listen like a camera.

I record.

Her stillness moves too much.

Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.

I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.

.

She says it is too much, I will not try.

But I am trying.

Which does not change.

Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.

She can’t decipher.

What it is.

She will not say.  Says I cannot.

I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.

(Depress, record).

She will not can.

I take a picture.

It does not hear.

.

And what she says is

There’s too much for me to wager on a word

Even in flocks

Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,

Even in swarms.

I blink.

I snap the shutters.

She has said nothing

She will not say

I hold the stillness, how it flutters.

Silence seems.

Seems only.

But what she says is

She cannot.

.

The birds swoop past

And there is nothing

Left to say.

Compositional Caveat

On By NW FilbertIn communication, Journallings, Reflections, Writing7 Comments

Greetings any readers.  I wanted to let you know that I am quite aware of the imperfections of my recent series of draft blogs.  These are first draft typings that I am doing mostly to convince myself that I am not ONE thing (a graduate student) and to have an outlet for unrestrained creative work outside of my studies.  I apologize that I currently do not have the time, attention or energy to perfect them prior to posting – and beg your latitude and generosity in browsing them.  Being that they are first occurrences of these words and this strange little trail, I more than welcome any and all feedback as to what might capture your attention or what is off-putting about their style, content or formal appearance.  I thank you for your graciousness – perhaps more time will open for more careful production by the first of the year….

N W Filbert

Interstices…continuing…

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, Interstitial, relationships, Writing2 Comments

earlier portions of this can be found HERE

– 5 –

Narrative seeming regurgitant, redundant, and indulged…yet as it occurred it was quite dramatic.  A vibrant life of tragic deaths and violent love.  The kind of loving one imagines as a lion gutting prey.  That ferocity and devouring.

Language always there, most assuredly, in circularity and dismay, its hesitant encumberance.  Its dance of waltz with tango, its distance from its cause.  We were ravenous for life, steeled in healing, shriveling seeds immersed in waters.  An obsessive metaphor.

She came.

From where?  Like lamps at sea.  Inside of windows, inside of houses, nonexistent.  The sea is no foundation in its turbulence, its depths.  I never charted.  But there she shone.  And there I strove, even while she drifted toward me.

The sky is murky.  A sound of panting.  My memories faint.  I grabbed her collar and held her still, bent down, like that, spread open (in my dreams).  They feed, they lion.  The forms reverse.

Talking a mean streak.  Accidental – no, – unavoidable or some inevitable undoing that I do.  I won’t stop speaking, but go on.  When I shouldn’t, when I can’t, when I do.  I am.

What I say (I said) goes like this, or would have, but the force, the draw, consumption – I speak in digits, speak in code, I squeeze pronouncing.  I will not say.  What I am saying, if I would not, would have been as it were love.  Instead I feed.

And she retracts and she releases, she relents but won’t rely.  We’re frightened beings, gorging beasts, so here it is – the valiant story, the fragile lines, the treacherous risk.

I engulf her.  Still she comes.

She feasts and I retreat.

The battles rage, my hair grows wild (she makes it so), her full of bruising, fully of greed – my want, my spunk.  Our torsos open.  We choose withdrawal along with weapons for attack.  I bare my teeth and force her hand while she recoils, she hits, she sneaks.

We die away.  I have remorse, and so I speak: again, again.  Say “what I meant” I do not mean.  Say wonder why.  She will not speak.

There’s never truce but we find trust, a glyph we muster, when we must, because we want (for something), want (for edges), want (for love).

She says my name.  Says “you remember!”  And I don’t.  Says work from there.  My body rotted, her blackened breasts, her flesh unwilling, still we progress.  We feed and lion.

A torturous joy.  An adumbration..  Spiraled mind and twisting body.  And there we are beneath a flow I cannot cease, my acrid words, my oily blunder.  Why should I think, and what?  While she moves thunder.

With firm resolve.  And solve again without solution.

Then here screes the story wrenched of life – away and from – she drains a bank I cannot fill, I rob her purchase.  We are one.

The scene begins.

Re-searching: Hope Questions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Language, Writing8 Comments

skeleton at desk

I archive.

– Edouard Leve –

At some point in the future this will be very important to someone: that I wrote.  Will be significant.  To someone.  That I disciplined my “self” determinedly, conspicuously to experience; to experience experience.  That I asked questions of as much as I could, and as many, and then held on to each question in a kind of world’s-largest-ball-of-twine or world’s-largest-bundle-of-wire or inter-cranial-neuronal-tangle, or… that each little curiosity that cropped up as I “came up against”, each discomfort, each discomfiting sensation, I translated – and when I rendered it, became something different, something new in the world (even though agelessly repetitious) and that new thing was another questioning animal – and those questions disappeared into the world’s-largest-body-of-water – doubt – oceans and underground marshes, or, in actual everyday life, simply a “questioning spirit,” an “inquiring mind,” a “researcher” (to search again) – a human that keeps turning round and around observing things, seeking, searching, asking, in other words, I feel like it will be important – to some other existent thing/individual/organism/ being – that I quizzed and catechized (and that, mostly genuinely, compunctionally) whatever discomposing-affective-awareness-alert occurred for me (thereafter losing them all, after their fashion, in the generalized posture or aspect of querying) followed it in accord with its continuance of interest and then released, lost, offered it to a larger sign:

question mark

Someday it will matter that every little thing, moment, perception (i.e. “experience”) that I noticed, felt, underwent – was aware of becoming-encountering – I interrogated, I archived, I disoriented, mislaid, lost track of in some larger point-of-view, mien or cast: I had reservations, I chronicled, I forgot.  And inscribed.  Addressed and assigned in whatever way I was capable of.  Marked and then faded, cancelled by the mere activity of demarcating.

Translating manifestations and intimations into gestures and cues delimited and distinguished (de-scribed) the perturbation and disconcertment into ambiguous and indeterminate denotations…opaque obfuscations or auguries that bore little substance or portent.

My questioning, rather than resulting in poignant prognostications or revealing adumbrations simply fed the murky mass of life’s analysis – a scrupulous and turbid scrutiny.

I beggared the question and then repented.  Metanoia.  I aimed and turned, aimed and swerved, and turned again.

When the engagement perturbed, I transliterated, diverted, and sacrificed it to a chaotic deity … discovering … language.

 

 

 

IN THE MIDST

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Philosophy, Reflections, Writing1 Comment

Moments: The reality of accrual and depletion, growth and diminishment

chicken-or-the-egg-550x550

“It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad things that form, persist and break up in its currents.”

Tim Ingold – Being Alive: Essays on knowledge, movement and description

            In the reading journal I keep, I record what I read each day in entries numbered according to my years.  For instance, today is Day 364 of 43.  Each day counts UP the days I have lived, simultaneously counting DOWN the days I have left.

If our weight in the world is conspired via our capacity for object-making, “perception,” – how we collate and identify active collective of particles, lending them shape and color, space and duration – in effect: “organize them according to our own purposes and facilities” – co-creating manageable entities with which we might interact and navigate life “sensibly” (body-minded)

then the “lightness” of vitality/movement/being comes from the constant (relatively frenetic) buzz and action of the unseen particles composing and constituting the scales we are able to perceive and conceive.

Does this sound workable?  I trust that I am a hive of vibrating, exchanging, bounding, colliding and connecting atoms/molecules/whatever, and that to certain interlinked bundles of material interactivities this can appear, be sensed, perceived, interacted with, as an apparently distinct “organism/being/organization of activities” constructing (or being constructed/perceived AS) almost a form, a differance, an “object.”

And likewise, and vice-versa.

Particles, drilled down or zoomed out in their interactivities and motion form ever-varying “wholes” (temporarily composed perceptible forms or variable entities).  Thus poets and scientists, thus Ovid and religions, philosophers…HUMANS…METAPHOR.  Taking various realities for another and one another, or, ALWAYS – in relation to.

Crossing and dipping, perceiving/conceiving, we are able to invent scenarios and subjects, conduits and concretions, whereby we are also able to communicate, invent, share, cognize imaginative possibilities for our temporary coagulates (or “life-forms,” ever active and morphing).  The tinier particles simply continue their trajectories and behaviors while their collaborated forms appear to be “born” (or formulated, occurring) and die (or dissolve, dismember, separate to join in other alignments, reactions and compounds).

Thinking is a lucky pleasure of our particular combo-formulations, as love, emotion, felt embodiment, enmindedness, entanglements…

I am grateful for all of it: lovely purposeful accidents to sense, perceive, grow, change, become, decease, connect and disconnect…attach and release…combine and unravel.

IN THE MIDST of which…and this is where the trembling, shifting, unstable, particularly and elaborately conditioned partial perception “I” initially chose (in languaging) to begin…”in the midst of…”

but then I realized that MIDST might beggar a belief-explanation (theory) as to what I was beginning in the midst of…ALWAYS…this strange living process…and so I diverted through the above contingent caveat.

i.e. EVERYTHING DEPENDS.  On context, formulations, occasions, circumstances, surroundings, kind, type, species, conditions composing NOW.

There is some longevity to “sticking together” (successfully? Symbiotically? Interactively linked or bonded for some formal survivable persistence) but it’s all quite temporary (the place-time from which an opinion is held or conceived, promulgated…changes slightly with each moment, more in an hour, a day, each “year,” each…occurrence).

To say: all is active and contingent.  I.e. DEPENDS – on multitudes of very specific things, unseen tiny things, enormous systemic things, situations, arrangements being…”the case.”

A Hal Hartley film or a novel by Dostoevsky, the face of my child or the sound waves of song; the body and voice of my beloved…won’t have any “effect” “meaning” “sense” when my particles realign and this particular arrangement is “dead,” “decayed,” “reorganized.”

Activity is a curious thing.

Although we experience “age,” “knowledge,” “experience,” as a kind of “growth” or accretion, it isn’t very long at all in our formulating as a human before we become profoundly aware that our “growth” is an indicator of cessation, “progress” a sign of our undoing…dismantling, shifting, and changing.

This central comprehension of human systems – paradoxical tension, momentary accretion/diminishment – likely fuels much of the emotion, trauma, passion, energy, delight, grief, disturbances and elations of our particular species instinctual cognitively embodied behaviors.

Angst, joy, terror, hope – perhaps all of these reside in this mysterious yin-yang of coming together / coming apart AT ONCE and ALWAYS.  Each addition is a removal, each connection another breakage, each revelation a forgetting.  Each next accrues a last and never.

NOW – the pivot point of addition/subtraction – for human living.

I crave, delight, wonder, rejoice, and find my survival with each NEXT while grieving, losing, aching, suffering, and ceasing with each movement as well.

There is no choice in the matter (that I can see) – it happens.  Everything we do effects and disaffects inherently.

Rising indeed IS falling.  Growing IS diminishing.  Living truly IS dying, while our dying is yet living for something else…Reciprocal, ongoing, continuous realignments.  Any departure is a novel thing joined.

And thus, simply process, simply going-on.  Not “us” but it.  Not you, I, we, but the particles and universal systems, arrangements.

And we, in the midst.

Perhaps.  That’s how I’m thinking it today.

As I count up and down the days.

ouroboros

Scripture : Roots

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Language, Reflections, Writing8 Comments

Scripturient

“In the beginning was the word…”

“…and the word was god.”

Enigma.

My youth was spent immersed in a form of neo-fundamentalist, conservative, evangelical Christianity.  It would be difficult for me to estimate the number of bible readings, passages memorized, commentaries consumed, and sermons received during my first twenty-some years of life.

Twenty-some years later, libraries of world literature later, this particular phrase, passage, verbal construction remains like a haunting, a rule, a resonance and reverberation of the deepest sort – a kind of First Sentence that rises and echoes in me whenever I turn myself to writing.  A statement some whole of me attached to in presumptive belief and passion that constitutes, in its way, the work of my adult life.

In what “beginning” was the word?  And what was that word, are we to read this word as, literally, “god”?  Or are words themselves divine, godlike in their creativity and actionable functions?  In the full passage we read that the word is both “with” god and itself god…a quintessential meta-statement from whatever interpretive stance one selects.

“In the beginning was the word [in beginnings words become?  In words become beginnings?],

and the word was with god [words that are with] and the word was god [words that are].”

            Religiously:  when humans spoke “god,” gods became.  Conception creating realities.  Referentiality – a term is attached to an object, idea, relation…and the object, idea, relation begins to become that term (and vice-versa, through public practice).

Words epitomize co-creation, collusion.  I am a tiny human organism, an infant birthed into a community of persons.  This community attaches a term to me: “Nathan.”  I grow into that name, define and fill it with characteristics, behaviors, activities, experiences…and, for my communities (the others I relate to) that word “Nathan” comes to mean my specific organism in the world.

Words are beginnings, are like relational diagrams, invisible cross-hatchings and webbing throughout lived experience as humans – inceptions of internal and external possibilities and limitations via their activity as connective linkages, as references and realities.  Every term is metaphor – symbol, signal, object – requiring its interpretant.  The multi-sided act: language.

So what began with language?  Language that joins with and is?

I suggest meaning.  Conscious participation, co-mmunication, reflective relating.

Religiously:  posit Supreme Being and it posits world.  Speak reality and reality speaks.  All a matter of relating, relation…communication…language.

World becomes via collaboration, interaction – made possible through efforts of mutuality and distinction: gestures, intelligible utterances, multilogues, dialogues – communication.

Possible interpretation: A god languages “god” into being.  “Unicorn,” “fairy,” “truth,” “quark,” “molecule,” “consciousness,” – invisible, imperceptible “realities” language (WITH) and then become (ARE).  Subsequently the commerce and exchange of the universe alters…

Each utterance brings new relations and thereby new “things/realities” into concourse.

I can believe that what begins in language (or, communication/relation/collusion) is MEANING (such a word as “god” itself).

I find, trundling through countless notebooks, pages, typescripts, letters and journals, that at the head of any larger work or endeavor I attempt is inscribed this personally indelible takeaway from my youth’s indoctrination:

In the beginning is the word

a thing that creates in being constructed

always co-constructed WITH something else/Other

and becoming something else/Other in its utterance and collusion

organism + environment = meaning

all reality resides in relation

all of these also words, beginnings, possibilities

In beginnings are words

and in words begins begins begins

ever forging relations into realities into relations

tying things one to another to another to another

in concourse

en route as route

(IF) I am a storm. (IF) I am a blizzard.

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Uncategorized, Writing4 Comments

FROM MY OLD NOTEBOOKS

It is beginning to appear that this Autumn-Winter season will not afford me many, if any, chances to compose writings or work beyond those necessary for school and work.  Gradually facing this fact – with reluctance and resistance – yet not wanting this forum simply to cease, I have decided to grab notebooks and loose pages stacked and scattered about my now-dusty attic writing cavern and cull them for writings I don’t feel ashamed of, and which would otherwise most likely never find opportunity to be engaged, read, criticized or perhaps even enjoyed.  As always, for what it’s worth… writings…

Dust-Bowl1-532x382

(IF) I AM A BLIZZARD

He/I/Writer hadn’t mentioned her (you/it/women) before, she had not factored in the memory because the hole was so deep there.  Like being from Kansas and not mentioning that you live on the planet Earth.  Constituent context.

His four-year-old used words like “conundrum” and “paradox;” said “I’m a particular kind of guy and I need my space.”

Literature, music and art invented Writer.

When snowing it had a way of being everywhere at once.

An infinity of points-of-view.  The angles of things.

 

Language like flakes, like droplets, ice forming on dust, on grains of sand.  Memories.  When they come back, as they came back, a fuzziness and quiet formed on everything.  Accrual of haze.  At times difficult to see through.  Uncertain.  Otherwise unknown.  Like prefacing everything with “I am finite and everywhere,” like mentioning (aside) that you are alive on planet Earth.

Like evaporation.  What seemed to be there just moments ago.

Concocting one way, then another.

Possible to build with what appear to be concrete blocks, distinct and limited, occupying a space with heft and hardness.  Or the voices of birds cawing out over air.  Vibrating, in motion, unlocatable like the dark, or “love,” or “fear,” or “joy.”

 

If I am a blizzard I occur over and across.  I extend and then fall (Winter might think).  (How “Writer” mimics “Winter”).

A “bird,” a “plane,” a dolphin leaping.  (Can/does anything really “leap” without legs?).

“Whiteout.”  Dust storm.  Memory.  History.

Writers’ progeny and progenitors.

Has anything ever really happened?  “Occurred”?

The Mimicking Birds are a Message to Bears.

So what (if anything) is known?

 

First thing, third thing, ninth.

 

Building a world from “facts” (shape, color, sound, size).  What the senses misrepresent or make guesses with: blowing wind.  Emotion.

 

In the midst of the blizzard.  What expulsions massive ambiguity.  As if blown from a mouth the size of a sun.  As if an arrangement that would craft The Great Depression and give birth to someone’s father.

As if Kansas, on planet Earth.

As if the word “me” ever even made a kind of sense.

 

The dark vacuum of “she,” “her,” “It,” “Other.”

Always an unsolved equation.  What holds pursuant consideration.  What moving from absence to presence might be like.  Things to consider and observe.  To take in.  Ruminate.  Decide.  Finitude and consequence (such fearsome things).

 

How a spoken word thuds a gargantuan typewriting arm onto air.  Like thunder.  How you are stuck with your language.  You open your mouth (Writer thinks) you are shoveling a grave.  The chink and thock of it.  The bite, the thrust, the throwaway.

 

The unlocking and the liftaway that sound and sense tend to be.  Spoonfuls of soil.

These are very small things.  Bitesize or microscopic.  Amino acids, molecules.

But we also possess imagination – webs and blankets.  Musics from spheres.  Scintillating overlays of networks and digitalia.  (What the mind can imagine! thinks Writer).

Let’s invent some All-Encompassing.  A Universal Meteor Shower, a Snow, a God.

((IF) I am a blizzard).

At times the word “love” feels this way.

Grandiose and miniscule.

 

  • Does it matter if we hasten our deaths – ?

 

Silly play of interaction.  Every single movement that person + person might be (is).

 

Writer lost in invention: what the mind is capable of: dream, memory, imagination, logic.

 

Spread it out.  Fly away.  Expand.  Contract.  Escape.  (Writer tells himself: “let go,” “set it/them free”).

Parachutes and sparrows.

 

There are scars on Writer’s hands.

And what of scars?

Below her ankle, beneath the eye, down the chest between her breasts, across the hip and back and thigh.  The hollows punched into the backs of knees (science must have named it),

How evaluate the residue of wounds?

 

If I forcibly spread her beautiful nakedest body out over this dining room table, askew and akimbo, that I might insert myself passionately inside her or press and pound into – (what does “physicality” mean?).

 

Flitting thoughts, mimicking birds, back and forth, to and fro – snow.

 

**** Interruption.  Interference.  Intrusion. ****

 

            A blizzard means static.  Windstorm.  Mindstorm.  Deletion and chaos.

 

Expectation.  Writer awaiting.  Awaiting letters in mail.  Music and language, experience.  To breathe is expectancy, anticipation.  Another child en route.

Something to live for.

A seven-mile-journey.

 

In the hopes that someone might read (some fine day) that someone might care, or, after encountering find that they “needed” (or something like it) to continue.  Art for the Writer:  discovery or uncovering of met needs never known until fulfilled and then absent = Art.

Things human people can give.

A blizzard (words, tones, and touches).

 

Blizzard – that we are, can be, may

 

  • an inherent isolation

“Person,” Writer thinks.

Person as inherent isolation (or Death again – the Unmattering – the Opposition to meaning).  The Void.

What haunts as forever, but actually is “never,” an End.

 

So go with it.  Flow.  And then die.

This brief burst of being.

With inevitable conclusion.

Children / Ideas / Actions / Creations / Labor / Life

What is: “Masterpiece” (Absence. Void. Boundary).

An insufficient multiplication.  An equation that will not figure.  We came.  We saw.  Deleted.  The system crash an accident.  Fini.  Sweet promise of tomorrow.

 

This is the arabesque, the frivolous gift.  The Enormance – beginning and end.  The all that in-between.  What is NOW.

All that “then” that is “now.”

 

Absorbency of blizzard.  Precipitate Earth.  6 billion lives falling like snow.  Beliefs and experiences, experiments, emotion, hatreds and loves.  Veritable shit storm with strange little gusts.  Enormity.

A blizzard.  A torrent.  A wind and a whiteout.

            A “blank.”

 

An ever-approaching storm…of void…

Finitude.  Fact.

Limitation.

 

To begin.

((IF) I am a storm.  (IF) I am a blizzard).

 07/09/2010

Black Blizzard

 

Reasons

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, Writing6 Comments

Reasons why a novel, memoir, or longer work may never be “FORTHCOMING!” from me: whenever I begin to write I get absorbed in the activity of writing. I seem unable (after all these years) to force myself to craft characters or plots or descriptions… The characters are LANGUAGE, the plot is made by LANGUAGE, and the LANGUAGE only seeks to inscribe itself…

ReMarking SelfAwareness

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections, Writing1 Comment

Erasure

 

If I possessed the capability of remarking, I would.  Indeed, in that term resides my life’s work.  I am a Remarker.  I attend, scrutinize, mull and vacuum the world around me for occurrences, things, and events that are “remarkable,” and then I make every attempt to re-mark them.  Sometimes I succeed, and my re-marks trigger stimuli for re-marking in others; often I fail – both in the assessment of what (in fact – in a special – species/al – sense) is remarkable, and, in my ability to effectively mark something in relationship to itself.

Eradicating Borders

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing1 Comment

A work in progress…

if i build it…perhaps it will come.