Writing: Impetus

On June 20, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Language, Writing3 Comments

It’s hypnotic. Illogic. You may recall genetic components – a sentiment, experience, curiosity or sensation…the fabrication begins its own spells. That plane where you drift from expression or fractaling inquiry toward Medium. When plot is played out and the voices keep talking. Or some other member begs a word.

You are no longer quite “author.” When it begins I’m usually puzzled or amazed. A vague and shifty core obsesses and eludes me. I ponder awhile, do research, spawn a dialogue or few with available others…but eventually turn to writing. A word inscribed in secret not only leads to more, but ricochets through spacetime like a pinball. The versions of the brain call out over the callosum: “Felt anything like this before? Have we had an experience that resonates?” / and / “Say – it seems I’m in the midst of something – check it out! Any words in your concordance for such as this?” To and fro – attemps to signify and symbolize, reify, rectify, making truce with our immersion.

The “language drill.” As it burrows metaphor, it fragments and splinters dust around the edges. Retrieving as it leads. Recalling through invention. I use my handwriting to find out. To find out. Searching something, spelunking expeditions, a nettling curiosity blind-feeling hunches and perceptions. Pulling them towards words in attempts to trick them into trap. Building tunnels, margins, stairwells to aim the lights at. As if broad enough term-corrals might lasso and then spiral, slowly cinching it round, whatever “it” is.

But whoa then, hold on! Once a breadcrumb trail’s discerned, it forges. Makes its rhinoceric way in accrual and erasure. Constructing as you follow, conundrum’d and deleting. A word – and sources cling like filaments. None of them accurate and all informing. History, culture – traditions. Intimate pain and joy. Perception, conception and query. Discovering bewilderment. Creating the unsaid.

Victim and perpetrator both, you, author, artist, song. Skewing and distorting in equal measures. Changing as you change it. This is the making. The being-made. Creator and created both. The artist in her medium.

There is no “having done.” Failure or not, it virals and contaminates. The path is incompletion. “The Artist’s Way…” Never through, until it’s through with you, coincident with a life.

Who do we say that we are?

Lessons Learning in Metaphors

On June 3, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography, Reflections, Writing11 Comments

HERE. Abandoned places fall apart. Decay to exposure. We, bereft. We, grieving. In the absence of care… Upkeep. Keeping up. Often when significant change occurs, we do not bother “keeping up.” Rather things, people, places, seem to hold on as long as possible to what is familial / familiar / to what seems known, as long as they can. Perhaps this marks some difference between survival and thriving. Maintenance versus development. Preservation versus advance. Enclosing versus opening.

But time. Molecules move and shake around; synapses shift, come undone, frackle, rewire…adjust. Adapt. There are new conditions. The movement of beings, of the world, continuously alters our context, alters ourselves. When they left, or something seemed lost, other inhabitants, presences, qualities, realities fill the perceptive interoperable surround…some constraints are increased, some loosened, restraints, license, “competition”: wind, rodents, weather, routine… The primary structuring relationships morph. Continually.

Now wife. Now wife and children. Now certain finances. Now no finances. Now surety, stability, now uncertainty, hazard, CHANGE. CHANGE (never not occurring) ALWAYS EQUALS OPPORTUNITY (for living things), ALWAYS EQUALS DIFFERENCE.

Now no wife. Now children. Now no job. Now scrapping for sustenance. Now certain friendships. Now the absence of certain friends.

Now different care.

What will the winds do? The rain, the sun, the heat, the ice? Critters? What new sounds will my structure make – interactions – given the changes in conditions, in surround? WHAT ARE WE NOW? The same. Structurally – a form made for interaction, a part of the world, interlocked and interwoven, a bundle of functions and processes, intentions and conditions – exposed by happening in a world.

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“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”

(Great! How else…life?)

And how beautiful the potencies of change. How messy. How easy to attribute – “good” “bad” “difficult” “help” “harm” “ease”…

But is what’s happening to the homestead, the barn now – in lieu of human use and care – less easy? Less beautiful? Does not every context surrounding and composing a structure of forms – both help and harm of a sort?

Would it be false to say this erosion, this abandonment to other interests and types of care, this shifting of primary interactions, reciprocating attachments, looks like loss? With all that light pouring through? All the redolent air and wheezing whistling and rattle? Has the new (ever-altering) context of comings-and-goings helped or harmed this structure…or, perhaps mostly…BOTH? Just like the previous and every future one?

We. I. You. Crafted ever-so-intricately in contexts we are unable to adequately identify (comprehensively) or evaluate – for they ARE the context that is co-creating (in-forming) our identifications and evaluations. We interpret – according to the context we are enmeshed in/with.

CHANGE CONTEXT – CHANGE PERCEPTION, INTERPRETATION, IDENTIFICATIONS, EVALUATIONS…change even what we look for…

A breaking, a leaving, an abandonment, some loss…(simply, really, change) – do they not equal a kind of damage, a kind of harm, so full of openings, exposure, new perspectives granted the initializing structures that we truly DO NOT KNOW what living is for? But this? – TO LIVE?!

The rent places let the outside in in novel ways, creating coevally novel openings for the inside to emerge. The wear co-creates other structural stresses and reliefs, new releases and new enclosures, novel shapes and textures, colors perhaps we never knew were possible to begin with. Never a potential until the context came that facilitates and allows, enacts and enables.

Always interacting, we change. Always changing (along with our entire surround) defines INTER-ACTION. Barn: Enter, Action. Always.

NOW…this…

Experiences confoundingly rendered with these sound contexts:

Creativity’s Luck

On May 28, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing9 Comments

Last week I in fact took one day “off.” Truly OFF. It rained. I read. It rained. I read. I wrote…

Eight hours later, finally, I am drunk with language. Like Kansas soil, I require such storms for the necessary surplus… for markings to begin to pool, swirl and confuse – for essential destabilization – undoing language from its conventional attachments and turning it toward an alchemy, a natural compound and resource, something to be stirred and sludged or steeped – allowing for aroma, skimming and residue. Just language, less meaning – an additive experience, unknown potentials of letters combined by some strange combinatory activity of intuition, convention and accident. Creativity’s luck.

There is a point to drunkenness – whether artificial, of language or pleasure or love, whether substance, experience or drug – it is to be estranged and immersed – in some sense undone. Renewed. Despoiled. It slows and diffuses me enough to write beautifully again. Instead of making words, to concentrate on shaping letters. Forces to create.

It is a baffling and bewilderment – allowing us to require effort for focus, selection and choice – so discreet motions of bodies become both complex and marvelous again, the capacity for smell a wonder and delight, communication and gesture (at all) a mysterious gift.

Inebriation levels the field. Returns to a source. Baudelaire may have meant we are potential and solidarity at once – flounderers grasping at tools and beginnings, constructing, cooperating. We are begun.

Perhaps, then, we drink to erase and begin. We scramble ourselves toward infancy that we might make effort to grow, while minimizing automated meanings. To struggle to learn, to be becoming rather than operative. Innovative over automatic. To develop and realize.

I love to form letters once drowned in the rain of them.

Flood everything to discover what’s possible.

Saturate in order to dredge, to pan, to anticipate.

The “Necessity” Notebook

On May 23, 2014May 22, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Writing1 Comment

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On May the 22nd

I, Artifact, Anyone

On May 12, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Writing2 Comments

I and the Anyone Artefact.

Given the miniscularity and brevity…and, say, the import or apparent heft – foils of mountain, sea, sky, and other incremental gravities or scale-altering engagements…

…what boils down in my insignificant, barely mappable blip of a space-form “life-span”?

What do I want? (Mountain. Man. Collective of actionable atoms.)

Or how about in another form: I, mountain, atom, want to write, am writing,

leaving record (partly), making record (partly), finding record (partly),

recording (partly), imagining (partly), learning (partly), playing (partly),

wondering (partly), thinking (partly), providing (manufacturing) company (partly),

because I can and it makes living-through delightful, meaningful, poignant, aware, alert…

Simply…I accounted for happiness recently as reading, writing and forms of companionship, because reading and writing (inseparable companions, or perhaps two aspects utterly meshed and merged, inextricably joined) – experiencing them seems to me to be enhanced when compatibly shared, mutually valued, reciprocated and informed.

I want to write. I want what I write to provide sustenance for my self and children and home. I want to write whatever I have it in me to make out of language, not what people ask me to write or pay me to write or suggest that I write.

PART ONE:

There is a grand, iconic, snow-capped mountain – Kilimanjaro, Hood, Vesuvius – symmetrical-seeming mounds of earth that simply and irreducibly and undeniably say – silently and continuously – “I AM HERE.”

Part One:

I exist. I mark. I testify to and quarry that existence in my way. I artefact.

[Write well. Parent well. Perhaps partner.]

“Companionship”: friendship, fellowship, closeness, togetherness, amity, intimacy, rapport,

camaraderie, brotherhood, sisterhood; company

[wants to be a writer. writes. AM a writer. wants to support existence by doing that which it wants : to write]

“the intersection of talents and joys”

[wants to parent well. to develop thoughtful, compassionate, productive child-persons of survivable health. parents.]

To artefact (not for longevity or endurance [perhaps partly – a kind of sustenance surely]) but to quarry the systems and processes – the multitude of unknowns to living-through.

I artefact – consciously to be present, to offer, to be worthwhile, to further matter (to participate in generation, ongoing complexity, collaboration, coordination and collocation – co-being, co-construction with world).

Write. Parent. Relate. (therefore) I, artifact (make ‘art’ in ‘fact’).

[take in artefacts via world – learn, adopt, adjust, adapt, extend – and artifact this process out]

These are wonderful, benign, banal, investigations.

The Simply Difficult: WHAT AM I? WHO AM I? WHY? HOW? : The Questions of Living-Through.

(I repeatedly note that life interests me insofar as I am querying WHY people think they exist and attending to HOW …)

What are your answers to these? (my present mobile answers provided in parentheses)

WHAT are you? (a temporary and dynamic collection of active molecules idiosyncratically coupled and formed)
WHO are you? (a fluid and alterable co-depending individuated space-form reciprocally coupled to its perceptual and perceiving, cognizable surround)
WHY are you? (a form of life…to be)
HOW are you? (idiosyncracies=personhood: the fluctuating continuum of activities and behaviors between what I contain and what contains me…the marginal substance where uniqueness exhibits)

Or… I, Mountain / You, Sky. Ocean. Flock. Field. Plain.

Metaphor: perhaps our primary mode of learning? Posit, compare, examine, observe, revise, pretend, fabricate, manipulate, invent: “Make-sense”=”Knowledge / Learning”

All of this to say that every object(form) at every moment is responsible for the possibilities of meaning.

We could be anyone (and will be, have been, are, plus…) individually (or ‘uniquely’ ANYone).

IN OTHER WORDS: I want to stop whatever this is and tell you.

Want to tell you I LOVE YOU. I am personally thankful that you exist and am convinced the entire world would be different (no matter how miniscule or brief you may be) if there were not you (seems to be the way EVERYthing – systemically – IS). So I am thankful (good or ill) that: ARE. IS.

Say there is/was a child. Mountain. Hypothesis. Arrangement. Beginning. Again. Scenario.

ARTIFACT: Chance. Atom. Action. Experience. Being.

Pretend: Sky crashes.

Mountain melts away.

All = nada.

And then “YOU”= WHO? WHAT? WHY? HOW? (WHERE is implicit)

p.s. someone will die in someone’s arms

p.p.s. someone will write about it, remember

p.p.p.s. someone might sing

p.p.p.p.s. someone will represent it in paint/clay/language/dance/sound

Mountain Sky Ocean Trees Soil

Opening the Hand

On April 15, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings7 Comments

Mapping the Meaning

What follows will most likely be of little interest to the bulk of you. For the past few years I have been working to drive and weave the resources for my writing ever more densely into the thickety webs of my authentic experience of the world. Normally I press this through interdisciplinary inquiry into ways we make meaning, or co-construct what we live as relational/relating realities, attempting the time and effort of translating and investigating these passions and fascinations through creative genres and forms. However, life events of the past couple of months have greatly constricted available moments or periods for research and reflection, and magnified the complexity and overwhelming magnitude of our multi-layered, cross-scaled, relativity-dimensioned (see Multi-Sense Realism, et. al.) actual experience of living as human beings.

The most authentic and naked (or base) way I have had of “making sense” of my experience has been, for most of my life, to do it on blank pieces of paper with a writing utensil in hand. This has enabled my body, like a court stenographer or EKG, to jitter out marks and symbols of what happens to it, get strange glances at the process, notate various strata of its responsive-formative interactivity and selection, and extend/diminish/further and edit or retract (evolve) its activity of living survival.

The past 65 days have been characterized for me by grief and bewilderment, gratitude and wonder, tectonic shifts and rejoined connections, breakings and openings, terror and panic and archaic survival strategies, and desperate hope and frenzied imaginings…I suppose you could call it trauma, dramatic change, upheaval…LIFE.

I’ve been fairly caught up in processing it all (with dear good help), parenting my children, continuing academic study and frenetically seeking employment that it all might go on. So I feel my posting of late has been fragmented, disorganized, spotty, haphazard, almost accidental…

I have found employment – fraught with uncertainty still, but employ – and something about that one structural determinant has triggered me to assay an account, as much for myself as for anything else…to make the time to manufacture a kind of map for myself of what has and is occurring in my life in this span.

All of this is to say that I plan a series of posts that will be intensely personal, self-revelant, my own way of reaching toward my experience, my being, and selecting language with which to mark it down – for re-memory, re-cognition, observation, reception, attention, account. These are journal entries, frankly. They are what I have to write. I am calling them “Mapping the Meaning.” Since I know very few of you personally, in your whole presence, I expect confession, inquiry, and its self-circular expression to genuinely interest or benefit very few of you. For me, it is writing with an open hand.

ReWritten / ReWriting

On April 7, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, WritingLeave a comment

accidentally opened a file from the past that seemed related…

The Pleasure of Reading

In other words (than what? than which?) we all of us are readers, all of us writers.

That is a pleasure.

And all of us, always, doing both. Simultaneously.

Speaking of my textbooks (were we?) – information sciences, developmental and behavioral psychology, reference services, librarianship / and the research to the side – physics, evolutionary biology, neuro- and cognitive sciences / my pleasures – novels, poems, stories, others’ blogs, visual, aural, literary artifacts / my relational – wife, children, family, friends, society, culture – gestures and vibes and dialogues and signs / my “self” – sensations, perceptions, formulations of these, reformulations, adjustments and maneuvers.

In other words, at all times, I am reading, even if only my lack of memorable dreams, or pulses and breaths. And writing it all in actions, movements, responses, adjustments of speaking and writing and making.

It is a metaphor, obviously. Perhaps.

Roman Jakobsen purported that “all meaning is a form of translation, and multiple translation (polysemy) is the rule rather than the exception.” (I am translating his text just now into another con-text).

Wolfgang Iser’s (perhaps, anyway insofar as I am translating it here) concept of actual text (text as it is recorded by an author) and virtual text (actual text as read by a reader).

This is an aspect of the deep living pleasures of reading/writing for me.

An author/speaker/artist/scientist/mother/etc. has an urge or sensation – a possibility of action/behavior/message/idea (a virtual text) and translates it through multiple processes and levels of activity through some medium into an actual text/painting/utterance/experiment/recorded idea/sound, etc. There it is in the real world – a physical artifact in time and space – added – if only for a moment. Transforming (simultaneously) its maker into a recipient (translating a now existent text/sound/behavior/gesture/sculpture/experience for him or herself) and if any witness/participant/auditor/recipient or reader is in his or her environment they are simultaneously interacting (via translation through their own tools, language, perceptions, sensations, mood, etc) with the actual text, writing a virtual text (translating) of their own.

And it goes on. And can be done innumerable times, this process, whether using an identical actual text over and over, or simply writing/reading life as it occurs, making it occur.

Paul Ricouer: “stories are models for the redescription of the world.” Possibly. Or at least redescriptions (translations) of models for redescription.

Iser: “the relative indeterminacy of a text allows a spectrum of actualizations…literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves…the reader receives it by composing it.”

Language, action, behavior as possibilities rather than certainties.

So that I can encounter with all I’ve encountered/experienced an actual text by psychologist Jerome Bruner translating these very quotes and contents with all he has experienced and translate it with the multiple translations of family life and being a human organism and novels and pains, poems and stories, paintings and laws, translated with data and education, emotions and animals, translating with you and a computer, internet, digits and bits, translating into…

a great pleasure of reading is writing reading

or, “a writer’s (reader’s) greatest gift to a reader (writer) is to help him become a better writer (reader)” – Jerome Bruner (parentheses mine).

literary texts as “epiphanies of the ordinary”

-James Joyce-

ReWritten / ReWriting

On April 5, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing4 Comments

ReWritten

The Disappearance of Needs

In any genre. Writer becomes when the needs disappear – needs like expression or dialogue, understanding or inquiry. The need to devise layers or multiples of perspective, to experiment or experience language or thought. To love.

When these needs are expunged or exhausted, and a human puts pen or pencil to page, writing might begin.

These needs are not expunged.

Needs complexly relocate.

Maybe they find a more suitable object, event, or entity. Writer attempts to construct love via language and page. This is also dialogue. But what is needed is resonance-WITH. What is longed for are moments of positive resonance with an other of Writer’s same kind. Where resonance would be acceptance, acknowledgment, empathy. Comprehension, understanding, attunement with Writer’s barest, most authentic expressions – Writer’s openness and risk, Writer’s life-experiencing, meaning-making processes.

[NOTE: Obviously it is literature being addressed herein – not formulaic, hack, commissioned, business or “professional,” aesthetic or philosophical – domain-specific languages, entertainment or communication-purposed compositions. Rather – writing that lays bare living – which can (also obviously) partake or occur within any and all of the above forms and kinds of inscriptions]

Writer, utilizing all accessible knowledge, craft and experience divulges (as best Writer can at this instant) Writer’s lived experience. Writer loves her. Writer grieves. Writer imagines. Writer pretends. Writer co-constructs (borrowing from the everywhere that language, experience, emotion, sensation, cognition, DNA, biology, physiology, dimensions etc. comprise) trails of letters, incipient sounds, rhythms, definitions, analogies and metaphors, socio-cultural baggage, spatio-temporal perceptions, historical variety and habitudes, toward some sort of text, artifact, writing.

In other words, Writer writes.

And as Writer writes, Reader reads (they are one and the same initially) and that reading also co-constructs the divulgence and activity-experience the writing com-poses.

Posing-with = Writing. An individual, posing-with, everything-at-disposal (its affordances and limitations) through language-inscribed.

[NOTE: pose¹pōz/

1. verb

present or constitute (a problem, danger, or difficulty).

“the sheer number of visitors is posing a threat to the area”

synonyms:

constitute, present, create, cause, produce, be More

assume a particular attitude or position in order to be photographed, painted, or drawn.

“she posed for a swarm of TV cameramen“

synonyms:

model, sit More

2. noun

a particular way of standing or sitting, usually adopted for effect or in order to be photographed, painted, or drawn.

“photographs of boxers in ferocious poses“

synonyms:

posture, position, stance, attitude, bearing More

a particular way of behaving adopted in order to give others a false impression or to impress others.

“the man dropped his pose of amiability“

synonyms:

pretense, act, affectation, facade, show, front, display, masquerade,posture More

]

The needs remain because they’re needs. Needs oxygen, needs community, needs interaction, needs movement. Needs nutriments, needs love. Needs habits and practices, processes and conventions. Needs society, needs shelter, needs protection, needs…

As if folded-into. As if woven. As if inherent and intrinsic, automatic.

As of anything and everything, then, Writing is not solitary. “To write” is TO-WRITE-WITH the universe-encyclopedia of said individual, “writing.” Some languages verb this better than others, some will allow us to feign.

Writer will not feign, unless “to survive” necessitates “to feign.”

Writer intends to write-with, perhaps finally surpassing a former dream of being no one, no thing, instead edging toward and everything that one is, of necessity, Writing.