“For it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject,
and all subjects are infinite.”
-Herman Melville-
Tag: Writing
Erosion, continued: “What Begins as I, Ends as It”: A Form of Fiction (explicit)
MEANING from EXPERIENCE: “What Begins as I, Ends as It”: A Form of Fiction
“Every movement resonates with its preacceleration and its overarticulation, active in a contagion of speeds and slownesses”
-Erin Manning, Always More than One–
I.
The erosion would be complete (or very nearly) now. What had once seemed an “inner life” or “personal experience,” perhaps “individuality” or some such, (as far as could be sensed) was wholly in absentia. No happening, event, or perception – let alone interpretation or meaning.
Now it was only something thesauri’d as anguish – maybe migraine, maybe ennui.
The emptying and erasure, incessant deterioration. Taking it back to the cells.
- Movement.
- Terror.
- Survival.
Formulating a system. Psychology and reflection not necessary. Systems in relation for persistence. An added instant. Another day.
Flefzzhat, remune, it sounded like, and signifying nothing. Activity is all. Behavior. Quieted, plastic, rearranged. Emotion in hiding or exile. It would not be decease, and he could not seem to help it.
It was cold. Began to chill. Unable, apparently to warm itself. Something gave it liquid, which, though iced cold, seemed to flush it warm. Reaction, not response.
Activity observed, not intention. It shivered. A scribbling, not a mark. A murmur, not a sound. It seemed deflated. Otherwise.
Not like a rodent, really: not furtive or purposeful. How to describe it?
A wrapped tree or scarecrow – if the scarecrow was broken and crook’d. What would survival mean, without love for words, without relish? Without desire – is it pro-cess?
Dead crow in flannel. No future envisioned, no breathing to count by.
II.
Room after room over months all displacing. Pieces at a time – chair here, sock there, key, sign, and implement. A picture. Emptiness synonymed, a variant from loss. Loss implies gone; emptied – gone away. The figure shuffling toil devolves the way of water – seamless evisceration – an evaporate.
The labor worked like cancer on its host – a devouring accretion. Humans call it grief – the impression of depression. Unable to relate, all signs a bag of Scrabble tiles. A tick will move toward warmth, grass stems trigger to the sun. Scarecrow? – merely flux. Perhaps the wind.
At one time it forayed. The worlds of animals and humans. Would have named systemic processing: “living.” Drill down deep enough, or extend exponentially – the vitality recedes.
Vitality recedes.
Sonic elements, sense. Beyond the psychosocial, even basic physics began un-mattering.
Another room, another artifact, another particle of dust duly removed. The figure now a beach – sand devolving slowly toward rock.
Rock: elemental, unfeeling, simply there. Simply there, in its flux. Taking space by making it. Stupid, muted, dumb. Pointilism sans points – that sort of thing. The figure itself an oxymoron, an elision. Not illusion. From outside this is really happening.
From within, it’s only time. The songs of Orpheus, collected as poems. Dalliance in extinction, without a puffin’s reward or a dinosaur’s drama. Just scarecrow – a covered tree – limbing in almost dark.
Prime example of nearly. Nearly being, nearly attached, nearly meaningful – nearly perceived. Nearly alive – another way of saying (in a scientist’s tongue): NOT.
III.
If a statement of faith is “always more than one” then here we have a really hard problem: no statement, no faith, and ever only one…Beckett’s dissolution… How It Is.
“how last how last”…”vast tracts of time”
IV.
It echoes. The emptying room. A hollow. Blowing stiffly enough, some would say it howls. If a howl, then a cry. If a cry, a reaching out. Scarecrow doesn’t cry. But the drink kills the migraine, whites out the angst.
Wrapped tree in snow. You know it’s there.
It, without life or blood or brain. It now alone, now diminished, now slowly stripping bare.
Call it the Passenger Pigeon, the Ibex, Orpheo rising from the dead.
Call it Nothing and No-one.
Please do not call it at all.
V.
Someone said meaning was the sticky point. Point dislodged. Evaporate. Another: “this is love.” Love fucked and raped in eye socket, armpit, ass – then abandoned.
Another room cleared by the scarecrow. More bark removed from the tree, even while the burlap clings.
Life would astonish the gods – an elegy owed. It’s worse than that. It’s autopsy alive – with light everywhere. A copyist’s error.
Branches clack, and make impressions. That is all.
Erosion, take two
II.
This is the story of how I began telling the truth. The truth I defined as “two truths and at least one lie.” The truth of my experience.
Poets often carry sorrow in their sockets – some underlying angst influencing attention. There’s sclera, iris, pupil, and a deepening mirror of perceived pain…or seared “ego.” Grief or grudge – and difficult to distinguish.
As much as there is to learn or to know, some simple patterns give the slip. Once you figure a composing context, the information is derived. Look out for what might constitute survival for each respective entity. Aim your inquiry there.
Parents hurt as much as heal. As do love and risk and wisdom (or well-being). All that is given in life is also taken away – exactly when it is given.
Everyone canvasses sorrow. The surgeons in their trembling hands, the librarians in their order. The therapist’s reflective stance, architect’s angles, businessman’s mettle. We all know that we’re going to die. Celebrities in their acclaim, the athletes in their strength, and whores in their affection. Everything is risk.
What = Now
EROSION
“to change patterns…expose the wounds…”
– Charlie Kaufman –
1. Truth is…truth was…truth is…
And this was the daily game of Reality-Telling…two truths with at least one lie. A morning-midday-evening list-assembling of continuous is-was-ises. Spilled coffee, set aright, sopped with towel. Triples. Thing – thing – relation. So many relations revising so many “things.” Complicating, co-creating, is-was-is.
“Change is never lossless,” it was written. Once comforted by the is of experience – that no matter the grief or anguish, no matter the disaster or rift, the poverty or destruction – experience kept accruing. “Experience is additive even in reduction.” Even deletion adds to experience. Isn’t it nice to know that regardless of what or who or how – for every living thing – at least something accumulates? Grows richer, more varied, expands?
But how calculate that every addition is reductive? That the raw fact of everything adding up = losing? At least this is one way of working the figures. An instant added is an instant taken away. “The Lord giveth…”
The very momentariness, unquantifiability of what happens seems to attest to this. Two precisely equal processes, or hands. The one inviting and offering, delivering; the other letting-go, sweeping aside, and waving goodbye. Moment in, moment past. Experience added, one less experience to have.
Life as a riverbank – new deposits and constant erosion.
The truth is: experience
The truth was: experience brought exactly what it took away
The truth is: experience
(therefore): NOW =
And thus it is known that living is equal to dying and “He who would save his life will lose it” is just a simple fact. Dying is equal to living. It all happens in the same instant. One step further = one step nearer to something else.
Sometimes people smile when they’re together. Sometimes they don’t. And sometimes other things happen.
You
Me. We are that we are, how we are, when we are, who.
What has gurgled in me throughout this week, and made it somewhat difficult to post much, is that I ran into these burls. Grief, change, adaptation, struggle – they all push us up against, or cause us to deny or flee from, these knots, these boundaries, these fabrications of how things ARE, how we’d wish they were, or could be. In myself, these evidence as anxieties, fears, verges of hopelessness. With the help of others – my children and their presentness, their being-into (ecstasy), being-out, unique ways of being-with – my therapist, and many other well-intentioned voices and persons who want good for me… I come to see that MOSTLY it’s ME and these burls, these knots, these imagined borders and boundaries in myself – MY IDEAS OF HOW IT WOULD BE NICE FOR THINGS TO BE, my ideas of my “self/ves,” my organismic survival instincts and ancestral tactics – that dislodge me, silence me, THAT I UTILIZE (choose or select) to withhold and diminish and undo my opportunities to be-in, be-with, be-out, be-for the rest of you – the world, my children, my work, my self/ves.
So I’ve been termiting around in these burls. Wondering how do I undo habit, instinct, ancient patterns of stanching, stoppering, limiting a potential flow of the world and my surround and my relationships and my knowledge and my emotions and my beliefs and my feelings and my thoughts and my dreams and my fears and my anger and my sorrow and my regret and my terror and my joy – work WITH those facts… and begin to erode my selections and choices of UNDOING and LIMITING and FEARING and DIMINISHING and instead tear or leap off these quantitative scales of evaluation, these assessments, these CVs and criteria – and JOIN. JOIN. OFFER. GIVE. BRING. SHOW UP. BE.
CHOOSE – slowly, granularly, deliberately, carefully, wildly – to INVITE the world (as it is) THROUGH, and OFFER the world (as it is) THROUGH…
ME
for…to…with…
YOU
…and All.
I don’t even have to reflect to be able to say that Synechdoche, NY – a film by Charlie Kaufman – is my favoritest made movie of my lifetime, or even of all time for my lifetime. And as I burrow in these burls of grinding away at the resistances, the terrors, the wishes, and the ecstasies of being a human alive, stumbling across this short lecture of his has been an invaluable gift. I do not know how to improve on it, so I let it pass THROUGH me… to you…
“Acceptance is nothing less
than the complete transformation
of what one has believed to be one’s self
and one’s reality.”
– Cheri Huber –
“The Creators Curse” – a raw deal – and everything is practice
When I stood up from the couch I thought. I’m tired of everything being practice. Each character sketch, each poetic fragment, each novel attempt, each theory, each relationship, each parenting moment, each breath. All participated in as if the engagement might provide benefit, as if the pain will promote healing, as if the mistakes will prove corrective, as if fitness might improve health. “Lifelong learning” – how nice it sounds, how endless.
But learning for what – ? There’s just more life until… and then it’s probably simply (well, complexly) variantly continued – one situation hardly informs another – for the next now the context has changed, as well the elements, the matter, the flow.
So then I think again – perhaps it’s fear. That lifelong learning, or anything meta- entails a splitting off – a doing WITH the observation; and thinking WITH reflection; the subject’s objectification. A remove. And so it feels like practice rather than NOW.
Earlier today (apologies – I’m really just rambling this post – no pre-write, no consideration or filtering) my son shared this with me:
– The “Creators Curse” from Cyanide & Happiness. In our making we extend and become in the risking required to attempt…to craft… to work… so it cannot end, for if we grow or move or change (which we will) the work will need to go farther, be finer, account for those fluctuations… ever stepping into new, fresh, dynamic, complex realities… PRACTICE IS IMPOSSIBLE.
But if we turn and try to bring the effort up to speed, in that turning, that editing, that effort, nothing stops. Nothing stops moving into that next moment, next ream of realities, heart-beat’s context, juggling atoms and muscles and breath… “Improvement”? Who knows. But different for sure. And even if we reach and stretch toward the work we imagine versus the work we are capable of…it all changes in kind…as change.
In optimistic moments this is cause for hope. The possibility that something might improve, benefit may come, a temporary health could be achieved. But not achieved only altered. And not altered only changing. I’ve argued before that we must lose our tenses to be honest to living – everything must become verb.
But I don’t want anything to be practice anymore…rather maybe process – doing, making, saying thinking in or with … everything.
I’m very tired of the hesitation, illusory gap, the pretend-vision of seeing our seeing, or feeling our feeling; loving our loving, writing our writing, thinking our thinking our thinking…
I want to be : living, writing, parenting, loving, doing, making, saying, thinking NOW and HERE as IS.
Intolerable Vulnerabilities – the fictions
Intolerable Vulnerabilities – fictions
I.
There comes a time when being referred to as “sir” by 100% of an establishment’s wait-staff is no longer over-polite and ironic respect, but simply a pronouncement that in these contexts you have no peers.
Eventually you’ll be skeletal, perhaps before too long the way things are going, you’ve never been difficult to avoid.
And it’s never been easy to know what you want – are you being selfless or self-protective in the attention you pay toward your lovers? Are your emotions inaccessible (some stunted empathy) or over-attuned in such a way as to pay your own processes no mind?
Whatever the case, you’re threatened.
And now you are old, sir, and alone. And both nothing and everything is safe, because you are no one to lose. And any potential of personal contact – some sort of opening – would inevitably create leakage, exponentially multiplying your probabilities of loss.
If only it could be viewed as sport – this frolicking across the page. (It’s not).
Who lays the trail
in the white sand
of the page?
Who explains it?
-Cees Nooteboom
You. Not you. Here. Not here. Ever trapped in beginnings because of so many ends. At this age, sir, you must force it. Opportunity becomes a consolation called survival.
No one is fooled, particularly not you, sir.
But she reminds you of something, probably someone, which is no help to you, just an increase in the accumulated weight of what’s past. You’ll go on, because why not? – You are nothing to lose.
Meaning is Molecular…
compliments of Percival Everett
In the Sea above the Sea: transitory reflections from above the Atlantic
Look at things, see them exposed
in their metaphysical innocence
unsure of their existence.
…
When do paintings shrug off
the painter, when will this same material
become a new idea? The evening mist crept over
the lawn, drowning the avenue, the fountain,
the house.
.
Music, the splash of oars.
Someone turns on the light, someone
doesn’t believe in dusk.
The unanswerable question drifts
past the window.
-Cees Nooteboom, Cauda
As I make my way back over the Atlantic from the nominally United Kingdom to the (equally nominally) United States, I am considering what things most prominently infected me. Partly “I think I wanted to get lost to see what happens next” (Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know) and partly I wanted to know what to do – my coursework and library visitations – to anchor my lostness while providing anonymity and foreignness in which to search for peace and move through grief.
nobody
More and more the invisible was named,
the blind man grew mightier.
How he wandered and called out to his echo!
.
which called back with the screech of gulls.
He is still searching among flags and vistas
for that same statue.
.
Sounds blow to the far side of the river.
Nobody is standing there.
.
Nothing takes shape. Newspapers melt,
photos fade. The stone is made of wax,
the notebook of ash, time takes itself
and repeats the appearance
.
until his life becomes a mirror
in which he disappears and appears,
but nobody looks at himself,
because nobody can see himself.
-Cees Nooteboom
my “self” photographed in front of Gerhard Richter’s “painting” Grey Mirror
-Tate Modern, London-
I noted how clear the signage. Clear and direct with no soft-pedaling of consequences stated. Mind the gap, way out (and way in), “moving through these doors may result in death or injury” (on the Underground), smoking kills. The ubiquity of concern for mental health – that Bibliotherapy is not just a bookseller’s or librarians metaphor of expertise – but is in fact a prescriptive cure – scripts are written by doctors for BOOKS! (hundreds a week, one library reported). Along the same culture-historic lines, perhaps influenced by the longevity and prevalence of hundreds to thousands year-old architecture and artefacts, traditions, and tangible evidence of time and identities – the apparent insistence on QUALITY – of life, of drink, of service – of literature and art and purposes. So while everything costs about twice as much as the USA, the options often doubled the quality. A local pub on every corner, small grocers, fresh markets – in the miles I walked I only spotted a handful of McDonald’s, Krispy Kremes or other international chains (and only in heavily touristed areas) – aside from Starbucks. I saw 3 gas stations.
And the bookstores!!! Sometimes 3 or 4 in a block, flush to the gills – but hardly a bestseller, a romance, or fluff! Amazing – perhaps the most profound difference between the USA and UK that I noticed: their stores FEATURED literary quality, and only sometimes provided mass appeal items that could be had anywhere online – in many stores 80% of the stock I encountered did not have an eBook format – the books were books meant to be books in the purpose of books – to be engaged with the body and mind and retained and gone back to – like the architecture, museums and galleries – not disposable pleasures – but necessary cultural artifacts made from the human condition and accessed repeatedly for its benefit.
Of course there are the “places”: Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, the British Library and British Museum, the Tate, Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Tower of London and on and on…walking over 15 miles a day, finding “oldest churches” in every nook and alley, colleges and universities every other block, London is a place swamped with culture and continuity, the high and the low, and great gaps to mind in between.
So with those great anchors securing me, I tried to see myself. In the reflections of great art and architecture, thousands of years of history and culture, thousands of languages in cosmopolitan streets, thousands of unknown faces and voices, habits and practices and sayings…my “life became a mirror in which he disappears and appears,” but, of course, “nobody looks at himself, because nobody can see himself.”
What did I see? Well by looking through others that I could see, I found “I wasn’t sure my skeletal system had found a way of walking freely in the Societal System” and the need “to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which I have been put together by the Societal System in the first place” including the “many delusions of my own”…”it’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject – it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer” (Deborah Levy).
And I thought of how, like the forest and the trees – it often seems we are unable to see reality for our experiences. So many of us semi-automatically equate our experience with reality – rather than note how small our perceptual bubble really is. Just try using the “Powers of 10” idea – start anywhere – with your pain, your fingernail, your happiness. Now imagine IN a power of 10 – you’re into the cells, into one strand of what’s causing you pain, into a moment eliciting joy. 10x more and you’ve gone beyond atoms and quarks – matter and energy ill-defined and inexplicable and ALWAYS dynamic. Imagine OUT a power of 10 – you’re viewing a street full of private perceptual experiences very different from your own – and trees and birds and squirrels and buildings. X 10 and you see miles and miles of earth – filled up with all kinds of creatures and systems, connectors and wonders and weathers and mountains and rivers – x 10! and you’re out in the galaxy of planets much larger than our own, stars much bigger than our sun, and still more galaxies to go…
Either way you go there is gargantuan forest – and our experience, our body – barely a branch…yet we evaluate so often from that individual outlook – incredibly distorting bubble of lens – with a minimal scope – not engaging the forest, absorbing the forest, wandering and listening and looking and opening – so that “the unanswerable question drifts by” and “unsure of its existence” can “become a new idea…” the beginnings of subject-ivity – a particle in relation from within and without – from mattering energy to butterflied effects…an individual instancing of human.
Be mindful. Be curious. Be patient. Don’t know, and enjoy your hands. Be generous, take refuge, find strength. Be grateful, keep going, be glad. Respond, don’t react. Slow down and forgive. Let go, accept limits, and do what you can. Take in the good, relax, have compassion. Feel safer, fill holes, and love.
-all chapter titles from Rick Hanson’s just one thing
It’s okay. Be human – the extremely hard, most natural thing.
cheers!
an added and unexpected catharsis – on the night I tried British telly due to trouble falling asleep – Synechdoche, NY – a remarkable example of how complex and generative our perceptive bubble can be…and yet how barrier’d from the world outside of that bubble…forests and trees / reality and personal experiences – beautiful drops in the sea… (and perhaps my favorite movie to date)..
February 23, 2014
Abroad – Notes from the Petrie Dish
Melancholy Musings
“Meaning, if there is such a thing, involves more than what there is. Minimally, it involves a truthful assessment of what living a finite human life adds up to.”
-Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem–
“I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear”
-David Foster Wallace-
“You are – your life, and nothing else.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre-
“That Spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to…” So begins Deborah Levy’s succinct “response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write,’ entitled Things I Don’t Want To Know. It speaks to me. Sentences like “Smoking cheap filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators. There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way.” And here I am in London, far from home, wandering scattered Lego streets, half of the time having an idea of where I am, where I might go. Like life with children – the half provided that’s never lost – versus the “self:”
I am the sign, I am the letter,
I am the language that cannot be come to terms with.
I will go to my resting place
and will not be born again.
I am what is scattered and cannot be gathered up.
I am small, I am silence,
I am what is not found.
–Charles Wright
“It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him.”
-David Foster Wallace-
– that sort of thing, left to one’s own musings. Levy speaks of her notebooks as “always gathering evidence for something I could not fathom.” Dan Beachy-Quick speaks of the blank page as “one version of chaos…the movement outward and the movement inward are simultaneous…that we enter writing to threaten the security of the knowledge we possess before we read it…” knowledge that isn’t reason – “but the plank that, in reason, breaks.” (from Wonderful Investigations).
As a kind of practice, as it turns out, (Beachy-Quick also says “language offers a method of experiencing death without dying” and “Life, world: we die into it. Words kill us. We lose the tops of our heads. Then we open our eyes. Then we walk out of the poem into the world.”) I recently labored over messages to those significant to me (including myself) –
what would I want to say or have said if I were to leave the living?
Beachy-Quick suggests that “poetry is birthed from such awful realizations – a fact which denies the fact of one’s own being, that says the self, even the godlike self, is not sufficient unto itself.”
Here some parts from The Letter to Myself:
“I believe the world has had enough of me, and I of it. Life is generous: overabundant with pain, surprise, people, noise, joy, danger, grandeur, poverty, tastes and sights, sounds and smells, anguish, glory and grief and their very complex mixtures. As are we – individual organisms – capable, unique, agentive…
We cannot capture life. It is ‘more than.’ As mine ends, I find myself desperately wanting to summarize and somehow represent it, but I find no words to do so.
Aside from the brevity of the fullest portion of my lived experience … with ease what I most grieve is not seeing my children shape and become themselves. That is the question I most toil over – have my children had enough of me?
In the main I have experienced myself as a person whom others accommodate, adjust to, endure. In classes, families, and communities of practice, even in friend groups, I’ve never FITTED – conjoined smoothly – BELONGED.
My children have never known another father, so they might find me definitive, ‘right’ only, unique and special. But my parents have known other children, spouses other partners and lovers, friends other friendships, teachers other students, bosses other employees and so on…and none would consider me ‘best’ or ‘only,’ definitive or unique. No one has chosen or selected me as theirs.
I know I’m not alone in this, nor do I need to be the BEST anything, but I would have loved to have been chosen, claimed, selected and pursued – not for being the best, or special, not for characteristics or qualities, talents or things I do well – but for being me, for the am I am.
How “uniquely me” turned out was never quite enough for others, or not the ‘right’ enoughs. I surely don’t blame others I‘ve encountered – no one was obligated to choose me, or owed me selection, I simply was not suited to my contexts.
I hope that my children and loved ones are able to discover and co-generate contexts in which they thrive.
I had my moments, my ‘times’ – the births of my children, my weddings, days of writing and travel, dialogues with friends and multitudes of sensations and aesthetic and enriching experiences – I do not lack,
but it’s a struggle my organism is tired of.
I want to say that in my life with my love I realized it – I knew myself as a unique person with particular qualities, capacities, failures, weaknesses and strengths. I accomplished and risked, expressed and developed more of myself during those years than perhaps the entirety of my life until then…
…in the end it’s only rambling, ever trying to grasp something of experience…ever unable…
Perhaps something, but not what I mean to. Always less, never enough… I’m sorry. Thank you for enduring me this wonderful long.”
“To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish. We always hesitate when we wish for something…A hesitation is not the same as a pause. It is an attempt to defeat the wish. But when you are ready to catch this wish and put it into language, then you can whisper but the audience will always hear you.”
-Zofia Kalinska, quoted in Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know
So speak up, practice, be gentle with yourself – “the story of this hesitation is the point of writing” – into and out of yourself…the activities where things con-fuse…
I wish to write.
I wish to parent.
I wish to love and be loved.
I wish to learn.
I am thankful the “I” is “what is not found,” for then we can keep searching (together), and in the searching, the interaction, perhaps begin a “truthful assessment of what a living finite human life adds up to” –
to matter and to mean.
All my Words are Silent 