A Contradiction in 73 words
A principal aspect in being human is opening to change. First one thing, and then another. To be deceptive. By which we mean adaptive and successful. The insurance one will thrive. If only one. “That which differs from itself is in agreement” (Heraclitus). I understand. We’re talking tension, balance, strain – a relation. Stitching together in hopes it will hold while everything tears. If we equate human being with living. It changes. We adapt.
The Temptress in 78 words
Her words taste pomegranate – the tart – bitter, erotic, and sweet. I tickle them over my teeth with my tongue, trying to untie them. I like the way the air glides over them, whispering cool and moist into my ears. I swallow. She speaks without using her mouth. I listen hard. So this is what it tastes like? Is difficult to digest, it vaguely turns the stomach, and I want more. Addicted as I am to the showers of seeds.
N Filbert 2012
Interviewing Correspondence (-ts)
Composing letters is good exercise for writing. Imagined audience and relation, fitting language to a function with a purpose.
Dear WordPress Users:
I regret to inform you. I’d like to congratulate you. It has come to our attention. In the matter regarding. Allow me to introduce myself.
The address sets a tone. There is little to waste. Readers can be lost in a matter of moments, of letters, of marks.
Sex. Hate. Cookies. Pups. Nudity. Self-loathing or injuries sustained. Rants. Cuss. Sexual organs. Deviant tastes or behaviors. Righteousness.
These terms as keywords capture the bulk of contemporary humanity. Money, sugar, self-sustenance/survival/success, fame. Beauty, distress, the hideous, tragedy and laughs work as well. Also superlatives. And challenges.
You’ve never seen a _____ this size! Fires burn out of control, lives lost… Wowza! She’s got _____!! You have no idea _____! Did you ever imagine _____ could be so good?!
Direct-ion. Scan billboards and headlines, logos and slogans – these things are devised to capture attention, activate interest. Use imagery and images – somehow we’ve evolved into a very visual culture – we taste, hear, touch and listen – with our eyes! Watch a video with the sound turned off. Gaze at some pictures of food. Read poems. I challenge you (smiley-face) – what are you unable to sense…just using your eyes? (Whatever it is will cause you to act).
Action works. Activate. Stimulate. Request. Invite. Offer. Command. Insult.
You really have no concept of what you’re doing here, do you? I mean, reading this? Hoping for some pleasurable payoff of insight or delight! Something succulent or soothing, entertaining or erotic, secrets or solutions. You selfish bastards! Give a little! It’s all ‘what’s in it for ME!?’ Sucking the world dry like these pages…
Give people something to find that they’ll consider “wrong” – people LOVE to feel “right.” Scapegoating works well – and it can be anything – people will follow: bottled water, big government, Christianity, children, homosexuals, genres, stupidity…the lemmings will leap.
Dear WordPress Users:
I regret to inform you that the following letters are not art.
“Works of art represent webs of sounds, movements and ideas… Human beings are contradictory… Freedom is the law of human nature…At the basis of every artistic work, every stage in artistic construction, lie similar principles of revealing the contradictions… artistic compositions show the fallacy of simple solutions… one can do anything, but there is no purpose…”
(all Viktor Shklovsky, from “On the Dissimilarity of the Similar”)
Dear WordPress Users:
I urge you: exercise freedom and complexity!
Utilize everything!
Sincerely,
da Man-O’-Word(s)
“To tie knots, not decipher them”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
Thinking again of my father. Which wends its way to thinking of my friends, my nearest family, my mother, sister, sibs-in-law. Children.
Mainly I’ve been thinking of my father. For decades now.
(Rewritten 41 times).
I keep trying to decipher. In fact in yesterday’s version I described my desire lacking the keys to its secrets, and declared us all impossible to descry.
If that’s the word for it.
Forty-one years using letters for rope. That is fraying.
I’ve said that I want to be known better than I can know myself. By him. By which I meant differently.
I’m sure that’s correct.
Otherwise not being possible.
And vice-versa.
Such knotted things.
Unfortunately I deciphered it, thereby fancying a code of simplifications and falsity. Reading something like this: ta TAH ta TAH ta TAH / de dum de dum de dum dum dum.
Sounding better than the truth I never hear.
In other words, by desiring my desire (to comprehend it – synonym: “fit it into my small frame”) I laid it out in lines of script as on a butcher’s table. And looked for patterns.
xxxx— I want to be known better (elsewise) than I know myself —xxxx
by: +@+@+@ my spouse; -/-/- my siblings; o][o my friends; ~!~~!~ my children; ^*_= my parents…
and likewise inter-pret them
forever crafting spies sniping through tiny keyholes
one another.
The dimensions are not vast enough.
We don’t possess the organs (apparently).
I’m not sure any of this has much to do with knowledge (though I keep on using those terms).
It was about knotting ropes or threads, veins or limbs, ideas. Tangling memories, blending emotions, and cross-narrations.
I tried actions (working-with, snuggling, fighting, conversation and more). I tried history (genealogy, geology, agriculture, politics, religion and so on).
Think of these as ropes or twine.
Perhaps tied is a better word than tried here.
I tied performing, misbehaving, more languages and themes. I tied sickness and health, better and worse for this knowing, this desire. These persons.
to no avail
What was I expecting?
Transparency.
Demystification.
Understanding.
Deciphered companions.
What have I got?
Unclear, confused and knotty, my hands can’t pass through them.
I can’t wrap my brain around it/them/us, nor define.
At a loss as to explanation (a probable gain).
Father-cipher. Mother-cipher. Spouse-cipher. Family and friend-ciphers.
Something substantial.
SUMMER READING 2012
from top-to-bottom as they appear at this moment on the table
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings
Joe Bolton – The Last Nostalgia
Susan Howe – The Midnight
Laurie Sheck – Captivity
Ann Smock – What is There to Say?
Jerome Klinkowitz – The Self-Apparent Word Continue reading “Man-O’-Word’s Summer Reading List”
Today I woke up.
I woke up in love. In joy.
A song was sparrowing to and fro in my mind’s sky (Boxer Rebellion – Soviets)
We have new puppies and they are loving and cute.
The heat has broken and there were clouds in the sky.
In love?
In joy?
What might those mean?
We danced the pups to trauma to the Lumineers “Ho Hey”.
Like coming out of a slump.
Like post-coital bliss.
That full, that relaxed and open.
For no particular reason.
For so many particular reasons.
How does the brain chemistry experience?
How do the senses collage reality?
How are we?
I woke today in bliss and joy.
I woke today in love.
.
Happy Monday this Tuesday.
Begin.
The Inevitable
What do we mean when we say “that ______ looks so German!”
To write. It.
That unnerving pronoun – the impossibility nothing is.
And probable.
The work of understanding. While standing under rain. The gravity of melancholy.
Resulting in a study of colors. As related to moods.
Desired solitude. Desiring. An oxymoron. (To solitude).
What would you desire in solitude? (While playing with yourself).
The “with” would be the problem.
Ever positing an other.
“we must each retain (and be granted) our uniqueness, even as we retain our relevance –
which is to say our interrelatedness”
-Lyn Hejinian-
In other words it is possible that we yearn for uniqueness and relevance, both requiring something else.
However might one be uniquely alone? And still recognize red?
Or relevance? (in solitude)?
The antimony that meaning is.
Meaning, nothing. Large terms stripped of their content. Yet undone.
If, then. If infinity, then an eternity of incompletion.
Is that what you wanted?
Like desiring wholeness. Oxymoron.
Living is logically incompatible.
Inevitably.
Upon viewing the sketch like a mirror. Its frenzy. Its worry. An uncertain field of marks.
Energy moves.
Impossible object, in other words. The world never calmer than an excited child with a squirming pup, in front of a camera. Using your eyes as camera is moving in barely calculable jitters. Each second.
How we view the world. Ourselves. Skittering fragments, objectless, composing subjective states, the subject of which, well, frankly, is subjectless, being, as it is, subjective.
A field, a spray, a flickering shower. Drowning in waves. Particles and fragments, all strung together without points of contact.
Inevitable delay. Perception. Duller senses.
Process requiring instants = moments = past.
Hardship of irony. What one pays for attention. Tolls of false awareness. Delayed. A logical impossibility. I.e. “presence” (presently).
Lucky for suffixes as arbitrary denotations. Arbitrarying.
Their simultaneity (e.g. –ed, -ing, -“ “).
You might say we “locked eyes” (past tense signifying long enough to catch up to the present experience thereby missing out on the initial wonder).
Processed cheese is not the same.
Fortunately every synapse of the factory also makes up now (as it makes it up) making up experience in order to. Experience.
Some animals delight in chasing their tales (that was a genuine error there, though the audience following Moses following Discontent following Freud). Tails, then. Or heads. Each swallowing another.
You know what I mean. Swatting at air.
Meaning, well, nothing = something (and vacuous nevertheless). Than?
Equals ever updating profile passed, passing, will pass, NOW.
It’s inevitable.
I lived for awhile in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attending graduate school and being regenerated and grown in-vitro like a culture into the family, religion and industry of literature. I’ve recently stumbled across a photographer’s blog who shoots many subjects in and around that West Michigan area. If you browse her photos over the past week or two it will provide you a feel for snapshotting summer…and here are some verbal renditions…
Snap-shotting Summer
Ever the distortion of mind. With emotion, contortion.
At times, a necessary snap.
.
.
A young woman peddling her bicycle, unclothed for summer. Body moving like taffy on its paddles. Just as pliant, just as tight, and just as supple. As salty, as mouth-watering, as sweet.
.
.
Tumbles in the machinery like loose screws, clanking and rattling around.
A clicker, a habit, desire.
.
.
Sun sears glares upon moments, lasering trains of thought. Dis integration. You stumble, you wobble, you very nearly fall. Erasing inspiration with foul mood. You adjust.
.
.
Scars like the outside, on the surface of the brain.
Called memory, called dreaming, called thought.
Or so you imagine.
.
.
Pool or sprinkler, sweat and breeze, you forgot. Moment’s season’s change, and you were happy. Somewhere in mountains, or North by the sea. Without belongings.
.
.
It emerges like a wire, a monster’s bite.
You’ll call it “me” or “I” and it’ll stand for something. Continuity.
An inventor’s dream.
.
.
Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
.
.
“I” continues to sit and walk, lie and stand. To eat. To breathe.
The Underlying Theory
What we found on his desk was a drawing. A very lightly penciled sketch of a woman from stomach to throat, as if seen from above to the side, one arm flung out in the viewer’s direction and her breasts provocatively displayed. Underneath were the words “underlying theory.”
Our work was to plunder his study. An author, famed for fiction and poems and writings on art, had died suddenly, and his wife had contacted us to go through his things, evaluate its worth and preserve for posterity. There were boxes of manuscript pages, notebooks and loose-leaf, letters and typescripts, recipe cards full of quotations. The library was extensive, each book filled with scribbles and markings, a signifying system of importance and reference for use in his various projects. His mind was displayed like a trail left in woods. Here the path to food, here the one to water, here the building nest, here the safety hideout. It overwhelmed us.
I had written numerous critical studies on this man and reviewed professionally most of his books. He’d written extensively in philosophy and aesthetics, with compendiums of writings on particular artists and particular works. He’d produced over a dozen literary novels and twenty or more books of poetry. He was prolific and known for the depth and acumen of his thought, the cavalier ways he used language, and the breadth of his interests and knowledge. No one knew he made visual art. None would have tagged him “erotic.”
I wondered what this drawing might “mean.” What did it refer to? Was it drawn from a picture? An image from memory? Was the subject herself the underlying theory, or was it something about representation? Desire? And what theories did this mean to evoke or give rise to? His wife did not recognize the sketch – not the body, nor an artist her husband might have copied – and it was interestingly tucked beneath blank open sheets, at the middle of the desk – the ones always ready when he came to compose. It was worn, wrinkled, as if indeed, it underlay everything inscribed above it and served as inspiration or focus, an impetus to his work.
I’ll note that the form seems composed, not a doodle. It appears to be representative. No one knows of him having a model or lover, in fact no other drawings exist from his hand. Perhaps he had need of a form to describe, an image to imagine, some desire to propel. The figure is finely proportioned, both busty and lithe, fleshy yet thin and shaped like the currents of rivers.
I’m not certain what draws me to this. In an office literally stuffed with fine books and odd trinkets, paraphernalia of printing, and stacks of diaries and drafts. Among paintings and stones and figurines of the Buddha, historical writing utensils, family photos and legal documents dating throughout his life. There is so much to uncover and know. But “underlying theory”? That grabs me.
As I’ve mentioned before, this author was a reader of depth. Fiction, philosophy, poetry, science; criticism, essays and cultural studies. There are tall shelves of monographs of particular artists, but nothing gives hint to this sketch. I am struck by this rendering – baffled by image and text. An erotic drawing is always of interest, all other concerns of this man are abstract. It beggars the biographers “who/what/when/where” yet the text writ along the arch of her back stirs me in a different direction. “Underlying theory.” What the hell? What’s it for?
A theory is made for a function, something “underlying” proposes a cause. This drawing, these words must explain something, but what?
Is it cosmic? Like what drives human vocation is desire? Or epistemological? Ethical? Aesthetical? Metaphorical for apprehension of form? I can only guess at this point but am open to ideas – I’d love to find some consensus for the book I’m contracted to write.
I ask you – how would you piece this together? I’ll share a scan of the drawing and request that you submit your hypotheses below as comments. I thank you so much for your thoughts.
Sincerely –
What are we waiting for? And why? It’ll never get any easier, and this is remedial.
I had thought we were awaiting the word. The right one. Any one, but right all the same.
I had thought that. But I didn’t know why.
Since any old word would do. Being all we had.
Still we waited, not quite believing.
How many words do you suppose there are? we wondered. Given multiple spellings and various languages all – how many? And their requisite alphabetical sourcings. I reckon we could figure it out in an equation, don’t you? Only so many letters rearranged so many ways with up to twenty-six (or however many) letters equals = ? For every tongue? There are limited options. It’s certainly not infinite, this isn’t rocket science here, or religion, so to speak.
Still, we waited. Because, well, because we didn’t know. Know which of the any was “right.” By which we meant, well, by which we meant “worked” for whatever it was we desired. Which, again, we did not know. Leastwise I certainly did not.
I had a feeling for how it might, or that I’d like it to, feel, but wouldn’t be able to tell you how that was until I found the right words, any words, but, you know, the right one(s). I could kind of hear the sound, how it would wrinkle into the ear and swoosh down their canals, troubling the waters. Or what textures the air would take as it blew up out of the lungs trembling the throat and over the tapping tongue. Some idea or sense of it, but nothing particular, not knowing the word, only the anticipation and desire.
That’s what waiting is, after all. A hunch without a reason or cause or an outcome. Guesswork with some directed hope. A running of options, but unable to identify.
So we waited, not knowing what we were waiting for or on, exactly, but also because we didn’t know.
And waited.
I could imagine its shape, the work of the muscles, the grip and the tracing of lines, but I couldn’t know how to begin, not knowing what or which curve happened first. And was it dotted or crossed or simply angles and loops? I had no way of telling, without the word, the one I’d keep waiting for, any word, the right one.
So I kept still. Well, actually we paced. Walked to and fro and back and forth, ahead and around, and sometimes sat down, sort of listening I guess, looking and listening for an outline or scrawl, whisper or code, some rhythm or sound that might bring on the term, any word, but not the ones we were using, no, the next one, the “just” or “proper” or appropriate word to our intake, our output, a resonance you know, what we were waiting on. The “correct” as it were, word, sound shape texture intonation field of references emotive trail and so forth…that one.
The discreet utterance or image that would hear us out, carry us on, would solve us.
I’m waiting.
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a photographic pilgrimage to Orthodox Christian monasteries across the continent
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"That's the big what happened."
Networking the complexity community since 1999
All my Words are Silent 