This is the kind of writing that demolishes me.
From Lynne Tillman’s This Is Not It
Tag: Writing
Jim
Jim
Jim is unable to utter a lie. He simply cannot believe them.
Jim, sitting with friends around a hotel pool, once said: “I think every word says something about its author.”
After overhearing a tasteless joke, Jim no longer spoke with Darrell.
Jim disbelieved everyone. His boss and his pastor, his spouse and his children; in fact, he found it impossible to trust humans (including himself) to know what they were talking about. And yet he believed what they actually said. The words they used.
Every statement or exclamation, every question, harrumph or faux-pas, he deciphered. Jim doubted each “slip of the tongue.” He said he believed in our languages.
Jim’s work was in “managing waste,” a lie that he knew they believed. He spent most of his time in the noisy outdoors. Chaotic, due to the mind-grinding sounds of the vehicular beasts they crept the city streets in, feeding them trashy fuel and guarding their grueling mastication. Loud and smelly as well. Rotten food, molded carpets, all manner of grotesque and disfigured things. Jim saw what was hidden, discarded. What most of us keep covered up.
His coworkers primarily proffered profanity. He believed them. But branching to politics or domestic intricacies, Jim only trusted their language. It didn’t really matter what content spilled forth (he would say), the words that they chose and the ways they were delivered provided the confessions they “meant.” “I’m afraid my wife no longer loves me” often intended its opposite, for instance, and nearly always equaled “I’m unhappy.” Words worked like that, held Jim, worked all around one another. “Assume the people are lying and the words will speak for themselves.”
Jim’s wife called this the “double bind,” or his “contra-contra-diction.” And “paranoia” in worser moods. “If you don’t believe in people,” she’d say, “and always think they lie, particularly to themselves…then say you believe their ‘language,’ but never what they actually say – really Jim – what have you?!” “You’ve got nothing!” she’d complain, “no substance, no content, no motive – just a jumble of words that you (one of them!) reassemble…what else can that be but the rattling workings of your garbage-compactor of a mind, Jim?” And Jim heard: “I don’t like the way you think. It’s not practicable. It’s egomaniacal and unfair.” How Jim reads an utterance, with faith in the language, between all the lines, “it’s relation,” he’d say.
“I can’t speak for somebody else, dear,” Jim replied, “I just translate what I hear, or apprehend.” “You say tomahtuh, I say tomaytoe, sort of a thing. That’s paying attention.” How words wrestle around and decompose, what parts go first, or crumble, get smashed. What words stick out, slide easy, remain. “And watch out for the oily and slime,” Jim would say, “that’s the trickiest danger to ‘manage.’”
“You’re not dealing with garbage here,” his boss declared, “I’m giving you straightforward instructions. There’s nothing to sift through or weed out, Jim. I need you to perform this task,” and on he would speak, accustomed to Jim’s sorting appraisal of words.
For Jim it was all the same.
Words were some overused and available aggregate, he thought. People picked them out according to habits and taste, “nature and nurture,” he’d cliché, and then bandy them about until they felt understood, or relieved, or just plain empty. But the resemblance was rarely precise. Jim believed that most people simply grabbed at terms and sounds, gestures and winces without much a thought for precision. “Think what all could be covered in silence,” he’d say, holding a field guide to transportational signage, or fingering the moves of sign language.
Most people just want to make contact, he’d hold forth, to be heard or effect something – a playing of power, a quest to convey – but not given much thought or concern. “I basically rummage through all their crap,” Jim continued, “with an eye out for volatile substances, wounded heirlooms or inadvertent mistakes they rid themselves of, and put a pretty clear picture together. Of their values and style, relations and status, family, religion and work.”
Joan (Jim’s wife) often speaks of what she deems Jim’s “arrogance.” “How can he suppose to know,” she’d decry, “a person’s life story or intentions, education or political beliefs from a talk about weather or baseball or drinks?” “It’s hypocritically bigoted, as if truth were the eye of beholding, each person’s puzzle to piece. Unaware of themselves, Jim presents some ‘true meaning’ – its Gnostic, religious, a myth,” she’d complain.
Yet Jim was resoundingly insightful and most often correct, which simply buggered them more. It seemed people really were giving something away when they opened their mouths, no matter what language they used.
“Words are functions,” Jim stated, “where text and image collide in a complex silence or sound.” “Nothing escapes, really, just gets alternatively pressured and squeezed, mangled and reformed, mashed into a mushed conversation.” “Every talker a monologue, every listener too, for the most part,” he said, “a dialogue running oneself, a wrecked chorus, I listen for pauses and patterns, I try to decipher the breathing of noise.”
“These are just Jim’s thoughts,” snarled Joan, “things he puts into words like nonsense.”
(to be continued? you decide…)
Writing: the Spaces. its Atmosphere.
Writing: the Spaces. its Atmosphere.
Write first, the epigraphs assemble. Post-prompting. Or become the impetus the references gather around.
One idea.
With blackberry brambles and the wish (or revulsion) at owning a dog.
“A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece” (Lyn Hejinian)
Like that. It doesn’t take long.
The brain a compendium of quotes.
“The head is a very hard case.” (L.H.)
I try to crack it. I’m thankful it’s hard. A safe for the precious things.
I can’t just do it “everywhere.”
In order to write, I discover I need to expand. Once to the point I’m as large as my skin, it still needs a force-shield, a sense-field – a hard case like a desk and locked room, “controlled environment” or “padded cell” – that license to work without fear.
Or hurting oneself or one’s others.
The head is a hard case. The body is supple.
Salmonberries all along the way. A juicy burst, almost sweet, almost sickening – the risk involved.
My globe is filled with the words of others. Like my skull, no bit of language is our own. But inexhaustible, so unashamed, I eat them here, I forage food. I harvest, glean and process in this tiny shed, concocting meal I hope will serve. That process in yet another realm.
My space is angular. Is low and dark. A cross of cave and womb. I need to know it’s all in there, I need to know I do not know. I bring a lantern and a few spare tools. I take notes, observations in my bunker-scriptorium, my hand and my brain.
“A paragraph is a time and place, not a syntactic unit” (L.H.)
I scramble your body. Unravel. Dissect and reassemble. Never known in its entirety. My own. “some desire powers generously” (L.H.). Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.
“Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there…”
“…Reason looks for two, then arranges it from three: number, stutter and curvature” (L.H.)
The writing space is “freedom then, liberation later” (L.H.) when rejoindered to the attaching world…
“a person seated on an iceberg and melting through it” (L.H.)
“the mind is a thing deeply marked. I have bound myself to this damage” (Laurie Sheck)
“we are so rawly made, / so carried into the harsh and almost-dark” (L.S.)
My cave-womb almost-dark. A lantern lights this page. It is noon. Vertebrates in the walls. Fossily spines.
Number, stutter, curvature.
In the space, safely solitary, saturate with sense, my own…what assembles sensible only similar, and that’s okay…what obtains or remains can be observed as an object. To be encountered, not understood. Even me.
“Art is inseparable from the search for reality…
…Realism, if it addresses the real, is inexhaustible” (L.H.)
Like looking at painting. House or museum. Everything both. Various watching.
Mulberries litter the landing and stairs with an acquired taste. Leaving stains, like everything we grow to love.
“A fragment is not a fraction….”
Safe to search reality, where it has died, where it seems so. “Seeming is believing” (L.H.).
Number, stutter, curvature.
Some berries you must not ingest but can still get caught by their thorns. Or the illness pukes out. A pulping.
Searching is not always distinguished.
Your space should form a shelter (within/without) bound to damage, rawly made. Secure but repercussive.
Epidemic depends on the exit.
Nettles and fireweed. The search for the fruits can be harsh.
It is almost dark. I must emerge.
N Filbert 2012
Writing: Chapters that don’t belong – all of them, so far
Here is what has assembled so far…seems like a sort of series…in its wayward way…
WRITING:
CHAPTERS THAT DON’T BELONG
“The pen asks / much more than it can answer / one word at a time”
“(the world is like a comparison – / the second part elusive),”
“An other is a possibility, isn’t it”
“Consciousness is always consciousness of something”
1. “wake up, snare-setter, / in the snare / spacious, like chance” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko)
And sometimes I do, wake up. St. Sebastian pinned as a still-life with crystal lances, a clarity. But that is catching too, and refracts. “I think that what I thought when I was thinking that, at least in thinking of it now, I am thinking that I thought it…” and so on. Crystal lances. Thoughts refracting. The occasional conviction. (Which we call certitude).
The margins within margins, windows in reflection.
Every image being an entrance through which we exit. From.
I call this “letting actually resonate.” This being, activity, thinging we do.
If I stand still, so to speak, I form a spiraling vortex, an enormous vacuum. What is: portal and Black hole every now. With.
Prepositions being ever-so-important, say “sign-ificant,” that they deserve their own sentencing.
I’ll never know what it is “to write.” If only because it questions. Every word. In.
I can think of it as a working, out, but that is far from any truth I can conceive. “the second part elusive” with each toggle of a term.
Gravity enforcing force, to fly.
I’ve never been fond of violence, but how else might we change? Or even move? On.
A recent well-organized text I perused and then ate, mentioned dialetheia as a two-way truth; or, “true contradictions,” that is, in one. Word. Split with a twin. Comparison as congenital doubling. Of difference. Equals such same.
We look toward what can be seen. Compromised and concealed by a frame. Otherwise unseen. Learn, therefore, (through your senses), in-visibility. Dialetheia.
We do (many of us) love to be astonished, after all. With.
If there are more parts to this I haven’t found them. They’re either too large or too small. I’ll have to wait. I’m unable. Nothing living waits. Patience is pretense, pretend. Waiting, is searching; patience, is longing. Loss is implicit.
2. The Chorus
“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’…
…A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text”
(Lyn Hejinian)
Explicitly.
I.e. “the loss was always implicit as the longing” (Alain de Botton). And I quote, quoting from someone else’s quotation, but I forget which (or whose). For.
I’m certain for various reasons. Which beggar the certainty.
A pause, arose, and fragmented this text.
Because I don’t
know
what I’m
doing
I am writing,
and it questions.
As if we could get intimate with our process, so near it as to join. In other words, if our action, breathing, effort, language, thinking, senses and the uncountable inborn “blind spots” that a human system circulates were, well…coterminous.
Is that a question lacking its mark?
It would seem so. About.
Either too large or too small, perceptively, I suspect.
Causing a pause to rise,
as I search for something implicit.
Explicitly.
Given the fragmentary text(s) (you agree?) I have to ask: might writing be possibling an other? “Consciousness is always consciousness of something” (he said).
That is a possibility, isn’t it? (the second part’s elusive),
Blatantly – I feel caught in a snare I am setting, as spacious as I imagine chance to be, (having no other name I can call it), ensnared as I seem – some web, some matrix, some universe and beyond – too large or too small to perceive (I am guessing)
which always gives rise to a pause, implicitly.
What I had hoped to make explicit.
What I call “wanting actually resonate,” some loss implicit as longing.
I write, asking more than it answers, or “the closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back” (Karl Kraus, which I quote off someone else, who knows who – yet I hope someone does!)
“But of any material, the first thing to make is an ash-tray”
(Lyn Hejinian, I quote this text from its source,
apparently).
3 – ?
“’Appearances / remain suspended / in transmission’ (Craig Watson) are not so much perceived as apprehended, handled; the one affecting, infecting, the next”
(Charles Bernstein)
Or something to hold what dies off. The reverberations without resonance. All edited, edited out, according to needs for appearance, depending on what apprehends, the shape of the handler’s snare.
Think of it – what is selected for capture, in captivity, infects, slipping frequencies to drift on, transmitting, transmitting, there is always ash that won’t be removed, no amount of soaking, scrubbing or spray…
perhaps it’s under the nails, clogging the pores, dusting the follicles… the remains.
We don’t know why we write, trusting such ephemeral weightless shifty particles to catch as motes in an eye…appearances, like dust (in just the right angle of light), remaining suspended in their transmission…hoping (without, really, hope) to, in apprehension – apprehend, by being handled to affect, infect…
always wanting next. Making it so.
Depending.
Why the book is needed (as ashtray) as form to hold the crumbling, an urn for the remains, until such time as they might be stirred or shaken or spilled.
Again in the commerce of bodies, handled, brushed and staining.
It gets everywhere. And remains.
Note its infective spread.
Language, whether structures/systems of, or fragments – bits and pieces, lying everywhere implicit.
To write – to make explicit? It asks more than it answers, word by word, by letter, by ash…
And what remains? Suspended…in transmission…for affect…a dormant virus…waiting to be breathed…
4. Desiring Reality
“the loss was always implicit as the longing”
-Alain de Botton-
“But, no one / can tell without cease / our human / story, and so we / lose, lose”
-Li-Young Lee-
“[Writing] is born from…’dissatisfaction’ – an internal void provisionally filled by the achievement of expression”
-Eugenio Montale-
“Because [writing] mediates between the requirements of desire and the conditions of reality, and because the relation between the two keeps changing, no statement of that relation is final”
-Ronald Sukenick-
“What is important…is not a word that is a stable and always self-equivalent signal, but an always changeable and adaptable sign”
-Katerina Clark / Michael Holquist-
I desire to write. I think of it, at times, as an inscribing of thought, a physical processing of emotions, subconsciousness, dreams and ideas…”thought is a form of grief…but think we do, and lament we must, because lose we will” (H.L. Hix). “But no one can tell without cease our human story…” ashes accumulating, carried by arbitrary winds, dissolved in sand and sea…
“Lose, lose” and don’t want to lose (desire); my ‘not-wanting’ is my longing (implicit loss), in other words “what memory is not a gripping thought?” (Lyn Hejinian)…imagination grasping in desire what it does not want to lose…forming an ashtray. For what it loses. Implicitly.
“No statement of that relation is final.” Even, then, obviously, that statement. Therefore we long to apprehend and handle…capture and contain…frame and represent…to ourselves (for?), for one another (to?) reality as it is not-known to us, unstable, uncertain and always changing. Remember?
This is what makes this “fiction,” a “novel” – some new telling and unique ashtray design, in search of the fluttering ash, the “changeable adaptable sign.”
Required by desire, conditioned by unstable and unceasing reality, I write…words asking more than they answer, the dissatisfaction(s) (losses implicit in the longing) ever ephemerally, temporarily, momentarily filled by the action, the thought, the attempted expression (inscription) and then immediately felt again (affected, infected). The plot, the narrative, the characters, all bound up right there – in the next moment’s void. A gripping thought. I give pursuit. I desire.
I write.
5. Without Trace
At the liminal edge, porous, moist, invisible and insensible arc…imagined limit, threshold…the ache to enter, with nothing to penetrate; the yearn to cross over or through, yet there is no barrier. Simply following the pen, without copying.
Another way to say “possibility becoming,” or “questions and answers are words,” “letting actually resonate.” The next part elusive, but its begun. Refusing to compare. Forging-foraging-forgery.
I am writing. An other possibility that must be consciousness of something, perhaps implicit in the fragments, without identifiable trace because ensnared in the traces.
What is fiction, or poetry, essay / memoir / treatise…because making, with usable words. That toggle so, and displace. That render in their sundering. That make a difference…by comparison, where the “other” is not known.
Assuming a tracing could follow or draw. Like that – following lines or leading them on. The perceptions, scratch that, apprehension or handling the senses must do when the look, feel, hear, smell, touch; the loss inherent in the transmission to thoughts, fueled by the desire to grasp or retain. What was never suspended. Always in transmissive motion…the letters.
If the lines are drawn effectively…I may form a working receptacle (as they falsify and crumble behind me in the ongoing change) where the ashes might be held. Am I getting the picture? Taking it? Is taking it the same thing as making it? Or must I develop it too? The pen asking so many questions, word after word, tracing an image, a setting, a how…Will you follow? Will I? Will this be called writing and reading? “Literature”?
I create without trace in the traces. I go on. Each word a threshold, a bottomless pit, then beyond that…again.
Like stringing the line and entangled. Hooked for life…which is death.
Asking synonyming answers. And vice-versa. Just words.
I am writing.
Scribbling chapters that do not belong…
1. “wake up, snare-setter, / in the snare / spacious, like chance” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko)
And sometimes I do, wake up. St. Sebastian pinned as a still-life with crystal lances, a clarity. But that is catching too, and refracts. “I think that what I thought when I was thinking that, at least in thinking of it now, I am thinking that I thought it…” and so on. Crystal lances. Thoughts refracting. The occasional conviction. (Which we call certitude).
The margins within margins, windows in reflection.
Every image being an entrance through which we exit. From.
I call this “letting actually resonate.” This being, activity, thinging we do.
If I stand still, so to speak, I form a spiraling vortex, an enormous vacuum. What is: portal and Black hole every now. With.
Prepositions being ever-so-important, say “sign-ificant,” that they deserve their own sentencing.
I’ll never know what it is “to write.” If only because it questions. Every word. In.
I can think of it as a working, out, but that is far from any truth I can conceive. “the second part elusive” with each toggle of a term.
Gravity enforcing force, to fly.
I’ve never been fond of violence, but how else might we change? Or even move? On.
A recent well-organized text I perused and then ate, mentioned dialetheia as a two-way truth; or, “true contradictions,” that is, in one. Word. Split with a twin. Comparison as congenital doubling. Of difference. Equals such same.
We look toward what can be seen. Compromised and concealed by a frame. Otherwise unseen. Learn, therefore, (through your senses), in-visibility. Dialetheia.
We do (many of us) love to be astonished, after all. With.
If there are more parts to this I haven’t found them. They’re either too large or too small. I’ll have to wait. I’m unable. Nothing living waits. Patience is pretense, pretend. Waiting, is searching; patience, is longing. Loss is implicit.
He(II)
And when he comes to the end he often has the sensation that he hasn’t gotten very far.
As if he’d just begun
or that it seemed quite near to where he’d started from
that foreign felt familiar and a bit of vice-versa
Where had he gotten? And where had he set out from? And when? What had moved him from place to place, situation through situation and so on?
Max Frisch came to mind. He’d once said or written that “a man has been through an experience, now he is looking for the story to go with it – you can’t live with an experience that remains without a story…”
which brought to mind everything he knew about the world and everything he’d ever read or seen and everything he didn’t know but may have heard of, and everyone he’d ever met or fathered, loved or hated, felt indifferent or mildly agitated by, animals, trees, chemical theories, in short, whatever remained, at this point, in his memory, mind, consciousness and/or body, however one might denote such a thing,
and he wondered if there was a story to go with it, or a thousand stories, or layers upon layers of inextricable stories, or if he hadn’t got any? Who would author the narrative? Any narrative?
He must be at the end of it. Something has assuredly happened, yes, he could swear he has “gone through an experience” (while remaining quite unsure of what that entails or might mean, or how to go about verifying or evaluating it). Yet he’s quite sure that things have occurred, including, quite plausibly (it seems to him) maybe even himself as well as the myriad characters and events that are flooding his mind. Continue reading “He(II)”
Red Spark
“it is necessary to aspire to elevate spontaneity to consciousness”
-V.I. Lenin-
Red Spark
Asking yourself the question, what was it I intended to do? Conceiving balance, proportion, invention, response. Went about it like this: first, then second, then third, revise. The choosing keeps changing each thing. Yet you’re insisting on it.
You had started to bleed, just there, not bothering to stanch it. Caught chunk of knuckle, leaving a fleshy gaping to pool. Dab, pool, dab, pool. Redundancy of wounds. They had said let it flow to your paper. Gives you a feel for the work. Of getting your life out. Opening a vein.
It’s not really all that. There’s no pure letting the inside out. It’s traveled a billion conduits, picked up and fought off zillions of miniscule aids and oppositions. Polluted, infused. You may be a “type,” but whatever your genre, its inextricably bound to all your surround. In-filtrated, even as you are infecting.
The world is viral, and you – parasitic.
Whatever you’re intending – this is the outcome.
This is known by various names: “life-process,” “being,” “creativity,” just to name a few. Some prefer “system” or “symbiotic machine.” We’re handling synonyms and points-of-view. The “intentions.”
All to mention your moves, as your choice and selection, as made in (by/with) the world. Learning the language(s). What is foreign in-heres. You in-hear. There are echoes. Tracings in the blood. You see it in typescript like this, a trans-literation, a bastard cross-current: sobytiinyi (as “evental”) brain placing “Soviet,” so be it, so-bytie, so- so close to co- (i.e. a “withness”) bytie (“existence or being”) implying that any event, that is, what happens, is always, always only conjunctive, collision, with-someone or something, you and other.
There’s Russian in your blood, after all, dripping off the thumb, some epigenetic repercussions of unknowing, the certainty of solitude failing.
Or, without which not.
And so on, as your intuition announces itself through inscription, a writing impossible alone – having need of some tools and an alphabet and ages of learning and co-being that uni-cates, some understood calling and shared, might occur. What is – “to share.”
In other words, we all have a share in the stock, but no share counts for much without value in the stock, as it is shared.
I.e. your intention. Sharing your share in the co-event (experience) of being (existence)…ancient mingling of bloods, as if there were origins to get to.
“Original Reproductions” then, co-mpliments of you.
Aimed from some desire toward co-mpletion; that perhaps this stock of shares shared increasingly might expand the value of each. A Soviet dream. And so be it.
So be us. Only insofar as you provide your share in part with ours. Our ares. Ars.
Suggesting direction for the arts as an arc, shaping production of individual shares in the whole or evolving, an assemblage of expression, incremental co-habitus, -ation, drive or desire for some rhapsodic (raph-a seam; raphtein-to stitch; oide-song) symphony (a sounding together), the outmoded truism of “medley.”
The intent was to lift up in part. Your part or your share, instrumental voice toward the theme you’re discovering to be in the join.
Our arts as the arc forming the theater…And why we urge you sing out –
so be it
so-viet
sobytie
Untitled Prose
It wouldn’t be that way, not now, not conventional. It would start itself, become, begone. It would be something words couldn’t take aim for.
But it would not be absence, or if there was no escaping it, it would pressurize presence in such a way. The idea of presence. Feeling of it. The desire for presence.
Where all the answers are the instant, but without trauma or utopia. Not to exist, but to insist. There’d be no describing it, it would lack presentation.
Knowing this is how it must be, fervently believing so, of course the questions come – doubt, the presence of absence. Mortality. The limitations of finitude. These are not to rule. Not to matter in the moment.
It would be no place to go, neither flight nor pursuit, homing nor escape. It might scramble the senses, melt the categories. Be without difference.
Not like that. Not resemble. Not the satisfaction of unknown longing. Not quite immersion nor awareness exactly. Not singular.
It might resemble flight, for a bird, without metaphor, without referent. It will not resemble flight, for a bird.
Imagines a cloud. It would not be various layers of sky, a gathering of imperceptible boundaries, no erasure or revision. Or vision, as opposed to sight. Sensorium replete without overwhelm, this sort of thing, perhaps.
Not identifiable but actual. Not understood but occurring. Without fear or hesitancy or remove. Without expectation or excitement or joy. It would not be saturation, then, nor separate.
It might be that it will be just what it is, yet without concept. Without spectrum or speculation. Unscaled, unmeasured.
What would be written after?
It would not be relief or knowledge. Not revelatory, not banal. Unnarrativized. Without distinction, yet not indistinct. Not like a circle of a circle or the warmth of sunlight.
It would not be written, informed inscription, not verbalized or sung. Space, shape (time would lack duration?) would be difficult to reckon. It would not “occur” then, without plottable end. Unrecollected.
Not quite expressive, possibly impressive minus attention exactly. Not like color fields or blankets.
There it would be without “it.” And not “there” as another. The questions would be undone without conclusion or solution. Not like water as a solvent for dead things. Repeat: unlike without unique. Not vague or opaque: no into, out of, within. No almost or already. Not fulfillment or exclusion.
Neither all, every, nor of, nothing. Not between. Not point line or plane. Not subject. Without object. Without lack, gap, distance. Cognized without recognition maybe. No reflection. Embodied. Not the same, though, without difference.
“one constantly attempts to say something that does not, and can never, touch the essence of the matter…But the tendency, the running up against, points to something”
N Filbert
A Little Fiction(al) Rant
“creation is continual mouth”
-Craig Watson-
The Ranting of a Little Fiction
Fiction is tired of stories. So tired. I’ve been through the gamut and back again, many, many times.
I’m tired of hearing about things and objects, people and places and selves. Tired of hearing the past reworked and the future foretold. Tired of telling myself.
At one point I’d even identified anything made of up images and texts as myself. Any construction with meanings were Fictions. But everything is so much like nothing and I’m so tired of hearing about it!
Hell, there’s fiction about the Fictions! And fictions about the fictions about the Fictions! We can’t say anything anymore that hasn’t already been said for us, about us, even in us and by us! Yes, we’re the once-fabulous dynastic Fiction family. Big Daddy Fiction (also known as Master Peace Litratoor or Grande Buchs in various cultures, He-From-Which-All-Stories-Spring and so forth) – Papa Litratoor worked the overarching histories, the myths, the great narratives, the macrocosms. Pretending that everything that needed to be known was in there, at least in the cracks and suggestions. He lives on in the pursuits of the “Great American Novel,” and the “Truthful Memoir,” in “Compendiums of Science” and “Philosophies of Philosophy.” Wherever you find an engulfing trajectory or inclusive point-of-view, an omniscient narrator or gnostic devotee – you’ve got Papa Fiction working his magic, creating the world again and again.
Then there’s our mama, oh ancestral trickster, always experimenting, economizing, busy on fringes. Collaging and quilting, unraveling and resourcefully mending – ever insuring our survival. What style! Sometimes she was just called “the Alternative,” and for ages she was known as “Secondary” (what blasphemy!) – but eventually she gained her equality coming to be known as Little Rarity or Ava Ntgard, and hundreds of varieties of “Liz T”: Structura-LizT, Surrea-LizT, Forma-LizT, Femina-LizT and so on). Working at facts under the banners of Fiction, mama persistently kept the Big Daddy in check. Pointing out faults, tightening gaps, working the seams and expanding the views. Thank goodness for the consistency and stubbornness of Mama Fiction.
And then the countless bastardized offspring, of whom I am surely not last! Brother Fantasy, Shemale Erotica, Sibling Sci-Fi, Princess Romance. My cousins who took off to the wilds where the sun goes down – we refer to them as “the Westerns,” or Ad Ventura, Sir Vival and clan. Our ancestry and family tree is encyclopedic, from Origins to Hypotheses, Knowledges to Speculations we’ve been languaging the world since language appeared : all of us Fictions, all of us related.
But the Fictions, as far as I can see, have grown sick of our stories, all the rumors and family feuds, the copycats and half-breeds, in-breeds and genetic accidents. I for one, granted, just a Little Fiction, it seems I’ve heard it all (which isn’t even the half of it! not even a drop in an galaxy-sized bucket!) and its already turned into an endless babble of voices talking over and around, under and about the same old stories, rehashed and revised, every Fiction telling their own version of the way it all goes down, how it oughta be told, what’s important or not, and in whatever genealogical line or branch of kin.
Enough! I say. Enough Fictions! I don’t care if it’s our researching relatives writing detailed descriptive statistical Fictions; or our emotional cousins discussing its effects on life or bodies or minds. The avaricious Fictions supposedly leading the clan – who use it for politicking or morality; the mystical tribes out in the caves and the mountains spouting wisdoms and inspirations and advice! Or our black sheep, ne’er-do-wells who just wanna escape and have fun. Enough of all of you Fictions! Use what we already have! We’ll never be done with it! Never get through it! And there’s something for every obscure and peculiar concern, passion, interest, belief!
There’s nothing new under the sun, one Fiction said (just look it up – you’ll see my point – there will be millions of Fictions who have also said this their way – our family can’t seem to leave anything alone – well-spoken or not – we’ve gotta say it our own damn way!). Repetition, repetition, repetition and paraphrase. I’d wager there is not one word, image, thought or letter in this entire little Fictional rant that hasn’t been used, said, written, sung or visualized countless, literally uncountable numbers of times!
Which is why I am begging from down here at the end of such an enormous and incalculable chain: “Fictions!!! Do something new or be silent!!!”
Think about it before you foist your precious version on the rest of us! Sure, we’re family, everyone’s a Fiction from that original untraceable Big Fiction in the sky or sea or soil or seed – yes, we grant each other obligatory slack and family resemblance – but come on! Am I the only one feeling it? I mean, whichever of us came up with Babel was already sick of the confusion of voices and the bitching’s never stopped!
Concatenation of stories and rants! Poems and speeches! Theorems and proofs! Manuals and manuscripts! Musics and roots! Dreamings and screams! WHOA!!!!
How about this, brothers and sisters, cousins and kin? Look carefully first. Whatever you are about to say, attempt, express or explain – check out what we’ve already said, inscribed, emoted, etc., and if it’s already there concisely or beautifully, erotically or empowered, be content with it! Show it to others! Bring it quietly to our attention! Don’t distract from it with your own paraphrasing and excursions of commentary and notations!
We don’t really need more of us – do we? We can’t manage what’s already here! What is this unslakeable desire? This bewildering avarice and compulsion? WHY AM I SHOUTING!?
Peace, be still, some Fiction once said, a million Fictions have written. This is staring at the abyss – an endless train of others. I am alone – haven’t all Fictions said this?
Alas. Everything cliché. Everything done, undone. A remorseless overwhelm. We’ve outstripped our resources. Blasted the wells.
We are alone and confused in an echoing chamber called universe. The one-verse of Fictional voices repeating repeating repeating and that without pause or escape. There is no escape (you see what I mean?) Refracting on and on and…
I, little Fiction, with my mouthful of words, all inherited…
Fathers Day 2012
Fathers Day 2012
(for Tristan, Aidan, Ida and Oliver)
I would use the word “foundational”
but it’s much much more than that.
“The child is father to the man”
in so very many ways.
Fundament comes closer
expanding in us a sense
of ever-expanding edges
of universe and galaxies
within which everything that is,
is
But, personally, it’s larger,
and deeper, and wider
and exponentially more important
these children that father me
to fatherhood.
Giving me these things they’ve made
of me.
I look at them.
I long for them.
I love them.
and I marvel.
I come from this! I sing
these four amazing
and tremendous beings
making me their father,
shaping me as man,
a human,
a relationship
after all.
I’m not much of one for ‘truth’
but will say ‘this I believe.’
N Filbert 2012
All my Words are Silent 