Tag: Writing

PRESS ON – Thank You

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing7 Comments

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“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted,

nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”

-Sir Francis Bacon-

“One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change…

ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”

-Harold Bloom-

“everything directly accessible to us (in reading) – except for the perceived characters (letters and symbols and space) – would be only our ideas, thoughts, or, possibly, emotional states”

-Roman Ingarden-

           

RUSH

I’m thinking storm-wind and flood.

The press and surge of words and images.

I’m thinking adrenalin and frenzy.

WORD:PRESS

                        It dawns on me today that blogging incites and anxiety to produce.  A pressing to keep up and create.

There’s a radiance to that.

On the one hand, to feel it.  That, even just here, at WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of creative human beings thinking, expressing, making…exponentially increasing my already over-saturated reading list.

RUSH

                        And I mean it, it’s downright EXCITING to view and ingest the enormous, surprising, sincere and ever-expanding activity of humans!  (There’s a thank-you in that to all of you I’ve found so far!)              WHOOSH!    RUSH!

On the other…frenetic.  If “all human beings are the same, but everyone is human in their own way” (Adler on Franz Kafka), then you all are as limited as I by time and space and finitude…i.e. face the anguish of not being able to give the people and things in your immediate surround let alone verbal and visual artifacts from around the world what seems to be their due attention.  To weigh and consider, to respond.

I spend a lot of time studying semiotics and theories of communication – how we, as humans, might “put in common,” “share” – “thoughts, information and opinions through speech, writing, images or signs” – “crafting passages between places and persons.”

Hundreds of thousands (actually many more) – passages made sensible, visible, right here with every click on WordPress, vimeo, Weebly, etc…

So long to fears re: death of reading, of art, culture, any such ‘thing.’

And there’s the ‘rub.’  Visiting “philosophy” pages today, I was significantly encouraged by so much sustained argumentation going on.  Persons thinking hard and working it out with signs and gestures.  Photographer’s sharing their eyes and the difficult work of seeing.  Artists shaping the world through the world’s materials and all their minds and bodies process into it.  Our poets, our healers, each of us shaping one another’s days/minds/experiences.

So thank you ALL for this thunderous RUSH.  For the challenge to take care, to work and enjoy, to weigh and consider who we are, who I am, what I do, what I intend to create, present and offer…

Press on…read in…find value.

“What are we doing here, and why are our hearts invisible?…

I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear…

what is the fear inside language?  No accident of the body can make it stop burning”

-Anne Carson-

“Behind, always behind the things in a hurry to be, you must search for what is”

-Edmond Jabes-

Stumbling Man

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Writing3 Comments

“This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief opportunities”

-Michel Serres-

            What I really want to ask, is where I am?  Implying already the question of an “I” to locate, whether or not there’s a who that could be.  I really DO wake into questions.

Pop over to my “currently reading” page/list.  It hasn’t changed a lot, perhaps gained a few pounds.  I set in this tribal circle, stacks of books like temple pillars, and feel like I’m made of shavings and fragments.  Some strange conglomeration of paper-thin shreds, filled with phrases and songs, floating in air.  Like using dust as a puzzle.

What sits in that center, bathed in blaring desk-light, really?

“a slapdash piece of [sometimes very hard] work, subject to the vagaries of time [its growth and its wear] and the [sometimes brilliant] blunders of brief opportunities”

That feels pretty accurate.  My parents, my sister, my Kansas.  My musical training.  Education, educators, friends.  Marriages and children, travel and work.  These words, this blogsite.  How “I” originates and am formed.  And thousands upon thousands of books, hours and hours of movies and song.

Then the dust and the shavings keep collecting: mountain climbs and ocean views, orchestras and art museums, foreign countries and people.  Slapdash, subject to vagaries, blunders of opportunities.

I’ve an urge to look closer (a terminal “illness” of mine).  For “slapdash” I find ‘things done hastily, carelessly,’ but I’ve often taken great pains over  much time with fervent investment – yet, yes, the results have definitely been ‘roughcast’ and ‘haphazard.’

And “vagaries” – ‘erratic, extravagant, or outlandish’ occurrences, ‘unexpected and inexplicable change.’  Admitted, time works this way, as (the dictionary suggests) the ‘variations of weather’ – a ‘wandering’ ‘fluctuation.’  I accept.

And what of ‘blunders,’ of blundering?  ‘Mistakes, usually serious, caused by ignorance and confusion.’  ‘Clumsily or blindly’ mannering forth.  However else could I proceed with this limited mind and body, space and shape, this miniscule duration (recalling ‘hastily’ – how much time, relatively, do we really have in a larger scheme?).  Yes, I am always walking into an unknown next, ‘blindly’ as it were, piecing together a ‘haphazard’ and ‘erratic’ assemblage of imagined/remembered experiences, ‘clumsily’ hauling them forward breath-by-breath.  Fair enough, ‘extravagant’ or ‘serious mistakes,’ I blunder.

Remains the “opportunities” to set it all aright.  These are described as ‘favorable or advantageous circumstances, or combinations of circumstances.’  ‘Suitable chances for progress or advancement.’  Possibles.  And this scattered smattered hollow or vortex, opens out again.

 

So – I’m here, and this – a clumsy blind wanderer stumbling through unexpected and inexplicable changes to haphazard and outlandish results; a con-fused combination of circumstances ever entering favorable and advantageous, suitable chances to progress and keep going…into the ever-possibles…

Voila.

I breathe and gaze.

I stumble on.

N Filbert 2012

Choose. Why choose?

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?  Choose, why choose?”

-J.M.G. LeClezio-

a blank page

“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”

-Michel Serres-

Choose.  Why choose?

Deep in love

the sight, the thought, the feel.

Look around.

 

Over here a line comes singing, her misting whispers, behind the ear.

Bold graffiti in the midst: the faces, the lettering.

Trilling of a baby’s babble.

 

Choose.  Why choose?

I build my shelter, I fashion my tent of language.

I might hide here.  I might scribble the wall.

Curving words, like celanic, like ocean.

 

I choose.

Why choose?

To shelter, to bloom.

I build a barn of story, the structure to hold it in.

 

This body, its experiences.

This wife, and hers.

Seven starling children, darting out and in.

And things: stuff, books, ideas, smells.

Dreams and hopes; fears and memory.

Do words burn?

 

I make a sprinkler, and a hose.  I fill them with water.

There is a fire there.  For warmth.

 

To build a well.

I am speaking tools.

Choose.  Why choose?

 

To erase disease-words, and plight.

She says color and I leave it on the walls.

Call and response, they’re in, through the windows.

 

I sing a night with rain.

I sculpt a bed of vowels.

We cry out in the form of wings:

 

Take shelter.

And choose.

Why choose?

 

“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know.’”

-Robert Creeley-

Flustercuck #2 – another aborted short

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Photography, Writing2 Comments

Our Visible Blindness

(please click title for text and picture for larger version!)

The Open

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Photography, Writing2 Comments

“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?

Choose, why choose?”

-J.M.G. LeClezio-

“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know'”

-Robert Creeley-

“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”

-Michel Serres-

Incidental Courage in the Crevices

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Traces, Writing1 Comment

I’ve taken someone’s advice and picked up David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary – what a potent little delight!  Immediately slid into place with Alain de Botton’s On Love and Macedonio Fernandez’ The Museum of Eterna’s Novel; Jesse Ball’s The Curfew and The Way Through Doors.  Also moved me back to Daniel Handler’s Adverbs and (so-far) wonderful Why We Broke Up.  In the process, feeling forever stunted as a “writer,” I cracked A. Alvarez’ The Writer’s Voice yesterday to these jewels:

“For freelance writers like myself who belong to an endangered species which, as long ago as 1949 Cyril Connolly was already calling ‘the last known herd in existence of that mysterious animal the man of letters,’ writing is less a compulsion than a misfortune, like a doomed love affair.  We write because we fell in love with language when we were young and impressionable, just as musicians fall in love with sound, and thereafter are doomed to explore this fatal attraction in as many ways as we can…fifty years of writing for a living have taught me that there is only one thing the four disciplines have in common: in order to write well you must first learn how to listen.  And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers.  Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false.  It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire.”

Flustercucks – aborted short stories

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography, Writing17 Comments

here’s a story begun for Fluster Magazine’s short story competition…ended all too briefly?

Dropping the Mask

It is clear that we called for the meeting to leave something behind.

I don’t believe that either of us questioned its integrity, intentions.

We both of us asking to know.

 

It had been long in coming, decades.  Still not yet old we hoped to find some kind of truth and choosing.  A discovery discovering.  Both an offering, a revelation, no lives to be lost.

 

I had never seen her this way.  Never this close nor this complicated.  I allowed her to undress, even asked her to.  I did my best as well, to arrive ready, with a thousand masks.

 

Long navigation.  The years had dug channels, paved roads.  The routes were secret, but we remembered, as if written on the palms of our hands.  We read them with our eyes, began to retrace.

 

I made the first call, in order to argue, to work something out.  Why we never, nor knew.  Our stories paralleled – the subterfuge, pain, and the pathways of scars.  We dug to heal, opening the wounds.

 

We held it together, even with weapons.  To cleave – cut and joined.  Rifts and bridges.  His truths were all lies, logically constructed.  I sprayed mine as graffiti on his monuments, defaced.  Undone.

 

I guess each truth is a lie to something else.  Our stories held water and ran.  We found ourselves somewhere in their flow and stood together as a base in cascade.  In the thundering rain the masks dissolved and our veils clung to our bodies, sheer.

 

What we experienced together we did not forget, but forged a place for it.  Here and now.  We began.  Possessions and pasts stolen, we clung and feigned, using only our skin and joined breaths – our voicings.  Fluid in a world of statues.

 

Something fell away, eventuating our silence.  We departed the space we had filled, abandoning its form bags packed full.  I felt I’d left something behind, still checking my pockets and luggage.

 

He preferred the weight he carried, holding him secure and anchored to the earth.  I chose the flight, and the destination, returning us unharmed.  My pillowcase was empty, nothing lost, nothing gained.  Of much was made.

 

I guess we masked our joy in difficulty.

  Which fell to the ground in our separate ways.

 

“This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief opportunities”

-Michel Serres-

 

N Filbert 2012

 

 

Nebulous Thoughts

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing6 Comments


But what if we went right on ahead?

If we charged like bulls bellowing our mysteries?

When I think of you, think about us, I want to.  That’s exactly what I want to do: be done with mysteries, be one in fact.

But when I look at you, when I touch, taste, smell and listen you, I cannot conceive it.  Can’t even imagine comprehending all that’s unknown, inexplicable.  And I’m afraid to.  That too, I’m frightened of some unfathomable overwhelm.

Yet from a distance, I mean, from here, now, it feels plausible.  To declare all mysteries, one to another, in song or verse or gesture.  Enaction.  To enact our mysteries and imperceivables all at once in some enormous chaotic unison, unashamed.  What is there to be ashamed of?  Secrets are not mysteries, only their private signs.  What forges them is larger and unclear.  Diversity and variation – these we celebrate – no?

Step out of your houses and enact your whole selves!

We will bewilder one another – not such a bad catharsis!

Running, perhaps amok, perhaps silenced to a shuddering ball – who knows?  It’s a mystery!

Perhaps we’d shout in brand new languages – delighting everyone’s ears!  Perhaps we’d alter the surface of the earth, its environments?

Would that we were one expressive impressive cacophonous voice!

Would that we were?

I’d split into a willow tree dropping language-boulders from my fragile limbs.  I’d erupt a perfect mountain steaming as a cold clear lake.  I’d mud.  I’d sprout as a milky pasture of weeds.

You’d Sousaphone in primary colors woven as a world-shawl.  You’d be all the quiet stars, glimmering in their conflagration.  You’d whisper through grain and aspen, moving through air like helium.

We’d crash without injury, fomenting monuments of grandeur.  Melding our mysteries.  You-topia.  Humana-topia.  “Other”-worldly.

Perhaps.

Perhaps a universal dancing, a carnival of beauty so trouncing our balancing globe as to shatter it, sitting afloat or casting about – some atmospheric inferno.  Perhaps a gaseous stench would burst forth, a deadly poison.  Perhaps disaster.  Apocalypse of  invisible revealed.

We could surely say “we know not what we do” living mysteries, eh?

“Off the hook” even as it gores us.

Earthquaking order in riotous glee.

The maniac’s laugh.

A universe of blindness and flare.

Breaking the eggs, precarious shells.

No wonder veneers.  Elaborate mechanisms.

Flexible and porous, rigid and finely tuned.

It wears  out, the strain and stress: containing, defending.

What if we went right on ahead?

Plunged up out of deep waters, rocketing down from our skies?

Going through with our propensities: explosion/implosion?

What do you imagine?  The beginning?  The end?

A flood, a conflagration?  Some perfect balance?

We hardly know ourselves, one another…

secrets give way to hiding, large blank territories blocking the unseen, from ourselves, one another…

equilibrium-fear

we call eco-system, survival, “life.”

Undoing?

From here, right now, I want to release, to channel and broadcast – to expose without imposition, sing that I might hear, dance that I might see, enact in order to know…become some inward/outward thing, supernova and black hole at once…

nothing escaping, nothing withheld.

Who (what) are we?

Begin.

Adding it up

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, Philosophy, Traces, Writing4 Comments

Reading, Writing – the ‘Rithmetic

You know, I honestly don’t know why I think of the many things I think of.  “About” usually, yes, usually I can surmise why I stick to a thinking project – it might be something that troubles or worries me, maybe it involves something about which I care deeply or enjoy – then I’ll ruminate around on the subject or object for awhile, attempt to figure or follow the thinks, arrange some digits or sounds, contents, feelings or symbols until I make fit or get lost in the simple joy of tinkering.

But then other times, and really quite often, I can’t locate the instigative trail or balancing of reason for why (or how) items pop into or swish by my apprehending (apprehensive?) brain.

For instance, just now (and it’s precisely the unknowing that prompts me to write about it, to squeeze it through language), I was sitting quietly to desk after a very full day of soccer games, bicycle rides and birthdays, perusing Ron Loewinsohn’s Goat Dances, Anne Carson’s plainwater, Jon Anderson’s The Milky Way and Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays – a very normal way I have of grounding myself, discovering a location by mapping found paths, when sploosh! across the internet of my mind zipped:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”

            And then I stopped.  Closed the books, slid them aside, rested my chin in my hand and gazed toward nowhere, wondering what question that sounds-like-an-answer phrase was responding to or anticipating.

Why would I think that?

Lost in language like dancing and syllables, stars and night skies, withs and relation and choros, why would my only clear thought (recognizably anyway) be:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”?

            When something stops me like that, and I already hear a rhetorical response, but no answers satisfy and questions only multiply exponentially…

I grab loose blank notebook pages and a ball-point pen…

and begin doodling, dabbling, and “showing my work.”

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” (implied automatic resonant answer: because it does) leads precisely (in this case, given all the contingencies and conditions) to the chicken-scratching rambling preceding this period.

In other words, not to a solution, or perhaps even a working equation or problem, but simply to activity.  Reading, writing, thinking it out in lines, shapes and signs.

Now during all this scribble-sketching around the inceptive phrase, my bodymind has been mantra-ing responsorials:  “because it really does,” “because I’m not even aware of things happening until verified in language,” “because life just occurs and I don’t know about it until I manifest the experience some way – bounce it off of a counterpart or internal funhouse mirror (other’s words) to learn what it is and isn’t” and so on…so-called “reasons” I guess?  Hypothetical rationales for the random (apparently) phrase having typed itself in my nervous wirings?

The only “fact,” as I experience them, is that this phrase: “I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” clearly spat itself across the innards of my cranium while I was going about the very normal activity of recovering, soothing, pausing and nourishing myself on books at hand, wishing somewhere it hadn’t taken me all day to reach this quiet, wishing somewhere that all conversations went like this listening, wishing somehow I had something that felt like it needed to be written down, wishing somewhere that I understood myself.

And alas: a baffling sentence in response to no one silently carves and engraving on my consciousness:

“I guess I always read and write as if my life depends on it”

My entire body replying: “well…YEAH!  It does!  It’s the only way YOU know that there’s possibly LIFE at all, and not just sensations, emotions, thinkings and dreams; reactions, responses and stimuli!  Without reading about it or writing words out I personally have no concrete object to sound my experience against, to test a happening – everything else out there from spouse to “god” is always moving, shifting, adapting, changing…just like me.”

“I guess I always read and write BECAUSE my ‘life’ depends on it”

Waking into Questions

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Photography, Writing3 Comments

“It is already late when you wake up inside a question”                    -Anne Carson-

 

It takes some prodding.  Prodding and probing.  You must have set out, been triggered or poked or otherwise disturbed.  In the first place: to ask.

So something, anything, disturbs you.  Annoys, feels good, causes you to move out of a way, or adjust.  Friction.  Something like pain or a sharp thrill, label it fear, designate desire.  In any case – unrest, discomfort, necessity.

There’s the rub.  A displacement of sorts, like an involuntary glance, or tripping on sidewalks.  Awareness.  I have legs.  Eyes.  An elbow.  Breath.  A need for a restroom, that kind of thing.  Self/other; here/there; now/now.  Force, motion, mass enter the vicinity.  You become aware.

To right yourself, “get your bearings,” “take stock” and what-not usually begins in some knee-jerk instinctual mannered-reaction, as it were.  Pierce-poke – wince and recoil.  Delight – magnetism and submission.  You are not awake, only slightly coming-to.  Displaced, disturbed, floundering for shore.

An experience is occurring and senses churn, mind starts mapping, here and now are tired of hiding – regardless of the fun of the game.  You startle and seek, calling things names deep in your head, listening for echoes that mate.  Radar of accounting and imagination, disjunctively it gradually becomes “all systems go.”

Go where?

And how do these systems “go”?

Who is it that’s waking?

The entire propensity expanding the proverbial “What the – ?!”

Whether infant or sage, and all of us, after all, somewhere in between.

And so it goes, ever waking in questions…

(What could be more exciting?

More repetitively strange?)