Tag: writings

Another Pause, Another Someday

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings2 Comments

“Words give clothing to hide our nakedness”

–Susan Howe–

“But a word is a bottomless pit”

–Lyn Hejinian–

And then it arrives, unexpectedly, another gap.  She sees a magician in bright jester’s garb, seated on a branch in a tree.  Amid the traffic.  Amid a swarm of bees, of thrumming crows and starlings.  A bat lies in labored breathing on the sidewalk.

Lightning- and Lady- bugs.

Like that, like both.

There is no goal to it in the beginning.  At first.  The seconds’ glow catches you off guard.  “What was that?” neon spot moving in the night.  Imperceptible polka-dotted red creeping carefully over your toe.  Structures pause.  Structures moment.  When realized, when you bring your own accident: awareness.

What pressures turns out to be necessity.  Of deadline, of assignment, of transactional fulfillment – relationship or vocation, even health.  Without apparent choice.  Or ever so long ago.  Why markings called parentheses are shields.  What gives pause.  And stays the pressuring.  For the moment.

An extended kiss.

A lapse in volume.

An ignored alarm.

You find yourself there : (YOU).

The rest of the world lining up, encroaching, exerting itself, themselves, your other selves, against the slender boundaries, the slick curving walls – they can’t be climbed, nor be toppled, only inverted )if you accept the pressures(, or erased as if they’d never happened.  Become brackets.  Prison versus asylum (in its native safety-seeking sense).

(YOU)?  )YOU(?  [YOU]?  ]YOU[?

            Now and then.  Another pause.  Another Sabbath.  A so-called rest.  Time is not the issue (as duration).  Time is at issue in its momentary absence.  Glancing the lightning-bug, bird-call, ladybug feeling out the stem.

“Another pause” with pressures all around.  Expectations or chores.  But no one calling, not this now.  Last week too, unexpected, unprepared, cage door left awry, or finding key in hand.  Parentheses.  And then you sleep that active way we call “rest.”  For a moment.  You make, for the joy of making, or not.  Either way is pleasure.  Or pleasant at the most.

Such as now, another pause, this day, another Someday that arrived.

Decompression: A Process

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

it goes on…this emptying search…

(Re)Assesments

 

At something of a loss, what feels like a “crossroads” except that perhaps nothing in existence is really either / or.

That was not a sentence.

Bewildered without anxiety, I approach a sort of noisy blank.  A surfeited absence.

I have the amorphous sensation of being entirely undone and woven up as a satchel of my everything.  Every instance of myself threads the material of an empty knapsack that is me, dangling from a stick over the shoulder of the world I inhabit.

That the bag, indeed, is empty.  No objects or trinkets in that wee darkness to finger or grasp, no spirits to set free, emotions to unstopper.  Nothing within to escape, not even air.

My entirety fabricated as an emptied bag.

 

All I’ve ever written, attempted, every action, thought, adventure or relation.  All my labors, abilities, acquisitions, emotions and dreams; every word or intuition, fear or blatant risk, all ongoing consequence(s)…EVERYTHING – internal, external; past-present-future: is the skin of a being, the form and the boundary, the grafted substance of an absent individuality.

 

I experience this neither as a blockage, nor an impasse; no meaninglessness, purposelessness or ennui – simply a vague, obvious experience that all I am as a being is my interface with the world within and around me, idenitifiable without essence.

Responsible, shaped, recognizable and devoid of identity – no narrative or plot, character or definitive name, just an inextricably meshed passel of experiences forming a pliable veneer around a vacant hollow.

That all will carry on, as such, until its end.  Experience upon experience, before experience, during and after experiences and experiments – weaving, threading, joining…this being-form, this walking thinking speaking shape, this perceptive living husk or porous shell, a wave and trajectory of experiencings.

To feign a purpose, an intention or choicy action as this reality requires some arbitrary groundwork – hypotheses and rudimentary organizational operations.  What might this handbag proffer?  Or emit?  What song might be huffed from this void?

 

This is where I seem to be.  Evaluate.  Assess.  No pillars, few givens, a smattering of beliefs and bones and hunches, a median vocabulary of gestures.  From this – what pretend to build?  What fabricate?  I find that I want to, have desire to, create.  Make out of what is woven – everything that forms me / allows me to be – but in what manner?  Open.  Free.

 

As if the absence is realized, the content in-formed, substance resulting from wafting motions and play.  Capacity for invention.  Something like soap bubbles – materials forming a translucent and wobbly funhouse mirror of shapes…leaking…nothing!  Yet capable of popping fragments like droplets or spittle, or words.

 

This seems to be where I am.  I know not what might emerge, but I’d like to leave some trace of the fabric experience has made of me.  Scraps or ephemeral stains, artifacts.

 

“Over there, it is raining…”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography, Writing6 Comments

Furthering Apologies for Rain

I’ve spent many years proclaiming, exclaiming, disputing and evangelizing my love of rain.

More intimately, for decades my journals and diaries are soaked through with ink and reflections of agonizing effort to verbalize just what it is, exactly, that the circumstance of raining represents, evokes, fulfills or actualizes in and for me.

I’ve written of fog and dusk, how they soften the edges, blur the inessential, provide a veil of connectedness and symbiosis of what is perceivable, in keeping with my sense and belief about selves, things, world.

I’ve written of smoke, the ephemerality of moments, a texturing for the fragility of what’s present.

I’ve noted how the greying of cloud, runnels and droplets heighten other colors like green, rather than glaring them out in the brightness of sun.  We filter everything – visible precipitation provides the physical opportunity of “seeing” that.

Or what is blocked and distorted (rain on glasses, windows, drops on an eye or a lash) – how choosy and minutely invested our visions are – what we choose to see, shape, create and how multitudinous what we skew, block out and deny.

Also its comfort – the blanketing, softening and quieting of snow and rain on atmosphere and mood.  Like a muting and subtlety; a gentling and slowing of a pace.  I’ve always felt I can curl up in rain, in fog, in mist and drizzle – cloaked, protected, respected, wombed.

And nourished.  How birds, soil, plants, trees, worms, flowers, sand crave and delight in the generosity and equanimity of rainfall.  How it blesses all regardless.  Helps me feel part, wholed, valuable and real.  I can stand in rain, clean in rain, play in rain, drink rain – without wealth or beauty, intelligence or strength, position or power.

What struck me today was how the pattering of rain – patterned and random, distinct while flowing together – was in perfect accord with my inner world – how my thoughts and feelings go, move, through, pool, form streams, gather, swell, evaporate.

The porosity.  The feeling that rain both permeates and respects boundaries, wets without drowning, soaks without penetrating.  Gives and gives and gives.  Inward, outward; saturate but rarely flood; joins without binding.

The list goes on.  What I find I repeat most often, having no words to explain it, is that the condition of rain (like the music of Mark Kozelek), of all the world most closely approximates my own fullest experiences or feeling of myself.

Somehow feeling that if someone “gets” the joy and glory, protection and soothing of rain, they’re a long way toward “getting” me, or me toward being known,

or at least somehow related.