Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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Self-Portrait with a Fascinator 2016
On Monday, I walked, buying frames from two stores in different parts of the city, then went to the Art Bar Poetry Series in the evening, ab...
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I have been asked to offer a presentation of some of my performance videopoems at Mount Pleasant Public Library on Thursday Feb 25th from ...
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Abrasion #2, Created, Interpreted, Edited, Sound & Music by Joaquim Gil & Nuno Tavares , and I love their YouTube channel name: &quo... -
The Buddha says: “ You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself .” The path is uncertain. Uncertainty is the guiding for...
What flame shines in the window? Are you speaking to me?
ReplyDeleteAnd who lit it?
"And Almitra, the seeress said, Blessed be this day and this place and your spirit that has spoken.
ReplyDeleteAnd he answered, Was it I who spoke? Was I not also the listener?"~Kahlil Gibran
This passage from Gibran's work came to my mind as I was reading your post this day.
I adore your writing here. This piece, in particular, captures the depth of that which does, indeed, haunt the Artist within and that which compells the soul to create.
Corridors, yes.
Many Blessings~
"We write with the poetry of angels, where the gradual lightness of the magnificent dawn enlightens. If the trope of light didn't burn, corrode our vision, that is. Sometimes I want to keep my secrets secret."
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this I thought, wow, she is right. That voice that emerges, that takes over, that spills secrets we have tried to keep even from ourselves. Where does that come from? Is it safe?
and ryc... thanks. I'm sure I've never gotten a review anywhere near that good. There is something about writing about dad that touches someplace very deep within me...
Thank you MB, Laurieglynn, and Narrator.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to know how to respond... still wondering about that doppleganger, inner narrator, the writing and secret-telling voice, it's quite different to our daily selves isn't it, most people who met us in real life wouldn't even suspect the poetry that shimmers through us.
Interesting questions. I don't even know "who" wrote this prose poem either! The influences, yes, in particular Blanchot, but who? No. Can we approach what allows us to write?
I often feel as if I am channeling some deep source. Not that it's not me, but that it is definitely more than me. Like swimming in a big river that wells up from way, way down deep somewhere. You've inspired me with your "who".
ReplyDeleteYou ask the hard problem that Beckett asked throughout his entire oeuvre, especially the trilogy of novels Malone, Malloy Dies, and The UnNameable as well as his classic one man play, Krapp's Last Tape: "Who is the voice speaking within me, if it is not me, and it speaks when I don't, all my life, up until my last breath.
ReplyDeleteYou pose it in a variety of fascinating ways here. It is a modernist question that the postmodernists could never solve, because they were trying to dismiss it as a disminuition of Being through the difference between signifier and signified to the mind and the language it articulated.
A pre Simulationist would say it's a "consciousness" feature that we cannot ever fully reckon, but must "approximate" by mapping our own access consciousness first, then the phenomenology (a more inclusive term than the Freudian "unconscious" especially displaced by Lacan)that becomes the larger territory as one's access point grows, both to the attention one gives to ones own "learnings" as well as the "self-expressions" that issue forth in the voice.
I loved this piece, Brenda.
I drew the opposite conclusion about blogspot, by the way, and stopped building a website here and chose gather instead, since there really is little interaction here amongst bloggers (this is in effect a Web 1.0 blog,with little architectonic interactivity developed.)
But you can see a lot of work of mind that isn't at Gather if you go to http://www.shadowofthealhambra.blogspot.com/
Cheers, Brenda!
John, I don't know Beckett beyond Godot, but see what you are saying even there, in that play. I'm sure Kristeva did a lecture on some years back on the question of who that I attended, but didn't connect it then to the who of the muse. Blanchot's The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me?... is my particular inspiration here.
ReplyDeleteThe "unconscious"- Freudian/Lacanian: I agree with you, prefering a phenomenology of consciousness, whatever that may be. How often do I access my own personal symbols to write? Ones that would be opague to others. From Celine I learnt much on interweaving. The personal myths in such a way that it's only hinted at and whose full meaning remains just out of reach.
I can't comment on the postmodernists ... but Kristeva is where I first learnt of the 'speaking subject,' the 'speaking voice.' Can we take it further to the 'writing subject,' the 'writing voice'? Like you, I don't want to get trapped in semiotics either.
Blogger's just a self-publishing site; not a blog community. It doesn't pretend to be anything else. It's a lot harder to build readership here. But I prefer their writer-oriented Terms of Service, and feel safer with it. Though I do also like a bustling, busy writing community like Gather, and intend to keep a presence there too. Just not with publishing my own 'creative' pieces, that's all.
I look forward to exploring your site at Blogger...
Many thanks for dropping by. Who else gives so fully of themselves in every instant? Every comment at every site, the full weight of your knowledge, understanding, holding nothing back. Such bounty. I learn much from you, my friend.
God, yes Brenda. Very strange. The inner narrator.
ReplyDeleteOften butting in uninvited, and then failing to show up when I really need it!
I love what you say about being haunted by ourselves ... and the secret secret-teller ... especially when we wanted to keep those secrets even from ourselves.
I think that is something which has driven me to write at times ... by 'write' I suppose I mean share things I have written. Those whispered secrets can be too much to manage on our own ... it can help to expose them to others, lighten the load a bit. I guess that is obvious of dark secrets, but I find it with the bright light ones as well.
I wonder if there is a gene for being unable to keep these kinds of secrets? A DNA mutation that causes us to carry ideas to others? Perhaps a kind of hemophilia of our own creative flow ... ?
"Shutters cannot stay shut" -- Without the ghosts moving through me and blowing their voices through my own, I become a ghost myself.
ReplyDeleteStray, who in us writes is a mystery. This kind of writing that is more like talking is easy, chatty, part of the daily banter of life. The deeper writing is more of a mystery. Who knows where your haemophiliac metaphor came from? A DNA of secret-telling? These are vibrancies of sparking connections between different areas of the massively-interconnected neuronal network, no? But how? And who is narrating these wonderful images, their strange coherencies? Can we approach what is writing us? Can the eye see itself? Is the writing that appears the mirror that reveals ourselves to ourselves? Who is such a mystery.
ReplyDeletee_journeys, oh, yes, we are borne into being through the ghosts who move through us... otherwise we'd be unmaterialized, unrealized, we'd be ghosts ourselves. I love this.
Twoberry, the idea of madness and genius being necessary to each other in the artist was a Romantic invention. We like it though, and it fits the madness of the writing life, and perhaps for some people it is even true - if they stem, resist, oppose, refuse to give voice to the voice within perhaps it can cause craziness, like one of a woman in labour who refuses to give birth. I have started writing a book on those who silence us, what that process is, and of course I very soon came to what in us enables writing...
Brenda, I've read this post several times now, so glad you left this one up, and every time I read the meaning in my mind shifts. The poem I wrote (which I hope you willl read), inspired in different ways by many sources but among others your "who", took a turn that, as I read your piece now, may be a different direction from your meaning. But in this instance, in asking a question like "who,' the meaning seems terribly elusive to me and it may only be that the asking is most relevant.
ReplyDeleteAnd those who silence us, or resistance. Oh. Having spent years, cumulatively, not writing, I will say it's a dark mirror, so dark one may not see it at the time.
MB, of course I read your poem - it's a fine poem, too. I enjoyed it. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteYes, this present manuscript is growing, but not linearly, rather from within the writing as it expands. A most interesting (if somewhat frustrating) process.
While we like to talk about 'writer's blocks' sometimes there are people who don't want us to write, and that's scary, and I'm forcing myself to explore it - rough terrain, I can tell you! Much easier to blame ourselves for 'being lazy,' or 'not producing,' or 'not honouring our muses,' than to see places in our lives where we not only haven't been nourished but rather the opposite has happened.
In an enlightened world we would all encourage each other to give of our gifts. If you unfold in your talent, then I benefit.
Which you and I know full well. But what do we do about those who would silence us? How do we survive?
Is that where our writing has to become hidden?
So beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI'm a Gemini and so the symbol of the twin is one that I have to some extent internalised.
I think as you say it is my eclipsed twin who answers only through my writing. I don't know her well. She is eclipsed after all.
And sometimes I know she is frustrated because she needs me to hand her poetry, words and phrases, and knowledge that I simply do not possess. I cannot give her what she needs.