Jacques Derrida
Getting Out of Bed with Jacques Derrida
It doesn’t take much to draw and bind me
to the precipice of madness
I fall easily to those craggy spots as
my own crooked steps seek recognition
And today I found myself inside a panic described by Jacques Derrrida
His consciousness undoing his subconsciousness
The panic that happens when you awaken and consciousness alerts itself to the workings of your mind and questions your very essence…I felt that panic this morning
Woke up in absolute terror of having made a fatal flaw, an immense imprecision, a massive mistake
That at the core I had erred. That at the core I am amiss
That at the core I am missing…and if Jacques is mistaken and there is an “I”
more than a kind of word-hope
more than a linguistic function
then, I am
a large gash of irreversible blunder
And Andrew Bird was whistling to me:
you didn’t write, you didn’t call
it didn’t cross your mind at all
And I mapped the flight path between us
not accounting for actual time and distance
Reckoning the limitless closeness of intention…
But that was my intention
You intended only your exit
each exit
And David Lethcoe, he’s handing me a hook and I’m trying not to get stuck, but he’s singing the praises of Ray Johnson and mail art
to a carcass arched over my keyboard probing similarities between Shakespearean courtship and sad cyber longing
And Dr. Rajesh recommends 18 rounds of Syra Namaskar, cardamom to cool the fire and milk to calm the nerves
More movement, less thinking…and I knew I wasn’t exactly going crazy but that Something was missing
Close your eyes
Dream it
Exalt it
Mystify that nomadic creature
the one that you,
by the way,
practically invented
Let him decide the slope of a cliff
instead of the gist of you
It’s near amusing,
bemusing
the way you’re suffusing the slash of your parenthetical gash
The one you don’t speak of, but it resembles the portrait of a child
Of your child equal
watching her father walk in the opposite direction and never come back and the words look like silence and comfort smells of indifference.
And it’s a lie
one you’ve been telling yourself for damned near 40 years.
And there goes Andrew Bird again proposing
what was mistaken for closeness was just a case of mitosis
because
we’re all
basically
alone
It isn’t exactly you
that I miss—my “I” that might not exist
It’s that abstract notion of your kiss
it echoes your remiss
Strikes the conscience and insists
that I wallow into the abyss
conjuring potions, measuring quotients, escaping any
tangible notions
It was anything but hear the voice
Anything but hear the voice
It was anything but hear the voice
That says that we’re all basically alone
But Dr. Rajesh is holding count to my 18 salutes of the sun and with any luck, Jacques
or Jackie as he preferred in his maturity,
–said it more accurately reflected his Semitic roots
…with any luck Mr. beautiful silver-haired Derrida remains lying unconscious in my bed
deconstructing structures
factoring
the reasons why the subconscious
trumps the conscious
Why the dream is preferable to waking
Why I want to luxuriate in anything but the constructs of normalcy.
And why I trade it
again and again
for madness.
