Indirect Address: A Ghost Story
[to Jacques Derrida]

I was already iterable when I woke up this A. M.:
I had begun to write to [you]

in Philadelphia and am now in New York,
dragging a motley pageant of tenses

across the first sentence
which is only just now finishing.

The deadline for this piece
on the occasion of [your] death

had passed before I began
and of course it is even later now,

which iterates me more. Across the mirror
it must be strict and still, I imagine:

no iteration. But imagining
means nothing when words

have stopped moving.
Direct address between the living

and the dead is foolish, unless
some gemütlich, unheimlich correspondence course

has already been inaugurated,
and has either of [us] signed up for that?

Here, times and places still bleed into one another,
New York, Philadelphia, yesterday, two days later,

and we continue to cut ourselves.
Courting coincidence, possibly. Myself, twice

while making dinner, nicking one thumb
(think empiricism meets formalism) and ten minutes later

grating the knuckle of the other on the cheese grater
(think pragmatism applied with brute disregard for local

circumstance). One thing bleeding into another:
can't that be one of the pleasures

of a settled art? Watercolor.
But words, think: which is more

to the point, "words bleed into one another," or
simply "words bleed"? Neither.

They're neither the neutral relays of a combinatory
enjoyment, nor the carriers

of a transcendently central
materiality of language.

"Words bleed," that's the feeling
of unstanchable vulnerability

that underlay modernism at its most Deco-baked-marmoreal.
Here, where [you] have died, we remain in the midst

of a long, stuttering song
that no one now writing

can't not hear:
it's going strong, shattered into slogans

each designed
to carry the tune. Blood

and boundaries: dull old tropes
but still tripping up heels faster than ever.

O, [you] who never
seemed to like finishing a sentence

when it was always possible
to go on writing it, as if,

within what might be made intelligible,
it was always the height of noon,

now for [you] the untraceable ink
of an endless period

has put a stop to the continuous
present [you] inscribed

onto just about every word.
"I weep for Lycidas, he is dead" we say

and life remains iterable.
[You're] not, however.

So questions of address
remain vexed, especially since

the language I am writing from,
flighty and false-bottomed as it is,

makes a few inflexible and awkward demands.
Here (American-English) there is no avoiding

the overlap of the sound of a formal regard
for appropriate distance--[you]--

with a more intimate noise--[you].
[You], sir, and [you], old mole,

seem to be one and the same,
at least if sounds sound like

what they're supposed to mean. Hence the brackets.
Which makes for a certain double-jointedness.

But doesn't meaning only appear
after address has been exchanged?

And I have addressed [you.]
[You] first appeared as a stage villain

in "Movie" in Captive Audience
–do I really have to tell [you] this?–

where against Grant and Hepburn [you] played
some shadowy figure with shadowy powers

suggesting an end to their regal portrayals of spontaneity.
In other words: there was a script,

or more, a counter-script, which [you] had in your possession.
At one point the poem

suggested [you] and Hepburn
had forged a certain intimacy

but it was one of those 'always already' shots,
where the audience doesn't get to see anything

except [your] arm handing her
a towel in the bathtub.

Next, [you] appeared in "The Marginalization of Poetry"
in propria persona, as [yourself] so to speak,

where I quoted Glas as an example of multi-margined writing:
"One has to understand that he

is not himself before being Medusa
to himself. . . . To be oneself is

to-be-Medusa'd . . . . Dead sure of self. . . .
Self's dead sure biting (death)" after which

I shrugged and winked:
"Whatever this might mean, and it's possibly

aggrandizingly post-feminist, man swallowing woman,"
and then issued a vague compliment:

"nevertheless in its complication of identity it
seems a step toward a more

communal and critical reading and writing
and thus useful." Useful:

that's one of those
canapes that taste of nothing

but institutional compromise.
Words are usable things

but it doesn't go the other way:
things aren't words. I can quote "Lycidas"

but not the tormented street tree out front.
"Poems are made by fools like me,"

the man wrote, "but only God can quote
a tree." When [you] live by the book

[you] tote it around, die by it,
and by the book is how [you] continue.

That's the same in poetry and philosophy.
But, still, the notion of two activities forming

the basis for a critical community is,
as [you] might say, utopian.

(We might say imaginary.) Poet
and philosopher at times have issued

cordial invitations for the other
to come over and discuss the pressing

common concerns, but there hasn't been
much pressure to actually visit.

I continued, "Glas is still, in
its treatment of the philosophical tradition,

decorous; it is marginalia, and the
master page of Hegel is still

Hegel, and Genet is Hegel too."
The names don't go away

when the eyes close. Neither do
the already crowded screens of younger readers

at least as long as the arrow of time
keeps pointing in the same direction.

And all attempts at instruction will,
somewhere along the line, find the instructors

in the discombobulated position of gesturing toward
some ideological Rube Goldberg ruin, folly, pratfall.

The poem. The concept.
But let's not let parallelism set precedents.

On the other hand, note
how the upcoming line break, although

philosophically insignificant (and semantically insignificant,
it must be said), is poetically

still up for grabs. We poets
(it must be written) really don't know,

are prohibited (structurally) from knowing
what we write before it's written, and,

in a back-eddying double-whammy,
can't really forget what's come before

the most recent word.
In that we model both the alert insouciance

of the newborn (with its millennia of entailments,
but still in-fant, unspeaking) and

the fully aged fluent inhabitant
of language flowing

around a life, offering infinite comprehension
all the way out to the sedgy banks

with fields of goldenrod beyond them
but not the algorithm that would allow for

moment by moment access to the whole story
which we never get to hold with frankly human concern

but have to address via the nerved scrimmage
of writing. Skin's mostly healed, but mind persists

in changing. Before, I'd figured [you] as some
jauntily allegorized emblem of

unknowableness and now [you] are
playing that part more unerringly than ever.

Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
perelman@english.upenn.edu

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