--------------------------------------------------------------- Indirect Address: A Ghost Story Bob Perelman University of Pennsylvania perelman@english.upenn.edu (c) 2005 Bob Perelman. All rights reserved. --------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------- COPYRIGHT (c) 2005 Bob Perelman. READERS MAY USE PORTIONS OF THIS WORK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. 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