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...