You won't know where I am heading here. Something about the man dancing at the bus stop -- what does he signify, what does he leave out? If I mention that I wanted to refer to this post as "erasure"-- of the things I would leave out and thereby posit as the ground (not the figure--that which is erased)...
Unknown we blink* to a paper on Derrida and Heidegger:
"One of the most important concepts in Derrida's analysis is the idea of "sous rature," (under erasure.) Heidegger often crossed out the word Being (Being) and let both the word and its erasure stand. He felt the Being was prior to and beyond signification or meaning, and hence to signify it was inadequate, though there existed no alternative. Derrida extends this practice to all signs. Since any signifier has as its signified another signifier, it always defers meaning and it always carries traces of other meanings. It must therefore be studied as defective, incomplete, under erasure."
Under the same title (erasure) I find this:
"He started to weep. He had told the story before, and had wept before. Each time it was like never before, he relived the pain each time. And, as thought leads to thought, standing there looking at the river, I felt an unexpected pang of my own. There was a sudden urgency in my groin, but her image flitted past quickly. Time, reliably, had dulled even that wound. It was getting cold, but I stood a while longer. How easy it would be, I thought, to slip gently into the water here, and go down to the depths. I knelt down, and trailed my hand into the Hudson. It was frigid. Here we all were, ignoring that water, paying as little attention as possible to the pair of black eternities between which our little light intervened. Our debt, though, to that light: what of it? We owed ourselves our lives."
This is from the lyrical writings of Teju Cole, whom I did not even know about until yesterday. What I am asking is this: what does it mean to say what we are saying, and what are we saying in all that we do not say, and what does it mean if what we say is crossed out, not mentioned, but still there, a visible, ghostlike shadow of a suggestion?
It would be a radical departure to dance at a bus stop, or to talk (walk--another erasure) away from who you think you are (your self erased) all the while your erased self gathers the force of Being from the echoes of graphite left on the page.
*Added: This was supposed to say "unknown weblink," but I learned long ago from Walker Percy that metaphor as mistake is the root of poetic meaning, so
unknown
we blink
to a paper on Derrida and Heidegger...
(instant beginning of a poem)
