Come, then, O tuneful muses, and make a fanciful statement based on as little as weak etymological connections which only sometimes agree within us and are sometimes in strife, working us up into a frenzy as their discourse progresses, such as the incompatibility of the written and the true, demonstrated by the man lost so in the power of song he forgets himself and dies. Or such as the written and the spoken, dialect versus the deferred word, reserved, enveloped, rolled up like some drug, hidden in a haze of cures and recipes and so much hocus-pocus unfit for the god of the gods whose word is all. O pharmakon, deliver me in an ancient way from modernity, make me worthy of expulsion from the republic by admixtures that call me out, drugs that tempt me forth like a carrot to a donkey. Help me to see by scrawls and scripts, like Thoth’s hieroglyphs, the value of poetic connections, weak or otherwise, so subversive, guiding via spoken word away from truth and round towards the rattling paradox at the ouroboros’ tail and therefore strangely back around towards the venomous forms that are its teeth...

And thus the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madman. Whereas the natural function of Plato’s wing is to soar, I cry for a beating of the air which rushes like a drug exhalation or the subsequent gasp, and in this cycle of vacuum and pressure made sonic, may we behold the truth, and may the truth also be the soaring, and the truth the wing itself, the truth in the air, the truth these very words, or none of these be true.

May all truths be on sale at the local pharmacy.


for Derrida

Performed live since well before 2010.