[Newspoetry] Rogues, a first tribute

[DL Emerick]

Rogues: Two Essays on Reason -- Derrida (Stanford 2005)

I am part way through reading this newest piece from Derrida's life works.  It is always shocking to discover how vast Derrida's perspective upon life was.  And, I shall next be reading, have already started perusing two other post-humous publications, On Touching -- Jean Luc Nancy, and Paper Machine, both also Stanford 2005.  Indeed, of the 70 to 100 books by and on Derrida that I have read in these last 10 years, my debt is incalculable -- and that does not count the partial mortgage payments that I have made, buying all these texts ($2,500), reading them each (12 hours/text * (say) 85 texts * MyCost/ReadingHour == (say) 1020 * 25 == $25,500), or the time I have spent thinking of the texts, their problems, the ways they open up (an unknown, because both conscious and unconscious time are involved, the possible quantities have no measure, and become non-quantitative, remain elusively qualitative, an experience of the beyond of the self, the aporia into the self that is not !
 the self, where the elipses of reason, spiral, as if to close, but always leave some path in-out), and not even, in the final analsyis, can I calculate the value of my labors in the times I spend in speaking and writing of Derridean conceptuality and its influences.  I leave only bits of ideas, propositions about ways into questions, for philosophy, unlike religion, despises answers and adores questions, as answers despise unknowns that questions love.

Rogues... I shall have already deferred my address of this theme, as you may have noticed.   I was about to say, what I must say, is that all men are rogues, though my use of man is the sense that all people are rogues, but that exceeds my experience, for I have not yet been a woman, nor yet a girl, nor an old person, nor a person of so many other kinds, in so many other ways -- and I know that it is true that, even of men, I have not been every man (or EveryMan -- except, of course, in the guise of a truth that I might endorse, as universal as it gets, a truth that I might endorse and also denounce, in the same breath as it were, as if truth could not be confessed without a denunciation that robs it of self-evidence, without which it has no evidence whatsoever, and remains merely hypothetical, in sofar as it talks of man, EveryMan, or even of that quaint individuality, people).

So, I must say, we are all rogues, provisionally, and mean here that it is statement of factuality, which is an acuality, undeniable by any person of sound mind and competent to reason.  For sound mind has to do with the evident, necessarily always self-evident before it is evident in the imperial voice, dictating to others what they must see, what they must accept.  And, sound mind, the voices in my head, must then speak, in some sound fashion, speak out of my understanding, speak to at least some other me, in a voice that resounds, in memory, marking a time of speaking, as if it provides an occasion for comparison, at some other time that is not then.  By such events, interruptions of the continuous, by these discrete aggregates of words, the question of the stone block comes to mock the mind, the block that reason raises to stop itself, on which it carves its rules as its words of reason, and thus creates an obscurity, a veil, a partition throgh which its own eyes no long!
 er can see, the eyes of reason ever being blind to its own ex-ante reason.

We are all rogues, but that is not all that we can be -- for the tale of man would be incomplete were it impossible for us to be nothing more than rogues.  A rogue lives almost anywhere, always in a secret society, a space that can be defended from intrusion -- for example, a suburb, or home, and suburbs are nothing but homes, hence we find them, even in the middle of the greatest of cities -- the rogue at home, everywhere, even on the streets he roams.

I am a rogue.  Let's make sure that the personal is never lost in the discussion of society and its ills (or its habits (or its hopes and dreams)).  It's not even, here, that I have a right to be a rogue.  I write NewsPoetry because I am a rogue, my readers are presumed to be rogues, all poets everywhere likewise roguish.  We defy the order, on some principle of disorder, defying the ISNESS of the WHAT IS, the dominance of mere sensuality.

And, thus, we claim sanctuary, the distance from authority, in our private space, where we the roguish saints may commune, upon the sacred and the profound and how the world tramples under foot the holy of holies, the dreams we conspire to dream together, of a better world, a new Jerusalem.  I preach to you, my fellow roguish saints, as inspired in this Quaker-dom that quakes when we all peak, not unanimously, but together, in many voices, as in the Pentecost, where one does not understand another, by the contents of the voices that sound, but only by the facts of the emotions those voices carry, as the tones of a philosophy universal in its stirrings, but not in words.

Of other rogues, the worst, perhaps, are those who wish only to remain rogues in the world, living in their lives of desperate housewives, and home owners, living in Pond Creek prisons of their own devising, as if life were a tomb, a dungeon in which one might hide, a slave to the past, a past constructed to be the illusion of a present that is never to change again, wherein disharmony and difference has been weeded out, discarded, banned, exiled, excluded -- forming the appearance of a peace undisturbed as a graveyard in which bodies are buried or ashes burned.