subtext

“Language is a virus from outer space,” William Burroughs wrote. The panoply of symptoms this virus produces determines how we create and view the world we inhabit. Language, like a virus, replicates itself and mutates as we attempt to control it, or perhaps, adapts to our attempts to control it. More often language controls us; and, we let it.
Sitting in an aisle of a local bookstore in Austin, I read, in a book on Derrida, “Meaning is Fascist.” I laughed out loud. Totalitarian perhaps, but fascism is not the only ideology meaning takes on. Ideology, whether political, religious, social, academic, or poetic, controls through cliché. Cliché controls through limitation of thought; self-satisfied set pieces that defy interpretation, interaction and interpenetration with a reader. Tom Raworth said he did not write down to his readers because he was one of his readers. I prefer my own clichés, a totalitarianism of myself. I rarely set out with any direction in mind; meaning manifests itself without my help. I place two words in proximity and meaning appears, despite myself.
Meaning is ambiguous; ambiguity is attractive. In ambiguity, the poem is opened to multiple readings, depending upon which facet sparkles the reader’s eye. As it comes forth, the multiplicity inherent in ambiguity dazzles like light through a prism. Which half of a metaphor is being compared? The subject/object dialectic fuses rather than divides. Infinity unfolds in a grain of sand. Meaning is never set; it shifts, not evasively, but transcendently: transcendent of any one reader or writer. Variant readings occur simultaneously; each brings depth and complexity to the other as strings in a piano create and sustain resonance.