thank you

three words

play

trace

undecidability

play is that place where thought is free,
although notsomuch like games or gambling,
but more like jouer, like the strings of a machine
when they are wrapped not-too-tight, such that their
very structure can be dislocated, taken apart just
because it's there, and is also that which reveals
what the disruption of presence is like and what
writing also is, thought communicated in the absence
of someone, like speaking to someone without being
able to see any re-action, allthewhile knowing that
it has some effect, like knowing someone from a
distance, and finally learning from that experience
that there can be two distinct forms of play, even
if surprised to discover that both kinds require a
certain disruption of
systems-and-structures-previously-set-in-place
in order to unfold, and how these two types of
play can be categorized but only after having
experienced their difference

and then understanding

1. the play of nostalgia for fixed systems or for
what already is or was, accompanied by some deep-seated
longing to return to simpler belief systems whenever
one mourns the loss of any fixity of meaning, like
alice's humpty dumpty perched upon a wall, deliberately
there but just to survey the scene, for equilibrium

and also

2. the play of desire, meaning the need to play along,
to find that opportunity to rejoice in multiplicity,
to search for what-ifs so as to affirm the
provisional nature of all meaning, to suspend one's
core beliefs, but not necessarily to look for their
full presence (because ultimately, doing that will
result in rest and cetain stability), but instead,
to adopt the playful pace of revelation amidst the
flux of impermanence, to find joy in the very
possibility of limitlessness, and to reside in a
state where everything is newly-coated-white,
like freshly fallen snow, like finding surfaces
as-yet-unmarked, moments when all things are
still possible, like an empty piece of paper or
the strobing screen of every breathless
first-time-thought-about-to-be-recorded, the moment
just before its inaugural expression unleashes
a floodofthought that shatters all hope of
unlimitlessness, knowing its release will unfurl
writing-as-the-game-of-being-trapped-within-language
that will build walls around the self, just as the
study of linguistics excludes the problem of meaning,
an idea that begins in Plato's Phaedrus, a moment when
Plato condemns writing-as-play (paidia) while also
wanting to preserve it and so opposes it to the gravity
of speech, thereby creating its own dichotomy,
just as the philosophical tradition of western
metaphysics strives to contain writing as playintheworld
while also knowing how it can never really be contained
like that, that meaning can never be fixed within
language, just as Derrida exhausts the question of the
inexhaustable world-ness of the world together with the
transcendental meaning-of-being, so as to free
play-as-writing from its empiricist, positivist or
metaphysical discourse, to bring its 2500-year-long
entrapment in episteme to an end, knowing how such
ideas must be rigourously worked through to their proper
conclusion, to stave off the stagnation of containing
them within the very re-presentation they condemn, as
their mere mark, as just another collected piece in the
game-of-the-world, and how these are all things to be
considered before attempting to understand the forms of
play, while also knowing that the beginning of this game
contains a certain hope in the "immotivation of the trace",
also having learned that this is the place where play
resides, and thinking all these thoughts while also
wondering if they serve to help one see beyond oneself,
imagining that one can finally set oneself free by them,
free enough to scale the walls of self-imposed
restriction, to see above it all or to think as if one
could scale such self-limits, to somehow cross beyond that
point of no return

and

trace: means nothing but displacement, as if a word
is like a marble dropped into a glass of water,
how one tracks its path while slowly sinking into it,
or like a footprint left in snow, the crunching press
of its impression left behind, that it can never
be a master-mark since it re-presents itself as
an anterior presence, as the mark of its origin
but only implied in the outline of its original
form, a word that Derrida uses interchangably with
"archi-writing" or "differance",
knowing that the race to trace anything left behind
or to catch up to it is what it is, is nothing but
the movement of thought itself, which is nothing
inandofitself, even as it also exceeds that overriding
question of 'what is...?', a question that contingently
makes its asking possible, knowing that there are so
many words with which to name the structure of the sign,
that names are always determined by a trace of something
else, by a trace of something absent, a non-concept
that describes some unnamable movement of difference
itself, like memory (which is always required for
meaning to operate), memory for something both present
and absent (as the non-presence of something else
inscribed within the meaning of its presence) and
knowing that what is absent matters (for difference to
exist) since any trace-of-being is not just the
disappearance of its origin (within the discourse of
Western episteme) but is also the origin of its origin
(or the origin of a transcendental truth), even if this
notion ultimately destroys its name, its arche-trace,
and this is where transcendental phenomenology
(being, experience, presence) equates with
metaphysics (interiority) in how it tries to show
the incompetence of science and philosophy (its
collective quest for the closure of an episteme
walled-in by presence), just as difference moves
beyond the field of episteme but can never be fully
named within the limits of science and philosophy,
as if the unrelenting race of difference could simply
be called writing (within this historical closure),
and if the structure-of-the-sign is determined by
its trace (of something other than itself), it is
paradoxically forever absent from itself, and therefore
not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than
sensible, not more transparent than opaque, which
ultimately eludes any precise definition

just as all these words are tangled up

like Zeno's paradox, his shooting arrow always-only-ever
resting in one spot along the arc of its journey while
still in-motion, still-in-motion, which teaches that the
presence of its movement is its essence and is conceivable
only insofar as every other instant is already re-marked
by traces of its pastandfuture, the arc of its movement
linked like still photos in a film and how its implied
motion can be present in one's stationary thoughts but
only if its present instance is not something given up,
like chains of static ideas that comprise becomings
even while weighted down by the result of all those
unpredictable relations captured inbetween the moving
aion, in between the ever-shifting pastandfuture of any
now and how the assemblage of becoming-every-second is
just like when one utters any word with intended meaning
while also knowing that it contains trace amounts of other-words-deliberately-not-chosen but nonetheless,
how any chosen word functions as a signifier only insofar
as it consists of other things, other traces, other threads
of meaning that matter to their movement, the living breath
of signification only made possible if each so-called
'present' element is related to something other than itself,
and thereby holds the mark of its past (as its path)
statically within, vitiated by some trace of its relation
to some unknown-unknown and shot through an ever-present-now
towards what is called the future no less than to what is called
its past, but always constituting the present by its very
relation to that which it is not:
"what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future
as a modified present"
but to its irreducible and singular self,
like standing-still-in-motion

and

undecidability: as if all time were mine and as
if every book ever written were beside me, surrounding
me with piles of leatherbound answers, knowing that
the only choice would be to pick the one as-yet-unwritten,
that the unfinished story (wherein all things are
still possible) would be the one to chose, while also
knowing that it would contain within its unfilled pages
more than what the conditions of its possibility could
ever allow, knowing anything that actually challenges
the idea of having purely uncontaminated criteria could be
what rests at the heart of all decisions, namely, Derrida's
radical undecidability, the very thing which cannot be
closed off by any decision, but which continues to inhabit
all subsequent ones, that unnamable thing that hovers in
the distance between the plurality of arrangements made
possible by it and the actual arrangement that finally
prevails, a decision, not predetermined by its original
structure but requiring certain passage through its
undecidability

how one gets lost in words but still finds a way

and while perched upon that point of (any) decision
is an actual moment of madness, like leaping across
a gushing creek, flinging across the experience of
everything-rushing-at-one-allatonce while staring
down the face of all possible undecidables and spilling
out towards some creative act of one's own chosing,
thereby breaking the spell of one's inertia, much like
Zeno's arrow, travelling perpetually in place while
also knowing that if one could rip the night right
off the sky until only white prevailed, one would,
and that one could also say without any trace of
hesitation or regret just how much one loved it all,
its playful splashing sounds of possibility contained
therein, even if its moving current leaves no
originary trace behind

and



o



take down the stars
roll up the roads
and
pour the lake away
when he is gone
for nothing left
will quite compare

to
this play
this trace
and
this undecidability