.

perhaps because it`s gray

and just as early morning rolls
across the bay, a watercolour wash
bleeds air to sky in pale Payne's
Gray layers, soaking surfaces
like words to lips in ebbsandflows,
like heat to skin between slow
sips of chocolate coffee in a
cup that slides upside the edge
onto a rim and greets the tongue,
lays a flavoured tip to each
incessant repetition while
rhythmic evocation after
rhythmic evocation drifts
along the edge of day, its
thick remains lay undissolved
like honey at the bottom of
a cup, and in the head its
meaning sinks snow-deep,
sliding further from its beat
until its definition melts
away like ice in shallow
pools, or sandy grains that
drift towards the shore,
the backandforth-ness of
unthought thought deposits
time inside a word, a word
that names itself inside
my voice, claims itself
outloud, epistemology,
the word, repeating it again,
its sounds, episteMOLogee,
sinking it like stone into a
moment, into this one time,
this epistemic epoch, episteme
drawn out like seaweed from
a rock, hard-core Locke-Descartes
and philosophes` disputes
between whatisness-es,
rationalisms and empiricisms
(the a priori and a posteriori
origins of the western canon),
non-poetic isms, thisandthat-nesses
hidden from a lazy sun that
seeps through opaque white,
the ink-black heat and cloud-light
gleam of their ideas sounds to
me like humid traffic stirring
up an early buzz below leaving
airborne dust with all of its
particulate presumptions,
ambient, machninic as the
day to dollars is, as if their
'knowing' is an essence that
informs itself, as if their
be-ing is a static thing that
fixes each of us to calendars
and clocks, as if becomings
can be captured and contained
in something separate from the
retrospective definition of
a life, of mine to yours, and
all this trapped in words that
beg for a context that refuses
chauvinistic thought, refuses
the philosophical chauvisism
that (the traditional portrait
of) a philosopher-as-ethical-judge
assumes, as when meter disappears
in jargon or expression to its
form, the this-means-that of it
a chainlink fence that has no
gate, so many words to words,
so, now's the time to rewrite
meaning in the margins like
grafitti on a page, marginalia,
not as episteme but as a hybrid
inter-text, and not to kill
tradition but also not to praise
the totalizing theories and
stagnant fixities of a language
that upholds academe.

hence, just as coffee starts
the day, so too neologies, each
neologizing act that lends no
final say to dictionaries,
epistemological absolutes and
the homogenizing limits held
therein, all these things that
hide new possibilites from view
also tugs the line of logic,
travels us back through 2500
years of Western thought and
like an elastic band pulled-taut
invites a letting-go, takes
taunting aim at this one moment
to blast its pure sense free,
and o sweet irony, the glancing
blow of a line that reads,

"the suppression of pluri-dimensional
symbolic thought ... [producing]
thesaurization, capitalization,
sedentarization and the formation
of ideology by the class that
writes or rather commands the
scribes" (Derrida, 1976)

lines that uphold the ideology
of hierarchy and the derridean
plea for non-linear thought
to pluck philosophy like a guitar
string, his poesis and his
observation being that the
history of non-linear writing
has always been with us (in
poems and paintings) and that
philosophy is a quest-ion of
finding new ways to read outside
the static line(s) of language,
of seeking a new way to "read
what wrote itself between the
lines of the volume" (Derrida),
a derridean notion of
supplementarity that always
seeks new interpretations,
to claim that words have
no metaphysically-fixed nor
historically-fixed origins,
but instead, only and always
arise from the text itself,
from its shifting frame,
from its con-text.

so why not play? puns, rhymes,
neologisms, complex references
and tangential digressions in
Derrida's epistemology, his
anti-episteme an acommunicative
strategy for combating logocentrism,
to seek difference in repetition,
differance,
to be in perpetual search of
a supplement that emancipates
meaning from the canon of any
text, an ethical quest for
what lies in the margins, as
if to dig philosophy out of
its academic entrenchment
because what is most threatening
to the corporate university
infrastructure is not an
interference with its academic
content, but rather any
innovation in the traditional
form of its language, because
stylistic innovation confounds
the logocentric tradition and
its corporate infrastructure
infinitely more than merely
debating its ideas, because
it re-presents that which is
not re-cognizable as that
which is yet-to-be, as if
to open up a new space of
experience that casts doubt
on the entire philosophical
tradition, its language, all
for the sake of exploring
philosophy further than
before.

so, epistemology, say the
word often enough in quick
succession, play it out until
it quickly loses meaning,
defaults into some sonorific
set of sounds stripped of
meaning, until it bleeds
itself of definition just
as early morning bleeds
the bay of sameness, see
predictability lit a little
differently along the static
line of its horizon each new
day because nothing ever
reads the same way twice.