He could never really understand, no matter how hard he tried, what deconstruction was, but COVID-19 seemed to be as close as he got to knowing it in its full energy. The virus itself was almost like an echo or a shadow of the idea materialized in physical form the way it wiped clean the blackboard of one’s future self, that is, all one’s plans for the immediate future, and how that changed the meaning of the past, and one’s identity itself.
Yes, the future was something he could no longer see, that thing he never knew he could see, or at least imagine, prior to it disintegrating just like that. There were vacations planned, and between them, various places he expected to go – a brief trip to his in-laws for a weekend, to his parents in Vermont – people he would see off and on, moments they would share, the jokes, the expressions on their faces – all gone, because who knows now, with this year disrupted, what was going to happen? Whether he and Liz would keep their jobs, stay in their Brooklyn apartment? Who knows if even the New York City school system, where their children would be in high school, would even be able to provide the education they’ve promised and intend to? Fuck, one or more of them might even be dead in the next few weeks.
Well, he wasn’t too concerned about the being dead part, though that was a possibility, however vague. But what was beginning to occur to Peter was how often he found himself dumbfounded, and at the same time relaxed and calm, or at times in a state of complete giddiness.
It was as if the whole rigamarole of having his expectations slashed, left in shambles, had begun to destroy the image of what and whom he thought he was, and it would just stop his thinking dead. And since he had trouble understanding who he was, it was actually harder to imagine his death, since he was unclear who it would be who was dying.
There was this aspect of deconstruction that was like the termite of all identity and civilization, all moral standards of truth that everyone tends to rely on, but there’s this other side of it which seems like some of the more rigorous side of Zen Buddhist exercise, not the popular, hokeyness that sold books in the business section at Barnes and Noble, and that was the more rigorous and flagellant part that interested him most of all.
Yet there was a book that his professor of many years go had written, condemning Paul DeMan, and deconstruction in general. He thought of it guiltily, having never read it through completely.
And yet, this same man poured an enormous amount of energy promoting many similar ideas, as well as John Ashbery, whom Peter thought of as the most deconstructive poet of them all, the way his words and phrases seemed to slip out from beneath the need to mean anything at all, or tended to mean too much, to be a kind of – no…not that… a kind of aporia.
And David himself played dangerously close, with his poetry of formal contrast, of paradox, the way it stitched together incongruities and irregularities that somehow worked, and seemed so simple. This was maybe the sneakiest form of deconstruction, when you put two or more things together that shouldn’t be together, and make them seem comfortable, the lion lying beside the lamb, that kind of thing.
But if it worked it worked, and if healed something within one, or helped to set one free, then that’s a good thing, is it not? It’s like telling the crystallization process that tries to turn us all back into earth and stone to fuck off, isn’t it?
After all, wasn’t it Stevens who said “How should you walk in that space and know / Nothing of the madness of space, / Nothing of its jocular procreations? / Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand // Between you and the shapes you take / When the crust of shape has been destroyed…”
Yes, to Peter that was all of deconstruction and all of schizoanalysis. Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, they mean well, they really did. But Stevens, he explained it.
He didn’t know what would happen, who and how they would survive this, but reports were saying that carbon monoxide levels were down 50% in New York City.