Reading de Man

“If we strip knowledge of all its sumptuous trappings, of the entire apparatus in which it decks itself out in order to present itself as an absolute, we find at its heart only a human appetite, frail and arbitrary...” - Paul de Man (Montaigne and Transcendence)

Part I
Putting words on the unnamable yet again,
With precise abstractions
(Progressing the mind by placing a pause)
Such brilliant death
Knells for sharing
Dead ideas,
I smile, hungry to connect to it,
Supposedly alive,
Where am I in all this?
What have I done these past months
But construct a bigger and bigger lie to call myself,
To become a thought,
An object, something real,
Anything but this all-feeling eye,
An invisible wind
Touching chimes and knowing them as music.
But then this same eye sees
A shadow ahead,
A strong, voluptuous form
Fearlessly strolling the night,
Grinding the asphalt to diamond,
Upright against the rolling sky,
Detached and free
From the sprawling spirit inside me
Fearing to be, fearing to speak,
Fearing to taste the real
Without a little less added in,
But coming keyless to the locked door
Of my own home
Without any concern.

Part II
Intention comes from existence
Like a metaphor comes from the real:
To connect inner with outer,
To correspond the heart and the eyes.
But is there, in truth, that relation
Except as we can create it?
The wall we leap to cross is still a wall,
The crossing still a leap,
The leap still a loss.

Intentions can’t be read,
They can only be made to fit
Another intention.
All that others do, good or bad, to you, comes from a place
Impenetrable, an intention
That can only be recognized as your own,
Not understood as it is.
So sharing becomes the fraying of the truth on either side,
To a common place
Where there are no collisions.
That it works together at all is a miracle,
The common ground of our humanity, we say,
So what, then, if we never really know if our thoughts are the same?

We accept it as a vast unknowable, like our imagined God
And create a fortress of gold mined from the vein of the skies,
To protect what is inside that has been denied
In all this agreement—
God to define itself in the world,
Truth to name itself in the word,
Darkness to fill itself with the light…
But it is not the words, but the meaning behind the words,
Not the real, but the interpretation of the real,
Not the world, but the individual that breathes life into the world.
The light comes from within,
Created from life’s hot core are
The blazing jewels of appearances,
The hard surface of the dead, made real
By the furnace within,
When, its processes disputed,
Its creations ignored,
Its reality questioned,
It churns up the outside, rearranges all to fit its secret pain
Of not being allowed to be among the world,
Making the foreign native to the inside,
Where whole worlds lie stilled in watching,
Where universes turn without being aware of themselves
Except as they leave a gap, a need:
The open window
And the steaming apple pie in the narrow sunlight.

Sharing makes us feel as one
Because that's all we remembered
Before we put on the bandages
And drew cartoons on the cast,
And felt the sting of others, who were there
Not to hurt, or oppose, or replace us,
But to share, too, with their own inside worlds,
Outsized through pain and neglect,
Using the toy of appearances
As a weapon, as something real
To chasten or reward,
So spirits reached spirits
Far beyond the place of sharing,
Far beyond the warmth of love,
In wretched individual holes where what is left quivers,
Holding tighter still to the remains of a soul
That came in so boundless and real
And now clings even to paper, as a shadow image,
Seeing itself only in the moment before light overtakes dark.

Yet this soul is above all that is real,
It has created it all;
We think we’re perceiving what is already there,
But we’re straddling the strings of a violin,
Reverberating between sound and strumming,
Not allowing ourselves to believe, in our constricted frames,
That creation and perception are one and the same
Ocean that we sit now enduring
As it crashes against shores that keep diminishing,
Sand disappearing to the place
Where we came from and can no longer feel—
Our whole soul, an alien
Trying, we think, to kill us, so we batten
A few moments to ourselves, to feel the sunlight
Under cloud, to taste the remnant of spray,
To gain the wisdom of knowing the sandforms will crumble,
And maybe to suffer enough to imagine
No external world
Binding us in servitude,
No captor to keep us looking
Out at the vengeful stars.