LANGUAGE
Language Recursions
(After Charles Bernstein)
The absence of meaning is not the same as
the meaning of absence. Signifiers float
in a soup of their own d e v i s i n g
while readers navigate the margins of intent.
The voice emerges not from the center but from the periphery, where language begins to break down.
Words turn to dust eventually
but meaning is just dust pretending
to be architecture. Thisiswhatlanguagedoeswhenitisfrightened
— it self-consumes, letter by letter.
A recursive function without a base case: language eating itself indefinitely.
I have lost the ability to distinguish
between P O E T I C S and P O L I T I C S —
each syllable a contested territory
where the r u l e s of engagement are
constantly being rewritten being ignored.
The echo of a voice within the
mechanismsofculturalproduction insists on
its own un-reality, its paratactic relationship
to history and memory and t r u t h.
Language resists its own constraints
even as it invents them: this is the
P A R A D O X that poetry lives inside,
the impossible space between saying
and meaning b e i n g.
in the tradition of Charles Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"