"APORIA"

"No one disputes the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign, but it is often easier to discover a truth than to assign to it its proper place." ~Saussure.

Today I couldn't stop sighing. I never woke up this morning. I got up, walked around but it didn't mean anything. Whatever the lack of food or the lack of water or sense made the day a total wash. I was bity and irritated. I'm still sort of comatose. I was going to tell you about saturday through tuesday but besides some quirky incidents like "running into" my director on the freeway an hour south or him finding out that i had a blog and wrote about him- nothing of note really happened. That and on the way to get something out of the car (sigh) I called him a bastard- and he said with a sort of smile, don't call me a bastard. Now in some people you might think they were joking but he was serious. The type of smile is hard to pin down. It's sort of dangerous, like inside he's seething and it hit some sort of trigger that if he didn't have that veneer of civility he might tear my face off. But perhaps I'm reading him wrong?

"The author has disappeared... God and man have died a common death." ~Foucault

It's true I have a potty mouth and if one were to complain about the degredation of culture and vernacular- words like bitch and bastard have become fairly normative, perhaps only in a corrupt set of linguists- not unlike how "suck" used to have much more seriously sexual implications then it does now. My mom used to hate it when I said, that sucks. A lot of a words' power derives from the delivery- emotional intent and cultural context- but to deny the certain objective power words have and not respect the cultural context and history of a word one is too obliviously "post-modern". So where does one draw the line? Cultural conditioning has made us abhor words like fuck and, okay, i won't offend your sensibilities by saying the C word- but even as the Vagina Monologues has taught us context and the empowerment of individual women can make the Cccc word sound a lot better, taking back the power anyone? For me, words like Jesus Christ, is and can be a catlyst for the sacred, and if I say it in anger or exasperation, it is indeed like dust in my mouth- but I still say oh my God! in the valliest of valley girl accents - Does that have anything to do with the word's pagan-germanic roots? Or perhaps to me it's more like saying, Gawd! And lately god can almost mean universe- something expansive and all encompassing. But I see the bind I'm in and I'm drawing a line.

However, when discussing a word we automatically agree on a context- it's the circular logic of people who don't believe in God but nevertheless continue to debate the existence of something they don't believe to exist- so the serpent bites his tail. You could probably play deconstructionism to anyone's benefit but to me it's primarily relief, because at the end of the day you have the life you have and it's got to be lived- not crammed into a contextual box ad nauseum- spending days arguing about the box we live in. It does give one pause though how certain words develop stigmas, go out of fashion or become cliched. Words were cliched long before Raymand Carver's character mourned the loss of a way to express grief in a non-cliched way. Ah, to be authentic. According to Wayne, in "Wayne's World" Kierkegaard said, "If you label me, you negate me." He acknowledges that words have power and the knowledge of those words, systems, Truth- is power- If you know it, you wield it. In "I, Pierre...: A case of parracide in the 19th century," Faulcault traces the development of the language of psychology. You would think that there was always a language, a pardigm in which to classify people but there wasn't, not in the modern sense. The case was curious because they could not classify the defendant- mad or very clever? In the case of Emily Rose- demon possessed or epileptic fit? And the power comes into play because once classified, once diagnosed they can be labeled away, processed, red tagged and forgotten about. We don't like quandaries- it causes shifty uncomfortableness, mainly because we might actually have to think for ourselves and have ourselves and others risk the wrong conclusion.

So, back to the bastard- at the end of the day once you've defined the exegesis you've got some boundaries to guide you and live your life by. You think to yourself, there is a word with a capital T called Truth and there is the objective and humanity- with its shifty smiles. Breathe a sigh of relief and just tell me a fucking story. In the end there was a girl, who watched too much tv, who wrote this while watching the simpsons, veronica mars and lost- eating a carrot, scratching her left arm, then ear, no wait- right shoulder, then left ear and who notices as she licks her lips how dry they are. She looks at two books- Critical Theory and Foucault and wishes she had a class to take that would compel her to read them again, she might just anyway- when summer comes again and the reruns start. As it is, the news started and there's a long-legged spider crawling up the wall.