Rose, after Derrida

Each time that I write something about a rose
it feels like I am unfurling
into its new territory looking for birth behind a vagina
a look into the mirror to get glimpse of its silverlust
This type of advance often demands certain gestures
from the flower that can be read as resistance to
an aggression which is a learned tactic
I repeat after the bees. The resistance comes naturally
and the rose swirls a little more to remind me of
the labyrinth’s choke on famous thinkers

I am not someone who’s by nature polemical
or even philosophical enough to be questioning
the flowers ability to construe its gestures
The mind of a little princess as regalia engulfs her
as seen by her and her decorators through the mirror
as she appears to destabilize beauty
or trap anxiety within the concept
and the gesture at some point turning sourly reactive
brings a moment of fear

This does not happen at the moments when I write the rose
when I write that a rose is an architecture of necessity
of an aesthetics that is stronger than aroma
demanding that I must write as I write
about the architecture of thought and
about architecture as an epitome of immobility

and just then
there is a breeze in the rosebush but
nothing intimidates me when I write

I say what I think must be said about half-sleep
of rosaceous insects hidden under curls with no practical purpose
but to obey laws that some wand stroked for them
in the fragrant air until at that moment
in a sort of half sleep I am terrified by what I’m doing
Contesting a textual institutional in a kind of panic
as clouds thicken above my subconscious
the winds ruse conspicuous in the rosebush

Freud talks about childhood dreams where one
dreams of being naked and terrified
as the rosebush sees that they are naked
with not a drop of viscous reality on their tender stamens

So half-sleep, I maintain, is an impression
of something criminal and daunting like the growing black brood
in the corner of petals but
why do I say “petals” ?
This is not about a pentagonal petunia
but about a rose which is all swirls and hardly petals

But once I wake up from it, it is over.
I am awake, conscious, yet working in a way
more unconscious than in half-sleep.
The tyranny is over the structure is felled
A kind of vigilance that the clouds conceived
and the winds bore isn’t part of the moment’s truth
This vigilance is actually asleep
like the rose in absentia

===================

I wrote this poem in 2008 while reading and listening to some lectures/interviews of Jacques Derrida. I was reading “Of Grammatology” and some text and video interviews from his later years, trying to understand “Derridian deconstruction”. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoKnzsiR6Ss) And this is when I realized that not only did “deconstruction” entail an element of self-doubt or self-contradiction in the very womb of the thinking process that led to the creation of a writing or art, but also that its metaphysicology had a strong resemblance with many ancient Indian texts – the Upanishads and in particular, the Srimadbhagwat Gita.

I wanted to attempt a poem themed on the aesthetics of art. And I decided to use some of Derrida’s own speech in it. So I picked out some lines from those books and videos, used them as palimptext, altered them and threaded them into my poem which was primarily about a rose.