Deconstruction
Indifference stilled an Autumn night
as wanton winds steered their love
elsewhere. Yet, somehow
a sparrow nest fell from high above
off a freckled, half-broken bough.
as wanton winds steered their love
elsewhere. Yet, somehow
a sparrow nest fell from high above
off a freckled, half-broken bough.
Their wings had grown
and the young had flown
wild and free.
Wild and free.
That autumn night
a shade called Home
went back to being
just another tree.
Lincolns Sparrow At Nest -- Damon Calderwood
The poem illustrates how things change meaning according to points of reference and circumstance. Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher who developed a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, particularly in his seminal "De la grammatologie" (Of Grammatology) of 1967. He borrowed Martin Heidegger's concept of "Destruktion," a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word and the history behind them, and applied it within the framework of Ferdinand de Saussure's 19th-century notion of language as a system of signs and words that only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs. Derrida insisted that a concept must be understood in the context of its opposite, but also that "in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand," so the first task of deconstruction is to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts. However, since language depends on duality, deconstruction needs constantly to create new terms to indicate the opposition and interplay. No text is a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable meanings; all texts therefore have more than one interpretation, all which are inextricably linked since meaning is made possible by the relations of a word to other words within the network of structures called language. He asserted that "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte); for instance, "house" derives its meaning as a function of how it differs from "shed," "mansion," "hotel," "building," "domicile," "residence," etc.; these connotations; at what point is one of these connotations abandoned in favor of another? There is never a moment when meaning is total; complete meaning is always differential and postponed.
ReplyDeleteThank you Duane for such a rich analysis of the poem and its nuances!
ReplyDeleteThank you Duane for such a rich analysis of the poem and its nuances!
ReplyDeleteThe reviewer seems very knowledgeable .
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteThat autumn night
a shade called Home
went back to being
just another tree.
Just sheer beautiful.