Iteration            eruption                        irritation

Roland Barthes slaughtered by a laundry van

OMO powder sprinkled liberally on the bodies of dead and alive authors

I follow the blue dots, like biscuit crumbs, through Binet’s imaginings:

Jacques Derrida attacked by dogs, his throat ripped out (it was pancreatic cancer,
Wikipedia tells me,

which got him in the end)

Louis Althusser strangles his wife (true)

John Searle throws himself into black	unforgiving water (false)

Michel Foucault gives head	 gets head (probable)

Umberto Eco in a peaked Venetian mask (possible)

Soller and Kristeva plot 		a psychopathic couple (im-possible)

Judith Butler down on her performative knees (horrible)
these icons – these thinkers, these – yes, I will admit it – heroes of mine – not all,

only some – played with – in a sacrilegious way
made flesh and corruptible, made foolish and foul

(were they ever Gods? yes, perhaps … if the Gods are those who tell us how to live)



I remember my pre-semiotic days

a tree was just a tree: prescient foliage, yes, but real dew drops on the end of the wattle

blossoms

We shook the branch to make fake rain, our daughter laughed her seven-year-old laugh
… she is 7 and there is a 7th function of language

and on the day I read of a plot twist, in Binet’s book, on the 2nd of August, 1980

it is the 2nd of August, 2017, which is also my daughter’s 7th birthday

the signs are everywhere …

impossible, now, to escape, to go back to innocence

truth       representation            intention
a huge piece of ice breaks off Antarctica

“the size of Luxemborg”

“seven times the size of New York City”

“one and a half times the size of Adelaide”

“more than half the size of Melbourne”

floating, free of referent, shape mutating in every different inflection of a news reader’s

surprise

It speaks in frozen water, and this is not a language we know
“I don’t want you to go” she weeps in the doorway; a body felt, a body feeling

I am leaving my daughter on her birth day

to be interviewed interstate, to be questioned as to my knowledge of the Gods: I grasp at

academia, 
hopeful of the climb, scrambling at the edges

They won’t ask about that day of birth, there is no way to speak of it, that day

no words

the bloated body does not exist in these exalted towers, I whisper of my children
will we hear the ice bump up against us when it comes?

Stretching         breaking                        yearning

“I don’t want you to go”

the ice will say something different when it comes

happy to say goodbye to its former tethering, to drown us 
the 7th function of language, Binet proposes, creates powerful politicians: Mitterand and

Obama, the

smooth ascendance of linguistic manipulation
in the meantime, the Gods have melted
there is no phone call, I listen hard

only the trickle of water to be heard

                                                                                                             slowly rising