“The Ink Stains That Have Dried upon Some Line”

This is the last of three posts about deconstruction. (Click here to go back to the first post.) We’ve been looking at a picture (below) of my parents at a Roman Catholic dinner honoring couples who had been married for 50 years.

In my last post I’d asked you to listen to John Hartford sing “Gentle on My Mind” and look for a reference to writing. (I hope you listened to it and melted the way I always do! Incidentally, I once heard Hartford – who composed the song and wrote the lyrics – perform it in person.)

OK, back to work. Here are the lines from the song that I’m going to talk about today:

And it’s knowin’ I’m not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that have dried upon some line

Written vows – according to Hartford’s song – are dry and lifeless. They hark back to a feeling in the past that was once alive and vibrant but may have faded with the passage of time. Hartford’s song is about the difference between marriage vows – “forgotten words and bonds” – and real  love, which has no need for promises and obligations.

What Hartford has tapped into here is a bias against writing that goes back to Plato and has found its way into every aspect of our Western culture. According to Jacques Derrida, we tend to dismiss writing as a stale and lifeless imitation of what’s real and alive: the warm breath of natural speech.

One of Derrida’s goals as a philosopher was to challenge Plato’s value system. Sometimes what’s unnatural and artificial is more expressive of who we really are than what’s natural, inborn, and spontaneous.

I’m thinking of myself after 25 years of ballroom lessons. I can feel and respond to a piece of music in ways that the untrained, “natural” Jean couldn’t have attempted. So who’s the real me? A postmodernist might say that all my “unnatural” training has uncovered parts of me that otherwise would have stayed hidden.

And what about those “ink stains that have dried upon some line”? I’m as much of a romantic as anyone else, and I love the idea of being swept away in a passionate swoon.

But I also have enough life experience to know that keeping a promise – even when it was made long ago, and things aren’t going well, and you really don’t feel like it today – has deep and lasting value. (But don’t think for a minute that my common-sense attitude towards life and love keeps me from appreciating Hartford’s song!)

If you’d like to learn more about these natural vs artificial and writing vs speech issues, I’ve published an article arguing that Bernard Shaw anticipated Derrida’s critique of Platonism in – of all things – Pygmalion (AKA My Fair Lady). You can read my article here. (If you’re thinking that Shaw was on the side of Derrida and the postmoderns – that’s what I think too. It doesn’t seem to have mattered that Derrida wasn’t even born when Shaw wrote Pygmalion!)

 *  *  *  *  *

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you might be thinking that I’ve loaded an awful lot of really heavy stuff into this simple picture of my parents. That’s right – and that’s my point.

In the end, writing is all about thinking. Because we want more, more, more out of life, we seek out writers who can add depth and breadth to our everyday experiences.

In the first of these three posts about the anniversary dinner, I talked about my mother in a personal way. Was there anything else to say about this picture?

My answer to that question is yes. I think we can “deconstruct” the picture – take apart its apparently simple and straightforward message to find unintended meanings underneath. Here’s my list:

  • Because the Catholic Church is so large, it sometimes loses touch with the individuality and diversity of its members
  • The Catholic bias against sex can complicate its support for marriage
  • No matter how hard an institution tries to send a simple, unified message, other truths will find a way to be heard

Do you have a picture you can “deconstruct”? Are there any accidental details that challenge the intended message? Or is there a “before” or “after” story that adds complexity to the picture?

My Mother and Father with the Bishop

  My Parents and the Bishop

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