Meg Dowell Writes

Sometimes, even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else, I’ll write something for a class and really fall in love with its depth. I don’t necessarily think I’m a great writer, but I do like the way my mind works sometimes. A sample, for you, since I am crazy and have no brain power left to write anything new:

The general theory of Jacques Derrida, in his work “Dissemination,” encircles the idea of truth versus lies. Reacting to the written words and ideas of Plato, he claims that “In writing, what [an author] does not speak, what he would never say…is already entrenched in…the man of non-presence and of non-truth” (Derrida 1700). In any true thing a writer documents with the pressure and well-crafted movement of a pen, honesty only comes from the mind of a human. Human nature, in reality, is an endless tangled web of truth and lies. Similarly, John Ashbery’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” is a poem about nothing other than what truths can be stated by lines full of lies. For one thing, paradox and oxymoron are, in themselves, woven strings of honesty and dishonesty. The first line of Ashbery’s poem sets off the nature of the stanzas to follow with a bang—claiming that “This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level” (line 1) even though the complexity of the work’s language is what gives it its worth. The speaker within the poem claims later that the poem itself has “set [him] softly down beside [us]” (line 16). However, the author’s diction and nature of the presentation of his point is anything but soft and settling. There is truth in his closing, though, bringing this argument full-circle, as he says, “The poem is you” (line 16), therefore referring to us, the faithful readers of his truthful and deceitful lines. If we are humans, and humanity has the capability of being both true and false, then the poem is, in fact, us; as it speaks to us without always clearly stating the truth, we are still able to decipher between what is real and what is not. As Derrida states in “Dissemination,” “only words that are deferred…can thus get Socrates moving” (Derrida 1702-1703). Sometimes, as human beings trapped in a world that is neither fully truthful or completely unrealistic, we must rely on what isn’t said in order to interpret what point is actually being made. Otherwise, even with truth to untangle from endless strings of lies, life would be quite boring to live.

And now, to plague my life with Food Science.

Love&hugs, Meg<3