What a stupendous essay this is! Thank you for posting it, Paul: you've done me a great favor--and I suspect I'm not the only one who needed this. It's the first time I've felt that I begin to understand what "Deconstruction" really means, despite the efforts of learned friends to explain it.
I've printed it, so as to be able to reread it and share it with friends. What you say about the mind's desire for order, the way it moves toward the creation of order and meaning, is exactly right. Sometimes the mind rushes to a meaning that isn't correct and then has to readjust its interpretations of what it thought it perceived, afterward, but it doesn't ever seem satisfied with no meaning, no order at all.
Julie's mention of "play," and of the experimental as a kind of play, fits in with experience, and especially with the experience of teaching. I've given workshop students separate words to use in the composition of a poem--not seriously, but as an exercise--within a very short time, and what happens is revealing. Almost universally what happens is that each student comes up with something that is his own, that was somehow "there" and ready on some level, and the arbitrary words, even words tossed before them at random, were subjected to the same desire for order that you mention in the essay, and ended by forming some kind of sensible utterance. We've all had the experience of being moved in a whole new and fruitful direction in a poem by the unexpected rhyme that arrives like a pull on the sleeve!
Clearly that's what we do with language, so that the poem is a coming together of language and thought, feeling, memory, associations of all kinds--not "phonemes" or any other atomic particles of speech. Why would anybody think--or want to think--that poetry--or any writing--could be produced in the absence of all evidence of humanity?
Anyway, thanks for this wonderul thing to mull over and learn from!
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