Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (3)

The third night's reading

The desire for knowledge is a condition predicated by the fact that we will at some time die. Why do we suddenly stop? What was at one moment vital and in close communion/communication with us is now as silent and cold as a stone. Where does that animated spirit go to once it leaves the body? At the base of all our questioning is perhaps the seeking after an answer as to why we must eventually die and how we reconcile ourselves to this. Mourning is perhaps just another form of question.

1 Knowledge can control the dead. We bind them into their graves with chatter, talk of accidents, disease, misspent years of dissolution and the fragile constitutions that were to be the cause of death. But unknown deaths will haunt us, deaths that fill the pages of the tabloid press, deaths inscribed in history books and deaths that we discover as we take the dog a walk.

2 The singing skull conjoins the past and future in one image. Its tongue articulated by lost muscles, its song echoing within a future auditorium of bone.

3 In work we save our souls. In work we sing our work songs, songs of the chains that bind the working class, swan songs of freedom chiming for a change.

When the fruit is rotten it’s time to plant the seed. The hard core is now ready to eat its outer coating, sucking nourishment from the teat of its own protection.
In following the father he is swallowed in the son’s wake.
Our lives are lived as repetition and copies, but for the living they are always new. When we are alive, each and every moment, even those seconds prior to death, are fresh minted and shiny. Each revolution of the Earth producing a new dawn, that for someone is always the first and for another the last. In this case the simulacrum is no weak copy. The repetition is renewal. All newborn animals set out with hope for the future, their strength and purpose unfurling as they grow. The fresh new copy pushes its head out through the soil and as it reaches upwards, raises itself up above last year’s fading cast off foliage.
Speaking with ghosts is a comfort when mourning; a prayer for forgiveness spoken quietly at the graveside.