It was last Thursday, the 27th of March, that I drove Rosemarie to the emergency room for what I knew would be her admission to the psych ward. On our way out the door I picked up a book to read during the wait. At the hospital, during the wait, I discovered I had picked up Madness and Civilization.
Foucalt didn't have much to say about Rosemarie. Or me. Or our relationship. Madness and Civilization is concerned with how the idea of madness evolved through a critical period of European history. Although some of the narratives in the book are quite vivid, it is not really about individual persons or their mental states.
I read a little and put the book down again. There was an aura of unreality about Foucalt's discussion of the idea of madness. It all seemed pretty vaporous compared to what Rosemarie had been going through.
But then, I get the same gut reaction to most writing from the postmodern/deconstruction people. The guy at my former dot.com job (I mentioned him here) claimed that nothing existed until it had a name. I said how do infants and small children interact with the world before things have names, and he said they don't. I thought that was preposterous and told him so. Reading Foucalt in the waiting room for Rosemarie's admission gave me the same goofy sense of somebody's language being all bent out of shape. It's as though nothing in the Deconstructionist's universe actually exists: the whole thing is constituted of nothing but words.
I wondered, sitting there in the hospital waiting room with my wife of thirty-six years, a woman who knows me better than any other living person, whether Foucalt had been a musician.
Then I wondered whether any musician could ever subscribe to the notion that human language is the entire measure of reality. To me that would be a flat contradiction: if human language is the measure of reality, then music is impossible. But music is real. My experience of music, and what I experience in musical activity, is not mediated by the conceptual layers and constructions the deconstructionists (at least the one I worked with three years ago) love to deconstruct.
The same is true, I think, of sexual experience. Or contemplative meditation.
11:52:02 PM 
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