Silent The Interpretation Poem by gershon hepner

Silent, the interpretation
from which love is born,
makes a sound with altercation
when true love is torn.
The messages we must decipher,
expressing worlds unknown,
can’t be read by any lifer,
loving in a prison zone.
They only can be understood
when love departs, replacing
“always will” with “never could, ”
and the heart stops racing.

Inspired by a quotation from Proust and Signs, by Gilles Deleuze, cited by Rivka Galchen in the first page of her book Atmospheric Disturbances. (Deleuze’s books Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense led Michel Foucault to declare that “one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian.” Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault's comment was “a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.” One can see what the two men meant when reading Deleuze’s quotation that Galcehn cites:

It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished in silent interpretation…The beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us…that must be deciphered.


8/29/08