Groan.
I once tried to read (and I mean REALLY tried to read) *Of Grammatology*. Derrida tells us deconstruction is neither science nor philosophy, rather (and you have to get to the end of the book to find it), he's offering what Rousseau once claimed he was offering: "The dreams of bad nights are given to us as philosophy. Younwill say that I too am a dreamer. I admit this. But I do what others fail to do. I give my dreams as dreams and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake."
So a bloke once asked him: "My question to you is: are you allowing me to interview in much the same spirit - as a dream to be taken as the listener or reader wishes?"
So ol' Jacques ups and sez: "Yes, but if I were to indulge in saying so, I would imply that I am totally awakened while dreaming, and I have no illusion about that."
Well, as is the case here, Derrida's always indulging in saying so, and also always indulging in saying he's not. You're allowed to do that when the possibility of meaning is infinite.
We poor boobs, who can but sit and listen, are left to allocate whatever meanings our contemporary dream bestows (and there are no logical limits in D. as to the meanings our all-commanding, and seemingly haughtily autonomous, dreams may choose to assign), and even whether we be awake or asleep depends wholly on how we dream ourselves.
If you can get anything out of that, please write and tell me what Macarthurs Park is about while you're at it.
I'll take you more seriously than Derrida would, for unlike him I value the written word, assume you're awake, grant your authorship a role in the scope of possible meanings, and presume to delimit that scope thus:
'left the cake out in the rain' does not mean 'Macarthurs Park is melting in the dark' because either (a) they have meaninglessness in common - so they do not have meaning in common, or (b) one or both has meaning, in which case there must be a lot they do not mean - for to have an infinite possibility of meanings is to have no meaning, thus there is no human communication, thus, whatever Derrida wrote (everything thus nothing), we'd be reading something else, and we'd have no reason not to read our keyboards instead (nothing thus everything).
Sorry Ange & Catherine, a few left conservatives still infest these shores ...
Cheers, Rob.