FOUCAULT’S FICTION

while Foucault died too young with AIDS in a Paris hospital,

once an insane asylum he explored in his probing the genealogy

of madness, he confessed his life to a fiction writer, his lover,

Herve Guibert who wrote a diary and later a novel, and even

though Foucault contended history is a fiction with no meaning,

I question if he really meant it, since he was still eager for his life

to be recorded, even if imagined, at least surrendered for posterity,

and when he said, truth is a fabrication, perhaps he was weaving

the fabric of a warm blanket to comfort him in the lonely end

and after years pass, I read Foucault in a house near the ocean

in York Harbour, a town Foucault never visited, when Lana

calls out because she has taken the window out of the oven door

in order to clean it and needs my help to put it back, and I am

only a little useful because I am thinking about Foucault and can’t

make sense out of the screws and bolts littered on the floor, can’t

figure out how the dismantled parts go together, can’t understand

Foucault’s compulsion to store his story, and lose my breath in

a tangle of memories, even my own middle-aged history, no fiction,

and while I hold the steel angle bracket for Lana to bolt the clean

window in place, I still can’t see how a life devoutly dedicated to

dissecting the cadaver of the individual subject could still close

with a conviction of duty to spell the truth about Foucault before

the death of the author (who he was, where he had begun, who he

had become), and with an agnostic’s fired heart, I know only my

knowledge is impotent, useless for screwing oven windows and

for sorting out the operations of language and discourse, history

and fiction, the hypertextual plots of a dying man’s imagination