[How generous of you.] Let’s go back to the pharmakon. In Derrida’s essay that you’re so fond of plagiarizing— [You’ve read it?] Dirk. There’s more to my life than just children’s stories about ponies. My first book was about feminist theory as it relates to short films. [Huh. I didn’t know that. Maybe I’ll read it sometime.] Anyway, Derrida claims that one of the most important words in Plato’s Phaedrus is a word that’s not in it. [Right. The “chain of signification” begins with a reference to Pharmacia, and travels through other related words, like pharmakon. But Plato never mentions pharmakos, the scapegoat. Which is what his text is implicitly entirely about. Even if it escapes the notice of Plato himself, it nevertheless passes through certain discoverable points of presence that can be seen in the text.] Yes. And you’ve copied Plato’s exact chain (or copied Derrida’s copy of Plato’s chain), but with one difference. You mentioned pharmakos, because your text is very explicitly about sacrifice. And you mentioned Pharmacia and pharmakon, both as remedy/cure and even its secondary meaning as paint. No, the word you left out, your invisible link, is pharmakeus. Sorcerer. [Ah. The powerful one. The one in control.] Exactly. [So the absence of “pharmakeus” reflects my uncertainty about who is really in control of my own book. Back to control again.] Back to control again. See my point? [What exactly are you saying I’m afraid of? Of not being in control? Of being in control? Or of the uncertainty?] All three. [I thought you’d say that.] But here, in this book, right now, you’re afraid of taking control. Of being the invisible pharmakeus. You say that you want to erase this book by throwing it into the river Lethe. But come on. You don’t need to do that. You could erase it yourself. You, the author. You could burn it, or tear it up, or, hell, you could just stop writing it. But you’re choosing to act through Dirk the character, and trying to convince me, who is still you, to symbolically destroy it. Even though, ironically, I couldn’t destroy it in this way without you creating more of it — you need to write me destroying it. [I really do want to erase it. Everything I said earlier was true. I just… I guess that that’s not the only thing I want, is all. Or, only part of me wants it.] We both know you well enough to know that you can’t just abandon it. It’s not what you do. You always take your projects too far, and make them so hard for yourself, but you complete them regardless. Or maybe you even complete them because they’re so hard. You’re a masochist who creates problems for yourself just so you can be the one who solves them. [You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.] So you need to finish it. And you could right now! “Jeanne Betancourt hurled the book into the river.” That’s all you need to write. So why don’t you write it? [It… this book’s gotten out of hand. It’s grown bigger than I intended. More complex. And I don’t think that I can just end all of that so abruptly.] Does that imply that you think this book has some sort of life of its own, beyond what you gave it? That in playfully making your characters self-aware, you made them aware of play, and somehow made them real? In a sense, at least. [When you put it like that, it sounds really stupid, doesn’t it?] Yeah, kind of. [But now the problem is that I’ve already wrapped up so much bullshit along with the rest of the book. Any parts of it that are worth saving are mixed up with all of my insecurities and self-importance and self-loathing. I can’t take any of those parts back now. Like I said, I don’t want Jane to see that. Hell, I don’t want to see that. So preserving this book would mean preserving all of… that along with it. Would it be merciful to put it out of its misery? Destroy it so that it doesn’t have to shoulder the onus of all the horseshit from my own brain that I pumped into it? Or is that just my selfishness talking, disguising itself as self-abasement?] Now we’re getting to the other big issue at the heart of things: responsibility. [Okay, yeah, I get it. We don’t need to talk about that one in detail here.] #DetectivePony #FMK #TheJudges #Minos #JeanneBetancourt #Dirk
