The Death of Derrida: A Meditation

"Why, Sailor Ripley...that was the day my sweet Daddy died." - Wild at Heart, dir. by David Lynch, circa 1992

On the morning I learned of the death of Jacques Derrida, I was staying at the Hotel des Orangers in Nice. Not trusting, and not being able to afford, American health care, I'd repaired from China to the South of France for my health. Unlike Bogart I was not misinformed, for the trip did me a world of good, and unlike Casablanca there was water aplenty in Nice, both salt and sweet.

I learned of the death of the the eminent *philosophe* in the Times of London, now a Murdoch rag, which let its liquid siftings drift down on the fresh dug grave, to dishonor a shroud, for it characterized Derrida as French, and incomprehensible.

Which had me spitting my teeth all over the shop, and I wrote a thunderous letter that morning at the cafe des internet.

On the morning I learned of the death of Jacques Derrida, I told Marc, mentioned in Lonely Planet guide to fair France as the owner and operator of the Hotel des Orangers, and Marc was appropriately triste: but the waitress in the cafe, albeit French, was a school-leaver and did not know the name of Derrida.

The Hotel des Orangers is one corner of an old mansion on the rue that connects the railway station, in Nice, to the beach. It is painted orange and graced with orange trees, and is the distant origin of Princeton orange by way of good King Henry of France, a Protestant champion from Navarre, and William the Silent of Orange and Nassau of Holland.

Their followers, descendants in part from Albigensian heretics of the south of France, used the color orange to symbolize Protestant resistance to the last Valois and their attempt to unify France under a Catholic king, and in Holland to Phillip II of Spain, whose Duke of Alba was an ethnic cleanser. Orange became the symbol of the Protestant cause in England and thence took ship for America, where many Eastern universities include the color orange in their foot-ball colors to remind their supporters of their Protestant origins.

"Ho! Master Teague, have ye heard the decree?"

The most infamous use of Orange is devolved to Northern Ireland, of course. It is there but dismal drumming of a summer afternoon but once meant Freedom.

On the morning I learned of the death of Derrida, I reflected how smoking takes people one by one away from me, for Derrida's pancreatic cancer (like that of the late Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh celebrated with such dignity last week on Google's simple and noble site) is caused in the main by *tabac*.

Edsger Dijkstra succumbed perhaps to the sot-weed, not being able to deal with depression without it. My Mom, in my most infamous loss, died at 72, far too young for an American woman, clearly of smoking.

As a Catholic, I secretly believe that these poor souls in Purgatory will not be released to eternal Bliss until I am myself shut of the use and misuse of Nicotine. My belief is reconciled with the Enlightenment through what Phillip Caputo of Notre Dame calls the prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida.