Only Parts Of Us Will Ever Touch Parts Of Others

In Memoriam, J.F.K.

This bullet is an old one. 

In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montivideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of the public hecatomb of a battle. 

In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socrates drank down one evening. 

In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.

Jorge Luis Borges

the efficacy of ambivalence or ambiguity

Graham Meyer: LET’S EAT GRAMMAR

Eely but pragmatist, language accomplishes its ends but resists revealing its inner life. The purpose of language is communication, and so when its business is done, most messages evanesce without a second thought, their interlocutors heedless of the theoretical matrices they’re supporting or opposing. Language is a tool, a medium, a vehicle. The successful use of language results in the successful transmission of a message.