Past the threshold of revulsion. Past all resistance. Past recognition. Past the eye, too. To be remembered to the point of being forgotten. To be swallowed whole, digested entire, used up without remainder. To slowly sink to the mind’s very bottom. Whence my dictum.

Addendum (December 23, 2000)

According to Richard Dawkins,[1] there is a suggestion that dolphins may have a means of communicating “mental images” to one another by emitting with their versatile voices the pattern of sound that would be produced by echoes from a particular object. However, there is no evidence for this delightful suggestion. If I were a dolphin, my dictum would be even more radical: what cannot be spoken should not be made. Not only would ornamental writing vanish without a trace, but there would be no art objects, also.

Footnote

1. The Blind Watchmaker, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1991 (first published in 1986), p. 118.