August 2008

If, with quiet, patrician dignity, he lies down to sleep each night saying his unanswerable prayer (for a word will never fully answer a word), why, at the drunken height of his feasts, should he notice another set of eyes gleaming over his own reflection's shoulder on the bloody surface of the wine in his goblet, and then rise and turn at once to greet a friend who was never there, overturning the banquet table with only the red heat in his cheeks as an excuse?



The idea of the last word is as the complement of the exin. If the exin is the first word, unsayable, that establishes the inestablishable logic of induction, then the last word is the ultimate answer, unsayable, to the question produced by all pronounceable words. If there is an answer to every sayable question, it cannot itself be sayable, for otherwise to speak it would be to generate more questions.