Tickle, tickle, funny bone; How I wonder why you laugh. If writing, it is such a bore What makes you write this . . . graph?I just made up this little ditty for no reason whatsoever. One needs an interruption every now and then. (If you can't beat them join them, right?) In any case, we were talking about some defect (original, to boot) in some truth. A truly fascinating subject. I was reading this article in a recent issue of PMLA the other day, and I encountered the following intriguing statement: "The plot is distributed through five principal images: apple, wilderness, temple, body, and seeds" (Teskey 14). This issue is so significant (it is so fraught with a kind of highly problematic [non]sense) that it deserves a new par/a/graph. We were (I hope you still remember this) speaking of some original defect of truth. This is important. The reason is not difficult to find. You see, the images in the quotation from Teskey remind me of some very genetic things. The apple. Could this be the pro/verbial fruit (forbidden, to boot) that Adam and Eve (ladies first?) consumed in the Garden of Eden? Wow! "Wilderness, temple, body, and seeds" suddenly form a con/text fraught with sign/if/icance (please notice the "if" in the middle of that marvelous word). What is (was) outside the Garden is (was), of course, wilderness. Temple. How should I take this? Of course, one's body is, in a sense, the temple of one's soul (which may well raise another question: which is the "meta" in the metaphor, the temple as body, or the temple as church? Never mind), in which case "seeds" are not necessarily apple seeds but spermatozoa. The "seminal" in seminal fluid (which carries the semen [seeds, lit.]) is, of course, related to such words as "seminar" and "seminary" (this last place is where young men study for the priesthood, for example - which would make the young men in question "seeds" or "seedlings" of sorts - never mind). You may wonder (wonder, wonder,...
