Meaning dies twice in speech, and is survived by two widows. Each widow mourns for the loss of the meaning that she survives, being unaware of the other. The first is a widow of attenuation. The second is the widow of saturation. The first is sure all she says is agreed by the world. She only has to speak and if it suffices for her, then it should suffice for all. Her words are shortly spoken, broken off abruptly by chance from the world inside, and returned, chiming, to the world outside. She crosses a great distance but is certain of her destination. The saying and the said are the same to her. She is like the prodigal son who does not squander his father’s money. Say something once, why say it again? The second widow is unsure if anything she says can be heard. She is unassuaged. To her words, she adds more words, and to those yet more. She overflows with explanation. She has to tell again what she has already told, and to tell it once more she must also tell it in its telling. She is the shepherd of the ninety nine lost sheep. The first widow is convinced of the necessity for total redundancy and is thrown back by things above her contempt. The second widow doubts the possibility of language and is impoverished by the endless branching in things. One of the widows speaks of her childhood: ‘just now, I was reminded of my father emptying boiling water from the kettle onto ant nests in the garden. It is the great castrating event of my life.’ The other widow says: ‘we are not castrated by the great event, but in the process for which the event is made to stand.’ The widow says: ‘I am reminded of the ferocity of his intent, the enormous distance from which destruction is poured. A child will observe such acts as if from another sort of distance, remote but drawn in. Soon afterwards, as if drawn along in his wake, I continued the work of destroying ants. I squashed them, burnt them, buried them, drowned them. This continued for a number of summers. Then, abruptly, whilst still a young child, everything changed for me, and I desired above all to save ants and to build for them an ant homeland. I cultivated colonies. I brought food to the entrance of their world. I served them gladly and my service was reparation for their historical traumas.’ The other widow says: ‘did your father notice this deviation?’ One of the widows says: ‘he discovered the colonies I was tending, he stamped on them, and he threw the immense structures I had built for them into the ditch. We did not talk of it, it was enough for me. I disappeared into my distance. I felt no desire to defend this nation of lazy ants for which I had become a servant. At last, my childhood was free from all reference to ants and I did not much think of them again.’ The other widow says: ‘We only consider the homeland when we can no longer return there. It is in the nature of such causes that they draw from their partisans great but futile expenditures of energy. A cause is the remnant of an arbitrary thing which is already lost, and to which we are compelled to renew our allegiance, and for which we will die, because it is otherwise wholly worthless. Everything worth fighting for is not worth fighting for.’ The widows may indeed exchange their lost meanings but only at the end: the first grieving, beginning in distraction, piecing together the world as it escapes her; the second in an abbreviated expression of careless relinquishment. The first window is like the grave of hard hearted Barbary Allen - as she was goin’ over the field, she heard the death bells tollin’. In fastening upon the death of the one she had disdained, she also swerves back into the world, startled. The second window becomes like the grave of Lord Donald’s wife, who throws herself after Matty Groves in a singular gesture, succinct, perverse and all consuming. At the end, the first widow encounters the category of the too late as her limit, whilst the second widow contemplates the last of as a formality of structure. Neither Barbary Allen, nor Lord Donald’s wife are widows in the ordinary sense.
