fau.cet \'fo.-s*t, 'fa:s-*t\ n [ME, bung, faucet, fr. MF fausset bung, fr.

fausser, to damage, fr.]LL falare, to falsify, fr. L falsus, false : a fixture for drawing a substance (liquid) from a pipe, cask, or other vessel

a faucet is foremost a site at which forces under pressure are tapped, routed, drawn off, drained; also the most likely place to spring a leak or otherwise experience system damage (fausser: to damage). given time, entropy and abscence of maintenance it will surreptitiously spill information and create surface stains that trace a conspicuous, though spotty, graphic history.

this topography exposes the extent and duration of the system's faultiness. leaks are by definition mistakes--intentionality aside--a nexus of freudian slips and faulty fittings.

stains are ghost images--always afterimages--trailing marks of the life of an event that shadow it, shade it like the vivid imprints on memory of radical first impressions. they taint and stigmatize the surrounding ground; they penetrate it, "sticking out" and thus exposing their phallic deportment as signifiers without signifieds.

the nuclear bomb: a phallic stain on human memory. a faucet of unlimited powers of destruction. it's release on the japanese populations of hiroshima and nagasaki radioactively ghosted human souls that now haunt western philosophy with the same disruptive impact as those of victims of the holocaust. what was soiled by both series of events was poetic imagination. poetry, as adorno has pointed out, is simply no longer possible in a post-apocolyptic world. beauty and harmony have been irradiated beyond recognition by torturous light--burnt except for shadows.

the mother of christ is superseded by an atomic madonna whose child is no saviour of humankind but only the blackened dust to which each of us returns alone.

while we live silence is not possible. to approach it's threshold is menacing.