Jonathan Swift wrote his own epitaph and, according to Ed Caesar's New Yorker essay, may have embedded a final satirical joke inside it, indirection as the only available weapon for someone who spent a life watching institutions crush dissent while maintaining polite fictions of their own legitimacy. The piece lands differently this week alongside the news that border wall construction crews damaged a 1,000-year-old Native intaglio in Arizona, the Las Playas Intaglio, a sacred site for ancestors of the Tohono O'odham Nation. The state does not always know what it is destroying. Sometimes it does not care.

What Survives the State, and How

The intaglio survived ten centuries. It did not survive a federal construction project moving on a tight timeline. This is a different register of loss than Prokofiev's hidden paintings or the Viking hoard, because there is no rediscovery available. The etching is damaged. The sacred site is altered. What connects Swift's coded epitaph to the Arizona intaglio is the question of what strategies are available to meaning when power moves against it. Swift used irony and indirection. Indigenous cultural memory used landscape itself as archive. Both are forms of encoding against erasure.

Martel, Glissant, and the Politics of Opacity

The New Yorker's piece on Lucrecia Martel describes her new documentary "Our Land" and her restored masterpiece "The Headless Woman" in terms of an elusiveness of form that becomes moral clarity. Martel works through indirection too. So does the Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant, whose concept of opacity as resistance, the right to not be transparent to power, surfaces in Hyperallergic's roundup alongside notes on his art collection. Swift, the intaglio, Martel, Glissant: different centuries, different media, same argument. Meaning that survives state power tends to survive by refusing to be fully legible to it. .