The exit wound. Was the fascination something that grew out of the Kennedy assassination? (His relative sainthood was almost certainly 90% carefully tended illusion, but if only 10% reality it was good for a lot at the top and even more at the bottom - it gave a nation hope, it made an aging, creaking republic seem to have some sort of youth again, ready to do its business fresh from the revolution.) The morbid picking at a scar, a scar that is growing around what we almost certainly know to be a mortal injury to ourselves? All I know is today the engrossing details of violence, the accurate visual portayal of gore and dismemberment, seems a little out of balance with what might be natural curiousity about pain and death. Exit, wound... Ah, isn't it the vengeful wit in us who dreams of replying to that last time we were embarassed so badly with just the right line, innocent on the surface, cutting just below, vicious after deeper reflection, while gracefully leaving the scene? Exit wounds. We all have them. To live without suffering the pain of losing someone important to us could hardly be called living at all. But the wound, its healing, and much worse its failure to heal, are such massive landscapes on our personalities as they develop. Fully healed they are a source of richness and temperament. Scarred over and crippling, the unhealing chancres of past losses make hideously deformed masses of reactions and prejudices out of what could have been our personalities. 11/28/99 
© Huw Powell
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