Re-member and dis-member
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The word play (if this the right word in the grisly context) between remembering and dismembering propelled my today to post a tweed on Twitter about Donald Trump’s denial of the complicity of his Saudi buddies in the heinous crime committed in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey two weeks ago.
[Trump, I hasten to point out again, is a vortex of amorality that draws in everything it comes near to. His enablers, deaf to the pleas of their spouses and kids (at least I hope this kind of drama is playing out at home), will rather stick their heads into the sand than acknowledge that one last line has been crossed].
But this made me suddenly realize that these two words are exact antagonists in the meaning they convey, except for a switch from abstract to concrete. “Re-member” connotes the act of retrieving, assembling and refitting bits and pieces of information in our brain, so that the end product resembles the physical being our senses took in at one time in the past. “Dismember” connotes the opposite act of splitting a human being, or an animal, into bits and pieces, but this time not figuratively but literally, in all gory details, with a lots of blood.
Re-collect, by the way, is an odd intermediate of material on its way to being remembered, since it only means that an inventory is being created, of everything that has to do with the subject matter.
[“Erinnern”, the German equivalent for “remember”, has no intuitive explanation. It connotes a nebulous gathering of matter in the interior of the person who is doing the remembering. The closest I get to its origin is to think about a puppa, the form of the butterfly that is all liquid inside, but then crystallizes into some pre-ordained form.]
Remembering a person who has been dismembered doesn’t do the dismembered person any good; he or she has been merely resurrected as a hologram, if you will. Dismembering a person who has been resurrected in someone’s memory doesn’t work since the act of dismembering requires a living, breathing body to act on.
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