“Just as man himself has an ambivalent potential for good and evil, so do objects. According to numerous informants, the most dangerous and poisonous substance is a simple lime, properly prepared by the bokor. If a bokor cuts a lime transversely while it is still on the tree, the half that remains on the limb overnight becomes the most virulent of poisons, more deadly even ‘than the three drops of liquid that issue from a dead person’s mouth.’ The other half, taken into the temple, becomes its equally potent antidote. The lesson is clear. The lime that is left on the tree remains in the realm of nature — uncivilized, threatening, poisonous. The other half, taken into the abode of the religious sanctuary, is tamed and humanized, and thus becomes profoundly curative.”
p. 52, footnote, "Passage of Darkness, the Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie", by Wade Davis

The device with rechargeable batteries. When they run down the device loses definition, if it were sentient we could say it’s having an ‘identity crisis’ but of course it’s not so we can’t. You’re shaving with it when the note of its buzzing drone drops and fades and suddenly instead of an electric razor you find yourself rubbing your jowls with a mobile phone.

Well, what if? What if quiddity, that which makes a thing itself and not something else, was as fluid and precarious, as subject to fluctuation and entropy, in a thing as identity is in a person? What if it required as much energy to maintain?

I went into the bathroom to shave this morning. Looked mournfully at myself in the mirror, noting the demographics of my beard: white stubble now outnumbers dark 2 to 1. And found that what I was holding in my hand was not the electric razor I thought I’d picked up but a mobile phone. Or a remote control for the TV. Or the one for the VCR. I can’t tell these gizmos apart.

That’s what prompted the ‘what if?’ scenario above. Because, as my batteries run down, I plan to amuse myself for as long as I can. My brain once blazed with ratiocinative candlepower. Now I’m experiencing a drop in wattage equivalent to a ‘brown out.’

You mean to tell me that a li'l ol' lime cut in half by a bokor can be more numinous...

... than THIS?

[A digitated lemon with very curious finger-like extrusions and outgrowths. From Cassiano dal Pozzo's "Paper Museum"]