Bodies of water make imperfect borders, subject to inconstancy and diffusion. Yet language flows on a swollen riverbank to mark and to efface our bed. And geometry knits polygons from anachronism. Cezanne tends to his beautiful beard, enclosing his truths in cylinders and squares. Apocryphal Pythagoras traverses a triangle and equates the eating of flesh with tyranny’s hypotenuse. We unravel our threads into the web. Its quicksilver frameworks and its blocks of discourse cannot not determine the area of a semantic paragraph through the antinomies of its dimensions. The printer lowers a shapely frisket, rolling ink and whitespace from the edges of the letters. Engineers practice to ignore Derrida’s graffiti, building our abstractions from the collision of requirements. Even so, we are complicit in deconstruction with every irregular “if” clause, as if acknowledging that topographies and dichotomies are subject to reversal and decay. In a deterministic system, what is the relationship between architecture and one’s emotions? Distinctions are not boxes and mental frameworks are not boxes, yet one is always trying to center and escape them. Rules and the exceptions multiply and offset one another. Beasts of fog and snow transpose the real. No protractors, no squares, no corners. From the fractal zygote to the constellation’s wink and flicker, nothing real knows of its margin. The water clock of Vitruvius dreams of the box model and we float our languages in the fluid chamber of the void.