Value-terms are not understood in acts of understanding which operate the systems of information, which delineate the meaning of one term more and more decisively by delineating more exactly the meaning of the other terms; they spread by contagion and spread contagion. The war-cry with which the healthy, the powerful, the proud, the joyous are designated as evil does not convey information; it infects the language, it is picked up like a virus.

When President Reagan identified Daniel Ortega Saavedra as a two-bit dictator in designer glasses, he spread an old man's rancorous castrating hatred of a young revolutionary to millions, confirming them in their militant ignorance. When one divemaster ascending from the Java Sea reports to the waiting boat 'Narked!' the rapture of the deep spreads to them already as they don wet suits and buckle weight belts.

One describes, as descriptively as possible, even clinically, the scene in the Bangkok cabaret where the seventeen-year-old Lao youth is leaning back against the wall, alone on the black-velvet stage, spotlit in the dark, his sensual body heaving with abandon, his gorged erection throbbing at eye-level of strangers in the dark; and then, as your listener awaits your appraisal, the word 'Wonderful!' or 'Wow!' -- an exclamation that breaks the narrative, that does not classify the narrated event in a judgment according to the social and normative codes, that says that what was just narrated, what had never before been done or seen, was outside all the codes and norms with which one judges what one sees, an exclamation which by its tone communicates to your listener.

Communicates something more, and something different from what the description, photographic and clinical as you could make it, did not communicate. Something unavowable, unconfessable, infantile and perverse, your own involuntary, searing envy, your own miserable pity that abruptly welled up, pity for your own seventeenth year, of child abuse, your own seventeenth year in which your erections were shameful, guilty, hidden in the odors of shit and urine of locked toilets, your own seventeenth year when your own coming into biological, sexual maturity was sealed with castration.

And in your listener, who listened to your description as the description of something he or she had never seen or heard of or imagined, whose somewhat frightened, scandalized mind was teeming with social, ethical, normative judgments and condemnations, suddenly blushed with the heat of the contagion of that feeling your word infected him or her with.

Something was understood, something was understood between accomplices. Something was said that made the other your accomplice.