In this essay, I reflect on the nexus of elementality and civilizational collapse by juxtaposing two imaginaries of extinction that seem at first very distant from each other—the biblical messianism of Bob Dylan’s songs and the archival impulse of the surviving Mycenaean tablets written in Linear B. The dialogue that I stage between them takes inspiration from an experiment in contemporary art that binds together these disparate textual corpuses. The overarching question that such a dialogue might pose is, what is the conceptual connection between the elements—fire, water, air, earth—and elements in a list? (The presence or absence of “the” is how I will differentiate the two concepts in the course of my discussion.) The etymology of Latin elementa, from which the English elements derives, is uncertain, but the semantic link between the Latin word and the letters of the alphabet, a list in its own right, is so...

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