Words and Meaning III

The analogy to time. Not long ago the world took exactly 24 hours to spin on its axis. The time it took to spin was always exactly, to the millisecond, 24 hours, not because the amount of time it took the world to spin was precisely equal every day (it has never been) because the day was defined by the spin and divided into 24 equal units of one hour. Variations were too minute for the technology of the day to perceive. The world spun on and on. Technology climbed steady up the hill of precision. A day came--we could name it, but I don't know its name--when the technology of the ruler exceeded the standard. There was a great divorce. Time became the standard by which the rotation of the earth was measured: the rotation no longer measured time. Slave became master then. The clock on which the ants live measured too erratically to be of use. Time measures only itself. It is without object or referrent--unless, at a moment, for a reason, someone chooses, temporarily, to give it one.

Words effected the same divorce, and at approximately the same time.

Merrimack, NH

What, when I return,
as I did today, to the place
where I was raised, am I—
knowing that I will never find it—
looking for?

And why,
as I move through charged space, marking
all that has changed, holding
out for something

recognizable,
am I reporting all I see
and all I miss
to you,
invisible beside me?

Nosing among new-named streets,
blank buildings whose histories confront me
with aimless urgency
old spots among the smear of the new:

the restaurant where I used to work,
the house of Nicky’s parents
with his name still on the mailbox,
the spot where Sandy,

on the day before we all left for college,
knowing she was the one in the world
I most wanted to love
leaned in at my window
and made an offering of goodbye, and

the place I last saw Kathy
before she died.

I know that here is where the text of whatever it is
I go back to read
must be read. But I don’t know why,

before I set my eyes on how little
of all I remember remains,
before I gave over the questions again,
I was already writing these words,
to you.

A System of Differences

"Language is a system of differences without positive terms." This is the first salvo in the closing off of the operation of language from reference--meaning. It almost works. Grammar requires that each word in a sentence have a function--a function in that sentence. It does require that any part of that sentence have a meaning, a referent, real or imaginary. It does not require that the sentence have any intent or function either of expression or of communication.

This matters, it seems to me, a lot and a little. A lot because language can be divorced absolutely from any of its assumed functions--conceived as as proper or ancillary; little because nonetheless this substance of neutral, naked, empty signifiers can be used for all of the functions for which it is used. We can, it seems to me, communicate and express by means of language most effectively. We can do this things outside of language, so called, as well--often better. The question must be turned around: it is not "what is language for? What does language do?" But rather "what do we do with language?" "What do we use it for?"

What becomes possible because we use it? (What do we use it for and nothing else?) What would be possible without it? What would not be possible without it? (Meaning could be created and conveyed, but how precisely?) Where are its borders? Where are its centers?

Why is all meaning metaphored in notions of carrying: metaphor, convey, communicate? But that's another matter.

Gardens Three

Borges Bakhtin and the OED

If Jorge and Mikhail had their way the OED would not merely cite every representative use of a word throughout history; it would cite every actual iteration, showing the differing nuances of meaning that emerge and accrue (or diminish or turn aside) a necessary correlate of the absolute uniqueness, the unrepeatability, of every moment. It would also there cite every quotation of every iteration, every undergraduate's particular reading and reciting of Hamlet, excluding only misuses, misunderstandings and misreadings but including the use of every word in a definition in the OED.

If you add Derrida to the dictionary you'd have to include in the already infinite book every misreadings and every misspeaking as well.

Words and Meaning II

The Impossibility of the Dictionary

A Spade a Spade
My Kingdom for a Spade

Arise My Love, Arise My Love:
Apollo's Lighting the Skies My Love

A Rose by Any Other Name
Still Would Not Be a Rose

Gentlemen: Choose Your Title

Here is the danger of the notion that words have meaning: It is the danger of believing that things as such exist. "Why don't you call it by its name?" Because it doesn't have one. It is not a question of the abitrary nature of the signifier merely. It is the "arbitrary" (in de Saussure's sense, which is only tentatively related to what is generally capable of supporting the name "arbitrary") "nature" "of" "the" "signified" (all words require quotation marks, which, for sheer convience, will, from this word forth, be invisible, mostly). A horse, a chair, a word, a duck: "things" "[that]" "exist" but not as horses or chairs or words or ducks. They are all existants momentarily snapshot-frozen into a form which we, running along beside them in the restless race of time, accidentally perceive as namable. Poor Adam; his very first test could not be passed. Was it not for naming the animals that he lost paradise? "Species" change--we could use the name "grow" here--from one "thing" to another. We call it evolution when we take a wider-angle shot and put our series of frozen snapshots in filmic sequence. It was a dinosaur, now it is a bird; who knows what it will be when if finally matures, which it will never do. Think of the butterfly who starts a journey from Mexico, arriving generations later, in Canada, returning, generations later, to Mexico.

Evening and Morning, the First Day.

Still Life

Cut oranges glasses galoshes
big fruit bowls of
apples onions autumn
leaves broken
sticks

circle
of dog ears miniature cattle
dead ducks limp bodies
frozen setter
eyes ablaze
lolling tongue
water glaze

life still
waiting a clock
paused a man a
house a yard a street a
lamp a job a wife a
sleep a life

still a
planet spun still
cold planets colder
stars dark space black
holes still a
trace a
lack