April 13, 2010. Tuesday.
Situation: Drive Wade to his doctor in Philly. When we arrive back, the pharmacist at the pharmacy where Wade fills his prescriptions reveals that he is a neighbor of mine, living on F_______ Road, and tells the story of a party at the old farmhouse just west of Hutchinson’s. The owner of the farmhouse and host of the party was a construction worker who owned a bulldozer. He had a fight that night with a friend, and in a drunken rage, dug a hole with his bulldozer and buried his friend’s Volkswagen in it. The man told his friend that when he apologized he would dig up the Volkswagen. The friend never apologized, and the man committed suicide a few years ago. The Volkswagen is apparently still buried in the field. No time for a walk for Mway today. Moi tells me the dog was moping all day, even sitting in the armchair in my office, sighing.
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The Picture from the Standpoint of the Canine’s Nostalgia and Anxiety
Under different circumstances the canine would rest content to accept the odor pockets upon the page for what they first appear to it to be: nonsigns, objects unto themselves. But because of its nostalgia, it continues to search for a referent for the odor as it would do with an odor in the countryside: it is as if, we could say, the canine intelligence is possessed by an interpretent in desperate need of a sign and an object. Although the sign (or more properly, the signifier) is there underneath its very nose, it does not yet recognize it as such, and as for the object or referent it appears to be nowhere nearby. However, in the course of its long concourse with books that have fallen to the floor and upon which it has been resting its snout, it will encounter, as we have mentioned before, any number of pages of reading material containing both a picture and a caption. The caption, as we have already shown, will manifest itself to the canine as an odor pocket, but, from the perspective of the canine’s nostalgia, it will also be manifested as a desired-for sign, one, moreover, in propinquity to the picture. A picture, as we have seen from our discussion of Washoe’s typology, is itself a sign, the type called an icon, a sign that bears a semblance or likeness to the referent. Under other circumstances, a canine, although capable of discerning the features that constitute the semblance, has no interest in an icon, either as a sign or even as an object unto itself (be it a portrait, TV image, or the like); but under the sway of its nostalgia and anxiety, it will project its memories of objects (which memories are themselves icons, as we will recall from Washoe’s typology) unto whatever similar objects might be at present available to it. Under the influence of its pining for the countryside and its masters, it will, whenever if finds a sufficient resemblance between the icon of its memory and the icon of the picture, connect one to the other, although certainly at first not in precise coordination; all the same, it develops the conception of the picture as an object that points to some other similar object, first the icon of its memory, or of its imagination if so appropriate, then to the referent, the thing not present. But at the same time it does this, it will also, again because of its nostalgia, treat the picture, which it has just recognized as an icon, as the referent of the odor pocket it has already discerned in close proximity. In other words, in its longing for the countryside and its masters, the underemployed family dog, with vast amounts of time with nothing to do, will treat the odor pocket on the page as a sign of the picture to which it is near, simultaneously treating the picture as a sign of an absent object. Although we see clearly that the canine at this point is inadequately treating an item of printed reading matter solely as an indexical sign for a nearby object (it is treating it, as should be no surprise, as it would a scent in the field), and that its concepts of signifier and signified are at this point completely muddled, nevertheless the first conceptual barrier has been broken: the book has signaled to the canine that it is a container of signs, not just a pillow, and the canine will now know bow wow how to continue its investigation into this most interesting of objects.
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