April 6, 2010. Tuesday.
Situation: Last night Moi downloaded a bird identification app on her iPhone. It show pictures and plays bird calls. It seems like an ideal resource, but I don’t know how much use I will be able to make of it. I’ve never had a cell phone, and the only way I might be able to use Moi’s is to bug her to use it for me. As it turns out, I have no work today, but I do have to go out on work related errands, including getting gasoline and oil for the lawnmower. I hate to begin mowing the grass, but it is getting high in a few places, and since my mower won’t go through high grass, I worry about keeping up. I take Mway out for her walk about 4:30. Just now, Moi has called me down to her computer. She has been looking online to try to identify the ghost flowers, and she found a site with a lot of photos, showing plants at different perspectives – and yes, indeed, we found our plant: it’s Pennsylvania
State of the Path: Moi follows me out as far as the outbuilding, where I’ve seen and heard a lot of bees. Moi worries that the bees might be making a nest in the building, and I worry too, because that’s where I store the lawnmower during the summer. It’s very warm today, almost too warm for my long-sleeve workshirt, but because of ticks, I’ll wear this all summer along. Throughout the field now, it seems there’s a layer of green, sometimes showing quite conspicuously, sometimes partially hidden under the brown dead goldenrod and blackberry brambles. The wild onions in the old orchard are high, and joined together now by other grasses. Over the grasses are the light green leaves of the Russian olive and honeysuckle shrubs, beneath the still gray black walnut and ash trees, which are the last trees to get their leaves. Down by the seeps in bug land, the new green grass is already about six inches high, and there is new green grass sprouting all among the dead brown grass of bug land. I see even more may apples coming up than I did yesterday, and I delight in seeing the yellow trout lilies, sprinkled along the banks of the creek.
State of the Creek: As I walk along, I wish I could identify the birds I keep hearing. The creek water is brown, and it’s barely moving in the pools. Beyond the oaks, I hear a splash in the water – I don’t see what it is, but I guess that it’s a frog. Last year dozens of frogs would leap in the creek water as I walked on a typical summer day along the bank.
The Fetch: The clearing is now all green grass, and some of it’s getting high. When I get there, I don’t see Mway, but then I spot her sniffing around in the sumacs. I call her, and to my surprise, she doesn’t come running over to me right away. I call her several times, and finally she comes. I toss the stick once; she dashes after it; then she runs past me to head back to the house. As she’s walking by the sumacs, I see her duck her head to peer once quickly through the trees – in the hope of maybe catching sight of whatever it was she was sniffing at before.
1 comment:
The Complication of Signs
But, of course, there is more to reading than being able to interpret one sign at a time. The canine eager to read must not only be able to comprehend a single fundamental reading unit, the sign “dog,” say, but also groups of such units, to varying degrees of complexity. It must be able to comprehend sentences, such as “what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on what she was very nice whats this her other name was just a P C to tell you I sent the little present have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything to be back in Gib and hear you sing.” Reading material, as this example of a sentence* shows, consists of arrangements of signs that exhibit, not only the arbitrariness and displacement of the signs themselves, but also what N’Kisi calls productivity and duality of patterning: signifiers work in combination to create more and more complicated signifieds, often by one signified determining another signified within the combination itself. In a sentence, signs have different functions; they not only refer to absent things but also to each other. They are, what we might say, at once outwardly reflecting and interrelational. This dual functioning seems at first glance to be of such sophistication as to be of a different order from the seemingly simpler function of a scent. But what does this dual functioning mean except that a word points in two directions at once: on one hand it points in a direction outside of the text and on the other hand it points in directions within the text. Until we take a close look at the manner of functioning of scents we cannot presume a categorical difference between words and scents. Indeed, as our thought experiment of the olfactorium suggests, scents do operate in these two different ways: We must now inquire into how scents signify and how scent signifiers work in combination, and we will see that, like the signs of reading material, they are also both outwardly reflecting and interrelational: they occur, in short, in sentences.
*It is actually only part of a sentence. See page 755.
Post a Comment