April 4, 2010. Sunday.
Situation: Unusual for me today, I have no work. Later on Moi, the Boy, and I plan to go down to Jazz and Matt’s and have a meal with their neighbors. Moi has to go out this morning to get a new door knob for our back door, which broke last night, and, though she has taken Mway out in the back yard to throw stick, she asks me to take Mway for her morning walk today. I oblige, around 9:15, and bring along my binoculars.
State of the Path: Right out the door, I see what I’m pretty sure is a mourning dove standing in the driveway. I bring up my binoculars, and immediately realize that I’ve forgotten that I’m wearing my bifocals, which makes the view through the binoculars not so good. In the walled garden, I see some robins, and try the binoculars one more time – not good again, and I let them just dangle for the rest of the walk. In the corner of the old orchard, I see may apples coming up – where they generally come up every spring. They may have been there days before, but this is the first time I notice them there. I take note that I’ve been keeping the side path pretty well trampled down, but there are shoots of blackberries or dewberries starting to come up, and I realize that, unless I’m diligent about walking this way, this side path may very well become impassible by summer. Down by the wigwams, water is still trickling into bug land.
State of the Creek: I decide to go over to look at the skunk cabbages – I may get my feet wet, I figure, but what the hell – I’ll get them wet anyway when I pass through the ridge around bug land. Amazingly, I manage to step on the rocks without any water seeping in my boots. Most of the skunk cabbages are in their leafy stage, but I see three or four with their “spathe and spadix,” or at least their “spadix.” Perhaps if I had been more attentive, I might have seen these plants in February, burning away, as described in Audubon, the snow around them. As I head down toward the oaks, I anticipate Mway scaring out the ducks – but no such thing happens. Maybe the ducks only come around in the afternoon, or maybe we have scared them off for good this year. At the feed channel to the skating pond, I decide to leap across it, rather than step into the still muddy foot holds – I manage to do it, but it is a big leap for me, one which jars my bones and muscles. I look for colt’s foot – and I begin to think that Moi is mistaken about having seen it coming up around the skating pond. Mway wades into the creek, and I see the mud roiling where she has stepped in. She then decides to step into the puddles in the skating pond, then wade through the brown muddy water of the feed channel – when she comes out, she’s pretty stinky looking. The sedges in the feed channel are growing taller.
The Fetch: In the clearing I take my stand where I usually do and immediately realize that, unlike in the afternoon, I’m looking into the sun. I think about changing spots, but Mway only makes one fetch anyway (well, she was already out earlier; this is all she really needs to do now, we both think together). Passing back through the walled garden, I see a couple of starlings, making their nasty chirp. I think for a moment about looking at them through the binoculars, partly because I’m concerned about misidentifying some of the black birds I’ve been seeing. As I’ve been leafing through the Audubon, I’ve found that there are a number of types of black birds that I could be seeing, for example, grackles and cow birds. Right now I can’t readily distinguish a grackle from a starling, and I’d like to be able to do that. But the particular birds I’m looking at are flitting all over the place, and I quickly give up trying to look at them more closely. Back in the house, as Mway and I are walking up the stairs, I think of her wading in the water and I hear Moi’s voice in my mind saying “close the bedroom door,” so at the top of the stairs I quickly reach over Mway to slam the bedroom door on her, before she can hop on the bed and dribble mud and water into the blankets and sheets.
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The Olfactorium
Let us consider a little further the situation we had imagined earlier, in which a canine intelligence is exposed to scents of all kinds but kept from any of the objects associated with those scents. The canine would be in a kind of objectless container, objectless, that is, except for the scents. Let us assume that the canine knew what all the scents stood for – the scents had meaning for the canine – and that the canine assumed (because it sniffed the scents so often that the meaning seemed natural) that the scents had meaning because they were indexical signs, that is, they shared a characteristic with the objects to which they respectively referred. Now we can even imagine that over time in this objectless container, because of the drifting and shifting of gas molecules, the character of the scents could change: what was once the scent of a rabbit now has a different quality. But the canine would still consider the new scent to be that of a rabbit, because the interpretent, the signified, hasn’t changed: the scent still refers to a rabbit. Perhaps the canine even considers two or more scents to refer to the same object: both the old scent and the new scent refer to a rabbit. Now let us suppose that the canine decides to leave its olfactorium for a while to investigate the world outside, the natural environment, only the natural environment is a place where objects look like words. The natural environment is, in a word, a book, a place where a squirrel looks like “a squirrel,” a tree like “a tree,” even the canine itself looks like “the canine” – the whole natural environment indeed looks like “the whole natural environment.” The canine would be able to instantly recognize these objects for what they are, because in this world these objects are not symbols for objects, but the objects themselves. And the canine would be able to connect all the scents to their proper objects because it already knows what the scents stand for. Only the canine (perhaps thinking about it for the first time) now realizes that there is no resemblance between the scents and the objects: those two particular scents that he associated with the object “rabbit” are completely arbitrary. The two particular scents are not two particular scents of “a rabbit”; they are symbols, as unlike what they stand for as anything can possibly be In this book, furthermore, the canine also encounters objects for which it has no scent: it sees an “in,” a “this”,” a “furthermore,” and many similar objects. When it returns to the olfactorium it decides it wants to be able to smell these objects too, so it concocts a new scent that it says now stands for the object “in” and another new scent that stands for the object “this,” and it takes an old scent but says it now also stands for the object “furthermore,” and it arranges the scents in such a way, so that it can now sit anytime in its olfactorium and smell a group of scents that automatically brings to its mind the object “in this book furthermore.”
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