The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names. (E. O. Wilson, as cited by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson)

Friday, April 15, 2011

Look for the Stick

April 15, 2010.  Thursday.
Situation:  Work tonight, but I spend all day running around like a chicken with its head cut off getting tax papers together.  After one initial trip this morning, I have to make a second trip to the tax lady, because she made some minor errors with attaching the payment vouchers to the forms, and, including what I have to pay for the Boy’s taxes because he can’t afford to pay them himself, I end up writing nine checks to fulfill all my tax obligations.   Finally I get everything done by 2:00, and take Mway for a walk then.
State of the Path:  Moi mentioned that Mway this morning had found the “pro-quality” stick that she lost yesterday, but that she lost it again somewhere on the path, so I take off this afternoon without any sticks, hoping I’ll find her stick before we get to the clearing.  I take the side path along the orchard to look again at the mystery tree, which appears just as inscrutable as it did yesterday.  As I’m walking along, so used to having a walking stick am I that I feel a little vertiginous and decide not to go down to the creek but to cut over right away to the clearing where Moi, I believe, said Mway lost the stick again.   As I double back on the side path, just before the cedar and the area of the flattened weeds, I almost stride past, what I’m surprised to find, a group of jack-in-the-pulpits, their hoods sticking so high above the ground for just coming up in one day.  I continue on, then, to the clearing, but I don’t find any stick, so I walk down to the creek where there are more sticks for me to choose one from.   As I enter bug land, I hear a pecking in the trees along the creek, and briefly catch sight of a bird’s red head – I think maybe I’ve seen my friend the red-belled woodpecker, but it flies off before I can observe anything more.  I walk across the plank over the drainage ditch of bug land, and find a suitable fetching stick along the path where it runs narrow along the creek.
State of the Creek:  I don’t look at the creek today.
The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, I have to call Mway, but she quickly comes running, and today I lose count how many times she fetches the stick, probably close to ten times.  The stick I found is about as long as the old one, but it is much lighter – and I think to myself, maybe Mway only fetched the other stick a few times, sometime only just once, because it was, after all, rather heavy for her.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Third Conceptual Barrier

In the process of making these connections between captions in close proximity to pictures, the canine is already treating the signifiers as symbols (inasmuch as they bear no resemblance to the icons), but it is hesitant to relinquish its misconception of them as indexical signs, a misconception it can retain so long as it can presume that the symbols derive their meanings in some manner from their close proximity to the icons. However, the canine quickly abandons this presumption as, in exploring various reading materials, it soon discovers the signifiers it connected to pictures in places far distant from the pictures, that is, on other pages, and even in places where there are no pictures, that is, in books with no pictures. For a while, it may try to retain the presumption by supposing that these distant signifiers, like scents in the field, will somehow lead him to the pictures (the canine may even move from book to book in an effort to verify this supposition), but it soon discovers that these signifiers, although they form some sort of trail, do not lead to any pictures except by accident, and it abandons this supposition. Furthermore, it discovers among these signifiers similar graphic images that it has never seen in close proximity to any pictures, and drawing upon, this time justifiably, a principle of the field that no sign is without a meaning, it realizes that juxtaposed among the signifiers it already knows are graphic images that are potential signifiers, and not by virtue of their proximity to any pictures. With these two discoveries the canine recognizes that the proximity of a picture to a word signifier is not an essential fixture of the reading material and that, as such, it is mainly, for the canine, a pedagogical tool: a means by which it can associate an icon of something it knows with a particular distribution of material. The canine recognizes that these distributions of material acquire their meanings only by their habitual connections to something already known, the icons of memory and imagination, and that once these habitual connections have been made the pictures are merely illustrations of these meanings, a mediating, but unnecessary, term between the signifier of reading material and the icons of memory and imagination. The canine comes to fully accept the signs of reading material as symbols.