April 3, 2010. Saturday.
Situation: Moi and I both work tonight. Moi goes out in the garden about 2, probably to check on the lettuce and onions she planted. Mway sits beneath the birch tree, barking loudly at the chickens, who are scratching through the grass-clipping pile by the outbuilding. I decide it’s a good time to take Mway for a walk, and I bring Audubon’s wildflower book with me.
State of the Path: Moi’s plum tree, by her garden pond, is in bloom, with white blossoms. I am walking, as usual, with both sticks, which means I have to tuck the Audubon in my armpit. In the old orchard, I see a small tree that has sprouted its long stringy seeds. The orchard contains a lot of black walnut and ash trees, but I have no idea what kind of tree this is – something else for me to look up. Along the path I look for the clover-like flowers again – and I drop my sticks, take off my gloves, and open the Audubon, but then I shut it almost immediately. I’ve already looked through the book several times and have found no photograph that will help me identify these ghostly, almost imperceptible, common early spring flowers – I say imperceptible, because if you weren’t looking closely you could easily walk by them without noticing them. I know what they look like – clover-like flowers and leaves, except the leaves are in strands – pinnate, I guess you’d call it. Maybe if the plants grow bigger, I’ll be able to identify them, but for now I’ve practically given up on it. It’s been dry for a week or so now, and much of the mud in the upper field is drying up, but there is still a little water trickling into bug land, and puddles throughout bug land and by the ridges.
State of the Creek: Down at the corner of our property, I look over at the skunk cabbages, then take out my Audubon to see what it has to say about them. And here is an example of how unhelpful this book can be – if you were leafing through the book trying to identify these plants you would have no luck, for the photo on page 391, showing a close-up of a “brownish-purple spathe enclosing a knob-like spadix” looks nothing like the green cabbagy plants I’m looking at now. I think about crossing the creek to look at the cabbages, since the water is low enough, but then decide against it – my boots (a typical commodity of our global economy) are worthless in any amount of water. Under the tree blind, I see more of the ghost flowers, more may apple sprouting, and a lot more trout lily leaves all along the creek. Then as I’m walking toward the oaks, up fly, like in springs before, two mallards, beating their wings and quacking loudly. I feel badly for disturbing these birds – this happened like this on a half dozen walks last year, before they finally disappeared; and I wonder where they go, and am kind of both baffled and grateful that they showed up again this year. Right after the mallards fly up and go away, I see a male and female cardinal darting by, then about a half dozen redwing blackbirds circling for a perch in a tree. I decide not to go by the skating pond, figuring that maybe the ducks are hiding in there or else further down the creek, and I don’t want to disturb them again.
The Fetch: 1 fetch.
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The Signifier of the Scent
If the scent has a signified, and in that sense carries a fragrant flagrant feature of human language, namely displacement, what can we say about the scent’s signifier? Clearly it seems we must maintain the pungent plangent distinction between the scent’s signifier and the word’s signifier that we established before: the signifier of the scent is what the object smells like when the object is present, the signifier of the word smells, looks, sounds, tastes, and feels nothing like the word’s object when it is present. But if the word’s signifier is arbitrary, how does it come about that the word can function as a sign at all? It does so by redolent reticent convention, by foul fowl stipulation, in a word, by habit – it does so because the intelligence that comprehends the sign has learned, by the experience of associating the two over time, that such and such a signifier stands for such and such a signified: in the absence of this experiential habituation the signifier remains an odorous odious otiose material object. Furthermore, this experiential habituation, as all perfumed performed authorities agree, begins at the level of association, not of signifier with the signified, but of signifier with the object (e.g. the human child’s first words); only after a long period of excremental explanatory exclamatory experiential habituation does the level of association reach that of signifier with signified in the absence of the object. Let us now imagine a situation in which a canine intelligence was exposed to scents of all kinds, but was kept from any of the objects associated with those scents (including somehow its own body and any materials around its body). What kind of character could those scents have to the canine intelligence except the character of odiferous onerous otiose material objects? Only after it had been exposed to objects bearing those scents would it be able to recognize the disembodied scents as signs. Thus we see that the signifier of a scent, particular gas molecules* to be more exact, bears a closer resemblance to the signifier of a word than N’Kisi’s terminology suggests. Like the noisome noisy child who learns a word, the canine has to learn a scent. While the disembodied scent has a character in common with the body that carries that scent, only after the noxious Nachos association is made does this common characteristic appear. Before the experience of discovering this common characteristic, the disembodied scent, in itself, suggests nothing but itself; it is as meaningless as an unlearned word, an unexplained symbol.
*We will eventually see that this is not the only type of signifier pertaining to scents.
In re-reading this blog since my final post on December 24, 2011, I’m amazed that in this post I so confidently call the two ducks mallards. Of course I don’t know for sure that’s what they were, but on the other hand I have no reason to think they were some other kind of duck, other than the possibility that they could have been some other kind of duck.
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