A wintry absence…

First, let me apologize for an embarrassingly long sabbatical from my blog, and then, let me explain, justify, rationalize my absence.

There are two distinct reasons I haven’t been writing.

1. I moved. Across the country. Into a geodesic dome. Where it has already snowed. It’s as if I’m living in a reversed snow globe.

2. My literary magazine, Omnia Vanitas Review, was finally launched.

Both of these things are chain-linked in my mind, as if they were organically related, but, as I was moving away from New York, and my partner wasn’t, we needed to wrap everything up before I left. This all culminated in a grand reading, a party, celebrating a different kind of writing. I used to say the underside of writing, the belly of writing, but this isn’t about depth, it’s about perception. It’s more about the expression without writing transcribed into pure writing. Language, that word, its flowery permutations, its acrobatic semiotics, changes from person to person. Wittgenstein talks about the impossibility of emptying the contents of your mind into someone else’s, the inability to create an exact duplicate of the analogons, the pictures inside your brain, for someone else to see, devour. Language, the relation of signifiers to signified, cannot be an exact science.

Signifier: The word, the sign, the representation, that describes the thing.

Signified: The thing itself.

Charles Sanders Peirce (the father of pragmatism):

A sign is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. The sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object.

So, an apple would be the thing, but the word “apple” would be the signifier. This issue is famously discussed in Magritte’s painting.

I could go on and on about the pipe-ness of a pipe, and how when someone says the word “pipe” what appears in everyone’s head is specific and generic and different, but, roughly, we all come up with something that kind of looks like that, unless, of course, you’re talking about a different pipe.

Remind me to someday print this out and do something with it. It’s one of the only images I have found that combines my love for semiotics with my brother’s love of video games, a rare and precious intersection.

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