The Nothingness of Symbols

a drowning.  a submersion.  a baptism (immersion)

I am drinking the arbitrary nothingness of symbols.

I am writing.

Writing is both a cry and a response.

Intuition / rationalization.

Nurtured and natural.

In the realm of symbols, I am safely between.  In the place of no safety.  The nowhere realm – a world of now here.

Where I am drowning.  Delirious.  Drunken on these symbols, arbitrary and well-developed, representative and unnecessary (?) signs.

I am alive.

Combining intellect to emotion to situation and its social constituents…I am writing, uttering, verbalizing -

- and, by chance, perhaps, you are here.

I am side-swiped.  Side-tracked.

In other words,

I set out to circumlocute on this very “subject” / “topic” / “matter”…yesterday…

resulting in a nothing of the kind.

Drowning in a limitation of symbols -

“composition,” we call it,

“For it is in the nature of language, as I have already noted briefly, that it is governed by the principle of ‘duality of functioning’,..to be more specific, the distinctive features of the sound system that constitute a language are determined by the limited set of phonemes employed in constructing the next unit up, morphemes.  And morphology is determined by the uses to which morphemes are put in forming lexemes or words.  Words, in their turn, are formally describable by the functions they perform in sentences.  Sentences, in turn, achieve their significance from the discourse in which they are embedded.  Discourse is governed by the communicative intentions of the speakers.  The communicative intentions of speakers, of course, are governed by the transactional requirements of the culture.  And along the way, there are further determinants of form that operate in this same way…”

-Jerome Bruner-

That sickness, that plenitude, those realistic illusions – as if one were totally absorbed in the unrealities of the human way of being-in-the-world.

“the world is not what we thought it was”

-Jim Harrison-

There will be a day my sons will die.

Hopefully I will be gone.

My spouse will die.

Hopefully I will be gone.

There is a word for things that hold too much (e.g. “things that can hold no more”)

Things at, or beyond, capacity.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet.  They are drunk, drowned, saturate.

And still there are fresh occurrences.

There are also #s, codes, algorithms, symbols…

I like the idea of doing something that matters, of being someone that matters, of my strange happenstance of existing as an organism having some effect, making some verifiable difference in a larger web of existing things

liking the idea certainly doesn’t make it so

and yet, perhaps,

My intention had been to talk about the wonder…

…that out of 26 letters…

this many years (generations, eons)

and variety

had even occurred.

Was all.

that meaning, is interesting, is cool

that, to (lil’ ol’) me…

it’s amazing…!

in 26 letters

#s, symbols, diagrams

we keep constructing…

About these ads
Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

9 thoughts on “The Nothingness of Symbols

  1. Holy crap that was amazing! Virtuoso. Thank you!

  2. N Filbert says:

    i wish. thank you

  3. simonhlilly says:

    I shall select: three too for one: yes! ( with a blot of surprise, a dot of completion)

  4. lucewriter says:

    This was great! Very thought-provoking and strangely beautiful.

  5. “writing is both a cry and a response” loved that line. This is great. You somehow always manage to encompass everything. All the big, scary, unsayable thoughts which most of us avoid or recoil from.

  6. N Filbert says:

    that is very encouraging, thank you

"Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said" - Umberto Eco

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Blogging for a Good Book

A suggestion a day from the Williamsburg Regional Library

Writing_Reading

Look at people when they read, while they write. Seem they are themselves, then. Maybe this is the trying and the definition and the failure of what we used to call literature.

Spread Information

stop the madness

The Bully Pulpit

(n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

Perlophonies

"que de sang caillé sur mon chemin griffé de lumière, l'or défunt des réverbères"

Neuroautomaton

A [mind] that hath the power of motion within itself, and which stands in need of no foreign assistance. --John Quincy

A is for Beautiful

making family memories one by one

Mr. Library Dude

I'm a librarian. I'm a dude. Mr. Library Dude. Blogging about libraries, technology & teaching.

Forming The Thread

Words form the thread upon which we string our experiences. - Aldous Huxley

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 953 other followers

%d bloggers like this: