Semiotic Territories 

If the world were different, or its circumstances, so would he be – no use going down that avenue.  Where he’d gotten to, he’d arrived of his own doing – his own choices, interactions and responses to his surroundings – his opportunities and limitations – his very own and very shared, complex experiences.

The “way of looking at it” is always only one way of looking at it – that’s the case of it, even when viewed through “multiple perspectives” – if its delivered of a human, it’s the processing of singular machines, however plural their construction may be.

So change is curious, in that, when any element alters, the entire effect is unknown, is of incalculable scales that can only be measured in probabilities.  Probabilities, hypotheses, theories and beliefs have one tremendous thing in common: they are all of them uncertain.  You’ve heard it said (or he has) – “the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself,” no, that doesn’t sound quite right, “the only thing we know for certain is that everything’s uncertain,” no, people don’t use the word certain and its relatives that often.  “Change is truth, truth is change”?

She said: “A shared past isn’t forgotten even in change.”  That works for him, for what is memory but the continuous recording of change?

It’s grown easy to confuse himself, he thinks.

 

He notes:  “You find yourself in an encyclopedia of circumstance and then you wonder.”  He only wonders because to inquire or investigate would mean to revise the encyclopedia by looking at it – selecting, perceiving, and thereby focusing an entry to the ignorance of the rest.  A book-burning, a global apocalypse, a conflagration of reality.  Not what he wants.  So he sits and stews or simmers there.  But the limiting fact of existing at “there” annihilates great distances.  He can’t seem to avoid mass destruction.  He takes deep breaths.

 

Writing like thinking like moving – all of it creating a splintered prism of mirrors, warped and shattering windows on presence.  He loves her.  And others beside.  And himself.  And the strange fanatic gifts of the world.  People – “good,” “bad,” or otherwise – how can they not fascinate, be beautiful, in even their minimal capacities?  Where had he edited this part of himself, during?  How he loved her, benefit or ill.

 

He changes, along with everything about (or around) him.

 

Everything was changing (an enormous statement) and he along with it (the Everything).  Self, selves, other, others – why did all seem unavoidably personal?  Just what was this ‘person-ness’?  He feeds encyclopedias to flames, and entertains the questions.  Realizing that questions are the riddling workings of erasure.

 

His question swipes across its context, even when he’s asking of its context.  In other words (his words) “focus obliterates the unclear.”  And the unclear composes the context.  The too-much and more-than, some even say “Beyond.”  What’s not forgotten in the stylus of changing – our memory?  What shared past is present?  He looks at her photographs uniquely each time, each moment, each instance.  Even in-stance he’s not stable.

 

How could he hold position on a spinning globe?

He asks Siri, the plastic voice of a Global Positioning System:  “Where am I?”  Her reply obliterates the world in a profession of some arbitrary gridwork (abstract and unreal) of names and points, streets and latitudes, longitudes, disabling fabrications designed to throw him off course and locate him against the constant movement.  He remembers not to believe, that very re-membering dismembering the possibles.

 

Desiring connection – the security or perceived safety of a tightened weave, to be knotted in a tangle of threads – he spies squirrels and birds, fences and trees, a woman’s breast.  To sense substance pressed against another, as if interacting a location that might not give.  Or give precisely.  An event.

 

He can’t remember what is not being forgotten.  He wanted to, wanted to know what she didn’t forget, like a recipe or table of contents, a topographical map.  He couldn’t imagine what response she would give – what saying or writing, what sculpting or paint – as an answer.

 

He stops guessing as an act of nonviolence.  Most probably he lays down and opens his arms as a wishing and welcome.  That is his practice now: bewildered? confused? give greeting and welcome.  “Hello there, unclear and unknown, I am unable to re-cognize you or you would be known and familiar…and yet I am sensing a pattern,” he says.  A family resemblance of mystery, a remembering of is.  If no one’s written that, perhaps they should (he thinks – another act of violence).  Pronouncements.  Aphorisms.  Like paradox-bombs, parables leaving remains.

 

As a first, he senses he understands “absolute truth” – that rage and genocide that attempts to rid the world of itself – its reality, complexity, multitudes.  Truth the large red button signed “Do Not Press!”  Depression must be a result of pressuring some truth, excluding all else?

 

Confused, he feels at home.  Mismembering, bewildered, changing with change.  Con-fused – isn’t that what he on some scale desires?  To be fused-with, part-of, belonging and participant?

He’s in motion, there is music and breath and these thoughts – all things depending on change.

 

“…no longer a subjective bubble, but rather a limitless interface through which ontological or ‘pure’ relations and ‘becomings’ easily pass…Subjectivity is constitutively open, or has a being-toward, as do all relative beings…We are semiotic, existential territories rather than brains in vats, and these territories or ecologies are not contained within our physical anatomy, nor are they known only as immanent representations.  The question becomes this: Where does your cognition or subjectivity terminate if it is a suprasubjective process and not a stable substance?  The ‘self’ becomes a sign relation or interpretant rather than an unrelated, ontological entity…What is being constantly emphasized is a kind of semiotic ontology in which relations become crucial at every level of analysis and allow for the interweaving of corporeal and incorporeal factors.  Relations are an intrinsic dimension of being, and every being becomes the active center of a web of relations with other beings…beings that are nevertheless in mobile relationships…the ‘truth of the relative’ rather than the ‘relativity of truth.”

– Paul Bains, The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations –