Work Text:
Sampson, Saul.“Watch The Gap: Language, Semiotics, And Letting The Symbol In." Adventures in Curiosity: Dr. Saul Sampson, PhD, Oct.15,19XX, www.drsaulsampsonblog.com
I would not be the first person to point out man’s arrogance in naming ourselves. Homo sapien, after all, translates to wise man, perhaps the most succinct and persistent example of the Western academic obsession with clearly separating that precious Man from the other denizens we share this planet with (and, in that, reinforcing the hierarchy that puts humans on the top and non-humans below them. Funny how that keeps causing us problems). Other animals are sentient, meaning that they have the ability to sense and feel the world around them. Humans, and only humans by our own definition, are sapient—wise. Capable of a level of thought and interaction with the world other things are not.
In that same vein, different academic disciplines have spent the last several centuries trying to define what makes humans so separate from other animals. This often manifests in someone making a broad claim about something which humans do that other animals simply do not do. It then becomes a hobby for others to point out and debunk these claims.
For example, it’s been said that humans are the only animals that use tools (incorrect; see corvids); the only animals that invent (incorrect; see chimps); the only animal that mourns (incorrect; see elephants); the only animal that kills out of malice (incorrect; the classic example here is chimps again, but I would like to put fourth meerkats as another good option). We can play this game all day, and I have. (I am what my students call “not very fun at parties”).
Some people will claim that humans are the only animals who tell stories. This, I think, is closer to a truth, but still rings hollow: “story,” at its basest form, is a sequence of events that contains information others can synthesize. Bees tell each other stories, as do dolphins and whales.
It would be more accurate to say that humans are the only animals who use metaphor.
Metaphor is, of course, the act of using one thing to say something else. Though it is a definition most learn in grade school and a device most use every day without thinking much about it, it is in fact a very complex cognitive process. Think of even the simplest application of it: Someone who just heard something agreeable may say, “That’s music to my ears.” Your husband may come in on a cold day and say, “It’s a freezer out there.” Not only are both of these statements that aren’t true, they actually carry more weight, meaning, and information because they aren’t true. In the first example, we understand that the information gained is not only good, but pleasing, transportive, more equivalent to art than just an exchange of words. In the second, we understand not only that it’s cold outside, but that it’s cold in a way that’s stable, in a way that implies it will stay that way for a long time. It may also imply a kind of stillness to the cold: it’s not snowing, there’s no blizzard. It’s a landscape so cold and still it preserves.
You may also point at a familiar place and say, “I spent time there.” This is also a metaphor, because time is not actually a currency one can spend. However, we take the meaning without even thinking about it, and we also find a deep truth within it—you have given this place something you can never get back. Every second you were there is a second you weren’t somewhere else, in addition to a second you can never get back. We know this, even if we don’t think about it. We embed it in the way we speak.
And this is something that any human with language can understand, at least on some level. It’s nearly instinctual. Consider that nearly every culture we know of teaches children (and non-children) with stories of talking animals or objects. Even a toddler is aware, on some level, that when we tell the story of a mouse who bravely helps a lion and is later rewarded with a kindness by the great beast in turn, we are not actually talking about a lion and a mouse. If you use the word agency to a child, you’ll get a blank stare, but if you tell a story about how the baker’s daughter only frees herself from the curse when she searches for the answers herself, they understand the meaning of it. Really think about that—they understand the meaning of the word without the word itself.
Children understand metaphor the same way they know to flinch from a snake or cry when the snake moves closer. We reach for metaphor the way that we reach for a parent.
Is it so surprising then that, sometimes, the metaphor reaches back?
.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Collective unconscious + space?
[Sent at: 3:34 a.m.]Hi, Prof. Bogosian
Thanks so much for your help at my last thesis meeting, and sorry I needed to duck out a little early, the hospital was calling me about my mom. You know that update already.
You gave me a really good direction. I’ve been deep into Jung for the past few days, and people who are spinning off Jung, and people who are spinning off of people who are spinning off Jung. You’re right, there’s a lot of people with thoughts about Jung. Did you know about the whole thing with the rocking chairs? I think I hate rocking chairs now.
Weird question—do you know anyone who has done work with the collective unconscious as a place? I’m seeing some interesting concepts being brought up and I am trying to find some academic sources that go in that direction. Like, if it's something that things come from and that we can access, so someone must have done some kind of space/place analysis of it, right?
I’m thinking back to Tuan, actually. I’ve only read his first book (Space & Place, for Dr. Olson’s class last winter) but I always think about the way he puts forth that we create the high/low hierarchy because of how important standing is to human development on both the personal and evolutionary level. I’ve been turning that one passage over and over in my head.
Page 37: “Upright and prone: these positions yield two contrary worlds. [...] For the infant the move from the supine horizontal to the seated perpendicular is already more than a postural triumph. It is a widening horizon, a new social orientation.’ This postural triumph and the consequent widening of horizon are repeated daily throughout a person's life. Each day we defy gravity and other natural forces to create and sustain an orderly human world; at night we give in to these forces and take leave of the world we have created.”
He goes on, “‘High’ and ‘low,’ the two poles of the vertical axis, are strongly charged words in most languages. Whatever is superior or excellent is elevated, associated with a sense of physical height. Indeed "superior" is derived from a Latin word meaning "higher." "Excel" ( celsus ) is another Latin word for "high." The Sanskrit brahman is derived from a term meaning "height." "Degree," in its literal sense, is a step by which one moves up and down in space. Social status is designated "high" or "low" rather than "great" or "small." God dwells in heaven. [...] Edwyn Bevan wrote: “the idea which regards the sky as the abode of the Supreme Being, or as identical with him, is as universal among mankind as any religious belief can be.
I don’t know, professor, something about perception and how it shapes us and how we shape it back and how all of it is symbol and also it needs to come from somewhere. Like, he’s talking here about how this is a lived reality of people and how this symbol for greatness and gods come from our own visceral physicality and it’s symbol but it’s also real.
Do you ever feel like—some fantastic idea, this answer to all your questions, is right in front of you and you’re running to reach it but it’s just out of reach? And every time you get close to it your brain just—stops? You can feel your brain stretch but whenever you feel like you’re about to touch it, you touch a blank whiteboard instead.
I can literally feel the sign and signifier slip. It’s frustrating.
Anyway. Glad for any guidance you might have.
—Franklin
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Collective unconscious + space?
[Sent at 8:32 a.m.]Good morning, Franklin. Always good to hear from you and happy to help but, I’m sorry, I’m not sure I’m following you here. What do you mean by collective unconscious as place? Jung’s collective unconscious isn’t literal (or proven), it’s a way of thinking about the ways human symbology repeats over time and why. There’s also better sources, if you want to look at repeated motifs across human cultures. Jung had a very flawed and old-fashioned understanding of the workings of non-Western cultures, for instance, and very period-typical thoughts about women.
I also really enjoy this part of Tuan’s argument, but I’m not sure where within your argument (or question) it fits. He’s talking about how human perspective and experience uniquely shape the way we talk about and conceptualize the built environment we live in. I thought you were planning on writing about how the development of the American nuclear family was constructed and disseminated through popular narratives. That’s not something you need to be looking at Tuan for—how did you even end up there?
I’d love to help, please just clarify your question.
You also need to be careful with following rabbit holes about the collective unconscience specifically, as those discussions often end up in a place filled with pop-psychology and wiccan/neo-pagan circles which, while not bad, would not do you well for the specific topic you’re interested in.
Hope all is well with your mother and your family, or as well as it can be. Let me know if I need to get in touch with any of the other faculty you’re working with about extensions.
Let’s also set up another progress meeting soon.
Best,
Dr. Penelope Bogosian
Associate Professor
English & Semiotics Studies
Clear Mountain College
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Collective unconscious + space?
[Sent at: 9:12 a.m.]I was looking into origins of the “white picket fence” image specifically, and I ended up reading something that played with some interesting ideas about house images and now I’m thinking that maybe I should look more into, like, conceptual metaphor and signified/signifier slip and the reasons behind semiological structure. maybe i should take out some psychology books too…
And thank you. She’s about as well as we can hope and seems comfortable, finally. Everyone at the school has been really understanding.
—Franklin
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Collective unconscious + space?
[Sent at 9:30 a.m.]Franklin, you’re still not being very clear. Have you slept yet? How about you grab a quick nap and then touch base again. I’d be glad to recommend you some literature, and I think the “white picket fence” idea is a rich ground of analysis, but all-nighters are not always the best place to start when it comes putting new ideas into words.
I know it’s a stressful time in the semester, and for you in particular, but remember to take care of yourself as well.
Dr. Penelope Bogosian
Associate Professor
English & Semiotics Studies
Clear Mountain College
.
[cont. "Watch The Gap: Language, Semiotics, And Letting The Symbol In"]
You think, of course, that I mean this metaphorically. This is a problem we will continue running into—the only way to talk about metaphor is with metaphor, the same way that the only way to talk about language is with language. It doesn’t matter which one we speak in. Say it in as many as you’d like: Metáfora. Liknelse. Metaphora. Yǐnyù. It’s like trying to fix a hardware problem by running different software. There are some who say that composing in a language other than your first is the truest way to express something sincere—the removal from the building blocks of meaning you were raised on forces you to create new pathways, new meaning, and a clearer understanding of what you intend to convey.
But the fact remains that we are still trying to explain something using itself. This is something we drill into all new students of any language: the worst way to define something is with itself. Yet we can do nothing else. Truly, we’ve trapped ourself in one great maze that leads only in on itself, and we wander it like—well. Never mind.
But let’s return to the point. I say “metaphor reaches back.” To begin to sketch out my meaning, I must go back and say, “Metaphor must come from somewhere.” You might say, “It comes from us,” and that’s true, but it also doesn’t answer the whole question or, in truth, begin to fathom what I’m asking.
Many things come from humans, and we in turn are made from many things—and all of them come from something else. We know how to break ourselves down into atoms. We know our own physical elements: mostly oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, with much smaller amounts of potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. I can tell you the automatic structure of all of these and how one might mix protons, neutrons, and electrons together to form them. And we also know that protons, neutrons, and electrons come from somewhere, though that is a mystery that even us Wise Men haven’t been able to fully find an answer to. Physicists suspect it was an explosion. I am not a physicist.
All of that is to say that “metaphor comes from us” cannot be a sufficient answer, because humans are not the center of any mode of creation, no matter how very wise we name ourselves. Human beings are conduits and vessels for other things—for chemical diffusion. For cell respiration. For electrical impulses over brain tissue. And for metaphor.
So we ask again: where does it come from?
And you might say instead that “metaphor comes from language,” and that may be stepping closer to the truth, but then we must ask where language comes from. This is a question that we don’t have an answer to. In fact, we have less of an answer to it than those happy physicists who theorize that the building blocks of the physical originated from an explosion. We know that, at some point, humans started doing it, and have done it ever since, but the exact why and how of it is likely lost to us forever. It has also caused as many problems as it has solved.
To answer “where does language come from,” we circle back to that first question: what makes humans so different from other animals? How is human language different from the ways animals communicate with each other, to warn of danger or call the rest of the pack to hunt or seek a mate?
The simplest answer is the same as metaphor: we are the only species that can say one thing while meaning something else.
In evolutionary biology, signaling theory grapples with the idea that animal sounds and communications are unfailingly honest, even when it would be in the animal’s best interest to deceive. Non-human animals cannot fake sounds of fear, pain, or pleasure. A cat purring is direct evidence that it is happy. An iguana, sensing it is threatened and becoming afraid, will puff up its frills. Neither can do that if it does not actually feel that way. Scholars such as Chris Knight in his paper “Ritual/speech coevolution: a solution to the problem of deception” have put forth that the reason other apes do not develop more advanced language is because the best way to avoid being misled or deceived is to simply not create a form of communication where it’s possible.
But humans have. Words make that deception possible. It’s the classic signified/signifier gap. By expressing something with language, we remove it from its reality. Between the signifier—the physical reality of something, which we can touch, taste, feel, experience—and the signified—the conceptual, ideal form that lives, unique and untouchable, in each person’s mind—is an ocean of possibility for interpretation, misinterpretation, change, growth, mutation, and transmutation. We dive into that ocean and create signs—that is, we create meaning.
A sign is, after all, anything that creates a meaning that is not the thing itself. It allows you to carry something as an idea when you don’t have an object. It allows you to tell others about the object when they haven’t seen it, or when it’s not in front of you to point at.
To create language is to create a gap. To use language to create metaphor is to widen that gap.
And it is the nature of the universe that, when presented with an empty space, something will come and fill it. That’s just basic diffusion.
.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Collective unconscious + space?
[Sent at: 3:00 p.m.]Good afternoon, Professor.
Yeah, sorry about that. I haven’t been sleeping well lately. You’re right, it’s probably stress, the thesis plus everything else is really starting to get to me. I got some rest and am feeling a lot more clear headed.
I fell into the work of an academic named Saul Sampson. Are you familiar with him? A lot of his work has been archived on a blog which I’ve been reading, though I’m not sure if it’s him running it or if it’s just an archive. It’s still being updated but the content seems to have changed a lot in the past few months.
But he makes really interesting points about the ways metaphors grow and develop the same way living creatures or languages grow and develop, and I’ve been very interested in that. Talking about metaphors like they’re living things seems to open up new ways of talking about their development, even if it’s just—ha!—metaphorically, and I think I can use that structure in my thesis even if I don’t use the content.
Also, I don’t know, there seems to be something really…accurate? Of talking about the place metaphors come from as a place we can get to. And it’s so interesting to think about what that place might be like. Sampson talks about it as an ocean, mainly—I think because of connotations with it being unformed and deep, and an old theory about sleeping and drowning and dreaming being the basis of storytelling? I can’t remember the source for that though, sorry—but I think it would have more structure when we went and visited it. Maybe a jungle? But that seems too organic.
The earliest structures that were totally made by people (that we have on record) were probably grave sites and watch towers, but not long afterward we started building rooms, for worship and storage if not for living. I guess walls are probably human being’s earliest form of architecture. I think it would only make sense if we would structure a world made of all metaphor as a world made of walls.
A structure made of all walls…I guess that would be a maze? Oh, and then the maze has such a long history in myth and as a metaphor in itself! We’ll end up behind the Overlook Hotel, or below Crete! Do you ever think about how messed up that myth is? I always end up thinking a lot about Pasiphaë. Have you noticed how many Greek myths are actually about mothers? The Shining is also at least a little bit about mothers. You know, in the book, Wendy is basically the main character. Kubrick flattened her a lot in the movie but also I don’t think that guy like women that much. I read the book and then watched the m movie right after and they really are two different stories. One is about an evil House. The other is about a weird House and an evil guy who takes the weird House as an excuse to do the things he’d always wanted to do.
Interestingly, the movie ends in ice, and the book ends in fire (an explosion).
…Sorry, maybe I didn’t get as much rest as I needed. You’re not in film studies, and neither am I. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Maybe everything is finally getting to me. I think I need a break, I’ve been thinking about taking a weekend trip to clear my head.
But. Yeah. Anything about using metaphor as organism/organic would be helpful, I think.
Thanks,
—Franklin
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Collective unconscious + space?
[Sent at 5:05 p.m.]Franklin,
Yes, I am familiar with Dr. Sampson’s work. We once met at a conference. He’s considered very fringe in the field.
(For the sake of full disclosure, at that conference where we met, he and I had something of a public disagreement over the use of the word “gap” or “space” when talking about sign, signifier, and signified. He insisted that we needed to either use different wording for these concepts, or accept that, by “invoking” those words, we are implying that there was a literal space or gap between concept and conveyed that we should be discussing. He thought the verbiage was adding an unnecessary level of abstraction and metaphor that made the truth even more difficult to ascertain. I found this absurd and a gross misunderstanding about the way representative language works. This debate went on for longer than anyone intended it to.)
I can certainly ask around for good resources on conceptualizing metaphor as something organic, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in anything Sampson says, even as a conceptual frame. He’s prone to logical and argumentative leaps that are completely unforgivable for a scholar of his level, and you’ve worked too hard to have your thesis doubted and set aside because he’s snuck into your works cited page.
I think a break sounds like a very good idea—you’re right, it doesn't seem like you’ve gotten enough rest. I suggest putting down the books and the laptop entirely and getting some distance. Where are you planning on going?
Feel better.
Dr. Penelope Bogosian
Associate Professor
English & Semiotics Studies
Clear Mountain College
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Collective unconscious + space?
[Sent at: 11:34 p.m.]A road trip out to rural Virginia. I might do some hiking. See the ash trees.
Thanks for being so understanding. Let’s set up another meeting when I get back.
—Franklin.
.
[cont. Watch The Gap: Language, Semiotics, And Letting The Symbol In]
The idea that metaphor must come from somewhere is not new, nor is the idea that some symbols and metaphors have a unique, universal resonance. Carl Jung most famously presented the idea of the kollektives Unbewusstes—collective unconscious—as an explanation for the way stories, themes, and motifs echo across time, cultures, and myth. These patterns of thought and images (and metaphors) are inherited by all of us, baked into our cognitive DNA. The mother, the father, the child, the monster, the flood, the trickster, the maze—we are born with the outlines of these ideas already formed.
But it also functions as a metaphor in and of itself. Read the words collective unconscious and allow it to conjure its own image in your mind. Something dark and deep and eternal, waiting just below the surface of the known and every day. Something you can plunge into. Something things emerge from, fully formed.
And we keep going back to this idea of Jung’s because there’s something there that makes sense, something there that rings true.
Most importantly, it offers a place where metaphors come from, at least theoretically. An origin point where they develop, where they marinate and begin to force.
It implies that, without us, the metaphors would still be there. Floating beneath the surface. Waiting for someone to give it the means to wake up. Waiting for us to encounter something we do not and can not understand, reach out a hand, and find something to give it structure.
Because that’s what metaphor does best, in some ways. It gives us ways to talk about things we would otherwise not have any way to describe. We need it so that we don’t fall into the signified/signifier gap and die there, unexpressed. It needs us so that it can leave that ocean. Symbiosis at its finest.
In doing so, in giving it that structure—in some ways we tame it.
Because this also implies, however strangely and uncomfortably, that metaphors are alive. Or they can be alive. And there’s a logic there: Language, after all, is an organism, that grows and changes and breathes with the people who speak it. So too is metaphor.
It also implies that this is a place we can go. That the basis of metaphor comes from a place we can access.
That, I think, is the next great step in human innovation. What might that place look like? What might we find there? What can we discover—if we allow this force to reach back?
And what might a metaphor look like untamed?
.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Sentient metaphor?
[Sent at: 4:01 a.m. ]Good evening, Professor. Morning? Both, I guess.
Sorry to bother you at this hour. But also you’re just going to read it when you’re awake, so I think it’s okay.
I know I said I’d leave the laptop home, but I took it just in case. Something I saw today just…made me think. Dwell. Ponder. Fuck.
If we recognize the world through archetypes, do you think it’s possible they sometimes recognize us back? Like, in their unsculpted form.
Or. Do you think that maybe we give them form because if we don’t, something bad might happen?
—F.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Sentient metaphor?
[Sent at 7:09 a.m. ]Franklin, I will not mince words here—I am becoming very concerned about you. Are you with anyone right now? One of your roommates reached out to me and is equally concerned. If you are not comfortable getting in touch with him, would you give me a call when you wake up? It would ease my mind a lot. 555-761-0986.
I am also a bit lost on your point. Sentience? Unsculpted metaphor? These aren’t rooted academic concepts. Unsculpted metaphor isn’t anything.
Please take care.
Dr. Penelope Bogosian
Associate Professor
English & Semiotics Studies
Clear Mountain College
.
[cont. "Watch The Gap: Language, Semiotics, And Letting The Symbol In"]
People scoff at this as a revolutionary or preposterous idea, to speak of metaphor as if it has any sort of agency or instinct. The very concept of a sentient idea feels contradictory to our own definitions of life. But just like language, just like animals, ideas evolve and change and fight not to die. Stories and themes hide themselves in other stories, desperate not to be forgotten, just as bits and pieces of dead or endangered languages fold themselves into dominant languages and hide there.
To say a metaphor has sentience feels absurd, yet to say that metaphors have power—that ideas have power—that’s just common sense. Wars have been won based on narrative, on story, on symbol. On who can more perfectly frame themselves as the hero and therefore winner.
We give metaphors power. We do this because we cannot help it—it’s the only way we have to understand, speak about, conceptualize the world around us, the things that we have no other way to express. I spent time there. You shot down the argument. Sleep is far from my grasp. And if you give something enough power, eventually you’re not giving it anymore—it just has power.
So much of what we fear boils down to a metaphor for something else. Ghosts are literary device brought off the page and into reality. The idea that the dead are lingering somehow, for either positive or negative reasons, nearly always with the implication that they would be doing less accumulated harm if they “moved on”—there’s no better way to talk about grief. Ghosts aren’t about the dead, they’re about the living—but we’ve given them enough power to become about the dead again. And then they start moving furniture.
Demons across many cultures embody some specific vice or evil because we need a metaphor to talk about them, and if you speak enough in metaphor about a creature that embodies wrath, eventually there will simply be a creature there for those who go looking for it. Angels and gods are metaphors for the goodness we see in the world and need an explanation for, and if you speak enough of angels and gods than you will begin to see their good works appear around you.
We can pull back and speak more broadly. There has never been a war fought for the sake of being a war. Wars, then, are metaphors for a greater social or political conflict. It is well documented that interpersonal violence, everything from a barroom brawl to s rape, is less about the act of violence itself and more about the power that acts represent. Therefore, all acts of interpersonal violence can also be seen as metaphors for power.
The famous placebo effect, where people experience changes to physical symptoms when given something they only think will help them, shows that the power of metaphor and belief is very real and literal. The person takes something that stands for healing, and feel themself heal, regardless and often in spite of the physical reality. We can say the same thing about prayer. Meditation. Ritual. And kind of magical thinking you can name or imagine.
To return to ghosts, the connection between the poltergeist and the adolescent—most commonly the adolescent girl—are well documented, because we need a way to talk about all the rage and ugliness adolescent girls have inside of them without sullying our image of what girls are. And that connection becomes all the more resonant if we think of it in terms of the struggle between two symbols. The image, the sign, of what the adolescent thinks she should be, what she’s been told she should be, what every piece of media and story around her tells her she should be, and the image of what she sees in the mirror, what she feels inside herself, the image, sign, and story she tells about herself. And those ideas come into such conflict that from it comes—energy. Violence. A way for one image to prevail over another, often with explosive results.
And all of this is from a metaphor that is still being sculpted, and therefore in some way controlled, by the person composing it. All of this from metaphors that are acting only within human constraints, and not on their own.
So let’s take for a moment, that metaphor comes from some kind of place that has some kind of relationship with reality (its own, in addition to ours). For the sake of ease, we’ll call it the collective unconscious. The problem with accessing it is that, as soon as we interact with a metaphor or an otherwise empty cognitive space, we begin to change it with our interaction and observance. We cannot meet it unless we give it structure but, by giving it structure, it’s no longer the collective unconscious—no longer the well of untamed, moving ideas that I am so eager to explore here.
How do we open it up and release it?
I think, first and foremost, we would need a very potent, very resonant metaphor. Something that rings back as far as humans have understood their own basic needs as differentiated from animals.
For example, let’s take a House house.
The use of “house” is important here, because the implications and connotation are both more concrete and more weighted. Not every language differentiates house and home (French does not; German does; Spanish does indeed have two separate words but “hogar” is not quite used the way “home” is in English), but English does so with distinction. A house is a place, a physical lived reality, while “home” is something rooted in emotion and sentiment. If you ask any child living in the Western world to draw a house, you will get a similar result. It will likely look like this:
[fig. 16]
It would look like that despite the fact that many of the children you ask live in apartments; despite the fact that so few new houses actually have chimneys; despite the fact that very few houses actually have exactly two windows in the front. This is a very, very stable sign; it’s a very stable metaphor. We know what a house is meant to look like, even if that is very rarely analogous to reality. That makes it, I think, ideal for this.
(We would not get the same result if we asked the same group of children to draw a home. These images, because of the way English functions, would be more sentimental or more tied to individual lived reality rather than the imagistic and conceptual reality of shared signs. This is likely a more “true” representation of the child’s life, but it would not necessarily reflect the way they think things “should” be.)
This is an image rife with social and political baggage, with emotional resonance, with implied meanings. We know what a house is supposed to mean. We know what should be in there. We know how our own experiences map out onto that heavy, heavy “should.”
So we take the image of a House house, and then the reality of a house. And then we fill it with more meaning. Let’s say this house is also a personal commitment—of a husband to his family. He is dedicating himself to this house because he has left his family and partner before. This makes the house a promise in addition to a house and in addition to an image. Fill it with a family that looks the way we think a family should look—a mother and a father and a brother and a sister—except there’s something wrong. There’s been no marriage, for instance. Maybe the sister is the same age as the girls who create poltergeists.
We can destabilize it further. Maybe with an awareness of image, somehow. An awareness of the eyes on you, of the construction of them, of the way people construct you and your eye—the understanding of lens that a photographer has, for instance, or a model.
And then put even more eyes on it. And encourage all of them to tell their own version of the story.
And, I think, the last element may be to somehow distort the layer of reality this House is on. For instance, a veneer of fiction, or of constructed reality (such as an edited recording, video or otherwise), or manipulated pictures. The more layers we add in this theoretical experiment, I suspect, the more effective it will be.
The idea being that, with enough pressure on it, the sign itself might...crack. Fold in on itself, or open up. Let us in.
Let something else out.
And from it comes—well. I’m not sure. That’s the point of the experiment, after all. To see what comes out. To see what an unsculpted idea looks like—and can do for us.
And, I suppose, what it wants.
.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Sentient metaphor?
[Sent at 5:45 p.m.]That’s the problem, professor. It’s not that it "isn’t anything."
It’s that it’s nothing.
It’s nothing.