Semiotic Theories are for The Birds
From Eve — A Semiotic novel. VOLUME TWO. VOLUME ONE is published and available here.
Eve had had it with semiotic theories. She had made the mistake of Googling the topic. They, I mean the theories, would give a nod to Peirce and then seek to apply his circumlocutions in the face of dogged realizations that times do change.
Big deal, Eve thought. She could not read this stuff.
She knew that semiotics was three things: The language of signs, the appreciation of reality, and the necessary ethical and aesthetic ammunition to shoot the moon.
Shooting the moon was allowing the hand of God to actually touch the hand of Adam.
She repented of her own use of semiotic lingo. She repented any posturing she had done. She repented any suggestion that she was part of any garde whatsoever. Eve shook mentally like a wet dog. She spewed drops here and there.
The language of signs was whatever any brave soul made of them. Conventional words would freeze them, distort them, confine them or simply mis-hear and miss-see. The result was gibberish or poetry it made no difference. They were what we had to work with. What a blend.
The appreciation of reality was a matter-of-fact acknowledgement that the world, the seen world, the cosmos, the seen cosmos, the mind, the viewed mind, was all a glitz-studded selection of signs that varied with each viewing acolite and spoke in ways too myriad to guess. To appreciate reality was to embrace it as you saw it and surmise it as you didn’t. And it was to take from Peirce not all of his involved mechanics, his scholar fodder, but his broad and righteous caveats –- fallibility, continuity, (freedom, responsibility).
Yes, take these and insist on these. Find a way to make these things a norm. Send all the academic claptrap to some charitable incinerator.
We are going to shoot the moon, Eve thought.
It was her last day on the shores of Lake Sebago. Maine had changed. The country had changed. It was approaching as last gasp. It was a binary wasteland.
It would either be wasted for good or revive as a triadic lesson in common sense, patience and cessation of silliness.
We will shoot the moon by welcoming the dull, Eve thought. She thought of her mother.
Her family was aging away, Her dad had not remarried but he had turned into something of a ladies’ man. It was a curious story. It involved a Southern woman whose notion of goodness was to relieve the hidden frustrations of the rejected old.
Eve smiled to think of it. She thought of Adam. Strange world.
She knew at some point wiser heads in the academic world would see the fundamental aim of Peirce and related philosophers. Things would become comprehensible to all.
It was the matter of finding the right words. It was always that. But it would always need to change. It would always be not all there is.
