Approaches to Semiotic Composition Author(s): R. V. Cassill Reviewed work(s): Source: College English, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Sep.

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Vol. 37, No. I

SEPTEMBER

1975

College English
E

R. V. CASSILL

Approaches to Semiotic Composition

The lover scanning his mistress's... scowling brows is learning to read. So is the theologian comparing the ideas of eros and agape .... I. A. Richards: How to Read a Page

FIVE YEARS at Brown I have been teaching and developing a class in which the distinction between reading words and reading other signs and emblems is minimized-in which composition mingles elements of pictorial signification with typographical and syntactical variations. Thus far I have shrunk from labeling it a class in "semiotic composition." It passes in the University catalogue under the moping title "Notebooks, Lists, Collections and Diaries." It is not unusual for some students who enrolled in a fog to remain unsure to the semester's end of what we are up to and, above all, what our efforts are for. On the other hand it is not an unusual semester when at least two-thirds of them thrive at a level of creative effort that is-simply put-completely beyond the range of the undergraduate work I am used to seeing and reading. Beyond noting this uncommon proportion of excellence, I too remain unsure of what we are headed for. And as the work of any given semester begins I waver before deciding where to plunge into the exercises, theory, and speculation that will occupy us. It would seem appropriate to warn all incoming students that we are going to subsist largely on a diet of Freud eggs. Then, when the predictable hooting has subsided, and if they offer me the other cheek, I would plant this warning from Fowler: "The assumption that puns are per se contemptible . . . is a sign at once of a sheepish docility and a desire to seem superior." I might also mention Auden's illuminating quip: "Good poets love bad puns."

FOR THE LAST

R. V. Cassill is a novelist, critic, and teacher. He has taught at the Univ. of Iowa, Columbia, Harvard, and Purdue, and is now completing his ninth year as a Professor at Brown Univ. in the English Dept. 1

COLLEGE ENGLISH

In our work of the semester we will have much to do with punning-verbal and pictorial-as we paddle into the deep waters beyond graffiti and TV commercials toward the conquests of Picasso and Joyce. From McLuhan we hope to learn that the deceptions of the commercial media are no more abundant than the revelations they afford a keen reader. I want the students to find that the compositional practices elaborated by Klee, Steinberg, Cummings, and hundreds of professional ad men are available to them, for objectives that need not be declared precisely in advance. We will lay our own Freud eggs as we learn to digest those laid for us by exemplars we choose and those we can hardly, in our time, avoid. We will have to do with parody as well. And to give a taste of the theoretical speculation on which I have meant to ground our cut-and-paste methods, here is a parody of a didactic parable so familiar that I need not repeat it in its trite and usual form. The parody: There are three students who have never seen an elephant. In an experiment they are led blindfolded to an elephant and asked to feel the beast and say what it is
like.

One student feels its trunk and says: Like Grape-Nuts. The next feels its leg and says: Like the sound of an avalanche. The third feels its tail and says: Like Raquel Welch. The point of the parody is not that students are contrary and whimsical, or that they seldom reply with the earnest candor of Socrates' young friends. If students are sometimes disingenuous when they are marched through such tests, we dare not say so after the Sixties. The point I intend for the parody is that when students, artists, or sooth sayers search for honest metaphors and concrete universals they find that every sense perception is most wondrously implicated with memory, emotion, hypothesis, and a sense of relative importance which, in its turn, is implicated with the basic hope, wish, or instinct to survive. It is a barren candor that ignores or denies these complex entwinings. The first student may have experienced between his teeth the roughness of Grapenuts that he now feels on the elephant's trunk as his fingers encounter it. The second student is not necessarily displaying pathological synesthesia. He is, perhaps, evidencing the fact that the process of comparing sensory perceptions runs them through a screen of concepts, frequently verbal. Massive is a concept that includes both girth and voluminous sound. I decline to comment on the third student's answer. I might be tripped into making another detestable pun. After reminding us that lovers and theologians are all trying to learn to read, Richards goes on to say:
There is an ambiguity here which is brought out by asking, learning to read what? The answer of course is 'Both.' . . . There is no such thing as merely reading words; always through the words we are trafficking or trying to traffic with things ....

-the written word, or by means of that word the face, or the heart, of Nature?

Approachesto Semiotic Composition 3

Our encounters with language on the printed page ought to be mingled with the sensory and emotional impingements of the tangible world that give an individual stamp to our bio-psychic and cultural inheritances. There is a passage in Willa Cather's novel The Professor's House that recalls this mingling. Here the "great student" and polymorphous genius Tom Outland describes how he read the twelve books of the Aeneid during a summer of "high tide" in which he also explored the primitive Cliff City he discovered on a mesa in the American Southwest: It was possession.... For me the mesa was no longer an adventure,but a religious emotion.... It was the first time I'd ever studied methodically or intelligently.... When I look into the Aeneid now, I can always see two pictures; the one on the page and anotherbehind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green pifions with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong with calmness and courage-behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring. It is with the paradox of the "two pictures"-with the paradox of finding visual recollection fused with the recall of language-that we are engaged in my class. We are digging for the roots of language, not in the study of its derivations from other spoken or written languages, but where the ancient vines have taken new root in the experiences we may claim to "share" with others like us, but long dead and gone. Ezra Pound's famous enthusiasm for the essay of Ernest Fenollosa on the Chinese written character came in large part from the notion that Chinese words on a page still bear pictorial promptings that have been lost to alphabetic languages. The methods I have been promulgating are another attempt at restoring what old Ez persuaded me had been lost to most of us contemporary readers at all levels by advances in our language. I have already mentioned Richards, Pound, McLuhan, Fenollosa, and a few painters as among those I drew on in the development of my course. I prepared a bibliography-more for my own use than for the students because, frankly, some of the titles are rough going for unselected undergraduates. It is wasteful to launch young people too far above their level of familiarity-or too far outside the indoctrination that has trained them to say that when they feel an elephant's trunk it is like a downspout. So I don't require the reading of any of these books. But I point out that the books-with their own appended bibliographies in some cases-make a sort of concentric circle around the things we do and talk about in class. These titles are your compass rose, I say emphatically-the greatest waste of all is to lead young people through courses of instruction that have rigid outer or upper limits. We are going to do some things with scissors and paste that will carry them right back to the joys of elementary school. It would be an abomination if any of them scissored themselves back into Procrustean cradles. These books wait at the compass points leading into empiric psychology, semiotic theory, anthropology, art history, and the sensible world. Visual Thin2king A Certain World Rudolf Arnheim W. H. Auden

COLLEGE ENGLISH

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry The Creative Process The Intelligent Eye The Book of the It Man and His Symbols Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? The Mechanical Bride Journal of the Fictive Life How to Read a Page

Ernest Fenollosa Brewster Ghiselin (ed.) R. L. Gregory Georg Groddick Carl Jung Kenneth Koch Marshall McLuhan Howard Nemerov I. A. Richards

When it has been available I have sometimes required the class to buy Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, telling the students it is the best model I can think of for the notebooks they are to work in during the semester-though, to be sure, it offers no example of the visual collaging and montage we will employ in part. To my best students I hint that the more remote model may be Pound's Cantos, his effort to smuggle the paideuma onto his own life raft. To the freshman moyen et sensuel I say the notebook is supposed to be "a very personal collection and arrangement of things you know and care about." Though I follow Richards in an attempt to reconstruct the students' notion of what reading is, some vestige of the old style "reading list" enters into our work. We work from a good anthology of old and new poetry. Each semester we invent new approaches to reading the prose of, say, Huckleberry Finn, or C. S. Lewis, or sometimes the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. What is important is that out of our reading we make something. Paul Engle used to insist "the proper response to a poem is to write a poem." Kenneth Koch moves beyond this in showing unsophisticated young people how to go about it. But I am reluctant to follow Koch's methods except as part of a mix that includes preparations for the purely verbal assault, wary of shortcuts that would leave me with a semester of reading student poems that began, "Dog, where did you get that bark?" or "Snow, where did you get that white?" Scissors and rubber cement and simple stencils are as much the tools of the imagination in our (poetic) composition as pen or pencil. We work with collages and stencils because no training at all is required to make them dependably useful. Just as I try to reconstruct prejudices about the nature of reading, I try to debunk the idea that the manual dexterity acquired in "art training" is an essential to artful composition. Anyone with a dirty finger can rub a design through the miniature stencils we prepare from tracings or inspiration. And I would like all students to understand that to search and find-as one must search through back issues of magazines for elements that belong in a collage in progress-is no less part of the imaginative process than an initial conception. We read Robert Frost's poem "Design" to learn, indeed, that initial conceptions are as much the gift of roadside flower, spider, and moth as of the poet's frontal lobes. How

Approaches to Semiotic Composition 5

the poet works up to and from such gifts is our study-guided by hints from

Visual Thinking and The Intelligent Eye about the way the eye fabricatesdata

from stimuli, guided by Richards' emphasis on "the constructiveness of understanding." "Passive reading" is simply an anomaly. Emerson says, "When the mind is braced by labor and invention the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion." McLuhan echoes him. I echo McLuhan. And when and if it takes the regressive joys of cutting up magazines and repasting to begin labor and invention, it would be nearly criminal to let a student believe he can read a page merely because he can eyeball his way across it. Since analytic reading is always in part dissection, then a literal dissection of ads for cigarettes, perfumes, or politicians with scissors is the start of a reading process advanced by pasting the elements in new combinations. It is useful in deciphering the encoded semiotic elements in any given ad. It is homologously related to the processes by which McLuhan linked the ploys of admen to the creations of Joyce, Eliot, and Piscasso. On a nude torn from Playboy or Playgirl a student may paste the hooker line from a National Airlines ad: "I'm Linda. I'm going to fly you like you've never been flown before." This pasting clears up whatever intentional ambiguity the ad writer left in his language, does it not? If my description of the recaptioned photo truly does not clear up the ambiguity of the language, then try the experiment with your own scissors and paste to prove the efficacy of our laboratory methods. Yet some idolaters of literature will insist that the ambiguities of metaphysical poetry are constructed on a different principle than the National Airlines ad. To which one can only respond that homology is not identity. How foolish to suppose it might be, though the disclosure of a homologue is a usable construction on the way to understanding. In any case, as Richard Wilbur wrote, "What's lightly hid is deepest understood." Meaning that the constructive effort required for disclosure engages a reader in a complicity with the author more consequential than would a bare recognition of the primary signification of any verbal declaration. The ad man happens to agree. That complicity is what all our processes of reading and composition aim to refine. We might, at the beginning of a notebook, play with semiotic homologues to words by performing exercises suggested by Arnheim's Visual Thinking (Chapter 7: "Concepts Take Shape"). He would have us start by observing the spontaneous metaphor in manual gestures (exclusion, disproportion, enclosure, abruptness, etc.). Then we might observe that these spontaneous metaphors can be and are often made by teachers who have a piece of chalk in one of their gesturing hands, so that the metaphor leaves its trace on a blackboard. That trace can seldom be called a mimetic drawing. Nevertheless, as Arnheim demonstrates, the differences between mimetic shapes (spitting images) and non-mimetic ones (zigzags, enclosures, diagrams of scale and position, contrasts of regularity and

COLLEGE ENGLISH

irregularity) are only matters of degree. In the non-mimetic abstract design or diagram "yet there is the unmistakable resonance of experiences gathered in the visual world," he says. Then he discusses and illustrates experiments made with non-mimetic drawings in which students were asked to draw their ideas of such intangible entities as "a good marriage" or "equality among individuals." Following his lead I ask my students to draw in their notebooks their ideas (in homage to Pound and Fenollosa we might even call them ideograms) of some of the entities that presumably shape their individual lives: Music, Reason, Authority, Shame, Love, Convention, Astral Influences, Anxiety, Family, Public Opinion, Vengeance, Prayer. To be sure, they are invited to add to or subtract from such an obviously motley list. The objective of the exercise is chiefly to show them how readily-how spontaneously-they will select some shape, line, or group of lines and shapes to represent these various ideas for themselves. The mere, sheer fact that these shapes have been made to represent an idea illustrates their kinship to words. They are, one might say, extremely provisional hieroglyphs. One must not yet call them the symbols of a written language because no exclusive meaning has been stabilized by usage in communication. And yet some resonances from a world of common experience will show, from the beginning, their potential reliability in communicating conceptual thought. Drawings of a "good marriage" set against drawings of a "bad marriage" can be distinguished with a degree of consistency not quite uncanny but, nevertheless, alluring to one of scientific bent. The degree of unprompted recognition argues that some of the properties of a common written language, or of a set of stabilized hieroglyphs, are present in even such arbitrarily chosen and fabricated symbols. Further, when a student is called on to explain his ideogrammatic symbol-as he frequently must be to make it intelligible as language aims to be-his explanation is governed and delimited by what he has drawn, just as a topic sentence or thesis might be said to govern a detailed exposition. Thus, if a student has diagrammed an axe or dagger shape to represent his idea of vengeance, then his discursive explanation of venegance must include the metaphoric idea of vengeance as something with a sharp edge. If he has shown axe or dagger shape aimed at a large shape, his symbol has partaken of the David and Goliath myth. Some elucidation of the structure of complex words is possible if the teacher asks the author of such a symbol to decode every angle, proportion, position, closed form, open form, weight of line, or color-every peculiarity that can be encoded, that is. Like the interpretation of handwriting? Yes, indeed. Like the interpretation of dreams, as the interpretation of language should be. In my mind it is not a demerit of such spontaneously metaphoric ideograms that they may not be susceptible to such stabilization as The Lessons of Watergate or The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. Perhaps, I like to fancy, they will stabilize among those strata of human communication that the Herods of the mass media or the state can neither co-opt nor destroy.
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Approaches to Semiotic Composition 7

Like words, brands, or labels, the symbols produced by this preliminary drawing of concepts can be printed on or amid, above or below, in significant relationships to other symbols originating elsewhere, pasted into the notebooks from other excursions. For this printing we use miniature stencils, cutting the shape of the symbol out of an ordinary 3 x 5 card with a razor or X-acto knife. The stencils are printed most simply and effectively by rubbing graphite or ink from a stamp pad through them with a brush or fingertip-reflecting as we rub that in McLuhan's terms the brush is a media simulacrum of a finger and that fingers are as much a part of the system of the imagination as the cortex. And the primitive paper stencil? One may realize the analogy between the stencil and all other frames, material and immaterial, up at least to the Organizing Principles posited by Gestalt psychologists. ("Organizing principles" is a term for that innate constructivism of our sense organs that makes certain stimuli "belong" to certain patterns while it excludes them from other patterns.) A frame is that which includes and excludes-which is what a stencil so obviously does. In some perfectly intelligible sense of the word frame, there is a functioning frame in the human visual system that includes all generally circular shapes in a series that excludes all generally rectangular shapes. This is a fundamental perceptual organization essential to our separation of figures from a ground that is, as often as not, sending equally intense visual stimuli. One might linger a long time pondering how a stencil is like a hypothesis-or like a Platonic paradigm-and how variant stencil frames make our encounters with the sensible world into packets manageable to understanding. No student is forbidden to linger at his leisure on such epistemological concerns, but I don't encourage abrupt flights into philosophy any more than I encourage abrupt versifying. There are elementary prosodic lessons to be learned from making collages in which, evidently, printed matter of the verbal persuasion can be pasted into or onto printed matter essentially pictorial. Proportion, repetition, sequence, variety in unity, antithesis, the mirror image of chiasmas, parallelism, balance, suspension, parodic variation, and (why not?) rhyming are as native to the composition of a collage as to English verse. The hues of lipstick in a lipstick ad can be counted as well as the stressed syllables in a line of verbal poetry. There are shapes of the human figure to be alliterated with susurrus. There are themes to be stated, inverted, suspended, muted, amplified as one page after another in the notebook is developed and composed. Or, to proceed in another direction and claim a poem by incorporation into the ongoing act of the imagination, the student might print his sharp-edged symbol of vengeance on a page of his notebook where all or part of Milton's poem on the Massacre in Piedmont has been copied out. Just as some key words in Milton's lines might be underlined for emphasis, so some of them might be with a dagger or axe shape. Words thus framed and overprinted transparently overprinted are qualified as the addition of adjective or adverb might qualify them. And then, since even Milton's concept of vengeance includes more than blood-

COLLEGE ENGLISH

letting with a sharp instrument, a student might construct on a facing page of his notebook a collage that would extend the translation of the sonnet into pictorially associated signs. Vengeance contains the idea of equilibrium reestablished. So the first thing pasted in might be cut from a photograph of a seesaw in a children's playground. In Milton's vision it is not children but churches that wish to rise by suppressing each other. So pictures of churches are superimposed on the children's figures. If the bodies of churches still have childish feet protruding below the board on which they ride, all the better faith has been kept with the spirit of translation. Since churches are more than the edifices they inhabit, creed words and emblems need to be found and pasted on. And somewhere in this montage the sign of a balance-righting God ought to appear, prepared to intervene with nuclear-equivalent force. So one must find, where he can, an effective image of partisan intervention, perhaps some MIRVequivalent potency susceptible to the prayers of indignation. I see that I have made this translation into pictorial collage sound far too rationalized. That is altogether unfair to the best efforts of my best students. They range far beyond such point for point similarities. Like ducks to water they take to punning in the manner stimulated by the Dadaists half a century ago, and the "felt kinships" they discover between words and pictorial signs produce the most exciting work. I have here as I write the notebook of a girl who has made a series of collages intertwining themes of (1) mechanized flight and (2) the debasement of sexuality. In the resolving image at the end of the series a mysteriously cropped feminine figure is being hurled upward into an orgasmic sundown by the thrust of a 747's jet motors. I read the sequence in the same revery of excitement stirred by my reading of her parody of Randall Jarrell's "Woman in the Washington Zoo"-or by reading Jarrell's original. She has placed herself among great companions with work like this. Another has made me laugh and go sombre with a mixed verbal and pictorial parody of Robert Frost's "Design"-resolved by a photo of a boy peering through a shattered window in which the fracture lines in the glass parody the unmentioned web of the spider in the poem. The rest is a "design of darkness" including photos of cannibalism and carnage and a text associating these with a variety of human atrocities. Another has pasted up a "fight sequence" in an Army barracks which seems to me on a par with the best of what I have read in contemporary novels. Well ... let me temper my own enthusiasm and yours by admitting that only a few of my students hit and sustain these levels. Neither these nor other tactics produce great results automatically. The best claim I can make is that they release, sometimes, those subliminal uprushes we respond to in all genuine art. To be sure, the more reluctant of my students end the semester believing I have given them a passing grade for pasting scraps of pictures into their notebooks at crazy angles. So I have heard it said. One more tactical innovation we go in for-with much more diversity than I can illustrate here-is the use of lists as a device for studying prosody and for pre-syntactical composition. At best accumulating, rearranging, and pairing lists

Approaches to Semiotic Composition 9 of words teaches the student many possibilities of expression latent in sheer sequence, in homogeneity or diversity, or in the emphasis and surprise obtained by inserting the exotic into the midst of the predictable. It is worth pointing out to unsensitized readers that expressively structured lists appear in the syntactically complete examples of prose and poetry they are expected to read throughout their college years. In this example from Ruskin the calculated structuring of a list is glaringly evident: In a community regulated only by laws of demand and supply ... the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible,unimaginative,insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the wellinformed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just and godly person. No one, I suppose, can fail to note the expressive effect obtained by arranging the last four elements in this particular sequence or the irregular slide down the value scale in the first sentence. And, having noted such things, the student is primed to make a list of attributes leading to success or failure within his own peer group or among college friends. Then the list of attributes might be matched with a list of proper names of real or fictional characters who have been, at various times in his life, influential on him. Or it might be matched, according to felt kinships, to the list of things he has abstracted from his written report of a recent or a recurrent dream. For real dreams must be implicated in the process we are engaged in, as a hedge against the faking and superficiality that threatens to discount writing at all levels of proficiency. "A fiction," says Nemerov in Journal of the Fictive Life, "is a projection of real wishes and real fears, real crimes and real punishments, upon persons who do not exist." And most writing, he points out, is unconsciously intended to disguise or deny these fundamental inclinations of the psyche, to bury the realities under the stones of cliche and indoctrinated sentiments of institutionally defined peer groups. Of course we know that there is disguise and denial in dreams, as well. But of a different sort. And the more tactics we can devise for establishing dialectic connection between dreams and our rational evaluations of things and people around us the more light we can filter through the chinks of the censorship that makes for bad reading in exact proportion to its obstruction of writing. It is neither easy nor safe for a student of our times to identify the "merciful, just and godly person" that Ruskin writes of, though the epithets may be recognized. Justice, mercy, and godliness are as precariously lodged in the vocabulary of the contemporary student as, say, joy, ecstasy, divinity, soul, salvation, transcendence, damnation, eternity or other such eschatological terms as they are likely to stumble over in any extensive reading of our literature. Yet from anyone's dreams symbolic equivalents for these reckless words can be retrieved as a currency for usage if our methods are righti.e., properly poetic. None of the methods of making, scrambling, or arbitrarily matching lists de-

10

COLLEGE ENGLISH

rived from the memory of individual students is intended to be analytic in any psychiatric sense. Rather they are intended to provide occasion for'that "subliminal uprush" cited by F. W. H. Myers long ago in Human Personality-"an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being." I take it for granted that good composition, good writing, will afford the writer some perspective on his own nature kin to that derived from psychotherapy. But such perspectives are of transient worth, in any case-static understandings in a world where all changes-while the process of "fiction" (making) is co-terminal only with life. I don't ask my students to make lists of godly things, or gods, but of things on which they "depend." And here, pushed on from the list form in which they originated into easily constructed syntactical continuities, are a few examples: I depend on black coffee, my camera,T. S. Eliot, my memory, and The Pill. Organization, orderliness, my license, familiarity, fingernails, mirrors, and the American Heritage Dictionary fail me less frequently than other things. I depend on luck. My purple plant, my purple flair pen, and the Boston Globe sustain me.
My beige shorts, my quilt, my hoods ... pray for me.

Lives lived in letters, a lone mellow flute, free and animatedhands while sketching, a masturbating, body that's light and tight, magic, power, innocence, brown paper nakedness between two sheets, tasting fruit, cheese, and froth, leaning on bags, glistening tiles, green thorns, tulips, April-change me, hold me. George, Janie, Nancy, Mark, my stereo, my purple flair pen, my memory and my hearing-these are the structure of my world, supported also by my right hand, my hearing,luck, soap, and dancing. Without cigarettes,conscience, puppies, sleep, and luck the integrity of my life would dissolve. I need my checkbook and The Atlantic. Sharing secrets, riding well save me from rivalry, dirty hair, holding babies, walking by construction workers in the presence of real hippies, and from religion.

These fragmentsmay or may not strike you as partakingof the true poetic substance,but at least, I think, they demonstratethat interest in the "raw material of poetry in all its rawness"that MarianneMoore thought the absolute requisitefor a genuine interestin poetry. And they are, at least, closer to poetry than the common undergraduate indulgenceof writing poems out of deep moods. In any case, our interest is less in making autonomouspoems, essays, or narratives than in unearthingtrustworthy raw material,beginning to shape it to significanceand then finding ways to integrateit with other entries in the notebook. When somethingis deliveredby a subliminaluprush,the problemis often
to make a place for it on blank pages or among or upon other assemblages within the notebook's covers. It is at this point that one must grapple with the role of the arbitrary in the creative process, hoping to reveal that the apparently arbitrary disposition of signs is arbitrary only to the rational part of the mind, while it may be the best of clues to the coherent purposes of the unconscious intelligence.

Approachesto Semiotic Composition 11

Particularly when the notebook is first begun and contains hardly anything but blank pages the choice of whether to make an entry on the first pages, near the middle, or farther on must seem as arbitrary as anything can be. But when all the pages begin to fill up and the initial scattered entries are surrounded with material amounting to a thematic or qualitative context, then very often the student will have intimations that all along he has been following a plan that may be intelligibly called either his or him. The accruing context claims the isolated element, lending and borrowing colors of significance, exposing meanings unknown before-that is, meanings unread until the continued process has made them readable. It is tonic for any writer to discover that his expressive efforts meant things he didn't mean for them to mean. Or if one should arbitrarily force a list of things on which one is dependent onto a collage developed out of Milton's vengeance poem, the startled mind of the compositor would be forced to make accommodations of meaning in both the reading of the poem and the reading of the names of the pseudonymous gods listed in jest. What relevance have black coffee, camera, T. S. Eliot, memory, and The Pill to massacres in Piedmont or anywhere else? The answer of course is: None until we make the relationships. And, unarguably, some of the relationships made by arbitrarily forced combinations will be more frivolous than surprising, but in the explosion of oxymora and paradoxes the rational intelligence may find a metaphor, or series of metaphors, straddling between memory and the embalmed passion encoded in the poem. Avenge, O Pill, my slaughtered chastity ..... Again, I have no inclination to argue that the immediate result of such sport is the commodity we call poetry. Altogether I am only saying that by a proliferation of compositional methods we are mining the substrata out of which metaphor and image have to be liberated if reading and writing are to serve maximal purposes, energizing the fossil fuel accumulated in veins beneath the surface of routine communication. And in attempting to make either arbitrary, rationalized, or aesthetic connections within the notebooks, we are trying to make coherent models of the individual psyche, which willy-nilly somehow does accommodate the absurd diversities of data provided by formal and informal education. "A book is a machine to think with," said I. A. Richards, and all too easily we slip into the abased error of supposing that must mean the books composed by others, the "good books" available in such profusion to students in libraries or inexpensive reprint. But a book of his own, in which he literally does think by a manipulation and combination of the symbols bombarding him from the siege lines of his actual world-that is what I want each student to begin. To the extent that he represents in tangible, referable form in his notebook those willy-nilly, purposeful processes by which he has arrived at his spontaneous assents, he has taken a grip on the processes by which he can deliberately decipher the signature of all things, make the translations that altogether constitute the accomplishment of understanding.
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I suppose that life and meaning are for all but philosophical purposes synonymous. The life we are able to comprehend can only exist within a constant and incessant network of signal systems. Without these vital signs neither the idea nor the experience of life is intelligible to the humanist. Through kingdoms and phyla the messages run . . or creep with baffling rhythms. Bees dance out pragmatic instructions about the exact location and amounts of honey they have found. Vegetables signal by their color when their seeds are ripe and ready for distribution through the digestive tracts of birds. Cyril Connolly, among others, had intimations that the signal systems of the animal and vegetable orders might be purposively intertwined with ours. "... may there not be animals and birds who make use of man and study his habits, and if they, why not also insects and vegetables? What grape, to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?" We are closer to the Vegetable Kingdom than we know, he says in The Unquiet Grave. And to the mineral as well. "And what of gold that slow mineral poison? Money talks through the rich as alcohol swaggers in the drunken .. ." Yet for good and sentimental reasons we will continue to believe that human language has a central and preeminent place among the signal systems of the universe. It has capacities for accumulation, modification, distinction, generalization, and abstraction that are not imaginably within the grasp of lesser codes. The universe of meaning revolves around human languages like a sun and stars of lesser magnitude revolving about a fit and intelligible planet. Surely we can permit ourselves to imagine such a cosmology though the physical universe, immeasurable now by our senses, no longer serves its old metaphoric purpose. But the study of human languages is simply narrower than it needs to be when we isolate it from the study of other strands in the encompassing web of communications. Semiotics in theory or practise opposes this narrowness.

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