”Psychologically our thought– apart from its expression in words– is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.” (Sassure 966)
When I think of poetry, I think of the manipulation of sound, space, and meaning. I also think in images. While sitting in the student reading protion of the symposium, I was not think in particular about the words that they were saying. I was thinking mostly about the feeling and the images that they created if I closed my eyes. From reading Sassure I have learned that language is a very abstact thing, and that the words alone are nothing, just manufactured sounds.
While Tim read his award winning piece from the “Bad Poetry Reading” I was focused on the paculiarity of sticking ones tounge into someone’s eye as though licking out the peanut butter in a Reesses Cup. However, these quezy feeling of peculiarity would have no meaning with out the context of words to give context and meaning to the image. Words and language set up boundaries in which a “sound becomes the sign of an idea.” (Sassure, 967)
In poetry we mix the context of sound with the context of imagery, but can we ever separate the two. Could anyone ever listen to pure phonetics and not create a mental picture with it? Or have a mental picture of something in which the meaning is not derived from the symbolic sounds attatched to the physical? Sassure says that this is as impossible as trying to cut the front of a piece of paper without cutting the back.
So why write, why try to create meaning in a system built by random? Why have poetry and literature when there is no poetic liscence to meaning? Some poets fill their poems with symbolic references to religion and anciete myths. This, however, according to Saussure does not stop a person who knows nothing of these before mentioned, from gainging an “understanding”. Since meaning and symbolism is arbitrary in the intial sense then meaning is derived upon relativity to the reader. This then makes truth relative, because all you need is a meaning that creates some sort of proof.
Where does this leave English, or language in general as a tool of explination and standardization?
