Category Archives: semiotics

On literature

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I am often amused by those who would define literature, thinking that somehow they can draw boundaries around such an abstract idea as if drawing boundaries would ever make any difference at all. Literature is a phenomenon unequaled in the imagination of human creation. It bleeds into every avenue of human endeavor, but has nothing to do with any particular area of writing. Some would say that literature is just the creative arm of writing–poetry, essay, fiction, non-fiction, but who hasn’t read an interesting letter, diary, o explanation? Some theorists would have us think that literature has something to do with artist’s intention, but that idea has long since burned itself out on the ash heap of good intentions and dead end streets. Literature cannot be explained because it defies explanation, escapes facile definitions, runs away from those who would box it up and sell it. The problem with definitions of literature is that almost all of them come with some sort of aesthetic attached: that this writing is not aesthetically driven so it isn’t literature, that a novel by Nabakov or Cervantes is literature, but the instructions for building a model race car are not. There is no doubt that these are different kinds of literature that do extremely different things, but they are both literature. Literature does not need protecting, or defining, or coddling, or anything at all. Whether one likes a piece of literature or not is another matter entirely, but then again, nothing is written about personal taste. You may or may not like Ovid, Aristotle, Aquinas, O’Henry, Miller, Flaubert, or Pasternak, but others do. You may like romances, or mysteries, or essays on evolution, and others may find all of that very boring while they read historical fiction and biographies which you hate. The problem with a word such as “literature” is that it is too big to be constrained in any meaningful way which does not deconstruct into nothingness. Literature can be almost anything. Maybe the list of ingredients on a cereal box is not literature, but then again, maybe it is. Literature, regardless of its form or content, has life when readers do whatever it is that readers do: read. By trying to define literature be its function, or form, or content one falls into an aesthetic tiger trap of irrelevancy and vanity. Though some might react by saying that literature has to be definable because it exists, I would still insist that all definitions fall short of actually saying anything of importance about literature, writing, genre, tropes, metaphors, or reading. Some might accuse this point of view as completely relativist. Those who teach “great texts” are often blinded by their own aesthetic considerations for what constitutes literature, which is fine because literature offers liberty especially for those who would lock themselves in a prison of pious opinions, anachronistic literary theory, and worn out traditions. Literature does not have to be old, or written by white European males to be good, profound, insightful, entertaining, delightful, or moving. I’ve read my share of Aquinas and Augustine, and although they are very good, they are literature for more mature minds that have time to disentangle the complex rhetoric and profound theologies. Dashiell Hammett has as much, or more, to say about nature of sin in our fallen world, and he’s a little more accessible than his predecessors. Since what we consider to be literary has so much to do with personal taste, a rather subjective criteria, we must admit that there was no golden age of literature in the past when everything was marvelous and that today we are passing through a decadence from which we cannot free ourselves, which is just so much nonsense. Literature, even in the age of mechanical reproduction, will survive every challenge to quantify it, change it, monitor it, censor it, or kill it because readers will always want more.

On literature

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I am often amused by those who would define literature, thinking that somehow they can draw boundaries around such an abstract idea as if drawing boundaries would ever make any difference at all. Literature is a phenomenon unequaled in the imagination of human creation. It bleeds into every avenue of human endeavor, but has nothing to do with any particular area of writing. Some would say that literature is just the creative arm of writing–poetry, essay, fiction, non-fiction, but who hasn’t read an interesting letter, diary, o explanation? Some theorists would have us think that literature has something to do with artist’s intention, but that idea has long since burned itself out on the ash heap of good intentions and dead end streets. Literature cannot be explained because it defies explanation, escapes facile definitions, runs away from those who would box it up and sell it. The problem with definitions of literature is that almost all of them come with some sort of aesthetic attached: that this writing is not aesthetically driven so it isn’t literature, that a novel by Nabakov or Cervantes is literature, but the instructions for building a model race car are not. There is no doubt that these are different kinds of literature that do extremely different things, but they are both literature. Literature does not need protecting, or defining, or coddling, or anything at all. Whether one likes a piece of literature or not is another matter entirely, but then again, nothing is written about personal taste. You may or may not like Ovid, Aristotle, Aquinas, O’Henry, Miller, Flaubert, or Pasternak, but others do. You may like romances, or mysteries, or essays on evolution, and others may find all of that very boring while they read historical fiction and biographies which you hate. The problem with a word such as “literature” is that it is too big to be constrained in any meaningful way which does not deconstruct into nothingness. Literature can be almost anything. Maybe the list of ingredients on a cereal box is not literature, but then again, maybe it is. Literature, regardless of its form or content, has life when readers do whatever it is that readers do: read. By trying to define literature be its function, or form, or content one falls into an aesthetic tiger trap of irrelevancy and vanity. Though some might react by saying that literature has to be definable because it exists, I would still insist that all definitions fall short of actually saying anything of importance about literature, writing, genre, tropes, metaphors, or reading. Some might accuse this point of view as completely relativist. Those who teach “great texts” are often blinded by their own aesthetic considerations for what constitutes literature, which is fine because literature offers liberty especially for those who would lock themselves in a prison of pious opinions, anachronistic literary theory, and worn out traditions. Literature does not have to be old, or written by white European males to be good, profound, insightful, entertaining, delightful, or moving. I’ve read my share of Aquinas and Augustine, and although they are very good, they are literature for more mature minds that have time to disentangle the complex rhetoric and profound theologies. Dashiell Hammett has as much, or more, to say about nature of sin in our fallen world, and he’s a little more accessible than his predecessors. Since what we consider to be literary has so much to do with personal taste, a rather subjective criteria, we must admit that there was no golden age of literature in the past when everything was marvelous and that today we are passing through a decadence from which we cannot free ourselves, which is just so much nonsense. Literature, even in the age of mechanical reproduction, will survive every challenge to quantify it, change it, monitor it, censor it, or kill it because readers will always want more.

On the blank page

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Many people fear writing as if it were some arcane art in which only especially initiated adepts were allowed to work. Still others doubt that they have any talent at all, and they don’t want to make a fool of themselves, or that they don’t really have anything to say. They see the blank page as a challenge, not as an opportunity. The blank page stands before all of humanity as a monument to immobility. The difference between writers and non-writers is simple: writers don’t think about the shame of failure or that others will think their words boring or superficial. I have read things that I consider boring and superficial, but I have seldom come across anything that should never have been written at all. Some people will stare at the blank page and feel defeated before they even start because they fear failure, yet they have given themselves over to failure without even having tried. Writing is just words, one right after another, forming sentences, ideas, arguments, but if you never try to write, the blank page is a barrier, a wall you will never climb or pull down. Some people cannot even get past the first word, much less the first sentence. When I have thought my work trite or vacuous, there have been times when I have thrown things away, but for the most part, if I just keep writing, letting the words march across the paper by themselves, I can always go back and edit, throw away the crap, polish the good stuff. The blank page is filled with so much opportunity, so many possibilities, so much creative energy that you must yearn to fill it with discourse, poems, essays, conversations, descriptions, arguments, explanations. Bad writing is always a possibility, but if you never write at all, you are wearing cement shoes and won’t go much of anywhere. I see the blank page as a page already filled with ideas, metaphors, similes and a host of other poetic tropes which are all willing to clarify an to confuse perhaps both at the same time. Words are dark, no question, but we are all playing with the dictionary, so why not split open the dictionary and let the words run wild? The blank page stands up to the creative energy of the literary arts. All the best writers that have ever lived have always lamented the fact that there is nothing new to write about, so if we accept that premiss as a given, then we can stop worrying about whether Seneca or Ovid or Horace wrote about it two thousand years ago. I know I was born late, but there is nothing I, as a writer, can do about that. I accept the blank page as my traveling companion, and I am willing to work hard to fill up that page, sometimes with greater or lesser success. Thinking about the blank page just makes me want to write all that much more, and it also makes me care less about whether anyone likes what I write or not. I have no control over how anyone reads my writing–whether it moves them to cry, or moves them to snicker. I can’t even be sure if they understand what I write, but then again, do I understand what I am writing either? Or if I read this little ramble in two or three years, will I still think the same? Or will that ever matter? Once this is written, it is its piece of art over which I have no control, and that is really what the blank page is really all about, whether we have any control over our work, our ideas, or our lives. The answer is “no”, but then again, this page is no longer blank.

On the blank page

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Many people fear writing as if it were some arcane art in which only especially initiated adepts were allowed to work. Still others doubt that they have any talent at all, and they don’t want to make a fool of themselves, or that they don’t really have anything to say. They see the blank page as a challenge, not as an opportunity. The blank page stands before all of humanity as a monument to immobility. The difference between writers and non-writers is simple: writers don’t think about the shame of failure or that others will think their words boring or superficial. I have read things that I consider boring and superficial, but I have seldom come across anything that should never have been written at all. Some people will stare at the blank page and feel defeated before they even start because they fear failure, yet they have given themselves over to failure without even having tried. Writing is just words, one right after another, forming sentences, ideas, arguments, but if you never try to write, the blank page is a barrier, a wall you will never climb or pull down. Some people cannot even get past the first word, much less the first sentence. When I have thought my work trite or vacuous, there have been times when I have thrown things away, but for the most part, if I just keep writing, letting the words march across the paper by themselves, I can always go back and edit, throw away the crap, polish the good stuff. The blank page is filled with so much opportunity, so many possibilities, so much creative energy that you must yearn to fill it with discourse, poems, essays, conversations, descriptions, arguments, explanations. Bad writing is always a possibility, but if you never write at all, you are wearing cement shoes and won’t go much of anywhere. I see the blank page as a page already filled with ideas, metaphors, similes and a host of other poetic tropes which are all willing to clarify an to confuse perhaps both at the same time. Words are dark, no question, but we are all playing with the dictionary, so why not split open the dictionary and let the words run wild? The blank page stands up to the creative energy of the literary arts. All the best writers that have ever lived have always lamented the fact that there is nothing new to write about, so if we accept that premiss as a given, then we can stop worrying about whether Seneca or Ovid or Horace wrote about it two thousand years ago. I know I was born late, but there is nothing I, as a writer, can do about that. I accept the blank page as my traveling companion, and I am willing to work hard to fill up that page, sometimes with greater or lesser success. Thinking about the blank page just makes me want to write all that much more, and it also makes me care less about whether anyone likes what I write or not. I have no control over how anyone reads my writing–whether it moves them to cry, or moves them to snicker. I can’t even be sure if they understand what I write, but then again, do I understand what I am writing either? Or if I read this little ramble in two or three years, will I still think the same? Or will that ever matter? Once this is written, it is its piece of art over which I have no control, and that is really what the blank page is really all about, whether we have any control over our work, our ideas, or our lives. The answer is “no”, but then again, this page is no longer blank.

On signs

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We all spend our days navigating a series of signs–stop signs, high signs, labels, street signs, gauges, big signs, little signs, misspelled signs, unintelligible signs, ambiguous signs, blank signs, missing signs. empty signs. All signs, regardless of what they might signifying, exist in a world of multiple meanings, denotations and connotations, which means that the possibility of misreading is a clear and present danger. All possible communication is always essentially a miscommunication. All assumptions about the way signs work, i.e., stable signs and signifieds, can only ever be assumptions, but those assumptions are essentially wrong because no one can guarantee that all signs will be interpreted as the signer intended. The question of intention is a naive one because signs never come with explanations, and if they did, even the explanations might cause confusion of original intent. There is no “meta” position from which meaning may be imbued. Original intent is, then, irrelevant, illusory, and delusional because even the signer cannot ensure that the signs they send out coincide with the message they intended to send. Does the author of any sign really know what they meant to say? The original author cannot be trusted to understand the difference between what they meant or intended to sign and what they did create. In other words, original intent is a meaningless phrase that leads to a naive understanding of the world because of the displacement between the epistemological strategy involved the communication and the hermeneutic event horizon, i.e., that one can know what a sign means and that signs are stable over time, which is untrue. Whether we are looking at the weather, or reading some medieval poetry, all signs contain complexity, and the greater the complexity or number of signs (whose relationship is geometric, not arithmetic), the greater the ambiguity and danger of miscommunication. Complexity increases with the number of signs and the time expired since the initial iteration of the signs, so it is necessarily harder to read something that is a thousand years old as opposed to something that was written just yesterday. Yet, this too is a false assumption about complexity because the receiver of signs, the reader, the interpreter, is unexpected, imperfect, and unpredictable, bringing a entire set of unknown parameters to the reading of the signs. Since the reader has no chance of knowing what the writer had in mind, or if this even mattered, all communication is unstable going into the transaction. Even simple utterances are open to misunderstanding, so communication destabilizes, ambiguity is ubiquitous, and meaning is obscure. In an ideal world meaning would always be clear and constant, unvarying, but no one lives in an ideal world. Signs change, vary, suffer from irony, become subtext, and may even become empty and devoid of any meaning at all. Signs contaminate and modify each other, contexts change, subtexts morph and flow into other rhetorical devices, changing the entire meaning of any given sign. The impossibility of clean and clear communication is a dream dreamt by those who have never left the 19th century and don’t want to either. The instability of meaning, then, is the only constant within a string of signs, the signifieds multiplying wildly out of control and out of bounds, blurring meaning, complexity increases, and misunderstanding is ensured.

On signs

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We all spend our days navigating a series of signs–stop signs, high signs, labels, street signs, gauges, big signs, little signs, misspelled signs, unintelligible signs, ambiguous signs, blank signs, missing signs. empty signs. All signs, regardless of what they might signifying, exist in a world of multiple meanings, denotations and connotations, which means that the possibility of misreading is a clear and present danger. All possible communication is always essentially a miscommunication. All assumptions about the way signs work, i.e., stable signs and signifieds, can only ever be assumptions, but those assumptions are essentially wrong because no one can guarantee that all signs will be interpreted as the signer intended. The question of intention is a naive one because signs never come with explanations, and if they did, even the explanations might cause confusion of original intent. There is no “meta” position from which meaning may be imbued. Original intent is, then, irrelevant, illusory, and delusional because even the signer cannot ensure that the signs they send out coincide with the message they intended to send. Does the author of any sign really know what they meant to say? The original author cannot be trusted to understand the difference between what they meant or intended to sign and what they did create. In other words, original intent is a meaningless phrase that leads to a naive understanding of the world because of the displacement between the epistemological strategy involved the communication and the hermeneutic event horizon, i.e., that one can know what a sign means and that signs are stable over time, which is untrue. Whether we are looking at the weather, or reading some medieval poetry, all signs contain complexity, and the greater the complexity or number of signs (whose relationship is geometric, not arithmetic), the greater the ambiguity and danger of miscommunication. Complexity increases with the number of signs and the time expired since the initial iteration of the signs, so it is necessarily harder to read something that is a thousand years old as opposed to something that was written just yesterday. Yet, this too is a false assumption about complexity because the receiver of signs, the reader, the interpreter, is unexpected, imperfect, and unpredictable, bringing a entire set of unknown parameters to the reading of the signs. Since the reader has no chance of knowing what the writer had in mind, or if this even mattered, all communication is unstable going into the transaction. Even simple utterances are open to misunderstanding, so communication destabilizes, ambiguity is ubiquitous, and meaning is obscure. In an ideal world meaning would always be clear and constant, unvarying, but no one lives in an ideal world. Signs change, vary, suffer from irony, become subtext, and may even become empty and devoid of any meaning at all. Signs contaminate and modify each other, contexts change, subtexts morph and flow into other rhetorical devices, changing the entire meaning of any given sign. The impossibility of clean and clear communication is a dream dreamt by those who have never left the 19th century and don’t want to either. The instability of meaning, then, is the only constant within a string of signs, the signifieds multiplying wildly out of control and out of bounds, blurring meaning, complexity increases, and misunderstanding is ensured.

On signs

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We all spend our days navigating a series of signs–stop signs, high signs, labels, street signs, gauges, big signs, little signs, misspelled signs, unintelligible signs, ambiguous signs, blank signs, missing signs. empty signs. All signs, regardless of what they might signifying, exist in a world of multiple meanings, denotations and connotations, which means that the possibility of misreading is a clear and present danger. All possible communication is always essentially a miscommunication. All assumptions about the way signs work, i.e., stable signs and signifieds, can only ever be assumptions, but those assumptions are essentially wrong because no one can guarantee that all signs will be interpreted as the signer intended. The question of intention is a naive one because signs never come with explanations, and if they did, even the explanations might cause confusion of original intent. There is no “meta” position from which meaning may be imbued. Original intent is, then, irrelevant, illusory, and delusional because even the signer cannot ensure that the signs they send out coincide with the message they intended to send. Does the author of any sign really know what they meant to say? The original author cannot be trusted to understand the difference between what they meant or intended to sign and what they did create. In other words, original intent is a meaningless phrase that leads to a naive understanding of the world because of the displacement between the epistemological strategy involved the communication and the hermeneutic event horizon, i.e., that one can know what a sign means and that signs are stable over time, which is untrue. Whether we are looking at the weather, or reading some medieval poetry, all signs contain complexity, and the greater the complexity or number of signs (whose relationship is geometric, not arithmetic), the greater the ambiguity and danger of miscommunication. Complexity increases with the number of signs and the time expired since the initial iteration of the signs, so it is necessarily harder to read something that is a thousand years old as opposed to something that was written just yesterday. Yet, this too is a false assumption about complexity because the receiver of signs, the reader, the interpreter, is unexpected, imperfect, and unpredictable, bringing a entire set of unknown parameters to the reading of the signs. Since the reader has no chance of knowing what the writer had in mind, or if this even mattered, all communication is unstable going into the transaction. Even simple utterances are open to misunderstanding, so communication destabilizes, ambiguity is ubiquitous, and meaning is obscure. In an ideal world meaning would always be clear and constant, unvarying, but no one lives in an ideal world. Signs change, vary, suffer from irony, become subtext, and may even become empty and devoid of any meaning at all. Signs contaminate and modify each other, contexts change, subtexts morph and flow into other rhetorical devices, changing the entire meaning of any given sign. The impossibility of clean and clear communication is a dream dreamt by those who have never left the 19th century and don’t want to either. The instability of meaning, then, is the only constant within a string of signs, the signifieds multiplying wildly out of control and out of bounds, blurring meaning, complexity increases, and misunderstanding is ensured.

On translation

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I don’t trust translations. As a child, however, I did, and had great time reading all sorts of things in translation–French, German, Russian, Spanish–it didn’t matter. I took the translators at their word that they would faithfully read, interpret, and re-write a book so that I could read it in English. Of course, I lost my translation innocence when I learned Spanish, leaving behind my career as a life-long monolingual who had basked in the naivete of a one language world. I had always suspected, for example, that when strange species met on episodes of Star Trek that they would have trouble communicating–English-speaking earthlings shouldn’t be able to communicate directly with just off the space shuttle Klingons, for example–but I suspended my disbelief so I could enjoy the show. I was, however, skeptical that the Klingons didn’t even have an accent of any kind when they spoke, or was that the accent of Los Angeles that they had learned via Rosetta-stoned? Then, I kind, if not well-meaning, teacher taught me that the word for “red” in Spanish was “roja.” Again, I was skeptical, but I kept it to myself. In fact, I kept my skepticism to myself for years while I learned this other “language.” For the most part, even when using Spanish (I’m not going to brag and say “speaking” just yet), I still felt that English was right there, a crutch, a back-up, that would always save me, that is, until I landed in Spain and English was useless on most any level. I realized right away that none of these Spanish speakers knew any English at all, and their world seemed to work pretty well: the ate, communicated, fought, drank coffee, gave directions, explained, interacted, and a whole host of other things while ignoring English completely. They said “hola, buenos días” as if they meant it. After about a month of this foolishness, it began to dawn on me that there were places in the world that didn’t know English, and didn’t want to, either, to paraphrase Thorton Wilder. I began to learn and use words in Spanish that I had never seen in a text book, had never written in my notebook, and didn’t really know what they meant in English, or at least I didn’t know what their English equivalent was. At that moment, a major epiphany struck: English and Spanish don’t know each other, aren’t equivalent, and you can’t make one language mean the other, especially if the discourse is at all complex. “Roja” does not mean “red.” Both words refer to a similar darkish shade from the rainbow or perhaps the color of some apples, but words from different languages are not equivalent. The idea is absurd, especially to bilinguals. I joined that group of people in my early twenties, forever ruined for reading translations. At some point I did a translation assignment that concerned a poem by García Lorca, “Canción del jinete.” I turned in my assignment, crestfallen because I knew it was a failure–you can’t translate that poem and still keep the poem alive, and my horseman had died long before he ever made it to Cordoba–so the poet had been, ironically, right–he never did make it to Córdoba. Whenever I must read a translation today, I always try to keep an original near. I read Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago in English, knowing full-well that the Russian must have been gorgeous. I know why Dante and Petrarch were so good: their poetry sings in Italian in a way that it never could translated into English, but the best way to kill Shakespeare? Translate him out of English into anything else. There is nothing funnier than Hamlet speaking Spanish, except Hamlet is not supposed to be funny. Cervantes is brilliant in Spanish, but he’s just funny in English, and so it goes. I guess I’ll have to learn Klingon to enjoy their operas, now, won’t I.

On translation

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I don’t trust translations. As a child, however, I did, and had great time reading all sorts of things in translation–French, German, Russian, Spanish–it didn’t matter. I took the translators at their word that they would faithfully read, interpret, and re-write a book so that I could read it in English. Of course, I lost my translation innocence when I learned Spanish, leaving behind my career as a life-long monolingual who had basked in the naivete of a one language world. I had always suspected, for example, that when strange species met on episodes of Star Trek that they would have trouble communicating–English-speaking earthlings shouldn’t be able to communicate directly with just off the space shuttle Klingons, for example–but I suspended my disbelief so I could enjoy the show. I was, however, skeptical that the Klingons didn’t even have an accent of any kind when they spoke, or was that the accent of Los Angeles that they had learned via Rosetta-stoned? Then, I kind, if not well-meaning, teacher taught me that the word for “red” in Spanish was “roja.” Again, I was skeptical, but I kept it to myself. In fact, I kept my skepticism to myself for years while I learned this other “language.” For the most part, even when using Spanish (I’m not going to brag and say “speaking” just yet), I still felt that English was right there, a crutch, a back-up, that would always save me, that is, until I landed in Spain and English was useless on most any level. I realized right away that none of these Spanish speakers knew any English at all, and their world seemed to work pretty well: the ate, communicated, fought, drank coffee, gave directions, explained, interacted, and a whole host of other things while ignoring English completely. They said “hola, buenos días” as if they meant it. After about a month of this foolishness, it began to dawn on me that there were places in the world that didn’t know English, and didn’t want to, either, to paraphrase Thorton Wilder. I began to learn and use words in Spanish that I had never seen in a text book, had never written in my notebook, and didn’t really know what they meant in English, or at least I didn’t know what their English equivalent was. At that moment, a major epiphany struck: English and Spanish don’t know each other, aren’t equivalent, and you can’t make one language mean the other, especially if the discourse is at all complex. “Roja” does not mean “red.” Both words refer to a similar darkish shade from the rainbow or perhaps the color of some apples, but words from different languages are not equivalent. The idea is absurd, especially to bilinguals. I joined that group of people in my early twenties, forever ruined for reading translations. At some point I did a translation assignment that concerned a poem by García Lorca, “Canción del jinete.” I turned in my assignment, crestfallen because I knew it was a failure–you can’t translate that poem and still keep the poem alive, and my horseman had died long before he ever made it to Cordoba–so the poet had been, ironically, right–he never did make it to Córdoba. Whenever I must read a translation today, I always try to keep an original near. I read Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago in English, knowing full-well that the Russian must have been gorgeous. I know why Dante and Petrarch were so good: their poetry sings in Italian in a way that it never could translated into English, but the best way to kill Shakespeare? Translate him out of English into anything else. There is nothing funnier than Hamlet speaking Spanish, except Hamlet is not supposed to be funny. Cervantes is brilliant in Spanish, but he’s just funny in English, and so it goes. I guess I’ll have to learn Klingon to enjoy their operas, now, won’t I.

On the rose

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The rose is a transcendental metaphor that exists outside of its velvety petals, thorns, dark green leaves. Whether the rose is just a flower, or something else, goes way beyond its meaning as a simple plant. In fact, there is nothing simple about either the word or the plant. The iconic existence of this flower reaches into the darkest part of the human soul as a metaphor for the transient nature of beauty, the impossibility of fooling the clock, and the ineffable nature of sublime experiences. The inner nature of the rose hints at the mystic, if not mundane, nature of symbols and how they invade the hermeneutic horizon of any given moment in which meaning is being generated. The rose is logos in its most primitive form. The sign of the sign, the inherent, if not obvious, signifier which means signifier, the rose means signified. The rose signifies a meta-signified symbol metonymy that may or may not mean anything more than a bit of nature that arbitrarily signifies beauty, love, aesthetics, youth, and an almost unlimited host of other things. We give roses because they are beautiful and because they will not last. The rose’s beauty is transient and a symbol of the finite nature of all physical beauty. The rose is, then, a piece of tragic irony because it invests all life, all creatures, all humans with meaning. Juliet understood that some things, some people, transcend their names, and that names do not always square with the thing, person, being signified. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same, everything changes, even change. The fact that all flesh will eventually pass away is a universal truth that is reflected in the short-lived flesh of the rose. We give roses because like the human being, we can only face our mortality when we see it reflected in another living thing–even a thorny plant. The aesthetic of the rose, the petals, the fragrance, the velvety texture of the dark red flower, the painfully sharp thorns adorning the stem, the innocuous green leaves, form a whole which is both contradictory and unifying, hard and soft, round and pointy, fragrant and gritty, iconic, but all of that is undergirded by the promise of corruption and decay. The beauty can only be beautiful because it cannot last, born into corruption, the perfect rose blossom will always only ever point to the end of existence, a musty, off-purple, decadent flower that represents death, dying and corruption. The rose is at once a symbol of birth, death, and resurrection, replicating the human experience in its most basic form. As we observe the rose, we are also observing ourselves since the rose is the image, imago, of the human form–birth, youth, middle-age, old age, and death. What we see in the rose and its short life is our own mortality, but we also see the beauty of nature that exists outside of ourselves, that there is something beautiful outside of ourselves. Yet, the rose, feminine, anonymous, unknown, transcendent is inscrutable and silent, a sphinx, unwilling to ever reveal its secrets. The name of the rose, whether post-modern or medieval, is unknowable and undiscoverable. The mystery of the rose cannot be divined in any sense because it transcends all realities and all simulacra. A rose is a rose is a rose only if it is never a rose which means that the essence of the rose is larger than any given rose that might grow in your garden, which is anecdotal. In the end it is a fight between the thorns and the fragrance, a paradox of that which is sublimated by the beauty of the flower that has no function, does no work, has no reason for existing unless it is to produce more flowers, more flowers that mean everything but produce nothing.