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had governed him, so he realizes that here is technically nothing to stop him from proposing a new code (for example, nX, nY, nX): such a code would legitimize sequences of the type BBBBBBAAAAAABBBBBB, as in the fourth line of (17). While bent on destroying the system, he comprehends its full range of possibilities and discovers that he is master of it. Only a short while ago, he fondly imagined that poetry was a medium through which spoke Gods. Now he is becoming aware of the arbitrariness of signs. |
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At first he loses control of his own exuberance. He continually takes to pieces and puts together again this crazy gadget that he has found in his control; he composes totally implausible gibberish and then hums it admiringly to himself for hours on end; he invents the colors of the vowels, flatters himself that he has created a poetic language accessible, some days, to all senses; he writes of silences and of nights; he defines vertigos. He says, An apple! and, out of the forgetfulness where his voice banishes any contour, inasmuch as it is something other than known calyxes, musically arises, an idea itself and fragrant, the one absent from all baskets. Le suggérer, voilà le rêve! He wants to make himself a seer, by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses. But then, step by step, he escapes from emotion, expressing it through its objective correlative and, as does the God of the Creation, remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. |
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3.5. The Reformulation of Content |
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Eventually, Adam calms down. At least one thing has become clear during his manic explorations: the order of language is not absolute. This gives rise to the legitimate doubt that the pairing off of denoting sequences against the cultural universe of meanings, which was provided as the system in (2), may not be an unquestionable absolute after all. Finally, he feels inclined to question the very totality of the cultural units which the System had neatly paired off against the series of sequences which he has so recently destroyed. |
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Now Adam passes on to an investigation of the form of content. Whoever actually said that Blue was Inedible? From conventionalized meanings Adam takes a short step back to the world of experience and stages another encounter with its physical referents. He picks a blue berry for himself and eats it; the berry tastes good. So far he has been in the habit of drawing all the liquid he needed from (red) fruit, but now he discovers that (blue) water is eminently drinkable and develops a pronounced taste for it. Again, he is influenced by the curiosity which he first felt after the experiment in (11): probably there are different gradations |
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