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The carrying: Material frames and immaterial meanings 399
The carrying:
Material frames and immaterial meanings1
Wendy Wheeler
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
London Metropolitan University
e-mail: wendy.j.wheeler@btinternet.com
is lecture is divided into three main sections. e rst part discusses the von
Uexküllian umwelt and Funktionskreis; the second concerns Charles Sanders Peirce’s
semiotic, and the growth of signs and meanings; and the last explores the biosemiotic
idea of poiesis– particularly in relation to culture and literature. e rst two sections
will look at some of the main theoretical ideas underpinning biosemiotics. e third,
taking particular account of this audience of members of the European Association
for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment, will make some suggestions,
with examples, of the ways we might think biosemiotically about the makings and
self-makings which art, and especially literature, a ords.
1. The von Uexküllian umwelt and Funktionskreis
When we talk about framing nature, we must of course ask who, or what, is doing
the framing. Are we framing nature? Or is nature, perhaps, framing us? And if the
latter is the case, which aspect of nature might be doing the framing? Or should
we perhaps be talking about a mutual framing, an on-going and growing dance of
complexity in which the frames are, themselves, made of a constantly shi ing series
of focuses and a growing evolutionary frame? Can we think of this dance of shi -
ing focuses like movements of attention: periods of dreamlike habit punctuated
with intense experience of di erences developing at di erent levels and in di erent
places? Perhaps we can think of this as, for example, like a lm or video camera’s
shi s from interior intimacy to exterior distance, from wide panning shot to tight
close-up. What I mean to convey is a cybersemiotic dance of all the organisms in
1 Jakob von Uexküll Lecture; University of Tartu, 30 April 2014.
Sign Systems Studies 42(2/3), 2014, 399–411
http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2014.42.2-3.11
400 Wendy Wheeler
which framing, itself, is a matter of perspective and subject-position. is is framing
as autopoiesis and, more speci cally, evolutionary life as a self-reading text in which
meanings are constantly growing.
I am very honoured indeed to have been asked to give the rst annual Jakob
von Uexküll Lecture here at the University of Tartu, for so long a centre of dynamic
thinking and scholarship in semiotics, and I shall attempt to answer these questions
from a biosemiotic point of view. So I start with von Uexküll, and, in particular, with
two of his most signi cant contributions to the elds of philosophy, theoretical biol-
ogy, and biosemiotics especially.
e rst of these contributions is the Uexküllian conception of umwelt. I know
some of you will know about this, but some won’t, and especially because this lec-
ture honours his great in uence upon our biosemiotic understandings, I thought it
would be helpful to go into a little detail. In von Uexküll’s usage, umwelt does not
mean simply ‘environment’ or ‘surround’ in a general sense, but, rather, ‘signifying
environment’. In other words, each organism inhabits a species-speci c semiotic
world. As is well known, one of the simplest worlds invoked by von Uexküll is the
umwelt of a species of tick. is animal has a semiotic world comprised of three
signs only: the rst is the odour of the butyric acid which is produced by all mam-
mals, and which, when smelt, causes the tick to let go of the plant where it waits; the
second is the blood temperature of mammals, indicating a successful landing; and
the third is the hairy mammalian skin which causes the tick to burrow downwards
in order to sink her thirsty head into the subcutaneous tissue of the “lucky” prey in
preparation for reproduction.
Every species sees, or otherwise senses, only the signifying world which con-
stitutes its own species-speci c carriers of meaning, or signs. is includes human
animals of course, although here we will need to add further, much more complex,
levels of semiosis. In the case of umwelten, the framer is evolution. Every species
‘sees’, or otherwise senses, what evolutionary pressures have sculpted it to ‘see’, or
otherwise sense, in terms of survival and reproduction. But in naming the fram-
ing force evolution, I am not by any means invoking either a simple neo-Darwin-
ian story of random genetic mutation and natural selection, or, indeed, a passive
organism. Natural selection must always be a sculpting force of some signi cance,
although quite a few biologists have questioned the full extent of its role in evolu-
tionary change. Natural selection can sculpt or re ne existing forms, but it cannot
explain big speciation di erences.
When we come to highly complex things such as cultures, the questions sur-
rounding the applicability of Spencer’s, and then Darwin’s, idea of the production of
the ‘ ttest’, meaning the best tted to the environment, become much more di cult.
Should such a thing as ‘cultural selection’ exist, it might be to do with a ‘ t’ in terms
The carrying: Material frames and immaterial meanings 401
of dominant fashions in ideas and groups, but here we enter the realms of philoso-
phy and sociology of religion and science, of Kuhnian paradigms, and of shi s in
knowledge, and also of a general logic of development and growth. is, indeed, is
Peircean territory of the logics of change. is question of the logics of change will
take Peirce and us to both biological and cultural evolution. It will take us to natu-
ral and cultural stories, to the organism as processual semiotic structuration of hab-
its and di erences, to the organism as made up of sign relations, and to the natural
metaphors and metonymies before it takes us to cultural ones.
But before moving on to that, I want to pause a moment to notice the changes
that are going on in biology these days. e life sciences are certainly slowly mov-
ing on from the Modern Darwinian Synthesis (sometimes also called the neo-Dar-
winian synthesis) associated with Julian Huxley, eodosius Dobzhansky, J. B. S.
Haldane, Ernst Mayr and so on. e growth of Developmental Systems eory, in
particular, has meant that biologists are much more likely now to talk about meta-
phors and stories than they were 10 or 15 years ago. Kalevi Kull has noted the ways
in which the grip of the Modern Synthesis has dug a vast trench between humani-
ties’ interests in language, semiosis and meaning-making, and similar interests in
the life sciences. In his Foreword to the recent English translation of Patrick Sériot’s
book Structure and the Whole: East, West and Non-Darwinian Biology in the Origins
of Structural Linguistics, a book, incidentally, which demonstrates a long history of
the intertwining of linguistics, geography, and biology, Kalevi Kull (2014: xi) writes,
e Modern Synthesis in […] biology during the 1930s made from a set of
Darwinian ideas an extraordinarily strong dominant and it dug a trench between
philology in the humanities and the study of other living and meaning-making
creatures that was almost insurmountably wide. It temporarily killed the idea of
intentionality in life sciences; it almost excluded the idea of convergence.
Baer, Berg and their followers developed a sound non-Darwinian approach to
the explanation of the means and forms of evolution. According to this approach,
development explains evolution, and not vice versa. Remarkably, the principles
and means of this approach could be formulated in Jakobson’s hands as structural-
ism. Jakobson introduced this term into linguistics.
One has seen this gesture before. Darwin’s development of the branching structure
of evolution was in uenced by his cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood’s study of the evolu-
tion of languages. Roman Jakobson’s importation, via Claude Lévi-Strauss, of Prague
School thinking into French intellectual life, as structuralism, could not take either
the wider semiotic or wider and deeper biological dimensions across the East/West
border. e neo-Darwinian Synthesis was already established in Western thought
more broadly, and French semiology was already closely wedded to Saussure’s dyadic
402 Wendy Wheeler
and anthropocentric semiological theory. Although Jakobson was in uenced by
Charles Sanders Peirce, as well as by Saussurean linguistics, both anthropological
structuralism, and its theoretical appearance in other humanities disciplines, was
not. Nonetheless, research in epigenetics, the activity of prions in protein folding,
and other non-genocentric mechanisms means that it is becoming increasingly clear
that DNA is not the only means of heritable change. Not only are epigenetic behav-
iours a source of evolution, but also, in a surprising rebirth of a form of Lamarckism,
it appears that environmentally acquired traits, such as reactions to stress, can be
heritable too.
To return, now, more directly to von Uexküll, the organism is not passive in
evolutionary terms. Just as we, in our very complicated human ways, shape our
environment, so, too, do all other organisms. It is here that we can introduce von
Uexküll’s second important contribution to biosemiotic thinking. is is the notion
of the Funktionskreis or functional circle. Making von Uexküll a very early proto-
cybernetician, the Funktionskreis describes the way in which signs from the umwelt
enter the Innenwelt, or inner world, of the organism and thus change the organ-
ism’s behaviour. I would say that they activate the organism’s interpretive capacities,
its mind. But, when I say this, please remember that we are always having to use
words designed for the human versions of these phenomena. However, this might
make us want to rethink what we mean when we use words such as ‘mind’ and
‘interpretation’.
At any rate, we can notice that signs ows inwards, round and about the organ-
ismic innenwelt systems, and, there transformed by interpretations and translations,
ow outwards again as other signs. Does this require consciousness? No. Humans
are the only animals that are deeply self-re ective and conscious of the fact that they
use signs. e e ects of these changed signs – sign relations interpreted and trans-
formed– are felt, and in their turn translated, in the umwelten and Innenwelten of
many other living things. Every creature, no matter how simple, must have a sense
of ‘aboutness’ or intentionality; organisms have meanings and purposes and aims.
However system-derived and non-conscious, they are not machines, and every liv-
ing thing must be capable of negotiating a sometimes surprising world. is means
that every organism has something like ‘mind’. Mind does not require consciousness;
most of your mind and my mind, and certainly the most creative parts, are non-
conscious– as research on creativity shows. Consciousness, well, human conscious-
ness at any rate, is extremely focused and thus limited– like a very bright spotlight.
Again, what all this means is that we are required to stretch our language and thus to
stretch our concepts.
We can also notice that, when signs enter an organism’s Innenwelt, they enter a
space in which, even from the start, it makes little sense to talk about body and mind
The carrying: Material frames and immaterial meanings 403
as though these were two distinct things. A mind is the sense which an organism
makes of the relations between itself and its umwelt. As Gregory Bateson pointed
out, mind is a ‘no-thing’ (Bateson 2002: 10). It is relational and immaterial. Mind is
a sign of the activity of sign relations. us, instead of talking about mind and body
as two distinct things, it will make much more sense to us to talk about a place of
cybersemiotic feedback loopings, a constant circulation of semiosic processes, which
also result in other signs owing back out into the environment again. us are ecol-
ogies and worlds made, and made of the ceaseless cybernetic looping ows of semio-
sis. And with this in mind, it’s worth noting that what DNA encodes is not a detailed
assembly plan but is also a set of signs or cues whose reading by the cell depends
upon the successful achievement of sense-making at each antecedent stage. In this
you will surely recognize the germ of our own human practice of reading, word by
word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, building up
meaning as we go. In other words, meanings biological and cultural grow. e story
is the thread through which we can trace all those transformations and growing.
So we have the notions of Funktionskreis and umwelt, but why does von Uexküll,
and separately Charles Sanders Peirce, the other major theoretical resource for bio-
semiotics, want to talk about signs rather than simply about a direct and unmedi-
ated perception of the material world? Firstly, with von Uexküll, the insight that all
organisms are oblivious to things which don’t matter to them in terms of their sur-
vival and reproduction, that the umwelt is a signifying world, must imply that, for
any species, there are many, many aspects of the environment in general, as opposed
to the umwelt of a species, which have no meaning-carrying capacity at all. For
any species, this means that reality as such does not ‘get through’. ere is no view
from nowhere as omas Nagel memorably put it. What ‘gets through’, and is real
and causally e cacious, is organized into a coherent view, a model or map, and that
means that we must distinguish between all that is, and what we know about, our
map. But, as Alfred Korzybski said, we mustn’t go mistaking the map for the terri-
tory. What we know about is the organized web of semiosis; those things which can
be, for any species, bearers of the signs of their world. ese are the things which
make a mark on an organism’s way of getting about in the world.
2. Charles Sanders Peirce:
The growth of signs and meanings
Semiotic matters are more extensively developed into a system by Charles Sanders
Peirce. Not only does he pick up a semiotic way of thinking which had lain more
or less dormant between the end of the Middle Ages and the second half of the
404 Wendy Wheeler
nineteenth century when Peirce revived it, but he also developed an evolutionary
semiotic whose movement through time– as a triadic series of relations forming
what omas Sebeok named as the ‘semiotic spiral’– bears some similarities with
both von Uexküll’s Funktionskreis and with the later ideas of cyberneticians such as
Gregory Bateson.
Peirce’s understanding of the sign involved a triadic structure– more accurately
a triadic structuration of evolving sign relations– formed by an object, a representa-
men and an interpretant. e object, whether thing or idea, is never fully known, not
least because it exists in a world of incalculable relations (Whitehead); the represen-
tamen is the sign vehicle, the object as it is known to any individual organism; and
the interpretant, not simply the human ‘interpretation’, but the meaning (or func-
tion) for every organism, is the di erence (or change) brought about by the sign rela-
tion as a whole. is is a mobile, processual, understanding of the sign; any of the
three aspects is capable of occupying any of the three positions, and it is from this
process that new learning, development and evolutionary growth can occur. Note
that the outcome can be, and usually is, governed by habit. A habit is something like
a dead metaphor: a di erence which no longer signi es in its fullness. It is, so to
speak, a change or di erence which doesn’t make much di erence. But, clearly, life
and communication depends upon regularities or habits. It’s when the change or dif-
ference occurs which does make a real di erence that we have real growth. is kind
of di erence is the result of something like a living metaphor in which the framing
suppositions of the representamen are seen to be similar to another di erent frame
entirely. is collision, or perhaps blending, of di erent frames leads to an interpre-
tant which is a di erence which really does make a di erence (Bateson 1972). Such
a di erence, dependent on the kind of logic of chance and guessing which Peirce
called abduction, provides the potential for real growth.
But what I want to notice especially about the semiotic emphasis is as follows:
rst, signs are composed of relations, not only between the three aspects of the
sign– the object, the representamen, and the interpretant– but also the fact that
signi cation itself is a ‘standing for’ relation. Relations are not things. e semiotic
object may be a material thing, but it can also be an immaterial idea. Signi cation
works, and is causally e cacious, absolutely regardless of this distinction. us,
semiotics also erases the materialist/idealist opposition. ere must be mate-
rial bearers for signi cation– codes and channels– but sign relations, themselves,
indeed like all relations as such, are immaterial. is is why semiosis, and subjectiv-
ity generally, has been such a problem for a science committed to materialism with-
out exception. Everyone now talks about ‘information’, and codes and channels, but
such talk cannot talk about semantics, or meanings. Scientists like to measure things,
but try measuring relation, meaning or all possible dimensions and extensions of
The carrying: Material frames and immaterial meanings 405
function. [See, for an example of this impossibility, Stuart Kau man’s (2013) discus-
sion of the ‘adjacent possible’ in his Foreword, “Evolution beyond Newton, Darwin
and entailing law”, to Henning and Scarfe (eds.), Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life
Back into Biology.] It can’t be done. I think that materialism is better understood as a
form of necessary carrying of semiosis, so that objects which are also material things
(which they needn’t be, of course; objects can also be ideas) are equally understood
as potential bearers of meaning. Matter, it seems to me, can usefully be thought of as
a potential bearer of information, and living matter as a potential bearer of semiosis.
Inform-ing the non-living and the living turn out to be di erent things. e former
is in exible– what Charles Peirce called ‘e ete mind’– whilst the latter is capable of
self-organized responsiveness, especially of a very creative kind in relation to chance
events.
Some of you will recognise in this a sort of biosemiotic confraternity with the
new materialism and object-orientated ontologies. All semiotic objects (whether
thing or idea indi erently) are real objects and causally e cacious. Such semiotic
objects can develop and grow; both things, in other words, and ideas can gener-
ate more knowledge and more meaning. is is the business of art and of science.
Peirce, himself, wrote that “every symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that
is no mere gure of speech. e body of the symbol changes slowly, but its mean-
ing inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws o old ones” (EP 2:264).
Meanings evolve. But the meanings which belong to non-living objects are not their
own; they belong to the living organisms who make them. e meanings that belong
to all living things grow and evolve themselves also. ey do this via the movement
of similarity and di erence, expressed in the play of habit (or repetition) and chance,
linked in chains of association thus establishing new habits to be creatively disrupted
by chance and new di erences. is is, itself, a description of what humans call met-
aphor, metonymy and synecdoche, so when I use the word metaphor, I am not using
it metaphorically.
Each organism lives in its own creaturely umwelt. But on top of that species
umwelt of signs and meanings, any creature with culture most surely inhabits a
world of meanings which are made by the historical time, temporalities, and geo-
graphical place of each culture. Here, we can think about another thing associated
with an evolutionary view. is is that evolution expressed in natural metaphor and
metonymy is, at the same time, building strata of development; each layer is trigger-
ing, supporting and sca olding the evolution and thus semiosic complexity of the
next, none simply reducible to what was rst laid down. e concept of emergence
was coined to address this non-reducible dynamic of evolutionary adaptive systems.
Nothing comes from nothing. ere will always be semiosic threads making the
future from the past. And this should remind us that we cannot assume that either a
406 Wendy Wheeler
plant or an idea which grows benignly in one place and culture will grow benignly in
another.
Jesper Ho meyer’s theory of semiotic sca olding captures this structuration of
developmental and evolutionary levels. He writes:
the human genome cannot be considered a “master plan” or controller of human
development. […] the genome is better understood as a semiotically controlled
sca olding system. However, as a sca olding system, the genome is only the most
basic form; multiple semiotic sca oldings of a more and more overriding range
are built on the top of the genetic sca olding system, and most important in the
context of cultural psychology, semiotic sca olding systems painlessly bridge the
mind-body gap, being in their function as controllers, essentially somatic and
social, in one and the same process. (Ho meyer 2014: 95–6)
3. The biosemiotic idea of poiesis
In my nal section I now want to look at the role played by chance in a necessarily
habit-run, but not deterministic, world. e growing of meaning from chance, from
the semiosic apprehension of patterns of similarity and di erence, runs through-
out the living world. It is a major motor of learning and adaptive change. But since
we humans, at least in the West, have largely abandoned the kinds of languages,
practices and understandings which make room for a creative and non-calculative
response to the unexpected, for chance and the abductive attitude, and have instead
replaced it with a dependence upon the will and upon control rather than respon-
siveness, chance as fruitfulness has been associated mainly with artists.
I want to end with a brief consideration of creative practice, and of poets in par-
ticular, because I think this tells us something signi cant about the conduct of life
in general, not just for artists and inventors, and the limits of the will as a source of
creativity, adaptation, and evolution more generally.
My rst example of the chance encounter o ered as renewal is omas Hardy’s
“ e darkling thrush”, rst published at Christmas 1899. e story the poem tells is
of the poet’s chance wintry meeting with the ‘aged’ thrush, which was, nonetheless,
surprisingly capable of a Christmas birth of newness in its carolling in of the New
Year and the new twentieth century.
We might say that the thrush, and what it can mean, is a chance a ordance
(Pickering 20072). It provides a kind of sca olding for Hardy which can make a
bridge into the future. Peirce called this aspect of evolutionary life tychism, a er
2 Pickering, John 2007. A ordances are signs. triple C 5(2): 64–74 can be accessed at http://
www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/viewFile/59/61.
The carrying: Material frames and immaterial meanings 407
tyché, the Greek for chance. is creative use of chance, by the individual, but neces-
sarily drawn from and working for the community of being of which the individual
is a part, is characteristic of the play between habit and chance event which makes
all evolutionary life, biological and cultural, possible. Peirce called this principle of
connectedness, in this reminiscent of A. N. Whitehead, agapism. It links every evo-
lutionary event in the universe in a play of semiosic patterns and exchange. Martin
Heidegger called this relatedness “the mirror play of the simple one fold of earth
and sky, divinities and mortals” (Heidegger 1975a: 179). In our own modern period,
Heidegger thought that this interrelatedness of things, a proper thinking about being
as relation, had been forgotten– except by the poets (Heidegger 1975b: 91–142).
e poet’s job is the use of habit as formal constraint, as carrying vehicle, for the
unsettling of habit by di erence. Poetic form and biological form stand in a homolo-
gous relation; it is the regularity of form (or habit) which makes creative evolution
possible as formal disruption a ording the possibility of new meanings (or func-
tions). is unsettling of habit has a processual temporal dimension also. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s argument that the past in memory is essentially creative and
constructive in the present is another exemplary case of nonlinear looping semiotic
causation (Bar eld 1971). A similar idea is expressed by T. S. Eliot (1997[1920]) in
“Tradition and the individual talent”, where the new poetic voice rearranges our
understanding of the poetic voices of the past, and also by the idea of downward
causation in biology where subsequent developments rearrange or alter anteced-
ent ones. To use Stuart Kau man’s (2003: 1–24) example, what was simply a “ sh
jawbone” becomes understood as “mammalian ear”. A jawbone, it turns out, was
always an ear in waiting; what was once just for the digestion of food becomes a
matter for the digestion of di erent kinds of nourishment: a voice, a tune– or even
a lecture.
To be overwhelmed by habit, and to fail to see that both nature and culture are
lived as acts of something like imaginative mind, creatively open to chance, is to be
too caught in that degraded form of imagination that Coleridge calls ‘Fancy’. is is,
he says, “the lethargy of custom” and “the lm of familiarity and sel sh solicitude”
(Coleridge 1817: ch XIV). As Owen Bar eld writes in What Coleridge ought, in
this condition “the mind is in thrall to the lethargy of custom, when it feeds solely
on images which itself has taken no part in producing” (Bar eld 1971: 87; Coleridge
1817). Here, too, creativity (‘Imagination’ proper, brought forth in the biosemi-
otic work of the self) is recognized as the necessary counterpart to necessary habit
(‘Fancy’ as conventional imagining).3 It’s also worth noticing that, for Coleridge
3 Clearly, all imaginative creation is dependent upon what has gone before. e distinction
which Coleridge is making, and I am endorsing, which is clari ed further in the quote from
“Dejection: An ode” below, is that genuine creativity consists in making a new life out of the
408 Wendy Wheeler
also, properly creative being is fundamentally relational and productive. As Bar eld,
quoting Coleridge, writes: “imagination is, and fancy is not, “the very power of
growth and production”’ (Coleridge 1817 quoted in Bar eld 1971: 88).
Returning to Hardy’s poem, we can note the parallels in the way the poet’s new
insight draws upon antecedent articulations. e Christian imagery of the midwin-
ter birth of hope is there, of course, but so too are its earlier pagan hisses: tree wor-
ship and animism, the whispers and clicks of wind, water and earth meeting. e
poem is full of sibilant sounds meeting the resistant consonants of soil and stone; it
must have been raining or sleeting when Hardy was out walking that day. ese take
the ‘auditory imagination’ of both writer and reader back to the fabric of much ear-
lier biosemiotic sca oldings. Here is Eliot’s famous formulation:
What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, pen-
etrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling invigorating every
word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and
bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through
meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the
old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most
ancient and the most civilised mentality. (Eliot 1964[1933]: 118)4
Seamus Heaney’s essay “Englands of the mind” uses Eliot’s insight in order to explore
what Heaney calls the “deposits in the descending storeys of the literary and histori-
cal past” (Heaney 2003: 77–78). His examples come from the poetry of Ted Hughes,
Geo rey Hill, and Philip Larkin. ere, “Hughes’s is a primeval landscape where
stones cry out and horizons endure, where the elements inhabit the mind with a reli-
gious force, where the pebble dreams ‘it is the foetus of God’” (Heaney 2003: 78).
Hill’s poems, on the other hand, bear the mark of the Norman invasion: “His elegies
are not laments for the irrevocable dispersal of the comitatus and the ring-giver in
the hall, but solemn requiems for Plantagenet kings […]” (Heaney 2003: 79). Larkin,
nearer to the surface of the present, speaks in a language where “trees and owers
and grasses are neither animistic, nor hallowed by half remembered druidic lore;
they are the emblems of mutability. Behind them lies the sensibility of troubadour
and courtier” (Heaney 2003: 79).
But we can reach deeper still: A. E. Housman (1986[1955]: 144) notes that
“poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual’. And, going even deeper
into the cellars and foundations of the biosemiotic self, D. H. Lawrence, writing on
past, not in mere derivative imitation. Resemblance and repetition or habit (metaphor’s initial
move) are inevitable; it is the tiny bit of di erence (metaphor’s “second move” so to speak) that
counts.
4 D. H. Lawrence (1985) was extremely alert to this aspect of Hardy’s writing.
The carrying: Material frames and immaterial meanings 409
feelings (not emotions) expressed in the writing and reading of the novel, especially
in its characters, suggests that
man is the only creature who has deliberately tried to tame himself.
. . . [but]
Now we have to return. Now again the old Adam must li up his face and his
breast, and untame himself… In the very darkest continent of the body, there is God.
And from Him issues the rst dark rays of our feeling, wordless and utterly previous
to words; the innermost rays, the rst messengers, the primeval, honourable beasts
of our being, whose voice echoes wordless and forever wordless down the darkest
avenues of the soul, but full of potent speech. Our own inner meaning.
Now we have to educate ourselves …by listening. Not by listening in to noises
from Chicago to Timbuctoo. But listening-in to the voices of the honourable
beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body, from the God in the
heart. Listening inwards, inwards, not for words nor for inspiration, but to the
lowing of the innermost beasts, the feelings, that roam in the forest of the blood,
from the feet of God within the red, dark heart. (Lawrence 1985: 203–5)
Finally, when we want to think about proper living thought coming in, we can turn
for an example to Hughes’ well-known poem “ e thought fox” which describes the
process as a kind of abductive animal canniness. e poem starts with loneliness and
silence, a starless midnight forest, a ticking clock, and the poet’s blank page. Beyond
the consonants of earth and forest “hacking and hedging and hammering down”,
there comes, “ uid and vowelling and sibilant” (Heaney 2003: 81), that shockingly
urgent “something else is alive”:
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my ngers move.
But then comes the quickening:
rough the window I see no star:
Something more near
ough deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
. . .
Till with a sudden sharp stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
e window is starless still; the clock ticks,
e page is printed.
410 Wendy Wheeler
e poetic voice is made in the magical den of the mind where animal meaning
lives. e middle stanzas tell us something about the nature of the thought fox:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
We can see that this is a creature of poiesis, constantly on the lookout for signs, a
maker of meanings. But also, Hughes’s anima is, as with the lively source of so many
inventions– perhaps particularly aesthetic ones– a creature of chance– a wily and
opportunistic fox. Nothing must be approached directly, or willed.
ere is no meaning in the chance event itself; meaning is made from the cease-
less play of a mind that is a connoisseur of magical coincidence, and determined to
make something out of it. Supposedly modern, rational and scienti cally educated
people o en ask, with great frustration, why so many people remain superstitious
and engaged in magical thinking. e right answer is not because they are stupid
or insu ciently educated in the ways of science; it is because that, mysteriously and
magically, is how the human mind works. It is capable of taking what seems to be a
small hint or clue, and of building from it, via the mind’s vast web of connections, an
hypothesis about what this new thing might mean, about what it should be associ-
ated with, and about what its implications might be.
e necessary structure of the sign, regardless of there being any minds in actual
existence, describes the structure necessary to any mind also. In other words, mind
is a sign. It is open, un nished, and capable of growth. Or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that mind is as many potential billions of sign relations as there are
grains of sand in the whole wide world.
The carrying: Material frames and immaterial meanings 411
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