Thinking more about references and symbols, intentional fallacy and affective fallacy and whether I am an anachronistic New Critic and how stupid Dead Poets was after all, I think about a way of thinking through what our namer saw of his river and what might be thought of as connotation and denotation in the meaning of the river’s present name. Or, this can-of-worms question of what the artwork means and on what basis and when and for whom. For me, the reader of this work. I was thinking about spheres around people’s heads, a very unfair spatialisation of thought which doesn’t orbit our heads like some sort of unwanted detritus around a planet, after all, but creates the world for the sphere-circled perceiving mind. I do enjoy the connotation of the bubble and of the need to breath (think) in a hostile environment. Anyway, spherical Venn diagrams are a thing, I’ve googled it. Spheres representing the individual episteme of each mind, which I suppose for the image to work must all be connected to a large overhead bubble somehow to show the episteme proper, but I’ll just go with the spheres first.
Our man down under is walking, in his unique perception he is walking alone, toward the place, just over that rise, about 10 miles south-east, that he has previously identified as the probable location of a body of water, potentially a small lake, a river, or an area of marsh. He is a white man, an imperial man, he naturally thinks the natives are not proper people (or does he), he’s ambivalent about being in this overheated country, England was not that green and pleasant for him, the Governor seems to think he has promise and he’s getting paid and he could set up with a piece of land once his commission’s over. He came over the seas for all those weeks and stopped looking at the horizon because after a while it made him feel a sick feeling that his mind was detaching from his head and seeing the horizon from somewhere other than his body. All the violence and the shame and nowhere to hide alone and be dignified. (Doesn’t he sound rather nice?) Ok, he used to bully his wife and small son and he lies and steals food from others sometimes. So far so bad novel. Let all this go into his perception sphere as he looks at last at the greatgreygreengreasy Wambool.
I was trying to work out how much two (or more) different perceivers could ever be thought to overlap in their set of connotations or their lexicon as they look at the same thing which has been taken a referend for something. Here there is a river and it is water first before it is a thing with a name. I am deliberating over whether I should say ‘there it is, storing all this volume of water before any geographers ever even look at it’ because the people who say those sorts of overly-absolute statements like ‘this thing was literally not going on until it was declared to be going on’ are a bit off-putting – like Baudrillard with the Gulf War and so on. I’m not trying to strike a pose and I am trying to avoid striking a pose or assuming the position but I am trying to work out to what extent I think it is legitimate to say that the river did not store water until someone said that it did.
Maybe thinking from the other chronological end, it makes more sense – there is no river, no fleuve, no Fluß, no avon, until there is a thinker-in-language who looks at this watery place and thinks river, fleuve, Fluß, avon. Linguistic meaning needs to be conventional, so our thinker-in-language told her friends about this idea to refer to all the flowing watery places as rivers. Ok, I don’t know how meaning of this originary sort comes to be established, obviously this scenario sounds ridiculous, but suffice it to say that one way or another, on the basis of the evidence that we presently have use of a category for watery phenomena that is the term river that is able to denote bodies of water that rise somewhere and join the sea somewhere else, or dry up along the way or join a lake along the way, but one way or another flow from higher points of land to lower points of land, and that are not still and that are not oceans and that are not puddles or rain or rock pools, one way and another this term exists and has a conventional meaning.
But even without thinking of Macquarie, my sphere concerning river contains different things to that guy’s sphere. Maybe a lot of crossover, at least at the level of conventional meaning, and that means we can have a chat about what we think about rivers, and we’ll be able to call on lots of other areas of conventional meanings that we share, like how I’ve heard that rivers can contain piranhas perhaps, and I have a sub-sphere of thoughts relating to piranhas that would include a lot of cartoons and some diagrammatic side-views of fish heads and general voyages in the Amazon (how can you have a general voyage?). We can have a chat.
But in my thought-sphere about rivers is that geography field trip where someone had to wade across to the other side and do some sort of measurement and it certainly wasn’t going to be me but I do recall who it was; there’s that freezing pool somewhere in Wales with the copper-coloured water; there’s the Monnow which I decided to get annoyed about on that walk because we kept criss-crossing it; there’s that map I looked at, and the other one, and the other one; there’s that artwork all about the Thames that I spent ages writing about and listening to; there’s that visit to the Thames barrage where the river was wide and brown and linked up to Canary Wharf somehow but from a perspective I’d never seen before; there’s that brown flow under the stone bridge in the small-sized English town, and the other, and the other, and the other; there’s that beach with the worn-down pebbles of orange brick and the small muddy reaches and the waves of the police speed-boats; there’s that blue tumble with the churning white bits; that brown tumble with flowers by the side; there’s my oar sliding through the water and the water sliding down my arm; there’s that scaly slither for a moment over there by the reeds, at dusk; there’s the enormous sign forbidding swimming because of the crocodiles. How many pages would it take to refer to every memory I have of any sort of river anywhere? I can think of lots more…
Then there would be the images and memories of rivers about which I have been told, which have come from novels, the ones from films (with the piranhas), the ones from paintings, and after a while the map would cover the territory, as it were, and the cataloguing would become as substantial and more so than the thoughts that were the subject of the cataloguing procedure. BUT there is no two-way, two-directional relationship between the thoughts and their classification because my ideas about rivers have been cumulative. That list is not in chronological order, but it could be roughly put in that order, to show that when I perceived the blue tumble I had already perceived the copper-coloured water, so that had a part in what I saw, but I had not seen that artwork about the Thames so that had no part in that thought-sphere-episteme. I could probably also map the arrival of notions like storage volume and drainage basin into my thought-sphere whose arrival then acted upon my river-memories as well as waiting to act upon my yet-to-be-had river perceptions. I have now perceived that artwork about the Thames as I perceive Boetti and Sauzeau’s thousand rivers and try to think about what can really be said for sure about the connotations of rivers.
Macquarie is a language function, as is storage and piranhas and river and I have not even attempted to describe the thought-sphere of the native woman who looks at the watery place because I don’t even know what her category might be that might be able to map onto the idea of native, of someone-who-was-in-this-place-first-and-is-a-subject-of-classification-for-the-person-who-is-not-from-here, or of woman (fingers crossed she hasn’t got one) or what would be in her category of watery phenomena that flow from higher places to lower places, though I think I could reasonably exclude from her thought-sphere the copper-coloured water in Wales and the blue tumble and Canary Wharf and the pebbles of lovely, neglected Vauxhall beach.
Into Ruins 