Symbols

 

signs in the Indus Valley script used in Mohenjo-Daro

     Our species’ most distinguishing characteristic is surely the ability to manipulate symbols.  We are all semioticians and we are, today more than ever, filled to bursting with representational signs.  I myself have a considerable library of physical books, and my walls are covered with visual art, but now everyone spends the day gazing at iPhones, tablets, and other glowing screens filled with icons and memes in offices, in elevators, in the subway, and at home.  Interpreting signs of all sorts is a problem-solving technique, it is recreation, it is paid employment, and it is human nature.  Rather than creating wealth by transforming nature through agricultural or manufacturing processes, most American workers today spend their time manipulating symbols on computers. 

     The characteristic trait of homo sapiens is skill at handling signs, or semiotics.   Our brains have long evolved in this direction.  Other species are highly intelligent, outdoing humans in a great variety of ways, but none can compare to us in this ability which lies at the foundation of the development of languages far more precise, complete, and efficient than any other animal's communication system.  Surely it is speech that facilitated cooperation among paleolithic people in both hunting and gathering, allowing us to thrive in spite of inadequate speed, claws, or teeth.  If we are to believe Chomsky, language is also essential for organizing the world to better process solitary thought. 

     Children do not doubt that a doll can live through daily soap operas or that a plastic tiara will make a princess of any preschooler.  The intense, often solitary, play of the young requires considerable imagination and little else, yet, like tussling lion cubs, children are surely practicing the skills that later will serve more practical ends.  Their ability to completely absorb themselves in symbolic associations is paralleled by our ancestors to whom the correspondences of sympathetic magic, the efficacy of spells and amulets, and the truths of mythology were every bit as true as any observed reality.

    I have always felt particularly drawn to symbols, the more arbitrary, the more fascinating.  Unlike some of my elementary school friends, I took little interest in automobiles.  Others could identify model and year of a car disappearing around the corner and knowledgeably discuss horsepower long before they were old enough to get behind the wheel, but what I liked was the corporate logos in which I saw an appealing system of American capitalist heraldry.  I would painstakingly copy these emblems from parked cars, using colored pencils, into a little notebook, like a birdwatcher seeking always to expand my collection of sightings.  

     Many of these metallic ornaments followed a common usage based on forms developed out of the elements of actual coats-of-arms, lending the vehicles a vaguely aristocratic air.  Cadillac was atypical, in that it was based on a genuine family crest, that of Le Sieur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Detroit’s founder, a rather elaborate pattern in some iterations with a crown atop and two quarters each with three merlettes (though simplified versions also were used).  Some Fords had a trisected shield with three lions rampant, while the “bow-tie” emblem of Chevrolets in some iterations had the appeal of simplicity, but sometimes was superimposed over a squashed and quartered crest with fleurs de lys.  Certain Buicks had a deer’s head on one side and a red cross in the other, and Dodges might have a shield with a knight’s helmet atop. 

     I pored over as well the lists of symbols in the back of my Webster’s Dictionary: a rich grove of astronomical and astrological signs, biological notations (distinguishing unisexual from monoecious, diecious, and polygamous plants, for instance), those for chemists and businessmen, medicine and pharmacy (mysterious glyphs for drams, scruples, and minims), and a final miscellaneous category which included the ampersand and an X indicating the signature of an illiterate person.  How diverting I found the contemplation of these pages without ever the slightest intention to use even one of them! 

     As an adult I came to love Roman mosaics and emblem books and Baroque title pages, all of which are packed with symbolism and rich as well in intricate visual ornament.  The most elaborate signifying system for our species, though, is language which became my particular study, both the arbitrary association of signified and signifier in ordinary speech and the second-level play of meaning with figures of speech, in and out of aesthetic texts, each of which might be called allegory in the etymological sense of “saying something other” than what is commonly called the literal sense. 

     Even the simplest of similitudes offers a semantic field extending as far as the reader cares to pursue.  When Burns writes, “O my Luve is like a red, red rose,” the beauty of a rose’s blossom and aroma are the primary characteristics it shares with the beloved, making this particular flower a frequent lover’s gift. Yet all roses will in the end die and wither and, even when flourishing, the lovely flowers are accompanied by thorns.  Among the countless references to roses in earlier poetry are Shakespeare’s rose that “might never die” in Sonnet 1, Blake’s “Sick Rose,” and Emily Dickinson‘s in “Nobody knows this little Rose,” not to mention the epic-length treatment of the trope in Romance of the Rose.  Far-reaching metaphysical implications are suggested by the “rose of Sharon” in the Song of Songs, the Virgin Mary’s identification as the “rosa mystica,” and Rumi’s use of the flower in many lyrics.  The associations evoked by a rose proliferate indefinitely until one tires of tracing them, exemplifying what Eco called “unlimited semiosis.”

    As suggested above, symbolism is at the heart of magic, a universal prescientific system for understanding and influencing the world, but even apart from culturally constructed practices, symbolism is at the base of everyone’s vision since all perception is inevitably symbolic.  I don’t directly respond to my wife or to the keyboard in front of me, all I really know are the chemical and electric impulses my nerve cells are passing around.  Not language alone, but the entire sensory phantasmagoria of subjective consciousness is far from direct; it is mediated, simplified, and highly processed.  While we cannot see the energetic vibrations that create the waves of probability we regard as the material world, we are altogether at home in the imaginative constructions our minds build based on the input from our eyes and ears and skin. Similarly, all an organism’s specific characteristics are determined by the codes of genetic DNA, written in just four amino acids.  Just as one’s morning greetings to coworkers and the works of Shakespeare are built from the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, the myriad traits of animal life are determined by various combinations of these few fundamental components.  Today we are all aware that anything whatever may be, in a marvel of coding, digitally represented by nothing but a series a series of ones and zeros.

     Far from being an artificial and sophisticated man-made phenomenon, symbolism is inscribed in the very processes of existence; it is even more significant for living things and, in particular, for our species.  The skillful manipulation of symbols is the most distinctive characteristic of homo sapiens, doubtless more useful than opposable thumbs in the proliferation of our kind.  Because we are so very good at it, we find pleasure in symbols.  A teenager in the slums of Rio de Janeiro may wear a tee short saying Harvard or New York Yankees or Coca-Cola merely in order to feel that he thereby participates in the wealth and power associated with these names.  People name a child after her grandmother in tribute.  Paradegoers salute the flag.  A priest offers absolution.  A veteran wears a purple heart.  A museum visitor is fascinated by ancient hieroglyphics without any notion of their meaning.  No one has any difficulty interpreting even metasymbols, symbols of symbols, such as a number on the icon for a telephone’s messaging app indicating a verbal message, a cross that suggests Christ’s passion which itself suggests one’s own travails, or a bag marked with a dollar sign in a political cartoon that means wealth and thus the capitalist class and thereby an antagonist.  Our consciousnesses are always occupied with one kind of symbols or another, the entire phantasmagoria of the quotidian marvel we call everyday experience is symbolic.  We cannot avoid wandering always in a great cave of symbols.  It seems a measure of grace that we find them so diverting. 

     On his deathbed my father-in-law was visited by a chaplain.  A thoroughly secular person not amenable to spiritual succor, yet unfailingly sociable, he engaged the man in conversation and ended up trying to teach him Morse Code.  Somehow, as he declined, this symbolic code he had learned over eighty years earlier recurred to his mind and his mastery of it may have made him feel a bit less at sea in a situation he could not control.  In this way symbols might serve as a refuge.  Indeed, if we spend our lives unable to reach the Ding an sich, we are nonetheless comforted by the company of a plenitude of symbols among which we feel quite at home.