The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  Other new properties appear, such as the relation between the utterer and the receiver, which are subject to such familiar variables as “intersubjectivity” (I-thou) and “depersonalization” (I-it).

  A particularly mysterious property is the relation between the sign (signifier) and the referent (signified). It is expressed by the troublesome copula “is,” when Helen said that the perceived liquid “is” water (the word). It “is” but then again it is not. Herein surely is the root of all the troubles Stuart Chase spoke of when he said that his cat had no dealings with such a relationship and therefore was smarter or at least saner than humans.

  Another unique property of the sign-user, of special significance here, is that as soon as he crosses the triadic threshold, he not only continues to exist in an environment but also has a world.

  The world of the sign-user is not identical to its environment or the Cosmos.

  Relation AC—your giving a name to a class of objects to make a sign, and my understanding or misunderstanding of such a naming—cannot be understood as a dyadic interaction.

  Relation BD—the I-you intersubjectivity of an exchange of signs—cannot be understood as a dyadic interaction.

  These are two conjoined triadic events which always happen in any exchange of signs, whether in talk, looking at a painting, reading a novel, or listening to music. It allows for such peculiar properties of triadic events as understanding, misunderstanding, truth-telling, lying.

  VI

  The first Edenic world of the sign-user

  Miss Sullivan (writing of Helen Keller): As the cold water gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled “w-a-t-e-r” in Helen’s free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled “w-a-t-e-r” several times. Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning around asked for my name. I spelled, “Teacher.” Just then the nurse brought Helen’s little sister into the pump-house, and Helen spelled “baby” and pointed to the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she added thirty new words to her vocabulary. Here are some of them: Door, open, shut, give, go, come, and a great many more.*

  Roger Brown and Ursula Belhigi (writing in “Three Processes in the Child’s Acquisition of Syntax”): Some time in the second six months of life most children say a first intelligible word. A few months later most children are saying many words and some children go about the house all day long naming things (table, doggie, ball, etc.) and actions (play, see drop, etc.)†

  Philip E. L. Smith: Having inherited from more primitive ancestors large and efficient brains, as well as a serviceable technology, these new humans proceeded to make a quantum jump greater than anything seen before in a comparable length of time. In esthetics, in communication and symbols, in technology and adaptive efficiency, and perhaps in newer forms of social organization and more complex ways of viewing their fellows, these first modern men went on to effect a transformation worldwide in its impact.*

  The signal-using organism has an environment.

  The sign-user has an environment, but it also has a world.

  The environment of an organism is those elements of the Cosmos which affect the organism significantly (Saturn does not) and to which the organism either is genetically coded to respond or has learned to respond. There are many gaps in an environment, i.e., there are elements which are without significant effect. A honey bee takes account of the bee dance of another bee indicating the direction and distance of a nectar source, but not of a grouse dance.

  The sign-user has a world.

  The world is segmented and named by language. All perceived objects and actions and qualities are named. Even the gaps are named—by the word gaps. An African Bushman has hundreds of names for plants which are either noxious or medicinally beneficial. But he also has a word bush to name all other plants. The Cosmos is accounted for willy-nilly, rightly or wrongly, mythically or scientifically, its past, present, and future. All men in all cultures know what is under the earth, what is above the earth, and where the Cosmos came from.

  The sign Canada is part of the world of most sign-users. It can signify whatever lies at hand to be signified, either a place and a people one knows or a large pink place on a map transected by longitudes and latitudes.

  If there is an unknown territory in the heart of Africa, it is labeled as such on maps and known to sign-users as “unknown territory.”

  A cat has no myths and names no real or imaginary beings. It responds to the Cosmos exactly as it has learned or been programmed to respond.

  For the sign-user, a world is imposed upon the Cosmos—to which he still responds like any other organism.

  For example, he still responds to signals, to heat, light, hunger, sudden noises, perhaps also to female pheromones, perhaps even to the magnetic field of the earth and the gravitational attraction of the moon. But there are other segments of the Cosmos to which he does not respond, even though astrologers say he does.

  The environment has gaps. But the world of the sign-user is a totality. The Cosmos is totally construed by signs, whether the signs be the myth of Tiamat, Newtonian cosmology, or through the auspices of such popular signifiers as “outer space,” “out there,” “the heavens,” “the sky,” “stars,” and so on.

  Not all items of an environment are part of the world. A noxious element—say, an increase in ultraviolet radiation—is a significant environmental factor and may cause skin cancer. But it is unknown to the patient and not part of his world. But the signs unicorn and boogerman may be very much a part of a person’s world and yet have no known counterpart in the Cosmos.

  The Strange World of the Triadic Creature

  Note some odd things about the self’s world. One is that it is not the same as the Cosmos-environment. The planet Venus may be a sign in the self’s world as the evening star or the morning star, but the galaxy M31 may not be present at all. Another oddity is that the self’s world contains things which have no counterpart in the Cosmos, such as centaurs, Big Foot, détente, World War I (which is past), World War III (which may not occur). Yet another odd thing is that the word apple which you utter is part of my world but it is not a singular thing like an individual apple. It is in fact understandable only insofar as it conforms to a rule for uttering apples. But the oddest thing of all is your status in my world. You—Betty, Dick—are like other items in my world—cats, dogs, and apples. But you have a unique property. You are also co-namer, co-discoverer, co-sustainer of my world—whether you are Kafka whom I read or Betty who reads this. Without you—Franz, Betty—I would have no world.

  VII

  The world of the sign-user is a world of signs.

  The sign, as Saussure said, is a union of signifier (the sound-image of a word) and signified (the concept of an object, action, quality).

  If you protest that your world does not consist of signs but rather of apples and trees and people and stars and walking and yellow, Saussure might reply that you don’t know any of these things but only a sensory input which your brain encodes as a percept, then abstracts as a concept which is in turn encoded and “known” under the auspices of language.

  Take the sign apple. It consists both of the sound-image apple and also of a kind of general impression of apples you have known, embodying qualities of roundedness, redness, shine, texture, and sound of apple flesh at bite and pop of apple-skin against teeth, tart-tang taste, and so on.*

  One’s world is thus segmented by an almost unlimited number of signs, signifying not only here-and-now things and qualities and actions but also real and imaginary objects in the past and future. If I wish to catalogue my world, I could begin with a free association which could go on for months: desk, pencil, writing, itch, Saussure, Belgian, minority, war, the end
of the world, Superman, Birmingham, flying, slithy toves, General Grant, the 1984 Olympics, Lilliput, Mozart, Don Giovanni, The Grateful Dead, backing and filling, say it isn’t so, dreaming …

  The nearest thing to a recorded world of signs is the world of H. C. Earwicker in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

  VIII

  In a sign, the signifier and the signified are interpenetrated so that the signifier becomes, in a sense, transformed by the signified.

  Saussure gave a formal analysis of the dual nature of the sign. It remained for Werner and Kaplan and other writers to describe the dynamic process by which the signifier and signified are interpenetrated and the former transformed.

  If you do not believe that the word apple has been transformed by the percept apple, do this experiment: repeat the word apple aloud fifty times. Somewhere along the way, it will suddenly lose its magic transformation into appleness and like Cinderella at midnight become the drab little vocable it really is.

  Further evidence of the interpenetration of signifier and signified is false onomatopoeia.

  Words like boom, pow, tick-tock are said to be onomatopoetic. But what about these words: spatter, slice, brittle, limber, blue, yellow, high, low, rattle? Many people would say that there is some resemblance between these words and the things they signify. Blue sounds more like blue than yellow. Brittle sounds brittler than limber. But there is no such resemblance. Or rather, what resemblance there is, is far more remote and problematical than it appears. The resemblance occurs because the signifier and signified have been interpenetrated through use by the sign-user.

  Slimy does not sound slimy to a German speaker.

  IX

  Signs undergo an evolution, or rather a devolution.*

  At first, the signifier serves as the discovery vehicle through which the signified is known, e.g., Helen Keller discovering water through water—or any two-year-old learning the name of a new object—Peirce’s example:

  BOY: What is that?

  FATHER: That is a balloon.

  Note that when a child hears a new name, he will repeat it; his lips will move silently while he frowns and muses as he considers how this round inflated object can be fitted into this peculiar utterance, balloon.

  Next, the signifier becomes transformed by the signified: the signifier balloon becomes informed by the distention, the stretched-rubber, light, uptending, squinch-sound-against-fingers signified.

  Next, there is a hardening and closure of the signifier, so that in the end the signified becomes encased in a simulacrum like a mummy in a mummy case.

  FIRST BIRD WATCHER: What is that?

  SECOND BIRD WATCHER: That is only a sparrow.

  A devaluation has occurred. The bird itself has disappeared into the sarcophagus of its sign. The unique living creature is assigned to its class of signs, a second-class mummy in the basement collection of mummy cases.

  But a recovery is possible. The signified can be recovered from the ossified signifier, sparrow from sparrow.

  A sparrow can be recovered under conditions of catastrophe.

  The German soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front could see an ordinary butterfly as a creature of immense beauty and value in the trenches of the Somme.

  A poet can wrench signifier out of context and exhibit it in all its queerness and splendor.*

  Cézanne recovered apples from the commonplace sign, apples.

  Scientists recover the inexhaustible mystery of the signified from the mundane closed-off simulacrum of the world-sign.

  One sees a line of ants crossing the sidewalk and sees it as—ants crossing the sidewalk. Fabre saw ants crossing the sidewalk and stopped to wonder where they came from, where they were going, how they knew how to get there, and why. Then, like von Frisch and his bees, he discovered there is no end to the mystery of ants.

  X

  Consciousness: Conscious from conscio, I know with.

  Consciousness is that act of attention to something under the auspices of its sign, an act which is social in its origin. What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

  It is no etymological accident that the prefix con- is part of the word, since the origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.

  It is also not an accident that grammatical usage requires that conscious and consciousness are generally followed by of. One is always conscious of something.

  It is also the case that one is always conscious of something as something—its sign.

  If a hunter is conscious of an animal in the field, it is part of the act of consciousness to place it—as a rabbit, fox, deer. The signing process tends to configure segments of the Cosmos under the auspices of a sign, often mistakenly. It is often possible to see a certain pattern of light and shadow as a rabbit, ears, and all. The hunter coming closer may say with surprise: “I thought it was a rabbit.”

  Deer hunters, who are increasingly shooting each other more often than deer, invariably report: “But I saw a deer!”

  XI

  If the sign-user first enters into an Edenic state by virtue of his discovery and constitution of the world by signs, like Helen Keller or any normal two-year-old, and if aboriginal sign-use is a joyful concelebration of the world through an utterance in which the ancient environment of the Cosmos is transformed and beheld in common through the magic prism of the sign, it is also, semiotically speaking, an Eden which harbors its own semiotic snake in the grass.

  The fateful flaw of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension—and that is the sign-user himself.

  Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.

  The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.

  You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me. (Have you ever wondered why the Ralphs you know look as if they ought to be called Ralph and not Robert?)

  For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

  You are not a sign in your world. Unlike the other signifiers in your world which form more or less stable units with the perceived world-things they signify, the signifier of yourself is mobile, freed up, and operating on a sliding semiotic scale from –α to α.

  The signified of the self is semiotically loose and caroms around the Cosmos like an unguided missile.

  From the moment the signifying self turned inward and became conscious of itself, trouble began as the sparks flew up.

  No one knows how such a state of affairs came to pass, except through the wisdom (or folly) of religion and myth.* But, semiotically speaking, it is possible to describe the consequences.

  As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in myriad disguises.

  One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which tells lies.

  The exile from Eden is, semiotically, the banishment of the self-conscious self from its own world of signs.

  The banquet is still there, but it is Banquo in attendance.

  The self perceives itself as naked. Every self is ashamed of itself.

  The semiotic history of this creature thereafter could be written in terms of the
successive attempts, both heroic and absurd, of the signifying creature to escape its nakedness and to find a permanent semiotic habiliment for itself—often by identifying itself with other creatures in its world.

  Among Alaskan Indians, this practice is called totemism. In the Western world, it is called role-modeling.

  The question must arise: What is the nature of the catastrophe of the self? Is the catastrophe nothing more or less than the breakthrough itself, the sudden emergence of the triadic organism into a dyadic world? And is the predicament of the self the price of naming and knowing? Or is the catastrophe a subsequent event, a bad move in the exercise of its freedom by the sign-user? Is it a turning from the concelebration of the world to a solitary absorption with self?

  It is fruitful to speculate on the possible nature of other intelligences (ETIs) in the Cosmos, if they exist.

  Presumably, they too have achieved the triadic breakthrough. Might they not have achieved the world of signs without succumbing to the terrible penalty? Might there not exist preternatural intelligences who do not necessarily share the shadow-life of the earth-self?

  Much of current speculation about the nature of ETIs— what level of technology have you achieved?, etc.—is misguided. The first question an earthling should ask of an ETI is not: What is the level of your science? but rather: Did it also happen to you? Do you have a self? If so, how do you handle it? Did you suffer a catastrophe?

  XII

  As soon as the self becomes self-conscious—that is, aware of its own unique unformulability in its world of signs—from that moment forward, it cannot escape the predicament of its placement in the world.

  An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond.

  But a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed.