"Seldom we find," says Solomon Don Dunce,
"half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
Through all the flimsy things we see at once
as easily as through a Naples bonnet –
trash of all trash! – how can a lady don it?
Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff –
owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff
twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it."
And, veritably, Sol is right enough.
The general tuckermanities are arrant
bubbles – ephemeral and so transparent –
but this is, now – you may depend upon it –
stable, opaque, immortal – all by dint
of the dear names that lie concealed within 't.– Poe
...probability. Like the synchronicity of falling stars, ports of call and flowers blooming out to sea. Or islands as holes in the solidarity of water (Buckminster-fuller) or a sucking vortex like a pepper-mill grinding life into mince-meat before it can bloom, thrust out of context and then spewed and quasi-renewed (The Kalevala). Like, the name is not the thing – how many comrades are named "Mary"? When Wittgenstein accused Freud of merely constructing a mythic narative, Siggy might have answered, "What other kind of discourse is there?" Regarding the sentiment that the time-lines of things are not the be-all and end-all of language or history, Foulcalt says this:
"Let there be no misunderstanding: it is not the objects that remain constant, nor the domain that they form; it is not even their point of emergence or their mode of characterization; but the relation between the surfaces on which they appear, on which they can be delimited, on which they can be analysed and specified.
[...]
What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.
[...]
The analysis of lexical contents defines either the elements of meaning at the disposal of speaking subjects in a given period, or the semantic structure that appears on the surface of a discourse that has already been spoken; it does not concern discursive practice as a place in which a tangled plurality -- at once superposed and incomplete -- of objects is formed and deformed, appears and disappears.
The sagacity of the commentators is not mistaken: from the kind of analysis that I have undertaken, words are as deliberately absent as things themselves; any description of a vocabulary is as lacking as any reference to the living plenitude of experience."
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