Relationship between things and names:
The expression of unambiguous substantive meaning therefore, cannot be accomplished without the word. Language, while incapable of defining an individual object of reality unmistakably â being able at best to approach it through the process of naming â can indeed precisely specify emotional or intellectual content and provoke questions." â Hapkemeyer, âImage and Word, Photo and Text' in photo text text photo, p. 10
"[...] as everyone knows or, at least, senses, things only exist once they have been named" â Javier MarĂas, Your Face Tomorrow, p. 14
Perhaps Hawking is trying to be reassuring. What he seems to mean is that human language has a limit. We (or at least the rest of us) reach this boundary whenever we ponder the cosmic. We imagine by analogy and metaphor: that strange and vast thing is like this smaller, more familiar thing. The universe is a cathedral, a clockworks, an egg. But the parallels ultimately diverge; only an egg is an egg. Such analogies appeal precisely because they are tangible elements of the universe. As terms, they are self-contained â but they cannot contain the container that holds them. So it is with time. Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft. â Maria Popova
âBut a few days later he discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them. When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and JosĂŠ Arcadio BuendĂa put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. Then he was more explicit. The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.â â Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude, pp. 48-49
We can understand this conjunction of name and object [within Robert Macpherson's Frog Poems] in two ways. The relationship between the species name and the object MacPherson chooses is what Linguists would call 'motivated': it isn't arbitrary. At the same time, the principle of conjunction recalls the French writer, the Comte de Lautreamont's, famous 'chance encounter of the sewing machine and the umbrella on the dissecting table', which underwrote French Surrealism's ideal of 'the marvellous'. We have then, on the one hand, a 'system' holding the two parts of the work togetherâ something we have seen many times in MacPherson's practice â and on the other, a sense that this system can open out into potentially limitless avenues of play, linguistic and otherwise. â Ingrid Perez, Robert MacPherson â The Painterâs Reach, pp. 28-9
