A New Alphabet ~ Commentary I

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I Imagine

de Chirico, Giorgio. Painting, The Disturbing Muses. 1924.
Lichtenstein, Roy. Painting, Temple of Apollo. 1964.
Quoted Text: Pinsky, Robert. The Sound of Poetry. 1998.
Original Poem, “I Imagine”. 2002.

Two images depicting columns construct the letter “I” a metaphor for the concept of a speaking self. This design repeats the page form for the letters "A" and "U". The text from Pinsky is characteristic of the philosophy of the 1960’s – 1980’s artistic movements which privileged the body and embodied consciousness in art and discourse. Pinsky’s statement locates poetry within the body in the interior space of the speech apparatus. The identification of poetry within the body is an affirmation of the individual self or the lyric I. The accompanying poem “I imagine” portrays the aspiration of breath as the effort to create by translation of idea into physical form.

Mary Keeler’s “Iconic Indeterminacy and Human Creativity”, in The Iconic Page is a study of the unpublished manuscripts of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 - 1914). Peirce, the founder of the only American school of philosophy –Pragmatism, is the innovator of numerous mathematical and scientific developments including: a schema for the first electrical circuit, computer logic, semiotic rational logic, and the length of the meter in terms of a wavelength of light and other measurement standards.

Peirce proposed that the faculties of knowledge are the necessary condition of knowledge, and that epistemology must examine cognitive process, rather than the objects of knowledge. Edmund Husserl’s philosophy of Phenomenology uses a similar premise in phenomenological reduction. New cognitive research is discovering that perception is learned, supporting, Peirce’s idea that consciousness subsides as a habit (Pierce in Keeler 166-167). He challenges the premise of traditional logic, because it ignores the metaphysical problem of reference by which meaning is established in tangible experience.

According to Peirce, the language of philosophy is graphical. Peirce’s manuscripts include graphics and other iconic forms to portray a moving picture of thought in motion. In his “Introduction to the Logic of Relatives” Peirce discusses his Existential Graphs: “better display its living ideas and connections with philosophy and with life” (ms436 1898 qtd. Keeler 179). Peirce explains: “since no reasoning that amounts to much can be conducted without icons and indices (Pierce SS 118 qtd. Keeler 179). His mode of writing and his theory are coherent with the evolution towards an evolving pictographic mode of written language which this essay posits. The multiple modes of language, perception and cognition constitute the engine of consciousness.  

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© Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Contact: Jeanie S. Dean. Updated: 01/18/04