To sit and write is to not feel very clever. 

“ Clever Prometheus..” this broadcast could begin, “full of various wiles...”. Or I could abandon that, and begin instead with a question from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain - “What then was life? It was warmth...” to lead you, the listener, into my questions about fire. My confusions about fire. My confusions about semiotic squares. My confusions about everything. 

I will actually begin with the myth of Prometheus, who “stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk”.. And while that involves fire (What contains it? What stories are carried in fire? What carries fire? What can fire carry?), for me it quickly becomes about the fennel stalk. 

Well, then, it becomes about carrying a fennel stalk with fire contained in it down a mountain. And this is what I actually want to tell you about, because while fire is life and death and opposite, the story here for me is the journey from the top of that mountain to the bottom. Holding a dry, hot, fibrous stalk. It’s ropey, wiry, it slips in your hands from sweat. Grey rock sifting below your feet. Red ember, green moss, yellow grass, white stalk, white horizon. Hopping slightly, one arm sore from bounding and the other from carrying. What coyness has ever not overstayed a welcome? What trickster has ever not gone too far? The brow of the mountain is well behind your back now, and you are running, stubbly, across plateaus. 

More on the stalk: “...about five feet high and three inches thick, with knots and branches at intervals of about ten inches, the whole being covered with a tolerably hard rind. 

‘This stalk is filled with a white pith, which, being very dry, catches fire just like a wick; the fire keeps alight perfectly in the stalk and consumes the pith only gradually, without damaging the rind; hence people use this plant to carry fire from one place to another...”

History could probably be traced by a series of vessels thrown and built and carved for that very purpose, to carry things from one place to another. 

2. Semiotic Square

So, “let us try out a few irrefutable statements, on subjects not open to interpretation.”

The very first time I ever saw a semiotic square was in a magazine I bought in France when I was 20 (Do I still carry 20? It feels like the velocity with which I move through the world has tripled since then) I read it on the train back to Lyon, where I was living, from Paris. I don’t think I really understood any of it, but I loved the pictures. And I remember there was a sticker sheet included in it and there was an image of a group of people all seated on each other laps in a circle, a trust exercise. If one of them falls, they all fall. If one of them sits, they all sit.

The semiotic square is a graphic tool created by Algirdas J. Greimas in the mid 20th century. Its primary goal is to map out relationships between semiotic signs through binaries. 

One of the most startling uses of a semiotic square I’ve come across is in Umberto Eco’s satirical essay “Three Owls on a Chest of Drawers,” where he maps out the binary of being and seeming. 

The conclusions for Eco’s square are: 

S1 (being) and ~S2 (non-seeming) are implied; To be but not to seem is a secret.

~S2 (non-seeming) and ~S1 (non-being) are contrary; To not be and to not seem is falseness.

~S1 (non-being) and S2 (seeming) are implied; To be and to seem is truth.

S2 (seeming) and S1 (being) are contrary; To not be and to seem is a lie.

In the “Dictionary of Symbols” by Juan Eduardo Cirlot, vessel is defined as such:

“In the Egyptian system of hieroglyphs, a determinative sign corresponding to the idea of receptacles in general. It is a symbol whose immediate significance is that of the content in which the intermingling forces take place, giving rise to the material world.” 

If the semiotic square means to make sense of the scaffold of reality, it carries something too...It’s a vessel for ideas, for words. Just like Ursula K Le Guin wrote of a novel being a sort of bag, a semiotic square can also hold things “in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” I find it hard to put into words what exactly it is, because it feels like the true meat of it comes from the content that fills it. Similar to a jug or jar. A jar is a jar, but upon being filled with jam, it becomes a jam jar. 

3. Carrying

I could say I know how to tell you about things you already know. How to tell you about a few things you don’t. I know how to tell you about the color of the grass on foothills in November in Northern California. I don’t know how to tell you about the color of the grass on Mount Olympus in November in Greece. I don’t know how to tell you about the color of the grass on the plateaus when Prometheus hobbled down, heat radiating from that fennel stalk down his arm.

But indulge me, let’s jump together. Let’s pretend it was November, and that there’s a thin thread eeking between all these places that makes the grass the same color. The same grass, even. A true sea of grass, one that Prometheus waded through, stalk well above his head. I could take you to a place today that has that same grass. I could peek at a corner of that grass, glance at it from below its rising hill, through a moving car window, at an awkward angle. White clouds, black road, black oak. Window glass where the light seeps. The radio can only get out a single line of song before the hill moves into the rear window. But that corner of hill, of grass, it stays with me. And I’ve sometimes found myself, in moments like this, overcome by a feeling of remembering. Time compresses, the radio plays that line again, the hill moves into the periphery, and I will remember it for always. And so, I know how to tell you about the things that we carry and where we carry them.

I’ve been thinking lately too about the way we organize time, the way we chop up history. What ideas are carried through years, across cultural waves.  Thinking about how carrying things involves a number of muscles, of arms, of bags. Of satchels, of purses, of leaves, of gourds, of shells, or nets. I’m thinking about hands here. Thinking about the ways that a heavy bag cuts into them. Thinking about carrying heavy bags home from the grocery store. Thinking about the ways that a heavy load pushes your feet deeper into the ground. Makes gravity a little stronger. Makes the humid summer air a little heavier. 

Ursula K. Le Guin said “... it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again...” 

Ruth Asawa, about her wavering woven sculptures, talked about the necessity of transformation, the necessity of shape shifting. She was interested in the economy of a line (What can a line carry?)  To me, at least today, it feels like the past is crystalized, and we plunk forward. That there are circular moments, moments when the grassy hill retreats into the rear window a few more times than usual, but ultimately, we are all toeing a line that goes forward, carrying things in our various ways.