OK.. People, and I am not sure other sentient beings aren’t but lets keep with people for now, tend to have a “thing” with meanings. In fact if I began to type here in a c0d3 l1k3 [0000] [00] [0000 00 000], reading this might bore if it took many lines and much time, right?
The boring feeling would be due to perhaps seeming meaningless. How can I relate/link to X is X doesn’t link/relate/speak to me??
However, in reality, or my experience, meanings are not exact – not always. In fact, typing this, I think would probably mean various “things” to different people. “People” is a rough element. A group of humans, a mass, a multitude, a nation, a cloudy audience, a bunching of individuals, a trope to be used when deeper thoughts about describing a more that one amount of humans evade the brain – or just failed by a flailing brain – and so on..
“People” in this case, could be said to be – rather than mean – a range, a certain rainbow. We know it isn’t a shark the guy is talking about, nor a bionic moon, but some stuff to do with humans in one kind of grouping or another. The exact spot in that range, is clearly hard to tell, and perhaps not entirely required to.
However, that “range” or “rainbow” of possible exact meaning – in terms of what the artist meant when she said moo – is the stuff that seems to be interesting for me. How this animal “meaning” is? How does it live? Where does it go? etc. In that sense, I think it might be hypocritical to ask from others to find – or create – meanings as the reason of life, the value, of reason, the being.
Nope meaning creation isn’t. In that sense, contextual art, the one that places x in a context of y to create new possible meanings by the audience is exactly the kind of stuff I do not aim at. Not anymore.
Meaning however, does seem for me to be sort of animal with significance to sentient beings, but as an enabling source rather than a goal, or a definition. In that sense, as an animal on its own, the meaning-strand, is placing sounds into words on a trajectory range, a certain rhythmic movement that characterises the sounds, that turns sounds into possible words with their own unique qualities.
In that sense “people” is a verbally linguistic animal with a rhythmic movement that is both its signature and energy that moves it, feeds it, towards nowhere. Because it is towards nowhere “people” animal can – and is – be played with like a sequence.
In that sense, “people” can be its own, just a sound that today might be used for a bunch of humans, however, tomorrow, conceivably, it can be used for a bunch of amoebas, or sentientised chairs, etc.. This can be done because of the rhythmic range rather than a territorial range – because it moves in spacetime, rather than being stuck in its own “Xanadoo”/”Camelot”/”Jerusalem”/”Mecca” etc..
If meanings are an element of the word-animal, then they are not separate entities towards which a reference to that animal should strive for. Neither to Be the perfect knife, nor the ultimate book, or the ideal wife. The knifeness, the bookness, the wifeness are goals for the objects to go towards, as if the end of a process is already known. Is that an event? An act? A performance? A charade? A show? An insurance policy? A spectacle? A territory? A plane? A prejudice?
Meaning, as a practice we do & do to do over again & again, are we to do it like Pavlov’s dog? Like Macintosh’s chair? Like a dance of a bee? Like a wind in the desert or wind in the sea? Or are we to practice meanings without a Like, just as it is with people rather than trees or rare metals?
If meaninging is a practice, then the focus is on the strands, the sequences of rhythms that drives, moves stuff into being not knowns, into imagining, ays to imagine and let meanings the freedom to become an element of the rhythm’s life and living – or die?
