How Would You Like To Spend Eternity?

---- A stone in Wales. (From J. Lennon's "Foreword" to Yoko Ono's 'Grapefruit')

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Thanks to L. J. Kramer for his post, On Piggyback, THIS BLOG (I will address J. Kennedy's comment, too, and thank for it, too).

I do think the natural-nonnatural (or artificial) distinction is one that Kramer does make, and Kennedy may be right in questioning it! -- but I would think Kramer's point runs along different lines.

Oddly, thinking of this, I recalled "Privates on Parade" (I was playing the piano all day yestrday, and I rejoiced when I played that great "Flanagan and Allen" number "We're going back to that homely little shack"). As I write this, I realise what I mean is "Oh, It's a lovely war", rather than "Privates", but you get my drift. In "Oh What a Lovely War", featuring Corin Redgrave -- I only have the CD of the _stage_ version, though, given to my by a Colonel in England! -- there's this song which DOES look like the 'piggyback': only it's a LEAPFROG -- So I would perhaps write a post on 'Leap frog', as I would think the "U" (utterer, artist, what not) does: he leap frogs over nature, not piggybacks her.

I recall I had a beautiful poster, once. It depicted, boringly, a tree and a landscape, sort of Italian woody thing. It read, -- the placard read -- an adage attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci --:

Nature is God's art.

I expect -- "La natura e l'arte di Dio" (he may have said it in Latin?).

For a time I was fascinated, and I would reflect on it on my own and with the aid of my maieutic friend, Ernesto S. Eventually, I reached the conclusion that the 'implicature' was a negative one. It was not meant to signify: "Behold Nature: So Beautiful -- Nothing a grand artist even like me -- the utterer: Leonardo -- could ever hope in his highest dreams".

On reflection -- perhaps under the influence of "Gilbert and George" -- the most otiose artists on earth, who claim they are art, rather than artists -- the thought came to me that what Leonardo meant was that,

Hey, the world is useless: a useless place to be.

I think THIS was the implicatum. There is no reason for the sun raising and setting on the Riviera in Liguria, for example. It just raises and sets.

I think Kramer used "natural English" (or more generally, 'natural' as applied to things like 'language', 'languages', any language -- e.g. English, or even 'tongue') trades on that -- ambiguity as to what is that adds to a thing to say it's 'arty' -- or 'artSy', as I prefer. (As when Grice uses 'folkSy' to derogate 'folky').

There is a piece of art by a conceptual artist H. Fulton -- a pretty good one. It just depicts a black and white photo --. It is a black and white photo -- of a very English sort of Cotswold rural beauty that we only find in the best of England. It's a valley, really -- nothing too pretentious about it. But the flowers are displayed in a way that they INVITE the idea, "There was an artist behind this". They have been cut, some of them -- daffodils in bloom, or something perhaps less tacky -- to mean, "I meant something by just having some of the flowers on this valley like this". I never got to learn what he meant -- but that's neither here nor there, because as Kramer says, Hamish Fulton is piggybacking in a meta-level. It's the mention of the message that matters.

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When I was leaving in Sachem's Head -- a pretty exclusive area in my favourite (by far) district in Connecticut (Guilford -- no 'd', please -- it WAS NOT built after Surrey, but after a town in Essex, East Guilford) I would subscribe to the "Guilford Courier". One feature oneday was a display of stones in my favourite riding route --. The stones, mysteriously, as photographed ONLY FROM a special angle, displayed the bloody sachem's head itself!

------ The similitude was CREEPY, and there followed a flurry of comments by readers, as to whether it had been intentionally 'meant'. I.e. if some unknown (or meant to remain anonymous) genius had cared to transport pretty huge (but never SO huge) pieces of stone just there. The display is on Old Sachem's Head Road. I knew (and know) the route well because it is one of the loveliest loops one can ever bike on -- with a fascinating view to Falkner Island from Falcon Road, from the private beach of the S. H. A. -- Sachem Head Association --.

(As it happens, I know and have conversed with Guilford town historian, Rhodes-Island native Joel Helander, and he tells me that "Falcon" Road was thus named by a Mrs. Murray, who lived there -- since "Faulkner" is, we know, a variant of Falconer -- and which is meant to signal the 'osprey' rather than a falcon proper).

So back to Kramer. Reading his thoughts, and thinking of HIS focus: 'natural language' -- his original focus -- for he turns to general questions of meaning later in the post -- I was reminded of Austin. Austin was a good one, a good case, for the idea that everything in "natural English" is natural. Grice at times endorsed this. He famously said (to Warnock), "How clever language is!". This of course sounds naive, and Grice knew it ("He said it NOT on a Saturday morning, but in private conversation with me" -- and he adds a tag that explains the implicature: "For we found that every distinction in language had its point". I never knew really what Grice may have meant precisely. Later on when reading on the archival material released by Chapman (in her book, _Grice_, 2006) I found out: 'visum'. Grice and Warnock wanted to say that to say, "I saw the visum of a cow" -- as opposed to "I saw a cow" would be 'overinformative' and 'otiose' and all the rest. They thought that 'visum' (their 'technicism', or piece of jargon) was thus -- while first praised as a 'gap in English', no such thing). We could argue about that. I don't think 'visum' is such an otiosity, but then of course I don't think it's a neologism: it's a boring old Latin thing.

At this point Grice also mentioned that he was always BORED by Austin's "Sense and Sensibilia" (I never am). He thought that an ordinary-language philosopher as he regarded Austin and himself to be were of course justified to introduce 'the occasional' technicism or piece of jargon. This is not just the gesamtkunstwerke (a piece of jargon on its own right). Each piece of technicism in each discipline or walk of life seems to play a different role. The 'gesamtkunstwerke' seems to draw on the lack of reason why a music critic should care to translate some obscure German idea. In the case of Austin's or Grice's technicisms -- 'illocutionary force', 'perlocutionary effect', 'performative', 'implicature', 'non-natural meaning', etc. -- the point seems to be somehwat subtler -- in, I don't think, in any case, there IS a German idiom to say precisely that, etc.

---- So I'll go back to Kramer's and Kennedy's points, as I think, too, on general meaning.

Kennedy seems right in that there IS or SHOULD be a continuum -- between 'art' and 'nature' -- or on "mean", if you must. I have digested the 'pathetic fallacy' too well to want to avoid it. Grice WAS a victim of it. The use of 'mean', is in MY IDIOLECT, totally 'pathetic' -- so it's not by reflecting on anglo-phones' use of "mean" that we will elucidate the tricky shortcircuits between 'nature' and 'art', or between intentional communication and unintentional (where the word doesn't even make sense) phenomena that we may held to hold some sort of 'semeiosis' for us.

At one point, Grice played with 'mean to'. He wanted to say, "I mean to say goodbye' is a NATURAL use of 'mean' -- or rather, a use of 'mean' which does NOT qualify as what he calls 'non-natural' meaning -- the convoluted intentions. And I would agree. But we are not yet beyond uses of 'mean' that ARE truly 'pathetic'. This is the case, not so much of a cat meaning he is hungry as he miaows (because I agree with R. B. Jones that THAT particular 'specification' of the 'that'-clause, what Jones calls the 'proposition' -- may be a bit of a stretch). I am thinking of a stone in Wales, rather!

--- In the adage, I think to Yoko Ono's "Grapefruit", John Lennon ascribes to "a stone in Wales" this particular utterance, in scare quotes --. Is the idea that a stone means like that? -- Stones featured strongly in Occam's account of 'significatio naturaliter'. One of his delightful examples -- surely the man was from Ockham, Surrey, alright -- goes: a 'stone', placed outside a pub, means that the publican is selling wine.

Petra naturaliter significat vinum in taberna.

(I think Occam's example in Summa Totius Logicae is -- fascinating!)

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There is NO WAY that particular clause may be a 'natural growth' (to use Grice's phrase) out of the stone. Nothing can a stone mean. Yet Lennon, to provoke us, has this particular bit of a Taffy rock to go,

How would you like to spend eternity?