Seven Ways to Signify a Circle
Readers of my dispatches will have noted that all of my dispatches have featured images of works of art that in some way resonate with the text of my dispatches. I have included images in my dispatches because I do not believe that symbolic signs alone can ever effectively communicate anything to anyone.
As I have come to see it, symbolic signs that are meant to communicate a given idea ought to be supplemented by iconic and gestural signs that further communicate a given idea. What’s more, as a rule of thumb, I’d like to start working from the assumption that there is something suspect about most every deployment of symbolic signs that claims to be literal as opposed to figurative and functional as opposed to ornamental; the reason being that iconic and gestural signs alone should suffice to properly communicate most ideas.
In light of this, I shall aim to use symbolic signs less and less in these dispatches. Indeed, to that very end, I will not belabor my point too much further with symbolic signs in this dispatch, and I shall let you glean what I mean from a series images.
An artless rendering of a circle.
[An iconic way to signify a circle.]
The algebraic equation for a circle.
[A symbolic way to signify a circle.]
The analytic geometry of a circle.
[A symbolic-iconic way to signify a circle.]
The normalized vector field for a circle.
[A symbolic-iconic-gestural way to signify a circle.]
Artful renderings of a circle.
[Iconic-gestural ways of signifying a circle.]
A literary rendering of a circle.
[A symbolic-gestural way of signifying a circle.]
James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake “forms a cycle: the last sentence—a fragment—recirculates to the beginning sentence: ‘a way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.’ Joyce himself revealed that the book ‘ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence.’”
A circular motion.
[A gestural way of signifying a circle.]
