just knecht

The Afro-American rhetorical strategy of signifying is a practice unengaged in information giving. Signifying turns on the play and chain of signifiers, and not on some supposedly transcendent signified. The "Blackness of Blackness" Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Esu is the Black Interpreter, the Yoruba god of indeterminacy, the sheer plurality of meaning, or ariyemuye ("that which no sooner is held than slips through one's fingers"). As Hermes is to hermeneutics, Esui is to .Esu-‘tufunaalb ("bringing out the interstices of the riddle").

@hipbonegamer Yeats’ zig-zag is a KO connection, thanks! You win! Olson met Yeats as a young man, and people often compare and contrast them. The Kingfishers was very much in my mind writing this. Also Wordsworth’s Daffodils, which covers very similar ground more economically.

Bashō’s debt to Chuang Tzu here may be seen in his own poetics of refamiliarisation (recasting traditional topics into new languages and material cultures - A3) and recontextualisation (defamiliarisation and dislocation of habitual perceptions - C1). (Traces of Dreams, Shirane)

I also admire Peter and Wendy Steiner’s use of Karcevskij to expand on Mukařovský’s ‘line of connections’ in their postscript to the 1976 translation of On Poetic Language (O jazyce básnickém, 1940).

Slightly less controversially translated, still as a chiasmus: ‘all kinds of things can have the same one meaning (i.e. synonymy); all kinds of meanings can come from the same one thing (homonymy)’ Of course the horse itself is a MacGuffin, Chuang Tzu’s nod to earlier Hui Shih

Criss-Cross: Introducing Chiasmus in Old Chinese Literature Author(s): David McCraw Source: Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 28 (Dec., 2006), pp. 67- 124 McCraw‘s examples include one from Chuang Tzu, though I am solely to blame for this one.

天地，一指也；萬物，一馬也。(Chuang Tzu) Translated literally as a parallelism: ‘heaven and earth, one meaning; myriad things, one horse’ Translated liberally as a chiasmus: ‘all kinds of things can be put to the same use; all kinds of uses can be made of the same thing’

So what if the two terms lie not as poles on a continuum, but on axes orthogonal to each other? It enriches the descriptiveness from a single variable on an axis (-x to +x) to a double coordinate (x, y) where one aspect can vary while the other stays the same.