The moments and elements of this meaning-situation are more easily grasped in the example of the boy seeing the strange bird in Alabama. The first notable moment occurred when he saw the bird. What struck him at once was the extremely distinctive character of the bird’s flight — its very great speed, the effect of alternation of the wings, the sudden plummeting into the woods. This so distinctive and incommunicable something — the word which occurs to one is Hopkins’s “inscape”—the boy perceived perfectly. It is this very uniqueness which Hopkins specifies in inscape: “the unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, selving.”
The next moment is, for our purposes, the most remarkable of all, because it can receive no explanation in the conventional sign theory of meaning. The boy, having perfectly perceived the flight of the hawk, now suffers a sort of disability, a tension, even a sense of imminence! He puts the peculiar question, What is that bird? and puts it importunately. He is really anxious to know. But to know what? What sort of answer does he hope to hear? What in fact is the meaning of his extraordinary question? Why does he want an answer at all? He has already apprehended the hawk in the vividest, most plenary way — a sight he will never forget as long as he lives. What more will he know by having the bird named? (No more, say the semioticists, and he deceives himself if he imagines that he does.)
We have come already to the heart of the question, and a very large question it is. For the situation of the boy in Alabama is very much the same sort of thing as what Cassirer calls the “mythico-religious Urphenomenon.” Cassirer, following Usener and Spieth, emphasized the situation in which the primitive comes face to face with something which is both entirely new to him and strikingly distinctive, so distinctive that it might be said to have a presence—an oddly shaped termite mound, a particular body of water, a particular abandoned road. And it is in the two ways in which this tensional encounter is resolved that the Urphenomenon is said to beget metaphor and myth. The Tro or momentary god is born of the sense of unformulated presence of the thing; the metaphor arises from the symbolic act in which the emotional cry of the beholder becomes the vehicle by which the thing is conceived, the name of the thing. “In the vocables of speech and in primitive mythic configurations, the same inner process finds its consummation: they are both resolutions of an inner tension, the representation of subjective impulses and excitations in definite object forms and figures.”
One recognizes the situation in one’s own experience, that is, the metaphorical part of it. Everyone has a blue-dollar hawk in his childhood, especially if he grew up in the South or West, where place names are so prone to poetic corruption. Chaisson Falls, named properly after its discoverer, becomes Chasin’ Falls. Scapegoat Mountain, named after some Indian tale, becomes Scrapegoat Mountain — mythic wheels within wheels. And wonderfully: Purgatoire River becomes Picketwire River. A boy grows up in the shadow of a great purple range called Music Mountain after some forgotten episode — perhaps the pioneers’ first hoedown after they came through the pass. But this is not how the boy conceives it. When the late afternoon sun strikes the great pile in a certain light, the ridges turn gold, the crevasses are cast into a thundering blue shadow, then it is that he imagines that the wind comes soughing down the gorges with a deep organ note. The name, mysterious to him, tends to validate some equally mysterious inscape of the mountain.
So far so good. But the question on which everything depends and which is too often assumed to be settled without ever having been asked is this: Given this situation and its two characteristics upon which all agree, the peculiar presence or distinctiveness of the object beheld and the peculiar need of the beholder — is this “need” and its satisfaction instrumental or ontological? That is to say, is it the function of metaphor merely to diminish tension, or is it a discoverer of being? Does it fit into the general scheme of need-satisfactions? — and here it doesn’t matter much whether we are talking about the ordinary pragmatic view or Cassirer’s symbolic form: both operate in an instrumental mode, one, that of biological adaption; the other, according to the necessities of the mythic consciousness. Neither provides for a real knowing, a truth-saying about what a being is. Or is it of such a nature that at least two sorts of realities must be allowed: one, the distinctive something beheld; two, the beholder (actually two beholders, one who gives the symbol and one who receives the symbol as meaningful, the Namer and the Hearer), whose special, if imperfect, gift it is to know and affirm this something for what it actually is? The question can’t be bracketed, for the two paths lead in opposite directions, and everything one says henceforth on the subject must be understood from one or the other perspective. In this primitive encounter which is at the basis of man’s cognitive orientation in the world, either we are trafficking in psychological satisfactions or we are dealing with that unique joy which marks man’s ordainment to being and the knowing of it.
We come back to the “right” and “wrong” of blue-dollar hawk and blue darter hawk. Is it proper to ask if the boy’s delight at the “wrong” name is a psychological or an ontological delight? And if the wrong name is cognitive, how is it cognitive? At any rate, we know that the hawk is named for the boy and he has what he wants. His mind, which had really suffered a sort of hunger (an ontological hunger?), now has something to feast on. The bird is, he is told, a blue-dollar hawk. Two conditions, it will be noticed, must be met if the naming is to succeed. There must be an authority behind it — if the boy’s brother had made up the name on the spur of the moment, it wouldn’t have worked. Naming is more than a matter of a semantic “rule.” But apparently there must also be — and here is the scandal — an element of obscurity about the name. The boy can’t help but be disappointed by the logical modifier, blue darter hawk — he feels that although he has asked what the bird is, his father has only told him what it does. If we will prescind for a moment from premature judgments about the “prelogical” or magic character of the boy’s preference, and also forgo the next question, why is it called a blue-dollar hawk? which the boy may or may not have put but probably did not because he knew there was no logical answer the guide could give*—the function of the answer will become clearer. It is connected with the circumstance that the mysterious name, blue-dollar hawk, is both the “right” name — for it has been given in good faith by a Namer who should know and carries an ipso facto authority — and a “wrong” name — for it is not applicable as a logical modifier as blue darter is immediately and univocally applicable. Blue-dollar is not applicable as a modifier at all, for it refers to a something else besides the bird, a something which occupies the same ontological status as the bird. Blue darter tells us something about the bird, what it does, what its color is; blue-dollar tells, or the boy hopes it will tell, what the bird is. For this ontological pairing, or, if you prefer, “error” of identification of word and thing, is the only possible way in which the apprehended nature of the bird, its inscape, can be validated as being what it is. This inscape is, after all, otherwise ineffable. I can describe it, make crude approximations by such words as darting, oaring, speed, dive, but none of these will suffice to affirm this so distinctive something which I have seen. This is why, as Marcel has observed, when I ask what something is, I am more satisfied to be given a name even if the name means nothing to me (especially if?), than to be given a scientific classification. Shelley said that poetry pointed out the before unapprehended relations of things. Wouldn’t it be closer to the case to say that poetry validates that which has already been privately apprehended but has gone unformulated for both of us?