The Word

Doorways

To call a beetle a synchronicity, a sign, a coincidence, or a rose chafer is already to change what can be noticed. Naming participates in the seeing.

• fieldOpen ground, and then a hundred borrowed sciences.
• signSomething that stands for something else, to someone, in some way. Not always a message.
• semioticsA name for a looking you already do: how one thing stands for another, and that it does not always stand in the same way.
• languageA taught system of standing-for. The word pipe does not resemble a pipe. That is the whole trick, and the whole danger.
• remainTo stay with. What becomes visible only after the first naming.
• symbolA token of recognition, later a word that had to carry too much.
• imageWhat appears. Before it is asked to mean.
• patternA model to copy, then a recurrence we think we see.
• synchronicityA word coined for meaningful coincidence without an assigned cause.
• coincidenceTo fall together. Before anyone decides whether that falling means.
• archetypeA first stamp. Later, a word that became a personality category.
• psychoidA border word for a problem that would not stay inside psyche.
• daimonA companion in a story of a life, not a certificate of destiny.
• projectionTo throw forward. A psychological word that can heal or erase.
• attentionTo stretch toward. A narrowing that feels like the whole.
• illusionSeeing that comes apart from a measurement.
• perceptionTo take hold of. Not a window. An act.
• memoryWhat remains, and what is rebuilt in the remaining.
• dreamAn image that arrives without being asked, and does not owe us a translation.
• ErosCharge in the between. Not a synonym for sex, and not a proof of reciprocity.
• LogosWord, speech, account, reason, relation. Not a synonym for logic, and not the masculine opposite of Eros.
• missWhat did not fit. Data, not embarrassment.
• relationA carrying-back. What stands between two things, including the one who looks.