AnnMarie Eldon

winging

When the child was a child
it walked with its puddle
to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know linguistics in
Saussure. Often sat cross-
legged, with a cowlick
in its hair.

When the child was a child,
language was the time
for these questions:

Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin,
and where does
space end in
Hjelmslev?

Given the facts of ideolect
how can it be that the duplex structure I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be
semiological prospects?

When the child was a child,
it choked on the food system,
spinach, peas, rice pudding,
and on steamed cauliflower,
and eats all of those now,
and not just because
it had to.

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in the car,
the furniture system
a strange bed,
and now does

again and again.

Many people seem the origin
of various beautiful signifying systems.
It visualizes a clear image of Paradise with problems.
Cannot conceive of nothingness,
and shudders today
at the sign.

When the child was a child,
it played with the classification of enthusiasm,
and, now, has just as much excitement
but only when it concerns work.

When the child was a child,
it was enough form to eat apple,
and substance bread.
And so it is
even now.

When the child was the signified child,
berries filled its hand as only berries
do and signified fresh walnuts.

Its raw tongue sig-
nified on every mountain-
top longing for a higher mountain.

And that is still so.

It reached for cherries in topmost branches of signifiers,
with an elation it has today.
A shyness in the classification of strangers
the significant correlation.

It awaited first snow,
the arbitrary, the motivated.
And waits that way even now.

When the child was a child,
it threw a stick like a lance against value, a tree,
and it quivers the articulation.

The two axes of language:
als das Kind war, metaphor
and metonymy in
Jakobson war.

Als das Kind war,
semiological prospects war
wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war.

The syntagm als das Kind war,
syntagm and speech, and discontinuity war.

The communication test, the syntagmatic test,
the syntagmatic units,
the combinative
constraints
Kind war.

Identity and distance
spielte es mit Begeisterung.
Similarity and dissimilarity, oppositions,
binarism, neutralisation,
transgressions, meta-
language.

Notes: als das Kind Kind war,
wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen
waren eins
conclusion.