Signifier and signified

Signifier and SignifiedES

#lyricalessay, #stone, #meanings, #multiplicity

S-T-O-N-E

Stone. Stone is our sound-image. Our signifier. But is it ‘a stone’, or ‘to stone’, or ‘the stone’? Your signifieds are innumerable.

‘A stone’. I can hold you in my hand. You are soft and warm, basking in rays of summer sun. I run my fingers up and down you, circling your flat surface; caressing you. I stop in my tracks and face the water. Breath in the cool, wet, salty ocean air. I flick my wrist back. Once, then twice, and the third time I fling you forward, right back where you belong. Out into the ocean. Where the water can endlessly caress your skin. With every wave your shape changes. You crash into your friends, and the chances rise of you cracking in half. A broken body at sea. I wonder what your insides look like. Are they grey, or marbled? You might not know yet either. You’ve left my hand and I move on. Under my feet the stones crunch as they grind up against one another, and give way underneath me. Where does the first layer of stone begin, on this endless stretch? Where does the floor end? You are unstable but still you support me. I sit down and you crowd around me, moulding yourselves to the shape of my body. When I lie down, arms stretched out beside me, I feel your irregularities. They are fixing the kinks in my back.

‘A stone’s’ signified is a piece of rock found on the ground. It is the piece of rock that travels from here to there; that is picked up, and replaced or misplaced. How did you all get here? Crowded on this shingle beach, bunched up, one on top of the other. You were born as the ocean water passed over you, washing over you, with lines of loose stone particles. Like sandpaper. Now you are smooth to the touch. Now you are dormant on land, waiting to return to sea, to be remoulded. Stone is the pebble that crosses boundaries and borders. From land to sea. From the beach, to collectors’ hands, to home. From beach, to industry, to construction site; becoming the neighbours new driveway. But ‘a stone’s’ signified is also weighted. You have a weight to you as you lie in my hand, ready to be thrown away. But it is not heavy enough. We are looking for 6.35 kg. Your name is used to measure my weight, but not your own. Maybe you are 1/100 of a stone.

‘To stone’. They use you to stone objects. They use you to stone cars in protest. They use you to stone people. Stoning as a method of capital punishment. They hurl you at people until that person dies from blunt trauma. But we also stone fruit. We remove the stone; remove

the pit, which holds the seed of the fruit. The inedible. We remove the fruits of the mother, before we even bite into their flesh, sucking away their nutrients, tearing through the skin with our teeth. We tear the unborn child from the womb, and throw it into the trash, as we get ready to cut it into slices for our fruit salad. Cherries, peaches, and plums.

‘To stone’s’ signified is two fold. It is the act of throwing the stone, the act of violence, intention to harm, to injure or to kill, which is in every individually thrown stone. But it is also an act of removal, of taking away the inedible essence of a fruit; violently punching away the cherry pit.

‘The stone’. The stone of our fruit. The object that we discard. Why do we not plant it? If we were to plant it, we could grow another fruit. A fruit tree perhaps. Outside you see many discarded stones. They are thrown to the ground by those who have eaten their flesh. Sitting on the shingle beach, we used to eat cherries in the summer months. June. July. I pick two connected cherries from the plastic box. The perfect earrings. I loop them over my ear and they dangle down, one touching my cheek, the other behind. We laugh. Once the moment has passed I pluck the fruit from its stem, and pop it into my mouth. Biting into the skin. Sucking out the flesh. Working my way around the stone. Once I am done I am left with the tasteless, hard remains. I spit it out in front of me. To become a part of the shingle beach. To become another stone on this pebbled waterfront. For a moment I think, perhaps you will grow a little cherry tree, but of course I know you cannot. Not here. So you become something else. You become your own memorial stone. A memorial of this event, of me eating you.

‘The stone’ is just as much a memorial stone. The tombstone, headstone, or gravestone. The marker that is placed over the grave, with its very own personal inscription. A funeral art, focused on mourning and remembrance. Perhaps with just one name, or two, or numerous, of all the relatives past. An entire family spread over decades. These stones are made of stone. Of the very stone they are named after. We inspect them, nurture them, and tend to their decay, for the sake of our lost loved ones, as stones may settle, or topple over, or rarely, very rarely, fall and injure or kill.

The kidney stone is also ‘the stone’. But it is not made of stone, rather a collection of salt and minerals. Pebbles of calcium or uric acid. Its own little gemstone. It forms itself inside your kidney, to later travel to other parts of the urinary tract. These stones vary in size. They can be small, a fraction of an inch, or grow to a few inches across, and in some cases grow so large they take up an entire kidney. And so, the kidney itself becomes the stone, with a fleshy, red outer skin.

‘My stone’ is my kidney. Kidney stone pain is similar to that of a kidney infection, like the one I am fighting as I write. Except the

excruciating pain that radiates from your central back, underneath your ribs, where the bean shaped kidneys lie, is rather like being stabbed in the side with a large knife. The stone rolls into the narrow ureter, it is too large and it causes a blockage. Pressure builds in the kidney. It is slowly pushed, travelling down, down, down, just like the pebbles on the beach are pushed further out to land with every wave. Once it reaches the bladder your urine burns. You feel like you urgently need to go to the bathroom. Day and night, our little stone is keeping you awake, asking for your attention as it continues to travel to land. Do I just have cystitis or are my kidneys about to explode? You bleed as you pee. You cannot move. It is a debilitating pain. You are burning up, but shaking from the cold. But, at its end, this tiny little stone, our strange friend, will have reached its destination. It will have succeeded its journey, through your pain. Landing in the toilet bowl.

‘The stone’s’ signified is specific. It is weighted, referring to a specific stone. But it is not always made of stone. My stone is my kidney. It is not made of stone, nor is it made of salt or minerals. It is fleshy and squishy and warm, huddled inside my rib cage underneath my pancreas, and my liver. It is protected by my crowded organs and bones, yet at the same time is so vulnerable. It is like a stone, a pebble in shape and size, and it produces its own stones. Yet it has none of the same hardness, solidness, or unbreakability that we associate with stone.

‘Stone’. Stone without a, or the, or to, is material. The hard, solid, non-metallic mineral material that rock or stones are made of. It is the substance that makes up many of the previous stones mentioned. Stone is favoured over other materials for the construction of monumental architecture. It is durable, adaptable to sculptural treatment, and is safe. It builds our homes, our schools, and our hospitals. It is what keeps us safe. ‘Stone’s’ signified, is the safety of its material, the reliability that it holds, the industrial process needed to obtain it, and the grey colour we associate with its final product. Stone is our safe outer shell.

The relationship between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, and there is no intrinsic or direct connection between them. For example, if our signifier is the word ‘stone’, there is nothing in the word S-T-O-N-E that refers directly to its concept. Its signified could in one context refer to the pebble on the English, Suffolk coast. In another it might refer to the seed of a fruit. Or perhaps to a weight. Or a memorial. Or an illness. Or a death sentence. Or maybe merely the material itself. The relationship between signifier and signified is ever changing in every different context. Signs can only be understood and encoded in a context, meaning that, in the case of the word ‘stone’, a relationship between signifier and signified is made meaningful through its context.

(Michigan, Humanities Press International, 1988), 71. Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible Caws, Peter.