PATAPHYSICS-THE-POETICS-OF-AN-IMAGINARY- SCIENCE_C_Bok

'~ichol even goes so far as to imagine a device
217
for measuring the signified:
a graduated cylinder, whose
increments are marked off, not with numbers, but with
animals (1985:ISO).
Such a device implies that to impose a
random system upon the real by arbitrarily demarcating
differences between signifier and signified only results in
absurdities no less bizarre than an imagistic form of long
division: for example, a giraffe, a woman, a church, and a
sailboat, when divided by a woman and a sailboat, equals a
cello, a giraffe, and a weathercock, etc. (115).
'~ichol suggests, for example, that the poem
"Translating ~pollinaire" is the 54,786,210,294,570th letter
in such an infinite alphabet (1990:112). To write is to
quote one of the points in this series, and to equate the
set of the alphabet with a set of al1 integers raises
questions about the continuity of such sequences: "the
concept of whole letter is itself an interesting one[ ...]
since if you have H &[...II
what are the fractional letters
in between them & what do they express" (1985:89)
We have
no way of adequately expressing such improbable exigencies.