(1) Lye semiotics and 'holding':
From LPA209.227.02:
In what Place do Words twine together?
The Mouth.
From LPA186.480.26 (the Moorland diary):
Others I must hold still also for Speech, Swirl of What lives — Loom underfoot to sift through too — What will be said is between my Fingers — […] These words they Snarl — I am the same as Them we rub Eyes — and Them with the Wind living apart together […]
Conceptions of the planet as a unified organism are of upmost relevance to the study of Lye semiotics and the meaning of language. Prof S. A. Leach’s invaluable research has shown how a framework which holds that all things are literally the same leads to both an abundance of metaphor and to its total negation; for if all things are equally alike and equally comparable, then there is none of the semantic distance between things which allows metaphor to function.
This peculiar subversion of the ‘sign/signified’ relationship, coupled with a recurring tendency in the artefacts to speak of words as if they were physical entities, has led Leach to develop the concept of ‘holding’ as a way of describing the relationship between language and the Lye Planet. Authors such as the writer of the Moorland diary, Leach suggests, ‘considered semantic units as being nestled, as their own entities, in the same all-encompassing unity as the rest of the phenomenal world’:
‘[…] any word is, at its root, the same kind of thing as what it is describing: it exists in the same way. Words are parts of the living world on their own terms, equal and irreducibly unique parts of the organic whole. And at the same time, they are exactly the same as what they correspond to in the world, united through the whole. They are both infinitely closer to, and infinitely further away from, the thing(s) that they refer to than we can possibly conceptualise.’
Still, the closest one can come to capturing this attitude in translation, Leach confesses, are through inadequate metaphors:
‘I have found that the metaphor, which insists on the likeness of unlike things, the closeness that is nestled inside distance, is the familiar semantic device that most fits the diarist’s rather beautiful evocation of ‘holding’ a word alongside a thing—not too tightly, not too loosely. The word belongs to the speaker or the writer, and is at the same time absolutely, ineluctably ‘other’.’
(2) LPRU semiotics:
In studying the Lye artefacts, we are forced to reckon with the task of describing an entirely alien body of work through Earthly vocabulary and concepts. We have already discussed the problem of metaphor, and the process of rearticulating the Lye Planet into English complicates even the simplest pieces of information we can gather.
It can be difficult to know at what point our language, in attempting to make the planet and its artefacts more tangible, bridges such a distance too easily, glossing over the essentially different and unknowable nature of its culture and even its ecosystem. For example: we know from both the artefacts and from physical evidence that there existed several living species with root structures, species which were often used in building work and as a food source. Are we right to call this a tree? Generally, the LPRU prefers to describe phenomena by the things they resemble, to avoid a deluge of neologisms that would make the Lye Planet seem a vague abstraction. Still, the thin line between accessible research and overly familiar prescriptivism is a regular subject of debate within the organisation (see LPA210.045.42)
This issue is not only textual: certain musical manuscripts can present similar challenges, where we might have the ‘shape’ of a piece but not the instruments for which it was written, or even the intervals of the chosen musical scale.