Word: hieroglyph
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...dodges the fallacy, allowing meaning to creep in with the names and painting one side of the name instead of trying to reduce an ocean of meaning to an eyedropper. In "Clarence," she follows the thread of landscape as it spins out from the names of places. A Mayan hieroglyph means "sky", but not only sky-in the Guatemalan sky there also fly-or flew-quetzal birds, the source of ancient Indian folklore and mystery. Nye brings the bird naturally into her sky. She traces the connotations of each image down through the rest of the poem, so that...
...Marie-Thérèse, curled up in Nude Asleep in a Landscape, 1934, is seen as a graffitist might see it?a lilac-toned pink blob, twisted and curled to show its openings, nipples and navel, the body recomposed in terms of its sexual signs. It is a hieroglyph for arousal, tumescence in paint. Yet it is something more. For in these images of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso demonstrated his power to materialize his sensations. The body is not merely a sign, but a direct translation of desire into plastic terms, and that is what graffitists cannot...
Once gone, and often before, every decade migrates into the vocabulary of folklore. There it persists as a sort of handy hieroglyph for conjuring up popular memories of a time. So it is that "the '20s," as a phrase, evokes not only The Great Gatsby but more social lore than the entire text of the novel. Similarly, to allude to the '30s, the '40s, the '50s or the '60s is to speak volumes. In contrast, the '70s have not, so to speak, learned to talk...
Lunge, Dart, Pierce. Unlike the contemporary cubists, who had moved steadily away from subject matter, the futurists depended on subjects as their springboard. Gino Severini prized abstract, rhythmic forms that could evoke associations involving all the senses. His Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (see color) is a jumbled panorama of twirling skirts, a laughing face, the monocle of an aristocratic cafégoer, hints of music and noise through words ("valse," "polka," "bowling...
...clearest proof of inflation's hydra like quality has appeared during the last few months. When the steel dispute rolled into Washington, anyone could see that a dozen knotty issues would roll in with it, all tangled up like the parts of some inscrutable hieroglyph. That no one seems able to disentangle these issues and set them right is not all the fault of Truman's sword-play, for one of inflation's perversities, it seems, is to grow more impregnable with every attack...