A Free-Association, or Semiotic Reading, of Andre' Breton's poem "Ghostly Stances" Part 1

Ghostly Stances 

[Title]: Epiphenomenal Gestures (poses)

I don't attach any importance to life

[Context]: an evocation of a personal biosemiotic objectivity

I don't pin life's least butterfly to importance

even considering an expansive non-linearity, or strange attraction,
must consider scale, or render scale a foreground to void (non-symmetry)

I'm unimportant to life

[End Context (provisional)]: systemic autonomy

But branches of salt white branches

[Begin Meditation (aes/thesis)]: recursion, density, complexity as computation (diagrammatic representationalism)

All the bubbles of shadow

Latour's  “practical metaphysics” coupled to Sloterdijk's "spherology", Keats' "Negative Capability" rendered as non-anthropomorphic, or biologically distributed ('decentralized') formal ontology, or as "optic thought" (mapping ontological transparency onto surface by referencing transparent phenomenality, and referent-like phenomenon, or "para-ideational inscription", as well as a nod to the myth of the origin of drawing, which conflates, memory / desire / inscription which precludes the phenomenality of referentiality itself, and Plato's "the world of becoming and passing away",
or classic vicissitudinalty rendered as epiphenomenal referentiality. "Bubbles" pop, just as cultures pass away, the meaning of that, rendered as cognate to the transcendental reality of physics itself, ie substance (our epistemic description of it) as shadow, or representation (an inscriptive 'tracking').

And sea anemones

Possibly relating to metaphor of socio-sexual diversity, collectivity, 'communism', an organic, or 'grotesque consctructionism' also implying various symbioses, and also, an aesthetic evocation of the anthropomorphic rendered alien to itself, which also relates to an 'auto-epistemic' transcendence, or the Kantian 'Ding an sich' enacted 'through poetic expression' as the Heideggerian
'Zuhandenheit' which poses an interesting linguistic iconism of something like 'Zoe-handed-heights',
a pre-continental philosophical metaphor grotesquely united to a cryptic anthropomorphic immanence which also supports the universal genetic heritage.

Go down and breathe deep inside my thought

A beautiful example of Olsonian 'Projective Verse' figured as an imperative command,
and one which illustrates the form of the idea, iconistically.

They come from tears I don't shed

further 'table-rapping' on continental decentering, ie. cf., poesis / aesthesis, metaphors..

From steps I don't take which are steps twice over

And here we are, Breton has evinced a Surrealist cognomen of Syntaxis, in which, by means of his earlier invocation of the Ding an Sich as 'poetic' 'Zuhandenheit' has conjoined the Husserlian abolition of categorical difference between the Phenomenal and Noumenal worlds into a figure combining both biosemiosis, and semiosis, ie., a constructionist computationalism which configured in this way unites the Keatsian 'Negative Capability' to both episteme and telos. The use of 'steps'
is also a nod to a long tradition of classical Hindu poesy. If we then conclude that semiosis = aesthesis, or as a figure of naming, one could say: "Reality is an unfolding Beauty" which is then cognate to ancient etyms of Techne, we might, paradoxically as well, consider spirit, in the sense of apparition, ie 'the world of appearences' as daidala (prodigality).

And which sand remembers when the tide rises

Exquisite non-biological metaphor of memory and consciousness, or the Leibnizian Monadological model implying for want of a better term, an unconscious, or "performative" 'animist agency', with
historical, and prophetic nods to Tesla's inscription in the sand of the structure of Alternating Current, as well as a wonderful new versioning of the Heraclitan arrow of time figured as discrete semiosis, or syntaxis. Consider the phrase, "Erasure is also inscription" as a translationary intermediate figurality, ie, Semiosis is |positive|...

The bars are inside the cage

Ideology is psychology is biology, or, the Husserlian "ph(a)noumenal"..

And birds come from high up to sing in front of these bars

Figure of Enunciation as grotesque decentered collectivity, swarm, invoking the simple computationalist unit in congress, ie structurality as frisson, evanescent, which hearkens
back to buddhist ideas of layers, or 'gunas'.. and even "The medium is the message."

An underground passage connects all perfumes

Here we have a very specific conception of the Deleuzian Rhizome figured as immanence,
which also combines the Husserlian  "ph(a)noumenal" via Keatsian NC with Amour Fou
figured as some possibly delimited sense of the Freudian drive, or non-linguistic process, possibly,
but also connotes an archaeological architecturalism, ie memic drives as 'computational autonomies'
which dovetails nicely with Maturana's Autopoiesis..

One day a woman entered it

Seems to imply a standard Surrealist Narratology invoking the universal feminine as both
capricious and fertile, but also, sexes the subject in terms of scale and sensitivity to figure
the 'agent of syntaxis' as a system become icon (bio-lexeme) entering another system (Umwelt)
which is the container of immanence (beauty = perfume) with subliminal suggestions of epiphenomenality (wafting, drifting, roiling, being consumed, sniffed, read)..

That woman grew so radiant I couldn't see her

This would seem to figure a narratology of the collapse into  "ph(a)noumenality"
which also seems destined to perform as a metaphor of this 'process'
as some form of episteme, or at least, a "cognition of change". This also seems
to pose the question of referentiality as both internal experience, and inscription
as an optical production.. also prefigures pop cultural meme "blinded by the light"..

With these eyes that have even seen me burning

an invocation of the "Sobject", perhaps, but also, mortality, the figure of thermodynamics,
the second law as the 'ground' of autopoiesis as a 'metaphysics' ie productive / destructive..

I was already as old as I am now

Temporal identity as poetic 'Zuhandenheit'

And I watched over myself over my thoughts like a night
     watchman in an immense factory
The only watchman
The traffic circle still cast its spell over the same trolleys
The expressions on the plastic figurines hadn't changed
They were chewing the smile's rye

Continuing the rubric of poiesis, or production as computation, we find
here, a small homage to de Chirico, and in the last phrase only, Dali.
We could dig deeper here, but we won't.

I know of a cloth in a vanished city

The 'daidala' of absence could reference an Ozymandian romantic vision of ruin coupled
to a materialist episteme of memory re: inscription, here figured as 'cloth'.. common metaphor
of fate as construction, ie, threads, etc..