There is only one reasonable way in which to successfully navigate one’s way though life. A child, finding his own two feet suddenly useful beneath his portly body, stands and takes his first steps. These steps are a sign of strength, freedom and mobility. This freedom is immediately regulated, from the first steps onward, forever, by those who most immediately exercise a certain, undoubtedly benign, authority over him. This child’s parents take him by the hand, and guide him, away from danger, and safely into the comfortable nest they have lovingly provided. This parental hand, and sign of authority, trust, and love, becomes a guiding force for the child for so long as he needs and wants. Soon, the young lad himself, already capable of producing signs of life within his body, will, like his elders, learn to produce signs of even more sophistication for his own more pressing desires. He speaks. A world of significance now resides within the very flesh of this young man. His entire anatomy and physiology become a profound, heavenly forged machine of symbolic production. Freedom, however, and all those signs that stand in its place, are not quite so useful in a world full to the brim already with signs, more sophisticated than his own, of authority and regulation. The new and thrilling use of one’s own two feet is no longer significant enough, on its own, to produce any worthwhile amount of lasting freedom. But soon, with the use of the tongue, and all of its symbolic output, a young upstart may now get where he so desires to be through the tongues ability to provide the worlds authorities with a proper explanation for what he so desires. This explanation is not the thing itself, but a sign, pointing towards the thing.  The thing may be whatever it desires to be, but so long as the sign is acceptable, the thing can begin. The more articulate and legible the sign, the more likely the chances that the thing will be approved. Time and activity process and expire. A child, who once saw dimly, as in a mirror, sees ever clearer, and with clarity, which is to say, the intelligent production and consumption of signs, becomes what is called an adult...  a being fully immersed within a body, and a world of significance.

The signs tell me where to go and where not to go, what to do and what not to do. When the signs serve me well, I follow them. When they do not, I destroy them and create my own. My body is a sign that reveals my habits and refusals. My attire is a sign that reveals my preferences and associations. Some are authentic, others are counterfeit, but all are signs nonetheless. My food, my friends. My work and my enemies. I am riddled with significance.

And what is all the world but a sign, in blue and green and white, of exuberant freedom and life in a dark and vapid universe of insignificance and void... Void, that is, of signs. for when we seek life, we first seek signs, and when no signs are present, what do we call it? Death.

Oh wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of significance?  Remove just one jot, and the sign becomes sin!