Endlessly Proliferating Semiosis Poem by gershon hepner

Endlessly proliferating semiosis
interpreted too fallibly by exegesis
converts the numinous in all five books of Moses
to fodder for best sellers or a doctoral thesis.

Joseph Leo Koerner reviews 'Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games, ' by Edward Snow (North Point Press) (The New Republic, February 1,1999) . Snow devotes his book to a study of Pieter Bruegel's Children's Games of 1560, a painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna dating to 1560, describing 230 children playing 90 games. Snow writes that no sustained investigation of the painting can hope to reach summarizable conclusions, describing its inconclusiveness as 'endlessly proliferating semiosis'. This syndrome is one that is a happy description for the Torah whose characters display behavior that signals an infinite number of signals to a long chain of exegetes.

1/27/99