Post-Rhetoric

Signs direct us through our chronotope, our contextualized spatiotemporal activities: They tell us where we are, where we’re going, where we’ve been. What we’re doing, what we need to do, what we’ve done. During our walks, drives, meanderings—our movements constructed by discourse—we occasionally come across the sign that itself seems lost. No words, no guidance, no warnings: just a frame, a form, that once held textual identity for the passerby and for the one who conducted business under its frame.

To the left, six frames that once probably held individual letters, standing above the highway: Exit 240, to be exact. Northbound on Highway 81, cutting through the Shenandoah Valley. The empty panels now frame a blue sky and passing clouds, announcing silence to green pastures and passing vehicles. A truck stop? More than likely. We can probably guess the letters that were once there. The taller sign to the right, a digital marquee, now unplugged, once probably flashed the price for regular, premium, and diesel fuels in its three panels. The buildings that the signs once identified are gone too. But there is hope:

A different view gives us a context. Not the context that situates the discourse of silence, of what once was, of now only material memory. But a context of future texts. For what?

Ah. The signs of filling up, filling out. But a silence still holds on.