I. Chao before Ciao. - Fernando Modesto

Whether as Vietnamese rice porridge or as fried rice in the guise of yang chao at local Chinese eateries, “chao” in the epigraph is in opposition to “ciao,” such that primacy is granted to the former: Chao before ciao. This opposition transcends the symbolic & does so towards the systemic, as in Roland Barthes’ famed schemata of the sign’s 3 relations: symbol, system, syntagm. Notice also that while metaphor here is not taken for granted, it does take the backseat in favor of the metonym.

‘In favor of the metonym,’ in the sense that we arrive at chao from ciao by way of punning, thru the sheer logic of metonymy—for how else does one depart from departure’s decidedness—from the finitude of farewell (ciao)—to leap onto the infinitude of rice (chao)? The vast field of Modesto’s universe—Galaxies, Earth, St. Mary’s, Second Heaven—cannot be measured just as rice grains cannot be counted. & yet its dimensions are definite, still: Where Modesto, hinting at boundaries, depicts the axes (East-West axis, North-South axis) of his realm, rice too has bounds made definite by cupping—

Continued...