Able to imagine a thing other than as it is and called to be a maker, individuals very quickly separate themselves from a state of nature by modifying personal circumstance.  Each successive modification of circumstance presents persons with a new state of things as they are and the possibility of an opposite state, things as they are not.  Quite naturally the negative posits its negative and the spirit of orders emerges as an ever-present possibility.  Finally, the hortatory negative ensures that human beings can never be happy in the world of circumstance as they find it.  The ability to embody the negative and its opposite provides humanity with an active image (mythos) of complete action--perfection, teleology, eschatology --toward which the goad of order drives.

Where this gets us is this:  those very attributes which distinguish human beings as human beings from the other animals are the attributes which separate human beings from an unreflective state in nature. Furthermore, human beings are able by possession of the nagative to imagine a state prior to separation that unreflective state; we are "rotten", driven, by a sense of pre-separation perfection.  When we claimed that myth answers, or attempts to answer the questions of etiology, soteriology, and eschatology, we were describing precisely this:  human beings are not happy with their actual state; they are able to imagine another pre-separation: pre-lapsarian state; and they are convinced of their ability to act toward realizing a perfection of this present state based on the embodiment of a real realm beyond the present of actual circumstance. Embodiment of realms of action beyond the actual we will term iconic panoply.

Hegel notes, " . . . man possesses an impulse to assert himself . . . and man does all this, in order that he may as a free agent divest the external world of its stubborn alienation from himself . . ."   Everywhere human beings are driven to assert their freedom from the merely actual, we may dream, and because we are makers, our dreams may take "present" shape--dream into memory: act complete.  The stuff of tragedy is humanity asserting itself over the actual.  The stuff of tragedy is the failure of a dream.  A look at the enveloping action of several tragedies demonstrates just this, the ever-present human inability to distinguish an action from its thought.  Why "rotten with perfection?":  precisely because humanity is quite capable of bringing dream into memory as already present perfected actions.  Individuals may 'scene' themselves in symbolic confusion, convinced that the dream of an action is already its immediate present.
 

II.
PARADIGMS for exegetes:

Other possible paradigms:
 
 

 POINTS of exegetical analysis:
 

   Analogy/Comparison/Simile/Affirmation
   Antithesis/Contrast/Denial
   Amplification/Repetition/Hyperbole/Exaggeration
   Inversion/Transposition
   Balance/Parallelism
   Metaphor/Identification/Substitution
   Truncation/Omission/Understatement
   Order/Rhythm/Climax

 It was myn entente / To forthere trouthe . . . / And to be war from falseness . . . this was myn menynge . . .
  Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, l385

 [W.Ger.: O.E. maenan=OFris. mena to signify, make known (OHG meinen to have in mind hence also to love), to intend, signify, make known, mention.  OHG. gemeinan to proclaim, show forth]
  from Oxford English Dictionary

 A less analytical age could claim the goal of writing was the articulation of meaning.  Meaning’s meaning is much debated, and the nature of signification is questioned by literary theoretician and philosopher alike in these last years of the twentieth century.

 No one would claim, however, that the best writers work from a vacuum.  Successful writers work from intentions toward goals. No writer meets those goals precisely, but tracing unmet goals is one important interpretive task.

 Building a community of interpretation is a goal of articulation.  At least as early as the pre-Socratic Heraclitus (5-6th cent B.C.), thinkers have puzzled over the human tendency toward private --gnostic-- understanding.  It may be our doom to fail in building a community of interpretation, yet that has been the ages-old goal of rhetoric and it is not insignificant that meaning’s etymology contains both proclamation and love.
 

Meaning—intention : go to the  OED for a thorough discussion of meaning and intention; note the relationship between the noun means and the instrumentality of meaning.

MEAN --verb-- to have in mind with purpose, intention, or aim.
Note the etymological relationship to the old Frisian: to signify:

The state of  sign / signifier / signified / significance in our age is much debated.  Using traffic signals as example, it is possible to describe “red” as the signifier and “stop” as the signified.

III  Kenneth Burke again