The Snark and the Myth of Meaning: 3 Cuts, Construal, and Local Actualisation

In The Hunting of the Snark, the hunt intensifies not through discovery, but through differentiation.

Nothing definitive is captured.

And yet, something continually happens.

That “something” is the cut.

---

1. What Is a Cut?

A cut is not destruction.

It is not violence.

It is not division for its own sake.

A cut is a perspectival differentiation within a field of potential.

It:

• selects one trajectory among many,

• stabilises figure against ground,

• produces a local phenomenon.

Without cuts, potential remains unarticulated.

With cuts, potential becomes instance.

Every chant, every suspicion, every sighting in the poem is a cut.

---

2. Construal as Actualisation

Construal is not passive perception.

It is not reception of pre-existing meaning.

Construal is the act through which a relational field becomes locally determinate.

When the crew “identify” something as possibly Snark-like, they do not uncover a stable object.

They actualise a phenomenon within the constraints of their coordinated expectations.

The phenomenon is real — but locally real.

And it does not exhaust the field.

---

3. Why the Snark Remains Elusive

Each cut generates a local stabilisation.

But each stabilisation leaves surplus potential untouched.

This is the structural principle:

Every act of actualisation is partial.

If a cut could exhaust the field, the Snark would be captured.

The hunt would end.

The system would close.

Instead, the poem performs iterative construal.

Expectation thickens.

Attention sharpens.

Phenomena flicker.

But total capture never occurs.

This is not narrative delay.

It is ontological structure.

---

4. The Persistence of Surplus

Why does the Snark never resolve into final form?

Because the relational field always contains more potential than any single construal can actualise.

Cuts are generative precisely because they are incomplete.

They stabilise enough for coherence, but not enough for closure.

Meaning lives in this asymmetry.

Local phenomenon.

Global inexhaustibility.

---

5. The Reader’s Cut

The most subtle cut is not made by the crew.

It is made by the reader.

Each attempt to interpret the Snark —

as satire,

as nonsense,

as allegory —

is itself a construal.

You stabilise a figure.

You differentiate ground.

You actualise a reading.

But no reading closes the poem.

The text remains structurally open because its field of potential exceeds every interpretive cut.

---

6. The Structural Law

We can now state it cleanly:

Meaning is locally actualised through construal and globally incomplete by structure.

The poem does not describe this law.

It enacts it.

The Snark persists not because it hides.

It persists because the field cannot be exhausted.

---

In the next post, we confront the danger built into this structure.

If cuts accumulate,

if density thickens,

if expectation tightens too far —

threshold appears.

And threshold, in Snark, has a name.

Boojum.