What poured into Eve’s consciousness on the day she opened her eyes to the world, before she had even become conscious of her own existence, was a world full of semes. Semes are firstness, presence, immediacy, freshness, newness, initiative, origin, spontaneity, freedom, vividness, consciousness and evanescence. A seme is a unique occurrence, never repeatable. And yet, semes occur all the time. In fact, your perceptions are full of semes, but they are like a background to your range of vision that, on imaginative variation or eidetic reduction, turns out to be your eyebeam. Take the quality of the dark unknown in your meandering quests for truth or beauty and try to distill it : the part of it that you will never be able to grasp, to reify, to preserve – that is a seme.
Deriving from the Ancient Greek neuter noun “σῆμᾰ” (sêma), seme may well denote a mark, a sign, or a token – yet, every description of it must be false to it : It is its proof of genuineness, to vanish with its own immediacy. It defies the second moment, the other moment, by which you can turn the Non-Ego into your Ego, perception into apperception, consciousness into self-consciousness. Before you become self-aware, the seme has crossed your mind like a dream in a white night; like a sign from the gods; an omen; a portent. By the seme your grave is known; it turns the mundane mound, the carefree cairn into history. But do not stop there. Of course “sêma” is neuter. We shall work with signs that begin something not yet gendered. It can manifest as a sinsign, before the “sin”.
A watchword, signal, or banner, the concept of seme enables language by its own power, capacitating the speech-act to fly through speech like a javelin. The derived terms “σημαίνω” (sēmaínō) and “σημεῖον” (sēmeîon) make seme an origin of semiosis, perhaps. But how the transition from perceptual semes into linguistic judgments is even possible is still something scientifically unclarified.