May 15, 1983

The West 55th Street offices of the Jewish Guild for the Blind now have emergency-door exit signs that speak. The 29 signs, installed in the Guild's building last month, utter the words, ''Fire, this way out,'' in a synthesized but commanding voice, according to John Heimerdinger, executive director of the nonprofit organization.

IT has been more than two years since a Federal judge found that overcrowding at the Nassau County Correctional Center was unconstitutional, but the overcrowding continues. ''Conditions have considerably worsened,'' said David K. Kadane, the special master appointed by the Federal court to bring about a resolution of the problem. ''And the time has come to take decisive steps to bring about compliance'' with the court's orders, he added. Nassau County, acknowledging that the jail was indeed overcrowded, agreed to work toward solving the problem in a settlement with the Nassau County Legal Aid Society, which represented the inmates in the Federal suit. The agreement, which was approved Oct. 7, 1981, in a consent judgment by Judge George C. Pratt of Federal District Court, set a limit of 800 inmates at the East Meadow jail and banned the practice of having prisoners sleep on cots in corridors of the jail.

The Islanders played for 40 minutes tonight the way they had played for many of the 80 games of the regular season: They chugged, sputtered and stalled. But this time they avoided a crash, backed by the 35 saves of their goalie, Billy Smith. Bob Bourne and Ken Morrow scored goals in a 70-second span early in the third period, pacing the Islanders to a 5-1 victory over the Edmonton Oilers and a 3-0 lead in the Stanley Cup final playoff series. Sixty minutes of hockey now separate the Islanders from their fourth consecutive National Hockey League championship. They could wrap up the series in Game 4 Tuesday night at Nassau Coliseum.

''There is a lack of subtlety now, an indifference to what are ultimate concerns, a tendency to improvise rather than think something through clearly. When we started out, there were people like Mondrian, who regarded art as a calling, something that expressed the world of the spirit. People now are quite cynical about that. They have forgotten what art is all about.'' The speaker is Robert Motherwell, the 68-year-old Abstract Expressionist painter who was a leading figure of the first generation of the New York School. ''Culture is not monolithic. What has meaning at a given moment has a way of changing, for all kinds of reasons. What is specific to American art, as opposed to European art, is the idea of inventing yourself from scratch. The tradition of the New York School is, at least in part, precisely that. That is one of the criteria of seriousness and significance. That is itself a cultural renewal, not an obliteration of the previous culture's values and achievements.'' These are the words of 30-year-old David Salle, one of the best known of the new wave of neo-Expressionist painters.

When public television's ''Masterpiece Theater'' presents D.H. Lawrence's ''Sons and Lovers,'' beginning tonight at 9 on WNET/ Channel 13, it may surprise some viewers to see the name of Trevor Griffiths credited with the seven-part dramatization. What possible connection could there be between the author of ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' and the ebulliently left-wing British playwright best known for ''Comedians'' and as the co-author, with Warren Beatty, of the film ''Reds''? ''For me,'' says Mr. Griffiths, '' 'Sons and Lovers' is the first great working-class novel in English, the one in which Lawrence dared to test his experience against the form. Lawrence has been subjected to fierce criticism from the British left, which is only to do with his espousal later in life of mystical fascism. I dislike that about Lawrence, too. But it is a grave error to read that back into the entire oeuvre.'' The novel was published in 1913 and is indeed deeply autobiographical, documenting the sexual and intellectual awakening of a young man named Paul Morel in a Midlands mining community in turnof-the-century England. Although contemporary feminists get shorttempered with Lawrence, the novel is also about domestic life and women's work: Gertrude Morel, Paul's mother, is in many respects Lawrence's tribute to his own mother. She hovers possessively over Paul's involvement first with the prim and proper Miriam, then with the sensuous suffragette Clara Dawes.