Metaphors of Everyday Life

Ordinary language is the graveyard of dead metaphors. Ricoeur says as often as he says anything that metaphor is what you will not find in the dictionary. Thus he draws the line between metaphoric and literal expression, between those metaphors that have not (yet) ossified into a plain meanings and those that have. For his purpose this is perfectly legitimate. In a larger sense it creates a problem in that all the fundamental corpses of literal language can be (in theory) spontaneously reanimated. We never know if it’s truly dead or merely catatonic. Whether it is truly dead but can rise as a zombie. (This carving of a man out of wax seems sincere.) And there are a number of metaphors at the fuzzy border of the line of the dictionary, passing back and forth, not quite settling into death or sleep. And finally, for anyone deeply immersed in language and the history of language, the implicit metaphors are not dead at all. (I see dead—metaphors. Ghosts.) He laughs at the claim that the typhoon decimated the population.

It’s in part because language’s dead metaphors are never yet quite dead to all readers and yet dead beyond recall to others that sentences are so hard to nail down.

Moreover the study of metaphor yields, eventually, the realization that the ordinary language we use literally every day to make plain and unambiguous meanings is really just a collection of dead, half dead, playing dead and merely sleeping metaphors that create a bizarre monster of meanings in whose belly we live and which, but for myriad accidents of history, might have been entirely another monster.

Reason and Story--and Hamlet

Reason and Story

In one context, the other of reason is unreason, its opposite. In another, its other is story, which is not an opposite at all.

Unreason exists in the realm of reason. Story exists in a realm external to reason and unreason. Think of two nonoverlapping circles.

Reason and story are two distinct ways of seeing, describing, living in the world. From the point of view of the one, they are mutually exclusive. From the point of view of the other, they are not circles. We can live here without reason; we cannot without story.

Reason and story are the two ways we perceive, understand, and respond to being. Reason sees the world as a state that is, reason wants a hierarchy; story sees the world as a field, a field of incessant becoming. Reason wants to put the right name on everything. Story sees that nouns are never quite accurate.  

Both are necessary. Story is the name given to the other by reason. Our perspective, here, in this little essay is that of reason. This is not a story about the two realms of thought. The same exploration should be done from the point of view of story. And it has—too many times to name—never better than in Hamlet.

In the realm of reason, opposites contradict. In the realm of story opposites exist without contradiction. A man can be rich and poor, kind and evil, right and wrong.

In the realm of reason, Hamlet is a hopelessly confused character and a particularly confused play. Reason cannot make sense of the play. It tries. It is reason’s job to try. Reason understands the appeal of the play. Reason should never give up the play. But it will never bring the play into itself.

Story is where Hamlet happens, and story too tries endlessly to make sense of Hamlet. (Gertrude of Denmark, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Gertrude and Claudius are just three of many 20^th-century examples of this, ones whose attempts are more or less direct.) But story is not anxious about Hamlet. Hamlet is a pool in which story swims.

Garden Entrance

Or "How I spent my summer."                                             

Why Paint What Is Present?

You’ll never smell the painted rose

I watched a painter paint a scene of beauty—a nude, a landscape, a starry night—

Why did he do this? It was not to preserve the scene’s beauty.

What he painted wasn’t there or if there it was unseen.

Did he enhance the beauty with his art or his imagination

or did he paint what was unseen?  He added to the scene—yes

but from where did he draw his addition? What absence drove him?

The lover says, I paint my lover when she is absent . I paint from memory or a photograph because, overwhelmed with desire, I want to bring her back. I paint to spend time with her. I paint her for the same reason one who cannot paint stares at the photo or plunges into memory: to make present what is absent.

That’s a motive to paint what is absent. But why paint what is present?  Why crawl out of the lover’s bed when she is there in palpable flesh and paint her? I see her better when I paint her than when I merely look at her, better than when I make love to her. That may be so. But is it enough? The painting is also the delay, the foreplay, of making absent what is present in order to make more present what is already present but not fully present. Also true. But isn't the painting also already about the future absence of what now is present. The future absence that makes the touching more urgent as the painting dries is the same future absence that drives the painting. This play of presence and absence underlies all art.  

Let's think this through more systematically. Why paint what is present?

To preserve, to enhance, to supplement, to elicit. Those might be the whole range of possibilities. They all meld together if stared at too too closely. And even if they were distinct in themselves their borders would be imperfectly discernible, always in dispute. Nonetheless, they are the possibilities.

There’s no need now to paint in order merely to preserve, if "to preserve" is aimed at the ostensible beauty a very good photograph (also a work of art of course) or video would do as much as could be done in that way more closely and more easily. It wouldn’t be the same—as Emerson noted. The whole scene is its spatio-temporal context. And that is irretrievable. You’ll never smell the painted rose. But it is as much as can be had. And so, “to preserve” can never have more than a small part in painting a present scene.

To enhance: This is never not part of the effect. A painting that is only as beautiful as the scene lacks something. We might say the scene can never be captured in a painting, but that is misleading. Something is lost in the translation. Yes, but something must also be gained. A painting points at the thing in the scene that accounts for its beauty and pulls it forward, enhancing contrasts, directing the gaze. This may be enough. But it’s not all.

To supplement, to add what is missing, put in what isn’t there. There are only two ways to talk about what isn’t there: the absent and the invisible. The invisible is there but doesn’t seem to be. "To elicit" is to bring out the invisible. "To supplement" is to add what isn’t there. To supplement is to commandeer the scene. It’s the imperial impulse. It may not be wholly negative for that. One wrestles the scene into what it is not in order to convert it into what one wishes it were or needs it to have been or to be or to make it say what one wishes to say. Lights and filters and oboes and violins. To supplement is to comment on the scene or to use the scene to comment elsewhere. The choice of subject is of course already a comment if it is not an excuse (“this is worth painting”), and everything done from there is also comment, personal or transpersonal: I love this, it moves me or this is a to-be-loved thing; it moves me or it’s moving. That general comment underlies the whole enterprise. All range of specific comments also obtain, potentially: this is why I love it, this is what is lovable about it, or her. One cannot escape supplementation.

To elicit is the Romantic impulse. To make the invisible visible. There is always something invisible, not absent, in anything beautiful. To see through the apparent to the real. God or nothing. This is not strictly the sign-value of the scene. What is invisible may be unutterable. One can ache to possess or to become part of the beauty one perceives. The art may amplify that impulse. It may do this by supplementation or elicitation, and it may deaden the scene too, but it may also bring the ache to such an intensity that the viewer—the lover—loses all power to stand. We fall over for lack of strength in the presence of so much beauty. (Was this the real fall of the mythic Adam for Eve? Milton may have thought so.)

The painting either leads us back to the scene or takes us away into itself. Either way, if it is art and not hack work, it leads us to whatever truth there is in beauty.

What Humpty Dumpty Said

Saturday, as we sat at seder
I sought to borrow Simon’s seeder.
Simon had a super seeder
It superseded that of Peter.
I sought to borrow Simon’s seeder
Because that day I bought a cedar.
I sought to spread some seed around
To spiffy up my soiled ground.

Simon said he understood
And said he’d help me if he could,
“But as it is the Sabbath, sir
And so to such we mustn’t stir,
I suggest you bother Peter
For your seder cedar seeder.”

Gun Thoughts

Some questions to answer before you choose to buy yourself a handgun.

1. Have you ever in your life been in a situation in which it would have been appropriate to shoot somebody?
2. Do you know anyone who has ever been in a situation in which it would have been appropriate to shoot somebody?

If the answer to both of those questions is "no," you probably don't need a gun.

3. Have you ever been in a situation where you were glad there was no gun?
4. Do you know of any who was in a situation that would have been improved had there been no gun?

If your answer to either of those question is yes, you probably don't need a gun.
If your answer to both of those question is yes, you should stay clear of guns.

5. Keeping in mind that the handgun you buy is more likely to shoot someone you don't want shot than anyone you do want shot, why are you buying the gun? Is it to make a political statement?

If you are buying  a gun to make a political statement, to solidify your association with the political right, to thumb your nose at the left, if you are endangering yourself and those you love in order to feel like one of the in crowd, you need to find another hobby.

Copyright Breaks the Contract

Commodification Is Never Innocent

The liar with the lyre strums to town

poetry holds the folks on edge
until they break
in laughter tears astonishment rage
and call to the lyre to play it again

and again

until they know it by heart
until they can write it in air with their voices
until they no longer need the liar and the order of words
he mixed from a town down the river.

Begin

It is still the seventh day

 and we are still

digesting the fruit.

Christianity and the force of history

It was said in the recent CNN special “After Jesus” that if not for the conversion of Constantine, Christianity would never have become the force that it is, essentially that Christianity like all religious movements is an historical accident that could have been stopped at any number of points had this or that chance event not occurred—and any number of intellectual Christians will be suspicious of the claim that God helped Constantine win the battle; we simply don’t see good evidence for such a God. But perhaps history does not work this way after all. Christianity was a growing force in the empire at the time of Constantine, though many emperors and others had tried hard to get rid of it. Like a bubble rising or a stream falling this force was looking for a place to emerge. It happened to emerge here. Had Constantine lost, it would have emerged elsewhere. But it was going to happen because it was a swelling force in history—a force which the church, for all we know, prevents like a dam as much as it channels like a dredge.

Alarmed

Children used as fuel in woodstoves to heat the house—
Oh well, I thought, in this hideous dream, probably too late
to help them anyhow, though they must be in pain, but that’s the way
we heat our homes these days, and though I went back to reading the book
because, after all, there was work to do, I awoke in a sweat
and remembered—I had forgot to set the clock.

Somewhere inside me lives someone who knows how to shock me.

He uses images because he does not have words.
And never the obvious ones
like an image of me failing to set the alarm.
I’d like to know who he is and how he knows so much
and why he keeps such careful track of everything
I’m hoping to lose—like time.
And why he spends all night
shouting at me.

 

The Sensor in the Ceiling

The sensor in my ceiling is watching me

It wants me to move.

If I do not obey, it will throw me into darkness.

It’s like a cowboy shooting bullets at my feet

To make me dance.

Closed Form Poem

by Alan Lindsay

 
 

This is a closed form poem. The rhythm

is invariable. It does not rhyme.

But the third line has to be

enjambed and the fifth line always begins with the word

yellow. I am sorry. You cannot alter the subtle play of vowels.

The glottal stops, the fricatives—all stay the same.

Also caesura, strategically deployed. You cannot change

the words, or the order of the words or any of the line

breaks. The form is locked tight as a drum or painter’s canvas.

 
 

I have created the form. It is mine.

How can you make the poem your own?

You can change the name beneath the title.

That name is not part of the poem and does not belong

to the form. You can tack the poem to a tree

deep in the woods, overlooking a stream. You can place the poem

on a pole in a field above the swaying grass, above the gazing grain.

You can tattoo the poem to your breast and embarrass men by asking them

to read it to the final period. You can recite it before crowds on New York City streets

hurrying to work with cardboard cups of Starbucks in their free hands.

 

Open Form Poem

 

 

 

Why would that be?

Reality gives us too little to think about, too little stimulation for the brain, so we create puzzles and literature and math and physics. They keep our brains busy, our minds from imploding. They satisfy our craving to be curious. But why would evolution spend the resources necessary to create a being dissatisfied with survival? Nature’s principle for success is excess: cast millions of seeds in the expectation of a dozen trees. Create a universe whose size exceeds all image or metaphor in the hope (if hope is part of the universe) of a handful of planets capable of sustaining life and of creatures capable of looking back at it and saying “what?” Because if it make sense to say that the universe is for anything, that is what it is for.)  Any God this universe has is not interested in efficient manufacture.  Why would that be?

A reconsideration of Wittgenstein’s “Family Resemblances” and “Language Games.”

What baffled Wittgenstein was his inability to define “games,” a simple concept, easily understood, but which defies the impulse of the dictionary. I have no interest in defining games. But I am very interested in his bafflement. There’s nothing special about a word that cannot be defined. What would be interesting would be a word that can be defined. What’s fascinating is the fact that anyone ever thought up the concept of dictionary, which is the legacy of Platonism, which got everything backwards. How much of history and philosophy and just thinking has been confused by the idea that meaning is something that words have rather than something, as every poet knows, that we use words to produce: always in time, at a moment in history. The moment stretches and changes through memory and writing (which is any form of recording) forward (Shakespeare would have said “backward”) into time. But meaning only ever exists at a moment, the moment of saying, the moment of hearing (writing/reading). We want to be as precise as possible, but not based on the meaning of the word, based rather on the history of the use of the word—the contexts in which it has been used to create meaning. The presupposition that meaning exists always already “out there,” and that our job is to find it, inscribe it, and pass it on is a metaphor less accurate and less useful than the metaphor deployed here, that words are used to inscribe meanings available but never yet accessed in language, by novel combinations of words. What is “out there” is the pressure of “being” at this moment on the writer (thankfully, me) to reassemble the words to settle for now the image whose formulation is functional, which makes our present make better sense. Since words like “game” (and all other words, those that obviously defy definition—poetry and history and love and nation and person and on and on—and those that we think do not) mean only in moments, then all uses are stipulative. And so in a moment of use “game” have have all the precision of the number “2”’ and “2” all the vagueness of the concept “nice.” And what’s surprising is that it is surprising. 

The Paradox of Memory

Memory is fallible.

Every time you access a memory you change it.

To retain a memory you must access it often.

The more vividly you remember a long-ago event the less accurate that memory is.

The passion then that became your being is therefore now more metaphor than substance.
True only as metaphors are true.

If the goal is an accurate account of an event, recording works best. You can put it down just then and put it away and never think about it--until, years later, you stumble upon your image of this forgotten time and read it like a story, one you feel you may have read before, recalling each line as it emerges, unable to anticipate what’s next, as though the account you are reading is of something that happened to someone else.

Which it is.

It is always the destiny of history to be resurrected

as story. 

Murphy's Law and Gun Control

I don’t know the origin of Murphy’s law. I suppose the origin is only a google away, but it doesn’t matter. The law itself states, as we all know, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” with a sometimes corollary, “at the worst possible time.” The corollary is clearly a late add-on, intended to intensify the perceived cynical joke that is the heart of the law. But the law itself, though comically formulated, is in fact a law. Better stated, “Anything that can happen, will happen, given enough time.” It explains why intelligent life showed up in the universe despite the extraordinary chances against it (by the reckoning of some). The universe is that big and that old and given certain conditions it is possible. It tells us also, then, that even if we were to eliminate all causes of death except one—let’s say car accidents—then eventually everyone will die in a car accident. Much could be accomplished if we were to simply keep Murphy’s law more prominently in mind when we do such things as build nuclear power plants and put in place ample safeguards to insure against meltdown. There are not enough safeguards in the universe to insure against meltdown. Or when we argue about gun control: no law (as the right wing always reminds us) will prevent random slaughter. Or when we put locks on houses: no lock will prevent unwanted access. Safeguards and locks and laws are all means of reducing chances, lowering percentages.  That doesn’t mean they are useless.

More on Time and Language and Borges and Nietzsche

Borges’ “New Refutation of Time,” and Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return,” rest on the same thing (for “thing” we could read “fact” or “error”): that the world of language has no way of conceptualizing the world of experience that can fit into itself (that can “comprehend”) time. Our system of concepts as well as our vocabulary is too poor. We simply cannot say what we intuit regarding time in an irrefutable fashion.

A close look at Borges’ essay reveals how tricky the problem is: is it according to experienced that time exists or according to intellection? Experience tells us both that time exists and that time does not exist. Borges walks down the streets around his old neighborhood. One moment succeeds another. He stops at a wall,

I kept looking at this simplicity. I thought…: This is the same as thirty years ago… Perhaps a bird was singing and for it I felt a tiny affection, the same size as the bird; but the most certain thing was that in this now vertiginous silence there was no other sound than the intemporal one of the crickets. The easy thought ‘I am in the eighteen-nineties’ cased to be a few approximate words and was deepened into a reality. I felt dead, I felt as an abstract spectator of the word; an indefinite fear…. I did not fear that I had returned upstream on the supposed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I was the possessor of a reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity.

It is the same thing expressed by Keats, “Thou wast not born for death immortal bird.” Borges also experiences this eternity, as do we all, he tells us, in music and other “human moments,” such as suffering and pleasure, moments repeated exactly from one person to another, moments, we might add (contra Bakhtin) that are the basis for art and language, when identity fades and different experiences lose their difference.

Time is experienced as successive and eternal, as existing and as not existing. In language it is posited as the only explanation for phenomena and yet it is uncapturable, inexpressible. It must be posited because it cannot be shown to exist at all. (To call it “self-evident” is to say the same thing in a disingenuous way, trying to erase the very problem—not visible to language.) Time’s existence and time’s nonexistence are both part of both language and experience, but as four nonoverlapping circles.

This cannot imply that our experience is true and our intelligence is false. But it does mean that we have to choose which to accept before we can choose how to respond. (How could one stay neutral here?) Let’s choose, provisionally, momentarily, experience over language not for no reason, but only because it’s more interesting to do so. It leaves us more to say.

This problem of the inadequacy of language to its presumed object is of course not limited to the comprehension of time. This inadequacy of language to match experience (subjectivity) or the world (objectivity) accounts for the whole being and frustration of philosophy as well as literature. It’s demonstrable, for example, of the infamous cogito, the so-called foundational statement of modern philosophy. The statement itself has become ragged for all the darts tossed at it: I think, therefore I am. In its favor, it functions as well as statement can to capture the experience of being. But it does not make logical sense—it fails in terms of language. So here’s the point: contradiction is the sine qua non of statement. Go back through these very paragraphs and graph the contradictions.

In his “New Refutation,” Borges makes the marvelous statement that night pleases because it “suppresses idle details, just as memory does.” Reading—in fact any comprehension of language—requires darkness as well as light. All coherence, all meaning, is washed out if the reader comprehends the full scope of every word. Every word is a potential metonymy. And every statement is a riddle of contradictions that must be ignored for the reception of the thread meaning that runs through it under the fabric of noise. All understanding requires the good faith and hard work of the receiving brain. 

Tomorrow was Christmas

Tomorrow was Chirstmas said Mr. Escher yesterday there will be snow.

Ambaguam, Beginning at the End

Ambaguam, Beginning at the End

He's not human.