The New York Review of Books
recently reprinted the Nobel Lecture of Czeslaw Milosz, which he
presented in 1980 and the Review first published in 1981.1
In reading it I found clear statements of what I have been trying to
say about metaphor in this blog. I'd like to quote some passages
from Milosz's lecture here, interpolated with some of my own
developing thoughts on the importance of metaphorical thinking.
Milosz's comments are presented in italics; my comments follow his in
brackets.
“One of the Nobel laureates whom I
read in childhood influenced to a large extent, I believe, my notions
of poetry. That was Selma Lagerlof. Her Wonderful
Adventures of Nils, a book I loved, places the hero in a
double role. He is the one who flies above the earth and looks at it
from above but at the
same time sees it in every detail. This double vision may be a
metaphor of the poet's vocation.”
[I would say this
double role is not just “a metaphor” but the very action of
metaphor, metaphorical thinking itself—seeing the forest and the
trees at once.]
“And yet perhaps our most precious
acquisition is . . . respect and gratitude for certain things which
protect people from internal disintegration and from yielding to
tyranny.
Precisely for that reason some ways
of life, some institutions became a target for the fury of evil
forces, above all the bonds between people that exist organically, as
if by themselves, sustained by family, religion, neighborhood, common
heritage. In other words, all that disorderly, illogical humanity so
often branded as ridiculous because of its parochial attachments and
loyalties.”
[Milosz is, of
course, speaking here about the rise of the totalitarian state in
Eastern Europe during and after World War II and the resistance of
some of the people from within their more local senses of community.
But what I particularly like in this statement is Milosz's use of the
term “organic.” Totalitarian states function abstractly,
assigning all to absolute categories, proclaiming such “truths”
as all Jews are inferior, all religion is merely an opiate for the
masses, etc. People often do prefer to think abstractly, probably
because relating to others through feeling is more particular and
messy and not as “safe.” It's quite possible to love one human
being or several, but probably not possible to “love”
humankind—at least, the two kinds of love are very different. The
first is sensual and emotional, immediate; the second is just the
opposite, a mental concept rather than a personal commitment. Even
if we see a butterfly and look up what kind it is, we put that real
insect that we had a brief relationship with into an abstract
category. And the categories tend to drive our experience, so that
we really don't expect to see a butterfly that does not fit into a
neat category. And if one is discovered at some point, then we have
to create a new category for it and look for others to fit into that
category. Essentially, we deny individual reality, relationships in
the moment, when we confront the world this way. And totalitarianism
can anchor and build itself on this human tendency. So, as Milosz
says, we need to respect and love what does not fit into categories
so easily, that which has identity sui generis, organically,
and does not need our categorizations to matter, to be noticed. Only
such messy, ridiculous, parochial experiences can help us to recall
that we are not just items in an abstract category that authorities
can manipulate as they like—but individuals, with a unique presence
in time and space, and so are all the other living things in this
living world.]
“The exile of a poet is today a
simple function of a relatively recent discovery: that whoever
wields power is also able to control language and not only with the
prohibitions of censorship but also by changing the meanings of
words. . . . there is no reason why the state should not tolerate an
activity that consists of creating 'experimental' poems and prose
[what Milosz earlier terms
'theories of literature as ecriture'], if these are
conceived of as autonomous systems of reference, enclosed within
their own boundaries. Only if we assume that a poet constantly
strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search of reality
is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a
conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching,
becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one [poet] to think of
anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external
exile.”
[Note that when
Milosz talks about the poet feeling compelled to speak the truth, he
uses metaphors: a pistol shot and an acute itching. It is the poet,
more than any other kind of artist, who feels compelled to keep
language tied to actuality, to the raggedness of being alive, in
order to protect us from the smooth abstractions that can lead to
tyranny. And yet this compulsion feels threatening to others who
want to live according to abstract categories (such as are readily
available in politics and religion and, yes, even in academia), so
that they do not themselves have to negotiate the reality of every
moment2;
thus, the pistol shot—and thus the danger of the poet, the
truth-teller, to others. If the poet is to survive as an individual
and go on writing, she very often must exile herself—internally, if
not externally, as Milosz says. (The one thing that really irritates
me about this essay is Milosz's constant use of “he” for the
poet, even though he starts out with a reference to a female writer
and fellow Nobel laureate.)]
“He [the Eastern European poet]
feels anxiety, for he sees in this [media fictionalizing of the past,
such as denial of the Holocaust] a foreboding of a not distant future
when history will be reduced to what appears on television, while the
truth, because it is too complicated, will be buried in the archives,
if not totally annihilated.”
[Truth is
complicated because reality cannot be contained in easy abstractions,
as much as we want it to and try to make it do so. What is that
saying, again?--Paradox is the only basket that can hold reality.
Metaphor enables us to link the difficult, messy reality with the
easy abstract idea. The concrete image, like scratching an itch, is
something we can all relate to in our individual physical experience,
while the abstract idea, compulsion, is only an idea. Metaphor ties
ideas to reality. Without metaphorical thinking we are far too
easily led by authority, because if we give up the concrete image
that provokes our own physical, embodied understanding, we give up
our own individuality and allow ourselves to become just part of an
abstract category—and to see others as just part of an abstract
category as well.]
Towards the end of
his speech, Milosz mentions how one of his relatives, Oscar Milosz,
and the great visionary poet William Blake both drew on the ideas of
Emanuel Swedenborg for inspiration. Swedenborg's spiritual
philosophy attempts to forge links between aspects of the real world
and spiritual essences, links that he called “correspondences.”
(More on Swedenborg in a later post.) Essentially, Swedenborg's
writings flesh out the process of metaphorical thought, striving to
keep the concrete and the abstract ever tied together. Milosz says
that Swedenborg, who was also a scientist, “earlier than anyone
else foresaw the defeat of man, hidden in the Newtonian model of the
universe”--in other words, in a universe subservient to
abstract ideas and laws. Perhaps Blake's greatest literary work is
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an argument for a unified
duality, a vision of a metaphorical world. Many a poet has said that
the poet is the defender of language, but clearly the poet is also
the defender of the diversity of individual experience and thus of
reality.
Copyright 1980 by The Nobel Foundation.
2Obviously,
no human can “negotiate the reality of every moment”; the brain
categorizes sensory perceptions even before they reach
consciousness. We need to work via some abstractions to survive in
this very complex world. The problem with abstraction arises when
some authority uses it to manipulate others and those others cede
their own baseline experiences of reality in order to conform with
authority and thus gain some measure of protection or preference.
