Sunday, August 25, 2013

Milosz on Metaphor


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.

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.

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