How often do you hear the phrase, “but
that's only a metaphor”? Because I particularly notice such
denigrations of my favorite subject, I can tell you that it (or a
variation on it) occurs quite frequently, in speech and in print.
The phrase seems to suggest that metaphors are not fact but fiction,
and thus we must remind ourselves to get back to reality after using
a decorative metaphor. I totally disagree.
This idea was expressed in a very
round-about way in an article by Timothy Egan, “Words for the
Dumpster,” about words and phrases that have become useless for
various reasons.
Here's the part that caught my eye: “. . . I renew an
earlier objection to 'literally.' It’s become the most overused of
phony emphasis words, as in 'I went to the store,
and they were out of kumquats — I mean, they were literally
out of kumquats!'” True,
the emphatic use of the word “literally” should not be necessary
in ordinary speech—saying there were no kumquats in the store
should be enough. But I think people are using “literally” more
often lately because so much speech today is so inflated and abstract
that we feel we have to add the tag “literally” to make sure the
listener knows we are speaking fact and not exaggerating this time.
(I'm as guilty of this kind of exaggeration as anyone else in my personal life.)
OK—Let's get back into what
metaphor is. A metaphor pairs up an abstract idea with a concrete
image that can represent it in the real world, as in the depths of
the ocean representing the unconscious mind (see next post). To use
the concept “just a metaphor” is usually to favor the concept
(unconscious mind) over the real thing (ocean). And yet, what do we
really know about the abstract idea without reference to the concrete
image? It's so much easier to fudge clarity and responsibility when
you are speaking only in abstract terms! No one has any grounds on
which to pin you down—metaphorically, of course.
Let me get some help from the
modern poet Wallace Stevens in explaining this. Here's what he has
to say about poetry (and by his extension reality) in his essay “The
Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”: “The
subject-matter of poetry is not that 'collection of solid, static
objects extended in space' but the life that is lived in the scene
that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the
life that is lived in it.”
Perhaps even a materialist could concede that it is basically
impossible for us to look at objects in the outside world without
reference to our history with them. Looking at an oak tree, for
example, I might have (probably unconscious but still influential)
associations with what Joseph Conrad said about the English oak as a
literary symbol, with the fact that I spent the latter part of my
childhood in a house on a street called Oak Lane, with the memory
that we kids sometimes had nasty snowball fights in which acorns were
embedded in the snowballs, with the fact that even in my present
property after I have mowed or raked up the leaves from all the other
trees some stubborn oak leaves still cling to their twigs, with the
fact that oak wood has a deep grain that I really like so much of my
furniture is oak, etc., etc. On the contrary, when I look at poison
ivy, I have an entirely different set of associations. It doesn't
matter too much if these associations are unconscious because
everything we look at is tinged with some emotion created by the
accumulation of our associations with that object.
We really cannot perceive something in the outside world without at
least a tinge of emotion; even if we behold something we've never
seen before, the brain pulls up associations with similar things or
perhaps generates fear of the unknown. Even quantum physics (to the
extent I understand anything about it) seems to concede that even
under scientific controls, what we look at is affected by our
observation. The truth is, our sense of reality is really a
relationship between ourselves and the so-called objective world.
In another essay, “The
Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” Stevens uses a metaphor to
explain his sense of reality as a relationship between outside and
inside worlds:
“A poem
is a particular of life thought of for so long that one's thought has
become an inseparable part of it or a particular of life so intensely
felt that the feeling has entered into it. When, therefore, we say
that the world is a compact of real things so like the unreal things
of the imagination that they are indistinguishable from one another,
and when, by way of illustration, we cite, say, the blue sky, we can
be sure that the thing cited is always something that, whether by
thinking or feeling, has become a part of our vital experience of
life, even though we are not aware of it. It is easy to suppose that
few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when
we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not
merely see it but look at it and experience it and for the first time
have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a
geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that
exists there—few people realize that they are looking at the world
of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.”
To put it rather reductively,
when I was growing up in a Western Christian culture, I heard all
sorts of explanations about the sky: heaven is up there (and thus
also dead relatives), when there is thunder God is bowling, it is
blue because it reflects the oceans (or was that vice versa?), you
can see familiar objects in the clouds, there is a “man” in the
moon, etc. We naturally project ourselves onto things in the outside
world; we tend to humanize them and thus make them less threatening.
And all this before I began to study science. One thing science
tells us is that beyond our hospitable atmosphere is a vacuum, where
nothing can live. Another thing science tells us is that it is
possible that one day we may lose our atmosphere and the earth will
become as barren as Mars, which once had an atmosphere but lost it.
I assume that many people
embrace religion because its stories give us more hopeful and thus
more comfortable associations with the world. It really would be
just too scary to walk around all the time thinking about how
everything around us (and all life) might be lost someday. (And
isn't that partly why so many people deny global warming?) But we
really don't even need religion to console us about the meaning of
our life. Just in the process of living in this world, we accumulate
experiences that emotionally color the things in the world. For me,
for instance, the snow on the ground outside today is beautiful—not
because I know that it is made of frozen particles of water, but
because I have many happy associations with snow (and a few negative
associations that do not outweigh the happy ones). And because we
are all human and share basically the same neural and hormonal
systems, many humans have similar reactions to many things in the
outside world, even though our individual experiences vary somewhat.
This is the basis of Jung's concept of the collective unconscious.
Reality is a relationship
that we nurture as we move through our lives. Reality is
metaphorical; it combines outside things and internal thoughts and
feelings. It's worth repeating Stevens here: “We
live in the center of a physical poetry. . . . [we] are looking at
the world of [our] own thoughts and the world of [our] own feelings.”
What a self-affirming,
beautiful way to understand life!
