Just a Metaphor

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.¹ 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.² 

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.”³
 
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!

1http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/opinion/egan-words-for-the-dumpster.html?emc=eta1

2Neurologist Antonio Damasio presents a wonderful picture of how the brain may give rise to consciousness by its “mapping” of things in the outside world, which includes the value of that thing for us and thus its emotional tone. See especially chapter 3 in Self Comes to Mind (Pantheon, 2000).

3Both essays appear in The Necessary Angel (Vintage, 1951). The two quotes are from pages 25 and 65-66 respectively. The book is also available online, e.g.: https://archive.org/details/WallaceStevensTheNecessaryAngelEssaysOnRealityAndTheImagination