Natural Imagery

It's very important that the image that accompanies an abstract idea in a metaphor have characteristics that can “carry” the idea,¹ in the sense that the physical characteristics of the image are relevant to the mental characteristics of the idea as well. Otherwise, you are just thinking or speaking gobbledy-gook, not truly metaphorically. I'd like to illustrate this with reference to an article on the mudslide in Washington state that recently took so many lives and so much human property: the New York Times article “A Mudslide, Foretold,” by Timothy Egan.²

I agree with Egan's thinking all the way through this article, up to the last sentence, where I think he tries to tie an abstract idea to the concrete image of the mudslide that does not establish a legitimate relationship between the two and thus undercuts his whole argument. Egan notes that there were plenty of studies and warnings about slides in this particular area and that the trees in the area above the slide had also been over-harvested, so that when a great deal of rain fell, the earth had nothing to anchor it in place and simply turned to mud. As Egan puts it, “. . . enough with the denial, the willful ignorance of cause and effect. . . .” He continues, “It is human nature, if not the American way, to look potential disaster in the face and prefer to see a bright and shining lie. . . .” I agree strongly with all this; it is certainly human nature too often to see what we want to see rather than objective reality. We too often live in a state of denial, especially about our own power over nature: “. . . the delusion that large-scale manipulation of the natural world can be done without consequence.”

But here is Egan's final line: “. . . you love the land, but you should never forget that it can turn on you.” First of all, the phrase “it can turn on you” is an abstract idea that Egan is seeking to connect to the image we all have in our minds of the mudslide, thanks to the media. But think about this metaphor—the mudslide representing or carrying the idea that nature can “turn on you.” What does that phrase mean, really? Doesn't it connote betrayal? Someone or something can only “turn on you” if there has been a previous implicit or explicit relationship of trust. So, one person can turn on another person: a husband, perhaps, can become enraged and physically assault his wife. This is a betrayal because the state of marriage presupposes that married people will love, comfort, honor, and keep each other (to use words from the old Episcopal marriage ceremony). An assault is a betrayal of that understanding held in common by virtually all people who accept social conventions. 
 
It is even possible, I believe, for a domesticated animal to turn on a human being. There is a compact between humans and their domesticated animals, as well, though it is not necessarily part of any social code. I feed my dog and provide comfortable shelter and medical care, take care of all her basic needs. In return, I expect that my dog will relate to me and other humans close to me in a friendly manner. If my dog bites me for no reason that I can see, then, yes, I would probably be justified in thinking that the dog has turned on me, though we tend to give domesticated animals more leeway than humans in reacting to violence or hostility from them, because we view our domesticated animals as closer to nature than we are.

On the other hand, if I starved and beat my dog, then I should not be surprised if the dog turns on me; in that case, I have broken the implicit compact with the dog first—and the dog has just responded in kind, in self-defense. But nature in the wild simply cannot turn on you, because there is no compact between us and nature that governs our or its behavior. Yes, we are creatures of nature—and would do much better to remember that, but nature and all the individual entities that make up the abstract idea of nature do not owe us anything. A grizzly bear that attacks you is just following its nature, not turning on you—because it has never accepted a curb on its behavior in exchange for benefits from you, as domesticated animals have. A hill that turns to mud because of a lot of rain and a lot of tree-cutting and then slides to a level plain is not turning on you; it is simply obeying its nature—it is a matter of physics, nothing else. There is no intention involved on the part of nature at all. Even if the grizzly bear intends to eat you, there is nothing personal in its actions—you are just warm meat in its path. There is absolutely no betrayal of humans in the actions of wild nature; to put the two ideas together is simply a contradiction of terms—and a dangerous way to think.

Part of the problem with global warming, mudslides, and other objective reactions by nature to our own activities is that we do not have any formal compact with nature. Perhaps we should have. Nature cannot make a compact with us in any intentional sense, because it behaves objectively, not subjectively. But we violate nature in so many ways; we treat nature as if it is there only to serve us. That mental attitude ignores the independent and objective existence of wild nature, and so long as we work through that attitude, we will increasingly suffer from nature the longer we fail to respect it. That's why using images in metaphorical thought and speech that are accurate is so important. Wild nature actually provides us, at least a little still, an objective measure of our own thoughts and actions. If we romanticize nature, as Egan says those who settled in that valley in Washington state did, and ignore the independent objectivity of nature (it is not just a nice view, but a cluster of living entities in their own right)--then our images are skewed by our wishes and will not temper our thoughts and actions. If we think not of the beautiful view but what is happening to the ecosystem when many trees are cut and much rain falls, we will not delude ourselves into thinking we are safe when we are not. If we use images of nature that are objective and concrete, then they can perform as a reality check on our thoughts and actions. And it seems so clear that more and more as each day passes, we really need that reality check.

1As I've explained before, the image is the vehicle that carries the abstract idea in a metaphor.

2http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/opinion/sunday/egan-at-home-when-the-earth-moves.html?

Fear of the Deep: An Example

This post is meant to be sort of a footnote to my previous post “Fear of the Deep” (February 2014). David Brooks' latest column in the New York Times¹ is about depth, and I think it provides a good example of not understanding depth. One thing conservatives do very often (and way too successfully) is to redefine terms to fit what they want reality to be. In his column, Brooks, a conservative, works hard to redefine depth as not having anything to do with the unconscious mind, or even really with the evolving scientific understanding of the human mind:

“[The] evolutionary description [of the human mind] has become the primary way we understand ourselves. Deep down we are mammals with unconscious instincts and drives. Up top there's a relatively recent layer of rationality. Yet in conversation when we say someone is deep . . . we don't mean that they are animalistic or impulsive. . . we mean they have achieved a quiet dependable mind by being rooted in something spiritual and permanent.
A person of deep character has certain qualities: in the realm of intellect, she has permanent convictions about fundamental things; in the realm of emotions, she has a web of unconditional loves; in the realm of action, she has permanent commitments to transcendent projects that cannot be completed in a single lifetime. . . . depth, the core of our being, is something we cultivate over time. . . . We begin with our natural biases but carve out depths according to the quality of the commitments we make. Our origins are natural; our depths are man-made—engraved by thought and action.” 
 
OK, where to start? First, please notice the fluctuating and very vague definition of “we.” Brooks wants to appear to be stating what is obvious to all of us, so he includes us readers in his thoughts as if we automatically agree with him, as if he has the ability to speak for all of us. Personally, I don't agree with his description of depth at all and thus resent his use of “we.” As my posting on smarm discussed, smarmy people (who are often conservatives) value “right” thinking over any kind of equal communion among peoples. We are only part of Brooks' “we” if we agree with what he is saying; otherwise, we are not a part of that we. The reader is excluded by not agreeing, by questioning.

Secondly, take a look at the adjectives Brooks uses in his description of a person of depth: “quiet,” “dependable,” “spiritual,” “permanent” (used thrice), “unconditional,” “transcendent.” This is another characteristic of conservatives; they do not deal with the world as it is but with the world as they wish it were. What or whom do these adjectives benefit? I mean, why is Brooks using them as positive descriptions of the deep person? What value does a quiet, dependable, spiritual person with very permanent, unconditional, and transcendent interests have? It seems clear to me that such a person would be of great value to an orderly society based on stable religious values. But that kind of society is a pipe-dream, and that kind of person would be devoid of truly creative thought and awareness of the way things really are or might be. That sort of person would be a prop to existing social structures, not a freely thinking being. Note that Brooks uses abstract terms in his definition almost entirely, but when thinking metaphorically about his description of what he calls a deep person, it seems quite clear that he is not describing depth but width or breadth, perhaps. His description reminds me of the pressure my generation got from guidance counselors in high school to participate in the broadest range of courses and activities possible, to present a person of breadth of experience to colleges. And, indeed, such a person undoubtedly is of great value to a static society or religion, but again such things really do not exist.

The greatest artistic geniuses (whom I think are often deemed by some as people of depth) tend to go very deep into the area of their talents but not worry so much about being quiet, dependable, permanent, unconditional. Picasso most probably did not worry too much about how many wives and mistresses he had. James Joyce left behind not only the society that educated him but also an increasingly indigent birth family, in order to pursue the depths of his own literary talents. I'm not saying that these people are socially admirable—that's not the point about these people. I'm saying that depth is absolutely not a character trait that we can concoct for ourselves by being the kind of people that a stable society approves of. And I do argue that depth is greatly dependent on access to the unconscious mind, which Brooks relegates to being only the realm of the “animalistic or impulsive,” a realm in need of control by our rationality.

The guide I choose in trying to understand depth is the psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jung felt he found certain universal archetypal images in the unconscious mind that we humans all share based on our common evolutionary history and our common nature; I believe that art bears out Jung's findings. We respond to great art because it reaches something deep inside ourselves that we might not be consciously aware of otherwise. It expands our sense of our own nature and therefore of humanity itself.

Society has a very great interest in keeping its citizens quiet, dependable, permanent in affections, etc. We are socialized to be this kind of dependable person as we grow up, but hopefully at some point (perhaps in college, perhaps in middle age) we learn that we are so much more than our social personas—that we have creative depths that allow us to be active thinkers, to question given truths, rather than (or in addition to) being a quiet, dependable participant in social institutions.

Brooks speaks of how suffering can deepen a person; I'm fully with him there. If your place in society causes you little pain, why question it? What motivation do you have to see beyond the surface? But, again, Brooks chooses a rather tame definition of suffering: “So much of what we call depth is built through freely chosen suffering. People make commitments—to a nation, faith, calling or loved ones—and endure the sacrifices those commitments demand. Often this depth is built by fighting against natural evolutionary predispositions.” This kind of “suffering” doesn't sound too awful, does it? Yes, parenting involves some sacrifice, and certainly being of a particular religious affiliation can cause suffering (though I don't think Presbyterians in this country suffer too much for their religious commitment). This is sunny thinking that assumes we can become the best a person can be by living quietly within social institutions; again, this type of thinking is entirely unrealistic. If I were going to talk about how suffering can deepen a person, I'd inquire about the father whose son was killed in a car crash on graduation night, so senselessly. I'd take a look at the soldiers and veterans of our current wars who are turning to suicide so much more frequently these days. Does their suffering make them deeper people because they suffered for their country—or just people suffering because our society does not want people to be aware of and educated about the unconscious mind of the individual or the nation. Otherwise, we might question what we are doing, what we are being asked to do.

One time Brooks uses metaphorical language is when he paraphrases the theologian Paul Tillich on the experience of suffering: “. . . suffering scours away a floor inside themselves [sufferers], exposing a deeper level, and then that floor gets scoured away and another deeper level is revealed. Finally, people get down to the core wounds and the core loves.” I wonder if that world “finally” is Tillich's word or Brooks'? I don't think there is any finally, any end to how deep we can go; I think the ongoing evolution of art and culture shows that. Conservatives like to believe there's a permanent structure that we only have to identify and live within and then we will be safe. They are afraid of the deep because the deep challenges us to question and be creative and improvise. Anyway, I assume the metaphor of scouring a floor is Tillich's, and I can agree with this metaphorical definition of depth—it's a going deep into the structure of one's self, including one's unconscious self—especially one's unconscious self, and it's done not by making broad social commitments but by questioning and moving beyond socially imposed definitions of the self. The father may decide that alcohol should not be so widely available in our society; the soldier may have to accept that he has killed innocent people. It seems to me that Brooks here has used a metaphor that contradicts his own argument, but then he is very clearly not a metaphorical thinker. If you want to believe in absolutes, you have to think in abstract terms—not the concrete terms that can remind us of how things actually are.  The concrete image in the metaphor is a reality test of sorts.

Brooks is a smarmy thinker and writer. I don't know if my posts in this blog mean anything to anyone other than myself—perhaps not. It feels to me that we are being swept away into Brooks' kind of world—a world of breadth and not of depth. My experience in life has been that individual depth can be salvific. I write mainly as a witness to a world or at least to an individual possibility that I think we are fast losing.

1http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/brooks-the-deepest-self.html?emc=eta1

More on Smarm

Speaking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . . . .¹

I'd like to add a bit to Tom Scocca's essay “On Smarm” (on Gawker.com) from the point of view of metaphorical thinking.² Here's how Scocca characterizes the social phenomenon of smarm:
“Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. . . . the major themes or attitudes of smarm [include] the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity. . . . It expresses one agenda, while actually pursuing a different one. It is a kind of moral and ethical misdirection.”

I feel like I understand smarm pretty well. I grew up in its culture; I see it all around me even now. In some ways, it is the very fabric of society, which is why (as I explained in an earlier post) I have learned to prefer the hammock to the canopy.³ It is essentially conservative; it passes its users off as cultured and thus superior. The liberal economist Paul Krugman has often used his blog on NYTimes.com to discuss the great need of the super-rich to be respected, their insistence on good manners by others toward them, their need to be not questioned. Here's a recent example: “They [plutocrats] can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear. . . . They're accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions.” And yet, because their money insulates them from the reality most of us live in and also gives them so much power, they develop “political and economic views that combine paranoia and megalomania.”⁴ Hence, the danger.

Thinking metaphorically, however, has given me some new insights into the problem of smarm. Let me tell you of one of my own experiences with it, as an example. I was once pressed to lead a group that I had only recently joined. The group had just come through some rending experiences (before my arrival), which had reduced the size of the group and left a fair amount of bad vibes. I will take on leadership positions when it's helpful, but I much prefer to be a thinker in the background. I liked the people in this group for the most part and no one else seemed able or willing to do the job, so I accepted the role. Shortly after I did so, great problems among members of the group arose again. One person decided to leave the group but wanted to speak to the group openly first. I thought this was a good idea, considering that old issues were still obviously simmering and affecting the group negatively. I believe that it is better (more constructive) to be honest than to be polite, when possible. This person showed me a written copy of what he wanted to say, and I told him to go ahead with speaking out his ideas at our next meeting.

Well, his hurt and negative feelings were not appreciated by the group. One woman in the group said to me later, “Obviously, none of that should have been said at all.” I took this to be a critique of my leadership, and I very much disagreed with that word “obviously” but there was no opportunity to discuss this. Not long afterwards, the previous leader of the group (a woman I felt very warm towards) strongly suggested that I should move on to another group—I was no longer wanted there. I had broken the facade of smarm, or had allowed it to be broken, so I no longer had any place in the group. There was no discussion of why I made the decision I did to let that member speak openly; there was absolutely no consideration that maybe there was some virtue to that decision; there was no open discussion among members. I had apparently committed a great sin and was simply encouraged to leave.

It seems that the group needed to preserve a facade of friendliness and happiness at all costs and that that facade was much more important than any real group or individual experience. As Scocca has put it, the smarmer “is disgusted and wounded by it all. To say nothing of disappointed that the [truth-tellers] should have betrayed the promise of a more civil world.” In my experience, women tend to be much more smarmy than men, and I have throughout my life felt a great deal of pressure, as a woman, to falsely support certain groups (starting with family) even when they have caused me much unhappiness and had problems that really needed to be addressed. It has been a clear message throughout my life: the well-being of the group should be more important in your life than your own individual well-being. Perhaps I would have been better prepared for this experience if I had previously understood consciously what Scocca has expressed: “The evasion of disputes is a defining tactic of smarm. Smarm . . . insists that the audience accept the priors it has been given.” In other words, a group implicitly defines its own reality, which all its members have to accept or no longer remain in the group. The problem here, of course, is that smarm thus allows for no growth or creativity. Also, since I was so newly a member of the group, I did not understand the “priors” of the group very well or the nature of the troubles it had been having. 
 
Anyway, what happened with this group, what happens with smarm generally, is that an abstract concept is given great priority over concrete realities. Any real fact that doesn't fit the abstract self-understanding of the group must be ignored or even punished. As Scocca has said, “A disagreeable attitude is one thing, but a disagreeable fact is much worse.” I find Scocca's theory that “Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and post-modernity” very interesting and quite possibly true. But anytime abstract goals are given precedence over individual experience and thus cause individual suffering, those abstract goals must be questioned lest they lean toward the inhumane.

I do agree with Scocca that smarm, or the preference of the abstract over the concrete, is a serious problem in our society and in our world. And that's why I write this blog—to ask again and again that we at least balance the abstract with the concrete, if not give preference to the concrete. Giving preference to the concrete might mean overdoing generosity (thus conservative concerns about welfare, etc.), but giving preference to the abstract can create monsters, like Dr. Jekyll, the creator and enabler of Mr. Hyde.

1See my previous post “Fear of the Deep,” from 2/14/2014.

2http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

3See my earlier post “Hammock & Canopy,” 12/6/2013.

4http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/opinion/krugman-paranoia-of-the-plutocrats.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Fear of the Deep

Consider this simple, archetypal situation. A child has been put to bed, the lights dimmed or turned off in her bedroom, but soon she cries out for her parents, convinced there is a monster under the bed. Her rational, capable parents come in, shine a light under the bed, and assure their daughter that there is no monster under there. Often, the child is not convinced.
 
And there's good reason she should not be. She will soon fall asleep, down into the unconscious realm of the mind, and indeed there are often scary things there that surface in images and dreams. Her parents, as they visit her, are creatures of the lighted rational world; they reassure with reason, which does not apply in this deeper, darker place. The child must enter this realm on her own and learn to navigate it—or, as far too many of us do, to suppress it.

Personally, I do not believe space is the last frontier—that's just a matter of developing technology to cover more ground, same as the old kind of exploring. The really important, mostly unexplored frontier is the mind, primarily the unconscious mind. Exploring the unconscious mind requires a whole different set of tools, and it is primarily artists who produce the most helpful results. When I was teaching modern literature for honors students at a university in the New York City area a decade or so ago, those students told me that they had been taught in a psychology course that there is no such thing as an unconscious mind. (All the students in the course agreed they were taught this.) I am quite aware that Sigmund Freud and many of his theories are in great disfavor with many psychologists currently, but to throw away—to deny—the unconscious mind?   Wow. 
 
That put me in a quandary. As a professional and as a person, I considered that particular piece of information presented as fact in a psychology course to be highly irresponsible on the part of the professor, if not in fact propaganda rather than objective information. Also, I was teaching an honors course in modern literature, and the great modern authors took the unconscious mind for granted and often spoke openly about it. (I would, of course, argue that the great writers have been dealing with the unconscious mind for long, long before Freud named it and discussed it in a quasi-scientific sense.) One student in that class became quite assertive in resisting everything I had to say about these authors because I was focusing so much on the unconscious mind, which he had on authority did not exist. Eventually, I could only see his desperate resistance as very strong denial covering fear.  But why?

This particular student was rather religious; he sang in the university choir, and this was a university with a religious affiliation. Religion, of course, offers a more external view of what occurs in the unconscious mind—the devil, etc. Religion often consoles us that we can handle everything in the conscious, daylight world of reason; so, too, does science. Most humans seem to prefer external explanation (the parent shining the flashlight under the bed) to internal exploration.   Again, why?

Well, it seems that partly we are afraid of our own bestial origins and the animal instincts that still do sometimes obtrude from the unconscious mind; partly we are afraid of the unknown; partly we are afraid of what often seems like emotional chaos, uncontrolled by reason, welling up from the unconscious mind. Both religion and science have taught us not to trust unbridled emotion or instinct—that we are most noble when most conscious and rational. And yet we spend about a third of our lives unconscious. There must be a reason for that, even beyond the regeneration of cells. It seems to me that denial of the unconscious mind is dangerous, for by not learning how to deal with it we are all the more helpless when it does assert itself in a negative manner. Also, the most beautiful things culture offers (poetry, music, art) arise from the unconscious mind; it is a place of beauty and not just horror. William Blake, for example, argued for a “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” a union of the conscious and rational with the unconscious and irrational—that is when we are really most whole and not denying an important (energetic and creative) part of ourselves.¹ That's metaphorical thinking.

A couple of recent articles give me hope that we are making some progress as a society in recognizing the need and value of such a marriage. Marina Warner has published two essays on the monsters in old maps in the New York Review of Books.² She notes, on the one hand, the interesting association of fact and fancy: “. . . in many ways maps and monsters would appear antithetical: maps are about measurement and evidence; they attempt to document a real world out there in an objective way with empirical tools tested over time; by contrast, monsters are fantasies, mostly sparked by terrors, but sometimes born of desiring curiosity, too.” Maps, in other words, are products of our rational minds; they are an important effort in our quest to control our environment, or at least to know best how to deal with it. But monsters are symbols of our ignorance and thus of what we fear. We can laugh and dismiss them as fantasies, or we can take them seriously as messages from the unconscious mind.

Warner implicitly equates the oceans these map-monsters come from with the unconscious mind:
“Monsters still fascinate precisely because they express what might lie beyond the light of common day [or reason]. . . . The ocean swirls in a condition of mythopoeic duality: it is there, it covers two thirds of the world [much as unconsciousness during sleep makes up one third of human life], it is navigable and palpable and visible, but at the same time, unfathomable, stretching down in lightless space and into the back water abysm of time where every fantasy can be incubated.” [Comments in brackets are mine.]

The unconscious mind, also, has its depths: in its shallower realms we can sometimes laugh at one of our Freudian slips; in its deeper realms we can be taken over by delusions, cravings, irrationality, incoherence. We do not know everything in the unconscious mind, as we do not know everything in the ocean. But sometimes we throw a line into the sea and pull up a nourishing fish or throw a line of inquiry into the unconscious mind and bring up an image or a memory that helps us to understand some situation in our lives. (See W.B. Yeats's poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” in my first blog post of 25 January 2012.) The metaphor of the sea representing the unconscious mind is a helpful map; it show us that the latter, like the former (the abstract idea like the concrete image), is vast and mostly unexplored and thus sometimes scary, but also that it can be the source of beauty and nourishment. It also shows us that some people are better trained and more able to get good stuff out of it than others.³

I've always had a liking for the Middle Ages of Western culture. I'm sure it was a horrible time to be alive, physically, but in their art the people of that time had a better understanding of symbolism and what it tell us about our own minds than we have now, I believe. Perhaps it was the fact of their everyday vulnerability and suffering that allowed their acceptance and partial understanding of other realms of ignorance and lack of control, like the symbols of the unconscious mind. Once science began to be the more dominant mode of understanding the world, we began to lose our capacity to understand symbolically, metaphorically—except for the artists. Since the Renaissance, we humans have striven mightily to organize our world, to make it comprehensible to ourselves and to some extent controllable by ourselves. (We see this even in the social media today.) But when something is gained, something is lost, as Tim Parks has written lately, also in the New York Review of Books:⁴
 
“What we have then is a propensity in modern life to substitute cataloguing and recording for actual doing, to create for ourselves an illusion of responsible action by endlessly multiplying the work, so-called, that precedes and—in the rare cases where it actually occurs—follows responsible action. . . . life is transformed into a series of categories, made more mental, more a matter of words and intellect; we revel in the mind's ability to possess the world in language, rather than to inhabit or change it. . . . [this is] the desire for a control that stands off from participation, and perhaps substitutes for it: the desire to turn the world into words, page numbers, segments.”

Think the bird watcher who wants to tick off the specimen on his life list more than to watch it; think the scientists who tag representatives of virtually every living creature on this earth; think the tourists who spend more time taking pictures of themselves in strange places than in exploring those places. An American Indian once commented that Western science wants more to learn about things than to learn from things.   I think that is very true—^{and not just of scientists.   We often treat other things and even at times other people as objects rather than fellow subjects with their own integrity, like ourselves.5}

So, what happens when we are too successful in protecting ourselves from the unknown? Well, here's one thing that can happen: Ethan Couch, a sixteen-year-old who (while driving drunk) killed four pedestrians on a sidewalk in Texas and was sentenced to probation; his lawyer argued that Couch was not fully responsible for his actions because he suffered from “affluenza.” One account of the case in the New York Times revealed that Ethan Couch lives in a gated community (the community controls who can enter it) and that he lives in “his father's heavily gated home.”⁶ Clearly, these are people who have little capacity to think symbolically. I assume this family was relatively successful in warding off dangerous people from the outside, but in doing so they overlooked and thus enabled internal dangers. 
 
The author of the Times article on the case observes: “. . . millions of affluent—typically white—Americans choose to live in communities whose primary raison d'etre is to afford their residents a pampered escape, a chance to withdraw from the barbarians at the gate and from every external reality imaginable. . . The case of Ethan Couch . . . is a metaphor for the dark side of suburban cosmology, for every other barricaded enclave . . . places that, if not entirely above the law, are somehow removed from it.” 
I take issue with the writer's use of the term “suburban” in this context; I have spent most of my life in suburbia and never witnessed a situation like this. I spent most of my childhood on a street on which there were no fences; on which the lawns of every house ran into each other, making up a big playground for the kids; on which the houses were all for the most part open to anyone at any time. It was a truly open community in that sense. But I agree with everything else this author says. When we close ourselves off from things, we have no opportunity to learn from those different things and thus diminish ourselves. Even more, when we define all danger as being from outside, then we open the gates to the dangers inside. A child who has had little contact with different outsiders will not feel much empathy for them and perhaps will not have as much internal resistance to harming them.

The external gates in the community Ethan Couch grew up in symbolize a dangerous restriction. The external gates led the inhabitants to be not so vigilant of what dangers can arise from the inside. If there is danger outside, there is also danger inside. Life is metaphorical. What we experience is in part who we are, and the more we restrict what we come into contact with, the more we starve and sicken and contort ourselves, psychologically.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, has a new book called Focus. I haven't had the opportunity to read this book yet, though I intend to because of a very interesting review by Nicholas Carr.⁷ According to Carr, Goleman discusses two poles of mental attention: “When we're too attentive, we fall victim to tunnel vision. The mind narrows. When attention is absent, we lose control of our thoughts. We turn into scatterbrains.” Goleman advocates a middle ground called “open awareness,” which allows for movement between the two poles:
“All forms of attention . . . arise from the interplay between two very different parts of the brain. The older, lower brain, working largely outside of consciousness, constantly monitors the signals coming in from the senses. Acting as a warning system, it alerts us to shifts in our surroundings, pains in our body, memories of worrying events. Such bottom-up attention, as neuroscientists call it, is impulsive, uncontrolled and often commanded by fear and other raw emotions. The alerts that stream from the lower brain are so visceral that, when they pop into the conscious mind, they're hard to resist.”
(This is part of the unconscious mind that so many people fear.)

“Working to control all these primitive impulses is the neocortex, the brain's more recently evolved outer layer. The source of voluntary, or 'top-down,' attention, the neocortex's executive-control circuitry is what enables us to screen out distractions and focus our mind on a single task or train of thought. . . . 'Top-down wiring' . . . 'adds talents like self-awareness and reflection, deliberation and planning to our mind's repertoire.' As we go through the day, the direction and steadiness of our mental gaze are shaped by the 'continual dance' between the top-down and bottom-up systems of attention.”
(That's good metaphorical thinking, if we let it happen.)

Trying to live only in the rational world may well produce a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation, where the worst parts of the unconscious mind are denied but also thereby indulged, as with Ethan Couch. Marina Warner, in her essays on old maps, refers to another pair of light and dark characters in literature: Prospero the magician and Caliban the creature (who is mistaken once for a fish monster) in Shakespeare's The Tempest; and she notes that Prospero says of Caliban at the end of the play, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mind.” Prosper is done with the abstract realm of magic; he has broken his staff and thrown his book into the sea. At the same time he acknowledges his responsibility for the realm of the dark, ignorant, and scary. Prospero is healing, becoming more whole. Warner then links The Tempest to a modern play, Fishkin Trousers by Elizabeth Kuti, which deals with an old English legend about a monster man from the sea. This play, Warner argues,
“. . . takes up the challenge that the monster from the sea sets us in modern times, when the ignorance he figures is no longer epistemological but ethical, and does not belong to him as much as to his tormentors: scientific overreach, as well as cruelty, exclusion, intolerance. The monstrousness of the monsters can still show us dangers, from the sea and from ourselves.”

The rational and socially admired Dr. Jekyll is really more to blame for problems from the dark side than the ignorant, bestial Mr. Hyde—precisely because of the failure of the former to acknowledge and attend to the latter.

1Available online at http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=mhh

2“Here Be Monsters,” 19 December 2013: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/dec/19/here-be-monsters/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=December+3+2013&utm_content=December+3+2013+CID_0f499f28b68d7642ed57c93bf0bc9c06&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Here%20Be%20Monsters

“Maps and Monsters,” 3 January 2014: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/gallery/2014/jan/03/maps-monsters/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=January+14+2014&utm_content=January+14+2014+CID_0991eadabd8de430a36bfbbdb42de0a9&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Maps%20and%20Monsters

3It has been said that the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung told the artist James Joyce (regarding Joyce's schizophrenic daughter, Lucia) that some people, like Joyce himself, can dive into the unconscious mind (which Jung compared to a body of water) and reemerge safely, while others, like Lucia, fall into the unconscious mind and get lost there, not finding the way back. Wikipedia has a note on this in its biography of James Joyce.

4“Literature and Bureaucracy,” 2 December 13: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/dec/02/literature-and-bureaucracy/

5Many sources online depict this native American sentiment.

6James McAuley, “The Affluenza Society,” New York Times online, 22 December 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/opinion/the-affluenza-society.html

7“Attention Must Be Paid,” New York Times online, 1 November 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/focus-by-daniel-goleman.html?emc=eta1

The long quote that follows is Carr occasionally quoting Goleman.

Lessons from Antaeus

One more quick post. If you are interested in my argument about metaphorical thinking and agree that we are endangering ourselves by trusting too much in the abstract and losing contact with the natural, the physical—please read Simon Critchley's recent piece in The Stone series of the New York Times, “The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson from Auschwitz”:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/the-dangers-of-certainty/?emc=eta1
And, as Critchley requests, please watch the whole video that is embedded in the essay (not long).

Tyranny of the Abstract

Just a quick note while I'm working on the post about the ocean and the unconscious mind. A judge has ordered the hospital in Texas to take the body of Marlise Munoz (the brain-dead pregnant woman) off “life support” but has also given the hospital until 5pm Monday to comply with or contest the decision. The hospital is considering an appeal. 
 
What struck me most in the New York Times article about this situation¹ is this information, which to my knowledge had not been previously released:
“Lawyers for Ms. Muñoz’s husband, Erick Muñoz, said they were provided with medical records that showed the fetus was 'distinctly abnormal' and suffered from hydrocephalus — an accumulation of fluid in the cavities of the brain — as well as a possible heart problem.
The hospital acknowledged in court documents that the fetus was not viable.”

So, the mother is brain-dead, the fetus is severely disabled and “not viable” (not able to live outside its mother's womb) and yet the hospital persists in totally ignoring the actual situations of these two people and also the ongoing sufferings of the families of the two. Surely an abstract law should be held as more important than the physical and emotional well-being of all these people, right?

If this isn't the failure of metaphorical thinking in spades, I don't know what is—allowing an abstract concept to override compassion, concern for real living beings. How is this different from what we normally think of as evil?

PS--I'm a bit nervous about using the term "evil" and want to clarify what I mean.  I do not believe in "cosmic evil," but in how merriam-webster.com defines the term, using such descriptions as "causing harm . . . sorrow, distress, . . . suffering . . . discomfort or repulsion . . . morally reprehensible."  The families of Marlise Munoz have certainly been caused harm, including sorrow, distress, suffering--a lot more than discomfort.  I and other onlookers have certainly felt repulsion.  The actions of the hospital are "morally reprehensible" in that way.
I wish that we as a society could see that certain decisions can add up to wrong action, without the individual decisions being able to foresee those wrong actions.  But metaphorical thinking--giving equal weight or hopefully even precedence to the real over the abstract--should help us to see this when it occurs.

1http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/us/judge-orders-hospital-to-remove-life-support-from-pregnant-woman.html?emc=eta1

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