“The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities.
Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation ...”
— Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher
Metaphor is not only a creative writing device bringing originality and delight; it can also be a compact carrier for brand new experience in a way that takes us somewhere completely new, experientially speaking.
Inherent in metaphor's 'job description' is the potential for novelty. The work of metaphor is to place together things that are in fact unalike, in a new fusion that implies something new; or elaborates, or fills out, or brings novelty to something in a new way. Aristotle put it like this, “A good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” and, “from metaphor we can best get hold of something fresh”. The poet Shelley asserted that, “language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before apprehended relations of things ...” Modern-day writer Diane Callahan says of poetry – and this feels especially true of metaphor, that its purpose is a process of defamiliarisation in order to make something known anew.
These assertions all point to metaphor's novelty factor - it's potential to bring
something fresh in our experiencing, in an unexpected way.
Until the 1980s metaphor was regarded as a literary garnish. In the 80s cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson took metaphor to a new place of understanding. They saw it as something ubiquitous in our world, not just as a way of talking and writing, but also as a way of thinking, and as a key feature of higher cognition and abstract thought. They also understood that metaphorical activity is important in creating embodied thought.
Psychologist and philosopher Eugene Gendlin has written richly about the realm of implicit experience and how fresh, new experience arises. Language has a vital role to play in this. Gendlin asserts that, “Language elaborates how the body implies its situation and its next behaviour.” Metaphor, which unites 'unalikes', does what Gendlin calls 'dippings' and 'crossings.' He says, “A human situation is always part of a second variety of situations ...," and that, "... a human situation is the kind of situation it is only because it implicitly involves many earlier, later and related other situations which cross in it ... In
crossing each opens the other to a carrying forward which makes new possibilities. The more determinants cross, the more novelty is possible.” These assertions underscore the great potential of metaphor, through dippings and crossings, to carry new experience in uniquely novel ways.
I see metaphor as a swing-bridge of language that lets us traverse an experiential landscape further – not as sure-footedly as when we know the lie of the land, but more intuitively, rather like the way a chameleon negotiates a journey along a branch. Chameleon hands are always sensing - after all, chameleons are the master-magicians of crossings. As a swing bridge of language and implicit meaning, metaphor takes us somewhere we’ve not been before, and might never go again in quite the same way.
Dreaming is both an ordinary and extraordinary example of metaphor. Dreaming a dream is like being inside a 3D interactive metaphor. Our night consciousness has chosen metaphor as the means to bring us wisdom to spur us on and to encourage our further evolution; it has not chosen logical, memo-like communication. Our dreaming
consciousness thus knows about metaphor’s vast potential to make a unique, cutting-edge impact. And so through our dreaming we become poets and storytellers, artists, architects and theatre-makers of exotic proportions. Those of us who appreciate and listen in to our dreams as resources, know that they can take us further in our living.
Even when we 'don’t know' what a dream was really about, if we lean in to be curious about the atmosphere in the dream, we will probably know something about that.
James Geary, author of I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World tells us that “Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent...”
Metaphor can also be crucial in how we integrate experience. Its potential for integration is always there, because it is ‘made in the land of crossings’. In therapeutic processes the coming of an apt metaphor to capture some aspect of experience usually feels very novel and vital. With the metaphor that captures something just-so in all its singular exactness, the client and counsellor enter a new doorway of what can be known, and they enter it together, making this not only a moment of deeper and more precise knowing, but also an important relational moment. The 'arrival' of the metaphor will often signal the deeper grasp and integration of various dimensions of an experience. A metaphor that draws on the image of a butterfly pinned to an exhibition board might, for example, serve to integrate both the taut confinement and the potential for freedom implicit in a given frame of experience.
Masters of metaphor have a very mighty tool: Joan Didion, writing about the value for writers of keeping notebooks to have material to fall back on when the well seems to have run dry, describes how “some morning when the world seems drained of wonder... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.” “On that bankrupt morning”, has, for me, such incredible might and is a wonderful example of metaphor as compact carrier of a richly complex implicit intricacy. ('Implicit intricacy' is a term of Gendlin's.)
It is almost impossible to have immunity against ‘living’ metaphor ('living' as opposed to the overused, ‘compressed’ metaphors of everyday speech). Living metaphors enter the body directly through the cellar door, as it were, where they activate an experiencing process. Metaphor is the native language of the zone in us where things can be sensed directly and anew, and novel connections made.
Regarding language in general and its crucial role in development, Oliver Sacks’ book Seeing Voices about the prelingually deaf population, makes vivid the crucial link between language and our human evolution and psychic growth. He shows how massively calamitous is the absence of language for our development. He points out that the prelingually deaf population was at one time most horribly referred to as the ‘Deaf & Dumb’, but that this name also points to the horrendous consequences of a life of deafness without access to language / Sign for its forward living.
Metaphor, for me, sits in the pound seats for opening new experience and integrating it. It seems to do what Gregory Orr says about poetry: that it doesn’t change experience, but it holds experience. When experience is held, it becomes more bearable.
Metaphor, and all language that arises in a whole-person, embodied way, has the wizardry to reformat a wedge of ordinary experience and lift it out of its ordinariness. In lifting experience from its usual stock character, metaphor makes a larger ‘suitcase’ in which to carry it, so that the metaphorized experience is made bearable. Consider those times when you have found a metaphor to capture something painful or difficult. The
metaphor may well have brought a sense of relief, in the kind of moment that can feel both elevated and contained.
In a recent webinar I heard poet and psychotherapist David Shaddock speak about his new book Poetry and Psychoanalysis The Opening of the Field. In it he explores how the imagination and the language of the poet can be brought, very fruitfully, to psychoanalysis. He writes about how the therapist applies “the poet’s sensibility, the poet’s inventiveness and the odd mix of humility and boldness that underlies the poet’s
endeavour.” He says also, “There is a strong resemblance between the kind of alert reverie one falls into under the spell of a poem – combining both a heightened sense of meaning and the lulling trance of sound and rhythm – and the way one listens to both the content and the nonverbal aspects of patients’ communication.”
The poet Jane Hirshfield uses 'doors' and 'handles' when she talks about metaphor. She says that metaphors are “handles on the door of what we can know and of what we can
imagine. Each door leads to some new world that only that one handle can open. What’s amazing is this: By making a handle, you can make a world.” See more in Brainpickings.
New, living metaphors can be welcomed as intuitive knowing hot off the press, as deeper and more precise knowing, and as fresh expression. And, as Hirshfield says, with metaphor a brand new world is made.
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