Metaphores

Metaphores.  You can find the word on the back of any moving van in Greece, where it carries its original meaning, to carry across.  The Latin equivalent was transfer, and there you have the deep meaning of metaphor.  A metaphor is something that transfers meaning to a new place.

In his fascinating book The Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher explains this background only after he has described the long, depressing process which linguists went through as they studied languages only finding evidence of their decay.  For many years it seemed that all languages were doomed to disintegrate as people took shortcuts and chopped words down into easier packages.  Ancient languages seemed harder and more complex than modern ones and they could find no evidence of any process that built up languages. 

But it turns out that one of the primary mechanisms by which languages are built is metaphor, wherein two words are placed together with a novel, poetic sort of power.  If the metaphor captures the public imagination and becomes a steadily-used piece of language, it will eventually cease to be new or to have any special power.  At that point it will be ready to cut and spliced into one new word.  Meta-fores.  Trans-fer.  And so it is that those with a poetic bent are the creators of language, the gods of word, while the rest of us speak our language, any language, which is now littered with dead metaphors we never know we are trampling upon. 

There is something in us which recognizes the power of this process and is attracted to it.  If we ever get over the strangeness of poetry and how it jolts us out of our learned language sensibilities, we can become addicts of reading and then of writing poetry.  It's a rarified place to be with virtually no money to be made, but with the power to alter the course of language, it is little wonder that so many Gather members seek out and cling to its poetry, recognizing the stars of this little world and sometimes daring to cast our metaphors into the spinning sea of words.  At the very least, we try hard to find the comments which can add additional power to the original poem, wanting to be part of the flow which it created. Metaphor creation is a process of taking words which describe our physical world and moving them into an abstract concept.  As such, metaphor is the path by which we can explore that which is vague, because it is not physical.  With it we can build up a vocabulary which allows us to talk about that which we do not understand because it lives in our heads and not in the world of our physical senses.

I myself have snuck a dry toe into this foaming brine, most recently as part of Ed Nudelman's metaphor contest for his poetry correspondent series.  He got me thinking about how people might have first come upon this idea of transferring meaning, and my imagination took me to that substance which is likely the ultimate agent of transfer, constantly working inside and outside of us to remake the world in every way in every moment. 

The First Metaphor

The seeds of water ran down the hill

And into the valley where one

Woman listened unconsciously

Until the day she dipped her pot

And she knew: "It talks to me!"

Her people loved the shaded meaning

And they called her Talking Water

They became the Talking Water people

Till the day the metaphor dried

Out of longing for new sounds of meaning

New seeds of words were placed together

And so the water lost its power when

Mystery left the sound of language

That flowed with the water on the hill

Gerry Wass 2/27/07