The Great Arsenic Lobster

WHOLE EARTH'S MINI-SECTION ON METAPHORS AND MORALITY

Perhaps it was inevitable. Metaphorical language is a theme section of this Whole Earth. Week after week, we encounter a tsunami of polysyllabic Latinate words--biodiversity, sustainability, globalization, transgenic organisms, compassionate conservative. Quickly colorless, this flabby jargon rarely stirs the apathetic heart, or warms the blood of brains asleep. Compare "transgenic" to "Franken-food."

Add to these words a recent neoplasm of awkward metaphors like "to think outside the box." When I hear that, I feel an odd mix of pathos and disbelief. Poor guy, did he really live in a box for the past thirty years? New words and new cliches, in a world increasingly anxious about its future, clinched our desire to open up this metaphor confab.

It's a Whole Earth task: If words, images and phrases can be considered "tools," how does a wordsmith incite wrath or kindle love or bore a listener 'til the blood curdles? Yes, words impeccably ringing of truth or glamorously beautiful do move citizens and lovers of literature, but what is it that gives this power to language?

What emerged from polling various contributors about metaphors is a deep ambiguity about powerful images and morals. Do these engaging images help move people toward a kinder or a harsher world? Take an in-house example. Whole Earth introduced the aphorism, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." Over the last thirty years most readers have loved this simile, while others began to question: Which gods (or goddesses)? Do we really want to get good at being Kali, the destroyer-creator goddess, or Jupiter or Hera? The same phrase can be thrilling inspiration from the mouths of poets or dangerous ideology in the speeches of demagogues.

PROVOKING METAPHORICAL MIND

Metaphorical language, at its broadest, includes all those forms from English class (similes, metaphors, metonyms) as well as personifications, certain idioms, and phrases. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the literal becomes figurative: green fields, green-eyed, a green complexion, a green business, a green wet dream, a wet green dream. As a scientist taught to avoid imagery and seek only the bare truth, I discovered more enlivened, rich, and vivid modes of speech only through corny insights ("Can you give me a hand?" and I'd say, "Which one?"), bad puns, and early Bob Dylan.

Schooling wasn't much of a help. I'd been told that the simile (X is like Y; my girl is like a lioness) was weak compared to metaphor (X is Y; my gift is a lioness). I was going to ask poet Gary Snyder what he thought, when I noticed that his latest email ended with an "as if" construction that played on simile:

   Work like you don't need money
   Love like you've never been hurt
   Dance like no one's watching

And Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 60 starts:

   Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
   So do our minutes hasten to their end;
   Each changing place with that which goes
   before....

So much for that rule. Others fell from lofty literary heights. Mixing metaphors (which is a bit like opening all the blades on a Swiss Army Knife) and "conceits" (overly extended metaphors, which are perhaps equivalent to using a penknife for everything, including the point for a screwdriver) found their place in the imagist toolkit. Mike Stone, our managing editor, found the Duchess of Newcastle (Margaret Cavendish), whose edible "conceit" poems have become classics of bad taste:

   Life scums the cream of Beauty ...
   And thicks it well with crumbled bread of Truth....
   Then takes the eggs of fair and bashful Eyes,
   And puts them in a countenance that's wise,
   Cuts in a lemon of the sharpest Wit--
   Discretion as a knife is used for it....

Gary emailed a great combo of bioregional metamorphosing personifications:

"In one of the California Indian coyote stories, Coyote is walking with this rattlesnake travelling along beside him. He introduces him, "This is my dog, Rattlesnake."

In good time, my scientist-self found goofing about, listening to the actual words and sounds, a lot more interesting than attending to the content of scientific meetings. Metaphor itself, rather than its linguistic "X is Y," became joyous stuff, human outpouring that can't be stopped. Meta comes from in-the-middle-of (mid-wife, inter-med-iate); phor comes from the Indo-European root bher (to bring forth, to carry), which gives us birth, bear, wheelbarrow, and birr (a favorable wind). In its Greek transmutation (bher to phor), the root continues to carry everything from joy (eu-phor-ia) to wine and olive oil (am-phor-a) to a bride's dowry (the early meaning of para-phen-nalia). Figuratively, metaphor is "in-the-middle-of bringing forth or carrying"--caught in a gust of words about to help you get where you want to go, an unfamiliar linguistic infant in the midst of emerging into the world.

METAPHORS ON THE LOOSE

Once born, metaphors appear to have a life of their own. Some thrive, some subdivide, some transmigrate, some wither. Jaron Lanier (page 16), for instance, has watched his own metaphor--virtual reality--escape and journey its own path from the technoculture into the world culture. He has had to keep on his toes, running down (or after) the many guises of "virtual," and wonders what its lifespan might be. Howard Rheingold has tracked the pinball-machine life of his metaphor, virtual community (page 18).

There's nothing new in metaphors journeying with an amoral sense of independence. A "polished" person, for instance, was never as well waxed as your car body or silverware. Over a 200-year period, "polished," the metaphor, transmuted into the word "polite," as in "polite person," jumping the barrier from metaphor to everyday adjective.

I now lust after word history. Tracking the changes in metaphorical lingo opens doors to understanding what's happening in communities or nations, and how leaders and citizens can best navigate through these fickle wordscapes.

METAPHORS AND MORALITY

As Whole Earth scratched about, an old two-horse dogfight relit its fuse (trading horrific mixed metaphors became a bad side effect of preparing this issue). Do metaphors encourage an engaged citizenry, overcome apathy, and nurture truth in politics? Or are metaphors the delusional beauty of political sweet talk and honey-tongued con men? The dogfight is not trivial, and it influences how governance and public peace can be achieved. Plato wanted no poets (poetical language) in his Republic. He proclaimed: Poets delude the citizens with spellbinding images that are not good for public order. In Mein Kampf the poetic Hitler, for instance, described Germany as an abused mother. The metaphor was, at the time, daring, carrying the weight of its partial truth to hundreds of thousands of Germans frustrated by the Treaty of Versailles. Given the times, the abused mother became one part of Hitler's glamorous speech making, hinting at the need for German revenge.

In contemporary politics, George Lakoff (page 23) identifies, within the umbrella metaphor of Our Nation Is a Family, two styles of family (metaphorically, the "Strict Father Family" and the "Nurturant Parent Family"). He explains that many Americans vote or choose sides on issues like abortion, government aid to students, welfare, etc., not on logic-based truth but on the deep feeling they have for one or a mix of these family metaphors.

A concern for potentially traitorous and worn-out metaphors that counter reason appears throughout this issue. Mary Catherine Bateson (page 14) explores the Gaian metaphor of Mother Earth--would Infant Earth be a more skillful term? Stewart Brand (page 89) hints in his short review that corporations might have to update their tooth-and-claw, survival-of-the-fittest metaphors. The Business As Evolution metaphor is now at odds with new science findings, especially that evolution also works by symbiosis and fluid, fast, self-organizing wholes. Vicki Robin (page 88) highlights how our metaphor of Wall Street financial sharks needs a new monetary compassion--a money metaphor that includes saving, not devouring, dolphins and tuna, even endangered sharks. Rick Fields (page 19) warns against ascribing a metaphorical personality-type to people with cancer, as this only adds to their suffering.

INTELLECT AND INTUITION

It's the old "grammar vs. glamour" question. Glamour and grammar, originally the same word, moved apart just a few centuries ago. Grammar sided with logic, truth, and writing. By getting their syntax perfect, cleaning out the word play and enchantment, philosophers, and some linguists and scientists, hoped that their grammar could capture the beauty of truth.

Glamour, on the other hand, kept its suggestive, alluring, spellbinding, magical, and "charm-ing" qualities. In glamour's presence, it's hard to believe that the beauty displayed is not true. Artists, filmmakers, priests, and politicians have a special hankering for this old sense: grammar as glamour.

Literary writers in this issue (Salman Rushdie, Diane di Prima, Adriel Heisey), first and foremost enjoy carving language into strange or fresh shapes, finding vibrant words and phrases that defamiliarize everyday perceptions, tickle, pant, stir up, quicken, resound, and echo.

So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.

--Ortega y Gasset

Old-time "glamorous" images evoke a moving, affecting presence--the birth moment, here and now. They also serve as pointers saturated in expectation, moving like the tendril of a vine toward something that is not yet exactly predictable or clear.

The more analytic minds prefer the pursuit of the general mechanism and design of metaphorical power. "My horse with its mane made of rainbows," from a Navaho song, is studied as mapping one domain (in this case, weather observations) onto another (the domain of the horse's body). Metaphorical language is understood as a series of conceptual movements or transformations. If you live in Greece, you see METAOOPA on the side of moving vans carrying furniture from one home to another. Metaphor, through sense organs and the neuro-anatomy of the brain, is an organic moving van.

Gregory Bateson felt that all organisms worked by metaphor--as all life had to map information from one domain to another. For a bacterium to feel heat and to motivate its flagella to swim away required an informational transfer from one mode (sensing) to another (movement). That transfer was, in essence, a metaphor.

For those favoring intellect, the quest to know metaphor marches in a wilderness between imagery and scientific "model." Is the model itself just a metaphor? Or is the model really scientifically true? Recently, for instance, left brain/right brain "reality" has been challenged and abruptly turned from fact to metaphor. "Lord of the Universe" has been challenged by the model of the "multiverse"--who knows what will happen to prayer.

Ah, the tensions. Watch the glamour, as it might deceive with fictitious sparkle. Watch the grammar, which can equally deceive with its intellectual agenda. Watch the metaphor as it cruises and metamorphoses. Garcia Lorca, a Spanish playwright and poet, says it:

Very often intellect is poetry's enemy because it is too much given to imitation, because it lifts the poet to a throne of sharp edges and makes him oblivious of the fact that he may suddenly be devoured by ants, or a great arsenic lobster may fall on his head.

Whole Earth learned it's helpful to check out metaphors for their incompleteness and social consequences; and to have unbridled fun seeing all "facts" alchemically light up as imagery. Metaphors that seem too real, true, and concrete can justify war, peace, or oppression--until some darn poet defamiliarizes the "reality" and winds up exiled or banned as morally corrupt. Or a scientific model seems momentarily complete and true, until some darn scientist exposes its flawed imagery and, presto, the model has become a fossil metaphor.

I feel like a guest editor. It's not just the new paper and color (pages 49-56), it's this new terrain. For instance, too late for this issue, I understood that access to distinctly regional metaphors would have gussied up the text. In Texas, oil riggers call a girl who likes to dance close, a "buckle polisher." Send us your favorites. We also need a more global feel. Japanese and Chinese ideograms mix pictographs and words in ways impossible in linear alphabetical languages like English. Is email changing the power of ideogrammatic languages as it's changing English? Another issue.

   Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
   Within his bending sickle's compass come....

--Sonnet 116, Shakespeare3

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