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Notes on the Metaphor:
This is a paper I wrote for a class, which includes 3 readers' comments:
Hi.
The readers have sent me their comments. Thanks!
Reader1:
Koon Woon: Examination of the Metaphor in Three Modes
An interesting exploration of the concept of metaphor that goes beyond the simple literary analysis, but also provides evidence of critical thinking and analytical skill. The citation of Lakoff and Johnson is key in this exploration, but I would suggest adding Roman Jakobson’s seminal study “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in which he situates metaphor against metonymy as fundamental poles of language. In addition, Paul de Man, especially in Allegories of Reading and “Rhetoric of Temporality,” identifies the privilege according to metaphor by the Romantics, as does Jonathan Culler in Pursuit of Signs. For a poet, even more than his contemporary Frost, Wallace Stevens grapples significantly with metaphor (see his essay “Three Academic Piece” and poems such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” where he writes of the sun “Phoebus is dead//But Phoebus was/A name for something never could be names…The sun/Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be/In the difficulty of what it is to be”—“Phoebus” does not work as metaphor as neither does “gold flourisher”—because, for Stevens, the sun can only be seen in its being; it cannot be named—as it cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Reader 2:
Comments for Woon:
This piece is an intriguing and thought-provoking meditation on the relationship between metaphor and thought. That the paper is wide-ranging is a testament to the inquiring and expansive mind of the author rather than a serious flaw (as the writer seems to suggest in his Reaction). I see this as the beginning of a quest to understand a number of complex interrelations rather than an endpoint, and the occasional tangents, in my opinion, do not distract from that main thrust.
Reader 3:
Thank you for the opportunity to read your thesis. I feel like I learned a lot about you, in the process.
Overall, I came away impressed by the lucidity of your writing. I appreciate your main claim that metaphor isn’t just a literary device, but a deeply embedded cognitive and cultural way of being and thinking about our world. In some respects, it takes literature off its pedestal, by considering in more profound and fundamental respects the ways in which metaphor is embedded into our language and culture. You provide the foundation for this thesis through a review of what I’m assuming is only some of the literature on this subject.
I find myself thinking about what you might want to do next in this area, for if anything, this project seems well-informed but preliminary. I imagine that there are many possibilities for projects that reach across the disciplines and professions you mention in your thesis. The question is whether you would like to develop a project in cultural metaphorical thinking that can build upon what you review here. Such a project would need to offer something new, to address an aspect in history or current society that can draw upon all that you’ve read while offering an original project. Again, there are probably many possibilities.
As a side note, I did some Googling of you and discovered that you are published with Kaya Press. It turns out that the editor of the press, Sunyoung Lee, was a classmate of mine when I pursued my MFA at UC-Irvine many years back. Interesting connection!
Koon Woon
Dr. Hutchison
ENG 874
20 December 2016
Examination
of the Metaphor in Three Modes: Philosophical, Conceptual, and Poetic
REFLECTION
My program of study is Literary Arts in
the Master of Liberal Arts (MLS) program at Fort Hays State University. My
culminating project is the nature and use of the metaphor. Reflecting upon the skills and habits required for this
study, I have identified several courses in the MLS program at Fort Hays State
University that were most helpful to me to prepare for this culminating
project. These courses are: Ways of Knowing in Comparative Perspective (Fall,
2011), Origins and Implications of the Knowledge Society (Fall, 2011),
Information Literacy, (Fall, 2013), Topics in English: The Classics and You,
part II (Fall, 2011), Topics in English: Modern American Poetry (Fall, 2012),
Topics in English: World Drama (Spring, 2013), and Studies in Literature:
Theory and Application (Spring, 2014). Each of these classes provided me with
the necessary perspective, essential information, and the skills to complete
not only my current project but future projects as well.
Although I have been studying, writing,
and publishing poetry at an amateur level for several decades, it is here at
Fort Hays State University that all my knowledge cohered. I will take more
advanced courses and engage in self-study to tackle more erudite and
specialized writing and literary arts projects, and all the courses listed here
will be invaluable. The poetry I have written was mostly for my own psychic
relief and enjoyment among a small circle of friends and an
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occasional publication
in a small literary journal somewhere. Because I have a form of mental illness,
schizoaffective disorder, I have used poetry as my therapy, and later on in my
paper I will discuss how that has helped not only persons afflicted with
thought and affective disorders, but also poetry opened the minds, hearts, and
souls of those who make an earnest effort to comprehend it. It is also here at
Fort Hays State University that I learned professionalism in my written work
and earned the confidence that I can be a professional literary critic and
editor. Even though I have acted as editor and publisher of poetry in my own Chrysanthemum poetry zine and my small
literary press, Goldfish Press, as a presenter of poetry readings, and as judge
for poetry contests, I did not have the precise and professional language and
work habits to go along with those tasks. Again, my studies at Fort Hays State
University will give me the tools and the necessary confidence to excel in
these undertakings.
Prior to my enrollment at Fort Hays State
University, I have studied some formal academic philosophy in the analytic mode
such as metaphysics, philosophic logic, the philosophy of language and the
philosophy of mind. I was taught and persuaded to think in abstract terms and
to ask and to ponder such questions as the nature of meaning and the nature of
consciousness. And so when I enrolled in Dr. Tim Murphy’s class on Ways of
Knowing in Comparative Perspective, I had a review of logic as to be able to
say what are valid arguments and sound arguments. And how we can know and come
to know things through various modes such as a scientific, mathematical,
ethical, aesthetic, or even an indigenous way of knowing. As an illustration of
an instance of indigenous ways of knowing, two students at the University of
Washington had made a video that accompanied one of my poems from my published
book of
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In addition to logic and ways of knowing,
in Dr. Murphy’s class we also studied aesthetic theory as to what determines
the value of a work of art; whether it is the art object, the artist, or the
viewer. We studied the aesthetic theory of Clive Bell of the Bloomsbury Group who were followers of
the Cambridge philosopher and teacher G.E. Moore. Bell promoted his theory of
formalism and defended abstract art (in his book, Art, 1914) claiming that there is a unique aesthetic emotion in the
visual arts which depends on “forms and relations of forms (including lines and
colors) which elicits an aesthetic response in the viewer that is not to be
confused with other emotions.” Tolstoy, on the other hand, was more concerned
with the moral message that is transmitted from the work of art to the feelings
of truth that connects humanity (in his What
Is Art? XX). He rejected any view of objective beauty because he believed
that the appreciation of art is in the subjective perception of the viewer. I
myself am more persuaded by a didactic
view that art should teach us how to live and get along with others, and I
agree with Tolstoy that when art is practiced by the “professional” artist, it
tends to be disingenuous.
The class I was taking concurrently
alongside Dr. Murphy’s class was Dr. Marthann Schulte’s Origin and Implication
of the Knowledge Society. In Dr. Marthann’s class, I learned how to search for
information and learned how to use the Internet advantageously. I used the
technique of the “snowball” effect of gathering information. It is to start off
with some small set of individuals who might be helpful to my search, and from
them, develop links to other individuals or sources of information. This method
rapidly generates a pool of potential leads, in a manner that a snowball grows
bigger and faster. And as a contributing
editor to the international
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anthology A Long and Windy Road, I was largely
responsible of picking world-wide a set of Chinese Diaspora poets and fiction
writers of the generation born 1940 to 1960. I began by making inquires to
poets and writers that are associated with academia or publishing houses and I
asked them to recommend other writers they knew. In this way, the list rapidly
grew and I was able to reach some internationally-renowned writers and poets.
And of course I relied partly on my own knowledge of certain writers/poets that
I have read in this category.
To be “a man of letters,” it is necessary
for me to read and study from past masters and to locate them in their
historical periods to view the legacy that they have left for posterity. What
more joy is there than studying the Classics? So, for my first literature class
at Fort Hays State University, I had the luck and the opportunity to study with
Dr. Michael F. Meade in a course
named just that: The
Classics and You: Part II. Here I learned from a variety of great Western
writers, poets, playwrights, their literary philosophies, contributions to
their genres, and their legacies. I have learned from Dr. Meade that there are
reasons and beliefs behind literary movements and there are strong and unusual
personalities behind them. From Dr. Meade, I have taken the Classics, World
Drama, American Drama, and Modern American Poetry. What is encouraging is that
there is room for me in the American poetry idiom. Dr. Meade renewed my
interest in literature that had lay fallow for many years because many of the
past professors I had were narrow in their field, whereas Dr. Meade not only
encourages original and creative work, he is also a champion for diversity
without sacrificing the rigor for literary excellence. It has been a joy to
craft explanations and arguments for my interpretation of what we have been
studying. Here I learn the possibility that I can be a part of this historical
dimension.
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Finally, I took Studies in Literature:
Theory and Application from Dr. Eric Leuschner. This is an in-depth study of
specific critical theories that could apply throughout all our literature
courses. We have many approaches to reading a literary text. Among these, for
example, are Formalism, Reader’s Response, New Criticism, Structuralism,
Marxism, Post-Colonialism, Feminism, and Deconstructionism and more. The
purpose to this rigorously taught class by Dr. Leuschner is to broaden the
reader’s response to the writer’s and the text’s message, delivery,
implications, and appreciation. It calls for close readings and critical
thought.
Armed now with these research techniques,
logical thinking, knowledge, and theories, I embarked on a study of the
metaphor. How this came about was that I was asked to be a presenter at
a four-day poetry festival in western Washington State at the Skagit River
Poetry Festival in early part of 2016. I was asked to present a workshop on
poetry – how to understand
and appreciate it, and
how to write and innovate in this genre. The workshop participants were to
include high school and college students, as well as veteran poets. Since I
have a background in the philosophy of language and poetry is all language, I
originally decided to give a workshop on how to write better poetry by
understanding what it is that we are doing with language when we write poetry.
As I tried to write a prospectus for the workshop, I realized that the topic is
too broad. And so I asked myself, “What can I do to narrow it down and still
make this workshop distinctive and useful?”
Then I recall that in Modern American
Poetry, the seminal course I took under Dr. Meade, the thing that impressed me
the most was the striking ways poets used metaphors to bring home a comparison
between two similar ideas that are in different domains. For example, the
metaphor (my own), “A cup is a handle on a volume,” compares a concrete object,
a cup, such as a coffee
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cup, to something
abstract – volume. While a cup is bounded by physical dimensions and weight, a
volume is shapeless and unbounded, that is, unbounded until some object
circumscribe its physical extension. But a cup is also a unit of measure, such
as a cup of flour or sugar in the recipe that is called as ingredients to a
cake. Therefore, we are “carving out” a unit of volume
with the coffee cup or
the measuring cup.
Think also of this passage from the Tao Te Ching, the Chinese philosophical
classic from 500 B.C., reputedly written by the legendary sage Lao Tzu, “Shape
clay into a vessel; / It is the space within that makes it useful.” Therefore,
“carving out and defining” a volume makes it useful. The passage continues,
“Cut doors and windows for a room; / It is the holes which make it useful” (Lao
Tzu 11). This is the converse of the previous example of the vessel, because
now a bounded volume of space, i.e., the room, is not useful unless it is
joined to unbounded space via the doors and windows. “Therefore profit comes
from what is there; / Usefulness comes from what is not there.” And so now we
have two ways of looking at space – space is useful when it is bounded and
accessible as in the door and window that can enter the room, and space is not
useful when it is bounded and not accessible if there were no door or windows
to the room.
This
example illustrates the fact that we use language daily and poetry is one
hundred per cent language. The poem depends on the elements of language such as
syntax, semantics, figures of speech and especially metaphors. The poem is
fresh and powerful when it enables us to see the world in a different light.
The poet does this by following the rules of language and the pragmatics of
language to communicate, but he can also deviate from these rules. According to
Dylan Thomas, “A good poem helps to change the shape and the significance of
the universe,
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helps to extend
everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him” (Runcie).
Coleridge goes further
to claim that “no man was ever a great poet without at the same time a great
philosopher” (Goodreads).
With my background in academic philosophy,
I had found the various schools of literary criticism in Dr. Leuschner’s course
very interesting and horizons expanding. I believe that a reader is better off
knowing some philosophy of language, because for one thing, it drives the
various literary theories. Great American poets such as Emily Dickinson, Robert
Frost, Wallace Stevens, Donald Justice, and Theodore Roethke all have changed
the way we see and feel about ourselves and our world by their ground-breaking
use of language, especially their vivid and astounding metaphors. In Emily
Dickinson, she “taste[d] a liquor never brewed” (Dickinson 214). In Robert
Frost, he took “the road less traveled by.” And in Theodore Roethke, “in a dark
time the eye begins to see.”
However, there is a reverse process to the
metaphor – to deconstruct it to see what it implies in such political metaphors
as “War on Terror.” When one thinks about it, this war on terror, like the war
on drugs, we are responding to a small terror with a larger terror, since war
is a very large and catastrophic terror. What’s more, what is implicit in that
metaphor is that we have the higher moral ground. We need not know the genesis
of terror and terrorists, but we will bomb them back to the Stone Age.
Therefore, the poetic metaphor is powerful and cognitively and emotionally
expanding. And with the previously mentioned courses at Fort Hays State
University, under the very high quality teaching of my various professors, I
feel ready to tackle the poetic metaphor.
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ABSTRACT
“Examination of the Metaphor in Three
Modes: Philosophical, Conceptual, and Poetic”
The metaphor is fecund, powerful, and
versatile in our use of language. Great minds since the time of Aristotle have
found the metaphor to be of great value in expressing similarities between
concepts which we cannot say in a literal way. Present day studies of the
metaphor take
in accounts of mind,
language, and models of the world. New thoughts and linguistic expressions are
being created by the use of the metaphor every day. New metaphors are “born”
each day from language use as old ones become dead and recede away.
Poetry is the hotbed of metaphors.
Robert Frost claims that poetry is essentially metaphor and even thinking is
largely metaphor. Present day cognitive science has conceptual models of the
metaphor. Even in psychotherapy metaphor is useful. This paper examines the
various modes of metaphor creation and use, and at the same time warns us to be
cautious to accept someone else’s characterization of things like gifting us
with a Trojan Horse.
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RESARCH
In this paper I will examine the metaphor in three modes – philosophic,
conceptual and poetic, what they are, and how they are used and why it is
important to have a better understanding of them. I also need to distinguish
the differences between metaphor and irony, metaphor and analogy, metaphor and
simile, and finally, though very obvious, metaphor and literal language. The metaphor,
a way of saying something with something else, or, X=Y, has been known probably
as long as we possessed language, at the very least since the ancient Greeks,
as Aristotle had catalogued it. The conceptual metaphor came to be a mode of
linguistic analysis after the 1950’s due to the emergence of analytic
philosophy early in the twentieth century, largely at Cambridge University in
England by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And lastly, even though we
can recognize, interpret, and invent metaphors, we still do not know its deep
mechanism because it is in the realm of language; and language, thought, and
mind are all intricately linked. With the development of computer models, mind
models, and brains studies or neuroscience, we come closer to some
understanding of the metaphor but much work needs to be done, and the prize of
understanding its exact mechanism can be a “big win” in terms of
self-understanding and a window into the minds of others through their use of
language, primarily the metaphor. Let’s strive for that “win.”
There seems to be a link among philosophy
of language, cognitive psychology, and poetry that is as fundamental as the
properties of the mind but yet as ineffable as dĆ©jĆ vouz. Something that may
fall in and perhaps fill this gap is the
poetic metaphor or just generally the metaphor.
There are some basic
questions that we must mention, though we are in no position to even attempt to
answer them, because these questions are as fundamental as what our proper
relation
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to the “world” is, and
all sorts of epistemological and metaphysical questions that arise from that
relationship. The first question is what is the relation between the “world”
and our “mind”? Some philosophers say that the world is mind-independent. This
is the view that Science takes and it produced many wonderful, repeatable
experiments and results that we accept as “natural.” This “mind-independent”
view says that the laws of nature, i.e., the physical laws as obtained by
physics will exist and operate regardless whether we human beings are here or
not. But throughout history, we had to modify some of our conception of the
world. We used to think of the world as being flat or that the sun orbited
around the earth, but experimental and conceptual evidences have talked us out
of that. But some problems remain. We, even in science, formulate “models” of
the things we investigate. Examples abound – we think of an atom as electrons
orbiting around a nucleus, similar to our planetary motions. In reality,
however, the electrons form a “cloud” around the nuclear such that the closest
distance could be the stadium of the ball park and the furthest distance the
electron from the nucleus may be as far away as the periphery of the United
States.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant addresses the question “What can we know?” The
answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to
mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible,
Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative
metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is
that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience
and limiting the mind’s access only to the empirical realm of space and time.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that the position and momentum of a particle cannot both be measured exactly
at the same time. Therefore, there is a margin of precision in measurements
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we are limited in obtaining. And this has to do with the laws of physics
itself, and so if we are to believe in a mind-independent world, our
instruments of measuring nature will always have a margin of error. This is
further compounded by the fact that our concepts of the
world will bind us to observations that are consistent with those concepts
only. That is why, from time to time, our concepts change or expand and become
more generalized, as in the case that Newtonian physics gave way to Einstein’s
theories of relativity, special and general.
The phenomenon of metaphor is far more
prevalent than is generally acknowledged by philosophers; and it raises two
questions: what is metaphorical meaning”? And how do hearers grasp metaphorical
meaning as readily as they do? Because philosophers have a bias for literal
language, priding themselves to be precise and discerning, hairsplitting as it
were, when they use language, the metaphor is a monkey wrench in the soup. “But
the bias is only a bias: sentences are very often used in perfectly ordinary
contexts with other than their literal meanings” (Lycan 309). As a matter of
fact, virtually every sentence produced by any human being contains importantly
metaphorical or some other figurative elements.
The claim that almost every sentence
contains figurative elements is widely conceded because of the prevalence of
many “dead metaphors,” that is, phrases there were once novel metaphors but
from overuse have turned into clichƩs and now mean literally what they used to
mean metaphorically. When we speak of a river’s “mouth,” for example, no one
now would be directed by this to visualize a human or animal mouth. Another
example may be “the fence runs along the lake.” It is obvious that a fence
cannot run like an animal or a person and we do not conjure such a mental
picture now when we hear the word “runs” in this context. James Geary shows, in
his book, I Is An Other, that
metaphors are not rhetorical thrills at the edge of how we
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think, they are the
very heart of it. “Metaphors live a secret life all around us. We utter about
one metaphor for every ten to twenty-five word, about six metaphors a minute”
(5). The following is the first sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address (the metaphors are in italics):
“Four scores and seven years ago, our
fathers brought forth, upon this
continent, a new
nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all
men are created
equal.”
The two main metaphors in Lincoln’s
opening line of 30 words (one metaphor every fifteen words) both describe
America in terms of conception and birth. Indeed, the entire speech is only
243 words long and is a
single extended metaphor about how nations are like individuals are conceived,
born, fight, and die (7). I might add parenthetically, that metaphors themselves also are conceived,
born, fight, and die, in print and in usage otherwise.
I like to give another example of a
metaphor and this one is unusual in the sense that it is just one word, but it
really is two ideas that needs “unpacking.” Heidegger in his Magnus Opum, Being and Time, uses the
word “unveiling” or “reveal,” (Heidegger 307) to mean to undisclosed the factiveness, or the real state of Dasein
(a being-in-the-world, that is, we are already in the world whenever we talk
such terms as our existence). Moreover, we are already in a situation that we
are “thrown into” by the accident of birth and circumstances and exist in our
present situation or “equipment whole.” He used the analogy of “the workshop”
wherein we are pounding away with a hammer when suddenly the handle of the
hammer breaks, forcing us to be idle. It is at such times we contemplate our
activities and survey what it is we are doing. The literal meaning of “unveil”
is to “lift the veil” so that we can see the face, but metaphorically, it can
mean a host of things, such as dysfunctions or breakdowns in our everydayness
or our
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civilization itself is
revealed to us. This is to say that we can go along willy-nilly doing all the
things that we normally do until something “breaks down,” and thus forces us to
confront ourselves. Thus, metaphors can appear very simple but their profundity
is revealed to us when we give them a context which all their nuances come
forth to interplay.
Another example may be the Ezra Pound
poem, “In a Station of the Metro:” where
The Apparition of these faces in the
crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(DiYanni 348)
The verb “to be” is missing and two images
are just juxtaposed to form a resemblance and a contrast. This “likening” takes
place in the mind and the compression of images give it an emotional
significance. I will return to this point later when we discuss how poetry,
which is primarily metaphors, according to Frost, and how this can be
therapeutic, not only in the sense of improving mental clarity and stability,
but also how it can be a “cure” for civilization’s neuroses.
What is a Metaphor?
George Lakoff and Mark Turner in More than Cool Reason, first defined
what is not metaphorical. “If a
concept is to be understood and structured on its own terms – without making
use of structure imported from a completely different conceptual domain – we
will say that it is not metaphorical”(57).
A metaphor is a figure of speech that is
an implied comparison between two things that offers “a way of seeing one thing
in terms of another” (Parini 66). A metaphor is to be distinguished from a
simile in that the latter is a comparison using the words “like” or “as.” One
metaphor often quoted is from Romero and
Juliet, where Romero compares Julies to the sun:
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But soft, what light through yonder window
breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
(Romeo
and Juliet, 2.2. 2-3)
Philosophers like language to be literal
as they are wont to think that literal speech is the default while metaphoric
utterances are occasional aberrations, made mainly by poets and poets manquƩ.
To begin to get some rough idea what is a metaphor, we first note that a
metaphor is not an idiom. Moran (3)
uses the idiom that “so and so kicked the bucket;” or “somebody bought the
farm” to indicate that someone had died. Even though in these two instances, we
do not mean the
literal
contents of these statements, in the manner that a metaphor, such as “Juliet is
the sun” is also not to be taken literally. The distinction is that in the case
of the idiom, it is linguistically primitive in the sense that the entire idiom
is one chunk of semantics, and unlike the metaphor, “they are simply taught to
us as wholes, rather than being a matter of interpretation on an occasion (4).
“An idiom’s meaning is simply given:
there is no ‘open-ended’ quality to the idiom’s meaning, no special suggestiveness,
and no call for its creative elaboration” (4). The reader can think of an idiom
as sort of like a molecule, which loses its definition and properties once it
is broken into its constituent parts, which are atoms, which can have entirely
different chemical properties than its composite, the molecule; for example,
water is a liquid at room temperature, but when it is separated into its
components, it is two gases, hydrogen and oxygen. We should also make a passing
remark that a metaphor is not a code word. A code word generally bears no
relation to what it stands for. It is something agreed by two or more persons
that it does not mean its appearance. Two people may be speaking in a group of
people and may have agreed on the word “martini” to mean “Martin is here. Let’s
pretend we don’t see him.” Or
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in
the case of the “code talkers,” the Navaho Indians were utilized to speak their
dialect while communicating military things in the Pacific islands war with
Japan in World War II, but since the Japanese had no knowledge of Navaho
dialect, they were completely in the dark as to what was communicated.
Another question: can a metaphor be
replaced by a literal description or narrative? Some philosophers, the early
logical positivists, thought not. They believe in verificationism”, that is to say, whatever “truths” supposedly
exhibited by a statement needs to be given a procedure to verify it. If
something cannot be so “verified,” then that statement is said to be
meaningless. For
example,
we might be able to say “the present King of France.” But no such entity exists
and so we say that the declarative statement is meaningless, for it fails to
verify such a person. Later on, even noted philosophers, such as Donald
Davison, believe that a metaphor is meaningless if we were to say they have
open-ended meanings, and the only meaning it has is the literal words that it
is made of, despite sounding totally ridiculous in some cases (Lycan 241). For
example, “Juliet is the sun” would just mean
that Juliet the girl is taken to mean that star of our solar system, which in
this kind of literal rendering, sounds very bizarre. Nevertheless, that is how
Davidson would interpret this metaphor. This generates a lot of discussion in
philosophical circle, but the poets would not bother with such worries, they
would just go about their business writing and interpreting metaphors as they
have not heard a thing that Davison had said.
When we resort to using metaphor, we
contrive to talk about two different and disparate subject matters, mingling
them to rich and unpredictable effect. The primary subject of a metaphor is
called a tenor, that which is the
subject matter already under discussion. The young girl Juliet is the tenor in
Romeo’s metaphor. The secondary or the vehicle
is the newly
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introduced
subject matter with the view to enriching our resources for thinking and
talking about the first (SEP 2). We are in effect saying that X is Y. But of
course, X is not identical to Y for otherwise we simply have X is X. We are
really analogizing or likening properties of X to properties of Y, and usually
going from the more concrete to the more abstract. In this example of my own: a
cup is a handle on a volume, I am likening how holding a cup of something, say
coffee, I have a “handle” on a volume; that is to say, I have made “volume”
more tangible, less abstract. Or to take another example of mine: the metaphor
is the dark horse of language. By this I mean to say that the most fecund
figure of speech is the metaphor and it is the “winner” in
language
use in the sense that just when we think that language is “dead,” a new
metaphor pops up and renews our perception of language. As a matter of fact and
which we will discuss next, language expands by the invention of metaphors.
How to
View the Metaphor:
First we will consider the metaphor as a
concept that is in one domain being mapped into another domain. We will give an
example to flesh out this statement. All of us have a conceptual system (Lakoff
& Johnson 3) and it is not something that we are always aware of.
Nevertheless, this system which guides our actions and thoughts is “conceptual
in nature (3) and this is primarily based on the basis of linguistic evidence
(4). In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to
the understanding of one idea, in conceptual domain,
in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in
terms of directionality (e.g.
"the price of peace is rising"). A conceptual domain can be any
coherent organization of human experience. The regularity with which different
languages employ the same metaphors, which often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the
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mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural
mappings in the brain. This idea, and a detailed examination
of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson in
their work Metaphors We Live
By.
Most of us, especially English
literature majors, know what a metaphor is, or think that we do. We will show
by the end of this paper that our knowledge
of metaphors is still ad hoc,
that is, not complete, even though the ancient Greek poet Homer and Chinese
writers of the Tao Te Ching around
2,500 years ago used metaphors quite conspicuously. Robert Frost, the
quintessential American poet said, “What I am pointing out is that unless you
are at home in the
metaphor,
unless you have had your proper poetic education in the metaphor, you are not
safe anywhere (Frost, “Education by Poetry,” 5).
Is Frost joking or is
he giving us a measured warning? It certainly is a huge claim. We will take him
seriously until proven otherwise. And as we will see, we are going to go on an
intellectual excursion because of this “little claim” by Frost, and like
Frost’s taking “the road less traveled” (Frost, Mountain Interval, 1912), we will be better off both intellectually
and pragmatically for it. We will argue in this paper, that if anything, we
need to even go beyond Frost to state the importance of the poetic metaphor.
Frost said that he can find metaphorical ways of thinking and speaking in every
discipline with the possible exception of mathematics. My claim is that any
language, mathematics included, will have metaphors from usage, and in this
particular case, the idea of a “homomorphism” fills the job. A homomorphism is
a “mapping” or setting to corresponding structures of one object in one space
to another object in another space that preserves the correspondences (Enderton
89). For example, a toothpick model
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of a building can be
mapped into the steel structures of a building downtown. Another everyday
example is the use of mathematics to model physical quantities. For example, in
physics, it is very difficult to determine what the nucleus of an atom contains
of various elementary particles. We can bombard the nucleus with atomic
particles say protons. This will result in a scattering on an X-ray film or
tracks in a “cloud chamber.” We then make a mathematical model of the
scattering as a homomorphic image. Then, by performing the mathematics, we can
rule out cases what the scattering results are not. And thus we reduce the
problem by an order of magnitude, which makes our work easier. Before we get
into the academic rigors of discussing the poetic
metaphor in its
philosophical, linguistic, literary, and even therapeutic dimensions, we will
first give a broad outline of what it is we are dealing with here in this
paper.
The conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff
and Johnson has its critics. Kovecses (168) writes that the most often heard
criticism is that the researchers set up conceptual metaphors on the basis of
intuition and on dictionaries or lexicons and some linguistic examples that they
arrived at the following example: the
word “boil’ means “to be very angry, “explode” means to “lose control of the
anger,” “hotheaded” means “someone who loses control over anger quite easily
and so the researcher concludes that there is a conceptual metaphor we call
ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER (Lakoff & Kovecses, 1987), which is
rather silly because anger is not a fluid in a container. In another example
from Lakoff & Johnson, we find the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR based on the
following everyday language by a variety of expressions:
ARGUMENT IS WAR
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
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His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished
his argument.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
Lakoff and Johnson ask us to note that we
don’t just talk about arguments in
terms of war; we actually win or lose arguments (4). However, one can also say
ARGUMENT IS CHARITY:
His criticisms were very helpful.
Your disagreements were enlightening.
Our differences led to a better understanding.
The point I am making here is that our use
of the metaphor can be culturally conditioned. Given the fact that the US had
been in constant war since its inception (except for a fraction of its 300 plus
years of history), I think war is so much of our conditioning that naturally we
assume that war is the normal state of things. I also wonder how many countries
use the metaphor LOVE IS WAR as often as Americans do – to wit, “everything is
fair in love and in war.” The use of war in a metaphor extends even in commerce
– TRADE IS WAR.
We will now give a little history
of the metaphor. The ancient Greek philosophers knew what a metaphor was. According to Aristotle (Poetics 21), a
metaphor is “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus
to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by
analogy, that is, proportion”. He exhibited four types of “metaphors” but only
the fourth one resembles what we nowadays consider a metaphor. And it was an
analogy sort of like this: Old age to life as the evening is to day. But
for over two-thousand years, practically no serious discussions in philosophy
were devoted to the metaphor. Max Black,
the logician and philosopher succinctly stated, “To draw attention to a
philosopher’s
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metaphor is to belittle
him – like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting” (Metaphor 273). That is because Western
philosophy prides itself in having a precise language, where each term is
totally discernible from other terms, but the metaphor is a wild horse to tame
indeed since one cannot definitely accord it meaning or that its meaning is
open-ended. It was more or less in the realm of poetry that poets tossed the
metaphor around. A recent philosophical study of the metaphor was instigated by
Max Black (272). Black here considers a metaphor, let’s say the following: “The
chairman plowed through the meeting.” If this sentence is translated word for word
into a foreign language, we would like to say that it is the same metaphor, and
so to call a
sentence an instance of
a metaphor is to say something about its meaning,
and not about its grammatical or phonetic forms. Therefore, argues Black,
“metaphor” must be classified as a term belonging to “semantics” and not to
“syntax” (276).
Lakoff and Johnson gave a huge boost to
the interest of the metaphor with their book Metaphors We Live By, in which they claim that “Our ordinary
conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally
metaphorical in nature” (3). And since then, the study of the metaphor
proliferated like nobody’s business. There is the joke that if the number of
students of metaphor grow at the rate it is growing now, then in 2039, there
will be more scholars the metaphor that the population of world (Wayne Booth, Metaphor as Rhetoric, as quoted by of
Peter Norvig, U.C. Berkeley, in “Review of Metaphors We Live By,”http://norvig.com/mwlb.html).
Seriously though, we are entering a new age where many previously unrelated
disciplines are merging together. These are philosophy, linguistics, cognitive
psychology and neuroscience, anthropology, computer science, artificial
intelligence,
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and logic are all
combining forces to investigate the brain/mind, thinking, language, and
creativity.
First, since the poets have for over 2,000
years after Aristotle have been writing and communicating via metaphors from
Homer to Shakespeare to the Beats and to postmodern poetry; we at least know
that we can write metaphors. So, let us take a few examples in ordinary verse
writing and glean some properties of metaphors, to evaluate their contribution
to literature, to language, to thought, and to discover some knowledge of their
structure and relationships to various domains of expressions and inquiry. We
shall begin by studying three well-known poems
by three very
well-known poets. I will analyze the “depth” we must go to obtain the
metaphorical meaning that is conveyed
by word choices and their arrangements.
Sylvia
Plath
Metaphors
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A mellow strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty
rising. 5
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I am a means, a stage, a cow in a
calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there is no getting
off.
---
Sylvia Plath
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(DiYanni 43)
This poem has “consciousness” in the
sense that it is self-referential of the poet. It does not take much reflection
on the reader’s part to see that it is about the nine months of pregnancy. But
what does Plath say about her pregnancy? Is she glad? Is she upset? Or is she
resigned? The first line, “I am a riddle in nine syllables” challenges the
reader to figure out the riddle. Apparently the riddle can be merely stating
her pregnancy. But there is more. Men often say that they don’t understand
women, that women are a riddle, and I get the feeling that she is saying men
don’t understand women because they have little or no empathy for women, and in
a sense also for the
bearing and giving life
itself. Juraslov Seifert has said, “Women do us the least harm” (Casting of the Bells, The Spirit that
Moves Us Press). And the last two lines of the poem, Plath said she has eaten a
bag of green apples; maybe this is the biblical reference to the Garden of
Eden, where eating of apple is knowledge
of sin, and that she says in a mocking tone that she has derailed paradise by
eating a whole bag of green apples and that boarding the train and no getting
off, meaning on the one hand, motherhood is nonreversible, and on the other
hand, “civilization” starts now and it is not all good, and not only would she
have to endure it, but the child she is carrying is subject to the same fate –
mortality. This is my own interpretation of the poem, just to illustrate
rightly or wrongly, from a reader’s response approach and necessarily
subjective, that to understand a metaphor, one needs to go deeper into it,
because poems can be construed as one metaphor. I will have more to say about
that in a bit when I talk about the linguistic analysis of metaphors.
Another example is Theodore Roethke’s
Theodore Roethke
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In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to
see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening
shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the
wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of
the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul?
At odds with circumstance? The day’s
on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating
wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a
cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I
have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged
moon,
And in broad day the midnight comes
again!
A man goes far to find out what he
is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless
night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural
light.
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Dark, dark my light, and darker my
desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened
summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my
fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the
mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing
wind.
The first line of this
poem, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” why is it in the singular? Why
only one eye? There is a proverb, “In the land of the blind, the one-eye man is
king.” [Also, this occurred to me as of late. The sniper’s eye is training on
the target in the impending darkness of death]. One could also play around with
the homonyms “eye” and the first-person singular “I.” And there may be more
than one “I” as in the last line of the poem, “Which I is I?” And what does the eye see then? I will not use a strictly
formalism interpretation of this poem, and I will draw on Roethke’s background
a bit. Following the reader’s response subjectivism of Wolfgang Iser (Bresler
78), I will actively use my own experiences to interpret this poem by Roethke.
“I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;”
this second line of the poem continues with the theme of “dark time.” What does
Roethke refer to here? Is he referring
to a perverse political climate or economic hard times? From biographical
materials, Roethke suffered manic/depressive illness, and so this is probably
episodes of depressions. The first two lines of the second stanza are
interesting. He claims that his illness is actually a mark of nobility and the
world is unable to fathom his privileged position, nay, not only that, but to
put great odds in his way. To continue with my subjective reading, I would say
that the nobility often inbreed, as in ancient Egypt where brothers can marry
sisters, and in Europe where the Anglo-Saxon nobility
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married each other with
close gene pools. And so madness or deformity is often the result of such
inbreeding.
This poem is a juxtaposition of many
images that conflict and amplify the moods and feelings of manic/depressive
illness. The poet, Roethke himself in this instance, claims that this condition
gives him more depth and insight into identity, claiming that the conventional
life does not let him go far enough to find who he is. Some of the words used
for his depressive spells are “shade,” “dark,” and “purity of despair.” Some of
the words used to describe his manic moods were “fire,” ‘storm,” “blazing,” and
“buzzing.” The last two lines of the poem, “The mind enters itself, and God the
mind, / And one is One, free in the tearing wind,” tells us that he embraces
all
the contradictions and
paradoxes of who he is. This poem can be an illustration or a metaphor for his
manic / depressive illness. However, there seems to be a moral message of
Roethke saying that he “goes far to find what he is,” meaning here that he does
not accept the label mentally ill “lying down,” he worked hard and “went far”
to embrace not only himself all the psychological aspects that he is as a
result of mental illness, but also to embrace that “all is One,” to show
solidarity with all of humanity, somewhat reminiscent of the Buddhist concept
we are all one soul.
The reader can see here that the poem goes
from a despairing mood to one of triumph. When a poem is worked through, we
transform ourselves through the working out of the poem. We, in a manner of speaking,
talked our troubles out, as a rich client will pay a psychoanalyst to listen.
For the more financially modest persons we have a blank sheet of paper to
listen to our pen. For this reason, the magazine Poets & Writers, had asked me to blog for them (Poets & Writers 10.7.13 Koon Woon on
Poetry as a Survival Technique). I said in my blog that I worked through
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many of the difficult
feelings of mental illness utilizing poetry. This illustrates the ability of
the human mind to transform a certain metaphor of itself to a different one,
from bondage to the psychological dysfunction or addiction to a healthier model
of the personality. This idea will be elaborated more fully in another section
of the paper.
Robert
Frost
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted
wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
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Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
---
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(DiYanni 48)
David Orr, the author of the book, The Road Not Taken, says in the
September 11, 2015 issue of The Paris
Review, “This poem plays a unique role not simply in American literature,
but in American culture and in world culture as well” (3). The signature
phrases of this poem grace many artifacts, speeches, commercials, to
televisions shows, such as The Twilight
Zone, and “Battlestar Galactica,
as well as video games, and anything that sells. And if one were to do a Google
search for a poem and the frequency it is “hit,” “The Road Not Taken” scores a
48 and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” comes a distant second at 12, while
Pound’s “Station of the Metro” only scores a 2. But also outside of poetry, the
search worldwide has “Road Not Taken” at 47 to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling
Stone” a distant second again at 19, with “Psycho” by Hitchcock at a mere 14.
This poem is normally taken to be
self-assertion that becomes triumphant (“I took the one less traveled by”), but
the poem’s two literal lines seem completely at odds with this interpretation.
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The protagonist of the
poem tells us that the two paths “equally lay / in leaves” and “the passing
there / Had worn them really about the same.” And so the two roads are equally traveled. The
two roads are
interchangeable (5). What has happened? This is either a flat-out contradiction
or irony. Irony is not taken literally the same way as a metaphor is not to be
taken literally. But irony has closure;
it means something definite – it’s the assertion’s opposite meaning and the
interpretation is not open-ended as a
metaphor is. Therefore, this poem is really a trick, a wolf in a sheep’s
clothing, as Orr quoting the critic Frank Lentricchia say, “It [this poem] may
be the best example of all of American culture
of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Finally, we conclude that Frost did not deceive us; we were too eager to see
what we wanted to see – the triumph of the individualist spirit.
Applications of Metaphors:
Spying:
Recall that Frost says that one is not
safe anywhere without some facility with the metaphor.
(reference). Robert
Frost cautioned us back in 1931 that we are not safe anywhere without an
understanding of the metaphor. An article appearing in the “Atlantic Monthly,” “Why Are Spy
Researchers Building a ‘Metaphor Program’?” exposes that “a small research arm
of the U.S. government’s intelligence establishment wants to understand how
speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building
software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors (The Atlantic, May
25, 2011). The budget is almost one billion dollars given in contracts by the
NSA and the CIA to language translation teams such as Applied Research
Associates, a 1,600-strong research company. It is hoped that the program will
exploit the fact metaphors are so pervasive in everyday talk that data mining
them will reveal the underlying
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beliefs and worldviews
of members of a culture (2). Before we can evaluate the plausibility of such a
program, we need to talk about the Chinese Room Problem as the celebrated
thought experiment of the American philosopher John Searle.
The Chinese Room experiment basically is a
scenario set up like this: A man is in a room who does not know the Chinese
language but he has many dictionaries, tables, and cross-reference between
Chinese and English. There is an incoming slot to the room for the man in which
a text is Chinese is fed. And there is an outgoing slot where the man outputs
his “translation” of Chinese, which he has “translated” into English by the
various tables and dictionaries in his room. A bilingual Chinese person then
compares the input text in Chinese and the output text in English and finds it
satisfactory. The question now is: Does the man in the room know Chinese?
Knowing this set-up, we of course say no. But what about the bilingual Chinese
person who does not know who or what is in the room and whether that person or
machine knows or does not know Chinese or the fact that there is a roomful of
cross-references.
Now imagine that the “Metaphor Program” is
able to “translate” or “interpret” metaphors speakers of a language use; this
is asking the metaphor program to know what the thought process is from what a
speaker of a language utters. This means we have an algorithm to scan the
entire target language as it has been kept as data and to be able to decide
which phrase is a metaphor and what is in the speaker’s mind. This presents the
undecidable question of the Chinese Room experiment of John Searle again. This
time it is phrased differently. This time we ask how can the machine “know”
when it is correct. The whole point of the Chinese Room experiment is that the
bilingual Chinese-speaking person who examines the input and output
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texts is a human! This is the classic case of GIGO
or “Garbage in and Garbage out.” The machine is only as smart as its
programmer.
The “believer” is not to be deterred. He
will quote that the computer has already beaten the world champion chess and Go
players. And in time, it will be able to parse a language for metaphors and
catalogue them in the manner of Lakoff and Johnson to reveal our mindset when
we use metaphors, such as Argument Is War, Time Is Money, or Love Is a Journey,
etc. However, this is a different sort of activity altogether. In chess and Go,
we have an end result we are seeking and we know what it is by “winning” or
losing such a parlor game. The metaphor is open-ended and thus ambiguous and
undecidable. Remember that it is context dependent. So, it will have a different
propositional content given different contexts. For reasons too technical for
this paper, we will leave the question whether John Searle is right about
whether the Chinese Room problem is a refutation of “strong artificial
intelligence.”
Education:
Robert Frost, when addressing Amherst
College in 1931, delivered this essay, “Education by Poetry,” in which he said
that he would throw away all the intellectual enthusiasm like the spectrum of a
prism except “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor.” He believed that we need to
understand the discreet use of metaphor, other people’s and our own, unless we
have had a proper education in poetry. Poets begin with very trivial metaphors,
he said, and go on to the most profound thinking that we have (3). “What I am
pointing out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe
anywhere…Because [if] you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t
know the metaphor’s strength and its weakness (5). He goes on to say that
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“thinking” is largely
metaphor. We come closest to the poets and writers when we understand their
metaphors and thus we come close to their thinking and wisdom (8). Frost also
mentions that our scientific models of the universe are also metaphors; for
example, thinking the world as a thermodynamic machine. But Frost also cautions
that all metaphors break down somewhere, when the likeness is forced or
exaggerated. The metaphor is a “likeness” and not an identity and thus one must
know how far “to ride” the metaphor. Therefore, one must be wary when hearing
the metaphor of others, e.g., try this – “The War on Drugs.” Here what slips
into our mind is that the drug problem is so severe that we must go all out
against it. But how far before this metaphor breaks down? It might be the case
of killing the patient to relieve one of the diseases.
Metaphors’
Curative Values:
Speaking of personal experiences, I have
used poetry as a means to alleviate severe symptoms of my prolonged
schizoaffective illness since its inception in my mid-twenties. Those
depressions and anxieties were feelings of brittleness as a junk car rusting in
a junkyard. Who can identify with a rusting junk car with broken rear view
mirrors imprisoned in the cemetery of broken down cars? One would like horses and
pasture but no, just the vacant, empty, voiceless rusting abandoned cars
stripped of whatever was left of their useful machinery.
According to some historians and
philosophers of science, attention is drawn to the idea that, just as the facts
and methods of any scholarly discipline are to be understood as shaped by
larger and larger theories and eventually by worldviews (Lyddon, 442).
According to this perspective, one domain of therapeutic counseling is that
different views of human change are subscribed to by different schools and
personalities of the therapists. This underlying set of assumptions of the
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world is called the
root metaphor theory. This is essentially a way to view the phenomenon of the
illness in various ways which then is reflected in the course of treatment. It
is almost like
learning a new
language, where the patient learns the lingo of the school of therapy and
almost as if “playing along” to their “fiction of him.
Sometimes, however, the patient comes to
the therapist with a metaphor of his own illness. A paranoid, suspicious
patient may have a delusion that there is a knife that someone has stabbed him
with and left in his back. It would be incorrect pragmatically if the therapist
were to say, “I do not see such a knife in your back.” The therapist should not
“deny” this but say to the patient, “It is only a small knife and I will pull
it from your back.”
Milton Erickson, the famous psychiatrist
and hypnotist, when confronted by a mental hospital who claimed to be Jesus
Christ, did not argue or try to disillusion the man but said to him
instead, “Then, I
understand you know something of carpentry”? The mental patient said that he
did. And so Erickson arranged to have a job in the mental hospital where the mental
patient played out his “metaphor” of being the Son of God and a useful
carpenter at the hospital (Hanlon 16).
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REACTION
After some thoughts about the
metaphor, as it is represented and discussed in different academic realms of
philosophy of language, cognitive science, and in poetry, but mainly in poetry,
I become aware where some avenues where my investigations could lead. The first
is to post in the Academia website where fellow students and professors may
read it and react to it, as a topic to be discussed in literary workshops, or
as a foothold in the application of the poetic metaphor in the philosophy of
language to try to overcome some of the shyness philosophers of language
reluctant to investigate this “dark chapter” of language. It is my hope that my
cursory paper will stimulate more thought and generate more curiosity into the
enchantment of language, which is a human necessity, and which is at the same
time, a very high art. Therefore, I feel that my work should be shared with a
larger audience, both students and scholars of the humanities and those of the
cognitive sciences and those in the rarefied field of philosophy.
What I hope also is that the readers are
stimulated to create a poetry that is rich in metaphors, to expand the already
language-rich and symbol-rich of some of the finest poetry ever written and to
do it with such an affective content that the readers can easily identify with
the emotive messages and renditions of well-chosen words that not only open
one’s doors of perception but also in so doing, invite the readers to enrich
their empathy and sympathy of those who write to communicate volumes of meaning
and to leave ineffable messages of good will that we are as one race of people
despite outward appearances of differences. And to make poetry matter as one
saying has been quoted, “An ulcer, sir, is an unwritten poem.”
For those who are aware of the powers of
the word and those that are strongly affected by its curative properties, the
metaphor, as Robert Frost has said, “one is not safe anywhere if one does
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not understand the
metaphor,” he might have said, in addition, one is likely to be more
open-minded and sensitive to the world around one, knowing that metaphors are
not what they seem, in the way that the appearance is not the reality as Arthur
Schopenhauer said of the world.
Originally this fascination with the
metaphor grew out of an invitation to a poetry festival as a presenter of the
art and discipline of writing poetry. I was to hold workshop and teach high
school and college students, and practicing published poets in the intricacies
of the metaphor. When a friend, who is both a poet and a cognitive
psychologist, heard of my contemplated task, he proposed that we write a book
for the MIT press, showcasing the power and the versatility of the metaphor and
to bridge the gap between the humanities and the cognitive sciences. We both
were enamored by the idea and went at it with glee and vigor. However, as we
dig deeper and deeper into it, I found that not only we, but also not many
philosophers or cognitive scientists, knew much about the metaphor. The problem
was further complicated by the logical foundation of such an inquiry. My friend
and co-author chose to examine the laboratory studies of the metaphor, by
generating from experiments done with college students the statistical measures
of such things as what parts of the brain are activated by the exposure to
metaphors and the time it took to recognize a metaphor. I, on the other hand,
was more interested in the philosophical and epistemological foundation of such
an investigation. What assumptions are we making about cognition, translation, meaning, and models of the brain and how is that similar or different from our
concept of mind. What assumptions are
we making about the relationship between mind and the world? Can we ever say with any degree of certainty
that our models of the world is what it is if the world is mind-independent.
There were all sorts of questions like these, and I was unable to answer them
without committing myself to serious and prolonged studies. Hence, I aborted
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my part of the book
project and set myself to delve into this investigation further. I reason that
it is no shame to admit what one does not know. As opposed to my friend, I
needed an analytical model of mind, language, and the dynamics of the metaphor
and that would mean that I commit to some brand of metaphysics. What is there
really in the world? And is my description of it doing it any justice? I then
saw that generating data per se is not really where our work should lie.
Having been most of my life employed in
blue-collar labor such as the US post office, furniture factory, and culinary
work, especially in culinary work, I have a practical bend and I like to see
theories applied to the real world – the proof is in the pudding. Despite my
background in mathematics and in philosophy, I like to work in applied areas of
knowledge, and my background in mathematics and philosophy was merely to make
my applications more coherent and precise. I also have done some graduate work
in Whole Systems Design, where the methodology is to use feedback and control
mechanisms to diagnose, analyze, and to repair entire systems, be it a
white-collar organization, an accounting problem, or the running of a
warehouse, since these ultimately human organizations follow paradigms or
archetypes. Problems can be traced to various components, that is, their
control and feedback mechanisms. Such diagnoses can be given descriptive names
such as “the limits of growth,” “unintended consequences,” “accidental
adversaries,” and so forth where the problem can be isolated and fixed. What my
friend the co-author and I had encountered was the problem of “accidental
adversaries,” because being a psychologist and having little background in
literary theory, he is very much a “formalist” and very much patronizing of my
mental illness, albeit many first rate poets and writers are mentally ill, or
at some ways at odds with the everyday machinery of the
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world. And since he had
been a professor for thirty-odd years, he tended to be professorial. He quoted
Robert Frost who derided poets who work in free-verse as “playing tennis with
the net down.” I, on the other hand, saw such blind adherence to formal poetry
and regulated verse as a “straightjacket” based on my experiences of the
world’s misunderstanding, and I reacted negatively to these biases. Friction
arose and we became “accidental adversaries” as being in academia, he is competitive
as a matter of a survival mechanism in that kind of setting. Because of the
organization needed to write and present many academic papers because of the
“publish or perish” environment he is in, he already outlined the book before
writing, and just thrust the agenda to me. But being a generative artist, I
work heuristically and am open to ideas as they come to me. Therefore, our work
habits clashed. We reached an impasse and I bowed out of the book contract.
Another problem was that after surveying
the literature available on the poetic metaphor I found in Lakoff and Johnson a
mere taxonomy of this figure of speech. Even though some of their categories
had wide application and seemingly convincing that they share a “family
resemblance,” but in fact they merely categorize the metaphors they found
without going to the root, sort of seeing a light show without knowing optics.
A much stronger approach would be “causal,” where the researcher can identify
the births of metaphors as they are being mapped from one conceptual domain to
another. Since we are mapping something more concrete to something more
abstract, the “carry-over” of the concrete from the originating domain will in
some sense “flesh out” the destination conceptual domain. An example of mine
would be, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Here, we do
have a very tangible situation of a hot kitchen being mapped into a situation
that is perilous in some ways. One can also see that
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this metaphor is
open-ended; that is to say, one can collaborate and evoke other situation where
it is good to abandon.
As the Tao Te Ching said in 500 B.C.,
“Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations. Ever desireless, one sees the
mystery.” What my co-author wanted is the “manifestations” while I was seeking
the “mystery.” And my friend, having taught so many capable students and had
become distinguished professor at a prestigious large public university, his
job was just that – professing. So, all the time, I did not feel like he was
treating me as his equal. Had he been a better psychologist, he would have
“given” me the feeling that I was valuable, and not just some patronized
disabled individual as an adjunct to the writing of the book. Perhaps I am a little
sensitive because my father was a blue-collar, self-made and self-employed man,
that in order to cover up for his lack of education and prestige in the world,
would say to me, “I don’t know how much a professor makes, but I make
thirty-thou.” He also likened a professor with “so many degrees after their
name he is like a monkey with many tails.” Needless to say, even though my
basic instinct had been to be a scholar, my father had deflated that ambition
of mine that it is not only sad, but kind of a parallel what some professors do
to their better students – to see them as a potential threat.
So, this leaves me somewhere still as
everybody got to be somewhere sometime. It is to trust my instincts and my
unconscious mind. I have produced two award-winning books of poetry and one
memoir that was funded by a grant from the Office of Arts & Culture of the
City of Seattle.
Quite often, artists
and visionaries can see and feel what others cannot see and feel until a much
later time. My need is to trust myself as a generative artist and to
investigate the subject of the metaphor in my “work” of writing poetry. The
maxim, “the eye finds what the heart seeks” is as
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clear and all-embracing
as any philosophical treatise or brain scan of the metaphor as it is being
discovered by the poet. The Chinese Book of Odes, compiled by Confucius is
3,000 years old, and it states that “poetry is where one’s heart wants to go.”
And those were the dying words that my Uncle in China said to me over the cell
phone that bridged some 12,000 miles. Analytics, while well-reasoned and even
elegantly stated at times, is no match for what comes from the depth of being.
One of the pragmatic results of working on
this project is that I volunteered to teach poetry at a senior center. I have
as of now six students who are senior citizens in their sixties and seventies
whose interest now in poetry is not for bread or a feather in their cap. They
are here to enrich their lives as quality is quite often lacking in this American
consumerism, especially one’s own generative art. In a sense, they are very
surprised by the way they can express themselves in a language that they spoke
and written all their lives but now viewing it like for the first time. I even
applied and will obtain a grant from Poets & Writers, Inc., a charitable
organization that supports and advances poetry and writing. This grant I will
plow back to our group as rental for classroom space at the senior center and
pay for such small items as Xeroxing costs and paper clips and so on. I do not
aspire to teach younger people with ambitions to become famous writers, because being famous can be merely topical.
Instead, I want writers to write from the heart. The older citizens have
experienced much of the world in their retirement years and for some of them,
this is the first time they are exposed to and committing themselves to the
production of art, written art that is.
Studying the metaphor has also opened my
eyes to what is published out there on “scholarly” subjects. Using my culinary
experience as a comparison, some of the papers have very high-
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sounding names and
technical terms, but to me, a can of chili is a can of chili, never mind the
fact that it contains JalapeƱo that can really “zing.” I discover that many
writers hide behind their words much like an ink fish, which uses ink to
camouflage itself. There is also a bandwagon effect – when a subject is hot,
everyone is in hot pursuit.
I had a lot of trouble writing this paper.
It is really the third topic I have chosen and worked on and with the first two
topics abandoned. My mistake is to be too broad and not focusing. It is my
regret that I did not plan this paper properly and also had tried to do more
than what I was capable of doing, not from an inherent inability but from lack
of proper organization and discipline. It is also a lesson that I learned that
some things are not suited to my personality and my illness. I wrote poetry
largely because it is short for the most part for poems that I have the
attention span to read and remember. Here I should just limit to one section or
one theme / topic, such as why Frost said that poetry is largely metaphor and
thinking is largely metaphor. Or, I could have focused on the role of
conceptual metaphors in our everyday thinking. And also to deconstruct some of our hidden assumptions
about the world and dangerously lull ourselves into believing that a metaphor
is truth itself. The experiment some cognitive psychologists have done is
enlightening. They present the urban crime problem to two groups of students
with one description by the metaphor “urban crime is a wild animal” while to
the other group of students they presented the metaphor for urban crime as
“urban crime is a virus.” Those who were presented the wild animal metaphor
opted for more strict police enforcement and higher criminal penalties, whole
those students who were present the metaphor of crime as a virus were more
lenient and advocated prevention as opposed to punishment.
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In the course of researching for this
paper, I found out that now a Ph.D. degree in psychology is now available for
Media Psychology. Now, the metaphor being sometimes shocking in the sense of
revealing to ourselves how we can grossly misrepresent the world, this is a
serious point to ponder, especially when loud sound bites come out of the
television tube and in mass sporting events, the spectators of a football game
will yell, whatever they will yell, such as “crush those guys”! The Atlantic
Monthly article on the NSA and CIA trying to fathom peoples’ minds by what they
say or write is again a double-edged sword. On the one hand, by ferreting out
metaphors or hostile groups we can spot terrorism, but on the other hand, our
own government can find more and efficient ways to control us. Just knowing
this reinforces the saying, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
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