Notes on the Metaphor by Koon Woon

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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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poetry The Truth in Rented Rooms (Kaya, NY, NY, 1998). The video is on Youtube through the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtrkcz5QckQ

     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 déjà 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 clichés 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 manqué. 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 Jalapeño 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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