THE WORLD-AS-METAPHOR
Daniela Boccassini
In considering Russ’s question, i.e. “What is the spirit of the depths seeing
now?”, Paco was suddenly and spontaneously presented with the (mental)
image of “the monstrous, sub-seafloor earthquake-and-tsunami of 2004, in
Indonesia”. He then submitted to what was seemingly being asked of him,
namely, a re-membering of those cataclysmic events. Paco felt that the
magnitude of energy that “Nature”, aka the earth, harbors as a living planet,
and is capable of releasing, is, as such, humanly un-thinkable, yet nevertheless
understandable as a “resounding metaphor for the magnitude of what we
humans are most likely to undergo, one way or another, in this Age of
Consequences.”
Russ’s initial reaction to Paco’s recollection was in line with Paco’s
interpretive move: the tsunami offered “a potent metaphor for what the Spirit
of the Depths was seeing.” But then a dream came to Russ, not just to correct,
but seemingly to censor — not the seismic event as such, but rather our all-toohuman attempts to relocate it within the precinct of our “poetic or imaginative”
efforts at making sense of the unthinkable. “This is not a metaphor,” the dream
announced — thereby seeming to deny legitimacy to our age-old way of turning
the wildness of the more-than-human world into a series of orderly rhetorical
figures. In trying to cope with the dream’s brazen pronouncement, Russ was in
turn forced to admit that “perhaps the dream wants to call attention to some
aspect of reality that we are not tending to.” Hence, he surmised that “there is a
problem with reality, or, rather, a problem with how reality is being related to.”
In so far as reality keeps being degraded and drained of necessity, the dream
leaves Russ to conclude that, at our human scale, “the metaphoric function of
reality loses all vitality and potency for those caught up by the plague of denial.”
I was struck by this coming together of different aspects of “reality,” as
well as by our misguided essays at handling “them” through “metaphor.” Russ’s
dream raises the stakes to a staggering new level. If we welcome the dream’s
statement as a pronouncement by the Spirit of the Depths, what is this
paradoxical affirmation/negation of metaphor demanding of us now? In
sweeping aside our inane ways of metaphorizing reality, this affirmation
prompts instead the revitalizing of the metaphoric function of reality in all its
untamed power: as such, it carries as much explosive power as the 2004
tsunami did. Through this dream statement, the Spirit of the Depths conjures an
all-encompassing re-wilding: of the earth, and of our way of relating to it. As I
ponder the dream’s wreckage of our cognitive assumptions, and the
alternatives it may be foreshadowing, I find myself back at first principles,
asking: “what is a metaphor”?
Merriam Webster defines metaphor as “a figure of speech in which a word
or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another
to suggest a likeness or analogy between them”. As such, a metaphor is neither
a comparison nor a symbol. A comparison highlights similarities between
“things” that are deemed equally well-known within our cognitive system. A
symbol, on the other hand, aims at opening new cognitive horizons by
suggesting the possibility of a new relationship between a “thing” or level of
reality we believe we “know,” and something else that, while still unknown to
us, beckons from afar. Along with simile and symbol, metaphor aims at
promoting a unitive mode of cognition, but it does so through the specific act of
“carrying over” (meta-pherein, μεταφέρειν).
We can hear echoes of this “carrying over” (φέρειν) in the name of the
primordial bearer of light: Lucifer. On the mythical level of our accounting for
cosmic phenomena, Lucifer’s forgoing the “metaphorizing” he had been
entrusted with, turned him into the Great Separator (dia-bolon): severed from
light, the universe entered the age of darkness, and the tsunami-like
consequences of this fracture, of this denial of the metaphoric, enlightening
power of reality, are still with us.
We can also hear echoes of this “carrying over” in the name of the vessel
that ferries goods, humans and vehicles across waters, from one shore to
another. Even if we discount our millennia-long misunderstanding of “meta” as
“higher,” the point is that a relaying needs to take place between a “here” and a
“yonder,” such that a transformation of sorts also has to occur in the process,
for reality to be the wild, living and enlivening process it is. Hence, the
transformative power of metaphor may well be the “aspect of reality we have
not been attending to,” or have been attending to in such a way as to strip it of
“its vitality and potency”: in our aim to corral reality and make it subservient to
our colonizing impulse, just like Lucifer turned into Satan, we keep preventing
the “ferrying over” of untamed goods from beyond, so that what we are left
with is a shuffling of inanimate, meaningless, stuff: we live in the deprived,
deadening world of severed entities, where we cringe at the possibility of
comparison — abhor metaphor, and obdurately disprove symbol, as the
delusional fabrications of a deviant mind. As civilized humans, we take pride in
severing ourselves from the very possibility of a unitive mode of cognition. And
the more we persist in our technologically-warranted stance of literalizing
reality by dissecting and desiccating it, the less capable we become of tapping
into the regenerative power of reality as metaphor.
Merriam Webster’s approach to the question is revealing: “when we use
metaphor, we make a leap beyond rational, ho-hum comparison to an
identification or fusion of two objects, resulting in a new entity that has
characteristics of both: the voice isn’t like silk; it is silk. Many critics regard the
making of metaphors as a system of thought antedating or bypassing logic.
Metaphor is the fundamental language of poetry, although it is common on all
levels and in all kinds of language. Lots of common words were originally vivid
images, although they exist now as dead metaphors whose original aptness has
been lost.”
If metaphor antedates or bypasses logic, is foundational to language as
poetry, and its once enlivening presence can still be traced in our mummified
speech, clearly the problem lies in the deadly severing of metaphor from reality
that we operate, by reducing metaphor to nothing but a figure of human
speech. What offends us is the unthinkable fact that in the more-than-human
world reality is metaphor, and metaphor is reality. Hence, when the dream says:
“This is not a metaphor,” what the Spirit of the Depths is “ferrying over” to us is
the apocalyptic, tsunami-like revelation of the all-pervasiveness of reality as
metaphor. From all quarters, life conspires against our deadly fixation on
literalism: everything, in its poetic becoming, is and reveals itself as metaphor.
Approaching reality in these terms entails sitting on this shore, watchfully
waiting for the gifts from the other side. It also entails understanding that as
living beings, we too, like everything else, are metaphor: conveyors of a mystery
that in transcending us, can only ascend into existence through us. We, along
with everything else, are metaphor.
What would happen, should we become capable of remembering our
primordial, Luciferian task — should we wish to embrace the transformational
power of reality-as-metaphor? Only a re-wilding of this magnitude, it seems,
might have the power to carry us back to the shore of our senses, and bring the
more-than-human world back to life.
Metaphor understood in this rewilded way “ferries over” words, and
beings, as images: that is to say, as symbols. Thus, I am reminded of another of
Russ’s dreams: “words as eggs”. Re-membering how to approach words, and
images and things as eggs — as symbols, as living archetypes — is a truly
luciferian task. The cosmos has been waiting for us to embrace and carry
through this light, for us to re-enter life as the primordial experience of the
alam* al-Mithal: the world as metaphor.
*[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alam]