Writing, speech, and metaphor

Before we proceed, a memo: I have changed the picture that I was using as my blog graphic and avatar per the request of a couple of friends who were a bit grossed out by it. Originally, as most of you noticed I’m sure, there was a vivid picture of a girl voraciously devouring a giant spider of some kind, her small hands speckled with gore from the body of the arachnid (one imagines). I think the spider had been superimposed in the girl’s mouth; before, it was a grilled-cheese sandwich. Frankly, I would choose a spider over grilled cheese. Two measly pieces of toasted white-bread with a gob of tasteless, melted American-cheese goober stuck in the middle is not appealing to my taste buds.

Nevertheless, I have to agree with my friends: the graphic was a bit too graphic. More importantly, it was kind of redundant. For a blog that is supposed to rely on words and imagery, the picture kind of stole the thunder. I think the idea of eating spiders—multiple spiders, even thousands of little baby ones newly hatched from their mother’s pulsating nymph sack; or perhaps spiders with big fat bodies and jet-black legs, garden spiders or black widows with legs that are angled like the freakish mantis arms of those characters in fighting games, designed to impale and lob off heads and other limbs; or meaty wolf spiders that run along the baseboards in your home (yes, YOUR home) and leave swollen welts when they bite you with inch-long fangs—excites the imagination enough. I could just show you a picture, but I would feel prouder for making you squeamish with words.

To that end, I have put in a much less disturbing (and far more ambiguous) image of a the black rabbit of Inle from "Watership Down". Hopefully this fixes the problem of artistic redundancy and adds some bonus “irony cred” to the site.

I started this blog to be a place to discuss writing and to talk ABOUT writing. But meta-writing can be pretty boring and everywhere I look in the world there are interesting things to comment on. I may sometimes talk about the difficulties faced when writing; how to overcome compositional hurdles; style and technique, etc. But I’ll let other, more serious blogs handle those dry topics for the most part. What I’m interested in is exploration of the magic of the written word.

Writing is at root a kind of catharsis, a radical means of expressing yourself over space and time. Whereas speech is an almost immediate vehicle for thoughts in real time, bursting with inflection and tone and emotion, writing is a silent distillation of thought. It requires some level of patience due to the time delay between your brain and your fingers or pen. Although this can be frustrating at times because you want to shout out every passionate thought that enters your head—which is what vlogs are for—it also is empowering because it gives you a much bigger palette of words and expressions from which to choose (and more time to choose them) to build your statements, to enhance your arguments and make more profound your insights into the world.

The great speeches of history, which we take for granted as mere beautiful ideas spoken in an arresting voice, were more often carefully crafted speeches, written with care for poetic sensibilities, for fidelity to the truth and with consideration to the impact the words would have on listeners. Recall the stunning language used in the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., FDR, Indira Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. It is poetic and measured, balancing hindsight and foresight, tailored to the audience but not pandering.

Contrast this to the kinds of speech we find in the streets or during political debates (or on vlogs), which is often just a repeated blip or meme dripping with emotive wordsauce that has been poured out in the same way a million times before. But this natural quality of speaking often makes people’s words more genuine, if less original. And political speeches that are poorly written or littered with clichés in an attempt to come off as folksy or patriotic are so phony that they can offend the ear more than grand, powerful speeches that are hateful or destructive (unfortunately). The difference is usually that one can deconstruct the language of a rousing speech because it uses strong metaphors and symbolism, but one doesn’t want to waste time with analyzing empty clichés.

But enough about public speaking. The crucial element, whether writing speeches or plays, editorials or novels, is that there is some kernel of truth or beauty in what is being written. I have not yet published any of my writing, though I have had enough “aha!” moments in the course of my experience with writing to know that those most serene instances of revelation only occur when you have written something that resonates, something that is true. And there may be a hundred or a thousand different ways to say this little truth, but like a flake of gold in a stream you have found one that is pure and worthy of keeping.

We all spend a lot of time (those of us that use the internet a lot each day) sifting though and adding to what is commonly known as “the bullshit”. The bullshit surrounds us in myriad forms. It is in the inflammatory and ignorant posts we see on news and entertainment threads. It is on the walls of social media sites. It is in the editorial pages of magazines and newspapers. It is embedded in the speeches that politicians make when they are pandering to one special interest group or another. The bullshit lives and grows like a living fungus, spawning additional lobes of bullshit, releasing bullshit spores into the atmosphere and infecting entire regions and even nations, who react to the bullshit storm by launching counter-bullshit measures (much of which is composed predominantly of post-consumer recycled bullshit). The bullshit is the carbon of the internet—the common element of all things cyberspace.

But it’s not so bad. It doesn’t mean that we are being disgusting or hateful or wrong just because we engage in the bullshit. Another, perhaps less cringe-worthy word for some might be “junk”. We wade through junk and produce junk everyday, and for what purpose? Well, to find the truth of course! And in this way, the bullshit/junk is not only common or important, it is absolutely necessary for us to get at the truth.

In every sphere of society—politics, relationships, law, education, art, business—we run up against this junk. Even science has a junk factor that is overwhelmingly high. But the beauty of our systems is that the output in the end becomes more and more refined, more like truth. We have so much raw data, so many unprocessed opinions and facts and observations of our world that we need to put out there. And we need to put it out there in order to find our pebbles of gold—or in some cases, our Hope Diamonds of truth and wisdom. So we tend to uphold institutions that have rigorous anti-bullshit methods, like science and technology; and we tend to be wary of the truth claims of domains which haven’t worked the bugs out yet, like….pretty much everything else.

I see this is as positive thing. It means we are always pressing ourselves to find truth, perhaps because we know the amount of untruth and meaningless static out there is so high. And in the final sum, there is no authority to tell us what is true and what isn’t, who was right and who was wrong, even in history books. So we often are faced with relativism—the notion that what is true for you is true for you and the same law of truth applies to me.

Truth becomes easier to uncover when we have an idea of what it looks like. When an opinion doesn’t get to stand alone unjustified or defended only by “gut feeling”, we can look at it as a community and assess the truth of certain claims. But when an opinion is based on a subjective experience such as the “nastiness of seafood” or the “beauty of Picasso’s painting”, a community of observers is rendered obsolete by the individual’s insistence on her own feelings and reactions to the experience.

Returning to the power of speeches, I affirm that language creates truth, if only psychologically. (Philosophical arguments about subjective versus objective truth go back forever.) We are all, each of us, more than capable of using language that is “true” in this sense, in the sense where facts do not exist but where there is still a reality to mess around with. One of the most powerful devices for creating powerful language is the metaphor.

A metaphor “shows how two things that are not alike in most ways are similar in one important way.” It creates a relationship between two objects or ideas that did not exist before. It is a kind of magic trick that calls new things into being.

Many metaphors are simple because of the singular similar property they possess:
“I was really upset about Mom’s death, but Tina was a rock.”
What do Tina and a rock have in common? What are their individual properties? A rock is composed of inorganic material; it is not alive, and it is probably very, very old. Tina is most likely a complex organic life form, a human; probably a woman; likely not that old in geologic terms.

Of course our minds aren’t so analytical to go through this sort of listing and we will probably just see the two things in our head: a woman and a rock. The shared quality is that they are both solid, in one sense of the word or another. So the beauty of the metaphor here is that it gives us a characteristic that we might not have given if we were asked to make separate lists about the two. We have made a bridge of abstraction between real things. The power (the truth) of a metaphor depends upon the strength of that bridge.

There are also slightly more complex metaphors. Take the title of this Pat Benatar song: “Love is a battlefield.”

We do not think of love as a battlefield in any material sense of the terms. What are the properties of the two? “Love” is a strong, chemically-created bond between people; a cocktail of good feelings; strong affinity for something. A battlefield is a field where warring factions carry out combat; the scene of many deaths; a chaotic mass of people attacking one another.

This metaphor is trickier because we must choose among meanings of the word “love”. Cultural context helps us out here, as standing alone the word usually refers to romantic love. Next we must see the word “battlefield” for more than it is—more than just as a physical place but also what the intentions are of the people in that place. They are presumably warriors, at least two sides opposing each other, fighting one another. Thus we can see the metaphor to mean love is a place (a state of being) where people fight and oppose each other.

The complexity of this metaphor makes it richer as well. The next line of the song goes: “We stand heartache to heartache.” Combined with the first line, this forms an “extended metaphor” because it contains both a comparison of two ideas (love and a battlefield) and then an additional comparison (“we” who stand here on this battlefield). It is similar to the line from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”:
“All the World’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”

The power of these metaphors should be self-evident (even if the definition is a featureless desert…see what I did there?) It abounds in the most eternal poems, prose, and speech. Much of our language hangs upon it. In fact, even the verb “hang upon” is metaphorical but has become used so often and is so common that we no longer see the comparisons involved but just the singular action-meaning that the metaphor conveys.

I propose that we do a brief exercise together now with metaphors we see, hear, and interact with. Look around the room you are sitting in (or survey the space in your head) and try to think of ten metaphors using at least two objects in each. Do it as quick as you can, less than five minutes if possible. I’ll do it right now and see what I can think up (I swear I won’t cheat with time). Aaaaaaand GO!:

A water-bottle is an hour-glass of thirst.
Books are drivers of the future of imagination.
Teachers are ants living in a colony with too many queens.
My mind is a river and the thoughts mere molecules of water.
Smartphones are step ladders to libraries of useless information.
Coffee is the devil.
Alcohol is the devil.
My mind is a blank canvas and I have no paints.
Words are fodder for fools.
A blog is a faucet left on in an otherwise empty house.

Whew! That was hard to do in five minutes! Not so great, but I may have to take that last one into consideration. A Freudian slip perhaps…

Please feel free to any metaphors that you came up with in the comments below (if you are even still reading this post).