Hello Alison,
Thanks for the Ed Dorn quote.
>(Curious what you mean here: "the metaphor will always win"? Win what? What
>metaphor?)
Oh, I don't quite know what I meant either!, but I suppose it was partly ALL
metaphor, from the basic spatial metaphors which run through - seemingly -
all expressed thought - so that speech always seems to end up being
figurative - and also that the construction of metaphors in politics cuts
both ways as the metaphor reacts to other things, to reality or modulates
itself against other conflicting metaphors (as you point out concerning
neo-con rhetoric - and because it's so difficult to find out much
information about Iraq, how bad it is or how really bad it is, perhaps one
particularly notices the different metaphors here clashing in the media
while through the glass Ed Dorn's Power of Reality keeps erupting into this
field to change it) - or in a trivial smaller way with celebrities known for
being THIS who find it difficult later to change that image when they want
to do THAT. Having a metaphor-identity placed on you from outside is the
worst possibility - as the category of "muslim" seems to have hardened over
the last few years, that "all muslims are like this or believe that". What
is won is life, if politics becomes that which "gives form to the life of
the people". I don't know if you've read it but there's a very interesting
discussion of all this in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life which i find myself reaching for...
The difficulty you write about in the representation of & reaction to
atrocity is one of the most pressing of difficulties, I think, in life & in
writing (how to not "represent" but to connect, somehow), and I do see what
you mean with the Abu Ghraib photos and also with Laurie's poem - it's just
that I thought Laurie's poem was a quick illumination of the linguistic &
political line of movement towards torture, and so in this case the occasion
of the atrocity wasn't entirely out of sight, wasn't doubly erased, as so
much specifically "war art" does tend towards doing, I'd agree.
O to leave the contemplation of the Horrors of War for a while and, with
Kenneth Koch, head off to find the "love's flat, sun's sweets" Pleasures of
Peace...
Edmund
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