OK, back from Chinon, pretty disgusting, the French New Year and I'll spare
you the details.
Pretty much agree with Ric re metaphor. Try Jackson Mac Low's "Hotly knives
fish shoot blood" in his "42 Merzgedichte in Memorian Kurt Schwitters" and
ask: to what extent are the connections that you form metaphors and to what
extent are they literal usages? Gets difficult.
E.g., "Hotly knives", if we think of knives hot by being washed, or heated in
pans, has a literal aspect. Unless they have that meaning but with buried
metaphorical significance. Or perhaps they are literal in the sense of a Dada
object -- chamber pots and so on. Well does a Dada object have a metaphorical
dimension?
Or "Hotly knives" as if they flashed out in a hot quarrel might be literal too
-- if Jackson was describing a literal quarrel he observed over some fish" (!)
but that would borrow "hot" = "hot tempered and there were knives present",
which would be a metaphor fossilised into language. Then the adverbial use
takes it out of the fossil state. "fish shoot blood" has all sorts of
ambiguities depending on whether you read it backwards or forwards -- for
example, forwards from knives, backwards from fish to make "fish knives",
forwards again from fish (is "shoot" metaphorical in the sense of shooting
outwards in a spout of blood, or could it be to shoot at blood -- less
likely?), and so on. So you have a collocation with multiple meanings
depending on interpretations (not exhausted here by), and the readers'
question might be whether they prefer one reading over another. If so, why?
If not, how is the pleasure gained -- from multiplicity itself, for example?
Is, then, a phrase which offers more possible readings than another, and plays
across both metonymical and metaphorical axes to create max interpretations in
both directions, a "better" phrase than one with fewer possible
interpretations? Well, then we run into people who say "Who judges better?"
(I do, within the confines of my own mind?) For example, the classic
Chomskyean phrase which I have forgotten perhaps but goes something like
"colorless green ideas sleep furiously" has the same kind of buzz as Jackson's
phrase. Which does reader X or Y find most satisfying?
Maggie O'Sullivan has made her own pathways here, such as
IMPEARLS TO FEATHER
feathering & stars
lit lit lit
FINGERS IN BEHIND THE EYE--
Where the pearl texture is lent to the feather as colour metaphor; "impearls"
becomes almost a new verb but the pun is made with "impulse", in which case
"feather" can be noun or verb, "feathering" hints at "farther -- ing" & stars
and this is interfered by pokey fingers playing with the retinal firing --
which presumably contributes to stars. This is from her "winter ceremony"
where we begin with geese from an old Irish poem "grieving in the cold night",
so that a singing is taking place along metaphorical axis, pun-like processes,
and a literal action (presumably) affecting sight (and vision).
You can find phrases in Prynne playing across multiple grammatical functions
and metaphorical implications of its component vocabulary; but, there, when
the Prynne process is working at optimum, the meaning is sometimes
complicatedly philosophical (I've written about this a couple of times). His
"Stars and Tigers" booklet deserves to be more widely known because it creates
a position to worry us, to argue with in our minds.
The question is bewildering in its depths: why do we need metaphor at the
moment when our experiencing the world prompts us into language? Presumably
the fact that language is insufficiently powerful to render experience is one
reason -- we require metaphor to do fuller justice to our experience and also
to extend its possibilities for ourselves. The "real" over-determines our
language (passes beyond its borders) and yet, since we are language users, we
feel the "impearls" to push language further to see if we can get more of our
dimmed sense of the real into it. Then, in doing so, we extend our "real",
making it partly linguistic and accepting the result as a formative act of
mind -- the act of producing the poetic line, for example.
Metaphor, as I think of it now, operates at levels much finer than what
orthodox criticism normally calls metaphor (which is why the "New Martians"
often seemed so crude, poetically, because you could sense the striving for
simile. There is a sort of torque that language takes in its formation which
twists it metaphorically one way and into literal syntactical (and
paratactical) chains the other; but the two aspects can't always be
distinguished clearly. For example, supposing I have a "literal" mystical
vision, of a divinity descending in a gold chariot, is that a metaphor? Or is
it a literal vision? Or is it both? Or is its "impearls" really partly
linguistic, translated into vision? (I do occasionally have waking glimpses
but not of divinities, by the way.)
God, that was a good New Year's meal!
Doug
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