[MD] Dreaming and death

[david buchanan]

Mark said:
...the MoQ is asserting that some metaphors are better than others, not me. 
This is how is goes if i have it right: 1. All sq patterns are evolving. 2. 
The best ones survive. 3. Therefore, some are better than others as a matter 
of MoQ (and empirical) fact. ...The MoQ is itself an intellectual metaphor, 
and the best one yet invented in my opinion. An intellectual metaphor uses 
abstract symbols to describe reality as sq, (maths, philosophy, etc.) but 
they all point to DQ. Social metaphors, like religion, laws, describe 
reality as sq, but point toward DQ.

dmb replies:
Oh, I see what you're doing. As you're using it, the word 'metaphor' pretty 
much applies to everything. Its equivalent to static patterns because all of 
human understanding is a matter of building analogies upon analogies. Is 
that about right? This is not what I mean at all when I use the word. I'm 
simply talking about a form of expression. I'm just talking about the 
picture language of our mythologies, which is much more specific than the 
mythos in which they exist.

See, when you asked about which was better than the others the title of 
Joseph Campbell's first book popped into my mind; "The hero with a Thousand 
Faces". To put the main premise in Pirsigian terms, we could say that there 
is a Dynamic value force constant enough in human experience that every 
culture has depicted it in myth and celebrated it in some way. Thus we have 
a single hero, but with a thousand faces. Each culture uses the metaphors 
that make sense to them in their context, but the value force being 
expressed are essentially the same.

Pirsig's nightmare octopus could have been a squid or a swarm of bees. The 
surface can change shape in all kinds of directions but still do a good job 
of expressing the fear it depicts, for example.

But if we drop the "metaphor" problem and simply ask if intellectual 
descriptions should be preferred over social level references, I'd say sure, 
okay. But part of what I've been saying is that if we read the myths as 
myths instead of misreading them as history or metaphysics or whatever, then 
we don't have to pick one over the other because then the two depictions are 
not in conflict. They don't tell a different story so much as they tell it 
differently. The MOQ's philosophical mysticism and the myths of our culture 
only illuminate each other. They speak to us on different levels, but the 
message is the same. Or so it seems to me.

dmb

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