[MD] A Meditation on Metaphor by Alicia Ostriker

[MarshaV]

A Meditation on Metaphor  by Alicia Ostriker
 
 
Metaphor: a carrying across.  You see the word on delivery vans in the dusty avenues of Athens, Metaphoros.  A carrying across, a getting over, a bearing there, of what?  Of course, of love.  Of the erotic.  Metaphor:  that which joins, that which announces connection, overlap, shared essence, and yet retains the actual distance between whatever objects it brings together.  As with eroticism, the betrothed / beloved is both one with me and elusive, evasive, ever capable of escape.  I myself moreover am ever able to escape my beloved, I know very well how I can lapse from the height of desire.  Into death, says Keats, breathing softly, ceasing upon the midnight with no pain, pillowed on the fair love's ripening breast, and so on.  The poet loves linking love and death, l'amour and la mort.  My own experience is that the lapse is into boredom, for example, that slippery slope of too much satiation bringing indifference, dulling the sharp point of desire.  The honeyed point.
 
In the interior of love isn't there a flaming sword turning every which way, beyond which the lover steps.  In the innerness of love.  A curtain of fire, which means or can mean anything from real danger --- or legal or moral inhibition --- down to the pure and simple otherness of the beloved.  Surely all those familiar distances and prohibitions in love stories are merely metaphors whose function is to augment (as an oscillograph augments a tremor) and register physically (as an electron microscope registers the dotty wheeling of subatomic particles) the fundamental otherness of the beloved to the self, which however infinitely small it may become, is a distance that can never become zero.  And yet, in love, one feels absolutely, momentarily or perhaps in a suffusion of feeling diffused over time, that the distance truly is zero.
 
The distance, one feels, is infinite, all the winds of the cosmos blow through it.  Yet at the same time it is zero.  There is no distance, it is annulled.  
 
One steps over to the beloved, into the place of the beloved, through a wheel of fire.  One is aflame, oneself.  We can do this, and remain deathless, because the fire is invented, fictional.  While, certainly, being real. We ourselves vibrate ecstatically, in love we recognize this, between being real and invented creatures.
 
Come, my beloved.
 
Come, my beloved, and I will play a part which you are now imagining.  I wish to crystallize into a form of whatever you have foreseen, to become what you invent, and then even more beyond that, to surprise and overwhelm you, beyond your known desire.
 
(In my dream last night we are talking with our friend, a woman publisher, in her mountain retreat.  She is in her late forties or early fifties, comfortably but fashionably dressed, her features chiselled and bony.  She has just hired as an advertising manager a man we never met before, or rather, met for a few minutes just now, as we are arriving and he was leaving.  He had three small snowsuited children with him, with whom we played, crawling on the floor.  He seemed bulky, confident, a bit of a charlatan of some sort, moderately attractive.  Our friend turns to us abruptly when he is gone.  "He has a lot of experience licking pussy," she says, blushing slightly.)
 
Metaphor is the erotic element in language.   This is why language without metaphor is chilling and irritating.  Inhuman, not quite believable.  A web of refusals.  Ice.  Keeping me at a distance when I want to come closer, dive deeper, know more.  Withholding information.  Refusing bread.  Offering stone.  In discourse which lacks metaphor, a disinfected discourse, which pretends to protect itself from the st(r)ains of desire, the greedy exhausting disease of love, there is no mother's milk, the bread is old rags, the meat is sand.
  
 
 
 
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