[MD] A Meditation on Metaphor - part 2

[MarshaV]

With metaphor we have a convergence of desires, a locus of perceptually renewable pleasure.  As the generation of leaves, so is that of men.  As a flock of migrant birds, so a War swooped down from Olympus, and sped across the Achaian plain.   Thy belly is like a heap of wheat, thy neck a tower, thy beauty terrible as an army with banners, come into my garden and eat the pleasant fruits.  That book, and the man who wrote it, was a pimp.  I burn and I freeze.  If we are two, we are two so, as stiff twin compasses are two.  My love is like a red red rose.  Was there another Troy for her to burn?  The evening stretches out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.  Petals on a wet, black bough.  Not waving but drowning.  Love or death, who cares.  The sharp honeyed burning point of course is that the pleasure we take in metaphor is a pleasure of consent, an agreement that the distance between two things is cancellable because of their likeness, whereby each illuminates some inner truth belonging to the other.  Locates it.  The question of whether the things are themselves usually pleasurable or painful becomes irrelevant.  Like truth, metaphor makes pleasant all that it touches. 
 
As process it goes as follows, the convergence of desires.
 
First, I desire to communicate (to you), to share (with you) my sense of some object, such as the life cycle of mankind, or your belly.  Second, in order to do so I must meditate on my object, further, understand it more fully --- in other words, I desire more of it.  Its inward structure or qualities.  I want to kiss it with the kisses of my mouth --- that is to say, my imagination.  Next, I remember that I cannot communicate what x is and means except by comparing it to non-x, but I don't yet know which non-x.  The metaphor is a given, comes, like an act of grace, into my consciousness.  It enters with a leap and a bound.  Though I may have been sweating for it, frustrated as when one searches for missing keys, the search is irrelevant --- it may appear without a search; and, on the contrary, any amount of search may fail to produce it.  Two objects now are present; I joyously recognize illuminating affinity, as something which really exists already in the world and was attending discovery.
 
So here we have several sorts of desire.  My desire as a poet at communicate.  My desire to know x better than I do.  My desire to think of a non-x, which resembles x and will shed exciting light on it.  Then, when I have joined my x to its non-x, the awareness that their relationship pre-existed the discovery, and desired to be discovered.  Can this be?  Yes, it can be.  Of course it always is.  It always has been.
 
Notice two things now.  The two objects which a metaphor erotically joins are always at some odd asymmetrical angle to each other, they are never mere opposites (the juxtaposition of opposites is the figure of paradox, not metaphor) nor are they from the same category of objects.  There would be no point saying that a rose is like a tulip, because there is no discovery being made here.  But if we say that a woman is like a rose, or that men are like leaves falling in a forest then we are discovering that the world of plants and that of beasts are in some respects (which we do not spell out) alike, have arisen from some common source or obey common laws or manifest common features.  Or if my friend says "My love wants to park in front of your house, it wants to beep its horn," she is discovering an affinity between the world of feeling and that of technology.  The implication of every metaphor is that the world is a multidimensional web of connections between animate and inanimate, larger and smaller, past and present, which await discovery.  Every metaphor hints at universal metaphor.  In the physical world it is true of course that all objects attract each other gravitationally, and in some cases magnetically as well, and at a subatomic level bits of matter compel one another through strong and weak forces behaving selectively.  Second, the two compared objects retain their own qualities and histories. 
 
 
 
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