"Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car," William Blake
Finding Meaning Through Metaphor
The Power of Metaphoric Thinking
Here is an insightful article on the importance of metaphoric thinking in our lives.
In our image-saturated, over-sped world, we are losing the imaginative power to create and find meaning through metaphor
This is like this is like that is one of the primary ways that we make sense of new entities. We compare them to things with which we are familiar, from our environment, our culture, our identities. Aristotle wrote that metaphor ‘has clarity and sweetness and strangeness’, adding:
It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
From the real to the fanciful, metaphoric comparisons are not only part of the architecture of language and mind but they are elemental to human thought and imagination.
Overlook the lessons here at your peril. Stick to the literal, and you are dead. You remain with the immediate, the tangible, the obvious - you deny yourself the future. Facts and figures have to come with stories and meanings that strike a deep chord. The future has to have a metaphoric quality for us to be able to imagine it and strive to bring it about. To have any kind of a future worth having, we need to nurture and expand our capacity for metaphor every bit as much as we need to grow our empathy for the planet.
"As we see it, metaphor exists – and relies upon – the complex, emotionally resonant, arresting connections we make. These linkages, between ourselves and the world, require a degree of primary experience, as well as sensitivity to the nature and details of that experience. Metaphor is the knot between language and image, between language and sensory experience, and between language and narrative. Indeed, a growing body of research supports the view that metaphoric thinking could be deeply tied to empathy."
Metaphors grow the mind and feed the soul. Dante insisted on the truth of all he wrote in "The Comedy." Whether that truth is literal or metaphorical is one for Dante scholars. (I'm wrestling with the notion of a "metaphorical physics." There's great psychic and moral depth here. But is it true? Yes. But in what way? Facts have to be existentially meaningful. I'm interested in the decline in empathy all round. That's a question of lack and deficiency in various areas. If the unexamined life is not worth living, the over-examined life is unliveable). Beware the missing metaphor. I'm hearing people repeat the phrase that climate crisis is an "existential crisis." Understand how deep that notion of existence goes, and attend to the cultural and moral environment as well as the natural.
Hélène Domon: “Very important notion. My own Livre Imaginaire was all about metaphors or "écriture" as primary power in our experience of the world.” https://www.academia.edu/5565136/Le_Livre_imaginaire_DOC
There are some incredibly important issues here, and things we miss at our peril. The need to make facts existentially meaningful is something I keep returning to. I'm hearing the phrase "existential crisis" a lot, with respect to climate crisis. I'd urge people to see this as more than a threat to physical existence in its more obvious manifestations. Existential goes deep into the core of being and meaning. I liked this quote from the article:
"Reading, alone, is not sufficient for building empathy; it needs the image, and essential foreground, for us to forge connections, which is why textbooks filled with information but devoid of narrative fail to engage us; why facts and dates and events rarely stick without story."
Story, narrativity, words, all the points I made in The Ethics of Enchantment article, are the key themes of the literary ecology I explore. These are all often treated as ephemeral but are actually central to the motivational economy. We lose this metaphoric quality at our peril.
I am currently wrestling with the balance between metaphorical and literal truth in Dante. I have a feeling he believed his impossibilities, but this is nothing at all like the literalism criticised in this article, the very opposite, in fact. There’s a section in this article on the dissection of poetry, comparing it to the dissection of a frog or the separation of platelets in a Petri dish. This made me think of something Dorothy Sayers said about Dante. We are all so clever now as to be able to identify the mechanics at work, pick entire works apart by showing how they were constructed. I would challenge the people who are so expert at identifying the materials, the mechanics, and the construction to do likewise themselves – put their own set of tools and materials together and create a poetic work of similar weight. Then they’ll see the nature and value of true creation. Sayers understood this point with respect to Dante’s technique:
“In a way I know how it’s done. I could take it to pieces and analyse the tricks. Just when you are getting tired, some ‘invention’ occurs – an alarming hold-up at the gates of the infernal city, a pathetic story by Franscesca or Ugolino, a pleasant aerial excursion on Geryon’s back, a grisly laugh over the quarrelling demons, a picturesque apparition of giants, a sudden dab of bright colour when Dis appears in the middle of the grey ice, a smattering of science when they pass the Centre … but merely naming the tricks doesn’t explain the achievement; it only makes one think one’s self clever.”
Sayers in Reynolds p20
And she gets why the world has been reading Dante for seven centuries:
"Neither the world, nor the theologians, nor even Charles Williams had told me the one great, obvious, glaring fact about Dante Alighieri of Florence — that he was simply the most incomparable storyteller who ever set pen to paper."
Further Papers on Dante (New York, 1957), p. 2
Of course, being a Dantista, I would agree. But we can certainly agree that he was one of the very greatest storytellers. It is that power as a storyteller that impresses:
“I still don’t know how he does it. After all, even without having read it, one know what it’s all about, and you wouldn’t think there would be any real suspense about it … In spite of which I found myself panting along with my tongue hanging out, as though it were a serial thriller, careful not to read the argument of each canto beforehand, lest it should spoil what was coming.”
Sayers quoted in Barbara Reynolds The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante 19
I never liked dissection, and consider the mechanics important, but very far from being all-important. The ends are nothing without the means to realize them; but the means and meaningless without ends. The modern world has seen an expansion of means accompanied by a diminution of meaning. Ray Monk's article above makes the point with respect to methodology:
"Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept."
I spent ages trying to spell out my methodology to the academic research committee in Manchester. It was so incredibly frustrating, debilitating even, since I knew exactly what I wanted to say and was keen to set about actually saying it, making modifications as I proceeded to the depths. I'm remembering a quote attributed to Einstein here, “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research.” I can never find any source for that quote, but it makes a kind of sense with respect to the process of discovery. Of course, I have a very good idea of where I was going and why I wanted to go there in the first place.
I also write a little on Wittgenstein's use of musical metaphors in the Tractatus, making a comparison with the inherent musical structure of Dante's Comedy. Now that may strike many as quite a leap, but one way or another we all have to leap. The more logic and evidence we have on our side, the less of a leap we will have to make. But I'm feeling in flighty mood.
Dante himself makes that very argument in his letter to Cangrande:
"For we perceive many things by the intellect for which language has no terms – a fact which Plato indicates plainly enough in his books by his employment of metaphors; for he perceived many things by the light of the intellect which his everyday language was inadequate to express." (Dante, Epistles, XIII: 84).
Musical metaphors and imagery serve as a way of carrying a truth and a meaning that is unintelligible to the rational mind. That's how it goes in The Comedy. I rather like this idea of music as the mode of mystic revelation. Lose metaphoric thinking and you are lost, period. This is a big part of my Dante, I do hope to have it finished long before the 700th anniversary of "the great Florentine's" death in 2021.
There are times when I think I'm on my own taking the approach I do. It's always encouraging to see quality work being produced by thinkers working along similar lines. It's easy to get discouraged writing on someone who wrote so very long ago like Dante, with people thinking they have nothing of any relevance to say. That's a huge mistake. Truth has nought to do with the date at the top of the newspaper. There's great depth and nuance in these figures. Of course, Dante knows all about walking the lonely, but right, path.