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"STALKING THE WILD METAPHOR
by Don Washburn
"Logic builds fences; metaphor leaps over them."
For many people the word "metaphor" conjures up the image of Miss Grundy in the seventh grade explaining the difference between metaphor and simile. (The latter used the word "like" or "as," she explained.) It was called a figure of speech, which seemed to be some sort of literary embellishment, a superfluous wreath decorating thought already solidly anchored in the granite of ordinary prose. "MacBeth doth murder sleep! the innocent sleep, sleep which knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care," Miss Grundy intoned. Why didn't Shakespeare just say MacBeth had insomnia? Metaphor, one might conclude, is something that poets and other unreliable people use to have their pretty way. But it is nothing to take very seriously.
Recent scholarship, however, gives quite a different picture. Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By declare, "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical." They demonstrate the pervasiveness of metaphor and the many ways in which the ordinary affairs of life are conceived of and acted on by reference to metaphors imbedded in our language. The sociologist Catherine Norton in her recent book, Life Metaphors, also concludes,
This collection of interviews has demonstrated that metaphor is not an abstract linguistic device employed solely by poets. Metaphor is alive and used by people in everyday life to express their perceptions of the world. People possess metaphorical structures to define the way they cope…Metaphor subtly empowers people with the ability to change their identities, their lives, and their interactions with others. As people craft metaphors they also craft their lives. (p. 192)
And David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner, discussing metaphor's narrative cousin, myth, add the following thought: "Much of the psychological suffering people experience is entangled in personal myths that are not attuned to their actual needs, potentials and circumstances." They stress in their book Personal Mythology (p.2) the importance of metaphor and myth in the healthy functioning of the psyche. Unfortunately for most people, the central role of metaphor in their lives is largely unconscious.
It is a contemporary prejudice that literal language is the most reliable way to access reality. But when one goes in search of the purely literal, it is hard to find outside computers and academic specialties. Natural language is riddled with metaphor. In fact, the word "literal" itself comes from a metaphor, a Latin word which means with the spoken sounds of a language. (The capacity for creating conventional correspondences or codes is one of the symbolic resources of the human nervous system.) Unlike metaphor, which is based on experienced similarities, the literal participates in a conventional code or schema. It is derived from the logic of distinctions and the consensus reality that grows up around those distinctions.
If you browse through your Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, you will notice that the vocabulary, that rules our thoughts is organizable in an implied hierarchy of abstract categories, such as quantity, number, time, space, form, motion, volition, value, etc. Such categories and their subdivisions are the record of the consensus reality created by our ancestors going all the way back to the Indo-European nomads. Whatever identifications they found useful or life-serving were crystallized in a kind of shorthand, commanding instant recognition from others in the same language community. (Denotative definition is the process through which such agreements are clarified.) But it is important to remember that these semantic "fossils" preserve an implied metaphysics that powerfully controls the way the world is experienced. Much of what we think of as literal thought turns out to be the inherited structure of our language, so familiar that it has become second nature. This has its usefulness, since every new baby born does not have to invent his own worldview and mode of expression. But at the same time, he or she becomes an unconscious prisoner of the prevailing way of thinking and talking about things.
Metaphor turns out to be one of the ways out of the prison. The typological thrust of language, which generates hierarchies of subordination and superordination, is compensated for by a process of lateral rather than literal (or vertical) thinking. Gregory Bateson called this "abduction," contrasting it with the familiar processes of induction (making generalizations based on observation) and deduction (drawing conclusions from premises, using categorical logic). "Abduction," he wrote in Mind and Nature (pp. 142-143) "may be seen as a double or multiple description of some object or event or sequence… certain formal characteristics of one component will be mirrored in the other." This is multi-dimensional thinking in contrast with the self-limited "fix" of literal thinking, which is more concerned about clarity and suppression of differences that interfere with communication. Blake called literal thinking "the sleep of reason" because it screened out so many other dimensions of experience, especially those accessed by the magical and mythical stages of knowing.
Obviously the way we know things changes at different times in our lives and seems to undergo major shifts in the history of human consciousness in general. In the first half of life we mostly spend our time filling up with everything we have to know to function in the world in which we are born. In the second half, we often find ourselves undoing the work of the first half and emptying out much that we have learned. We start with the problem of mastery and end with the problem of mystery. And from time to time in moments of transition we undergo the process of alchemy, in which we are both filling up and emptying out at the same time.
The great Sufi poet Jaluddin Rumi metaphorically described this process in the third volume of the Mathnawi:
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game. (We are Three, p.10)
Butterflies and frogs transform once, but humans more often, at least in our consciousness and our relationship to the cosmos.
How many stages are there? Rumi mentions five. Others list seven or ten. (Depending on the fineness of your perception, a rainbow can have as many colors as you like.) In any case, it seems plausible that a number of stages do exist, that each embraces a characteristic form of knowing, and that our understanding of the world and ourselves shifts as we move from one stage to the next. My thesis is that certain "wild metaphors" provide us with symbolic antennae to grasp the realities of the still-unknown next step. I also would like to explore the possibility that each stage embraces those figures of speech that are most congruent with its own epistemology.
In stage 1, the EMBRYONIC, there is an absence of ego ("nourishment comes in the blood") and a blurring of the distinction between inner and outer. Consciousness is global and has the feel of what the anthropologist Levy Bruhl called the "participation mystique." It corresponds individually to infancy and collectively to animism. The babbling and cooing of the infant in whom sound and sense are commingled is the characteristic linguistic expression. Therefore, words that are nonsense syllables ("jabberwocky") or onomatopoetic (sound imitating sense) probably derive from this stage. The kinds of puns and wordplay that are found in schizophrenic "word salad" and in literary works such as James Joyce's Finnigan's Wake may also have their roots here.
In stage 2, the MAGICAL, there is a precarious ego ("infant drinking milk") and the absence of a clear distinction between the self and the physical body. Consciousness is subject to right brain intervention and associational short-circuiting in which sequential features of a repeated experience become exchangeable. It corresponds individually to childhood and collectively to totemism or voodoo. The power of symbols as controllers of behavior and feeling is uppermost so that incantation (word magic) as a linguistic mode is central. Most advertising operates at this level. The characteristic figure of speech is metonymy, which substitutes the part for the whole or the whole for the part.
In stage 3, the MYTHICAL, there is an established ego ("child on solid food") but a blurring of categorical distinctions. Perception and imagination are mixed. Consciousness is subject to cross-matching in which the features of one situation or domain of consciousness are applied to another. Contents that seem to possess compelling similarities are sometimes taken as identical. It corresponds individually to adolescence and collectively to religion. Lateral thinking at this stage favors myth and metaphor. Myth vitalizes consciousness by saturating it with the numinous imagery of intuition and prescience. As religion, it links heaven and earth. Metaphor also jumps semantic fences but usually does not have the narrative quality of myth. Rather it overcomes the semantic sclerosis to which language is subject by shifting conscious perspective. Or as the poet Wallace Stevens has written, "Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor."
In stage 4, the MENTAL, there is a fulfilled ego ("searcher after wisdom") but also a tendency toward confinement in the cocoon of conditional awareness. The habits and programs of a lifetime circumscribe the horizon of consciousness. And there is a tendency toward reductionist attitudes and spiritual agnosticism. It corresponds individually with to early maturity and collectively to secular empiricism. This is the modus operandi of our contemporary industrialized world with its commitment to the methodologies of science and technology. Consciousness is dominated by the logic of distinction and literal thinking. Lateral thinking most naturally takes the form of analogy (a is to b as x is to y), and imaginative activity is characteristically under conscious control as fiction.
In stage 5, the PSYCHIC, there is a displacement of the ego ("hunter of more invisible game") which begins the process Jung called "individuation." It is the transpersonal equivalent of stage 3, corresponding individually to late maturity and collectively to "new age" spirituality (i.e. the descent of the Holy Spirit and channeling). Here the mid-life shift from master to mystery takes place, and a hunger for spiritual realities begins to stir. This is the starting point of Danté's Divine Comedy. Danté (the character) discovers that heaven cannot be taken by storm and that he must embark on a spiritual journey. The journey takes him through Hell (confrontation with the shadow) through Purgatory (work on himself) and eventually to Paradise, where he has a vision of Beatrice, the soul guide or spiritual heart of his inspiration. Consciousness at stage five becomes sensitive to subtle realities and subject to the alchemy of higher transformation. The characteristic figures of this and subsequent stages are parable, paradox, and epiphany, all of which can be considered near-cousins of "wild metaphor."
In stage 5, the TRANSCENDENTAL, the ego is overcome and the illusion of independent existence disappears. There is a turning away from both inner and outer experience to a condition prior to self-definition, which is sometimes called "witness consciousness." It is the transpersonal equivalent of stage two, corresponding individually to spiritual mastery and collectively to the archetype of the New Jerusalem or Millenium. This stage is best visualized by contemplating the lives of the great masters, saints, and prophets of every tradition. Consciousness is rooted in what Da Free John calls "conditional Self-Realization or the intuition of Radiant Transcendental Being via the exclusive self-essence (inverted away from all objects.) The non-discursive symbolic thinking of this stage may add divine revelation to the previous list of figures.
In stage 7, the TRANSFIGURAL, the whole body self is completely sacrificed and dissolved into the Radiance of the One being. It is the transpersonal equivalent of stage 1, corresponding individually to avatars and adepts and collectively to the pleroma (communion of saints). Consciousness is "cosmic" and communication is post-symbolic. To quote Da Free John again, "the Lion-hearted seventh-realizer…is inherently free of any apparent implications, or binding power of phenomenal conditions. If no conditions arise to the notice, there is simply Radiant Transcendental Being."
Although they remain active as regressive possibilities, stages that are left behind are commonly invalidated or reinterpreted. For example, at the MENTAL stage myth is "explained away" as primitive attempts at natural science. This was an important theme in Frazer's The Golden Bough, a classic reinterpretation of ancient mythology. Although "rational" people retain the ability to experience things in mythic mode, it is no longer thought of as a legitimate part of consensus reality. It is relegated to the unconscious side of things where it remains an important ingredient in personal transformation and dream life. In the post-mental or transpersonal stages, however, myth regains its importance as a legitimate avenue of wisdom.
The limitations of abstract thought by itself is succinctly dramatized in Anthony de Mello's collection of brief teaching stories called One Minute Wisdom. In the entry entitled "Thought" the Master is conversing with another philosopher:
"Why are you so wary of thought?" said the philosopher. "Thought is the one tool we have for organizing the world."
"True. But thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it."
To his disciples he later said, "A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality." (p.113)
This is also the message of General Semantics Korzybski's famous dictum: The word is not the thing. Whatever you say something is, it is not. In every statement something is always left out. There is an inevitable gap between the world of symbols and the world of experiences and events.
Conceptual thinking is important to full human development. But if the seven stages described above are a reliable map of human evolution, a highly developed thinking function is not enough. Moreover, thinking can become pathological if it cannot be relinquished at will. People who are compulsively and obsessively "rational," like the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" or "Dr. Strangelove," the mad scientist, become separated from reality and fall prey to delusions that make a mockery of rationality. Clearly literal or analytical thought alone is not sufficient to encompass the Real. Many of the problems of technological societies are rooted in a hypertrophy of rational consciousness at the expense of openness, intuition and developed feeling.
This idea is an echo of C.G. Jung's teaching that inner growth depends on the development of all four psychological functions; sensation, feeling, intuition, and thinking. The functions can be regarded as channels to reality that must be operational if the world is to be fully present. The same note is struck in many mystical traditions which attempt to define what is meant by "higher truths." The following passage from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (author anonymous) is a good example:
"(pure mystical experience) must objectivize itself in consciousness and be accepted there as true (gnostic revelation), then prove to be certain by its objective fruits (sacred magic) and lastly, prove to be absolutely true in the light of pure thought based on pure subjective and objective experience (Hermetic philosophy)." It is a matter, therefore, of the four different senses: the mystical sense or spiritual touch, the gnostic sense or spiritual hearing, the magical sense or sense of spiritual vision, and lastly, the Hermetic-philosophical sense or sense of spiritual comprehension.
It is tempting to connect the stages of development already described with each of these "senses", at least at the higher turns of the epistemological spiral. But it is probably more accurate to say that there is a continuous process of refinement taking place as people respond to their own life conditions and discover within themselves hitherto unacknowledged psychological and spiritual resources.
Metaphor is one way to unblock conceptual exclusivity and "hardening of the categories". What I have called "wild metaphors" are those which anticipate the next development in consciousness. They break the grip of conventional perspective and, for a moment at least, shatter the prevailing mind set. This is especially important for people who are primarily functioning at stage 4, the MENTAL. Through metaphor, the realities of the transpersonal realms can be grasped intellectually long before they are fully realized experientially. Wild metaphors can prepare the way for conscious acceptance of "weird" happenings and orient the personality to changes that at best are unsettling and at worst terrifying.
Our most fundamental attitudes are metaphorical. The divine order itself is almost exclusively comprehended through cosmic metaphors. And from these metaphors we also get our sense of our own place in the world, as the following partial list suggest:
GOD WORLD MAN/WOMAN
Mother Home Child
Father Inheritance Descendant
Light Energy Spirit
Teacher School Student
Creator Creation Creature
Love Beloved Lover
Evolution Nature Animal
Word Idea Confidant
Playwright Stage Actor
Fate Machine Automation
Joker Illusion Seeker
Cynic Snare Dupe
Chance Wheel-of-Fortune Gambler
Sadist Torture Chamber Victim
Depending on what image we feel drawn to, our sense of the meaning of life shifts. In the twinkling of a metaphor we can literally move from heaven to hell and back.
Many powerful and problematical social conditions have arisen partly because of seminal metaphors. The conservatism of the Catholic Church may be linked to the saying of Jesus, "Upon this rock I found my church." And perhaps the relationship of the priesthood with the laity is derived from the Gospel metaphor of the shepherd and the flock. This incidentally is challenged in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, where there is the famous ironic chapter called "The Grand Inquisitor". The Inquisitor scolds Jesus at the Second Coming for offering mankind too much freedom. Men are sheep, he argues, who must be protected from life. Some thinkers claim that our current ecological crisis derives from the Biblical passage that grants man dominion over the earth. The hidden metaphor in the word "dominion" is that of master and subject, a far cry from the saner and more accurate contemporary metaphor of the "web" of life.
The realities of individual transformation are also typically expressed in metaphor. Ralph Metzer addresses this in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (column 12, pp. 47-62). His rich article "Ten Classic Metaphors of Self-Transformation", catalogues some of the most common. Three are biological (sleep-awakening, seed-flower, death-rebirth); four are physical (darkness-illumination, fragmentation-wholeness, separation-closeness, setting out-arriving); one is psychological (illusion-realization); and two are sociological (imprisonment-liberation, exile-home). There are many others, of course; but suffice to say, metaphor plays a very important role in the intra-personal dialogues that take place during important inner change.
Since every important change reconstitutes the mind as well as the deep psyche, it is useful to furnish it with images that will assist the process. "Wild metaphors", which are available in all the great spiritual traditions, have this sort of power. In some ways they are like the Buddhist koan, by-passing ordinary ways of comprehension. Often they are paradoxical, such as the Christian, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth", or the Taoist, "The highest good like water benefits many things, yet occupies dark places men despise," or the Buddhist, "Even upon a heap of rubbish the lotus will grow full of sweet perfume and delight."
Our greatest poets also occasionally move in their work beyond ordinary consciousness. One thinks of Walt Whitman, Dante Alighieri, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson. And high on this list is Jaluluddin Rumi, the thirteenth century mystic, already mentioned, who in his own language, Persian, is one of the greatest masters of world literature. Rumi presided over a Sufi teaching community which was dedicated to spiritual transformation. Most of his poetry is addressed to the problem of moving beyond stage 4 ("searcher after wisdom") to the higher stages ("hunter of more invisible game") and it is rich with wild metaphors. Part of this vast body of poetry (the Mathnavi alone is over 51,000 verses long) is now available to contemporary readers in idiomatic American English thanks to the work of the Coleman Barks, John Moyne, Robert Bly, and other inspired translators.
One cannot read very far in Rumi's work without meeting wild metaphors. Some poems are almost entirely made up of them. The following short examples, culled at random from Coleman Barks translations, are offered as an aperitif:
"Think what glories God can make from the fertilizer of sinning!"
"Soul of my soul of a hundred universes, be water in this Now-river."
"Choice is the salt on acts of worship."
"In sleep I migrate back. I spring loose from the four-branched time and space cross, this waiting room."
"The body is a device to calculate the astronomy of the spirit. Look through that astrolabe and become oceanic."
"We should try to wake up and look with the clear eye of the water we float upon."
"Someone listening to a millstone falls asleep. No matter the wheel keeps turning."
"There is a milk fountain in you. Don't walk around with an empty bucket."
The greatness of Rumi is that his explicit aim is to prepare the mind for higher consciousness. Just as Shams, the fierce dervish with the God-fire in his eyes, came to Rumi's life and transformed it, his single purpose is to help us transform ours.
Ultimately, of course, this moves us beyond words, beyond metaphors. Mysticism aims at the direct experience of the divine presence.
A thinker collects and links up proofs.
A mystic does the opposite.
He lays his head on a person's chest
and sinks into the answer.
Thinking gives off smoke
to prove the existence of fire.
The mystic sits within the burning.
Imagination loves to discover shapes
in rising smoke, but it is a great mistake
to leave the fire for that filmy sight.
(We Are Three, p.18)
In the silence of that burning the wildest metaphor is consumed!
REFERENCES
Anonymous. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. (New York, Amity House, 1985.)
Bateson, Gregory, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. (New York, Bantam Books, 1988).
De Bono, Edward. Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step. (New York, Harper and Row, 1970).
De Mello, Anthony. One Minute Wisdom, (New York, Doubleday, 1988).
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. (New York, The Heritage Press, 1949).
Feinstein, David and Stanley Krippner. Personal Mythology. (Los Angeles, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Ind., 1988).
Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough. (New York, Macmillan, 1922).
Heard, Gerald. The Five Ages of Man: The Psychology of Human History. (New York, The Julian Press, Inc., 1963).
Jung, C.G. Psychological Types. (New York, Pantheon Books, 1923).
Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. (Lakeville, Ct. International Aristotelian Library Publishing Co., 1948).
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. (Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Metzer, Ralph. "Ten Classical Metaphors of Self-transformation" in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 12, (Number 1, 1980).
Norton, Catherine Sullivan. Live Metaphors. (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill. Southern Illinois University Press, 1989).
Rumi, Jalaluddin, Open Secret. John Moyne and Coleman Barks, trans. (Putney, VT, Threshold Books, 1984).
Rumi, Jalaluddin. Unseen Rain, John Moyne and Coleman Barks, trans. (Putney, VT, Threshold Books, 1986).
Rumi, Jalaluddin. This Longing. John Moyne and Coleman Barks, trans. (Putney, Vt., Threshold Books, 1988).
Rumi Jalaluddin. We Are Three. Coleman Barks, trans. (Athens, Georgia, Maypop Books, 1987).
Stevens, Wallace. "Adagia" in The Laughing Man, 3 (Number 1, 1983).
"The Seven Stages of Eternal Life" in The Laughing Man, 3, (Number 1, 1983)
Wilbur, Ken. "Spectrum Psychology" in Re-Vision, 1. (Number 1, 1978).
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