i try not to use this blog as a noticeboard for my own purposes, but i've been thinking a lot about the creative impulse and i have decided that everything is metaphor and metaphor is everything.
this essay on language by john hughes (published in island) triggered something in my already quite manic brain.
"Analogy is a much richer mode of apprehension than explanation, and truer, I think, to our own experience. It's not simply that the part can stand for the whole (that one thing can stand for another), but rather ... that the part is more interesting than the whole, because like a trace it suggests what we have missed, something larger, something looming but elusive, which cannot be grasped; that what is important, what is real, is there, but just out of reach. The wonder of the whole. That the world has an agency separate from our own."
a personal theory that poetic resonance is a phenomenon of neural pathways - that metaphors actually build the mind - may or may not be possible (damn, i should have studied neuroscience) but i keep coming back to it. that trace visualised as a crack in a dam wall or barricade.
my old mate raoul said some stuff about this.
"Poetry ... reinforces spontaneity's hold on reality. Poetry is an act which engenders new realities; it is the fulfilment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence."
it is a product of our stupidity about the nature of reality that we identify the awareness of such things as an illness.
this essay on language by john hughes (published in island) triggered something in my already quite manic brain.
"Analogy is a much richer mode of apprehension than explanation, and truer, I think, to our own experience. It's not simply that the part can stand for the whole (that one thing can stand for another), but rather ... that the part is more interesting than the whole, because like a trace it suggests what we have missed, something larger, something looming but elusive, which cannot be grasped; that what is important, what is real, is there, but just out of reach. The wonder of the whole. That the world has an agency separate from our own."
a personal theory that poetic resonance is a phenomenon of neural pathways - that metaphors actually build the mind - may or may not be possible (damn, i should have studied neuroscience) but i keep coming back to it. that trace visualised as a crack in a dam wall or barricade.
my old mate raoul said some stuff about this.
"Poetry ... reinforces spontaneity's hold on reality. Poetry is an act which engenders new realities; it is the fulfilment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence."
it is a product of our stupidity about the nature of reality that we identify the awareness of such things as an illness.
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4 Comments:
I'm guessing that you like metaphor...
about as much as i like creative highs. i should point out that i haven't read the book i referred to above. i did find a disturbingly giggly interview with the author on RN today.
the essay is great and reminded me of the best description i had of how language develops. it was told by trevor jamieson at the NYWF last year and goes roughly like this (i'm paraphrasing so don't take it for gospel):
1.you a born in a spot, this spot becomes significant to you as you birth spot.
2.your mother leaves the umbilical cord at another spot this spot becomes significant to you as the spot you ties were finally severed and you a you.
3.your mother takes you to the camp of your tribe and you enter the tribe this becomes signify to you as a larger belonging
4. your mother takes you to sleep and you rest your first night
As time goes on you have to tell the significance of each place to the next generation and so on and so forth throughout all the generations. each generation learns a new place and word and spreads it along language developing naturally and organically like so.
that to me is such a beautiful sense and understanding of place and language and the way the two are intertwined.
also as someone once pointed out to me language is a system we live through and all system are metaphors. if you live language you have to love metaphor.
thanks for that reflection. i feel better about sitting up doing a little work for his play now!
the poem i have been working on says
'language is a singing
into being we must do;
if you want, our fabrication'
i mean that language makes the world.
i am aware of using an Aboriginal way of speaking here, though perhaps i am saturated in that stuff. it's hard to tell what comes from country and what comes from mind, and that, i suppose, is the point.
if language is a system it is an emergent system... a living anarchy.
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