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| Caught my eye ... |
Metaphor … a figure of speech, my dictionary says … and is
that almost a metaphor itself? … the image conjured in my mind a human outline
(figure) dancing among or perhaps with words … Though it might I suppose also
be a number tangled up with words, depending on where your mind goes first.
The dictionary goes on to say the figure of speech that is
metaphor is one “in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing
is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison as in ‘a sea
of troubles.’” But the nature of the comparison is interesting since it doesn’t
imply simply likeness but skips immediately to identity. My troubles are a sea, one whose stormy waves threaten
to carry me off, to drag me under.
It’s in this way that I think of metaphor as enacting a
moment of metamorphosis, that process of transformation in which something is
radically changed in form. A
caterpillar rests in its silken cocoon and when it wakes and emerges it has
become a butterfly or moth. A tadpole darting about in the water, evading
predators of all kinds, gives up its tail for legs and becomes a frog.
With a good metaphor for an instant one thing becomes another, often something to which
it bears no actual material resemblance. My troubles aren’t a literal sea
washing up with its undertow, but they feel
like they are rising around me and some days they make it hard to breathe;
they are an emotional sea. We use the processes we see in the world around us to make sense of
ourselves, our feelings, our experiences.
But I’m wondering if there aren’t also material metaphors—if the trick objects have of suddenly looking
like something else, something alive for instance, isn’t a form of metaphor …
the way our imaginations leap ahead of our perceptions. A few times walking at
Jokers Hill I’ve found myself encountering “creatures” – not just in the woods,
but also in the lab. Is it a trick the eye plays, to see something that isn’t
there in what is? Or is it the objects themselves winking at us, saying we
don’t always know what’s in front of us?
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| Here's another lurker in the woods. |
And the lab is full of eyes ...
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