Words&Dirt

“It was as if they were approaching the edge of the world; their oval of light, cut off abruptly ahead of them, became shorter and shorter.  But far out on the curved screen of the Sea their monstrous foreshortened shadows had appeared, magnifying and exaggerating every movement.  Those shadows had been their companions every step of the way, as they marched down the beam, but now that they were broken at the edge of the cliff they not longer seemed part of them.  They might have been creatures of the Cylindrical Sea, waiting to deal with any intruders into their domain.

Because they were now standing on the edge of a fifty-metre cliff, it was possible for the first time to appreciate the curvature of Rama.  But no one had ever seen a frozen lake bent upwards into a cylindrical surface; that was distinctly unsettling, and the eye did its best to find some other interpretation.  It seemed to Dr. Ernst, who had once made a study of visual illusions, that half of the time she was really looking at a horizontally curving bay, not a surface that soared up into the sky.  It required a deliberate effort of will to accept the fantastic truth.”

––Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke, loc. 912-20

“Though metaphors are omnipresent in language, many of them are effectively dead in the minds of today’s speakers, and the living ones could never be learned, understood, or used as a reasoning tool unless they were built out of more abstract concepts that capture the similarities and differences between the symbol and the symbolized.  For this reason, conceptual metaphors do not render truth and objectivity obsolete, nor to they reduce philosophical, legal, and political discourse to a beauty contest between rival frames.

Still, I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language.  The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath––not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition.  Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.

Language, by its very design, would seem to be a tool with a well-defined and limited functionality.  With a finite stock of arbitrary signs, and grammatical rules that arrange them in sentences, a language gives us the means to share an unlimited number of combinations of ideas about who did what to whom, and about what is where.  Yet by digitizing the world, language is a ‘lossy’ medium, discarding information about the smooth multidimensional texture of experience.  Language is notoriously poor, for instance, at conveying the subtlety and richness of sensations like smells and sounds.  And it would seem to be just as inept at conveying other channels of sentience that are not composed out of discrete, accessible parts.  Flashes of holistic insight (like those in mathematical or musical creativity), waves of consuming emotion, and moments of wistful contemplation are simply not the kinds of experience that can be captured by the beads-on-a-string we call sentences.

And yet metaphor provides us with a way to eff the ineffable.  Perhaps the greatest pleasure that language affords is the act of surrendering to the metaphors of a skilled writer and thereby inhabiting the consciousness of another person.”

––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 276-7