From: Daniel June <perfectidius@gmail.com>
Date: 5 July 2011 05:14
Subject: [Philosophy Forum] "Metaphor Mind" a short essay
To: Daniel June <perfectidius@gmail.com>
Greetings Students of Life!—
Here is the next section from the part of my essay "Strategies for the Game"
on creativity. After this, I look briefly at madness and its relationship to
creativity, and then look at how to establish a creative space. Here I
introduce what I talk of at length in another essay: the part of the mind
that makes metaphors to understand the world. Here I establish its
centrality to creativity. Later I will explore elaborate personal myths and
rituals which use this capacity.
Take care, caretakers!
Daniel Christopher June
4. Metaphor Mind
art - spirit_flight.jpg
Genius is a high capacity for analogy. Metaphor alone, and the
metaphor mind, mark distinct the higher intellect. We all have a
metaphorical mind which gets a sense of the form of things, and matches like
to like. The sciences and arts are both inspired by metaphors, one testing
them with experiments, the other with aesthetic effect. William James
identified Plato and Shakespeare as the ultimate synthesis of the poetic and
the scientific analogical approaches.
We ought to transform all instances of experience into the one
form of our personal project in life. The serious writer should make an
academic study of, say, the symphonies of Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. Each
poem is many poems; all language can be broken into rhythm charts, vowel
patterns, clause lengths, topic variation, and such other such things.
Studying pure music complicates a writing style.
Necessity creates the basic shape of what we need. What better
saying is there than "Necessity is the Mother of Invention"? Genius is the
father. We invent the concepts we need. And to study any and every
philosopher, merely identify his terms and ask what personal crisis led him
to that particular formulation. We assume ideas from personal experience,
shape them into mental furniture, adorn the mansion of our thinking habits
with them, equip each moment with its own tool box, a set of concepts to
address every object and situation.
A thing is more meaningful, important, and significant the more
it expresses certain clichés, stereotypes, regularities, combined with their
own self overcoming: these comprise the basic myths. Wrap the mirror back on
itself. A concept can be stretched in two directions: to its extreme reach,
and back on itself.
The writer is akin to every artist, and every man, in that the
stuff of his art can structurally parallel or complicate what it refers to.
A sentences is a structural unit of logical relationships. Likewise, all of
reality breaks into units of identity. Every being contains parts which are
also beings, down the to the infinite energy of the smallest part, which
makes everything else possible, which makes possible even the mind of
consciousness. The perfect writer knows how to make the form of the sentence
imitate the form of his whole, to trouble the logic of his clauses with the
structure of their interrelationship. We establish a few forms and
strategies as the mental toolbox. Some men are square structured and
practical, other are unstable and flowing.
Form is compulsion. The mere structure of a form, once
internalized, demands profligation. Beautiful forms demand expression;
having consciously internalized a form, we need speak it, repeat it. We
internalize all sorts of forms, and combine them into concepts. The entire
universe can be viewed as an arrangement of energies taking on different
forms, and our own emotions as energies awaiting the correct expressible
form.
What we say the most, what we do the most, becomes a typeset for
all other things. The everyday common things are not denied or judged by the
exceptional moments, but shed off those few exceptional moments like a skin
to hold the normal and unexceptional in place. How do you structure your
experience, and what new experience will improve this?
We can't help but express the forms we internalize, but we can
alter and master the forms we comprehend. Understanding is the ability to
put something in your own words. Comprehension is the ability to abbreviate
and summarize. "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those
inquiries he would put." To be able to summarize our lives into stories,
parables, and cautionary tales lets us educate our future self, lets us
educate our friends and family.
To contemplate a form is to hold the shape of that form even
when it is gone, is to fold the sphere of consciousness into its contours,
so the mind is that form. When we are accustomed to it, we take the grasp of
it as normal. For instance, a cutter working all day with diamonds handles
his other problems as if they were little bits of gem. The surgeon puts the
scalpel even to his marital problems. The hunter patiently awaits his
opportunity to shoot.
Trauma implants form. Significant experiences redefine all other
experiences, like food color working through dough. A molested child seldom
has only one assault. Having experienced the sexual situation, she becomes
more vulnerable to it happening again, even in an unrelated instance. Every
experience both puts a twist on the previous ones, sculpting our memories,
and changes the lenses by which we take in new experiences.
A thing is not itself until it becomes something else. An
experience is not useful until it has been transfigured into a concept. When
a story becomes a parable, it approaches becoming a universal idea. When we
take a form out of a thing, that form becomes language, a stamp we may
imprint up on the clay of all things. The pessimist lives in a different
world than the optimist. Neither world is right or correct, both serve
needs, both must be respected.
Forms reproduce themselves through system. The center of the
system holds the allform, the DNA, the informer and conformer. The language
of the Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of Independence,
"the Gettysburg address," the Federalist Papers, are at the center of the
American mind, work throughout our system, conform the full stature of the
States to one Nation. They are a sort of DNA to our Republic. A worldview is
a language. The language of importance is the tone and terms we adopt when
addressing The Importance. Scripts, routines, and rituals implant these
forms into the minds of youth. That is all they are for. Every worldview is
a lifestyle. It is important that we all conform to a few shared values, but
also seek our own personal values as well. The former is necessary for the
group self, the latter necessary to the personal self: two layers of many
within the full self of me in the universe.
Some forms get smoothed over with such desire that the
information they contain no longer fascinates. It no longer snags the mind,
it is easy. The mind uses the form unthinkingly, which is handy and good.
Many of us don't question our religion, the nature of Civil Law, the fitness
of marriage, the structure of our furniture, or any other everyday
taken-for-granted object. For to ponder all things always is to stun our
ability to decide. The world is strange, confusing, bizarre, imposing, but
we don't know it, because we take it as normal. The hard edges of wire have
been covered over with smooth clay. Nevertheless, wisdom is the ability to
see the ordinary in the extraordinary, and the extraordinary in the
ordinary. By taking in foreign forms – perhaps reading the Tao Te Jing or
the Koran, or looking at a Zen garden, or whatever else is distant from you
– you break apart the everyday forms. Our daily language, our clichés and
every day sayings, are deeply rich when deeply understood. But sometimes we
need to take the tools of a foreign tool box to break them apart, to see the
metaphors buried within them, to liberate the energy in each form which
holds it together, just as food energizes us only when we chew it to pieces.
We can decongest everyday life when we no longer take the normal as unworthy
of study.
Ideas are so many lenses and mirrors, reflecting the light of
experience into consciousness. It is as if all deep concepts were glass,
transparent in themselves, but bending reality into a special focus. The
name of a thing is a powerful lens. An essay, a symphony, a person, is
almost defined by the title, name-nickname, or reputation that has congealed
around its head like a halo. Our attitude about a man determines what facial
expressions and stances will appear before our mind when we hear his name.
Transposing forms reveals hidden essences. Metaphors, titles,
nicknames, and jokes reveal the hidden pith of a soul, the tone and tenure
of the soul's blood. Every man is transfigured, every man has his moment. I
am most fully Daniel in a few instances, when the layers of politeness and
conformity peal away like unnecessary garments, and my divinity stands nude.
What gives a form identity? What makes it itself? How is my
inner self structured, so that I am ultimately me? For if all reality is
made of matter, and matter is eternal, then form is the ultimate reality.
Forms change – is this not an objection against eternity? Yet we have a
sense of the wholes and parts, and the idea of a whole may be its entire
reality. If a car is repaired part by part, at what point is the car no
longer the original? Perhaps the mere idea of that car is projected onto it.
For an idea is an energy made large through brain structures. Merely the
idea that a thing is itself, that the mind is the same mind throughout our
lifetime, even if you suffer brain injury, maybe even if you die, is all the
eternity you need. Not God, but Mind, offers the promise of eternal life.
For most people, forms and structures are known and usable, but
only unconsciously. We can do a lot because we absorb the forms of our
environment at the job we figure out how to talk, what to do, we absorb what
is expected of us and take the role of worker readily. Most people learn
quickly, take the forms and subtle cues from their environment. The
philosopher plays the game differently. He gives the forms names, shapes
them into concepts, makes them consciously thinkable, verbally speakable.
The philosopher alone can say what he knows, though the others are neither
able to nor need to. But the philosopher also has the powers to invent new
forms, to analyze the old, to extract the gold from any ore, for his
conceptual tools let him play a more subtle game. He knows best that each
private life, no matter how normal and everyday, is a goldmine of ideas.
Life is fractal. My full book also resides in each sentence, each paragraph,
which are like veins and arteries to carry the blood of my soul, and like
blood, all things are mixed together, for as blood moves oxygen, nutrients,
antibodies, hormones, and wastes, all to their correct place, so my style –
I call it the allistic style – conveys all things at the same time in the
same place. The genre is language, but then all art is language. Grammar
codifies beings, becomings, and logical relationships: the noun, the verb,
the preposition. So much of language is mere framing, mere set up, for the
one or two moments of true intimacy. Perhaps a whole drama is mere set up
and alibi for the true moment. Perhaps that true moment isn't known, but
felt deep down.
The job of learning, of knowing, of realizing forms, is the
scholar's payment in this life. Suffering is superficial. Life is about
growing in power and love, is about mastering forms. The way to play the
Game is to be able to hold metaphors as handles on reality. Each mood is
like a room in the mental mansion. Each room has its own furniture, its own
tools. Some concepts work like microscopes, getting at subtle, small,
intricate facts; other tools work as telescopes, getting at the remote.
Mastering verbal form is like mastering music. Beethoven's
symphonies often transition by radical leaps between disparate keys, with a
small but perfect phrase which knows how to bring you there. In writing, you
can gracefully get from an X to any Y, with the ingenuity of a transition.
Consider the structure of the whole against the microstructure of the parts.
The microscopic structure of style can hold the clue to transferring ideas.
In the same way, life is made up of what we think of all day. To be able to
focus intently on each part requires a metaphorical grasp of what we are
looking at, to segment it off as This Fully Now. We must learn how to revere
intent focus.
To have a sacred, personal or public, you must know how to
adore. To be able to set a given thing as personally sacred for you, utterly
important, an image of Importance, is the ability to become a priest and
bestow blessings. No religion is necessary, but merely taking the conceptual
tool which religion worked out for centuries of setting a thing apart. Your
language will protect it. Know how to revere, protect, hide, and glorify a
thing. If writing is your blessing on the world, love it, honor it, never
denigrate it. If dancing is it, or whatever else, then do the same.
As the incarnation of Allism, as the representative of it, in
accordance with Ama, the face of Mother All, I seek especially to put my
roots down in the nation of my birth, not to recommend that all men love
America, but that they love their own birthplace, glorify the details of
their own becoming, to celebrate most what they are, without denying the
glory of the planet and the whole universe as well. The music of the spheres
is in loving a thing for what it is, loving myself as myself, my family as
my family, my city as my city, my nation as my nation, mankind as mankind,
life as life, the universe as universe, honor to the honorable, love to the
lovely, respect to the respectable.
And so I internalize American forms, sinking the roots of my
World Tree deep beneath the soil of my very feet, drinking in the forms
which the ancient ideas assume passing through our minds, reading Emerson
daily, studying Whitman in the outdoors every season, analyzing William
James, figuring out the music of Charles Ives, admiring and emulating the
structuralism of the architecture of Wright, and balancing them all against
the foreign ideas of Nietzsche, the Gospel of Thomas, the Tao Te Jing, the
Norse Eddas.
There are many layers of form in every meaning, as if each
concept were a geological column in which different fossilized critters had
solidified in the layers of rock. Except they are alive, and vital, and
merely await identification to add life to what I use them for.
All of life is creative, and the creative life is the liveliest
of all. To ever create, to make your own birthday cards, your own birthday
cakes; to study law, imposing new systems and tables over it; to sing in the
morning, dance at noon, the meditate at night; to beautify all you touch, to
recreate all forms and experiences into your own; to copyright the universe;
this is the life of glory, the divine life, the life of an incarnated god.
~~
Perfection
Is
Easy
perfectidius.com
~~
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