Blood and Bones Part 10: Metaphor

The text as printed here is an extended version of what I say in the video.

 “Metaphors are dangerous, Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera

 “I don’t get metaphor.  Says my young friend Skidmore.  “At the writing course, they were on about it all the time.  I’m not sure what a metaphor is or where I’m meant to find one.”

Look, Skidders, there’s no point me going over all the technical stuff but basically what you need to know is  that the word originates from the Greek meaning to carry over. It means describing a tricky abstract mental image in terms of a, usually, physical action;  carrying the abstract idea over in a basket of every day stuff. Like smuggling a stash of tobacco into a prison in a laundry basket.  To carry an idea over to explain another word so that it’s easier to grasp is, in itself, metaphorical.  Metaphors  can also be conceptual and non-lingusitic.  I could still see Skidmore looking blankly over his Tequila Sunrise but I persevered. This is where the idea of metaphor swims into view for the playwright.  For me, all plays are metaphorical. This, brief action on a stage represents the chunk of actual life we are trying to illustrate.  I’ve got a feeling somebody’s said something to that effect in a play before but we’ll leave that to one side for now.  Indeed, for me, everything I write stands for something else.  Subtext, permeates any dialogue so that the actual spoken words are metaphors for feelings that are going on underneath.  The very language we use is metaphorical.  This group of sounds stands in place for these ideas going on in our heads.  They bear no actual relation to the ideas except for this iconic, metaphorical, carrying over.  One thing standing for another..

“Can’t you just say what you mean?”  Says the now completely befuddled Skidmore

I do mean what I say, it’s just that I use metaphors as sort of pictures to help illustrate what I’m saying.

Along with all the other seven and a bit billion other inhabitants of the planet, you’ve gazed up at clouds on a summer’s day in seen faces and animals, lions and dragons and strange landscapes, castles and mountains.  You’ve experienced the same thing when you’ve looked into the glowing coals of a barbecue.  That’s because human beings are programmed to make out faces and animals against a confusing background of clutter.  We need to be able to distinguish friend from foe, or the attacker hiding in the shadows. We need to make this sort of decision rapidly and without recourse to further scientific evidence so our brain makes a snap judgement based on something we may have experienced before. That shape?  Tiger?  Bunny rabbit?  Sometimes this mechanism gets a bit over active and we see faces where there are none but it is this capacity to associate shapes or outlines with other images that we call metaphor. 

Peter Bruza at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, suggests “The constraints we face are often the natural enemy of getting completely accurate and justified answers,”

Sometimes it’s not so easy saying what you mean.  You need a picture to help it along.

Cognitive psychologist Peter Gardenfors of Lund University in Sweden, for example, argues that much of our thinking operates on a largely unconscious level, where thought follows a less restrictive logic and forms loose associations between concepts.

In other words metaphors help because they aren’t limited by the narrow confines of word meanings. Metaphor creates a trail of allusion and association.  This way metaphor seems to provide a short circuit between idea and idea.

We live in a world of symbols and rituals.  Everything we do and say has hidden meaning.  Everything implies something else. We seldom unpick the metaphors and we can generally get the association without having to understand an otherwise illogical connection. And we can even begin to understand the mechanics of how this works.

A study of patients with localised brain damage has shown that there are areas of the brain specifically devoted to the understanding and interpretation of metaphor. Vilayanur Ramachandran and his colleagues at the University of California at San Diego were intrigued by four patients who were mentally lucid, fluent in English and highly intelligent, but could not understand proverbs. When one of the patients was asked to explain the adage "all that glitters is not gold", for instance, he completely missed the metaphorical angle, replying that people should be careful when buying jewellery. All the patients had damage to part of the brain called the left angular gyrus. This lies at the intersection of the parts of the brain which process tactile, auditory and visual information.

 Our use of a particular word or phrase reaches down into our brain and pulls out a rats’ nest of related ideas and congruences. So the meaning of that word becomes, not a single point of truth, but a fuzzy ball of associations.  The picture that this confused, tangled image, provides is sometimes, oddly, clearer than the word or phrase itself.  It offers some sort of ranging point around which our meaning revolves.  Clarity comes because that ball of associations is big enough to contain associations that are similar in the listener.  They may not be entirely the same but there are enough points of similarity to provide a correspondence and thus a complex or difficult idea can be passed between us.

The German mathematician David Hilbert came up with a form of maths that was much later used to describe the quantum world.  Mark Buchnan in an article in New Scientist argues that Hilbertian mathematics also applies in other areas and can be used to describe human interaction and explain the way in which human beings resolutely refuse to think in apparently logical ways.

Interestingly, at another level, physicists themselves have difficulty grasping and conveying concepts of the workings of the quantum world and have to resort to entirely metaphorical language in describing sub atomic particles. Quarks are described as having qualities such as charm, strange, up, down, top and bottom and quarks and gluons having colour.  None of these relate in any way to the use of the words in our macro world.

Metaphor is that cross over point between poetry and playwriting A playwright needs to play with the possibilities of the language to convey complex ideas and most of that will be through metaphor.  And the resonances of the words in the empty space should echo out into the real world and stay in the mind of the listener for ever. Perhaps for a playwright the message must be, if you want to make specific points, the dialogue you use needs to be fuzzy and non-specific.

Think logically but let that logic be flexible.  Our fuzzy, imprecise language enables us to access our fuzzy, probabilistic thinking.  Not only are there more avenues of the brain explored by wider, looser speaking but also better, more accurate conclusions are drawn from it.

Metaphor can be novel and shocking but we have to be careful when the metaphor becomes jaded and over used.  To convey a truth, the metaphor must be sharp enough and offer an intriguing twist where we can at once see the two ideas operating together.  The use of a metaphor should be a way of making an idea more lucid and understandable and not so banal that we don’t even recognise its metaphorical function.

. Frierich Nietzsche goes on to say:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically, rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.2

Says Frederick Nietszche In this early essay, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’,

As a writer I think its necessary to understand the way in which metaphor influences our thinking and how our thinking influences which metaphors we choose.  We need to understand how particular metaphors resonate through a characters actions and thoughts.

We must enter the mind of our character so thoroughly that we can emulate their tangled mess od associations and differentiate it from our own. Choice of metaphor indicates a pathway of thought, unconscious or conscious that reveals more than the character’s dialogue reveals. Sometimes our character will use metaphors and allusions that may seem banal to us writing it but we can only listen to what our characters say. Becket was particularly adept at choosing metaphor and allusions which are perfectly aligned when fuzzy imprecise metaphor is the only way of conveying otherwise inexpressible existential anxiety.  “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more”

 For the audience they will pass unnoticed but a trail of such metaphor choices will lead us to divine instinctively more about the character than at first sight. So bear in mind when choosing a metaphor, it will reveal a great deal about your own fund of ideas and associations but we really need it to do that job for your characters.  Ask yourself, what does that particular metaphor tell us about their back story and hinterland of ideas rather than our own.

“For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really hovers before him in place of a concept. For him, the character is not a whole laboriously assembled from individual traits, but a person, insistently living before his eyes, distinguished from the otherwise identical vision of the painter by his continuous life and action.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Thanks again for watching.  In the next episode I’m going to talk about the way in which our wonderful, imprecise English language is tied in with this metaphorical, imprecise world.  If you enjoyed this please like and share and press the red subscribe button to make sure you get the next part. Meanwhile Be bold in your use of metaphor.  Your arrows may just pierce to the heart of the matter