Metaphoric Activism

I had an idea tonight, an idea that startled me; it bothered my sleep, gave me an uncertain conscience. I thought, “Metaphor and metaphoric thinking have become outrageously distracting processes.” What an odd thought for a mythologist, psychotherapist and poet, whose stock in trade has always been, or so I imagined, metaphor: religious and spiritual metaphor, therapeutic metaphor, and literary metaphor. Strictly speaking, metaphor is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: “The [first subject] is a [second subject].” More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second subject in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first (TheFreeDictionary.com). The example that constantly comes to mind is old, venerable, and often used to point to the differences between simile and metaphor. The poet famously wrote: “My love is like a red, red, rose.” This is simile; for it to be metaphor, the poet would have had to write instead, “My love is a red, red, rose.” Each is valuable, but claiming that love is a red, red rose removes any distance or dissimilarity the reader might feel between love and rose. It creates in us discomfort, it makes us wrestle with the impossible sameness of love and roses. If one says that love is like a red, red rose, there is not the same immersion, the same wrestling, in and with either the love or the rose. A comfortable emotional distance may be maintained.

But here is the problem. Metaphor is useful because of the precise reason for which I am now considering its rejection. It conflates the seemingly unrelated, and the shock of seeing a relationship where one might never before even imagined (imagining is in fact, metaphoring) one, can radically alter one’s perceptions and beliefs. But we now live in an increasingly histrionic society that seems to have an increasingly insatiable need to “create” conflicts and drama where there really aren’t any, and conversely, to ignore issues and problems that are in dire need of attention, and have reached crisis levels. (It is tempting to engage a critique of our current political season, but that should be a tragic farce all too obvious to anyone not in a coma to point out here.) Metaphor seems to have worn itself out.

Our culture is drowning in ennui, and we don’t have the will to look deeply into anything, let alone metaphor. (Dostoyevsky wrote, “…and it was all from ennui, gentlemen, all from ennui; inertia overcame me.”) We live in a post-modern culture that does not want to do the kind of thinking that post-modernity requires and the unadulterated meaning of the word metaphor is lost through an indiscriminate, lazy, and hysterical mingling of one thing or idea with everything else. I often have the feeling these days that we simply must, we just have to, say certain things–such as meaningless, insincere apologies for public misdeeds–in certain situations whether we mean them or not–all too often we do not. All that is being required of us is an effort at form, and any real substance is avoided. This phenomenon has never been articulated better than by W.B. Yeats in his poem, The Second Coming:

…everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

We need, all of us, to make a different kind of effort; to be a different kind of activist. The kind of activist who looks deeply into things. We need to see through things. We simply must stop worrying about needing to know things, as if true knowing is possible. Looking deeply into them is enough, seeing through them, more than enough. Moreover, it is just then, in the deep looking, that the world reveals itself to us. Wallace Stevens wrote, “It was when I said/”There is no such thing as the truth,”/That the grapes seemed fatter./The fox ran out of his hole.” A little, tiny piece of the Mysterium reveals itself to us.

David Miller put his finger on it when, in discussing the work of the marvelous Stanley Romain Hopper, he called such a view as I’m trying to articulate in this post, not metaphoric, but “…diaphoric. It is not a ‘carrying across’ of one thing onto another, but is a seeing through—diaphorically, diaphanously, diagnostically, diacritically. It not only means reading poetry. It means, especially, reading everything in life and work poetically. It does not mean stepping out of the depths through to anything else. Rather, it means walking through everything deeply, seeing through life deeply.” Walking through everything deeply, seeing through life deeply–seeing through ones own life; why, this is the mystic’s path, the mystic’s way of moving and seeing, is it not? I cannot think of a better form of activism, a better way of changing the world than by seeing through it. Coincidentally, this is exactly what a post-modern world and a post-modern sensibility demands of us: to look deeply off the beaten path, to see through the apparent “hard, cold, reality” and into the soft edged margins of the world to behold her treasures. Seeing through allows one to turn one’s life into art–to make a poem of one’s life–and bear witness to the eternal philosophy so beautifully articulated by Sri Aurobindo in one of his last letters: “In the way that one treads with the greater Light above, even every difficulty gives its help and Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be.” Existence is not like that, it is that.