There’s a wide gulf between confidence and self knowledge. The confidence of an unconscious creature can masquerade as self knowledge. Sociopaths in positions of opportunity - ranging from car dealers, therapists, and cowboy carpenters to lawyers, doctors, academics, CEOs, MPs and priests - prove this every day all over the world.
Likewise, real self knowledge can be ignored or misapprehended, also leading to disaster. The man or woman who feels they know and who actually does is likely also to know the unreliability of feeling, and the dangers of hubris. Whose vote will they get? Rampant ego and testosterone don't always indicate the best candidates for positions of power, but they do indicate the likely contenders.
So we can feel that we know and act as if we know, and yet not know. And we can know and have our knowledge affirmed by time and events, and still maintain a healthy self doubt. We can be wrong and feel right, and we can be right and feel wrong.
Most crimes are attempts to escape a situation which is unbearable. They often feel right at the time. Poverty, oppression, exploitation, confusion, boredom, domination, disempowerment, sexual frustration/oppression, inexplicable compulsive anger - all demand action (even if the object may be an innocent and helpless child). These acts are extreme symptoms of a social condition also expressed in many non-criminal ways.
The current rapacious appetite for mediated public personalities is one instance. Here our inability and unwillingness to accept the sheer ordinariness of our existence is the itch we're scratching. One effect of this is that any political aspirant with an iota of self knowledge would be emasculated or effeminated in the modern media coliseum. Knowing oneself at all, who could convincingly create a political persona that meets the mass’s needs?
Self-aware individuals are often boring. They’re often not handsome or pretty. They’re negative. They’re pessimistic. They’re unemotional. They lack glamour, they’re definitely not sexy, and therefore not worthy of the 15 minute salvation we mete out to the soundbite people.
They’re also on the side of the angels, not to mention the facts. Here’s one:
Human existence is, on the face of it, meaningless, and - miraculously- both repetitive and unpredictable. The worst of all worlds! Behind or beneath the face of it, though, some do experience a sense of meaning, sometimes for extended periods. Where does this sense function, and how?
The narratives of memory and fantasy oscillate between the peaks of excitement, self indulgence and occasional grace, and the troughs of "the thousand ills that flesh is heir to". Our dream of the peaks is a temporary palliative that inevitably leads to dread of the trough. The grammar and spelling and syntax of ordinary human existence, though, is the meaningless day to day grind of work, confused relationships, financial stress, sexual frustration/oppression and miscommunication.
The moments of epiphany in life, the accidental windows into the eternal, aren’t fantasies or memories. They are moments when we somehow penetrate the ordinary and mine it - not escape it. (This mining is what art does when it’s functioning.) The ordinary human can’t stay there for long. But in every instance we carry over something with us when we return. Sometimes just the vestiges of a sweet aroma, sometimes gold dust.
This is the meaning of metaphor : “To carry or bear, over or across”. Though current usage may carry other contradictory implications (e.g, ‘comparison’ in many definitions) this is the root of the word and the essence of its conception.
It’s an active concept, not an analytical one. It presupposes the ’I’ who carries, the place carried from and the place carried to. A kind of triangulation, as stable as a three legged stool. And it’s an act of inclusion. It takes two concepts, objects, qualities, creatures, places, thoughts, or feelings, and says “These two are one.” Not, “These two are like each other” but “These two are each other”. Not “These two, when compared, differ in everything but this” but “The shared identity of these two lies like solid granite beneath transitory superficial differences.”
So, metaphor is the language of meaning, both meaning discovered and meaning created. If humanity may be the planet's - or the universe's, or the multiverses' - organ of meaning, i.e. if we are responsible for meaning in existence, then metaphor is a very important issue.
The sense of metaphor is fading from the human psyche. Its absence characterises our modern existence.
The psychic urge to metaphor staggers valiantly on - even the triviality of personality worship and media glamour and reality TV carries a vestigial aroma of transformation by metaphor. But the noble role of metaphor (carrier of meaning) is being crudely usurped by a brutal sense of quantification and comparison.
The geopathy of our social and psychic bedrock is our increasing inability to live a metaphorical life. It’s making us ill.
I hope you’ll come with me through this old door.
I’ll be grateful even of your disagreement.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
