blog 5: I know this reading is hard...some attempts to clarify

Among other things, Lewis is interested in what happens when metaphor progresses to a state of death or fossilization. These terms—metaphors, actually—describe a state of being that encompasses the relationship between language and thought. To talk about language as dead or fossilized would seem to make a pretty strong case for language as once being alive. Fossilization refers to statis, a historical remnant, evidence of a living thing. What’s made possible by thinking of language as alive? What’s deflected?

He talks about the magistral, or enlightening, function of metaphor in the context of teaching and explaining. When it’s no longer magistral, though, he says that we use metaphor unconsciously, forgetting the original context through which we learned the metaphor (i.e., the “truth” it originally helped to illuminate for us) because we eventually know more about a given topic. Or, sometimes we forget that the metaphor is a metaphor, which is a kind of ignorance, or an end of thinking about our own thinking.

He compares the construction and use of metaphor to the teaching situation, calling the use of metaphors as tools a common tactic of “masters,” or teachers, who reduce a concept or idea to a metaphor in hopes of better explaining it. The student, or the “pupil,” is then at the “mercy of the metaphor,” as puts it. In other words, their understanding of the content is held hostage to a particular way of seeing presented through the metaphor. Metaphors, he explains, can limit thinking, can blind us to certain things when we depend too much on their explanatory power.

Lewis suggests that freedom from metaphor is really freedom to choose between metaphors; in other words, there’s no such thing as language or thought without metaphor: “It is abundantly clear that the freedom from a given metaphor which we admittedly enjoy in some cases is often only a freedom to choose between that metaphors and others” (305). In the end, he says that creating new metaphors requires imagination—no big surprise there—but he’s cautious about saying that artists (or poets, more specifically) are the only ones capable of generating imaginative metaphors.

Some metaphors of pop culture that seem driven by an imaginative impulse to explain the world differently, in renewed language and imagery, might include the following:

** the creation of “emoticons,” or text-based symbols used in online environments to stand for emotions

** Eminem’s “Slim Shady” persona as a metaphor for a threatening thug (“You don’t wanna mess with Shady—Why?—Cause Shady will f**cking kill you”)

** the Matrix (the movie) as a metaphor for blurred realities

Many more, but time is limited and your drafts are waiting….See you tomorrow!