Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution 9780773581968

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One
1 “Combinatorial Algorithms”
2 “Peyne and Wo”: Metaphor among the Discourses
3 Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven
4 DNA and the Three R’s
5 Graceful Errors: The Mutation of Metaphor
6 Possibility Naturalized: The Story of Evolution
Part Two
7 Metaphor and Cognition
8 A Word Aside: The Detour that Became a Thoroughfare
9 The Metaphor of Consciousness
10 Megaphors: The Seeing As Tool
11 Natural and Design Evolution in Culture
12 The Evolution of Literature
13 Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment
14 “Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”: The Allowing Conditions of Metaphor
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

Missing Link I’ll sing of metamorphosis. The changes you have worked, O gods, work such a change in me, my rhyme Would dearly weave the unbroken thread From the world’s first starting out to our time. ~Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Missing Link The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution

J E F F E RY D O N A L D S O N

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4518-2 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4519-9 (paper) 978-0-7735-8196-8 (epdf) 978-0-7735-8211-8 (epub)

Legal deposit second quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Donaldson, Jeffery, 1960–, author Missing link : the evolution of metaphor and the metaphor of evolution / Jeffery Donaldson. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4518-2 (bound).–isbn 978-0-7735-4519-9 (pbk.).– isbn 978-0-7735-8196-8 (epdf).–isbn 978-0-7735-8211-8 (epub) 1. Metaphor. 2. Science. 3. Humanities. I. Title. pn228.m4d65 2015

808'.032

c2014-907817-x c2014-907818-8

N.F. In Memoriam

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Figures / ix Acknowledgments / xi Introduction / 3

Part One 1 “Combinatorial Algorithms” / 33 2 “Peyne and Wo”: Metaphor among the Discourses / 66 3 Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven / 89 4 dna and the Three R’s / 121 5 Graceful Errors: The Mutation of Metaphor / 153 6 Possibility Naturalized: The Story of Evolution / 182

Part Two 7 Metaphor and Cognition / 217 8 A Word Aside: The Detour that Became a Thoroughfare / 237 9 The Metaphor of Consciousness / 245 10 Megaphors: The Seeing As Tool / 284 11 Natural and Design Evolution in Culture / 309 12 The Evolution of Literature / 328 13 Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment / 356 14 “Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”: The Allowing Conditions of Metaphor / 397 Notes / 437 Bibliography / 467 Index / 477

This page intentionally left blank

Figures

1.1 Your mind as an entire cosmology. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 37 1.2 Metaphor as substitution. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 37 1.3 Metaphor as interaction. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July, 2014 / 40 1.4 Joseph Jastrow’s Duck-Rabbit. Wikimedia Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kaninchen_und_Ente.png / 61 2.1 Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, ca. 1817. Oil on canvas. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Hamburger Kunsthalle. Photo Credit: bpk, Berlin/Hamburger Kunsthalle, Habburg, Germany/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY. Reproduced with Permission. / 67 2.2 Albion Rose, ca. 1796. Etching and watercolour. William Blake (1757–1827). British Museum © Trustees of the British Museum, reproduced with permission. / 69 3.1 George Herbert’s “Prayer I” as discussed by Helen Vendler in Poems, Poets, Poetry, 3rd edition (Boston: Bedford Books, 2009). Illustration by Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July, 2014 / 100 3.2 The covalent bond in metaphor and chemistry. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 106 3.3 A nucleus of meaning. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 107 3.4 The ionic bond in metaphor and chemistry. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 109 4.1 The basic structure of dna. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 128 4.2 The bonding area. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 129

x

figures

4.3 Words in language are like codons in a strand of dna. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 134 4.4 Genotype to phenotype. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 135 4.5 Genotype becoming phenotype in a poem. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 136 5.1 Crossing over during meiosis. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 159 5.2 Point mutation as substitution. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 161 5.3 Frame mutation as interaction. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 164 5.4 The replication process. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 166 5.5 In search of a metaphor. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 168 5.6 In search of a metaphor: the associated commonplaces fall into place. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 168 7.1 The neuron synapse. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 225 7.2 The neuron network and the switchboard. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 226 9.1 Lite-Brite. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 247 9.2 Drawing Hands, ca. 1948. Lithograph. M.C. Escher (1898–1972). All M.C. Escher works © 2014 The M.C. Escher Company – the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com / 273 14.1 Expanding domains of influence. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 398 14.2 A species evolving into its environment. Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 86. Reproduced by Permission. / 407 14.3 Chardin vs Dennett. Steve Janzen, McMaster Media Production Services. 20 July 2014 / 410

Acknowledgments

Here are the missing links whose absent presence in this volume forms its long chain of happy connections. To start at the beginning, I thank my friends Glen Gill and Adam Bradley: Glen for our long inspiring talks in the late nineties and early aughts; Adam for his almost nagging encouragement throughout, his brilliant insights, and his having had the sole and dubious privilege of reading the whole of this manuscript in its original, inflated form. Alvin Lee has been a mentor and model for me over the years; he also made more difference than he can know with a single sentence he spoke at a lunch a number of years ago, on the secret of how to write a book. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, I thank Mark Abley, Susan Glickman, and Ryan Van Huijstee: Mark for his insights, advice, and constant support at the acquisition stage, Susan for the sharp, measured, always correct work of her editor’s scalpel, which has helped this manuscript shed pounds of excess, and Ryan for his care and calming influence in the late stages. My research assistant John Nielsen has proved a spritely Ariel, with his talent for darting among parts and appearing out of nowhere with conjured solutions. He is also author of the index, whose detailing is owed to his patient and perspicacious eye. My thanks to Simon Oakley and Steve Janzen at McMaster Media Services for their excellent help with the illustrations. To my parents, Harold and Joyce Donaldson, the very heart of relation, and my sisters, Tracy Donaldson and Lisa Haindl. Sincere thanks to the following, for their abidance in the various roles they have played: Cory Abma, Annette Abma, Joseph Adamson, Christina Brooks, Wayne Clifford, Eleanor Cook, Andrew Coward, Robert Denham, Miller Donaldson, Allan Garshowitz, Peter Haindl, Richard Howard, Amanda Jernigan, Ross Leckie, Shane Neilson, the late Richard Outram, John Reibetanz, Wayne Rosen, Bernadette Rule, Peter Sanger, Karen Schindler, Garry Sherbert, John Terpstra, Philip Wylie, and Jan Zwicky.

xii

acknowledgments

“Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” and “The World as Meditation,” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens, are used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House llc. All rights reserved. “Mind” from Collected Poems, 1943–2004 by Richard Wilbur, copyright 2004 by Richard Wilbur, is reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Finally, my dedication of this book to a former teacher and literary critic at the forefront of Canadian letters feels to me a tad selfaggrandizing, except that even if I said nothing these thoughts would still swim upstream to their source.

Missing Link Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various “codes,” into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world. ~Robert Pollack, Signs of Life, 177 I think in the conclusion I need something about the Darwinian structure of art, as a total hypothetical body throwing out dialectical shoots in all directions. ~Northrop Frye, Collected Works, Vol. 23, 212 Today, woolly symbolism, shallow similarities, and mercurial mappings are the hallmarks of many kinds of quackery. ~Steven Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 255 … the logical form of the world is given in the internal relations among its objects. ~Jan Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor, §83

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

the formula It begins with metaphor, with A = B. It begins with identity and difference, with forms attracting and repelling. It begins with the spaces between things, between things and us, and between ourselves and each other. It begins with the gaps that hold us apart and with the binding energies that dwell in gaps. It begins with patterns and unities, with change and possibility, with transgression and impertinence. Metaphor makes us what we are. It is how we got here. It is how we live, how we act, how we think and dream. Metaphor has bequeathed to us the tensions we feel between science, religion, and the arts; it is the missing link that, in missing, holds these alienated expressions of human experience together and apart. We tend to think of metaphor as a property of language, and sometimes a minor property at that. And yet cognitive philosophers and scientists are coming to appreciate how metaphoric thinking is an important part of mental processes that precede their expression in language. Some have gone further back to show how metaphoric thinking is an original, perhaps even constitutive property of consciousness. This book aims to participate in that initiative by reflecting on how the experience of paradoxical relation – an is and an is not – may be traced back to a time before the advent of mind, before language and its inherent structures of relation, back through evolution, through dna, through chemistry to the origins of matter. This book is about how the behaviour of matter, the behaviour of relational energies, has changed as its material conditions have changed. By this I mean not merely to use actual metaphors to help us understand how matter works – something the sciences already do very effectively – but rather to show how the workings and logic of what we call metaphor

4

missing link

may actually constitute that natural process. What is it, for instance, about the “shared” covalent bond in chemistry that is suggestively metaphoric in its behaviour? What does it mean that dna functions in terms of connected strands, pairings off, self-divisions, reading processes that construe and copies that transform? Is it significant that a neurological synapse is a gap in which energies are exchanged between simultaneously differing and identifying units, where there is a carrying-across by means of which “unthought-of” actions and responses are freed to explore themselves? Conversely, I also want to suggest that it is because nature has functioned according to metaphoric or relational behaviours that human beings possess metaphorical thinking. Part of what nature has produced by evolution is the very mechanism of mind that embodies, ipso facto, its own working parts. These embodiments are then, naturally, the terms and conditions by which it may think of and understand itself. Insofar as metaphor proper is an extension of material unfoldings in nature, there may be more to learn about nature by looking into the habit of mind that nature has expressed. My point isn’t that atomic physics, for instance, or dna, or chemistry are “really” just metaphor, for they are so many things besides, but that what we call metaphor and its counter-logic inhabits them all. There is a way in which everything we know stands at the end of these processes, a tree or an ipod just as much as a metaphor. They too are the result of relational events. But the tree and ipod are products of a process, not a way of talking about the process; that is, they are not an expression of that process in actual thinking. Metaphor, however, is exactly that.

the empty box The metaphoric initiative finally presents itself in and as consciousness and its conscious workings. Julian Jaynes writes: “When we introspect, it is upon [a] metaphorical mind-space which we are constantly renewing and ‘enlarging’ with each new thing or relation consciousized.”1 Consciousness is the reality of metaphoric relation expressed in neurons. Our being conscious to ourselves is the ne plus ultra of the metaphoric event.

Introduction

5

Our arrival at ourselves is by no means the end of the road. Our consciousness of metaphor and our metaphoric consciousness carry us to a further threshold, one that has borne many names, including the one I prefer: spirit. I take my cue from Northrop Frye, who argues that when the Bible uses the term “spiritually,” it seems primarily to mean “metaphorically.”2 What does it suggest that God is seen as “unseen and all seeing,” that he is thought to be everywhere at once, that he is the power of creation ex nihilo, that Yahweh’s name for himself is I am that I am? Our experience of spirit is the expression in human being of metaphor’s standing forth at last as itself; it is the ability, and the audacity, to say with Yahweh that it is what it is. I had better add a caveat about my approach to religion in this book. I grew up with only a very vague awareness of some of the protestant churches in Canada, and passed most of my time as a child being very afraid of ghosts and the dark. My imagination blessed and terrorized me. As the saying goes, I spent the first half of my life trying to keep gods and ghosts in a closed box and the second half of my life trying to get them back out again. Well, the empty box is wide open now and the ghosts are still hiding. That’s fine, they can lie low there if they like. I’ve come to learn since that their not really existing at all is probably the spookiest thing about them. I find debates around the existence of a god somewhat misleading and sympathize with arguments on both sides. The spate of books in the last ten years by leading scientists on how “God really doesn’t exist, honest” (the get real effect) shows how we are still stuck using the out-dated terms of a tired debate. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (who are central characters in this book), along with Christopher Hitchens, believe that institutional religion is still so powerful in the world, enjoying a kind of theocratic exceptionalism liable to abuse, that someone has got to come along and knock some scepticism into their gullible adherents. They seem more opposed to rigid dogmatic thinking in religion, as well they might in any field, than to interest in the unknown per se (where they can become quite watery-eyed when the terms are right). Scientists are the Lutherans of our day, preachers from the good book of nature, our one true authority they would say. To be sure, their modern-day reformation is opening lots of doors. But you can point into an empty box

6

missing link

and say there is nothing there for as long as you like. The moment you point anywhere at all and say there is nothing there, you become pleading and suspicious. Telling children that there is no such thing as ghosts, I have learned, is the quickest way to terrify them, for a ghost is just that: “no such thing.” Nay-sayers in the sciences produce a nature that is more haunted by spirits, not less. It isn’t that there is nothing there or that there is not nothing there. It has to do with the nature of the empty box. In the mean time, I wander around like the majority of people in the world with some prevailing and, as it seems to me, inherent sense of spirit, of feeling that everything around me is somehow enlivened by my thinking about it. Whatever it is that I propose filling the box with – the emptiness, in every sense, of metaphor – I hope it might be understood that spirit is not just extra baggage that we can drop behind, at least not without dropping ourselves behind with it. We are the people with the empty box. Nor is it proof of any skyparent or devil, indeed proof of anything other than our own mindful calling and responsibility. I think of myself as a theist, an atheist, and a secular “tragic humanist” (in Terry Eagleton’s phrase3) all wrapped up in one. Whatever the moniker, I don’t have license to chide religionists or their spiritual instincts. We can understand spirituality in secular terms without disqualifying in the eyes of “believers” (whom I think of as “feelers of spirit”) the reality of what they feel.

grounds to p ro ceed I seem always to come upon books later in a process that I wish I had read at the beginning. Working in the Bob Miller Bookroom in Toronto in the 1980s I sold copy after copy of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I suppose if I had read the book at that time, its value for a project of this sort would have escaped me. Jaynes and I are, after all, up to very different things (though they may turn out to be complementary if not interdependent). But what I have found in the book now is a reassuring precedent for the kind of argument I propose: This book is a thorough going scheme of emergent evolution vigorously carried all the way back into the physical realm. All the prop-

Introduction

7

erties of matter have emerged from some unspecified forerunner. Those of complex chemical compounds have emerged from the conjunction of simpler chemical components. Properties distinctive of living things have emerged from the conjunctions of these complex molecules. And consciousness emerged from living things. New conjunctions bring about new kinds of relatedness which bring about new emergents. So the new emergent properties are in each case effectively related to the systems from which they emerge.4 Whatever you make of the historical plausibility of Jaynes’s argument that the bicameral architecture of our brains changed only about three thousand years ago, I take heart at his claim that “all properties of matter have emerged from some unspecified forerunner.” I say above that the behaviour of related things changes as its material conditions change. Jaynes puts it another way: “new conjunctions bring about new kinds of relatedness which bring about new emergents. So the new emergent properties are in each case effectively related to the systems from which they emerge.” I would add that one of the “systems” from which these emergents emerge is relation itself, expressed in always new “kinds of relatedness.” This may seem like the most banal of claims to venture in a book of this length, but the book exists to convince you otherwise. Scientists as a group are prone to restrict the operations of metaphor to language, even to particular habits in language. Metaphors help us to communicate complex events but are not themselves a part of them. Strange events in the world may be communicated through metaphor, or a metaphor may be brought to them. But metaphors and the events they describe are not to be confused. Consciously or not, science has been snooping around the issue of metaphor for some time. We’ll be seeing how scientific accounts of essential events in nature and physics – from the Big Bang to our decoded genome – implicate the essential problem of our metaphoric A = B and are plausible expressions of it. Steven Pinker speaks of “combinatorial algorithms” in nature, a phrase we will make good use of. The chemist Roald Hoffmann speaks of interacting chemicals as being “the same and not the same.”5 Thomas Kuhn speaks of how “anomalies” in scientific models become the occasion of their recreation or reinvention. Scientists have been applying the language of metaphor for as long as they have wrestled with the logic of their “combinatorial algorithms.” I hope to suggest why this might be the case.

8

missing link

once more with feeling Metaphor has journeyed a long way. It has crossed disciplines and domains of inquiry, it has passed through physical and biological barriers, it has quite actually and figuratively leapt across gaps. Metaphor is a kind of missing link, the active relation of elements in space, but it may also be a missing link between the biological sciences and humanistic inquiries into imagination, mind, and spiritual experience. Metaphor trades in gaps. It is what falls, and what happens, between things. Its seed time began, unsurprisingly, with the Big Bang. It found its first legs in the interactive algorithms of chemistry. It was present in the reading and writing processes of dna/rna and in cell replication; indeed, it evolved to inform, and to become, the method by which cells themselves communicate with each other. Metaphor embodies the grammar and form of evolution, of cells mutating into untold kinds. With the evolution of matter into the bonds of molecules and living organisms, metaphor became the allowing condition of body, and then of stillunconscious command modules stored in our skulls. By its own enabling means, it became the flesh and bone of brain behaviours, of vast networks of electro-chemical relations by which energies were exchanged between still unthinking neurons. It then served as the scaffolding for symbolic thinking, of memory, of fired neurons that are “put for” objects and ideas, of which they are the mental footprint. Thence it formed the structure of language, the grammar of related, interpenetrating symbols, verbal and syntactic wheels-within-wheels, the swim and flux of vast networks of signifiers. At this stage, metaphor became the means by which it might speak of itself, treat itself as a phenomenon in the terms it had already prescribed. Its hermeneutic and ontological status as a being as is the root and reality of consciousness as we experience it. Further into the social domain, metaphoric thinking is the designing and designful agent that provides for the conditions of cultural change, the transmitters and ligatures of an organism that has mutated, metaphorically speaking, from biological genes to social and cultural memes. And finally, it is the informing body of spirit, of spiritual thinking, and those states of consciousness that seem able to conjure realities out of illusions, substances out of things that are not. It is a god of sorts, or at least the speculative or heuristic process of a god trying to conjure itself, trying to imagine what it might be if it were conjured.

Introduction

9

Metaphor is both a form and a process. Like electricity, it is not so much a thing as the way things behave. It is as actual and scientifically legitimate an agent as the most rigorous cause-and-effect argument, carefully controlled Petri-dish experiment, or microscopic observation. It is a science unto itself, a model for science, and the model that science is. At the same time, it is the root and manner of imaginative thinking and daydreaming. It is every expression and manifestation of wistful desire, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is the reality of language, the allowing condition of human myths, of storytelling, of imaginative creation and its endless possibility. It is the fact of love, of connection and sympathy and identification. It is the bond of Eros and the magnetism of Agape. Homo sapiens may in some sense represent a culmination of metaphoric processes in evolution, at least in this corner of the universe; but the notion that metaphor, having got to us, is altogether finished unfolding would represent one of our grimmer solipsisms. The continued unfolding of the metaphoric initiative is the subject of the last chapter.

just be cause … Any evolutionary narrative of this sort must have some idea of cause-andeffect at its heart. Our lining up material and living phenomena in sequential order, our finding links to fill gaps between them, our reverse engineerings to discover how a thing got to be what it is: these all adhere in a causal logic. We’ll have more to say about the nature of causal logic in the chapter on evolution. You won’t be surprised to learn that I’ll be arguing that cause-and-effect logic is itself essentially metaphorical. So while I apply cause-and-effect logic in my own evolutionary narrative, I will show that it is already an expression of the principle that is at stake, and so shares the aspect of being at once “there” and “not there” that is the essence of metaphor. I think, though, that it might help clarify my purpose and the nature of my argument at this point if I related the logic of my evolutionary narrative to Aristotle’s classical theory of the four causes. Briefly, these causes are the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final.6 The material cause, naturally, is the matter that constitutes a thing. The material cause of paper is wood. The formal cause, by Aristotle’s own admission, is the trickiest of the three, being the identifiable shape

10

missing link

that attaches to a thing’s being what it is. Thus the formal cause of a basketball is roundness. Thinking of form as causing a thing to be has proved problematic, as Aristotle anticipated, but in the same way that we think of wood as causing paper, we may think of the paper’s shape as centrally implicated in its being what it is. The efficient cause speaks to the question: what creative act has brought this thing into being? Thanks to the carpenter’s work, the chair exists. While the carpenter did not make the wood that the chair is made of, he is the efficient cause of the finished product, the source of applied energy that brings about the result. Final cause is sometimes confused with issues of intention and purpose, as when I would say that the final cause of the chair is my needing a place to sit. But no, the chair’s being a place to sit is the final cause of the chair. It is the chair’s telos, the way it ends up, its fulfilling state. The final cause of a seed is the tree it becomes. I started off my project thinking that metaphor was simply the material cause of the evolved phenomena I discuss. Human mind is made of metaphoric behaviours. Chemistry is made of them, mutation is made of them. I’m not sure now that material cause applies at all. Part of the difficulty I saw was that metaphor is not so much a thing as the reality of how things relate. It shapes matter and allows matter to be what it is, but it is not what we normally think of as matter. Of course we’re no longer sure what we’re talking about when we talk about matter; physicists understand that the elements that make up matter are both material and non-material at once, a dance of energies, energy’s afterthought. Any inferences that came to bear on this debate would certainly have implications for our thinking about the matter of metaphoric behaviour. I am on safer ground speaking of metaphor as a formal cause, for it is indeed a shaping property of our material condition. Electrons and protons have the shape they do, compounds look thus, brain structure is as it is, because of the shaping effect, the form, the nature, of relation. With efficient cause, we come to the heart of the argument. Can the continuity or persistence of a form over time be an efficient cause of later evolved contents? Is the metaphoric initiative the carpenter of the world? I’m not claiming anything more controversial than that the possibility of change is itself an efficient cause of changes. But this particular change has a nature and a condition worth investigating. Because there is the form of metaphoric relation, there are protons and electrons, chem-

Introduction

11

icals, dna, evolving creatures, and human consciousness. I am not saying that the relationship between the metaphoric structure of dna and metaphoric thinking involves a direct cause-and-effect relationship, like one billiard ball bumping into another. But there is nonetheless an algorithm that passes into and through dna into its further material expressions. The form is preserved there and passed along as the oomph that makes new expressions possible. It is the carpenter’s know-how if not the carpenter’s muscle. To speak of the efficient cause of metaphor is to wrestle with the mysteries of the Big Bang and the prevailing conditions that allowed it to happen. I hope to show that, whatever else the Big Bang is, it is something coming from nothing, a metaphor of metaphor. The final cause of metaphor is simply metaphor as we usually think of it in language. Metaphor proper arrives at a conscious naming of itself and folds into its own culmination. I don’t go as far as the French archaeologist and visionary Teilhard de Chardin in arguing that this “standing forth” of human consciousness is the expressed presence of a god in historical life, the telos of creation.7 I’m content to see it as nothing more, and nothing less, than an expression of its own nature, and leave it at that – at least until we become more comfortable thinking of it in these material terms.

the double helix of my argument I’ll be devoting a chapter to the evolution of the metaphoric initiative in and through the double helix of dna. I hope I won’t confuse matters by using the double helix as a metaphor in its own right of how my argument unfolds. Two strands will wind together. I argue on the one hand that metaphor is an expression of material combinatorial algorithms. At the same time, our very understanding of those algorithms is governed by the metaphorical mind that is already disposed to see them thus. At every turn, the metaphoric initiative will present both as an observed phenomenon and as the biasing agent of the observer. The double helix winds together through every chapter. So for instance, in relation to chemistry, I show that there is a metaphoric initiative at work in the form of chemical relations. But I also show that actual metaphor includes vestiges of chemical interactive properties. That is, we see metaphors all

12

missing link

around us, even in the physical processes of nature, because we look through the metaphoric filters that those processes have evolved into. That we have such a bias needn’t qualify the argument; indeed, the presence of the bias is proof in the pudding of a material inheritance that cannot leave us seeing other than as we do. The evolution of metaphor and the metaphor of evolution: each perspective then qualifies the authority of the other as a place to start. Ouroboros-like, I swallow my own tail. This is an argument about metaphor but it is also a metaphoric argument, a history of metaphor and a metaphoric history. That can mean either that its flaws will be selfevident as it vanishes into its own emptiness, or that it will be a manifestation of its own authority. Or both. As for how my argument tracks the evolving forms of metaphoric relation, you may imagine a series of concentric circles, each enlarging upon and containing the one within it (energies from the Big Bang expanding, as it were, inside chemistry, inside cell mutation, inside dna, inside evolution, inside neurons, inside memory, inside symbolic thinking, inside metaphor proper, and so on). But the image would lack a logic of continuous embodiment, a thread that joins each of the expanding contexts and defines them as part of the same thing, rather than just as metaphors of one another. In his theory of literary typology, Northrop Frye, borrowing from Blake, characterized myths evolving in time as a rolled-up ball of string.8 The entire ball contains the start of the string and is continuous with it. The outer surface of the string appears, like a concentric circle, to contain smaller circles within it, but only because so much more of itself is wound up inside. A further analogy might be useful here. The reappearance of the metaphoric initiative at various stages of evolution, in forms that are always different and always the same, may suggest to some mathematicians the behaviour of fractals in geometry and chaos theory. Fractal geometry, simply put, is the discernment of order inside disorder, the identification of a repeated pattern or behaviour inside a seemingly random data set in a dynamic system. Fractal, writes James Gleick, means self-similar: “Self-similarity is a symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.”9 While the data in the system arise unpredictably – the motion of clouds, water dripping from a tap, economic cycles – they nonetheless appear to gather over time around consistent

Introduction

13

“attractors,” forming patterns inside the apparent chaos. The forces that govern subtler or less-recognizable patterns are called “strange attractors.”10 The metaphoric initiative might be thought of as such a strange attractor, a kind of gravity, a gestalt around which physical and then biological materials coalesce as they rise up into always higher levels of evolutionary expression. In all events, my argument that relational behaviours in metaphor weave a continuous thread through the changing forms of things might prove a strange attractor for thought itself in its approach to these puzzles. The meat of my argument is made up of metaphoric identifications that I make between aspects of metaphor itself and principles, models, practices, and theories inherent in the various fields of science I approach. At one stage it will be one feature of metaphor that I draw upon, at another stage, another feature. So I will come to speak about associated commonplaces in the chapter on chemistry, and about catachresis in the chapter on mutation. But you may be wondering: if metaphor is inherent in all stages of evolution, why would all its features not be relevant and visible at all stages? Why only some here and others there? My purpose is to show the variety of ways in which the metaphoric initiative can manifest over time. All the features I draw upon are genuine features of metaphor. At each stage it will be metaphor that I am talking about and metaphor that will be relevant. It seems only suitable though to draw upon those particular features of metaphor that are most germane to the subject at hand. I hope it will be implied nonetheless that all aspects of metaphor are in strong vigour at all stages. It would make a tiresome argument if I tried to show this at every turn.

metaphoric horizons One of the reasons, surely, that metaphor is often seen in language practise as rhetorically manipulative and conniving (as it certainly can be …) is that we believe the associations evoked are contrived, unnecessary, merely decorative or playful. At their best, metaphors are hypothetical learning tools; at their worst they are obfuscating and deceitful. Rehabilitators of metaphor have been at work for at least two centuries, starting with William Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley, continuing through

14

missing link

Hegel, and Nietzsche into the age of the modern theorists – I.A. Richards, Max Black, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Northrop Frye, Julian Jaynes, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson among them. But it is relatively esoteric work still, as this roster suggests. In broader educated culture, the word joins with that other bugaboo term, “myth,” to be associated with things that we know are false. Such questioning of the value of metaphor is probably nowhere as strong as in the sciences, and there are respectable reasons why this should be so. Science is a descriptive discipline and objective reality is its text. Its job is to describe what is there, not what might be there if we tried describing it some other way. Metaphors are seen as extra, not only additional to nature but even additional to the descriptive and conceptual initiative in language. And yet in his book, The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker joins a nascent movement in science that gives more recognition to the constitutive value of metaphoric thinking: “If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatronics.”11 At the same time, Pinker remains guarded, often suspicious of metaphor’s tendency to obscure and obfuscate. Our abstract thinking may be metaphorical by nature but there is still the work of genuine science: “the methodical use of metaphor in science shows that metaphor is a way of adapting language to reality, not the other way around, and that it can capture laws in the world, not just project comfortable images onto it.”12 The metaphor of metaphoric gemutlichkeit – that our tropes are an imposition of wish fulfilment on hard fact – is unmistakable, and, Pinker’s brilliant analyses notwithstanding, pervasive: The messiah has not come. Though metaphors are omnipresent in language, many of them are effectively dead in the minds of today’s speakers, and the living ones could never be learned, understood, or used as a reasoning tool unless they were built out of more abstract concepts that capture the similarities and differences between the symbol and the symbolized. For this reason, conceptual metaphors do not render truth and objectivity obsolete, nor do they reduce philo-

Introduction

15

sophical, legal, and political discourse to a beauty contest between rival frames.13 Ouch! I love the last metaphor. It is very persuasive rhetorically, and Pinker would expect us to be suspicious of it for that reason. He grants metaphor a place in the cognitive sciences and allows that human intelligence may be metaphorical by nature. At the same time he draws a line between the work of reason and logic and the uses of metaphoric thinking itself. This leads him to make a corresponding distinction between the arts and other forms of human creative activity. In his book How the Mind Works, he writes: The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection with combinatorial algorithms for causal and probabilistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects, and people. It is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge. That toolbox, however, can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive value.14 Yes, they would certainly have been of dubious adaptive value had they evolved earlier than they did. Our ancestor primates would have had little use for Picasso’s Guernica had it been offered to them; finding somewhere to hang it would not have improved their survival odds. Pinker draws a line between those adaptations that produced the powers of mind that were crucial to our advent and those others, as for instance artistic thinking, that were “Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive value”: Many writers have said that the “function” of the arts is to bring community together, help us to see the world in new ways, to give us a sense of harmony with the cosmos, to allow us to experience the sublime, and so on. All these claims are true, but none is about adaptation in the technical sense that has organized this book: a mechanism that brings about effects that would have increased the number of copies of the genes building that mechanism in the environment in

16

missing link

which we evolved. Some aspects of the arts, I think, do have functions in this sense, but most do not.15 It is easy enough to understand why Pinker would attribute a dubious advantage to the value of art as he characterizes it above. According to Pinker, art is about pushing the right pleasure buttons, feeling a harmony, a togetherness. While certainly attractive, art would not have been as useful as growing an opposable thumb and “knowing” how to use it. The implication of my argument is that we are talking about the same adaptation, that the evolution of mind that was manifestly favoured in our contest for survival is the Sunday afternoon project of human being as it has since evolved. The behaviours of metaphoric relation have mutated into cognitive and linguistic forms where they continue to do their adaptive work in human culture. That adaptation into metaphoric mind became the next adaptive step in replicative algorithms. Its ligature-effect was taken up and put to use. It carried us across a gap – meta-pherein, to carry across – into a new environment, where symbols might be manipulated to our further adaptive advantage. Pinker seems to look right past the expression of those relational energies in art as one culmination of a process he has been celebrating all along. We are the Sunday afternoon project he dismisses.

humanities and humilities Metaphor is my subject and the style of argument I would like to pursue. This book will aim for an element of rigorous logic and an element of metaphoric play. I don’t know if there are many defenders of “play” in the domains of science and logic, but I do use the word advisedly. We understand that logical thinking can begin in playful and audacious speculation, but it shouldn’t end there. The criteria we work with in the sciences involve facts, direct observation, controlled experiment, reasoned argument, verifiable proof. There is a form of metaphoric thinking that abides in all these truth-seeking practices, in spite of what scientists may intend. But play suggests possibility, an attitude of “what if” and “let’s see” that has its back turned to factual evidence, at least initially. Metaphor is heuristic in principle.

Introduction

17

Steven Pinker is more than eloquent on the dangers of a too-eager metaphoric habit of mind when it is applied to scientific inquiry. “Today, woolly symbolism, shallow similarities, and mercurial mappings are the hallmarks of many kinds of quackery.”16 He points to certain practices in homeopathy, folk medicine, forms of quasi-reasoning in numerology, cabbalism, and voodooism. The closer the “woolly symbolism” and “mercurial mappings” come to realms of the unobserved and unobservable, the riskier their conjurings become. The recent spate of science books that demystify religion points to a wide-spread suspicion among scientists towards the kinds of quackery that have passed as truthful inquiry in human history (I exclude from this group Marcelo Gleiser in his recent The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning, where he convincingly aligns science and religion as corresponding pursuits of understanding). Established religions share quarters with the more explicitly esoteric writings of new-age science and religion by such as G.I. Gurdjieff, Fritjof Capra, Ken Wilbur, and others. For these thinkers, writes Robert Denham, a schematizing imagination accompanies a “belief that there are correspondences between all aspects of the visible and invisible worlds that are meant to be decoded.”17 The products of such thinking – multi-verses, alternative dimensions, holograms, domains of the inexplicable – normally exceed the scientifically demonstrable. Northrop Frye called such graspings at the edges of the thinkable “kook books” and loved to read them to see what popped up and to enjoy the sheer energy of metaphoric mind that he found there.18 Even in the legitimate sciences, Pinker finds evidence of “loose and overlapping analogies” that are “a mark of bad science writing and teaching.”19 Analogy is essential to understanding in the sciences, Pinker argues, but it has been a long time in separating itself from other forms of associative-thinking-as-proof that have plagued it from the beginning: Most practitioners before the modern scientific era, and most purveyors of pseudoscience today, rambunctiously mix their metaphors, crisscross the connections, and get seduced by surface similarity. The alchemists, for instance, analogized the sun to gold, because both are yellow; Jupiter to tin, because Jupiter is the god of the sky and the sky was thought to be made of tin; and Saturn to lead, because it moved slowly, as if it were heavy like lead, but also because lead is dark, like

18

missing link

night, which in turn is like death, and Saturn is farthest from the sun, the giver of life, making Saturn the lord of death. The piling on of metaphorical and metonymic allusions was thought to make the system more compelling, whereas by modern scientific standards it makes it less compelling.20 Indeed it does. We are quick to recognize the “piling up of analogies” in science as a form of pseudo-argument. Our pliers in the rigorous sciences reach to pick up concrete and reliable material evidences. That is what pliers do. But to use a metaphor of my own, the pliers are metaphor, are metaphoric thinking; they are the grasp of the metaphoric initiative in us and in all our sciences. Even if it were, as I argue, the experience of reachingness in human mind, we would still need to debate the question of what kind of reaching would be most appropriate in the various disciplines. The question in all disciplines of eligible evidence is still open. As Jan Zwicky writes in Wisdom and Metaphor, “How is it even possible that there should be dispute over what constitutes a proof?” and “What, indeed, do we mean by ‘rigour’? (Or perhaps, what is it that we want to mean? – And why?)”21 We might begin by recognizing that the reaching itself is metaphoric and proper to both.

method and madness I appear to be proposing a rather grand argument in this book. At the same time, I’m not a huge fan of argument per se, that is, of sustained, logical, cause-and-effect reasoning that leads to inevitable conclusions and stands as the proof of its own premises. The more effectively you line up your own bits and pieces, the truer your argument must be, and the more it comes to represent the evidence of its own authority.22 I had been taught to believe that this was the only way of writing with any critical or conceptual clout. I did however have an alternative example before me throughout my undergraduate years, an example that I only later came to appreciate as an alternative method of embodying and presenting ideas.

Introduction

19

The great absent mentor in my life, Northrop Frye, has been for me an inspiring advocate of the ultimate potential of metaphoric thinking.23 I say absent mentor, because for the most part in my years at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, Frye was a distant ghost. You saw him crossing the quad with his head down, lost in thought. His fame alone could easily have accounted for how unreal he seemed. But it was also something about his writing. For the most part during my years at the college, I found Frye’s prose at once lucid and impenetrable. There was no jargon in the usual sense. I could understand every word and sentence. But I had no idea how to follow the argument. I found this intriguing. I eventually came to appreciate how Frye doesn’t so much argue the truth of a point as immerse you in its elements. You don’t feel that you are following (or indeed could follow) the steps of a logical discourse, but participating in a vision, not to get anywhere finally, but to find yourself dwelling more deeply at the centre where you already were. Steven Pinker’s quackery-detector would certainly go off at this point. Scientists cannot proceed in this manner. Yet it was no accident that Frye was considered to be one the more scientific of literary critics, with his intensely descriptive modellings of literary phenomena. This made literary critics later suspicious of his findings. Frye would not argue that A was true, therefore B, therefore C, therefore D. He would make observations in discrete paragraphs, usually descriptions of features in literary works, and he would lay these paragraphs out in juxtaposition with one another, where the relations between each observation were in part unspecified, left partly to the reader’s own ingenuity of critical response and imagination. It was only when you went back and thought about all the dimensions of the argument and their relations to one another that you would find yourself not at the end of an argument that you had to agree with, but at the centre of a revelation, the start of something that simply made you want to think more. In this sense, Frye’s essays were much more like poems than critical arguments. That they were also critical arguments of the most challenging and riddling sort was part of their genius. He found a way of writing scientifically about literature while preserving in his style the spirit of its own metaphoric and imaginative procedures.

20

missing link

I am rather surprised actually that more hasn’t been made of Frye’s method of argument. One important exception is Jan Zwicky’s Wisdom and Metaphor. One of Canada’s foremost poets and thinkers, Zwicky works in the same spirit, placing brief passages by writers on metaphor and metaphoric language face en face with small critical vignettes by Zwicky herself. Reflecting on the aphoristic style of both Herakleitos and Wittgenstein, she writes: An aphorism invites its reader to looks at things a certain way; a collection of them invites her to see connexions for herself. – That is, aphoristic writing cultivates our ability to see-as. We may be puzzled at first – but then we “get it,” experience the coalescence of a gestalt. It is the experience of that coalescence that is crucial. It is an experience quite other than that of granting the reasonableness of proposition B, given proposition A.24 The antiphonal relationship of call and response doesn’t so much aim to explain the found gems that she “hosts,” as to resonate with them in the direction of further metaphoric potential. Her work has been an inspiration to me. The tacit inference is that this form of argument represents an alternative and legitimate wisdom among the discourses. In the mean time, one of the great contemporary defenders of Darwinian evolutionary thinking and practice, Daniel Dennett, opens his seminal book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea with an apology for what is effectively not a strict philosophical argument: I want to get thinkers in other disciplines to take evolutionary thinking seriously, to show them how they have been underestimating it, and to show them why they have been listening to the wrong sirens. For this, I have to use more artful methods. I have to tell a story. You don’t want to be swayed by a story? Well, I know you won’t be swayed by a formal argument; you won’t even listen to a formal argument for my conclusion, so I start where I have to start.25 I think it is actually Dennett’s powers of story-telling, the imaginative and associative flair of his arguments that make his work so generally appealing among lay readers like myself. It carries its own authority.

Introduction

21

I have picked up along the way something of the metaphoric spirit of argument. I seem to prefer bathing in a problem over wading straight through it. I am, to be sure, more of a plain arguer than Frye, but my chapters comprise separate sections that are sometimes logically, sometimes metaphorically related to one another. You may have the feeling from time to time of a tour guide wandering through an art gallery crisscrossing the floor between canvases, as a fuller presentation of some vision at the heart of the room demands.

disciplinary caveats As I set out to write now, I am surrounded by giants, by what Stephen Spender called in a moment of bombastic humility “the truly great.” Theorists of myth and metaphor, literary and hermeneutic thinkers, cognitive, neuro-biological, and evolutionary scientists and philosophers, theorists of language and linguistics: they stand so closely together, like the taller trees of the rainforest, in their fronting of bright revelations, that there seems nothing left for me but to go out amid the lower grasses where I can graze in peace. To show what sort of disorderly rabble I have called on by name, I invoke again Northrop Frye, Daniel Dennett, Paul Ricoeur, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Jan Zwicky, but also Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, Julian Jaynes, Teilhard de Chardin, Charles Darwin, Samuel Butler, William James. There are many others. Perhaps the best I can hope for is to have convened a forum where these giants in their fields may sit across from one another – however haphazardly and without a proper briefing – to exchange glances of mutual if somewhat bemused respect. As for the idea of a forum, wherever there is juxtaposition, a discerned proximity, there is metaphor and metaphoric potential. This book is about metaphor as the missing link and one of my intentions is that it may be entertained as a missing link between these thinkers themselves, as between any two disparate ideas that with a flourish may fall into relation and engender more thinking. There may be a good reason that few humanists have ventured into the area thus far. The fields of atomic theory, biology, neurology, genetics – to spot but a tip of the iceberg – each require a lifetime of devoted learning. Humanists have been no more inclined as a group to study

22

missing link

Protein Kinase A than scientists have wondered about the use of parataxis in Emerson’s prose (though in my own experience scientists have shown a healthier curiosity about other people’s disciplines). Had my science teacher not taken me aside in the spring of 1976 for a severe peptalk, I would have failed grade-ten chemistry. I got a 55 in my final year of math. My first love had long since swept me away. I was all about words, about language play and imagination, and the sort of daydreaming and whimsy that I cannot recommend to anyone as an effective regimen in research. I wish I knew then what I know now about the vast, thrilling, and complex fields of inquiry in the various sciences. I would at least have done my homework. Much is risked in interdisciplinary studies and I think there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about the ends and means employed. People often take offence when their own discipline is “invaded” by researchers from other fields who purport to have new answers or new approaches to old problems. As interdisciplinary inquiry becomes an end in itself, the cries of foul grow louder. Terry Eagleton has (for the most part rightly I think) taken exception to how certain biologists and physicists claim to speak with authority on religious matters, parodying their presumption that anyone with a science degree can explain, and explain away, religious faith.26 The more you read this sort of antiphonal call and response, the more middle territories start to look like mine fields. I was disappointed to find Daniel Dennett express an ungenerous attitude towards what he calls “interlopers” in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Dennett himself has developed his own work in neuroscience by venturing ambitiously into the realms of social justice (Freedom Evolves) and religion (Breaking the Spell) but takes exception to those who have wandered into his own field: Incurable optimist that I am, I find this recent invasion by physicists into the domains of cognitive neuroscience to be a cloud with a silver lining: for the first time in my professional life, an interloping discipline beats out philosophy for the prize for combining arrogance with ignorance about the field being invaded.27 The accusation is turned on Dennett himself by Eagleton: “Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell … thinks [Christianity] is a kind of bogus theory or pseudo-explanation of the world. In this sense he is like someone

Introduction

23

who thinks that a novel is a botched piece of sociology.”28 The volleys back and forth have made for a good spectator sport, if they haven’t helped the initiative that lies at their heart. Later on in this book I will be talking about the “allowing conditions” of evolution. I’ll anticipate my discussion by saying that there is an important condition for a work of this (and any) interdisciplinary sort. It is a reader who will make allowances for the myriad blindnesses I may prove guilty of, and the stumblings they may cause. I write for a reader willing to make those allowances so long as they provide some glimpse of further or hidden paths worth testing. One can play sceptic and take exception to the gaps that this theory of metaphor will make much of; one can show how the jointures I propose are really just gaps indeed, where the unique differences of each discipline are concerned. There may indeed be, as it were, holes in the argument. Enough people have tried to fill in the gaps with exhaustive work in their respective disciplines to prove that a missing link will not always be a connecting thread, that sometimes a gap is just a gap. But I’ll take heart at Jean-Pierre Changeux’s caveat in his book of conversations with Paul Ricoeur entitled What Makes Us Think?: A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain: “Experience has shown that it is often at the boundaries between disciplines that great discoveries take place.”29 Where better to look than to the behaviours of mind that have to do with boundaries, limits, and crossings-over, with unarticulated spaces and elusive ligatures? Metaphoric thinking has an insatiable appetite for gaps. Gaps are metaphoric oxygen. Metaphor is at home where gaps abide. It would set itself where they stand, without prejudice, merely to see what happens. If metaphor is a kind of allowing condition for thought, then perhaps there is breath and agency to be enjoyed in such an argument as this and we should follow it, if only to erect “caution barriers” for future sojourners.

consilience and the new scientific spirit As we’re on the matter of disciplinary boundaries and what good can come from exploring them, I should stop to acknowledge my debt to E.O. Wilson and Gaston Bachelard, two scientists who have showed the way in revealing unexplored grounds between science and art. Wilson could

24

missing link

represent the apotheosis of Pierre Changeux’s remark just quoted, that “it is often at the boundaries between disciplines that great discoveries take place.” Wilson has long lamented the kind of polarization between science and the humanities that has dominated inquiry in both disciplines for much of the last century. If there has been a growing sense in the past decade of potential intersections, Wilson’s book would represent the reconnaissance that has mapped the territory and made preliminary advances. His own understanding of the polarization is instructive. Scholars trained in the social sciences and humanities, he writes, consider human nature to be their province and have difficulty conceiving the relevance of the natural sciences to social behaviour and policy. Natural scientists, whose expertise is diced into narrow compartments with little connection to human affairs, are indeed ill prepared to engage the same subjects. What does a biochemist know of legal theory and the China trade? It is not enough to repeat the old nostrum that all scholars, natural and social scientists and humanists alike, are animated by a common creative spirit. They are indeed creative siblings, but they lack a common language.30 Naturally, from my perspective, the polarization of related disciplines begs the question of metaphoric relation. Two disciplines stand apart, yet in decided tension with one another. There is a gap, “an unexplored terrain,” Wilson writes, “awaiting cooperative entry from both sides.”31 Explorers in each camp tentatively approach the interstice and find themselves mutually transforming and transformed. It is our ignorance of the terrain, Wilson argues, that makes the crossing treacherous. I would go even further to say that it is our ignorance of how we relate and conceive of identities within middle spaces, gaps, and unexplored terrains, that leaves us reluctant to “give up” our own established grounds. Not a small part of this book is dedicated to a revision of how we think of unknowns and the betweenwheres they inhabit. Wilson speaks of the challenges facing the two cultures of science and humanities: We know that virtually all of human behaviour is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin

Introduction

25

of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature. What, in final analysis [sic], joins the deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the more recent cultural histories of its far-flung societies? That, in my opinion, is the nub of the relationship between the two cultures. It can be stated as a problem to be solved, the central problem of the social sciences and humanities, and simultaneously one of the great remaining problems of the natural sciences.32 Wilson has certainly anticipated the arc of my own argument. We are interested in the same things: tracing a narrative line from biology to culture, understanding the kind of evolutionary lift that culture represents, and further understanding art and even our experience of spirit as expressions of behaviours that have their antecedents in material evolution. He has shown how such an interest may be responsibly pursued. The solution, again, “is to view the boundary between scientific and literary culture not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides.” I take heart from that last prepositional phrase. Wilson’s book shows what may be accomplished when someone with an open and inquiring mind approaches the “territorial line” from the side of the material sciences. Wilson proposes an understanding of how symbolic thinking in culture – art, literature, religion – may be seen as extensions of the evolutionary algorithms that precede them. In approaching the territorial line from the other side, I often come to similar conclusions as to the meaning and potential of the nature/culture consilience that our species represents. We move from the material to the immaterial, in just the direction we would expect evolution itself to have followed, with scientific study trailing in its wake. At the same time, I come at the issue from the opposite direction. This partly means complicating the kind of hierarchy that may for some be implied in the material-to-immaterial evolutionary narrative. I do this by turning the material universe inside-out, that is, by understanding nature as a condition of an initiative that may be most fully understood in its humanistic dimension, where it comes into its own. Heisenberg’s discovery of the uncertainly principle has complicated our pursuit of an objectifiable reality, even if its inference is not particu-

26

missing link

larly new. Scientists and humanists have long understood that everything around us reflects back our own way of looking at it. This is Kant’s epistemology, but the idea goes back to the ancients.33 While observations like this have opened the door to hawkers of “woolly symbolism, shallow similarities, and mercurial mappings”34 in various new-age scientific and humanistic undertakings, most physical scientists have kept their wits about them and relied on controlled experiment, direct observation, verifiable facts, and reasoned argument. The fundamental claim in this book is that there is a transforming and informing initiative at work at the heart of physical reality (i.e. metaphoric paradox) that is hidden from observation in observation. While scientists like Pinker might object to such “mercurial mappings” at a certain level of investigation, the inference isn’t altogether foreign to scientists in general, particularly at the higher end of physics and mathematics. Indeed, inquiries along these lines, in a new scientific spirit, have been offered for upwards of a century. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard loomed very large in my reading as an undergraduate. The Poetics of Space was never far from my satchel. Quite a while before I had caught up with some of the deeper implications in Northrop Frye, Bachelard was the first in my reading to suggest that we inhabit the architecture of our own minds. Bachelard, like Wilson, was a scientist who was interested in extending his research in chemistry and mathematics into the imaginative worlds of art and culture. Unlike Wilson, Bachelard made the full migration into philosophy and literary criticism and brought his primary training along with him. His book The New Scientific Spirit (1934) was published around the time that thinkers in a variety of disciplines were scrambling to accommodate the counter-logical and relatively un-intuitive discoveries of quantum mechanics to a more manageable understanding of how the world was real: In what, precisely, does belief in reality consist? What is the idea of reality? What is the primordial metaphorical function of the real? My answer is this: The belief in reality is essentially the conviction that an entity transcends immediate sense data; or, to put the same point more plainly, it is the conviction that what is real but hidden has more content that what is given and obvious. Of course it is in the realm of mathematics that this “realizing” function operates most delicately.35

Introduction

27

Bachelard recognized in mathematical reality “a world of the possible” and he saw that it was only in the “realm of aesthetics that we may find synthetic values comparable to the symbols of mathematics.”36 He makes reference to images in Mallarmé, where “what is possible and what is (l’Être) are homogenous.” At the same time it is his belief that “what is real but hidden has more content that what is given and obvious” that provides oxygen for my journey. He gives me a further edge: “if the roots of the relations among objects do not lie in the objects themselves, if the objects acquire their properties only after relations are imposed upon them, then we must be very careful about asking where these relations come from.37 Precisely: where do these relations come from? Where does relation come from? Bachelard pulls up short of the idea that the very roots of relation lie in the objects themselves. My own argument is that those roots are both imposed and inherent, i.e. that they are both an expression of how we look at them and a core behaviour in the real. This difference aside, Bachelard remains for me an oracle whose prophecy licenses a journey through “the realm in which relation has priority over being.”38 If the material universe is a product of relational behaviours whose meaning receives a fuller expression in studies of mind and culture, we should perhaps consider the possibility that our understanding of those material conditions may get an important boost when nature has been brought “full circle” in just this way. The material world – physics, chemistry, biology, the cognitive sciences and the designing cultures of Homo sapiens that have come of these – is an expression of a metaphoric initiative that was there from the start. And that initiative – how conveniently, how prophetically – is in front of us now, offering up for inquiry its every secret in the imaginative worlds that spill from us in art and literature. I am not trying to reverse the material/immaterial hierarchy here, but to see that hierarchy – all Ouroboros like – vanish in a circle that effectively unfolds in both directions at once and meets everywhere on the circumference. Isn’t that the hope held out by the subtitle to Wilson’s book, “The Unity of Knowledge”? This phrase goes to the heart of metaphor, and might well be considered one of its more broadly encompassing definitions. When we struggle to grasp the riddles of the Big Bang, chemical relation and evolution, dna replication, and consciousness, we are struggling with a counter-logic of paradox that we puzzle out in humanistic

28

missing link

study as well: how metaphor works on us, in our language, in our poems, in our thoughts. In literary studies, we have come a long way in isolating a complex hermeneutic of metaphor, the veiled and elusive A = B, the problem of a simultaneous is and is not. Perhaps we should pool our resources. We may have neglected to take full advantage of the interpretive potential that our understanding of metaphor in the humanities can bring to a study of matter and material relations in science. If the laws of paradox, to invoke an important oxymoron, are a fundamental property of material reality, one that came into being when the four fundamental forces of the universe did, then we have before us the potential of a grand unfolding narrative that begins and ends in two places at once: in the Big Bang and in us. We are the evolutionary extension of its caveats. We are the special and unique access to the laws of paradox, for we are their living and conscious expression. We may not yet be able to solve this fundamental secret of material creation, but we are the only key we have to unlocking it. If we cannot know the truth, W.B. Yeats wrote in one of his last letters, we do at least embody it.39

mechanisms and initiatives Throughout the book I will be using such phrases as “metaphoric initiative” and “relational behaviours,” distinguishing them from actual metaphors. In early drafts I had used the term “metaphoric mechanism,” which I thought read as an attractive oxymoron (the kind that is writ large in this entire book). Mechanisms are made up of concrete interrelating parts – ligatures, hinges, gears, wheels within wheels – whose “output” does actual work according to its application. Metaphors we normally think are anything but mechanistic or machine-like; they are slippery, unpredictable, and above all immaterial. Their “output” is often as inscrutable as their procedures. If we go back to Steven Pinker’s thoughts about art as a Sunday afternoon pastime, we’ll find him implicitly distinguishing between artful purposes and effects, on the one hand, and the nuts and bolts of scientific cause-and-effect on the other. All these claims are true, but none is about adaptation in the technical sense that has organized this book: a mechanism that brings about

Introduction

29

effects that would have increased the number of copies of the genes building that mechanism in the environment in which we evolved.40 So that is one bias, that art and imaginative creation don’t have to do with mechanisms per se. Pinker would find plenty of folks in agreement in the humanities, where any thought of reducing art and literature to concrete and measurable working parts is counter-intuitive, counterproductive, or downright offensive. Yet metaphor is made up of working parts, so many indeed and so intricate sometimes that they are hard to analyse. You have only to read Paul Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor to feel your mind spin with the substantive intrication. Relation itself as a phenomenon can be substantially measured and dissected. The behaviours of metaphoric relation are no less quantifiable than the behaviours of chemicals, strands of dna, evolutionary processes. Indeed, they are the same behaviours. I hope to drive that point home in this book, while making my findings palatable to both the scientists who would dismiss metaphor’s precision workings in the material world and humanists who balk at the idea of its having any. I say all this while not forgetting that to call metaphor a kind of machine is, of course, to speak metaphorically. At the same time, the term “metaphoric mechanism” may have a reifying tone that would make of its unfoldings an unstoppable juggernaut. I can see how readers might feel aggressed with any implication that the term represents a kind of Panzer advancing with machine-like precision on its way to ultimate victory, so in most instances I’ve avoided it. The risk of seeming to speak of fixed absolutes and concrete realities, and implying that metaphor proper has been here from the beginning, is greater than any advantage the term may have. So yes, I have settled on a few alternative terms, most prominently “metaphoric initiative” and “metaphoric behaviours.” The advantage of the former term is its suggestion of originary energies. The first definition of “initiative” in the oed – “the act, or action, of initiating or taking the first step” – goes to my belief that metaphoric behaviours inhabit the material and immaterial world as part of its originary oomph. A further definition – namely “the power, right, or function of initiating or originating something” – carries useful inferences. Functions are not just purposes; they are the way things work. In math, functions are

30

missing link

formulas, and formulas have genuine particulars. One of the attractive implications of the latter term, behaviour (“the manner in which a thing acts under specified conditions or circumstances, or in relation to other things”), is the implication of an actual property, a way of acting that can be observed and whose observation is its reality. Behaviours can be seen to define materials even while they are separate from them; behaving courageously makes me a courageous person, and so on. If the Big Bang has behaved metaphorically, we may do well to think about what metaphoric behaviour means.

Part One

This page intentionally left blank

1

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

Metaphor is an effort to extend our being into the external world, to break down the wall between subject and object and start currents of verbal energy flowing between them. ~Northrop Frye1 Both are alike; and both alike we like. ~Shakespeare, King John

what is metaphor? The makings of metaphor appeared in the world when the world first appeared, and to what degree ex nihilo we may still speculate. The initiative passed through myriad incarnations that have led up to and become ourselves. This book might do well to follow a similar procedure, with an introduction of metaphor per se, a conjuring of it ex nihilo: what metaphor is thought to be, how it is thought to work. With each chapter that follows, we will have occasion to draw out unique features of metaphoric behaviour as they become relevant. To avoid repeating myself too much, I’m aiming at this stage for an outline only, a feel for the inherent audacity and strangeness of metaphoric relation. There will be particulars to be sure, and a degree of jeweller’s-eye tinkering, but all in the service of getting the watch up and running. I also include a brief chapter on the reputation of metaphor among philosophers, scientists, and writers over time. We need such a narrative to stand over and against the alternative history of metaphor that I will offer subsequently, that is, a history of its unfolding and evolving material expressions since the Big Bang. That history will arrive eventually at

34

missing link

its instantiation in culture, though even there I will track its expression and significance in terms that are largely ahistorical in the usual sense. Those who are less interested in defining certain principles of metaphor proper, or in the history of its reputation, than in how its makings have evolved in our direction and become a large part of what we are, could skim the next two chapters. The guiding principle of “Metaphor and …” maintained throughout this book should in each case be sufficient unto itself.

space, the final frontier Paul Ricoeur writes in The Rule of Metaphor that we study two things when we study this subject: semantics and semiotics, what words mean and how they are used. When words are set in relation to one another, their meanings change. One can study those meanings. That’s semantics. But their meanings change when we put them in relation to one another. Something happens in our minds when we put signs together. There is a reaction and a result. That’s the semiotics, the study of signs and their behaviour.2 The study of semiotics points us in the direction of a psychology of metaphor. At its root, metaphor is a discerned relationship between two things. A and B are juxtaposed. Their arrangement in space, and their arrangement spatially in your mind, renders them metaphorically charged. The radical environment of juxtaposition is space, and so space is the radical environment of metaphor, its allowing condition. When something means, it lies in the eyes of a perceiver in spatial relation to something else. The assumption of space lingers behind most every metaphoric relationship that I discern in this book. Space is the origin, the horizon, and the context of metaphor. It is well nigh everything in metaphor but the act of mind that sees it for what it is. The importance of spatial thinking in metaphor comes through in the word itself. The meta- prefix is slippery, but intelligible. The principle sense (the sense above all, according to the oed) is that of change. It is expressed in words like metamorphosis (“metaphor” itself is used as a further example). Among the subtler delineations of meaning in meta- we find “across” and “beyond.” The preposition “across” indicates a tran-

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

35

sitional space between two things. “Beyond,” on the other hand, suggests a vector heading away from a certain position, a space that begins at the limit of something. The “across”-meta bespeaks the transference of a body or meaning between two points. The “beyond”-meta stresses how an element gets carried away, transgresses a limit, becomes not itself. These alternative resonances will prove to be central. But if this isn’t kaleidoscopic enough, the oed reminds us that the original sense of meta- is most likely connected with the Mycenean Greek “me-ta,” meaning “together with.” When we recall that “with” itself suggests both “towards” and “against” (such that to stand “with” someone is not the same as to “withstand” him), our sense of the myriad tensions, transgressions, and bonds involved in metaphor is refreshed. Finally we come to the “phor,” to the “pherein” as the Greek root has it: to journey, to carry (cf. fare, far etc.). This gives us the oomph that we need to accomplish the crossing over or beyond a given limit. It is metaphor’s agency. We have boundary and the transgression of boundary, at once the drawing of a line and its supersession. Seeing metaphor as an expression of spatial relation – or seeing relation as an expression of space – doesn’t solve or do away with any of the attendant difficulties, but it provides a useful context in which to think about them. We say that in metaphor a meaning is transferred, carried across to another meaning. How do you carry the meaning of love across to the meaning of rose? I can take an object from one room and carry it to an object in another room. But they are still two objects. How are they related? I can bring them closer to one another, but what has changed? How do they become one and yet remain separate? Space doesn’t resolve the complexity of interpenetration, when one thing is changed by the energy carried to it by another thing. Space only expresses that complexity. I think Wallace Stevens was on to something essential in “The Motive for Metaphor.” We could ask ourselves whether the concluding image in the poem, the “vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X” (Collected, 288), refers to the elusive variable reality that metaphor would draw out, or to the variable of metaphor itself. In this poem the two are very difficult to distinguish – the things words are about and the words themselves – and that is surely part of the point. At the same time, the essential meditation of the poem revolves around this search for an original

36

missing link

purpose or drive. A motive for metaphor certainly directs us to think about goals and uses, but “motive” means more than that. The Latin motivum (reason, impulse, cause) returns us to the roots of spatial relation in the sense of “that which moves or initiates motion” (oed). In this sense the metaphoric initiative that lies at the heart of this book, whose roots we trace back to space itself, is actually and figuratively the motive for metaphor.

the amoeba and the gem But let us ask nonetheless about the motive for metaphor in the more common sense. Why do we use metaphors? How do we use them? Let’s draw a brain (see figure 1.1). This brain is going to be important for a while so we should be clear about it. If you wish to be less literal, you can draw a circle instead. Either way, think of it as a picture of your mind and all it contains. In it is everything you know, everything you recognize, everything you believe and feel, every memory, every cognitive item that you can work with, including all the words and names that stand for these. To speak neurologically, the circle is the total network of potential synaptic relations in your noggin. Now, draw a shape outside the circle and call it “A” (figure 1.2). This A is some new or unfamiliar thing. You’ve never seen it before and you have no idea what it is. When I do this in class, I ask my students what the shape is, and after a snicker or two they reply dutifully that they don’t know. I ask them, “Now what do we do?” Silence. I say, “OK. You’re in the cafeteria after class and you’re talking to your friends and you say ‘Donaldson drew this weird thing on the board today, but I have no idea what it was.’ What does your friend reply?” Sooner or later, someone ventures: “Umm, what was it like?”’ Of course. You are asked to name a thing that you do recognize, so that you can make a connection between the two and understand the first shape better. Maybe you say, “Well, it sorta looked like an amoeba, or like the map of the US, except with two more Floridas on the west coast.” A picture comes to mind. Now let’s call this “amoeba” or “three Floridas map” the B. The B goes inside the circle. You already know what the B is. You can visualize an amoeba or a US with extra Floridas. You summon B to mind because it is like A. Now we understand A better.

Figure 1.1 Top Your mind as an entire cosmology. Figure 1.2 Bottom Metaphor as substitution: an unfamiliar thing drifts into your ken.

38

missing link

Now what just happened? Think of the imaginary equal sign as traversing the boundary between what you know and what you don’t know. It carries a thing across. You could also say that a line is erased and redrawn so that both elements now fall inside your circle of knowledge. Now you see what A is, you know it, because you know what its relation is to other things that you know. This is what knowledge is: a vast network of relations. Notice that any question-and-answer binary takes the same form. When I ask you what time it is, or what the meaning of life is, you search among the network of relations in your mind to find an agreeable match. You are implicitly replying: what you are looking for is like this thing I can name. If the questioner recognizes the substitution as an appropriate likeness (“it is ten to four” or “life is a riddle inside a mystery”) consciousness is expanded. This is the very thought process that Hofstadter and Sander suggest is common to thinkers: “at every moment in our lives, our concepts are selectively triggered by analogies that our brain makes without letup, in an effort to make sense of the new and unknown in terms of the old and known.”3 E.O. Wilson concurs: “In both the arts and sciences the programmed brain seeks elegance, which is the parsimonious and evocative description of pattern to make sense out of a confusion of detail.”4 Wilson goes on to quote the nuclear physicist Hideki Yukawa in his own characterization of the process: Suppose there is something which a person cannot understand. He happens to notice the similarity of this something to some other thing which he understands quite well. By comparing them he may come to understand the thing which he could not understand up to that moment. If his understanding turns out to be appropriate and nobody else has ever come to such an understanding, he can claim that his thinking was really creative.5 This form of relational thinking, very common in the sciences but characteristic of almost all searching cognition, is essentially conservative so far as the creation of knowledge is concerned. That is, the unknown element is assimilated to a body of knowledge that we already possess. It may, of course, be radically transformed in the process. Calling the blob I drew either an amoeba or a map of the US with three Floridas

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

39

changes my sense of what the blob is. As Lakoff and Johnson show in their book Metaphors We Live By, this is both the advantage and the danger of metaphoric thinking. Unknowns are assimilated and manipulated at once. We’ll have more to say about this shortly. Now, while this associative work is a significant part of our thinking, it does not on its own characterize the kinds of metaphors we prize in poetry and other forms of imaginative thought. That body of knowledge you and I have rattling around in our heads isn’t just lying dormant. Most of the time we are not encountering unknowns. Instead, we are shuffling around elements that we already know in a network of relationships that becomes more stable the more we are able to relate each element to each other element. We become confident about “how the world is” as we become confident about how everything in our heads can be understood in relation to everything else. But now let’s throw a spanner in the works. Let’s take, say, the idea of love and the idea of a gem. You already have a pretty good idea of who your beloved is. He or she, at least, is not an absolute unknown, like the blob earlier. And you know what a gem is. Can we work with this pairing as we did with the unknown shape in the previous diagram? But along comes the poet and says, rather troublesomely, that the two are really the same. He says, “My love is a gem” (see figure 1.3). Now, if you happen to be a computer – that is, working with numerical algorithms – you will have a bad case of cognitive dissonance; you’ll shut down, or you’ll start singing “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.” But more nimble brains like ours will try to sort out what happens when we say that they are the same thing. The metaphoric event has destabilized your circle of understanding, your picture of the world, and left you asking: What sort of picture could contain these two things as one thing? And you do try to sort it out. You recognize that the problem is also an opportunity and you go to work. What has really changed? Rather than having assimilated an unknown to a known element, accommodating it to your growing body of knowledge, you have destabilized that body of knowledge by saying that there are elements within it that are related in ways you hadn’t imagined. The body of knowledge is shaken and transformed. Conservation becomes transgression. “The positive assertion in a metaphor,” writes Jan Zwicky, “is always an act of overcoming.”6

40

missing link

Figure 1.3 Metaphor as interaction: two knowns are related.

the logic of metaphor We need to get some basic formulas onto the table. There is an ontology of metaphor, which is to say, a way of reducing it to and expressing its essential elements, its original chemistry if you like. The formula is not without difficulties. Some prefer a simple A = B, where the equal sign represents the act of comparison or substitution. Others prefer A is B, where a more radical identification is made. Still others would set a little vector between the A and the B (A B) as a way of emphasizing the transference of properties, the act of carrying across, though this really only expresses a sub-property of the first two formulations.

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

41

There is something at stake in your choice of formula and it is no less than your deeper metaphorical bias. Saying that 4 + 1 = 3 + 2 is not the same as saying 4 + 1 is 3 + 2. The latter should strike you as manifestly false. Clearly, 4 + 1 is not 3 + 2. 4 + 1 is 4 + 1. You can, if you like, replace 4 + 1 with 3 + 2 and say that they amount to the same thing, have equal status, that one can be substituted for the other in certain formulas without disturbing the results. But each is strongly itself. When we invoke such a connection, we imply that there are enough similarities between A and B that we feel justified in using one or the other under certain circumstances. But to say that A is B is more of an affront to common sense. A radical expression of this formula, one to keep in mind if you want to sense the impertinence, is “A is not A.” How can this be so? A is A, and B is B and never the twain shall meet. If you insist otherwise, you’re just playing with words. Jan Zwicky gets at the essential impasse of metaphoric logic when she writes: “Strictly speaking, ‘x is y’ is not a metaphorical claim unless ‘x is not y’ is true. In the general sense, an expression is not metaphorical unless it implies – or insinuates – a claim of the form ‘x is y’ where ‘x is not y’ is true.”7 Across the page, in this book of face en face presentations, Zwicky juxtaposes a passage from Herakleitos, who argues that “They do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself [literally, how being brought apart it is brought together with itself]: there is a back-stretched connection, as in the bow and the lyre.”8 The tension itself is irreducible. We have got much better in the last fifty years at thinking about things not being themselves. Quantum mechanics tells us that light is neither wave nor particle. It says that your being yourself – who and where you are in strict physical terms – is a function only of certain probabilities, and that you might well be, just now, on the other side of the universe, that you are equal to, and a product of, everything you are not. All is process, all is flux. It may be no accident that the fineries of metaphoric thinking are coming to the fore just as our scientists are discovering equivalent expressions, in all their dumbfounding paradox, in the physical realm. Good card-carrying logicians and other common-sense thinkers tend to go for “A = B,” all things being equal, and daydream about the advantages of substitution. Radical metaphorists, linguistic troublemakers, and other purveyors of manifest nonsense prefer “A is

42

missing link

B.” On one level we are talking about two different kinds of metaphor. But what issues from these differences-in-kind are two alternative theories. They respectively support and accommodate those differences to further questions of how we approach metaphors, what we may make of them and how we conceive of their meanings. Those two theories are called, on the one hand “the substitution theory” or the “assimilation theory” (a form of A = B) and on the other “the interaction theory” (A is B). I associate the former with literary critic I.A. Richards, and the latter with linguistic philosopher Max Black. Before we come to their unique features, we want to note that both theories, as you might easily guess, share a common ground. In both cases there is an A and a B and in both cases they are juxtaposed, set in unique and influential relation to one another.

is or is like You may have been squirming in your seat with a fatal rebuttal. When we say that A is B, we don’t really mean that A is B; we only mean that A is like B, that the two are identifiable in certain terms. We can say that things are like one another, or we can say that things are one another. It appears to be the difference between similarity and identity. A particular metaphor will suggest one or the other of these two orientations: Robby Burns’s “My love is like a red red rose” vs. the Bible’s “Joseph is a fruitful bough.”9 But your interpretive response, and other conclusions you draw around how metaphors work, will incline in one direction or the other depending on you and how you like to think. The emphasis on mere similarity in metaphor, as you might guess, defers to the authority of descriptive language and its referential logic. This thing resembles that thing. A tree is a tree and an umbrella is an umbrella and anyone who says that they are the same thing is just playing with words. We can only say they are similar in some respects, dissimilar in others. It seems no accident, given our bias now towards scientific language, that we usually try to reduce metaphoric thinking to a logic of mere resemblances (about which we’ll have more to say anon). Radical metaphor, on the other hand, makes no concession to objective logic and descriptive language. It says simply: two things are one thing. It performs

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

43

the kind of work that our bi-focal vision does. You have two eyes; each eye registers a different input from a different perspective, but our consciousness unites them and represents them to itself as one thing and one perspective. Is consciousness being unreasonable? Should we allow it to configure two things as one? Radical metaphor, unlike the more timid observation of similarity, is fundamentally counter-logical, but like human vision, no less real and no less useful. Of course the product of stereo vision, in consciousness, is more than the sum of its parts. Looking at two-dimensional objects as one adds a further dimension, the same scene but with depth. The same may be said of metaphor. What happens when you experience a metaphor? Well, you try to make logical sense of it. You stir up what Max Black calls “a system of associated commonplaces” (sac).10 A sac is made up of all the ready-tohand associations related to your familiar object of knowledge. The sac for a door, for instance, might include that it can be opened and closed, that it works on hinges, that it has a knob that must be handled to move it one way or the other, that when it is open it permits entrance, and when closed, acts as a barrier. When I complain that “Whenever I suggest we see a movie, you slam the door in my face,” I am invoking the “door as barrier” commonplace, and when I say that my employer has “a revolving door” attitude towards its workers, I am invoking the hinge commonplace (where in this case the hinge is a central axis that keeps you just going round and round). The connections we make are thus governed by all the smaller associations that make up what we know about the object or idea that comprises it. I say “My love is a gem,” and faster than thought you stir up two lists of the qualities of gems and beloveds and you make connections between those two lists as a way of firming up your sense of their relation. My love is rare, gems are rare. My love has many facets, gems have many facets. My love is fragile, gems are fragile. My love will last forever, the gem is not subject to the wear of time. This all looks tidy enough. But when we tweak the logic of this metaphoric association, all we find are further metaphoric associations. The way my love is rare is not the same as the way gems are rare. The many facets of my love are different than the facets of a gem, and so on. Love can hurt, diamonds can cut. This association requires further metaphoric finessing. We see them both as forms of “metaphoric” damage, which means that the damage is different in each case. As you chase after

44

missing link

a logic of association you find yourself creating a kind of Russian doll of metaphoric connections, trying to make rational sense of each one by looking at another connection implicated inside it, only to discover that it too hides a further leap within, and so on. We understand the metaphor “logically” not by making absolute connections (whatever those would be), but by making more metaphoric leaps across tinier gaps of semantic precision. It might be worth noting how often it is, when we are unpacking the logic of a metaphor, that we use quotation marks in isolating the individual associated commonplaces: “Do you know why my love is a red rose? Because both are ‘thorny.’” Those quotation marks are the tweezers that isolate and identify a further metaphoric muddle that you need to elide at that point in the service of your “logic.” One can keep an eye out for those tweezers and sometimes catch logicians in their bait-and-switch. Steven Pinker envisions a similar Russian-doll effect that characterizes our attempts to make logical sense of metaphoric relationships: For an analogy to be scientifically useful … the correspondences can’t apply to a part of one thing that merely resembles a part of the other. They have to apply to the relationships between the parts, and even better, to the relationships between the relationships, and to the relationships between the relationships between the relationships.11 The more leaps you are able to make, the more you feel justified in saying that the connection is “logical.” But you’ll never be making anything other than metaphoric leaps. There is no way around it. At some point, you just have to say that the leap is a leap and that you’re going to make it because it feels right, or because it relates to so fine a distinction that you would only be splitting hairs to make a fuss.12 We may be in a better position now to see why it makes little sense to say either that metaphors are logical or illogical. They are not illogical, because in discerning the meaning of a metaphor we sort out the causeand-effect relationships between the associated commonplaces that ground it. But metaphors are also not logical, for at each level of reasoning we find yet more metaphorical leaps opening up and receding away from us. Metaphor is best described as “counter-logical,” as Northrop Frye calls it.13 It participates in logical cogitation, but the thinking that

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

45

unfolds remains ungrounded. The logical coup de grace is always delayed, always deferred to the next level of association. This fact presents a serious threat to the notion of logic itself, whose cause-and-effect leaps will always disguise an inerasable metaphoric gap at their core. Every time we try to ground the logic, a detour opens up. We offer its associative leaps as reasons, only to discover that each reason is already an associative leap. If this discursive pas de deux sounds suspiciously like a bit of outdated deconstructive word-play, I’m happy to confess it, but only if we also allow, as we should, that it was in part the paradoxes of the metaphoric moment that writers like Derrida were revealing. Derrida’s genius was turning the counter-logic of metaphor into a discipline of its own and into a hermeneutic that sounded both uniquely modern and strangely timeless in character. We are also now in a position to understand the differences between our two formulations “A = B” and “A is B.” The “A = B” seems the more logical formulation, as it emphasizes how two distinct things may be thought of as amounting to the same thing, just as 3 + 2 amounts to 4 + 1. It invites us to puzzle out the relations between the associated commonplaces to see how their correspondences add up. “Yes!” says the logician. “I am only saying that A is like B. But both “A = B” and “A is B” drive the thinker through a cascade of further associations (and associations of associations) with no conceivable end. In this sense, then, “A is B” appears the savvier of the two, or at least the more resigned. There is at the heart of the juxtaposition of two things a form of relation that cannot be fully licensed in strict logical terms. The associated commonplaces that ground a similarity are reassuring to be sure, and so much of our thinking about metaphor – and logic – revolves around sorting them out. But they are always associated commonplaces and don’t ultimately save us from having to wrestle with the intractable problem of saying, and meaning, that two things are identifiable.

substitution We want to expand our vocabulary at this point so that we can get comfortable talking about particular parts of the metaphoric initiative. We’ve been working with A = B. Metaphor begins with a context of some sort,

46

missing link

the A. I’m going to go with I.A. Richards and call it the “tenor” of the metaphor formula, from the Latin tenere “to hold”: it is the meaning that “holds” through a discourse, the idea that you start with. And then there is the added element, the B. Richards calls it the “vehicle.”14 In our earlier example, the blob A outside our circle of knowledge is the tenor; the B to which we compared it in our heads is the vehicle. The B carries the original A elsewhere. A signification is borrowed. We call this the “substitution theory” of metaphor. When most people think of metaphor they think of a substituted word or idea. When you say “I’ve been down that road before,” we say that the road is a metaphor for our life in time, or for directions that we choose in life. When you say “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” we say that the phrase is a metaphor for reciprocated favours. When Homer writes “rosy-fingered dawn,” we say that … well, what do we say? That the sky has rosy fingerprints across it? or the sort of crumbled patina left on your fingers when you handle flowers? When a scientist speaks of “waves” and “particles,” we say that these terms are really metaphors for operations in nature that are very difficult to visualize or comprehend. Metaphor is just the good alternative thing that one hits on to get a point across. Substitutive metaphor (occasionally referred to as assimilative metaphor) is so common that we are often unaware we are using it. Its implications are less radical. We use it whenever we find the substitution of a vehicle more convenient than the tenor. Symbolic language itself is one of our best examples. I find it more convenient to substitute the word “tree” for the unliftable lumber growing out of the ground in my front yard. I don’t want to make any trouble over the business, I just want you to think of the object when I say the word. There are, though, moments when metaphoric substitution is more necessary still, as for instance when the thing I want to substitute for is an abstraction, i.e. not concrete, therefore more elusive by nature. After all, I can still point to a tree if I don’t have words. But how do I point to an argument, or the idea of justice? I’ll have to make a substitution, find a frame of reference that we already know or recognize to put in its place. This will include a set of associated commonplaces to attach to my idea of argument that will become part of its effective definition, what an argument “is like.”

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

47

I might, for instance, reveal as I speak an unconscious disposition towards the nature of argument as a kind of war. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s seminal Metaphors We Live By is a practical sorting out of the different ways we end up thinking of abstractions when we put metaphors in their place. We build up a kind of metonymic toolbox that contains concepts that we can “put for” other concepts (“metonymy” comes from a Greek root that means “change of name”). These adopted templates are a convenient means of communicating more efficiently by a kind of shared shorthand. They are also, Lakoff and Johnson showed, often constitutive of our very thinking on a subject. This idea of substitution is also why people get very anxious about the metaphors you use, because you are essentially determining how a thing will be known and spoken of from now on when you connect it to an already established frame of reference. People get especially upset at this when they think the metaphor is inessential, i.e. that you are playing with words in excess of reason, or worse, that you are manipulating unknowing thinkers into taking new unwanted views. Hence there is the strong association of metaphoric language with its potential, manipulative or ideological applications. Metaphor as a form of rhetoric. Take the example in Lakoff and Johnson of the “argument is war” metaphor.15 You attack my weak points, I counter with rebuttals, you follow up with further support for your position, and so on. To speak in these terms is to inhabit a certain frame of reference, a bias that when you argue you engage in battle. Other frames of reference might have evolved over time, say for instance “argument is love making.” You reveal what you have, I reveal what I have. We each admire what the other brings, we probe and feel out the other’s position, encourage one another’s advances and retreats, let things heat up, locate the areas of greatest tension and explore them, use the friction to achieve ecstatic mutual revelations, and then share a cigarette. Of course we would scarcely think of this as arguing, which shows how far we have gone in thinking of argument as warfare. You can feel that the conceptual metaphors we employ are largely of our own choosing, and so question our choices according to their dangers and advantages. You can also feel that the original adoption, say, of “argument is war,” betrays a pre-linguistic inclination or uncon-

48

missing link

scious bias that we do not choose. In this case we learn something about human-being proper, its inclination to think of relationships in terms of struggle, given that these are the metaphors we turn to. The main difficulty is not that we have metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson argue, but that we don’t know they are metaphors. If we could recognize how associative thinking goes into our reasoning on a subject, we would become infinitely more empowered in using the language with wisdom and care. In either case, the authors’ revelation to us of how deeply seated metaphoric thinking is in human consciousness has inspired debate over the importance of the metaphors we use. We spend time sorting out the good metaphoric contents from the bad, “My love is like a red red rose” from “Ethnic group X is animal Y” (racists, fill in your blanks). We divide helpful metaphors from the distorting ones, the beautiful from the pernicious. Lakoff and Johnson went far in revealing to us the metaphoric nature of human consciousness and communication. Yet it doesn’t appear that our sense of metaphoric thinking per se has been widely rehabilitated. Whether we have control over our metaphors or not, we still see them, perhaps all the more so now (Lakoff and Johnson’s own caveats notwithstanding) as forms of manipulation, potentially regrettable substitutions for genuinely reasoned thinking about an original idea or object. We see argument as war, but we know it isn’t necessarily war. The fact that we do see it in these terms is all the more unfortunate. Lakoff and Johnson have made advances, but it has been “an uphill struggle” (there’s that “argument is war” metaphor again). The established attitudes are “deeply entrenched.”

interactive metaphor In the service of further rehabilitation, we need to put a little pressure on the idea of substitution itself, that is, on the “instead-of” status of metaphor. We use things “instead of” other things for two basic reasons that I can think of. We return to the idea of lack in the tenor. Sometimes the word that we need is missing altogether and we’re obliged to use something else instead, a vehicle, something that will do in a pinch. Other times,

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

49

we’ll find a vehicle that appears to work better than the tenor we already have. In both cases, there is a deficiency perceived in the original tenor. The mathematician and linguistic philosopher Max Black got up hungry in the end from this exclusive characterization of metaphor as a form of substitution. We owe to him an alternative understanding of the principle of interpenetration in metaphor. He calls it “interactive metaphor.” He recognized that in many cases both elements of an association may already be familiar. We looked at the example earlier of “my love is a gem.” Let’s try another. I have always loved Walter Benjamin’s eloquent “Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed.”16 What is different? With the substitution metaphors above, I unfussingly bumped one thing in place of another because of a perceived deficiency, and was more or less comfortable with the issuances that unfolded. In this case, however, the oddity of the association is exactly the problem. There is no perceived deficiency. I thought I already knew what a fresh shirt was, and what daylight looks like, but along comes Benjamin to say “Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed,” and I do a “doubletake” (a rather interesting phrase for the process of metaphor). If I’m going to allow the expression as something one might say, I have to make sense of it. I have to appeal to the associated commonplaces of the two elements and think of which ones work and which ones don’t. The result will be neither fresh shirt as it was nor daylight as we commonly think of it. It will be some product, a “compound,” of the two concepts somehow collapsed into one. A is B C. In class, I use the idea of “break and make” to get at the heart of what happens in a metaphoric moment of this sort. Your understanding of “what is what” (what a shirt is, what daylight is) is upset or broken. This is the revolutionary, counter-logical potential of all metaphors. They disturb the fixed relations between things. They break them down, set them in flux, open them to new possibilities. It is in this openness that we try to make sense of them. Metaphor, writes Paul Ricoeur, “destroys an order only to invent a new one … [it] is nothing but the complement of a logic of discovery.”17 In The Rule of Metaphor, he uses the terms “impertinence” and “new pertinence.”18 We do not say that it is wrong to feel that daylight lies on the bed like a fresh shirt, but it

50

missing link

is “impertinent” to say so (impertinence related to French “appartenir,” to belong to, which can be traced back to what is appropriate or suitable). Your impertinence obliges me to construct a new pertinence. The essential value of this exercise, says Ricoeur, is that you have obliged me to “think more.”19 With substitutive metaphor there is less sense of impertinence. We think of a conservative co-opting, a drawing into the circle of an unknown item or one that was insufficiently self-identified. The new pertinence is the original concept rescued from its insufficiency. In substitutive metaphor again, we seek a better understanding of a relative unknown. One might assume that in the sciences this form of analogous thinking would dominate over more interactive thought processes. But in Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg offers a more nuanced picture of how symbols in the natural sciences “can be combined according to certain rules, and in this way statements about … phenomena can be represented by combinations of symbols. However, a combination of symbols that does not comply with the rules is not wrong but conveys no meaning.”20 We might better say that the meaning of such an impertinence is delayed, or projected into a possible future. Indeed, Heisenberg goes on: “In some cases conjecture that a certain sentence is meaningless has historically led to important progress, for it opened the way to the establishment of new connections which would have been impossible if the sentence had a meaning.”21 A theorist like Frye would say that it isn’t illogical to put the two symbols together but counter-logical, or counterintuitive. A good scientist will not exclude counter-intuitive experiments or results but keep them at hand to do more thinking with down the road. So Benjamin’s “daylight lies like a fresh shirt on our bed” may be seen as poetic metaphor’s version of certain hard puzzles in quantum mechanics. In both cases the “thinking more” opens up into new worlds.

alternatives and distinctions I use the terms substitution (Richards) and interaction (Black), but as there are a great many terms out there applied to the distinction, I should perhaps offer a couple of clarifying translations. In his book Metaphor and Reality, Philip Wheelwright offers a corresponding dichotomy:

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

51

epiphoric metaphor is substitution, and diaphoric metaphor is interaction. “Epiphoric metaphor starts by assuming a usual meaning for a word; it then applies this word to something else, on the basis of, and in order to indicate, a comparison with what is familiar. Contrast with diaphor: “Here, the movement … is through … certain particulars of experience, in a fresh way, producing new meanings by juxtaposition alone.”22 We can also use Northrop Frye’s terms in understanding substitutive and interactive metaphor. Substitutive metaphor is identity as, and interactive metaphor is identity with.23 With substitution, one thing is being seen as another, as though it were being placed in a larger comprehending container. I see that blob on the black board as an amoeba, meaning that I’m going to put it over here in the “amoeba box” that I already have. Interactive metaphor is where one thing is identified with another thing – love with rose – meaning that they are seen as the same thing. (If you want to picture the interactive character of “identity with,” just remember again that “with” in English comes from an Anglo-Saxon word that means both “against” and “towards.”) “Identity with” reminds us of the strange experience of thinking of two things as one thing and wrestling with the tension of properties moving towards and against one another. Substitutive and interactive metaphors can vanish into one another, though the principle of their difference is clear enough. When I say “Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed” I set daylight and shirt in interactive relation to one another, where each has equal authority in the equation, but the issuances from the equation, the C, is substituted for a plainer-speaking way of describing the dawn. In a similar way, Richards was no rigid or naive thinker about simple substitution in metaphor. There is an interaction implied in both elements, even when the vehicle seems to dominate it. Interactive metaphors are still substituted for something that they replace (what is dawn really like?), and the replacements themselves are rarely cut-and-dried. The difference between a substitutive and interactive metaphor, again, comes down to how fixed and invariable its elements are at first taken to be. If both elements are thought to be sufficiently stable, they will not be vulnerable to an easy semantic shift, and so will interact. If, however, element A is insufficiently stable (“What the heck is that weird thing on

52

missing link

the chalkboard?”), it is more likely to be carried elsewhere, very much in the manner of highly reactive chemicals, to join with an alternative B and be stabilized there (“I think it’s like an amoeba”). The new pertinence of the metaphor is really just B, as B (the amoeba) has not really suffered a significant semantic shift away from itself. This is why there is that unique form of substitutive metaphor that makes for a good joke, where the vehicle B, which is supposed to be stable in helping us to understand the tenor A, turns out to be itself re-identified by the tenor it is supposed to explain. “That novel has more endings than a Bruckner symphony,” or “That painting is more out of place than I am at a Mensa conference.” In any case, substitutive metaphor abounds; we confront it any time we experience a verbal or cognitive lack and seek finer definition. “My husband is like a football … he’ll only let you run him around so far before he squirts loose.” But with interactive metaphor, where there are two known elements considered to be of equal semantic stability, you have a tension of meaning such that both shift towards a new pertinence. This can also happen where it is the oddness of connection that stabilizes the two elements. “This baseball is like a tongue-twister.” The absence of any connective logic makes it difficult to say that one or the other of the terms is more dominant or stable in the given context. Incidentally, you can always stir up a logic. I just came up with this last metaphor, but now I want to say, “They would both be hard to get out of your mouth.”

the political stakes We’re not just messing with words. The shifting properties of metaphoric relation can go a long way in helping us to understand different kinds of knowledge, indeed different ways of knowing. We should not be surprised to find their differences expressed in the broadest political and cultural terms. Think of the long historical crisis of colonization, a glaring instance of metaphor as substitution or assimilation. The “new world” that your empire imagines is, as far as the powers that be are concerned, a blank, and so it gets colonized. From the sixteenth century on, the Americas were adopted into Europe’s categories of “New World,” “innocence,” “primitiveness,” “savagery” etc. We are attracted

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

53

to colonial studies in English departments, where we look at the manipulative effect of metaphoric thinking in the behaviour of empires. Interactive metaphor or identification “with,” on the other hand, is what you would have between two equal political powers. The Cold War was essentially a stand-off of differences, where the US and the Soviet Union, ostensibly stable independent units, were put together on the same planet, metaphorically juxtaposed so to speak, but not identifiable. The difference was emphasized, but an identity was necessitated by their co-existence in “one space.” A kind of ideological detente ensued. The term “cold war,” if you inclined to think of relationships in terms of battles, would be a rather good term for an interaction theory of metaphor. What does in fact happen in language when interaction is mistaken for substitution? You say to a student that the day lies on the bed like a fresh shirt, and the student assumes that from now on we should use the term fresh shirt instead of day. “Ah, the fresh shirt is cloudy today!” Well, first of all, incoherence. It would be a conceptual error, one that violates the A’s (the day’s) power of self-identification, a violence upon it, finally. As for empire and colonization, the thing about the Middle East crises of our day is that Western forces have behaved as though Iraq and other nations in the region required an identity, a new one, the Western one, or at least one that the West could “relate to.” Thus Iraq A is taken up into Western thinking B. This is Edward Said’s point in his seminal work Orientalism. B is put for A. Is it any accident that it was the two most recent empires, America and Britain, that were most active in Iraq? God knows Britain had long been in the habit of putting itself for others, as it had done originally in America. Western governments have gradually been forced to acknowledge that their relationship with the Middle East is really one of interactive metaphor, where the tenor cannot and will not be subsumed under the vehicle. You get a political mess when you treat interaction as though it were assimilation, that is, when you treat someone being with you as someone being as you. Coming from a failed relationship with Russia and the interactive metaphorical tensions of the Cold War, it is no surprise that the Western alliance should have cultivated its assimilative habit of mind, exercising what it felt was a sufficient stability and authority (capitalism and the free market rule!) to throw its semantic weight around. Everybody gets to be the West, lucky everybody. This could also help us to understand why

54

missing link

Americans are sometimes thought to be rather insular and unaware of what is going on elsewhere. They think of themselves as sufficiently selfidentified; their identity is not obviously a function of their relation to something else, as is often said of Canadians, for instance. America fought a war of independence. Canada didn’t. Americans had to fight for an independent identity; it isn’t hard to imagine how such a nation might get stuck wondering why everyone wouldn’t want to be “like” them. Canada went quite far the other way and used to be thought of as the blank slate just waiting for another cultural identity to come along and name it. America gets to position itself on the strong side of substitutive metaphor, Canada on the weak side. Treating other nations as equals in an interactive relationship would entail a new pertinence that is neither the “you” nor the “them” as previously understood and would involve a meshing of identities. The government and culture would have to change in their involvements with others, or enter an “openness” in which they might find over time that they had so changed. E.O. Wilson, we remember, accounts for our experience of polarization in the sciences and humanities by the “misunderstandings” that “arise from ignorance” of the “unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides.”24 In the First World War, we would have called this misunderstanding in unexplored terrain “trench warfare,” with a “no man’s land” that falls between differing nations. During the Cold War, we saw how the “no man’s land” between differing ideologies could become abstracted from actual territories and yet be no less contested, perhaps even more dangerously so, as a kind of distant stratosphere no one could possess, with nuclear warheads pointed at it.

money talks There are high stakes indeed when you go about substituting things for other things, people for other people. The stakes are equally high in certain cases with interactive metaphor, the transgressive or revolutionary initiative. The current political and economic state in America has been radically transformed by a recent US Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. The decision evoked a new,

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

55

and newly effective, interactive metaphor, that the expenditure of money is a form of free speech. In his book Metaphor, Denis Donoghue deftly draws our attention to the fact that the Supreme Court decision of 25 June 2012 – regarding the constitutional right of corporations to spend money on political parties during elections – is essentially an argument over a metaphor.25 The savvy appellants in question made their case with reference to a decision that had been made in an earlier Supreme Court case, Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976. There, the court found “the right of association is a ‘basic constitutional freedom’ that is closely allied to freedom of speech and a right which, like free speech, lies at the foundation of a free society.” It was but a short leap to the inevitable conclusion: “In appellants’ view, limiting the use of money for political purposes constitutes a restriction on communication violative of the First Amendment, since virtually all meaningful political communications in the modern setting involve the expenditure of money.”26 In short, “money talks.” It is a brilliant interactive metaphor. Go back to figure 1.3. You may have thought you knew what spending money was, and understood what speaking was. Along comes the Supreme Court (which in such cases represents a kind of critic or reader evaluating metaphors that others bring to them) that says, “Yes, spending money is like talking.” Not that it needed the sanction of a poet, but it might have made reference to Wallace Stevens’s adage that “money is a kind of poetry.”27 But how exactly do the appellants get there, that is, how do they license this metaphoric leap? By a series of further metaphoric leaps, a syllogism gone wild: words = speech; speech = a form of communication; communication = a form of association; spending money = a form of association; therefore spending money = a form of communication. If our freedom of speech is guaranteed, then our freedom to spend money as we choose is likewise guaranteed. One could argue that case law itself is essentially a wrestling with the implications of substitutive metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson write that “it is common for the Supreme Court to use metaphors to extend legal categories developed in previous decisions.”28 Every new hearing addresses a unique ethical situation or legal puzzle. Like the tenor of a metaphor (the blob in figure 1.2) it appears to lack definition. In the vast existing literature of legal precedent (the brain in figure 1.2) we look for a vehicle or vehicles with which to compare it. Once we find the relevant

56

missing link

earlier cases, we identify the associated commonplaces and thereby justify importing the earlier decision into the present matter. With the new case now admitted to our growing circle of understanding, our “consciousness” of the law is thus expanded. The appellants of Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission were very dextrous; they got the Supreme Court to take two decidedly independent entities (money and speech) and put them together interactively; they did so by arguing that one of them (the act of spending money) is insufficiently understood. The court is led to its conclusion by the substitution of an earlier decision based on the associated commonplaces. For the rest of us, the intervention is an audacious interactive metaphor that has changed the very nature of political and economic power. The move from substitutive to interactive metaphor involves a bait-and-switch of enormous consequence. To live by this new interactive metaphor (that money should be free to speak) is to transform the reality of the world and the “laws” that govern it. The appellants were poets of a sort. They took two domains that were formerly thought of as distinct and they identified them. Daylight lies like a fresh shirt on our bed. Spending money is a form of free speech. The results were, like a successful poem, surprising. The changed reality now is one in which corporations (already granted the rights of persons in earlier Supreme Court decisions of equal metaphoric ingenuity) are free to “express themselves” as you and I do.29 Corporations get to be poets, which is to say, they are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

discovery o r i nvention? Again, in his Rule of Metaphor, Paul Ricoeur divided the study of metaphor into two distinct disciplines, the semantic and the semiotic, the mechanics of meaning vs the psychological processes that construe them. We’ve been concentrating thus far in this chapter on the semantics of metaphor, on the “change of name” aspect that divides into problems of substitution and interaction. The semiotics of metaphor is a further field in itself. Metaphor may be “things in space,” but it is only “things in space” according to the sentient mind that perceives them. There is something

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

57

inherently metaphorical about how things relate in space, but we don’t think of them as metaphorical “out there” until they have been perceived as metaphorical “in here,” in our minds. That seems obvious enough. But it begs a problem of semiotics. How do metaphors happen? Do they exist a priori, or are they the mere conjurings of conscious thought. Are metaphors made or discovered? Emily Dickinson’s poem of apocalypse “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –” finely allegorizes the difficulty: I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air – Between the Heaves of Storm – The Eyes around – had wrung them dry – And Breaths were gathering firm For that last Onset – when the King Be witnessed – in the Room – I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away What portions of me be Assignable – and then it was There interposed a Fly – With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz – Between the light – and me – And then the Windows failed – and then I could not see to see – The poem is apocalyptic in the obvious sense of being about an end time, a final reckoning, and a final revelation. But it is also apocalyptic in light of the word’s etymological derivation of an “uncovering,” the taking the lid off something, the removing of scales from eyes. In our perspective it is happily also about the particular conditions whereby a cognitive item first comes to one’s attention. The fly, whatever else, is a metaphor of metaphor, that is, a metaphor of the apperception of a reality that suggests itself to us quite actually in this poem “out of the blue.” The

58

missing link

allegory in these terms seems friendly enough: in anticipation of the revelation (when all things are made clear) we make ourselves ready in such a way that the anticipation becomes a prior condition of the advent. The stillness in the room is pure expectation, a readiness for last bells, to tinker with a Wallace Stevens formulation.30 Eyes are wringing dry, breaths are gathering firm, keepsakes are willed away. This last phrase is powerfully suggestive of a clearing out of one’s possessions, making room for unthought-of novelty. We don’t want to discover that we see only what we expect to see. We want to see the thing itself. One such keepsake that you might “sign away” at such a moment is the expectation of any conventional revelation, whatever traditional messenger of “the King” (himself traditional) might enter in a blaze of glory. What more surprising and unthought-of revelation than a domestic fly. No angel of the apocalypse, just this winged creature from the dunghill, something much more diminutive, actual, and particular than anything we might have imagined ourselves discovering. How did such a presence get here? What is the truth of what I appear to see? I have emptied my mind in readiness, but now look! Who is responsible for this … metaphoric fly? Who put it there? It is a problem of agency. All the evidence suggests that the presence has got here under its own steam, presented itself, as it were. It is a “last onset” that interposes its own appearance; it quite actually “comes between.” Between what and what? Well, between the light and me. Between revelation and myself, between what is really there and what I see as there, between my expectation (my “looking out for…”) and my spectation. How finely tuned is that ambiguous phrase “… and then it was …” Not “and then a fly interposed itself,” but rather, all passively, “then it happened that there interposed a fly,” almost as though the passive syntax were responsible for how the fly, whose appearance is unanticipated, appears. Let’s leave our speaker here for a moment, staring in disbelief at first and last things. Are metaphors made or discovered? You say “my love is a gem.” The metaphor is yours. You made it. If you had said that “with Dave, love is like a Heisenberg principle: he is never there when you go to look for him,” it might be even more obvious that you are the author of your whimsical association. I did just stir this one up, but don’t really understand how I did so. I want to say that the metaphor “just came to me.”

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

59

This implies that I am the passive recipient of an association that was ready-made and available, that I just had to take what was freely given. Metaphors travel around in the world, quite on their own, and under certain presumably welcoming conditions will turn towards thinkers and “occur” to them. In a certain sense, this is true. Somewhere in the “out there” in the world that is “in here” in my head, there was my sense of what Dave is like (he’s never around) and my understanding of the Heisenberg principle (that the position of an electron that you point to is never quite where it is when you observe it). The world is made up of entities that have associations that it may share with other entities. As the associations of each entity are only limited by the imagination that thinks of them, the relations between the entities are always imminent and potentially inexhaustible, already available and waiting to be recognized. But because everything is potentially equal to everything else, one might feel that there were no meaningful relations at all, just an enormous blob of potential relations. Metaphors then don’t seem to amount to much until you isolate particular ones as having more authority or value than others. Your ability to isolate particular metaphors has to do with your act of perceiving the relevant similarities as similarities. Ricoeur reflects on how we interpret metaphors when we see them, that is, on the “iconicity,” as he calls it, of their meaning (Rule, 207–15). But his thoughts go equally to the question of how the metaphors are discerned, or noticed, in the first place. He turns to Marcus Hester in his The Meaning of Poetic Metaphor. Hester in turn uses Wittgenstein’s reflection on Joseph Jastrow’s renowned duck-rabbit picture (figure 1.4) in developing his all-important notion of “seeing as.” Here is Wittgenstein’s original text: I am shown the duck-rabbit and asked what it is; I may say “It’s a duck-rabbit.” But I may also react to the question quite differently. – The answer that it is a duck-rabbit is again the report of a perception; the answer “Now it’s a rabbit” is not. Had I replied “It’s a rabbit,” the ambiguity would have escaped me, and I should be reporting my perception. The change of aspect. “But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!” But what is different: my impression? my point of view? – Can I say? I describe the alteration like

60

missing link

a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes […] The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being changed.31 Ricoeur develops the idea: Considering the ambiguous figures … Wittgenstein remarks that it is one thing to say “I see this …” and another to say “I see this as …”; and he adds: “seeing it as …” is “having this image.” The link between “seeing as” and imagining appears more clearly when we go to the imperative mood, where, for example, one might say “imagine this,” “Now, see this figure as this.” Will this be regarded as a question of interpretation? No, says Wittgenstein, because to interpret is to form a hypothesis which one can verify. There is no hypothesis here, nor any verification; one says, quite directly, “It’s a rabbit.” The “seeing as,” therefore, is half thought and half experience.32 “Seeing as,” then, “is an experience and an act at one and the same time.”33 Your “discovery” of an association by inference is (apologies for the outdated formula) always already a construal of the association as such. And yet your construal of the association as such appears to you as, again, always already a thing you actually see. You feel that you have seen it before you thought of it as something to be thus perceived. There was no resemblance before the “seeing as.” As Ricoeur writes, the “‘seeing as’ defines the resemblance,” the resemblance does not define the “seeing as.”34 The event or experience is irreducible at this point. To understand how metaphors are perceived, discovered, created, or contrived, it seems you can get no closer to an answer than the concept of “seeing as” that metaphor already is. The phrase “seeing as” is nothing less than the psychosomatic term for an act of metaphor, for what the brain is doing and what the brain is seeing at the same time. In metaphor, one thing is seen as another thing. Aristotle wrote that “the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”35

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

61

Figure 1.4 Joseph Jastrow’s Duck-Rabbit.

That eye for resemblances is not, we know now, a passive eye, but an active one. As E.H. Gombrich showed us in the visual arts, the innocent eye does not exist.36 Hochberg and Neisser in neuro-psychology showed that we are not passive to external stimuli, but that our sensory systems “actively transform their stimulus inputs.”37 Steven Pinker offered his own version of this point in How the Mind Works, when he showed that what the mind produces with the visual data received by the eye is already a “description” of what is out there.38 We are already “writing out” what we think we passively see. Seeing as is both discovery and invention. We must leave the question aside for a while, but the occasion will arise in the chapter on mutation to return to that ambiguous moment where a metaphor “gathers itself together” in your attention. Dickinson’s speaker has been waiting patiently, dying, if you will, to get in the last word. Her metaphoric revelation has apparently interposed itself. We stare and stare and try to see what it is we are seeing:

62

missing link

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz – Between the light – and me – And then the Windows failed – and then I could not see to see – Dickinson is one of our greatest poets of consciousness, of mere awareness, the shock and frisson that attends our seeing that we see. She plays on levels of conscious perception as a layering of metaphoric windows. The light of the external world is seen as a window. Our own eyesight is seen as a window. Finally, our awareness of our seeing is seen as a window that gives onto our eyesight. Consciousness itself is a seeing-as. These seeings-as – just so many windows – are seen as one another. They are the same window, the window that we “cannot see to see.” Whatever is really there intruding on our vision, whatever passes before our eyes with blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, our seeing it as is finally a revelation to ourselves of our own impermanent lights. At the moment of apocalypse (the uncovering of what was covered) it is our own seeing-as that we behold. When we come to the chapter on consciousness, we will see how the metaphor of our seeing-as (in every sense, the seeing-as that metaphor is) comes at last into its own as a being-as. It would be worth concluding this section by noting how centrally implicated the acts of discovery and invention are in conventional distinctions between scientific and humanistic inquiry. In his study of Gaston Bachelard, Paul Ginestier writes: The humanist must have the most comprehensive image of the world possible, excluding no perspective, neither that of the sciences nor that of the arts. To grasp each perspective better, we must consider it at its point of change, itself evolving: discovery for the sciences, creation for the arts. It is further significant that these terms are more and more interchangeable.39 I would like to think of this as one of the more hopeful implications of my argument, that the interpenetration of discovery and creation at the heart of the metaphoric initiative may find a further expression in actual historical tensions that abide between the arts and sciences. Tension is

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

63

just what we would look to discover in disciplines that bifurcate in directions that are metaphorically one.

the unity of metaphor For much of the time in this book we’ll be talking about the metaphoric initiative in its raw A = B form. Correspondences will suggest themselves with varieties of assimilative and interactive metaphor, and we’ll work them out. At the same time, one of the horizons of my argument is the enlarging and containing contexts into which these various expressions unfold. That context is present in every metaphoric event and it appears in a particular form: the problem of unity. The relations between unity and diversity might not strike you immediately as a problem of metaphor, but presented in the form of Many = One, the inference is clear enough. Actually, the problem of relation within a unity comes in two guises. There is the relation of whole to part, as we see in the Many = One formula. The identity of a larger group has to be negotiated in relation to its particular elements. There is always a tension between the whole and its parts; if the group forms a unity, each of its parts must be both uniquely itself and at the same time identifiable with that whole. Every scrimmage of national, ethnic, racial, class, gender, and religious group identification, to name but a few, comes to bear. But there is also the relation of part to part, the relation between the particulars. If A and B both are and are not the same, then their containing environment both is and is not a unity. This gives us the paradox of unity in a nutshell. A simultaneous is and is not drinks deeply from its own mirage. As we’re on the subject of unity, we might note how the question of a “unifying theory” or “theory of everything” has become the preoccupation of so many contemporary scientists. The mismatch that currently exists between the micro and macro domains in physics (the one pertaining to quantum measurements and the other to calculations relating to gravity and the cosmos) is the daily torment of many physicists. The abidance of two unreconciled systems is proof for them that our science is incomplete. Their thirst might be slaked somewhat if they were to see metaphoric thinking as the “unifying theory” they seek.

64

missing link

missing link There is one other element that comes to bear on the semiotics of metaphor, and that is the apperception of a gap or interstice between two relating elements. To call what abides in relation a gap is to use a metaphor, and there are unquestionably other images one might call to mind. The formula “is and is not,” for instance, doesn’t so much suggest an intervening space between two entities as an ontological dissonance that simply applies to the event. There is no gap between the duck and the rabbit in the Jastrow drawing (figure 1.4). The same might be said of the idea that in metaphor two entities collapse into one another, i.e. that whatever distinguishes them or keeps them apart, simply disappears.40 But the “gap” will prove a productive image to be sure. With the problem of the metaphoric “both/and” in mind, Don McKay proffers the term “betweenity,” a term I like very much, particularly for its implication of a directional preposition turning into, or gathering to itself, the authority and solidity of a noun. By “betweenity,” he means “not compromise, but the inclusion of both terms along with the energy of their interaction. Where logic is the regulatory spirit of either/or, metaphor will prove to be the angel of betweenity.”41 The inclusion of both terms along with the energy of their interaction: in all cases there is a je-ne-sais-quoi that abides in the event, whose elusiveness represents a suspension of logic and tidy resolution. It is this lacuna that we try to fill with the metaphor of a betweenwheres, a gap between A and B that is filled in with equal signs or copula verbs or arrows traversing a gulf. The metaphor of the gap evokes a differentiating space, an environment in which two things are set in relation by the minds that think about them. To have (or perceive) two things is to have (or perceive) a space between them. That space will necessarily appear empty. The emptiness is an area of potential relationship, but one where the exact nature of the relationship is open in the play of differences and identities. In that openness there is, as it were, potential nothingness. We find in Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man” his well-known and penetrating distinction between “Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.”42 The space between things is not a “nothing that is not there,” but rather a not-yet-something that is there. In the presence of that something-missing there is an air of expectancy, a prescience, as Stevens says

“Combinatorial Algorithms”

65

elsewhere, “a readiness for first bells.”43 The emptiness is sheer potential, and therefore a promise of sorts, the abidance of not-yet-a-thought, into which thought may enter. Metaphor is a “missing link” that we seek in order to connect things. But it is equally the missingness that is itself a link. Metaphoric thinking activates a missingness-between and charges it with potential energy. Such “potential space” will come to question throughout my argument and in various forms, both where I see all things around us crying out “once more into the breach” and where my very argument vaults into the gaps that it throws ahead of itself. As we would have all things come to question, it seems a good place to start.

2

“Peyne and Wo”: Metaphor among the Discourses small potatoes Metaphor is often seen as lower fruit on the language tree. We have a pretty confident sense of its use and place among our core language tools. When it comes to using words for getting at truths, metaphor is the handy gadget for special uses. It is like the angled ratchet attachment that helps you get at fasteners in hard-to-reach places: too delicate and unwieldy for those tough, straight-forward bolts that we spend most of our time wrestling with. This attitude is strongest among disciplines in which language is a necessary but sometimes frustrating instrument of communication, and where any attention drawn to it as such may be counter-productive. Writers in the sciences, as well as in philosophy and history, often just need a job done and don’t want a great fuss made over the words they employ. When you’re fixing a car engine, thinking for a long time about the “wrenchness” of the wrench might strike the car’s owner as a tad whimsical, not to mention a way of padding labour charges. If, from time to time, a particular likeness makes a thing clearer, then fine, but let’s not get carried away.1 We need to pass things along to one another and words, as Jonathan Swift winkingly reminded us, are a lot lighter than the things themselves.2 We put words for things so that those things can be reshuffled in our heads more efficiently. But ultimately, we feel, it is the supra-verbal – whether inside or outside our heads – that commands authority. When you see the letters r-o-c-k, you are meant to think of that grey thing on the beach. This is the descriptive function of language, word as servomechanism. Metaphors, even the most beautiful among them, must have the same purpose, we suppose. Their job is to evoke an object, an idea, a feeling, a reality, even if they do so in a roundabout manner.

Figure 2.1 Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, ca. 1817. Oil on canvas. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

The trouble is, we usually don’t like the pointer getting in the way of the thing it points to. Like the figure in the centre of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (figure 2.1), a metaphor, we believe, shouldn’t block the view, no matter what it appears to see itself. Friedrich’s painting dates from that time in the early nineteenth century

68

missing link

when artists were becoming sensitive to how “figuration” (Friedrich may not be punning on the two meanings of “figure,” but I am) was becoming the self-reflexive subject of our attention. It seems now that we can’t help but see it there. Part of the problem is that metaphors often do get in the way. Anxious teachers of poetry will spend half their time trying to paraphrase a poem’s metaphors into submission, so that they may show the way clear to some sort of result. One of the first issues you have to address in a poetry class is the prejudice that the unusual language of a poem is just a kind of “grumpy code” written by poets who don’t know how to call a spade a spade. The teacher ventures a paraphrase and the student replies: “Well, if that’s what she meant, why the heck didn’t she just say so?” A wily student will play a waiting game, hanging fire until you’ve sorted out the estranging formulas and told her what she needs to remember for the exam. We’ll never get past this so long as we think of metaphor primarily as a descriptive tool. Metaphor, how we do not love thee, let us count the ways. You are extra, excessive, often redundant. You embellish and decorate. To speak plainly, you are a mistake, a misprision. You cultivate illusions. In your darker moods you are manipulation, and subterfuge, and deceit. You are unethical and mercenary, seemingly lawless, easily seduced and yet dangerously seductive. And you are all of these because you are relative, subjective, ambiguous, unverifiable, and mercurial. Like a genie whose bottle has been rubbed by the wrong master, you are the ready servant for every political autocrat and sociopath. You keep bad company. Why should people feel this way? The short answer is, because they have good reason. Metaphor is all of these things and we need to be wary. We need a metaphoric version of nicotine gum that we can chew when we feel an unnecessary likeness coming on. In the mean time, metaphors come to us easily, naturally, almost as though they were a part of thinking itself. Metaphor seems a blatant offense to rational thought and yet when we hear one, we intuitively know what is happening. When a person says “my love is a conductor’s baton,” we don’t stare at him as at a babbling Martian. We might raise an eyebrow, suspect that it is a bit of a stretch, but we don’t respond as though its operatives were an acidic to thinking. We go with it. We listen in. We want to get at its secrets, to know what it knows.

“Peyne and Wo”

69

I suppose this book could seek a place among the small army of poetry and metaphor defenders, though this isn’t really my purpose. In fact, one of the questions that I ask in the final chapter is whether or not metaphorical thinking will be evolutionarily favoured in the long run. It may be, after all, that our inbred penchant for metaphor is what dooms the human experiment. I hope not, but our job in either case is to recognize that we are, front to back, beginning to end, the reality of metaphor. We are its embodiment, its current and latest expression; as in Blake’s painting of Albion (figure 2.2) – an about-face in every sense from Friedrich’s painting above – we are its manner of stepping forth into its own light. We have to decide what it means that we should be so.

Figure 2.2 Albion Rose, ca. 1796. Etching and watercolour. William Blake (1757–1827)

70

missing link

metaphor in history My book ventures a kind of history of how the workings of metaphor have evolved. But it is not a social history of changing attitudes towards metaphor proper and metaphorical thinking. That would be a vast subject with many perspectives and approaches to account for. Let me sample a few that come randomly to mind. How has the ideal polis been represented in Utopian literature? What has been the place of theatre and other physical (or three-dimensional) manifestations of figurative thinking in history? How have our emotional responses to the unseen and unseeable changed over time? In what ways has ritualistic thinking influenced our behaviour? How have our attitudes changed, if at all, regarding the rules in language of the conditional and the subjunctive? These terms of reference reach across the various sciences, philosophy, literature, literary criticism, religion, and anthropology. Each domain tends to characterize the reason/imagination binary in the terms, and with the natural bias, relevant to its particular idiom. Each in its own way tracks the terms and conditions of a struggle with, and against, our habits of symbolic mind. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t briefly mention a few of the principle stars in the debate over the place of metaphoric thinking among the dominant discourses. You may think of this discussion as a detour, certainly: “detour” is the favoured itinerary of metaphor. Indirection, find directions out! You may, however, wish to take a detour of your own to the start of my argument in the next chapter. All roads lead to Rome. I should emphasize that metaphor proper is the subject of this brief cook’s tour, i.e. metaphor as a linguistic device as opposed to the substantial initiative that I trace back to the origins of matter. This book is a history of how that initiative has evolved to take the form of metaphor proper. I offer here, in the interests of framing the debate in socio-historical terms, a brief history of attitudes towards this later expression. We might do worse than start with Plato, with his banishment of the poet in Book X of The Republic. What artist or writer has not scratched his head in learning that the Greek philosopher, while lauding Homer and the Greek tragedians, would nonetheless escort them firmly to the gates of the city and give them the toss? In historical terms, this isn’t like a Toronto mayor asking the city’s artists to go live in the suburb of Missis-

“Peyne and Wo”

71

sauga, but like an earthly delegation asking them to go live on the moon. Unlike philosophers, who use largely conceptual language in the service of the truth, the poet trades in imitations and fabrications that are at two removes from the ideal form of the thing itself. The poet’s creation is not the abstract form of the bed, nor the particular bed fashioned by a carpenter, but a mere representation of the latter. The poet’s license to play freely with “things as they are,” and his ability to manipulate and charm our emotional responses in so doing, would leave him wreaking havoc among the citizenry and military, where moderate and predictable behaviour is the order of the day. If we scramble to explain, as many writers have done, “what Plato really meant” when he censored the poets, we miss the point that Plato was essentially correct in his attribution of figurative making: that it is deviant, and that its deviance is at a remove.3 Plato’s dismissal of poetic excess and manipulation is still very much with us. It takes a variety of forms, including those of the social-concern criticisms in English departments, where literature is seen to harbour a potentially dangerous ideological (which is to say rhetorical) political unconscious that will undermine your better judgment if it is not constrained, or at least brought into the open. The army of the ideal Greek republic becomes the rigorous critical reader who will not fall victim to a work’s ideological trappings. The suspicion is flanked on the other side by scientists such as Pinker, who warns us of the dangers of “shallow similarities” and “mercurial mappings.”4 In such critiques we may hear a tone of patronizing condescension toward poets, reminding us of Plato’s own compassionate stipulation that before the bards are banished, we must be sure to have them sign their books for us.5 Aristotle’s intricate taxonomy of figurative language in his Poetics assures us that Plato’s caveat is not the last word on metaphor in antiquity. Aristotle’s analysis is inductive rather than deductive, absorbed in the communicative power and potential of metaphoric acts themselves. He writes: “the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”6 An actual hermeneutics of metaphor begins with Aristotle. Hermeneutics is the study of rhetoric, and among the ancients rhetoric was central. Under the auspices of persuasion in oratory – tallying such rhetoricians as Demetrius, Cicero, Quintilian, and Pliny – metaphor

72

missing link

was bound to be celebrated as one of the speaker’s more effective tricks. Writes Cicero: the poet is next door to the orator. His metre ties him down rather more, and he’s freer to use words as he will: but in many departments of embellishment he is his ally and equal – virtually the same, indeed, in one thing at least, that he sets no bounds to his prerogatives, to his freedom to wander where he likes with the same licence as the orator enjoys.7 We’re bound to hear lauds of this sort as too like those of a lawyer who will praise metaphor as an effective way to manipulate people. But we do at least have an unwincing acknowledgment of the liberating initiative inherent in figurative language. Quintilian gives the inference a further edge: Theophrastus says that much is contributed to an orator’s training by reading poetry, and many follow his lead, reasonably enough: for the poets are a source of inspiration in subject, sublimity of language, range of emotion, appropriateness in depiction of character. In particular, minds deadened by the daily round of legal activity find especial refreshment in the attractions of poetry.8 This is not to say that metaphor gets a free pass from Aristotle on. For the most part through classical antiquity, the allowances made for metaphor were guided by the rule of moderation. A judicious application under appropriate conditions is always preferred over a heavy onslaught. “If a metaphor seems risky,” writes Demetrius, “turn it into a simile. Then it will be safer.”9 An orator must be figuratively “on guard”: poetry, Quintilian declares, “is designed for display … is in search of pleasure alone, and pursues it by the invention not only of falsities but even of impossibilities … We, by contrast, are armed soldiers, standing in the front line, with important matters at stake and victory to strive for.”10 There appears to be a consistent and tacit association of the fictive with the leisurely and extra (rather than with the inherent and purposeful), and therefore also with a potentially dubious ethics. Horace is careful to remind his readers that “my character is different from my poetry: my life is decent, my Muse sportive. A great part of my oeuvre is untruthful fiction, allowing itself indulgences not permitted to its author.”11

“Peyne and Wo”

73

We finish this brief survey of classical antiquity with an interesting and prescient case. Longinus (also known as Pseudo-Longinus) could be as eloquent as the orators and rhetoricians on the dangers of metaphoric excess: “Playing tricks by means of figures is a peculiarly suspect procedure. It raises the suspicion of a trap, a deep design, a fallacy.”12 It is usually most effective, he suggests, when its employment is concealed. We must be masters of rhetoric, he argues, in order to control our effect. It is in the nature of the effect that Longinus’ difference from his predecessors becomes clear. We are aiming, he writes, for the “sublime,” a very important word for our purposes and one that anticipates the debate over the nature and source of metaphor in modern discourse. When we think of sublime moments, scenes, and emotions, we tend to associate the effect with an observation of an external stimulus: a mountain, an ocean, something larger and “beyond” the capacity of human mind to comprehend or contain. The etymology of the word points us in the direction of a limit that is transgressed or superseded. Words are used to capture that sublimity, but they are outstripped by a reality that they are at considerable risk of distorting. Longinus believed, however, not that such loftiness or grandeur is a condition of the objective world that we perceive but that it is a function of the human mind that perceives it. “Sublimity is a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse,”13 he writes; it is an aspect of style, a condition of expression rather than something inherent in the material expressed. The sources of the sublime are such as “the power to conceive great thoughts,” “noble diction,” “dignified and elevated word arrangement,” and of course “certain kinds of figures.”14 For Longinus, the objective world is a potential expression of human mind, not the other way around. In a suggestively deconstructive move, he reverses the typical logic of signified and signifier that would subordinate words to the things words point to, or emotions to their external stimuli. We are licensed to do this, he argues, because words are not pasted onto nature, but a part of the nature they represent: “it is by nature that man is endowed with the power of speech.”15 Words are evolved natural forms: nature made man to be no humble or lowly creature, but brought him into life and into the universe as into a great festival, to be both a spectator and an enthusiastic contestant in its competitions. She implanted in our minds from the start an irresistible desire for anything which is great and, in relation to ourselves, supernatural.16

74

missing link

It is in words then that the work of nature continues. Nature is in the process of finding further expression. The sublime in metaphor is an expression of that process. Longinus was anticipating a version of my own argument: there is a sublime initiative, a reaching beyond a limit (metapherein again, to carry across), a desire to “think more.” It is an inheritance of something inherent in nature and therefore an expression of that inheritance and that inherence. Not surprisingly, the enlightenment tradition mostly offers extrapolations not from Longinus’ invocation of an in-dwelling rhetorical initiative but from Plato’s earlier caveat, whereby metaphor is viewed suspiciously in relation to the dominant religious and scientific discourses of the time. Indeed, some of the earliest known uses of the word “metaphor” in English, as one may sample them among the citations included in the oed, serve more to underline our suspicions than to specify its proper use. In 1477, Thomas Norton wrote in his Ordinal of Alchemy: The subtile science of holi Alchymye; Of which science here I entende to write, How be it I may not curyously endite, For he that shuld al commyn peple teche, He most for theym vse playne and comon speche. Thogh that I write in playn and homely wise, No good man shulde suche writyng despyce. Al mastirs which write of þis soleyne werke, Thei made theire bokis to many men ful derk, In poyses, parabols, & in methaphoris alleso, which to scolers causith peyne and wo …17 One finds interesting tensions at the heart of such arguments as Norton proffers. Works of genuine scientific rigour will stick to a “playn and comon speche.” Norton will not have his work despised by those critics (mastirs) who unhappily have made their own books “ful derk” for lay readers by employing “poyses,” “parabols,” and “methaphoris alle-so.” To “scolers” the practise “causith peyne and wo.” There is a rich irony to be found in the passage. Norton’s science is the “subtile science of holi

“Peyne and Wo”

75

Alchymye,” that practice in which experimenters sought to transform baser metals into precious ones. Transformations of the material world into finer and more precious substances are nothing if not metaphorical; employers of “poyses,” “parabols,” and “methaphoris alle-so” were only using a form of linguistic alchemy, where the potential for transformation and refinement matches that of the material sciences. Two hundred years later J. Hartcliffe writes, “Men will embrace Metaphors and Allegories, fancies and forms of Speech, instead of the Substance of true and real Righteousness.”18 Truth and divinity, going hand in hand, are naturally preferred to evasion and obfuscation. And yet parting the way between these two nay-saying citations appears Bonner’s reminder in his Certayne Homelyes (1555) that “Chryste alwayes in hys speakynge dyd vse fygures, metaphores and tropes.”19 If Jesus found metaphors fundamentally useful in getting at “the Substance of true and real Righteousness,” who are we to argue? As we will see in Chapter 13, the “figure” of Christ, whatever else it symbolizes, is in its own right the radical of metaphoric identification. There were certainly no critical holds barred in Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579), where we learn that “ancient Poetes are the fathers of lies, Pipes of vanitie.”20 Here is a sampling of his invective: So grosse are the errours, so great the abuses, so horrible the blasphemies we finde in Poetes, that wee may rather iudge them monsters of nature … Whilest they make many gods, they ouerthrow euery God. For if their gods bee of equal power, no one of them can doo any thing without his fellow, and so none of them may be called a god because God is perfect and almighty … By writing of vntruthes they are open liers, but if they do faine these frantike conceates to resemble somewhat els that they imagine, by speaking of one thing and thinking another, they are dissemblers … But if you looke well to Epæus’ horse, you shall finde in his bowels the destruction of Troy.21 Gosson is alluding in this last sentence to the Greek military tactic, made famous in Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, of the Trojan Horse. One of the great metaphors of feigning and deceit (and therefore a metaphor of metaphor!), the horse gains admission into Troy by seeming to be a desirable gift, all the while disguising a host of dissembling invaders.

76

missing link

Most dissenters against metaphor, even today, make mention of the irresistible seductive potential of metaphoric language, which, once you allow it through the gates of your mind and do not recognize it for what it is, will wreak unconscionable havoc with your beliefs and behaviours. Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, thinking of imaginative literature as whole, operates on the same principle. Gosson’s treatise is in fact a response to one of the more famous, inspired, and genuinely insightful defenses of metaphor in the English tradition, Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, written in the same year: 1579. But coming to Sidney, what particularly interests me is how even defenders of metaphor tend to include some sort of escape clause, some allowance, regarding the accomplished work and authority of imaginative thinking. Sidney is often quoted for his famous adage that “for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.”22 His insightful characterization (still easily misunderstood) of the non-referential – and therefore undeceitful – nature of figurative language resides at the heart of this book. Sidney writes that because descriptive accuracy is not its end, a metaphor, a “profitable invention … figuratively written,”23 can be neither true nor false. As W.B. Yeats once said, you can refute Hegel but you can’t refute the Song of Sixpence.24 How ironic, Sidney writes, that we allow for this truth in other considerations in life: We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chessmen; and yet, methinks, he were a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend title of a bishop.25 I once thought I was rather clever in coming up with a similar analogy (and was humbled to see myself so thoroughly anticipated) that people nowadays don’t argue against the legitimacy of baseball in American culture just because one could never find a second baseman per se in the actual world. The position, we say in its defence, is intelligible in relation to the game-fiction, and we happily accept as much, without spouting a baseball version of “I don’t like Hamlet because ghosts don’t really exist.” At the same time, I can see how even such a strong defense as Sidney’s will win over few if any thinkers in the sciences. That a fiction need not

“Peyne and Wo”

77

be verifiable or descriptively accurate subordinates it to those fields of inquiry where reliable knowledge of the “world we live in” is paramount. It is the poet’s figurative freedom (and I do mean “figurative” both literally and figuratively) that makes his conjurings beside the point, as he goes “freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.” Sidney’s analogy with the chessmen dooms what it would defend in the eyes of most “rational” thinkers because it aligns metaphoric conjurings with game-playing. By Sidney’s own admission, poetry is only “first nurse” to mature thinkers. Its “milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterward of tougher knowledges.”26 This is perfectly true (as we will see) in that it is metaphoric thinking that underlies and enables so-called rational thinking, but you can see how the claim also holds to the entrenched dichotomy that would subordinate the “primitive” and puerile brainwork of the imagination to maturer knowledges. Volleys have been exchanged on both sides of the divide ever since. George Puttenham’s “The Art of English Poesie” (1589) holds to the metaphor-as-ornament line: this ornament we ƒpeak of is giuen to it by figures and figurative ƒpeaches, which be the flowers as it were and coulours that a Poet ƒetteth vpon his language of arte … if the ƒame coulours in our arte of Poesie … be not well tempered, or not well layd, or be vƒed in exceƒƒe, or neuer ƒo litle diƒordered or miƒplaced, they do onely giue it no maner of grace at all, but rather do disfigure the ƒtuffe and ƒpill the whole workmanƒhip taking away all bewtie and good liking from it.27 In his essay of 1603, “A Defense of Rhyme,” Samuel Daniel breaks the cardinal rule of every successful politician: never apologize. His apology for poetry reads as a litany of the very excesses he would excuse. It is as if art “were ordained to afflict Nature … as if it were not to fashion, but to confound the understanding, which makes me much to distrust man, and fear that our presumption goes beyond our abilitie, and our Curiositie is more than our Judgement: laboring ever to seem to be more than we are.”28 A study of metaphor and the allowances made for it in Shakespeare would require volumes. It is a part of Shakespeare’s genius that so many

78

missing link

of his passages may be borrowed from their context and read as commentary on their own fictive workings. Prospero’s confession in The Tempest of the “baseless fabric” of his vision, a fading insubstantial pageant that leaves not a rack behind (IV, i). In King Lear, Edgar’s creation of an imaginary cliff – “I’ll look no more; / Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight / Topple down headlong” (IV, vi) – into which his father Gloucester must “throw himself” in order to be cured of his despair. The performance of a wall by Snout in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “This man, with lime and rough-cast, doth present / Wall, that vile Wall which did these lovers sunder; / And through Wall’s chink, poor souls, they are content / To whisper” (V, i), a commentary on metonyms themselves, which serve as both barrier and conduit and through whose chinks secret whisperings may pass. But nothing may serve our purposes so well as Theseus’ “disavowal” in the same play of the power of metaphoric conjurings, which both bewilder and entice: More strange than true: I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: […] The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (V.i) George Lakoff borrowed a line here for his second study of metaphor – More than Cool Reason – emphasizing the apprehensions of mind that are not subject to the comprehensions of reason. Shakespeare’s distinction between two kinds of knowing anticipates by some three hundred years theories, in Wittgenstein and others, of how metaphoric thinking is primarily a mode of apprehension, a discovery of identities, a seeing as (cf. 59–61). Experienced thus, such knowing marks its seer as standing

“Peyne and Wo”

79

outside the conventional sanities: it is as much apprehended as conceived, something that happens to a mind as much as it is created in a mind. A simple phrase like “bodies forth” is as nuanced an inquiry into the agency of imaginative thinking – i.e. are metaphors created or discovered? – as we will find anywhere in literature. Its double entendre serves as an axis on which pivot our two conceptions of metaphor, one as passively giving body to forms that occur to it, the other as actively bodying forth those forms. Our “airy nothing” and “a local habitation and a name” offer precise synonyms for tenor and vehicle respectively in a substitution theory of metaphor. In can be no accident, surely, that attitudes towards metaphoric language in Shakespeare are becoming thus more nuanced at a time when the theatre offered writers an alternative architectural metaphor for imaginative conjurings, where actual bodies, performing what they speak into being, give body to hypothetical realities on the other side of an imaginary barrier. The round circle of a Globe theatre that was at the same time “all the world” – as the Chorus declares in the prologue to Henry V: “may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt? / O, pardon!” – would have confronted religious and scientific thinkers alike with the substantial reality of a world divided from theirs by an imaginary proscenium, otherwise immune to their descriptive or ideological imperatives. That is one of the things that made theatres and metaphoric play so dangerous and suspicious at the time. All the less surprising then that, as we come to the Enlightenment, we find metaphoric thinking brushed to the side as at best a kind of guilty pleasure, at worst an offense to genuine knowledge. In his Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke returns us to the principles we find in Thomas Norton. Norton’s “playn and comon speche” as applied to the work of “holy alchemy” becomes in Locke the exhortation to a strict rational language in the service of objective understanding. Making the requisite allowances for the entertainment value of figurative language, Locke turns to its dangers: if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else

80

missing link

but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats: and therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them.29 We’ve seen this language already in Steven Pinker, not surprisingly given the continued allegiance of modern science to Enlightenment principles: “The piling on of metaphorical and metonymic allusions was thought to make the system more compelling, whereas by modern scientific standards it makes it less compelling.”30 Locke is more of a rational idealist than Pinker; he has a non-scientific investment of his own in the ultimate authority of “Soul,” in which reason finds its seat. As we move into the nineteenth century, we will see how soul comes to be more and more identified with a condition of mind – the existential presence-toitself of conscious thinking – that is primarily metaphorical. This is how a scientist like Pinker would be able to ironize the authority of an idealist like Locke, by seeing the foundation of his argument – that soul is the seat of reason – as but one more piled-on metaphor. That chicken will come home to roost, for it is reason itself as a principle of ostensibly nonmetaphoric thinking that will, in time, have to testify before the jury (cf. 198–200). As we pass among the romantic and post-romantic writers, we find some of the reason/imagination binaries loosen in favour of an enlightened (not to say Enlightenment) attitude towards metaphor. Among the principle advocates those binaries are turned inside out. In William Blake, for instance, truest vision is metaphoric and re-creative rather than merely “vegetative”: I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What,” it will be Question’d, “When the sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy,

“Peyne and Wo”

81

Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look through it & not with it.31 The kinds of systematic reasoning that we associate with eighteenthcentury argument become, in Blake’s view, little more than a licence to oppress. From Coleridge we learn that poetry has “a logic of its own, as severe as that of science.”32 It has a synthesizing power, which if still strangely “magical” in a way that scientists might scoff at, is nonetheless now existential: This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laxis effertur habenis) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order.33 A subordinated property now turns out to have a disguised existential authority. While imagination is “first put in action by the will and understanding,” and retained under their control (which now, according to the Latin phrase, carries on “with slackened reigns”), it possesses an original providence that antedates these and other acts of mind. This comes out very clearly in Coleridge’s renowned definition of imagination in Book XIII of his Biographia Literaria: The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this

82

missing link

process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.34 Primary imagination in Coleridge comes very near to a characterization of consciousness itself as essentially a function of metaphoric behaviours, an inference I’ll be expanding on in Chapter 9. In the Coleridgean spirit, we might venture that metaphoric consciousness (i.e. the consciousness that metaphor is) is the “repetition” in physical form of an initiative that is coextensive with creation, an original and potentially infinite beingas. From this “esemplastic power” (to mould into one) is derived our secondary imagination, comprising those acts of mind that are more explicitly metaphoric, with a difference only of degree. The work is one of dissolving, diffusing, and dissipating cognitive inputs in order to recreate them, the break-and-make initiative we have described already in interactive metaphor (cf. 49): consciousness put to work on the world, as it were. Coleridge goes on to distinguish these two formative acts of mind from mere “Fancy,” which “is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” The characterization comes nearest to conventional definitions of metaphor in those modern disciplines that remain suspicious of its workings. Fancy makes things up that we know aren’t so; its products are synonymous with the term “fantasy,” of which it is the contracted form. The romantic poets, then, offer the intuition of a power that precedes the top-down authority of objective reason; that power, in the spirit of much nineteenth-century transcendentalism, lies at the heart of both physical creation and the mind that envisions it. We will become familiar with this conception of two ontologies at work “inter-penetratively,” the one a creative initiative in all physical matter and the other its expression in the workings of creative consciousness (i.e. the consciousness that metaphor is): in Coleridge`s terms, “the living principle” and “the process of our own self-consciousness.”35 For the first time since Longinus, the in-folded perspective of the metaphoric initiative comes clear in its own mindful expression: “the one … tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity.” Metaphor is coming to be associated with divinity. In his “Defence of Poetry,” Shelley anticipates a further aspect of my own argument:

“Peyne and Wo”

83

It is at once the center and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life.36 There’s that concept of adornment again. Shelley wins over few scientists when he argues that “the production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility.”37 Even his pithy conclusion, the single line that survives in educated culture, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”38 must have the same effect on scientists as a poet’s crying out “I demand to be heard!” would have on a politician. We are already up and running on the various twentieth-century theories of metaphor and metaphoric thinking (cf. the preceding chapter) and will fill in the picture further as occasion arises. We can finish this potted history, then, with reference to two later-nineteenth-century essays, Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” and Wilde’s “On the Decay of Lying.” In Nietzsche we find, perhaps first among the modern thinkers, an investment in the radical of metaphoric thinking per se: “the drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.”39 In metaphor, “the intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself.” His association of metaphoric thinking with the positive expressions of dream-work and magic is conspicuously post-Enlightenment: When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens … then, as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.40 And yet I wonder whether Nietzsche’s celebration, in a Blakean spirit, of the transformative potential of metaphoric thinking wouldn’t alienate a

84

missing link

contemporary scientist, who must see the practices of the poet as that of a child smashing toys in a playroom, or that of a schizophrenic who simply denies what is real and has his way: That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts … When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.41 For the scientist there is no walking from beneath actual storm clouds under normal circumstances. This is a sure way to get yourself struck by lightning. In each instance, humanists and scientists might enter into a debate regarding which frameworks or scaffoldings we should cling to and which may be profitably thrown into confusion, and why. Their dialogue would be highly constructive. Oscar Wilde’s not-so-tongue-in-cheek exhortation to his reader to lie and lie as often as he can, is unlikely to win many adherents among practising scientists. On the surface Wilde produces what might count as a rather disingenuous argument. When the poet openly lies at last, Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life – poor, probable, uninteresting human life – tired of repeating herself for the benefit of … scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.42 Beneath the playful witticisms of Wilde’s argument lies a principle that is challenging in a way that we have not yet understood. His more

“Peyne and Wo”

85

popular, and also regularly misunderstood, adage that art is for art’s sake somewhat anticipates the thesis of his present essay, that “the only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is Lying for its own sake.” This is not to be confused with gratuitous lying, which is something else indeed. It is conscious lying. What becomes of a deception that is advanced and invested in as itself, that is, as a lie? This carries to the next level John Keats’s celebration, seventy years earlier, of our potential for “negative capability,” our ability to “dwell in uncertainty” without hankering after absolutes.43 Here we have not just an uncertainty that is accepted, but conscious dissimulation thrown down as a gauntlet to other ways of knowing. Let’s be clear. This is not the “noble lie” that justifies its means by its ends, excuses itself as sadly necessary under the circumstances, but the lie that does not hide from you its own fictional grounds. It need not be brazen, but it holds out its counterfeit coin as the very point, as an end and culmination of human seeking and purpose. Its redemptive potential lies not in the now-subordinate question of whether it is true or not, but in what you do with your knowledge that it is a fiction. The potential, and the provocation, of Giambattista Vico’s principle of Verum est Factum (the truth is in what we have made), comes to bear anew.44 We will have occasion to revisit this puzzle at the end of this book, where it will culminate in Wallace Stevens’s adage: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”45 Let us merely note for now that we have come some distance from Plato into what is either a fallen world or a sophisticated one, or both.

damned that you are, and damned that you aren’t The two dominant discourses of the West over the past three thousand years have been religion and science. For most of this time, religion was the science, its myths a form of scientific knowledge. Today science is the new religion. I don’t particularly mean that science is the new religious fundamentalism; I mean only that science now tries to serve the function that religion formerly did.46 Both offer themselves in the service of

86

missing link

an existential authority, or a truth that lies beyond us in a reality largely unseen. In both domains, metaphor has been the deviant antagonist, either guilty of “religious blasphemies” as thinkers like Gosson had it, or of “woolly symbolism, shallow similarities, and mercurial mappings” in such as Steven Pinker’s more recent cosmology. These are simplifications, of course, inevitable ones perhaps in such a brief history, but it should be no surprise to find that in ages of science and religion a suspicious attitude towards the conjuries of metaphor should dominate. It seems to be largely in the realm of the literary – among poets and later their critics and theorists, among philosophers of language per se – that windows open on conceptual, descriptive, and rhetorical uses of language to let in some of the fresh air of the imaginary and hypothetical. We turn to our Sidneys and Shakespeares, our Coleridges and Nietzsches, for a more patient and invested inquiry into the power of metaphoric thinking. Science may be coming around to a more accommodating view. Credit writers like Pinker and Dennett, not to forget Thomas Kuhn and Julian Jaynes, all of whom acknowledge metaphor as an area of legitimate study in the cognitive disciplines. Still, we may only have come full circle. Religion’s earlier suspicions about deceptive language in the face of God’s “true” word has now become science’s debunking of religion itself for the same reason – that it deviates from “the truth.” In both domains, metaphoric thinking is seen as excessive and potentially distortive. In pre-Romantic configurations, soul and its sidekick reason were Godgiven and the demons were those who deviated from their “true and righteous path.” Though a large part of “good reason” has migrated into the discourse of the sciences in the secular domain, the element of makebelieve and conjuring realities ex-nihilo remains demonized. Given the displacement of religion today as a dominant discourse, we shouldn’t be surprised to find religious thinkers becoming more accommodating of metaphor as a form of legitimate understanding, that is to say, more flexible in their understanding of what it means for the Bible to be “true.” Understanding changes in dominant language use can help us to understand how culture has changed. Channelling his Vico, Frye argues that metaphoric language was actually the favoured mode of understanding in very earliest cultures, where a more magical relationship between word and thing obtained. The first articulate cave man doesn’t

“Peyne and Wo”

87

look at the thunder and say it is like the God Thor. He says it is the God Thor. He hears thunder and he thinks, “Thor is angry.” It takes folks like us to come along later and say, “actually Mr Cave Man, you were just speaking metaphorically, whether you knew it or not.”47 We are at a point of transition as the Bible and classical literature come along. Conceptual language dominates for two millennia, through the eighteenth century and its age of reason, and up to the industrial/scientific age of the nineteenth century. Descriptive language, with its principle of truth as correspondence, finally becomes the ascendant mode, for obvious reasons so far as the needs of science and industry are concerned. It is no accident that scientists are not very good at thinking of God as a metaphor any longer, or that if they are, it becomes merely another reason to discount its authority, i.e. that God is merely a metaphor. In a descriptive scientific age, he either is or he ain’t. I hope the unity of my project will come clear. Metaphor functions centrally in both domains of religion and science, partly because its material condition, like a good metaphor, both is and is not material. The metaphoric initiative as it comes to bear in conscious thinking is the existential experience of spirit. Religions come of it. At the same time, it is a material behaviour as worthy of scientific investigation as any original property in the universe could be. If the fact does not, as Nietzsche might say, throw science into confusion, it might help us to grasp the limits of its understanding and why it is continually confronting those limits. I will have occasion to make reference to many of the principle metaphor theorists of our last century – Max Black, Paul Ricoeur, Northrop Frye, and others – as we go along. We will see how the terms of the debate change and remain the same. We might note at this point that the approach itself becomes highly scientific and mechanical in its theoretical intrication. The condition and nature of metaphor is reduced (which of course is the wrong word) to its nuts and bolts, its linguistic minimums, quite actually (and figuratively) to its electrons and protons. That our study of the parts and kinds of metaphor has shifted over to the theorist’s version of the Bunsen burner, the Petri dish, and the micro-processor, won’t surprise us in an age where science and technology are in the ascendant. Yet there is an irony to be adduced, at least so far as a humanist is concerned. When we seemed as cave-dwellers to have been most intuitively at home in thinking metaphorically, we didn’t have much

88

missing link

awareness of metaphor as such. It is only as we became scientific modellers of physical reality that we got better at talking about the workings of figuration. Yet by that stage, our demystification of metaphoric language – what it is and how it behaves – only left us more suspicious of it. One of the objectives of this book is to edge towards a credulous scepticism that might represent an advance in our evolving attitude towards the mind, the brain, and the metaphoric energies that make them what they are.

3

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

The momentary tension of disparity is … like the fleeting bond of two molecules during which the valence of each entity is altered by momentary fusion and exchange of electrons, producing a third thing under the sun which has the “identity” of neither parent molecule. ~Peter Sparke1 There is a coherence in the descriptions of science, a unity in its explanations, that reflects an underlying unity in the entities and principles involved. ~François Jacob2 All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion; – Things are, and are not, at the same time; – and the like. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson3

beginnings “In our beginning is our end” (Complete, 177). T.S. Eliot’s Alpha-andOmega shell game is sometimes used as a first salvo in long arguments; it makes my case succinctly, so I’m pressing it into service again. Whatever end we human beings currently represent as evolved metaphoric thinkers is already present and active in whatever beginning the Big Bang represents for our universe. The launching of the metaphoric initiative and the launching of the universe are one and the same event. They consist of the same fabric, a material condition and a pattern of behaviour, a content and a form, as one. You can look one way and see the mother of all firework displays, or look another and see the birth of a behaviour whose evolution through a variety of incarnated forms began at that instant and continues in us.

90

missing link

Metaphor has a kind of chemistry; chemistry evinces the informing conditions of metaphor. We must consider this chiasmus from a variety of perspectives. We will review what models of metaphor and chemistry look like, consider their respective operations of reactivity and change, how they happen, why they happen, when they happen, and what products they yield, what horizons they expand towards, and what cosmologies they embody. I am not claiming only that metaphor is implied in the original state of things. The same after all might be said of a toothpick; if you don’t have a universe with interacting forces, you can’t have metaphor, or toothpicks for that matter. I am saying that metaphor proper, in this grandest figure of figures, is the fulfilment of interacting chemical energies in the mental activities that those energies have become.

metaphors of origin A book that seeks to accommodate our experience of spirit to the conditions of physical reality, and vice versa, ought not to shy away from looking at the metaphoric scaffolding in either domain. I reflect on how a sense of spirit is hardwired into human consciousness and that spirit is one further expression of the metaphoric initiative as it evolves through human being. At the same time, there are the particular metaphors that we use in both religion and science. I’ve been trying to keep the distinction clear. While my interest is not in particular metaphors and what they mean, I certainly appreciate the importance of their meaningfulness. This is nowhere truer than in our metaphors of origin, the sorts that we find in both the Bible and in theoretical models of the Big Bang. One needn’t focus on the Bible or the Big Bang in these terms. We could examine a few Aboriginal creation stories and earlier geocentric configurations of the known cosmos and test the corresponding results. But the Big Bang is the favoured model in science today, and the Bible is its nearest complement in the Western spiritual tradition, so I will work with them. Neither scientists nor Christians are particularly keen on seeing their foundational metaphors as just metaphors. But perhaps neither would object to the argument that Genesis need not serve as a scientific model of our physical origins but rather an account of how metaphoric acts of

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

91

creation ex nihilo may be thought to work, something that the logic of the Big Bang certainly offers, whatever else. Connections have long been drawn between Biblical and religious accounts of origin, so I should take a moment to clear room for my argument. Thomas Aquinas used a dextrous metaphoric leap to account for how material and spiritual accounts of creation are simultaneously correct (the world made wholly by God and wholly by natural forces at the same time), making an allowance that leaves the merely physical event to the scientists to describe.4 There are versions of this approach in our own time. In his books Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and The Bible (1991) and The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom, Gerald Schroeder discerns a harmony between the two master metaphors of origin. His aim, laudably enough, is to downplay Genesis as a literal account and to explore its value as a metaphoric expression of the Big Bang. So for instance in the Science of God, he aligns the telescoping effect of time in Genesis (the six-day creation of the world) to a similar elongation of time physicists have observed in the universe since the Big Bang.5 Genesis becomes a means of communicating a truth in physics to an earlier readership not yet equipped with certain material facts or the tools to discover them. Such an approach implies a version of Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” (a term Einstein used to describe the puzzle of particle entanglement in quantum theory), where in this case a work which could not have “known” the actual science of a much later age ends up revealing the same logic in its own terms. We’re left to marvel at the wonder and draw our own conclusions. Aquinas and Schroeder prove themselves to be nimble-minded and rather hopeful associative thinkers. Frye points out that it is the metaphoricity of story itself that renders it available to consiliences of this sort, with the implication that the terms and conditions of any event in physics could be found in any number of stories, and vice versa, let the associative thinker be only dextrous enough to find them.6 Whatever else they might mean to Christian and scientist, these stories embody the workings of the metaphoric initiative as an “originary oomph” in both matter and spirit. Our modellings of experience always seem to return us to the problem of metaphor that is there in the first place.

92

missing link

genesis There is no shortage of writers using invocations of Genesis as an opener: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” I propose a metaphoric substitution of “relation” for “the heavens and the earth.” We have in the Bible story something like the event that we find in the Big Bang. God creates the material world out of nothing, and his doing so may be seen as a figure of metaphor itself. This sleight-of-hand is alluded to at the beginning of the Gospel of John, where we can make similar, and equally suggestive substitutions: “and metaphor was with God and metaphor was God.” So metaphor is put for “word,” the word being the Logos, Logos being part of a trinity where, metaphorically, three things are one thing. The many defenses and interpretations of the Trinity in Christian doctrine, the counter-logical implications of three-in-one, can be seen as a struggle with the implications of metaphor. As the gospel writer John saw it, God is not only a metaphor, but a “metaphor of Metaphor” (a word for the Word): that is, a metaphor of the creative power that issues from whatever we imagine the original fabric of creation to be. I’ve always been drawn to the idea that the story of God’s creative acts in Genesis suggests a particular way of beginning. In his book Melodious Guile, John Hollander notes that God’s work is not expressed in the strict imperative, telling a thing to start being. He doesn’t cry out, “Light, start to be!” or “Cue the Light!” (amusingly parodied, near the end of the film The Truman Show, when the sky-father Christof – “of Christ” – calls out “Cue the storm!” inside his fabricated cosmos). God says only “Let there be light.” His utterance lies somewhere between the jussive mood (expressing a command) and the optative (expressing a wish). Neither of these two moods is strictly accommodated to English grammar. We accomplish them with more words and with the tones of words. God’s word doesn’t take light from the “non-being” box, as it were, and put it over in the “being” box. Creation ex nihilo is more magical than that. The expectation itself that a thing will come to be possesses a conjuring power. The French “Que la lumiere soit” and the German, “Es werde Licht” accomplish similar work. I wrote to the Hebrew scholar Robert Alter to inquire into the linguistic nature of the original Hebrew and received this helpful reply:

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

93

Here’s the short answer. There is no subjunctive in Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew does have a jussive or optative mood, and that is clearly signaled formally here by the use of a shortened form of the verb (yehi instead of yihyeh). The French translation you provide, though it’s technically a subjunctive, gets it right. The sense (jussive) is: I speak so that X will happen. The verb used is “to be,” and what it plainly means is: as I speak, there is no light, only the darkness over the deep; as a direct result of my speaking, I expect light to exist, to be. The same verbal form is used when you say, “Long live the king,” which of course could also be represented awkwardly as “Let the king live long” (“long,” I should say, is merely implied). If God were speaking in that case, one would expect that the king would live long as a direct consequence of the speech-act. Since it is a human speaking, the sense is optative.7 As a servant who knows, when his employer says “Let the table be cleared,” that he is being told to clear the table, light promptly begins to exist.8 But God didn’t need to tell it to do so, he merely (it helps if you accompany the phrase with an inviting sweep of your hand) makes or declares an allowance, a potential cognitive space as it were, in which light appears. Yet there is something to be said for the English translation. When I think of the graceful nuances of our wistful “let” I think of the mathematician’s frequent use of the term. Presenting an algebraic formula with two or three variables, he might say, “let x equal 7,” as a way of “solving” the formula, solving it in the sense of letting it unfold in the direction it must, given the available conditions. He is not saying that x really is 7, but only that this is what things would look like if it were. Think of it. God need not be saying that light exists or does not exist, he needn’t be telling light to start being. Instead, in a sense, he is speculating. Given the present conditions of reality, here is what the world would look like if there were light. And all of creation follows. It unfolds naturally from an hypothesis. We think of the Big Bang as a spontaneous event that activated time and space. Scientists struggle still to understand that spontaneity, that uncaused causal initiative, in terms that preserve the essential caprice (or singularity) of the event. Perhaps we might learn from Genesis’s revealing use of the jussive-optative in this regard. It would

94

missing link

suggest to us that our very existence is predicated on a hypothetical gesture. We neither exist nor do not exist. It is as though the cosmos, in an act of pure caprice, suddenly began to daydream about “what things would look like if it were….” Implied in every metaphorical utterance is the Ricoeurian imperative to “think more,” that is, to speculate on how things would be “if such and such were so.”9 It may be that all the universe did at the Big Bang was “think more.”

big bang and the elementals I offer this speculation, again, not to prove that the stories of Genesis and the Big Bang must be true accounts of reality because they “agree” with one another, but only that they both suggest how metaphors themselves begin and how things begin metaphorically. Whatever useful descriptive properties it may have, The Big Bang as a name certainly makes one of the more evocative metaphors of metaphor. Metaphor is creation ex nihilo (which usually turns out not to be “out of nothing” after all), where latent potential energies are released by relation-events into an expanding space whose very limits are its own. Classical physics teaches that there are four elemental forces in the universe, the original observed behaviours that came into existence at the point of the Big Bang event and which constitute the fabric of our reality. These are the Electromagnetic Force, the Strong Nuclear Force, the Weak Nuclear Force, and Gravitation. They are the “point d’appui” that Henry David Thoreau said we would hit at bottom if we plunged a “realometer” down through the world of sham appearances and illusions.10 The forces themselves comprise smaller elements: the positive and negative charges of magnetism (Electromagnetism), the quarks and gluons that hold protons and neutrons together (Strong Force), and the exchange of W and Z bosons that lies at the heart of electron activity (Weak Force). The behavioural characteristic shared by each of these is a function, simply put, of relation. Our universe came into being in and as the phenomenon of things standing apart from, and in relation to, one another. Relation, remember, is a function of difference. For two things to be related they have to be not one thing. Their relations were made possible by the time and

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

95

space that they embodied as they separated and expanded at the outset. Like the elements of a poem, they opened into their own allowing conditions. Energy itself might be thought of as the relation of identity and difference trying to work itself out. Relation becomes the evidence of the Big Bang event and all its issuances. The horizon of that event is still being “explored” by the elements it released. Space is expanding and its myriad interrelating contents continue to unfold and fill out the area they embody. We live inside a metaphor: it is a creative process unfolding, an exploration of itself, whose outer limit only appears to exceed the reach of its deepest imaginings. In our everyday understanding, space is what exists between things. At the “singular” instant of the Big Bang,11 particles of energy were densely compacted. There was no (or very very little) space between things (particles of energy), and therefore no space to speak of, no particles, no relation, only, in some mysterious sense, a potential for these. The Big Bang banged and as the output cooled, particles formed out of the energy expressed. They exploded outwards and their outward expansion was a measure of the force of the original bang, like a ripple effect from a stone dropped in the water (except that the stone was dropped from inside the ripples before the ripples were!). Metaphors too resonate in this way, after the initial light goes on, the “Oh!” of sudden revelation. There is a potentially inexhaustible expansion of meanings. Bachelard makes a connection with chemical reactions themselves: It seems that there are already ways in which literature reveals itself as an explosion of language. Chemists anticipate an explosion when the probability of ramification becomes greater than the probability of termination. Whereas, in the ardour and gleam of literary images, the ramifications multiply.12 In practical terms these resonances dissipate after we’ve followed as many of their implications as far as we can. This aligns rather well with the theory that the universe simply continues to expand until its energies are fully dissipated, until, in effect, it grows weary of thinking about itself.

96

missing link

We have believed at least since Democritus that the universe is a dance of minute particles. Simplicius (quoting Aristotle) gives an account of Democritus’ physics in which the metaphoric implications are clear: Democritus thinks that the nature of the eternal things consists of small substances infinite in number; these he places in space … He thinks that the substances are so small as to escape our senses. They have all kinds of forms and all kinds of shapes and differences of size. Now from these as elements he generates the visible and perceptible bodies. He says that they conflict with one another and travel about in the void because of their unlikeness and the other differences which have been mentioned, and as they travel about they collide and entangle with one another, and that entanglement makes them touch and be near one another, but does not really generate any single nature from them; for it would be quite absurd for two or more things ever to become one.13 C.C.W. Taylor offers an excellent commentary on Democritus’ use of unlikeness as a concept. “What is the force of ‘because of their unlikeness’?”14 So we might ask as well. “It is at least tempting,” he writes, “to postulate a principle of the repulsion of unlikes from one another as a counterpart to the ‘like to like’ principle.” One of the happier intersections I’ve stumbled upon in my work is the one between the language of metaphoric and atomic behaviours that Erich Auerbach notes among the ancient atomists, especially Lucretius. “And so it is that Lucretius … often refers to [atoms] as ‘shapes’ (figurae), and that, conversely, one can often translate figurae with ‘atoms’ … An incalculable number of atoms are constantly in motion. They careen about in the void, first joining with and then repelling one another, in a dance of figures.”15 The most important, and for our purposes defining, characteristic of the energy particles that issued from the Big Bang was that they attracted and repelled one another. We can note further that one of the fundamental properties of the universe is that sub-atomic particles like protons and electrons possess something called “charge,” but we don’t get much further ahead in doing so. “Mass and charge do not exist per se,” writes physicist Marcelo Gleiser; “they only exist as part of the narrative we humans construct to describe the natural world.”16 No one really

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

97

knows what charge is, nor can say why the universe has it. For me, the concept of charge is simply a way of imagining relation itself. Protons and electrons can be reduced to even smaller subatomic particles, quarks and leptons, whose properties contribute to the manifestation of charge in the larger particles. Proponents of superstring theory can further reduce the elements to vibrating “strings” of energy that manifest the different behaviours of particles at the higher end. This still only delays the question. We still want to ask why those smaller sub-atomic particles would possess the ingredients of charge, or why different vibrations of a string manifest it. As Brian Greene says in The Elegant Universe, “even though strings have spatial extent, the question of their composition is without any content.”17 Until such time as we discover, if we should ever discover, a breakdown into further and still smaller subatomic particulars, “we will take strings to be nature’s most fundamental ingredient.” Charge, or string vibrations, or whatever reduction we settle on for the time being, are an observed property of things that are; the fact of their existence remains a mystery and points us in the direction of the age-old metaphysical question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”18 In the end, or rather in the beginning, our scientists don’t do much better than anyone else when it comes to explaining the curious state denoted by our copula verb. They stand before a mystery, an object without reducible content, and they say “This is.” The Big Bang, then, is that moment when relation comes to bear. It pops into being and then heads off to track the results of its having done so. The mere fact of relation constitutes “the fabric of reality” (to use David Deutsch’s book title). It is not just a way of describing how things that already appear to exist happen to behave towards one another. Relation presents itself as matter. Or the matter that we have before us is an expression of relation.

why the universe h as a prayer How interesting to find ourselves living inside a body, a physics, that is still in the process of discovering “what it amounts to” and how far it can go. The universe, at least as it appears to us, is very curious. It is also strangely confident. It heads off to fill out and discover the potential

98

missing link

reach – realized as it goes – of what it may become. I hope as my argument unfolds that it will seem inevitable that poems evince similar behaviours. They are cosmologies writ small. We want to take a moment to work out the implications of saying so, as our findings will help to consolidate the argument of this chapter. George Herbert’s “Prayer” is one of my favourite examples of a verbal spatial cosmology: Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age, Gods breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth; Engine against th’Almighty, sinners towre, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-dais world transposing in an houre, A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear; Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Exulted Manna, gladnesse of the best, Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest, The milkie way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud, The land of spices; something understood.19 “Adding circle to circle, cell to cell,” as Robert Lowell might have said,20 the poem seeks to define what it also embodies: in short, “something understood.” It “works towards” its ultimate reach in being what it is. It is an act of communication about an act of communication. I’ve always thought that any prayer is partly a prayer that it be a prayer, that it have genuine purchase, that it accomplish all it possibly can in being what it is. In Wallace Stevens’s configuration, prayer is “a poem of the act of the mind … finding what will suffice.”21 Poems as prayers are the speculative condition – there and then made effective – of a cosmos they “think up” by wondering about it. How nice for the words of this poem to find themselves inhabiting a body that is in the process of discovering how much it might understand. But it is more still. One of the curious features of Herbert’s “Prayer” is that it doesn’t “say” anything. It is a poem without any main verb. It speaks without making statements. It is filled with content, but lacks the

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

99

active grammatical agent – a main verb – that would make of its materials an intelligible narrative or argument. Things just are what they are. It is certainly one way of insisting on the isness of things, emphasizing their status as the substance and material of what shows. You simply place things on a table and then step away from them, like a watchmaker god. But of course there is an informing agent in the poem, and as it happens that agent is fundamental, creative, and all comprehending. It is the agency of metaphoric relation. Without the poem’s explicitly saying so, it offers a series of juxtapositions, the relation of one thing to another, then another, into further and further potential relations of interactive and semantic reach. That the poem leaps with apparent haphazard between minute particulars and metaphysical horizons, between church bells and milky ways, bespeaks its hypothetical authority as a created cosmology of small and big, one that is simply there because it says so. A universe made of likenesses. This collection of apparently random instances is anything but random. We know, of course, that it is authored in the way that the universe almost certainly isn’t. But even more important is the fact that, like the universe, the poem actually and figuratively “holds together.” There is the nucleus of a tenor, to use I.A. Richards’s terms, the poem’s first word, and then twenty-eight vehicles (and all so lovely…) branching from it like so many spokes from a hub. Helen Vendler offers a fine diagram of this layout (cf. figure 3.1), where she refers to the metaphors as so many radii emanating from a centre.22 Here we find subordinated the sense of a narrative where one event leads to another then to another in the service of logical cause-and-effect inferences that make an argument whose conclusion is its raison d’etre. The conclusive “something understood” does indeed remind us that we are nonetheless working towards a goal, but as such it merely points us back to all the individual “somethings” that this something means.23 We might say the same of a universe: its ultimate reach, were it to become in the end “something understood,” would lead us back to understand everything it literally and figuratively comprehends. We have a verbal atom then, whose centre is the attracting nucleus of so many likenesses, whose meaning is a condition of those likenesses and the gestalt they form. We also have the “universe” that this kind of particular atom makes. Herbert’s “Prayer” is both a cosmology emanating

Figure 3.1 George Herbert’s “Prayer I” according to Helen Vendler: a tenor and its twenty-eight vehicles.

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

101

in all directions, pulling scarves from its own mouth, and a chemistry of juxtaposed relations that is its embodying particulate. The whole of creation made up of atoms and an atom within that whole. Metaphorically speaking, “a six-days world transposing in an hour.”

classical chemistry Superstring theory aside, atoms have been considered since the time of the Greek atomists the essential building blocks of our known universe. Atoms join together to form molecules. Molecules are the (sometimes) highly complex compounds of atoms, which make up our trees, our skin, our pencils, our toasters, our micro-chips, and our poems. Our chemistry and biology are still founded on their understanding. Every atom has a nucleus that contains positively charged protons in balance with an equal number of uncharged neutrons. Around the nucleus spin negatively charged electrons in various orbits. We’re going to be talking about how atoms relate to one another, combine with and attract other atoms to form new substances, but it is worth noting (and we will return to the point shortly) how the electrons themselves are related to their nuclei. That is, there is a gap that abides between them, an electromagnetic force of attraction and repulsion, identity and difference, that keeps them in constant tension. Antecedent to the relation of tension that occurs between atoms is the relation of tension that holds atoms together in the first place. There are two factors that influence the reactivity of an atom (its likeliness to join with other atoms to form molecules). The first is the laws that appear to govern the layering of electron orbits around the nucleus and which determine when that atom feels “complete” or “satisfied” in its spin. The first inner layer of an electron is “satisfied” when it comprises two electrons. When there is a second layer (moving along the table of elements in the direction of increasing weight), it must contain eight electrons; when a third layer, eight again, and so on, to the outer limit of seven layers. When the outermost layer, whichever it should be, possesses too few electrons, that atom will be looking to gain electrons from elsewhere, by taking them from, or sharing them with, another

102

missing link

atom. When the outermost layer has too many electrons, it will be looking to shed them. Deals are made in both cases. The other factor that influences the reactivity of an atom is the relationship between the number of electrons in orbit and the usually equal number of protons in the nucleus. If an atom that possesses too many electrons manages to shed them, it will have fewer electrons in orbit than it has protons in the nucleus. It becomes positively charged. If an atom lacks electrons and manages to gain them, it will have more electrons in orbit than protons in the nucleus and so becomes negatively charged. Atoms charged positively or negatively are called ions. These positive and negative charges, quite apart from the make-up of their respective electron layers, can behave in their own right as forces of attraction and repulsion between atoms, which will bond electro-magnetically when they possess opposite charges. Like most of us most of the time, atoms and the molecules they form “seek” a state of rest, or a stability more resistant to change, where the charge is neutral and where the outer electron layer possesses its full complement of electrons. Of course atoms do not actually want rest. They will simply continue to change until they are stable and no longer react. We’ll consider in a moment how the mind appears to be highly reactive in a similar manner, in apparent pursuit of a state of rest or equilibrium.

bonds We use the term “valence” to describe an atom’s readiness to undergo change, a positive valence attracting and a negative valence repelling. In the humanities we apply the notion of valence to words and their latent or potential meanings. One of Northrop Frye’s most basic tenets in the study of language and literature is that “the only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together.”24 The same may be said of atoms and molecules. Things combine and separate. Two atoms combine when they “recognize” a complementary need. I have two dollars and need a can-opener. You have a can-opener and need two dollars. We make a deal. One atom is seeking to gain two electrons and another

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

103

is seeking to lose two electrons. They trade. When they trade their electron pairs, the charges of both atoms change respectively and the atoms are drawn together. The bond is called an ionic bond, an electromagnetic fusion of opposite charges. The exchange of electrons makes for a rather clean deal, though the resulting electromagnetic bond can be relatively weak, depending on the strength of the opposite charges that hold the atoms together. So much for those cases when the needs are inversely complementary. What happens when the atoms’ needs are the same, rather than complementary? What if both atoms are looking to add electrons? A hydrogen atom has but a single electron in its orbit and so looks to add one. What it can’t trade for it may be able to borrow. It can share the electrons with another hydrogen atom and allow both electrons to spin around both nuclei. We call this a covalent bond. You have a car jack but need two and I have a car jack but need two. We decide to share the ones we have so that each of us may have the use of two car jacks. Our sharing binds us together. Drop a chemical in a test tube. That chemical will have a name, a set of properties, electron orbits that will make it available or prone to certain interactions. Drop another chemical into the tube; it too has an identity and set of properties. Now watch. You want to see what happens when they relate. You might be interested in the product that results, or you might be interested in the mechanism or logic of the interaction – exactly what properties were exchanged and why – in order to understand what other interactions might be possible, or to discover ways of using these chemicals to advantage. These two interests correspond with the semantic and semiotic valences of metaphors that we discussed earlier (changes in the meanings of words and how those changes occur). Each chemical, if it is interactive at all, will change and become (part of) something else. We no longer have two separate chemicals but a new unity of one chemical, a molecule (“little mass”). An oxygen atom doesn’t any longer look like, or behave like, an oxygen atom when it “identifies with” two hydrogen atoms. It looks like a water molecule. Hydrogen and oxygen lose themselves in one another. They hold together as a new third thing. This is the vanishing act, the “disappearance” of old things into a new thing that Peter Sparke refers to in one of the epigraphs to this chapter.

104

missing link

Let’s be more specific. One would still be able to identify the constitutive parts of a larger molecule, for instance two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom in a water molecule. But none of these original atoms is any longer what it was. The oxygen atom is not really an oxygen atom now, because it has two extra electrons spinning in its orbit, bringing it to that state of relative rest that it “seeks.” The same may be said of the hydrogen atoms. Each atom is at the same time both itself and a part of something other. It is an expression of identity and difference. This simultaneous identity and difference is made possible, remember, by the electromagnetic tensions that abide within the gaps between all the interacting electrons. The title of Roald Hoffmann’s book on chemistry, The Same and Not the Same, makes for one of the happier intersections of humanistic and scientific thinking that I have come across. “First and foremost,” he writes, “there is the question of identity, of being the same and not the same.”25 I can scarcely think of a better phrase to capture the metaphoric initiative that lies at the heart of both chemical interactivity and imaginative thinking. As it happens, Hoffmann is not talking about the relations of identity and difference that exist in a single molecule. He is talking about two separate molecules that are so closely related to one another as to be scarcely distinguishable. Nonetheless, he is sensitive to how the chemist works with a complex interaction of shared and unshared features among differing elements, and how these admixtures of similarity and singularity issue in the production of further possibilities, new combinations, new substances. In an earlier chapter we identified two essential kinds of metaphor, interactive and substitutive (cf. 50). Interactive metaphors imply a set of shared properties between two apparently stable signifiers (daylight and fresh shirt, for instance), while substitutive metaphors imply an assimilation or co-optation of the properties of one signifier into those of another that is less defined. As we’ve also now identified two kinds of chemical bonds, you won’t be surprised to find me working out the potential correspondences between all four. Think of these as experiments themselves, where we drop a species of metaphor into a speculative test tube with a kind of chemical bond … and observe the results.

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

105

interactive metaphors. covalent bonds. Let it be moved then, so to speak, that interactive metaphors are a kind of covalent bond, and vice versa. In working out the details, we need to go back to Max Black’s theory of “the system of associated commonplaces.” As we saw earlier (cf. 43), every concept or object in the world is defined by a set of related characteristics. The concepts of love and rose proffer cores of signification, nuclei if you like. Around them “revolve” all of the different things that we might say about them. Love can be difficult, marvellous, temporary, and fragile. The poet consciously or unconsciously searches among these associated commonplaces to find (or reveal …) those particular ones that match up with the associated commonplaces of something else, for instance, a rose (which is thorny, beautiful, seasonal, and delicate). Finding those matches, he proposes a bond and says “My love is like a red red rose.” Like the covalent bond in chemistry, an interactive metaphor like love-rose issues from a happy reciprocity, a sharing of unique qualities, such that one element or both is satisfied and transformed. Let’s visualize this in both metaphorical and chemical terms, using the simple covalent bond of hydrogen and oxygen that makes water (cf. figure 3.2). On the left you see Love and Rose with the associated commonplaces that relate to them, including those that they share and that make them metaphorically attractive to one another in the formation of a love-rose. On the right you see the atoms of Hydrogen and Oxygen (there are two hydrogen atoms in this case, though the principle is the same), with their orbits of electrons, including the electrons that they share in order to find their equilibrium. In the area of shared valence, we find the attributes of “won’t last forever,” “is fragile,” “is beautiful,” and “can be prickly” that belong to the associated commonplaces of both terms. They represent pairings that are held in metaphoric tension, where for instance what is prickly in love both is and is not what is prickly on a rose. The shared area is now the domain of something that is neither love on its own nor rose on its own; it is the domain of the love-rose, less than the total sum of commonplaces, more than the sum of the individual wholes.26 How does this work with the chemical covalent bond? In the example above, with the pair of electrons now orbiting around both nuclei, each atom can now behave as though both electrons were its own, though

106

missing link

Figure 3.2 The covalent bond in metaphor and chemistry. Their resulting products are “My love is like a red red rose” and water, respectively.

they are not. The atoms have now surrendered their distinctness to become water. Each atom’s owning of the shared electron is chemistry’s version of an illusion, a subsisting “as though.” The need of each one for a further electron is now unequivocally satisfied. But they both are and are not what they were. I should say in passing that there is something potentially misleading about this representation of the metaphor love-rose. Placing the word “love” in the middle of a circle makes it seem as though there were a nucleus of meaning separate from its associated commonplaces. In truth, the associated commonplaces in their hypothetical entirety make up the nucleus of meaning. In practise, we treat love or rose as though they had core meanings, but this is a convenience. I put the ideas of love and rose in parenthesis to remind us that their core meaning is essentially an inference drawn from the circle of associated commonplaces as a whole. In chemistry, what revolves around the core is certainly as important as

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

107

metaphor’s associated commonplaces; there would be no atom if there were no electrons spinning around the nucleus. But both protons and electrons are nonetheless distinctly observed phenomena that we don’t need to set in brackets. But this distribution provides us with a further understanding of how relation functions at the heart of both disciplines. I mentioned above that, before we come to the connections that atoms make with other atoms, we can think of the electrons themselves as relating to their nuclei, in a tension of attraction and repulsion that abides across a gap. Likewise, we can see how the associated commonplaces are already metaphorical (cf. figure 3.3). Just as the electrons are already related, in electromagnetic tension, to the nucleus, so the associated commonplaces of difficulty and thorniness are already metaphorically related to their “cores” of love and rose. And just as in chemistry I can usually knock even the most dedicated electron from its orbit around a nucleus, so with the application of a little critical scepticism, I can question the relation between any noun and its various associated commonplaces. “You think love is difficult? Why it’s as easy as falling!” I can knock the common-

Figure 3.3 A nucleus of meaning. The system of associated commonplaces bonds metaphorically to its subject in the same way that electrons bond (via the electromagnetic energies of difference and identity) to their nucleus.

108

missing link

place loose and so make the noun in question less reactive in equations involving the notion of difficulty. It might be worth noting in passing that figures 3.3 and 3.2 could be used to clarify a basic distinction between symbols and metaphors. A symbol would be any cognitive item, like the rose in figure 3.3, that has its own solar system of associated commonplaces. A metaphor would be any two such symbols in relation to one another, where one or more of their associated commonplaces fall into play, as in the Love-Rose of figure 3.2. A metaphoric relation is already implied in the symbol (a “nucleus” of meaning identified with its associated commonplaces), but it is a singular meaningful item until it falls into further relation.

substitutive metaphors. ionic bonds. In substitutive metaphor, you introduce vehicle B to tenor A because there is something lacking in A that you need to specify. The more you feel a lack in the tenor, the more you will feel that the vehicle has been put in its place to help. In Alexander Pope’s simple and memorable “This long disease, my life,” the poet begins with a vague tenor, “life,” and then adds the specifying vehicle “this long disease” as a supplement to the original valence. Recall the blob and the brain (figure 1.2). What the heck is that odd thing that just appeared? We find something, a B, in the vast swim of associated commonplaces in the brain that helps to specify what we lack in our understanding of A. We said the blob A was like an amoeba or a map of the United States with two extra Floridas on the west coast. The vehicle has what the tenor needs. This sense of a corresponding need and supplement finds its analogue in ionic chemical bonds (cf. figure 3.4). In this case, the atom on the right would represent the tenor A lacking in “definition” (“my life” in Pope’s metaphor). The term “definition” is very suggestive for our purposes. The first entry for the word in the oed is “the setting of bounds or limits.” An atom’s definition would be not what it means, but the extent to which its outer layer is properly “defined.” The outer layer of seven electrons is incomplete and is therefore under-defined. We introduce atom B because it has one extra electron in its outer orbit, just as Pope’s “This long disease” has a useful surplus valence, one that can be profitably

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

109

Figure 3.4 The ionic bond in metaphor and chemistry. Even in substitution metaphor, Max Black claimed, there is a change in the valence of both elements.

borrowed elsewhere.27 A transference or substitution is performed, where the extra electron will pass across the gap (meta-pherein) and supplement the “definition” (or outer layer) of the incomplete electron … et voila, “this long disease, my life.” Both atoms might be said to have attained just the right amount of definition in the equation.

110

missing link

But what keeps the vehicle and tenor together in this equivalent of an ionic bond? One might imagine in chemistry that once the atoms have exchanged their electrons they would be perfectly free to drift off in their own direction. This is partly true, since each now has a satisfied outer layer. What has changed however is the charge (the valence) of both atoms. Atom A has gained an electron and so becomes negatively charged. Atom B has lost an electron and so becomes positively charged. This differentiation in charge becomes a bonding agent in its own right between the two atoms. They stick together. How are we to think of this bond in metaphoric terms? Let’s recall what Black didn’t like in the concept of substitutive metaphor (cf. 49). The results of the substitution, he felt, were almost always as much interactive as they were merely supplementary. That is, in the substitution we end up feeling not only that the blob is like a map of the United States, but that henceforth the United States will be like a blob. Again, this comes out strongly in those jokes where we find that the thing that is meant to offer a likeness is itself the thing being re-likened: “this train is slower than Congress trying to pass a bill.” There is a “trade,” but the trade alters the valence of both atoms and renders them differently reactive. It is not only that “this long disease” redefines “my life,” but that “my life” now redefines what sorts of “long diseases” might exist. In short, both substitutive and interactive metaphors, like ionic and covalent bonds, produce results that implicate each element in the other. What holds the elements together are the different needs with which each comes to the equation, but in the end valences are always exchanged.

stability Let’s return now to the question of why metaphors happen. Atoms “seek” stability. We can find this stability or the desire for it in metaphoric thinking as well. Just as there is a restlessness, one might say, in an atom that lacks or is oversupplied with electrons, there is a restlessness of mind that starts our neurons firing and sends networks of them cascading in search of other networks to connect with. We’ll have much more to say on this matter when we come to the advent of mind and

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

111

symbolic consciousness that has evolved out of these chemical origins. For now, let’s go back to the blob and the brain (figure 1.2). A person walks along, encounters an unknown phenomenon A, and has no idea what it is or what to do with it. She scrambles to find something “like it” in her mind so that she can speculate on its possible uses, dangers, advantages, etc. Just before she encountered the object, we might assume that her mind enjoyed a relative equilibrium, that for everything she saw outside she had a corresponding image or conception inside, and that all these images and conceptions existed in relatively settled relationships with one another. But the introduction of the unknown element causes a disturbance or imbalance (as when a new chemical is introduced into a test tube). There it is, strange phenomenon A. We have said that the mind experiences a sudden lack: “I have nothing that goes with this.” We could also say that it feels a sudden surplus: “Here’s this new thing; I don’t know what to do with it and it is throwing things out of balance.” It feels restless. It must search among its particles to find an equal and opposite neuronal content to go with it. Once it can say, “Ah, this goes with this (or these),” the balance returns. New unknowns can certainly throw things off, but it is worth noting that an imbalance can result simply from an internal shift, that is, from thinking alone, whose flows and backwashes keep the mind permanently active. In practice, the various contents of your mind can be blithely uninteractive. Two actually contradictory thoughts can live inside your head, in their independent contexts, and never disturb one another. Suddenly a thought sets them at noticeable odds, causes a crisis of cognitive dissonance, and sends your mind churning to figure out how they relate and return you to calm.

hard and fast There is another way to get molecules and atoms to interact when their charges or electron orbits are relatively stable. You can heat them. Heat is accelerated molecular activity. If you speed up a set of molecules and let them crash harder into one another, electrons that are otherwise relatively

112

missing link

stable can be knocked out of their usual orbit. Reactions occur. Increased neuronal activity that we associate with vigorous cogitating or imaginative thinking is nothing if not a kind of heat. The neurons begin to fire more rapidly and concepts that might otherwise have rested in fixed positions are knocked loose and begin to interact with other concepts. This heating up of neuronal activity is another way of understanding what has happened when a poet “chances upon” a new association. We have interactive metaphor, we saw, when the two elements of an association are already sufficiently known and at rest in the mind. I’m putting on my new shirt and as I dress I look at the patch of sunlight on the bed. I’ve always thought that I knew what sunlight is, and I know what to do with a fresh shirt and how both of these are useful, but my mind is active and the neurons are firing. It comes to me (or I come to it). The sunlight on the bed is like a fresh shirt. I’ll unpack some of the resonances while scrambling for my notebook, that the day is a fresh start, freshly pressed and ready for me to “take up” or “put on” etc. The heated interaction has created a new substance as it were, a new understanding of what the world is like. Some chemicals are very ready to interact. Others need catalysts, such as heat or other highly reactive agents. Similarly, there are images and ideas that are very ready to react or bond. It doesn’t take a genius to say that the CN Tower in Toronto looks like a phallus (the associated commonplace is very “out there”). Others concepts, as we saw above, may need a more rigorous stirring up of mental energies. Those elements that bond easily can become common bonds, or commonplaces. We call them “dead metaphors” in language. The tropes have occurred so often that we scarcely see them as metaphoric bonds at all, but just stable realities in our midst (the leg of the table, the eye of the storm, etc.). Let’s consider for a moment the actual strength of the respective bonds in chemistry and language, and what products or “yields” issue from their reactions. The stronger the molecular bond in chemistry, the more solid the substance. As you move from a solid to a liquid and then from a liquid to a gas, the bonds weaken. The heating process, in speeding up the collision of molecules, keeps everything in motion. As the temperature drops, the molecules slow down and are less likely to get bumped from the ionic bonds they form, and so thicken and turn to solids. The familiar transformation of h20 molecules from a vapour to

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

113

water to ice makes our point. Though the hydrogen bonds in water are relatively easy to break (splash, splash, splash …), a water molecule itself is almost impossible to break outside the laboratory. Dead metaphors exhibit the properties that we associate with solids. I say “the leg of the table” and incline not to puzzle very much (if at all) over the association. I use the metaphor as a reference for that thing under the table and I move on. With the application of a little mental energy I could loosen the metaphor from its fixed definition and put it in play (“Hmm, if that’s the leg of the table, where is the knee?”). Lakoff and Johnson have shown us how a concept like argument can interact so easily with the associated commonplaces of war that we take it for granted that it is war, and speak accordingly.28 It may be worth noting that it would take a particularly strong, wide-spread, and prolonged application of mental energy to break these bonds and entertain other possibilities, for instance, as we considered earlier, that argument is a form of love making (cf. 47). Chemistry’s dead metaphors are the relatively stable molecules that we find all about us, such as water, whose elements and bonds constitute the “everyday world” that we inhabit. Water is but one of our most important, and ubiquitous dead metaphors. Some might balk at this idea of water being a dead metaphor, so alive and active it is. We should remember that in language, dead metaphors are the work horses of communication. Their bonds are solid and tend not to change, making their work in the world reliable and consistent. Living in our world of accumulated dead metaphors is a little like living in the Newtonian universe. Newton’s universe is a very functional model of how things are. You won’t get very far in a conversation with someone if you spend too much time thinking about how parts of his body may be, according to quantum physics, just at that moment on the other side of the universe. You accept his presence as a kind of dead metaphor that there is no point in drawing attention to at that moment. So too in the comfortable world of dead metaphors, we live life as though. But at its edges, there are the poets who, like good chemists, seek to comprehend and even reinvent the realities we inhabit, who search tirelessly for the more surprising and unusual combinations that will produce new metaphors, new substances, new realities that we might yet live by.

114

missing link

barely controlled chao s We’ve been talking so far about a fairly simple chemical reaction, hydrogen and oxygen making water, for instance. If all chemical reactions and metaphors were this simple, finding a cure for cancer would be everyone’s basement hobby. Chemical reactions can be vastly more complicated in the molecular universe, such that Roald Hoffmann would describe most chemical syntheses as scenes of barely controlled chaos.29 You can drop two molecules into a test tube and find five different molecules in the product. Or you can combine 1023 atoms, produce bedlam, and extract the one or two compounds you were seeking. Often enough, when chemists are combining elements to produce a certain desired compound, there will be a great many by-products of the synthesis they don’t need. Chemists speak of the “efficiency” of an interaction, which is a function of how much of the original formula is incorporated into the new desired substance. The fewer the unwanted by-products, the more efficient the synthesis. Some chemical interactions can be highly efficient and some may be profoundly less so, such that the desired product is actually an infinitely small part of the muck that gets produced and then thrown away. Of course, great discoveries can sometimes be made in the muck itself. We can speak of the yield and by-products of a metaphoric interaction as well, and perhaps even of its efficiency. No particular metaphor is made up of 1023 original elements (though there may be 1023 neuronal synapses to execute it): my love, a rose, a storm, an olive branch, a pearl, my Aunt May, and a can of worms; shake vigorously and bake at 350 degrees. Such a vast stew of interactive elements yielding highly complex results goes to the character of language. Our every conversation or written sentence realizes new potential compounds of varied efficiency producing vastly different products. In each metaphoric reaction, there can be the sense of an almost inexhaustible yield; the sense of a consciousness expanding around an original metaphoric event. It may be that our best metaphors are the ones that continue to yield new resonances long after we feel we’ve used up their potential. I’ve always been rather moved by Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging,” where he associates his father’s work on the farm with his own work as a poet trying to dig down below the surface of things to reveal

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

115

hidden depths. An Irish friend of mine, one who was particularly interested in the Irish troubles and how they had been represented historically, objected vigorously to Heaney’s familiar association (as my friend saw it) of the Irish landscape with Irish cultural history. A metaphor like digging, he said, naturalizes historical circumstances and makes them seem as inevitable and as “entrenched” as the earth itself. He had identified a “writing is a kind of digging” metaphor, and had found a dangerous by-product. I disagreed, but it is true that ideological readings in criticism have commonly worked along these lines.30 We take a writer’s language, his associative vocabulary, and we examine the latent political or historical implications of his syntheses. Doubtless I myself may be accused of reducing metaphor to a variety of random chemical properties, excluding other things that metaphor is like. But that these associations have authority in their own right, whatever else does as well and however different the by-products, I hope is the proof in my test-tube pudding. In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson made the case that metaphoric associations are filled with unconscious by-products. Ideology affects the acculturated mind below the radar. Jameson argued that the unconscious ideological pull of these by-products can seduce a writer. He believed that digging up those by-products and naming them as such is our only hope of controlling what we make of ourselves. I don’t know if chemists can help us out in these sorts of literary scuffles, but in their own practice, they are more likely to weigh judiciously the advantages and disadvantages of a synthesis. “The yield in a chemical reaction,” writes Roald Hoffmann, “is an aesthetic criterion.”31 Simply identifying an unpleasant odour, or dangerous by-product, of a chemical reaction, does not make the synthesis immoral.32 Indeed, many of our best medicines and most useful synthetic chemicals wouldn’t exist if we only adopted those that smelled like roses and produced a by-product that you could drink. Important debates often ensue as to whether we can safely handle the undesirable by-products of a reaction (nuclear reactors coming most readily to mind, or the tailing ponds in the Alberta oil sands). Is the synthesis worth the cost? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Do we resist or “out” all metaphors that (for instance) use nature as a vehicle because we fear that our habits of mind are thus being unconsciously licensed as inevitable and appropriate? On the other hand, if

116

missing link

there are dangerous by-products, a chemist needs to know about them and understand how to handle them safely without compromising the original synthesis. For both poets and chemists, the recognition of both identity and difference is an important part of the work they accomplish.

hypothesis A poet will “try on” a possible combination and “see what happens” when sunlight and fresh shirt are aligned metaphorically. The chemist drops two liquids into a test tube and looks to “see what happens” when they interact. A poet will sometimes reflect on the valences that issue from a proposition and if the work is read, his critics will join the conversation and perhaps discover issuances that he hadn’t anticipated, noticed, or looked for. For the chemist there may be a stronger sense of actual observation, since the result is floating in the test tube. For the poet, the test tube is the mind itself: the poet “looks to see” what happens by “thinking through” the various implications of the association. However, that thinking through, as we will see later, is a cascade of neuronal synapses that are chemical in essence. Hoffmann writes that “after analysis and synthesis, the next most typical chemical activity (which extends human curiosity and merges with what motivates history and psychology) is the study of mechanism. How did (does) that reaction happen?”33 This book is the study of a behaviour that we now understand as active in a variety of fields, including poetry and chemistry. Both poets and creative chemists have puzzled over the actual process by which new products are made, where discovery is creation, and creation discovery: In that limbo between serendipity and logic, there stirs the vast majority of chemical syntheses. One has a rough idea of what one wants to do – cleave a bond there, form a new one here. One has read of similar reactions on molecules that look vaguely like the one at hand, and so one tries … one of those reactions. It might work, it might not – perhaps the conditions might be juggled, the temperature changed, or one should follow a different regime of adding the reagents, to give

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

117

them more or less time to mix. On the seventh run-through, something happens.34 I think this paragraph would be perfectly at home in a creative-writing manual. But for a few principle terms, the reader would scarcely suspect that the passage was about anything but finding new metaphors. It isn’t just that chemists may be thought of as poets from time to time (creativity and whimsy have yielded extraordinary results in the laboratory), but that the processes of metaphoric thinking, where one juggles ideas and their associations, and that of chemistry, where one pours liquids from test tube to test tube, are metaphorically the same.

brave new world When we come to the chapter on evolution and metaphor, we will consider how evolution embodies an associative behaviour, and also how that behaviour evolved into the phenomenon of metaphor itself. We’ll be talking there about the important transition Homo sapiens made between natural evolution and design evolution, between the millenniaconsuming trial-and-error processes of natural change, and the expedited processes of experiment, tool use, and design, that characterize human creativity. We want only to anticipate that discussion by noting that there is in the chemistry lab, as in the metaphoric mind, a large role for invention. When we first began to explore chemistry, we tried to learn how to reproduce natural reactions in isolated environments so that we could analyse them and advance our knowledge of their mechanisms. At the same time, and at a very early stage, we became alchemists, i.e. conjurors of chemical compounds that either mimicked natural elements or produced substances that couldn’t be found anywhere but the laboratory. As an alchemist, you might spend your time trying to discover (i.e. invent) a formula for gold using the baser metals. In the contemporary laboratory you might busy yourself inventing synthetic compounds (plastic or Prozac, for instance), that can’t be found in nature at all. These fabrications can be applied to our advantage in every field of human

118

missing link

activity, from medicine, to food, to cosmetics, to shelter, transportation, and manufacturing. Metaphoric thinkers extraordinaire, chemists discover and invent new realities and then invite us to inhabit them. Poets too work both as mimickers of natural elements and as metaphoric alchemists of synthetic design. When Marianne Moore writes of the swan’s “gondoliering legs” in her poem “No Swan So Fine,” we can delight at the frisson of recognition. She offers a specifically human vision of what swans do. The conjuration is essentially alchemical since the reality intuited is not a part of nature. A swan’s legs cannot actually be gondoliering poles. But there is still that sense of seeing the thing itself for the first time. Something surprising in the association leaves us feeling that the swan’s legs have been faithfully realized. While there is often that sense of the poet’s faithfulness to “things as they are” (Wallace Stevens’s phrase35), we are perhaps just as often aware of the transgressive and transformative element in metaphoric thinking. The mental state conjured by a metaphor initially violates our idea of what makes sense. The metaphor, to use Ricoeur’s phrase, is an impertinence. A new pertinence must be construed, a new reality conceived of that stands over and against what made sense before. That impertinence in chemistry is, in part, the environment of controlled chaos that the chemist works with daily: Synthesis is a building process, but what a marvellous hands-off kind of building! This is not the nailing together of a wood box shaped like a cube, or even a Palladian villa. In the reaction flask there is not one molecule but 1023. They are tiny. They are all bouncing around, chaotically doing their own thing … We create local order, to order, through an increase of disorder in the surroundings.36 I am not just arguing that poets and chemists are alike creative, making things that didn’t exist before. There is that, to be sure. But in addition, both the chemist and the poet work with the principle of break-andmake, violating old combinations and orders and experimenting with new formulas. Those new formulas at the outset have a merely hypothetical value. A chemist’s synthetic compound has to go out into the world of chemical uses and applications to prove itself. If the new synthesis proves valuable, it will assume its proper place and the world we

Chemistry: Dualities that Enliven

119

inhabit will be duly expanded or transformed. A new metaphor similarly proposes an alternative reality and its value will be a function of its resonances and their hold on us. Its successful reproduction in other minds and other cultures would leave us with a slightly different understanding of what the world that we live in is like. Robby Burns was not the first poet to say “my love is like a red red rose,” but he and other poets (think of Dante) have gone a long way towards keeping florists in good financial trim. Both the chemist and the poet conceive of alternative realities and, if they are skilled and lucky, their hypotheses may then actually conceive, that is to say realize, the world envisioned.37

AU C O M M E N C E M E N T E S T L A R E L AT I O N

My final word here returns us to the first word of the chapter and to the central argument of this book; it provides me with an opportunity to specify once again what it is that I am, and am not, claiming with regard to the presence and expression of metaphor in the realities of matter and mind. Chemistry behaves “metaphorically” and metaphoric mind is the product of actual chemistry. Chemistry is unique, then, among the evolved embodiments of relation, in that, like the relational initiative itself, it represents the beginning and the end of a material evolutionary process. The chemist’s mind and his experiments are that Alpha and Omega writ small, that is, neuronal chemicals at this end of evolution observing chemicals that have been there from the start. But what I am emphatically not arguing is that those early chemical relations were just metaphors as we normally think of them. This is plainly impossible since in the beginning there was no one around to observe them or name them, and that is the only way that metaphors as we normally think of them can be metaphors. Nothing is metaphoric or not metaphoric, but thinking makes it so. While Martin Heidegger wrote that Newton’s laws did not exist before Newton did, some might prefer Alexander Pope’s anticipation of the same formula two hundred years before: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: / God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”38 A Kantian phenomenology obtains in the ability of a thing to stand forth as itself through the observer who conceives of it as such. That isn’t to say that we don’t still have some idea of

120

missing link

the thing itself, Kant’s Ding an Sich, the noumenon (Basic, 17). We like to think that the chemical givens of the world were what they were before we came anywhere near them. It is a part of an appropriate humility that we should be able to imagine this. I am arguing however that there is a constitutive behaviour in chemical relation that predated and determined the possibility of chemistry in the first place: the reality of relation itself. In one of his very early essays, Gaston Bachelard wrote: Most importantly we should remember that the noumenal level of the microcosm is essentially complex. Nothing would be worse than to postulate the simplicity and the independence of entities, or even their unity. Necessarily inscribed there, at the very beginning, is relation. In the beginning is relation.39 It is relation that was given expression in chemical formations. It later evolved through further expressions and embodiments until it stood forth in, and constituted, metaphor proper and the behaviours that define it. So little then is “perception of the metaphoric initiative” (in both senses) in chemistry an imposition, our observing it as such may in every material sense be a revelation of its deeper reality. How could it be otherwise? What we see and what we are, how we think and what we think about, are instantiations of a material process in which are written our charter and our laws, a guarantee that our promise, however much or little it may be, is a genuine inheritance, that what we handle and how we handle it will always involve an exchange of potentials, or as Roald Hoffmann writes, “dualities that enliven” (The Same, 244). We are the hypothesis that such a material process, like a kind of mystery novel read late into the night, may be worth following to the end.

4

DNA and the Three R’s

a funny thing happened on the way to us The metaphoric initiative was on the move. Getting its big boost from the Big Bang, it expanded, as tensions within gaps are like to do, and quickly constituted the laws of attraction and repulsion among subatomic particles. Metaphoric relation came to inform both the limits and the content of the cosmos. Fostered by an environment that determined its behaviours, the chemicals that burst from the Big Bang bonded with one another and made molecules, the molecules bonded to make compounds, gaseous, liquid, and solid. Nature became a realm of interacting forces of mutual transformation and exchange, dizzyingly complex in its organic laws and unfolding algorithms. At this stage we could skip to the conclusion of the book to speculate on the ultimate horizon of all this razzmatazz, what it says about our reality that it should foster such things as are. We will get there soon enough, but there are other embodiments of the metaphoric initiative to be added to the story, those in particular that pass through and beyond ourselves. Being living creatures, we have a particular interest and role to play in understanding the life forces of the chemical universe. We need to think about what constitutes a living organism and distinguish it from other nearly vital phenomena.

lo o s e fi sh I find it very strange that we aren’t plugged in. We are what Ishmael in Melville’s Moby Dick calls “loose fish,” unattached, nothing to anchor us. We were each plugged in at the beginning by a reassuring umbilicus (innocent of the fact that what we were plugged into was not plugged in itself), but the line was snipped and we quickly found ourselves, like

122

missing link

those whose tether to the mother-ship has been severed, floating off into unfamiliar space. This is what it must feel like to be a metaphor, I think, drifting, waiting to be swept up in some new mutual attraction, looking for an identity, something or someone to be the same as and different from. This must also be what it is “like” to be alive. We’re not attached to anything; we run on our own. But in truth, we are attached to more sources of energy than computers are. We are plugged into the sun, into fruits and vegetables, into protein-rich chickens and cattle. We are plugged into the air and water. We even have battery-like devices such as fat cells for storing energy. If an energy-burning metabolism were all that was required in order to be defined as “alive,” computers and cars and spinning tops and light bulbs would all qualify. An important difference between you and your Mazda is that while you both metabolize fuel, you do so partly in order to replenish your own parts in a battle against entropy. If Chevrolets could use some of their energy to replace their piston rings and put new tread on their tires, Detroit would have been a much smaller (or perhaps bigger) town than it is. Under the conditions of that cruel task-master, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which states that the entropy of an isolated system will increase over time: stuff falls apart), a living organism must be able to rebuild itself, almost completely from top to bottom, without relying on a Mr Lube, or even a doctor. Bacteria, which have autonomous regenerative metabolisms, are considered alive, while most viruses, which are parasitic on a living host, are not. We say, then, that if an entity can metabolize sources of energy and regenerate its parts, it lives. These tasks are minutely executed in the biological cell, the locus in living things of synthesis and replication. Etymologically speaking, a cell is just a small space, a little room, with the association of a dwelling apart, or a space aside (from the Latin root, “celere,” to hide or conceal). Early usage aligned the word with a small monastery, a storeroom, and an individual room in a honeycomb. I like the notion of a small space where deep thinking can be done or where important things, such as codes for instance, can be kept in something like a safety deposit box. The cell is the little room in which the work of vital replication goes on. Like the rest of the physical universe we know, cells are made up of interacting chemicals and their complex molecules. Like the atoms that

DNA

and the Three R’s

123

constitute them, cells have an inside and an outside. Cells code for having insides to protect them from hostile environments. One of the insides that cells can code for is the nucleus (the brain of the cell, if you like), home of the nucleic acids. Unlike the atom, the nucleus is contained within its “outside,” rather than electromagnetically in tension with it. Its outside is also effectively an inside, a jellied cytoplasm enclosed in a porous membrane and filled with goodies like ribosomes and mitochondria. It is more clearly defined inside its enclosing membrane than atomic nuclei are inside their fog of electron orbits. But as with the atom, there are spaces, gaps, and tensions in and between the inner and outer domains of a cell; transmitters and worker-molecules pass between the nucleus and the surrounding cytoplasm. There are cells of every imaginable variety in a living organism: cells that carry, cells that store, cells that hold together, cells that rescue and repair, cells that communicate, cells that constitute, and cells that build. Cells are protein factories. They receive bulk shipments of amino acids and on an assembly line link together large compounds of them to serve as building blocks for muscles and organs in the body, or as catalysts for other physical functions. Cells make up a kind of urban society writ small.1 If you could watch blood cells, for instance, you would see them course along major arteries into the smaller byways and passages of the city, ready to do work, then spend themselves in large organs of commerce and exchange before returning to a “home” site to be rejuvenated with rest or food. If an accident happens, fire fighter cells race to the scene. If there is an invasion of foreign cells, an army of defenders leaps into action. There are new constructions that swarm with builder cells, sign of a healthy economy, and there are run-down areas where cells are dying for lack of nourishment, cut off from the flow. And of course each individual cell grows weary in time, dissolves, and is absorbed into the stream.

replication In the chapter on evolution, we will think about how the reality of time is written into substances that persist. Time is the element that at once sustains and wears us down, as water does a fish. It would be even more

124

missing link

accurate to say though that we are the water we swim in. We embody time and resist it, we are its presence-in-the-world (as Kant might say2) and the agent that strains to transcend it. We embody it by persisting. We persist by replicating. Like individuals, cells serve a greater good. Subject to their own decay in time, they nonetheless preserve their species by making copies of themselves. When a cell copies out its individual identity, it takes its place in an unfolding narrative that reaches before and after its own poor horizons. It takes what it owes to its parent and passes it along to the later progeny that it is copied into. In his definitive essay on “Figura,” Erich Auerbach shows how, among the ancient atomists, this early metaphoric term of “figure” (semblance, model, image, figment) was closely associated with the idea of a copy.3 Let’s notice, to begin with, that copy-making is metaphoric from the start. When I say that my love is like a red red rose, I understand that something essential about love is being reproduced in rose, if with a difference. I need something more from “A,” so I introduce “B” and understand that “A” is copied into “B,” with variations. As one would say of any copy, it both is and is not its original. Consider: Alexander Pope finds that his idea of life is a little tired, wearing out in his mind. He needs to regenerate it with the introduction of something that will carry forward its essential properties. He happens upon the idea of “this long disease.” Unlike cell-copying, the idea of “life” didn’t actually generate its copy out of itself. The external agent, a god-like Alexander Pope, snatched it out of thin air and introduced it into his thought. In our world of design, we don’t leave the concept of “life” on the table and wait for it to generate some interesting version of itself. Our powers of conscious design, where metaphor making is concerned, have improved considerably on the slower trial-and-error processes of natural evolution. And yet, as to the notion of copying or replication, there is still a sense of the original being repeated in its substitution, where something lacking in the former (in this case the fact that it doesn’t last forever) is repaired or improved, and where it both is and is not the thing that substitutes for it. When we come to mutation and evolution in the next chapter we will expand on this problem of is and is not where cell copying is concerned.

DNA

and the Three R’s

125

Nature didn’t have the advantage of an external copier until it came up with us. That means that both the instructions and the wherewithal to replicate had to be built into the thing that needs to be replicated. Picture yourself photocopying (for wider distribution) a sheet of paper with the instructions on it of how to make a photocopier and run it, and you’ll have part of the idea. But like a sentence that reads “Read me again,” a cell that contained nothing but its own guidelines for replication wouldn’t be much use. It must also contain a blueprint for the edifices to be built or services provided. To this must be added the workers (the proteins), who will execute and embody, which is to say realize, those instructions. Instructions require a mode of communication, a language, agreed upon and understood by all parties that need to use it. A language or code, if it is to be accurately replicated (aural memory would not have sufficed in this case), must be recorded, and for it to be recorded, there must be ciphers, and therefore iterable symbols for those ciphers, and therefore a tablet of some kind on which to record them. As it happens, all of these were at hand in chemical form, and ready to use. Enter, into the nucleus of the cell, deoxyribose nucleic acid (dna) and its co-workers the various forms of ribonucleic acid (rna).

dna as language Before I get any further into this chapter, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to Robert Pollack’s Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA . His study accomplishes the marriage of humanistic and scientific understanding that I am striving for here, and his analyses go into substantially greater scientific detail. Nonetheless, he leaves room for an analysis like mine, one that focusses on the metaphoric structure of dna. Lakoff and Johnson might say that “dna is a kind of language” is a metaphor we live by. It is that indeed, but also more, for language proper is an evolved extrusion of behaviours already at work in the chemical forms of dna. As leaf is to seed, so language is to dna. I’ll be drawing some detailed correspondences between the elements of dna and the elements of metaphor, language, semiotics (the study of

126

missing link

signs and symbols), and semantics (the study of meaning). The linkages will in certain cases be quite specific, but I want to emphasize once more that I am not proposing a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the parts, that the structure and grammar of dna causes the structure and grammar of language to be what it is. We are only looking to detect the perseverance in language of certain original behaviours that have passed through dna on their way to something else. This needs emphasis. Let’s return for a moment to Aristotle’s theory of the four causes (cf. 9). As I argued earlier, the relational initiative evinces mostly formal and material causal properties. The form of relation inhabits all materials that evolve, including chemistry, dna, neurons, and words. If we go looking in the materials for the efficient causes of the evolution we’re describing then we will hit an impasse, here as throughout my argument. We would be left thinking that base pairs in dna have actually and directly caused language to have letters. Huck Finn would call this “a stretcher,” and I would agree. What binds dna to language is the variously embodied form of the metaphoric “missing link,” at once a gap and a ligature. There will be materials at every stage that will be made up of the physical hardware (electrons, amino acids, neurons, nouns) that just then happens to be available. How the “missing link” is embodied at that point will partly depend on the nature of those materials. This is why the relationship between the “missing links” as I present them may sometimes seem capricious. Interacting amino acids are not much like interacting neurons at all, though the former may be written into the latter in the same way that the start of a string is written into the ball of string it becomes. At the same time, the relational gestalt that inheres in these materials will make of the missing links a continuum, a single, long, and unbroken line of the metaphoric initiative’s various expressions. So base pairs in dna do not cause language to have letters. But as we track the expression of the metaphoric initiative, we may indeed find relational correspondences. We are looking, not for any claim that, say, “implicit metaphor is the hydrogen bond between amino acids,” but rather for the idea of an informing behaviour, so that it would not surprise us to find its various incarnations suggestively aligned. In any case these are hypotheses, and if one or another of them turn out to be “a stretcher,” I trust that the argument as a whole need not be imperilled.

DNA

and the Three R’s

127

the metaphoric helix dna is made up of a double strand of phosphates and sugars (picture the two uprights of a twisting ladder) held together by four bonding base pairs of nucleotides: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. The nucleotides are held together by hydrogen bonds in two exclusive combinations. Adenine will bond only with thymine, and guanine with cytosine. These are the A-T and C-G bonds that form the rungs of the double helix (figure 4.1). In the last chapter, we saw how a covalent bond between two atoms appears to correspond with the relationship between two nouns in an interactive metaphor. In working out the dynamic of the interactive metaphor, we drew two circles (figure 3.2) and showed how there was an overlapping area where the two sets of associated commonplaces can be thought of as bonding with one another (the thorniness of the rose with the idea of pain in love, and so on). There are two instances of fragility, two of beauty, and so on. If we were to isolate the pairs themselves, the bonds they form would look like a strand of dna (figure 4.2). There are attractive advantages to configuring a simple metaphor in this way. Each of the two connected associated commonplaces, like the nucleotides of the base pairs, will only bond with its alternate. Just as C aligns only with G, so beauty as understood in love would only associate in this particular interaction with beauty as envisioned in a rose. A sufficient number of these interactions (beauty, thorniness, fragility) will bond the two original concepts, love and rose, together at those points. As we found earlier, a metaphoric leap has to be made to connect the two notions of beauty, but the bond is sufficiently strong at these points (like familiar base pairs) that we tend to talk about them as logical (“Of course love is like a rose; they can both hurt!”). The concepts of love and rose meanwhile, like the plain and undistinguished strands of sugar-phosphates all the way down the line, would lack definition if it were not for the fact that they each have their own system of associated commonplaces, their own sequence of attached nucleotides, on the basis of which they bond with each other. Again, the area of general interaction between love and rose (the right side of figure 4.2) is made up of a sequence of these associations (or base pairs). The sequence is like a single gene that codes for the unique trait it names (A = B C), an analogy to which we will return.

Figure 4.1 The basic structure of dna. The hydrogen bonds between the nucleotides produce base pairs, while the sugar-phosphates connect the base pairs into twisting strands.

The form of the double helix in dna is determined by the logic of replication. A cell makes a copy of itself by a series of divisions. Its strands of dna unzip and divide into two complementary pairs. Because each nucleotide will bond only with its complement, the pattern on one side of the strand automatically determines, inversely, the pattern on the other side, so that when the two strands come apart, you can guess at, or reproduce, a new strand again on the template of the first. You would only need some free-floating nucleotides to be drawn to the dangling ends of the two strands to form new identical wholes (cf. 166, figure 5.4). The strands are duplicated and the cell divides in two in a process called mitosis. We have already noted that in metaphor this doubling works in reverse. In Pope’s example, “life” doesn’t have to duplicate itself. An external agent, someone like a poet, will come along and identify the shared properties of two concepts and decide that they are similar enough to make a bond, or a substitution, so that we find the essence of “life” reproduced and renewed in the concept of “this long disease.” The two are joined by their associated commonplaces so that the one can be in-

DNA

and the Three R’s

129

Figure 4.2 The bonding area in the metaphor “My love is like a red red rose” visualized as a strand of dna. The bonds inherent in the strand effectively code for the metaphoric “logic” of the relationship.

voked, or reproduced, via the other. You could for, instance, make a riddle, which is itself a kind of strand with dangling ends waiting to be matched up. Mr Pope asks: “What is painful, debilitating, contagious, and incurable? Why, life of course!” We should pause a moment to explore one aspect of copying in dna and metaphoric thinking that makes for a telling difference. I am arguing that a strand of dna makes a kind of metaphor, its two parts bonding at points of relevant intersection. But when a strand of dna divides to be copied, it is not looking for a change of name. It wants to be copied exactly, as though to create the same metaphor over and over again, “my love is like a red red rose” from here to eternity. The copying process would be more akin to the production of a meme or a dead metaphor, the same formula used repeatedly. We must wait until we come to the chapter on mutation to see how the copying process in dna can align

130

missing link

with the “change of name” aspect that is central to the production of new metaphors. Now, it is fine and well to duplicate oneself over and over, but if, like the phrase “read me again,” this were all cells and metaphors did, there wouldn’t be much to life at all. As Daniel Dennett writes (in this case using the metaphor of the book): “we would now have a printing press and a book-bindery, but the books would be too short to be good for anything except making more of themselves, with lots of misprints. And they would not be about anything.”4 The dna (or metaphor) has to do (or mean) something, and to mean something there has to be a mechanism by which units of expression are organized into forms of argument. We have figured out how the rungs of the ladder hold together, but we have yet to figure out how these rungs can be lined up in sequence to say something. What dna arguments ultimately say (what they “refer to”) are the twenty amino acids that bond together to make the myriad proteins that are put to work throughout the body. Somehow, the dna must be translatable into specified proteins. How can a strand of dna mean, or point to, the cell’s amino acids? You need a code. So far we have only a disorderly scramble of four letters, reproducible to be sure, but not saying much. How much can two letter-pairs say? If we were to take only the four single nucleotides our vocabulary would be severely limited. In any one position, you would find either C, G, A, or T. You could spell out only four words. Since there are twenty amino acids needing to be meant, needing their scrambling instructions, this won’t do. But if you were to take two positions along the strand to make single words, you would quadruple your vocabulary: 4 ⫻ 4 = 16. Almost there. Even better, if you were to take three nucleotide positions together to make combinations, and called each triplet a “codon,” you would have sixty-four words, or codons, to work with, more than enough to organize your twenty amino acids in the right positions. Indeed, you would have leftovers. You could have more than one word for each amino acid: synonyms! And not all codons would need to code for amino acids. You could use some for punctuation and grammar, saying things like “start copying” and “stop copying.” Now, proteins are made up of anywhere between 100 to 500 amino acids (some much larger), so you need a lot of codons. The clusters of codons that run together to signify the long chains of protein amino acids are called genes.

DNA

and the Three R’s

131

In English we have twenty-six letters that combine to form upwards of 170,000 words (and counting) of various lengths. These words, in turn, combine to form sentences of different lengths and near infinite variety. There is no conceivable limit to the stories we can tell. In dna cell biology, you have four letters (base pair nucleotides) that combine to form sixty-four different three-letter words (codons of base pair triplets), which in further combination can make thousands of different sentences (genes). They too have a story to tell. For instance, the story of you. dna is made up of parts that hold together – the phosphate bonds of the strands and the base pairs that wind the strands into a double helix – through various chemical bonds, each of which is sometimes fixed and sometimes fluid. dna gets unzipped and copied, read, transcribed, and zipped again. You won’t be surprised to find me arguing that metaphoric behaviours play a characteristic role in dna and its variety of functions. But before we get to unravelling the double helix, we need to spend some more time thinking about how language functions, i.e. gets zipped together, unzipped, copied, read, and interpreted.

telemachus dresses himself: implied metaphor We read a text and in it we find both “explicit” and “implicit” metaphors, as Frye calls them.5 Explicit metaphors are the ones we conventionally recognize. Implicit metaphor refers to the underlying organizational structure of language. Let’s take an example from Samuel Butler’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey: “Now when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, Telemachus rose and dressed himself.”6 The explicit metaphors are easy to spot: morning is like a child and dawn is like a rose-coloured finger. The implicit metaphors are subtler. They arise out of what Ferdinand de Saussure called the syntagmatic relationship between words: “In discourse … words … are arranged in sequence on the chain of speaking. Combinations supported by linearity are syntagms. The syntagm is always composed of two or more consecutive units.”7 Consider. What, for instance, does the word “rose” mean in the last clause? “Telemachus rose.” Does it mean a flower, as it does earlier in the sentence? Is it the name of a female character yet to be introduced? No, it means “to get up.” But how can we tell? Rose as past

132

missing link

tense for rise comes to mind only in its context. The word follows a subject, so we look for a verb. Telemachus is dressing himself; we think further of morning rituals. Of course, “dress” too only means what it means in reciprocal relation. We don’t think of Telemachus pouring balsamic vinegar over his body, because we know what the context is. Compare this with: “Once upon a time there was a salad named Telemachus. One day he picked up a bottle of balsamic vinegar and dressed himself.” Etymologically, context means a weaving together. Our minds do this sorting out of verbal relationships at lightning speed and we are scarcely aware of it. We wouldn’t say to ourselves that “rose” can only mean what it means because it stands in relation to other words that it is not; it is true nonetheless. The word’s ownness is a function of a surrounding and informing otherness. Words participate in one another. Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of how a thing is a thing only in relation to other things in space, how things are really just processes of relation rather than objects ineluctably there, is centrally relevant.8 Language is a vast network of polysemies, whose meanings are both reigned in and stimulated in relation. The bond between the two words “love” and “book” in the simple sentence “I love books” is reciprocally productive. Book takes on a bright glow (as opposed to Larkin’s “Books are a load of crap”). Implied relationships are active in phonetics as well. As Ferdinand de Saussure showed, “rose” is only “rose” because it isn’t “rise” or “raise” or “ruse.”9 Similarly, there are forms of attraction and repulsion at work within grammatical relationships. Verbs bond with subjects or at least gravitate towards them (stay close to them, even when subordinate elements intervene). Verbs also bond with objects, directly or by way of other elements such as prepositions. Adverbs bond with verbs and adjectives. Articles bond with nouns of almost any sort. As in chemistry, a bond can be effected, synthetically as it were, by the insertion of intermediate structures and chemical scaffolds. A verb will in some cases require a preposition to bond with an object (“I am waiting for a friend”), or the already larger compound of a subject noun clause will require a subordinate qualifier, to bond more convincingly with its verb and object (“What makes me especially angry, at least when I’m in a bad mood, is when you leave the cupboards open!”) All right then, we have language with its potential unfolding resonances manifesting varieties of explicit and implicit metaphoric relations.

DNA

and the Three R’s

133

We’re ready to press on and make the metaphoric leap that lies at the centre of this chapter, the leap between the semiotics of language and the semiotics of dna, i.e., how it is that dna and language both say things.

word codons Take the simple sentence “The leaf is brown.” You read the word “leaf” and you associate to that particular object that grows on trees. At the same time, you read through the sentence to “figure out” all the meanings together. The first direction of reading implies a one-to-one correspondence with a fixed or conventional referent. The second implies a process by which the meaning of each word is worked out in sequence.10 The picture can look a lot like the double strands of dna (figure 4.3). At the heart of this metaphoric leap is a simple formula: “Words in language are as codons in strands of dna.” The hydrogen bonds (in the middle) that make up the three base pairs of each codon would correspond with the conventional, relatively fixed definition or meaning of each word. The bonds between base-pairs are fixed and predetermined. We tend to think of conventional definitions as fixed in the same way, though in practice they aren’t. A word in isolation often means any number of things, as now when I say the word “dope”: like a kind of Rorschach test, you can learn something about yourself by noticing which meaning comes first to mind. It is in how the codons are lined up to make a statement, or sentence, that they begin to take on subtle (or just specific) meanings. In our simple example, for instance, you will conjure a certain picture of a leaf and of the colour brown when you think of them in isolation. But the sentence “The leaf is brown” might summon images of autumn, or of hot, dry days. If you’re a highly metaphorical poet like Wallace Stevens, it might evoke an experience of aging: “Take the diamonds from your hair and lay them down. // The deer-grass is thin. The timothy is brown. / The shadow of an external world comes near.”11 Am I doing nothing more than arguing that a thing can have two different sets of relations? Why should I make “The leaf is brown” look like a strand of dna when there are so many other ways of drawing two connections? Later on, for instance, we’ll focus on the model of the neuron, with its dendrites pointing in one direction and its axons reaching

134

missing link

Figure 4.3 Words in language are like codons in a strand of dna.

in another. We’ll be applying a slightly different model of relationship there. Why the dna model here? The twisting-ladder model of the double helix is very revealing but we don’t always draw it that way; indeed, if you look at magnifications of the chemicals involved, you’re more likely to think of a mess of tangled balloons. But we spread things out and we move them around and try to make sense of the relations between their parts. We make schematic drawings and those schematic drawings have a great deal to do with the mental structures that conjure them. In the end we want to say that in each case, in both dna and language, there are two different sets of relation-in-tension, two different gaps bridged, and that the relations between those bridged parts (separately and in total) are interactive in such a way that the identity of each part is a function of the identity of the other parts.

DNA

and the Three R’s

135

phenotypes and meanings We’ve broken down the word/sentence and codon/gene axes. But we can also move in the opposite direction to the level of sentence and gene expressions. Sentences, along with their implied and explicit metaphors, combine to make longer sequences, fuller impressions in the mind of the reader. So too genes combine to build phenotypic traits, characteristics that are observable on a larger scale. We use two different terms to describe meaning in genetics. The term genotype refers to the configuration of genes laid out on the strands of dna. The phenotype is the expression of those genes in the you that comes out of the wash, your individual health, behaviour, and appearance. We are looking for a corresponding sense, in both domains of dna and language, of how relations accumulate and form higher levels of expression.

Figure 4.4 Genotype to phenotype: codes produce traits.

136

missing link

Figure 4.5 Genotype to phenotype: codes produce traits.

One might easily assume that in the human genome, one gene equals one observable trait. I have a brown-eye gene that gives me brown eyes. But in many cases, if not most, it is not as simple as that. Genes themselves, or more exactly the proteins they code for, can interact with each other in such a way as to produce far more nuanced variations than any one sequence of codons could determine (figure 4.4). So again we find a metaphorical behaviour embodied, whereby the expressed protein of Gene A combines with the proteins of Genes B, C, and D (they relate in tension), to make a new compound that is both all, and not any one, of its components. What do things look like when we map out the corresponding relations between individual sentences or phrases (along with the metaphors that inhabit them) and the behaviour and appearance of the whole? Let’s look briefly at Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 (figure 4.5). You could, if you wished, take any one of the metaphors in the poem, read it in isolation

DNA

and the Three R’s

137

from the others, and draw conclusions about the poem accordingly. I might rise in class to argue that “the star to every wandering bark” refers to the pleasures of star-gazing, and who is going to prove me wrong? But this would be incomplete reading, a snatching upon a single detail (like a protein trying to storm off to work on its own). I would have failed to notice that the phrase joins with others around it to invoke a further impression of some idea like “stable orientation.” The phrase is preceded by “it is an ever-fixed mark,” which points us in the direction of beacons, touchstones, and the like, of which a star would be a fitting example. We read on and learn that love doesn’t change with the passage of time; stable orientation in space joins with durability in time to create a fuller impression of how love, no matter where or when, does not “bend with the remover to remove.” Whenever the metaphors of a work form a unifying context, we call the whole a conceit. No matter what language we find on any one line, we are invited to read the whole metaphorically, where the meaning of every part (explicit and implicit metaphors, images, assonances, rhyming patterns, language play …) is potentially related to the meaning of every other part. Let’s remember: under normal circumstances amino acids cannot but interact with each other in the way they do. Unlike some readers, they don’t need to be properly educated in the process of effective synthesizing. Chemical reactions unfold quite reliably and consistently, and change only with the generational-slow processes of mutation and adaptation. The circumstances are considerably different when it comes to reading a poem. There are no chemical reactions on the page. There the poem lies. Readers draw their independent inferences and conclusions that more or less help the poem, as it dwells in their mind, to its greatest reactive potential. Using rules determined by an understanding of how those reactions work, they must try to reconstruct some idea of the poem’s fullest, most meaningful, potential by a form of reverse engineering (retracing the individual reactions to their source). With dna, the chemical reactions are both the constructive and interpretive event. For most of the history of our cosmos, the poems that nature wrote needed no educated interpreter and could not fail to represent a judicious fulfilment of all they could be. How was this possible? We come to the essential practice of reading in genetics.

138

missing link

reading There are two things that happen to dna. It is replicated and its code is transcribed or interpreted. We’ve considered its replication as an expression of the metaphoric initiative, and turn now to its transcription. I say again: the chemical reactions of replicating dna include their own interpretation. There is an essential reading process inherent in it. But who, or rather what, reads the instructions that are built into the codons of dna and how are they read? What does it mean, in chemical terms, that a reading happens? Enter our very literate rna, ribonucleic acid. rna is a single strand nucleic acid. It comprises the same base pairs as dna except that it substitutes uracil for thymine (making U-A rather than T-A combinations).12 The main job of rna is to “write out” (transcribe) the code “written into” the dna so that it can be translated into worker proteins. We remember that the word metaphor (Gr. metapherein), if it were translated into Latin, would read something like “trans-vehicular,” a carrying across. “Transcription” offers a further variation on the concept. The dna “unzips” along its two strands of detaching base pairs. Freefloating individual nucleotides of “messenger rna” (mrna) assemble along one of the dna’s templates to form an mrna chain (cf. figure 5.4). Only unique sections of the dna are copied at any one time, using “stop” and “start” codons as reference points for the unzipping.13 Once the mrna strand is complete, it is released from the dna, passes through the wall of the nucleus into the cytoplasm of the outer cell. This is where the synthesis of amino acid proteins occurs. For synthesis, we need a further rna molecule called “transfer rna” (trna). trna looks a little like a folded-up and crumpled map of the London subway system. For our purposes we need only know that one end binds to a unique amino acid; at the other end is a set of three nucleotide base pairs (called the anticodon) that will match up with one of the sixty-four possible codons on the mrna strand. The synthesizing process unfolds inside a ribosomal sub-unit that moves along the strand of mrna. Picture a finger reading a line of braille.14 As the process unfolds along the mrna strand, a complexly folded chain of amino acids issues from the sub-unit, ready now to do the work prescribed by its individual constitution. The chemical make-up of the protein heads off to interact with

DNA

and the Three R’s

139

other parts of the body to form materials, catalyse activities, or carry resources. As Robert Pollack puts it, a protein is told to “do this to that” and it does.15 A code has been read, deciphered, construed, and turned into an action.

the grand academy o f lagado Those are cloudy waters, but I needed to go into a fair amount of detail (the process of transcription is infinitely more complicated, if one were to spell out each and every chemical reaction that makes it possible) so that we may gain a sense of what is actually happening in bio-chemical transcription and reading processes. But hold on a minute. Why does reading have to happen at all? Why should a cell evolve to code for the substances that are going to do that cell’s work? Why not make up strands of information with the proteins themselves, put those strands of already ordered proteins in the nucleus, have them unzip, replicate, and then, when the time comes, release them to do their work? In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift reflected on a similar question in reference to language from a satirical perspective when he tried to imagine a symbolic system that could accomplish its work more efficiently and with less room for error. On a visit to the “Grand Academy of Lagado,” Gulliver discovers that, instead of using words, interlocutors would carry on their backs the actual things that those words would point to: many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things; which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave.16

140

missing link

Swift’s amusing scene identifies the difficulty well enough. Your language system would be hopelessly inefficient and severely restricted in its expressive potential. The few chemical bonds that make a base-pair on dna is infinitely smaller than the bonds and chemical components of the bulky amino-acid proteins they code for. The latter fit well enough in the cytoplasm of the outer cell, but this would make for an impossibly burdensome clutter in the replicating nucleus, which would, like our philosophers above, sink under the weight of its load. Never mind the difficulty of having to have all the equipment of replication built into the protein (like having an individual photocopier attached to each one of your employees), how would a protein try on an altered configuration and still do the work it was designed for? How would it execute an imaginative hypothesis without ceasing to be what it is? You need a chalk board to do some thinking on, to try out new formulas, and a lab to try them out in. Those new formulas have to be free either to fail to make any protein at all, or to send some out on spec, just to see what happens. No, for life to be possible in the first place, evolution appears to have discovered a process by means of which a replicable and readable code is “put for” the physical materials it describes. In Chapter 7, we’ll be thinking about the importance of the metonymic symbol, the symbol that is put for something so that more can be done with it. As we’ll see, it is a trick that makes thinking itself possible. Here we see it in its nascent form. Making and reading signs is a part of life’s innermost nature. Nature learned it first, and passed the lesson on to us: if you can code, you can read, if you can read, you can change, and if you can change, all things are possible.

interpreting the code Letters, words, sentences, and texts. Base-pairs, codons, genes, and living bodies. We build from the smallest parts up. The expressive potential of each stage is isolated and exploited. A game of Boggle is played, symbolic characters are scrambled, ordered, and re-ordered, vocabularies are developed, grammars established, texts written out. Readers are assigned, translations effected, instructions followed and executed. There

DNA

and the Three R’s

141

are further inferences to be made in regards to biochemical and conscious reading practices and the purpose of the rest of this chapter is to work them out.17 The nucleic acids mrna and trna are brought to the dna text in the same way that our attention is brought to a book. In the biochemical world, dna codes for meaning, is transcribed by the mrna and executed by the trna. With us, the reader’s mind takes the place of mrna and trna; it serves as the domain in which that meaning is actualized, the environment in which it is able to unfold. Or perhaps we should venture a further precision. It is the mind’s own biochemical processes that do the work that mrna and trna do in the living cell. Just as interactions of mrna and trna unfold inside the cell and the cell’s nucleus, so the chemical synapses of thinking unfold inside our brains and their language centres. Readers, then, synthesize possible outcomes from a reading experience in the same way that a cell synthesizes the proteins that execute its commands. We can also note that a cell’s reading processes are regulated at different levels so that errors of transcription may be corrected and the whole effectively proof-read. Such self-regulation translates into the symbolic domain, where self-questioning and evaluative processes become the executive property of a conscious mind. A cell will only initiate a reading of those genes on its strand of dna that are relevant to it. The rest of the dna strand is left unread, for other cells to take from it what they need. There may be lessons for us to learn regarding kinds of readers. Any reader will absorb those parts of a text or story that grab his attention. This phenomenon is exaggerated when a reader goes looking for evidence in a text that will complement his work. A Marxist reader will attach to, and construe, those passages and images in, say, Jane Austen, that will allow him to do Marxist work. He “reacts” when he comes, for instance, to class issues in the novels. A gender-based critic will find other “genes” in the Austen dna to translate and enlarge upon. A reader like myself will “bond with” those aspects of Austen that evoke and embody states of consciousness or conditions of mind. Someone just out for a good read (all of us at one point or another) will connect with the turns of plot, the character intrigues, perhaps elements of style. We all do this. We fasten upon different textual “genes” and feel ourselves actualizing their meaningful potential by experiencing

142

missing link

them. If we are writing an essay with a unique argument, we “quote,” that is to say transcribe, only those parts that are most relevant to the work we hope to accomplish. But we can also go too far. More manipulative readers will fasten upon those parts of the Austen strand that they connect with and make it look like the whole of Austen. We could learn much from biology here. We are individual reading cells, not the whole body of a culture in which a text finds its life. We all read the same text but we don’t all need the same things from that text and won’t be interested in the same traits or characteristics. Like trna and mrna, we are part of a whole, and we do the work that we feel called to do. We should never assume that our transcriptions represent the real, or the underlying, or the ultimate truth of the whole “strand.” In biology, a maverick cell that behaved as though it were doing the only real valuable work in the body would be treated by the other cells as potentially cancerous. I’d like to think the body would never give it tenure.

code into action We’ve looked now at dna replication and transcription as a form of reading. What can we learn about our own reading practices when we see them as exponents of the chemical events they evolved from? The story of our evolution as readers mimics the evolution of the reading process in dna. As we will see when we come to consider the evolution of human consciousness and language, we have evolved from pre-verbal primates, to handlers of signs and symbols, to speakers, to writers, to increasingly efficient replicators and storers of writing and other forms of code. We have a growing language tree. Its seed lies in the materials and structure of chemical brain-processes. The root structure grows into a neuronal system, our associative consciousness of iterable and storable symbols. We then learn to verbalize and transcribe the activities of our associative consciousness, moving us into aural language, then to markers scratched in caves and symbols written in stone. Gradually, we get better and better at recording and reproducing those signs (with less and

DNA

and the Three R’s

143

less room for error), advancing from stone to parchment or birch bark, to paper, to books and the work of scribes, to the printing press, to the digital sign and the white screen I am looking at now, to files, texts, and images stored and shared everywhere at once throughout the world. Our means of reproducing code has changed over the years, as has, we understand thanks to Marshall McLuhan, the culture that evolved to express the form and content of that code.18 We found something similar with dna, where we first needed reactive chemical agents (the nucleotides, the amino acids, etc.), then a syntax of replicable and storable signs (codons), then a writing out of those signs into translatable instructions (genes), then finally the actual execution of those instructions in the synthesizing of proteins (trna and mrna). You may have noticed that something isn’t matching up here. The cultural evolution of language moves increasingly in the direction of more and more efficient storage, faster and faster reproduction. But what about the execution of that code? The goal of the dna code is to describe and initiate actions to be taken. What exactly does execution look like in language? We come to the issue of language praxis. Our language is a means of synthesizing thoughts, actions, and behaviours in the same way that dna is used to synthesize proteins that do things according to instructions received from the code. With dna, we can trace a direct line of chemical reactions from the original codons to the production of worker proteins by way of the nucleic acids that intervene. With us, instead of mrna and trna, we have living readers and thinkers, independent agents who learn how to read and decide what to do with what they read. A human reader takes the coded information and interprets both the nature of the information and the nature, or mood, of the instructions provided. Our language leaves more room for error and interpretation to begin with, because the reading machine is already more flexible and less precise. This can work both to our advantage and to our disadvantage. Errors in dna coding or transcription, if too great, can render the code for a gene illegible. A reader can be frustrated in similar ways, particularly if the code is not especially well written. At the same time, we can usually read symbols and understand the gist of a message in spite of misprints and other forms of obfuscation. We can experience the structure

144

missing link

and style of a message as a part of the message itself. We can also take what is a perfectly simple set of instructions and bungle them hopelessly, or entirely mistake our own relationship to the instructions given. In his book How to Do Things with Words, J.L. Austin contended that speech can be a form of action, “a speech act” that can perform what it says. With certain speech acts, the speaking of the code is its execution. To say, “I take this man to be my lawful wedded husband” means that you have done so.19 With dna, a code needs to be transcribed before being put into action. But once it has been transcribed, it too represents a form of “speech act,” whereby the coding for its own execution is written into its genetic argument. (Austin might still want to draw a distinction between “coding for” your own execution and actually enacting or performing the execution so coded.) dna possesses the information required to execute a task, but it also depends on mrna and trna to get the job done. The statement must be transcribed, or “spoken out,” to be effective. It is nonetheless true, as we move from dna to symbolic language, that the code’s expressive and effective potential appears to become more nuanced, no doubt owing to the more abstract and flexible nature of symbols. While we are on the matter, Steven Pinker’s consideration of the particular expressive register, intention, and executive potential of the invective “fuck you,” is alone worth the purchase price of The Stuff of Thought.20

tilting at windmills: levels of language e xecution The issue is important. Like dna, language codes for its own execution. We speak for reasons: to describe objects, emotions, and states of being; to argue and communicate ideas; to compel others to do things; and to play. Each of these implies a different relationship with a listener, a different idea of how the words spoken accomplish their work. In Words with Power, Northrop Frye attempted to work out a theory of language uses.21 He adduces four principle levels: the descriptive, the conceptual, the rhetorical, and the metaphoric.22 Each level of language contains and enlarges upon the levels of language that precede it, like an accumulating ball of string, increasing its expressive potential at every stage.

DNA

and the Three R’s

145

(1) “Descriptive” language is meant to call up, or “grab,” objects, events, or ideas. So I might say, “The leaf is on the tree.” The words I use are meant to stand in place of their corresponding signifieds in the actual world. We find descriptive writing in everything from recipes to chemistry textbooks, biographies, historical writing, and Big Bang theories. (2) “Conceptual” writing builds on what is already true of descriptive writing. It implicitly asks a reader or listener to “make this idea.” “If a tree has leaves, and if leaves are green, it follows that trees are green.” The authority of a conceptual argument hangs on how effectively and convincingly the words hold together as a unity, not on how convincingly they point to something that lies beyond them. A philosophical treatise on justice, proofs for the existence or non-existence of God (thinking of Dawkins et al.), a broker’s discourse on the advantages of the installment plan: these are conceptual uses of language. They often try to point to immaterial abstractions (justice, God, compound interest, etc.). (3) “Rhetorical” language in effect says “follow my instructions,” or “do as I say.” It takes the hidden initiative inside the conceptual mode (i.e. that I have particular reasons for wanting you to agree with me) and magnifies the element of the imperative or the compulsory: “Give us more leaves! Give us more leaves!” I use certain rhetorical strategies to inspire your ascent, or to compel you to act in a certain way. Politicians, religious zealots, and car salesmen make extensive use of the rhetorical mode. Certain politicians will employ every tool of language – repetition, syntax, word choice, rhyme, assonance, explicit metaphor – to short-circuit your more rational responses and get you to act as they would have you act. The rhetorical mode most closely matches up with the effective power of dna. While the complexity of dna translation, Robert Pollack shows, “makes the complete meaning of a dna sequence impossible to predict and difficult to fully fathom,”23 it is nonetheless true that dna codes for action. It is written in the imperative. But there is a difference. We have already noted that there is an interpretive gap between any use of symbolic language and a reader’s or listener’s response to it. Where dna makes things happen more or less directly, language is like a dormant code, with very tenuous ties to the ends it would affect; action and response remain

146

missing link

in the hands of the respondent. This is the gap that the rhetorical speaker attempts to close. On the other hand, some critics believe that social ideologies and the manipulative representations that promote them have very nearly matched dna’s executive power. They argue that we are only free in principle to act as we would, that for the most part we are conditioned, like so many mrna and trna molecules, to do as we’re told. (4) Finally, there is the “imaginative” or metaphoric level of language. This level, Frye writes, builds on strategies that are disguised in rhetorical uses, for instance the devices of language play, repetition, rhyme, and metaphor proper. The imaginative level of language brings these tools to the fore and magnifies them, makes them the point, rather than the tools to reinforce a point. The imaginative expression says not “the leaf is on the tree” (descriptive) nor “if trees have leaves and if leaves are green, then trees are green” (conceptual) nor “Give us more leaves! Give us more leaves!” (rhetorical), but rather, finally, Crossing the street, I saw the parents and the child At their window, gleaming like fruit With evening’s mild gold leaf.24 The shift in mode is significant. James Merrill, the author of this fine quatrain that opens his poem “The Broken Home” may, but need not be, describing an actual scene. His words would have equal authority in the poem and in the world it envisions if there never were such a street or such a leaf. There is no logical argument, no cause-and-effect building of “if/then” constructions in the service of a truth. It cannot be proven wrong. Again, as Yeats said, you can refute Hegel but you can’t refute “The Song of Sixpence.”25 And there is no compulsion. If you take the lyrics of the song as actual instructions to follow, you may be easily embarrassed. There are readers who dispute this. They believe a compulsory initiative lies at the heart of even the most innocent-seeming fictive speech. The charms of poetry, its musical cadences, the pleasing and lulling effect of its rhymes and schematic devices can prove potentially coercive insofar as they short-circuit a reader’s rational responses. They can distract

DNA

and the Three R’s

147

you from any ideological brainwashing at work there. This potential influence is unmistakable, but should not be confused with the imperative mode itself. 26 One may be moved to act by a poem or story, but it is the essence of hypothesis in a singer’s imaginative language (as distinct from other language uses) that makes a direct cause-and-effect response incoherent. As Don Quixote might have learned when he dashed off to go tilting at windmills, accepting a story at its word means not mistaking it for performable instructions. We’ll consider the nature of the non-imperative element in literature more deeply in Chapter 11. Hypothesis, then, is the antonym of necessity. The poem says “imagine this as a possibility,” or implicitly wonders “what if this were so.” It represents the kind of speculative lab work that scientists engage in when they hypothesize various formulas, most of which (we may be thankful) they would never dream of sending out to the pharmacies. The poem lays before you an invitation, and we feel free to take it at its word, follow where it would lead us, without actual risk, into made worlds stretched out like maps for our pondering. This is essentially the fulfilment of symbolic thinking itself in worlds of conscious design, the power to conjure worlds and reflect upon their meaning and value without risking a danger in any necessary or inevitable execution. As we will see later, the fictions of symbolic thinking may be one of nature’s happiest inventions, one that makes us what we are. As Daniel Dennett writes, it is a design enhancement that “permits our hypotheses to die in our stead.”27

poems that take place dna embodies aspects that correspond to all of language’s expressive potentials. It “describes” different proteins and how to make them. It is also laid out and organized like a complicated argument that holds together with an intelligible syntax and a beginning, middle, and end. It possesses, as we’ve noted, a direct rhetorical power, an ability to synthesize proteins that do actual work. But in a sense that executive power resembles the kind of effective or conjuring power we associate with fiction.28 When it comes to dna and the uses of fiction, some will immediately think of genetic engineering, where we reshuffle gene codes to

148

missing link

create exotic worlds and creatures entirely of our own design. The inference is fair enough, to be sure. But I mean something slightly different: dna that has not been genetically engineered is already like an imaginative fiction. As when God says “Let there be light,” the novelist writes “The boy climbed the tree” and a boy does climb a tree. Presto, the fiction is fulfilled. In the world of imagined hypothesis, a line of poetry synthesizes what it says by saying it, just as dna does. Before the novelist said so, there was no boy and no tree. The same may be said of a strand of dna, before whose existence there was no protein to speak of. dna conjures living worlds that did not exist before it described them, before it made them up. Its descriptions, in just being what they are, says that they are so. We want to be clear about this. The rhetorical mode in language is characterized by a desire to effect action. I say “Move the ball!” in the imperative mode in order to get you to do something in the physical world. We would have the particular oomph implied in the spoken word cross a line, as it were, into a domain that lies outside its own ken. But there also exist speech acts that are seen to be already a part of the reality they invoke. So, with Austin again, I can say “I take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife,” and we are to understand that I have done so, because the reality of the domain in which those words were spoken is already a verbal reality, the νόμος or law. So too with fictions. To say that “The boy climbed the tree” in a novel (where the statement is otherwise not ironized) means that the boy has climbed the tree within the fictive laws prescribed. The statement is part of the verbal cosmology the writer is assembling. In this sense, then, dna is more like a novel than it is like a politician trying to get a voter to vote a certain way. It has no line to cross, no external domain to enter into, as it bespeaks or spells out its living reality. It is part of that reality, and what it says, goes. Do I need to emphasize that we are not talking about a consciously creative process in the work of dna, the sort of which Henri Bergson speculated about in Creative Evolution and Teilhard de Chardin embodied in his idea of the “Omega point” (cf. 408–11)? Nature does not know, and does not need to know, what will happen to the “fictions” it cooks up out of the blue. Nature’s unconscious work is hypothetical in process, not in intention. At the same time, the actual physical reality of

DNA

and the Three R’s

149

dna reveals an essential property in fiction that we don’t often credit. Myths, we say with a cluck of the tongue, aren’t real. They only make things up. But now we see that the same is true of dna; it is both actual and imaginative. It makes things up just by saying so, and what it “speaks about” it also performs, as our living selves. Its material reality is the instantiation of an hypothesis and its executive potential. It takes the chemical conditions of nature, manipulates them into a language, and puts them to work. dna, properly spoken, is the hypothetical language that nature uses to generate living forms, whose potential, both fictive and real, is expressed in everything those forms can say and do. We are its expression in living form. We were made up. And if we come at it from the other end, we are confronted with the very real potential of fiction itself. The executive power of a fiction, as a form of hypothetical dna, lies in its ability to embody the world it conceives. We tend to think of fiction as not embodied, but only because we do not see ourselves as the cultural phenotypes of what we hypothesize. We have already considered one version of how a poem makes real what it says (cf. 98). In Herbert’s “Prayer,” a metaphoric beseeching actualizes its own initiative, becomes the “something understood” that it is talking about. But there is a certain kind of poet, like a Dickinson or Stevens, who appeals regularly to the ontological status of the fictive verbal act in making so what it says. I think of a work like Stevens’s “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain” and its interest in how a poem “codes for” the world it inhabits along the lines we’ve described in dna: There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction, How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

150

missing link

For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactnesses Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged, Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.29 The title sets on the table, as it were, all the significant stakes. We want to hear every nuance in a phrase like “took the place.” It should remind us of substitutive metaphor, to be sure: the poem as metonym, as something that is put for something else. A line is crossed. We would expect that, as a metonym, the lines would “recompose” and “shift” the details of any mountain that might actually have been there, as it were, in the first place. This is the poem as deviation or lie in relation to an actual world. But in this configuration we should also hear “in lieu of,” where it is not so much that a mountain has been displaced, but that its absence has been compensated for in such a way that the poem is now the mountain sui generis. We should also be permitted to include definition 7a of “place” in the oed – “A particular part of or location in a book or document” – particularly since the poem makes reference to an actual book lying open, necessarily at a particular place, face down on the table. (There is almost a visual pun here, with the poem’s unique place being “face down” in the given prospect that it comes eventually to look out over.) Any page on which a poem about a mountain appeared would therefore be where the poem’s own place was marked. Here then we have the poem as an actual place, a space in which one may move and breathe an oxygen proper to that environment. This might only land us back at square one, thinking about poems as “places apart,” ivory towers, not part of the actual world. How would we actually live in such a place? How to sort out these “places” of the poem? Eleanor Cook observes carefully that “the first two stanzas, each a sentence, are set in two worlds simultaneously; the last five stanzas, all one sentence, move fully on to the poem-mountain.”30 The poem opens with two “places,” the world of the book on the table and the actual world of a mountain. In those first two couplets, the poem quite actually crosses

DNA

and the Three R’s

151

a line between the code and what the code codes for. But then the poem literally and figuratively changes direction. It begins to “take place.” It begins to imagine, to say, to instruct, that there is no line to cross, no distinction to be observed, between the world it invokes and the world within which that act of invocation comes to lie. The poet can say “Let there be rocks,” and there are rocks, for there they “lie” within the verbal domain the speaker has mastered. Stevens gets further work done with “outlook,” a term that points to what both poems and mountains possess and, even better, “edge towards.” I love the valences in that single phrase “the view towards which they had edged.” To edge towards something, says the oed, is “to move by insensible degrees,” but even more suggestively for Stevens, “to insinuate oneself into a place.” This is what the poem is doing, of course. It has edged away from being a signifier of an actual and absent signified and towards being itself that actual – and no longer absent – signified that it signifies. But there is a further sense of “edging” in the poem, emphasized by the syntactical inversion of “towards which they had edged” that leaves “edged” at an outer edge of its own. The oed specifies a sense of “furnishing with a border,” making an edge, or in this case a summit, a brink. Here we have the common sense of looking out over something from a limit beyond which words cannot pass. The poem at once edges towards a world it would lie within, and experiences that world as an edge, a brink it cannot pass, in relation to which it is called a lie. Or, to push the reader one step farther, the “lying within” and the “lie,” the “edging towards” and the “being at an edge,” are finally indistinguishable. The world they are indistinguishable in is the place of the poem, the only place that, for the speaker who speaks there, finally exists in the end. A poem can possess “the prospects” of a unique and solitary home, prospects here meaning both the “view over” that home and the home’s imminent, but not yet realized, expectation. And yet it seems to have been its “place” to inhabit that home. Such a “coming to a limit” that is also no limit recalls the Biblical story of Moses on Mount Nebo, lines that are surely part of the echoic setting for Stevens’s poem. After years of wandering in the wilderness, Moses is able to bring the people of Israel to the borders of the Promised Land, in which they will enter into their promise and find fulfilled all that was verbally “foretold” about it.

152

missing link

Moses himself is not permitted to enter that land, because he lacked faith that God would bring all to pass. And yet, even though “Thou shalt not go over thither,” God tells him, “I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes” (Deut. 34:4). Moses climbs up Mount Nebo and is granted a vision of the unique and solitary home he himself will never inhabit. dna is always permitted to edge into its own promised land. It inhabits the made-up world it codes for because that code is faithfully performed. That we don’t believe poems – in all their “inexactnesses” – do something very like the same thing may have more to do with a lack of faith on our part, or a lack of sufficiently far-seeing vision, than with any “short-coming” that poems themselves suffer from, since they do only what dna does. That lack of faith will strand us at the edge of a world that even now – “word for word” – is taking place.

5

Graceful Errors: The Mutation of Metaphor We are reminded here by modern physics of the old wisdom that the one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent. ~Werner Heisenberg1

“the mind is like a bat” Mind in its purest play is like some bat That beats about in caverns all alone, Contriving by a kind of senseless wit Not to conclude against a wall of stone. It has no need to falter or explore; Darkly it knows what obstacles are there, And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar In perfect courses through the blackest air. And has this simile a like perfection? The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save That in the very happiest intellection A graceful error may correct the cave.2 For decades, Richard Wilbur’s poem “Mind” has been admired by both literary critics and thinkers in a variety of fields. Wilbur is one of those poets who develops a poem’s evocative potential by embodying the subject in the poem’s procedures. Here he offers a scene where a mind flits playfully about inside a world of stony recalcitrance. At the same time

154

missing link

he plays with a metaphor (the very one that says “the mind is like some bat”), and lets it flit about within the confines of three constrained stanzas, until it comes to the point where it “turns” to examine itself. It tests itself as a simile which, like a bat, can swoop around inside the hard givens of reality and understand intuitively how to navigate there. The relations between freedom and constraint, vision and darkness, precision and error, are dizzying in their passage through every least word of the poem. But consider how the poem makes, permits itself to make, a graceful error of its own, that graceful error being “precisely” the difference between metaphorical thinking and material givens. In imaginative thought, a graceful error (such as the one Wilbur pretends to make) may very well correct a cave and transgress its limits, whereas in physical reality any mistake the bat makes is going to land it on the floor with a thud. What are we to make of these two different errors? Let’s start with the important question at the beginning of the last quatrain. What does it mean for a simile to have “a like perfection”? Well, we’re partly talking about a perfection that is “like” the kind that the bat demonstrates in its dextrous course through the dark. At the same time, the evocativeness of “like perfection” points in two further directions. It suggests that likeness is itself a form of perfection (precisely!), where the phrase “like perfection” takes the grammatical form of something like “poem perfection,” i.e. the perfection that likeness is, for good or ill. It also suggests, however, that such similes as involve mere likeness can only be “like perfection”: that is, not perfection itself. Such interpretive flittings-about may crash indeed, but what comes out in the end, exiting gracefully from its cave, is a product of the poem’s own gracefully committed error. Its careful meditation upon itself is its saving grace, full of transformative potential in a world of real caves and real constraints. So Wilbur works through an extended conceit, one that is a metaphor of various “likenesses,” and decides in the end, at least by implication, that its saving grace lies “precisely” in how the imagination conceives of itself as a form of error, in all the paradox such a metaphor can generate. In so doing, Wilbur liberates us from the cave many of us are stuck in of thinking that metaphor is imprecision, or blindness, or error alone.

Graceful Errors

155

metaphor mutating a path towards itself This chapter is devoted to the kinds of graceful errors, in poetry and evolution, that have led to us. I have been working out a relationship between metaphor and its antecedent expressions in material reality. Its evolution in human mind is an expression of behaviours inherent in the fabric of our reality. We are in the enjoyable position at this point of thinking about how metaphor “mutates from mutation,” how it may be thought of as a deviant expression of the workings of mutation in the evolutionary process. Those workings are of course metaphorical, that is, an expression of the same initiative that we have identified in their antecedent forms, in chemistry, and in dna. We are considering how a form that has existed as a formula for change might itself change and take on new forms and embodiments as time passes, while also remaining essentially the same. We use the terms metonymy and synecdoche to describe two subspecies of metaphor, where a part is related to a whole. We use the word “metonymy” when the element is not actually a part of the whole but only used to represent it, as in “You must appeal to the crown.” The crown is not a physical part of the queen’s body or of her representatives, though it may be “put for” them. We use the word “synecdoche” when the part belongs to the whole. With “All hands on deck,” the hands are an actual part of the sailor’s body that is summoned; we highlight them because they represent his ability to do manual labour. In the introduction, I used the analogous relationship of seed to flower to describe the process of evolution that has brought about metaphor proper. A seed-to-flower relationship is really neither metonymic nor synecdochic. Each of the latter involves a spatial relationship where the part accompanies the whole, is present with it, either beside it, or attached to it. But metaphor proper grows from its anticipatory expression in mutation, in fact is mutation in a matured form, as cheese matures from milk. Metaphor is to genetic mutation as the adult is to its childhood self. Or more whimsically, if the sailor above were once a very small hand that grew up to be a very large one that leapt onto the deck when summoned, we might have in “All hands on deck” something similar to the relationship of metaphor to mutation.3

156

missing link

In other words, metaphor is not only an evolved form of mutation, but it got to be what it is by itself mutating through a series of increasingly complex material embodiments. Relation has been a constant since the Big Bang. It is like the dna that remains the chemical basis of cell replication regardless of the mutated forms it writes out. Daniel Dennett speculates that the specific coding for the earliest forms of life must still be preserved in the dna of every creature now alive.4 Just so we might see the metaphoric initiative as a kind of primitive code written into every form that has evolved in its wake, a charter for change inscribed in our bones.

mutation and its variants The word “mutation” has an interesting history. Its principle etymological root is the Latin mutatio, a change or alteration. The Latin is quite neutral; it describes the fact that things are no longer what they were. But as the English word continued to evolve through the fifteenth century, it gathered to itself something of the Middle French meutacion, riot or revolt, from meute, uprising (in its Old French form it meant a pack of dogs that are trained for hunting; our word mutiny also derives from this). Mutation no longer suggests a disinterested change in form. Particularly in medical terms, it evokes trouble-making, an overthrowing of established orders, even an animal force bred to be predatory. Metaphor and mutation are in part neutral terms. But as metaphor is to error, so mutation is to the riotous hunt. We want to work these permutations out in detail, but we have to start at the beginning, with the idea of change. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett devotes an early section to the problem of how it is that nature licenses change. How is it that possibility is naturalized? We need a starting point, Dennett argues, and “a means of ‘travel.’”5 His emphasis falls on the theoretical constraints and freedoms of genetic coding as these relate both to what is and what could be. dna would not exist if it had not evolved, and it could not evolve if there were no such thing as change. Change is possible because of the inexhaustible potential in the universe for always new, always varied molecular-chemical combinations. Some chemicals combine to form permanent substances like water. Others form combinations of highly reac-

Graceful Errors

157

tive elements that don’t hold together for very long. But at the start of life, all of these combinations unfolded randomly until they accidentally (if perhaps, as some believe, inevitably) happened upon a critical molecular arrangement. This arrangement hung around because it was able to produce relatively accurate copies of itself. As we saw in the previous chapter, a series of chemical bonds effectively provided the instructions for their own replication. This means that the arrangement had to be a code. The universe changed forever on the day nature happened upon a kind of chemical notebook and a language for writing in it. But life as we know it would not have evolved if the earliest forms of dna went about flawlessly replicating themselves ad infinitum. There has to be a mechanism in the process of replication that allows for, and drives, variation. As we know already, being now experts in metaphor, one way that you can bring about a variation in life form is by combining one genotype with another genotype and producing some hybrid of the two. Enter sexual reproduction. Harold and Joyce have a child, Tracy. A and B combine metaphorically to produce C. This C either does well or doesn’t do well in its environment; it flourishes or disappears. The “offspring” that flourish hang around to form further variations with other survivors. A gene for greater height might be favoured over time and the human population gets gradually taller. This is the process of natural selection and its engine is the mechanism of sexual reproduction, the passing on of family traits. We look at its workings in more detail below. But how do you get this process of sexual reproduction started in the first place? Nature didn’t have to look very far. The mechanism for producing genetic variation was already built into its constitution. Random accident in a vast chaos of interacting chemical molecules, already part of the puzzle, becomes part of the solution. In short, “mistakes” need to be made. The graceful error. The fortunate fall. The mutation.

meiosis and metaphor There are two mechanisms that nature uses to evolve, both of them essential. It employs the combinatory algorithms of reproduction, where genes from both parents combine in unique ways to engender hybrid individuals. At the same time, actual mutations will occur during the

158

missing link

process of replication in the gamete-cell chromosomes, causing variations which in some cases are slight enough to ride along as favourable adaptations in the genome. We want to look at both of these mechanisms in more detail and discern traces of their behaviours in the cognitive processes of metaphor proper. Let’s start with sexual reproduction. The genes of both parents combine to produce hybrid offspring. Every cell in a human being contains twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, forty-six in all. Each pair includes one chromosome from each parent. In normal cell transcription, these chromosomes, or strands of dna, interact with each other in such a way as to translate dominant and recessive genes into the production of appropriate proteins. These transcriptions of dna chromosomes into worker proteins goes on throughout your body, in your red blood cells, your bone marrow, your skin and muscle cells, and so on. But it is a different can of worms, as they say, when it comes to reproduction. I should emphasize here that in normal sexual reproduction we are not talking about mutation in the usual sense, but rather a licenced mechanism for variation. Replication in any cell is always combinatory. For a variation to be passed along, however, it has to manifest in the gamete cells, the cells that are used specifically for reproduction. Fertilization occurs when twenty-three chromosomes in the sperm mate with their twenty-three counterparts in the egg to create a cell with a full complement of forty-six chromosomes. What do these gametes need to have in them? Well, variations on the parent’s genetic make-up. But consider: if the gametes (twenty-three chromosomes) were simply to divide off from the original forty-six, each one would be an exact reproduction of one half or another of the parent’s dna. There would be your mother’s genes heading off in one gamete and your father’s genes heading off in another. When fertilization occurred, the parent’s contribution to the offspring (50 per cent) would be a 100 per cent product of either its mother’s or its father’s genes, rather than a mix of the two. This obviously won’t do. Your own child would be your half-brother or half-sister! A mix of genes from both your parents have to find their way into each of your individual gametes. The process that allows for this is called meiosis, a Greek word that means “lessening.” Meiosis effectively scrambles gene sections along the strands of dna in the gametes. The scrambling produces a unique

Graceful Errors

159

Figure 5.1 Crossing over during meiosis.

arrangement of genes from both parents in the dna of each sperm or egg. How does this happen? See figure 5.1. In the first stage of meiosis, snippets of gene sequences on the chromosome pairs are traded back and forth before they divide. This is called “crossing over,” which might remind us of meta-pherein. Where the chromosomes cross and join, a reciprocal cutting and pasting occurs that leaves each chromosome with a piece (or pieces) of the other. The four single chromosomes that result are amalgams of both parents’ gene sequences, bringing a little of each of them to the reproduction equation. The points at which the chromosomes cross over are actually called “chiasmi,” (which literary scholars may recognize as a term that describes a similar “crossing over” of verbal meanings). In the second stage of meiosis, a process of “independent assortment” aligns the mother and father chromosomes randomly along the dividing line of the cell so that one or the other will contribute to the new arrangement. What might this process look like in the unfoldings of metaphor proper? To use Walter Benjamin’s example again (“Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed”), there are commonplaces associated with “fresh shirt” and others associated with “daylight.” These are

160

missing link

properties of both terms and may be thought of as gene sequences that code for the particular identity of “fresh shirt” and “daylight.” Reading Benjamin’s metaphor, we discover that their unique properties are interchanged in precisely the kind of interactive process that Max Black describes. Aspects of “fresh shirt” (say its warm colour) cross over and now contribute to my sense of “daylight” (its actual warmth). Aspects of “daylight” (its dawning) cross over and contribute to my sense of “fresh shirt” (a clean thing I put on). These interactions would go through a further process of “independent assortment” depending on how (and which of) these interactions rose into your attention. The issuing product of this metaphoric meiosis would represent a “lessening,” a reduction of the two broader systems to those details that correspond. In metaphor, a single product expresses features of both elements. In meiosis, the two chromosome pairs come together, trade properties, and then separate again, leaving us with two chromosome pairs that will then separate into four singles. But it would always be only a single gamete that contributes to reproduction. So now we have variant gametes that are already hybrid expressions (“new pertinences” in Ricoeur’s sense) of the original chromosomes. One female gamete will pair up with one male gamete. The relationship between these two gametes creates a further hybrid. The dominant and recessive properties of each gene will now interact and generate a unique expression that we will know as the actual phenotype of the new individual. Reproduction is a way of varying future genotypes and is the means of change that nature has “licensed.” If nature were a church, reproductive variation would represent the “legitimate” offspring sanctified by a “proper” marriage. But nature of course has no particular commitment to legitimate progeny. It is just as willing to sanctify and send out into the world bastard variations that ride the back of reproduction, actual errors of replication in the gametes. These are mutations proper.

substitution and interaction How do mutations actually happen? The nucleic acid base-pairs (in the case of rna, they are C-G and U-A combinations) line up in triplets called “codons” and those codons code for particular amino acids, which themselves join together to form proteins. Chemicals interact. But what

Graceful Errors

161

happens if an interaction occurs that is somehow irregular or out of sequence? Let’s consider a particular codon along a gene, the codon for the amino acid tyrosine, UAU. Let’s say that in the transferring process an alternative base-pair accidentally replaces one of the base-pairs in the codon, so that a C falls in place of the first U in UAU to form CAU, coding instead for the amino acid Histidine. This is called a Point Mutation. Not all substituted base pairs will code for a different amino acid, since each amino acid can have two or three different codons that code for it. You can thus have a mutation at this point which does not vary the production of an amino acid at all. Or, the substituted base-pair could produce a “stop codon,” which effectively breaks off the production of the protein and renders it useless, a dire mutation indeed. But let’s follow the sequence of events in our substitution above. Inserting Histidine into the amino acid chain can alter the function of the protein. The bonding properties at that point in the chain could be so altered that the protein can no longer do its work, or must do it in a different way. The protein could be rendered ineffective, or it could introduce a variant structure or behaviour that subtly improves the health or viability of the living creature it inhabits. Sometimes the protein can still function normally, even with the misplaced amino acid. You can often guess at a word that is misspelled and you can often get the gist of a sentence when a wrong word is inserted. Mutations are called “silent” when they have no appreciable effect on their protein function. The codon CTT codes for Glutamic Acid, but when you take out the middle T and replace it with an A, you get CAT, which codes for Valine. Valine then, with this mutation, would be substituted for Glutamic Acid at this point in the protein chain. This, incidentally, is the Point Mutation

Figure 5.2 Point mutation as substitution.

162

missing link

that causes Sickle Cell Anemia. I.A. Richards’s theory of metaphoric substitution works upon similar lines. Take the sentence, “Get this clown out of here” (figure 5.2). We recognize that “clown” is a metaphor for the soliciting injury lawyer. In the position of the sentence where we would have used “injury lawyer” we substitute the word “clown.” The result is a different sense of what or who occupies that noun-position in the sentence. The whole sentence can take on a different meaning. The first sentence may express some anger or impatience, but the second sentence expresses sarcasm and disdain. We have noted that some point mutations can be “silent” if the new codon happens to code for the same amino acid, or if the new amino acid, given its position on the protein chain, has bonding properties that are similar to those of the former amino acid. The substitution of “clown” for “injury lawyer” may have the same result, i.e. of a man being escorted to a door. Or it may get you a punch in the nose. A point mutation is not the only way a mutation can occur. We’ve looked at the substitution of a single base-pair above. But what happens when a base-pair is inadvertently added or deleted on a strand of dna as it replicates? The displacement of a single base-pair position creates a whole new set of codon sequences following it. This is called a Frameshift Mutation. So the sequence of codons UAC.CGA.UAA.GGU would become, if you inserted a base-pair C between the first and second position, UCA.CCG.AUA.AGG and so on down the line. This results in an entirely new sequence of amino acids and the production of a radically different protein. These proteins can be benign, beneficial, or dysfunctional. One of the things that Max Black found unsatisfying about the substitution theory of metaphor is that it is not the substitution itself that determines the meaningfulness of a metaphor, or that determines that the substitution is a metaphor at all.6 For example, in the sentence “Get this injury lawyer out of here,” I could substitute a synonym, “this barrister who specializes in car accidents,” where the substituted phrase is not different enough from the original to be metaphorically meaningful. One of the difficulties Black had with the idea of substitution is that a word like “clown,” because it is so different, is not really a “substitution” at all.7 A substitute, according to common understanding, is meant to do the

Graceful Errors

163

same work as what it replaces. Think of when you are out of chili powder and substitute turmeric instead. Of course many substitutions are meant to have a transforming impact. But when this is the case, their impact lies not in the fact that they are substitutions, but in the fact that they have a different relation to the overall frame of reference. For Black, what “holds” in the original formulation is not the word that is going to be replaced, but the context of the sentence. The sentence provides the “frame” in relation to which the specific “focus” of the metaphor is activated. For Black, one need not project an alternative original formulation to understand that “clown” is a disdainful name for an injury lawyer. One need only recognize that “clown” stands in tensional relation with the rest of the sentence. Black’s interactive theory of metaphor gets us very close to Frye’s notion of implied metaphor, where the meaning of every particular is a function of the abiding context (cf. 131–3).8 Black’s “frame-and-focus” theory is a tensional or interactive theory, where wholes and parts, and relationships between them, push and pull at one another. Consider the first two lines of John Keats’s “To Autumn”: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun … The framing context at this point in Keats’s poem is an autumn scene with a mist, some fruit, and a sun. The term, or focus, that comes partly to bear on the impression made is “close bosom-friend.” With the focus in mind, we think of the scene now as one of an intimacy that abides between the natural world and the current position of the sun, as we may assume, just past the equinox. This would be, in Ricoeur’s language, the new pertinence. We have turned from a relatively indifferent relationship between nature and sun-cycles to a friendly one. A Frameshift Mutation in genetic theory takes place when the alignment of codons is thrown off by the insertion or deletion of one or more base-pairs. In both metaphor and genetic mutation, then, you have an original frame and a focal point where something changes in such a way that the frame shifts and takes on new meaning. See figure 5.3. Frameshift mutations can become quite complex. If you add several different

164

missing link

Figure 5.3 Frame mutation as interaction.

base-pairs into the gene sequence and delete a few others, you have a scene whose final meaning (the alignment of codons that code for proteins) won’t be clear until all the parts have settled. The same may be said of Keats’s poem. “Close bosom-friend” is not the only metaphoric agent in these two lines. We don’t just have “the sun” but “the maturing sun.” A term has been included that points in the direction of time, or to nature and the harvest, or even to the cycle of a human life. “Mellow” in “mellow fruitfulness” points to an inherent softness in the landscape. Indeed, it appears that this particular impertinence did rather well in the world after it was sent out. Keats’s phrase is the first to be cited in the oed under this definition “Chiefly poetic, of a landscape, season, etc.: characterized by warmth and abundance; gentle in nature.” It is followed by citations in the later nineteenth century that replicate its sense. One would have to take all the elements in Keats’s couplet, measure them in isolation and in relation to each other, observe and sort out their overlapping ripples of influence, their mutual attractions and displacements,

Graceful Errors

165

both here and in the context of the rest of the poem, to intuit the potential of these “frameshift mutations.”

making mistakes A metaphor, like a mutation, acts upon an original template and introduces into it a set of alternative codes from somewhere else. The result is a hybrid that is both the same and not the same as its original. A significant difference, of course, is that genetic mutations occur randomly, whereas symbolic thinking and metaphor making, at least to some extent, are part of a thinker’s intentional equipment. I promised in the metaphor chapter that we would return to the question of whether metaphors are intentional or accidental, made or discovered. We are in a good position now to take a jeweller’s-eye look at the precise behaviours that result in the generation of a new metaphor. The process of gene replication and transcription, as we know, is not in any way guided by an intentional agent. There is no thinker standing around the codons on a single strand of dna adding the corresponding nucleobases to reproduce the double-helix. The only way it is possible for the base-pairs to match up is to have all possible nucleobases (A, T, C, G) already available, already swimming around the dna template, so that each base on the dna strand will attract and bond with a corresponding base according to the A-bonding-with-T and C-bondingwith-G principle. Figure 5.4 shows the point where a double helix has unzipped and the free-floating nucleobases attach to create two new double strands. We often think of metaphor makers as going about their business consciously, fishing among associated commonplaces and designing their matching patterns, finding identities and differences where they choose. Certainly there is a sense afterwards of their intentionally evaluating the matches they have made.9 But we saw in the introduction that metaphor creation is also a form of metaphor discovery. In the same way that genetic mutation just happens, metaphor makers can happen upon the deviant term or concept that is added or substituted into their frame. They can feel that their metaphor “just comes to them.” Robbie Burns is sitting at his desk, pen poised at the ready. He is thinking, “my love is like a … like a what? He has taken his tenor,

166

missing link

Figure 5.4 In the replication process, a strand of dna unzips to create two sets of identical base pairs using the free-floating nucleotides.

“love,” and unzipped his mind, if you like, opening it to interactions with the idea of love. The associated commonplaces of other words and concepts are already floating around in the mind like so many nucleobases, already there, waiting to be happened upon as he remains open to thinking. Surveying the array of possible combinations, the poet fixes on his match according to the attractions that occur between particular commonplaces. In figure 5.5 you see the opening up of “My Love” to potential matches. Not all are relevant. The myriad givens in Burns’s mind constitute both the space that he searches through and the fog that disguises the connections he needs. His thoughts about his beloved – that she is beautiful, delicate, and maybe a little judgmental – “go out” and “look for” their associative pairings. In figure 5.6 we see which matches have been “fixed upon” in the process. The thorniness of a rose aligns (metaphorically) with the fact that Burns’s beloved can be somewhat

Graceful Errors

167

judgmental. A rose’s fragility aligns with his love’s delicacy. As the associated commonplaces fall into position, Burns may notice a pattern of associations that are related forming on the new strand, i.e. that three of those potential associations actually have to do with roses. Burns discovers – which is to say experiences – the pattern forming in his head. He lights up: “Hey, my love is like a rose.” You can see from the illustration that other associated commonplaces might align individually with those of love. The idea of sweet-smelling laundry aligns with the sweet-smelling fragrance of my love; her long hair aligns with the hairiness of an ape. But none of these in isolation produces a further pattern of related pairings like the three that have to do with roses. Only “rose” stands out as a noticeable candidate based on the related bonds. What constitutes a sufficient number for a pattern to come clear depends a great deal on the function of the metaphor. With jokes, for example, it may be the curiosity of a single associated commonplace that grounds the connection: “Why is Donaldson like a marsh? They’re both hard to wade through … baaaadum!”. In other kinds of manipulative rhetoric, where, for instance, a political speaker has a very specific vehicle in mind that he has decided on beforehand, one can be left with the impression that the metaphor has been “forced,” based on a single, flimsy match: “the honourable minister’s speeches are like angels: they fly over the heads of the opposition!” dna replication and transcription produce what they produce. Proteins form that “make sense” because they do consistent work in the environment in which they evolved. The metaphor maker sorts through the possible likenesses that make sense, a process that is partly intentional and partly a discovery of the bonds that present themselves. A pattern emerges. The thinker tries it on to see how it fits. The process aligns rather suggestively with Sam Harris’s argument in his book Free Will, in which he claims that human beings do not so much choose their own thoughts as stand witness to thoughts rising to their attention.10 In metaphor-making as in all thinking, there is the sense of the mind opening itself up at each moment of thought to the next association. We are the experiencers of those new patterns. While as thinkers we may differ from one another in how actively we sort among new potential connections looking for patterns, none of us really chooses the bonds that make those patterns any more than cytosine “chooses” guanine as a base pair

Graceful Errors

169

of dna. This naturally raises the issue of free will, and the extent to which we can choose the metaphors that come to us. Where deviant behaviour is concerned, the question is central. We’ll be thinking about metaphoric free will in the chapter on evolution.

metaphor as catachresis For strict rationalists, metaphor can be seen as introducing a degree of error, an element of uncertainty, and vagaries and obfuscations that don’t belong. The term “catachresis” means, etymologically, “a misuse,” with a soupçon of “abuse” or “degeneration” tied in (the prefix Katá in Greek includes a sense of perversion, as in “catalepsy” and “cataclysm”). We often apply the term when a metaphoric leap seems so outrageous as to undermine itself. “The hyenas of forgiveness.” “The bottle caps of questioning.” We roll our eyes. The suspicious nature of metaphor itself is implicated. What is “wrong” with metaphor? Let’s go back to Paul Ricoeur’s notion of metaphoric “impertinence” (cf. 49). With the word’s root in the Latin partinens (appropriate, suitable, relevant, corresponding), an impertinence suggests the introduction of something that doesn’t belong. You are not wrong to say that the day lies on the bed like a fresh shirt, but it is impertinent of you to say so. Impertinence stands between violation and error. It is neither in itself. It is neutral on the question of whether the intrusive agent is actually violating anything, or was even intended to. And to say that something doesn’t belong doesn’t quite mean that it is in error. The substitution would be in error, perhaps, if it were intended to fit with the established order. To say that 1 + 1 = 3 is not just

Opposite top Figure 5.5 In search of a metaphor: the mind unzipped and ready to interact. Opposite bottom Figure 5.6 In search of a metaphor: the associated commonplaces fall into place and form a pattern.

170

missing link

an impertinence, given the rules of the system it is meant to reflect; it is wrong. But if I were simply to write on the chalk board 1 + 1 and then beside it the number 3, you couldn’t say that any mistake has been made. With my impertinent configuration, I have made no claim that my awkward element belongs where it appears. Indeed, I may be quite aware that it does not belong and feel that its not belonging is the point. In his Defence of Poesie, Sir Philip Sidney reminds us that the poet never lies because he never affirms.11 The old Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong,” captures our sentiments rather well in those times when something awkward is included in an otherwise unified system. The impertinence is a form of mutation, the diversion of a body away from its own nature. I like the double sense of pastime and tangent inherent in the word diversion. All mutations, in metaphor as elsewhere, are first forms of play before they become new branches with their own authority. The conjuring of a new pertinence represents a revised understanding of how things are in the world. Metaphor is not “make and break,” but the other way around. Something is unsettled or disturbed in the likeness. You respond to make things “right” again, to get the neurons in your head to settle in a new arrangement. Every unsettling influence must be resolved, every deconstruction followed by a reconstruction, a putting something in place where the old order once stood. “Should we not say,” asks Paul Ricoeur, “that metaphor destroys an order only to invent a new one; and that the category-mistake, is nothing but the complement of a logic of discovery?”12 Wallace Stevens, who understood our motives for metaphor as well as anyone, spoke of the “break and make” process thus: It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again, So that the edge of afternoon, not over, Before the thought of evening had occurred Or the sound of Incomincia had been set,

Graceful Errors

171

There was a clearing, a readiness for first bells, An opening for outpouring, the hand was raised: There was a willingness not yet composed, A knowing that something certain had been proposed, Which, without the statue, would be new, An escape from repetition.13 Stevens was particularly interested in accounting for that brief moment that passes between the introduction of the impertinence and formulation of a new pertinence in response. Here an old myth is “blown up” and we find ourselves waiting to see what new arrangements resolve in the aftershock. The moment is one of metaphoric possibility wherein a new voice has cleared its throat but not yet spoken. The deviation is an opening out, an anticipation, a readiness for first bells. It is as necessary to thinking as mutation itself is to evolution.

cancero us mutations I have been talking about variations and mutations that provide the raw materials for evolution, that subtly vary a cell’s constitution and behaviour and make it more or less fit for survival. But there are also mutations that destroy outright, mutations that stunt a cell’s normal growth, preventing it from maturing fully. These stunted cells can multiply with unnerving speed and efficiency. They do no work, but merely replicate and, as they do so, increasingly hog the body’s nutrients. They become malignant. They can result from errors in replication and further mutations in those genes that are designed to repair replication errors. Not all cancers are mutations per se. We can be predisposed to certain cancers. Our genes may include programmes that increase the propensity for developing cancerous cells, so that their activation is actually a fulfillment of a latent potential, however pernicious. Many cancers require more than one, and often a series, of mutations to develop, which is why cancer is more common among older people than younger. (As cells age, the propensity for errors in replication increase, as do the chances that those errors will conspire together to invade healthy tissue.) In Sherwin

172

missing link

Nuland’s detailed, chilling, and strangely consoling How We Die, he writes of the “anti-social” behaviour of cancers: Knowing no rules, cancer is amoral. Knowing no purpose other than to destroy life, cancer is immoral. A cluster of malignant cells is a disorganized autonomous mob of maladjusted adolescents, raging against the society from which it sprang. It is a street gang intent on mayhem … There comes a point at which home turf is not enough – offshoots of the gang take wing, invade other communities, and, emboldened by their unresisted depredations, wreak havoc on the entire commonwealth of the body. But in the end, there is no victory for cancer. When it kills its victim, it kills itself. A cancer is born with a death wish.14 Throughout his book, Nuland uses metaphors of the “commonwealth of the body” to help elucidate biological symptoms and phenomena. The implied analogy, he writes elsewhere, between natural and social processes is inescapable.15 A modified form of this argument – which is not new by any means – lies at the heart of this book as well. There are points when a metaphor is not just benignly impertinent, but counter-productive or malignant. As ideological readers of literature we have been fond of trying to find unwelcome “growths” in literary texts, growths that have no proper place in the world we are trying to build. In this regard, ideological readings, or indeed any skeptical reading (such as that of a copy editor) that approaches the text as a locus of real and potential damage resemble those mechanisms of dna repair that “read over,” “identify,” and “correct” inappropriate substitutions. We have devised an early detection system in criticism, where we set the text under an x-ray to find implications that might eat away at the political health of the text, or worse, spread beyond it into the culture at large to become, as Lakoff and Johnson might say, metaphors we die by. Surgery can leave the text marred and compromised in recovery. I’m personally in favour, at least where poems and novels are concerned, of a more holistic approach, where we cultivate a subtler understanding of what it means for a work and a culture to be healthy. In literature and society, a metaphor is a kind of organ, functioning the same way in both domains. The organ becomes synecdochic in a

Graceful Errors

173

sense, where the work it does in the literary part relates to its work in the social whole. Readers who feel that we should be particularly watchful of inappropriate or “dangerous” metaphors are metaphorically configuring the body of the text as itself a significant organ or part of the social body. And to that extent, I’m all in favour. It is the same body. The text and the culture are each made of words. But there are identities and differences that we dispute. I believe that a great deal happens when one crosses from literature to society over the “hypothetical” divide, but we’ll save that discussion for our chapters on design evolution and evolution in literature. Malignant metaphoric influences that destroy the body they feed on do not just operate in literature. Metaphors are all around us, make us who we are. Lakoff and Johnson understood that the notion of “argument as war” may well have evolved inevitably from natural precedents, but if we don’t cultivate alternative metaphors to re-conceptualize our relations with one another, this particular growth may run a destructive course. We can see this in specific historical terms as well, in relation to metaphors that may not be ingrained in our cognitive equipment, as above, but which spread via media that the prevailing powers can manipulate. To use a familiar example, the metaphors that citizens of the Third Reich were encouraged to live by, representations of Jews as a blight upon society and of themselves as the chosen race, showed a remarkable resilience and an uncanny ability to replicate and eventually devour their living host. We might note ironically that the representation of Jews as a cancer was itself a cancer that left Germany, and European Jewry, in ruins. Our competing nationalisms, and in the West the metaphors of technological progress, of survival-of-the-fittest free-market capitalism and their associated commonplaces and imagery, have a complicated relationship with the body they inhabit. They have become, if not organs themselves, then essential parts of those organs that appear to keep the host alive. They have grown more or less unchecked for several hundred years. It is difficult to tell whether their embodying forms are evolving in a sustainable manner or whether they represent a tumorous growth spreading throughout every vital organ in such a way that our living host will have to die in order to cure itself of them. Such mutations are deviant in Nuland’s sense of the maladjusted adolescent. They are troublemakers for the host and ultimately for themselves. As it happens, genes have evolved over time to code for repair

174

missing link

mechanisms that, in an intricate pas-de-deux of post-replication or posttranscription chemical reactions, can restore a sequence of base-pairs to its proper configuration. The replicating cell has a room not only for compositors, but another for copy-editors as well. Certain uncorrected mutations can become viable, inconspicuous, “silent” enough not to disrupt the normal behaviour of the proteins that are synthesized. These benign mutations in the sex chromosomes are left to work themselves out in the evolutionary process. Nature provides for a distinction between destructive and benign mutations, those that sabotage the host and those that make it possible for the host to adapt to a changing environment. In culture, however, it is difficult to tell whether the new pertinence of a mutation is useful and sustaining or not. Where the case is clear enough with the Third Reich, we are less than certain with notions of profit or technological progress in our own time. So we debate and argue, while the new forms evolve into the large organs that they are. Though it may look for ways to “correct” itself, a body or cultural host is not a moral judge per se that considers whether its mutated variants are right or wrong, harmful or benign. Its willingness to try on any variant form, however potentially cancerous, makes its wild abandon and its openness to change nerve-wracking for those of us who cling to personal life, or to the notion of society as inherently progressive. Preserving physical health is a very conservative undertaking, a life-long protection of the status quo. Few people, even right-wing thinkers, would be willing to let their bodies work out their variant mutations as they choose, without the imposition of state regulation. The more help the better, as far as I am concerned. There are those, however, who are capable at life’s end of taking a more holistic approach and I do sometimes wonder, when my turn comes to be diagnosed with a terminal growth (that mysterious oxymoron), whether I will find any consolation in the thought that my body was trying to work out the potential of an as-yet unexplored variant. Our imaginations generate strange and otherworldly anomalies and then seek to accommodate them to a wider knowledge of who and where we are. Is there any equivalent in physical terms for the kind of expanding consciousness that results from a mutating, metaphoric impertinence? Near the end of the Metamorphoses, Ovid writes: “being born means beginning to be different from before, and dying ceasing to be the same.”16 I wonder what sort of courage it

Graceful Errors

175

would take to think of my cancerous body as leaping into a gap, reaching beyond itself into some inspired new pertinence, that undiscovered country from whose bourn, with the expanded wisdom it implies, no traveller returns.

criminal metaphors Nuland’s analogy of the street gang identifies biological malignancy with social malfeasance via the shared idea of “transgression against an established order.” The ethics of metaphor as a corresponding form of transgression completes the triangulation as a factor that has evolved out of mutation and taken in society the form of, among other things, potentially unruly behaviour. I spend a considerable amount of time at the end of this book puzzling out a possible ethics of metaphor in confronting its radical relativities, but we might do well at this point to work out how the notion of catachresis can tell us something about criminal thinking itself. In Chapter 1, recall, we talked about how interactive metaphor is a transgressive act where two elements that are already known are put together in such a way as to render unstable the unity of the world they occupy. The counter-intuitive association of “love” and “rose” requires that I rethink the nature of the world in which such a statement may be considered true. In his book Metaphoric Worlds, Samuel Levin makes the interesting claim that all metaphors should be taken in this sense as literally true.17 We understand that the metaphor appears paradoxical or problematic in our current world, but our task, once the metaphor has been spoken into being, is to imagine the kind of world in which it would be accepted as a familiar truth. That is the world-making potential of the metaphoric gesture. Its “thinking more” thinks up a hypothetical world in which it would find itself quite actually at home. One thing that fascinates me about premeditative criminal behaviour is that, in the mind of the criminal, the crime must seem justified. With few if any exceptions I can think of, a criminal must imagine himself to be creative; the act he commits is intended to solve a problem or satisfy a need, however depraved, random, or destructive it may be.18 One doesn’t hear much talk about this inference in our responses to heinous

176

missing link

crimes, but it strikes me as a relatively obvious and painful answer to the question, “How could he have done that?” The answer is: because it seemed to him like a good idea. The criminal act is possible not because the criminal sees it as evil (though his seeing it as evil, random, or transgressive may be partly what satisfies him), but because he sees it as creative, a thing it would be fulfilling or helpful to do (if only to himself). We see criminals as destroyers and we go about proselytizing against destructive behaviour, ignorant of how the criminal saw himself at the time as a creative thinker, a problem-solver, a maker of new worlds, a poet in his own eyes.19 A potential murderer or rapist finds himself at a crux, in a world where certain associations are not permitted, where for instance the word “murder” and the word “helpful” (or the word “good”) do not go together. Yet in his own experience, certain associated commonplaces draw the two concepts together such that he comes to a unique conclusion: “This murder is helpful” (A = B). Based on this understanding he feels called to act on the metaphor, to instantiate it. The associative act is a radical impertinence that breaks the laws of the world as we know it, exactly in the way that any interactive metaphor violates the assumed orders of how things have been made to be. The criminal’s associative act implicitly proposes an alternative world – a new pertinence – where his transgressive act is justified. His metaphor posits a new reality, one in which his act is, by his definition, literally helpful. He invokes a counter-conventional world and considers himself to be a viable participant in that reality. This is presumably how criminals can, as we say, “live with themselves.” They inhabit a new world in which their sense of self is identifiable with its newly created and self-justifying orders. A criminal who feels comfortable with his deed feels no more remorse or discomfort than a poet who bespeaks a transgressive association and plunks himself down amidst the expanding resonances of its new pertinence. The newly projected world in which the criminal feels comfortable will likely be identical to the actual world (where he might have a comfortable home, good food to eat and so on) in every detail but the one relevant to the transgression. That is to say, in his world murder equals helpful, whereas in our world it does not. In all other respects the two worlds might be indistinguishable. This “likeness” naturally helps him to feel at home in the nice new world he has made for himself.20

Graceful Errors

177

Of course there is an irony for the criminal. The new world is not in all respects the same as the world he happens to be driving through just now in his Toyota. He is often enough required to confront that irony, whether or not he is ever captured. He finds that he is considered by others to be still subject to the laws of the old world, laws he is now seen to have violated. In his world he is a creative problem-solver, a poet reinventing how the world should be, a maker of a new cosmology based on an associative leap. In society he is a transgressor tout court. As far as we are concerned, the “metaphor” he has insisted upon, over and against the laws of the world we share, must not be allowed to spread, must not turn out to be applicable to everyone everywhere as “how the world should be.” A circle has to be drawn around him to isolate the metaphor he has created. We call the circle a jail, or a “correctional facility,” an environment apart where the literal consequences of the catachresis he has committed may be contained. We would have it so, even though the consequences of the transgressive act – a lost life, a world of suffering – ripple out uncontained among the tragic ironies of the world at large.

an evolving language We need to shift gears (with a promise to revisit the ethics of metaphoric relativity later on) and conclude this chapter with a few summary thoughts on mutation as the power of metamorphosis. We’ll begin with some thoughts on language and then move back in the direction of the biological. Remarkably resilient as they are, words change from year to year, adapt to shifting needs in culture and technology, conjure and experiment with mutating and aberrant terms. We hang on to some of them, let others die in their struggle to find a way into our minds and books. We’ll be looking at these processes when we get into the evolution of human culture later. Here we’ve been appreciating how the process partly expresses itself as a mechanism in language that, like processes in chemistry, biology, and genetics, codes for change. We find this partly liberating and partly unsettling. Our ambivalence towards change in language is an ambivalence towards metaphor itself that lies at its heart. Not all change in language is strictly metaphorical.

178

missing link

Misprints, Freudian slips, forms of verbal dyslexia, need not be read metaphorically in the usual sense. And the language, you may be grateful, is not always mutating. Like the billions of replications of dna that your body performs every hour with stunning accuracy, we reproduce in our every conversation a conventional language with well established rules. The words we speak, while always in metaphoric play (parts interacting with other parts), needn’t cause us a great deal of trouble most of the time, nor introduce any novel pertinences. We find comfort in the fixed set of metaphoric relations (dead metaphors) whose stability is part of its expressive potential. At the same time, a conversation can be most exciting when your interlocutor likes to push at the edges, and our job as creative writers, as Northrop Frye always said, is to keep the metaphoric habit of thinking alive and not allow it to calcify into the rigid axioms and narrow views that conventional thinking can sometimes lead to.21

hypothesis When you say A is B, something happens. You have to rethink what you thought you knew. Many metaphor theorists, Richards and Ricoeur among them, tend to treat this rethinking as a form of hypothesis, a “What would happen if?” idea, not as a claim that actually obtains in the objective world we believe we live in. I do not say that metaphors are relegated to mere hypothesis. Hypothesis is a learning tool, a way of letting the fresh air of what may be into the closed rooms of what is. Hypothesis is the ground of the scientist’s speculative imagination, the poet’s dreams of a better world, and the spiritualist’s embodying faith. You only have to skim a book like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see how central hypothesis-making is to experiment, exploration, and discovery in the sciences. There is something essentially heuristic at the heart of intentional metaphoric thinking in the sciences and creative arts. Poems and novels show us the way. They represent a mutation upon conventional thought and language. They are centred in the kind of imaginative hypothesis that is the soul of metaphoric thinking. As such,

Graceful Errors

179

they turn discreetly away from the world as we presently find it and extend in some alternative direction. Metaphoric mutation ensures a constant variety of different visions, world views, ideas of relationship. We send them out and like good biologists watch to see what happens. Time will copy them, or leave them to return to the place they came from. We know that mutations in gene replication can take millennia to manifest in some new favoured adaptation. The smallest copying error in the gene of a baker in Calgary could generate a phenotype that dominates human being in the future. Perhaps that is all that novels and poems themselves require, in cultural evolutionary terms: more time for the worlds they conceive of to mature into the fuller promise of metaphors we live by.22

mutat ions that think more We began this chapter thinking about mutation and metaphor as forms of deviance, errors in copying, impertinences in meaning, the unpredictability of random variation, the excesses and abuses of catachresis. We have tried, in both the medical and cultural domain, to take more control over the mechanisms of variance and their products. Thus, Ovid’s harnessing the powers of imaginative metamorphosis aligns in our age with the spread of genetically modified foods and the growing of healthy organs from stem cells. There are real dangers; so much depends on the results of our whimsical tinkerings. In the meantime, it appears that nature itself has licensed this kind of revolutionary work, both its potential and its risks. I have had several occasions now to reference Paul Ricoeur’s concept of metaphor as a “thinking more,” but haven’t yet quoted the passage in which the idea is developed. On one side, interpretation seeks the clarity of the concept; on the other, it hopes to preserve the dynamism of meaning that the concept holds and pins down … The metaphor of life comes to the fore at this point in the argument because the game in which imagination and understanding engage assumes a task assigned by the Ideas of reason, to which no concept is equal. But where the understanding fails, imag-

180

missing link

ination still has the power of “presenting” (Darstellung) the Idea. It is this “presentation” of the Idea by the imagination that forces conceptual thought to think more.23 Notice that it is conceptual thought, as allied with our “reason,” that is at risk of failing. Reason is the name we give to the power of mind that attempts to hold and pin down conceptual thoughts, replicate them in accurate and consistent form. But when it comes to wrestling with ideas that are not easily, or even conceivably, pinned down, it is our imaginative capacity to deviate from our given formulas that represents the hope of stepping out into a clearing. This is Don McKay’s very point: “if you reach … a condition of paradox [in analytic philosophy], it is a sign that you must start over from first principles. But if you reach the condition of paradox within the context of metaphoric thinking – as for example in the fragments of Herakleitos – it is a sign that things are really starting to cook.”24 We don’t yet under-stand certain things, but in the act of thinking more that metaphor licenses we stimulate and inhabit an expanding consciousness. The change between conceptual and imaginative thought is not so much a deviation from one way of thinking (and meaning) to another, as a pushing of the same process further. Earlier in his book, Ricoeur turns to Gaston Bachelard in search of an alternative language for this reality: The poetic image becomes “a source of psychic activity.” What was “a new being in language” becomes an “increment to consciousness,” or better, a “growth of being.” Even in psychological poetics, even in “reveries of reverie,” psychism continues to be directed by the poetic verb. And so, one must attest: “Yes, words really do dream.”25 The biological and the conceptual/imaginative come together rather efficiently in Bachelard’s “growth of being,” a phrase that captures both the idea of physical life flourishing and consciousness expanding. Bachelard is referring to the poetic image here, but something similar may be said in the biological domain. The conditions of life at any point in the past represent, in the metaphoric sense and more, an attempt to understand something. By the simple fact of their existing and enduring,

Graceful Errors

181

our bodies have tried to “come to an understanding” with their environment, a grasp, however elusive, of what it means, indeed what it is, to be here. Genetic mutation, along with the incremental variations of reproduction, is nature’s way of thinking more, living more, moving further in the direction of a horizon not yet conceived of, to become one of its possible expressions.

6

Possibility Naturalized: The Story of Evolution Granting evolution, its materials can only have been the stuff in which a brilliant complexity would have inhered since long before the first generation of stars, to choose a date at random. It is not to be imagined that the character of matter would not profoundly affect the forms in which our reality has emerged. ~Marilynne Robinson1 We are at work on the past to make the future More bearable. Ah, the potential past, how it swells, How it crowds the days before us with feelings And postures we had dismissed until now. ~Mark Strand2

how things have changed Someday I’d like to write an article on the rhetoric of book and chapter titles, a fairly typical example of which you see above. We are drawn towards this kind of hinged twofold structure: there is a metaphoric or playful gesture on one side, and a discursive statement on the other telling us what the work is “really” about. The two halves are related: the discursive element participates in its metaphoric resonances, with the metaphoric resonances grounded in the discursive ballast. The colon represents an axis, a bonding agent in the juxtaposition, metaphor as part of the grammar of thinking. My title for this chapter is drawn from a heading that Daniel Dennett uses in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.3 He uses it in a very different context (his discussion of computational possibility

Possibility Naturalized

183

in genetics, via Gregor Mendel), but it does such interesting metaphoric work that I must use it here. This book is about how things change, and how things relate to one another in changing. An approach of this sort involves us in our two dimensions: the space in which elements interact and the time in which these interactions are permitted to unfold. In literary criticism this gives us, as Northrop Frye always reminded us, our two elements of metaphor and narrative: language parts that are related in space and language parts related in time.4 We have mostly been talking about metaphoric relationships. Now we need to acknowledge and understand how these relationships are centrally a function of the time that renders them continuous. This chapter on evolution is important not only because the subject of evolution is central to my argument, but also because my argument implicates the links of intelligible sequence, a quasi-logic (however qualified) of cause-and-effect that lies at the heart of narrative. While reading evolution as a form of story, I have created a story myself. The protagonist of my story is none other than the metaphoric initiative that has been active throughout. Let me approach this from another perspective. I’ve been considering how a relational behaviour might evolve from its earliest embodiments in material reality into the human experience of mind and its own late, still-changing offspring. As we have seen, metaphoric identifications have evolved at each stage. It is well enough to draw these identifications in space, as though atoms, chemistry, dna, mutation theory, living bodies, and human brains were spread out on a table and you were invited to draw lines of correspondence between them in whatever order suggests itself according to resemblances you discover. But I am also venturing a further argument, that, in a manner that has been, as far as we can tell, quite inevitable given the conditions of our universe, these behaviours are continuous. They have a formal cause (a kind of fractal) that unifies them as a single protagonist in an unfolding narrative. They have evolved in time, mutating inside their embodying forms while always preserving the essential characteristic of a leap across a gap. The relational gap cleaves, in both senses of the word (to bind and to separate). It abides at all these stages and is the missing link that makes a continuous narrative of the whole. As a variety of missing link itself (the binding element that

184

missing link

is at once there and not there), metaphor stands forth as the missing link, the link that is missing, between matter and mind, chemistry and spirit.

two kinds of stories Evolution has, as Philip Larkin quipped in another context, “a beginning, a muddle, and an end.” The beginning remains a mystery. The muddle is where we find ourselves. The end can only be guessed at. Before we get too far into an account of evolution, we have to address the kinds of bias that lurk behind most discussions, even in English studies, of fiction and story-telling. Religionists and scientists may have a hard time getting on the same page of late, but one thing they do have in common is a reluctance to be considered story-tellers. Religionists, the scientist says, go about masquerading fiction as fact, trading in mere myths and duping their adherents with fairy tales. The religionist for his part replies that scientists may feel that they have the market cornered on the verifiable facts of our universe, but their models are themselves “only theories,” evolution being one. The strategy of the religionists, I suppose, is to pull science down to its own level, the level of myth, inadvertently denigrating their own domain in trying to make science appear less than authoritative. I have no difficulty acknowledging the theoretical nature of evolutionary accounts, but I also have no trouble crediting their descriptive power. The theory of evolution will evolve, becoming more refined and more descriptively accurate as new evidence is discovered. It is because the theory of evolution carries such authority now that we should have no qualms about acknowledging that its features make a story, have story properties and story structure. By the end of this chapter I hope we will have turned the phrase “the story of evolution” inside out, and recognized that it is partly its narrative features that give the theory its authority.5 Daniel Dennett felt that he would need to tell a story in order to convince his readers of the authority of his argument.6 The story he tells is the story of evolution. He succeeds partly because every theory is an example of narrative operandi at work: the unfolding of plot, leaps between before and after, indirections finding directions out, climax and denouement. Now, the way you tell a story is simple. You say what happens. Stories are made up of events that follow one another. But you

Possibility Naturalized

185

can’t have just any old events follow one another, say, a dog eating some pizza, a pilot asking for landing clearance, a Buddha humming. They have to be related. I’m not saying that the three events just mentioned couldn’t be related in a single work (in fact, consider this a challenge). Indeed, this is the point: their relation has to be made intelligible. There has to be a cause-and-effect logic. You have to understand how the story leads from one event to the next, how what comes before issues into what follows after. If we are going to talk about a continuous relationship between various moments spread out in time, then we’re going to need a leaping mechanism to join them. You have to have what Steven Pinker calls a kind of “oomph” that passes between the evolutionary data to show that each is the continuity and continuation of what has come before.7 We need to be clear about the kind of story-time we’re talking about. In his three-volume work Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur makes the important distinction between Represented Time and Narrative Time.8 The former refers to events in the story that we imagine unfolding in the story’s actual world. Bruce buys a home on Tuesday; Bruce goes bankrupt on Friday. The concept of Narrative Time, on the other hand, goes to the structure of the literary work, the order in which moments are laid out paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. I open my novel with Bruce in bankruptcy court. I move backwards in represented time, but forwards in narrative time, to the cause of Bruce’s bankruptcy earlier that week. There are cause-and-effect imperatives in both these narrative dimensions. In the context of the novel’s represented time, we expect events to have a familiar logic. Let’s say that Bruce punches the bankruptcy court judge and the judge doesn’t fall over, doesn’t respond, doesn’t appear to have been hit at all, indeed asks his wife to pass the potatoes as though he were at home. We would reject the scene as incoherent and implausible, or at least would be in the world we live in. Similarly, on the narrative-time front, if in the middle of my novel I were to introduce a character you have never heard of before, as though she had been there all along, and then towards the end of the work introduce her again as though for the first time, you would feel that I had violated the integrity of the work, become sloppy or got things out of order. The logic of the narrative time would break down (this violation could be part of the point in certain works). If at the beginning of his film The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan told us that Dr Malcolm Crowe was

186

missing link

himself one of the dead that Cole Sear keeps seeing, we would send the writer back to get things right, so that the properly sequenced events could lead to – that is to say cause – the desired surprise at the end. One of the problems that arises in the debate between evolutionary thinkers and so-called Creationists is that we impose the imperatives of a cause-and-effect logic without specifying which time we are talking about, Represented or Narrative. The story of creation in the Christian Bible makes little sense to scientists because they are looking for the logic of a plausible Represented Time. Some “literal” Christians make matters worse by leaning on the same point, insisting that that logic is there. It may well be, however, that the story was written with more of an eye to Narrative Time, that part of what the story represents is the question of how a creation story ought to be organized in order to hold together as a story. Genesis is partly a story about how creation stories work. This leaves aside, and open, the question of whether the story has any descriptive value in relation to the actual world. Those who need to think in those terms pursue the torturous debate that goes on ad infinitum. The story of evolution for most thinkers would also fall under the concept of Represented Time; it is a story of intelligibly linked consecutive events that are seen to correspond accurately with events that have unfolded in the actual world. How do we know it corresponds accurately? Because the story holds together. Thomas Kuhn makes this point in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We build scientific models and then test them by introducing details from objective reality to see if they can be made to fit the evolving narrative. The more the model holds together as such, the more we call it descriptively accurate. Of course the idea that the actual world is a coherent order susceptible to any kind of modelling is a heuristic assumption, one that has to do with our own instinct for narrative in the first place.

the world as all before us The fact of evolution sometimes throws into question for religionists the idea of a divine agent who is implicated in our origin. The story of evolution also seems to nullify for religious skeptics the sense of history unfolding towards a foreordained end-time. Intelligible ends is partly the

Possibility Naturalized

187

focus of our final chapter. The evolutionary perspective for the most part looks backwards. Our scientific discoveries have granted us a heightened prospect over the forms of life on this planet. In its explanatory reach, science has promoted plausible relationships between a myriad disparate parts laid out behind it, creating a continuous narrative. We stare back over the vast stretches of earthly time and follow the branches that lead forward to us: a kind of reverse reverse engineering. That command of vast stretches of time – the question of who gets to explain how life has unfolded – becomes in every sense disputed ground. There was a certain genre of prospect poetry, popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that had to do with disputed grounds. A speaker stands on high terrain, surveys the land at his feet, and declaims authoritatively upon all he sees there. The height is in every sense commanding and is used to ground whatever authority – political, historical, scientific – the poet chooses to favour. The “world view” spun out from that centre is in every sense the allegorical “point.” John Denham’s excellent “Cooper’s Hill” has been the poster poem for the genre, but we’re looking elsewhere. When they think of Milton’s Paradise Lost, readers tend not to summon the prospect poem that takes up its final two books. The war in heaven, Satan and his band of ne’er-do-wells in Pandemonium, the temptation in the garden, the fall: all excellent box office. The final two chapters, in which the angel Michael takes Adam up to the highest mountain in Eden to show him a vision of human history, foreordained and yet-tobe-gone-into, can feel like an indifferent denouement. It is the point at which we leave the past and look towards a merely speculative future: So both ascend In the Visions of God. It was a hill, Of Paradise the highest, from whose top The hemisphere of Earth in clearest ken Stretched out to the amplest reach of prospect lay.9 The term denouement – which etymologically means an “unknotting” – would be ironic insofar as it implies a decline from the “climax” the story reaches (climax is etymologically “ladder,” κλμαξ), for our decline in this case takes us up to and through a climax properly speaking, where all of “known” Biblical history stretches out at Adam’s feet. But books

188

missing link

XI and XII seem like an unwinding denouement because they come “after” the loss of paradise per se, a paradise in which there was no significant change, no aging, no time. The final scenes instantiate “afterness” itself, the feeling of belatedness in relation to a past whose mysteries are now a paradise lost. From our “fallen” perspective, it is the start of time as we will know it, history unfolding in a cause-andeffect manner towards the present. Adam’s vision of our future is made up of repetitions that make a revealing pattern: “His eyes he op’d and beheld a field”; “He look’d and saw a spacious plain”; “He look’d and saw wide Territory spread”; “He look’d and saw the face of things quite chang’d”; “He look’d and saw the Ark full on the flood.”10 As each of the scenes appears, we are reminded that these are caused events, revealed to Adam that he may “behold / Th’effects which thy original crime hath wrought.”11 “The face of things quite chang’d” underlines for us the sense of evolutionary time, time made real. Adam is being schooled in the very logic of cause-and-effect that his transgression has set a-rolling. He is empowered in the end because he can now see the “whole picture”: This having learned, thou hast attained the sum Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the stars Thou knew’st by name, and all the ethereal powers, All secrets of the Deep, all Nature’s works, Or works of God in heaven, air, earth, or sea, And all the riches of this world enjoy’dst, And all the rule, one empire. Only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith; Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love, By name to come called Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A Paradise within thee, happier far. Let us descend now, therefore, from this top Of speculation.12 Evolutionary scientists like Dawkins and Dennett would get up hungry from a history of Biblical events presented as the history of human being.

Possibility Naturalized

189

It would be so much the wrong idea, particularly given how they themselves are very much in the business of searching out “All secrets of the Deep, all Nature’s works,” which Michael describes in every sense as a waste of time. Yet they might not mind seeing themselves as so many latterday Michaels, angels of a new evolutionary prospect. They lay before us a history of changes, a line of “ascent,” unfolding from the roots of life towards ends we hope to find more promising. This is exactly the manner in which science may imagine itself to achieve “the sum of wisdom.” It would stand at a summit and it would say, as Milton does: “Here is a history we have already come through. It has ‘already happened.’ But I must take you back to the beginning and walk you through it again. Thus we will find a paradise within us, one that is happier far to the extent that we are now able, at last, to name deeds properly answerable to our new-found knowledge.” Evolution is an account of the past that by definition cannot show us where we are headed. When Adam and Eve make their way out of the garden at the end of the poem, they are, albeit chastened, filled with the promise of an end they can envision because it has been shown to them. Stories of prospect that preclude such visions seem to foreclose on those intuitions of hope that are so central to our humanity. One of the culminations of argument in this book is the inference that hope itself is the presence in us of metaphoric thinking, and not therefore part of our knowing for certain that there are grounds for hope, or nameable horizons. But at the same time, Milton is cheating. In Paradise Lost the tale of the future is not really a tale of the future at all, but the story of a mythological past. That past already has a story shape, with a beginning, a muddle, and an end. But perhaps that is the point. Milton shows that such stories of time, in whichever direction they look, are already known and unknown at once and would be stories in either form. He is in the same boat with us, after all. What can he do but, like evolutionary scientists, base his vision of an unknown future on a known past? The prospect he offers is one in which we quite actually see both ways at once, into a recorded past and into a speculative future, for in this particular story they are the same thing. Our evolutionary story is an account of how we got to this point. It represents a forward-unfolding narrative that can be laid out before us all at once, its forks properly identified and accounted for, like so many

190

missing link

scenes. In its ideal form, it would represent the consolidation of a potential past in the sense that Mark Strand means in the epigraph that opens this chapter, one that we might then “move into,” which is to say go forward with. The angel Michael, like the evolutionary scientist, stands at a turning point for Adam. He knows that Adam’s new knowledge is the occasion of a relinquished perspective on an idealized past, a paradise lost. But his job is to create for Adam a “further past” out of that loss, something to head towards as a new act of faith. For Milton too that “further past” is a story, with a story form. But he realizes that it is only at that point and in that form that Adam has the courage to enter into it. That is, approaching an unknown future, Adam enters into that future’s having been laid out before him like a familiar story. I hope to draw out the unexplored, as-yet unentered-into, potential of evolution as an embodiment of story itself. That tale is an act of faith in the largest sense, and in it lie the proper nutrients of hope and futurity.

darwi n The essentials of evolutionary theory are widely known. The principle of natural selection at its heart was Darwin’s own: If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will

Possibility Naturalized

191

tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.13 I’ll confess from the outset that it is hard for a reader like myself not to see the whole of Darwin’s Origin of Species as a working out, in the biological domain, of the tensions of identity and difference at the heart of the metaphoric initiative. Particular terms of reference often leap off the page: distinct species present “analogous variations”; the accumulation of “beneficial differences” gives rise to modification in species.14 These concepts could easily be added to our discussion of metaphor proper in Chapter 1, illuminating the tensions at work in Max Black’s interactive metaphor, or the relations between Ricoeur’s “impertinent” and “new pertinent” figures. That Darwin was not thinking of anything like a metaphoric initiative at work in biological evolution might be all the more reason to take note of those moments when his comments on natural selection align so closely with the workings of metaphor proper: It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.15 Darwin is speaking “metaphorically” in the usual sense, characterizing natural selection as a kind of curious scientist, not surprisingly rather like himself, “daily and hourly scrutinising … the slightest variations.” For our purposes, “it may metaphorically be said,” I might venture that it is Darwin’s anthropomorphic metaphor (natural evolution, c’est moi) that licenses my own work as a kind of corresponding Darwinian (Darwin, c’est moi), offering homage as I scrutinize how the “slight variation” of the metaphoric initiative finds its way “silently and invisibly” from the beginning, “whenever and wherever opportunity offers … in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.” At the conclusion of Origin of Species, Darwin looked forward to the day when “terms used by naturalists, of affinity, relationship, community of type,

192

missing link

paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, &c., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification.”16 It may be that by the end of this book, when the puzzles of relation will have passed through the work of metaphor proper and come full circle in our existential condition that my own work will have “a plain signification,” “cease to be metaphorical,” and greet Darwin’s findings on the other side of language.

natural selection Darwin’s revolutionary theory, and even his formulation of it above, has not required correction since it was first published over one hundred and fifty years ago. It has been substantially refined and updated to bring it in line with the science of genetics. Part of Darwin’s genius is that he came up with the principle elements of natural selection without the benefit of genetic theory, without Mendel and his theory of inheritance, without dna, and without a completed map of the human genome. Darwin made a crucial observation on his voyage to the Galapagos Islands in 1835, namely, that animals of a single species, which we would expect to be identical everywhere, nonetheless evince distinct differences in different geographical areas. Like metaphors, the species were similar and yet different. Their similarity suggested a shared origin. Their differences suggested that the original species had at some point been separated into geographically distinct groups. It appeared to him that groups of a species that had been permanently separated tended to evolve in divergent directions. Species were changing according to some principle that we had yet to discover. There was already ample evidence that the earth was once inhabited by creatures who were no longer here. Species were coming and going, and nature was leaving their crumbs behind so that our paleontologist Hansels could find the route back to their origin. Darwin saw, however, that we didn’t actually need to start with what had been here, but with what was here still. He began with the assumption that still being here means something. Darwin theorized that if changes do occur in the characteristic makeup of a species, those changes that help it survive in its environment will

Possibility Naturalized

193

be favoured. The generations that are successfully adapted to their environment will endure to reproduce again, and those that are not appropriately adapted will die off. It was not Darwin but Herbert Spencer who came up with the phrase “survival of the fittest.”17 The phrase was unfortunate to some degree, given its tendency in people’s minds to suggest mosquitos bulking up in mosquito gyms so that they can scrap it out with the mayflies. The term is also partly misleading in its suggestion of a direct struggle. Still worse, more recent exponents of evolutionary theory have come to include “the law of the jungle,” the broader theories of Social Darwinism as applied to economics, and even more menacingly, ethnic relations. With survival of the fittest, there is no “getting stronger,” nor any struggle to speak of in most cases. Each evolving species has a chance to measure its viability against that of other species and/or against its own ancestors. In some cases, its viability can be determined in isolation from all others, where the environment itself says yes or no (as for instance, when the mutated creature suddenly has no lungs). In other cases, a creature’s viability may be measured in relation to other creatures, where, for instance, a mutation will make it easier for it to reach food or capture its prey. Such changes could result in a scrap in the field between orangutans and lizards, or more likely between two species with very similar make-ups (where for instance one has a food-hiding instinct and the other doesn’t). But such afternoon bouts could hardly account for the endurance of a species over long stretches of time. What we call a struggle for survival is really more like a process of “sorting out” those species who are best adapted to their environment. “Sifting” might get closer to the idea, if we think of the sifter as the environment and the various adapted creatures as those who will either fall through it or not. This wouldn’t be the whole picture of course. A big part of any creature’s environment is the reality of competition. Some of a species’ adaptations might allow it to take advantage of others, to eat them for example, or they might just exploit opportunities that come about via the presence of other competitors. We might refine our sifting analogy by imagining a bunch of small insects bonding with others near them (sometimes even antagonistically or surreptitiously) to keep from falling through. In such a case, survival would be made possible by a mutual interaction and dependence. The more naive Social Darwinist’s

194

missing link

faith in the adage “eat or be eaten,” or the platitudes of the free-market capitalist, appeal to nature’s example in arguing that if you aren’t destroying others you will be destroyed. These folks should look into the network of mutually sustaining relationships that fill out nature’s social safety net. Some genetic variations may be immediately unfortunate and compromise the viability of the living host. Other variations can be so subtle and unrecognizable as not to manifest any appreciable difference in the phenotype for many generations. The changes may be merely indifferent in their initial expression, but if they do not compromise the viability of the phenotype they are permitted to stay along for the ride, until perhaps they become more actively favoured. So an earlier quadruped might have evolved, by way of a slight mutation, a little nub on an appendage. Causing no difficulties, that nub survives while mutating into longer lengths, until the quadruped one day actually finds it useful, say, for picking things up. Now the few phenotypes lucky enough to have that unusual trait will come to be directly favoured in the competition for survival. The species evolves. Stephen Jay Gould coined the term “exaptation”18 to describe that process in evolution whereby an initially indifferent mutation, or a byproduct of a mutation, is later fastened upon as useful and becomes central to the species’ survival. Their theory is that most adaptations in evolution start this way, since nature can have no plan as to how a mutation might prove useful down the road. The mutation must be ventured, it is worth repeating, very much in the manner of an hypothesis, a whimsical trying-on of any least variant, before it can be exaptated to further purpose.

mutat ions and their enviro nments We have come as far as mutation theory and considered how mistakes can be made in the copying and/or transcription of a gene sequence. We have looked at the reproductive process and traced the “same and not the same” relationship of parent to offspring back to the “crossing-over” and assorting sleight-of-hand that we call meiosis. We have understood how essential these reproductive and error mechanisms are in releasing

Possibility Naturalized

195

a genome from “how it is” into the hypotheses of “what it might be.” Strands of dna make a narrative of genes, a narrative that contains “fictional” characters and “types.” The narrative is transcribed or “read” in sequence by the forming strand of mrna and communicated through the wall of the nucleus where the production of the coded-for “meanings” (in the form of worker proteins) is accomplished. The nucleic acid pairs gather to the unzipped strand of dna, assemble according to the dna template, and then are themselves unzipped from the template to float free. Mutations periodically occur in the transcription of dna. If they produce nonsense, nothing happens, the cell becomes dysfunctional or “dormant.” If they produce cells that do incomplete work, they can become cancers. If they occur in the reproductive gametes, the story they tell may find its way into the world to try its luck there. These are mutations at the level of the gene sequences themselves, involving a central unfolding narrative and the variations that are ventured upon it. This is a close-up view of how evolution unfolds. But in fact, the process of natural selection happens on a much larger scale. While individuals carry gene mutations into the population, evolution proper manifests itself in the context of the larger group. It is not the individual that “tries out” this or that variation but the species as a whole. Imagine that it were somehow possible to observe evolution at work through stop-frame photographs taken over millennia. Picture a field and a camera pointed at it. Imagine the members of a species there, ones that have been polite enough to live their lives in that little space for hundreds of thousands of years while you take your pictures. Life would continue in the film: that is, it would endure in time, generation by generation. What we would start to see, however, is the appearance of branching mutations, deviations from the antecedent group. Curious individuals would sprout up. Let’s call one of these anomalies Mr Opposing Thumb. Given his added capability, he would survive and reproduce, and his heirs would do well and they too would reproduce, and so on. Eventually, a majority of the group would be descendants of Mr Opposing Thumb. If we were to watch the film unfolding, it would appear that Nature had started a possible thread of interest and then, liking what it saw, decided to develop the plot in that direction. There might be other mutations as well, such as Mr Arm Coming out of My Back, and Mr No Testicles.

196

missing link

Mr No Testicles didn’t really do so well, and Mr Arm Coming out of My Back had a hard time turning around in crowded rooms. Eventually, the unfolding story would eliminate some of its earlier drafts, and along with them all their potential variants, and accept the favoured tangents. The population of Mr Opposing Thumbs would continue to change all the while, trying out mutations of Mr Taller and Mr Shorter, Mr Hairy and Mr Hard of Hearing. The story would have lots of minor plots to keep us waiting for the next episode. We can think of these branches on the evolutionary tree in strict metaphoric terms as well, for they are very nearly the same process. Think of the contents of your mind as a kind of species. Your thought is continually branching out in new directions – expanding into new understandings – based on associations that it makes, in the same way that species can branch off according to the mating of its individuals. Harold and Joyce have a child, Tracy; Tracy with her unique traits could go off and become the start of a whole new species. I can say that daylight A is like fresh shirt B and the impertinence – the audacity – of my saying so would create a new pertinence C, a branching off that would be some new understanding of what mornings are like (and by extension then, what the world is like). That new pertinence shares some traits with daylight and fresh shirts but is neither in itself; it is a hybrid that deviates from them both. Of course daylight will be compared with other things as well, and those issuances will branch off in their own directions. While Harold and Joyce are having more children, other breeders are doing the same thing, creating a vast network of possible new issuances. So in your mind there would be a near infinite number of connections being made. If the daylight-shirt metaphor started to become a familiar reference point as you journeyed in search of further truths, new possibilities would branch off from that point. Someone who came along years later might feel that you had become a different person. Species mutate in such a way that we will find their tangent branches – at least the surviving ones – evolving towards the conditions of their environment. A fish evolves towards the particular oxygenized conditions of water by evolving gills, birds to the air by evolving wings. The environmental conditions, or at least some of them, come first; those conditions define potential avenues of adaptation in such a way that the evolving species come to fill out – though never exhaust – that potential.

Possibility Naturalized

197

Of course there are environments within environments. The environment for a freshly mutated protein chain is the body. The environment for the body is particular local geographic and biological conditions in nature. The environment for nature is, well, nothing perhaps (or at least nothing more) … but we will come to that later.

humanity the fourth, part ii: the evolutionary history play Let’s get back to the problems of narrative and fiction. In his poetics, Aristotle argues that plot is a mimesis of action more than a mimesis of character.19 There are writers who have believed otherwise. Henry James, for instance, thought of matters the other way around. Character first, he insisted, then story. He was much more likely to start with a person and a situation, a set of relationships between characters. He would drop them into a Petri dish, they would interact, and the novel would be his account of what “happens” there. Certainly a writer’s allegiance to one or the other of these positions (or subtle hybrids of them), will tell us something about the nature of his or her work, whether there is going to be a good car chase or murder in the story, or whether a person picking up a golden bowl from the mantel of a fireplace and dashing it to the ground is going to represent the shocking climax and resolution of its lengthy meditations. Aristotle, for his part, believed that characters are only necessary because actions need to be performed and embodied. It is the sequencing of events in time that characterizes the essence of story. Evolution, as a creative agent, leans in Aristotle’s direction. It has characters, but they don’t seem primary and they are always changing. They come and go, so various, so impermanent; the arc of the entire narrative takes clear precedence over the destiny of any one of its actors. They appear out of the blue and disappear just as quickly, in the living yarn of the planet with its heroes and intrigues. If the meaning of evolution were an expression of any one character, or few sets of characters, that would be a tragedy indeed. Each species would arise and speak its few lines, fulfill its role, and then succumb to the conditions of necessity and change to take its leave. The protagonists – the dinosaur, the passenger pigeon – appear and disappear according to powers beyond their control.

198

missing link

But as story, as the fact of events unfolding in sequence, evolution looks more like a series of cyclical narratives along the lines of Shakespeare’s history plays taken as a whole. Each living dynasty has its moment on stage; it struggles, creates and destroys in turn, then passes away. While kings come and go, the history plays defer their ultimate significance and purpose to the momentum of the cycle, whose ultimate goals are unclear, whose horizon is potentially endless. When you spin out contiguous circular narratives like this, you get to postpone the question of where it is all headed and for what purpose. That’s the advantage of the history play.

cause and effect We are talking about how things are set in sequence. There must be a logic, a way of taking the leaps between distinct events or moments and making them intelligible as a continuum. We need to spend a little time thinking about cause and effect as a philosophical problem, one that as we have seen dates back to Aristotle, then comes to question in the eighteenth century (what we might call the Age of Reasons), and finds its contemporary expression in the challenges of evolutionary theory. The binding logic of cause and effect is the logic, or the counter-logic, of metaphor. We can easily discern the metaphoric structure of the phrase “cause and effect,” where there is an A (cause) and a B (effect), and some idea of how they are related to one another. The phrase “cause and effect” is admirably neutral on the question of how the two parts relate. We don’t say, for instance, “cause causing effects.” Indeed, the intervening conjunction opens up, as the middle term, a world of metaphoric possibility; the binding and separating “and” suggests how causes may be “put for” effects, may be equal to them, may transgress boundaries where one leads to the next, and so on. The possibilities are the possibilities of metaphoric interpretation. In cause-and-effect logic one assumes an effective relationship between two disparate elements. A key component of our thinking (this is Steven Pinker again), is “the intuition that the world is made of mechanisms and forces with causal powers – some kind of push or energy or oomph that is transmitted from the cause to the effect – and that the cor-

Possibility Naturalized

199

relations we observe are the products of these powers and actions.”20 A causes B, or “leads to” B. But what is this special “oomph” that passes between A and B? In the eighteenth century, David Hume spilled a great deal of ink writing about the impasses we confront when we try to find our way through the gap: We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoin’d together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the objects acquire an union in the imagination.21 You can watch one billiard ball knock another one into motion a thousand times over, but there is nothing about your understanding of the interaction that guarantees the same effect will play out the next time you make contact. No matter how microscopically you observe the interaction of atoms, or electro-magnetic forces, or quantum strings of energy (where the problem becomes even more complicated), the actual problem of cause-and-effect remains. You can only say that the cause and effect appear to be related and surmise that under matching conditions the apparent relation of this cause to this effect will remain stable. You think metaphorically, creating “an union in the imagination.” Hume’s point that we “cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction” goes to the heart of our matter. Emmanuel Kant was not surprised by Hume’s conclusion, given his terms of reference, but wanted to add that the reason we cannot penetrate into “the reason of the conjunction” is that the conjunction we observe is already a part of the reasoning powers we use. What we experience in cause-and-effect is the form of reasoning itself, the imagining of unions. Reason is made up of an a priori synthesizing disposition, or a spontaneous power of “synthesis” as he called it.22 We are thinking reasonably, we say, when one point of argument leads logically to the next, which is to say, when one point causes the next. An argument holds together based on such logical conjunctions. But those conjunctions harbour within them a necessary leap across a gap, which, no matter how much you reduce them to smaller and smaller rational

200

missing link

parts, still confront the paradox of saying that two things gesture towards one another without being identical. This ready expectation to find meaning in cause-and-effect relations is part of an “associationist psychology,” Pinker argues.23 I like the term, a good one for the metaphoric habit of mind at the heart of this book; it indicates how near problems of metaphor come to problems of causeand-effect thinking and rational thought in the sciences. The cause-andeffect process in evolution, the oomph that goes between, both produces and is a product of the “spontaneous power of synthesis” that is rational thought. The productive workings of between-where in evolutionary time stand clear in the productions of between-where at work in our minds.

the missing link There are gaps then in our theory of cause and effect, both actually and figuratively. No theory of evolution is complete without some account of why there are so many gaps in the fossil record between those very species that we claim are linked in evolutionary time. Darwin himself felt the need to address this apparent incongruity in his theory: “Why do we not find … great strata stored with the remains of the progenitors of the Cambrian fossils?”24 We won’t be surprised to find his reply deeply implicated in the relations of identity and difference: If two or three, or even more linking forms were discovered, they would simply be ranked by many naturalists as so many new species, more especially if found in different geological sub-stages, let their differences be ever so slight. Numerous existing doubtful forms could be named which are probably varieties, but who will pretend that in future ages so many fossil links will be discovered, that naturalists will be able to decide whether or not these doubtful forms ought to be called varieties? Darwin’s concept of the “doubtful form” might serve in its own right as a naturalist’s fine contribution to the theory of metaphor and the gaps it

Possibility Naturalized

201

leaves. The issues of every new metaphoric coupling might be thought of as a “doubtful form” until such time as it came to be accepted as a dead metaphor or was otherwise received into the fossil record of human knowledge, by which point all of the gap-like doubts regarding it will have been filled in. I should be clear about what I mean by evolutionary gaps. I’ve been talking thus far about gaps that inhere in all the workings of genetic variation, but the process in evolution doesn’t leave gaps per se. Natural selection works by sifting traits within species to proffer better-adapted individuals in an environment. These species branch out in time and space in such a way that, after generations, some of the branches related to any one species can go missing; they can fall extinct, then not be preserved in the random fossil record or get buried too deep in it for us to find them. It might be better to say that the process of evolution doesn’t leave gaps between species. The erasures of passing time does, which can make it challenging for us to trace the continuous narrative backwards. We can be even clearer about this. We are imagining two different narratives. One is natural selection, a narrative that is continually branching off in new variations that are “explored” in the environment as the branches grow outwards and upwards in time. This narrative leaves no gaps in the sense we are talking about. The other narrative is the line of descent, the story we try to tell of any particular species or fossil going back to its roots. We begin where we find it and then try to trace its ancestry back through the many branchings-off that in evolutionary terms led to it. What is the origin of Homo sapiens? We have drafted an ancestral tree, but the work is incomplete. We have plenty of specimens laid out in time: Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens. Some of these species and their immediate antecedents have been recovered in fairly detailed form. Little difficulty is made over the distinct status of each one, or when it branched off from an ancestor. We have an idea, for instance, when Australopithecus africanus turned away from Australopithecus afarensis. But in certain cases the exact fork can be missing or ill represented in the fossil record. How would you know that you have found a fork? You have to think metaphorically and sort through the identities and differences of

202

missing link

the two. The similarities will be sufficient to identify them as part of same genus connected lower down on the tree; the differences will be sufficient to identify each species as distinct. But how do you “prove” that a former species preceded a latter in time?25 A debate begins. Someone will argue that the differences override the similarities and that the two species are not divergent twigs of a shared branch. Some will feel that the similarities are so great that there are no grounds for distinguishing two separate species at all. As with all metaphors, we debate the terms of identity and difference themselves. When the gap between two species and the differences between them is too great to make a plausible case for a branch of descent, or when it leaves the relationship questionable, we speak of the missing link that we imagine must lie lower down on the tree and we go in search of it. From our perspective, you don’t have to search for a missing link, because, as a metaphoric aligning of simultaneously similar and differing species, it is right there in front of you, as is, so to speak. We know by now how to think about missing links, but it won’t hurt us to join the dots again, briefly. Debates in evolution are in large part debates about missing links. Our metaphoric frame of mind uses gaps – the missingness of those links we believe are there – to make leaps from one species to the next and propose relationships. Evolutionary narratives come together as new missing links are discovered. But gaps remain in the narrative. Some feel that we need to find more evidence to fill in the gaps. But such missing links are often found and only beg the same question again of how they themselves are related to the species that precede and follow them. You find a few letters from a large alphabet and you try to organize them chronologically, which is to say, alphabetically. Let’s say that those letters are D and L. You have a hunch that they are related, but can’t quite make out how to get from one to the other. You look for something that appears to go between them. You find a G. Oh good, you think, we’re finished. But all you’ve really done is opened more gaps. You must now ask how D is related to G and how G is related to L. No matter how densely you fill in the picture (an alphabet with a finite number of letters can’t show this), there will be lacunae, relationships of identity and difference between all the parts. There is no erasing the ontological and metaphorical gap between the relationships that form the fictional thread of evolutionary theory, just as there isn’t for any narrative we imagine and project.

Possibility Naturalized

203

This is not to say that evolutionary narrative has no authority as a narrative. Far from it. As Dennett writes: Gould and Lewontin shake an angry and puritanical finger at the adaptationists for their “just-so stories,” their “panglossian” assumptions, their willingness to engage in speculation where the only real test seems to be how imaginative you can be and how plausible a story you can tell. One of the responses that one can make is that there is no alternative; the fossil record is simply not going to provide enough information to provide a rigorous, bottom-up, scientific account of all the important moments in the evolution of species. The provable history has to be filled in. What we need is a just-so story.26 This book argues, after all, that the missing link, as missing and as link, is a function that does hold parts together. The story of evolution as we grasp it is not going to rise above the conditions of the metaphoric initiative that makes it possible. Indeed, it is going to be a further expression of that initiative doing some of its best work.

finding meaning in the gap Our struggle with the gap has borne some interesting offspring in evolutionary studies. Theories and ideologies, like nature, abhor vacuums and are quick to jump into a breach, wherever one is identified, in defence of their own narratives. This is only what one would expect in a domain defined by metaphoric tensions, by links that are and are not. Someone who wants to insist on the primacy of his or her own approach has got to get in there quickly and plant a flag. We’ve already spoken a little about the divide between religious and scientific thinkers and how their solutions for the remaining unknowables differ. It hardly took any time at all, after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, for Christian apologists to leap into the breach and argue that there is a divine hand at work in the sketchy unfoldings and betweenwheres of evolution.27 These debates go back to Darwin’s own time and continue today. But the divide between those who favour secular accounts of evolution and those who espy an agency there does not break down tidily into the religious and scientific camps.

204

missing link

The effort to fill in the missing links of the evolutionary story goes on, no matter how closely arranged the two given points in time may be. You can have one bone separated from another bone by a hundred million years and try to fill in the gap. Or you approach the issue using a subtler logic at the microcosmic level, as Dawkins regularly does in his Climbing Mount Improbable. For instance, he considers how a wasp’s committing suicide could favour the group. You can try to show that the wasp is protecting related individuals who are likely to carry the same genes; how this nearly inexplicable behaviour, which appears to act against the insect’s best interests, could have evolved to favour the wellbeing of the group. You fill in the steps. In this configuration the gap is a block, a puzzle to be solved, a canyon to be bridged. We want to say that it isn’t really there, that there is a way across or around it that we hadn’t thought of. Of course there are differences. Metaphor says: “You say I can’t think the impossible? There, I just did it.” Science says: “You think this is impossible? Here, let me show you how there is a further logic at work.” But in both cases there is a sense in which what we think of as impossible is presented as explicable in the terms allowed by the given discourse, in such a way that it becomes no violation of what may be. Indeed, their similarities may serve to show us how close metaphor may come to expressing the ontological conditions of reality. Steven Pinker has argued that “reality can’t be riddled with paradoxes and inconsistencies; reality just is.”28 That gives us all the more reason to pay attention to those behaviours of mind and nature that, by their ontological nature, seem quite comfortable with the paradoxical, the improbable, the inconsistent, and convert them into the counter-logic of where we are.

keeping the gap open Evolutionists are not always trying to bridge the metaphoric gap. In his work, Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett addressed the potentially unfortunate consequences of Darwinian evolutionary theory, i.e. a kind of wholesale determinism: “A universe is deterministic if there are transition rules (the laws of physics) that determine exactly which state description follows any particular state description.”29 We should pause, first, to ad-

Possibility Naturalized

205

mire a phrase like “transition rules,” which comes very close to our sense of the metaphoric operandum: the sense of a crossing-over and a grammar that governs it. With metaphor in mind, we could take up the cheer on Dennett’s behalf: “Transition rules!” Clearly a good part of Dennett’s work goes to establishing these transition rules, the rules that show how one natural state can lead to another. But what, Dennett asks, are the consequences of this determinism? Are we trapped in the cause-andeffect logic of physical laws? Have those laws, at work in every jiggling atom in the universe, already determined what is going to happen? Many religions focus on the same issue of predestination, of what God “knows” but isn’t saying. Exegetes from the Christian church fathers to contemporary systematic theologians have struggled to clear a little room for free will and our responsibility in relation to it. In Milton’s phrasing, humanity was made “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”30 God already knows what you are going to do, but you are still free to do it or not. The paradox actually puts the problem in rather metaphorical terms, if I may say so, that we are both free and not free at the same time.31 Freedom Evolves shows Dennett at work on the same problem in scientific terms that correspond richly with the religious debate and share the same high stakes for human being. Indeed, one can see, here as elsewhere, how science has gradually taken up questions that were once largely framed in a spiritual context. Milton, a self-ironizing Calvinist if there ever was one, was careful to put the free-will debate in Pandemonium, the fallen world, where the rebel angels lie about on hills and chew the fat over questions they will never be able to answer. In discourse more sweet (For Eloquence the Soul, Song charms the Sense) Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate – Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute – And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.32 There are a few mazes in Dennett’s argument, and it might be worth noting that his study too begins at the bottom, with the basic facts of natural selection, and then tries to work its way, by a slow and careful

206

missing link

evolutionary (and even rebellious!) argument, back up into the light of the free world that we hope to enjoy. He is like the rebel angels’ leader Satan – the genuine hero of the post-romantic world, Percy Shelley insisted33 – who tries to work his way out of the hell of predestination by spoiling God’s plan and reaching towards a kind of secular free will after all. Absolute determination makes us squirm a little, particularly as metaphoric thinkers who like to believe that we are capable of thinking the previously unthinkable. Dennett is at pains to show that human beings do have, and must exercise, free will. Freedom, he argues, evolves. The single cell amoeba may not have had it, nor even the woolly mammoth, but human beings, with their naturally evolved capacity for symbolic thinking, do. He argues that there are situations in which a prior descriptive state may not determine the state that follows it.34 In effect, he reintroduces or re-emphasizes the metaphoric gap that abides between a prior state and a later one. I offer a more detailed discussion of Dennett’s logic later on (cf. 303ff). All of this is to say that, while Dennett wants to bridge the missing links in evolution and show that they aren’t really there, he is at pains to keep the same kind of gap open when our freedom is at stake. This seems a reasonable enough procedure, given that we are describing, on the one hand, deterministic processes in nature, and on the other, conscious human action. It might help to lower the stress on the argument, though, if we allowed that the evolutionary story is neither fully closed in natural selection, nor fully open in our own struggles, and get comfortable with both. Having it both ways and neither is one of the things that metaphoric unfoldings allow us to do.

evolution and enviro nment We’ve spent some time considering how different thinkers approach evolutionary logic, with all the enabling gaps and narrative instability that comes with it. Now we need a perspective that doesn’t begin with a dispute over the logic of the process. We need to approach matters from the opposite direction, from the perspective of the context or environment in which this evolutionary narrative unfolds.

Possibility Naturalized

207

Species mutate and evolve into a myriad varieties with a kind of radical relativity (in the sense that, at first, anything goes) in the same way that metaphor does. New species and new metaphors can be spun out with surprizing haphazard. Their sheer relativity is an issue to be sure, and we will grant it centre stage in the final chapter. But at this point, we need only recognize that species (and metaphors) are viable to the extent that their traits complement their environment. Natural environments are made up of conditions that ripple outwards in wider and wider interactive contexts. A certain animal can eat a certain kind of grass. The evolved condition of that animal, then, is very much a function of the grass that he eats. The grass is inside him, inwardly disseminated, and becomes an integral part of his proteins and blood cells. That species of grass is itself enabled by general weather conditions. But it is also a condition of the several different animals that feed off it. The grass has evolved to do well in an environment where the weather is such and such (with all four seasons, say) and where the eating habits of its animal population are such and such (allowing it, for instance, to recover at regular intervals). It is a quick growing grass, because a slower growing grass wouldn’t make it in this environment of herbivores. The herbivores, in turn, would not survive without such an ample supply of food. In short, there is a mutual, interactive, even interpenetrative relationship between the container and the contained. The container is a partial product of the totality of its parts. It is an amplified expression of what they are. The traits of those elements, the makeup of their organs, their digestive processes etc., are in turn determined by the environment they inhabit. The meadow is the deer, and the deer is the meadow. Consider the fictional worlds of novelists, poets, and playwrights. Writers begin with blank pages but as soon as they begin typing, they project conditions upon the unfolding narrative that become more and more constraining. At the same time, there is an accompanying sense of moving towards a goal or purpose not yet fully grasped or realized. Like visual artists, authors draw their way into blank spaces, spaces that are potentially inexhaustible, to see where they lead. To borrow the ontological language of Martin Heidegger, there is a “towards-which” that abides in our composition of novels and poems. We are inside a space that

208

missing link

describes a wider circle or farther horizon, one whose greatest potential we ourselves represent and embody as we reach towards it. This is the same towards-which relationship that exists between creature and environment. Deer and their meadows, makers and what they make: there is a kind of stability or equilibrium where each lives off and feeds the other. I’ll be making the case in the chapter on design evolution that something akin to the organic relationship between the deer and the meadow unfolds in the relationship between human beings and the culture they both make and inhabit. In the mean time, we want to keep this notion of an evolutionary towards-which at hand.

evolution our hero It is worth emphasizing again that the process of natural selection is unconscious. It was not only unthinking from the beginning, but there was nothing in evolution, or in its cast of evolving characters, that foreordained that it would lead to us. We are a possible expression of its workings, not an intended one.35 Part of our attraction to story in general is that, as the intuition of a structure, it renders experiences intelligible, lines up events with ourselves in them as part of a trajectory. Evolution as a story has proven to be especially curious about means and ends, how we get from one thing to the next, why, and to what purpose. Dennett’s description of the trial-and-error process by which we came to be, while emphasizing its mindless nature, may nonetheless remind us how irresistible it is to think of evolution as a kind of story: Still, it is heartening to recognize that the problems facing us have precedents that were eventually solved by trial and error. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. Trial and error – even mindless trial and error, with preservation of partial progress – is a potent process. It has created genuine novelties in the world; it has solved major problems, overcome daunting obstacles. Trial and error works, so trial works. At least one variety of trying has a proven track record. Our varieties of trying may not look quite so feckless in the face of determinism when we see how successful their ancestors have been. The very cells that compose us are the direct descendants of cells that once had to solve a huge problem of cooperation, and succeeded.36

Possibility Naturalized

209

It is telling, I think, how human the work of trial-and-error can seem in even the most secularized evolutionary accounts. Trial-and-error has “created genuine novelties,” “solved major problems,” “overcome daunting obstacles.” In evolution we have a bona fide hero at work, a pretty bone-headed and unassuming one to be sure, but a hero nonetheless. The idiot-savant is not a common archetype for nothing. Heroes and trials make up one of literature’s most compelling genres, the romance. Romance narrative (as ubiquitous today as in the time of Homer) follows a protagonist hero on a quest for identity. His or her identity is usually in question at the beginning of the work, in some subtle way. Where are Batman’s parents? Why does Frodo live with Uncle Bilbo? Where does the sailor Ishmael, or Huck Finn, belong? And most importantly, what is our identity as Homo sapiens? Who are our parents? What primordial swamp was our original home? And so the journey starts, troubles are encountered, trials imposed. The central unifying myth of romance, Northrop Frye writes, is Agon, or struggle,37 the tone and language of which we can easily discern in Dennett’s passage above. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Normally, at the end of the romance narrative, there is a point of epiphany, where the “upper” world of freedom and possibility, for which the hero fights, and “lower” world of opposing forces come into alignment and a decisive trial ensues.38 Sometimes the hero loses his life but saves his distressed damsel, or the world. Live or die, the heroes’ final trials are typically followed by their “exultation,” where they are seen to transcend the conditions that have tested them throughout. As an ironized modern hero, trial-and-error was born in the “lower world” of natural selection, where base determination is at work. Its parentage is still in question. It rose from the primordial soup and began a quest in search of … well, it never really knew (romance heroes often don’t), but it inched its stubborn way through every misdirection and blind alley, rose gradually through the ranks of nature and – in an apocalyptic moment, when the stakes were particularly high – stood forth in us. Trial-and-error boot-straps itself, as Dennett says, above its roots and enters into its promise, its conscious power. It discovered in the end that it had the makings of that promise all along.39 It was a power scattered throughout the world in search of what it already was. Human being is the latest embodiment of the evolutionary hero, the expression of trial-and-error at its present culmination. We have

210

missing link

embarked on a romance journey of our own, a sequel to the original (romances, properly defined, never finally end once and for all), in which we pit our powers of reason and imagination against the very conditions of trial-and-error, the old hero that got us here in the first place. We are “above” natural selection, at least to some extent, because we represent a higher level of design. We have climbed out of the primordial soup, if not yet out of nature altogether. This is evolution’s “point of epiphany,” where the upper world of human reason and imagination “comes into alignment” with the cyclical and binding world of natural selection.40 The alignment itself is a unifying moment, as in metaphor, where two things become one thing, or where a gap is crossed. Natural trial-and-error is a little like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. For her entire life she laboured under the hard conditions of an oppressive world that was slow to change. But in so doing she made it possible for her child, Pearl (us!), to enjoy a freedom that she could never have imagined. Unconscious trial-and-error has worked hard, and we owe it everything, but as with child and parent, our adolescent awakening requires now that we leave home. We’d be remiss if we didn’t also note that in Dennett’s configuration trial-and-error is also the archetype of the redeemer, the saviour figure that must die in order that we might live in its name. Indeed, it was neglected or vilified, or at least thrown into blaspheming question by creationists (“Trial-and-Error, who do you say you are? Some have said that you are the answer to our prayers, the final gospel! Is that what you think? You must be crucified!”), until its story was resurrected by the many disciples who now follow after and preach in its service. Off we go into the world we make. We face our demons there, our dragons. We have our six shooters and our trusty horses, and our new powers of symbolic thinking, reason, and imagination. So we make plans. We hypothesize. We hope for things. We win and we lose. And there is something else that we do with our higher and more self-conscious evolutionary prowess. We write actual romances, with ourselves naturally as the heroes in them. “The romance is the nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream, one that feeds continually on whatever current social conditions

Possibility Naturalized

211

it finds itself in”; “no matter how great a change may take place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever, looking for new hopes and desires to feed on.”41 So in Edmund Spenser’s day the hero was a knight, whereas in ours it may be a “Terminator” or a humble Frodo Baggins. I find it striking how this articulation closely resembles most accounts of how evolution itself works. Living creatures also find themselves in an environment of changing conditions and continually adapt to those conditions as they evolve. The story, then, that evolution tells in unfolding the way it does is very like the changing story of romance narrative itself, whose form remains the same even while its content continually expresses new conditions. Those contents do not improve, they just change. Just as Lord of the Rings is neither better nor worse than The Fairie Queen, a human being, as far as nature is concerned, is neither better nor worse than a Brontosaurus. There are some who believe that even if romance doesn’t improve, it does advance, in the sense that it can build on the expressions that have preceded it. Conscious, self-conscious, and even unconscious echoings and allusions to earlier romance narratives in the Harry Potter and Star Wars cycles, for example, show the evocative reach of those works. Current software programmes build on, and contain, much of the programming of preceding versions. Sometimes these earlier lines of programming are useful; sometimes they are just junk. But they might prove useful again someday and are left because it is easier than extricating the later software from all the binary intrication inside it that helped to make it what it is. So a later literary work will “contain” and build on its antecedents and become all the more “conscious” as the levels of inwardly interactive expression increase. We have a sense that nature too has become more and more sophisticated in its ability, now for instance in ourselves, to produce conscious thinking, and then the products of conscious thinking. There were no iPods in pre-historic times, because nature hadn’t evolved the tool that it needed to build one, i.e. ourselves. As in literature too though, there is a difference between advancing and improving. There are certainly those who believe that the earth was better off with its herds of dinosaurs than it is now with the human weed choking its fields.

212

missing link

evolution our poet The romance journey we are presently embarked upon as conscious designers in human culture is associated with all the powers of mind, reason, wit, imagination, and hope that we can conjure and put to use. We know how closely the power of hypothesis – aligned with the wishfulfilment element of romance – is associated with the added “lift” that comes with design evolution. We are the hypothesizing species. It is what makes us, at least in our own eyes, heroes. But on another level, the natural selection that eventually resulted in us was already a bit of a poet and dreamer, and we want to close this chapter on the story of evolution with a celebration of its own creative power. I should recall the caveat I introduced in Chapter 4 (cf. 148), that nature does not hypothesize consciously. It works “hypothetically” in process, not in intention. But in its own strictly material and unthinking way, nature has a brilliant imagination. It pondered and day-dreamed through millennia, wrote out every random doodle it had time for, caught the gist of something only to see its impetus and momentum suddenly evaporate. It judged nothing ahead of time, and learned that it must be willing to throw things away. And all the while it stayed open, ready to take up whatever the accidental muses of mutation and environment might provide. In fact, nature has proved to be a remarkably competent, that is to say creative, associative thinker. Free association is a tried and true creative practice especially beloved of the poets, who know that you have to leap confidently into the blank, not try to guess in advance what you will come up with. The opening lines of Richard Wilbur’s “Walking to Sleep” (really a rather evocative title for the process we’re describing) have always represented for me a kind of first principle in thinking about problems of writing, inspiration, and how to get started: As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there, Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses, Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.42 Nature manages this kind of ingenious drift-into-an-openness by way of mutation and genetic variation. We ourselves use the conscious power of

Possibility Naturalized

213

metaphoric association. In both cases, the creative agents, in leaping, are assured that some of the results will prove to be inspired if they keep at it long enough. They will lead to ideas for whole works, “keepers” that are worth sending out into the world for others to build on. Which leads to the other question that evolutionary thinkers have always struggled with, the question of where all this free associative work will lead. The usual answer is “it remains to be seen,” or “stay tuned,” or my favorite, “time will tell.” This is for me really the question that this whole book is meandering towards, and so it needs to be saved for the final chapter about the “allowing conditions” in which evolution and relational behaviours unfold. At the same time, there is something worth recognizing and celebrating in the reaching-outwards itself. If we can’t yet name the ultimate end of all this evolving, can we for now at least celebrate ourselves as one of its more impressive products? Nature has “free-associated” to us. We are a metaphor tried on, a heuristic, a story. We are part of a “what happens if” experiment undertaken in nature’s laboratory, or at its writing desk. The dinosaurs made a pretty good yarn, but the manuscript was somehow damaged in a storm and nature had to start over with the surviving foolscap. How can we know that nature will run with us for a few million years and make us into a good long tale (or at least offer us a contract for a few more chapters)? We can’t. We don’t know how our story turns out. But we do know something about stories, and that their ultimate place and purpose cannot be determined by our judging them from the outside, as it were, finding them too long or too short. We can only try to learn more about how, at least to a certain point, the metaphors hold together, manage their resources, make a kind of sense, and learn to dwell within their own ventured filaments in that one fiction whose ultimate reach is never fully understood or exhausted.

This page intentionally left blank

Part Two

This page intentionally left blank

7

Metaphor and Cognition

Practically everything should be seen as itself pure and simple, so far as we can comfortably see it, and at the same time as not itself, so far as we can comfortably see it, and then the two views should be combined, so far as we can comfortably combine them. If we cannot comfortably combine them, we should think of something else. ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 149

upwards and onwards We’re at the half-way point in this book. If we were pilots on a trans-Atlantic flight crossing the gap between two continents, we’d be somewhere around the Point of No Return. No land in sight on either horizon. We would be crossing an important line and yet, if we looked out on the ocean, we would see no line at all. I consider in my argument two distinct and related contexts for the evolution of the metaphoric initiative. We have been thinking about how it has been at work in and as the material world from its outset. The reality of difference and identity in electro-magnetic charges, the constitution of the atom, the formation of chemicals and chemical relations, the origins of life in the advent of replication tools like dna and rna, the fortuitous fact of mutation, the story of evolution with all its productive gaps and its penchant for reaching always further with, and into, its own associative leaps: these are the contiguous spaces through which the metaphoric initiative has passed, always adapting to the new materials and conditions that it both helped to form and inhabited. We turn now to its corresponding cultural expression in the domain of cognition and symbols. The advent of thinking is

218

missing link

a game changer. The nature of evolution itself, from here on, will be entirely different, and very much the same. Everything will change and become more of what it already is. Because the cultural domain is an extension of properties already embedded in matter, the divide we cross is also not a divide. Like metaphor itself, the transition is at once the gap that separates nature from culture and the “oomph” that effectively transgresses and erases it. We turn a page. We spent some time in the last chapter thinking about evolution as a romance narrative and how we might think of it as advancing and not advancing. In even the most secularized accounts, the advent of consciousness and symbolic thinking is thought of as one of nature’s more recent and promising good ideas. The metaphors we use to describe how, and whither, evolution unfolds, speaks volumes. In their chapter on “Orientational Metaphors,” Lakoff and Johnson discuss at length how so many of our views of human activity are organized along a metaphoric vertical axis.1 Good is up. Bad is down. More is up. Less is down. Progress is up. Recession is down. Conscious is up. Unconscious is down. In his theory of the Four Variations in Words with Power, Northrop Frye shows how this vertical metaphor is to a large extent culturally relative and that major shifts have occurred through our history in how we perceive the well springs of creative activity.2 In pre-romantic times, Frye argues, the powers we deferred to were seen as above us. Top-down authority was good. Hell was down below. Human being, in its imperfect social and natural world, was somewhere in the middle. Our myths and metaphors revealed a desire to receive or make room for those higher powers that were thought to descend to us, that we might rise to their condition. But in the late eighteenth century, our sense of imaginative orientation began to turn over in such a way that positive and redemptive influences began to be associated with metaphorically lower worlds.3 The changing attitude towards nature itself was the readiest example of this shift. We began to think of creative power – in both religious and scientific terms – as breaking out and up from a nature that one must descend into in order to release its repressed potential. God, for poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge and those who followed, was to be found inside nature or behind it, rather than above it. For Emerson a walk in the woods brought one more closely in touch with the sources of spiritual life than any sermon in church could.4 For

Metaphor and Cognition

219

scientists of the same era, a descent into nature meant something rather different, but it too yielded powerful new theories of our origin and place in the sources hidden there. For our purposes, the most telling expression of this shift in imaginative/scientific orientation comes with Darwin himself. The upshot of the Origin of Species, however much Darwin tried to avoid its implication, is that God didn’t plant us here ready made from the heavens above.5 We bootstrapped our way up from humble origins in earlier species whom we once normally thought of as below our attention in every sense. We rose from the primordial soup, stood up and began to use our powers of higher consciousness. Notice that “up” is still the vector of choice when it comes to thinking about change itself. What changes is our idea of the hidden forces that drive that ascent and how they work. Daniel Dennett proposed the metaphors of “Skyhook” and “Crane” in characterizing two different ideas of how evolution happens. Advocates of “Intelligent Design” presume some idea of a skyhook that intentionally draws the evolutionary process upwards towards itself and the state of higher intelligence that we represent. For Dennett, in any case, the creative agency at work in nature does not operate from the top down with intelligence, but from the bottom up as an indifferent maker of mistakes that happens to have a lot of time. Instead of a skyhook, he proposes the idea of a mechanical crane. One of the coy features of Dennett’s crane metaphor is that while construction cranes may appear to lift from above, they are actually fully grounded. With the cranework of our feisty and tireless hero “Trial-and-Error,” we can gradually “climb Mount Improbable,” as Dawkins put it. The metaphors of lift are ubiquitous in nearly all scientific and sociological accounts of evolution. The advent of human being represents, as far as we can make out from the evidence gathered, a qualitative leap above the abilities of our living cousins. The crucial point for evolutionary theorists is that we must hold to a respectable logic of continuous, material, cause-and-effect changes, and not turn in a moment of weakness or awe to any idea of an intentional designer. The advent of thinking and consciousness that we represent, then, must be understood as a seamless lift. The mechanism of change itself must not change, though again, the nature of its content may.

220

missing link

“putting for” and the golfer’s putt The seamless lift into cognition at this moment in evolution represents the crucial bridge in my argument, the “carrying across” into the possibility of human mind. It is the moment when the tenor of a pre-conscious ancestor was fastened upon by the vehicle of a few simple adaptive steps and was carried into a world of new meanings. The steps are, I believe, genuinely simple. Certainly a metaphor theorist is bound to think that, in our hunt for the origins of cognition, we’ve been missing the trees for the forest. In order that we not do so here, I will break down the “carrying-across” into as small steps as I can manage. When we talk about metaphor, both assimilative and substitutive, we talk about the “thinking more” aspect of the experience, the sense in which something changes that is a function of the hypothesized relationship. But there are those strict substitutions where our objective is not necessarily to change the meaning of either element, but merely to let one stand as a symbol of the other, to let one mean the other. The vehicle is “put for” the tenor, without necessarily intending to change our view of it. Such changes in meaning can and often do result, according to the nuances of the substituted word. But the function of a metonymy is often just to hold a place. The queen is not “like” her crown, though we may refer to her as one. Golfers use metonyms when they lay a marker down on the green to mark the spot where their ball landed. In doing so, they are not intending to say that the ball is a piece of plastic or like one, but that the latter is “put for” the former. Their relationship is contiguous, to use Roman Jacobson’s terminology.6 It is meant to represent, or mean, one associated commonplace of the ball, specifically in this case where it lies. Metonymy is a species of metaphor to the extent that a relationship between two elements is proposed. I’m going to say this thing, and, when I do, you should think of this other thing. As we’ll see shortly, understanding this particular feature of metonymy will help us better understand the precise nature of the lift into human consciousness that we’re considering. Sometimes, it seems, nature just needs to be a golfer and put a marker down.

Metaphor and Cognition

221

ouch Put a marker down for what? Let’s begin with the most basic interaction between two parts of an environment (large scale or small, it doesn’t matter): one thing bumps into another. Let’s consider a scenario. A meteorite falls from outer space and lands on the Canadian Shield and makes a huge crater. The crater is the result of the rock’s impact. We could even say that the crater symbolizes the rock’s impact, or its force. Now let’s consider another interaction between two parts of the environment, where at least one of them is living. Let me take a pin and stick it in your arm. “Ouch!” Now, why did you say that? Why didn’t you, like the earth, just let a little pin-hole form on your arm and leave it at that? Living creatures evolve ways of responding to events in the environment that will help them to do better there. In living creatures nerveendings are “put for” external events. They are put for events so that the events can become meaningful, that is, so that more can be done with them as they are further managed, or passed along, or communicated to other parts of the body.7 Certain ancestral, simple-celled creatures must have learned early on that there was no future in just having crater-like punctures on their surface marking attacks upon them. They must have “figured out” that to protect themselves from physical insult they would have to come up with some nifty tool that would not only record the event but pass the eventinformation around to other parts of the body so that they could react appropriately in turn. The original lift into consciousness came long before anything like consciousness itself. The “lift” was the evolution of the metonymic nerve ending that is “put for” outside events. Characterizing this transference of energy as metaphoric would be justified on many levels that we already understand: the impertinent energy of the pin is “carried across” the nerve ending and passes the fact of the event along to parts within. But if we left it at that, we would leave something out. Like the crown that is put for the queen, or the marker for the golf ball, there is nothing in the nerve ending that is like the pin that has awakened it. There is just the body’s decision to “make something that stands for what has

222

missing link

happened.” The pin can go its way, the body has what it needs, a metonym that it can work with.

nature crosses a line The metaphoric initiative, the leap, the carrying-across, has suddenly ushered in a different kind of relationship between a living organism and its environment. For the first time, a living creature could think more with (if not yet about) its experiences in the world. It has translated an external event into the kind of marker for an event that it could use on its own terms, in relation to its own chemistry, and as a function of its own system. As Karl Popper wrote, “the inputs are already partially interpreted by the receiving sense organ, and our sense organs themselves may be likened to hypotheses or theories – theories about the structure of our environment, and about the kind of information most needed and most useful to us.”8 We want to take a moment to appreciate the marvelous event that has taken place. We live in the world consciously, or as Heidegger would put it, we dwell poetically.9 We find ourselves in such and such a place and are conscious of as much. Our presence to ourselves as conscious beings represents a kind of standing-forth in nature. We are a part of nature and yet apart from it. We seem always to have felt this way. It can be no accident that creation stories such as the Bible’s tell of an Adamic figure who is on the one hand raised from the material soil, but on the other represents to his maker a special instance of creation. The world was made for him, evidently, however much he appears to be made of the world. In the Darwinian configuration, we think in similar terms: we are risen from nature, while still standing over and against it as uniquely conscious beings. Though scientists will use a different vocabulary, their Adam has indubitably risen from the soil and appears to possess a special authority and dispensation in his environment. Nature at this stage of evolution has crossed a line that is also not a line, a line that only becomes a line when we believe we have crossed it. Our crossing is a particularly germane instance of evolutionary metonymy. It is the great leap across the “gap” between nature and human being, the gap in which has dwelled every paradox of identity and dif-

Metaphor and Cognition

223

ference, belonging and alienation, body and mind, we have ever experienced. It is the moment when nature put a thing for itself. The relations we have struggled to understand in both scientific and humanistic terms between matter and spirit find their genesis in this innocent moment, where a material line not really there was drawn, and crossed over, and erased all at the same time, where a crossing both was and was not, where a gap that was also no gap at all opened and was bridged.

synapse has

SOME

nerve

We want to get back to that single-celled amoeba so that we can follow it in the direction of its next good idea. But we need to take a moment to bone up on nerve endings and the neurons they become. Nerves can be very long. There are also a great many of them. There are, for instance, over 2,500 nerve endings in each square centimetre of your hand. In the earliest living creature, just as much as in ourselves when we are surprised, our nerves make us jump. Your nerve cells give you the jitters, and there is a good reason for that. They have “jitters” in them, little electro-chemicals that like to be set off by other electro-chemicals and go haywire. A nerve cell is a road or a path for your jitters to jitter down. The nerve cell is made up of dendrites that are like cables that receive electro-chemical impulses or “action potentials” and carry them through to an “output cable” called the axon. Every cell has many dendrites that can receive signals and only one axon that sends a signal out. Different varieties of inputs to a cell from other axons will stimulate different levels of action potential. These potentials carry through to the cell’s axon with the spike in energy required to activate it. Let’s go back to the pin. There are nerve endings with chemicals in them that reach to the surface of the skin. They are essentially waiting there to be rousted into action. The physical impact of the pin on the surface of the skin causes a trauma: tissue gets crushed and damaged, vessels are broken, blood rushes, chemicals move and are caused to interact. Their interaction creates a spike in electrical potential (chemicals, remember, carry charges; indeed they are charges). That spike in energy rolls through the cell in the same way that electricity rolls through a wire, by electrons bumping electrons from their orbit, in turn bumping

224

missing link

electrons from their orbit, and so on down the line. This impulse can travel at very high speeds, as fast as 120 miles per second. As quick as thought, really. (That pain signal you felt at the pin prick could get from Toronto to Montreal in four seconds.) When the impulse reaches the other end of the nerve, on the axon, its energy-boost jump-starts the chemicals at rest there. “Jump-start” is just the word we want, because there is a jump (a metaphorical one) into a breach, and it starts something. Chemicals burst forth. Burst forth into what? Into the space between nerves. Our nerve endings work like a kind of fire brigade, with a series of individuals spread out on a line between a water supply and a fire. The action potential is passed along in a chain of reactions in order to communicate the desired resource to the next in line. The bucket, to test the analogy, is swung through the weight of each individual and is then passed across a space from that individual’s hand to the hand of the next in line. The electrical impulse is carried through the body of the nerve cell and then passes across the space between nerve cells to the next one in series. Somehow, the action potential of the pre-synaptic nerve cell has to be carried across the gap to the post-synaptic nerve cell. That all important space between is called the synapse (figure 7.1). I find synapses fascinating. They are the ne plus ultra of the metaphoric initiative and they make mind and consciousness possible. We aren’t at the point of mind and consciousness yet but the synapse is the next stage in our evolution towards them. The word “synapse” comes from the Greek (σύν and ἅπτειν) meaning “to join together.” The synapse is the “missing link,” the gap that joins. Now we can go back to the chemicals that we left bursting forth at the end of the axon. These chemicals are transmitters, the jumpers across a gap. There are several different kinds of transmitters that are unique to particular nerve cells or unique to the different kinds of work the nerve cell can do. Our neurotransmitters (between nerve cells in the brain) include serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, dopamine and gammaamino butyric acid. There are also lots of helper chemicals (like monoamine oxydase and catechol-O-mythyl transferase) that do things like prep the receptors on the post-synaptic cell and break down the neurotransmitters after they have done their work. These chemicals can also act as inhibitors by breaking down the neurotransmitters before they

Metaphor and Cognition

225

Figure 7.1 The neuron synapse: metaphor in the brain.

reach their destination or by making receptor cells less receptive. This picture of a synapse is over-simplified, as you might well imagine. We will be able to complicate the picture in a little while when we come to neurons themselves, which are a species of nerve cell. But for now, we have our metaphoric ducks lined up in order.

how to save on hardware costs Why do we need to have many millions of nerve endings? Why couldn’t the human body just be, or contain, one enormous and continuous nerve cell that had millions of branches attached to millions of muscles and other body parts and performing millions of tasks? What would that look like? I picture one of those old switching terminals with a spaghetti mass of interwoven wires. As we learned with the early telephone, having every house equipped with single dedicated wires heading to every other house is not the most efficient way of going about things. Indeed, the introduction of the operator spoke to this very issue. Gaps were in-

226

missing link

troduced at “terminals” called switch boards, where operators could connect one phone to another only when the need arose. More flexibility, less hardware. The living body discovered this advantage long before, that likes and unlikes are best joined together not by using some kind of gating mechanism that opens and closes along myriad coiling tentacles that are already joined but where synapses are employed only under certain conditions. Look at the picture on the right in figure 7.2. A plug is connected (by an operator) to a receptacle when it lights up, i.e. when a signal is coming through. Without this handy design feature, there would have to be constant connections between the flashing plug and every wire on the board. You can imagine the mess. And because you wouldn’t want every signal going everywhere, there would still have to be some way of directing each signal impulse along a particular pathway.10 You would need gates that opened and closed down the line to guide the signal home. You save a great deal of energy, hardware, and space if you only make potential connections between nerves, or more specifically networks of nerves, and allow the impulses to find their own way as needed.

Figure 7.2 The neuron network and the switchboard.

Metaphor and Cognition

227

metaphor’s leap into the synapse Consider how metaphorically at home we are in this area. We have our two elements juxtaposed in two nerve cells. A crosses over to B (A B). A property of the pre-synaptic cell is transferred over to the property of the post-synaptic cell. The two cells are both identifiable and different. They are identifiable not only because they are made of the same thing, but also because they represent the same “action potential,” the same momentum of meaning, or stimulation, as it were. They carry that stimulation along in the direction of an expanded potential or significance. They are different, simply, because they are two cells, but also because they lie at different points in the system. In between the two cells is the almost-but-not-quite-magical metaphoric gap. In the gap dwells the transmitter (the putter-across: “trans,” across or over, and “metre,” to put). A whimsical neurologist might look at the metaphoric equation A = B, or A is B, and identify the equal sign or the copula verb as kinds of neurotransmitter. Launching off from A, an equal sign swims out and hooks up with B. An “is” bursts free from a tenor and moves across its synaptic gap to a vehicle. We want to keep our eye on the transforming initiative that passes through the synapse, where an exchange of energies wakens a resonance in the down-stream or post-synaptic nerve ending and stimulates cascades of firing nerve cells, or meanings, that were not otherwise likely. The synapse also gives the body a way of distinguishing cell events while joining them at the same time. It identifies and distinguishes. The synapse was the mechanism that enabled complex animals to evolve. And it is at the root of metaphoric thinking, as we will see. The synapse alone may be nature’s greatest invention. It is the manifestation of energized space, a “living” gap through which energy may pass. It expedites and holds in abeyance. It is where impulses are realized. It is the space of possibility and variation. It holds a place open for freedom, for decision and intuition. Synapse is the dynamo of mind and consciousness. It is therefore the space where spirit moves. But it is getting ahead of itself.

228

missing link

enter the interneuron So far we have been talking about how one nerve cell relates to another across a gap. While nerves can behave like the neurons in your brain, they are slightly different and serve slightly different functions. We need to go back to our pin-in-the-arm analogy briefly. We have identified a capacity of response to external inputs. A signal communicates to the rest of the body that an invasion has occurred. It fires and an action potential unfolds in the direction of a muscle response. The Nobel Prize winning neuro-chemist Eric Kandel spent most of his life studying the reactive mechanisms at work in the giant marine snail Aplysia. If you poke Aplysia in the side, it will move away. A receptor cell at the skin surface communicates an action potential to a muscle-nerve on the other side of the body and makes it contract. Kandel chose to study Aplysia because there is a direct connection between the input nerve ending and the muscle that will contract and propel it in the opposite direction. For early organisms this direct relationship between input and reaction might serve most of its needs. But we are not an organism of this sort. Consider a person on a small couch at a party. Like Aplysia, the person can move away when he gets bumped by someone who sits down beside him. Aplysia apparently gets along well enough just moving away in all circumstances. But we would be simple indeed if a muscle jerked to make us move away every time someone came near. We actually do have quite of few of these … in our knees for instance, where a tap will inspire a “knee-jerk” response, where the relation between input and output is relatively unmediated. But back to the couch: what if the person who sits down beside you is Karen, whom you’ve been eyeing now for weeks, but didn’t have the nerve to call. You need another input to check to see if the intruder is Karen or not. Let’s assume for a moment that vision was as simple as the nerve ending for the pin. Your eye-for-Karen has been stimulated by the movement of Karen in your field of vision, and like the pin nerve ending, has fired in recognition. Maybe there is also Karen’s perfume that you recognize too, so that an olfactory nerve ending has gone off as well. Now, you can’t just have these three nerve endings connected directly to your escape muscle, shouting different instructions. One of them is saying “Move from the couch” while the

Metaphor and Cognition

229

other two are saying, “Turn towards the adjacent body and say something nice.” Obviously you need a more complicated system, one in which simple inputs can be gathered together and computed in relation to one another so that more appropriate responses can be recommended. You need a bunch of cells that are not just input sensors and not just muscles that jump. You need interneurons. “Interneurons,” writes Kandel, “the most numerous class of neurons in the brain, serve as relays between sensory and motor neurons.”11 The principal job of the interneuron is to take a signal and pass it along to other interneurons, themselves collecting signals from inputs and passing them along. Interneurons put their sensory signals in play so that more nuanced responses to a variety of complicated inputs can be entertained. Most neurons in the brain are interneurons in Kandel’s definition. Like nerve endings, interneurons serve as memory markers, “put for” the fact of a prior nerve stimulus. The kind of lift that we are into here is almost intangible, and easily missed. A nerve ending is put for a pin prick, and then an interneuron is put for that nerve ending. The nerve ending itself is capable of stimulating a response (a muscle contraction). An interneuron, on the other hand, is capable of passing its record of an input into a domain where nothing in the way of a response necessarily or immediately follows. The input is noted but then set in abeyance for further managing. It is put in play with other interneurons in a gap where, depending on the relations between interneuron signals, responses will be recommended, laid aside for further interaction, absorbed, or ignored entirely. We’re thinking of a different sort of gap, one that abides between the inputs and outputs themselves, between stimulus and response. That larger gap – effectively your entire person – is like a kind of synapse itself, where a superficial signal passes through your skin into your nervous system and then issues in some further action or meaning at the other end. Stimulus and response are thus metaphorically identified on a certain level. The pin causes me to jump. They are also distinguished, since now much comes between them. Their transmitters carry their signals across to further results, further meanings and actions. An action potential that hangs and circulates among networks of interneurons is “thinking more” with and about the energy passing through it. This

230

missing link

“thinking more,” the creation of a space in which more thinking is possible – be it a mere delay in response, a hanging fire, a daydream, or a complex thought – is the essence of metaphor in Ricoeur’s terms. But we are not yet thinking. Even the response of Aplysia, after all, involves interneurons. An early organism can have sensors not only for touch but for factors like temperature and light. Let’s say that an amoeba has evolved so that it only moves away when there is light present and the water is warmer. This might indicate that it was too close to the surface of the water and needed to go deeper. So, you have three different nerve endings capable of communicating inputs from the external world. The amoeba needs to move away when, say, all three nerves are stimulated. You need a switching station then, the kind we talked about earlier, where signals can be recorded and passed along under certain conditions. In the case of the interneuron that causes Aplysia’s muscle to contract, certain impulse intensities are required. If three inputs fire simultaneously, the spike in energy will pass a threshold and so fire in turn (instructing the muscle to contract). If only two inputs fire (say, only the two that sense warmth and touch), the spike in energy is insufficient, the axon does not fire, and the cell remains dormant.

the bulgy node where thoughts live It is easy to see how far we are still from anything we would recognize as thinking. But it is important to see how close we are to it as well. A neuron is just another kind of nerve ending. It receives signals and sends signals. Neurons are a form of interneuron; they are particular nervecells that stand between stimulus and response. If you have just a few of them, or even quite a number of them, you can have an admittedly complicated, but still very unconscious network of synaptic relations that drive everything from knee-jerk reactions, to the regulation of your breathing and heart rate, to the release of adrenalin when you feel fear. If you get enough interneurons relating through vast interpenetrating networks, letting their action potentials wash through one another, then you have the beginnings of a thinking brain. As living creatures evolved, it became a useful design advantage to have certain kinds of interneurons clustered together where they can in-

Metaphor and Cognition

231

teract more efficiently. If they evolve to become complicated enough, the cluster of nerve endings will start to need more room, so will expand into a space of its own, a node of sorts, for instance, the bump on the back of an ancestral lizard, the lead end of a snake, or the bulgy part of an octopus. It turns out that, if you cluster all your interneuron hardware in that node, it becomes a good place to put your sense organs as well, like eyes and ears and taste buds, so that they are close to the activity hub and you save on wiring. You’ve got to have room for all these parts, so the hub will evolve a certain shape to accommodate them. Enter your head and pretty face. If you want to bring on one of those moments of existential alienation, just think of your head as a growth at the top of your body, a handy tote-box for interneurons. It is in the nature of the interneuron to be a messenger rather than a doer. The vast majority relate only to one another, rather than to inputs and outputs directly. For us at this stage, then, the medium is indeed the message. I love that scene in Lord of the Rings when word of an invasion is carried rapidly across mountain ranges by means of fires lit on their peaks, each station passing the signal down the line until it reaches its destination, the point where action will be taken. Why I find it so moving may have do with this picture of a world where nothing, or no one, is alone, where empty spaces can be bridged, where a light appears and is passed on.

just more of the same Funny how much talking one can do about thinking and the seeds of thinking experience before one gets anywhere near it. We are not at the level of brain activity you would find in your average fish or mosquito, let alone a dog. We’re trying to imagine theoretically dumb animals, like heads on pedestals, that evince a kind of neuronal activity that we can call “thinking” writ small. For it is thinking writ small. We have our simple circuits of nerves and interneurons. All we need now is more of the same and the kind of complexity that comes with quantity and volume. Strange things happen when we go from a dozen nerves or neurons to one hundred billion of them. All a single neuron can do is fire or not fire according to a sensitivity

232

missing link

determined by its individual chemical thresholds. If the chemical charge it receives from its pre-synaptic neuron or neurons is sufficient, it will fire. If not, it remains dormant. It is on or it is off. As cognitive theorists like Barbara Churchland show, working with computer models, neurons at this level of sophistication are very much like your single programmable bite. A bite can be one of two things, a “1” or a “0,” a “yes” or a “no,” an “open” or a “closed.” You can, if you wish, think of the “1” as the bite firing, and the “0” as the bite not firing. In themselves, they don’t amount to much, and we certainly wouldn’t think of them as embodying any kind of thought process. What can many 1’s and 0’s do that a few can’t? We’ve already anticipated a modelling of interneuron activity where more than one signal is being handled. Our single-celled amoeba, we decided, would only move when the temperature was higher, when there was light, and when it was touched. If all three fire at once, the combined charges spike in the interneuron and send a charge rolling down its own axon and into its downstream synapse. Let’s make this a little more complicated, using the computer model. Let’s create an electric circuit made of switches that are wired in series, terminating at a light bulb. “In series” means that all the switches are aligned in a row, so that if the current is stopped at any one point, the light will not come on. Now let’s give these individual switches unique sensitivities. One of them will close when a sufficient vibration is present. Another will close when the noise level reaches a certain decibel. A third closes when the temperature reaches a certain degree. A fourth closes when someone happens to say “dog biscuit.” Each individual switch will close when its own criteria are met. The light will come on when all four switches have been closed. If you have heat, “dog biscuit,” and noise level, but no vibration, then the light stays off. This very simple series circuit would constitute only a small part of brain circuitry. Let’s try complicating the circuit. What if the switch that reads heat sensitivity were itself activated by a circuit that had its own criteria for being open or closed? Let’s say the heat switch only closes when the heat rises quickly, and only when it is winter and already cold. There would need to be a heat-rising-quickly switch and an it-is-winter switch. Those switches would both need to be closed for the heat switch

Metaphor and Cognition

233

to close. Now let’s say that the heat-rising-quickly switch will only close when the heat rise is larger than ten degrees in thirty seconds and when the temperature is in the range of thirty to fifty degrees Celsius. You would need switches for these criteria as well. Now let’s make it messy. Let’s say that you want the heat-rising-quickly switch to close, whether or not its own criteria are met, if a dog barks. And let’s say that if that heat-rising-quickly switch is closed by a dog bark, you want it to turn the light on regardless of whether or not the other criteria are met. You’re going to have to work in some parallel circuitry so that the earlier criteria can be bypassed. We are only just beginning to develop a complicated circuit. The beep that tells you that your lights are still on after you’ve shut the car off is more complicated than this (the car is off, but the door is not yet open; the door is open, and the car is off, but the lights are off too; the lights are on, the door is open, but the car is still running, and so on). But we can see already, that the light’s coming on will be determined by a fairly complicated series of factors and relationships between factors. Let’s go back to our fellow on the couch. Let’s call him Dave. We left Dave wondering whether he should get up and leave when someone sits down beside him. There he sits. Someone sits down beside him. If it is not Karen, he will move. If it is Karen, he will stay. But he’s a little smarter than this. If it is a Karen, but not the Karen he desires, he will move. Or, if it is not the Karen he desires, but is a rather attractive Karen nonetheless who happens to dress like her, he will stay. If it is not Karen, is attractive, but doesn’t dress like her, he will go. If it is not Karen, is attractive, doesn’t dress like her, but has brought him a beer, he will stay. If it is his accountant, he will go. If he has to use the men’s room, he will go. How much he will let needing the men’s room determine his decision to go will depend on how attractive the person who is not Karen is. We won’t try to map this out, but you want to visualize a switch inside Dave that represents a decision to go or stay. Branching above that switch are a series of complicated inputs, the various relationships between which will determine whether the go switch is activated or not. It is already more complicated than this, because if Dave isn’t going to have a passive default position, that is, if he wants to be able to decide actively to stay, he is not only going to need a go switch, but also a stay

234

missing link

switch, both of which connect to an intermediary switch that will measure the intensity of their firings and respond accordingly, with a signal to Dave’s leg muscles or instructions to smile and say “Hello.” In his book Pattern Thinking, Andrew Coward uses the term “cascade patterns” to talk about how a neuron signal will wash through complicated networks.12 Cascade patterns are commonly known as brainwaves, though I’ll use the former term for its emphasis on relation, as against the idea in brainwaves of energies in motion, though obviously both apply. Each neuron, again, can only fire or not fire. But its firing or not firing will be a function of complicated cascade patterns that precede it. And they in turn will be a small part of further cascade patterns. It really doesn’t do any longer to talk about single neurons, but of neuron networks. Your ability to register on your optic nerve the edge of the page you are reading, a simple vertical line of a certain length and shading, requires hundreds of firing neurons. Those firing neurons are “saying” different things about the edge of the page, its position, its texture, its distance from you, not to mention its duration in time, or its belonging to anything around it like a page. Most of the networks in our brains are not actually receiving signals from outside. Most neurons and neuron patterns are forms of input themselves. Ideas come to you. You remember things. You think of a word. Those neuron clusters receive signals from one another. Dave’s being able to say “Hello” to Karen or not-Karen is really a function of vast neuronal networks, emotional, verbal, abstractly and physically visual, tactile, and libidinal. These feed into other networks, following asides, bundling results, looping back and leaping ahead, all round and round at lightning speed. Every least, unconscious registration of an unthought, an unfeeling, a not-yet-experience, is the product not of single neurons but massive populations of them relating in impressive metaphorical fashion.

before you say anything I wonder how many neurologists and cognitive philosophers (if any should read this book) are snorting at my simplifications here. The good sport inside me would get up and snort with them. Another side of me, though, would be touchier (like the Aplysia). “This isn’t intended to be

Metaphor and Cognition

235

a book on neurology!” Or I’d venture a more reasoned defence, that creating an eight-lane highway for my own little procession of metaphorsat-work-in-us would be counterproductive. Readers who want a real cognitive philosopher’s presentation of these complex processes and the issues that attend them will have to go to Pinker, Dennett, and Coward, among others, for further reading. Still, we have got ourselves to a level of considerable complexity in understanding brain behaviour and we should stop and take a look at the view from here, and maybe give it a name. At a fairly early stage of brain evolution, you can start to have what Andrew Coward calls “a recommendation architecture” of cognition.13 Coward notes that the more sophisticated a brain structure becomes, the more it begins to recommend behaviours and responses, rather than command them outright. We no longer have simple circuits that read an input and then say to a muscle “Get up from the couch” or to another “Stay where you are.” The more complicated those inputs become, from all sources external and internal, the more they become mere recommendations for action. We no longer have anything so grand as an identifiable result from computations. Inputs are measured, sorted, and evaluated, and their importance is ranked; some will weigh more heavily than others. The looping cascades of networks will become so dizzying that the outcomes will be more nuanced, calibrated, qualified. It will seem very much as though this ocean of firing networks were saying, “Yes, there’s A and B, but have you considered C and D, and what do you mean C is already accounted for in A, and D is irrelevant under the circumstances? Have you even considered R and H?” It is like thinking, but it is important to remember that this “conversation” may actually just be a cascade firing from your optic nerve sorting out two subtle shades of blue, or a very unconscious stage in your starting to make a “B” sound in the colour just named. Computers, relatively speaking, are still pretty bossy machines. You type a key and it produces a letter. You make a chess move and it responds (after crunching some permutations) with a better one. Computers can hang, though, when the cpu starts looping in infinite circles that don’t get anywhere. Of course human beings “hang fire” as well, to use one of Henry James’s favorite phrases (a rather good one, in our context), and freeze, even appear to shut down under the pressure of cognitive dissonance.

236

missing link

Because your brain is a more subtle handler of recommendation inputs, you might be able to manage “Um, I’m confused,” or a stutter, or at least a sheepish expression, or an impulse to flee. On a more sophisticated level still, you can experience genuine conflicts between inputs that can give rise to feelings of guilt, remorse, regret. At a still deeper level you can have conflicts between various pre-conscious but highly influential inputs and the destination of their recommendations in your conscious thinking (more on this in the next chapter). In such cases you can develop “neuroses,” odd or troubling behaviours that repeat. One solution we have experimented with this past century is to get yourself off to a therapist, lie down on a couch, and talk. The talking cure helps you to find and give names (symbolic markers) to those troubling inputs so that they can at least be stimulated, passed over, or passed through, more carefully in combination with other inputs. New associative cascades can build bridges over old gaps and show the way across their missing links.14 The fact that you can usually get something out of a person who is befuddled suggests that we can be a little more flexible in our commands. Your brain isn’t telling you to haul off at the parking attendant, it is “recommending” that you do so. Whether you do so or not is up to “you.” Now, who that you is is a puzzle indeed, perhaps the ultimate puzzle so far as we thinkers and our problems of free will are concerned. Where do recommendations go? Who or what receives a recommendation? We have seen how the recommendation architecture of cognition creates a space of abeyance, a metaphoric gap of sorts where the links between stimulus and response remain open. The enabling betweenwheres of the metaphoric initiative has risen into a special form of mindful lingering. We come to the threshold of consciousness.

8

A Word Aside: The Detour that Became a Thoroughfare start language thinking We take a big leap at this point, a metaphoric leap, a leap that is no leap at all. We move from relatively simple cascades of computing neurons to our existential experience of consciousness. In the last chapter, we worked up some of the tools we need to achieve conscious thinking. We kept it simple, but the rudiments were there. I see this movement then from relatively elementary forms of thinking to more sophisticated symbolic modes and the qualia of mind they present to us as a question of degree rather than of kind. The nature of the neuron does not change, but only how our neurons interact given the architecture of our brains. One central and conspicuous tool that appears to have been added to the recipe of consciousness at a very early stage is language. This is not intended though to be a study of the evolutionary origins of language. The critical and theoretical literature on the subject is vast. There are biological, socio-biological, and exclusively cultural theories; many of them are complementary, others are mutually exclusive in how they explain features of the language function that may have been accounted for in other terms. My argument isn’t meant to intrude on current debates about how language itself arose; I would certainly not suggest that the metaphoric initiative is the only factor in the evolutionary process. I would like to suggest, though, that whatever other factors are active in this evolutionary momentum, we can see the metaphoric initiative at work as well, shaping contours of relation, linking and separating, breaking and making. Once you have the metaphoric spatial relations guaranteed by an originary event like the Big Bang, you have the potential, even the inevitability, of the language function per se. It should be obvious by now that I have by-passed the advent of language. I assume it and

238

missing link

try to show how, once again, the metaphoric initiative is present at both ends, before and after language came along. In Robin Allott’s view, attempts to account for the advent of culture by pointing to our indigenous penchant for symbolic thinking in language are incomplete. Citing thinkers such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, Charles Lumsden and E.O. Wilson, Allott notes a penchant for thinking about culture as essentially abstract, disembodied, and arbitrary. “To assume that language is symbolic, that language is the prime example of a human cultural phenomenon, and that therefore cultural traits are also essentially symbolic and arbitrary makes a bad starting point for any theory of the relation between culture and biological evolution” (Allott). He would almost certainly identify some of these shortcomings in my argument, since I do see the moment when nature happened upon the practice, in living creatures, of putting things for other things as an event of significant evolutionary lift. He favours a view of the origin of language that emphasizes its non-symbolic, nonsymbolizing functions and attributes. His alternative approach resists the theory of discrete evolutionary steps that lead gradually to the use of language (such as can be found in Pinker’s The Language Instinct) and instead proposes “the formation of the language capacity by conversion or extension from previously developed perceptual or motor systems, by cerebral reorganization by which the complexities of language reflect the pre-existing complexities of the perceptuo-motor systems.”1 Allott’s book The Motor Theory of Language Origin favours a strongly mechanistic approach, whereby features of non-linguistic motor functions are exaptated and re-deployed to fill a communicative gap. The potential for language, then, is already embodied in evolved material functions. The missing link of the metaphoric initiative may help us around any impasses that the language theorists may have come to in trying to account for the evolution of the language function. If my argument is of any value in these debates, it will occupy a middle ground between the culture-as-symbolic-abstraction theorists and the language-as-embodiedmotor-function theorists. Allott writes: Rather than considering the appearance of language in human evolution as the product of some mysterious general symbolizing capacity, we need a genetic (physiological and neurological) theory of language origin and language function; a physiological theory of language ori-

A Word Aside

239

gin and function would constitute the missing link in the relation between evolution and culture.2 The convenience of a theory of metaphor along the lines that I propose is that it represents a both/and rather than either/or alternative to the nature/culture divide. The metaphoric initiative is the missing link that is both there and not there at this crucial moment of transition. It is both symbolic and embodied, metaphorically identifying the two as one. It is both an abstract process, “a mysterious general symbolizing capacity” and a “genetic” embodiment of concrete physiological changes, quite actually written into our dna, unfolding in matter through time.

neuron and meto nym Words are code, just as patterns of nucleic-acid pairs are, and just as cascades of firing neurons are. They are put for external phenomena and experiences. Sometimes we use words as descriptions of the external world, in which case we are granting them a status very like the neural codes that, as we will see in the next chapter, represent qualia like colour and sound. We judge their accuracy and value according to how their internal relationships appear to line up with relationships we perceive without (cf. the discussion of descriptive language, 145). But we also use words to argue, to compel, and to imagine, and in these cases we allow the internal relationships in the code to drift from relationships we perceive in the external world. We can still think of these words as metonyms, except that the reality they are put for is no longer out there but inside you: a need or idea you have, a scene you have imagined, a feeling you experience. A great deal of misunderstanding in our world stems from how these different uses of language are confused with one another (a rhetorical argument confused with a conceptual one, for instance), or even manipulated to sinister purpose. But in all cases, we agree, words are metonyms; they are put for things. So we need to think about the metonymic status of language and how it might be related to the activities of neurons. Neurons, again, are memory markers. A neuron’s “memory” of synaptic events, Eric Kandel reminds us, is “put for” action potentials that precede it. With the lowly but essential interneurons, we saw how nerve

240

missing link

endings pass their signals along to sets of intervening action potentials that are freed up to do more work than the nerve endings could do on their own. They are freed up because there are billions of interneurons that can set inputs in complicated relation to one another. Something of this is true of language. Recall Swift’s parody of simple, no-nonsense communication in Gulliver’s Travels (cf. 139). You have a set of objects, say a rock, a flower, and a bone. Two philosophers sit down and hold discourse with one another using the objects themselves, taking them out of their bags and passing them back and forth. At this level, the function of the objects would resemble that of the superficial nerve endings. They would be metonymic symbols now, not just rocks. They would be used to say things like “rock” and “bone.” But they would be comically limited in their communicative potential (Swift’s philosophers don’t seem troubled by this; they may have been British empiricists). You need a more flexible language. You need something to be put for those basic metonyms that can be passed back and forth, put into play with one another, construed in a myriad relations. You need words. Like interneurons, the words are put for idea potentials in the mind, idea potentials that are themselves related to various internal and external inputs. Those words are free by their symbolic nature. The word “rock” is not the rock itself and can be moved around and related more conveniently. One of the things that makes words valuable is that they need not lead immediately to an actual response. Words relate first and foremost to one another. They set forth, converse, feint, parry, hold in abeyance, recommend and dissuade, and most especially find likely and unlikely connections across gaps that open up new possibilities. Unlike the neural codes that make up conscious experience, words are not entirely in our heads. We can write them down, speak them aloud, or store them in books and computers. They are “out there” in the external world, even when we are just thinking about them. How did this happen? The same metonymic process we have been talking about here was put in reverse. It started when nature came up with the interesting idea of the interneuron, the lowly nerve ending recycled for further work. It was not long before it discovered that the interneuron could be recycled itself, that the nervy “tweener” that laid the groundwork for more sophisticated handling of internal events might also be externalized to help us to handle our thoughts with more sophistication and nuance.

A Word Aside

241

The pin-prick has, in effect, been returned to its roots. In the beginning of this process, it passed or was lifted into a nerve ending that was put for it internally and then passed or was lifted into the interneuron that could set it in further play inside the body. When a lot of interneurons got together they formed brains. Then some of those interneurons passed or were lifted into external markers called words, which could then be spread around in the world to take their place among actual rocks and pin-pricks. The kind of evolutionary lift that occurred when a fired nerve was “put for” a pin-prick is now the same kind of lift in which a cypher is “put for” an internal thought and sent back out to play. Suddenly we found ourselves able to look at our acts of mind in the same way that the body was able, via the interneuron, to look at its inputs. The world was lifted towards consciousness with the interneuron. That lift into consciousness may have been completed when our acts of mind were lifted back into the world and we became witness to them, a thinking made real. This externalizing of neuronal activity will revisit us in Chapter 10.

words and ideas Most definitions of metaphor proper refer to “a figure of speech” or “a linguistic device.” The association with language tends to be primary. Others feel – and this has been central to my argument – that figures of speech, language metaphors, arise out of and express an associative behaviour that is physical, chemical, and neurobiological. It may seem like a split hair to some, trying to distinguish metaphors as functions of words and metaphors as mental processes, but linguists and cognitive philosophers spend a good deal of time trying to figure out which is more important, or comes first. What, in short, is the relation between a neuron network that is put for an idea-stimulus and the neuron network that is put for the word or words that stand for that ideastimulus? In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker is unequivocal in his argument that idea precedes word, that thinking is not entirely a function of the words that stand for that thinking.3 There must have been some sort of cognitive activity that came before words, Pinker argues, or how would words have come along in the first place? Others argue that words

242

missing link

are start-to-finish constitutive of every cognitive event in your brain, that the event cannot be separated from the word that in a very real sense engenders it. It is only because cognitive events use words that they can be moved around and recognized at all. The word is the cognitive content that you are able to look at. From this perspective, the word, or some original symbolic form of it, was already present in the first evolutionary instance of thought. There is a related but distinct difficulty that we need to mention briefly. We think of images in the same way that we think of words, i.e. that both are mimetic representations of visual and cognitive inputs. An image of a thing is not the thing itself in the external world. It is a metonymic description of that thing, a description of various input stimuli. But how is an idea distinct from an image? How is an idea not a picture of an idea? James Joyce said that “a thought is the thought of a thought.”4 A picture of an idea will strike us as different in significant ways from a picture of an object. But are they not both pictures? When you “form an idea,” as we like to say, are you not effectively forming an image of something, or sequence of images, which are then understood as being the idea? The language we use to describe thinking supports this. As Lakoff and Johnson showed, this is one of the principle metaphors that we live by. I can picture what you’re saying, I can see your logic, I can erase memory, and so on. An idea then is a picture, or network of pictures, produced by the brain as a way of organizing relationships and forming and executing its algorithms. It would be difficult to distinguish word and idea so far as cognitive contents are concerned. But the question remains: is there a manner in which the formation of idea-images precedes the formation of word-images? We must look at how and when they are respectively formed. Let’s start with this premise: for a thought to be a thought, it already has to have, or be, a sign of itself. (Which verb you choose, incidentally, will determine which side of the word-idea fence you graze on.) Let’s follow the logic of a cognitive event. Something happens in the external world and a stimulus neuron fires reactively in your brain in response to it. That “first” neuron is connected to a myriad other neurons. Some of these we think of as directly, thoughtlessly, reactive (the detector that makes my finger pull back quickly before I am aware of deciding what

A Word Aside

243

to do). The majority of neurons in a very real sense “make space” for more computing. Because they are the neurons that come between stimulus and response, they are the domain of possibility. It is among these neurons that we entertain more subtle and various responses, calculations of alternative approaches, other inputs, before ending up finally (in a very simple circuit) stimulating some kind of response. These memory markers in the brain, according to some thinkers, prove the ultimate primacy of language, simply because they are memory markers. It doesn’t matter that they don’t look like words yet at this point. They “stand for” the stimulus that gave rise to them. The neurons that they in turn stimulate would be signs of signs and so on. Clusters of neurons begin to relate to other clusters in the manner of signs. Networks of signification evolve. Every nerve that fires in the human body is word-like, or word-ready – which is to say, already metaphorically identifiable with words. Let’s follow one of those chains of neurological reaction that are toppling other neurons like dominoes along established pathways. Many of the memory markers for the original stimulus have now become stimuli themselves of other neurons. Idea-images connect with other idea-images to form networks, and networks of networks. Very quickly we find that we are experiencing a great many cognitive events that don’t yet, or don’t yet necessarily, have actual words associated with them. Somewhere along the chain of reaction there will be neuron networks that are identifiable with the sound and meaning and look of word-images. They will be handy for consolidating and committing to memory parts of the idea-image or images that have already fired. But before we get there, we can feel a great deal of mental activity going on in our heads that doesn’t have a language for expression. Doesn’t the debate, then, of which comes first, word or idea, ultimately come down to the question of where, on the line from original stimulus-neuron to later word-image, we count the memory markers as actually first being or being like words. Those who feel that words come first, that there are only words for ideas, no ideas without words, will argue that the word first exists in the immediate memory marker of the original nerve stimulus. Those like Pinker who argue that the ideas come first and have an independent, if complexly word-interwoven existence in our brains, will argue that the word first exists when it comes to mind

244

missing link

as an actual word. So, when is a word a word? When it looks like a word? Or when it behaves in the same way that words do? Such an understanding can help to clarify where and how the parties differ, but we don’t need to decide ourselves one way or the other. We only need to picture the gaps, the metaphoric gaps along the way: gaps between the original nerve ending and the interneuron memory marker for that nerve ending; or between that memory marker and the neuron (or network of neurons) that is the sound and look and iconicity of a word for that memory marker. These metaphoric gaps are nothing less than the neuronal synapses that are the site of a crossing, a carrying across the empty spaces between neurons where energies are exchanged. So we can argue about whether metaphoric behaviours apply only downstream to words themselves, which embody ideas, or upstream to the idea images, which lie behind words. In the end, the struggle to understand the relation between word and idea, where word does and does not equal idea, is a struggle with the paradox of metaphor. What an oddly short chapter on language. And in a book on metaphor, language’s most prized possession! To have focussed more on the question of language per se, it may now be clear, would actually defeat a central tenet of my argument. It would imply that there is a specific point in evolutionary time at which we began to talk about metaphor. Whereas my point is that metaphor and the “language of metaphor” has been with us from the start. This entire book is about the language of metaphor and by inference the metaphor of language. To “carry the point across,” all I really need at this stage is a small chapter to argue that the chapter is, in the spirit of the missing link itself, no chapter at all.

9

The Metaphor of Consciousness

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened … ~Richard Wilbur1 That these two forms of existence, matter and consciousness, have indeed a common origin, seems to me probable … I believe also that neither the matter constituting a world nor the consciousness which utilises this matter can be explained by themselves, and that there is a common source of both this matter and this consciousness. ~Henri Bergson2

to p drawer Our brains store memories, images, pictures of things, feelings and ideas, words, the information and knowhow you need to tie your shoe and sound out the letter “K.” But you must have puzzled over this question at some point already in this book. How does a neuron, or even a network of neurons store things like pictures and sounds and ideas? If at some point we were able to isolate a network of neurons where an image of your house was stored, would we see a little image of your house inside it? Is there a network of neurons that, taken as a whole, would be like the keys on a piano keyboard that when struck sounds the desired note? How do we get from the physical reality of neuronal synaptic events to our conscious perception of things like houses and letters? How do you get a line fragment, a shade of light, a sound bite, part of a feeling or a piece of an image into a neuron? Is a neuron, or a network of them, like a little box that you can put things in, as Eeyore puts the gift of a broken balloon into an empty honey pot? The moment has always struck me as suggestively existential.

246

missing link

For most of my life I’ve thought of memory along these lines. Someone asks me about my childhood and I rummage around in my head and pull out a box called “Hockey on the Pond” containing a memory of long-ago Saturday afternoons. There it was all that time, “Hockey on the Pond,” yellowing and growing brittle, unthought-of until I happened upon it while sorting through the top drawer labelled “childhood memories.” My struggle to remember something was a struggle to find where I’d put the darn thing. “Now it must be here somewhere, just give me a minute ….” Later I began to think of memories as neurons that store information for things the same way the memory stick on your key chain stores your pictures and text files. Just as a decent picture of myself on the pond would require, what, three megabytes of storage space, so my memory of “Hockey on the Pond” might require the activity of a few thousand neurons (depending on the “clarity” and “resolution” of the memory). A neuron network had a content, and once that content was recorded, you could lay the network aside and not fire it up, or plug it in, until you wanted to read its contents again. This was closer to where neurologists are now, but there were two problems. I was still thinking that there was a latent picture of a frozen pond in that neuron network. But there is no picture on the memory stick; the stick stores a code for a picture that is translated on a computer screen into pixels. No single pixel can look much like a frozen pond by itself, but together, with one pixel saying “be grey” and another pixel saying “be blue,” a picture results. And what’s more, the code would still need to be translated into my consciousness of it. I used to play with the game Lite-Brite as a child (figure 9.1). You have a light box with a perforated plastic lid; sheets of black construction paper are inserted between the lid and the underlying bulb, so that no light shines through. As you inserted coloured glass pins into the perforated holes, breaking the black sheet and letting light pass through the pin, you could make a picture. The toy was more interesting to me than the idea of how a television worked (though the principle was similar), because I was the one inserting the pins and making the picture. I never thought of it at the time, but if I had, I would have been saying to myself, “So that’s memory: little pieces of neuron glass that light up and form a picture when I plug them in.” A more sophisticated self would have come along and said, “No, don’t you see, there are no innate

The Metaphor of Consciousness

247

Figure 9.1 Lite-Brite: pictures come clear as the board is perforated with glass pins.

colours in neurons; there are no red neurons and blue neurons, however small. There is only the synapse of a neuron, its action. You have to code for those colours. You have to teach your brain to read, so that clusters of neurons can say things like ‘a little red’ and ‘a little blue’ which you can then translate into a picture of blue and red.” That sounds fine, in a way, and it is part of the truth, but you have only delayed the problem. How do you get a neuron to say “see blue”? Code is fine, but what sort of code? How can you get a neuron network to read out R27, B34, G16 (which in computerese is a very dark colour). How do you get a code like that to stick to a neuron or a network of them? But the even bigger problem is this: how do you get a code to be what it signifies? What does it mean to read the code and translate it? Translate it into what? How do you get your brain to see blue? Who or what is looking at the computer screen, or at the Lite-Brite box? So that’s one problem. Keep it in mind.

248

missing link

a walk in the woods The other problem is that we often think of neurons as shutting off when a memory is stored in them, and coming back on when the memory is recalled. We don’t think of anything happening on the memory stick once we’ve stored a file on it. We think of the neuron network or memory stick as a sheet of paper on which we write something before laying it aside. There it would stay, waiting for us to find it and “read it out,” effectively bringing it back to life in the mind that looks at it. Once again, there are elements of truth here, but the picture is deceptive. A neuron is a living cell like any other cell; it doesn’t shut down. A “shut down” cell in the normal sense would be a dead cell. At the same time a cell can be dormant. We need to figure out what these terms mean. Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory, part autobiography, part summary of a life’s work in memory theory, was a revelation to me. Kandel shows that a memory is effectively a degree of connectivity between sets of neurons. I mentioned earlier that he worked with the sea slug Aplysia, which neurobiologists favoured for its siphon-withdrawal response. It gets poked in the side. It moves away. Kandel observed that the original reactive stimulus-nerve will fire repeatedly for as long as the external stimulus itself fires. He showed that as the stimulus-nerve repeats, it begins to leave a “memory-mark” on the interneurons that are most immediately connected to it. More tentacles grow between it and the set of pre-synaptic neurons that lead to it. A strong memory is a network of neurons that has many firmed-up links that pass through it. The links are firmed up by repeated firings. The more firings between neurons, the firmer the connection. Eric Kandel writes that Genetic and developmental processes specify the connections among neurons – that is, which neurons form synaptic connections with which other neurons and when. But they do not specify the strength of those connections … learning selects among a large repertoire of pre-existing connections and alters the strength of a subset of those connections.3 Later on Kandel quotes the work of psychologist D.O. Hebb, a passage that is highly redolent of the workings of metaphor: “When an axon of

The Metaphor of Consciousness

249

cell A … excites cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in its firing, some growth process or metabolic changes take place in one or both cells so that A’s efficiency is increased.”4 We might stop to notice how similar these firmed-up connections are to our memory markers of the last chapter. A firmed-up connection between neuron patterns can be thought of as a metonym that is “put for” the fact of its having fired many times. You commit something to memory by going over and over it, repeating the firings along that pattern. Strong memories are those where sets of neurons fire sufficiently often to create well-worn paths. Things that you don’t remember quite so well, like what you did last Tuesday, don’t get the same synaptic attention because they didn’t fire sufficiently to make a unique impression. Your drive to work, given the many times you have “gone over it,” will have made a strong impression indeed. Some routines that you’ve practised over and over again, like doing scales on the piano, are so deeply ingrained that you don’t even need to think about them to have their algorithms unfold and activate your fingers. Other memories require a little oomph to send attentional impulses down their pathways. We’ll come to attentional impulses shortly. An engraver can scrape at a piece of stone for five minutes and make a certain mark, and scrape for ten minutes and make a deeper one. But if you think of a stronger memory as that deeper mark, you’re still missing a piece of the puzzle. Think of a wood with paths coursing through it. These paths are networks of neurons, if you will. People have walked along the paths for decades. These are stimulus firings. How do we know that people have walked there for many years? Because the paths are worn in, have been worn in by the many passes over them of heavy feet. Now, if you are a neuron out for a walk, chances are you’re going to follow the paths that are already laid down. You could conserve your energy by choosing the path of least resistance, the path where the connections are strongest. But now there’s a problem. Time is passing. Let’s say two years pass without anyone using the path. What happens? It becomes overgrown, more difficult to make out, harder to follow. If even more time passes, the route may be erased altogether, replaced by a pathway nearby that leads somewhere else, or to the same place by another route. If the neural pathways that lead through certain patterns are not sufficiently stimulated to

250

missing link

keep the connections or the impression strong, the connections will atrophy or calcify, the route become effectively lost. Some old pathways can be recovered with a little attentional effort, or by associative leaps or cues that pass nearby or lead to the same place by alternate routes. There are two important inferences to make with your mental walk in the woods. One is that your memory of your tenth birthday, for instance, is not a fixed place in your brain that you arrive at and then dwell in, as you would a room. It is rather a sequential unfolding of neuron networks in time. A memory, a thought, is gone over; it is performed, in the way that a violinist would perform a score. The score represents a potential unheard until the violinist vibrates the strings. Your conjuring of neuronal vibrations is the playing of a memory. The intensity of the memory is the firmness of the connections to it, or the depth of the pathway. Indeed, there may be no it that the connection actually leads to, only the wash of a pattern whose unfolding in time represents your experience of the thought, a kind of glimpse that lasts only as long as the cascade of connections themselves. Marcel Proust’s understanding of memory – as Jonah Lehrer shows in his Proust Was a Neuroscientist5 – was remarkably prescient. Our sense of a memory – a reaching back through time – is a function of time: less a thing you have than a process you go through. The second inference to make is that your memory neurons are always alive. You don’t write something down on a memory neuron, or engrave it with repeated scrapes, and then lay it aside like a book. Your neurons are living cells. They can age and atrophy, but they are kept oxygenated for your entire life. The support cells around the neurons can become dysfunctional. Neurons can be dormant, to be sure, if the pathways that lead to them are less frequently activated. If a cell-firing sequence that represents the potential of a particular memory remains insufficiently activated to rise into your attention, the connections will become weak and unreliable. For remember, the more firings, the firmer the connection; the firmer the connection, the more easily thoughtcascades can pass through it. But the potential paths are there nonetheless, even if you haven’t gone through them for decades. Right now, this moment, your mind is alive with your every minutest memory. Your tenth birthday party, your first kiss, that moment at the lake: they actually live inside your brain. They breathe your oxygen. They wait pa-

The Metaphor of Consciousness

251

tiently. I find the thought very comforting. You weren’t thinking of them just now because you have other neuron networks that are firing more frequently and they, in every sense, have your attention. When we come to Daniel Dennett’s most recent theory of consciousness, we’ll be thinking about the notion of clout. Clout is a good way of thinking about memory and attention. Strong memories have more clout than weak memories because they fire more often. When you struggle to remember your first bicycle, your attention is reaching back through neuron networks associated with childhood memories, synapses are cascading through a dark wood. But your attention is not looking to find and hold up a finished object, as you would look to find a book or an old letter. It is trying to work through something that is still alive, whose particular pattern represents the potential playing-out of that memory. It is already written down and is only waiting to be re-cognized. Memory is like a piece of music on a vinyl record. You can’t point to the sounds. If you want to hear the music you have to play it through, feel your needle of attention pass through its grooves. Freud was certainly right in one sense about the Unconscious. It is constantly at work, and is mumbling away even when you’re not especially aware of it. But we go astray if we think of it as actually “down there,” or “in the back of your mind.” We use the metaphor of depth to help us understand the hierarchy of attentions that we experience. But we need also to picture how everything in our minds is laid out on a kind of surface, alive all at once. There is a scene in Dr Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who where Horton stands on a crest overlooking a vast field of pink clovers, into which has been dropped the single precious clover containing a microscopic race of befriended Whos. Horton knows that the clover is there somewhere, right in front of him, not hidden away below any kind of surface. He just doesn’t know how to find his way to it in the vast field he looks over. We face a similar challenge. Each of our memories is unique, but lies in a field that is so overrun that we find it difficult to go through particular ones when we want. Horton has the added disadvantage that the particular thing he is trying to find, unlike a cluster of memory neurons, looks like every other thing. He has to go out and check each one individually. We at least have the advantage of knowing that there is a particular series of associations heading out right from

252

missing link

where we stand that could lead us through it. The scene in any case is highly suggestive of a mind at work: Horton knows that a part of his identity, his “who,” lies out there somewhere. He looks for it, and listens. Your struggle, as Freud understood, is to become aware of something that is already and always happening. Every least thought and image. Your brain is alive with memories, the vast majority of them sounding below the threshold of your attention. Everything you are and were is choiring everywhere at once in your mind. You are its total music.

spat ial maps We need to take a moment to understand what we mean by a neural code and how it is organized in the brain. We tend to think of memories as buried in the mind and as having depth. We try to “get back” to a part of the brain that lies “behind” consciousness. My own argument has certainly been subject to this model, where we’ve thought about firing sequences and which neurons must be activated before others can be. Earlier I used the metaphor of the fire brigade, where individual neurons pass the action potential of a synapse through and across themselves to the next in line. The metaphor, however, is potentially misleading. The brain is not wired in series this way. If it were, our thinking processes would be dramatically slower and the possibilities of branching or deflecting into potential associations severely compromised. As Jerome Feldman writes in From Molecule to Metaphor, our brains are constituted by a “massive parallelism,” such that many different parts of the brain can be computing at the same time.6 This is what distinguishes the human brain from the cpu of a computer, which, though its binary exchanges happen at a much faster rate, must unfold consecutively in series. Computers appear to be thinking more than one thing at a time, but until very recently (with the advent of multi-core processors and their like) the effect was an illusion. Brain activity is characterized by firings that happen in highly complex spatial configurations. Feldman speaks of “spatial maps” and neural “schemata,” whereby ideas, impressions, memories – i.e. most conscious events – are constituted by patterns of simultaneously firing neurons.7 I’ve spoken of neuron networks. The relatedness of the neurons that con-

The Metaphor of Consciousness

253

stitute one or another meaningful pattern is the cohesiveness of that particular network. This is one of the central unifying principles of the metaphoric initiative. Metaphors are elements laid out in space according to their respective systems of associated commonplaces. Neuron networks or schemata hold together based on affinities “discovered” between them. Those affinities in this context would be the firmness of connection between the networks along the lines elucidated by Eric Kandel. Indeed, the term “system of associated commonplaces” might be a rather effective metaphor for just those networks that are made up of multiplyconnected dendrites. They are already the common places for action potentials to pass through. The process of these affinities being discovered and re-discovered is your experience of thinking. But it is clear too that thinking isn’t just a massive one-off simultaneous lighting up of variously related neural patterns in your brain. There are such things as arguments, where one thought leads to another in sequence, and where a prior thought may be seen as causing the discovery of the following one. They are cascades of firing neurons. Clearly we need to understand brain activity in both spatial and temporal terms, where neuronal schemata unfold according to affinities discovered between them, and where those constantly transmogrifying patterns unfold in sequence. In a sonnet entitled “Processional,” James Merrill offers a very suggestive picture of a certain kind of schematic word play, where “in three lucky strokes of word golf lead / once again turns (load, goad) to gold.”8 The alchemical motif reveals again, in schematic terms, the transformative potential of metaphoric thinking, how we can make verbal “gold” out of verbal “lead.” But let’s scrutinize the process and think about it as a model for the relationship between pattern and sequence in brain activity. Think of each word as what Feldman calls a neural schema, a given relationship among firing neurons. The process of “word golf,” as Merrill calls it, displaces one letter in each pattern to discover a new word. What governs these exchanges is the associated commonplaces of the other three letters. We would scarcely have discerned a relationship between lead and gold before the link was established via a sequence of intervening patterns. You can move from load to goad because the leap is a small one based on a single difference. Align several such leaps in a row and you have the “evolution” of

254

missing link

the word based on slightly altered word states unfolding in sequence. In our analogy, the word is a thought you are having, a thought that unfolds in time and which “moves forward” based on minutely varied neuronal networks lighting up in sequence. The corollary of this kind of unfolding argument would be those instances where a single element in a thought pattern suddenly reminds you of something entirely different. Just as the ou in sound could recall the ou in thought, your feeling that your head is swimming could remind you that you have a swimming date this evening. We do not need to think of these words as having depth.9 Even though there is a sequence of firing events, one pattern leading to another, we are not working our way into the depths of the mind any more than Merrill was working his way into the depths of the language in moving from lead to gold. There is no depth. Each word, or pattern, represents a gestalt in your mind. An infinite number of potential ones are laid out all at once in your cortex, ready to light up as soon as a series of associations leads through them. There are memories that you haven’t recalled in twenty years, not because they lie somewhere deep in your mind, but because no set of linked patterns unfolding in your attention leads to them. So you go searching among the association-patterns that are readily available when you say to yourself, for instance, “Grade Four at Gosford Public School”; you try to stir those patterns in relation to some new stimulant like “Ellen tells me that she knew me even then” and then see whether these two patterns might awaken that long unstirred pattern in your mind (the shared sandwich at lunch that fall) that has lain dormant for so long. When we think of memory as made of layers, we can picture a sap running up through a tree, first via the main trunk, then along smaller and smaller branches until it reaches a leaf. We think of the memory-sap as moving deeper into diversifying branches that carry it towards particular destinations. But memory as a sequence of related patterns is more like a game of Scrabble. The pattern of one word leads to the pattern of another word that is laid across it, based on the available affinities. A further pattern is laid across those, based on another affinity, and so on. We think of this as happening on a surface. Think of all the empty space on the Scrabble board as the latent potential of obscure memories waiting to be spelled out, if only the necessary intervening word patterns

The Metaphor of Consciousness

255

could unfold in their direction to help you to see how they might be played. In both configurations, there is a destination of sorts and a way of getting to it. The difference is our way of thinking about where the memory lies and the nature of the narrative that leads to it.

living in the matrix We are finally thinking now. We experience thoughts as potential patterns lying before us, knocking one another from attention by a kind of word-golf. Now we need to return to the harder problem of how we experience these happening patterns as our own. How do you get colour, or a line, or an “M” sound into a neuron or network of them? Terms like “qualia” and “sensa” are often applied to this trickiest of ontological events, your experience of the isness of blue, the I-hear-it-ness of the phone ringing. As Daniel Dennett points out at the beginning of Sweet Dreams, there are many reputable scientists and philosophers who feel that trying to make an account of the qualia that apparently constitute consciousness is doomed.10 Consciousness, Thomas Nagel argues, “should be recognized as a conceptually irreducible aspect of reality that is necessarily connected with other equally irreducible aspects – as electromagnetic fields are irreducible to but necessarily connected with the behaviour of charged particles and gravitational fields with the behaviour of masses, and vice versa.”11 Physicists say that the world came into being with electromagnetic fields as one of its essential properties and that is all that can be said on the matter. The same may go for consciousness. It is coterminous with being itself. Nagel talks about the irreducibility of electromagnetic fields and how much like them is the experience of consciousness. We have learned early on in this book that electromagnetic fields are at least reducible in one sense, reducible to the relations of identity and difference that we have come to think of as metaphor. It will be no surprise, I hope, to find that irreducible consciousness may be reduced in the same terms. If you are a card-carrying materialist, then you start with the premise that qualia must be in the neurons somehow. Part of the secret is not to go looking for where they are in the neurons, but how they are in the neurons. You remind yourself that all a neuron can do is fire at varying

256

missing link

frequencies. You can work with this fact and you can work with the intensity of the connection. Can the colour blue be determined by frequency? Can a rapid firing neuron make you see dark blue, and a slower firing one light blue? Kandel and others have made considerable headway in understanding the importance of firing frequency in strengthening neural pathways, but there is no suggestion that frequency alone is a form of coding. Nor need it be, for we already know that a “yes” and a “no” is difference enough to create infinitely complicated code. Computers do the same with “on” and “off,” or 0 and 1. So you have a huge number of neurons to work with, and something like a “yes” and a “no.” Let’s start coding. Let’s have, say, “yyynnynyynnnyynnnyny” stand for a shade of puce if you like. Think of this sequence as a pattern of neuron-axons that are stimulated all at once in an area of the brain, like a word spelled out on the Scrabble board. You can even start to make the code more easily intelligible by having a slightly different letter-pattern code for a slightly different shade of puce: “yyynnynyynnNNYYYYyny.” As we surmised in the last section, the new pattern might be pulled from the code pattern for purple. The variation in the code may be the equivalent of the corresponding variation in light refractions in the external world. Every nuanced and subtle difference in light, sound, shape, texture, and so on, can have a corresponding nuance in neural code. The firing patterns of neuron networks would be the code, and the routes of cascades would be their unfolding narrative, that is say, part of a larger network that represents other aspects of a qualia, for instance, what object the colour is attached to and how it is moving in space. So we come to the metonym again and see, once more, how useful nature is at recycling good tricks. It found that putting a firing nerve, or set of nerves, for a pin-prick allows the brain to handle that information in its own domain. It has devised a code in consciousness for all of reality’s “pin-pricks,” its colours, textures, sounds and so on. That code can be put for the external world because its internal relationships of identity and difference correspond with those same relationships as perceived outside. It maps those stimuli in a consistent manner within a system that is intelligible to itself. And yet, we object, we don’t experience “yyynnynyynnnyynnnyny.” We experience puce. No, say the materialists, you experience “yyyn-

The Metaphor of Consciousness

257

nynyynnnyynnnyny,” and you’re just calling it puce. One of the great recent films about our perception of reality and its existence as code is the Wachowskis’ The Matrix. There is the scene near the beginning when Cypher, who is looking at the code for the Matrix-world that its inhabitants believe is their reality, talks to Neo about what he “sees”: neo: Is that … cypher: The Matrix? Yeah. neo: Do you always look at it encoded? cypher: Well, you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it … I, I don’t even see the code. All I see is … blond, brunette, red-head … [Cypher gestures towards the monitors].12 One could argue that the writers favour the Qualia perspective, i.e. that the code eventually has to be translated into an image by a perceiving being like Cypher, begging the question, “translated by whom and into what?” But Cypher himself suggests another possibility. His talent is not really any different or more impressive than the talent of a conductor who can look at a score and “hear” the music coded there. The essential point is that “you get used to it,” so that you no longer see it as code. The only difference between Cypher and us, as between Cypher and those people who live imprisoned inside the Matrix, is that we don’t think we’re experiencing code. We think we’re experiencing brunette and redhead. We don’t think we’re experiencing neural code because we don’t experience anything other than neural code and, moreover, can’t experience ourselves experiencing it. We can only experience what the neural code codes for. Indeed, as far as the film is concerned, if you could see that you are experiencing code while you were inside that code, you would become “The One.” Not even Cypher can do that. He can only see the code when he is outside it. Once he goes into the Matrix he experiences brunette and red-head – the qualia of his being there – just like anyone else. The Matrix, in this sense, is rather like a brain. When you’re inside it, you can only experience the neural code as the world it codes for. If you could see it as code, you would experience an apocalypse. “Still,” you say, “I don’t see code, and frankly I don’t want to see code.

258

missing link

I want to see red.” But you do see code. What you think of as red is the code. Why should it look like anything else? You are experiencing an arrangement of neurons and very unconsciously saying to yourself that this arrangement is going to count as a degree of light, or this arrangement for a line, or this arrangement for a sound texture. The brain says I’m going to let these neuronal firings metonymically stand for this particular input. Your metaphoric mind is seeing as. Cypher himself confronts the improbable qualia of “seeing as” when, in the illusory Matrix, he speaks to Agent Smith about the delicious steak he is “eating”: You know, I know that this steak doesn’t exist. I know when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I’ve realized? [Pausing, he examines the meat skewered on his fork. He pops it in, eyes rolling up, savoring the tender beef melting in his mouth.] Ignorance is bliss.13 At the risk of wearying you, let’s try one more analogy. This is the kind of analogy that cognitive philosophers like to play around with as a way of reducing cognitive events to simple sticks and stones, or in this case, boxes. Put a man who has been blind from birth in a room by himself and tell him that you’re going to give him the information he needs to see a line on a page. You’re going to use arrangements of three-inch and five-inch blocks. You will show him how to arrange the blocks, put them for every least feature and pixel of that line. Let’s assume that an arrangement of ten of these blocks counts for one pixel in a particular position. You lay out the arrangement of blocks and he “goes over” them with his hand. Braille works in just this manner. Once he has considered the arrangement of blocks in their totality, i.e. touched them and remembered their positions, he would “see” the blocks. If the world were so constructed, he would never stop passing his hand over blocks, but he would eventually do this so unconsciously that he would scarcely admit that he was doing it. And he would gasp in delight at a certain arrangement of blocks that was a depth of colour or cry at another arrangement that was a remembered face. You have got so good at running the hand of your attention over the neural codes for light that you don’t think you’re running your hand over

The Metaphor of Consciousness

259

anything. You’re just seeing. The light that you see is the code that you say is light. You experience the relationship metaphorically. You see the code as light. That’s what light is for us. The code and the light are radically identified. A is B, or a pattern of firing neurons = the qualia of visible light. The blind man in the room has no idea whether what he sees is “like” what is out there, but he does know that this arrangement of blocks can be put for a line, and that doing so will be useful, so long as he can put another similar arrangement of blocks for another similar line; that is, so long as there is a consistent metaphoric relationship between the differences and identities of the inputs and the differences and identities of the codes. No one you know is seeing light outside of our perception of it, so you’re not going to be found out. But how, you may ask, does your brain know how to distinguish the code for light from the code for sound? How can there be different kinds of code that register in our minds as different experiences? After all, there are not just light wave/particles, there are sound waves, and there are textures, and there is time and space. The brain evolved to delegate those stimuli to different parts of its mass, designating parts of the brain as storage and activity bins for different kinds of input. Your brain has file folders of a sort, very like the ones on your computer. Those folders are partly physical areas of the brain and partly a system of assigned relationships. In one folder you keep “stuff you see” and in another “stuff you hear.” As Jerome Feldman writes: Neural representation is also characterized by dozens of systematic maps – collections of linked neurons with related functionality. We have talked several times about spatial maps. Starting with the retina, the neurons of the visual system are laid out in the brain in maps, according to the position in space that excites them. Other brain areas are laid out in systematic maps based on other properties: for example, the auditory cortex has maps organized by tone. Sensory and motor cortices have maps based on the body part involved.14 There would be a brain area for light code and there would be an area for sound code, and you would know which was which because their difference from one another is simply spatial. You couldn’t mistake one of those areas for another any more than you could mistake your right

260

missing link

arm for your left arm. You don’t tell them apart so much as experience how they are apart. You can even have two folders that have identical code in them, as long as you keep them in separate folders (we know what happens when you try to move a computer file into a folder that contains another file of the same name). You can even “open up” both files for “processing” as long as you know which folder you got them from and don’t confuse which is which. And how could you anyway, since you are those folders. So the brain may have a Vision folder with files that are coded in ways that are very similar to files in your Feelings folder. Indeed it may even be handy to cut and paste codes between these so that you can read images into memories, sounds into feelings and so on. Take a piece of this file that is a code for the word “angry” and paste it into the file that is in the folder of emotional inputs. After a time, many of the files, while still separated in their unique folders to do different kinds of work, will actually contain, or be connected to, large parts of one another. Amassing such a matrix of interpenetrating codes would be the unconscious and conscious work of the metaphoric initiative. This coding procedure is true not just of inputs, but of ideas as well. Ideas are made up of memories of image inputs that connect together to make narratives. In the same way that light gets coded, the thousand angles and aspects of an idea can be coded, and then read as an idea by the rest of the brain that (looping and looping) can work with it. So we come back to the original question. Are you seeing this book? Almost certainly. Is that tree really there? No doubt. But it depends on what you mean by the word “really.” We can be pretty sure that something is there, because we are putting neuronal patterns for it. Does it really matter if its form and constitution out there is the same as its form and constitution in our minds? So long as our coded map of the original is consistent, with corresponding differences and identities throughout, one reality may serve for the other. Whatever light “really” is, to us it is what we experience as our brainwaves for light. Whatever sound is, we experience it as our brainwaves for sound. A skeptic from the planet Zorkon (who in any case would be living by codes of his own) might cry out “What you think you see isn’t really there. It is an illusion!” “Ah,”

The Metaphor of Consciousness

261

you reply, “Mr Zorkonian, this illusion is our reality; we put it for the external world we’re pretty sure is out there, and so far it has been a pretty useful one. If you want to discover the reality of illusion, a secret we’ve taught ourselves, you’re going to have to learn to think metaphorically. But that’s not something we can teach you.”

kinds of minds Why is it a good thing to be conscious? This may be a silly question to ask given that we have to be conscious to ask it. It appears to be the purpose of human being to be conscious and to build around itself a conscious human world. But the dinosaurs, as my son likes to remind me, were around for 160 million years; they do not seem to have been conscious in our way and yet they did well enough. Conscious human being has only been around for what? 100,000 years at best, or as few as 3,000 years if you credit some of what Julian Jaynes has to say about the bicameral mind (cf. 363). In any case, a very short time. We are scarcely at the point yet where we can start to claim that consciousness is an advantage for survival. Is consciousness going to help us in the long run? Or will future species (if they are conscious …), think of our mental prowess as rather like that kind of madness we think some artists suffer from: it helped them create for a while but was ultimately self-destructive? There were all sorts of species on the earth since its beginning who discovered some nifty adaptation that gave them ascendancy among their neighbours for many generations. Most of them have long disappeared, leaving little trace behind. In my final chapter, I want to think more about this question, what it means that consciousness should have been licensed as a useful adaptation in nature, and where it might yet lead. For now, though, we do need to ask the question: Why is it useful to be conscious? The brain is that part of a creature that controls its actions and responses in and to the environment. When an environment is relatively stable, a creature’s equipment for response may be left relatively simple. The daisy doesn’t move around a lot and so its need to respond to a changing environment is minimal. It responds to alternating light and dark

262

missing link

with the good trick of photosynthesis. It has roots to drink up water and soil nutrients. As the environment becomes more complicated, however, the responses must become more versatile. No squirrel is going to survive long if it uses only a daisy’s ability to respond to light when it senses a fox nearby. It must have more options at its disposal, and to have more options, it must have equipment that will allow it to construe the variables of input and respond accordingly. Flexibility of response to environmental inputs varies from creature to creature. In his book Kinds of Minds, Daniel Dennett proposes four creature types organized according to their degree of responsive power. They are the “Darwinian” creature, the “Skinnerian,” the “Popperian,” and the “Gregorian” creature.15 The Darwinian creature is the unthinking species, like the daisy. The daisy’s progeny survives not because each particular daisy can respond effectively to changes in the environment, but because the species as a whole is able to adapt over time in such a way that favours them. No thinking is done, but as the environment changes those daisies that are lucky enough to change in step with its conditions will persist.16 The Skinnerian model – named after B.F. Skinner’s theories of behaviourism – is similar to the Darwinian model in that its phenotype is essentially unthinking. Like a computer that runs through a series of potential algorithms until it finds one that fits the data that has been input and then responds according to a set of programmed instructions, a Skinnerian creature will randomly try out a variety of potential responses in succession until it receives a reinforcing or negating signal from the environment. No mind is required. The deep-sea Aplysia, when it is touched by a foreign object, will keep moving until it is touched no longer. Options or sequences of them, algorithms of response, are tested, but the creature is not thinking about those options; it merely runs through them. Dennett goes on then to the next stage: Skinnerian conditioning is a good thing as long as you are not killed by one of your early errors. A better system involved preselection among all the possible behaviours or actions, so that the truly stupid moves are weeded out before they’re hazarded in “real life.” We human beings are creatures capable of this particular refinement, but

The Metaphor of Consciousness

263

we are not alone. We may call the beneficiaries of this [adaptation] Popperian Creatures, since, as the philosopher Sir Karl Popper once elegantly put it, this design enhancement “permits our hypotheses to die in our stead.”17 For this preselection function to work, Dennett argues, there must be a brain filter, a sort of “inner environment,” not necessarily sophisticated at this stage, in which potential responses may be tested against the likelihood that they would be favoured if they were actually performed. One such example is the nausea that an animal might experience when it smells rotten food. Something in its inner make-up is telling it that it might not be a good idea to proceed further. At a higher level of this adaptation, memory becomes important: a creature may record the image of a predator, or the undesirable consequences of an action, and use them as warning representations to itself when similar circumstances arise again. Indeed the nausea would count as a form of memory. What happens then when we make the final step to human cognitive abilities? We are “Gregorian creatures,” Dennett argues (naming our condition after the pre-eminent British information theorist Richard Gregory) because an inner environment evolves that can be informed not just by sensory data and memory, for instance, but by other elements in the world that are themselves products of design. Those designed elements may range from what the creature sees other creatures doing (succeeding or failing … “There but for the grace of god go I”) to the use of tools that are themselves designed or that have otherwise fallen into our hands as useable. “Tool use is a two-way sign of intelligence,” Dennett writes. “Not only does it require intelligence to recognize or maintain a tool … but a tool confers intelligence on those lucky enough to be given one … Among the pre-eminent tools, Gregory reminds us, are what he calls mind tools: words.”18 Dennett comes at last to the metonymic tool of symbolic thinking, and the advantages that such tools confer on human being in its struggle for survival. He continues: Words and other mind tools give a Gregorian creature an inner environment that permits it to construct ever more subtle move generators and move testers … Gregorian creatures take a big step towards

264

missing link

a human level of mental adroitness, benefiting from the experience of others by exploiting the wisdom embodied in the mind tools that those others have invented, improved, and transmitted; thereby they learn to think better about what they should think about next – and so forth, creating a tower of further internal reflections with no fixed or discernable limit.19 I wouldn’t suggest that Daniel Dennett has missed his calling as a literary critic but he might be pleased to know how valuable insights like this might be in the field of literary criticism. His comments chime in with Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on language as an objectifying tool: Ricoeur writes in The Rule of Metaphor that “language possesses the reflective capacity to place itself at a distance and to consider itself … as related to the totality of what is.”20 For both Dennett and Ricoeur, it is the externalizing power of language, its ability to put a thing out there, where we can see it and consider it, that gives us a special lift. But Dennett also provides a perspective to understand how literature itself serves the same purpose. In their unique configurations of human experience, fictions provide a convenient means of fashioning and externalizing our experiences in such a way that they can then become conscious symbolic tools available to everyone. Literature effectively orders and structures human concerns, attempts to give them a place in a larger context, showing how they are related to one another and to the kinds of creative power that human beings possess. Literature gives us a picture of the imaginative cosmos that we have put there. It is a vision of the world we ourselves have designed and, as such, it makes our own powers intelligible to us. And this is the crucial point. For Dennett, it is not just any knowledge that will do to advance the potential of its user. It is knowledge of the already designed element, the world we have already put out there, or discovered and recorded as otherwise meaningful to us, that gives us particular evolutionary lift. “We learn,” Dennett writes, “to spread our minds out in the world, where we can put our beautifully designed innate tracking and pattern-recognizing talents to optimal use.”21 We offload the contents of our minds into the world. And the world becomes intelligible and familiar to the extent that we recognize it as a projection of inner processes. We can then perceive it from a detached perspective and try to manage and choreograph it as best suits us. The more we see that

The Metaphor of Consciousness

265

this there is a projected here, the more the subject/object divide in the world falls away and we become possessors and inhabiters of a universe that is both very real and very symbolic at the same time. So Dennett writes: As we improve, our labels become more refined, more perspicuous, ever better articulated, and the point is finally reached when we approximate the near-magical prowess we began with: the mere contemplation of a representation is sufficient to call to mind all the appropriate lessons. We have become understanders of the objects we have created.22 We’ll be coming in the next chapter to the issue of design evolution and how it has changed things, most especially in how it has enabled us to float designing hypotheses. But for now we want to take note of what metaphoric thinking itself has come to. One of the ways we came to improve our wellbeing, as our tools and labels became more refined, is that those same tools and labels served not only to record and construe the external world, but re-imagine it. This was Northrop Frye’s point throughout his career. What those re-imaginings expressed were the concerns and preoccupations of consciousness, our desires and anxieties, the world we want as against the world we fear. The advantage that accrues to symbolic thinking is the same advantage that accrues to imaginative recreation. Those creations are externalized. The work of human consciousness is put out there where we can see it, learn from it, modify and adapt it, relate it to the world we appear to live in, and finally use it as a model and blueprint for potential further design adaptations. Dennett calls the powers of conscious symbolic thinking a “near-magical prowess.” How much more nearly magical are those powers when they show and set before us the potential reality of a world we have only imagined.

isness gets a lift We live in very exciting times so far as consciousness theory is concerned. Our great evolutionary and cognitive thinkers, memory technicians, neuroscientists – Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Leon Edelman, Eric Kandel, David Chalmers, Andrew Coward, Gary Marcus marshalling forces in

266

missing link

their different fields – have been hard at work on the problem, proposing solutions to one of the last great existential puzzles we face. What is it like to be you? What does it mean to be conscious? We often feel that language and cognition hit a wall at this point. Some word goofiness may be in order. What is the isness of isnicity that is your experience of being (your experience of having an is)? Every once in a while we can be startled by a sudden awareness of our isness, the buzz of consciousness happening. It feels as though every window out onto the world and back into yourself has been blown open and there is just the thrill of seeing, or being aware of, your awareness in all ways at once. We feel our isness is good, perhaps the one true good that we know, and we’re a little nervous about losing it. We don’t much like to think about the day when our own personal isness will head off and leave presumably isless the rest of what we thought we were.23 That quiet country where there are no verbs. Unhappy day, as Emily Dickinson writes, when the windows fail, and we cannot see to see. All the more reason to do some careful thinking about thinking while we can. It would be nice if one of the things that our own generation could pass on to its heirs two hundred years from now is some new and enlightened idea of what that isness was, what it will be now for those then who will enjoy it. I like to think of that special sensitivity, that wistful “what e’er you be” first given a language by those who have long since moved graciously aside to let others share in what they felt. We wouldn’t be the first. Every word ever written, every mark in a cave at some level has been a wrestling with this first of all ontological puzzles. Our approaches are all relative. We’ll be the bunch who tried to sort out consciousness in secular and materialist terms, whereas earlier philosophers talked about the “mind of God” (which still strikes me as a fruitful metaphor for consciousness that we might like to keep around). Our perspective in any case is bound to give way to some further, unguessed at frame of reference that will make our fiddling with neurons and qualia seem quaint in comparison.

The Metaphor of Consciousness

267

the seamless seeming How does a brain evolve a mind? If the mind was always there, waiting to be recognized, how do we find it and figure out how it works? Half the time, the debate over consciousness does not get past this question. It gets stuck on the old divisions between monism and dualism, between those who feel that mind is a particular kind of body and those who feel that mind is existentially other, and not to be reduced to material. Owen Flanagan calls the latter group “mysterians,” who feel that the subjectivity of our experience of consciousness will render it a mystery to us forever.24 In his book Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness, Joseph Levine speaks of “the explanatory gap” that intervenes between our experience of consciousness and the tools we have to explain it rationally.25 But I have no fear of explanatory gaps and welcome them, indeed test them to see whether they might be part of a disguised solution. Metaphor, if I might turn Levine’s phrase in on itself, is the explanatory gap par excellence, the gap that explains. There are those who feel that there must be a kind of headquarters in our brains where consciousness is centred, and a good deal of discussion and physical research has been devoted to locating it, either materially or theoretically. Dennett makes a useful account of the debate at the beginning of his Sweet Dreams.26 There must be, some have argued, a seat of consciousness in the mind, a place where the “youness” of you is housed, a “central meaner,” to use Dennett’s phrase, a little homunculus in your brain that acts as a kind of audience for all the thoughts and sensations you are having. Without such a property of mind, we would all be zombies, they argue, automatons, robots computing sets of coded instructions. I think it is worth noting that the idea of a central meaner in the brain is not that different from the notion of a cosmological central meaner. It is a modern version of the watchmaker god, who creates and then tosses into the abyss a universe that is left to tick away on its own, while God watches it, like an audience, from a distance. In the same way, there is a sense of “thrown-ness” in our experience of consciousness, a form of “seeing from the outside.” The little divine homunculus in winds up our

268

missing link

awareness and then watches it there, never needing to let that awareness crane around to see what or who is doing the watching, for it is known to itself. And there is an interesting corollary. We have tried to describe the properties of a divine maker who controls and observes what happens inside the space it has created. It seems no accident that what ends up getting embodied in those descriptions is very like the workings of our own minds, whose conditions and limits are what we end up grasping.27

on who (or what) makes the most noise and who (or what) listens While Dennett’s own descriptions of the nature of consciousness have evolved over thirty years, he has never swayed from his conviction that there is no central meaner in the brain, no homunculus or “little you” manipulating all the strings inside you. There are only the dizzyingly complex activities of neurons that make up what we think of as our consciousness. What Dennett has modified over the years are the metaphors that he uses to try to describe the phenomenon of consciousness. Dennett’s search for the best metaphors is, whatever else, an attempt to understand the function in human consciousness of the metaphoric initiative. Let’s start with the basics. The body is made up of nerve endings and neurons. Nerve endings are at the outposts of the body, and their job is to internalize inputs. The interneurons can serve as switching stations for processes that unfold at a preconscious level. Many of those interneurons make up that part of the brain whose activity we call “consciousness.” Dennett identifies three levels of synaptic brain activity, serving three distinct purposes.28 There are unconscious neurological inputs and outputs that drive and regulate the heart, the lungs, and many of our physical processes. There are also those inputs and outputs that have to do with certain emotional responses and physical states such as pain, hunger, the appetites, our sexual drives: signals that still do not appear to think about themselves as such, that may even fall short of our being aware of them, but which struggle or compete with other inputs to rise into consciousness, i.e. to the point where you will find yourself thinking “I am in pain,” or “I need to eat something.” And finally there

The Metaphor of Consciousness

269

are those inputs and outputs that include the thoughts and feelings that we have and that we know we are having (i.e. whose having we experience): our rational thinking, our active impressions and feelings, and the further – though not necessary – association of all of these with their potential representation in language. In an earlier formulation, Dennett worked with what he called “the multiple drafts theory” of consciousness: Mental contents become conscious not by entering some special chamber in the brain, not by being transduced into some privileged and mysterious medium, but by winning the competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behaviour … One of the most effective ways for a mental content to become influential is for it to get into position to drive the language-using parts of the controls.29 Though they may have misunderstood Dennett’s emphasis in passages like this, his critics took umbrage at the implication that consciousness is a function of language, or so related to the language-using parts of the brain as to be indistinguishable from them.30 Dennett saw that the issue of publishing one’s thoughts to oneself doesn’t quite speak to the issue of who is reading what has been published, and this is what Dennett’s critics believed to be the weakness of his revised theory, that he still couldn’t account for how there appears to be something within us, an “I,” that is witness to the activity. He focussed then not on the means of publishing but on the question of who or what is listening, and how “famous” or well known the publications themselves can become in their domain. In this manner, Dennett found another way of articulating how the conscious mind creates an atmosphere of reverberant self-observation. He described the experience of consciousness as “fame in the brain.” This theory focusses on how certain mental contents can be thought of as coming to attention based on their ability to determine behaviour. If you think of the brain as a kind of society, then certain contents will become famous in relation to other contents and their fame gives them added power. This somewhat revised approach took one of the central ideas in the earlier theory, that of “publishing” one’s thoughts in the form of language, and considered that there

270

missing link

are other ways in which thoughts can be published, and that it isn’t so much the publishing of those thoughts, through language or otherwise, that makes thinking conscious, but the particular way we experience what has been published and the authority and influence that is granted to it. But what Dennett didn’t like about “Fame in the Brain” is that it suggested that there are a whole bunch of little people in your brain whose attentions make you famous: But of course consciousness couldn’t be fame, exactly, in the brain, since to be famous is to be a shared intentional object in the consciousness of many folk, and although the brain is usefully seen as composed of hordes of homunculi, imagining them to be au courant in just the way they would need to be to elevate their brethren to cerebral celebrity is going a bit too far.31 In the end Dennett didn’t like the idea of consciousness trying to get somewhere, for one thing because it could imply an overseer, an agent pushing or dragging thoughts in certain directions. It is also a hair’s breadth from the notion that consciousness is not conscious until it enters a “special chamber.” Dennett wanted a metaphor that doesn’t suggest that our mental contents are trying to get into any position whatsoever. What was missing in both the multiple-drafts and “fame in the brain” accounts was a more nuanced grasp of how mental attention is registered in the mind. The passive construction of this last clause is central, for Dennett is trying to understand how thought processes can be experienced in such a way that the being experienced also serves the role of the experiencer. In Sweet Dreams, he introduced what he calls the “Fantasy Echo” theory of consciousness.32 The phrase comes from a charming anecdote involving a student’s mishearing of the term “Fin de Siècle,” which mishearing embodies the very quality of “fantasy echo” in the mind that needs to be characterized.33 Levels of brain activity, he argues, echo back and forth. Looping mechanisms send cascades of neuron networks coursing through one another. A feedback quality dominates conscious thinking. Thoughts are gone over, where the majority of neuron cascades do not result in commitments to act. The recommendation architecture of the brain that we talked about earlier

The Metaphor of Consciousness

271

(cf. 235) speaks comfortably to this idea of network-firings that echo among themselves, making recommendations without reaching absolute finished results. The brain is an echo chamber and the reverberant echoes are what make consciousness feel to us the way it does. Theories of echo in literary studies chime in quite well with Dennett’s claims. John Hollander notes, in The Figure of Echo (whose title puns conveniently in our favour) that, as in metaphor, echo is the reproduction and translation of an original tenor. Echo’s simultaneous doublingback and vectoring-outwards-and-onwards is metaphor’s principle of recreation and its penchant for “thinking more.” Both are a form of resonance. An item, a gesture, an activity sounds back upon itself, at once the same and not the same. The example of echo in literature per se, as with our experience of consciousness, is the impression created when symbolic events fold back on themselves through other symbolic events, effecting a hall of voices, whose reality and impression can seem stranger than the sum of its parts. But is our conscious thinking just these echoings of neural activity? There are a great many neuron networks firing in competition with one another. How do we hear one or some of those processes over others? And again, who or what, if anything, is doing that hearing? … consciousness is not so much fame, then, as political influence – a good slang term is clout. When processes compete for ongoing control of the body, the one with the greatest clout dominates the scene until a process with even greater clout displaces it. In some oligarchies, perhaps, the only way to have clout is to be known by the king, dispenser of all powers and privileges. Our brains are more democratic, indeed somewhat anarchic. In the brain there is no King, no Official Viewer of the State Television Program, no Cartesian Theatre, but there are still plenty of quite sharp differences in political clout exercised by contents over time … this political difference is achieved by “reverberation” in a “sustained amplification loop,” while the losing competitors soon fade into oblivion, unable to recruit enough specialist attention to achieve self-sustaining reverberation.34 Let’s work through this: I find myself here trying to focus on the text that I am writing. There are the cascades of neurons that these idea

272

missing link

representations send through my head. But there is also another set of cascades in my head just now that are responding to a nagging thirst I’ve had for about half an hour. Up until now, those thirst signals have been strong enough to rise into consciousness every once in a while to make me look over to my empty coffee cup, but not strong enough to sway me from a determination to get this paragraph written (which is related to sets of other work-ethic and stubbornness cascades that support it). There are competing loops in my head, then, and the think-aboutDennett loop has had, up until this moment, more “clout” than the Iam-thirsty loop. The first loop, now more or less satisfied, firing in my attention less frequently as I come to these last words, steps down, leaving the go-get-some-water process as the noisiest or most influential cascade currently active. So off I go. No wait … one more thought. Had my thirst been stronger and had my I-am-thirsty cascades fired more frequently, they might have been sufficient to interrupt and displace the other cascades. But obviously they weren’t. Now off I go. Yes, off I do go, but I go astray if I think that there is an “I” inside me taking a reading of these levels of input and responding accordingly. The “fantasy” part of Dennett’s “fantasy echo,” if I understand aright, speaks to the illusion that there is an “I,” an external observer in the mind. The echoings among one another of neuron networks register in the mind a “make believe,” if you like, of their being a separate person among them sorting it all out. Dennett writes: “we need to explain away this seductive metaphor … the searchlight of attention, by explaining the functional powers of attention-grabbing without presupposing a single attention-giving source.”35 If you think of neurons firing with increased frequency as generating a kind of heat, then consciousness is the heat so generated. The experience, or experiencer, of the heat does not stand over and against, or opposite to, the heat itself. Let’s try another trope. If all the firing neurons in your brain made a noise, consciousness would be those sounds that are audible above the crowd. But you mustn’t think that there is a distinct sound-maker and a distinct sound-hearer. Indeed it would be the audibility of the louder noises, echoing among one another along with the lower resonances, that actually constitutes the hearing. The idea of audibility as a form of hearing might get at part of this elusive idea.

The Metaphor of Consciousness

273

Figure 9.2 Drawing Hands, ca. 1948. Lithograph. M.C. Escher (1898–1972)

Try to think of what it feels like when you touch the skin on your index finger to the skin on your thumb. Which is feeling which? Impossible to say. There is only the “feeling” of skin. In this instance there is a brain standing back and having the feeling of rubbing skin, but one finger rubbing the other makes it nearly impossible for a conscious agent to distinguish which, if either, is feeling the friction of the other. A sensation of feeling arises among the two. If the nerve endings at the tips of our fingers were actually neurons, they would experience the same difficulty. There would simply be feeling. One neuron can connect to, or “rub against,” another neuron, and each will feel, or if you like “realize,” the other’s friction. M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands might be a useful image to think of in trying to visualize

274

missing link

how, among two or more creative agents, there is a kind of mutually interactive and reciprocally acknowledged manifestation of the other’s activity (figure 9.2). If whole populations of neuron networks chugged away in relation to one another, each experiencing or registering the impacts of others, it would be difficult to say how the totality of their experiences were gathered together or where it was centred. It would be everywhere and nowhere at once. The sensation of everything would be potentially related to the sensation of everything else; there would be a vast array of centres whose circumference is undiscernible. And because that circumference is undiscernible, it has no apparent outside. How could this not be experienced as a strange, very nearly apocalyptic, and radically subjective awareness?

on orchestras and consciousness Music provides a particularly rich analogy for our performance and experience of consciousness. Douglas Hofstadter (with Dennett) was obviously exploiting the potential of the music analogy in his essay “Prelude … Ant Fugue,” in which he compares the activities of an ant colony to those of a conscious brain.36 But I’m not sure that he is making fully conscious the potential he taps there. When he asks in his afterthoughts, “Is the soul more than the hum of its parts?” he comes nearer to the crucial issue that Dennett himself addresses in Sweet Dreams of how the generation of sound is identifiable with the experience of it. In his recent volume Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Antonio Damasio takes up this question of “consciousness performance” using the analogy of the orchestra. He sets the terms of reference rather nicely: The ultimate consciousness product occurs from those numerous brain sites at the same time and not in one site in particular, much as the performance of a symphonic piece does not come from the work of a single musician or even from a whole section of an orchestra. The oddest thing about the upper reaches of a consciousness performance is the conspicuous absence of a conductor before the performance begins, although as the performance unfolds, a conductor

The Metaphor of Consciousness

275

comes into being. For all intents and purposes, a conductor is now leading the orchestra, although the performance has created the conductor – the self – not the other way around. The conductor is cobbled together by feelings and by a narrative brain device, although this fact does not make the conductor any less real. The conductor undeniably exists in our minds, and nothing is gained by dismissing it as an illusion.37 You can see that Damasio is drawing a bead on Dennett here. Damasio thinks of “consciousness performance” as the product of a narrative brain device. I think Dennett, while he might be good with the idea of a performance, would probably prefer a phrase like “narrative brain experience,” since we would be less inclined to confuse the experience with an actual place in the brain that might imply a central meaner. Damasio, for his part, disapproves of any characterization of brain activity as illusory. It is, after all, the reality we live by. I think we could get more out of Dennett and Damasio if we spent a little more time with the term “illusion,” for it appears to be the ground they scrabble over. If consciousness is a fantasy echo (as Dennett would have it) or a conductor that doesn’t exist beforehand in its own right (as Damasio argues), that is, if this Gestalt in the mind is seen both to be and not be, then we need to look at that fact. We need to think about how, which is to say by what means, something can both be and not be at the same time. For my purposes, I think we can take the orchestra analogy in a slightly different direction as a way of exploring the nature of the conscious-making fantasy echo or brain device. A symphony makes an argument of sorts. That argument, like a mind’s thoughts, has central and subordinate parts, hierarchies of relationship, themes and developments, refrains, resolutions, denouements. We experience the unfolding of the argument as a totality of complex relationships between the many parts that make it up. We recognize that each particular instrument represents only a small contribution to the overall sound, that listening to the intermittent accents offered by the tuba or string bases alone would give a skewed idea of the whole argument. In fact, we might feel that there was no argument at all, because there was no relation, no interaction between the parts. This isn’t true of course. The score for each part, no matter how minor, still represents an

276

missing link

unfolding cascade of notes in its own right. But it isn’t, in any case, the argument of the symphony that we are after here. It is the experience of the music as a totality of organized sound that speaks to the puzzle of consciousness. There are some problematic aspects of the scene and Damasio was prowling around them: the figure of the conductor and the figure of the audience. In one instance there is distinct direction and in the other an experiencing of what is played. This plays neatly into the hands of the “central meaner” or “seat of consciousness” theorists, who hold that something or someone, a homunculus in the brain, must be present for the sounding arguments of thought to be controlled and experienced as such. Dennett goes for some idea of a greater democratic, even anarchic principle that would be at work in the orchestra. And yet it is the inconvenience of these details (regarding conductors and audiences) that might make the analogy all the more illuminating, certainly in helping us to explain how our experience of consciousness is partly an illusion that we project. We feel there wouldn’t be much point in an orchestra performing a symphony if there were no one around to hear it. Rehearsals of course might be an exception that effectively proves the rule. I do rather like the idea that our moment-to-moment experience of consciousness is more like orchestral rehearsal, the going over parts that they may be got right for their real performance (rather in the manner recommended by Dennett’s multiple-drafts theory of consciousness). The real performance is the moment when all the stirrings around in our mind resolve into the sentences that we have rehearsed and are ready at last to speak out to a listening audience (that is, other people, or when we talk to ourselves). But we want to get at our being conscious of the sounds as such, not of our making them conscious or expressible to other people. So we have to do away with the audience to get at the heart of the problem. We have to do away with the conductor. Indeed, we also need to do away with the ears of the players, which only complicate matters and send us in a circle back to the original problem of how to imagine someone listening. At this level of performance there would be the zombie-like creation of a thinking argument … with no one “there” listening. But the orchestra is less than a brain in one important aspect. We think of the instruments as only capable of output, not input. The instruments cannot

The Metaphor of Consciousness

277

hear the sound they make. But neurons can hear. They not only have axons that send their pulses of energy into the synaptic gap to communicate them further to the downstream receiving neurons, they have dendrites, the tentacles that make it possible for them to receive upstream impulses in the first place. Imagine that each instrument is equipped with its own equivalent of dendrites, some kind of input sensor. Instruments do in a way have such sensors. They take up vibrations from their environment. The registration of vibration in the wood of a viola (or in the metal of a tuba) is, in fact, part of the output of the instrument. The same might be said of the strings, which receive an input of friction from the bow and then express that reception in the form of an emitted sound. The hearing makes music! And the play of sound need not be restricted to local inputs. The violas would almost certainly register (at a subtler level) some of the vibrations of the blasting trumpets behind them, and those vibrations would be part of the violas’ own total response. I hope it is clear enough why a sensor on the instrument would be preferable, in our analogy, to the ears of the players. For one, the players and their ability to hear is simply too much like a little homunculus present at the scene. But for another, we can be easily confused or thrown off the track by the fact that the players’ hearing is separate from the instrument of output. We need instead some idea of those instruments themselves having, like neurons, both output and input capabilities. If the input capability seems unlike hearing at all, so much the better. It only needs to become what is like hearing, an illusion of hearing, as it gathers (quite literally) in volume. What would the symphony “sound like” to each individual instrument? Well, first and foremost the cellos would be able to hear the violas and the bases more loudly because they are nearer. But they would also be able to hear whatever instruments (violins, trumpets) were carrying the thematic line at that moment, even as that line was passed around among them. It would have sensors for those too. And it would also be able to hear the more distant instrumental parts, the flute, the triangle, for they would receive those signals, though perhaps only more dimly and in such a way that they become obscured by, or mixed in with, the effect of the whole. But the cello is not the whole of consciousness. If it were, we would be back with a little “cellomunculus” in the brain, a main listener. No,

278

missing link

what would make such an orchestra so like our conscious experience is that all the instruments would be listening and responding at once, listening to one another listening and speaking, listening to how the listening-and-speaking loops back upon itself listening and speaking. The sound is everywhere and no one where at once. Sound would be happening. The orchestra would be thinking. The temptation to infer an actual conscious listener in the orchestra is very hard to resist, though I hope to have done so. At the same time (it may be worth confessing), I wonder if this might in an odd way account for our attraction to orchestral performances. As a living audience, we get to see performed something that is very like the event of conscious experience, with all its emotional and rational arguments, its themes and variations, the sense of a piece of music, a narrative sound sounding, struggling to rise free of the unheard-of conditions of its own making, and in so doing, become the listening it is made of. I could scarcely imagine a more beautiful music.

consciousness and metaphor Dennett’s different characterizations of consciousness, for our purposes, could stand in for different descriptions of the metaphoric initiative. We’ve already seen how so much of neurological activity evinces and embodies metaphoric behaviours, from the binding and liberating gaps in synapses to the discovery of metonymic nerve and interneuron activities that are “put for” external stimuli. But we come to the apotheosis of the metaphoric initiative in the fantasy echo aspect of conscious thinking. The mind stands witness to vast networks of neurons interacting and relating to one another in spatial patterns across gaps; cascades spill through likely pathways, join with and stand in tension against alternative configurations, and finally reverberate into, and as, higher and higher levels of amplified activity winding up into a revelation of their own work. A pair of pliers must by its very nature have difficulty reaching around to grab itself; this is what we attempt when we try to grasp our own subjective experience. But if the pliers stopped trying to reach around and instead tried to feel how it does already grasp itself, that its grasping is its grasp of itself, that it lies in its own grasp, it could perhaps stop strain-

The Metaphor of Consciousness

279

ing in the wrong direction. What is consciousness, finally, but the ultimate expression of existential identification, where the leaps that are made (the thoughts in your brain) are simultaneously identified with their maker and the process of their being made? The two become one. The metaphoric initiative doesn’t just characterize the relationships among neural networks. It characterizes, and is the reality of, our ultimate identification of those cascades with a living, breathing, and conscious “I.” We generate consciousness and feel as though the consciousness we generate is both something apart from us and yet inside us at the same time. Feeling that inside you is a you that you are inside of is the very riddle of interactive metaphor.38 What can we say then about the conditions and effects of the metaphoric initiative at this stage of evolution? The final leap that human being makes in its search for the origins and meaning of consciousness is to identify behaviours of mind with its own experience of subjectivity, the metaphoric initiative finally revealed to itself. Evolving over vast stretches of time through thoughtless embodiments to the level of symbolic thinking, metaphor’s workings finally manifest themselves as consciousness. It stands in its own clearing, in the form of a conscious thinking agent, with whom it may then identify, in one last exuberant metaphoric leap, as an “I.” That is after all what identity means.39

what is it like? The “fantasy echo” of firing neuron networks is a space of mutually referenced relationships of identity and difference, where each is a function of the other. Indeed, the fact of identity and difference may account for our experience of there being something else, something different inside us that we want to call an “I.” It may be because the simple metaphoric formula “A is B” insists paradoxically that each element is at once itself and not itself that we find it impossible to come to terms with our own subjectivity. It is why Rimbaud made perfect sense when he wrote “Je est un autre.” But think of the further implications! Your consciousness, like metaphor, is an impertinence, the violation of a propriety (perhaps the propriety that evolution must remain nothing more than a material and

280

missing link

unconscious process), whose new pertinence remains still to resonate beyond itself into meanings and forms unguessed at. And it is also, like all metaphors, a ventured hypothesis. Your own being yourself is a ventured hypothesis, one which may in some new way as yet undiscovered become the reality that you, or others like you, might someday inhabit. Ever since 1974 when Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?”40 consciousness theorists have framed the problem of subjectivity around the syntax of a metaphoric proposition (what is it like …), and from the perspective of my argument, this is no accident. If there is a reverberant self-reflexivity in consciousness, it might be fitting to find it in the syntax of the question that seeks to describe it. What is it “like” to be conscious? Well, to be conscious is “to be like.” Likeness is consciousness, for we dwell consciously in the midst of a being as. Some readers may flinch at this idea that their consciousness is a fantasy echo, a metaphoric impertinence, because, for one reason, it so manifestly is. Didn’t Descartes prove centuries ago that because I think, I am? Isn’t that the rock we stand on (even if it only turns out to be a sandbar)? The illusion, however, is not that there is isness, or neural cascades registering among themselves; the illusion is that those cascades create an “I” that is distinct from them. But why do we balk so at this idea that the “I” inside each of us is so easily mistaken for something more substantial? Frye always reminded his readers that our bias against myth and metaphor in general culture has a lot to do with our thinking of them as illusions. We associate them with what we know isn’t so.41 A great deal of his work was devoted to rehabilitating our conceptions of myth and metaphor, and along with them our sense of what an illusion is. He recycled Freud’s “the future of an illusion,” an idea itself worthy of attention, and spoke of “the reality of illusion.”42 What does it mean to say that the red we think we’re seeing is really just our own code for red, that the redness registered in your mind is the code that evokes it? As we said before, there is nothing other than the look of that code in our minds. So yes, it is an illusion that we are seeing an in-itselfness-of-red that exists out there. But the concurrent reality of that illusion is inescapable, for it is where we live. If someone showed you beyond the shadow of a doubt that your house didn’t really exist, would you move out? More importantly, would you be wrong not to?

The Metaphor of Consciousness

281

No one would be surprised by Loyal Rue’s claim in By the Grace of Guile that a certain amount of deception would be evolutionarily favoured in competitions for survival. The duper and the duped have been dancing their pas de deux for millennia. Our evolving sophistication in relation to the illusions that we trade in (with our concept of the “noble lie” and so on) distinguishes us from other tricksters in nature. At the level of “conscious fiction” (i.e. consciousness as a fiction) our investments in the various guiles assume a unique grace and propriety. What can happen at this stage of awareness is what Frye argues happens to the figure of Job when he is given a vision of the universe by an ultimate creative agent.43 For our purposes, that ultimate creative agent is our own metaphoric consciousness. Indeed, the story of Job might offer an account of how human consciousness becomes conscious to itself, and I wonder if this isn’t part of why it possesses cultural authority outside Judeo-Christian religions. Frye’s reading of Job appears at the end of Words with Power.44 I need only draw upon some of its elements. Job is the subject of a wager that if you take enough away from even the most faithful man, he will eventually curse creation and its creator. So Job’s life is turned into a living nightmare: health, family, wealth, all lost. His accusers believe he must have done something wrong to deserve this tragic reductio ad absurdum. Job, to his credit, doesn’t defend himself so much as desire a hearing. He wants to get at the truth of what is happening to him. He gets things wrong, doesn’t really understand his situation, but he hangs in there, and God eventually lets up on him, makes an appearance, and explains to him why it is that, given his understanding in the first place, he was in no position to solve the mystery. He lacked the big picture. In one of God’s more impressive moments of rhetorical flare, he asks, Where were you when I created the mountains, Where were you when I set the seas to roll?45 It might be worth noting that God’s smack-down of Job and the limits of his knowledge chimes with Steven Pinker’s claim that human being did not evolve the mental equipment to understand what its mental equipment is.46 It is almost as though evolution itself were scolding us: “Where were you when I evolved genetic codes! Where were you when I evolved symbolic thinking! What makes you think that you have the tools to understand your origins?”

282

missing link

God sets in front of Job a picture of the world God himself has created. The world is a created world, put there by a creative agent. The creative agent in the Bible is metaphorically Yahweh. In Chapter 13, we will think of divine creative agents as so many metaphors. They are in part metaphors of the thinking processes that metaphors perform. The gods are metaphors of the metaphoric initiative coming at last clear to itself, becoming conscious. It is what the otherworldliness of metaphor must look like when it descends into the material world and comes to know itself there (“I am that I am”). It looks like a god. The godmetaphor, the metaphor-god, reveals itself as such to Job, and in so doing, reveals a created world in which Job himself is a participant, and of which, even better, Job himself is a living expression. Job is a story of what happens when a thinking person suddenly stumbles upon an awareness of the mental processes that make his awareness what it is. The moment that Job is shown a picture of the symbolic universe with a part of himself expressed there, he stands outside it, sees it as such, and thus assumes an important ironic relation to it. In so doing, Frye argues, Job lets go of an idea of himself as a stable identity, and says: “I no longer consider what I call myself, an ego, as any reality at all, and I am withdrawing from it.”47 We may believe in the self, in identities that belong to us as our own, in a spirit of consciousness dwelling inside us as ourselves. But an apperception of the reality that lies behind that conscious and metaphoric disposition, illusory or otherwise, would be highly conscious indeed.

what is consciousness good for? We’re still begging the hard question. Do we have much evidence that consciousness is an advantage for long-term survival, that greater and greater consciousness is selected for on the longevity and prosperity scale? The only creatures we know of who have survived a long time relative to the age of the earth are dinosaurs, who weren’t writing much poetry as far as we know. Our own evolution of say three million years may turn out to be one of nature’s briefer and more embarrassing experiments. This begs the question of whether or not long-term survival itself represents any kind of desirable achievement. Is our success as a

The Metaphor of Consciousness

283

species to be measured by whether or not we can stick around forever? If that were the case, we would be doomed not to know whether we were any use at all, because we will never have reached the limit of how long we might have survived. And consider too that even if we hang around for seven trillion years, hitching a ride on three other planets in a different galaxy or even universe, drinking from the fountains of eternal youth, at least for a while, our time here would still be an infinitely small fraction of what we think of as infinity. We have no idea what achievement means in terms of the larger evolutionary picture, and therefore whether it is better for us as a species to be noble in the mind and live a shorter life or dumb as dinosaurs and hang around for a little longer. We are left with the idea of expanding consciousness, given our terms of reference, and the question of what, if anything, consciousness is expanding into. Perhaps the best we can say is nowhere and somewhere at the same time. But this is a subject for our final chapter.

10

Megaphors: The Seeing As Tool

pinnacle becomes threshold It often happens when you approach them, that what you thought were pinnacles become thresholds. We have worked through the metaphor of consciousness (subjective genitive, the metaphor that consciousness is). Our A = B has issued in symbolic thinking and it has assumed the echoic properties of sentient awareness. We may be inclined to think that our individual minds are the be-all and end-all so far as metaphor is concerned, that metaphor can’t do any better than produce self-reflexive thinkers like ourselves. But in truth, it may just be getting started. It is still expanding and taking on new forms. My account demands not only that we bring metaphor to its culmination in consciousness, but outline what that conscious awareness has become aware of, and how its work is reflected back into the material and social world. The metaphoric initiative works itself up into our cultural forms; that is, it is turned around and consciously deployed in the material world of social interaction. That material world is still a kind of interior domain, insofar as it embodies a space of symbolic human activity in the manner of a human mind writ large. We’ll want to think carefully about how this happens, how the inside gets outside, how the outside is really still inside. The subject/object divide breaks down and the line between ourselves and the world we inhabit dissolves. What is also at stake, naturally, is our freedom, the ability to make decisions about our lives and direct them according to our own desires. If we cross a line into a world of our own design, what happens to the determinism of natural evolution? Are we still pawns in that game? How much freedom exactly do we have and how did it come about? To use Daniel Dennett’s book title, how does freedom itself evolve?

Megaphors

285

the thoughtful hammer We like to think of ourselves as the ultimate tool-users on the planet. As we have evolved, our minds have adapted to recognize, relate to, exploit, and learn from instruments that have come to hand, from sharp stones, to hammers, to language. But nature is still the ultimate builder of tools. It found itself with a few tools at the outset, put them to work and made better ones. It used electron and proton tools and built atoms. It used atoms and built molecules. It used molecules and built chemicals and a primordial soup. It used the ingredients of that soup and made dna and rna, and then used those nucleic acid tools and made living cells. It put the cells to work and made living creatures and covered the earth with them. It turned out to be advantageous if those creatures could do some of the decision making on their own, so they evolved nerve centres (brains) that were able to sort out and work with varieties of experience. Using the tool of the brain, nature learned how to build symbols, and then using those symbols it built conscious beings, and then used those to build whole civilizations, with ploughs, telephones, and computers. Now, using computers and other technologies, it can build finer and more sophisticated tools that could never be built by hand. At the heart of it all, I’m arguing, is a relational behaviour whose workings are coterminous with the material fabric it shapes. Indeed, understood aright, nature itself is a kind of tool, a material reality that was devised and put to work by, among other things, the relational dimensions of time and space. For millennia we have inclined to believe that we are somebody’s end result, a final product, a good in itself. But we have begun to intuit of late how the tools are making tools out of us. Frye wrote that the apocalyptic awareness of our creative power involves the revelation that it is not we who are using language, but language that is using us.1 Similar revelations nowadays are declared across the cultural spectrum and the sciences. We are the vehicle of our selfish genes, à la Richard Dawkins, a warm home for viruses and bacteria, we are the inconvenient but for the time being necessary pluggers-in and programmers of computers, we are the handy vehicle of replicable information packets. Our feeling subject to forces larger than we are is nothing new. For a long time we understood ourselves as the tool of a godly power that put us to work in the

286

missing link

service of a divine plan. We were mostly happy to find its creative intelligence work through us in building itself up. With our understanding now of the new tool-makers – genes, computers and so forth – we see how we are subject to a power that not only is not thinking about us, but may not be thinking at all. These are large social issues of the first importance. I don’t know of any civilization that didn’t feel it was at the threshold of major social changes; if we don’t have a very special claim to this feeling, we are certainly no exception. The conditions of change themselves are rapidly evolving. We find ourselves inhabiting a reality (both social and environmental) that seems scarcely subject to our conscious control. We are used by the computers we have created, by the televisions we watch, by the internets we surf, or in general by the habits and imperatives of our various social ideologies. We have put in play forces that pass through us, multiply, and quicken. They seem determined to get into the world, oblivious of our own desire to keep the upper hand. It is a question of who is at the wheel, who gets to make the decisions, and who ends up just going along for the ride. I still remember how I first laughed when I read Pinker’s caveat that if his genes don’t want him to be fighting some naturally evolved habit they can go jump in the lake.2 Do we have that power? If we are just tools, can we do the thinking for the agents that use us? What good is a thoughtful hammer? Fortunately, my job isn’t to predict where all of this leads, but to see how the metaphoric initiative is involved. We have spent most of this book exploring how metaphoric behaviours at work in the material world might have evolved into the human brain. We have been thinking specifically in the last few chapters about how the material world gets translated into cognitive contents for further processing and how our experience of consciousness may have evolved as a result. We were pouring lots of images and experiences into the brain but haven’t yet thought much about what comes out. The human subject has yet to respond. And it does respond. That appears to be its purpose, after all: to handle a variety of inputs in more and more sophisticated ways so that self-preserving actions can be recommended in reply. All the juggling of symbols in our minds, those synapses that are put for actual objects, images, people and so on, have to be turned around and pointed back into the ex-

Megaphors

287

ternal world and realized there. The metonym that made it possible for us to internalize experience in the first place has to be put to work again.

be careful where yo u put things I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.3 Wallace Stevens’s excellent think piece “Anecdote of the Jar” is about a lot of things: the relations between human cultural artifacts and nature, the forms and transparencies of art, the human will to power, the relation between bare descriptive truth claims and mere anecdotes. For our part, the poem will help us ponder the audacity of metonymic thinking. The boldness of the poem is the curiosity of its first line. I placed a jar in Tennessee. No fuss, no bother; this is what I did. It is almost as though the first line were being set down in the poem in the same way the jar is set down in the state. Now all is changed. The declaration has a kind of creation ex nihilo effect, like a god saying, “In the beginning, I made some light.” How would you place a jar in Tennessee? When we look at this poem in class, I lift my coffee cup from the table and then, setting it back down slowly, say “I place a cup in Ontario.” The strangeness of saying so comes clear. Suddenly our ability to “place” things – to put them somewhere or to find out where they already are – and the meaning of

288

missing link

place itself fall into play, when we activate things we have made. I place a thing, and everything changes. The poem predates Werner Heisenberg’s essay on the uncertainty principle (1927) – where he argues that an environment is changed by our observation of it – by some ten years. You must at some point have experienced difficulty finding a place to set a beach blanket down on a long empty beach. You look about. Why here rather than somewhere else? It all seems so arbitrary. A shadow of doubt, an intuition of loneliness, passes over you. But no sooner do you choose a place, that place becomes home on the beach. Everything else on the strand, far and near, organizes itself around your “placing,” your making of place. The jar jars, jars our attention, jars our sense of where we are. The effect might not have been appreciably different if the object set down were a stone, or if one had merely discovered a stone already where it was and then sat there and thought about it as meaningful. The moment it becomes meaningful – of what? A resting place? Our isolation or singularity in nature? – it becomes symbolic. But part of the point for Stevens is that the object placed on the hill is a human artifact, not part of the wilderness one would have confronted were it not there. The simplicity of the jar helps to magnify its importance. Jars are containers; they have insides. But the jar is in Tennessee. The container is contained. Is the outside of Tennessee but another kind of inside? The jar – round and grey and bare – suggests a poverty of meaning and content, an emptying-out in keeping with Stevens’s later idea of a de-creative imagination that lessens itself so that it may more truly reflect where it is.4 The round jar makes the slovenly (i.e. shapeless) wilderness surround it, that is, to become round around it. The relation is antiphonal. The wilderness both moves upon the jar, and shapes itself roundly in relation to it. The verb “surround” has a sneaky etymology, which is unrelated, except by later assumption, to roundness. It derives, via the French, from the Latin super-undare, to rise up or overflow in waves. Stevens knew his etymologies. A wilderness that was both overwhelming and transformed would fit comfortably with his conception of an interplay between symbols and the external world that surrounds them. The jar “in the end” does not “give” of bird or bush, does not, as the oed would have it, devote itself unselfishly, or lend itself to, the world it is inside, as presumably everything else in Tennessee does. That would be tidy enough, except for the fact that the “like nothing else in Ten-

Megaphors

289

nessee,” while pointing to the isolation of the jar, might also be pointing to the “else” (the nothing-else) that would be nothing in Tennessee without it. The jar makes everything else nothing else. In the end we are left with the metaphoric act of putting for. But putting where? The conclusion returns us to that opening prepositional phrase “in Tennessee.” A symbol that contains our own inwardnesses is set into a world outside it, a world whose external reality is nothing else than what the symbol itself contains. I mentioned Werner Heisenberg above. If the return of the metonym to nature and its disturbance there of the old laws starts to sound like a bit of undigested modern physics, I consider it no accident. In 1958, Heisenberg published an essay entitled “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics,” in which he seems to work out his own anecdote of a jar in exactly the terms Stevens anticipated. “The aim of research is thus no longer knowledge of the atoms and their motion ‘in themselves,’ separated from our experimental questioning; rather, right from the beginning, we stand in the center of the confrontation between man and nature … the object of research is no longer nature in itself but rather nature exposed to man’s questioning.”5 Marcelo Gleiser puts it thus: “the act of measurement gives reality to what is being measured … to measure is to create.”6

the meto nym moves on Northrop Frye often spoke of how, at the fullest realization of our human potential, the world turns “inside out.”7 He got the idea from Blake’s belief that we come to inhabit, in a true sense, our symbolic recreations of the so-called “vegetable kingdom.”8 As many do, I struggled with this idea for years and rejected its implications. But our tracery of metaphor’s continuing evolution into the symbolic worlds gives us a special opportunity to rediscover the essence of Blake’s vision, a world that turns inside out. We watch consciousness “spread itself out” in the world, again to use Dennett’s phrase.9 In the beginning, remember, an amoeba stores a reflex memory of a pin prick internally so that it or its descendants might “remember” to recoil next time it encounters one. That memory marker, as

290

missing link

in this instance, could be as simple as an interneuron that measures the intensity of the blow so that it may set in motion an appropriately calibrated response. New possibilities arise once you can see things before they actually touch you. So in time it would become more convenient for you, and easier to remember, if you associated the sight of the pin with a memory of what the pin is and is capable of doing. The pin flips and becomes, as it is newly encountered, an example of itself. The mere act of remembering turns the external input into a symbol. A rabbit sees a fox in the grass. The fox stimulates the rabbit’s memories of earlier bad encounters. The fox now = the fox then. Now it is a meaningful fox, a symbolic fox. For most pre-conscious creatures, this form of symbolic thinking would reach a limit with the use of the objects themselves as memory markers. The fox is an example of itself, nothing more, because the rabbit remembers it. Steven Pinker observes how this form of abstract thinking might then translate into our more adroit cognitive abilities: tamarin monkeys have a rich understanding of … spatial and mechanical relations. Now imagine an evolutionary step that allowed the neural programs that carry out such reasoning to cut themselves loose from actual hunks of matter and work on symbols that can stand for just about anything. The cognitive machinery that computes relations among things, places, and causes could then be co-opted for abstract ideas. The ancestry of abstract thinking would be visible in concrete metaphors, a kind of cognitive vestige.10 With the advent of human consciousness and our evolving grasp of symbols as symbols, the doors blow open on the potential configurations of our created world. The symbols can spread out. I don’t just have to have a pin around to remind me of how pins hurt, I can draw a picture of a pin, or put a stick down nearby me on the ground that sort of looks like a pin to remind me that I’m wary of them, or best of all I can make sounds and put scratches on a rock (i.e. say or write the word “pin”) in devising a mnemonic system that would help me to reference, organize, and manipulate all my different thoughts about pins, their uses and dangers. I can then tell stories about pins. The stories, like the objects themselves, exist in the world of concrete objects as sounds or as written

Megaphors

291

cyphers or signs. The enormous flexibility of words in helping me to deal with kinds of pins, objects that function like pins, other weapons that hurt like pins, and so on, gives it a distinct advantage over the mere memory of what pins themselves have done. The point is that the new metonyms and markers are now both symbolic and concrete. When I see an actual pin and think of it as potentially harmful, it becomes a symbol as well as an object. Conversely, when I draw a picture of a pin, the picture is both an object (say, made of graphite markings) and a symbol. Similarly, a word is both inside us and outside us. I can take a sign and move it around in relation to other signs as though I were moving around the objects or ideas they evoke. I can test possibilities and conjure hypothetical realities, imagine readier or alternative responses. Insofar as they are inside us, as abstract symbols, the signs are pliable. Insofar as they are outside us in the world, a reality and authority accrues to them. Words like “hate” and “love” can sometimes be taken for the feelings themselves. This is one of the things that makes words so powerful. Let’s take a moment to notice how closely metaphor is implicated in this flipping of the symbolic into the concrete. The moment you see the pin and think of it as a painful instrument, or the moment you hear someone say the word “hate” or “love” and think of it as the emotion itself – that is, the moment the symbolic is identified with the actual – you are thinking metaphorically. Remember Joseph Jastrow’s duck/rabbit puzzle from Chapter 1 (figure 1.4)? We know that the drawing is of a duck and rabbit at the same time, but we can only see it as one or the other at any particular instant, as the image in our mind flips back and forth between them. One drawing is two animals. Two animals is one drawing. So too the pin we see is both concrete and symbolic. Our minds think of them as one in the same. So the external world, filling up with meaningful objects that we have thoughts about and eventually names for, evolves into a symbolic domain, one that in a very real sense we live in, just as we live inside our conscious seeing as. The world you move through is a metaphoric world. The things you encounter are metaphoric things, for you think of your thoughts about them as what they are. The fact that objects are enlivened by our thinking about them, it should be worth noting, is a core aspect of Kantian epistemology, where we won’t be surprised to find a certain kind of metaphoric thinking at

292

missing link

work. Things do not appear to us as themselves, Kant believed, but as representations of the understanding, which understanding “we shall call by the general name of synthesis, in order to show that we cannot represent to ourselves anything as connected in the object, without having previously connected it ourselves, and that of all representations connection is the only one which cannot be given through the objects, but must be carried out by the subject itself.”11 Objects in Kant do have an (elusive) concrete authority of their own, but our involvement with them is a metaphoric synthesis in the mind, a processing of connections. And the existence of those objects as already synthesized within us, while still entirely its own thing, points toward a further metaphoric identification of subject and object. Everything both is and is not itself. As the material world becomes meaningful, it takes on a life of its own.12 Objects are quickened in our minds, their uses and values leaping across synaptic gaps. The inference underlies the principle of animism in certain religions: the belief that objects are inhabited by spirits and that those spirits can inhabit a tree at one moment, a rock the next. The rock is fixed but gives itself over to the animus that is free to pass through it. The materials we think about are as dynamically in play as the neural connections in our heads that animate them. That the world and its animation in our minds are indistinguishable is surely the point of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “For all things flow; all things are born / to change their shapes. And time itself is like / a river, flowing on an endless course …There is no thing that keeps its shape; for nature, / the innovator, would forever draw / forms out of other forms.”13 The Ouroboros of my own argument folds back on itself in this same way, where material conditions are seen to give rise to the habits of mind that see them thus.

there is nothing outside of “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” We’ve got the world turned inside out, so that the metaphors are not just in our heads but at the same time and in the same way everywhere around us. The world fills up with symbols; everything we see becomes potentially meaningful in relation to everything else. In the humanities and social sciences we have become quite comfortable with the idea that

Megaphors

293

the world is populated with signifiers. Derrida’s “Il n’y a pas de horstexte” could be seen as the familiar axiom of any introductory course in cultural studies.14 Objects signify, buildings signify, clothes signify, gestures and habits signify, and words – words above all – signify. We would be hard pressed to find anything in our world that didn’t signify in some way. Indeed, as soon as something has our attention, it signifies. One of the most important things about symbols is that, like cigarettes and viruses, they can be passed around. If you saw me carrying a rock on my shoulder and decided that it looked cool (which is to say meaningful), you would have to find a rock sufficiently like it to emulate the practice. If however I went around saying “Rock and Roll” and you thought it was cool, it would take you only a second or two to mimic the sounds, and head off to be cool yourself speaking them aloud. Among the short list of cultural symbols above – objects, buildings, gestures and habits, words – some are more easily copied than others. Those that are most nearly accommodated to our minds – gestures, words – are the easiest to duplicate. Others might take time, like a building or a garden or an economic system. In the meantime they can be named, and the names can be passed around as the things themselves. This gets us into metaphor proper. All of those ideas in your mind are moving around. They interact. They have their associated commonplaces and they join with other ideas. Your idea of love and your idea of gardens graze one another in a passing association and a bond occurs: “My love is like a red red rose.” Our minds are constituted by this vast swim of names and images interacting with one another and making possible every change we can imagine in the concrete reality that surrounds us.

some push-back from the concrete/symbolic If creatures are to survive at all they must find good tricks, as Dennett says, to persevere in a changing environment. In preserving themselves, they “strive” to accommodate and manage the environment that surrounds them. But their existing at all, in turn, changes the conditions of that environment; their presence in it (as predators, as builders-up of dams, for instance) contributes to and affects the organic whole. We are more aggressive re-creators of our environment, turning trees into houses

294

missing link

and furniture, minerals into computers, water into electrical energy, fossil fuels into transit and smog. We place jars in Tennessee. We build up a world and then move in. The world we build is symbolic; it is put there in answer to our needs and desires. It reflects back to us both the human concerns that inspired us to put it there and the (sometimes unfortunate) consequences of our having done so. A house reflects back to us our need for shelter. A plate or a bowl reflects back to us our involvement with food. A computer reflects back to us (as Marshall McLuhan showed us15) some of the conditions of thinking itself. At the same time, that world is concrete, it is made of sticks and stones that can break our bones. Thinking about the tree of life doesn’t make that oak any less painful when you bump into it. Our confidence in fostering material wealth in the face of global warming won’t retard the flood waters, or make them any less wet, when they rise. Because it is both symbolic and concrete, we find that the world is partly susceptible to our handlings and recreations of it, and partly not. The concrete/symbolic marks the charter of our freedom as much as the limit of an intractable reality. We’ve seen how relation in the material world has transferred its imprint to us, and how that imprint passes back into the material world. Masses and energies that are both ours and not ours fall into play with each other and work themselves out, with us as the simultaneous drivers and subjects of their momentums. What are the consequences of this metaphoric identification of matter and mind? We spoke above about how we use the material world as a tool and yet seem to be one of its own tools in a larger evolutionary narrative that we don’t control. The question of our freedom and responsibility is at stake. It will preoccupy us both in this chapter, when we explore it from the perspective of symbolic thinking, and then in the next chapter when we look at the work of the metaphoric initiative as a rematerialized social and cultural force under our partial stewardship.

“all memsy were the boro goves” It may have occurred to you, as it has occurred to many, that the behaviour of symbols is rather like the behaviour of genes in the natural world. Like genes, our world of symbols is coded; like genes, they mean things; and like genes, they can be copied. As genes get copied more or

Megaphors

295

less faithfully, nature evolves. Mutations can occur during the copying process, or their interaction with one another during reproduction will lead to slight modifications of the genome over time. The same might be said to apply in culture. If you like a certain pasta dinner, you can copy the printed recipe and come up with something fairly similar; or you can watch it being made, copy the process, and get something slightly different; or you can try to guess at the process by looking at the cooked product and working backwards. You can retell a joke you’ve heard. You can copy the latest fashions. As with the party game that we call “Broken Telephone” (where individuals try to whisper to the next person in line a phrase whispered to them), the final product represents an evolved form of the original. As it happens, a burgeoning science has evolved around this suggestive metaphor of symbolic transmission. It is the science of “memes.” A meme in short is an externalized mental content, a mental content in the marketplace. Richard Dawkins first coined the term in The Selfish Gene (1976), where towards the end of the volume he speculates on what the behaviour of genes might look like if they were to be seen as operating in the social world.16 The term plays on the Greek word “mimesis” (to imitate) and the French “même” (the same) with an assonant soupçon of the word “gene” echoing within. A meme, according to Dawkins, is a unit of replicable information, a mental content that leaps freely across the gaps between one individual and another. A meme is actually rather difficult to distinguish from any mental symbolic content that combines, separates, and recombines with others to form new, always evolving images, beliefs, and ideas. This may be its weakness as a new science in its own right. We’ve been wrestling with the symbolic contents of our minds since at least Aristotle, and giving them a new fancy name imported from evolutionary biology may not add much to the debate. Still, scientists have introduced the theory of “memetics” as their contribution to the study of cultural evolution, and the term certainly raises new questions and stakes. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore refers to the “‘meme’ meme,”17 since the word has caught on and got itself replicated in the population (as into the oed evidently). In her book Science and Poetry, Mary Midgley waxes sceptical of scientists who would march unbriefed into the humanities armed with one-size-fits-all scientific accounts of cultural transmission. She calls it a form of misplaced atomism.18 “Cultural items” are not, like the meme,

296

missing link

“ultimate, immutable fundamental particles,” she argues, but rather “shifting patterns within human life” or a “complex of constantly developing patterns.”19 Scientists may be prone to over simplification when they step out of their own domain, as humanists like myself are when they move in the other direction. This isn’t to say that such interdisciplinary efforts are not worth the trouble or suggestive in their speculative reach. I think more than anything, Midgley objects to what she sees as scientists’ intimidating confidence in their new tool, as though cultural thinkers haven’t been wrestling with the same issues for millennia and in terms more attuned to the stakes involved. I am certainly interested in the explanatory power of memetics and try to find, as you’ll see here, corresponding initiatives in cultural and literary studies. Like all metaphoric traces, it will find a place to thrive among the cultural discourses or go the way of the hula hoop. But I am mostly interested in how the metaphoric initiative is again implicated in what Midgley calls the “shifting patterns” that these cultural items, whatever you want to call them, form. One notable feature of the meme is its quasi viral behaviour. Memes get themselves copied even when we don’t want them in our heads. Mark Kingwell’s essay on the meme in his book Practical Judgments may wax suspicious of the value and novelty of the meme, but memetic theorists would claim that, in doing so, he has contributed to its dissemination among all who read him.20 We like to think that we have control over which memes inhabit our brains but like ideologies (a more general term with similar behavioural features), they nest in your head and do a great deal of unconscious work there. Copying is itself metaphorical. In his book The Tree of Meaning, Robert Bringhurst makes the interesting argument that the Greek term for imitation, “mimesis,” might better be translated as participation. “Mimesis means learning by doing.”21 Effectively, “what you did there” is “this thing that I can do.” It could take the form of a question: “What is that action like?” You answer, “It is like my movements here.” In common metaphor, this happening upon a set of shared associated commonplaces results in expanded understanding. In memetics, it results in the expansion of the meme and the space it inhabits, to the advantage or disadvantage of the individual and the group whose contents are now likewise enlarged.

Megaphors

297

The replication of mental contents can give the meme a menacing flavour in social and cultural studies. Metaphor has suffered from similar anxieties. One of the implications of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By is that metaphors can be pernicious and invasive if they aren’t handled consciously and to good purpose. Metaphors, like memes, can have enormous political clout, especially when they are intentionally promoted by governments and corporations. 22 As a result, a great deal of the language used to describe their behaviour can be fraught with anxieties regarding their easy replication. Like genes, memes don’t need a cynical government initiative to thrive. Dawkins and others who have written on the meme – Susan Blackmore, Jack Balkin, Daniel Dennett as well23 – emphasize that memes do no thinking of their own. Like genes, they get copied. The ones that succeed in getting copied (by the powers that promote them, or by ourselves) are the ones that stick around; they match with or complement their environment in some way that furthers their survival. Because they stick around, it can appear that they have done so on purpose. Their seeming convincing can seem conniving. But like living creatures that are here only because they have survived to this point in the process of natural selection, they are not conniving. They are just here. But it is their unthinkingness that can make them so threatening. They start to behave like zombies, that popular metaphor for unthinking invaders. It strikes me as telling that as governments and corporations do battle for our hearts and minds – trying to wield the metaphors we live by – that science should be promoting this notion of passive “cultergens” that go about getting themselves copied, as if their agents were entirely beyond our control. It wouldn’t be the first time that, as we become aware of menacing political or economic forces, we make popular programmes that portray apocalyptic attackers as the “walking dead,” unresponsive to reason, resistant to citizen opposition. The scientists’ language is revealing. Memes “try” to get copied. They win battles in competition with other memes for survival. Once they do, they “drive” your behaviour. They “delude” you into thinking things. Blackmore reminds us throughout her book The Meme Machine that memes don’t have intentions, but most everything she says (and certainly the metaphoric orientation implied) suggests they do. The title itself only partly disguises the term “mean machine,” an unstoppable juggernaut.

298

missing link

The archetype is fairly familiar in our age: witness our fear, with respect to powerful computers, that we have opened a Pandora’s box filled with robotic algorithms driving us to destruction. Dennett uses a more organic metaphor: I don’t know about you, but I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dungheap in which the larvae of other people’s ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational diaspora. It does seem to rob my mind of its importance as both author and critic. Who’s in charge, according to this vision – we or our memes?24 According to Blackmore, memes further create a “false story”; they are lies; they propagate illusions – the conventional language associated with metaphors.25 Memes are on the march. Blackmore foresees a future in which the memes turn us into their radically unthinking slaves.26 But there is hope, says Blackmore. One choice we have in resisting the pernicious influence of memes is to stop thinking, evacuate the self, enter a flow of present experience unencumbered by associations.27 Such dubious proposals are evidence of what can happen when science imports its own models into the humanities wholesale: you bring memes to the problem of thinking, look around for five minutes, and then suggest that people stop thinking. Is it ironic, or merely inevitable, that her recipe for liberation is redolent of familiar Eastern religious practices? Laudable as it is, a “meditation meme” would probably represent a step backwards for those trained in the exact sciences. As I say, memetic theorists are not really bringing much that is new to the culture table. English departments have been dominated for thirty years by the social-concern criticisms that attend to the invasion of free thought by ideological agents that, like memes, are unthinking and selfreplicating. Our job is to ferret out their pernicious behaviours wherever we find them – in poems, in advertising – to protect otherwise passive readers and thinkers from being taken over by them. Our brains are the infected hosts of selfish memes and the fertile soil of invasive ideological dispositions. They’re talking about the same social anxiety – our fear of what happens to the products of symbolic thought once they get into and then back out of our heads – but they aren’t talking to one another.

Megaphors

299

For better or worse, memetics is the new language of cultural evolution in the sciences; the concept of the meme becomes a metaphor for gene behaviour in society. Since genes themselves, as we saw in the chapter on dna, evince metaphoric behaviours, we should be prepared to find similarities between actual memes and actual metaphors. The word “meme” emphasizes a particular behaviour of symbols, namely their replicability. Like metaphors, memes get copied, in this case from brain to brain. They leap across gaps from person to person. But there are also equally significant distinguishing differences. Any too-ready inclination to substitute the word “metaphor” for the word “meme” would no doubt cast on each aspersions lazily associated with the other. Memes would be seen as mere untruthful metaphors and metaphors as mere insidious mental contents that infect your brain. We come closest to an understanding of the metaphoric initiative inherent in meme behaviour when we remind ourselves of the concept of the dead metaphor discussed in the chemistry chapter. We spoke of dead metaphors there as “bonds” that have become so fixed in our minds that we think of them as fixed realities. They become concrete-symbolic. The leg of the table, the head of state, and so on. Lakoff and Johnson helped us to understand how deeply and often unconsciously we live by metaphoric associations that cease to be thought of as such, that argument is war, etc. Their insistence that we become conscious of the metaphors we project, that we recognize them not as final truths but as convenient tools, is redolent of the same anxiety that attends memetic studies. This is one aspect of the metaphoric initiative in its behavioural range. It has to do with how “made bonds” become “fixed bonds,” or givens, or assumed facts, thereby becoming more effective agents in their domains. Indeed, it might be considered the defining characteristic of the meme that it has become a fixed habit, a replicable way of doing things or saying something. But it is only one part, the latter part, of the breakand-make initiative inherent in all metaphoric events. What we don’t find in the meme is that aspect of metaphor that is the very possibility of change, the transgressive, mutative relational leap that erodes fixed realities and adapts them to an alternative vision. Memes themselves can change, but only because their replication is metaphorical, part of the is and is-not dynamic of relation. As we will see, it is just this aspect of the metaphoric initiative that we turn towards in trying to release ourselves

300

missing link

from whatever grim entrenchments our strictly memetic habits of mind appear to condemn us to. We need to think more about the nature of this condemnation before we entertain the possibilities of … metaphoric possibility that is a saving grace.

“the meme made me do it” At stake in all of this are some fairly important questions concerning our future as an evolving race. If our heads are full of memes – themselves both concrete and symbolic – that drive our behaviour, how can we still think of ourselves as free and self-fashioning? Our minds are amply tooled for symbolic thinking and we know that we can reflect a great deal on our situation, make decisions about what to do next and what not to do, but if those reflections are largely driven by little gremlin ideas in our heads, how do we find leverage to bootstrap ourselves in directions independent of them? It may be worth noting, first of all, how little things have changed over the centuries. At the height of the “religion meme” (if you like) in the Renaissance, your mind could be possessed by demons that would make you do things you mightn’t otherwise. You had to keep on the right and true path. Nowadays the demons are not rising up from hell and hiding out in unlikely places; they move in the form of ideological or memetic dispositions that arise from history and hide out in the culture, as within your deepest self, ready to steer you astray. Our struggle to rise above them (the vertical metaphor still applies) represents the titanic effort to liberate ourselves from Satan … or rather nature … or rather genes … or rather memes … or rather history. Well, to rise above. The right and true path, say the scientists, is no longer “divine reason,” but good science. Kingwell writes: “as Dennett’s insistent optimism makes abundantly clear, science is the only solution to problems of selfunderstanding, everything else reduced to more or less graceful ways of being irrational” (203). Dennett and Blackmore differ on this count; in Blackmore’s configuration, even scientific thinking can be contaminated by deceptive memes. For Dennett (who doesn’t see all memes as bad), only hard science can penetrate to the heart of truths otherwise obscured

Megaphors

301

to us. In either case, metaphoric thinking, with its penchant for counterintuitive and counter-logical propositions, would fall on the wrong side of the divide. Like memes, metaphors can obfuscate as easily as they can reveal. In Blackmore’s terms, they can lie and delude. We mustn’t trust them. The metaphor meme, to the scientists, is not the answer for the meme metaphor.

how to get free We took a look at Daniel Dennett’s approach to the question of evolutionary determinism and human freedom in Chapter 6 (cf. 206). In our discussion there, we were particularly interested in Dennett’s desire to “keep open the gap,” that is, to preserve some idea of unpredictability, and therefore freedom, in our conscious decision making. In Freedom Evolves, he asks: are we subject to a radical determinism, such that every minuscule subatomic event that makes up both the weather and myself is already fixed by a set of intractable cause-and-effect relationships? The computational irreducibility of unfolding events may make predictions impossible (where the only way to calculate the algorithms is actually to go through them in time).28 But we can imagine nonetheless how it is all fixed from the beginning, every synaptic event in your brain, every wisp of cloud in the sky, every flap of a butterfly wing. Blackmore’s anxiety regarding deterministic memes (and her quasi-religious solution of rising above the thinking they inhabit) is a further expression of this. Dennett promises a solution to the impasse: … my task will be to bring this churning of perspectives to a halt and provide a unified, stable, empirically well-grounded, coherent view of human free will, and you already know the conclusion I will reach: free will is real, but it is not a preexisting feature of our existence, like the law of gravity. It is also not what tradition declares it to be: a God-like power to exempt oneself from the causal fabric of the physical world. It is an evolved creation of human activity and beliefs, and it is just as real as such other human creations as music and money.29

302

missing link

The power to exempt oneself from the causal fabric of the physical world may not be a “god-like” power, but there is a sense in which Dennett has it backwards. In our earlier mythopoeic configuration, the godlike power was associated with the determination itself. God knew all and determined all. His “knowledge” was the fact of determinism. Our free will, on the other hand, if we were to have any, derived from our understanding that we must still take responsibility for our actions in spite of what God knows or ordains. The equivalent squirm in the sciences – our trying to slither out from under nature’s deterministic powers – is evident in Dennett’s book. Science has its own language for our struggle to rise above whatever conditions limit our freedom, but it is the same struggle that religion has confronted for millennia, and allowing again for a difference in language the results are not appreciably different. Something has made us what we are, but that something (God or evolution) has determined that we should follow through on, and enjoy, the freedoms it has granted us. A phrase like “freedom evolves” – with the debts implicated and the upward arc invoked – matches with the freedom that we used to believe we owed in similar terms to the divine power that, like nature, simply went about doing its thing. Freedom Evolves may be my favourite of Dennett’s books. I find it enormously consoling, even moving in a way that we don’t expect of hard-core science. His central question is this: When you have a thought, how is it yours, and is it possible to think something other than what you were going to think? He combs through the research and examines the evidence. Citing experiments performed on individuals that test for reactions to stimuli, he breaks down the mechanisms of mindful response into their minutest components. Can we track the precise unfolding of synaptic causes and effects and measure the degree (if any) of independent decision-making between the beginning and the end such that we could imagine a different response resulting from the identical stimulus? In his account of the gradual rise of human being into conscious freedom, Dennett returns to a distinction between “natural” and “design” evolution. Natural evolution is the endlessly slow process of unconscious selection governed by the reading and copying of gene codes. The process eventually resulted in us. Our capacity for conscious reflection introduced the stage of design evolution whereby a living species could make conscious decisions about the world. Our design skills could manifest in

Megaphors

303

a myriad ways, from deciding to build settlements near water to creating genetically modified foods and animals. The case for our evolving freedom is already partly made in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. The conditions of design evolution already provide for the possibility that our minds are not entirely governed by fixed responses: Words and other mind-tools give a Gregorian creature [us] an inner environment that permits it to construct ever more subtle movegenerators and move-testers … Gregorian creatures [have learned] how to think better about what they should think about next … a tower of further internal reflections with no fixed or discernible limit.30 But as far as freedom of decision is concerned, Dennett realized that this only begs the question of whether our internal reflections are themselves free or instead determined by memes that we have no control over. In Freedom Evolves the question has his full attention.

freedom and metaphor The core of my own argument regarding determination and freedom is essentially this, that metaphor proper (and the metaphoric initiative that gave rise to it) is one of the forms that freedom takes. I think this is amply if quietly demonstrated in Dennett’s own argument, and I’ll try to show how here. It is in the nature of determinism that the relation between a stimulus and response, a cause and effect, is governed by laws that may be thought of as hardwired into the material world, such that the effects cannot be deflected from their course. You may feel that you are free to stop reading this book at this stage, but you haven’t decided anything. Your brain chemistry (itself governed by cause-and-effect billiard ball interactions) led to this thought and you merely became aware of it as it rose into consciousness. Or think of it like this: you have a little “I should stop reading books on metaphor when they start to bore me” meme or neuronal pattern inside you; it was activated like a nerve ending and you put the book down. As Sam Harris says, we do not choose our thoughts.31

304

missing link

Even if it turned out that causal determination was undermined by indeterminate gaps that intervene between one event and the next, we still would not have free will, since we would still be unable to control in advance the thoughts that come to us. Dennett’s challenge then is twofold. As we saw in the chapter on evolution, he is looking for a shadow that falls between cause and effect, a lacuna where there is a non-determinative connective energy, where one thing may lead to another but need not. He is looking for the link that can go missing, the metaphoric breach. As one of his section headings puts it: “Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap?”32 Dennett also uses the phrase “the hiatus of determinism,” an effective characterization of what the metaphoric initiative insists upon in all logical narratives. At the same time, he needs to address Sam Harris’s charge that conscious will itself is an illusion, that however much there may be accidents of thought that weren’t going to happen, “I” still have no way of controlling them, since the thoughts that come to me are “always already” the thoughts that come to me. Dennett’s argument is satisfying on many levels and his powers of analysis (pulling the fabric apart, keeping the threads sorted without knotting them, seeing how they interweave) easily embarrass my own. Fortunately, my job is only to discern where and how the emphasis in his argument falls, by implication, on the metaphoric initiative. Our use of Dennett’s thinking in earlier chapters has already provided us with most of the arguments we’ll need in order to follow his reasoning. With the psychologist Daniel Wegner, Dennett agrees that conscious will is an illusion.33 He cites experiments that have been performed that show how, in the act of voluntarily pressing a button, an individual’s “readiness response” is activated in the hand before he says he was aware of choosing to press the button. Dennett doesn’t challenge the findings of these experiments, though he does question certain implied assumptions. We ourselves should be more than ready to ask with him: Where is the “you” that you say is conscious of wanting to press the button? We tend to identify this “you” with an audience in the Cartesian Theatre inside you. But this “you” is an illusion, as we saw in the last chapter. And why, in any case, should your whole self be identified with this conscious projection? This “you” is like the tidy desktop you see on your computer screen that disguises the dizzyingly complicated 1’s and 0’s “behind” it

Megaphors

305

that make it possible for the computer to operate. Why should we want to grant free will only to the desktop? This is the domain considered in isolation where we seem not to choose our own thoughts. But we also need to look in that area where the neurological inputs are in genuine competition, where your drives, your memories, your emotions and reasons, and even your memes if you like, fall into a scrum. “You” wait to see which ones rise to your attention – or rather, you are the “ones that rise to attention” – and then you narrate the results. Now, you may want to insist at this stage that that scrum of multiple inputs is already determined by cause-and-effect relations in your brain chemistry. You would be right. There is some sense in which the interactions in your brain are computing, that is to say, deciding a response, but the response still happens according to laws that may be governed by forces you have no control over. Dennett puts it like this: A lot of what you are, a lot of what you are doing and know about, springs from structures down there in the engine room, causing the action to happen. If a thought of yours is only conscious, but not also accessible to that machinery (to some of it, to the machinery that needs it), then you can’t do anything with it and are left just silently mouthing the damn phrase to yourself, your isolated self, over and over.34 There is another gap, as it happens, Dennett argues, and that is the gap between that scrum among the multiple inputs (the engine room) and the need you necessarily experience to communicate its results to others. To do this you use words. The narrative line you come up with to account for yourself is one of the loudest manifestations of your conscious self (the one with the most “clout,” as Dennett would put it in Sweet Dreams35). Indeed, in a very large sense, your consciousness arises as the felt need to account for the happenings in your pre-conscious engine room. This conscious self may be an illusion as a distinct, independent entity, but it is a highly functional one, for it creates a gap between the engine room and the conscious reporting room: “one of the main roles of the brain’s user-illusion of itself, which I call the self as a centre of narrative gravity, is to provide me with a means of interfacing with myself at other times.”36 In your search to find the right words to

306

missing link

articulate the results of your inner scrum, you initiate a self-reflexive conversation in which those various inputs are given names of sorts, symbolic markers. They are set in a loop, where they inquire of themselves, measure and adjudge their relations in a way that gives that engine room a potential distance from itself. That your inner domain should be the same as, and different from, itself is the metaphoric allowance that intervenes between the engine room and the reporting room. An interstice falls between a chemical scrum “below” an illusory narrative domain “above,” that is to say, between the actual and the symbolic, the real and the imagined, the logical and the counter-logical, where the terms are more difficult to fix. The simultaneous “is” and “is not” that is the essence of metaphor leaves the lines of determinism running afoul of one another. We entertain an illusion, an illusion that there is something called an “I,” and in so doing we open a space where that “I” falls in play with the engine-room activities that lie behind it; it thus becomes the truest guide to those activities, the nearest we have to their accuser and defender: The perspectival trick we need in order to escape the clutches of the Cartesian Theatre is coming to see that I, the larger, temporally and spatially extended self, can control, to some degree, what goes on inside of the simplification barrier [i.e. inside the engine room] where the decision-making happens.37 While you may not feel that your conscious “you” controls its thoughts, there is nonetheless a total environment of mental activity above and below consciousness in which those gaps do set in play the uncertain algorithms of what we will think next. Our brains house a kind of interactive indeterminacy, even if we aren’t conscious of them doing so.38 Metaphoric mind is exactly that, an “interactive indeterminacy,” an uncertainty principle that intrudes between cause and effect and scrambles outcomes. Let me anticipate the centrality of this point for the final chapters by saying here that art is just this principle put to work in a culture, the instantiation of unpredictable futurity. As Ron Rosenbaum writes, “Artistic consciousness may be the last validation of free will, its last refuge from determinism. It is hard to ascribe every efflorescence of artis-

Megaphors

307

tic consciousness, every brush stroke or musical note or poetic image, to some materialist, physiologically determined, or behaviorist syndrome in the brain.”39

“escape the clutches” The distance from oneself that comes via language and metaphor. We need to have a self but also recognize its unreality in certain terms. We return again to Wallace Stevens’s useful adage: “the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”40 The more humorous version of this is the Woody Allen joke of the man who wouldn’t turn in his brother for believing himself to be a chicken because he needs the eggs. It may be worth observing how close Dennett’s engine room – where all the real work gets done – comes to Freud’s hundred-year-old model of the psychic agon. In Freud’s picture, an ego evolves as a separate domain, as an expression of our need to accommodate the otherwise unconscious id to the external environment it finds itself in. The ego is a kind of battleground, a mediating agent in constant “looping” negotiation with its driving forces, its engine room, its id. It is in the space of the “fictive” ego that the brain has a chance to “escape the clutches” (to use Dennett’s phrase) of a kind of libidinal determinism. It arises as an expression of that possibility. Thence one gets into the value of the “talk cure,” which is nothing if not the means of fostering (and embodying in story) the sorting mechanism that loops between the Conscious and the Unconscious. If I might redirect Dennett’s phrasing here, the talk cure provides a “means of interfacing with myself at other times,”41 only with Dennett you don’t need a couch or a therapist sitting behind you for you to succeed. Dennett argues that with our freedom of mind we are not stuck in a rut as human beings, doomed to be pushed around by our brain chemicals like so many neurotics. Freud sought the same freedom for his patients. Dennett hasn’t so much revolutionized the science of psychotherapy as rewritten its terms of reference in relation to the later cognitive sciences, using terms like “the engine room” and the spatially “extended self” over ids and

308

missing link

egos. Dennett updates the science of psychoanalysis, and Sigmund Freud becomes an early twenty-first century cognitive philosopher manqué, both and neither. So says the seeing as tool. Our internal metaphoric contents and processes have been projected back into the external world where they appear as well nigh every meaningful thing we experience. We build that world around us, find ourselves inhabiting it, then worry that the world we build – full of viral concrete/symbolic contents – is having its way with us. And we want to say that in a sense, yes, the evolving metaphoric initiative – passing in and through nature into and through us – is indeed having its way. In another sense, that same initiative appears to insist that the way it is is already always open. Its openness sets us marching to its drum. We follow it as its minions to see where we will lead.

11

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

… my eyes have seen what my hand did. ~Robert Lowell1

the means and end of freedom We spent most of the last chapter getting the metaphoric initiative turned around, like a heavy cannon, so that our salvos were no longer directed at the inwardness of human being but back outside, where we can see how that inwardness participates in the world around it. The material world is both concrete and symbolic, and we’ve come to recognize in the fictions of a functioning ego the potential for selfreinvention. We want to feel that we control our own destiny. Such a freedom evolves, Dennett has argued, and we have seen how metaphoric thinking makes this possible. How are we to understand the kind of lift that is granted to human beings, and what role does the metaphoric initiative play in enabling this lift? We’re going to leave the brain behind now and focus on the presence of metaphoric behaviours in human culture. Once again, we must confront the difficulty that we have met elsewhere in this book of the radical relativity of the metaphoric initiative. We’ll have to look at a principle of “fitness” in society that has its complement in those “survival of the fittest” theories that come to bear in natural evolution. We will find that the metaphoric initiative expresses its designs at this stage of evolution not just in the form of hypotheses, but in a unique domain that is the inherent reserve and function, within a society, of hypothesis itself. That moves us into the field of the literary per se. I’ll be using the example of tragic form in literature to suggest a way in which the work of hypothesis

310

missing link

in society becomes self-conscious and purposeful in a manner that we recognize as residing at the core of metaphor. My conclusions there will leave us with one final issue to take up in the chapter, and that concerns the kind of clout that this separate literary domain in society is thought to have, and may yet have with a little adaptive reasoning in its support. Why is it that we want to be free? Metaphoric consciousness has bequeathed to us a desire to be self-made and self-creating, not subject to forces, either natural or divine, that manipulate us like puppets on a string. We are symbolic thinkers and that means that we can think creatively about our condition, visualizing possibilities and alternatives. We have been set free to imagine them; we want to stay free to follow them wherever they take us. Freedom of mind is as much the goal as it is the means to achieve it.

do we have lift? This freedom that we have and don’t have – that both is and is not – are we doing anything useful with it? For the most part, from the perspective of historical hindsight, the jury is still out on the question of whether freedom has been especially liberating for us. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s adage applies as much today as it ever did: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”2 Abuses of power among classes, races, and religions compromise the freedom all people are owed as their birthright. Even where we believe freedom thrives, ideological and memetic theorists can show us how unfree we actually are, how pushed and pulled by socio-political, racial and religious, consumerist environments and their seductions, along with the various myths and metaphors they encourage us to live by. One of the myths we live by today is that things are getting better, that advances in science and technology and medicine are improving living conditions around the world. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature argues that we are evolving into a more moral species, and that science might prove to be a further enabling initiative. Whatever else these myths are, they conform to the romance story type of a hero – the gun-slinging hero “Trial and Error,” whom we met earlier, moseying

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

311

into culture at sundown – who passes through a series of actual trials until finally it transcends the very conditions that have tested it. Of course, just because a disposition is mythically based, doesn’t mean that it can’t possess genuine authority. Dennett is optimistic that “we may be able to discover some adjustments in our current design that have some hope of carrying us to higher summits.”3 Some are not convinced. Arguments are tabled on all sides across the sciences and humanities. Like most people, I look around and see countless reasons for despair and one or two reasons for hope, and try to manage on a meagre diet of the latter. We saw in Chapter 7 how the concept of lift is built into our theories of evolutionary change (cf. 219). The language of science today is not shy about making claims of genuine progress, for reasons that are largely justified given the criteria by which we measure. Dennett’s metaphor, our “summit” of current understanding, implies a faith in the power of conscious design. Generally we think that we are ascending, we are becoming more sophisticated, at least in comparison to the creatures who came before us. Theories that nature has been getting less sophisticated and hit rock bottom on the stupidity scale when it came up with us are relatively few and don’t hold much water. No, the principle of lift, in a process of natural selection that ends with us, appears to come with the hardware we were given. It is the romance narrative built into us.

the survival of fitness There is, however, one genuine alternative to the concept of lift, and as it happens it too is already built into the theory of evolution as another of its constitutive properties, and that is environmental fitness. In our age of relativity, no one would be surprised to learn that our notions of progress are governed by criteria that are radically relative, but the caveat deserves emphasis. Creatures don’t survive because they rise above their former condition, i.e. because they get smarter or faster; they survive because they fit their environment. Because environments change, a creature may appear to advance in changing with it, but there is no advance per se. An advocate of intrinsic lift might counter that creatures survive

312

missing link

because they win out over other species who are in competition for limited resources, and they win by coming up with better ideas within their environment. Smarts and speed might be two of those better ideas. But part of that environment is the fact of limited resources and a competition among contenders for them. Smarts and speed just happen to be favoured in this particular context. If resources were unlimited, smarts and speed might be unnecessary and perhaps even costly in evolutionary terms. Eyes seem like an absolute good to us, but only because there are wave-particles of light to be exploited for their tendency to pass through space and because elements in the environment can move around rapidly and need to be tracked. Worms in the ground do quite well without them. Lift is lift towards something. The “lift towards” is not an ascent per se, but a degree of fitness in relation to larger contexts. Synecdoche is the degree to which parts may be identified with wholes; you don’t have to squint too hard to see how the concept of fitness is built into it. Thus a rabbit’s speed has a synecdochic relationship with the open meadow it thrives in. Our eyes relate synecdochically to the open skies. The concept of environmental fitness is what the metaphoric initiative looks like when it manifests in the relations between creature and habitat. Max Black’s concept of interactive metaphor (cf. 49) is nothing if not a demonstration of the workings of fitness in metaphor theory (where clashing elements interact in such a way as to change the nature of the environment). In nature, “environment” is the total sum of conditions, macro and micro, that could influence the evolution of living things. In the final chapter we will focus on this “total sum of conditions” and use it to help us understand, in metaphoric terms, what we are and what we may yet become. The nature of environment itself, however, changes when we move into human culture, where the terms and conditions have to do increasingly with the added elements of symbolic thinking and design potential among its inhabitants. In fact, this is one of the more important questions in the latter half of this book. What stands as “environment” in human culture and what is its relation to the older, larger environments of nature and physics? But before we move on, we need to focus on that stage in evolution when the environment itself appeared to change, where questions of lift took on a different meaning.

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

313

the design world as meditation “Someone is moving / On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.” The character of Penelope in Wallace Stevens’s poem “The World as Meditation” finds herself in something of the same position as our species when it became capable of thinking symbolically and imposing designs on the natural world. Stevens’s Homeric figure is experiencing a “lift,” that is to say a sunrise – the beginning of another natural round – from which she herself has arisen and around whose narrative arc she has evolved a routine of trying to find something in it that she desires. What she desires is her husband, the hero Ulysses, for whom she has waited twenty years and whose return she has passed the time imagining. At stake is her capacity to find in the orders of nature the means and occasion to realize the potential of her own imagination. And so the poem opens with a question of what exactly it is she encounters when she “awakes into” such a world and looks for hopeful signs: Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east, The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended. That winter is washed away. Someone is moving On the horizon and lifting himself up above it. A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope, Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells. She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him, Companion to his self for her, which she imagined, Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.4 One of the inferences of the opening lines is not only that Penelope is superimposing an imagined reunion with Ulysses on what is just another day, but also that her imagining is a form of self-creation, a discovery in herself of the power to be the person who will meet that potential. In fact, it is part of Stevens’s genius that this may not be a poem about the real Penelope waiting for the real Ulysses. It might rather be a poem about just anyone who wakes into ordinary day and prepares a hopeful

314

missing link

self who, in seeking a fulfilment, thinks up a world in which that fulfilment “very nearly” comes true, and in so doing inhabits it as the person she would become there. To put it in other words, this woman, who wakes and imagines that the rising sun is the rising of her imagined lover to meet her, makes of herself the woman whom that lover rises to meet. The logic goes around in a circle, as the sun itself does in the poem. “If, in my waking, this is really Ulysses from the Homeric epic finally coming home, then I must be Penelope,” the woman might say to herself. “If I am Penelope, then I should awake to meet him, for he appears to be arriving.” We find in the poem an imaginative inquiry into the relation between actual and imagined worlds, or natural and designed worlds if you like, and how the one may be superimposed over the other like a kind of transparent template and transform it, while also leaving it partly itself. The natural world provides the cycles of repetition and change unfolding on their own. But it also provides the transformation that a more designing symbolic thinker might use to conceive of a further lift that comes out of it. What comes out of that natural world, in the symbolic consciousness that has been added to it, is a world in which its own needs and desires are more fully at stake, more concerned. At stake in “concern” is the fulfilment of a world in which the real and the desirable may be, in the end, metaphorically identified. When at last we rise above the natural world by taking its very habit of rising-above and using it for lift, we shall have fulfilled our potential. But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart. The two kept beating together. It was only day. It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met, Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement. The barbarous strength within her would never fail. She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair, Repeating his name with its patient syllables, Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

315

Heartbreaking, that last sentence in the first tercet above (these are the last three of the poem). What appears to be an admission of disappointment becomes an illumination. To a certain thinker, the recognition that “It was only day” would be a severe letdown. But for Penelope, the world she finds herself staring at and the world she designs in her own imagination, are finally one, metaphorically identifiable, a single world that both is and is not a fulfilment of her own imaginative power. There is no mention of a mirror or dressing table where Penelope combs her hair. They need only be implied, for there are mirrorings everywhere around her. She confronts the mystery of what Frye would call “the double vision,” the ability to see two things in one, to think metaphorically. That is her “barbarous strength,” the power she reflects upon as much in the unnamed looking glass as in the poem itself. She goes through the ritual of making possible worlds out of given ones and sees a future reflected in them. What future? The day when that chance will come again to meet the reality of what she has imagined.

natural vs. design evolution With the evolution of symbolic consciousness, human being has introduced into the world the element of design and of imagined and imaginable purpose. We are still, in every sense, products of our natural environment. So much that we do is determined by our primary needs for food and shelter, the ability to move, the freedom to associate in groups. We find ourselves still subject to behaviours that were settled upon thousands of years ago. But we have taken these needs and natures and we have begun to reflect and act consciously upon them. Moreover, we have designed and executed changes of our own, changes that go to the root of what it is to be human, changes that have themselves altered the earth’s environment and our place in relation to it. One stable feature of the natural environment is that it constantly changes. There are the longer-term variations in weather and season and the shorter-term facts, such as that a wolf may appear in front of you that wasn’t there a moment ago. We have spoken already about how creatures do better as they evolve more and more sophisticated strategies of

316

missing link

coping with these predictably unpredictable conditions. You can return to my discussion of Dennett’s four varieties of adapted creature on page 262. Moving through the four stages, we arrive at creatures like us who are able not only to think symbolically, but to think of symbols as symbols, as tools that can do thinking for us and serve as storerooms where we can lay aside some of our earlier thinking for possible future use. Design evolution is evolution under the conditions of consciously symbolic thinking. A beaver can build a dam, but it doesn’t make blueprints for the structure, sketching out two or three layouts of where to put the entrance and then choosing the best one. He “knows how” to build a dam because the knowhow, or the learning for the knowhow, is coded into his dna, and he doesn’t have to think about it any more than you have to think about how to walk or how to reach for an object. The most advanced forms of symbolic thinking, we believe, are those that are able to represent to themselves their own activities and processes and then use those representations to think more about the task at hand. We become able to plan ahead and generate images in our minds that are metaphorically put for proposed objects or events. We can represent these images on paper or with words and create further blueprints for execution. In the same way that we can design a building, we can design and execute belief systems, ideas, cosmologies. They become our biases, and they are as unconsciously our own as the beaver’s dam is to the beaver. Pressing still further into the realm of the intangible, we can create blueprints whose sole purpose is hypothetical, to help us reflect on the nature and content of the visions or blueprints themselves. We can tell stories, we can draw pictures. With symbolic thinking, the potential of design evolution explodes. Communication becomes more sophisticated, learning is accelerated, copying and imitation further expedited and exploited. We seem to have more control of our future. We can picture the world we desire, we can plan and design that world, we can reflect on how best to realize it, we can evaluate worlds we have made in relation to their function and morality; we can edit and speculate and test, strengthen our resolve to act or change our intentions, all with long-term goals in mind. The conditions necessary for design evolution appear to be favoured in the environment. They make us more flexible and better adapted, relatively speaking. They don’t necessarily make us “better.”

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

317

the devil, i mean nature, made me do it There is a distaste among practitioners in the humanities these recent decades against naturalistic accounts of social phenomena. Scholars in a variety of humanistic disciplines don’t care for the suggestion that evolutionary mechanisms may be at work in culture. “Indeed,” as Pierre Jaisson writes, “a kind of sanitary cordon has long been firmly maintained around the subject of humankind, where there has been an emotional and ideological refusal to consider that human behaviour might have any ultimate causality other than a cultural one.”5 A friend and I have an on-going debate whether or not male hypocrisy regarding affairs (i.e. that a man can have one but his wife can’t) may be understood in terms of early evolutionary pressures, whereby a man’s job was to get as much of his sperm out there as possible while simultaneously ensuring his paternity among the children born to women he has known.6 Such accounts have fallen out of favour in cultural studies, as politically incorrect in the extreme. We must recognize, my friend argues, how male/ female relations are entirely socialized, a function of ideological conditioning. We must recognize this fact in order to make change possible. If we naturalize a man’s selfish behaviour in the terms outlined above, we promote the status quo (Nature has ordained that this be so!) and thus render change impossible. The argument certainly has some merit. There are those who appeal to natural processes as a way of justifying cynical or unpopular practices. “Nature abhors a vacuum, so you should buy this couch.” Another unconscious appeal to natural behaviour that is predominant in our culture would have us become less conscious of our place and purpose, so that whatever powers dominate may continue to do so. We should run with the herd so that we are not left behind.7 Nature did this in the old days, though it did so unconsciously, without the cynical intention of keeping all its phenotypes in line or selling them things they did not need. And yet arguing that a cultural habit has natural roots doesn’t mean that we should approve of it, or accept it, or not attempt to rise above it.8 Again, Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works writes, if my genes don’t like the sorts of things I hope to do in this world, they can go jump in the lake.9 To rise above it, however, we may need a fuller understanding of the original habit. In this case, it may be that we are up against not just ideological conditioning, but evolutionary forces that

318

missing link

still compromise whatever solution we choose to promote. Design evolution can produce a relative lift; a factor of potential conscious reflection has been added to the evolutionary mix. This is what we invest in, the possibility that consciousness can choose not to follow where natural evolution might otherwise have taken us. This is our freedom. And as Dennett has shown, it evolved naturally.

let’s see what happens if … Let it be said, in our defence, that we may be doing the best that is possible given what we started with, insufficient as our best obviously is. This may sound squeamishly close to a form of soft liberalism, where the world is “more or less” getting better and we are “more or less” on the right track, as Terry Eagleton calls out Richard Dawkins for implying.10 It might be that the tragic humanism Eagleton recommends in the end – that “only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own”11 – must begin with certain preliminary recognitions. We don’t have gods who possess foresight and hindsight and who make no mistakes along the way looking after us, and we aren’t such gods ourselves. Our design prowess has produced the CAT scan and the nuclear bomb. It doesn’t mean that we will make the best designs or the best decisions, either for ourselves or our environment. But there is an even more important fact to consider. Design evolution does not do away with natural evolution. It adapts it and assimilates it to its own laws and procedures. Or rather, it may be that natural evolution assimilates some of the advantages of design. I don’t mean only that natural evolution may still be at work in the old manner, i.e. using the unconscious laws of natural selection to favour certain genetic adaptations over millennia. This may be so indeed, though scarcely enough time has passed for the era of human history to produce many noticeable changes in the genomic population. What I mean is that there is a version of natural selection that operates in culture as one of its principle engines. We like to think that we can control what we make. However, we have more difficulty controlling, or even managing, what happens to what we make. Over decades, capital investments rise and fall according to the fickle conditions of a free-market environment.

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

319

We venture design features in the world: a vaccine for the flu, electric cars, a map of the human genome, donations for the indigent. Some of these fill an immediate gap. Vaccines, for instance, will help both the ill in need of them and the pharmaceutical companies that engineer them. Donations are typically harder to sustain because fewer decision-makers profit from them. Still other ventures, like our newly-minted genetic map, have unpredictable consequences and present new puzzles to solve. Such impressive leaps into the unknown can throw off social and economic balances, or change the way medicine is practised. Nature tends not to take huge leaps beyond its own current conditions.12 Design features may be self-consciously proposed, but no one can know how they will fare in society, where they compete for attention and resources. “Man proposes, God disposes,” said Thomas à Kempis. In Chapter 6, we considered how the process of evolution appears to mimic the procedures of the experimenter, the romance hero, and the poet. Every adaptation, including those that have led to us, is a kind of ventured hypothesis, a whimsical “what if.” Every better cell phone, every new traffic law, every cut tax or new social program, even negative acts, such as acts of violence in the minds of their perpetrators, is a kind of “let’s see what happens when we do this.” Every act is a ventured act. Our lives in time, however modelled in advance and consciously manipulated, are subject to an elusive heuristic. Our struggle to be more creative than destructive in our lives bespeaks an evident wish that something should go out from us into the future. This is one of the reasons that hypothetical thinking – with its focus not on what happened, but on what happens – is so essential to the work we do. We are fixated on consequences and need to figure out where we are in those consequences.

THINKING AHEAD

about literature

In the next chapter, we’ll think about how literature evolves and how the principles of natural and design evolution at work there contribute to corresponding processes in human society. Now we need to consider how the principle of the literary per se – that is, of the fictive or imaginary with its unique embodiment of the laws of hypothesis – is already at work in the forms of design and natural evolution that we find in society.

320

missing link

Let’s remember that we are looking for a gap. The theory of natural evolution depicts an environment of intelligible causes and effects in which there is no room for the kind of conscious design that comes with symbolic thinking (that is, no room until nature actually evolves conscious design). Dennett sought the “much-needed gap”13 between the inputs of experience and our outputs of intentional response and espied them in the mind tools of symbolic thinking, in the “tower of further internal reflections with no fixed or discernible limit.”14 In his work on “complex adaptive systems” in computer technology, John Holland speaks of the importance of simulation and “stage-setting” in the classic process of “hypothesize, test, and revise.”15 It is the potential “recombination of building blocks” inherent in the feed-back of complex design that gives a system special lift in its computation of recommended responses. This capacity for “stage-setting” distinguishes the design capabilities of human consciousness from that of other creatures. From our perspective, the metaphor of stage-setting, of the proscenium arch, where actions can be played out at one remove from lived experience, is especially germane, even prescient. How inevitable was it that such stage-setting skills would evolve an independent domain in the form of actual theatres and actual stage sets? Nature, remember, works by hypothesis.16 Adaptations are ventured, then explored or discarded. The power of hypothesis is only increased with the advent of symbolic thinking. We have already seen its principle at work in the sciences as one of its core means to an end. We have already entertained some of the differences between the hypothetical work of a test-tube experiment and that of a poem. However reserved or merely speculative the use of the hypothetical in the sciences may be, there is still an investment, no matter how delayed, in their tangible applications. But in artistic culture, the expressions of hypothesis become more complex and begin to possess an independent authority wherein the conditional and the subjunctive become prized for their own sake. As far as I can tell, there is no place in nature where hypothesis occupies its own conscious portfolio, has rights to a separate budget of resources, and is supported by independent organizational structures. The only place nature has opened up such a domain within itself is us. We are the space apart in nature where heurism reigns. But it is also true that there

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

321

is one area of human society where we feel that the powers of hypothesis are particularly celebrated for their intrinsic value. This is the domain of the arts. What is the nature of hypothesis in art as distinct from hypothesis in natural evolution? There is a difference between the “proposals” of natural evolution (where the variations it dreams up are deployed in the material world) and the inherent detachment of hypothesis in art. We don’t, or at least shouldn’t, look for a Mrs Dalloway in the actual world. Mrs Dalloway is a character-function at work in a fiction entitled Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. She represents Woolf’s unique refraction of actual and hypothetical experiences, certain character types, and their beliefs. In this refracted form, Woolf can make hypothetical use of her imaginary character for the further ends of proclaiming something essential about human being. But there is another principle at work that is unique to the domain of the imaginative per se. Hypothesis can also emphasize the exemplary meaning of certain acts. I can say, for instance, “all angels are weightless,” and you would understand my claim in certain terms. This, you would say, is something I apparently believe. But I can also put the claim in quotation marks (either actual quotation marks or by using a tone of voice or a facial expression to purpose) and ascribe an author to it thus: “As Jones says, ‘all angels are weightless.’” You would understand that I am distancing myself from the immediate claim. Geoffrey Hill has likened quotation marks to a pair of tweezers; we use them for lifting statements out of their effective context into a domain of detached, reserved, or ironized proclamation.17 In literature, as Aristotle was the first to understand, every statement is an example of a statement; every action is the imitation of an action, every idea an imitation of thinking. “The poet,” Sir Philip Sidney reminded us centuries ago, “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never Lieth.”18 To affirm in the usual sense would be to ratify or pronounce the truth of a proposition, that such and such a thing is so, that your words have descriptive purchase, that they refer accurately to an object, belief, or set of conditions external to them. These are the affirmations and speculations of scientific hypothesis. Not to “affirm” in this manner, Sidney believed, is to elude the problem of descriptive reference and its truth-value.

322

missing link

Once again: you can refute Hegel but you can’t refute “The Song of Sixpence.”19 We still haven’t quite mastered the implications of this simple but elusive truth, where the value of the arts is concerned. This element of the non-imperative in literature, of the strictly hypothetical, distinguishes imaginative writing from other uses of language, where the intention to describe, convince, or compel is more pronounced. Trying to clarify the distinction in class, I often recount an excellent skit performed on Saturday Night Live decades ago. A busker sits on a subway platform playing his guitar and a man standing beside him throws some money into his guitar case. The busker snaps at him: “Hey, what are you doing … I don’t need your handout … I’m just playing here!”20 The embarrassed man takes the coins back out. The busker resumes his song. “It wasn’t just a song / I really need the money. / I was just too embarrassed / To let you give it to me. Please come back / And put the money in my case. / I’m not really an artist I’m just a begger.” The man throws the coins back in, is again admonished for his presumption that the busker really wants something, again retrieves his coins, and so on it goes. Our would-be Good Samaritan obviously doesn’t appreciate the difference in speech between an actual imperative and the example of an imperative in the symbolic world of exemplary, imaginative creation. An entire discipline in linguistics – Speech-act theory – arises around the consequent issues and difficulties.21

“what if” and “as though” The special domain of the literary – the “what if” and “as though” initiatives that lie at the heart of myth, story, poetry – evinces the unique properties of hypothesis, the art of reserved or qualified proclamation, the skill described by Dennett as providing humans with the leverage to “rise above” other creatures on earth. Many theories are tested on how art evolved in culture. Ellen Dissanayake’s What Is Art For? and Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, for instance, make very instructive reading. I am certainly simplifying the attendant difficulties, but I am surprised that the matter is at all controversial. From our perspective at least, one could scarcely imagine how art wouldn’t have evolved. Is it surprising that the mechanism of testing already built into

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

323

natural evolution should come into its own as that mechanism matures in human culture? Our penchant for re-presentations of experience in symbolic thinking, it seems to me, could not but open an independent space for their workings. We saw earlier how a metonymic nerve-ending is “put for” an external stimulus (cf. 220), just as an interneuron in turn is “put for” the original nerve-ending, so that it may be construed to advantage. Just so, mental codes are “put for” actual events in the world, and design evolution is “put for” natural evolution in the cultural domain. Each of these later manifestations of the metonym represents the translation of the metaphoric initiative into a new environment (that of symbolic culture) and its on-going purchase on evolutionary processes that unfold there. It should not surprise us then to find the pièce de resistance of the metonym in the literary-imaginative domain. As exemplary hypothesis, the fictive world of literature is “put for” the actual world, in the same way that the nerve-ending is “put for” a stimulus, so that more can be done with it in the new domain than might otherwise be possible. No nervous system is likely to get very far if it lacks confidence in its own ability to translate stimulus-experiences into a language it can duplicate and construe. Working in the density of their own new element, the synapses go about firing nuanced connections across gaps, recommending subtle responses in turn. However complex the recommendations may be, the system doesn’t second-guess itself. It recommends what it recommends. It is not self-conscious in the usual sense, mumbling suggestions half-inaudibly through its hand. (Even “I don’t know what to do here; I’ll just blush and see what happens” represents a decisive recommendation that the body performs.) The system enjoys a unique authority in its own domain. Its value is in the survival advantage it affords its host. The question for the system is not whether it is true or not, but how far it can go with its necessarily confident, necessarily heuristic assumptions. Something like this must apply for the literary. The relationship between the imaginative and the actual is not characterized by established or verifiable truth. This alone may account for our habitual subordination of fictional to “real” events. At the same time, it may have struck you how audacious stories and poems can be in their claims. The fictiveness of story is not a “mumbling through its hands.” What it says is so. Imagine

324

missing link

someone like Ronnie Corbett (of “The Two Ronnies”) sitting down to tell one of his rocking-chair stories. He begins thus: “Once upon a time, a woman told her husband that she wanted a divorce. ‘I want a divorce,’ cried the woman.” Corbett pauses an instant. “There now, didn’t I tell you that she wanted a divorce?” This little joke zeros in on the power of fiction to put a thing there that wasn’t there before and make it true. At the beginning of Genesis, God is similarly impressed with his ability to put a thing before himself just by speaking the words that make it so. Going back to our earliest chapters, you may recall that there is something existentially unequivocal about the metaphoric claim of A is B (cf. 41–2). We can water down the boldness of the metaphor by employing a simile instead, by saying that one thing is only like another, but this only delays, it does not by-pass or eliminate, our confrontation with the essentially paradoxical or counter-logical initiative at the heart of metaphor. At the same time, there is an implicit hypothesis in metaphoric thinking. When it says “A is B” unequivocally, a metaphor implicitly also says “What if A were B?” or even better, “Let us say that A is B.”22 Metaphor, then, is both audacious and hypothetical, unabashed and conditional; it is, impossibly, the indicative in the subjunctive, a kind of amplified or declarative tongue-in-cheek. Our duck/rabbit rears its head again (cf. Figure 1.4). The claims of metaphor as either actual or fictional are incomplete when thought of separately in turn; they are both and neither at once. In the metaphoric world that I create, A actually is B, and I make no bones about saying so, even though I recognize that in your world my saying so can only have hypothetical value. It seems impossible to look at it from both perspectives at once and yet, in our configuration, it is both at once.

the tragic hypothesis Let’s follow this thinking through in practical terms to see what new forms these evolved tools of symbolic thinking might take in a specific cultural context. Let’s entertain the possibility that the imaginative has the same importance in culture as the advent of symbolic thinking had for early primates. Its presence represents a survival advantage for the species able to employ it. Karl Popper, you will recall from our earlier dis-

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

325

cussions of symbolic thinking, wrote that, once we were equipped with the powers of anticipatory thinking, we and a few other creatures like us were able to “let our theories die in our stead.”23 Popper may not have appreciated how the idea, his exact phrase even, might represent a very insightful contribution to the study of tragedy. As we have known since the time of Aristotle, tragedy sets in front of an audience vicarious experiences of worst-case scenarios. Tragedy engages the cause-and-effect mechanisms of inevitable consequence (and the terrible places they can lead) without actually realizing them in the lives of its spectators. Catharsis is that business about purging pity and fear. The players re-present certain experiences; we watch what happens under the proscenium arch; sympathetic and anxious responses rise within us; the action takes its inevitable course; the actors take their bows. We applaud them but keep our distance, freshly sensitized to what terrible things can happen in the world, but also confident in the power of the proscenium arch to keep us safe from the real impact of what we have witnessed. Such representations have proved a compelling and valuable way of accommodating and dealing with our fears and anxieties from a remove, fears and anxieties that might impair our willful resolve, our commitments to action, our capacity for hope, our desire to envision. It is in any case evidently a long-proven strategy. We see a great deal with our farsighted imaginations and not everything we see (or even very much of it) is attractive or encouraging. Such powers of foresight might potentially inhibit us from acting at all, paralyse us (as indeed they sometimes do), if they were to gain a long-term upper hand in our mental conjugations of every frightful possibility. A deeper understanding of tragic circumstance might be selected for in a cultural environment where the ability to act and influence others would favour an individual’s or group’s success. The Gregorian creature can use symbolic thinking to contemplate possible responses to experience in advance, to “let our theories die in our stead.” What works for the creature adept at hypothesizing may work in much the same manner for its culture. The culture tries to see in advance the sorts of things that might happen given certain circumstances. Tragedy offers a kind of ritual sacrifice, a serving-up of our every worst imagining, where the gods can feast on our fictions and accept them as an offering, letting hypothetical

326

missing link

characters die in our stead. Comedies and romances represent the corollary of this. They participate in the desire side of the desire/anxiety axis of our imaginations. As such, they are part of a cultural “recommendation architecture,” which, like the conscious mind, can propose positive solutions to challenges. Such possible futures, patiently reflected upon in this hypothetical space, renders our cogitations about what to do next less relative. As Dennett writes, human beings “learn to think better about what they should think about next.”24 Dennett’s “inner environment” of human cogitation becomes, at the level of cultural activity, the inner environment of literature and theatre. “Inner environments” expand from the individual mind and open out in material culture. Think only of the classical Greek amphitheatres, those round spaces (containing both performers and their audience) built into hillsides around the metropolis. They are spaces strictly reserved for the representation of fictional events, open to the skies like loud-speakers (to use Roland Barthes’s metaphor25) that broadcast to the society at large their urgent prophecies and caveats. That inner environment, Dennett writes, “permits us to construct ever more subtle move generators and move testers.”26 These become the narrative arcs of tragedy and comedy respectively, announced to all who will come to listen. Tragedy is the move tester, and comedy is the move generator in a society otherwise stuck doing the same thing over and over again (which describes the disadvantage of creatures with less imaginative chutzpah than we have). Tragedy and comedy are what new cognitive environments look like when they are projected into the social world. It is reassuring for a humanist like myself to see the study of evolutionary cognition lead so seamlessly into a study of literary form as its most self-conscious cultural expression. We have considered the nature of design evolution – as a form of hypothesis – and we have reflected on the possible place of a domain within design culture where hypothesis-making stands in its own right to express one aspect of our destiny. I suppose in one regard that I’m taking the domain of hypothesis-making – the literary or imaginative per se – and distinguishing it from other activities in society where symbols, or memes, or cultergens get replicated and put to work with more traceable social and political consequences. I want to suggest that the imaginative domain does achieve a certain “clout” in society, in the sense of Dennett’s

Natural and Design Evolution in Culture

327

use of the term.27 It would represent a society’s attentions having spiralled up into a revelation of its own awareness, a kind of “fantasy echo” (to use Dennett’s other phrase) of everything the society is.28 In other terms, so far as the driving of social behaviour is concerned, we can see how the imaginative domain of the arts possesses very little if any political clout at all. History, W.H. Auden claimed, would have been the same had not a single poem ever been written.29 It is not in that sense much of a competitor in the everyday scrimmage where social inputs compete for the right to drive political behaviour or determine action, as memes are often wont to do. Most of the “metaphors we live by” – absenting Oscar Wilde’s heroic belief that art creates life30 – do not appear to derive from the metaphors by which literature lives. We will certainly want to revisit the question of art’s place in our conscious design world, and query again its apparent lack of clout there. But we’re not finished thinking about the unique status of the hypothetical in fiction, judged in its own terms. If nature can evolve a hypothetical literature within itself, we might expect that very literature to have an evolving nature of its own that helps to make it what it is.

12

The Evolution of Literature

It has been shrewdly observed that for many poets of our age, verbs that have been traditionally transitive have become intransitive. Rilke, for example, speaks of praising as a central activity of poetry, but he does not praise God or nature or his fellow man or anything else objective: he simply praises. ~Northrop Frye1

recap In our tracking of the metaphoric initiative, we have seen how processes of natural evolution unfold via a logic of replication, genetic causes and effects, governed by the principle of natural selection. We asked the following questions. Is this same unconscious process at work in culture? If it is, how are we to understand ourselves as free and self-determining? If it is not, that is, if the terms and conditions of evolutionary change have themselves changed in the cultural domain, what power of agency or self-determination, if any, do we gain? Can we understand those mechanisms of change better, control them consciously, and if so, direct them in such a way that we get a lift? We set off then to understand the processes of evolution in nature and culture and the mechanism of replication at work in both domains. We thought about the importance of hypothesis-making as a kind of evolutionary heuristic. We had claimed in Chapter 6 that evolving creatures are themselves forms of hypothesis. This penchant for unconscious speculation explodes in the symbolic world of human culture, where predictive and anticipatory thinking occurs in every imaginable area. In daily practice, we look for faster routes to the airport, we adjust a recipe, we change our tone of voice when speaking with the boss. In the larger view, innovations are ventured, better toasters are designed, new med-

The Evolution of Literature

329

ications developed, and faster cpus manufactured. This is the world of ventured action where the competitive scrimmage of new ideas and designs plays out. But there is also an added sense in which hypothesis-making in culture comes into its own, both literally and figuratively. A space within culture opens – in the arts, in literary fictions – where “what if” and “as though” thinking is fostered as an independently valuable activity. Research in the sciences has as much to do with hypothesis as our work in literature does. But unlike in the sciences – where hypotheses are tested out and applied in very practical ways – art comes into its own as hypothesis and plainly reminds us of the hypothetical initiative that lies at the heart of evolution and culture. If we want some idea of where metaphor, if it had its way, would take us, then we should follow it, at least a little distance, down this new path where it appears to assume a unique authority. We are groping towards an understanding of the actual work literature provides in a culture. We have to think about what sort of doing literature is and how it changes. A micro perspective will take us into the smallest units of literary replication: the word, the image, the metaphor, in the context of a writer’s attempt to fulfill his or her promise in an individual work. A macro perspective will reveal relationships that unfold between works, and the relationship of those works to their cultural environments.

the selfish metaphor One of the smaller units of verbal replication is the word and its attendant mental image. I replicate the green and brown object outside by saying “tree,” that is, by putting a word for it. You, in turn, generate the image of a tree. But even the smallest units of literature – the haiku, for instance, or the adage – do not normally consist of single words or images. Lacking is the pattern of relationships between words and images that makes a fictional whole. So “tree” on the page would not count as a poem, but Joyce Kilmer’s “I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree” may do so. Let’s remind ourselves why this use of metaphor represents a form of replication. Etymologically, “replicate” does not mean to copy identically, but to fold or bend back (L. replicare), to unroll, to turn over in

330

missing link

one’s mind, to reflect on. A child replicates its parents, is an unfolding from them, both different and the same. The signal potential of upstream neurons is replicated in that of the downstream neurons, whose function along the given synaptic line sets in further play relations of identity and difference. The substitution theory of metaphor gave us a simple model of replication in metaphoric thinking. As I write my poem, the word “love” comes to mind, but I find it inadequate, so I double up my signifiers adding a metaphoric vehicle that stands in for it. Something of the original must be replicated in the vehicle for there to be a meaningful tension. At the same time, the original is unfolded, or opened up. Our interactive theory of metaphor, with its two inter-relating systems of associated commonplaces, helps us to understand this tension. There are also schematic versions of replication within a poem. The use of rhyme or refrain, schemata that are themselves metaphorical (rhymes being auditory embodiments of simultaneous difference and identity) represents a kind of echoing-back and echoing-forward. We saw earlier how these tensions in metaphor proper replicate the replications of genetic evolution, where a gene code unfolds down the line with new “meanings” that are also the same. Just as the immediate environment for a gene is the body in which it is replicated, so the immediate environment for a metaphor is the individual poem or work in which it stands. If a gene isn’t configured to do useful work in its body, either it or its body will have to go. A muscle cell can have a smaller containing environment (say, a hand), but we are less inclined to isolate its work there as unique in relation to the work that other muscle cells do throughout the body. One of the reasons that we consider the body an environment is that, in the vast scrimmage among cells, germs, bacteria, viruses, the body forms an intelligible unity, one where it makes sense for us to stop and say, at least tentatively, “this is a thing that holds together.” Just so, metaphors can live and die in poems. Poems, like bodies, can be made up of smaller environments – couplets, stanzas, cantos – but the unity of the work as a whole provides us with a convenient measure of unified relations, in reference to which we judge the place and purpose of all its constitutive parts. Does it make sense to talk about how metaphors survive in poems? I think so.

The Evolution of Literature

331

blake’s ro se Let’s consider a practical instance of metaphors and schemata replicating in a poem and “fitting” there: William Blake’s “The Sick Rose.” We will consider both the question of its composition and the interpretive reading of it that follows. O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.2 My goal isn’t to offer an interpretive analysis of this famous gem, but to reflect on its integrity, and what that integrity means. I often invite my students to approach a new poem as though they were detectives who have just come upon a crime scene. The “room” of the poem is filled with mysterious evidences, which the detective must sort through in order to come to some understanding of what has happened there. Now consider: as a detective at a crime scene you are not free to imagine any old thing in relation to the evidence you come across. You would not pick up a computer that was, say, toppled on the floor and decide that the victim worked for Dell or Hewlett Packard. A student might reply, “Well, you can’t prove that he isn’t an employee of Dell or Hewlett Packard. And it’s all subjective anyway. It can mean what I want it to mean, no?” I reply “You’re right, I can’t prove that you’re wrong, but it would be poor detective work to suggest that the computer on the floor, in isolation, proved much of anything. It’s a computer on the floor. It would be smarter to think about it in relation to the fact that the desk is on its side, and that the book shelf is pulled down and a can of paint is spilled over the rug.” In short, I tell them, you mustn’t take any one thing and read it out of context. And most importantly, my success depends on my assumption

332

missing link

(my heuristic assumption, I emphasize) that the room tells a unified story, that however mysterious or difficult (or even passive) the evidences may seem in relation to one another, they all point in some way to the event that we want to get better at talking about. The upshot is that, like a good detective, the reader assumes that everything in the poem is potentially related to everything else, and that the more deeply one understands how the parts fit together, the closer one gets to some imagined (never actual) whole. So, to come upon the “room” of Blake’s poem, I would not see the word “worm” and decide that the poem is about fishing. I would look at the most conspicuous evidence: a rose, illness, a worm, a storm, a bed, some crimson, some joy and love, a life, and some destruction. I would want to think about how these images form patterns of potential relationships, that illness, storm, darkness, and destruction align with one another on some axis of anxiety; that rose and crimson may be physically related in the same way that rose and joy may be emotionally related. Worm and rose are related as living things. I might want to notice that there is something “invisible” at the beginning and something “secret” near the end. Night is quite at home with bed. These are just examples. From here, we could take the rose/crimson binary and set it in metaphoric play with the rose/love binary. Worms going to bed might call up some sort of phallic idea; we would keep it in mind to see if anything came of it. We might ask ourselves whether the destructiveness of a worm in bed with a rose was ironic or more or less inevitable. My analogy of the crime scene owes something to a belief that the room has everything in it that we need in order to understand more, the kind of belief associated with the “New Criticism” favoured in English departments in North America through the middle decades of the twentieth century. It represents, in other words, an inductive reading practice that approaches the poem as a document whose meanings may be construed without recourse to historical or biographical details. When you are reading Blake’s “The Sick Rose” as a new-historical reader, you permit yourself reference to, say, the French Revolution that began only a few years before its composition, because you believe it is implicated in the poem, as for instance in the reference to “the howling storm” or all that language about crimson destruction. You make a metaphoric connection of something inside the text with something outside the text and

The Evolution of Literature

333

assume a unity of expression in relation to that larger historical environment (even if you believed that that unity caused a disunity in the poem, or a complicating, or self-undermining unity). Fredric Jameson, in his discernment of unconscious political forces that can eat away at a work’s ostensive purposes, would be conscious of the work as a unified expression of some compromising principle in history. Indeed, the poem or novel would become a synecdoche – part standing for whole – of historical realities that make it what it is. The relations between fiction and history, with their interpenetrative patterns, gel into a provisional whole. If Jameson referred only a single detail to history – say, “the crimson storm” to the French Revolution – we would think him on shaky ground. The argument gains authority as the external references help the poem to a further unifying context, a new weaving together of its argument in reference to its political unconscious. A provisional unity is proposed. History, with the poem in it as part of its total expression, is seen as the larger condition, or environment, of that provisional unity. An axiom of the new-historical reading is that the historical details resonate from the poem into history, a resonance that the reader must track in order to make deeper sense of both. History represents the poem’s genesis, causes it to be such and such, and so is ignored at the reader’s peril. In effect then, new-critical and new-historical readers start from the same premise: that any order of symbols must hold together, either on its own or in relation to a further symbolic environment. The authority of argument for both readers resides in how effectively they can read the poem and its totality of relations as a unity, with as many of its parts as possible incorporated into the reading, suitably aligned in relation to the particular patterns discerned. Of course the unity of a poem can be extraordinarily complex or subtle, even to appearances self-undermining. There are a host of poems whose raison d’etre would appear to be disunity – fragmentation, dissociation, erasure, opposition – particularly in modern times.3 T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is as much about the inertia, the breakdown, and exhaustion of modern culture as it is about the dissolution of the individual ego or speaking voice. The point is that many elements of the poem speak to this disunity and so represent a unity of effect or purpose that still abides there. It might be worth noting that a discernment of more than one possible interpretation of a metaphor does not compromise our

334

missing link

sense of the unity of the poem. There might be several different potential unities, where parts fit with other parts in different ways. We judge the authority of each pattern according to how effectively it holds together. A poem whose interwoven details, for instance, fostered the construction of four entirely different unities would be a masterpiece indeed. The assumption in the poem of a unity, literally a context (a weaving together), is our prerogative as readers. We adopt it as a heuristic. It is also the goal of the writer (though the unity a writer imagines need not be the unity a reader discovers). As the poem unfolds, as it evolves through the writing process, fitness is a central guiding principle. Blake will include no word in the poem that doesn’t belong, that isn’t in his estimation the one best adapted to the conditions of the imagined whole. If an image or metaphor were to pop into his mind, say, a pair of eye-glasses, he would need to measure its fitness against other words, ideas, phrases, motifs, that are competing for his attention while he writes. His decision to leave it out might be easy with the glasses, but more difficult, say, with the word “thorn.” Yet still, the integrity of the poem as a whole is allowed to determine which products of his associative consciousness should be permitted to “survive.” There are allowing conditions, then, for what elements evolve within a poem as it unfolds, and they are a function of the poem as a whole, such as it is at every stage. As Blake writes the poem, he will naturally allow a new metaphor that comes into his mind to alter his sense of where the poem is going, what it is about, how its parts fit together. This may involve some revision of earlier parts or a change (from a kind of readerly perspective) in how parts relate that are there already. Note that as readers (and poets are also readers as they write), we are never entirely sure what those allowing conditions are. We cannot exhaust their potential reach or limit. Indeed, we only come to them by way of the individual images, the patterns, the woven relationships, that point to them. Like a poem, a living body represents a fabric of interrelating tissues and organs. The fitness of those organs and tissues in relation to one another and to their containing environment determines the odds of the body and its parts surviving. This is true at every stage of its evolution. To come upon a creature is to come upon a finished poem, one that has been sent out to find its way in the world and take its chances. But there is a major difference. The creation of a poem is partly controlled by a

The Evolution of Literature

335

conscious agent, the poet. Nature, on the other hand, has only the unconscious process of natural selection to come by its present population of genomes. The poet in comparison is like a kind of god, whose textual clay yields to his hand (if not always his intentions). Nature evidently has no need of a god to guide it through long years of trial and error. It is the most patient of composers. Because of this, a poet could write a poem in a couple of minutes, while nature is happy to take millions of years to fill out any work it happens to have on its desk to its current satisfaction. There is an exception that proves the rule. Certain poets seem perfectly happy to send out every least scratch they have ever ventured. They are implicitly investing in nature’s tried-and-true fitness tester called trial-and-error. Nature, after all, often favours the prolix. The sheer volume of throw-away mutations is bound to produce a viable phenotype. In the mean time, editors learn to become as ruthless in their purging of dross as nature itself. Young poets beware. We should not make the mistake of assuming that nature is trying to reach a greater potential. We know that nature doesn’t try to reach anything at all. It is a finished poem of sorts, at every stage. It would be more accurate to say that nature is continuously satisfied with the poem it is in the process of writing, that it is always “finished” as it evolves, no matter how preliminary its work may be at the time. At every stage, all parts of the poem weave together and relate fittingly to the evolving body. As time passes, nature slowly, very slowly, will turn what started as a modest haiku into an impressive and open-ended epic. The question of agency is not entirely black and white. In their accounts of the creative process, poets often describe a feeling of not being in control. Shelley’s “fading coal” account of poetic inspiration puts this very succinctly: Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.4

336

missing link

Shelley’s use of natural imagery is typical. Poets frequently represent themselves as a channel for waters, or a midwife to something they feel coming to life inside them, an Aeolian harp for mysterious winds to permeate. As in nature, variations appear to suggest themselves. They are not evidently chosen. Poets in this sense, like unconscious nature, get out of their way and merely represent the allowing conditions for their advent. As with the creative process in nature, poets’ imaginations represent the total body of possible relations in their minds. When they feel at their most creative, they endeavour to provide the conditions in which something might happen, a clearing, a tilled soil, a readiness for invention. Their sense of themselves as intentional makers (imposers, deciders) gives way to a sense of themselves as conduit, as the providers of an allowing space into which a novelty may enter. This is part of the mystery of metaphor, where new ones, just as we make them, seem to have been stumbled upon. Wallace Stevens describes “the way the earliest single light in the evening, in spring, / creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself.”5 The moment and mis-enscene of creation that he imagines involves the provision of a surrounding space and a new light. The new light “adds itself” and is made “out of” a nothingness, that is, appears out of it in contradistinction, but is also magically caused by it, i.e. made out of its materials. The poet’s mind, boundless as an evening sky, is both creator ex nihilo and the mere observer of a thing happening. Nonetheless, we understand well enough how poets are conscious agents in the usual sense. They make plans, edit, manipulate; they try on possibilities, take the measure of them, save some, discard others, all in the manner of an authority “overseeing” (in both senses of observing and managing) the evolution of the whole. The central point is this: the poem is the immediate and original environment of the metaphors and images it contains. The poem presents a defining yet indefinite set of allowing conditions that determine which metaphors and images survive as the work unfolds. In turn, our understanding as readers of the relationship between its metaphors and the allowing conditions of the whole informs our reading of the poem, our grasp of its greatest reach and potential. But both the poem and the poet’s imagination that makes it are themselves subject to conditions significantly larger than they are.

The Evolution of Literature

337

archetypes in the literary gene pool Metaphors are to poems as genes are to the body. Recall that genes as they are transcribed into proteins produce a living body, a unique phenotype, the sum total of observable characteristics in an individual. Many phenotypes are produced, but the functional unit of replication and variation is still the gene. Its same-and-different details express themselves in the common traits and characteristics shared among many phenotypes as they evolve over time. Just so, a symbol or image in one poem will contribute to, and join, traits in a larger population of poems. We call these traits “types.” Moons, suns, kings, rivers, mountains, clouds, goddesses, trickster spirits, devils, birds, prophets, saviours: almost any replicable symbol will have accrued resonances that are a function of its having evolved from earlier appearances. Its fitness in a literary or larger cultural environment is its manifestation as a type. Literature is the total and immeasurable body of these characteristic traits. A caveat. A type’s success in the larger culture involves a complicated process of cross-fertilization between imaginative works and general language uses in society. A politician promising radical change – think back to Barack Obama in 2008 – can become a more recognized saviour figure than Huck Finn or Frodo Baggins, though they draw from the same well. While we are focussing on the distinctive features of design evolution in the hypothetical domain of literature, we should remember that the boundaries between fictional and historical worlds are suitably, even sometimes hopefully, blurred. In the humanities, archetypes have to do with familiar story contents; they also have a place in Jungian psychoanalytic thinking and in Frazerian anthropology. Archetypal criticism in literary studies was popular in the 1950s and ’60s, sharing a limelight with various formalisms and the Petri-dish procedures of New Criticism. This was when our appetite was greatest for comprehensive literary models that possessed a kind of scientific authority. The love-affair ended when its reading practices began to be associated with bland categorizing and hermetic formulas that sealed the work off from its social conditions and impact. Recent decades have softened rigid attitudes on both sides and teachers of literature still find helpful resource, for instance, in the notion of an intelligible imaginative cosmology that can be mined for a variety of revelations. English

338

missing link

departments, along with memetic critics in sociology and sociobiology, have been re-sensitized to the value of identifying and interrogating, as they say, the replicable units of cultural production in order to understand and manage what actually comes out of us. Archetypes traverse and embody historical particulars, and can therefore, with careful analysis, tell us something about our primary needs as human beings, regardless of race, gender, or historical ubiety. Northrop Frye’s theory of the Four Variations in Words with Power represents his final attempt to work out the details of what a total body of interpenetrating metaphoric patterns might look like.6 I define literary types simply as sustained verbal patterns, the repetition of metaphors and images in literature and their subsequent standing in relation to one another. As a unit of replication, a type can be as grand as a saviour figure, or as subtle as a poetic echo or allusion. I am violating practice to a degree in including, for instance, sonnets and romances as examples of types. Yet literary forms do evince typological properties. The sonnet has evolved a great deal since Petrarch’s time. Every possible variation, or adaptation, has been tested, from numbers of lines, to stanzaic patterns, to rhyming schemes, line lengths, conventional subject matters. Poets test their mettle against the established precedents of earlier forms, looking to awaken undiscovered potentials within them; novelists and script writers continue to try their hand at various mythoi, at romance and tragedy, seeking to grow new kinds of stories from old seeds. I quote Frye in one of the epigraphs to this book. As he mapped out his argument for Words with Power in his notebooks, he wrote: “I think in the conclusion I need something about the Darwinian structure of art, as a total hypothetical body throwing out dialectical shoots in all directions.”7 Precisely. So a metaphor will survive the process of a poem’s coming into being by suiting its environment better than eligible competitors. From there it survives as a type by suiting the larger environments of its literature and culture. I still find T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” remarkably prescient in its intuition of an evolutionary algorithm that lies at the heart of literary culture. Eliot can be tricky, certainly. He monumentalizes an “ideal” Western European tradition. He insists on value judgements, lays down a set of approved precedents by which poets ought to conduct themselves and be judged accordingly. These needn’t distract

The Evolution of Literature

339

us from noticing the essential dynamic that Eliot discerned in literary history: The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted … the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.8 Had he been a geneticist, Eliot might as easily have written the same paragraph thus: The gene pool forms an order in itself, which is modified by the introduction of a genetic variation within it. The gene pool is complete before the variation arises; for it to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing gene pool must be, if ever so slightly, altered; so the relations, proportions, values of each variation toward the whole are readjusted. The gene pool should be altered by the variation as much as the variation is directed by the gene pool. I differ from Eliot in seeing the unit of replication in literary culture as the symbolic type rather than the entire literary work. Just as it is the gene that first changes in a population of genomes, so the smaller denominator of the type in its various incarnations changes over a population of literary works. But the evolutionary process that Eliot identifies remains intelligible, I think. There is one further difference. For Eliot, the gene pool from which the units of replication diverge and to which they return is the literary tradition itself. The whole of literature, in my configuration, represents one of the environments, but there are others, such as the larger social and historical conditions of culture, and beyond those, the conditions of mind that manifest them and the conditions of nature that ultimately evolved the conditions of mind. In addition, Eliot’s theory begs the question of whether or not he saw literature in this process as getting better. Eliot may want to call his established tradition an “ideal order,” but regardless of his intention, the implication of his

340

missing link

argument as an evolutionary theory of literature suggests that there is no “getting better” per se, only the unfolding of an adaptive whole and the parts that fit it. Eliot’s penchant for value judgements reveals a desire for control in an evolutionary process where design capabilities are at work. This isn’t surprising. Some might think that the advent of design evolution in human society ought to have guaranteed only good and effective adaptations from there on; we can look at what we’ve done and toss out all the bad ideas. So Eliot might have imagined that his theory of literary history was a recipe for evaluating literature of lasting merit, i.e. those works that both participate in and renew the evolving tradition. Some merely derivative works might not diverge sufficiently from precedent and those that diverged too radically would lack sustaining roots. Nature doesn’t mind producing the same frog over and over again for millennia, because it doesn’t get bored. It has little patience for unviable forms that aren’t already in some way adapted to prevailing conditions. One might have pointed out how certain works have been considered radical mutants and ignored for generations (Moby Dick for instance), until they were recognized at last as ingenious re-inventions of some tradition at the time. Eliot might count such instances as only delayed accommodations of the same process, not a frustration of the general rule. I should think, though, that such examples would leave us wary of making value judgements at all, of trying to declaim with any authority upon who’s in and who’s out in the dodgy scrimmage for literary celebrity. There may be a place in review criticism for Eliot’s idea of the critic as one who cultivates desirable hybrids by a process of intentional weeding. Such reviewers should always remember though that their greenhouses are very small and that vastly larger selection processes are at work that will almost certainly overrun their little gardens in time.

the death of the pot boiler Writers, if they are concerned with their fitness in the marketplace, can only try to predict it in the very short term. Publishers will normally try to catch and ride a wave of popularity in genre or subject matter; indeed, this pressure to sell what sells and so to write what sells may account for

The Evolution of Literature

341

the majority of books we find in the chain stores. Those stores have enjoyed a certain power in determining which books get written by making it known which books they would be willing to order in quantity. The writers are hardly to be blamed; indeed we would expect this of a conscious “Gregorian” creator (cf. 263), who takes a measure of the latest interests and trends in the environment, thinks in advance about what would be worth doing, and lets his bad idea for a history of the paper clip die in his stead. The fitness of a work of literature in its cultural environment is certainly different than the fitness of a species in its natural one. Writers have the advantage of foresight. And yet there are many ways in which the unconscious mechanisms of natural evolution still obtain in the literary domain. There is a sense in which the long-term fate of any work of literature is beyond the control of its writer. No novelist or publisher, however popular, can anticipate how the current environment will change, rendering his or her own creations either fashionable or irrelevant. Indeed, the publishing industry depends on a changing environment to make space for the next crop of best sellers. The tide waters of literary attention rise and sink around the library bookshelves, leaving shoals of discards in the flea market. This leaves the writer in the position of the watchmaker god who can only throw his work into the milieu and stand back to see what happens to it over the long run. And yet it can seem sometimes as though works themselves possess, or evince, a kind of agency in the determination of their survival. Gregorian creatures like ourselves appear to be advantaged in the gene pool because we have evolved thinking mechanisms that respond and adapt to unpredictable circumstances. A novel does no thinking on its own. But a work does mean, and its meanings are the criteria by which its fitness in an environment is determined. Is a classic novel (one that survives) perhaps a kind of Skinnerian creature (cf. 262), capable of adapting to conditions which it cannot have predicted at the outset, but which it is nonetheless flexible enough to accommodate? A work may appear to think more about alternative responses when it finds itself in changed or unfamiliar circumstances. There is a sense in which a work of longer-term viability, one of Shakespeare’s plays to name an obvious example, will seem to adapt itself to changing cultural conditions and tastes. Like the Skinnerian creature it is not conscious, but

342

missing link

can “run through” a variety of potential responses in search of one that will help it stick around. It generates novel resonances in a variety of cultural contexts, even languages, such that it continues to respond to them effectively. Of course it is the changing cultural conditions themselves that draw out one or another of a work’s potential resonances. Hamlet is not a Gregorian creature, even if its maker was. But there are times (performances, class discussions) in which it appears to have a mind of its own, at least the mental dexterity that we associate with Skinnerian creatures, refusing some advances and favouring others, hiding from us, fooling us, running ahead of our guesses. We still go to see productions of Hamlet because Hamlet is still “thinking more” about us in the twenty-first century. In turn, we learn more about what our cultural needs are by trying to understand why Hamlet still has a hold on us. Every work that is still present in a culture contributes to its fulfilment insofar as it actualizes or makes real, makes present to itself, some of its primary concerns. Frye wrote that the centre of the literary universe is whatever work you happen to be holding in your hands.9 It doesn’t matter which book it is. If you are holding it at all, it is telling you something about the culture you are holding it in. One of the unique features of imaginative creation is that a work is never superseded. For all our “updatings” and moral massagings of his texts over the centuries, Shakespeare is not improved upon, is not outdistanced by later dramatists, and, as Frye says, cannot be refuted (cf. 146). Whereas in the sciences we consider details of the Ptolemaic universe to be quaint and outdated, the Epic of Gilgamesh is still mined for its hidden mysteries and revelations. Mozart does not give way to the Beatles, and Vitruvius is no better or worse than Frank Lloyd Wright. The criteria for the rise and fall of these tides of attention are not a function of a work’s absolute value (absolute in relation to what?), but of its fitness in relation to the cultural environment. While the dodo was no better or worse than the common sparrow, its make-up proved no longer viable, and so it vanished. Shakespeare is performed and read a thousand times a day around the world. If we follow the analogy through, he is the common sparrow, able to do well in most environments; the very fine American poet Trumble Stickney, skillful as he was, is the unlucky dodo (as most of us are bound to be). The poems of Robert Frost can still sometimes be found in tiny mall bookstores in the New Age sec-

The Evolution of Literature

343

tion alongside The Love Poems of Emily Dickinson and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. University classrooms keep Chaucer and Beowulf on lifesupport systems. In spite of such intentional preservation, they remain a species (if you will) of Sidamo Lark, which is in danger of becoming extinct in mainland Africa. Lesser works, say those of a Canadian poet, will last a little while, if they do at all, because libraries, like zoos, preserve works in isolation, on the basis of their potential importance, until such time as they may be deemed viable outside their protective habitat. Other works, while they may end up on some hard drive deep inside the Library of Congress (surely the epitome of the fossil record …), will be less fortunate still. Nature never ventured some version of a living library where the dodo might have bided its time. But in the cultural domain, every minor poet that ever wrote waits on its local library shelf until some day of judgement when it will receive another hearing and either be resurrected or returned to limbo.

literature’s expanding contexts What is it about, or in, the evolutionary processes of literature that implicates the nature and meaning, and best of all the potential, of design evolution in culture? We’ve spent a little time thinking about literary types and how they replicate, but we have to consider them in their entirety, as a kind of fossil record if you like, and think about the relations between them. This is the study of typology. The term is traditionally associated with an area of religious studies, most especially with discerned relations between the Old and New Testaments in the Christian Bible, but as typology is primarily a theory of how symbols relate in time, it can be of considerable use in literary studies as well. Like myth (which by Frye’s primary definition is simply “words in sequence”10), typology in imaginative literature concerns the relationship of words and figures in time, where an initial figure, or “type,” calls to and foretells its fulfillment in the larger context or dimension of an “anti-type” that comes later, which anti-type then becomes a type that calls to and foretells another anti-type, and so on in ever broadening contexts.11 The sequential relationship between works invokes a kind of cross-textual narrative, where

344

missing link

parts of those works relate to one another over centuries to tell a different story than the ones we find in the works read in isolation. This intertextual narrative expresses, among other things, a sense of further human potential, an always renewable initiative borne of the imaginative engagement with our primary concerns, desires, and anxieties. In his recent volume Metaphor, Denis Donoghue connects the relationship between type and anti-type to the relationship between tenor and vehicle in metaphor.12 Just as the anti-type is thought to fulfil something latent in its original type, so the vehicle is said to fulfil, or enlarge upon, as-yet unrealized inferences in a tenor. Donoghue’s question there of whether the vehicle lessens the tenor by adding itself to it has implications for a theory of typology that we’ll be addressing here.13 Let’s take one of the more famous examples of a typological relationship in Biblical studies. The figure of Moses is seen in the Christian Bible’s Old Testament as a type and that of Jesus in the New Testament as its later anti-type. Further typological relations spill out in both directions. Adam is an earlier type for Moses, and the Christian church (the body of Christ that arises after him) is a later anti-type for Jesus. Looking beyond the Bible into literature, we could point to the “death” and resurrection of Odysseus as a Christ type, or to the Red-Crosse Knight heroically slaying the evil dragon, or to the mystery of Melville’s white whale, or to the innocent wisdom of Faulkner’s Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, or to Superman, or to Frodo Baggins. As literature has shown us, it’s hard to throw a rock without hitting a redeemer. The authority of the Moses type, which is not itself original, lies in its being the original for the later figure, but also in its anticipating that figure’s identity and “concealing” its promise or meaning as a seed within itself. How exactly is the promise fulfilled? To fulfill a type in the fictive domain would mean to represent its current or present significance for later readers, that is, what would be most “real” for them. So Huck Finn as a saviour anti-type would fulfil the potential reality of those earlier stories about saviours by showing what they might mean for a reader in post-bellum America. In the first pages of the novel, Huck gets all hot and bothered over an exciting tale about Moses and the bulrushes read to him by the Widow Douglas. But then he learns that Moses has been long dead and gets bored, because, as he says, “I don’t take no stalk in dead people.”14 The point is that Huck himself, though he wouldn’t know this, is a further embodiment of exactly what Moses represents. He

The Evolution of Literature

345

reveals how such a figure, who may have seemed a merely figurative and outdated archetype of the past, is here and now operative again in the world of the present story. That reality for Americans at the time would comprise the struggle of an enslaved race, an exodus, and a leader who takes his guidance from a “higher power” that speaks through him. The use of echo or allusion in literature functions for our purposes in much the same manner as types and anti-types. So Gerard Manley Hopkins may write in “God’s Grandeur”: And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.15 In so doing, he echoes Milton’s invocation to the creator at the beginning of Paradise Lost: Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad’st it pregnant.16 Milton is himself picking up on the hints of a mother-hen brooding over an abyss in the first few verses of Genesis. There is a kind of mutual furtherance that results from the gesture. Paradise Lost is enlarged by its now containing something within it as authoritative as the opening of Genesis. The opening of Genesis in turn is enlarged by our seeing that it is still relevant, that its meaning is freshened for an audience in seventeenth-century England. It becomes retroactively prophetic, as it were. So Hopkins, who sees God’s grandeur as potentially compromised by late nineteenth-century industrial expansion, nonetheless sees that same spirit as rising again with the dawn, ever undiminished. Indeed, Hopkins’s echo dramatizes the very work of echo, where “last lights” of a past poem are allowed, like a returning sunrise, to illuminate the landscape of the poet’s new creation. The relation of literary works to one another over time, then, introduces into a culture a very real element of expanding consciousness. This would be true whether or not a later writer was consciously echoing or alluding to an earlier one. A reader may still

346

missing link

recognize through the later work that literature was thinking about itself in expanding circles of figuration. We’ve been exploring how “survival of the fittest” might function in a literature over time. Typology represents the work of expanding consciousness in literature, but we should notice that it is subject to the same principle. Any writer can intentionally recall an earlier type and resurrect it, but over the long run only those types that fit a culture – that is, answer continually to its needs and preoccupations – are likely to stick around, find themselves actualized again. Species don’t improve in any absolute sense, but only find themselves more or less suitably adapted to the environment that contains them, hanging on or disappearing accordingly. A large part of each species is made up of the replicated dna of its earlier incarnations, some 96% for human beings in relation to chimpanzees. So with the unit of replication in literature, the symbolic type: we don’t say that it improves, only that it expands in the direction of having more and more of what it has been within it. And if the type is preserved, there is a sense in which each evolved expression of it over time is preserved as well. The present world contains both chimpanzees and humans, both with their adapted places in the environment. The chimpanzee isn’t replaced in the world, only opened out through human being into what were at the time unexploited or unexpressed environmental conditions. So long as they both “fit” there, they share a space in the world. Terms like then and now, or old and new, cease to have any meaning. Just so you might find at any Starbucks a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein lying beside, say, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Frankenstein is not replaced by sci-fi novels on genetic engineering; the sci-fi novel has only discovered a further potential in what Frankenstein already is, and shows what room for growth Shelley’s novel still has in a culture whose metaphoric reach has not yet been exhausted.

the theatre of the mind steps forth in theatres We have then an expanding circle of typological relationships, Genesis (itself related to earlier creation stories) prefiguring its later fulfilment in Milton, prefiguring its later fulfilment in Hopkins, and so on, each seeding what comes after and representing the flowering fulfilment of what

The Evolution of Literature

347

came before. Works of literature relate metaphorically to one another, each containing and contained by others in a series of cascades that renders the whole more vitally interactive and self-reflexive. A vast domain takes on a life of its own. We have described this very phenomenon, recall, in relation to consciousness, where synaptic cascades result from and stimulate one another in increasingly conscious patterns. We can expand that inference here. Literature contains past memories in the form of iterable types and stories in the same way that the brain contains memories of past experiences in the form of summonable and interrelating synaptic networks. The brain appears as an increasingly self-conscious (i.e. self-referential) body of literature, and a body of literature appears to operate like a brain. A literature is inhabited by increasingly “selfconscious” conversations among its constituent works in the same way that individuals talk to themselves when they allow a variety of neuronal inputs to interact with and stimulate one another. Both the brain and literature reflect with increasing consciousness on the problems they encounter and then further reflect on themselves doing so. The kind of typological experience that unfolds in literature over time – its types looping among themselves – represents in society the form writ large of an embodied and expressed neuron network. A metaphoric interpenetration comes to light. It is brains that make literature; it shouldn’t surprise us to find that literature works like a brain, both of them shot through with metaphoric behaviours. Where are we then? Looping cascades of literary archetypes, echoes, and allusions, are internal imaginative contents that cogitate among themselves about inputs that lie at the source of human experience. Understanding as much may help us to approach the age-old debate regarding the uses of literature and how they lead to – or maddeningly seem not to lead to – recognizable social action. We saw earlier how at a very early stage of input and output, the simple-celled creature Aplysia takes a poke in its side and responds with a push in the opposite direction (cf. 228). Cogitating creatures, on the other hand gradually evolve more and more sophisticated internal networks, through which to filter experiential inputs. At this level of sophistication, it no longer makes sense to talk about simple inputs and their responsive commands to act. We speak instead, à la Dennett, of hypothetical “move generators,” or even more poignantly, à la Coward, of a “recommendation architecture,”

348

missing link

whereby inputs are continually fed into a vat of grey matter that renders those inputs relative and almost all outputs nuanced and ambiguous. This is exactly the level of sophistication we would expect to find in a culture. Move generators are all around us. They come in the form of political slogans and in those corporate advertisements that drive us, like so many Aplysia, to respond to their “inputs” without thinking. We might have hoped, for the sake of the species’ survival, that a domain would open up within culture where those inputs might be subjected to a more sophisticated recommendation architecture of actual theatres and actual libraries. In those collateral spaces, the inputs of experience would pass through storage and computing terminals, through memories of what has happened before and through the processes that compare and contrast them. Out of these processes would come results that looked very different from knee-jerk compulsory commands per se. People leaving the Festival Theatre in Stratford, for instance, or the ones getting up from a novel they’ve been reading, are in their state of mind the kind of “outputs” we would expect a culture to produce. Having enjoyed a sampling of exemplary experience in the form of move testers and generators, these artful witnesses can step back into their lives as more nuanced “outputs,” feeling that what happens to them now is indeed less relative, and more understood. They become by an almost invisible increment more able to act appropriately based on the imaginative space – the very space of metaphoric thinking – they have just passed through. We wouldn’t want all social inputs to pass through “inner theatres” of this sort in a culture. The same is true of actual cognition. When a car is heading straight for you, you would scarcely want your brain to “recommend” that you get out of the way. You would want more sensitive fright-nerves to save you. Similarly at the level of art and social action, it might prove counterproductive for a government whose nation had just been invaded to attend a performance of Major Barbara before defending itself (though perhaps one could hope they had already seen it). In relation to art and literature, this is the exception that proves the rule, for when you are sitting in a theatre, quietly reading a book, or patiently looking at a painting in an art gallery, your life is expressly not in danger. That is the prerequisite of hypothetical experience. And so there is no need in that interval for any compulsory commandments to act. To ex-

The Evolution of Literature

349

perience them would be as confusing as to have Hamlet, in the middle of one of his soliloquies, suddenly turn to the audience and yell “fire!”17 Are we to lament then that art is always going to be beside the point when unmediated action is called for, and that literature is a luxury that many of us lack the freedom to write or read? To lament so, I think, would be to get our formulas of social evolution backwards. Symbolic thinking appears to have arisen because living creatures discovered that most experiences provided them with an “interstice” where the input could be passed into their recommendation architecture and more sophisticated processing and move generation could be accomplished. A rabbit sees a fox on the horizon, not immediately in front of it (cf. 290). The fox doesn’t see it yet. The rabbit has some time to think. It would not do the rabbit much good if it had only evolved a knee-jerk mechanism that makes it leap into the air and start running the instant it feels threatened. It has a memory of foxes and of what foxes do, and it has some time to decide how to work with those memories. It may add to these cogitations its sight of a path of retreat that lies behind it, or it may notice that the grass in front of it is especially thick and could function as good camouflage. It acts accordingly. We would hardly say to the rabbit as it pauses, “What an idle and selfish creature you are; you only thought more about the right response because you were at leisure to do so. There are a lot of other creatures out there in nature, those daisies for instance. They don’t have the luxury to think more about what is happening to them. You should be ashamed of yourself.” And so the debate goes with the theatres of the human imagination and the time we spend in them. Artists and humanists reject the idea that art is nothing more than a leisurely activity, a “Sunday afternoon pastime” as Steven Pinker called it (cf. 15). Theatre is not an expression of leisure or luxury, as some ideological readings of art might have it, just because certain economic systems generate enough surplus to make them possible, even though the latter is unmistakably true. This would be like saying that the rabbit’s having time to think about where to hide is a leisurely privilege granted to it by the fact that there is enough surplus grass for it to hide in. That grass happened to be there. A socially conscious rabbit, having time, might reflect ethically on whether such grass ought properly to be there at all, and whether it was available to anyone

350

missing link

who might need to use it. But given that it is there, the rabbit would be foolish not to use it. Had it not been there, it would have looked for other environments that would have bought it time to use its thinking skills to advantage. What really makes its cogitations leisurely at that moment is the simple fact that it can think ahead. It has “experience sensors” that are able to translate space into time; its eyes and ears “buy it time” – if you still need to think of a surplus economy – to do the right thing, and even buy it time to find other environments in which to put those native skills to work. The point is, we are metaphoric thinkers, and we would be metaphoric thinkers whether or not we had the leisure to build theatres and libraries to shelter us. If we need to think of “leisure” (from Latin licere, to be permitted) as being granted to us by the fact that we can think symbolically, then we should rethink all the implications of what exactly leisure is in human consciousness and culture.

circles We are looking at the advent of design evolution in symbolic thinking – as a constituted property of the metaphoric initiative – and trying to understand what, if anything, in the evolutionary process changes at this point in the long march of life on the planet. What elements of natural evolution are still present in society? Do we have lift? We have argued that the advent through human being of a hypothetical domain is significant, but hypothetical thinking is not the exclusive province of imaginative literature. We do this kind of Gregorian thinking outside of literature regularly. There are other ways in which Homo sapiens has learned to take experiential inputs and steer them aside into domains where more can be done with them. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, for example, represents a theatre of the sort described above, where our processes of mind open out into collateral domains that will help us get better at doing what we do. But clearly that agency is not the same as the Festival Theatre in Stratford. What good is it that we can devise fictional worlds? Are they going to get us anywhere that non-fictional thinkingaside couldn’t as easily manage?

The Evolution of Literature

351

If all theatre needs to do is buy us more time to think, then why not just put up signs that say “Avoid Bossy Ghosts at Night” or “Don’t Procrastinate When You Are Given an Important Job by a Ghost” and save ourselves the trouble of either writing or going to see Hamlet? You could even convene a conference and get people to debate the propositions. What does the fictional aspect of symbolic thinking add to the “space aside” in which it unfolds? My former professor and friend, the late Sheldon Zitner, once announced in class, after I’d made a particularly inane remark, “Mr Donaldson, that idea and a subway token will get you a ride on the subway.” What if the fictional initiative in art was only like that idea I had, and the leisure of symbolic thinking-ahead was the real subway token that would get us somewhere? Steven Pinker might want to make the case that the Sunday-afternoon pastime of art is still only an exaptation from evolutionary behaviours that precede it, even if, as I want to argue, it is the very exaptation that expresses that behaviour. Is it, as some evolutionary theorists claim, merely a question of fictions pushing our pleasure buttons, making it more fun for us to think symbolically? Is art to human society what the orgasm is to sex? Art’s pleasure might be seen as seducing us into generating more stories, as orgasms inspire us to more sex. Of course, if propagation is the purpose of sex, its pleasure could hardly be thought of as for its own sake. Pleasures in nature are rarely for their own sake, and the same may be true of art. We have to return to the idea of fiction as a circle of expanding consciousness at a remove from some of our more directly active cogitations. We’ve been talking about two things: cultural environments in the broadest sense where all of our thinking goes on, and circles of expanding consciousness in literature proper. It’s time we joined the circles together, or pass them over one another, like transparent templates. Changes in a population, be it a variety of monkey or a trend in detective fiction, occur in step with changing conditions in their corresponding environment. There are different kinds of environments of course, on different scales. The environment for a worm is its individual soil, for a polar bear its melting ice cap, for the planet its solar system. Environments intersect and overlap, providing a complex interrelationship of allowing conditions in relation to which a living creature’s

352

missing link

viability is measured and worked out. Expanding consciousness is an environment as much as any other. Our minds, in all their associative reach, are the space in which everything we can think and do will find its fitting place, or die in isolation or rejection. Our designs inhabit the reach of that space, our expanded consciousness. We had a certain understanding of physics in Newton’s time and the world we constructed was a function of that understanding, made up as it was of machines that operated by weights, steam pressures, eventually electricity, and so on. With new scientific discoveries computers have flourished, as does the world we have very quickly built out of them. We live inside an extent of mind in the same way that an evolved species of monkey inhabits the greater reach of its environment. Echoes of synaptic association loop among themselves and ripple outwards. But outwards towards what? Towards the limit of their environment? The environment for a single metaphor, we saw, is a poem; that environment is contained in the poet’s imagination and everything that is in it. In turn, the environments for these are the worlds of culture and nature that he or she moves in. Culture and nature as we experience them are products of our consciousness, our conscious awareness of them. But consciousness inhabits a further domain, as Daniel Dennett showed, the domain of symbolic tools themselves, into which it expands. Again: tool use is a two-way sign of intelligence; not only does it require intelligence to recognize and maintain a tool (let alone fabricate one), but a tool confers intelligence on those lucky enough to be given one … And among the preeminent tools, Gregory reminds us, are what he calls mind tools: words.18 Now the environment for these verbal mind tools, is nature and the process of natural selection that has led to the “discovery” of their advantage in evolutionary terms. And one of the environments for evolution, we know already, is finally the metaphoric initiative, the principles of relation, identity, and difference whose algorithms are worked out inexhaustibly in the minutest particles of energy in time and space. And so the environments fold together at both ends, or come full circle. The metaphoric initiative is the inner particulate in natural evolution and the outer reach of our expanding consciousness. Metaphor

The Evolution of Literature

353

emerges from its own metaphorical seed. It is a behaviour manifest in every least relation, and the farthest expression of worlds expanding in and through human being. Its centre is everywhere, its circumference is nowhere. Like a perpetually stirred-up whipped cream that finally becomes thick enough to stand on its own, metaphor comes clear in the language we have for it, in the language whose nature it fosters and embodies, and then stands out further still in the hypothetical domain where it is free to play as itself among the theatrical and literary conditions it has helped to evolve. Metaphor in imaginative literature, as the apotheosis of hypothesis if you will, can often behave like an intransitive verb. Think of descriptive language, in contrast, as transitive in the sense that it reaches directly to a referent that it handles. The word “tree” describes the brown thing with leaves. It picks it up. The word “book” lifts a book and the word “wrench” handles a wrench. But metaphor in literature does not need to take an object in this way, nor need to have an actual effect upon something. Indeed, it turns from the world of actual things and embodies effects that are at a remove, or that complete themselves in being what they are, as with such intransitive verbs as “to walk” or “to live.” Metaphor in literature can strike us as intransitive in another sense. Think of how the metaphoric initiative has evolved over time as an effective agent. In the evolutionary narrative we’ve constructed, metaphor spends most of its time acting upon things in an obviously transitive way, acting upon chemistry, upon dna, and so on. It made things happen. It then comes to the point where it acts upon the symbolic world, brings it into being, embodies and is embodied by it. As it is taken up into the symbols it makes, more and more of its original creative agency comes clear in intransitive acts – it thinks, it rises, it breathes – to the point where it comes very near in kind to the intransitive verb that makes all verbs intelligible, “to be.” Its work at this level seems intransitive because the symbolic domain has only symbolic content. It no longer appears to act upon real objects. We know on one level that this isn’t so. In imaginative thinking just as much as in descriptive language, things get moved around as objects of transitive verbs (“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”). It’s just that the objects that get moved around are themselves symbols. A kind of heavy symbolic lifting, if I may risk an oxymoron.

354

missing link

At the same time, however, we’ve been considering the evolution of metaphoric thinking proper, and the design culture that comes of it, as but one further stage in an unfolding algorithm of real causes and effects in nature. The world of symbols and all that those symbols enact is but the latest real thing that the metaphoric initiative has brought into being. We know that chemistry and dna do actual work in the world. They move things about, or rather, they are the moving-about of things. They are transitively effective in being themselves. In the same sense, the symbolic world was brought materially into existence, and became effective in merely being what it was. And in the same sense, it does heavy lifting, though we are still doubtful as to what exactly is being lifted. In us, metaphor may indeed be thought of as yanking at its own bootstraps. One last analogy. Back in the chemistry chapter when we thought about the Genesis story as a story about what sort of work metaphor can accomplish in the beginning and from the beginning, we saw how closely linked are the metaphor of God and metaphor as such. We can do more here. It is as though in the Genesis creation story, God as a verb had stopped transitively making things after six days and on the seventh sat back and was himself, free to say “I am that I am.” That sabbatical time may well be seen as a day of leisure, and I should think that scientists like Steven Pinker, who see art as a “Sunday afternoon pastime,” could scarcely keep from smiling at the inference. But a day of rest – as the origin of the word “holiday” serves to remind us – is not just a day for hobbies. A day of rest is an active return to one’s home, to one’s origin, where one may be oneself. That day of leisure is the place, born of symbolic thinking, where “as though” and “what if” return home to be what they always were. We step away from the world of objective work, where we make things and lift things, and instead enter into a space where our very ability to make and lift is realized and refreshed. Metaphor in literature, then, is just such a god, metaphorically speaking. The initiative was there “in the beginning” as the originating impulse of creation long before there was anything called literature. It brought a physical world into being, a world that became the very incarnation of its creative energy, a world that it expressed, a world that expressed what it was. On the seventh day, it created a space of its own. If on that day it “let all material things go” – as the Buddha says we must – it didn’t do so by

The Evolution of Literature

355

throwing away what it had made, but by creating out of it a new form that was still itself. Its doing so was not a pause in making, but the next thing to be made. And on that seventh day, the new form was not anything that metaphor needed to step into, for there it was.

13

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

esprit. Nom masculin singulier. Entendement, cerveau, intelligence, imagination, pensée; génie, coeur, finesse, souffle, âme, essence, inspiration, grâce, émanation, beauté. ~Dictionaire francais Obviously there is a vital impulse: what I was just calling an impulse towards a higher and higher efficiency, something which ever seeks to transcend itself, to extract from itself more than there is – in a word, to create. Now, a force which draws from itself more than it contains, which gives more that it has, is precisely what is called a spiritual force: in fact, I do not see how otherwise spirit is to be defined. ~Henri Bergson1

the spirit of consciousness Our symbolic thinker, human being, has set out to design a world that gives it survival advantage. Thinking ahead, testing and deliberating, it has striven to build and inhabit a world that, it would hope, makes sense. The thick cream of its society has been whipped into myriad shapes that stand on their own. At the same time, that most characteristic of human being’s talents, its prowess for symbolic thinking, has evolved a domain unique to itself, where the symbol as symbol has come to the fore, where hypothetical thinking has become a survival-enhancing end in its own right, as well as the means to it. The rise into social conditions that embody aspects of metaphoric thinking – such as expanded awareness, mutual reciprocity, pattern and design set in play with the mechanisms of

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

357

adaptation and change – may be the best that a gathering of conscious beings like us can hope for. We left off discussion of the metaphoric initiative’s highest expression in the individual back when we considered consciousness. There is good reason to think that we don’t do any better, as symbolic thinkers, than to be fully conscious. It is also possible that consciousness may only be getting started. We turn now to the consideration of a latency in human mind, an unrealized potential, as it expands, like a universe, as and towards its own outer limit. As we will see, this domain too involves the reality of an environment whose conditions significantly influence what states may prosper within it.

matter to spirit One of the more ambitious, some would say foolhardy, objectives of this book is to trace a thread from the tangible to the intangible, matter to spirit, from covalent chemical bonds to the conjurings of metaphoric mind. This gets us into the area of reductionist philosophy, the belief that everything can be explained, some say explained away, by identifying its material ingredients. As Brian Greene writes in The Elegant Universe: The reductionist philosophy easily ignites heated debate. Many find it fatuous and downright repugnant to claim that the wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointed dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.2 Greene quotes Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg’s response to those who find such thinking chilling and impersonal: “the reductionist world view is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.”3 I think writers like Richard Dawkins would dispute this view that reductionist approaches have to be chilling and impersonal. In Unweaving the Rainbow, for instance, he works to restore wonder and reverence – two ingredients of spiritual feeling, surely – to our study of biology and evolution. He does require of us, certainly, that we redefine our sense of what qualifies

358

missing link

as spiritual experience, removing it entirely from the context of faith. Not surprisingly, his implied new definition shifts in the direction of scientific inquiry and discovery. At the same time, there ought to be room in our common definitions of spirit for a scientist’s notion of the unknown. “Spirit” (from spirare to breathe), is what some think of as the breath of life. It isn’t a great leap from the invisibility of breath to other ideas of immaterial forces, disembodied presences, invisible essences, that make up many of our notions of spirit. Scientists commonly speak of hidden forces in their own work, and get excited at the idea of uncovering secrets, removing the material veil from the intelligible, if not intelligent, orders of the cosmos. I am proposing a similar redefinition of spirit along scientific lines, but my own preference would be to account for it in terms that some spiritual thinkers at least would find more palatable, that would not leave them feeling that they had given up the ghost, as it were, in assenting to the views offered here. There are both physicists and religious thinkers who believe that current accounts of material reality still leave room for a presiding spirit, an intelligent creative process, or some such all-knowing surrogate. But horns tend to lock at that point where intentionality comes to question. Are things meant to be as they are? Scientists like Dawkins would argue that finding meaning in the nature of things, “the way the world works,” as Weinberg says, does not mean that you have found intention.4 Things can have meaning without anyone having intended them to mean. Their meaning lies in the physical laws that govern their behaviour. Interestingly, the divide rests on two definitions of “meaning”: one signifying knowledge and understanding, the other purpose and intention. The strict secularist believes that we can find meaning and still understand ourselves as random accidents of an unintentional process. More religious thinkers believe that to find meaning implies the exact opposite. I suppose my own view is reductionist by definition, in my consideration of how the metaphoric initiative, whose origins are coterminous with the advent of material fact, pervades the nature of things. Metaphor is the meaning-finding behaviour in cognitive activity, the process of generating patterns and relationships among brain contents. In this sense, it is both the principle of understanding, and the end, or rather the allowing condition, towards which meaning-making exercises expand. I have

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

359

wanted to show that the relationship between matter and spirit is something more than “merely metaphorical” in the sense commonly associated with metaphor, i.e. not really true. I have wanted to show how our physical, chemical, and evolutionary threads are built into the shuttle that weaves the fabric of reality. I would now suggest that metaphor is intrinsic in the properties and experiences that we associate with spirit, spiritual thinking, and spiritual reality. Metaphor is spirit’s missing link, the link whose absence is the very meaning of spirit.

breaking the spell Most of those who argue that genes and the neurological networks they determine are significantly responsible for the state of mind we associate with spirit work in the biological and evolutionary sciences, where the appetite is stronger for tracing lines between brain chemistry and behaviour. There appear at the moment to be fewer religious scholars (though not none5) interested in tracking the roots of spirit to our biological condition. The closest we get may be those scientists who also count themselves religious. Beauregard and O’Leary in The Spiritual Brain and Gerald Schroeder in The Science of God are three such. Daniel Dennett has waded into the debate with Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He speculates that religion, as social agent, is a product of evolutionary selection operating on such functions as group formation, instinctive attitudes towards the unknown, the consolidating and reaffirming power of a shared consensus in the face of doubt, etc. We can “break the spell” of troubling religious ideologies by recognizing their evolutionary origin and condition. That is, we can see spells not as truths established by an objective God, but as biological adaptations. Indeed, any work that suggested ways to attenuate the destructive power of ideological institutions, and whatever churches are among these, would prove a welcome influence. Many popular scientists have pushed into the waters, sometimes giving the impression that the fulfilment of their own discipline lay in this domain, so avidly do they rise to the occasion. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion has been highly controversial; that book, along with Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great gives ample evidence that, as Dean Hamer has argued, some

360

missing link

scientists aren’t looking to debunk gods altogether so much as replace them with their own set of axioms.6 John Allen Paulos’s enjoyable Irreligion may belong with this group, where the supplementary divinity is strict mathematics instead of science. Dennett’s findings, along with some insights in Dawkins, are in many ways compelling. I felt that genuine frisson of illumination when I read, for instance, about how evolution would inevitably select in favour of a mental wariness or superstition. Any creature that believed that something unknown was out there in the dark, like a carnivore, or a boogeyman, or a god, even when it wasn’t there, would be advantaged over any creature that disregarded such hints and guesses.7 Better safe than sorry. This habit of mind may account for a good number of fence-sitters who pay lip service to some belief or other, just for insurance, and is in its own way an expression of metaphoric thinking, whereby a nothingness is identified with a presence to the thinker’s advantage. Religion as Dennett speaks of it may be hard to distinguish from, say, business or political organizations. Corporate ceos and politicians show many of the traits that Dennett uses to characterize churches. They have anxiety about the unknown, react to possibly insignificant events, bond with like-minded ideologues, and find the unanimity of large numbers a sufficient guarantee of righteousness to outdo any TV evangelist.8 Now that corporations have been granted the rights of a person in the Fourteenth Amendment of the American Constitution, I wonder whether they mightn’t represent the latest demonic (or negative) anti-type of the Christ figure: God-Men, bodiless but embodied, avatars for an invisible higher power nonetheless at work among us, both liable and not liable for the crimes of which they are accused. But socio-anthropological answers for religious attentions can scarcely account for all acts of faith in their complexity. Such accounts tend to steer clear of our experience of spirit. Dennett himself devotes a few paragraphs to drawing some important distinctions.9 “Religion” is the social dynamic, our inclination to sign on to an established creed with likeminded individuals. “Spirit” is a mental condition removed from, or prior to, questions of collective social response. Dennett allows for the existence of spiritual states and reminds us that this is not his subject. I should say in passing that I believe Dennett’s Sweet Dreams, in its conception of what consciousness is and how our thoughts “spiral up”

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

361

into higher states of awareness, provides one of the more advanced studies of spiritual mind in the biological domain and in cognitive philosophy. I wonder that Dennett himself didn’t join the dots when he wrote Breaking the Spell. In any case, we saw in the chapter on consciousness how very nearly a discussion of higher mental states may touch on questions of spiritual being, and we’ll be building on some of those findings. Modern science first took note of the independent authority of spiritual experience in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. James’s accounts of spiritual states, as they meshed with Freud’s theory of oceanic feeling, gave us a glimpse of what might be involved if we were to account for spiritual experience in terms of the early neuro-psychologies. The allowances they make for what might and might not count as spiritual experience show how complicated the field is, and serve to warn off scientists – and a humanist like myself – who might be too ready to make easy connections between a fired neuron and a state of mind. In his study James takes the confessions of spiritual experience at face value in order to speculate in practical terms on their possible roots, cognitive or otherwise. Following in his footsteps, I approach the question from the other direction, not in analysing visions, but studying the material workings of mind that may underlie these. Religion is not only a product of evolutionary forces operating on such factors as group formation and a wariness of sounds that go bump in the night, any more than literature is solely a function of our desire for publishers and our inclination to whistle when we walk past cemeteries. Religion is a property of mind that predates the advent of these more sociological phenomena. It binds to those phenomena as human being evolves socially, but the property must be there, somewhere, at the start. Searching for it in a humanistic-scientific light might be one way of both demystifying the spiritual in neurological terms, while preserving a sense of openness and reach in relation to the unknowns that we associate with more positive expressions of spirit. My argument might be seen to complement Dennett’s own effort to “break the spell.” Dennett reminds us that there are good spells and bad spells.10 A bad spell is one in which a citizen is convinced it is God’s will that he bomb an abortion clinic. Good spells have to do with being swept away by a fine musical phrase, a good wine, a beautiful face, even an idea or a hope. Dennett goes on to say that some of the hardest work

362

missing link

begins when we try to distinguish the good spells from the bad spells, a work that would get him bound up in difficult but necessary debates on cultural value and morality, as he himself admits.11 This is where Terry Eagleton shows the vulnerability, or limits, of these arguments before one of the essential questions that all religions ask, namely, “How shall I live?”12

out of myth, out of mind Spirit then – to be distinguished from religion – is innate metaphoric consciousness, my argument in a nutshell. Indeed I’d like to argue that metaphoric mind really gives us no choice in the matter (every pun welcome…). This will get us closer to understanding how religions themselves may be thought of as externalized and externalizing metaphors of metaphoric consciousness. I also want to do a little more on-the-ground thinking about how spiritual consciousness can be seen to manifest in the particular fictions and gods that we create. Verum esse factum, said Giambattista Vico: “the truth is in what we have made.”13 I have quoted Vico already, but his formula strikes me as a poignant first principle for my purposes here. Our minds are constituted by, and expressive of, the metaphoric initiative. It should be reasonable to speculate then that our creations would reveal traces of their phenomenological roots. Our truths are revealed in myth, not in the particulars of what it says but in the revealing form of what it is. Metaphoric spirit requires, and perhaps makes inevitable, its material expression in the form of story. One of the axioms of my argument is that metaphoric mind is evidenced in any story we might tell. It would be doubly revealing to look at those stories in particular that address the question of spirit in prophetic literature. Thus one might show to readers who are inclined to invest in the descriptive truth of their myths that spirit is indeed manifest in the Word they value, if not in the way it first seems. They might even find the inference reassuring. At the same time, scientific thinkers and other religious skeptics might be willing to meet them halfway and negotiate a new language of understanding. I will try briefly to discern just such revealing evidences in the JudeoChristian mythical literature and spend some time reflecting on how the

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

363

Bible itself often advocates in favor of its own metaphoric roots, from nothing less than Yahweh’s actual name for himself, through such as the creation story of Genesis, to some of the more general points of systematic theology. I repeat the caveat with respect to religious faith that I brought up at the beginning of the book. To find significance and implication in a religious text like the Bible should not be taken – as it sometimes is – as advocating for the descriptive authority of the stories it contains. Quite the reverse. Northrop Frye, for one, encouraged his readers to approach the Bible as a secular-text-and-more with a particular social authority that has its roots in the unique reality of myth and metaphor in human being.14 I have followed in his path, in the hopes of providing contestants in the religion/science debate with a perspective in the middle ground that is both spiritual and material. Religion is the most obvious expression of how spirit tends to manifest in the world. The challenge of understanding how it does so is surely one of the greatest we face. It is not, and perhaps could never be, a question of doing without spirit, but of understanding what it is: a function of myth and metaphor, a divinity, to call it that, within ourselves.

bicameral mind One of the most interesting accounts of the origins of spiritual thinking I have come across is Julian Jaynes’s controversial The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. At the beginning of this book, I used some of Jaynes’s own justification of his position as grounds for my own proceeding. We need to look now, however, at the actual details of Jaynes’s argument. Jaynes suggests that our experience of gods can be accounted for by understanding how the human brain, comprising two distinct hemispheres, evolved. Those hemispheres work now in unison with one another such that we are not aware of any information that passes between them. They communicate, and their communication, Jaynes argues, is our experience of consciousness. There was a time, however, when the brain was more divisively bicameral in such a way that the two hemispheres were not as seamlessly aligned in their job descriptions. Using the evidence of early literature, painting, and

364

missing link

sculpture, Jaynes argues that we experienced at this stage of our evolution a kind of pervasive cognitive dissonance that characterized the nature of our subjectivity. We would not, according to Jaynes, have experienced the dissonance as a dissonance within us, for indeed we didn’t have a within at the time, at least not in the way we think of it now. One side of the brain would simply “hear” instructions from the other side of the brain as distinct and separate. I’m leaving aside the question in Jaynes’s studies of what it must have “felt like” to have two chambers in the brain that were not entirely attuned to one another. His term “Iliadic man” denotes the state of mind revealed and characterized in Homer’s writings, among others at the time. Iliadic man had not developed subjectivity, “had no awareness of his awareness of the world, had no interior mind-space to introspect upon.”15 In short, Jaynes writes, we experienced certain kinds of mental activity in the bicameral mind as a hearing of other voices, as auditory hallucinations that “came to us” from without. These hallucinations very often manifested themselves as gods who spoke “out of the blue,” whose utterances could be seen as the workings of that person’s conscience, the revelation of fears or angers, the prophecy to himself of unexpressed intentions: The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speaking to. Sometimes they come in mists or out of the gray sea or a river, or from the sky, suggesting visual auras preceding them. But at other times they simply occur. Usually they come as themselves, commonly as mere voices.16 I might note how the manner in which these spoken revelations appear is similar to the metaphor-making process in cognition. The reach for correspondences half created, half discovered, the preparing of a mental readiness to receive matches among our systems of associated commonplaces: if these were allegorized in narrative terms, they might very well manifest themselves as mists, out of which serendipitous voices arise. Jaynes believes that these voices would have been actual halluci nations. Many scholars have found this claim incredible. Others, like Daniel Dennett, are nonetheless curious about the explanatory power of

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

365

bicameralism and its breakdown so far as our experience of consciousness is concerned.17 A human being had “gods speaking to it” in such a way that goings-on inside seemed as though they were coming from outside. As the brain evolved further and learned to bridge, or adapt to, the gaps between its hemispheres, the mind became a single echo-chamber of voices. Our experience of an externalized dialogue with mysterious presences was folded into our experience of subjectivity. We became conscious. We held dialogue with ourselves. We might still put a good angel and a bad angel on separate shoulders and listen to them hash out a conflict, but on the whole now we understand that our conscious thoughts are made up of an ongoing integration of various internal events. Not surprisingly, Jaynes holds metaphor in high esteem, devoting more than fifteen pages to its analysis,18 and making the grand claim in the context of his study that “consciousness is the work of lexical metaphor.”19 He tends to restrict metaphor to its lexical function, but nonetheless grants it a special importance in our experience of subjectivity. At the same time, he doesn’t visit the possibility that bicameralism (both what it felt like in itself, and what it evolved into) is physically metaphorical – with an A in one side of your head speaking across a gap to a B in the other – and could be thought to anticipate metaphorical thinking and our experience of consciousness. The debate over what might have been our experience of bicameralism is in part a debate over what metaphoricity itself feels like in the head: one mind divided against itself and feeling like two minds (one of them you, and the other not you). It is another version of the problem we discussed at the end of Chapter 8, that is, what consciousness itself feels like. For Jaynes our bicameralism accounts for the origin and character of the gods themselves. When you hear voices and don’t see anyone around you, you are likely to credit the unseen with impressive powers of articulation. At the very least you would be listening carefully. You would find that they are unusually interested in you and in your thoughts, well nigh at one with them. The voices would seem able to guess what you’re thinking and feeling before you know it yourself. Their knowledge would strike you on the one hand as objective, ex officio, and on the other as intimate and strangely familiar. You would feel as though you couldn’t control when they speak or what they say. (Do we even yet have a sense of deciding what our next thought will be?) You would intuit a strong

366

missing link

sense of the imperative, of secret instructions, or of advice written into its utterances, however cryptic. The breakdown of this bicameralism, the gradual adaptive tuning of the brain into the apparent whole we enjoy today, would represent in part the recession of the gods into so-called spirit. The plurality of many mysterious voices, born of many states and moods, would recede into “the still small voice” that religions speak of today, a unity, a single projection of conscious experience. Indeed, spirit becomes unicameral conscious experience, just as in metaphors two become one.

a is b = spirit In what other ways does the spirit dwell within us? What we call and generally mean by “spirit” is the substance and the intelligible product of metaphoric thinking. To understand how this may be so, we must revisit our old formula A is B and think about the paradox of “is” and “is not.” We must think about gaps, about what is missing in gaps, what missing links reside in gaps, and how missingness is both the presence of what is not there and the bridge we use to cross it. We must think about the transgression of conventional orders, the opening up of spaces in which to “think more,” the creation of potential realities seemingly out of nothing by mere hypothesis. Remember that we distinguished two ways of making metaphoric connections, by assimilation and by interaction. We make assimilative connections when some unknown entity enters our ken but seems not to belong there. We try to understand that unknown by relating it to something already known. So the odd shape we draw on the chalk board looks like an amoeba and is thus assimilated to our understanding (cf. 36). But what happens when we put two things together we already recognize? This, we learned, is the more radical of the two metaphoric moments: the interactive. It tends to destabilize rather than confirm systems of relationship that already exist. I know what love is, I know what a rose is; someone comes along and says they are the same. The impertinence requires that my mind go to work construing the semantic shifts that are implied.

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

367

One of the most important aspects of metaphoric experience is the sense we have of an elusive and intangible result. You can imagine a hypothetical early non-thinker having to do a great deal of assimilative cogitating in the beginning as his brain grew. There would be many things he would have to “make sense of” by connecting them to his relatively small storehouse of associations.20 This is effectively what every newborn does, learning how to handle objects in space, their relations to one another, and how to accommodate new objects to those already recognized. But right from the very beginning, having a storehouse of interchangeable symbols in his head (no matter how small or limited), he would start to make connections among them. Everything – his unstoppable synapses are telling him – is potentially related to everything else. The possibilities created by the growing system of new relationships are intangible, cannot be pointed to. For instance, a person may point to a tree that “backs up” the image in his mind of a tree. And he can point to a rocky overhang that “backs up” the image of a rocky overhang in his mind. But he doesn’t have the abstract idea of shelter that he can point to, an idea that is the product of discovering a relationship between what a tree offers and what a rocky overhang offers. The product of his metaphoric association is, at least for the time being, an intangible. As he comes to assimilate this new idea of shelter to other associated commonplaces he already has in mind (home, dryness, safety, etc.), the sense of the intangible in the metaphor will fade. One of the upshots of this process is that your mind comes to be filled with abstractions. What Kant writes of poets is true of everyone: “the poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc., as well as to make that of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc., sensible beyond the limits of experience, with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature, by means of an imagination that emulates the precedent of reason in attaining to a maximum.”21 And abstractions are born of abstractions, feelings from the interaction of memories and images. Out of these abstractions, you build an entire cosmology of what and how things are and how they relate. In a very real sense, as we have seen, you inhabit that cosmology.

368

missing link

god with a capital “c” Any assertion that “A is B” creates a thought “C” that is intangible and elusive, tricky to name or pin down aside from the associative evidences that point to it. Yet at the same time it is meaningful and compelling. Frye wrote: “There’s something to be said for the god of the gaps: when you’re faced with the unknown you project into it, so ‘God’ is the totality of nothingness first of all.”22 We feel ourselves reaching into that gap, stretching our minds to the unseen limits it spreads before us. It removes us from the fixed determinants of where we are and invites us into the openness of where we are not. Richard Dawkins appears to agree with Frye’s view, though with a less generous spirit, when he decries “the worship of gaps”23: It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God – imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant – and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we’d be better off filling with something else?24 I’m surprised that Dawkins would have given up so quickly on his own rather ingenious phrase “God-shaped gap,” turning away from the informing nature of the gap towards the merely debatable contents that might fill it. Sitting more patiently with the phrase, he might well agree that the gods appear as they do because they are “gap-like,” products of metaphoric thinking. That is, they arise out of the relationships that we intuit between things in the world, namely how things “go together,” how they form patterns and unities. Kant himself would offer a version of this inference in his actual definition of “spirit.” It is, he wrote, “the animating principle in the mind … that which purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e. into a play that is self-maintaining.”25 It was David Hume who first made this case in the eighteenth century. He observed how the elusive ligatures of cause and effect – in particular our intuition of an effective agent hiding there – left some thinkers scrambling after an unseen force that would govern and licence those relationships and make them intelligible:

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

369

They pretend that those objects which are commonly denominated causes, are in reality nothing but occasion; and that the true and direct principle of every effect is not any power of force in nature, but a volition of the Supreme Being, who wills that such particular objects should for ever be conjoined with each other … Thus … everything is full of God.26 The elusive presence of the metaphoric initiative, which is not a thing so much as how things behave, moves us closer to the hide-and-seek presence of the gods. They seem to be both inside us and outside us. We find patterns and relations that are puzzling, elusive, invisible, yet also beguiling, suggestive, and full of immanent potential. That indwelling potential will reside, on the one hand, in the interstices between the things we are observing. On the other hand, they appear in the objects that are so enlivened by our thinking about them. We had occasion in Chapter 7 to consider Kant’s discussion of human understanding as an act of synthesis (cf. 199): “we shall call [understanding] by the general name of synthesis, in order to show that we cannot represent to ourselves anything as connected in the object, without having previously connected it ourselves, and that of all representations connection is the only one which cannot be given through the objects, but must be carried out by the subject itself.”27 Objects appear both as themselves in our acts of mind, and as the potential that those acts of mind would seem to espy. A god would be both a verb – the “this is that” that moves among all things we observe – and a part of the substantive “that” that the “is” so unequivocally insists is there. This manner in which the material world is enlivened by a pervading energy or spirit implies the kind of metaphoric bifocal vision that we visited in our discussion of the concrete/symbolic in Chapter 10 (cf. 291). Jastrow’s duck/rabbit: two images are one drawing, one drawing is two images. The paradox of is and is not comes to bear in the elements of the Christian Eucharist, the ritual of Communion whereby adherents take into their own body the body and blood of Christ via the bread and the wine that are identified with them. Dennis Donoghue offers an excellent discussion of the problem of metaphoric meaning in the Eucharist.28 He cites Thomas Aquinas’s poem “Panis angelicus” in which the theologian

370

missing link

claims that “the angelic bread becomes the bread of man: the heavenly bread puts a stop to figures.” What could this mean? Donoghue asks. He defers to an explanation offered by Hugh Kenner: “Figures can only say, ‘This is “like” what cannot be shown; what you see is an emblem.’ No more of that now: no more of this making shift to ‘represent’ that. We have the gift of the Eucharist, which is what it represents.”29 This insistence that the bread is not “like” the body of Christ, but is the body of Christ, should remind us of the difference between mere simile and the radical of metaphoric identification (cf. 42). As Frye writes: “a metaphorical statement is not so much an assertion that A is B as an annihilation of the space separating A and B.”30 Metaphor pure laine imagines that the space between subject and object collapses in such a way that the metaphor is no longer really a metaphor, while still remaining one. A self-respecting radical metaphor tries to push past its own metaphoricity. Aquinas thinks of the feat (one thing’s actually being another) as a kind of “gift,” even a miracle. This is indeed what a god would be, by our definition: a metaphor miraculously erasing itself as such, having it be so that two things are one thing, that the bread is a body, that the god/man is a single unified being in more than just a manner of speaking. For Blake, as we saw earlier (cf. 80), this is the meaning of “vision”: “What it will be Questiond When the sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.”31 Everywhere he looked, Blake saw how the material world is spiritualized by our thinking about it, by our seeing as. Frye uses the analogy of empty space to suggest something of a spiritual abidance in the interstices of things. Metaphor and the metaphoric gods are the very air we breathe: The creation began with air and light, the two symbols of “spirit.” Air is the first thing we think of when we think of things that we can’t see but know to exist, and in a sense we do not see light either: what we see is metaphorically fire, a source or reflection of light. We see by means of light and air: if we could see air we could see nothing else

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

371

… In the Bible the invisible world is not usually thought of as a separate and higher order of reality: it is thought of rather as the medium by which the world becomes visible.32 This may help us to understand the kinds of anxiety that certain religious faithful can experience when they feel the need to prove the reality of their god in the material world, but keep finding themselves confronted with the paradox of a metaphoric event. If you weren’t comfortable with the event as such, it might make you want to be even more insistent. In fact, religions might be seen as just this (anxious) desire to make manifest in the world of churches and religious icons (and more positively in genuine acts of faith) the absent presence that metaphoric thinking brings to life but refuses to actualize. As inverse proportions, the sheer size and weight of our pyramids and cathedrals might stand witness to just how not there that elusive there is.

the as similated gods These reflections bring us back to substitutive or assimilative metaphor (cf. 45). That feeling of not understanding something that is out there may be one of the major motivating forces behind human endeavour. We work to assimilate the unknowns; we feel threatened by them. Our demonizing of other people (which Sartre famously said is what hell is), neighbours, races, countries, can be partly accounted for in this way (cf. 53). When we confront a barrier to knowledge, we can feel anxious about whatever lies beyond it. I’ve always loved Hughes Mearns’s little poem about our feelings towards presences that “aren’t there”: Last night I saw upon the stair, A little man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Oh, how I wish he’d go away.33 Our culture is filled with ghosts; we are fascinated with the paranormal, the obscure evidence of lingering presences, which, left undisclosed, haunt us incessantly. They tell us about ourselves and our anxieties. They

372

missing link

are products of a misgiving, a sensing of something beyond knowledge not yet assimilated to knowledge. Spirits, not surprisingly given our imaginations and the vagueness of the referent, come in all shapes and sizes. Freud tried to make quick work of the paternal attributes of the Judeo-Christian God, the big daddy, with his theory of the Superego and our tendency to project our experience of authority into abstract spaces beyond us. But there are so many other attributes. Spirits reside on mountain tops and in palaces. They can, as we saw in Homer, appear as fogs or mists. They can be guardian angels or demons under your bed. They may be fishers or wrestlers, gamblers or tricksters, animals, birds, bread, wine, a grain of sand or the limits of the universe. They can be intimate relations or remote first causes; distant watchmakers or wrathful punishers. The number of revealing metaphoric associations we could make is potentially inexhaustible, an unlimited wellspring of meaning, which is in itself a feature often attributed to gods. Much of our spiritual history has been the work of assimilating the conjurings of the imagination to the familiar world of rocks and stones and trees. One of the interesting characteristics of these spirits is that most of them seem to have thoughts and intentions. Spirits are products of metaphoric mind, issuances from and into our neuronal synaptic gaps. We should not be surprised to find them cogitating, for they are thoughts, and not just finished thoughts, but active thoughts that appear out of the blue of other thoughts, thoughts that like metaphors we may not fully grasp or control, thoughts that seem to do thinking of their own.

pneumatiko s With the inference in hand now of deus in nobis – the god in us34 – we can shift to a consideration of the “spirit of metaphor” in religious writing, where we might expect to find the implications conspicuous. I was quite struck the first time I came across a claim that Northrop Frye makes in The Great Code. The Bible, he wrote, understands better than many of its adherents that spirit and metaphor are the same thing, ontologically, in their very incarnation. “The word ‘spiritually’ (pneumatikos) means a good many things in the New Testament, but one thing

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

373

that it must always centrally mean is ‘metaphorically.’”35 The same principle can be found in St Augustine’s Confessions, where we find the writer striving to understand how the Bible articulates its truths: “he lifted the veil of mystery and disclosed the spiritual meaning of texts which, taken literally, appeared to contain the most unlikely doctrines.”36 Frye cites an example from the Book of Revelation, “And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified (11:8).” A metaphoric association is made between the earthly Jerusalem (which had recently fallen) and their fallen counterparts in the city of Sodom and enslaving Egypt. The free and natural identification of spiritual thinking with metaphorical thinking is unmistakable. Spirit can “equal” many other things as well, but this particular metaphor, Frye believed, was worth any time one might take to reflect on it. He often favoured passages in the Bible that accommodated both a spiritual and a secular meaning at a single point, as a way of redirecting our attention to what is inherently spiritual (inherently metaphorical) in words alone.

i am that i am The Judeo-Christian God, as the “Logos,” is associated not just with reason and logic (the hidden intelligence of things), but with word and discourse (“in the beginning was the Word”; John 1:1). It is both an abstraction and the symbolic tools we use to represent it. The names of the Logos further enable us to consider how closely spirit is associated, not only with the products of the metaphoric imagination, but with its workings. Spirit is not just the resulting “C” according to our formula “A is B C,” but the “is” that lies between the parts and animates them. The metaphoric predicate cannot be easily reconciled to the forms of conventional logic that we live by. How can A be both itself and something else? How can A be not-A? The Hebrew God’s name for himself in Exodus 3:14 makes an especially interesting case: “And God said unto Moses, i am that i am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, i am hath sent me unto you.” “i am” is a translation of the cultic name of God, made up of four letters, yhwh, and conventionally pronounced “Yahweh.”

374

missing link

In the original Hebrew, God uses the name twice, separated by “ashr,” meaning “who” or “that which.” The temptation from our perspective to highlight the apparent doubling of oneself is irresistible. The statement is tautological, to be sure, along the lines of someone saying “I see what I see,” where the first “I see” is subject and predicate, and the second “I see” is object, part of the accusative noun phrase “what I see.” The circularity folds the name into itself, is fulfilled and complete without reference to anything beyond it. It would be perfectly appropriate for an all-powerful god to say “I am what I am, and there’s an end to it.” There would also be something fitting in a God evoking himself as both the subject and complement of his own utterance. And yet the name is also not circular. God does not appear to be saying, or not only saying, “I am i am,” or “My name is i am” (which in any case, if it were in this form, implies two different grammatical persons). The name is mirrored or doubled, juxtaposed with itself; the “ashr” serves then as a predicative axis, or a reflecting surface, or perhaps even, if you will, an equal sign. In any case, the grammar is unusual and not easily reduced to any consecutive alignment of subject, predicate, and complement. There are before us two i ams and they are identical, such that each i am is referenced in the other, and is a function of it. This invokes something of the difficulty of our A is B, where a thing is both itself and something other than itself. We would normally say in such a case that each is not fully itself then, not self-sufficient, that the A is not A, except that the thing that i am is not itself in reference to … is itself. We have imagined a god who can eat his metaphoric cake and refuse it too. In the original Hebrew, the term yhwh comes nearest in English to some idea of “causing to be,” and is therefore associated with a future tense of being. Frye proffers some idea of “I will be” or “I am becoming” or “I will be what I will be.” “That is,” he writes, we might come closer to what is meant in the Bible by the word “God” if we understood it as a verb, and not a verb of simple asserted existence but a verb implying a process accomplishing itself. This would involve trying to think our way back to a conception of language in which words were words of power, conveying primarily the sense of forces and energies rather than analogues of physical bodies.37

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

375

I can scarcely think of a better characterization of the paradox and the power inherent in the metaphoric “is.” It is certainly true of metaphor, as with the God of Moses, that out of the surprise of its speaking a meaning arises that must be projected into a future, into what ripples outwards from its utterance, a “thinking more.” I’ll take a moment to draw physicists back into the discussion by noting how this process of working out a counter-logical puzzle, the sense of an anomalous phenomenon or observation that doesn’t fit with any others, can send a thinker off to do further work. The solution is projected into a future of fresh inferences. The scientist looks for a way to make sense of the anomaly and assimilate it to his understanding. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is nothing if not an analysis of how scientific theories and models (fictional worlds in their own right, to be sure) evolve according to the counter-logic of metaphor. A kind scientific typology obtains. If there is an anomaly, the formula or model remains open, like a type that looks towards its fulfilment in a future anti-type. Even without a conspicuous anomaly, there is still a sense in which the meaning of the formula (as in all equations) lies in its potential, in the number-crunching it affords. “God is a process trying to fulfil itself,” Frye said elsewhere.38 Perhaps had Niels Bohr climbed to the top of his mountain of research and found revealed there for the first time his model of atomic structure, and if that atomic structure had spoken, he might have heard it say, “I am that I am,” and “I will become what I will become.” A is B. A is not A. We also want to say that God is the paradox of this very statement “I am that I am.” You would not think that God would violate his own conditions of being, though if anyone could do it, God could. One of the things that we know about paradoxes, about things that cannot be, is that they are windows to elsewhere, openings where some as-yet-ungrasped state of things comes into view.

via negativa There are other divine attributes that align with the workings of metaphor. Some of its counter-intuitive aspects, for instance, are reflected in apophatic theology, which emphasizes a knowledge of God obtained by

376

missing link

negation (apophatic from Greek ποϕατικός, negative). Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, along with the anonymous fourteenth century work entitled The Cloud of Unknowing, document the meditative techniques by which you may more nearly approach a condition of spirit: “right so put a cloud of forgetting beneath thee; betwixt thee and all the creatures that ever be made.”39 As God is not any merely created or knowable or objective thing, we miss him if we seek him in these concrete forms. Only by negating our habitual constructions do we clear a space in which spirit may enter. So T.S. Eliot recommends in “East Coker”: In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not.40 One of Aquinas’s principles is that statements about God are by definition metaphorical, the veering away from an essence. “Similitudes drawn from things farthest away from God form within us a truer estimate that God is above whatsoever we may say or think of Him.”41 Only the metaphorical statement that effectively cancels or disqualifies itself can point, however indirectly, to divine properties. We are free to approach this idea from the opposite direction, where it is in and as metaphor, which is not what it is, that one comes nearest to divine properties otherwise unnameable. “The very hiding of truth in figures is useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds.”42 We have talked about dead metaphors already (cf. 113); they constitute the known world and may be thought of as the paved access to their established referents. But fresh metaphoric thinking passes through the knowns of the world. Its impertinences open up a clearing for a thing to reveal itself not as what it is, but as what it may be. This last phrase recalls Richard Kearney’s The God that May Be, which opens with the enticing metaphoric formula that “God neither is nor is not but may be.”43 I hasten to note that Kearney, whose fine study pervades and licenses much of what I’m arguing here, actually situates what he calls “metaphorology” – the “endeavour to say something …

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

377

about the unsayable” – between the negations of apophatic theology and the more positive declarations of cataphatic theology. “Between these poles … I propose … approaching God neither as non-being nor as being but as the possibility-to-be.”44 The inference is certainly appealing and I would only want to add that it is metaphor’s withdrawal from the merely descriptive that makes apophatic theology possible. Gary Zukov’s Dancing Wu Li Masters in 1979, along with Edward Harrison’s Masks of the Universe, first published in 1985, were two of the earlier studies to address the elephant in the room in contemporary physics, i.e. that its findings recalled age-old religious questions and formulas as regards knowledge itself and our methods of exploration. Harrison uses the term “Cloud of Unknowing” as a metaphoric axis that identifies the Via Negativa in spiritual thought with the counter-intuitive estrangements of quantum theory, where such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle creates as close to an actual “cloud of unknowing” as any metaphor is like to do. Current physicists struggle with the language to find intelligible verbal formulas for the paradoxes of quantum reality: “as we descend into the strange world of the quantum, the meaning of ‘being’ in the sense of permanent identity becomes untenable,” writes Marcelo Gleiser; “nothing is what it seems, and nothing remains what it is for very long, as matter and light dance about in continuous transformation.”45 Certainly the lessons of apophatic theology would not be lost on puzzlers-out of how quantum theory obliges one to renounce very basic tenets of classical physics. One of Gleiser’s chapter titles is “Learning to Let Go,” in which he writes: “Physics was thus proposing that something could exist without mass, that things could exist without being material … A deeper understanding of Nature demanded a new worldview. Physicists had to let go of the old ways.”46

creator spiritus We come again to the Genesis creation story, in which, as promised, I discern an allegory of the workings of metaphor. I do this not in order to prove that metaphor is the explicit subject matter of Genesis, but to reveal how a finely tuned creation story can scarcely put a world before itself without implicating its means of doing so.

378

missing link

Maker. Prime mover. First cause. We make this readiest of connections between the creative powers attributed to the gods and metaphor’s corresponding ability to pull rabbits out of hats, to put to a thing there that was not there before. I don’t need to repeat the argument concerning God’s use of the subjunctive in “Let there be light” (cf. 92). We only need to note again the kind of hypothetical thinking that may be implied. The mathematician’s “let” (for example “Let X = 4”), makes no claim that X actually does equal 4, but only asks us to follow the hypothesis through to the necessary conclusions it would lead to if it did. The metaphoric process in conscious thinking is not, strictly speaking, creation ex nihilo. With interactive metaphor, two elements are knocked together and out of the spark a new world recommends itself, one that, however similar to the old world, includes the revelation of a truth that had been merely potential in the infinite number of possible relations available. It might be worth noting, though, that God’s own creative acts are scarcely ex nihilo. We’re told in the first verse of the Bible that “in beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”47 We have a creator making two things out of nothing. Those two things make a very interesting and in some ways original binary, as though God’s first job in creating anything was to create two opposite poles and juxtapose them, metaphorically. But even if this were the case, there is a strong sense in verse two that God’s creative work begins only at that point. This would imply that the first verse has more the status of a chapter summary. Let’s hold this thought. The original creative agent in the scene is “the spirit of God” that moves upon the face of the waters. “Spirit” here is a translation of the Hebrew “ruch,” a moving force. We recall that one of the attractive connotations of the phrase “metaphoric initiative” is how the latter word bespeaks a motivating influence, the willingness or ability to take a first step. With the leap between spirit and metaphor established earlier, the “spirit of God” opens readily onto “metaphor of God,” which in itself breaks suggestively into “God as a metaphor” and “metaphor as a kind of creator spiritus.” The earth is without form and void. In other words, it is and is not. We can admire the attempt to accommodate a quasi-scientific account of what material conditions existed at the beginning of the world. Religion is perfectly comfortable with the kind of semantic difficulty that ensues,

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

379

particularly when it is administered by a god, but scientists move at their ease here as well, where light can be both one thing (wave) and another thing (particle), and where, as Lawrence Krauss has observed in A Universe from Nothing, matter can arise from an unstable void.48 In fact, I’d be surprised if a Christian physicist somewhere has not argued that verse 2 offers a convincing description of how something may arise from nothing and used it as “proof” that what the Bible is “actually” speaking about is the Big Bang.49 As my own argument may seem to align with such proofs, I hasten to emphasize that if Genesis proves anything it is that “in the beginning were the destabilizing conditions of metaphoric thinking.” In any case, we press on to notice that God’s work for the most part in Genesis may be characterized as making two things out of one thing. Darkness appears to pre-exist the presentation of light. God has to divide the light from the darkness once it has been made, rather in the manner that he makes Eve out of Adam. Light and dark then illuminate one another in metaphoric juxtaposition (an inference not irrelevant to current theories in physics of matter and anti-matter). Lacking in the scene is some actualizing of the relational gap that abides between things. It must already be there, between the light and the dark, by implication, but the problem is made explicit when a “firmament” is introduced to divide water from water. The word in the Vulgate is a rendering of Hebrew rāqīăʿ, for the vault of the sky. The root rāqaʿ means among other things “expanse” and “to spread out” (oed). It introduces delineated space, where things may come of other things and be distinguished from them. From our perspective, it is as though all the elements of metaphoric behaviour had to be put in place (including copula verbs that go about saying this is that, or equal signs that pull things together) before any real work could be accomplished. The dividing “expanse” turns out to be heaven, not surprisingly. That heaven is created at this point reinforces our argument that verse 1 is not the first act of creation, but a kind of dust-jacket summary of the whole chapter. The waters below the firmament gather together to reveal land (“let the land appear”), very much again in the manner of evincing a light from a darkness or a person from another’s rib. And so the work goes on of creating new things out of old things, delineating identities, dividing properties from properties, and standing back to see how it all

380

missing link

looks. The evaluation of goodness at each stage, and the rest that God permits himself after the week of creation are both redolent of that sense in metaphor of retrospective evaluation, of standing back from various identifications and “reading” the new whole that is formed from them. As the spirit of metaphor, God is capable of thinking heuristically. In the creation story of Genesis, he appears to be thinking like a kind of Gregorian creature (cf. 263), who puts a thing in front of himself and then stands back to decide how he feels about it. He makes light, looks at it, decides that it is good. Elsewhere, he appears to notice a short-coming in the work he had accomplished to that point (deciding, for instance, once he sets Adam in the garden, that “it is not good” for him to be alone there, Gen. 2:18), suggesting, as Frye argues, that the whole effort was a kind of work in progress.50 He also creates animals and puts them in front of Adam “to see what he would call them” (Gen. 2:19). Not to mention all the corrective interventions he must undertake later on when the people of Israel go astray (the punishment at the foot of Mount Sinai, the flood). This is very much the case of a maker only “discovering” the errant potential of his creations (as a poet does his metaphors) after he has launched them on their way. In human consciousness, we use our power of symbolic thinking to reflect on possible arrangements and designs in advance, letting hypotheses die in our stead (cf. 263). God, however, isn’t thinking in advance. He has the power to make and change things that actually are. The hypothetical world and the actual world are one and the same and unfold together. Earlier in this book I indulged myself certain inferences as I followed through the implications of God’s use of the subjunctive (or the jussive) “let” (cf. 92). The subjunctive invokes a hypothetical creation, where the world does not so much exist as become an expression of what it would look like if it did. For God, the living historical world is a prototype, a blue print, a ventured hypothesis. The material world, with us in it, becomes a kind of work sheet, which makes us, rather strangely, both ourselves and a working draft of ourselves, with the strangest of all consequences that we must die in our own stead. There is perhaps a bit of the Watchmaker-God sensibility implied here too. You build a finely designed mechanism, wind it up, but leave it to tick away on its own without your oversight or maintenance. A poet may have some idea of the work a metaphor accomplishes in a poem, but

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

381

he is very much a Watchmaker-God to the extent that he cannot control how that metaphor will spin out in other readers’ minds. Again, the best metaphors are capable of expanding in resonance indefinitely once you set them in motion. Are we justified in drawing quantum physics into the picture again? I quoted Heisenberg earlier in the book where he argues that “The aim of research is thus no longer knowledge of the atoms and their motion ‘in themselves,’ separated from our experimental questioning; rather, right from the beginning, we stand in the center of the confrontation between man and nature … the object of research is no longer nature in itself but rather nature exposed to man’s questioning.”51 The quantum physicist faces the same conundrum that our maker of metaphor does (cf. 56) in addressing the grey area (every brain pun intended) between discovery and invention, leaving us saying improbable and god-like things such as “We decide what the photon shall have done after it has already done it” (italics original).52 It isn’t much of a leap from this to saying “let there be light” and then standing back to find light “good.” “Strictly speaking,” writes Gleiser, “the act of measurement gives reality to what is being measured, bringing it from the nether-world of quantum potentialities to the concrete world of detection and sensorial perception. More dramatically stated: to measure is to create.”53

forbidden fruit Metaphors, we have said, are transgressive. I’ll complete this allegory of metaphoric creation by noting how these creative initiatives by god are themselves followed by a transgression, almost before anything else can happen. Adam is told right from the beginning that he must obey certain laws. He can live in the garden and will thrive there, but he cannot eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If he does, there will be consequences. The transgressive nature of metaphor tends to come clear in retrospect. I make things one that were two. My doing so already implies that I see the given laws of the world as a kind of playground, but it is the metaphor itself that transgresses the established orders with its impertinence. It violates an accepted logic in the interests of expanding my

382

missing link

knowledge. Eve covets the fruit of the tree that it might make her wise, Gen. 3:6. The new knowledge created in Genesis is ethical in nature, a knowledge of good and evil, of which we were innocent before we overreached. In metaphor, the transgression is counter-ethical in the sense that it refuses the binaries that would say a thing cannot or should not be thought. This is partly what makes the transgression possible. Adam and Eve in their innocent world of free play can scarcely be blamed for wanting to test the conspicuous unfreedom that is set in front of them. In a very real sense, when I make a metaphor, my transgression ironizes the world I have lived in. “Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal,” wrote Wallace Stevens.54 My expanded knowledge must make it appear less than it was; in any case, it is too small for me now, knowing what I know. I am “expelled” from it merely by seeing it from a larger perspective. The same may be said of Eden. We saw earlier (cf. 187ff) how in Book XII of Milton’s Paradise Lost Adam is taken by the archangel Michael to the top of the “Hill of Speculation” where he is shown a picture of the historical world that he will shortly enter into, in search of a paradise within him, happier far.55 Every impertinence bears the responsibility and the burden of a new pertinence to be “entered into.” So with each new metaphor I am effectively cast from a fallen world into a world where I must find my way as best I can, strewing about me as I go the metaphors that will make up the history I have yet to live.

dant e The informing structure of this book unfolded as it did more or less by accident as I worked to fill out gaps in my thinking and discovered what went with what. A pattern eventually came clear, a metaphoric initiative winding up through ever-expanding circles of relation and working themselves out there. In his Dantesque poem The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill has a character tell the poet that, so far as spiritual lessons are concerned, there is “no accident.”56 So I have come to feel. Dante’s use of the four levels of interpretation – literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic – were broadly recognized in medieval times.57 The literal would appeal to details of plot; the allegorical would reflect ele-

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

383

ments of the Biblical story; the moral would evince inner psychological struggles in Christian experience; the anagogic would represent the revelation of the divinity as such, an apperception of a three-in-one, whose main job is mostly just to be itself. Dante’s arduous trek up from one end of the Christian cosmos to the other has represented, among other things, an ascent up through certain states of being and conditions of mind. But these in turn have represented an ascent up through the means at Dante’s disposal of communicating these. I find William Anderson’s Dante the Maker the most poet-friendly consideration of how visions are envisioned.58 Dante finds that his journey expands in meaning as he learns the skills to discover what meanings it might have. Anderson writes: “the changes in Dante’s grasp of reality would be related to a progress through the allegorical and the moral levels to the anagogic level of full contemplation … His perceptions and what his mind made of the world about him would therefore dictate what he saw according to the dominance of one or other of the levels of meaning.”59 Revealed to Dante at each stage was that aspect of the essential revelation that he was most able to recognize at the time, in the form in which he was most able to recognize it. And so his rising circle to circle embodies the meaning-making initiative that Beatrice tells him had been with him from the start. When Dante finally meets Beatrice near the end of the Purgatorio, she tells him that she was behind the pilgrimage the whole time; she was the one who petitioned to have Virgil sent down to find him, who organized Cato and Statius and others in their turn to get the poet over certain humps in the journey. The guides are “bridgers of gaps,” “carriers-through-and-across.” They are metaphors of the embodied transitional energies that are the essence of a poetry trying to find out what it is supposed to be saying. Merrill has a character argue in Sandover that as Dante rose up through the circles of human experience he came nearer and nearer to the natural expressive conditions of poetry itself, revealed in their essence: The resulting masterpiece takes years to write; More, since the dogma of its day Calls for a Purgatory, for a Hell, Both of which Dante thereupon, from footage Too dim or private to expose, invents.

384

missing link

His Heaven, though, as one cannot but sense, Tercet by tercet, is pure Show and Tell.60 The Divine Comedy may be thought of as rising into its promise in just this manner. We reasonably expect to find in the journey through the inferno – with all that surrendering to carnal knowledge – a poetry that is more physically concrete, where enslaved automatons eat one another’s brains and find themselves variously mired in natural torments; where the will is crushed and there is no escape from the round. Thence we would cross a gap – as my own argument did at a crucial stage – and pass into a realm where, if the work is still arduous and not altogether consciously chosen, more becomes possible. Finally, we would enter a state where our means of expression becomes conscious of itself, where what you would express and how you express it become indistinguishable, metaphorically speaking. “It is here,” writes Anderson, “that Dante’s intellect receives its purification and the enlarging of his capacity to conceive the inner truths of creation.” That revelation becomes “the effect of illuminated intelligences making themselves manifest.”61 But Dante’s vision would be incomplete without the vision of hope and love that is both the enabling condition of that journey and its fulfilment. Beatrice herself is the guiding principle of these and their human incarnation, and we can see, writes Anderson, how “the degree of interpenetration of [their] minds … grows throughout in intensity.”62 But their apocalyptic revelation comes in the form of one last master metaphor with which the poem ends and folds up into itself. The Rose of the Divinity seems to represent and house just about everything we see at the end of the poem. It blooms into one last multi-petalled metaphor that is variously Beatrice herself, the love and hope that flower in her, the light of angels and saints, the Virgin Mother, the Trinity, that ever resonant three-in-one, and the revelation of these in the only way they can come clear to us, that is, in and as metaphor. The rose is both a particular metaphor and metaphor per se, returning into, and flowering from its own conditions. Often when writers find themselves midway in the journey of their work, they will look to find direction, like Dante’s geometer, in some initiative or “figure” they can call their own. They might if they’re lucky find

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

385

a trail that, there all along, goes on ahead before them. Dante’s final lines would be both the hope and the humbling of such an argument. A geometer, observe, will give his all to measure out a sphere, but fail to find the principle he seeks in thinking hard; just so was I before that new appearance, for how could human form so fall within a ring like that and find its place in it. My wings gave out. I would have failed, had not a flash of light then come to mind, which through that blazing All received its wish, just as the strength went out of my tall story. My own desire and will began to circle – exactly as a wheel goes spinning true – the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.63

love and hope One of the implications of Beatrice’s multifaceted personality is that love and hope are expressions of radical identification. They assume its form. They are bodied forth in the “figure” that rises through its own history, its having-been-all-along, to an apotheosis in and as itself. These potential properties in human spirit of the metaphoric initiative come to the fore once its more material embodiments, including perhaps the human body itself, fall away like a snake skin from our concern. Love is the existential identification of one’s whole being with something or someone else. It is the emotional confusion and excitement of feeling, metaphorically, both yourself and not yourself. Frye writes: “The word love means perhaps too many things in English and for many has an oversentimental sound, but it seems impossible to dissociate the conceptions

386

missing link

of spiritual personality and love. The capacity to merge with another person’s being without violating it seems to be at the centre of love.”64 There are biological antecedents for love that are equally existential. We saw in Chapter 4 how closely the replication and mutation of genes embodies metaphoric algorithms in their unfolding. In a still more obvious sense, the reproductive system of most living creatures is manifestly metaphoric in its behaviour. Like and unlike bodies join together, copulate, which is to say “couple” (where the metaphoric copula verb “is” comes between them), energies are exchanged, and a “something new” is born from the “impertinence.” As Wallace Stevens wrote, Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come.65 Shall we unpack the inferences of radical identification, for love’s sake? You and I are different from one another and yet also the same. It seems that both our differences and similarities are factors in our attraction to one another. We share things. A chemistry develops. We grow curious, we want to know more about what might be there. We couple. Our bodies join. It is the discovery of something shared inside a difference. We begin to identify with one another more deeply, which is to say that it feels now as though a part of you is a part of me, so that I can’t tell whether I am really me or just the me that is reflected back to me in you. Ritualized unions such as marriage reflect the metaphoric experience of two becoming one. They are the social and religious symbol of our existential experience of metaphor. There may be issuances from our couplings, both in the form of children who are us together and neither of us individually, and in the form of other creative acts and bonds that expand into families, communities, and societies.66 In Chapter 1 we talked about the difference between saying “My love is like a red red rose,” and “Joseph is a fruitful bough” (cf. 42). The use of “like” in certain metaphoric associations makes a concession to the

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

387

descriptive uses of language, where objects cannot actually be one another, only similar. How convenient in English that the transitive verb “like” should reproduce this affectionate difficulty. When you “like” someone, you may wish to see more of them, but you are not yet radically identifying with them sufficiently to call what you feel “love.” “Like” becomes “is” when a friendly association becomes a more radical identification. Identity and difference must always work hand in hand; they are functions and illusions of one another, like space-time. In both chemistry and human emotions, bonding occurs when there is sufficient identification within a context of movement and change. Difference is not the opposite of love. It is the environment, the setting, of potential relation, the space in which love dwells. Frye wrote in Words with Power that “On the top level of experience, identity is love and difference is beauty.”67 I was always intuitively ready to sign on to this aphorism, even though I couldn’t say exactly how it is that “difference is beauty.” Recalling the sentence now, and coming at it from this perspective, I feel its gravity: beauty has something to do with how we perceive variety lovingly, how we find a thing beautiful when we perceive its uniqueness, its singularity, suddenly actualized and made intelligible in relation to everything else around it. Ugliness in this understanding would be simply difference perceived as wholly other, difference inside a difference, unlike anything. We appear not to live in an entirely loving and beautiful world. There is that mindset, to which we are all susceptible, that embodies the corresponding reality of alienated difference. You can enter a space of various things and, instead of seeing them as potentially related, you go about finding parts variously unequal to one another. Of course if we had an infinite and expanding space of different things, then an agent of separation – though it might amount to nothing – could do little harm. Everything could just go off and be itself, as it were. But in finite space, there is the necessity of relation; things are obliged to interact. In a space of constrained proximity, the failure of interactive metaphor poisons our relations. You are outside my ken and because I cannot – or will not – find any associated commonplaces to connect us, you remain something strange, other, vaguely menacing. You seem like a threat to what I am, or I feel that a part of what I am is cancelled by what you are. We resist one another.

388

missing link

Perhaps we clash. In time, if the clashing takes on a life of its own, a deeper animosity evolves towards you and your like, which is to say that the alienation becomes something that I identify with. My aversion to the difference you are becomes a necessary part of my being who I am. All the while there are issuances from our aversion, both in the form of nothing-that-comes-to-be in the world, and in other forms of alienation and destruction that chafe away at family and community. The dance of identity and difference that lies at the heart of metaphoric relation has its expression here in an existential form. Love is the energy of attraction that abides there, and hatred the force of aversion that dwells in the same damned place. The environment takes on a certain character when we see it as a dance of love and beauty, and quite a different one when we see it as a battleground of aversions. The existential relations of likes and dislikes, loves and hates, become as richly entangled as the neuron networks of a single individual’s brain in which they thrive. We intuit a fundamental ethical dilemma, to make the most of our loves and to limit the damage we can do to others who seem not sufficiently alike. If we find Jesus’s caveat that you must love your enemy (Matthew 5:44) next to impossible, we can at least take consolation in the fact that it is a paradox written into the nature of matter and its algorithms of relation. We are the conscious expression of a struggle to love what is different that began to work itself out from the Big Bang. Martin Buber, in his book I and Thou, argued that love is what we call our deepest comportment towards one another. It is an actual ontology, or a power of being, that passes through us and makes us what we are. “All actual life is encounter”68 he writes, such that “In the beginning was the relation.”69 Because it is existential, Buber believed, love goes deeper than our mere “feelings for” one another.70 Our best selves are a striving towards the experience of relation itself, that is, of ourselves in relation: Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

389

the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like a You – and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness.71 Buber knew how to use his Germanic abstractions to good purpose. Notice how careful he is not to ground in either the “I” or the “You” our dwelling in love. We strive towards the loved one in trying to experience the loved one’s consciousness more and more directly, that is, to identify with it. We may find ourselves frustrated but if we persist, he suggests, we come nearer to “a bursting point.” That point interestingly enough is not an achievement of the loved one’s consciousness, naturally, but a “confrontation” with how our no-longer-being-ourselves is “like” the loved one, that is, where A’s experience of being not-A is metaphorically identified with B’s being itself. “This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You.”72 That is to say, our love does not dwell in the “I and You” taken as a unity, but in the “and” that abides between them. “And” is the between where fullest consciousness dwells. Buber’s understanding of metaphor as just so many metaphors, actually turns out rather ironically to make our point: this is not a metaphor, he insists, but what actually is. And what about hope? In what sense are we by nature hopeful? Does hope, as Buber said of love, dwell in us, or we in it? Hebrews 11 describes faith as the substance of hope (subjective genitive: the substance that hope is) and the reality of what cannot be seen. Because hope exists and because we intuit movement in the invisible, faith exists. The saving grace of hope is that, counter to what we may believe, it doesn’t have to be hope for something. You don’t lose hope when you lose hope for an afterlife, for instance; you lose an afterlife. As Emily Dickinson famously reminds us, hope is not the content of something anticipated, but something that the soul performs in being what it is: “Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune – without the words – And never stops – at all – 73

390

missing link

In his monumental study The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch distinguished himself from other Marxist thinkers of his time by grounding the conditions of hope not in modes of production but in physical materials. Hope is only possible, he wrote, because the reality of “things being possible” is written into the very matter of the universe: Nothing would circulate inwardly … if the outward were completely solid. Outside, however, life is just as little finished as in the ego which is working on this outside. No thing could be altered in accordance with wishes if the world were closed, full of fixed, even perfected facts. Instead of these there are simply processes, i.e. dynamic relationships in which the Become has not yet completely triumphed. The Real is process; the latter is the widely ramified mediation between present, unfinished past, and above all: possible future.74 The world for Bloch is hopeful in its very matter. Hopelessness would be inconceivable, for the world itself is “dynamic relationship”; its unfixed workings are the very condition of what he calls “the not-yet conscious” and the “forward dawning” that characterize our conscious experience.75 Such dynamic relationship has been with us from the start, the behaviours of play at work first in the atomic structure of the universe and later in the synaptic scrimmage of our own minds. “The concrete imagination and the imagery of its mediated anticipations are fermenting in the process of the real itself and are depicted in the concrete forward dream; anticipating elements are a component of reality itself.”76 Faith can be “the substance of things hoped for” because hoping-for itself has substance. At the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve have lost everything. We saw in Chapter 6 how the angel Michael presented them with grounds for hope in every sense: They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms: Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

391

They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.77 They are in transition – “some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon” – on the threshold between a happy seat and a hard lot. But the transition is not from the first to the second, but a carrying-across that reverses the terms: the happy seat becomes a retrospective military compound and the hard lot a forward-dawning landscape of opportunity. The passage dramatizes the threshold that we can, and do, pass through any moment in our lives, in which the arrow of time points away from the ineluctable givens, the fallen world of so many faits accomplis, and opens onto a becoming. It is a way of solitude and uncertainty to be sure. But there is a Providence that makes it possible, an allowing provision: they move out to occupy a space that, in the imaginative form revealed to them, already includes their moving through it. Hope appears to be our inheritance as conscious beings, the inheritance of what consciousness is. Our ability to reach into the unknown, to take what is and to feel it open into something not yet defined, is surely the very substance of hope as much as it is the expressed reality of metaphoric consciousness. The corollary of this is the despair that would be a short-circuiting of the metaphoric habit of mind, where you cower in the face of fact and where what is just is, end of story. We may feel that a hopeless situation is one in which a desired goal appears to be unreachable, where the world seems emptied of possibility. It would be more accurate to say that we lose hope simply when we stop thinking hopefully, that is, stop thinking metaphorically. But if hope’s forwarddawning condition lies in the roots of consciousness, to stop hoping we would actually have to stop being conscious. The corollary is the bitter irony of the suicide – the tragic paragon of one without hope – for whom still being conscious is the problem.

all seeing We’re in a position now to enlarge on some of the implications that were adduced in the chapter on consciousness. Daniel Dennett, we saw, uses the suggestive phrase “echo chamber” in his description of neuronal events (cf. 270ff), arguing that consciousness is a form of “fantasy echo”

392

missing link

that registers as attention-giving revelations-unto-themselves of neuronal networks in the brain. Spirit may be the form that matter takes once it becomes capable of imagining itself in this way. Spirit is the reachingness between one neuronal synapse and its anticipated mooring in an I-know-not-yet-what. We also know how, by association, the reaching may become the reality in you of the thing reached for. Just so, spiritual sense may fill with, and be identified with, the gods so projected. We should also remember that an “all-seeing” cognitive power often appears to come from both within and without, in the same way that “consciousness” appears to come both from a you and a you that that you looks at. A phrase like “consciousness of consciousness” is very nearly synonymous with a phrase like “consciousness of God” in both its suggestive valences. There is the scientific sense, in the partitive construction “consciousness of n,” where god is the object of conscious thought and dissected as such. The other is the ontophenomenological sense, “the consciousness of god” in the subjective genitive, the consciousness that god is. While the phrase points, in the first instance, to our need to limit objective analysis to observable facts, it also reminds us, in the second instance, that the spirit we seek is not in the observable facts at all, but in the presence of conscious thinking to itself. In physics we say that everything is related to everything else; things are reflections of one another in space and time; their placement and interaction cannot be firmly established and are governed only by certain probabilities. The total network of possible interconnections cannot be worked out; the computer that might do so would have to be bigger than the universe. We say then that everything is potentially related to everything else. We also say that these infinite relationships are already out there, already active and mutually constitutive of one another. We are a part of their manifest expression. It is as though the universe were a total poem already written down in the language of its materials. We try to copy down or decipher as much of that potentially infinite world as we can make out. We do so by making things of our own – ploughs, houses, poems – out of them. The realm of mortar and timber that we have built up around ourselves and inhabited is only one interpretation of all things that are possible. In just this manner, our world is an actual ongoing revision of what we think it all means.

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

393

The total of possible relations is the fabric of reality and our energy of mind is already built into it. It is already an expression of its potential, seeded and cultivated within itself. In a very real sense, that fabric of reality, the energy of association, has evolved a form whereby it may go looking for itself and write down its own formulas of being. The total unity implied is something we can (quite actually) only imagine. Our work is incomplete. We do all we can to fill in the picture, fulfill the potential that metaphoric thinking has written into us. Some feel that “God” is the name we give to that total unity of being that we will never quite achieve. Others, like Frye, define God not as the unity itself but the human capacity for unifying perception, i.e. the power to recognize and comprehend as much of that unity as we can.78 To imagine our achievement of that total unity in our own minds, however impossible, is one of the meanings of apocalypse. Metaphor, on the other hand, is already aligned with both the potential unity yet to be discovered and the power in us to discover it. Metaphor is already waiting at the heart of that apocalypse. That means that a part of us is already waiting there too.

in the meantime … We have the condition of mind that we call spirit and all that comes of it in the world of social action. That condition of mind is poetic by definition, I’m claiming, but it clearly has a more conspicuous expression in the institutions of religion that try to harness and organize its beguiling spells. The “spell,” in essence, is the spell of metaphoric thinking and its imaginative fictions. Both religion and literature have traded in the exemplary nature of fiction and its possible applications in behaviour. As religions tend to gather around such fundamental questions as “How shall I live?” it often leans more in the direction of applied mythology. “Go and do thou likewise,” says Jesus in Luke 10:37. Literature tends to reside more in the interstices between social input and output, as with the interneurons discussed in Chapter 7, in whose abeyance the relation between stimulus and response becomes less direct (cf. 236). The poet “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” answers Philip Sidney. I think the good work of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell lies not so much in the content of the argument, i.e. that religion has such and such

394

missing link

evolutionary roots, but in the longer view embodied there that fictions need to be seen as fictions. It’s implied in most everything he writes. A bad spell is one whose authority we project beyond ourselves, as having a truth-value that transcends the relativities of hypothesis and make-believe. We need to remember, Dennett implies, that spells are spells, and so perhaps be less inclined to put them to unsuitable uses, or become so carried away by them that we lose our bearings in the world of human action. Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories offers a corresponding argument that goes into convincing detail as to how story and story-telling are hardwired into our brains. He argues that seeing stories in this way can give us a different kind of critical leverage on the literature we read and the cultural questions it leaves us to think about. His book also shows that we have an investment in fiction-making that owes little to our sense of whether or not a story is “true” or accurate. Stories come out of us. They carry us places. We go with them.79 If we’re going to sort out the difficulties of distinguishing bad spells from good spells, as Dennett says we must, we’ll need more study along these lines to help us understand better what sort of “faith” is expressed when we try to live inside and outside fictions at the same time, and what it finally shows we believe. But where would that get us? If you came to feel that everything was just made up, that it was just you and your own habits of mind working away in the void, would you feel deflated? Would you come to lack purpose or conviction? How can we act on fictions that we also see through? A fit response continues to be one of the great challenges to humanistic study. Wallace Stevens wrote again that “the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”80 I’ve carried this little slip of paper around in my mind’s wallet most of my life and in many ways it makes up the ground and horizon of this book’s argument. Break a spell, yes, if you want to break the unthinking hold it has on you. But also harness it. Put its energies to use. As Ricoeur says in relation to metaphor, use it to think more about something, not less. In a study of metaphor, this might partly mean finding out what its neurological roots are, and how these are related to chemistry, matter, evolution, symbolic thinking, reason, imagination, vision, hope, and whatever reach of spirit these might imply and foster. It also means that in a world where the complexities of metaphoric relation are everywhere we must learn to read metaphorically.

Spirit and Its Metaphoric Environment

395

When we prove that something is a fiction, we prove it false. This axiom alone may account for misunderstandings between the sciences and the humanities. We do in fact live by fictions and ideologies that have no basis in anything but the powers of its possessors to use them to advantage. Cynical manipulators of relative fictions and other propagators in the state of so-called “necessary illusions” (to use Noam Chomsky’s book title) would have a selective advantage in worlds of opposing political forces. I’m not a huge fan of the view that there are a lucky few in the world who possess this special knowledge and therefore have added powers. The richest 5% of the world’s population along with their political protectors live as much within the illusion as any of us does. They too are pawns in a game that is much bigger than they are. The system, meme-like, has a way of replicating, like a naturally evolving species that does not easily give of alternative designful intentions. We don’t live within them as though they were realities; we live in them as realities. Movies like The Matrix trilogy reveal our increasing understanding that we live unconsciously inside something that we make. Our curiosity about virtual realities and the hermeneutics that govern them, even our critical studies of fictional worlds and “metaphors we live by” bespeak the desire that we not be victimized – as we are for instance in the film Colossus (1970): “We built a super computer with a mind of its own and now we must fight it for the world!” – by the worlds we spin. A culture as deeply invested as ours in the image marketplace – the unabating onslaught of advertisements, ubiquitous corporate rhetoric, political sloganeering – could either create a citizenry of utter automatons or a culture of scepticism and resistance towards fictions as such. In The Matrix you have both, and they get caught up in a war. It takes someone like the hero Neo, who both sees through the code and knows how to work with it, to oppose all the sinister momentums. We, on the other hand, see through fictions without seeing with them (once more that preposition that means both “towards” and “against”). Seekers of the truth, we move inside it and try to look away. Merely to break down fictional structures, without a subtler understanding of what they are, would be only to replace them with other ones, and doom ourselves to the same cycle repeatedly. To master the subtleties of thinking more, to become generally more intuitive about is and is not, much would have to change. The ability to read all things metaphorically – including

396

missing link

religious narratives, social ideologies, and theoretical physics – regardless of their assumed truth value, might prove to be one missing link between the society we have and the one we want. Stevens’s adage leaves us with a simpler question. Do we even have a word for an illusion that is recognized as an illusion yet still thought of as positive, meaningful, and productive? Is there a way of speaking about illusions without compromising their authority as potential agents of action, to see them as part of a real process unfolding in the direction of a real end? Illusions seen as illusions are not emptied of their promise. They become heuristics, a means of “finding out.” Were such heurism to become second nature, we would participate in its fictions with detachment, not withdrawal. We have noted an attitude of hypothesis in both the sciences and in evolutionary processes. Daniel Dennett talks about the importance in such explorations of making “errors.” He quotes a charming quatrain by Piet Hein in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: “The road to wisdom? / Well, it’s plain and simple to express. / Err and err and err again / but less and less and less.”81 I think the notion of making an error that is inherent in fiction (with its soupçon of conscious intention) might go further than Dennett himself would, but his attitude towards error as nonetheless headed in the right direction gets at something of a humanist’s investment in fiction qua fiction. Paul Ricoeur referred to the desired attitude as a “second naiveté,” wherein a kind of belated interpretative act takes a central role.82 Keats called it “negative capability … when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”83 Wallace Stevens had a word for the kind of fiction that might inspire such faith. He called them “supreme fictions.” I have the feeling that a “supreme fiction,” which might suggest to Marxist critics an ultimate enslaving ideology, isn’t likely to catch on soon. At the same time, any pre-critical rejection of the phrase – and the idea of metaphor taken to the limit as such – evinces the original bias and may enslave us just as quickly. One of the many suggestive meanings of the word supreme in its Latin etymology is “forming the furthest point or edge,” “endmost,” and “last stage of” (oed), all potential characteristics of a genuine faith in fictions.

14

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”: The Allowing Conditions of Metaphor The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming. ~Freeman Dyson1 We scientists can feel smug for having discovered the underlying expansion of the universe, the cosmic microwave background, dark matter, and dark energy. But what will the future bring? Poetry … of a sort. ~Lawrence Krauss2

the view from here We are nearing the point where two ends meet. One is the end of the book. The other is the end of the metaphoric unfolding that we have been tracking throughout. That end is, in plainest terms, metaphor, the enabling and embodying initiative that like the dog in Rilke’s “Orpheus. Euridyce. Hermes” scampers impatiently to the next rise, where it appears to see views still farther beyond, even while it waits for us to catch up with it. In one sense, it appears that we have been moving to the heart of a concentric circle, from all-encompassing nature to culture, from culture to the particular example of the imaginative domain in art and literature, from literature as a whole to individual works, from those works to the

398

missing link

Figure 14.1 Expanding domains of influence: nature and metaphor interpenetrate.

metaphors that constitute them. Yet in another sense, we have described a series of contexts expanding outwards from the material world to the free reach of metaphor. We have a picture, then, in which centre and circumference dissolve into one another, interpenetrate, become metaphorically one. If we were to try to visualize this in two-dimensional terms as expanding domains of influence (as though we were looking at the narrowing concentric circles in profile), nature, on its side, would be both a containing context for metaphoric events and a mere point in reference to the context of the metaphoric initiative opposite it (figure 14.1). So too the metaphoric initiative would be the containing context for nature, though metaphors as we think of them make up only one small part of what is. Each may be reduced to a function of the other, while also expanding upon it. My salvo in this final chapter is brazenly simple. I want only to say that environment is the horizon we look and evolve towards, and that environments and the things that environments contain are metaphorically related. This chapter is about parts that stand for wholes, parts that have their wholes already written inside them, related as a blade of grass is to the lawn, as a strand of dna is to the body that contains and expresses it, as a metaphor in a poem is to that poem’s meaningful potential.

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

399

But it is more than that. Evolution and literature both constitute meaningful environments, both represent relations in context, relations between parts themselves on the one hand, and between parts and the wholes that contain them on the other. This means that the respective environments in evolutionary science and literature are themselves metaphorically related as embodiments of a shared process. Out of this metaphor, it should be possible to imagine a kind of ultimate environment, one which, whatever it may be, and however vague or insubstantial it may seem, is contained so far as we know inside nothing beyond it. My gambit is that this vaguest of ultimate environments is worth a little scientific and imaginative hypothesis. That is what metaphors ultimately do, reach in untold directions where their potential hold (I’m thinking of my chapter title) may not yet be clear to us.

environment and enviro nmental In the books that I’ve read over these years in evolutionary science, I have taken a special interest in the attitudes implied in approaches to the nature of environment per se. When you read thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, you get a bit of a mixed bag regarding the question of the containing contexts of evolution, the surrounding conditions that determine what things may be. I think of E.O. Wilson and his work on Consilience as an exception among this group, for reasons that I outlined in the introduction (cf. 23ff). However, Wilson too concentrates on the nature of an unfolding process rather than on the total environment in which that process unfolds. Darwin himself looked forward to the day when “a grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened” on, among other things, “the causes and laws of variation,” and “the direct action of external conditions.”3 At the level of higher physics, scientists grapple heroically with the puzzles of reality. Whatever is ultimately the case in our universe (or universes), they are curious indeed and we want to know them better. But evolutionary theorists are less preoccupied with ultimate environments, for reasons that are perfectly sensible. “Environment” has a particular meaning in evolution. It is an important factor in determining how and

400

missing link

why species change. We study the symbiotic relationship between environment and species, container and contained. We see each as a function of the other. We learn about the character of a particular environment by studying some of the characteristics of its inhabitants. “Indicator species” like frogs, for instance, often serve as a barometer of the health of a natural environment. If they begin to decline, we know that something has changed. We depend on indicator species because there is so much about the environment that we don’t see, whose health we cannot measure, whose changes and ultimate constitution elude us. We require metaphors of this sort, “indicator species,” to stand for them and suggest something of their secret nature. At the same time, we study the viability and fitness of a species by observing how well or ill adapted it is, or was, to its immediate surroundings. Over millennia, a changing environment will leave species scrambling for advantage in relation to it. We treat environments of this sort as givens. There was a meteor that fell from the sky sixty-five million years ago, there have been ice ages, and the continents have shifted. We use these facts to understand better the details of the evolutionary narrative that are folded into them. Understanding the mechanisms of evolution often inspires awe for the curious spaces in which creatures have prospered or passed away. We marvel at the relationship between species in their environment and the processes like mutation and adaptation that make it possible. An appropriate respect comes with our increasing understanding of biological complexity. We long to know the deepest secrets of our reality, solve its darker puzzles, reach with Thoreau’s “Realometer” down to the point d’appui, so that we may say with him “this is, and no mistake.”4 Nonetheless, there is a kind of “over there” attitude in evolutionary studies towards the simple fact of environments. In evolutionary theory, nature simply does what it does. It goes about minding its own business in ways that are increasingly intelligible to us in simple cause-andeffect terms. It is the scientists’ job to describe its behaviour, not ascribe hidden meanings to it. That they think of nature as the ungiven given is usually what raises the ire of religious thinkers, who look to find innate purpose or intelligence in nature’s workings.

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

401

church going The question of whether or not there is intentional agency in our natural environments is the dividing line that separates strict material scientists and religious thinkers who take on the problem of evolution. It is left out on purpose by the scientists, if it isn’t actively campaigned against. We no longer need to think of environments as consciously fostering or encouraging the evolutionary processes that unfold within them. It is time, say writers like Richard Dawkins, that we stop thinking of environment as a thoughtful process, the house of a thinking god, however vaguely defined. My own tack is to follow theorists like Dawkins and Dennett as far as they go, without trying to alienate or antagonize religious thinkers along the way. Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” tells us something about what happens to “environments” (be they churches or cosmologies, or both) when they no longer function the way they once did. A person visits an empty church. The fact that there is no one there but the speaker himself surprises a quieter reverence in him than he would have expected. Just so, we once thought of the cosmos as “filled out” with purposes that made our being-in-it more intelligible to us, with its benign heaven and a conscious agent of creation present everywhere inside it. All was right with the world. Absent the god from his “house” and what do you have left? “An accoutred frowsty barn,” along with a mystery as to the meaning of the place and tentative probings into its somewhat menacing magnitude. Larkin’s visitor to the church is a kind of Richard Dawkins representative, who, first making sure that there is “nothing going on inside,” counts himself a healthy cynic, guarded and circumspect in his pokingsabout through the “tense, musty, unignorable silence / Brewed god knows how long.” Scientist or religionist, our questions are the same: “From where I stand the roof looks almost new – / Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.” Religionists tend to think that for scientists the larger conditions of evolution have become very much like an empty church, still inspiring a kind of reverence, but with a touch of the alien or foreign about it, even the deathly. Yet Larkin appears to suggest that the faithful are only attracted to the church for the same reason. The reasons embrace them both, and “never can be obsolete”:

402

missing link

A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognized, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.5 For the evolutionists, the old church of a former cosmology is gradually emptying. Our speaker turns from it halfway through the poem and spends most of his time wondering why he bothered. He sticks closer to home and is more apt to find wonder and meaning in the particulars of the place, “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky / … a purpose more obscure.” Dawkins’s most recent characterization of evolution as “The Greatest Show on Earth,” whatever beguiling advertisement it represents for evolutionary studies, bespeaks an eagerness to see natural processes in terms that are down-to-earth, full of carnival and razzmatazz. We should enjoy the dazzle and not worry about what’s outside the big tent; or rather, we should enjoy the dazzle inside because we know that outside the big tent is nothing in particular, indeed, that there is no outside the big tent and its spectacle. Shall we note without prejudice that in Dawkins’s configuration once the church falls empty, the circus comes to town? Larkin understood how our relation to the cosmos was changing. He saw how the architecture of the mysterious space remains after it empties out, and he saw how many of its features still bespeak the old habits of mind and seem almost to advocate in their favour. The ground has largely been staked by those who would still argue that environment points to an intentional agency and is an expression of it. In physics and evolutionary science, the issue of environment and its meaning per se is delayed. As Larkin saw, there is an atmosphere about this place we inhabit, a kind of “blent air” that vexingly makes room for a variety of approaches. It is where all our compulsions meet, the ones that each of us – scientist and religionist alike – recognize as our unique destiny. We all try to grow wise in it. Is it possible to grow wise about the nature of

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

403

larger environments without arguing over the problem of agency? Or even better, is it possible to conceive of our empty church in such a way that the question of agency falls away as irrelevant? Is it possible to conceive a vision of ultimate horizons on which both materialists and spiritualists would be willing to sign their names?

everything that is dwells within everything that can be The rest of my argument in this book is founded on what I hope is an uncontroversial, perhaps even banal, premise: that nothing can evolve or come to be that hasn’t in some way been “allowed” by its environment. We understand intuitively how a flower is a product of the contents of its soil, the turn of the seasons in a particular region, the prevailing conditions of light and rain and shelter available there. Nothing will come from the soil that isn’t somehow an expression of what the soil and local climate have made room for. But the flower inhabits more environments than one. The soil and local weather make up the most immediate contexts. The region reflects aspects of broader weather patterns, which have to do with the position of the land in relation to jet streams, bodies of water, and latitudes. The soil is made up of minerals that have been distributed by storms, by glacier movements, the shifting of tectonic plates, the formation of planets and their rotation, solar systems, galaxies, the cooling of energy into matter. These environments – from smallest to largest – are permeated by other environments, such as the essential constitutive properties of our universe, that there is time and space, that there is gravitation, that there are Higgs Bosons that form into chemicals that interact with one another according to laws of difference and identity, that universes form and change, possibly come and go according to laws that govern Big Bangs or Big Bounces.6 One title I had originally considered using for this book was Metaphor and the Allowing Conditions of Evolution, and I have kept this phrase in the back of my mind. I like it for the ambiguity implied in its partitive construction. Evolution has provided us with the allowing conditions of life. It is the language in which the unfolding narrative of creaturehood on earth has been written. At the same time, we also know that evolution

404

missing link

itself is subject to allowing conditions. It is a product of those larger environments just mentioned and in its nature expresses them. But think of how strange the most far-reaching and abstract allowing conditions must be. There is one fact that we can be sure of, greater even than Descartes’s attractive but idealizing cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” The wondrous fact we can be certain of is that, as Wittgenstein might put it, something is the case.7 We may be completely wrong ourselves about what the case is, we may be labouring under apocalyptic illusions. It won’t matter. Even mistakes and illusions are. Even dark matter is. As we said in the chapter on consciousness, there is isness. And whatever is the case with that isness, it will constitute conditions and laws that it imposes upon itself. It will be what it will be, as Yahweh said of himself. Those conditions, however infinitely elusive and abstract, or paradoxical, or counter to anything we may be able to think about them, in a very simple sense make allowances. It is owing to these allowances that everything we see about us, including ourselves and what we can think, is made possible.

finding the middle term Why allowing conditions? Why not enabling conditions, or fostering conditions, or defining conditions? Each of these terms has advantages in accounting for the influence of the container upon the contained. What is at stake in our deciding among these adjectives? As it happens, I think, something very important: the question again of creative agency, over which we inevitably come to loggerheads. Robert Frost, one of modernity’s best secular naturalists, once confessed an intuition that because there were so many “little purposes,” there must be “a larger purpose.”8 This is a variation on argument-by-design, and something like it may be felt by even the strictest materialists in moments of curiosity or wonder. I have preferred the phrase “Allowing Conditions” because it straddles that line between unthinking and intentional processes. Think of the ambiguity in the term. Nature is an allowance, that is, both a space that makes room, and the fact of a provision that is granted to it (in the sense of a child’s allowance). A doorway can “allow” you to enter a room without intending to do so, just by having a certain width

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

405

and height. So too, at the other end of the spectrum, a god can allow you to exist, by designing you, turning you about and sending you off in the direction of being. These passive and active agents can themselves be metaphorically identified on the basis of the “allowances” each makes. In any case, it is no accident that their passivity and intentionality are functions and expressions of human conscious thinking. We seem to perceive passively (though really we don’t) and we cogitate actively. Our minds bequeath to us the terms of the debate about the universe we inhabit and they are the expression of that debate. The word allowance may be put for our acts of mind as much as for the space our minds inhabit. The following paragraph from Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea reinforces my conviction that there is something worth saying about even the most remote and abstract of allowing conditions, and it goes to the heart of the problems we face when we try to talk about evolutionary agency: We may have figured out a way of excusing God from the task of designing the replication-machinery system (which can design itself automatically if any of the theories discussed … are right, or on the right track) but even if we concede that this is so, we still have the stupendous fact that the laws do permit this wonderful unfolding to happen, and that has been quite enough to inspire many people to surmise that the Intelligence of the Creator is the Wisdom of the Lawgiver, instead of the Ingenuity of the Engineer.9 Dennett is talking here about two things. On the one hand, he chimes in with an appreciative hurrah that the wonderful things around us should be here. On the other, he warns against conclusions that are often too easily drawn from this feeling. Some timid souls of a religious bent, he suggests, have been willing to leap out of the life-raft called the Intelligence of the Creator, but only because they have set up another beneath it called “the Wisdom of the Lawgiver.” If the given laws of nature imply for you any sort of wisdom, a thinking-up of those laws, then you’re still stuck in the problem of agency. The laws were never given per se. They are simply givens. Indeed, Dennett goes a step further in disattributing the powers of the lawgiver a few pages along:

406

missing link

So, as we follow the Darwinian down this path, God the Artificer turns first into God the Lawgiver, who now can be seen to merge with God the Lawfinder. God’s hypothesized contribution is thereby becoming less personal – and hence more readily performable by something dogged and mindless!10 The point as always for Dennett is that “the Ingenuity of the Engineer,” that representative of mindless evolutionary change, is more than sufficient to account for everything we find in nature. We have no need of a giver or an intender. We just have the conditions themselves and their innate habit of engineering products of dazzling complexity.11 I can’t think of anyone who writes with more authority and precision about the problem of agency in evolution than Daniel Dennett, whose writings in any case are more inviting than Richard Dawkins’s in the same area for being less bullying. Because of this, I have long been fascinated with a series of illustrations that Dennett provides regarding the relationship between evolving forms and their containing environments. In both Kinds of Minds and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett illustrates how a series of stages in brain aptitude unfold in our direction. We’ve come upon his discussion before, talking about the Darwinian creature, the Skinnerian creature and so on (cf. 262ff). We don’t need the details of the argument, only an example of one of the illustrations he includes (figure 14.2). There are a series of these drawings, more or less alike in their suggestion of a binding relationship between an environment and what evolves within it. You can make out the components easily enough. The evolving genome is represented by the smaller amoebalike blob on the left. The arrow suggests how the amoeba evolves towards the conditions of the environment it inhabits on the right. Dennett needs a set of allowing conditions that inform what the evolving genomes within it may become. The sense of allowingness is very strong, so strong indeed that it almost, without meaning to, begs the question of agency. Dennett isn’t as interested here in the problem of agency, so he was free to characterize the environment as would best serve his purpose. But to me it looks like a kind of alluring amoeba, pulling its evolving forms towards it. In any case, it appears to be heading east, or to the right, and intentionally or unintentionally drawing its evolving genome along with it.

Figure 14.2 Daniel Dennett’s Kinds of Minds: a species evolves into its environment.

Would it be possible to draw allowing conditions without making them appear as though they were pulling, or drawing, or attracting, or, if you go to an extreme, behaving like a kind of pied piper or magician (or god …) mesmerizing its genomes to follow after it? What are the alternatives? A hoop? A flat two-dimensional circle? No, we require three dimensions. The environment is a container, a shape that must be seen to determine what may or may not fit in it, or grow towards it. We’ll be speaking later in this chapter about Heidegger’s notion of “towardswhich” in his phenomenology, but we can use something of the idea here: environment is that space “towards which” all viable forms must evolve. Dennett does not intend his illustration to suggest intention of any sort. Quite the opposite. But we are left with the question of whether it is possible to draw an environment in such a way as to suggest the influence of its conditions without implying any agency in the reality of

408

missing link

that influence.12 Can allowances just be allowances? I incline with Dennett to think so, but we need to pause, and approach the question again from a broader perspective.

de chardin’s “omega point” Scientific and theological accounts of evolution can run very nearly in parallel. They can describe the same process of natural selection with equal scientific care, examine the same phenomena and draw similar conclusions regarding the nature of its constitution and the characteristics of the cause-and-effect logic that has produced it. And yet they can draw very different conclusions regarding the meaning of that process, the direction it seems bound upon, and its horizon. In many ways the work of the French paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin matches very closely with Dennett’s in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. De Chardin was a Jesuit Priest who was also very active in the excavating of Peking Man in the 1920s. As anyone would do who wants to consolidate his various personal investments into a unified vision, de Chardin sought to find reciprocities between the process of natural evolution and his intuition of a higher purpose in its meaning. Like Dennett, de Chardin understood that evolution works. It succeeds as a process by means of extravagant increase. There is nothing written into the process that needs to be conscious or intentional. All you need is a lot of variation and a lot of time and eventually you will have a species as complex as human being. Dennett calls evolution a process of “R and D,” Research and Development, which not accidentally has to do with scientific procedures and analysis, as though evolution were a kind of scientist mumbling away anonymously in a basement lab.13 Such R and D comes up continually with a host of plausible adaptations to send out into the world to try their luck. R and D doesn’t require an “intelligent artificer,” Dennett shows, but only vast amounts of time and a means of recording and preserving successes that have been chanced upon. He calls this the “Principle of Accumulation of Design.”14 Alternatively, de Chardin refers to a process of “groping”: “Groping is directed chance. It means pervading everything so as to try everything,

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

409

and trying everything so as to find everything. Surely in the last resort it is precisely to develop this procedure … that nature has had recourse to profusion.”15 You can see already how de Chardin’s language tweaks the principle of blind accident in Dennett’s formulation. For Dennett, you can have blind accident so long as you keep a record (dna) of what works. For de Chardin, there is no blind accident because the evolutionary process is a configured one, that is, one that is bound to lead to greater and greater forms of complexity. It may not be consciously configured, or with any conscious deity fingering the reigns, but nonetheless there is an inevitable direction built into it. What Dennett calls the “Principle of Accumulation of Design,” de Chardin calls “Consolidation,” or “Controlled Additivity”: that is, a process by which over time mere profusion is turned into a weaving together of successful forms.16 It is this principle of apparent directedness that our two thinkers share, an understanding that evolution in retrospect (an important word in this context) appears to have been an unfolding-towards the allowances of environment. Now, we can be fairly certain that de Chardin didn’t design the illustration on the front cover of his Perennial paperback edition of The Phenomenon of Man. It represents a plant growing up towards an overarching omega symbol. A version of this appears in figure 14.3. I place it beside Dennett’s illustration to illustrate a point of my own. Both configurations conceive of a containing environment in the direction of which nature’s profusion unfolds. For de Chardin, that “environment” is “the Omega Point,” a set of predetermined and informing conditions, a point that lies outside of nature but which draws nature towards it. For Dennett, those informing conditions are no more than the environments themselves, both large and small, as we can observe them. I’ve rotated Dennett’s illustration to help us see how the two configurations may be metaphorically aligned. The fact that Dennett’s environment was not configured vertically, but horizontally, makes part of his point, that nature is not rising towards foreordained conclusions. For de Chardin, the proof that the “Omega Point” is meaningful is simply that we stand forth as its ultimate expression. We represent “the great drive of consciousness” towards its own revelation in the world, such that it appears that consciousness was the goal, if not originally the mechanism, of the entire process.17 We don’t need a self-designing evolutionary process, de

410

missing link

Figure 14.3 Chardin vs Dennett: the allowing conditions of environment.

Chardin argues; we only need the inevitable conclusion of that process in consciousness to intuit meaning and purpose. It is to de Chardin’s credit, and evidence of his nimbleness of mind, that this theory avoids the “skyhook” thinking that Dennett critiques. Evolution in de Chardin needs no guiding hand drawing adaptations upwards from above. All he calls for is an environmental space that is shaped in such a way that adapting creatures cannot but rise to a certain pinnacle, one that we might imagine then was foreordained insofar as the shape is what it is. As the environment “fills up” – think of a pyramid – the creatures gather towards the “omega point” at the top. For Dennett there is no single pyramid per se. There are particular conditions that adapting creatures will evolve towards, but they are everywhere, infinitely complex, and offering anything but inevitable pinnacles. Dennett takes the same accumulated complexity, along with our advent of conscious being within it, as one of many possible results in the process. Nonetheless, both de Chardin and Dennett make much of the fact of human consciousness, its advantages and praiseworthiness, and celebrate the kind of lift that nature demonstrated in making it possible. I’m trying to steer a course between these two positions in the hopes of identifying a common ground. I’ll just finish my thoughts here by quoting Frye on the same problem:

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

411

Natural-theologians used to say that evolution must be divinely guided, as it is impossible for its complicated directiveness to arise out of blind chance. The usual answer is that there is no question of “blind” chance, but of chance operating within a framework of natural law. But natural law, unlike human law, is neither an imposed commandment nor a response to one. It is simply a series of statements about how nature has been observed to behave. So the “chance within law” answer is a tautology: things happened the way they did because they happened the way they did.18 I’m not sure that a scientist like Dennett wouldn’t be content with a tautology like this but Dennett’s job in any case is to explain how things happen, not to what end or purpose. Frye for his part cannot resist adding: “If natural law is anything more than that, the origin of such law is a far deeper mystery than the origin of life.”

evolving into an emptiness Does it mean much to say that the primary properties of the universe play a meaningful role in the existence of flowers? Think of our evolved consciousness as a kind of particular flower. If those most distant of allowing conditions could allow for almost anything, can we really learn much about them based on the fact that they allow for a flower? In short, where they allow for so very much, these environmental conditions can seem scarcely better than a vast emptiness to us. And if it is a vast emptiness, the flower’s place in it is merely relative. And think of what the potential of those allowing conditions may be! Is fourteen billion years enough time for the universe to have accomplished anything worth writing home about? Or would it be considered laughably infantile among the pantheon of universes where the elderly ones (say, hundreds of billions of years old, assuming universes can last that long), have had the time to evolve creatures and realities that we couldn’t dream of. That is, we may think we represent a rather impressive product of the working processes of our universe. But the reality, we must say with apologies to de Chardin, may be that the universe has scarcely got started and that we are but minor molecules in a vast empti-

412

missing link

ness of indifferent potential. If our universe flared out tomorrow, its evolved forms might be tossed aside as scarcely worth recording, they are so utterly preliminary. Where does this leave us? We know that, given the condition of the universe, certain events are simply impossible. We would no doubt get these wrong in trying to guess at them … no sooner do you say that a thing cannot, for instance, be both here and somewhere else, than a quantum physicist comes along to prove otherwise. And yet still we can imagine that there must be some things that simply cannot be. The conditions of the universe will not support them. (If we did live in a universe in which absolutely everything and anything could be – hydrogen that was not hydrogen, like charges that both attracted and repelled at the same time – all bets would be off, meaningless, like metaphor gone haywire.) We can also look around us, including into ourselves, and see what is, and we can know that these things have been allowed, whatever else as well. That may be something yet. Allowing conditions, from our perspective, are potentially unlimited and inexhaustible. But there is the limit that we can know, and that limit is partly, we like to think, ourselves. We are as much as we can know of them, in looking around to see what is. We appear to be a limit of what the allowing conditions allow. We want to be able to identify ourselves with where we are. We want to be the indicator species, the species that – whether purposefully or not – may be metaphorically put for the meaning, health, and destiny of the universe that contains it. Thus related, we would be more than merely relative. We would have a relatively interesting job, so far as gainful employment in the mysterious cosmos is concerned.

metaphor and relativity: blake’s ro se revisited To press beyond these inferences, we need to turn to the literary and hermeneutic domain that shares and evinces some of evolution’s significant behaviours. We turn to the relations between parts and wholes in that hypothetical domain where metaphor and metaphoric relation come into their own. In particular we want to think more about mere relativity, and how in a poem the problem of “anything goes” lets the air out of every meaningful potential.

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

413

Remember the laments about metaphor and its uses that we rehearsed in Chapter 2? Metaphors are untethered, mercurial, and mercenary. Their relativity can be used to license all manner of abject or abusive purposes, empty propagandas, and fatal obfuscation, products of whatever sinister intent or accident gives them life. We prefer not to think of ourselves as mere ventured metaphors set loose in nature to mean anything at all. The relativity, or subjective nature, of metaphoric language has been a bugaboo from the start. It goes not only to the ethics of metaphors per se, but to how we interpret them, ethically or otherwise. I want to speak to the issue on both fronts, but will start with the latter: how we interpret metaphors that are by nature relative. Working at this idea of environments and their centrality in determining what evolves within them, we turned in Chapter 12 to William Blake’s “The Sick Rose” (cf. 331ff). I said that the poem as a whole represents the “allowing conditions” of the metaphors it contains. We make this assumption heuristically, to see where it might lead in a fuller understanding of the kind of work the poem accomplishes. We have already noted the one fundamental difference between poems and universes. The poem is a designed environment. It has a maker who makes decisions about what will appear within it, and how all its parts are arranged in relation to each other as an intentional unity. We also noted that often, when poets feel most empowered, they speak of a creative initiative that passes through them with a minimum of intentional handling on their part. We note this issue of creative agency from the outset. So, a poem represents the first and most obvious environment of the elements it holds, just as a body is the immediate environment for the gene code it houses. A metaphor that appeared not to “fit” the unity of the poem, as for instance the pair of reading glasses we thought about inserting into Blake’s poem. It would be easy enough for the poet to insist they remain, but if no one could make sense of their being there, the survival potential of the poem would be compromised just as any creature with an anomalous mutation in its gene code would be. One of the possibilities that we will consider shortly is that human being represents a mere metaphor-part that doesn’t really fit in its environment-whole (our planet and its ecosystem), or belong there. We might turn out to be a regrettable mutation. Thanks to our own powers of design as creative agents, we have insisted on spreading ourselves around in such a way that the larger environment we inhabit is now critically compromised, like

414

missing link

our tampered-with Blake poem, flawed because somehow a pair of anomalous reading glasses made their way into it. It is also true that metaphors can survive beyond their poems. A poem may fall out of circulation, even become entirely lost, while a metaphor within it takes on a life of its own in the larger culture. There are instances where a metaphor has become considerably better known than the poem in which it originally appeared. The Bible is a veritable storehouse of them: “hiding your light under a bushel,” “by the skin of your teeth,” “a fly in the ointment,” among others. Perhaps human being may be seen as a metaphor that, for the time being, is housed in the containing poem of its planet; some hope it will outlast it, to become “famous” enough in its own right that it survives on its own long after the planet has fallen into obscurity. Perhaps it would be wise of us to note that this doesn’t happen very often. Metaphors do best, even if they take on a life of their own, when they also stay at home. There is one further aspect of this argument that I didn’t emphasize in the chapter on the evolution of literature. While the whole poem represents the allowing condition of the metaphors it contains, it is also true that it has no meaning or effect – even existence – apart from the individual metaphors that make it up. Our reading of Blake’s “The Sick Rose” is a product of what we can make of all the metaphors within it. The limits and expansive potential of a poem have everything to do with the weaving together of its separate parts. We begin to read a poem and initially have little sense of what that whole might be. Then we begin to make connections. Just as the detective coming upon a crime scene has little or no idea of what has happened there apart from his own assembling of the available clues, so the particular details of our reading of Blake’s poem represent the whole of what the poem may be for us, however far or not we carry them interpretively. Everything that we find in a poem is meaningful in relation to everything it can mean; and everything the poem can mean is expressed through, and embodied in, everything it contains. The more we can relate each individual element to the whole assembling around it, the more we can feel confident that the connections we have made carry authority. How we work towards that whole characterizes how our experience of a poem evolves. What we try to evolve towards is “unified perception,” the increasing sense, when we feel that

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

415

we’re on the right track, that everything we see in the poem can be related to everything else. In the last chapter, we noted Frye’s dictum that unified perception is the kind of comprehending vision that we associate with a god’s perspective (cf. 393), though that perspective for Frye is largely secularized; which is to say, it is the perspective that dwells in us.19 This is also true for scientists in their own terms. As Thomas Kuhn showed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a unified model – where everything is grasped in relation to everything else – is the proof in the pudding of any confident truth. The search for the Higgs Boson has sometimes been referred to as the search for the “God Particle,” not because it would represent any deistic clincher or the final piece of the puzzle, but because it seems to proffer a further unity in the model physicists are still exploring.

existential metaphor This discussion of metaphors and the evolving horizon of the poem that contains them gets us a step closer to the problem of our own relativity in nature, because it partly reflects that problem. Time to step beyond the poem and consider relative metaphors more broadly. Back in the chapter on metaphor and mutation, we looked at how the mechanism of metaphoric thinking might go to work in the mind of a criminal, where merely relative impertinences and new pertinences (eg. murder = helpful) are criminally performed with tragic consequences (cf. 176). How are we to think of metaphors that are part of our everyday thoughts and habits? Where the containing context for the metaphors we generate moment by moment is so elusive, how are we to think of their place as more than just vaguely relative? And further, what do we do with those metaphors that are so abject and appalling that we are sorry to see them exist at all? Interpretation is beside the point when someone like Hitler says “Jews are swine.” Think of how you just reacted to those words. We flinch at language being used this way and we can’t help but feel disappointed that there is nothing in the metaphoric event that refuses or disqualifies these criminal leaps. The wrong master has rubbed an evil genie out of the bottle and set it loose. The same anxiety accompanies our thoughts about evolution. If relational behaviours can do anything at

416

missing link

all, how are we to think of ourselves as just one of the things they happen to do? How do we know that we are not some version of “Jews are swine” that nature just came up with on a bad day? Given that we are the ones who make metaphors like this in the first place, it doesn’t look good for us. We could reply that it isn’t metaphor’s fault. Many take this approach. It is the argument that the nra makes in regards to dangerous weapons, whereby the weapon itself is innocent, whether or not it is used to kill someone. “Metaphor is a tool, not a moral agent with intentions that can be judged. Metaphors don’t kill people. People kill people!” This argument, as applied to metaphor, may account for why it is often looked at suspiciously in the general population. “Don’t give me that guff about metaphors being innocent. I can’t hurt someone with prepositions, now can I? Metaphors have to go!” How do we rise above, if that is the right word, the relative and mercenary amorality of metaphor? We’ve answered that question in a closed interpretive context, where the metaphor ceases to be relative in relation to other metaphors around it and we can judge accordingly whether or not it seems “out of place.” But if a dictator writes a poem on the ascendancy of the Arian race, we don’t congratulate him for getting all his metaphors working together as one, and we certainly wouldn’t feel that his having accomplished this means that he is right in what he says. The poem as a whole, and the metaphors in it, remain relative in the larger ethical sense. Genocides happen because leaders are allowed to behave like demi-gods whose word is law, whose least demonic metaphor can be quite actually realized at a whim. Often enough, when we feel frustration in the face of a given metaphor, in how it has been used or to what end, our tendency is to pull back towards whatever we think is not metaphor, whatever seems to us more stable or controlled in language. I think this is a counterproductive instinct, one that may even exacerbate the difficulty. A more helpful approach may lie not in restraining metaphoric freedom but in pushing the impetus still further. A particular form of metaphoric identification raises the stakes; Frye calls it “existential metaphor.”20 Everything is potentially identifiable with everything else and you are free to make what connections you like, but there will be that residue of radical relativity (and therefore of potential abuse), until you take one last metaphoric leap. You have

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

417

to recognize yourself as a further part of the metaphor you make. Something in what you say, or what you show, must imply “I am that.” For his part, Hitler would say “Jews are swine,” but he would not say “I am a Jew,” nor “I am swine.” Nothing of himself was at stake in the association he made; he was free to toss it off at a whim. But at the level of existential identification, your body, your existence, is perceived as metaphorically one with the elements it manipulates. You see yourself as the metaphor actually and figuratively embodied. So what? Frye talks about the moment of recognition at a certain point in your life when you discover that “you are what you identify with.”21 We might use the analogy of diet. You take things into your body indifferently year after year, but then you discover one day that your body is actually made up of the things you are taking in. And what’s more, you can feel it! Feeling it, you might begin to eat more carefully. Notice that “you are what you eat” is true whether or not you acknowledge it, and whether you’re fat or trim. It’s just that you don’t change your eating habits until you see it that way. Suddenly you realize that you are no longer merely moving foods around in the world outside you. You are making yourself out of them, managing your own wellbeing. Frye develops the idea on a larger cultural scale, and talks about the advantages such a recognition would proffer to a humanity that learned to see itself as a part of what it consumes. Remember that with unified perception in a poem, the more you feel that everything relates to everything else, the more confident you can feel that you are on the right track interpretively. Now take a step in the direction of existential metaphor. What would this same principle look like if it were applied to people on a planet instead of metaphors in a poem? We would take our every thought and association – where everyone and everything is potentially related – and we would look to recognize ourselves in it. You can speak any metaphor you like, but the more you feel that everything, including you, is related to everything else, including everyone, the more what you say gains in authority. Your existential participation in a metaphor is the most involved you can be with the associations you make. It assures a listener that you are handling the elements of tenor and vehicle as carefully as you would yourself. The metaphor recalls some version of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” The ultimate implication should be clear

418

missing link

enough by now: the universal experience of existential metaphor is love. It is in love that our identifications become indistinguishable from who we are. It is in love that our bodies become the most involved they can be in experience (with the possible exception of illness, which would be its existential opposite). It is in love that we become ourselves at stake. When we make a metaphor we are its “efficient cause” and so become an object in our own right that can be read, sometimes even judged, in the discernable attitude that is expressed. Indifferent metaphors will suggest an attitude of “take it or leave it,” a sense that “I’ve just tried this on for the fun of it, or as a whimsical hypothesis.” They are the vast majority of metaphors we stir up in our daily lives and they go about their business breaking down rigid attitudes and opening thought in the direction of the possible. Other uses, such as rhetorical applications, may employ metaphors to compel, as in commercial advertising or political sloganeering. A degree of objectification is always implied in treating the listener as a lump that needs to be moved. A step down from these uses takes us into an area of metaphor use that is actively antagonistic and whose goal is to get people to destroy. As we pass down through these varieties, we see less and less of the maker’s own identity in them, however much he may be invested in their effect. The opposite of existential metaphor is dissociative metaphor, metaphor whose purpose is primarily to distance the maker from the made. The dissociative aspect of metaphor is in a very real sense a form of excretion, that is, something evacuated from the self. The metaphor becomes shit. Consider. Hitler shits out a metaphor “Jew = swine.” He does so to “flush away” the parts. He has “made” it and may well be proud of it. Now he gets to flush it away, because from his perspective it has “nothing to do with him.” It is that part of his world that he wants to purge from himself. But from our perspective it is a different metaphoric identification that tells us something about the relation between the maker and the made. We know what tragic effect such radical dissociation had on living human beings in Nazi Germany who happened to be Jews and we know what they were treated like. Another aspect of dissociation in metaphor suggests the analogy of inoculation. We take certain contaminants, such as shells of viruses, into our bodies in order to build “antibodies” against them, so that they do not become what we are. A dissociative metaphor is the “shell” of a virus because as a metaphor it is safely a symbol, not the people or animals you

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

419

want nothing to do with. Once you take it within and integrate it into your symbolic system, it protects you, most obviously by cultivating a bias (a kind of antibody indeed) against them. Excretion or inoculation are the shadow forms of existential metaphor. They don’t tell us what metaphors we can use. But as we extend the metaphoric imperative, they do tell us how far we have gone, or are willing to go, to inhabit the furthest reach of metaphor’s allowing conditions, a reach that would include ourselves as an ultimate end. We’ve been talking about the problem of relativity in metaphor and we’ve tried to approach the problem from two different perspectives, in two different dimensions. We have thought about how, in a poem, metaphors become less relative when we read them in relation to other metaphors included there. We reach towards some idea of unified perception or interpretation, a kind of eco-balance in the work, where the meaning of every metaphor becomes a function of, and a contribution to, the meaning of all the others. But this is a fairly limited context for the kinds of work that metaphoric thinking does in human life. Most metaphors we stir up have little to do with poems; their relativity is not constrained by context. Baddies can say anything they want and metaphor makes it possible for them to do so. We need something else then, some frame of reference that abides wherever metaphors are used, and in relation to which their dangers or abuses may come into focus. We need to see ourselves as existential parts of the world we create, whose total unity is its own saving grace and the saving grace of everyone in it. These two frames of reference imply two unique metaphoric relationships, one of metaphors in a poem to the poem as a whole, and the other of ourselves to the world of associations that we project. As we inch towards our final gambit, these two frames of reference become metaphorically one.

the univers e is a poem There will be some readers, myself among them, who would cringe to think that poems should be thought of as models for anything but poems. I should emphasize that I am talking about the poem as a model of the universe, not a model for the universe. The distinction is a primary one. The poem and its composition as unmediated template for effective social structures

420

missing link

and behaviours is a pretty straight-forward recipe for totalitarian disaster. W.H. Auden put paid to any idea that poets would make good politicians if they were to govern in the same way that they write: A society which was really a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror for, given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.22 Poets’ creative power cannot be brought willy-nilly into the social world because they are no longer dealing with symbols. Words are not people, which is one of the reasons that we allow ourselves to explore them under controlled conditions. Skills are indeed developed and exercised in both writing and reading poems; poems are that place in society where associative mind has been granted its own training room. The point is that the proper domain for the kind of rigorous cutting and pasting that we associate with intentional poetic creation is hypothesis. The wager of a poem is that hypothesis itself, in a symbolic world at one remove from the first, has value in its own right. Nature evolved poems of just this sort once it had got the hang of symbolic thinking through human being, and is in the process of finding out what use they are.23 You will have guessed where I am headed with this analogy. Be it moved that, as metaphor is to poem, so evolving forms are to their allowing conditions in evolution. The poem may be seen as representing a set of allowing conditions for the metaphors that abide within it. The allowing conditions of evolution may be seen as a kind of comprehensive poem, a work created by no one, and for no obvious purpose, but where all its parts form a creative unity. We read poems and universes according to the myriad relationships we can discern among their parts. The whole can only be guessed at, cobbled together out of the available data, out of our observations both micro and macro and the connections we discover between them. “The universe is a poem,” as a horizon of argument, is one of the more audacious and tentative metaphors this book has been inching towards. And as a metaphor, it is also not so, for quite obvious reasons. Poems, again, are made things. Allowing conditions, on

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

421

the other hand, are not made by anyone. They were not intentionally or consciously designed. They require no maker or poet.24 At the same time, we could come at the problem from the other direction and put more sceptical pressure on the idea that conscious design in the poetic arts is a free, self-determining agent. I have already suggested that the poet’s creative process can be seen as minimally intentional in significant ways (cf. 335ff). Poets may decide consciously on a subject and form, but once they have done so, a part of themselves can only follow to see where their discoveries will lead them as they occur. They are in this sense mere witnesses to an evolutionary algorithm unfolding within them. Sam Harris’s claim that we do not consciously choose our own thoughts is obviously implicated, and a further expression of the phenomenon I’m describing (cf. 304). Let’s build on the inferences. The poet is just an observer who watches a creative energy take shape within him. The poem represents an accumulation of discovered novelties, not unlike Dennett’s “principle of the accumulation of design” (cf. 408). The poet begins with a mere spark of an idea, a phrase, a verbal momentum, no more chosen than the universe chose its Big Bang. The question that is often put to poets as to why they write goes wrong when it assumes that there was a choice in the first place. Furthermore, poets take what they get. Something happens and something unfolds from what happens. They follow to find out what it is. The amassing whole of the poem becomes a function of elements that coalesce within it, and those additions themselves are a function of what fits the burgeoning whole and what doesn’t. Poets will “think up” subject matters to be sure – poems about toasters or the Upper East Side – but they do so in the same way that the universe “thought up” actual toasters and Upper East Sides, i.e. as an expression of their individual quirks and habits. We wouldn’t judge the subject of a poem any more than we would judge the contents of a universe that – given its character – happened to be contained there. Poets, like universes, work with what they’ve been given. In the end, the element of conscious design becomes irrelevant. To say that the poet may have chosen this or that form, this or that alternative subject, line, or image, is merely to say that alternative conditions were possible and that the poem could have looked different than it now appears. We can also imagine that other universes than the one we inhabit would be possible, that the universe might be filled with entirely

422

missing link

different contents that shape themselves to entirely different forms. It wouldn’t matter. This is the universe that we find ourselves in. This is the poem that was made and lies before us. Universe and poem: as creations that have come into being over time, a central law applies. Parts fill out wholes and are related to them. Wholes are made up of, and allow, the parts they contain. The poem and the universe represent the condition, the context, in which this happens. And we should remember that the farthest reach of those allowing conditions can be as remote and mysterious in the poem, whose interpretive potential is inexhaustible, as they are in the universe. We are never quite sure that we have reached a limit of what those conditions (or interpretations) might be. With the intentions of the poet-agent subordinated for the moment, we are free to think of the cosmos as behaving like a poem in-the-making. It starts with little hints and guesses, with seeds of itself and of what it might become. It tinkers with its initial intuitions, tests alternatives, builds on hopeful threads. It expands and pushes at the limits of possibility, the possibilities that strangely open before itself as time passes. All the while it tosses out bad ideas and hangs on to the good ones, good meaning little more than what keeps fitting. It does not end when it “comes to” its last line. As it reaches towards a possible circumference (one that was there all along as it expanded) it also “turns within” to adapt more and more of its contents to the accumulating effect of the whole. So while it fills itself out to a still-expanding limit, it changes internally, finding new combinations and openings to follow through to their limit. Only when the spinning out of possibilities begins to slow or cool off, when the universe has exhausted its potential – a heat death of sorts – may it then be laid aside and another creation begun.

towards-which So, poem and universe are metaphorically identifiable sets of allowing conditions. Things “come to be” in them and then work themselves out. Martin Heidegger makes an essential distinction between things that are (“beings” or “essants”) and what “allows” those beings to be. Being (with a capital B) is embodied in beings. It only comes to be known there, it only stands forth within its own environment, through those creatures who are able to think it symbolically in language. In language, Being

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

423

reaches towards itself. Human being articulates in language Being’s own properties, its Being-to-itself. Such creatures – not surprisingly, they are ourselves – are called Dasein, Da-Sein, the “Being-there.” It is through Dasein and its activities that we see Being’s potential flower into the world. Our lives are made up of purposeful acts that embody the reaching-towards-itself of Being and its horizon. Any activity can serve the purpose of this reaching-towards. It doesn’t need to be a prayer on a mountain top; it can be the fixing of a bicycle chain, the hammering of a nail. We do things for reasons, and our actions embody an attempt to build up an environment in which we are most at home. That environment is, by inference, an expression of Being’s reaching-towards-itself, its Being-in-the-world. One of the central tenets in my argument is that the metaphoric initiative in the universe appears, in us, to have evolved a form in which it stands forth as an expression of its own properties in conscious language. One doesn’t need to be creating metaphors that characterize the nature of the universe for this to be true. As we think metaphorically, as it thinks metaphorically, the metaphoric initiative that stirs in the heart of nature goes to work in us. It will think more there. It will express unintentionally a towards-which, a reaching-towards its own condition of being, its own allowance. I hope that we can see how, in these terms, it would be possible for there to be something agent-like in allowing conditions without there really being an agent. The relationship between allowing conditions and evolved forms may appear to express intention, but only because we perceive a relationship between what evolves and what is allowed to evolve, a towards-which. Dennett’s drawing of the evolving amoeba and the gluey environment that “woos” it (cf. Figure 14.2) makes a good illustration of how agency may be seen as an illusion, the illusion produced by the embodiment of a towards-which that we already are.

indicator species We still have to address the fact that, though the universe appears to have evolved us, it might also have evolved many other different, and possibly much better things instead. We may be just random metaphors in a poem that is ultimately too large for the fact of our being in it to mean

424

missing link

anything. What is more, we have no way of knowing whether we are a mature expression of evolution’s potential reach or an early draft. Are universes in the habit of filling out their deepest niches of possibility as a matter of early practice? Reason suggests that they would do this eventually. Because there is light, there are eyes to see it with, because the air vibrates, there are ears to pick up those vibrations. Because objects release some of their molecules into the air around them, we evolve noses to sense them. In short, mutations find useful niches in an environment, the channels of further potential that a species does well to find. The metaphoric initiative, the energy of relation itself, might represent a further sensorial environment that species can grow sensors for. It was de Chardin’s view, remember, that a great deal of evolving has reached its apotheosis in us. This is a peculiarly human bias. Intuition would suggest that, given enough time, an environment will produce species that can take advantage of all its potentially useful conditions and that there may be aspects of the allowing conditions we inhabit that the universe has simply not had enough time to fill out, or express, or evolve living detectors for.25 It may be that human being inhabits a universe filled with delicate gems, but has so far only evolved a pair of oven mitts with which to pick them up. This is part of Steven Pinker’s anxiety that I mentioned earlier (cf. 281). Human mind did not evolve in order to grasp its own complexities. It is one of the things that worries us, that our most sophisticated high-end mathematics and physics are but a pair of oven mitts. This is the nagging puzzle of the relation between part and whole. To address it, we’ll need to review the difference between metonymy and synecdoche that we talked about earlier (cf. 155). Consider one of each: “You must appeal to the crown” and “All hands on deck.” In the first instance, the vehicle of the trope, the crown, substitutes for the tenor of the queen. Though a crown is not an actual part of the queen, it can be used to represent something of her power. In its etymology, metonym means “change of name”: we focus on the shift of meaning in another direction – the co-habitation of two things – rather than on the details of the association that license it. In the second instance – “all hands on deck” – the vehicle (“hands”) forms part of the tenor (the shipmates’ bodies). The hands reference and signify something of the sailors’ importance as manual labourers. We move freely back and forth between such parts and wholes and understand them intuitively. Newspaper head-

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

425

lines read: “Canada says NO to private health care!” We know perfectly well that the entire country has not spoken, or even could speak, with one voice. But a few representatives that are a part of that whole have spoken, and it is as though the nation itself had a voice.26 As purveyors of fine metaphor, we would like to think of ourselves as synecdoches rather than metonymies in relation to the allowing conditions of our universe. We want to be parts that embody the whole. In one sense, we are synecdoches whether we say so or not. The metaphoric initiative lives and breathes in us as it does in every existing thing. Yet we may be metonymies after all, metonymies who think they are synecdoches, putting ourselves for the best we see around us, but not particularly expressive of its greater potential. We might just be an interesting whim, fairly revealing in our own right, but ultimately just a “change of name,” a quirky mutation, a crown to be laid aside. Now in a sense every species on this planet is an indicator species for the nature of the environment it inhabits, particularly if we look over longer stretches of time. As the environment changes, so change its inhabitants. We often speculate further. Greater complexity in the environment seems to correspond with a greater complexity in the nature of its species. So, as Dennett writes: “In general … we expect cognitive complexity to co-evolve with environmental complexity.”27 Can this hypothesis be carried further? It appears that we have evolved a “sense” of spirit, in its own way perhaps as receptive as our hearing or vision. William James, as pragmatic a religious thinker as science has evolved, assumes outright that religious experiences have physiological and therefore material and environmental origins: “there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition.28 To leap from proximate physiological causes of religious experience (which scientists like Dean Hamer are still investigating) to the allowing conditions of the universe is a tremendous leap indeed, but perhaps no more so than to make the same leap with regard to eyes or ears. If scientists were to observe some chemical behaviour in the early universe that resembled a corresponding behaviour in the visual cortex, would they not leap to publish their findings? The correspondence itself would be sufficient reason for exploration. In any case, we do have a sense of spirit, a product of our metaphoric habits of mind, for both of which there are further allowing conditions. These conditions were already here and open to being recognized (and

426

missing link

by “recognized” I mean, quite actually, brought back into thought). I should emphasize once again that I see this in a strict material sense, an initiative in nature that may account for our experience of spirit. In fact, there are scientists who believe that our universe may have been particularly conducive to conscious thinking. The universe may have known we were coming, Freeman Dyson wrote (in the epigraph to this chapter). Brian Clegg writes that conscious thinking may even be part of a universe’s “survival instinct”: It is arguable that a universe with life forms might develop differently than a universe without life forms because there was a different class of observer within the universe, so quantum processes would happen in different ways. Similarly, a universe with intelligent life forms might develop differently from one without intelligent life forms. If this is the case, having intelligent life could be a survival trait for universes, so once arrived at by random chance, it could be more likely to continue in future universes.29 In studies of natural evolution you can see the environment first, and so read and understand how a species has evolved into it. We don’t project the existence of an environment that we cannot see or experience. We look for evidence. At the same time, we do have our indicator species and we do allow them to reveal the possibility of a condition or change that we have missed. Science has found nothing to suggest anything spiritual about the process of evolution – just lots of good cause-and-effect mutating. But we also cannot exclude the possibility that what we are is a harbinger, a kind of prescience for both states of mind entirely unknown to us and for the greater conditions that allow for them. Material spirit may be like a metaphor whose resonances, not wholly grasped in their own right, expand when some new abiding context is introduced. The same goes for love, which we have aligned with our experience of spirit, of existential identifications with others who are not ourselves, like gods and spouses. There wasn’t a great deal of love around, as far as we know, when the Big Bang happened, but there is quite a lot of it now. Whatever love is, and whatever merely material science you want to use to explain it, there is no denying its reality among us, any more than there is sense in denying the evolved reality of a jumbo jet.

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

427

bad metaphors like us Again, this only begs the question. Are we a useful indicator species, sensitive enough in our habits and abilities to register the subtler conditions of this largest of environments? Back in the chapter on mutation, we talked about how evolution is a hypothetical process whereby nature tries on various possible genomes to see what happens. It spins out metaphors, as it were. But it will also spin out bad metaphors and then throw them away. As an uncompromising poet who rightly insists on the unity of the poem it makes, nature and its allowing conditions have thrown out a great many bad ideas. Conscious human beings, whatever revealing curio they may represent, however noble their sense of spirit and love may seem to be, may turn out to be one of those bad ideas. How would we know? One way of knowing whether something is a bad idea or not is to consider its survival advantage. Sticking around through thick and thin certainly has the air of the romance hero about it. On the other hand, as we’ve noted, the dinosaurs were around for almost 200 million years, but then they disappeared. Does that mean that they were a bad idea? We have a lot of surviving to do if we want to do only as badly as they did. If we endure for many millions of years and then disappear to become, in relation to some concept of endless time, an infinitely and progressively smaller whim, what will it mean? Nothing, presumably. Another way of measuring our value is to return to our poem-and-itsmetaphors analogy and think of the planet as a poem with ourselves as one “figure” among many others inside it. We could look around and see how well we interact with the others that make up the whole of our world. We could see how badly we mess things up for them, like a metaphor that doesn’t belong in its poetic environment. One of nature’s tendencies is to sustain a balance in its ecosystem where as many of its living elements as possible thrive together. It might be nice for some to think that it means to do so, but there is no reason to believe that it cares a hoot whether it was balanced or not. It seems perfectly happy, every once in a while, just to knock down its staggered but functional tower of evolutionary building-blocks like a restless or bored child. But what if a balanced eco-system were a desirable end, even if not from nature’s own mindless perspective? It is certainly not hard to imagine that the other animals on

428

missing link

the planet would be eager to knock us off, given the chance, seeing what hogs we’ve become of the earth’s limited space and resources. Nature doesn’t care whether we are a good or bad idea, and the other animals at best would have doubts about us.

royal metaphor Must we give up the ghost, as it were, and let go of the idea that as a species we are especially viable and valuable? We evolved, we stood up and looked about, then went the way of our destiny along with every living thing that has come to be. We may be nothing more than a tired and rather predictable metaphor hidden inside a piece of derivative doggerel stapled into a hand-made notebook lying at the bottom of a cosmic landfill, trying to mean everything it can. But if I were that little metaphor, I would try to be less invested in myself and more attentive to the creative impetus that made me possible, and I would be trying to let that impetus be everything it could be as it passed through me. Frye identified a relatively rare species of interpenetrative identification that he named “royal metaphor.” He derived the term from our most familiar application in socio-historical terms, the identification of monarchs with the countries they rule. Britons sing “God Save the Queen,” not because they have any personal acquaintance with Elizabeth II or because their life will end when hers does, but because as their monarch she stands for the well-being and, even more importantly, the continuity of the nation as a whole to which they belong. A curious feature of such an identification is that the Queen is both a “figure” of Britain and a citizen of Britain at the same time. She is at once a container and a content inside the container. This ought to be impossible. It ought to be even more impossible than the usual variety of metaphoric identification A = B. To say that A is the same as B is paradoxical. But to say that A is both the same as B and something that B contains, is making for special trouble. We’ve been working with many different kinds of metaphor throughout this book and adding one more variety of identification-anddifference at this stage may seem to be adding more dry ice to the existing fog. But there is a distinction to be made and I have saved it for my con-

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

429

clusion as something of the pièce de resistance in metaphor, or even more accurately the crème de la crème. If I am right about its application, it will give us the added leverage we need to think about our own relation, as purveyors of fine metaphors, to the allowing condition of metaphor that makes us what we are. You’ll recall that in the chapter on evolution we talked about a particular kind of interpenetrative relationship between the deer and the meadow in which the deer lives (cf. 207ff). The aspect that makes the relationship existential is that there is a form of cross-fertilization. The deer eats some of nature in order to live and nature uses the deer as food. We could use the deer as a synecdoche for nature; the part stands for the whole. But it is not also the whole at the same time. So we also might say, as we did above, that “all hands on deck” is a useful synecdoche for the sailor because it is a part of what it stands for. The hand is part of the sailor and stands for him, but it is not also the sailor. That it is not also the sailor makes it convenient to use it as the sailor. Go back to the duck/rabbit drawing on page 61. At the time, we were thinking about the original problem in metaphor of how two things can be one thing and yet each also itself. The duck is the rabbit, and yet we cannot see both at once. It might be tempting to say that the duck (or rabbit) could also be an example of synecdoche, since each is clearly part of a whole that contains it. But it would make a particularly confusing synecdoche, because the part is so like the whole that we would fail to extract meaning from the identification. The duck/rabbit image is unique not only because the duck is one part of the whole drawing but because it is also, at the same moment, identifiable with the duck/rabbit drawing that contains it. They are the same lines, the identical features. As you look, your mind can “flip back and forth” between the whole and its identical part, now the rabbit, now the duck/rabbit drawing it cannot be distinguished from. Of course Queen Elizabeth is not much like the whole of Britain in this sense. But her meaningfulness is a function of our thinking of her as though she were. Once again, she is not just a synecdoche. If the hand were cut off, we would not say that it was as though the sailor had died. You could show a picture of a sailor without a hand. On the other hand (sorry), you could not get rid of the duck without also getting rid of the duck/rabbit drawing as a whole. The fact that monarchs are mortal

430

missing link

actually presented a difficulty in this regard, because clearly Elizabeth could die and Britain would still be there. We solved this difficulty by devising the concept of the “King’s two bodies,” which proposes that there are actually two kings in one person; one of them could disappear without the whole state being imperilled. This is just a further metaphoric sleight-of-hand. But it is why, when a monarch dies, Britons can cry “the King is dead, long live the King!” That is an example of royal metaphor in political life. Frye found the royal metaphors in mythology still more interesting and it is no surprise that he should turn to the figure of Jesus to develop the thought. The myth of Jesus is a particularly rich one and in a book that seeks to marry the concerns of science and spiritual mind, I might be able to make a tacit, if still secular, point in closing with it. Frye doesn’t go quite so far as to say that it was Jesus’s being an apotheosis of royal metaphor that accounts for his centrality as a mythical figure (central, that is, because he was the “figure of royal metaphor”), but there isn’t anything to stop me from doing so here, if only to underline that I am thinking of the story in its secular dimension. It isn’t that the story is fundamentally true or not, in the conventional sense. It has become as important to us as it has because the “figure” of Jesus represents a particularly special instance of conscious thought, a metaphor for a certain kind of identity, and we feel drawn to it. At the time of his crucifixion, Jesus is both a slave and the king of the slaves, that is, a slave among slaves and the total body of a state that includes slaves. Similarly, after his crucifixion, he is both a mortal man who has died and the resurrected body of the church that is constituted by its living Christian adherents. He is a pile of (vanished) bones and the total collect of living physical bodies that “stand for” his manifest physical presence in the world, “the body of Christ.” Representation of state and slave within the state, container and contained. We are not royal metaphor. We may have a special relationship with the conditions we find ourselves in, but we are not the same as those conditions. We are not like the relation of the duck to the duck/rabbit drawing as a whole. If the duck disappears, the drawing disappears. We on the other hand could vanish as a species at any time and the planet with its living populations would still be here and likely none the worse off. Royal metaphors are rare enough to come by. The two that we have

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

431

discussed are particularly potent political and religious symbols from the past. That Jesus was also a king and that some kings and rulers in the world think of themselves as Jesus Christ suggest how truly potent this particular form of paradoxical relation can be. But we live in an age when certain “figures of identity” can become overly attached to the structure of power that gives birth to them. Perhaps we are in need of another royal metaphor, in an embodied spirit, to accompany its mythical forebears. I have a particular one in mind, and it has been with us from the outset. The metaphoric initiative is royal metaphor in its secular apotheosis. What have we discovered throughout but that the workings of relation are present at the beginning and the end, that they are the inner particulate and the allowing condition of everything that has come to express it? Like the duck in the drawing, take away metaphoric relation and you take away all. Gone would be the Big Bang, the fundamental elements of the universe, chemistry, dna, mutation, evolution, cognition, ourselves, metaphor proper, consciousness, and spirit. In fact, it is hard to imagine what would be left and I suppose that is the point. There would be nothing left to imagine. If metaphor is royal metaphor, we could do a lot worse than being its minion, its attendance upon itself. Metaphor proper is the “being-there” and the “towards-which” of combinatorial algorithms. It is an environment that on a whim went out from the Big Bang to see what it might mean. We are one of its present advocates. Insofar as we represent royal metaphor’s ability to identify, through one of its parts, with its own metaphoric nature, we too would be more than merely relative. Be the universe nothing or be the universe something, we ourselves embody one of its horizons, so far as we can make one out, a horizon that is already here in us, waiting to be recognized, because we are one expression of what makes it what it is. If we can discern a relationship in us between the container and the contained, between the allowing conditions of the cosmos and what those allowing conditions have generated, then perhaps it makes less sense to speak of an emptiness. If we are, metaphorically speaking, an organic filling-out of the metaphoric properties at the heart of the universe, if we are an expression of those properties coming into their own, then we might say, with the universe, for the universe, as the universe, I am that I am.

432

missing link

before yo u leave Then again, maybe a universe with a metaphoric initiative and beings that express it is a dumb idea, or in any case an indifferent one. If there were such a thing as a bad universe, would we really want to be its henchmen? We know that we have evolved unique properties in the universe we are conscious of. But this might not amount to much; our advent might indeed represent one of nature’s sillier ideas. We may be a bad idea inside an indifferent idea. What is more, our capacity as conscious thinkers, laudable perhaps among the pantheon of sophisticated beings in the universe(s), may nonetheless be for naught, if the space it is evolving into is really just a vast and indifferent emptiness, a big tin can without a lid. We may be nothing inside of something, or we may be something inside of nothing.30 Of one thing we may be confident. Because relation is moving through us, we are being tried on. We are a heuristic, an hypothesis, but perhaps now an hypothesis of a different sort. Our species is a kind of wager against the odds that we are a dead end. We are the testing ground for all that we think and do, for all that we become. If we have everything wrong, then we are the experiment that shows whether having things wrong has any value. We spent some time wondering about whether illusion itself has any viability once it is recognized as illusion, whether it is a good idea to believe in fictions that you know to be fictions. We may add that perspective to our thoughts there. If gods are sneaky tricks, then we are the experiment that shows what, if anything, tricks of god are good for; what survival value they have. If we are people who see past the sneaky tricks of gods, then we are those who will show whether doing so is useful. If we are the people who can’t decide whether the environment is a god’s hiding place or just a vast emptiness, then we will be those who show whether such a debate is worth the trouble. We would be the physical creature that also represents the descent of the god-trick into material life, or the descent of the illusion of the god-trick, or the descent into material life of an inquiry into the illusion of the god-trick. We are presently in the process of discovering what these might mean. I was careful earlier to distinguish my approach from de Chardin’s optimistic vision of human consciousness as a fulfilment of the “Omega”

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

433

striving towards its own pinnacle. I think of myself as a hopeful materialist, and so have tried not to look for any “omega point” that stands outside the physical world, or think of it as a place where all the best evolutionary processes may be thought to converge and come to perfection. But I do feel that, whether or not we represent a fulfilment of anything, our own value and meaning is nonetheless implicated in our being who we are, and to some extent then, the whole value and meaning of where we are. De Chardin saw similar high stakes. Evolution, he writes, “becomes free to dispose of itself – it can give itself or refuse itself. Not only do we read in our slightest acts the secret of its proceedings; but for an elementary part we hold it in our hands, responsible for its past to its future … Therein lies the whole problem of action.”31 Christianity has addressed itself to just this “problem of action” in its central figure. Jesus is an example of royal metaphor and we ourselves are not. And yet Jesus was also a man, which means that a part of himself fell short of the metaphoric apotheosis he was. While the gospels tell different stories of Jesus’s death, we often collate their details (metaphorically we might add) into one unified narrative. That narrative has Jesus first saying, “My God My God why has thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), and then, in seeming answer to himself, “It is accomplished” (John 19:30). How would the story change if we understood that Jesus at the moment of death was discovering that everything he thought was true was an illusion, that is, if he were experiencing a revelation of his mere humanity? And how would it change if at that moment of revelation, at the heart almost of its bitterness, he were suddenly to recognize as well that he is the embodying form of that illusion as a heuristic, that he is the seeing-through of its value as an act of faith, in such a way that, through him, “it is accomplished.” He would be its embodying metaphor. Perhaps it is at this point that his sacrifice would be greatest, because he would know then that he was dying as a man, not so much as a god, but as one who seeks the courage to be curious about what a god in his shoes might do and be. He would become what the universe has been from the Big Bang, a working-out of the question “what happens when I do this?” Perhaps it would be Jesus’s willingness to see himself as accomplishing, or working through, the hypothesis of an illusion – the illusion that he is God – that he would become a god, at least as much of one as any man could be.

434

missing link

The initiative of metaphor appears to have done quite well without us through the vast ages. It has gone about its business joining and separating, leaping across gaps, mutating, casting forth, opening spaces, binding, unifying, breaking and making. Like Odysseus, it is the figure of many turns. It goes on doing its work without us. We may be only a minor rest stop on its way, or we may be an apotheosis of its best potential. It is a question we as a species agree to explore in being metaphorically who we are. We live to discover how metaphor’s conditions of being speak through us; we live as an allowance of its uttermost. In that sense we are responsible – quite simply, a response – whether we would have it so or not. As it dwells inside us now, so that part of us will respond in kind wherever and however it evolves.

epilogue How better to end than with a poem? Among the points I’ve hoped to bring home in this book is how poems in their own domain are both means and end, they point to horizons whose limitless limits they represent, and they show us how to recognize them. Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider” is based on a central metaphor of this sort. His poem is an elaborate conceit; you can almost hear the metaphoric hinge creaking between the first and the second stanzas as you read through it. The scene is, fittingly, a natural environment, one that contains a species we find vigorously at work in solitude. We watch it reach into its emptiness in search of some kind of hold. Whether the hold is actually there is irrelevant. The creature’s evolved instinct is to throw out another filament, to reach. The poem describes not the activity of one spider only, looking to find its moorings under a barn rafter, but the work of all living things, throwing out filaments into the spaces they inhabit, in search of something receptive there, an allowance of sorts. Whitman is not just describing an evolutionary process but the creative process of poets themselves. The poem too, with its guessing metaphoric filaments, reaches into a surrounding, in search of anything at all it might lay hold of. And still further, the spider of what Whitman calls “soul” is what I have called spirit, metaphorically embodied, metaphorically constituted. It is our experience of reaching into a we-know-not-what.

“Til the Ductile Anchor Hold”

435

I said in the chemistry chapter – it seems so long ago – that we live inside an expanding metaphor. Metaphor is a creative process unfolding, an exploration of itself, whose outer limit only appears to exceed the reach of its deepest imaginings. “Til the ductile anchor hold” is so beautifully ambiguous, with that last subjunctive verb, yearning to become, yet not quite becoming, the solid noun it reaches to lay hold of. The anchor is “ductile” in the sense of being both actual and pliable, of a certain form and of a changing form at once. It is the way and it turns to find the way. It is the hold that it reaches to grasp. There is the poem full of its conjured relations. There is the universe and its evolved living forms. There are scientists who probe the dark with their hopeful hypotheses. There are poets who say “Let there be light,” just to see what happens. There is the material world and its metaphoric makeup; there are the rational, and the imaginative, and the spiritual senses that come of these. There is a spider’s physical and a mind’s ephemeral filaments. All of these reach, and are reached for, in the same way and in the same direction. And what they make together is a metaphor. a noiseless, patient spider, I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; Ever unreeling them – ever tirelessly speeding them. And you, O my Soul, where you stand, Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, – seeking the spheres, to connect them; Till the bridge you will need, be form’d – till the ductile anchor hold; Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.32

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

introduction 1 Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 60. 2 Frye, The Great Code, 56. 3 Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 163. 4 Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness, 12. 5 Hoffmann’s title alludes to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s exploration of metaphoric thinking in The Last Writings of the Philosophy of Psychology (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Proposition 174. 6 Aristotle, Physics, 26ff. 7 De Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 291. 8 Frye, The Great Code, 126. 9 Gleick, Chaos, 103. 10 Ibid., 133–5. 11 Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 243. 12 Ibid., 259. 13 Ibid., 276. 14 Pinker, How the Mind Works, 524. 15 Ibid., 526. 16 Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 255. 17 Denham, “Northrop Frye’s ‘Kook Books’ and the Esoteric Tradition,” 331. 18 Ibid., 341. At the conclusion of the essay, Denham offers a very helpful appendix of “The Sources of Frye’s Reading in Esoteric Spirituality,” 348–56. 19 Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 256. 20 Ibid., 255. 21 Jan Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor, §39 & §40. 22 Northrop Frye calls this the conceptual order of words, distinct from other descriptive, rhetorical, and properly metaphoric applications. I offer a full discussion of these language uses in the chapter on dna, 121–52. 23 I have made prior use of this paragraph in an essay entitled “Ghostly Encounters,” published in The New Quarterly 117 (Winter, 2011): 122–9, reprinted in my collection Echo Soundings: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (Palimpsest Press, 2014).

438

notes to pages 20–38

24 Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor, §81. 25 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 12. 26 Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution. I offer a fuller account of Eagleton’s response in Chapter 13. 27 Dennett, Sweet Dreams, 6n10. Dennett goes on: “Neuroscientists and psychologists … used to stare glassy-eyed and uncomprehending at philosophers arguing the fine points of supervenience and intensionality-withan-s.” I’m probably missing the point as to what kind of philosophy Dennett is parodying here. But let it be said that for centuries philosophy was the only game in town so far as cognitive neuroscience was concerned (does it get any better than Kant, for instance?). Showing philosophers to the gates of the republic feels too much like the “new regime” and doesn’t suit Dennett’s more generous spirit as an interdisciplinary thinker. 28 Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 6. 29 Changeux and Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?, 25. 30 Wilson, Consilience, 126. 31 Ibid., 126. 32 Ibid. 33 In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tries to locate phenomenal experience between objects themselves and our experience of them, between the knower and the known (cf. Scruton, Kant, 58–61). The philosopher Democritus said it first: “man must know that he is removed from reality … in reality we know nothing about anything, but each person’s opinion is something that flows in (D19, D20 in Democritus, The Atomists, 11). I have more to say about the relevance of Kant’s epistemology in my discussion of the concrete/symbolic later on 291. 34 Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 255. 35 Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, 31–2. 36 Ibid., 58. 37 Bachelard, New Scientific Spirit, 31. 38 Ibid., 69. 39 Yeats, Letters, 922. 40 Pinker, How the Mind Works, 526. chapter one 1 Frye, Collected Works Vol. 4 (Northrop Frye on Religion), 101. 2 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 3–7. 3 Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences, 3. This book is an excellent anthology of the many forms of analogous thinking in all fields of human activity. The sheer inventory of evidence pays witness to one of the central themes in this book, that the relational initiative is the warp and woof of human being and its creations. 4 Wilson, Consilience, 219.

notes to pages 38–56 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

439

Yukawa, Creativity and Intuition, 114. Jan Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor, §11. Ibid., §5. Ibid. Frye, Collected Works Vol. 18 (The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991), 316. Black, Models and Metaphors, 40. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 254. There is a version in chaos theory of this recession into further gaps. Gleick talks about an infinite regression of finer distinctions in the drawing of a simple coastline, which breaks down into a kind of patterned chaos the closer you look. See his discussion of a “fractal shore,” in Chaos, 95. Frye, Words with Power, 72. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 96. In his seminal discussion of the relation between metaphor and the earliest forms of thinking in human beings, Julian Jaynes uses the terms “metaphrand” (tenor) and “metaphier” (vehicle). See Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness, 48ff. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 4. Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1913–1926, 483. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 22. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 303. This idea of “thinking more” will become a core reference in this book. Ricoeur attributes it to Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. “The imagination (as a productive cognitive faculty)” writes Kant, “is, namely, very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it.” Further: “Imagination is creative, and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion … it gives more to think about than can be grasped or made distinct in it.” In poetry, the imagination is given “an impetus to think more” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, 192–3). Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 84. Ibid., 85. Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, 72. Frye, Great Code, 87. Wilson, Consilience, 126. Donoghue, Metaphor, 7. “U.S. Supreme Court: Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).” Democracy21.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 June 2014. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 191. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 268. The authors mention on the same page the book A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind (University of Chicago Press, 2003), in which the author, Steven Winter, discusses “the central role of metaphor in legal reasoning.” “The identity of the speaker is not decisive in determining whether speech is

440

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40

41 42 43

notes to pages 58–66 protected. Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster” (quoting Bellotti, 435 U.S., at 783). The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.” Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Supreme Court of the United States. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 June 2014. Stevens, Collected Poems, 483. Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein Reader, 182. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 212. Ibid., 213. Ibid. Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a. In D.A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom, eds. Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principle Texts in New Translations, 122. In his ground-breaking study, Gombrich took on a certain bias in psychological studies of art that had flourished since the time of John Ruskin. Ruskin believed, says Gombrich, that the artist must “disentangle what we really see from what we merely know and thus … recover the innocent eye … For Ruskin and those who followed him, the painter’s aim was to return to the unadulterated truth of natural optics” (14). Gombrich dedicates the first half of his book to showing how seeing is already an act of recreation. Gleitman, Psychology, 246. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 213. Ginestier, Pour Connaître la Pensée de Bachelard, 125. My translation. The original text reads: “L’humaniste doit avoir du monde l’image la plus complète possible, on ne saurait donc exclure aucune perspective, ni celle des sciences ni celle des arts. Pour bien les saisir, il faut essayer de le faire à la pointe, toujours évoluante, de leur mouvement: découverte pour les sciences, création pour les arts. Il est d’ailleurs révélateur que de plus en plus ces termes découverte et création puissent s’interchanger.” Frye writes: “metaphor, then, suggests a state of things in which there is no sharp or consistent distinction between subject and object. That is, a metaphorical statement is not so much an assertion that A is B as an annihilation of the space separating A and B” (Collected Works, Vol. 18, 316). McKay, The Speaker’s Chair, Field Notes on Betweenity, 11 (npag). Stevens, Collected Poems, 10. Ibid., 483.

chapter two 1 Don McKay offers a fine account of this tension between rational and metaphoric expressions in his analysis of Richard Dawkins’s ambivalence towards the latter: “while there are plenty of metaphors and a great deal of

notes to pages 66–77

2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

441

analogical thinking working for Dawkins, they are kept closely in check, like (here’s my own metaphor for his attitude) a team of huskies over whom discipline must be absolute, lest they revert, as they are always eager to do, to the condition of wolves. It’s fine to think this way, for the purposes of ‘brevity and vividness’ as long as we don’t ‘get mystical about it’” (McKay, The Speaker’s Chair, 35). Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and Selected Writings in Prose and Verse, 182. Romano Naddaff offers a helpful review of the criticism of The Republic X before building her own argument (in terms that are recognizably at home in the current critical idiom), that Plato’s censorship was cunningly selfsubverting. Cf. Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic, University of Chicago Press, 2002. A heroic if perhaps unnecessary finessing of the facts. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 255. “I must speak my mind, although I confess I am inhibited by a kind of shame and friendship for Homer, which I have had since I was a child. For of all those beautiful tragic poets he seems to have been the first teacher and guide. But it would be wrong to honor a man at the expense of truth, and therefore I must, as I said, speak out” (Plato, The Republic, 352–3). Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a. In Russell and Winterbottom, eds, Ancient Literary Criticism, 122. Ibid., 232. Ibid., 384. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 384. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 481. Ibid., 462. Ibid., 467. Ibid., 495. Ibid., 494. Wogan-Browne et al., The Idea of the Vernacular, 141. John Hartcliffe, A Treatise of Moral and Intellectual Virtues (London, 1691), 339. Edmund Bonner, Certaine Homelyes (1555), 71. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, 65. Ibid., 67–8, 20. Sidney, The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 41. Ibid., 42. Yeats, Letters, 922. Sidney, Miscellaneous Works, 42. Ibid., 5. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 150.

442

notes to pages 77–91

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Daniel, Poems and a Defense of Ryme, 137. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 372–3. Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 255. Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 555. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:4. Ibid., 2:12. Ibid., 1:202. Ibid., 1:198. Shelley, Shelley’s Prose, 293. Ibid., 292. Ibid., 297. Cazeaux, The Continental Aesthetics Reader, 60. Ibid. Ibid., 61. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” 177–8. Keats, Letters, 77. Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 45. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 189. Science advocates like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris argue quite convincingly that the antidote to religious fundamentalism is objective knowledge and verifiable evidence. They are sometimes charged with a degree of fundamentalist thinking in their own right, perhaps unfairly, given how often and eagerly scientists permit themselves to be proved wrong. But it is their unswerving belief that science provides our only access to the truth in these matters that renders them vulnerable to the charge. 47 Cf. Frye’s The Great Code, 5–22, and Vico, New Science, 140. This view of early human beings as more intuitively metaphorical chimes in nicely with Julian Jaynes’s view of the original bicameral structure of the human brain.

1 2 3 4

chapter three Sparke, The Ground of Our Beseeching, 250. Jacob, The Logic of Life, 323. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 585. Cf. Summa Contra Gentiles III.70.8. “It is also apparent that the same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly by the natural agent; rather, it is wholly done by both, according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and also wholly to the principal agent.” Each “different way” of describing and effecting creation has its own independent authority: the same event happening in two different ways, according to the allowances of metaphoric thinking. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Vernon Bourke. “Contra Gentiles.” Dominican House of Studies, Priory of the Immaculate Conception, n.d. Web. 17 June 2014.

notes to pages 91–7

443

5 Schroeder, The Science of God, 62. 6 Frye writes: “The events the Bible describes are what some scholars call ‘language events,’ brought to us only through words; and it is the words themselves that have the authority, not the events they describe. The Bible means literally just what it says, but it can mean it only without primary reference to a correspondence of what it says to something outside what it says. When Jesus says (John 19:9), ‘I am the door,’ the statement means literally just what it says, but there are no doors outside the verse in John to be pointed to … We could almost say that even the existence of God is an inference from the existence of the Bible: in the beginning was the Word” (Great Code, 60–1). 7 Robert Alter, “A Question about Genesis 1:3.” Email to author, 21 February 2008. 8 In his poem “Walking to Sleep,” Richard Wilbur riffs on this implication in Genesis. He shows how the confidence of an expectation in the creative act can occasion, as it were, the thing itself: “As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there, / Or a general raises his hand and is given the field glasses, / Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. / Something will come to you” (235). 9 One of the alternative names for the Big Bang that was submitted for the Sky and Telescope contest in 1993 was “What Happens if I Press this Button …” Our case exactly. Cheryl J. Beatty and Richard T. Fienberg, “Participatory Cosmology: The Big Bang Challenge,” Sky & Telescope (March 1994): 20–2. In case you are interested in the results of the contest: “And the Winner Is … nobody. Or Fred Hoyle, really, though he didn’t submit ‘The Big Bang’ as an official entry last summer, having coined the term 44 years ago. The unanimous decision of the judges is that no entry to the Big Bang Challenge is a worthy successor to Hoyle’s original.” 10 Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, 187. 11 How much weight lies on that little preposition “at,” which must not suggest a place in space, or a point in time, while evoking the abidance of conditions that are the ingredients for these. 12 My translation. The original reads: “Il semble qu’il y ait des zones où la littérature se révèle comme une explosion du langage. Les chimistes prévoient une explosion quand la probabilité de ramification devient plus grande que la probabilité de terminaison. Or, dans la fougue et la rutilance des images littéraires, les ramifications se multiplient” (Terre 153). 13 Democritus, Atomists, 70–1. 14 Ibid., 194. 15 Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 70. 16 Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge, 58. 17 Greene, The Elegant Universe, 141. 18 This is how Bede Rundle put it in his book of the same title. Krauss’s A

444

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27

notes to pages 98–109 Universe from Nothing offers a more recent reflection on the same problem, with more physics and less metaphysics. Herbert, Works, 51. Lowell, Collected Poems, 591. Stevens, Collected Poems, 239. Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry, 158. In her reading “Prayer I” in The Poetry of George Herbert, Vendler argues that the poem does indeed progress through groupings of emotional affect: it “arrives at a state of joy from an earlier state of anger and rebellion” (38). This unfolding logic of psychological response may be thought of as the counter-intuitive “logic” of metaphor trying to work itself out. In the mean time, Vendler writes, “it is the whole which is complex, a something (prayer in this instance) which can be any number of things, not only at different times, but even at the same time. This tolerance of several notions at once appeals to us nowadays in Herbert, just as his profusion of images appeals” (37). Frye, The Great Code, 60. Hoffmann, The Same and Not the Same, 243. Understanding interactive metaphors as covalent bonds may help us to understand one important inference in metaphoric thinking that we might otherwise miss. Substitutive metaphors involve signifiers that seem to “lack definition.” But what we see here – vis-a-vis interactive metaphor as covalent bond – is that most signifiers are ready to react given the right circumstances. We don’t think of either daylight or fresh shirt as lacking definition in the metaphor “Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed.” But they are always reactable; both have their associated commonplaces revolving around them. They would seem stable in most conversational environments, but let these two signifiers come near to one another in a certain context, allow their shared valences to come in contact, as it were (the cleanliness of a fresh shirt, the innocence of a new day), and the rapid exchange, quick as thought, will create a new bond. It might be worth noting here a distinction between substitutive metaphors and ionic bonds. In the chemical bond the “donating electron” has a prior surplus negative charge that it is “trying” to get rid of. In substitutive metaphor, no one would have looked at the concept of “a long disease” beforehand and thought that it had any “surplus” meaning at all. It has its system of associated commonplaces and they are always free to be at play. The vehicle is seen as superabundant only in reference to what the tenor “my life” needs. This further means that in substitutive metaphor any word or image can become a “donator” atom, so long as it has floating about its system of associated commonplaces some inference that the tenor could use. Every least thing around you waits for its chance to become exactly what you need.

notes to pages 113–23

445

28 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 4. 29 Hoffmann, Same and Not the Same, 105. 30 There must be a literary critic somewhere who has objected to Burns’s “My love is like a red red rose” along similar lines. In gender studies, for instance, we are very aware of how, where love is concerned, the habits of the majority are often accepted as natural givens (that nature is exclusively heterosexual, for instance). With this metaphor, a reader might argue that our feelings about love, with all its ready and familiar associations, are being naturalized, made to seem as inevitable and desirable as an innocent rose, or that love is made here to be largely a function of beauty. Metaphoric reactions can be highly inefficient this way (in fact, are inevitably so), and one could spend a life time scrapping over the dregs in a single test tube. 31 Hoffmann, Same and Not the Same, 103. 32 We don’t have a Fredric Jameson of chemistry who argues that when such and such a chemist designed his famous synthesis, it was his unconscious channelling of pernicious influences that made the results doubtful. On the other hand, if you want to look for ideological determinants in the field of chemistry, you need look no further than the pharmaceutical industry, with its profit-driven motivations. 33 Hoffmann, Same and Not the Same, 244. 34 Ibid., 97. 35 Stevens, Collected Poems, 165. 36 Hoffmann, Same and Not the Same, 105. 37 Samuel Levin makes the interesting distinction between “conceiving” and “conceiving of” that I’ve used here. While we might draw the hasty conclusion that the chemist “conceives” new substances while the poet only “conceives of” new realities, I hope to have shown that there are envisioning and actualizing stages of creation in both domains. We are going to hold in mind Levin’s conception of how metaphors variously “execute” what they invoke, and put it to work again in the next chapter on dna. 38 Heidegger, Basic, 256; Pope, Poems, 808. 39 Bachelard, Etudes, 19. My translation. The original reads: “Avant tout, il convient de retenir que le plan nouménal du microcosme est un plan essentiellement complexe. Rien de plus dangereux que d’y postuler la simplicité, l’indépendance des êtres, ou même leur unité. Il faut y inscrire de prime abord la Relation. Au commencement est la Relation.” chapter four 1 The analogy here requires a caveat. Individuals in society are not as altruistic as cells are in multicellular organisms. The latter cede their reproductive rights to the germ cells in the gonads, whereas individuals in a society only serve this greater good, if they do at all, because they are trying to get themselves reproduced. Most societies function (with the exception of certain

446

2

3 4

5 6 7

8 9

10

11 12

13

14

notes to pages 124–38 eusocial insects) by allowing their individuals to enjoy ostensible autonomy. The more a society restricts that freedom in favour of the whole, the more it will come to resemble the biology of the living cell. “Time is not an empirical concept deduced from any experience,” writes Immanuel Kant (Basic Writings, 49). It enters into the world as an a priori function of our own ability to perceive it. “Only when this representation a priori is given, can we imagine that certain things happen at the same time (simultaneously) or at different times (successively).” Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 70. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 159. In the origin of life, a syntax of replication must precede the usefulness (or meaningfulness) of the replication. As Dennett writes, “before we can have the meaningful self-replicating codes that make this possible, we have to have self-replicating codes that don’t mean a thing; their only “function” is to replicate themselves” (161). Frye, Great Code, 59. Homer, Iliad, Bk II. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 123. Saussure goes on: “In the syntagm a term acquires its value only because it stands in opposition to everything that precedes or follows it, or to both.” In a corresponding footnote, he distinguishes the concept of the syntagm from that of syntax, the latter of which belongs to the study of the former. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 91. “Just as the game of chess is entirely in the combination of the different chess pieces, language is characterized as a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units” (Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 107). Frye called these two directions of reading “centripetal” and “centrifugal,” the former pointing to words that lie in sequence and take their meanings by thus holding together, and the latter to conventional meanings associated with the words beyond the text (Words with Power, 3). Stevens, Collected Poems, 349. The substitution of uracil for thymine is nothing if not metaphoric, where “the new pertinence” introduced into the chemical sequence makes possible a new level of transcription. The question of which sections of a dna strand are decoded in a cell is determined by the function of that cell. The dna of a hemoglobin cell in the bone marrow, for instance, would only unzip at those points where the proteins synthesized are relevant to the creation of hemoglobin. Inside that sliding finger, if you will, a trna molecule enters and using its anticodon finds its complementary codon triplet on the mrna strand. The subunit moves over one position and another trna molecule enters and finds its match. Now there are two trna molecules side-by-side inside the sub-unit; their two amino acids bond together at the top. The first trna molecule is

notes to pages 139–50

15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

447

released and the sub-unit moves along another position to accept a new trna molecule with its accompanying amino acid ready to join the building protein chain. Pollack, Signs of Life, 72–3. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 182. On dna transcription as a reading process with convincing analogues in book reading, see Pollack, Signs of Life, 64–89 and Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 196–7. McLuhan’s famous edict that “the medium is the message” could serve as a subtitle of this book in general, where what I call the metaphoric initiative appears as a constitutive part of what every chemical and linguistic event communicates. McLuhan’s theory of how the form of a medium imbeds itself in, and becomes part of, the message easily recalls the workings of dna, where the coding for the message’s own transcription is imbedded in the coding for the work that that message is meant to accomplish (The Essential McLuhan, 151). Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 5. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 352–64. Frye, Words with Power, 3–29. Frye includes a final level of language, which he calls “Kerygmatic.” It describes those works of imaginative literature that have passed beyond their merely relative conditions into a domain that reintroduces the idea of an imperative without ideological pressure. When I come to speak later of “existential” and “royal” metaphor, I’ll be touching on features that Frye attributes to this level of language, but as I use the concept to different purpose there, I stick with these latter terms. Pollack, Signs of Life, 88. Merrill, Collected Poems, 197. Yeats, Letters, 922. Eleanor Cook’s volume Against Coercion: Games Poets Play, is a marvelous meditation on the effect and inherent reserve implied at the heart of our poetic devices. Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 88. Robert Pollack identifies an inherent unpredictability in the transcription processes of dna/rna: “The proteins encoded by the aperiodic crystal are … oxymoronic: their individual shapes are precisely unpredictable. So long as this is true, the genomic language, like our own languages, will not have a logical link between signifier and signified. This will not prevent its being read or understood; rather, it will assure that dna remains a language expressing as full a range of meanings through arbitrary signifiers as any other language” (Signs of Life, 70). Stevens, Collected Poems, 512. Cook, A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens, 285.

448

notes to pages 151–75

chapter five 1 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 86. 2 Wilbur, Collected Poems, 314. 3 A sceptic might say that watching a little hand grow up into a big hand is no metaphor at all, but a literal description. I’d be fine with that implication here, since I am arguing for a continuum of the metaphoric initiative (quite literal in its way) across a span of time (the start of the string inside the ball of string). At the same time, I have tried to show elsewhere that there is always a metaphoric identification implied, even when the elements are just you at two different ages (the child and the adult). 4 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 159. 5 Ibid., 118. 6 Cf. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 86. 7 Black, Models and Metaphors, 31–2, 45. 8 I.A. Richards might have asked Black if he didn’t think the substituted term was relevant, what he would make of the sentence if the man who was standing in the room were wearing striped pants, had over-sized shoes, and a red ball on his nose. Black might have answered that our understanding of the sentence as metaphoric does not depend on finding out who or what is actually there (indeed, if there really were a clown in the room, the one thing that you would not be likely to say is “Get this clown out of here,” unless you were a comedian yourself). The frame (sentence) and focus (word) in front of us is sufficient evidence of figuration. The frame in this instance is minimal. “Get this ____ out of here.” The shorter the frame, the more we have to fall back on the effect of substitution to grasp the new pertinence. 9 There is a kind of self-evaluating process in gene replication as well, where a system of appropriately instructed proteins (also coded for on the dna) “looks over” the replicated strand to check for accuracy. 10 Harris, Free Will, 32. 11 Sidney, Miscellaneous Works, 34. 12 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 22. 13 Stevens, Collected Poems, 482–3. 14 Nuland, How We Die, 210. 15 Ibid., 208. 16 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV, ll. 255–7: “nascique vocatur / incipere esse aliud, quam quod fuit ante, morique / desinere illud idem.” 17 Levin, Metaphoric Worlds, 1–4. 18 I am thinking primarily of premeditative acts, where the forethought that goes into the crime requires some form of self-justification. But I think the principle may apply as well in unpremeditated crimes and crimes of passion. The immediate response is still meant to “fix” something that is a problem at that moment for the perpetrator. The unpremeditated act leans more on hypothesis, some implied asking of the question “What happens when I do

notes to pages 176–91

19

20

21 22 23 24 25

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

449

this?” where the venturing is immediate, unconsidered, and highly speculative, however actual the tragic consequences may be for the victim. The farther-reaching implications of such an inference come out in debates over the existence and origins of evil. In his Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil, Ron Rosenbaum tests the theory that Hitler saw himself as a creative artist. He writes in the foreword to the recent reprinting: “one of the most heuristic ways of looking at Hitler was to see him as he saw himself from the very beginning in Vienna: as an artist. A failed artist, but one who was then able to put himself in a position where he could create a kind of art of evil” (cf. 457n39). The criminal would normally see his “imaginative leap” (that murder = helpful) as a minor adjustment to the world he already inhabits. That he is not creating a new world ex nihilo with wholly unfamiliar laws and habits is part of what makes it possible for him to act. If he saw the “resonances” of his murder in the new world he is creating as unattractive, launching him into a “world of grief,” it would naturally be a less positive choice. These are the deterrents, such as they are, of punishment itself (of whatever sort, either imposed or occurring as a natural consequence of the act) that under normal circumstances give people pause. Frye, Words with Power, 73. See note on Levin’s distinction between “conceiving” and “conceiving of” addressed earlier (cf. 445n37). Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 303. McKay, The Speaker’s Chair, 25 (npag). Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 215. chapter six Robinson, Absence of Mind, 6. Strand, Dark Harbor, 11. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 118. Frye, Collected Works, Vol. 18, 316. Brian Boyd’s The Origin of Story is certainly relevant here. I offer an outline of his argument in Chapter 13 (cf. 394). Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 12. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 217. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1: ix–xii. Milton, Paradise Lost, XI: 376–80. Ibid., XI: 429, XI: 557, XI: 638, XI: 712, XI: 840. Ibid., XI: 423–4. Ibid., XII: 575–89. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 638. Ibid., 200, 211. Ibid., 112. The italics are original.

450

notes to pages 192–204

16 Ibid., 644. 17 Spencer, The Principles of Biology, 1: 474. 18 Gould and Vrba, “Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” 4– 15. 19 Quoted in Russell and Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism, 97–9. 20 Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 217. 21 Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 1: 129. 22 Kant, Basic Writings, 70. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes: “But the connection of anything manifold (conjunction) … is a spontaneous act of the power of representation […] all connecting … is an act of the understanding. This act we shall call by the general name of synthesis, in order to show that we cannot represent to ourselves anything as connected in the object, without having previously connected it ourselves, and that of all representations connection is the only one which cannot be given through the objects, but must be carried out by the subject itself” (70; italics original). Hence we discover something we have already made. This aspect of Kant’s argument will come to bear again in my discussion of the advent of cognition, where we see how the metaphoric initiative evolves an act of mind that is pre-configured, as it were, to witness its own presence in the materials it observes. There is an aspect of my argument that is essentially Kantian. Kant foresaw how the world we “synthesize” is both itself and not itself, a fact that can only return us to the reality of the synthetic initiative in its own right. 23 Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 157. 24 Darwin, Origin of Species, 618–19. 25 One species being continuous with its later embodiment is not appreciably different than the problem of your own life in time. We all like to believe that we are continuous with ourselves, that “who you are” at this instant has caused, now that three seconds have passed, the “who you are” in this instant. I evolve, I am a continuous flowering out of myself, a series of selfs laid out in space, linked together in time. But our experience of contiguity is an illusion imposed by our very experience of time, our experience of events as both consecutive and related. You are, and you are not, yourself. 26 Dennett, Brainchildren, 125. 27 Darwin himself was careful to continue to implicate a creator in his portrait of evolution governed by natural selection and in the end produced a hybrid process that includes the work of intentional design. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” he wrote in his conclusion, “with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one” (Origin of Species, 649). 28 Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 155. Pinker argues, that “there is a crucial difference between space, time, and causality as they are represented in our minds and as they exist in reality. Our intuitions of these entities are riddled with paradoxes and inconsistencies. But reality can’t be riddled with paradoxes

notes to pages 204–9

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

451

and inconsistencies; reality just is.” We may indeed be getting things wrong, but there is an implied bias that we need to talk about first. To say that reality cannot be paradoxical implicitly aligns “what is” with the logical and consistent, which is as much a bias as its opposite. Reality may simply be of such and such a nature that paradox defined as such is no violation of its fundamental laws, its being able to be itself. When in response to the uncertainty principle in Quantum Physics Albert Einstein famously wrote that God does not play dice with the universe, Niels Bohr replied, “Stop telling God what to do.” The point is an important one, for it goes to the heart of what metaphor and metaphoric thinking preserves in human consciousness as always possible or potentially thinkable. Metaphor is itself counter-logical, and its power to say that a thing both is and is not stands in no violation of their being something with respect to which it is the case. If what appears to be the case seems to threaten logic, so much the worse for logic. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 29. Milton, Paradise Lost, III: 96–7. Secular thinkers might disapprove of such voodoo deterministic thinking, but we have our own versions of this dilemma. Consider the world of statistics. Statistics might indicate that .001% of a population will die this year by falling in the bathtub. So what do we do? Recognizing that no one can anticipate his own fate, and given how small the odds are, do we ignore what statistics “knows” and dance a jig in the slippery bathtub? No, we try to appease the gods, I mean odds. We put bath mats down in the tub and say, “Look, aren’t I careful? I’m not going to … become a statistic, no sir.” Statistics is the name we give to one of our most pervasive trickster gods, not appreciably different from any Protestant version of it, and it makes us a little paranoid. We are always wondering what it is thinking. Milton, Paradise Lost, II: 555–61. Shelley, Prose, 290. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 221–57. This view depends partly on what side of the deterministic divide you graze on. One could argue, even on a secular level, that given the original conditions of the cosmos, and given an invariable cause-and-effect algorithm unfolding through every atom from the beginning of time, we would be its necessary and inevitable product. But this could be said of whatever creature should happen to be present. Something would be here, and that something could be understood to have been inevitable from the start, though not intended. Again, parallels between this aspect of evolutionary theory and concepts like the watchmaker god are rich and revealing. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 156. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 187. For a full discussion of the romance mythos, its characteristics and tendencies, see Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, 186ff. Typically in literary romance, heroes carry some evidence of an inherited or

452

notes to pages 210–36

intrinsic stature (Joseph Andrew’s birthmark, Harry Potter’s forehead scar). The revelation of this mark, or the revelation of its meaning, shows that the hero was chosen from the beginning. Its appearance (as in the case of Joseph Andrews) is often saved for the late stages of the struggle, where it can complement the revelation of the hero’s fullest potential. 40 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 203. 41 Ibid., 186. 42 Wilbur, Collected Poems, 235.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14

chapter seven Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 14–21. Frye, Words with Power, 166–74. Ibid., 143–51. “In the woods we return to reason and faith” (Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 10). See chapter 6, note 27. Jacobson, Language in Literature, 109ff. Let’s notice a distinction here. The nerve endings on your skin are not an effect of the needle’s puncture in the same way that the crater is caused by a meteorite. A hole in your skin would do just as well for a mere caused effect. Conversely, the crater in the earth is not a metonym; the earth does not “put it for” the falling meteorite (though we are free to so, in thinking about it). The earth didn’t have any use for a “marker” called a hole that it would put down to remember what had happened to it, or that it would use to pass the event-information farther along (like the immediate after-effect of earth tremors) in some sequence of awakened responses. Popper, The Self and Its Brain, 45. Heidegger, Philosophical and Political Writings, 265. The switch-board is a risky analogy, for no doubt someone will conclude that I am inferring the existence of an independently conscious operator, someone who stands back and plugs the right impulses into the right receptors at the right time. As we’ll see, no such operator is required. Kandel, In Search of Memory, 66. Coward, Pattern Thinking, 63–78. Coward, A System Architecture Approach to the Brain, 1. Northrop Frye argued that any two points in a linear argument can be “logically” connected, no matter how dissonant they may seem, if you just throw enough coiling prose between them. Politicians and other masters of rhetoric know this. But in a happier application, there is a version of the same principle at work in the Freudian talk cure. A patient lies down and presents to a detached listener the elements of a cognitive dissonance, conscious and unconscious parts that seem not to connect. The narrative that he

notes to pages 237–59

453

spins out becomes the prose labyrinth that winds between them and, if the patient is lucky, reconciles them to one another (Frye, Words with Power, 11–12).

1 2 3 4

1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

chapter eight Robin Allott, “Evolution and Culture: The Missing Link.” Ibid. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 89–151. Joyce, Ulysses, 39. chapter nine Wilbur, Collected Poems, 84. Bergson, “Consciousness and Life,” 927–8. Kandel, In Search of Memory, 202. Quoted in ibid., 284. Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist, 75–95. Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor, 110. When I was in the late stages of research for this project my heart leapt into my throat when I came upon the title of Feldman’s book. It seemed to promise a narrative arc – how to get from molecules to metaphors – very like the one I was trying to map out. Feldman’s book was genuinely revealing and useful. It offers a “Neural Theory of Language,” as his subtitle has it. His grasp of the cognitive sciences is far more extensive than mine, and far more focussed. But there were two major differences in approach. Feldman thinks of metaphor as so many metaphors; it is a language function comprising combinatorial algorithms in the brain. It is not a relational initiative that can be traced back to molecules themselves. My own argument was free to hitch a ride on his every discovery in the cognitive domain, but I begin and end elsewhere. The other difference is that Feldman is trying to see how metaphoric operandi in the mind can be seen as made up of molecules and their associated materials. My own molecule-to-metaphor narrative arc leaves us with a slightly different understanding, that molecules are already metaphorical, that metaphor is already in molecules in ways that we have not yet appreciated. Ibid., 112. Merrill, Collected Poems, 583. In another poem, Merrill speaks of a “depthless dazzle” available to us in the surfaces of things (Changing 560). The phrase is very suggestive. Dennett, Sweet Dreams, 1–23. Nagel, “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem,” 338. Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski, Matrix, The Script at IMSDb. Ibid. Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor, 112.

454

notes to pages 262–79

15 Dennett offers a series of very helpful illustrations of these levels of consciousness in Kinds of Minds (cf. pp. 84, 86, 89, 100), one of which we will return to for analysis in its own right in the last chapter. 16 If we were to look, from a prospect, at a whole field of daisies over, say, a thousand years (using stop-frame animation), it might appear to us that the field was thinking, trying out this and that response to the environment with its many potential daisy options, until it found the right option and “went” with it, so to speak. Consciousness, then, may really just be unconscious processes given more time to work themselves out, or (as with us), sped up so that they can respond more quickly. 17 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 88. 18 Ibid., 99–100. 19 Ibid., 100–1. 20 Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 304. 21 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 139. 22 Ibid., 151. 23 In his astonishing book La Mort, the Russo-French writer Vladimir Jankélévich offers the most no-nonsense account of personal non-entity that I expect to read. He develops the concept of “ipseity,” the experience of one’s unshareable “ownhood,” as both our sole access to, and the terminal limit of being. 24 Dennett, Sweet Dreams, 8. 25 Levine, Purple Haze, 69ff. 26 Dennett, Sweet Dreams, 1–23. 27 This paragraph has been adapted from an earlier version in my essay “An Access of Power: Job, Evolution, and the Spirit of Consciousness in Northrop Frye and Daniel C. Dennett.” 28 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 57–80. 29 Ibid., 155. 30 Ibid., 131–43. 31 Dennett, Sweet Dreams, 160–1. 32 Ibid., 159–60. 33 Ibid., 159. 34 Ibid., 137–8. 35 Ibid., 161–2. 36 Hofstadter, “Prelude … Ant Fugue,” in Hofstadter and Dennett, The Mind’s I, 149ff. 37 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 23–4. 38 This anticipates my discussion in the final chapter of existential metaphor (a term used by Northrop Frye). I need only say now that the latter is a radical form of interactive metaphor. 39 I’m thinking again here of the etymology of the word “identity,” which comes from the Greek “idem,” the same. To have an identity as such is to

notes to pages 280–9

40 41

42 43

44 45 46 47

455

be the same as oneself, or as I would say, the same as the generation itself of likenesses. According to the oed, “the Latin word was formed to provide a translation equivalent for ancient Greek ταὐτότης identity.” You may recognize the Greek root, ταὐτό, selfsame, in our English “tautology.” Explanations don’t really count if they are tautological in the sciences, and yet our experience of consciousness confronts us with the reality of “the self-same” manifesting as our ultimate awareness. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Frye wrote in one of his late notebooks: “Myth, like metaphor, both asserts and denies: it says ‘this happened,’ and conveys ‘this almost certainly didn’t happen in precisely this way.’ The latter may be concealed or suppressed by gullible fatheads, but it’s there, and its presence is what gives to myth the popular meaning of ‘something that didn’t happen or isn’t true’” (Frye, Collected Works, Vol. 6, 504–5). Frye, Words with Power, 131. These paragraphs are adapted from my essay “An Access of Power: Job, Evolution, and the Spirit of Consciousness in Northrop Frye and Daniel Dennett,” in Northrop Frye, ed. Rampton, 319–40. Frye, Words with Power, 310–13. Job 38:3ff. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 565. Frye, Collected Works Vol. 13, 573.

chapter ten Frye, Words with Power, 116. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 52. Stevens, Collected Poems, 76. Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 174–5. Heisenberg, “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics,” 104. Heisenberg’s language of center and circumference as regards the breakdown between subject and object in quantum physics is redolent of Stevens’s poem. He writes earlier in the essay: “The things that are daily around us do not for that reason become a part of nature in the original sense of the word … these machines would be more parts of our human organism than parts of surrounding nature” (101; italics mine). Heisenberg concludes the essay with a reflection on what it means that human being should confront a limit of knowledge in its own measurements: “It follows that in the course of long stretches of time the conscious acceptance of this limit will perhaps lead to a certain stabilization in which the thoughts of men will again arrange themselves around a common center” (108; italics mine). 6 Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge, 221. 7 Cf. Collected Works Vol. 18, 168 and Anatomy of Criticism, 119. 8 Cf. Frye, Collected Works Vol. 14, 55. 1 2 3 4 5

456 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26

notes to pages 289–98 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 139. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 242. Kant, Basic Writings, 70. There is a genuine irony in the fact that the more meaning an object possesses, the more real it seems to us. Frye reminds us that this is one of the counter-intuitive discoveries that Blake made in his response to the scientism of his age. A spiritually intense “perception of the sun makes it a far more real sun … because more imagination has gone into perceiving it” (Frye, Collected Works Vol. 14, 28). Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 499. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 227. McLuhan, The Essential McLuhan, 151. Richard Dawkins is not by any means the first to have proposed a language for the symbolic item in culture. Charles Lumsden offers a helpful summary of terms critics have volunteered, while offering a word of his own: “Imagine for a moment an array of transmissible behaviors, mentifacts, and artifacts, which we propose to call culturgens (from L. cultur(a), culture + L. gen(o), produce … The unit is the equivalent of the artifact type employed in archeology (Clarke, 1978), and it is similar in variable degree to the mnemotype of Blum (1963), idea of Huxley (1962) and Cavalli-Sforza (1971), idene of H.A. Murray (in Hoagland 1964), sociogene of Swanson (1973), instruction of Cloak (1975), culture type of Boyd and Richerson (1976), meme of Dawkins (1976), and concept of Hill (1978)” (Lumsden, Genes, Mind, and Culture, 7). Blackmore, The Meme Machine, xix. Midgley, Science and Poetry, 72. Ibid., 72. Kingwell, Practical Judgements, 194 ff. Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning, 144. “Political and economic ideologies are framed in metaphorical terms. Like all other metaphors, political and economic metaphors can hide aspects of reality. But in the area of politics and economics, metaphors matter more, because they constrain our lives. A metaphor in a political or economic system, by virtue of what it hides, can lead to human degradation” (236). Recall also my discussion in Chapter 1 of metaphoric types in the political domain (cf. 52–4). Jack Balkin has worked on the semiotics of the meme in the ideological domain. He is the author of Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (Yale University Press, 1998). Dennett’s discussion of the meme in Freedom Evolves (especially 174–8) is very useful. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 346. Blackmore, The Meme Machine, 231, 234, and 237. Some interesting work might be attempted in reconciling Sam Harris’s argu-

notes to pages 298–317

27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

457

ment in Free Will and Blackmore’s conception of the invasive meme. There appears to be a shared principle that our thoughts are not chosen but simply happen to us. “One trick is to concentrate on the present moment – all the time – letting go of any thoughts that come up … With a lot of practice the world looks different; the idea of a series of events gives way to nothing but change, and the idea of a self who is viewing the scene seems to fall away.” Ibid., 242–3. Cf. Coward, Pattern Thinking, 143. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 13. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 378. Harris, Free Will, 32. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 103. Richard Dawkins uses the phrase “A Much-Needed Gap” (noting its ambiguous meaning) in The God Delusion (347). Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 242–6. Ibid., 253. Dennett, Sweet Dreams, 137–8. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 253. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 257–89. Ron Rosenbaum, “Hitler, Continued: Afterword from the Updated Edition of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.” Los Angeles Review of Books. 10 July, 2014. https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/hitlercontinued-afterword-updated-edition-explaining-hitler-search-origins-evil. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 189. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 253.

chapter eleven Lowell, Collected Poems, 708. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 17. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 268. Stevens, Collected Poems, 520. Jaisson, Evolution and Culture, xi. I first read an account of how gender relations in culture are rooted in unconsciously selected evolutionary behaviours in Pinker’s How the Mind Works (460–7). 7 One of the most effective ways of herding consumers is to promote the opposite and more flattering sense that they are expressing their individuality by buying such and such a product. I think of that scene in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, where Brian tries to get his followers to leave him alone: Brian: “Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t need to follow me! You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!” Crowd: “Yes, we’re all individuals!” Brian: “You’re all 1 2 3 4 5 6

458

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

notes to pages 317–27 different!” Crowd: “Yes, we are all different!” We laugh, but we lap up the same exhortations in a great deal of commercial advertising. Robert Bringhurst writes: “explaining the shape of the universe is one thing; justifying habitually shabby behaviour is something else. Myths that set out to explain something overtly – etiological myths, as they’re called – often slide into justification, especially if what they explain is sociological. The mythteller, like the geneticist and the philosopher, should never have an agenda” (Tree of Meaning, 152). Pinker, How the Mind Works, 52. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 65–6. Ibid., 169. See Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 73–80. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 103. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 378. Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems,” 29. Recall from Chapter 4 (cf. 149), that nature’s hypotheses are entirely unconscious (at least until we come along). Nature doesn’t want to know, and has no need to know, what will happen before it happens. But as with human imagination, it is continually sending out alternative configurations and “measuring” their viability in a given domain. We hypothesize in order to let our hypotheses die in our stead. Nature is less detached, more carelessly executive. Like a company with all the money in the world to waste, it simply dreams up unusual variants and lets them sink or swim. Hill, The Lords of Limit, 143. In the same book (page 1), Hill describes quotation marks as a pair of raised eyebrows evincing a supercilious attitude towards its own claims. Sidney, The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 41. Yeats, Letters, 922. “Subway Guitarist.” snl Transcripts. n.d., http://snltranscripts.jt.org/93/ 93csubway.phtml. Cf. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. It might be useful to remind yourself of the nuanced effect, or gain, implied in the conditional “Let” of God’s creative invocations at the beginning of Genesis (cf. 104). Popper, The Self and Its Brain, 138. Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 101. Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 78. Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 100. Cf. 271 and Dennett Sweet Dreams, 137–8. Dennett, Sweet Dreams, 159–60. Auden, The English Auden, 393. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” 192.

notes to pages 328–52

459

chapter twelve 1 Frye, Words with Power, 131. 2 Blake, Poetry and Prose, 23. 3 I am borrowing these adjectives from an essay on Marianne Moore by Richard Howard: “For whatever Modernism may be, we know this much about it, that its modes and mechanisms are those of fragmentation, dissociation, erasure, and opposition. In a word, of collage, an abrupt dispersal without modulation, without continuity, functioning not by transformation but by transgression, very likely” (Paper Trail, 65). 4 Shelley, Prose, 294. 5 Stevens, Collected Poems, 517. 6 Glen Robert Gill’s Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) offers a revealing analysis of the shared identities, similarities, and subtle differences between Frye’s and Jung’s positions in archetypal theory. My own argument chimes in with Gill’s theory that Frye’s myth criticism treats the essential unit of story as specifically embodied in such a way that myth may be seen as possessing phenomenological authority. My study approaches the same question from the perspective of the metaphoric initiative and its evolution from matter into spirit. 7 Frye, Collected Works Vol. 23, 212. 8 Eliot, Selected Essays, 15. 9 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 121. 10 Frye, The Great Code, 31. 11 I have adapted this paragraph from my introduction to Frye and the Word. 12 Donoghue, Metaphor, 48-51. 13 Donoghue is building here on Erich Auerbach’s “Figura.” Writes Donoghue: “This may be a version of one of Auerbach’s themes, whether the figures in the Old Testament are annulled or even diminished by having their fulfillment in the New. The Ten Commandments are not – or not necessarily – diminished by comparison with the Beatitudes, unless we take fulfillment to entail supersession. Does metaphor demean the tenor by declaring what it lacks? Is it shamed by that consideration?” (Metaphor, 49). 14 Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 10. 15 Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 66. 16 Milton, Poetical Works, I. 19–22. 17 I am reminded of the scene near the end of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge where the action of a play on stage becomes so confused with an attempted murder occurring there at the same time that Toulouse’s cry “He has a gun!” only sends the audience into further ecstasies of delight. 18 Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 99–100.

460

1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14

notes to pages 356–63 chapter thirteen Bergson, “Consciousness and Life,” 930. Greene, The Elegant Universe, 16. Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, 52. Dawkins is not above sending mixed messages on this matter. He is sceptical of those thinkers who claim to discern evidences of intentionality (usually divine) in the workings of the cosmos. But in his own metaphors he will often project intentions of a more secular variety. His representation of genes as “selfish” is offered as a matter of convenience, and yet an entire politics of environmentalism and social behaviour is implicated. A number of religious thinkers have sought to defend religion against some of the more materialist implications of Darwin’s Origin, though their achievement is checkered. Henry Drummond’s highly popular Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) evinced questionable science and an active metaphoric imagination. Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Many (1955) is more robust, I argue in Chapter 14. Hamer, The God Gene, 209. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 109. Politicians and evangelists often seem indistinguishable enough in the United States that Dennett’s cautions are only more broadly relevant. He offers this caveat in relation to corporate habits (ibid., 180–5). Ibid., 8–12. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 14. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 37. The cage match between Dennett and Eagleton comes down to these radically different conceptions of what is being debated. Dennett’s first principle stems from the scientist’s drive to know “what is out there” and what sort of belief system one ought to have – scientific or religious – in seeking an answer: “Tentatively, I propose to define religions as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought” (Breaking the Spell, 9). Eagleton’s repost situates him, as a Marxist, in the historical conditions of real suffering and the acts of mind that respond to them: “Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love” (Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 37). Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 45. I was disappointed to find Eagleton in his book including Frye with Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis and Co., “in their campaign to convert literature into a pseudo-religion” (Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 84). Eagleton includes Frye’s “magisterial” Anatomy of Criticism in his “book bag” of top all-time works

notes to pages 364–70

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

461

of criticism, but then seems to have tired out in reading him – “Frye’s later work never lived up to the promise of the Anatomy” (Book Bag) – at just that point where their two ideological lines begin to converge. The point is evident throughout Reason, Faith, and Revolution. Take Eagleton’s “The resurrection for Christians is not just a metaphor. It is real enough, but not in the sense that you could have taken a photograph of it had you been lurking around Jesus’s tomb armed with a Kodak. Meanings and values are also real, but you cannot photograph them either. They are real in the sense that a poem is real” (119), and lay the subtle inferences alongside Frye’s “If I had been on the hills of Bethlehem in the year one, I do not think I should have heard angels singing because I do not hear them now, & there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped” (Collected Works Vol. 13, 74). Both of them appeal to a reality that underlies everyday experience and its common standards of belief. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness, 75. Ibid., 74. Dennett, “Julian Jaynes’ Software Archeology.” Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness, 49–66. Ibid., 58. We’re thinking of an individual early human being standing up and having to take stock of his environment, as though he were the first to start from scratch. In reality the development of Homo sapiens would be more subtle and gradual. The species’ power of assimilation would grow in proportion to the brain capacity, and vice versa. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 192. Frye, Collected Works Vol. 5, 378. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 125. Ibid., 347. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 192. For Kant, “genius really consists in the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence learn, of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind … can be communicated to others. The latter talent is really that which is called spirit, for to express what is unnameable in the mental state … requires a faculty for apprehending the rapidly passing play of the imagination and unifying it into a concept … which can be communicated without the constraint of rules” (194–5). A propos of Kant’s connecting of genius to (metaphoric) spirit, we might recall Aristotle’s definition of metaphoric thinking as “the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (1459a). Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 1: 82–3. Kant, Basic Writings, 70. Donoghue, Metaphor, 23–4. Kenner, “Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph,” 424.

462 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56

notes to pages 370–82 Frye, Collected Works Vol. 18, 316. William Blake, Poetry and Prose, 555. Northrop Frye, The Great Code, 124. Hughes Mearns, “Antigonish.” Academy of American Poets. n.d. http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/antigonish-i-met-man-whowasnt-there. The phrase is from a passage in Ovid’s Fasti (6.5): “Est deus in nobis: agitante calescimus illo. / Impetus hic sacrae semina mentis habet.” (There is a god in us, by whose movement we are inflamed; this impulse holds the seeds of sacred mind.) As Ovid is writing here of poetic inspiration, the lines can seem only more prescient. Frye, The Great Code, 56. St Augustine, Confessions, 116. Frye, The Great Code, 17. Frye, Collected Works of Northrop Frye Vol. 24, 1011. Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, 12. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 181. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.1.9. Ibid., I.1.9. Kearney, The God that May Be, 1. Ibid., 8. Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge, 166. Ibid., 168. The original Hebrew (b·rashith) actually brings us closer to “in beginning,” or even “beginningly,” rather than “In the beginning.” The emphasis falls suggestively on the act of initiating, rather than on the time or place of the act. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, 153–70. Gerald Schroeder for instance writes that “‘quantum uncertainty’ … allows the small but finite possibility of something coming into being from nothing via what is known as a quantum fluctuation” (Science of God, 23–4). He largely dismisses the theory, but makes the metaphoric connection between the two creations ex nihilo as corresponding “leaps of faith” (25). Frye, The Great Code, 190. Heisenberg, “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics,” 104. John Wheeler quoted in Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge, 225. Cf. C.M. Patton and J.A. Wheeler, “Is Physics Legislated by Cosmogony?” in Quantum Gravity: An Oxford Symposium, ed. C.J. Isham, R. Penrose, and D.W. Sciama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985): 538–605. Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge, 221. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 195. Milton, Paradise Lost, XII: 587. Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover, 190.

notes to pages 382–94

463

57 Frye offers a full discussion of the four levels of interpretation along with one of Dante’s source texts in The Great Code, 220–4. 58 Cf. William Anderson, Dante the Maker, 320–45. 59 Ibid., 360. 60 Merrill, Changing Light at Sandover, 45. 61 Anderson, Dante the Maker, 376. 62 Ibid., 378. 63 My translation of Paradiso, Canto 33: ll. 133–45. 64 Frye, Words with Power, 126. 65 Stevens, Collected Poems, 392. 66 Should I hasten to add that this applies in both straight and gay relations? Indeed, the choice of adoption for both straights and gays is the expression between a couple that there will be a tangible and living issuance from their bond, regardless of any biological inconveniences. 67 Frye, Words with Power, 85. 68 Martin Buber, I and Thou, 62. 69 Ibid., 69. 70 Ibid., 66. 71 Ibid., 80. 72 Ibid., 66. 73 Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, #254. 74 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1: 196. 75 Ibid., 1: 114. 76 Ibid., 1: 197. 77 Milton, Paradise Lost, XII: 641–9. 78 The relation between imaginative perception and the “perception of god” (in both senses) is a continuous theme in the early pages of Frye’s Fearful Symmetry. In Blake, Frye argues, the unifying imagination embodies and evinces “the universal perception of God” (31) as a single reality (Collected Works Vol. 14, 38–9). In his work Axis Mundi, Joe Velaidum writes: “The external element is nothing but an unrealized process of unified perception seeking its most perfected expression. Since this universal act of unified perception is God, we can perceive as God perceives through our own acts of unified perception” (150). 79 I would proffer Boyd’s study as an antidote to Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. One might point to Rosenberg’s book as evidence of how far apart the disciplines of science and humanities still are in their representations of one another: “When it comes to real understanding, the humanities are nothing we need to take seriously, except as symptoms” (307). His caricature of humanists as scientists manqués ends with an attempt to separate our evolutionary roots in story-telling from genuine knowledge: “Don’t take narratives too seriously. That is the most obvious moral of our tour through science’s version of reality. By now

464

80 81 82

83

notes to pages 394–408 you can see why this advice is important and also hard to follow. After all, the human brain has been shaped by millions of years of natural and cultural selection to be addicted to stories. They are almost the only things that give most of us relief from the feeling of curiosity. Scientism has nothing against stories. It just refuses to be an enabler. Stories are fun, but they’re no substitute for knowledge. In fact, the insistence on packaging information into narrative is an obstacle to understanding how things really work. Scientific findings, along with models, laws, and theories that explain them, can’t be squeezed into the procrustean bed of a good detective story, or any other kind of story for that matter” (310). Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 189. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 200. “Does that mean that we could go back to a primitive naïveté? Not at all. In every way, something has been lost, irremediably lost: immediacy of belief. But if we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can, we modern men, aim at a second naïveté in and through criticism. In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again. Thus it is in hermeneutics that the symbol’s gift of meaning and the endeavor to understand by deciphering are knotted together” (The Symbolism of Evil, 351). Keats, Letters, 77.

chapter fourteen Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, 250. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, 105 Darwin, Origin of Species, 645. Thoreau, Walden, 187. Larkin, The Complete Poems, 35–6. Clegg, Before the Big Bang, 187. Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein Reader, 25. Frost, Robert Frost in Recital. Caedmon (ct 1523), 1976. lp. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 164. Ibid., 176. Italics original. Some time I would like to do a study on Dennett’s use of the metaphor of the “given” in his work. It comes to bear importantly on the question of natural law here, but it also holds a central place in his discussion of consciousness in Sweet Dreams where he talks about our experience of attention-getting and attention-giving processes in consciousness, where the giving of attention is the experience of receiving it (cf. 272). I would call the essay “Grace Abounding: The Ungiven Givens in Daniel Dennett.” 12 In Sweet Dreams, Dennett says that “we need to explain away this seductive metaphor, and its kin, the searchlight of attention, by explaining the functional powers of attention-grabbing without presupposing a single attention1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

notes to pages 408–21

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

23

24

465

giving source” (161–2). This is a fine sentence indeed. In the case of his illustrations, the difficulty is one of portraying an allowance-grabbing relationship without implying an allowance-giving agent. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 68ff. Ibid., 68. De Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 110. Ibid., 108, 151. Ibid., 149. Frye, Collected Works Vol. 5, 47. Frye quotes Ovid’s “est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo” (“there is a god within us; when he stirs we grow warm”), and relates the principle to our notion of the poet as divine maker (Collected Works Vol. 14, 160 and 160n25). See also 463n78. Frye, Words with Power, 75–6. “So we have to go on to consider an extension of the use of metaphor that not merely identifies one thing with another in words, but something of ourselves with both: something of what we may tentatively call existential metaphor.” Ibid., 116. W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, 85. The truth of Auden’s claim struck me anew when I came across this comment in Ron Rosenbaum’s new afterword to Explaining Hitler: “‘Art of evil’ in this context is not an empty phrase. In one sense, [Hitler] was using genocidal means to re-sculpt the human genome by carving off entire chunks (Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs)” (Explaining Hitler, Da Capo Press [2014], 419). In our composing of a poem, and in our interpretation of it, the question of fitness is foremost. In evolutionary debates, where the same relation between environment and what it allows applies, our account of nature’s “composition,” as it were, is well nigh indistinguishable from our interpretation of its meaning. To describe a cause-and-effect sequence of events in evolution is to account for its meaning. But in literary studies, one wants to keep the two ideas separate. To confuse the two contexts of fitness – how it got to be that way and what we make of it as such – is to commit the “intentional fallacy,” i.e. to assume that what I find there is what the poet intended me to find. This is because in poetic creation there is conscious intention. In evolution, without intentional agency, the question of how the process actually works and the meaning of how the process works are metaphorically the same. Whatever else they are, the gods are metaphors for just such a principle of creation that is fully intentional, designed, and worked through in advance. A great deal of pre-romantic poetry is founded on this principle, whereby the cosmos is the product of a god-poet’s intentions, carefully fostered and managed. Even after the romantic poets came along and we began to see nature as more self-determining, there was still a residue of intentional thinking discerned in or projected upon the evolutionary processes. Part of my

466

25

26

27

28 29 30

31 32

notes to pages 424–35 argument is that that projection of design in evolution will, to some extent, always nag at us because we ourselves are its intentional agents, its way of being in the world. I hasten to add that such creatures might already exist. They just aren’t us. Whales and mosquitos may already sense something more (or other) of what is out there than we do. It may be worth pointing out that as the frame of the metaphor changes so does the species of metaphor. In the case of the queen above, if I were to say something different like “this land belongs to the Crown,” I would be using the crown as a metaphor for the Queen’s overall property and riches. The relationship between the gold crown and all the Queen’s riches might be said to be more synecdochic than metonymic. It might also be worth pointing out that the relationship between the queen herself and the state power she represents is certainly metonymic, that is to say more arbitrary than existential. Dennett, Kinds of Minds, 130. Dennett is not just speaking here about natural environments, but designed social environments as well. As the cultural environment becomes more complex, we expect the cognitive complexity to evolve in step with it (partly as its constitutive agent). But these are all environments and they all count. If nature needed to evolve a thinking being that could make machines in order to evolve a jumbo jet, then so be it. The jumbo jet is still a product of allowances that are made down the line. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 21–2. Clegg, Before the Big Bang, 233. Wallace Stevens goes through the possible permutations of these somethings and nothings in his poem “The Auroras of Autumn”: an unhappy people in a happy world, a happy people in an unhappy world, an unhappy people in an unhappy world, etc. His findings are illuminating (Collected Poems, 420). De Chardin, The Phenomenology of Man, 226. Italics original. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 564.

Bibliography

Allott, Robin. “Evolution and Culture: The Missing Link.” From J.M.G. van der Dennen, D. Smillie, and D.R. Wilson eds. 1999. The Darwinian Heritage and Sociobiology. Westport, ct: Praeger. 67–81. Academia.edu. Accessed 27 June 2014. http://www.academia.edu/5952797/Extracted_from_EVOLUTION _AND_CULTURE THE_MISSING_LINK Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing. Trans. Evelyn Underhill. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1947. Internet Sacred Text Archive. 8 July 2014. Aristotle. Physics. Trans. Richard Hope. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. St Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Ed. and trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin Books, 1961. Auden, W.H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1962. – The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1977. Auerbach, Erich. Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Edited and with an introduction by James I. Porter. Trans. Jane O. Newman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bachelard, Gaston. Études. Ed. Georges Canguilhem. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1970. – The New Scientific Spirit. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. – The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985.

468

bibliography

Beauregard, Mario and Denyse O’Leary. The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: 1913–1926 Vol. 1. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Bergson, Henri. “Consciousness and Life.” In Mélanges, ed. André Robinet. Paris: Press universitaires de France, 1972. 915–33. [Composed originally in English.] – Creative Evolution. Mineola, ny.: Dover Publications, 1998. Black, Max. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962. Blackmore, Barbara. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Blake, William. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. 3 Volumes. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Boehme, Jakob. The Signature of All Things. London: JM Dent (Everyman Library), 1912. Bringhurst, Robert. The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. Wolfville, ns: Gaspereau Press, 2006. Burbidge, John W. Cause for Thought: An Essay on Metaphysics. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Burkert, Walter. Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Butler, Samuel. Selections from the Notebooks. Ed. A.T. Bartholomew. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930. Cassirer, Ernst. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. Trans. S.G. Lofts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. – Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 3 Vols. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Cazeaux, Clive. The Continental Aesthetics Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Changeux, Jean-Pierre and Paul Ricoeur. What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain. Trans. M.B. DeBevoise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Cleary, Thomas. Classics of Buddhism and Zen, Vol 1. Boston: Shambhala, 2001. Clegg, Brian. Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of our Universe. New York: St Martin’s, 2009. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 2 Vols. Ed. J. Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Cook, Eleanor. Against Coercion: Games Poets Play. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. – A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

bibliography

469

Coward, L. Andrew. Pattern Thinking. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. – A System Architecture Approach to the Brain: From Neurons to Consciousness. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005. Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind. New York: Random House, 2010. Daniel, Samuel. Poems and A Defence of Ryme. Ed. Arthur Colby Sprague. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species and The Voyage of The Beagle. Everyman Library. New York: Knopf, 2002. Davies, P.C.W. The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: Norton, 1997. – The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2006. – The Greatest Show on Earth. New York: Free Press, 2009. – The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. – Unweaving the Rainbow. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1999. de Chardin, Teilhard. Le Milieu Divin: An Essay on the Interior Life. Trans. Bernard Wall. London: Collins, 1960. – The Phenomenon of Man. Trans. Bernard Wall. New York: HarperCollins, 1975. Democritus. The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus. Text and translation with a commentary by C.C.W. Taylor. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Denham, Robert. “Northrop Frye’s ‘Kook Books’ and the Esoteric Tradition.” In Frye and the World: Relgious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye. Eds. Jeffery Donaldson and Alan Mendelson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Dennett, Daniel. Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds. Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1998. – Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking, 2006. – Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. – Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking, 2003. – “Julian Jaynes’ Software Archeology.” julianjaynes.org n.d. Web. 5 April, 2012. – Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, 1996. – Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967. Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961. Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: Macmillan, 1992.

470

bibliography

– What Is Art For? Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988. Dobzhansky, Theodosius. Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. Donaldson, Jeffery. “An Access of Power: Job, Evolution, and the Spirit of Consciousness in Northrop Frye and Daniel C. Dennett.” In Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old, edited by David Rampton. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009. Donoghue, Denis. Metaphor. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2014. Dyson, Freeman. Disturbing the Universe. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. – “Terry Eagleton’s Book Bag: 5 Favorite Works of Literary Criticism.” The Daily Beast. 31 May 2012. Web. 5 April 2013. Edelman, Gerald M. The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. – Selected Essays. 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983. Fauconnier, Gilles. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Feldman, Jerome A. From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language. Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2008. Foss, Martin. Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. – Collected Works [CW] 4. Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. – CW5 and 6. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. – CW13. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. – CW14. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Ed. Nicolas Halmi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. – CW18. Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory: 1976–1991. Eds. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. – CW23. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for Anatomy of Criticism. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

bibliography

471

– CW24. Interviews with Northrop Frye. Ed. Jean O’Grady. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. – The Great Code. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1982. – Words with Power. New York: Viking, 1990. Gazzaniga, Michael S. The Mind’s Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Ginestier, Paul. Pour Connaître la Pensée de Bachelard. Paris: Bordas, 1968. Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Gleiser, Marcelo. The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Gleitman, Henry. Psychology. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981. Gosson, Stephen. The Schoole of Abuse (1579) AND A Short Apologie of the Schoole of Abuse (1579). Edited by Edward Arber. London: Alex. Murray and Son, 1868. Gould, S.J. and Elizabeth Vrba. “Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form.” Paleobiology 8, no. 1 (January, 1982): 4–15. Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: Norton, 2003. – The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. New York: Vintage, 2004. Hamer, Dean. The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes. New York: Random House (Anchor Books), 2005. Hardy, Alister. The Biology of God: A Scientist’s Study of Man the Religious Animal. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. Harris, Sam. Free Will. New York: Free Press, 2012. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. – Philosophical and Political Writings. Ed. Manfred Stassen. New York: Continuum, 2003. Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New York: Harper and Row, 1958. – “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics.” Daedalus 87: 3 (Summer 1958): 95–108. Herbert, George. The Works of George Herbert. Ed. T.E. Hitchinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941. Hesse, Mary B. Models and Analogies in Science. Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1966. Hester, Marcus. The Meaning of Poetic Metaphor: An Analysis in the Light of Wittgenstein’s Claim that Meaning is Use. The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1967. Hill, Geoffrey. The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007. Hoffmann, Roald. The Same and Not the Same. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

472

bibliography

Hofstadter, Douglas and Daniel Dennett. The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. Hofstadter, Douglas and Emmanuel Sander. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. New York: Braziller, 1959. Holland, John. “Complex Adaptive Systems.” Daedalus 121: 1 (Winter 1992): 17–30. Homer. “The Internet Classics Archive | The Odyssey by Homer.” Trans. Samuel Butler. Internet Classics Archive, n.d. Web. 22 June 2014. http://classics.mit. edu/Homer/odyssey.2.ii.html. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 4th Edition. Ed. W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Howard, Richard. Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965–2003. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004. Hume, David. The Philosophical Works of David Hume. 4 Vols. Edinburgh: Adam Black and William Tait, 1826. Huxley, Aldous. Evolution and Ethics. New York: Prometheus Books, 2004. Jacob, François. The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity. Trans. Betty E. Spillman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Jaisson, Pierre and Stephen C. Levinson. Evolution and Culture: A Fyssen Foundation Symposium. Cambridge, ma: mit, Press, 2005. Jakobson, Roman. Language in Literature. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1987 James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Vintage/ Library of America, 1987. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Jones, David Alwyn and Dennis A. Wilkins. Variation and Adaptation in Plant Species. London: Heinemann, 1971. Johnson, Mark, ed. Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. Johnson, Samuel, ed. The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper. London: J. Johnson et al. 1810. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Everyman Library, 1997. Kandel, Eric R. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. New York: Norton, 2006. Kant, Emmanuel. Basic Writings of Kant. Edited and with an introduction by Allen W. Wood. New York: Modern Library, 2001. – Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kearney, Richard. The God that May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

bibliography

473

Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. 2 Vols. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931. Kenner, Hugh. “Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph.” Common Knowledge 10:3 (Fall 2004): 377–425. Kingwell, Mark. Practical Judgements: Essays in Culture, Politics, and Interpretation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Krauss, Lawrence. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something rather than Nothing. New York: Free Press, 2012. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 50th Anniversary Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Viking, 1999. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Larkin, Philip. The Complete Poems. Edited by Archie Burnett. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Laszlo, Pierre. La Parole des Choses. Paris: Hermann, 1993. Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. New York: Mariner Books, 2008. Levin, Samuel R. Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions for a Romantic Nature. New Haven: Yale, 1988. Levine, Joseph. Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In one volume. London: Tegg and Son, 1836. Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003. Lumsden, Charles J. and Edward O. Wilson. Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. 25th anniversary edition. World Scientific, 2005. Margulis, Lynn and Dorian Sagan. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species. New York: Basic Books, 2003. McKay, Don. The Speaker’s Chair: Fieldnotes on Betweenity. The 2010 Pratt Lecture. St John’s: Running the Goat Press, 2013. McLuhan, Marshall. The Essential McLuhan. Eds. Marshall McLuhan, Eric MacLuhan, and Frank Zingrone. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Melville, Herman. Redburn; White Jacket; Moby Dick. New York: Library of America, 1983. Merrill, James. The Changing Light at Sandover. New York: Knopf, 1992. – Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 2001. Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2001. Mithen, Stephen. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Nagel, Thomas. “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem.” Philosophy 73: 337–52.

474

bibliography

– “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83: 4 (October 1974): 435–50. Nuland, Sherwin. How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. New York: Knopf, 1994. Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2013. Palm, Theobald, A. The Faith of an Evolutionist. New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911. Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2008. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011. – How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. – The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2007. Plato. The Republic. Trans. and Ed. Andrea Tschemplik. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Pollack, Robert. Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. One Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text. Ed. John Butt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Popper, Karl and John C. Eccles. The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism. Oxford: Routledge, 1984. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. A Facsimile Reproduction. Intro. Baxter Hathaway. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970. Raff, Rudolph. The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of the Animal Form. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Richards, I.A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Eds. Mark Wallace, trans. Donald Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. – The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. – The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. – Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. 3 Vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. New York: Harper, 2006. Rose, Steven. The Chemistry of Life. Fourth revised. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1999. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. On the Social Contract. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.

bibliography

475

Rue, Loyal. By the Grace of Guile: The Role of Deception in Natural History and Human Affairs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Rundle, Bede. Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Russell, D.A. and Michael Winterbottom, eds. Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principle Texts in New Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Sacks, Sheldon, ed. On Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Schroeder, Gerald L. The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom. New York: Broadway Books, 1997. Scruton, Roger. Kant. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2010. Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Sharpe, Peter. The Ground of Our Beseeching: Metaphor and the Poetics of Meditation. Selinsgrove, pa: Susquehanna University Press, 2004. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Prose. Ed. David Lee Clark. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954. Sherbert, Garry. “Frye’s Double Vision: Metaphor and the Two Sources of Religion,” in Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye, eds. Donaldson and Mendelson, 59–80. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Sidney, Sir Philip. The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Philip Sidney, Knt: With a Life of the Author and Illustrative Notes. London: D.A. Talboys, 1879. Smith, Maynard. The Problems of Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Spencer, Herbert. Principles of Biology. 2 volumes. London: Williams and Norgate, 1864. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1955. – The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1942. – Opus Posthumous. New Edition. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels and Selected Writings in Prose and Verse. Ed. John Hayward. London: Nonesuch Press, 1968. Thompson, Richard F. The Brain: A Neuroscience Primer. New York: Worth Publishers, 2000. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. Bantam Classics. Ed. Joseph Wood Krutch. New York: Random House, 2004. Tudge, Colin. In Mendel’s Footnotes: An Introduction to the Science and Technologies of Genes and Genetics from the 19th century to the 22nd. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics, 2009.

476

bibliography

Velaidum, Joe. Axis Mundi: The Spiritual Journey of Consciousness in the Thought of Northrop Frye. Dissertation, McMaster University. Digital Commons at McMaster. 18 July 2014. http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=9531&context=opendissertations. Vendler, Helen. Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Second edition. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002. – The Poetry of George Herbert. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1975. Vico, Giambattista. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language: Including the Disputation with the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia. Trans. L.M. Palmer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. – The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968. Wachowski, Larry and Andy Wachowski. Matrix, The Script at IMSDb. “The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb).” N.p., n.d. Web. 27 June 2014. http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Matrix,-The.html. Watson, James D. The Double Helix. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Wheelwright, Philip. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967. Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1982. Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying,” in The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose. Ed. Linda Dowling. London: Penguin Books, 2001. Wilbur, Richard. Collected Poems 1943–2004. New York: Harcourt, 2004. Wilson, E.O. Biophilia. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1984. – Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf, 1998. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Wittgenstein Reader. 2nd edition. Ed. Anthony Kenny. London: Blackwell, 2006. Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, et al. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of English Literary Theory, 1280–1520. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999. Yeats, W.B. The Letters of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade. London: Rupert HartDavis, 1954. Yukawa, Hideki. Creativity and Intuition: A Physicist Looks at East and West. New York: Harper Row, 1973. Zwicky, Jan. Wisdom and Metaphor. Kentville, ns: Gaspereau Press, 2008.

Index

alchemy, 74–5, 79–80, 117, 253 allegory, 382–3 Allen, Woody, 307 Allott, Robin, 238–9 allowing conditions, 358, 403–8, 412; agent-like, 420–3; vs. alternative phrases, 404; of environment, 403, 410–12; of evolution, 23, 213, 334, 351, 403, 420, 427; limits, 422; of metaphor, 397, 419; of poems, 334, 336, 413, 420; of universe, 422–5, 431; unthinking and intentional process, 404 Alter, Robert, 93 anagogic, 382–4 Anderson, William: Dante the Maker, 383–4 Aplysia, 228, 230, 234, 248, 262, 347– 8 apocalypse, 57–8, 62, 257, 274, 285, 297, 384, 393, 404 apophatic theology, 375–7 Aquinas, Thomas, 91; “Panis angelicus,” 369–70; Summa Theologica, 376 archetypal theory, 337–40, 459n6 Arnold, Matthew, 460n14 Aristotle, 96, 126, 295, 321, 325, 461n25; Poetics, 60, 71, 197–8; Physics, 9. See also cause arts, 15–16, 21–2, 24, 38, 70–1, 287, 320–2, 327, 348, 397; pleasure, 351; classical, 70–3; Enlightenment, 79– 80; early-modern, 74–9; fictional initiative in, 351; pre-romantic, 86,

465n24; Renaissance, 300; romantic and post-romantic, 80–5 associated commonplaces, system of (sac), 13, 36–8, 43–6, 49, 56, 105–8, 113, 127–8, 165–7, 173, 176, 253–4, 293, 330, 364, 387, 444n27 Auden, W.H., poets and politicians, 420; The English Auden, 327 Auerbach, Erich: “Figura,” 459n13; Time, History, and Literature, 96, 124 Austen, Jane, 141–2 Austin, J.L.: How to Do Things with Words, 144, 458n21 Bachelard, Gaston, 21, 23, 26–7, 61, 180; reality of relation, 120; chemical reactions and expansion of meaning, 95; The New Scientific Spirit, 26–7; The Poetics of Space, 26 Balkin, Jack, 297; Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, 456n23 Barthes, Roland, 326 Beauregard, Mario: The Spiritual Brain, 359 Benjamin, Walter, 49–51, 56, 159–60, 444n26 Beowulf, 343 Bergson, Henri, 21, 245, 356; Creative Evolution, 148 Bible, the, 42, 86–7, 90, 222, 281, 363, 371–5, 378, 389, 414; Adam and Eve, 379–80, 382, 390; book of revelations, 373; Eden, 382; Genesis, 90–4, 186, 324, 345–6, 354, 363, 377–82; Gospel of John, 92; “In the beginning,”

index 378, 462n47; Jerusalem, 373; Job, 281–2; John 19:30, 433; “Joseph is a fruitful bough,” 42, 386; knowledge of good and evil, 381–2; Matthew 27:46, 433; Moses, 151–2, 344, 373, 375; New and Old Testament, 343–4, 372–3, 459n13; Sodom, 373; Ten Commandments, 459n13; transgression in, 381–2. See also Milton’s Paradise Lost bicameral mind, 6, 261, 363–6; metaphorical, 365. See also Jaynes Big Bang, 7–8, 11, 27–8, 33, 89–91, 93–7, 121, 156, 237, 379, 387, 403, 421, 426, 431, 433, 443n9; metaphor of metaphor, 94 biology, 3–4, 8, 22, 25, 27–8, 177, 179–80, 357, 361, 386; biochemistry, 141; definition of life, 122; indicator species, 400, 412, 425, 427; life, 121– 2; metabolism, 122; photosynthesis, 262; selfish genes, 285; single-celled amoeba, 223, 230, 289; symbiotic relationships, 400. See also cells; dna; human body; reproduction; rna Black, Max, 14, 42, 49, 87, 105, 109, 160, 162–3, 191, 312; frame and focus theory, 162, 448n8 Blackmore, Susan, 300–1; The Meme Machine, 295, 297 Blake, William, 12–13, 289, 456n12, 463n78; Albion Rose, 69; “The Sick Rose,” 331–2, 334, 413–14; “Vision of the Last Judgment,” 80–1, 370 Bloch, Ernst: forward dawning, 390; the not-yet conscious, 390; The Principle of Hope, 390 Blum, H.F., 456n16 Bohr, Niels, 375, 451n28 Bonner, Edmund: Certayne Homelyes, 75 Boyd, Brian: On the Origin of Stories, 394 Boyd, Robert, 238, 456n16 brain, 224–5, 230–2, 252, 260–1, 267– 72, 285–6, 298, 305; bicameral architecture, 7, 363–6, 442n47; interneu-

rons in, 229–30, 241; recommendation architecture in, 235–6, 347–8; total network, 36–8, 108, 111. See also cognition; consciousness; memory; neuron Bringhurst, Robert, 458n8; The Tree of Meaning, 296 Buber, Martin: I and Thou, 388–9 Burns, Robert, 42, 119, 165–7, 445n30 Butler, Samuel, 21, 131; Notebooks, 217 Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, 350 cancer, 171–2 capitalism, 53, 173, 194, 318 Capra, Fritjof, 17 Cartesian Theatre, 271, 304, 306 catachresis, 13, 169–71, 175, 179. See also metaphor (error) cataphatic theology, 377 catharsis, 325 cause: efficient cause, 9–10, 418; final cause, 9–10; formal cause, 9–10, 183; material cause, 9 cause-and-effect, 9, 18, 99, 126, 146, 183, 188, 368, 400, 408, 451n35, 465n23; as logic or counter-logic of metaphor, 198, 200; determinism in, 302–6, 320; God in, 368–9; in evolution, 198–200, 219; in literature, 146–7, 184–6; metaphoric behaviours of, 45, 198–200, 304, 306, 354, 368; religion, 408, 426; in tragedy, 325 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, 456n16 cells, 122–3, 230, 248, 285, 330; living or dead, 248; dormant, 248, 250; reliable copiers, 123–4; urban centre, 123; nucleus, 123, 125, 140, 195. See also dna centripetal and centrifugal, 446n10 Chalmers, David, 265 Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 24; What Makes Us Think? 23 Chaos Theory, 12–13, 439n12 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 343 chemistry, 3–4, 10–11, 27–8, 40, 90,

index 112, 119, 183, 353–4, 359, 386, 394, 425, 435; atoms, 96, 101–2, 111, 114, 123, 183, 199, 217, 285, 289, 375, 390, 431; atoms and words hanging together, 102–4; atomists, Greek, 26, 96, 101, 438n33; bonds, 132, 140, 357; by-products of, 114– 16; charge, 96–7, 101, 232; chemical reactions, 95, 103, 110–12, 114–19, 122, 137, 156, 174, 217, 223, 403; chemist as poet, 116–19; covalent bonds, 103, 105–8, 110, 127, 444n26; donating election, 444n27; efficiency, 114–16; electromagnetic tensions, 103–4, 107, 199, 217; electrons, 96–7, 102–6, 223, 285; heat, 111–12; hydrogen, 103–4, 113–14; ionic bonds, 97, 108–10, 444n27; metaphoric behaviours in, 4, 10–11, 17, 52, 89–120, 125, 137–8, 155–7, 241, 253, 299, 435, 446n12, 447n18; molecules, 101, 103–4, 111, 156, 411, 424; neutrons, 94, 101; nucleus, 99, 101, 105–7; observation in, 116; oxygen, 104, 113–14; pharmaceuticals, 117, 319, 445n32; protons, 96– 7, 101, 285; relation in, 119–20; stability, 110–11; strength of bonds, 112–13; synthesis, 114–16, 118, 199; valence, 102, 105, 110; water, 105, 113–14. See also metaphor as energy; synthesis Chomsky, Noam, 395 Christ, 75, 369–70, 388, 430–1, 433, 461n14; body of, 430 Churchland, Barbara, 232 Cicero, 71–2 circles, concentric: centre and circumference, 398; expanding, 346, 382; heart of, 397–8 Clarke, David, 456n16 Clegg, Brian, 426, 464n6 Cloak, F.T., 456n16 Cloud of Unknowing (Anonymous), 376–7 coding. See cognition; dna cognition, 217, 220, 242, 266, 286,

479 290, 326, 347, 358, 431; and computer systems, 232, 246, 252; architecture of cognition, 236–7; central meaner as seat of consciousness, 267, 276; coding, 246–7, 260; brain circuitry, 232–3, 243; brain chemistry, 305; brainwaves, 234; cascade patterns of, 116, 227, 234, 237, 253, 256, 270–2, 278–80, 347; clout, 271– 2; cognitive dissonance, 235, 364, 452n14; conscious thought, 269, 405, 426; early forms of, 230–4; experience sensors, 350; inner theatre, 348; looping mechanism, 270, 347; massive parallelism, 252; memory marker, 248, 289–90; metaphoric behaviours in, 220, 227, 229, 236, 348, 364; neural code, 240, 252, 256–9; pre-linguistic, 241; recommendation architecture, 235, 270–1, 323, 326, 347–9; visual and cognitive inputs, 242; spatial configurations, 252, 259. See also consciousness; human body (nerves); memory (metonym); neuron Cold War, the, 53 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14, 86, 218; Biographia Literaria, 81–2 Colossus (film), 395 colour, perception of, 247, 255–8, 280 communication, 8, 35–6, 47, 66, 98, 144, 240, 316; gaps in, 238, 305; in the brain, 230, 235, 363. See also neuron, interneurons, and neuronal network computers, 235, 256, 259, 267, 285, 294, 298, 352, 392; binary, 232, 252, 304; complex adaptive systems, 320; desktop, 304–5; super computer, 395 concrete/symbolic, 291, 293–4, 299– 300, 308–9, 369, 438n33 consciousness, 4–11, 14, 25, 27, 38, 43, 47, 82, 142, 180, 219, 224, 227, 240, 245–6, 252, 268–9, 285–6, 303, 305, 347, 350, 352, 356, 391, 409– 10, 431, 454n16; advent of, 218, 267; apocalypse in, 266; artistic, 306–7; beneficial, 261, 282–3; central meaner,

480 267, 276; clout in, 271–2, 305, 326; code, 256–9; communication between brain hemispheres, 363; consciousness of consciousness, 266, 392; distinct from other creatures, 320, 432; dualism of, 267; environment, 352; existential experience, 237, 267, 279; expanding, 114, 211, 283, 289–90, 345, 351–2, 432; externalized, 265, 279, 316, 362; fame in the brain, 269–70; fantasy echo, 270–2, 275, 278–80, 391–2; fiction, 281–2, 351, 432; fulfillment of Omega point, 432–3; heuristic, 269, 272, 279–80, 304, 306; 380-1; immaterial, 267; irreducible, 255; levels of, 454n15; likeness, 280, 365; in literature, 346; material, 267, 284; metaphoric behaviours in, 7, 11, 43, 62, 80, 82, 180, 266–8, 270–1, 278–82, 303, 362, 365, 389, 450n28; monism, 267; multiple-drafts theory of, 269, 276; spirit, 372; orchestra, 274–8; prognosis for, 255; qualia in, 255–7, 266; seamless lift, 219, 221; sense, 255; spirit, 90, 361, 362; subjective experience, 278– 80, 364; symbolic, 314–16; theory of, 265; thinking, 119, 236, 302, 307, 316, 378, 392, 430, 432; threshold of, 236; unicameral, 366; work of lexical metaphor, 365 Cook, Eleanor, 150–1; Against Coercion: Games Poets Play, 447n26 Corbett, Ronnie, 324 cosmology, 98–9, 358, 383, 401–2, 412, 432, 451n35; poem, 419–22; created world, 290, 314–15, 367; designed world, 314–15; fictive world, 323, 342, 350. See also literature Coward, Andrew, 235, 265, 347; Pattern Thinking, 234, 457n28 creator spiritus, 378 creature, types of: Darwinian, Gregorian, Popperian, Skinnerian, 262–4, 316; Darwinian creatures, 262, 406; Gregorian creatures, 263–4, 303, 316, 325, 341–2, 350, 352, 380, 406; Popperian creatures, 262–3; Skinnerian

index creature, 262, 341–2, 406. See also Aplysia Crichton, Michael: Jurassic Park, 346 culture, 34, 218, 285, 287, 309, 312, 328, 346, 352, 397; advent of, 238; artifact, 288, 295–6; product of consciousness, 352; inner theatre, 348; culturegens, 297, 326, 456n16. See also meme Damasio, Antonio: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 274–6 Daniel, Samuel: “A Defense of Rhyme,” 77 Dante, 119, 382–5; Beatrice, 384, 385; Divine Comedy, 384 Darwin, Charles, 20–1, 399, 450n27; Darwinian Structure of art, 338; Galapagos Islands, 192–3; Origin of Species, 190–2, 200, 203, 219; Social Darwinism, 193–4. See also evolution, natural selection Dawkins, Richard, 5, 21, 188; Climbing Mount Improbable, 204, 219; agency in evolution, 360, 406; environment, 401; evolution, 399, 402; God Delusion, The 359, 457n32; God-shaped gap, 368; meme, 297; metaphor, 440n1; proof of non-existence of God, 145, 360; science fundamentalism, 442n46; Selfish Gene, The 295; selfish genes, 285; soft liberalism, 318; Unweaving the Rainbow, 357–8 de Chardin, Teilhard, 11, 21, 411, 424; consciousness as telos of creation, 21; consolidation, 409; extravagant increase, 408; groping, 408–9; omega point, 148, 408–11, 424, 432–3; responsibility in evolution, 433; The Phenomenon of Man, 409, 460n5 deconstruction, 45, 170 de Man, Paul, 14 Demetrius, 71–2 Democritus, 96, 438n33 Denham, Sir John: “Cooper’s Hill,” 187 Denham, Robert, 17, 34

index Dennett, Daniel, 21, 278, 293, 297, 454n27, 460n8; allowing conditions, 405–8; bicameralism, 364–5; blind accident, 409; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 22– 3, 359, 361, 393, 460n12; central meaner, 267; clout, 251, 271, 305, 326; cognitive neuroscience, 22, 86, 235, 265, 268, 401, 411; complexity, 425; consciousness, 255, 267–8, 275– 6, 289, 304–6, 352, 464n11; creature types, 262–5, 303, 316, 352, 406 (see also creature, types of); Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 20, 182, 303, 396, 405–6, 408; de Chardin, 408–10; Eagleton, 460n12; echo chambers, 391; environment, 406–8, 410, 423; errors, 396; “escape the clutches,” 307; evolution, 184, 204–6, 208, 301–2, 304, 399, 405–8; fame in the brain, 269– 70; fantasy echo, 270, 272, 275–6, 327; freedom, 206, 284, 301–3, 309, 318; Freedom Evolves, 22, 204–5, 301–3, 456n23; Freud, 307–8; gaps, 304–5, 320; “givens,” 464n11; “godly power,” 301–2; homunculus in the brain, 267–8, 270, 276–7; hypothesis, 322; inner environments, 263, 326; Kinds of Minds, 147, 262, 406–7; literature, 264; memes, 297, 298, 300, 456n23; missing links, 203; move generators and testers, 347–8; multiple-drafts theory, 269; natural and social environments, 466n27; philosophy, 438n27; pre-conscious engine room, 305–7; principle of accumulation of design, 408–9, 421; religion, 5, 188, 359–61, 460n12; replication, 130; skyhook vs. crane, 219, 410; spells, good and bad, 361–2, 393–4; spirit, 205, 361; Sweet Dreams, 255, 267, 270, 274, 305, 360–1, 464n11, 464n12; symbolic thinking, 263–5; symbolic tools, 352; transition rules, 204–5; trial-and-error, 208–10 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 45; “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” 293 De Saussure, Ferdinand, 131–2

481 Descartes, René, 280, 404 design evolution. See evolution determinism. See evolution Deutsch, David; The Fabric of Reality, 97 Dickinson, Emily, 149, 266, 343; “Hope,” 389; “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –,” 57, 61–2 dinosaurs, 261, 282–3, 427 Dissanayake, Ellen; Homo Aesthicus: Where Art Comes From and Why, 322; What Is Art For? 322 dna (deoxyribose nucleic acid), 4, 8, 10–11, 27, 125, 130, 140, 149, 152, 156, 165, 172, 183, 192, 217, 285, 298, 346, 353–4, 398, 409, 431 (see also rna [ribonucleic acid]); amino acids, 127, 130, 137, 140, 143; anticodon, 138; coding, 125, 130, 138, 140, 143, 157, 178, 239, 246, 256, 316, 323; codons, 130–1, 133, 138, 143, 160–2; double helix, 127–8, 131, 133; gamete-cell chromosomes, 158–60; genes, 130–1, 136, 141, 143, 160–2, 179, 183, 192, 248, 286, 295, 297, 299, 318, 330, 337, 359, 386, 413; genetic engineering, 346; gene expression, 135–8; genetic codes, 281, 302; genetic variation, 194–5; human genome, 135, 192, 335, 406; hypothetical language, 149; imaginative fiction, 148–9; language, 125, 130–1, 133–8, 147; meiosis, 158–59, 195; metaphoric behaviours in, 4, 8, 11, 29, 121–52, 155–9, 162, 165–7, 169, 178; mitosis, 128; narrative, 195; nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, uracil, thymine), 127, 130, 136, 143, 160–2, 165–7; phenotypes, 135, 179, 262, 317, 335, 337; replication, 122– 5, 128, 138, 142, 157–60, 165–7, 171, 174, 178–9; selfish genes, 460n4; semantics, 126; semiotics, 125, 133; transcription, 139, 143 Donoghue, Denis; Metaphor, 55, 344; metaphor in the Eucharist, 369–70 Drummond, Henry; Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 460n5

482 Dyson, Freeman, 397, 426 Eagleton, Terry, 460n14; tragic humanism, 6, 318, scientists on religion, 22– 3, 362, 460n12 Edelmen, Leon, 265 ego, 307, 333, 390 Einstein, Albert, 91, 451n28 electrical charge, 94–7, 101–3, 110–11, 217, 223–4, 226, 229–30, 232–3, 255, 277 electricity: parallel circuit, 233; series circuit, 232–3 electrons, 10–11, 59, 87, 89, 94, 96–7, 101–12 elemental forces (Electromagnetic, Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear, and Gravitation), 94, 255 Eliot, T.S., 89, 338–40; as geneticist manqué, 339; “East Coker,” 376; “The Waste Land,” 333; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 338–9 Elizabeth II, Queen, 428–30 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 22, 89, 218 Enlightenment, the, 74–80; postEnlightenment, 83 environment, 196–7, 207, 221, 261, 286, 288, 293–4, 332, 338, 342, 346, 349–52, 398–9, 401–3, 413, 424, 426, 432; changing conditions of, 351, 411; complexity of, 425; container, 407, 410; health, 400; horizon, 398; meaning in evolution, 399–400; natural, 315, 434; nature of, 399; poem, 413–14; literature, 399; symbiotic relationship between species and, 399–400, 406–7, 428; total sum of conditions, 312; ultimate, 399; unfolding process, 399, 409. See also allowing conditions; indicator species Epic of Gilgamesh, 342 Escher, M.C.: Drawing Hands, 273 evolution, 3, 8, 11, 23, 25, 27–8, 119, 142, 357, 431; adaptations, 359; agency in, 203, 219, 401–6, 465n23; allowing conditions of, 213, 336, 351, 403, 405–6, 410–12, 420, 424,

index 426, 431; analogous variation, 191; of art, 322–3; beneficial differences, 191; brain, 4, 230–1, 235, 259, 267, 285, 290, 406; cause-and-effect in, 9, 11, 126, 183, 185–6, 188, 198–200, 219, 303, 319, 325, 328, 354, 400, 408, 426, 451n35, 465n23; of cognition, 326; of consciousness, 268, 286, 365; crane metaphor, 219, 410; creative agent, 197–8; culture, 295, 299, 317; of DNA, 156; design evolution, 117, 208, 263, 284, 302–3, 309, 313, 316, 318–9, 326, 337, 340, 350, 466n24; determinism, 204–6, 284, 301–3, 307, 451n35; double form of, 200; emergent, 6; environment in, 206, 399–400; evolutionary thinkers, 186, 188–9, 204, 213, 401; exaptation, 194, 238, 351; fitness, 309, 311– 12, 316, 465n23; fossils, 200–1, 343; gender relations in, 317; gene pool, 339, 341; genetic variation, 201, 212, 339; heuristic, 319, 323, 328, 427, 432; human culture, 177, 179, 285, 310; hypothesis, 194, 212–13, 319– 21, 396; indicator species in, 424; language, 143, 237–39; lift, 264, 311, 350; literature, 319, 328–55, 414–15; logic in, 183, 185–6, 188, 198–200, 203–6, 219, 304, 408; metaphor, 4, 70, 73, 90, 101, 155, 289, 354; metaphoric behaviours in, 9, 12–13, 117, 155, 171, 183, 196, 198, 200, 202–3, 206, 210, 218–19, 238, 330, 396, 399, 403, 420, 434; mind, 4, 16; mutation, see mutation; natural evolution, 117, 124, 284, 302, 309, 318, 320–1, 323, 328, 341, 350, 352, 395, 408, 426; natural selection, 190–6, 201, 204–5, 208, 210, 311, 318, 335, 352, 408, 426; omega point of, 408– 10; process, 4, 29, 119, 124, 155, 174, 177, 200–1, 206, 208, 219, 302, 319–20, 351, 396, 399, 427; relativity in, 415; religion, 359–62, 394; romance narrative, 209–12, 218, 311, 319, 326, 427; sifting, 193; skyhook

index metaphor, 219, 410; spirit, 426; story, 183–5, 189–90, 198, 201–3, 208–11, 213, 217–18, 352, 400; survival of fittest, 193, 281–3, 297, 324, 338; time, 183–6, 411, 424; towardswhich, 207–8; trial-and-error (see trial-and-error); variation, 136, 157– 8, 160, 179, 190–1, 194–5, 201, 212–13, 321, 336, 339, 399, 408–9 Fairie Queen, The, 211 faith, 358, 363, 394, 433; substance of hope, 389–90 Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury, 344 Feldman, Jerome, 259, 453n6; From Molecule to Metaphor, 252–3 fiction; falsehood, 395–6; fictional worlds, 207, 307, 395 Flanagan, Owen: mysterians, 267 fractal geometry, 12–13, 183 Frazer, Sir James, 337 freedom, 284, 300–2, 307, 310, 318, 417; conscious decision making, 301– 2; metaphoric, 416; metaphoric initiative, 303; unfreedom, 382 Freud, Sigmund, 178, 251–2, 280, 307–8, 361, 372, 452n14 Friedrich, Caspar David; Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, 67 Frodo (Baggins), 209, 211, 337, 344 Frost, Robert, 342; on purpose, 404 Frye, Northrop, 5, 12, 14, 21, 42, 328; apocalypse, 285, 289; Bible as secular text, 363; on Blake, 12, 370, 456n12; centripetal and centrifugal reading, 446n10; double vision, 315; evolution, 411; existential metaphor, 81, 192, 324, 386, 416–17, 419, 454n38; four levels of interpretation, 463n57; Four Variations, 218, 338; God and spirit, 368, 372–3; God as process, 375, 380; God as unifying perception, 393, 415; Great Code, The, 372–3; identity with vs. identity as, 51; implicit and explicit metaphor; on Job, 281–2; kook books, 17; language us-

483 ing us, 285; levels of language (see language, levels of); literary universe defined, 342; logic of linear argument, 452n14; love, 385, 387; metaphor, 5, 12, 17–18, 21, 33, 44, 50–1, 86, 91, 130, 144, 146, 163, 178, 182, 280–1, 315, 338, 363, 368, 370, 372–3, 393, 416–17, 428, 430; metaphoric counter-logic, 44, 50, 370, 440n40; metaphoric habit of thinking, 178, 391; myth and metaphor, 14, 21, 91, 218, 280, 363; romance, 209, 451n38; royal metaphor, 428–31, 447n22; spirit, definition of, 372–3; unified perception, 414–15; Vico, 86–7; words hanging together, 102; words in space and words in time, 182, 343; Words with Power, 218, 338, 387; world turning inside out, 289; writing style, 19–20; yhwh, definition of, 374 gaps, 8, 15–16, 23–4, 34–5, 44–5, 64, 120, 183, 217, 278, 301, 304, 323, 366, 368, 379, 382, 384, 391; between inputs and outputs, 229; body, 224–5, 305; brain, 236, 365, 372; carrying across, 74, 138, 220–1, 244, 391; cells, 123; chemistry, 100, 104; communication, 305; dna, 126, 134, 146; evolution, 200–3, 206, 210, 222–332; explanatory gap, 267; language, 126, 134, 146, 240, 244; metaphoric, 3, 8–9, 23–4, 44, 200–2, 206, 217, 227, 236, 244, 278, 292, 299, 304, 306, 366, 372, 434; missing link, 200, 236, 244; separating nature and culture, 218; synaptic gap, 227– 8, 292; thought, 244. See also neuron, synapse gender studies, 141, 445n30 genocide, 416 Germany, 173 Gibran, Kahlil: The Prophet, 343 Gill, Glen Robert: Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth, 459n6 Ginestier, Paul, 62

484 Gleick, James: Chaos, 12–13, 439n12 Gleiser, Marcelo, 377; The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning, 17; mass and charge, 96; paradoxes of quantum reality, 377; quantum measurement, 289, 381 Globe Theatre, the, 79 God, 148, 186, 318, 368–71, 373, 380, 401, 432, 451n28; above or superior to humanity, 217–18, 319, 460n12; all powerful, 374; bicameral mind, 363–6; Blake on, 80–1; conceptual language, 145; consciousness of, 266– 7, 392; creator spiritus, 91–3, 377– 81; creative acts, 378; debates on existence of, 5–6, 359–62; determinism, 205–6, 302, 318–19; divine plan, 285–6; “God’s Grandeur,” 345; god particle, 415; godly power, 301–2; God-shaped gap, 368–71; god-trick, 432; hallucination, 364–5; heurism, 8, 380; higher power, 345; identified with nature, 86–7, 218; “I am that I am,” 354, 373–5, 431; “in us,” 372; Job, 281–2; inference from existence of Bible, 443n6; Jesus as, 433; lawgiver and lawfinder, 405–6; metaphoric behaviours of, 8, 83, 87, 92, 266, 282, 354, 364–81, 393, 465n24; mind of, 266; Moses on Mt Nebo, 152; not is, nor is not, but may be, 376; overthrown by metaphor, 75; Paradise Lost, 187–8; poet as, 335; process accomplishing itself, 374–5; spirit, 366, 392; substitutive metaphor, 371–2; totality of nothingness, 368; transgression, 381; unifying perception, 393; unseen and all seeing, 5; verb, 369, 374; via negativa 375–7; watchmaker, 99, 267, 341, 372, 380–1, 451n35; working in hypothesis, 380; Yahweh, 373–4 Golden Rule, the, 417 Gombrich, E.H., 61 Gosson, Stephen, 76, 86; School of Abuse, 75

index Gould, Stephen Jay 194, 203. See also evolution (exaptation) Greene, Brian; The Elegant Universe, 97, 357 Gregory, Richard, 263. See also creature, types of Gurdjieff, G.I., 17 haiku, 329, 335 Hamer, Dean, 425: The God Gene, 359–60 Harris, Sam, 303–4, 421, 442n46; Free Will, 167, 456n26 Harrison, Edward: Masks of the Universe, 377 Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling), 211, 451n39 Hartcliffe, John, 75 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 210 Hebb, D.O., 248 Heaney, Seamus: “Digging,” 114–15 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 14, 76, 146, 322 Heidegger, Martin, 119, 207; Being, 422–3; beings or essants, 422–3; “dwell poetically,” 222; towards which, 207–8, 407, 423, 431 Hein, Piet, 396 Heisenberg, Werner, 25–6, 153, 288–9, 377, 381; Physics and Philosophy, 50; “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics,” 289; Uncertainty Principle, 25–6, 58–9, 288, 306, 377, 392, 462n49 Herakleitos, 20, 41, 180 Herbert, George: “Prayer,” 98–100, 149 hermeneutics, 28, 71–2, 412, 464n82 Hester, Marcus: The Meaning of Poetic Metaphor, 59 Hester (Prynne), 210 heurism (heuristic), 332, 334, 432; assumptions, 186, 323, 334, 413; God’s thinking, 380; human being as, 213, 319–20, 432; hypothesis as, 328; illusions, 396, 433; process, 8; metaphor, 16, 178. See also evolution, heuristic

index Higgs Boson or God Particle, 403, 415 Hill, Geoffrey, 321, 456n17 Hitchens, Christopher, 5; God Is Not Great, 359 Hitler, Adolf, 415, 417–18, 449n19 Hochberg, Julian and Ulric Neisser, 61 Hoffmann, Roald, 7; chemical syntheses, 114–18; “dualities that enliven,” 120; The Same and Not the Same, 104 Hofstadter, Douglas, 38, 274 Holland, John: “Complex Adaptive Systems,” 320 Hollander, John: Melodious Guile, 92; The Figure of Echo, 271 Homer, 46, 70, 209, 313–15, 364, 372, 441n5; Odyssey, 75, 131 homo sapiens, 9, 27, 117, 201, 209, 350, 461n20 hope, 9, 180, 189–90, 210–11, 311, 325, 361, 384, 389–91, 394 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 345–6; “God’s Grandeur,” 345–6 Horace, 72 Howard, Richard, 459n3 Huckleberry Finn (character), 126, 209, 337, 344–5 human being, 16, 218, 222, 431; advent of, 219; conscious, 261, 279, 302, 427; evolutionary hero, 209; genome, 346; good or bad idea, 427– 8; heuristic, 213, 319, 320, 432; metaphor, 413–14; misfit metaphor, 413 human body, the, 330, 334, 385; environment, 413; fitness, 334, 413 humanities, 21–2, 24–5, 54, 61–3, 298, 311, 332, 394–5, 463–4n79 Hume, David, 368–9; on cause-and-effect, 199–200 Huxley, Aldous, 456n16 hypothesis, 60, 93, 86, 93, 116–17, 119–20, 140, 173, 319, 350, 366–7, 394, 399; adaptations, 319; antonym of necessity, 147; apotheosis of, 353; consciousness as, 280; criminal, 175– 7; Darwinian structure of art, 338;

485 design, 212, 265, 291, 316, 326, 337; die in our stead, 147, 263, 325–6, 380, 458n16; dna executed as, 148; evolution, 194, 212–13, 319–21, 326, 328, 396, 427; how actualized, 147– 9; human being as, 93–4, 210, 212, 432; Jesus, 433; learning tool, 13–14, 178–9; literature, 147–9, 309, 319– 29, 337, 353, 418, 420; move generators, 347; mutations, 194–5; sense organs as, 222; taking place, 147–52; survival enhancing, 356; “Let there be light,” 92, 148, 378, 380; “what if,” 319, 322, 329 I, 306, 389. See also self id, 307 identity, 217, 222–3, 252, 259, 279, 330, 344, 352, 388, 403, 418, 428; etymology, 454n39; existential, 385, 387, 426; figures of identity, 431; identity as and identity with, 51, 389, 412, 417; “I am that,” 417; love, 384–9; quest for, 209–11 ideology, 286, 296, 300, 359, 395–6, 445n32, 456n22, 456n23; among institutions, 47, 53–4, 358, 360; in reading practice, 71, 83, 115, 172, 298, 310, 349 Iliadic man, 364 illusion, 68, 106, 260–1, 280–1, 304, 306, 395–6, 404, 423, 432–3; as heuristic, 433 imagination, 8–9, 77–9, 179–80, 199, 326, 347, 353, 379, 390, 394, 439n19, 458n16; de-creative, 288; form, 391; more real, 456n12; primary and secondary, 81–2; theatre of, 349; poet’s, 336, 352; nature’s, 212; reason/imagination binary, 70, 80, 210, 367 imitation. See mimesis inoculation, 418–19 intelligence, 14, 356, 358, 384, 400, 405; higher, 219, 263, 352, intentionality, 358; intentional agents, 466n24; meaning, 358

486 interaction theory. See metaphor interdisciplinary studies, 22–8, 61; biochemical, 139; chemistry and spirit, 357–9; evolution of language, 237; humanistic and scientific, 104, 125, 132, 178, 311, 361, 395, 399; nature and metaphor interpenetrate, 398; religion and science, 90–1, 184–5, 363, 401–2, 408; science and spiritual mind, 430; sociology and anthropology, 360 interpenetration. See metaphor Jacob, François; The Logic of Life, 89 Jacobson, Roman; Language in Literature, 220 Jaisson, Pierre, 317 James, Henry, 197, 235 James, William, 21; organic states of mind, 425; Varieties of Religious Experience, 361 Jameson, Fredric, 333, 445n32; The Political Unconscious, 76, 115 Jankélévich, Vladimir: La Mort, 454n23 Jastrow, Joesph: duck-rabbit drawing, 59–61, 291, 324, 369, 428, 430–1 Jaynes, Julian, 4, 6–7, 14, 21, 86, 261, 439n14; The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 4, 7, 363–6 Jewry, European, 173, 415–18 Johnson, Mark. See Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson Joseph Andrews (Henry Fielding), 451n39 Joyce, James, 242 Jung, Carl, 337 Kandel, Eric, 228, 239, 253, 256, 265; In Search of Memory, 229, 248–9 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 119–20, 124, 438n27, 450n22; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 439n19; epistemology, 291–2; poets, 367; spirit, 368, 461n25; synthesis, 199–200, 292, 369, 450n22 Kearney, Richard: metaphorology, 376–7; The God that May Be, 376

index Keats, John: Letters, 85, 396; on negative capability, 396; “To Autumn,” 163–4 Kempis, Thomas à, 319 Kenner, Hugh: on the Eucharist, 370 Kilmer, Joyce, 329 Kingwell, Mark, 300; Practical Judgments, 296 Krauss, Lawrence: A Universe from Nothing, 379, 443n18 Kuhn, Thomas, 7, 86; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 178, 186, 375, 415 Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, 14, 125, 172–3, 242, 299; “argument is war,” 47–8, 113, 173, 299; “metaphoric vertical axis,” 218; Metaphors We Live By, 39, 297, 395; More Than Cool Reason, 78; Supreme Court, 55 language, 237–44, 269, 285, 307, 403; advent of, 237–9; Braille, 258; codes for change, 177–8; dna, 125–6, 133– 8, 149; evolving, 177–8; Freudian slips, 178; intransitive, 353; memes, 297, 299; metaphor in, 9, 11, 13; relation to neurons, 239–41; rules, 178; sentences, 135–8; speech act, 144, 322; syntax, 143, 280; transitive, 352, 387; using us, 285; where being reaches towards itself, 422–3; words, 133–4, 239, 242–4; words holding together, 102 language, levels of, 437n22; conceptual, 18, 87, 144–5, 180; descriptive, 68, 87, 144–6, 239, 353, 387; kerygmatic, 447n22; metaphoric, 76, 86–7, 144, 146–7; rhetorical, 71, 74, 79–80, 144–6, 148, 182, 239, 281, 395, 418, 452n14 language moods, 324; imperative, 60, 92–4, 145, 147–8, 366; jussive, 92–4, 380; optative, 92–4 Larkin, Philip, 132, 184; “Church Going,” 401–3 Leavis, F.R., 460n14 Lehrer, Jonah” Proust Was a Neuroscientist, 250

index let, 380, 458n22; Bible, 92–3; mathematics, 93, 378 Levin, Samuel: conceiving and conceiving of, 445n37, 449n22; Metaphoric Worlds, 175 Levine, Joseph: Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness, 267 Lewontin, Richard, 203 lift, 212, 238, 241, 311–14, 318, 350, 410; fitness, 312 literature, 173, 309, 319, 321, 326, 397; allusions, 343–6, 347; archetypes, 337–8, 347; chemistry, 95; classical, 87; cosmology, 99, 148, 264, 337; echo in, 271, 347; environment, 339; evolutionary theory of, 319, 327–55, 399, 414; exemplary nature, 321–3; fitness in relation to, 341–2, 346, 465n23; getting better, 211, 339–40; hypothetical divide, 173; idealized form, 338–9; ideology in, 71, 76, 172; inner environment, 326; intertextual relations, 343–6; intransitive verb, 353; memory as, 347; modernism, 459n3; non-imperative, 147, 322–3; prophetic, 362; pseudo-religion, 460n14; relationship between works, 329; religion, 393–4, self-conscious, 346–7; tradition in, 338–40; tragedy, 309, 325–7; types, 337–8; Utopian, 70; writers, 340–1. See also narrative Locke, John: Essay concerning Human Understanding, 79–80 logic, 16, 42–5, 64, 127, 146, 185–6, 242, 306, 328, 373; argument, 452n14; cause-and-effect reasoning, 18, 44–5, 199–200, 204, 450n28 logos, 92, 373 Longinus, 73, 82 Lord of the Rings 211, 231 love, 385–8, 418, 426–7, 460n12 Lowell, Robert, 98, 309 Lucretius, 96 Luhrmann, Baz: Moulin Rouge (movie), 459n17 Lumsden, Charles, 238; Genes, Mind, and Culture, 456n16 Matrix, The (movie), 257

487 McKay, Don, 180, 440n1 McLuhan, Marshall, 143, 294 Major Barbara (Bernard Shaw), 348 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 27 Marcus, Gary, 265 Marxism, 141, 390, 396, 460n12 material world, 29, 292, 301–2, 390, 435; creation of, 92; hope in, 390; hypothesis, 380; laws hardwired, 303; metaphoric behaviours in, 27, 29, 75, 284, 286, 294, 369, 435; spiritualized, 369–71; symbolic and concrete, 291, 294, 299–300, 308–9, 354, 369 materialist, 255–7, 266, 403–4, 433 matter and anti-matter, 3, 379, 387, 394; as spirit, 392; dark matter, 404 Mearns, Hughes: “Antigonish,” 371 Melville, Herman, 344; Moby Dick, 121, 340 meme, 8, 295, 303, 305, 326, 395; deterministic, 300–5; false story, 298; invasive meme, 457n26; meditation meme, 298; memetics, 295; “meme” meme, 295; quasi-viral, 296; religion, 300; symbolic and concrete, 300; untruthful metaphors, 299; theorists, 296, 298, 310, 338 memory, 245–7, 259, 263, 289, 305, 347, 349; alive, 250; clout, 251, 271; depth, 252, 254; differentation, 259– 60; dormant, 254; layered, 254; mental codes, 323; pathway, 249–50; sequential unfolding, 250, 253; strength of, 248–51, 256; time, 249–50 Mendel, Gregor, 183, 192 Merrill, James; “The Broken Home,” 146; The Changing Light at Sandover, 382–4; depthless dazzle, 453n9; no accident, 382; “Processional,” 253–4 metaphor: alchemy, 74–5; “as if” and “as though” thinking, 53, 105–6, 113, 235, 291, 322–4, 329, 354, 395; being as, 8, 280; both/and, 64, 239; break-and-make, 61, 82, 118, 170, 182, 237, 299, 434; carrying across, 40, 74, 138, 220–1, 223, 244, 391; catachresis, 13, 169–71, 175, 179;

488 classical antiquity, 70–3; copying, 124, 128–9, 179, 295–6, 316, 329; counter-logic, 43–5, 49–50, 175, 198, 204, 301, 306, 324, 375; creation ex nihilo, 94; creation or discovery, 56– 61, 116, 165–9; creative, 82, 92, 94, 117, 282, 336, 356, 377–8, 434; criminal, 172–7, 415, 448n15; dangerous, 13–14, 39, 47, 52–3, 71, 73– 6, 79–80, 115–16, 167, 297, 299, 413, 418; dead metaphor, 112–13, 129, 178, 299, 376; depth, 251, 254; deviance, 71, 86, 155, 165, 169, 173; deviation, 150, 171, 179–80, 195; diaphor, 51; dissociative, 418; distinct from symbol, 108; efficiency of, 68, 114–16, 445n30; energy, 32, 35, 64– 5, 95–7, 198, 221, 223–4, 227, 229, 304, 424; epiphor, 51; error, 141, 153–81, 194, 396; ethics of, 69, 175, 413, 416, 427–8; etymology, 16, 34– 5, 74, 109, 138, 159; excretion, 418– 19; existential (see Frye); expanding, 94–5, 381, 435; explicit, 131–2; frame and focus theory, 163, 448n8; identity and difference, 95, 101, 104, 107, 116, 191, 200, 202, 217, 256, 279, 330, 387–8, 403; illogical, 43–4, 50; implicit, 126, 131–2, 135, 137; interaction, 39–40, 42, 49–51, 53, 104–8, 112, 114, 127, 163, 175–6, 191, 220, 279, 312, 330, 366, 378, 444n26, 454n38; interactive indeterminacy, 306 (see also Heisenberg, Uncertainty Principle); interpenetration, 35, 49, 62, 82, 230, 260, 333, 338, 347, 398, 428, 429; is and is not, 227, 266, 280, 292, 299, 306, 310, 315, 324, 366, 369, 378, 395, 420; “like” perfection, 154; lexical metaphor, 365; malignant, 172–5; mechanism, 28–9, 116; meme, 129, 295–301, 310; metaphor proper, 70, 90, 120, 146, 155, 159–60, 191–2, 241, 303, 330, 428, 431; missing link, 8, 21, 64–5, 87, 126, 183–4, 200–4, 224, 236, 304, 359; multiple interpre-

index tation, 333–4; myth and, 21, 184, 218, 280, 363–4; negative capability, 85, 396; ontology, 40, 204, 372; ornament, 68, 77; paradox, 3, 26–8, 45, 63, 154, 175, 180, 200, 205, 222, 244, 279, 324, 366, 369, 371, 374–5, 377, 428, 431, 450n28; play, 71, 73, 76–7, 79, 154, 178, 182, 332, 353, 381; property of language, 3, 7, 11, 14, 237–44; process, 4, 9, 117, 132– 3, 138, 159–60, 167, 170, 177, 239, 241, 282, 358, 435; relativity, 207, 309, 411–15, 419; transgressive, 49, 52, 73, 118, 175–7, 179, 218, 299, 381–2; simile, 42–5, 72, 153–4, 324, 370, 386–7; sublime, 73–4; substitution or assimilation, 36–7, 42, 46–8, 50–2, 79, 92, 104, 108–10, 124, 150, 162, 169, 220, 330, 366, 371, 444n26, 444n27; radical, 41–4, 75, 83, 370, 416–18, 454n38; relative, 315–19, 428–31; royal (see Frye); seeing as, 59, 78, 258, 291, 370; spatial dimension, 34–6, 64; surviving beyond poems, 414; surviving in poems, 330–4, 413–14; tenor, 46, 48–9, 55, 99, 108, 220, 227, 271, 344, 417, 424; thinking, 3–4 , 36–9, 60, 66, 68, 70, 77, 79, 117–18, 129, 165, 178, 189, 199, 227, 261, 291–2, 301, 309, 315, 330, 348, 350, 356, 365, 371, 373, 376, 379, 391, 393, 415, 418; transition rules, 204–5; truth, 14, 16, 19, 58, 66, 71, 75–8, 86, 94, 146, 175, 299–300, 323, 359, 362, 376, 393, 441n5; unity, 27, 63–5, 145, 330, 332–4, 393, 413–15, 417, 419– 20, 426; vehicle, 46, 48–9, 55, 99, 108, 220, 227, 330, 344, 417, 424 metaphoric initiative, 3–5, 18, 70, 118, 121, 309, 434; bad idea, 432; cause, 126, 353–4; chemistry, 120, 155; consciousness, 87, 268, 278–9, 303, 362, 450n22; continuum, 448n3; code, 156, 260; definition, 28–30, 104, 222, 253, 304, 369, 378, 397–9, 424; dna, 155; double helix, 11; environ-

index ment for, 352–3; evolution, 126, 183, 191, 217, 236–8, 279, 308, 323, 423; lift, 309–10; material world, 27, 217, 284, 358–9; memes, 296, 299; missing link, 238–9, 244; mutation, 155– 6; nerve endings, 222; origin, 89–91; royal metaphor, 431; spirit, 282, 358– 9, 378, 385; strange attractor, 12–13 metaphorology. See Kearney, Richard metonym, 8, 17–18, 78, 424–5, 466n26; etymology, 47; metonymic nerves, 223, 278; metonymic thinking, 287; put for, 140, 150, 155, 220– 2, 229, 239–42, 249, 256, 261, 285– 6, 289, 323, 412; symbolic and concrete, 291; tool, 263–4 metonymy, 47, 155, 220, 424 Middle East crisis, the, 53 Midgley, Mary: Science and Poetry, 295–6 Milton, John, 346; Paradise Lost, 187– 90, 205, 345, 382, 390–1 mimesis, 71, 197, 295–6, 316, 321 missing link. See metaphor monarchy; and royal metaphor, 429– 30, the King’s two bodies, 430 money, 54–6 Monty Python: The Life of Brian, 457n7 Moore, Marianne, 459n3; “No Swan So Fine,” 118 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 342 Murray, H.A., 456n16 music, 272, 274–8, 301, 361; experience of consciousness, 272, 277–8; symphony, 274–8 mutation, 8, 153–81, 183, 207, 217, 427, 431, 434; anomalous, 413; cancer, 171–4; catachresis, 13, 169–71, 175, 179; chemistry, 10; criminality, 175–7; culture, 295; dangerous, 179; evolution, 193–7, 205, 212–13, 294– 5, 335, 413, 424; frameshift, 162–5; genetic, 165, 181; human being as, 413, 425; language, 177–8; metamorphosis, 177, 179; metaphoric behaviours in, 153–71, 179–80; meme, 299;

489 point, 161–2; silent, 161–2, 173; substitution, 161–3 myth, 14, 21, 171, 189, 218, 310, 343, 362–3; ball of string, 12, 144, 448n3; creation myth, 92, 186, 370, 377, 379–80, 465n24; etiological, 458n8; what isn’t so, 14, 149, 184–5, 280, 455n41 Naddaff, Romano, 441n3 Nagel, Thomas, 255; “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” 280 narrative: authority of, 184–6; causeand-effect logic of, 183, 188; comedy, 326; evolutionary, 9, 25, 183–7, 189, 195, 197–8, 201–3, 206, 209, 211, 218, 294, 353, 400; romance, 209– 12, 218, 310–11, 319, 326, 338; story, 290–1, 394, 463–4n79; time in, 185-6; tragedy, 309, 325–7 natural selection. See evolution nature: allowance, 404–5; builder of tools, 285; change in, 156; creative process in, 336; culture, 239, 287, 316–18, 352, 381; descent into, 218– 19; environment, 197, 210, 312, 399; hypothesis, 149, 212–13, 320, 339; interpenetration, 397–8; laws, 119, 121, 405; metonymy in, 220, 222–3, 289; poem 137, 335, 420; product of consciousness, 352; reproduction, 160; romanticism, 218–19; spirits in, 6, 83, 281; ungiven given, 400; unconscious, 148, 335–6; used as example, 194; vehicle, 115; words in, 73–4 nerves, 221, 223–4, 227, 229, 243, 268, 273, 285, 348; nervous system, 229, 323; response to external inputs, 228–30, 242, 274–8 neurons, 4, 8, 110, 112, 127, 230–2, 234, 237, 239, 242–5, 255–6, 266, 273, 277, 290, 330; axons, 223, 230, 249, 256, 277; cell, 248–50; dendrites, 223, 253, 277; firing, 234, 242–3, 253, 256, 258, 271–2; interneurons, 228–32, 240–1, 268, 290; network, 225–6, 234, 241, 245–9,

490 270–1, 274, 278–9, 303, 347, 359, 388, 392; neurotransmitters, 224, 227; synapse, 36, 116, 141, 223–32, 239, 244–5, 247–9, 252, 268–9, 277– 8, 286, 292, 302, 323, 330, 347, 352, 372, 390, 392 New Criticism, 332, 337, 340 New Historicism, 332–3 Newton, Sir Isaac, 113, 119, 352 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 86, 87; “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” 83–4 Norton, Thomas, 79; Ordinal of Alchemy, 74 Nuland, Sherwin, 175; How We Die, 172 Obama, Barack, 337 Odysseus, 344, 434 O’Leary, Denyse: The Spiritual Brain, 359 omega point, 409–10 ouroboros, 12, 27, 292, 352 Ovid, 415; Metamorphosis, 174, 179, 292 paradox, 3–4, 27–8, 34–6, 41, 45, 175, 180, 200, 204–5, 222, 371, 373, 375, 386, 388, 404, 431; being and not being, 274; divine, 376; is and is not, 366, 369, 375; quantum reality, 377; symbolic and concrete, 290–2; unity, 63–4; with, 51, 395 Paulo, John Allen: Irreligion, 360 Peking Man, 408 Petrarch, Francesco, 338 philosophy, 22, 33, 66, 70, 140, 180, 240, 255, 266; neuroscience, 438n27; reductionist, 357–9 physics, 4, 7, 289, 312, 399, 424; classical, 96; error in, 153; everything related to everything else, 392; hidden, 26–7; irreducibility in, 255; laws, 204–5, 357–8; material and non-material at once, 10; micro and macro domains, 50; Newtonian, 352; physicists, 22, 38, 358, 375, 377, 379, 399,

index 415; reductionist view, 357–9; spirit in, 377–9; story, 91; symbols in, 50; theoretical, 396. See also Gleiser, Marcelo; Heisenberg, Werner; Kuhn, Thomas; quantum physics Pinker, Steven, 19, 21, 235, 243, 265, 286, 354; abstract thinking, 290; art, 14–17, 28–9, 349, 351, 354; “associationist psychology,” 200; Better Angels of Our Nature, 310; cause-andeffect, 198–9, 204; combinatorial algorithms, 7, 11, 15–16, 33, 242, 306, 386, 431; cognitive complexity, 281, 424; gender relations, 457n6; How the Mind Works, 15, 61, 317, 457n6; language, 241–3; Language Instinct, The, 238; “mercurial mappings,” 26, 71, 86; metaphor, 14–19, 44, 80, 290; “oomph,” 185; reality and paradox, 204, 450n28; Stuff of Thought, 14– 15, 144, 241; “woolly symbolism,” 1, 17, 26, 86 Plato, 74, 85; The Republic X, 70–1 Pliny, 71 poem: accumulation of discovered novelties, 421; allowing conditions, 95, 336, 413, 423; anything goes, 412, 416; cosmology, 98–9, 208, 413; crime scene, 331–2, 414; disunity, 333; echo, 345; ecosystem, 427; environment, 151, 336, 352; errors in, 154; evolution, 414–15; fitness, 338, 342–3, 413, 465n23; genes, 337; healthy, 172; human body as, 334; hypothesis, 97–8, 147, 178, 320, 323–4; ineffectiveness in history, 327; means and end, 434; metaphoric relation, 99, 136–7, 337, 352, 380–1, 392, 398, 415, 419, 434; metaphors surviving in, 414; metonym, 287–8; mutation upon conventional thought, 178–9; planet as, 427; “towards which,” 207–8; unified perception, 414–17; unity, 331–4, 417; universe as, 392, 419–22 poet: agency of, 207, 334–6, 338, 367, 413, 421, 434, 465n23; cannot be re-

index futed, 146, 322, 342; censorship of, 71; chemists, 113, 116–19; Canadian, 343; creative power, 420–1, 434; fading coal, 335; free association, 212; goes beyond nature, 367; Kant on, 367; “nothing affirmeth,” 321, 393; romantic, 82; social world, 420–1. See also literature; poem; poetry poetry: charms of, 146; chemistry, 116– 17; defense of, 76–7, 82–3; “fading coal,” 335–6; fictional world, 207; logic of its own, 81; “money is a kind of,” 55–6; conscious design, 421; intentional fallacy, 465n23; orator’s training, 72; graceful errors in, 155; impetus to think more, 439n19; praising in, 328; Prospect Poetry, 187–90; science, 81; sonnets, 338; synthesis, 148; teaching of, 68; “what if” and “as though,” 322 Pollack, Robert, 139, 145, 447n28; Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA , 1, 125 Pope, Alexander, 119, 124, 128–9; “this long disease, my life,” 108–9, 124, 128–9, 444n27 Popper, Karl, 222, 324–5 primary concern, 344 progress, 218, 310–11; technological, 173–4 protons. See chemistry Proust, Marcel, 250 Puttenham, George: “The Art of English Poesie,” 77 qualia. See consciousness quantum physics, 41, 91, 113, 377, 381, 412, 451n28, 455n5 quantum uncertainty. See Heisenberg (Uncertainty Principle) Quintilian, 71–2 Quixote, Don, 147 reading, in genetics, 138, 141; as synthesizing process, 142–4 reason, 77, 180, 373, 394, age of, 87, 198; Blake, 81; cause-and-effect rea-

491 soning, 18, 44–5, 199–200, 204, 450n28; Kant, 199, 367, 439n19; motivum, 36; reason/imagination binary, 70, 80, 210, 367; romantics, 82, 335, 396; soul, 80; “thinking more,” 179–80. See also logos Red-Crosse Knight, 344 relation, 7, 10, 27–9, 38–43, 92, 97, 107, 156, 192, 237, 294, 352, 388, 424, 431–2; “in the beginning was,” 119–20, 388; spatial, 34–6, 94–5, 132, 387. See also metaphor religion, 5–6, 218, 300–1, 310, 361–2, 371, 386, 396; animism, 292; apophatic theology, 375–7; divine agent, 186; fiction, 393–4; social agent, 359; Calvinism, 205; Christian apologists, 203, 205; Christians/ Christianity, 90–1, 186, 205, 369, 379, 383, 433, 460n12, 461n14; churches, 360, 401–2; Communion, 369; creationists, 186; determinism, 204–6; Eastern, 298; ideology, 312, 322, 359–60; Judeo-Christian, 281–2, 361–3, 372–3; literature and, 393; predestination, 205; protestant, 5, 451n31; religious studies, 343; religious thinkers, 79, 358–9, 401–3, 405; science and, 17, 22, 74, 85–7, 90–1, 184, 203, 205–6, 302, 359–63, 375, 393, 401–3, 425–6, 430, 460n5; secular thinkers, 358, 363, 401, 404, 408, 425, 451n31. See also Bible; God; spirit replication, 8, 122–5, 128, 138, 157–9, 165–7, 170, 329–30, 337, 338, 386, 446n4, 448n9; culture, 328; literature, 329–30, 337–9, 346; memes, 296–7, 299 reproduction, 122, 124, 158–60, 164 Richards, I.A., 14, 42, 46, 51, 99, 162, 178, 448n8 Richerson, Peter, 238, 456n16 Ricoeur, Paul, 14, 21, 23, 87, 94, 118, 163, 169, 178, 191, 230, 394; iconicity, 59; pertinence and impertinence, 49–50, 52, 118, 160, 163, 169–71,

492 174–6, 191, 196, 279–80, 366, 381– 3, 386, 415, 448n8; second naiveté, 396, 464n82; Rule of Metaphor, The, 29, 34, 49, 56, 59–60, 264; Time and Narrative, 185; What Makes Us Think?, 23; Wittgenstein, 60. See also thinking more Rilke, Rainer Maria: “Orpheus and Euridyce,” 397 Rimbaud, Arthur, 279 rna (ribonucleic acid), 4, 8, 10–11, 27, 125, 138, 160, 217, 285; interacting with dna, 138, 141–4; messenger rna (mrna), 138, 141–4, 195; transfer rna (trna), 138, 141–4 Robinson, Marilynne, 182 romance. See narrative Romantic poets, 82 Rosenbaum, Ron, 306–7, 449n19; Explaining Hitler: “Art of Evil,” 465n22 Rosenberg, Alex: The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, 463n79 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; On the Social Contract, 310 Rue, Loyal; By the Grace of Guile, 281 Rundle, Bede, 443n18 Ruskin, John, 440n36 Said, Edward: Orientalism, 53 St Augustine: Confessions, 373 Sartre, Jean-Paul: on hell, 371 Saturday Night Live “Subway Guitarist,” 322 Schroeder, Gerald: Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and The Bible, 91; The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom, 91, 359, 462n49 science, 5–7, 22, 33, 38, 41, 46, 85–8, 203–4, 255, 285, 300, 375, 399, 408, 425–6, 460n12; alchemy, 74–5; art and, 23–5, 38, 54, 81–3; cultural evolution, 299; discoveries, 352, 358; Enlightenment principles of, 80; humanities and, 24–5, 38, 54, 62–3, 295–6,

index 298, 311, 395; hypothesis in, 178, 319–21, 329, 435; language in, 66, 87; metaphoric behaviours in, 7–9, 13–15, 87–8, 187, 200, 204, 375; play in, 16; pseudo–argument in, 18; Ptolemaic universe, 342; scientism, 463n79; sum of wisdom, 189; symbols in, 50; theory of everything or unifying theory, 63. See also biology; chemistry; cognition; evolution; physics self, 267–8, 279, 282, 298, 304–7, 309, 389, 392, 418; centre of narrative gravity, 305 semantics, 34, 56, 103, 378 semiotics, 34, 56, 103, 133, 142–4, 456n23 sensa. See consciousness Seuss, Dr: Horton Hears a Who, 251 sex: pleasure, 351; reproduction, 157– 60 Shakespeare, William, 77–9, 86, 198, 341–2; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 78; Hamlet, 76, 342, 349, 351; Henry V, 79; King John, 33; King Lear, 78; “Sonnet,” 136–7; The Tempest, 78 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 346 Shelley, Percy B., 14, 206; “Defense of Poetry,” 82–3, 335–6 Shyamalan, M. Night: The Sixth Sense, 185 Sidney, Philip: Defence of Poesie, 76–7, 86, 170, 321, 393 Simplicius, 96 Skinner, B.F., 262 Social Darwinism, 193–4 society, 173–4, 351, 396; brain as, 269, 347; cells as, 123, 445n1; design evolution in, 319, 321, 340; fitness in, 309–10; malfeasance, 172, 175–7; natural evolution in, 350; poem as, 420; theatre in, 326–7 soul, 80, 389, 434; pre-romantic concept of, 86. See also spirit space (dimension), 8, 34–6, 56–7, 93– 5, 132, 183, 208, 256, 285, 350, 387, 392, 403

index Sparke, Peter, 89, 103 spells, 359–62, 393–4 Spencer, Herbert: “survival of the fittest,”193 Spender, Stephen, 21 Spenser, Edmund. See Fairie Queen, The spirit: “I am that I am,” 373; consciousness, 87, 90, 282, 356–7, 359, 362; material world, 90, 292, 357–9, 363, 392, 425–6, 435; metaphoric behaviours in, 5–6, 25, 90, 359, 362, 366–73, 376–7, 380, 434; of God, 378, 380; pneumatikos, 372–3; relation to science, 8, 184, 223, 227, 357–62, 430; religion, 361–2, 393; wonder, 357–8. See also religion statistics and probabilities, 451n31 Stevens, Wallace, 58, 65, 98, 118, 133, 170–1, 336, 382, 386; “Anecdote of the Jar,” 287–9; “Auroras of Autumn,” 466n30; decreation, 288; final belief in a fiction, 85, 307, 394, 396; “money is a kind of poetry,” 55; “Motive of Metaphor, The,” 35; “Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain, The,” 149–52; “Snow Man, The,” 64; supreme fictions, 396; “World as Meditation, The,” 313–15 Stickney, Trumble, 342 Strand, Mark, 182, 190 story. See narrative string theory, 97, 101, 199 subject/object split, 33, 265, 284, 370, 440n40, 455n5 superego, 372 Superman, 344 Supreme Court, US: Buckley vs Valeo, 55; Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, 54–6 Swanson, Carl, 456n16 Swift, Jonathan, 66; Gulliver’s Travels 139–40, 240 symbolic thinking, 8, 12, 206, 210, 238, 294, 349, 394 symbols, 14, 16, 217, 266, 289–90, 292–4, 328, 367; conscious design,

493 147, 165, 265, 310, 312–16, 320, 324–5, 350, 380; conscious tool, 264–5, 284–5, 300, 316, 352, 373; consciousness, 111, 218, 271, 284–5, 315; evolution, 25, 218, 349, 420; fictive, 351–4, 356–7, 418–20; genes, 125, 144, 294–300; language as, 46, 139–40, 142–3, 237–44; meme as, 293, 295–301, 326; metaphor as distinct from, 108; metonym, 140, 220, 236, 240, 263, 286, 288–9, 290–1, 306; sciences, 50; semiotics, 125–6; symbolic and concrete, 239, 264–5, 290–1, 293–4, 306, 308–9, 369; unity in literature, 334, 337 synapse. See neuron synecdoche, 155, 312, 333, 424–5, 428, 466n26 synthesis, 199–200, 292, 369 Taylor, C.C.W., 96 theatre, 326, 349–51; architectural metaphor, 79, 320, 346, 348–9 Theophrastus, 72 thinking more, 50, 74, 175, 222, 375, 412, 423, 439n19; Big Bang, 94; echo, 271, hypothesis, 220, 366, 394– 5; interneurons, 229–30; literature, 341–2; symbolic thinking, 316; mutations, 179–81 Third Reich, 173–4 Thoreau, Henry David: “point d’appui,” 94, 400 time (dimension), 46, 285, 350–2, 387, 391–2, 403; Big Bang, 93–5, 443n11; evolution, 123–5, 182–8; myth, 12; narrative, 185-6; Paradise Lost, 189– 90, river, 292; story, 197 Tolkien, J.R.R. See Lord of the Rings transcendentalism, 82 trial-and-error, 124, 210, 335; hero, 208–11, 219, 310–1. See also evolution Truman Show, The (movie), 92 Twain, Mark. See Huckleberry Finn Two Ronnies, The, 324 types, 337–8, 343–5, 347; allegorization,

494 364; anti–type, 343–5, 360, 375; Moses, 344; replication, 338–9, 344– 5; Saviour figure, 338, 344 typology, 343–7 Ulysses, 313–15 universe, 392, 405, 423; allowing conditions of, 411–12, 424–6, 431; “bad,” 432; deterministic, 204; heuristic, 433; material, 25, 27, 390; metaphor in, 89; origin of, 94–7, 267, 403; literary, 342; poem as, 99, 392, 413, 419–22; symbolic, 282 Velaidum, Joe, 463n78 Vendler, Helen, 99–100, 444n23 Vico, Giambattista; verum est factum, 85–6, 362 Virgil: Aeneid, 75 Vitruvius, 342 Wachowski, Larry and Andy Wachowski: The Matrix, 257–8, 395 Wegner, Daniel, 304 Weinberg, Steven, 357–8 Wheeler, John, 381, 462n52 Wheelwright, Philip: Metaphor and Reality, 50–1 Whitehead, Alfred North, 132 Whitman, Walt: “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” 434–5 Wilbur, Ken, 17

index Wilbur, Richard, 245; “Mind,” 153–4; “Walking to Sleep,” 212, 443n8 Wilde, Oscar, 327; “On the Decay of Lying,” 83–5 Wilson, E.O., 21–6, 38, 54; Consilience, 24–7, 399 Winter, Steven: A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind, 439n28 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 20, 59–60, 78, 404, 437n5 Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway, 321, 353 words, 34–5, 237–44, 266, 329, 347, 362, 373, 420; code, 239; codons as, 130–4, 140; evolved form, 73–4, 177; myth as words in sequence, 343; symbolic and concrete, 290–1, 293–4; tools, 263, 291, 303, 352; hold together, 102, 132, 145, 446n10. See also language Wordsworth, William, 218 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 342 Yahweh, 5, 282, 363, 373–4, 404 Yeats, W.B., 28, 76, 146, 322 Yukawa, Hideki, 38 Zitner, Sheldon, 351 Zukov, Gary: Dancing Wu Li Masters, 377 Zwicky, Jan, 21, 39, 41; Wisdom and Metaphor, 18, 20