⚘ Branch thought from Poets are subjects of the ineffable
There is always a spatiality to coherent sets of ideas, and metaphors reveal the laws within that spatiality. In a way, when we think, even abstractly, we are always playing with ideas and their contents in a spatial or visual way. This is true from poetry’s obvious metaphorical weight (which allows us to see and experience existence and phenomena differently) to the eminently stripped-down visualisations of diagrams.
Metaphors are keys. They are both decryption mechanisms and alchemic reactions, catalysts for transmutation. If you enter the metaphorical space the author was in while writing an explanation, you can easily decode what they are talking about and inhabit that territory. At the same time, a metaphor can help you unlock new potentials of ideas whose previous metaphorical territory was rather arid and inadequate. In metaphorical spaces, authors employ verbs attached to hitherto abstract ideas or symbols, and these verbs suddenly make sense and seem essential. The writer unlocks these verbs, and the verbs themselves crack the symbol open, so that once again we can explore what the symbol was pointing to instead of being constrained by the inevitable limits of its representation.
They liberate it from the inevitable progressive crystallisation of ideas communicated through words that become more the symbol than what they are actually pointing towards. They become a static, barren code for a representation of some isolated part of a phenomenon, with the danger that those who read it confuse the actual reality with the symbol’s encoded definition. It becomes more stand-in, a shadow in a cave, than radiant vector, a crack in the wall. For example, symbols qua symbols (treated as independent objects in their own right) work with certain verbs that are conventional to their treatment. New unexpected verbs penetrate this layer and reach the reality behind the symbol, in order to configure a new symbolic territory.
This is some of the magic of metaphors. The oldest words and verbs bear a certain physicality to them: explain means to flatten out (from ex-: out, and plain: to flatten, as in “plain” or “plan”). And the word metaphor is a metaphor itself (from the Greek meta-: beyond, and -phor: to carry). These words abound, consisting mostly of modal verbs or other words composed of a prefix and suffix; and very often they denote abstract concepts or actions that we perform on abstract things, but they all have a visualisable, geometrical physicality to them.
So, when we deploy (from de-: apart, and ploy: fold, resulting in a Latinate equivalent to “to unfold”) new verbs into the space that the metaphors underpinning abstractions (or other ideas, visions, and so on that are not so abstract) create, we are transforming the metaphor itself. We are changing this geometrical physicality, which helps to organise our way of thinking about something and understanding it, while also limiting how we can think about it. With new metaphorical fields, we think about things in different ways, from new angles, with new inner laws and dynamics, and sometimes we reveal hitherto hidden compatibilities with other ideas. We effectively find the possibility of a larger coherent system of thought governed by this new metaphorical field.
These new metaphorical fields are where many thinkers (or anyone trying to explain their genuine understanding of something) attempt to guide us in their writing. Sometimes these explanations seem long and impenetrable. But the reason is not intentional obscurity or lack of intelligence in the reader; it is rather that the reader hasn’t yet truly assimilated the metaphor and the inner laws of the metaphorical field.
They have yet to be able to visualise it and explore it freely. Once understood, the metaphors get us to that space, where we can trace back or deduce going forward the generative principles that the idea sprang from. Once they find this key, in a way they learn the spatial language of the author’s mind. They become dwellers of this territory, and they can enjoyably follow the author who guides them through the fascinating terrain of their ideas; and sometimes the reader might even map it further themselves.