Across seven seasons and 178 episodes, Patrick Stewart performed the role of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the United Federation of Planets NCC-1701-D starship the USS Enterprise with professionalism, wisdom, and humanity. Displaying granitoid stoicism and reserved decorum, Picard was the thinking-person’s captain. The fifth season episode “Darmok” is an example of how Star Trek: The Next Generation was among the most metaphysically speculative shows to ever be broadcast. In the beginning, the Enterprise is hailed by the Tamarians, but the Enterprise’s computerized translator can’t comprehend their language. Against his will, Picard is transported alongside the Tamarian captain Dathon—whose head looks like a cross between a pig and a walnut—to the surface of a hostile planet. Confronted by a massive, shimmering, and horned beast, Dathon tosses Picard a dagger and yells “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” After they’ve defeated the monster, though at the price of Dathon being injured, Picard realizes that the enigmatic phrase is a reference, an allusion, a myth. Thus, a clue to their language—Tamarians speak only in allegory. Dathon has invoked two mythic heroes to communicate that he and Picard must fight the beast together. Doubtful though it may be that Paul Ricoeur was a Trekkie, but Dathon embodies the French philosopher’s claim in The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language that “Only a feeling transformed into myth can open and discover the world.” Dathon, however, has sacrificed himself upon the altar of comprehensibility, for he received a fatal blow, and dies as a pieta in Picard’s arms. As he passes into that undiscovered country, Picard speaks to him in our own mythic-metaphorical tongue – “They became great friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.”
Tamarian makes explicit our own language’s reliance on the figurative—any language’s use of metaphor, for that matter. “Try as one might, it is impossible to free oneself from figural language,” writes Marjorie Garber in The Use and Abuse of Literature, as “all language is figurative.” Examine my first paragraph, for there are several mythic allusions throughout—the first clause of my fourth sentence reads “In the beginning,” a reference to the 16th-century Bible translator William Tyndale’s rendering of the Hebrew Bereshith in Genesis (later incorporated into the more famous King James Version, as well as the translation of a different koine phrase in John 1:1). My penultimate sentence has two mythopoeic references; one to Dathon having “sacrificed himself upon the altar,” and a mention of the “pieta,” a word that translates to “piety” and often refers to Christ dead in the arms of the Virgin Mary. Such mythic allusions abound in language. For example—as a writer my Achilles’ Heel is that I take on Herculean tasks like writing an overview of metaphor, requiring me to stop resting on my laurels and to open up a Pandora’s Box, so that I can leave no stone unturned; touch on wood, and don’t treat me like a Casandra, but let’s hope that I can cut the Gordian Knot here. Such Greco-Roman adornments aren’t just mythic allusions, they’re also a dead or at least dying metaphors—for who among us ever tells somebody that we’re “Between a rock and a hard place” while thinking of the Scylla and Charybdis in Homer’s The Odyssey? That’s another way to say that they’re clichés, but mythic connections abound in less noticeable ways too, though perhaps I’d do well this Wednesday to render unto Odin what belongs to Odin and to spare a thought for the Germanic goddess Frigg when the work week draws to a close.
Star Trek: TNG screenwriters Joe Menosky and Philip LaZebnik make “metaphorical” synonymous with “mythic,” though figurative language draws from more than just classical tales of gods and heroes, but from anything that transfers meaning from one different realm into another. In my first paragraph, I described Stewart’s face as “granitoid,” though he is not coarse-grained igneous rock; later I deployed a simile (rhetoricians disagree on how different that conceit is from metaphor) where I said that Dathon looked like a cross between a pig and a walnut. I can’t claim that these are great metaphors, but they were my attempt to steer the course of the ship away from the rocky shoals of cliché. “A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image,” writes George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language,” his classic essay of 1946, “while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’… has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness.” Between the arresting, lyrical, novel metaphor of the adept poet and the humdrum language of the everyday are the “huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.” Orwell lists around a dozen clichés, including “ride roughshod over,” “grist to the mill,” “swansong,” and “toe the line.” When encountering clichés such as these, in other peoples’ writing but especially in my own prose, they appear to me like a dog turd hidden under the coffee table; their fumes make my eyes water and my stomach churn. Cliché must be ruthlessly expunged by red pen at every opportunity. But those two other categories that Orwell lists are entirely more interesting.
Dead metaphors—not just those on life support but also those decomposing in the ground—merit us getting a shovel and some smelling salts. Tamarian was imagined as structured by metaphor, but the vast majority of words you use every day were originally metaphors. Take the word “understand;” in daily communication we rarely parse it’s implications, but the word itself is a spatial metaphor. Linguist Guy Deutscher explains in The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention how “understand,” derived from the Middle English understanden, itself from the Anglo-Saxon understandan, and ultimately from the Proto-Germanic understandana. “The verb ‘understand’ itself may be a brittle old skeleton by now,” Deutscher writes, “but its origin is till obvious: under-stand originally must have meant something like ‘step under,’ perhaps rather like the image in the phrase ‘get to the bottom of.'” Such spatial language is common, with Deutscher listing “the metaphors that English speakers use today as synonyms: we talk of grasping the sense, catching the meaning, getting the point, following an explanation, cottoning on to an idea, seeing the difficulty.” The word “comprehend” itself is a metaphor, with an etymology in the Latin word prehendere, which means “to seize.” English has a propensity to those sorts of metaphors, foreign loan words from Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, and Norman; Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish; Abenaki, Wolof, and Urdu, which don’t announce themselves as metaphors precisely because of their foreignness—and yet that rich vein of the figurative runs through everything. Dan Paterson gives two examples in his voluminous study The Poem, explaining how a word as common as “tunnel” is from the “Medieval English tonel, a wide-mouthed net used to trap birds, so its first application to ‘subterranean passage’ will have been metaphorical—and would inevitably have carried the connotation ‘trap’ for a little while.” Similarly, the word “urn” comes from “the Latin urere, to burn, bake,” the word itself holding a connotative poetry of immolation. In both these examples, “the original neologists will have been aware of their elation to earlier terms,” Paterson writes, “but this conscious awareness can be lost very rapidly.” If you’re lucky enough to have a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, you can trace the etymology of prosaic words and find their glamorous metaphorical beginnings. Within the seemingly hollow throat of every word resides the voice of metaphor, no matter how faint it’s call to us may be.
The manner in which metaphors fossilize into everyday words is not unlike the process during the fetid days of the Carboniferous Period when giant spiders and scorpions, salamanders and sharks, scaled trees and seeded plants would sink into some shallow tropical pool and fossilize until dug out of the ground by a coal miner in Wales or West Virginia. Just as miners occasionally find deposits in the shape of a trilobite, so too do some metaphors that are dead appear as obvious clichés, but the bulk of our language is so dark and hard that it might as well be bituminous. Yet as burning coal releases heat, so too does the glow of meaning come off of these rocks that we call words, the once vital energy of metaphor still hidden inside. “However stone dead such metaphors seem,” writes I.A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, “we can easily wake them up.” Such evolutionary development is what linguists call “semantic change,” as tangible and concrete words are used as metaphors, transferring intent in a one-way direction towards abstraction. “The mind cannot just manufacture words for abstract concepts out of thin air—all if it can do is adapt what is already available. And what’s at hand are simple physical concepts,” writes Deutscher, so that when I say that I’m trying to establish a foundation for my argument, I draw from the concrete metaphors of construction, while it would be odd to appropriate abstraction to describe something tangible. “One thing is certain,” Deutscher says, “nothing can come from nothing.”
Every word is a metaphor; every phrase, no matter how prosaic, is a poem—even if it’s mute. Words don’t correspond to reality; they only correspond to one another. All languages are a tapestry of threads forever floating above the ground. “Metaphor is the transference of a term from one thing to another, whether from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or by analogy,” as Aristotle defined it in his Rhetoric, the first book to taxonomize the trope. The word metaphor is itself, rather predictably, a metaphor. The Greek μεταφορά, as Aristotle’s explanation literally states, translates as “to transfer,” with all the connotations of transport, shifting, movement, and travel. As contemporary travelers to Greece still discover, delivery vans have the word metaphora painted on their side, something that was a delight to Ricœur. No language can lack metaphor for the same reason that no tongue can lack fiction; it’s not an issue of grammar in the same way that there are languages incapable of tense or person, but rather figuration is the domain of rhetoric. Wherever there are words that are used to designate one thing, then the moment somebody uses those terms to refer to something else, we are within the realm of metaphor. This, it must be said, is rather different from encouraging novel metaphors, or enshrining metaphor as a poetic device, or really even noticing that it exists.
During the Middle Ages, there was a literary fascination with metaphor’s gilded siblings—parable and allegory—but the explication of figuration’s significance didn’t move much beyond Aristotle’s original definition. By 1589, the great English rhetorician George Puttenham would still define the term in The Art of English Poesy as involving “an inversion of sense by transport,” and that belief that metaphor gets you somewhere else remains central, metaphorically at least. Contemporary study of metaphor begins with Richards’s invaluable 1937 The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Because the subject went largely unexplored over two millennia, Richards complained that the “detailed analysis of metaphors, if we attempt it with such slippery terms as these, sometimes feels like extracting cube-roots in the head.” He had a method of exactness, however, for Richards presents a novel vocabulary, a vocabulary that—also unsurprisingly—is metaphorical. According to Richards, a metaphor is composed of two parts, the “tenor” and the “vehicle.” The first is whatever it is that’s being described, and the second is that whose attributes are being carried over in the description of the former (shades of that Greek delivery van). “For the Lord God is a sun and a shield,” writes the Psalmist, providing us an opportunity to see how Richards’s reasoning works. Belying the fundamentalist fallacy that the Bible is a literal text—though nothing is—it’s clear to most that God is neither a giant ball of ionized hydrogen undergoing nuclear fusion into helium, nor is He defensive armor. What God is, in King David’s metaphor, is the tenor, because He is what is being described. The attributes that are being borrowed from “sun” and “shield” are those connotations of being life-giving, luminescent, warm, as well as being defensive and protective. “Sun” and “shield” are even gently contradictory, as blocking out the former with the later can testify towards; but it’s also a demonstration of how the non-literal can express reality in its glorious paradox. In exactly the same manner, Robert Frost’s central conceit in “The Road Not Taken” uses the vehicle of an arduous and uncertain wooded path on the implied tenor of the narrator’s life. A great richness of poetic metaphor—as separate from cliché—is that it allows for ambiguity of referent, so that meaning is a many-colored thing. What makes a poetic metaphor successful is the delicate interplay between tenor and vehicle. A poet’s task is to space that width just right, and to somehow surprise the reader while doing so, without befuddling them.
Poets are less the unacknowledged legislators of the world than they are its wizards, because the form has “the power to define reality,” as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write in Metaphors We Live By. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that those who nurture metaphors are as if apiarists, since the figurative is like pollen from a flower and each word a bee, meaning traded in a continual hum. Language—and thus reality—is supersaturated with meaning, everything capable of being transformed into something else. “If all language is metaphorical,” writes David Punter in his short study Metaphor, “then it could also follow that we might want to say that all language is continually involved in a series of acts of translation: translating things which are difficult to apprehend into things we can apprehend.” Just as translation is based in difference, so is all communication. All language is relational, a communion between that-which-is and that-which-isn’t. Because words are always arbitrarily connected to that which they represent, language is intrinsically metaphorical, the tethering of random shapes on a page or the vibration of air molecules to an outside sense, the compulsion of someone with a mind different from your own imagining that which you wish them to. Without metaphor there’s no fiction, and without fiction there’s no metaphor. Without either, there’s no possibility of communication. Metaphor is a bridge that doesn’t exist that you’re still able to cross, for faith in being understood is that which gets you to the other side.
Figurative language encompasses the expansiveness of metaphor; the insularity of metonymy; the granularity of synecdoche; the straightforwardness of simile; the folksiness of parable; the transcendence of allegory. We don’t just read metaphor in literature; humans have always seen it in events, in nature, in the cosmos, in any manner of thinking that sees existence as overdetermined, as meaning permeating that which would otherwise be inert. We see metaphor in the hidden grinning skull of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors and the melting clocks in Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. It’s in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s green light and Herman Melville’s whale. It’s in the Anglo-Saxon form of the “kenning,” where the sky is a “bird-road” and Homer’s evocation of the Aegean “wine-dark sea”; in saying that space-time can “curve” and that genes are “selfish”; with Rene Descartes description of the body as a machine and William Paley’s claim that the universe is a clock, and the understanding that God can be both Mother and Father. Politics is threaded through with metaphor, narrative, and artifice—the most effective means of getting the masses to listen to you, for both good and evil. Metaphor is both what facilitated the horror of the Rwandan genocide when Hutu propagandists described the Tutsis as “cockroaches,” as well as what generates the hopefulness in the socialist call for “breads and roses.” Symbolism undergirds both the eagle in the Seal of the United States of America and that of the Third Reich. That the same animal is used for both only emphasizes how mercurial metaphor happens to be. As Punter explains, “metaphor is never static, and rarely innocent.” Figuration’s precise power and danger comes from such slipperiness, as everything is forever morphing and mutating between the metaphorical and the literal.
When Patrick Stewart first came to the United States in 1978, arriving in Los Angeles where he would make his greatest fame as a starship captain, it was as a 37-year-old member of the Royal Shakespeare Company performing the role of Duke Senior in As You Like It at the Ahmanson Theatre. Traipsing through the enchanted forest of Arden, and Stewart appeared opposite Alan Howard performing as Jacques. During the seventh scene of the second act, Howard (most celebrated for voicing Sauron in the Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films) uttered the most celebrated extended metaphor in Shakespeare’s literary career of extended metaphors: “All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances;/And one man in his time plays many parts.” Conventionally understood as referring to the various roles we all perform over the course of our lives, it’s an apt encapsulation of metaphor itself. All of communication is a stage, and every word is merely a player, and one word can play many parts. When it comes to figuration, Jacques’s monologue is right up there with Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Because nothing in the English language is as perfect—as immaculate, as blessed, as sacred, as divine—as the word “like.” What it effects is a syntactical transubstantiation, the transformation of one thing into another. If everything—our concepts, our words, our minds—are sealed off behind a wall of unknowability, then metaphor is that which can breach those walls. Whether implied or stated, “like” is a bridge transporting sense across the chasm of difference, providing intimations of how all ideas and things are connected to each other by similarities, no matter how distant. Whether uttered or only implied, “like” is the wispy filament that nets together all things. Perhaps there is naked reality, but we’ll never be able to see it ourselves, always clothing it in finery that is continually put on and taken off. In our life, metaphor is the intimate kiss between difference.
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