Recently I’ve been coming back to and reflecting on this old post a lot The Poet and the Mystic where I quoted Emerson as saying:

“Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”

In the comments I also referred to Witold Gombrowicz‘s statement that: “[we] must know that systems have a very short life and not allow ourselves to be imposed on”.

This week I stumbled across a book called More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Turner.  One of the aspects of metaphor they explore is ‘conventionalization’ which is to say the extent to which a metaphor is “automatic, effortless, and generally established as a mode of thought among members of the linguistic community”:

“For example, DEATH IS DEPARTURE is deeply conventionalized at the conceptual level; we probably all have it.  Though a basic metaphor like LIFE IS BONDAGE might be deeply conventionalized for a particular subcommunity (such as certain Christian communities), nonetheless it is not as conventionalized across the whole community of speakers of English as is DEATH IS DEPARTURE.” (p.55)

A further aspect of metaphor which they call ‘basicness’ is where conventionalization has become so strong that a metaphor is (almost) indispensable to people’s ability to conceptualise something.  An example would be time and the metaphor TIME MOVES.

Lakoff and Turner then go on to talk about the way poets change our way of seeing and thinking by finding fresh metaphors, extending metaphors further than they have been previously used, or to place unusual sub-metaphors into the slots of larger composite metaphors.

Reading all this made me think about my two main spiritual touchstones Dōgen and Shinran.  Obviously there are many historical reasons why the names of these two figures have attained such prominence but I think that a major factor must surely be the way in which they approached some of the prevailing metaphors of the tradition in which they participated. Much of the appeal of Dōgen, especially the early Dōgen, is the great verve with which he upturns and destabilises existing metaphors (See Loy 1999).   Shinran tends to be more scholastic than poetic in his own approach but there are still moments when he noticeably reinterprets conventional Buddhist metaphors.  For example in the Agamas the ocean is used as a simile for purity and it is said that it will not tolerate a corpse (impurity / evil) but will cast it out onto the shore.  In contrast Shinran reinterprets ‘does not tolerate’ to mean ‘transforms’ and says that evil and good acts are all transformed by Amida’s Vow into “the great treasure ocean of all the true and real virtues”.

I guess where I am headed with this is that Emerson’s comments raise an important issue but I think that the dichotomy that he sets up is a false one.  The reality is that even poets require certain ‘basic’ and ‘conventional’ metaphors both to live by and also to write poetry.  I can make up some non-conventionalised / non-basic metaphor such as ‘time is like a cheesecake’ but if anyone is to make any use of it they will need to extend it and relate it to and embed it in other existing metaphors.  Conversely, as Emerson rightly points out, if we insist only on certain metaphors then we are closing off our experience of the world.  Lakoff and Turner note that two metaphors that each help us make sense of particular domains of experience may well be contradictory of each other but this does not diminish their value under particular circumstances.

I had an interesting experience toward the end of last year when I gave a talk about the Shin Buddhist notion of ‘sincerity’ (jp. makoto).  At one point in my talk I quoted Robert Frost as saying:

“There is such a thing as sincerity. It is hard to define but it is probably nothing more than your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead selves. Miraculously. It is the same with illusions. Any belief you sink into when you should be leaving it behind is an illusion. Reality is the cold feeling on the end of the trout’s nose.”

At first a Japanese Shin Buddhist priest who read my talk was uncertain about my use of this passage due to the word ‘cold’ which seemed to them very negative and which they felt might contrast confusingly with the usual metaphor for Amida as ‘light’, and light’s accompanying extended metaphors of ‘warmth’ and ‘life’.  In my talk I therefore expanded Frost’s metaphor by talking about how when we encounter ‘liveliness calling us out of our dead selves’ it can be frightening and that fear feels ‘cold’ but when we go forward like a fish swimming up-stream, or leaping up a salmon ladder, we are infused with life and warmth just as when oxygen floods into a fish’s gills.