Do Metaphors Reveal The Contradiction At The Heart Of Our Language?

As a fiction author, I have to nail my colours to the mast of metaphor. For who would want to read a novel which read something like "He did this. Then he did that"? without any metaphors and similes and images to bring the action alive? Even speechmakers resort to metaphors rather than just providing a literal presentation of the message it is they want to transmit. Hell, some scientists indulge in metaphor to communicate their abstruse mathematical equations when translating them to effects in our reality.

And yet, we have to acknowledge a fundamental paradox at the heart of our reliance on metaphors in what it says about language itself. Metaphors and similes express things in terms of something else. These two things cannot be the same, can't be mere homonyms for one another, otherwise what would be the point (other than a very short list of two). Now we have form for this, seeing as our dictionaries which provide and define our vocabularies for us, also define words in terms of other words, which themselves can be looked up and, well defined in terms of other words in the dictionary. (You can look up words to find their etymological roots, usually Anglo-Saxon/ Norman-French, Greek or Latin, but sometimes words have shifted away from these original root meanings, like a decaying half-life, so you are non the wiser: 'screen' means both to hide something behind it, as well as to project something upon it, fundamentally contradictory).

The dictionary definition of our words forms a perfect closed circle, except for the constant change of word usage which means it's still closed, but considerably less than perfect. There is no basecamp of primordial words from which all other words derive. There is supposedly an Ur language, the first ancestor of human language, but we don't know what it was. So there is no rooting magnetic core at the heart of language against which all words can be defined. And when we employ metaphors, we face a similar lack of solidity. Take the humble simile, describing something as 'like' or 'as' something else: his aspirations were as vaporous as a plane's contrail. Aspirations are an abstract concept, therefore in a physical or material sense they can't be like anything else. But that's okay, we're saying they're vaporous anyway, like the short-lived exhaust trail of a passing airplane. And there's the nice bonus of aspirations being aimed skywards to raise us from our current state, matching something skywritten by the plane. But both aspiration and contrail have other associations; the pollution of the burned plane fuel; the hanging contrail evidencing a plane that is no longer in sight; the possibly political, social or advertising fostering of one's aspiration. Is aspiration a noble mental construction, or does it share the more bodily drives of ambition or appetite? So in fact the humble simile more approaches a Venn  Diagram - what they share where they overlap, still leaves great chunks of their structure that have nothing to do with each other.

A Venn Diagram yesterday

Because the overlap of shared meaning is a fraction of the two wholes, this makes metaphors rather hard to land perfectly. In focusing on the shared meaning between the two words, it calls for an obliteration of the other shades of meaning and association of the two words. Many metaphors don't stack up to an even cursory reading. I have just read and reviewed two novels in which most of the metaphors were nonsensical yoking of images together - one of the authors was, I think, doing this deliberately, although I couldn't see to what end.

So is the conclusion that language is eternally and internally referential without ever being able to settle on a single definitive interpretation of a sentence's meaning? Well in one sense yes, but while this is useful in fiction where we are appealing to the imagination of forms that don't necessarily accord to the evidence of our eyes and our understanding of reality, it's not terribly useful in spoken communication (or increasingly in communication online) when we are trying to transmit ideas or an argument unambiguously.

In his book "You Are Not Human", Simon Lanchester asserts that the origins of our alphabet used important notions of man's reliance on hunting, on different animals and tools for the kill, to give shape and name to the earliest letters. This makes sense when you think of the earliest cave paintings being chockfull of images of animals and their hunters who looked to imitate their habits in order to get up close to them (imitating their calls, dressing up in same animal skins etc). Therefore there was a close relationship between letters, the sounds those letters made when combined into words and what those words were actually expressing: letters about animals and hunting, forming words aggregated into sentences that were talking about hunting. However, when those alphabets were taken on and transformed by seafaring nations like Phoenicia and the Ancient Greeks, they became stripped from this meaning. The earliest surviving records of these alphabets are found mainly listing mercantile inventories. The magical imaginations behind the hunting/animal alphabet are replaced by a far more prosaic numbering and categorising based alphabet. The sound of our words no longer bear any relationship to the meaning of those words. And this is why we are yoked to the notion of metaphor. We don't have the word to express directly in order to convey the precise meaning, so we have to try and illustrate its meaning in terms of something else is shares a partial quality with.

Animals still have a formative role in our language, just consider children's alphabet primers, how many of those 26 letters are illustrated with an animal - 'Z' is for zebra etc. But we have severed the animals from our former reverence for them as expressed in our very language. Now we have a mercantile and categorising relationship to animals, as food, pets, predatory threats to our farms or huntable just for pleasure, so that our very language both provides a threat to animal survival and, as Lancaster argues, to our fellow man as we dehumanise groups through animal metaphors, 'Rats', 'Dogs', 'Pigs', 'Vermin', 'Snakes', 'Worms' etc.

The Quality Of Writing Is Strained - Friday Flash

I typed a log entry into/on to my tablet. Then I deleted it and watch it seemingly become snaffled by the roiling plasma. Apposite word that 'tablet'. Harks back to the origins of writing, pieces of flint gouging out marks on stone beneath their sharpened tips. Matter grinding away at matter. Energy transference, heat sparks engendered through the friction. The intaglio letters cupped within the stone. Any natural cleft in the petrous grain, easily confused with a character whose shape it coincidentally approximates. Who can say where the boundary of a character ends and the natural stratum of the stone resumes? The letters utterly interacting with the flow of the grain around them, since one is hewn from the tissue of the other. Letters as impressions in negative space. That stone which was formerly there, now hacked away to leave the fossilised shapes of an alphabet.

Progress to mankind writing on parchment or papyrus with quill or stylus. Two materially different substances, pigment and canvas. The ink licked on to the surface of the fabric, filling its empty plane with characters. Colonising it. Again at the stiff pointed tip, although scribes also used the reedier kalamos to brush the ink on, like drummers who have both drum sticks and brushes for that more jazz vibe. Just as well really, or we'd have to doff our caps at the Freudian imagery of a shaft spilling its liquid seed on to a receptive membrane. The mark of the scribe, being the accidental transference of ink into the whorls of the pads of his fingers.

And it's not just fleshy fingertips. For unlike the carved incisions in stone tablets, here the ink rests upon the host surface, albeit some of the ink will seep and spread into the fibres beneath. In the main the two substances coexist in a space that is not as blended as those characters cut into stone. The inked boundaries of the letters delineate them from a differently coloured paper textile. They sit flush on a plane that is itself flat. The ink does not really have any texture of its own. No raised surfaces. The two do not interact, in the sense that where the ink lies the paper beneath is effaced and where the ink is not, the paper bears sole possession untouched. Once the ink has dried and settled, the two are inert from each other. Of course with illuminated manuscripts, where gold leaf was being applied to the pages, then such calligraphy would have a texture. And while such manuscripts provided an interesting approach to representing the divine light in halos and the illuminated script itself, let's just say the legerdemain of gold leaf doesn't actually represent how light operates. Rather, it more approximates the reflective properties of the moon's light actually originating from the sun. Reflected glories as second-hand light. A paucity of illumination.

Then on to moveable typesetting of the printing press and its personalised version in the form of the typewriter. An embossed letter block, whether placed in a composing stick, or at the end of a typebar, which then punches an impression filled in with ink. An inverted return to carving letters in stone through incision. Directly with hammer rather than chisel. The paper surface is indelibly altered, distorted, beneath the inroad of the press. The letters sit on a plane, but not flush. They are slightly sunken into its weft, a fact you can plainly see were you to view the underside of the paper, with its Braille-like displacements projecting through towards your eye. There is something almost animated by the process of smashing force upon force. Each typebar a metal monolith, with a homunculus letter clinging on for dear life to its surface, being smashed and pounded by the press of a lever launching the typebar like a ballista. Particularly if you used the red half of the ribbon, pressed in blood. Off key and off centre, the type was idiosyncratic. Personal. Die cast stamped with the metallic grain of the writer's force brought down on the keys. 

Of course in time, electronic typewriters and superior printing technologies ironed out these concavities and restored the smooth, unbroken plane of the canvas that houses the letters ranged there in regular blocks of text. The white of the paper merely acting as spacers between words, lines and paragraphs. Typescript orderly ranged across the paper, but more concerned with proportion to itself, so that the paper fades into the background. Print and paper barely having any relationship one to the other.

And now we are come to the present state of affairs. The plasma screen, a curvy sea in which the letters hang seemingly unmoored. Movable to anywhere on the display. The dancing characters which can pirouette and spin across the turbid screen as they are formatted. It is hard to determine which is more vaporous, screen or letters mounted there. The plasma remains indifferent to what it plays host to, yet it utterly determines its nature. In the ineffable coding that remains hidden and unknowable. Somehow, like planets in spacetime, these characters too interact with the curved plasma and the two shape one another. No longer is the screen an inert host. Yet neither letters nor plasma ocean possess significant mass. This is not like the heft of a planet curving proximate space around it. This is more akin to particle physics. Letters like elemental particles, brushed from the keystroke perhaps to become manifest in the plasmatic field. Colliding hard up against their neighbour, expressing their valency. The nature of their charge.

And thus do our letters evanesce and die. Oh they persist in some ghostly form, as hypertext, but they are quickly interred by the next rolling mass of text which too will be overwhelmed and underwritten, or should that be underwhelmed and overwritten? The letters, our letters, have become cast asunder from our fingers. Left to drift and do battle with CEO algorithms in the plasmatic main. The quality of writing has been strained through being shorn of material paper through which to filter it.

Maths & Engish (no, not Dizzee Rascal's album)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 And there you have it. Ten digits, ten numerical symbols. A perfect hermetically sealed system from which all mathematics stems from. All the way up to infinity, a mind blowing concept but related back to these basic numbers - in this case, symbollically all you have to do is turn a number 8 on its side and hey presto, the symbol for infinity! Everything mathematical refers back to these ordinal first terms. They reach out to encapsulate the physical universe and the physical universe is defined wholly in these first terms. The four basic functions, + - X / and equals, even these derive from the interrelationship of the numbers straddling them, One digit functioned upon to yield another. And when there are logical breakdowns within the system, the NP problem or The Hodge Conjecture and the rest, well then mathematicians ironically revert to the alphabetical abstraction of letters (Roman or Greek) in order to try and grapple with their breaches. So the numbers are still unsullied, untainted. It's the algebraic letters and the limitations of language and metaphor wot get the blame. Quantum behaviour? We just haven't cracked the multi-dimensionality to come up with a predictive probability for it yet is all.

But enough of maths, I get enough arithmetic all day at work. The only sheets I want to spread are those of a folio of a book. Maybe soon I won't even be able to do that the way technology and the market may be heading.

We possess 26 letters in our alphabet, a finite number to correspond to a finite set of phonic sounds to express every one of our words. Of course there are more than 26 phonic sounds, so here at source we already have a great deal of slippage, unlike the flawless 10 numerals within maths. Never mind, onwards and upwards eh? We can aggregate our alphabetic characters into a huge amount of combinations, first within single words, then further sliced and diced and tossed into salad day sentences, building into novels and wonderful journeys within the logic of the human mind. It's ironic that the earliest traces of writing, all seem to be recording stocks figures and the debits and credits arising from them, ie accounting systems. Numbers demanding to be expressed in symbols again. Little more rivetting than reading somebody's laundry list.

Letters are the building blocks for reading and writing our language. Children learn to recognise letters and attach the requisite sounds to them. Then they learn to associate the character symbol with each letter and from that reconstruct the sound of the word from its written representation. As they become more and more fluent readers, the eye and brain bat scarcely an eyelid as they steam through blocks of print. The words ingested as familiar and therefore automatically scanned, even though the text is fresh and unseen to them. Once a reader is fluent, they take little cognizance of the letters on a page, being several processing steps ahead of that bottom reading rung.

So how does the basal building block of letters compare with the fundament of numbers in maths? The letters themselves bear little correlation other than sound, to the words they help form. A letter 'B' is no more indicative of a 'bear' or a 'bestowal' or some 'bitumen'. It happens to usher all three onto the tip of the tongue but that's about it. Other than phonetic ordering, the letters do not bear the ordination of numbers. They do not build into scales of importance. If letters bear no significance other than arranging sounds, then we have to move on to the unit of the word for deriving everything about language. In a curious way, like numbers, words are sort of hermetically sealed. They are individually defined in terms of other words which are defined themselves by other words defined... An endless loop. This reflects the origins of language, of roots of words, of importations from other languages whether by force or through trade. There is no equivalent of 10 digits, or 1000 basal words, from which all meaning stems through second and third stage acting upon them (prefixes and suffixes). Esperanto took a shot at naailing down a basic language at 900 root words, but has had to expand to accommodate all the new words of technology.

Clearly language isn't hermetically sealed. No perfectly circular system. New words are coming into usage all the time, old ones dying off. So, given that letters do not seem to be able to carry the same weight as numbers do in maths, do we still need the visual prompts they provide? Txt spk is fast pensioning off certain superannuated characters, vowels mainly (mind you, if you ever hear der yute speak, it's like vowels were never invented anyway as their lips barely crack open to eruct their glottal stops). Maybe we should just condemn printed matter off to the recycling bins forever and content ourselves with audio and vook delivery systems for our great works of literature. Printed books will become the new samizdat, the subversive, underground literature produced on home-made presses. Oh no wait, that's self-publishing isn't it?

Me, I haven't finished messing with the alphabet yet. I don't just want to break down words and probe their plasticity, I want to split their atomic letter structure. I play with typefaces and linearity, so self-publishing is pretty much beyond meeting my needs, with its template typesetting.

And Dizzee Rascal? he'll soundtrack it for me

Since I posted this, I have come across a wonderful blog posting about the symbology of letters and numbers by @egllinski which reminded me that the Hebrew alphabet also ascribes numerical value to its letters, thus buttressing worded 'proofs' with more mystical codes of proof by numerology... And the Sanskrit word 'Om' or 'Aum' that contains all sound within its three letters and is the creative force behind existence. Fascinating stuff.