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 Island Of Stability - Flash Fiction

As dead as the dinosaurs. Though not of course coeval with them. In laboratories chemists create super-heavy elements which exist for mere milliseconds before transforming back into more stabile arrangement of protons, neutrons and electrons. Such elements, if they ever existed in Nature, have such rapid decay rates that they have long ago become iron, lead, radon and the like. Their half lives played out into immutability. Why do the scientists bother when these elements have such a short lifespan, they offer no practical use at all? Because they quest after an ‘island of stability’ at some point on this spectrum, where elements exist with increasing half-lives that mean they have a much more stable existence, only no one has figured out how to create them, nor found them existing naturally. 

Such decay would have taken place by the time man appeared on the earth, but hey who’s present to say what time is at this pre-temporal stage? We use carbon dating and other radioactive decay metrics to back-define chronology, so this cavil still holds in real time. Not that there is such a thing of course. Experienced time is not stable. Only in mathematical terms is it regularly sequenced and segmented.

Ug had mined some lead by cracking open a rock. Unsurprisingly he was unaware that it was a radioactive isotope of lead (210), as he used it for a pillow to cradle his head at night. His body absorbed its decay and would have sparked off carcinogenic mutations within his body, only the era’s low natural life expectancy meant he would not outlive the lead’s twenty two year half-life that would have ravaged him unto death.

Ug pointed to the animal skins on his feet with the very spear that had smote the beast. Unk just assumed he was boasting and flouting his fortune from the recent hunt. Ug danced from one foot to the other, waggling the raised one in Unk’s direction. Unk’s blood was rising at the perceived continued sleight. Ug emitted some sounds, but Unk just shrugged his shoulders, or scratched his head, or held his hands out wide while crinkling the lower features of his face, the precise gestures not having been set in mutual comprehension as such. Ug threw himself at Unk’s feet, then struggled to lift one of them off the ground, sending Unk into a frenzy of hopping trying to keep his balance. Ug pointed at the scars and scabs and blisters on his confrere's foot, then pointed to the skins wrapped around his own and emitted some more sounds to convey the comparative weals of skin. Look Unk, we went through all this yesterday, remember, the petroglyphs? Unk smashed him over the head with his club as his final indecipherable and yet inviolable thought on the matter. 

Wait, hold on a minute Sonny Jim, I can smell it on you. Spliff. Skunk. Yes you do. Marijuana. Sinsimilla, Mary Jane. Grass. Cannabis. Bud. Weed. Collieweed. Reefer. Chronic. Blunt. Draw. Ganja. Herb. Whacky tobaccy. Oh this is hopeless. Let me open my Urban Dictionary translation app… What? Give me a moment here. Is that ‘dope’ as in isotope 13 or 15? Come on, throw me a bone here please. Open your mouth wide and enunciate clearly. As if any imaginary doobie between your lips would fall out… Do you mean ‘bad’ in the sense of isotopes 6, 8 or 10…? Damn youth and their rapidly mutating argot. Or is it ‘ergot’? Either way I’m getting a migraine… Not least think about how much money you waste on that stuff. No not waste, ‘spunk’. What? Money, you know, money? Oh sorry, English as a second language. Bank (isotope 72). Swag. Scratch (isotope 52). Dosh. Readies. Moolah. Lucre. Lolly. Loot. Booty (isotope 107). P’s. Spondoolicks. Skrill. Ah we have lift off! Docking with the mothership. Docking your pocket money might be an idea… Hold it, I’m an ‘askhole’? What the hell is ‘askhole’ when it’s at home...? Oh here we are. Hmmmm. You’re lucky I heard that right first time mistah, see you can enunciate when you choose to… I may be your mum, but even I can see that’s a fauxpology. See not quite as beyond redemption as you might think… How do you spell that…? No, nothing, guess Urban Dic hasn’t even caught up to that one yet goddamnit… Would you care to enlighten me as to its meaning…? Pretty please…? Oh, so it’s just the silent treatment now is it? Words fail me….