Metaphor

It's a classic defense to claim that you were employing a metaphor, just as it is a classic defense to claim that your listeners were employing one incorrectly. Metaphor is dangerous, because you never have to say what you mean, and people don't like that.

It's not like a simile, where you say, "Hey, racists are like pigs because they eat slop, their shit smells awful, and they're only good dead."  People expect an explanation to a simile. "Okay, so you're saying that this thing is like this other thing. How so?" they ask.  And the answer satisfies them that yes, while you can describe the first thing by evoking the second, the first thing is distinct and different and it's merely a way of describing and not a literal equivalence.

But metaphor doesn't work that way.  "Racists are pigs, stewing in their own offal, declining to contribute anything of benefit to society except their deaths."  Yes, you might see that I am indeed saying the same thing about racists as I did before: they eat, and smell like, shit, and we enjoy them more dead than alive.  But note: I am not explaining; I am elaborating on the metaphor, thickening it, but I'm not saying anything about racists, I'm saying it about pigs and then saying that a subclass of the pig is the racist.  Racists are pigs.

That's confusing.  I mean, do I really think racists are pigs?  Of course I don't; that's an insult to pigs, which are wonderful, loving, intelligent creatures which just happen to possess certain attributes which can be used to amplify how I feel about racists.  And it's convenient, so I start simply saying, "Racist pigs," when I mean to say, "Racists who embody these traits which can be metaphorically illustrated by a comparison to a pig."  And then I just say, "pigs," because the rest is implied. The metaphor has legs.

Surely not.  Surely it doesn't work that way.  Why would I remove the racist part?  That's the part that's important.  Because language is literal and never figurative, and what I say is exactly what I mean, and I won't die and have my words passed down and translated and misheard.  If I preserve the exact condition of my original statement of metaphor, people can tell that I mean it metaphorically.

But let's look closer: sure, people might know that I meant, "Racists are pigs," metaphorically, but what about "stewing in their own offal?" Do pigs literally (using the term which has come to mean the exact opposite of its literal meaning, which is irony of the highest order, another term that doesn't mean what it literally means) stew in shit?  They cook themselves in a pot filled with shit?  I think not.  Stewing is a metaphor so far removed that it has become simply figurative language.  And do I think that, describing racists as pigs, I am saying that they wallow around in their own fecal matter?  Dear God, there are layers here, and I'm terrified, so instead of following the trail and discovering that maybe there might be turtles all the way down... well, it's hard to be entirely literal because the sentence I'm currently finishing had at least two easily-identifiable turns of metaphorical phrase, and if you keep digging, pretty much everything we say and do that isn't a concrete noun or verb is a metaphor at the bottom.  Language is symbolism. Language isn't literal.

That's terrifying to people who want a straight answer.  Absolutely baffling and terrifying.  You know (or may be, in which case I'm sorry but you should get your head out of your ass, though not literally) one of these people: they were the kids in school who, when the teacher was reviewing what would be on the test, would always want to know what the answer should be, even to the essay questions; they're the folks who don't like long passages when a short summary could do; who don't like nuance; who don't read "hard" books or, if they do, think Moby Dick is about the whale and Dante's Inferno is a tour guide to Hell.  They're not bad people, but they can't deal with uncertainty.

The world is an uncertain place. That's scary. But believing that something is literal, or can be literal, just because it's hard to understand any other way isn't helping. It's sticking your fingers in your ears and humming loudly while the doctor tells you that the cancer isn't responding to treatment, then going home and having a "Cancer Free!" party, then wondering why everyone is surprised when you get sicker.  It's... well, it's a metaphor, because that's the only thing I can do to continue to talk about it without just saying exactly what it is again, which is, "believing that something is literal, or can be literal, just because it's hard to understand."

A lot of time is spent on "literalist" readers of the Bible (to pick something totally at random) and how they don't get that even though they claim that there's only one literal meaning to the text, they're applying their own interpretation.  There are some very good pieces being written on the subject; I link to this one because, well, it's apropos.

But I think a deeper issue exists than people being unable to understand that there's no way to read something without interpreting it.  It's recognizing that, regardless of "interpretation" you might be missing the fact that the whole thing is a metaphor.  When it says, "Samson slew the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass," maybe we have to take that in context and realize that The Bible isn't sanctioning the slaughter of Palestinians with a very small bone in that verse, but more than that, maybe we have to consider that, "slaying the Philistines," and, "jawbone of an ass," might very well not mean anything like what they "literally" mean to anyone, even if we were able to divine exactly what literal meaning they should have somehow.

I'm not a Biblical scholar. I don't pretend to be. So my example is necessarily wrongheaded and stupid because I don't know what the metaphors were and thus I'm as at sea as anyone trying to read the Bible as a literal text with literal intentions.  But suppose we take "Philistines" for a moment.  In our wonderfully figurative language, "Philistine" has become "philistine" and is used to refer to those who... well, let's let Miriam Webster take a crack at it.

a :  a person who is guided by materialism and is usually disdainful of intellectual or artistic values

b :  one uninformed in a special area of knowledge

Because at some point, someone said, "Boy, that materialistic person who has no knowledge and is disdainful of intellectual or artistic values sure is a Philistine, an enemy of God's Word (that's what it means, so let that be a lesson to anyone)."  Metaphor. Give it long enough, it takes off and everyone forgets everything but the object being metaphorically used for comparison.

So there's a legend about slaying enemies of God's Word that didn't make it into the Bible, probably because it wasn't actually about slaying enemies of God's Word and in fact may have predated the whole idea of God's Word(shocking, I know).  And in it, the hero slays his enemies, who happened to be people who could be described as Philistines at the time the Bible was written down, but who may have been Canaanites or Syrians or whoever was the enemy of this particular Semite hero. Now, the audience (never forget that it wasn't written down at first) for the Samson story would have known this other legend, and they would have known that the anonymous Semite hero of that legend was vain and had slain these enemies because he was showing off for a woman, and the audience would have said, "Aha, so Samson is John Q. Semite as he slays his foes, so what does that tell us about Samson?  It's an object lesson in humility, even in the service of one's cause. We must not be proud before Jhvh, nor should we be proud in His service, for He is the one to be exalted and we are merely his instruments."

Eventually, it became, "Oh, so Samson is a slayer of enemies, so we must be humble before God."  Then, when it was written down, the Israelites weren't fond of the Philistines, so "enemies" became "Philistines," and "we must be humble before God," became implied.  And then other people took the story but didn't look at the book of commentary where it explains, "So, you see here that Samson was killing the Philistines because he was proud of his strength, plus he's going to have girl troubles later on, so maybe, you know, make with the less showing off, nu?"  And those other people didn't have a clue what the metaphors were, and Samson himself became a metaphor, and pretty soon you've got folks from the South saying that literally the Bible wants us to kill everyone in Palestine and give it to Israel.

None of the above is true.  I have no idea whether "slaying the Philistines" was a metaphor for something.  And that's the point; I don't know, and neither do most of you, including pretty much every joker who claims to be reading the Bible "literally."  The "jawbone of an ass" might be a reference to a popular folk song of the time where Avram makes a marital aide out of a donkey's jawbone so he can please his wife since he can't get it up any more, and this is all a smutty joke about how Samson was gay, since he was "slaying Philistines with 'the jawbone of an ass' if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge."  As far as I know, that's not true either, but you don't know.

And the scariest metaphors I haven't even covered yet.  Those are the kind where you don't even make a comparison.  Where you say, "Boy howdy, pigs sure do like to wallow in shit.  I wonder if we should buy them some white hoods."  Whoa, too fast for me buddy, slow down.  You're alluding to your subject without mentioning it because you're assuming that the audience has the context to be able to pick up what you're putting down.  And you can be satirical on top of that; my racist pigs don't really support an example because they're too simplistic, but suppose we take Gulliver's Travels and say that not only is Swift using metaphor without telling you what the subject is, but he's deliberately exaggerating the metaphor's characteristics so as to satirize the original, unstated subject.  No, Gulliver's Travels is not a fantasy about visiting different strange lands filled with different strange people.  A literal reading might let you interpret, which is why movies made from the same book aren't the same, but unless you get that it's all a metaphor (in several layers, with satire) you don't get it and you don't even know you don't.

It's like the Bible is a satire that nails its subject too well, and so people don't think it's satire.  It's a metaphor so convincing and complex that people are fooled into believing that it's literal.  Except that's not true; people aren't fooled, they're duped, or they willfully believe against proof, or they know and are lying.

This was all an excuse to link to the post to which I linked in the text, plus this:

Destroying the ballet in the name of artistic freedom

Unless you know the context, it looks like the Federal Theatre Project is about to make a resurgence, and that, while it might seem like a good thing, would not be.  Keep government hands off of artistic expression, I say. Unless you know the context.