Sometimes I wonder what the hell any of us are doing. Every other day I’m fairly convinced that if we’re not in World War III already, it’s just a matter of time and semantics. I’m not a pessimist, but I *have* been doom-scrolling. I don’t believe global catastrophe is inevitable, but I also know that most people around the world live in catastrophic settings all the time. Sometimes it feels very odd to be going on and on about literature and poetry and art and books at what feels like the end of the world. But I think we need to.
The long and the short of it: send me your previously published stuff if it’s uplifting and peace-making and you’d like me to boost its signal (even a little).
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Please read more about Belt’s mission here. It hits very close to home, and I’m so proud to now be part of it. Thank you, Ryan and Belt!
On average, how many metaphors do human beings use in the course of daily speech? It’s a lot more than you probably think.
Skip the next section to get right to the answer. Read through if you’re interested in how I came upon the figure. (It has to do with New Testament Greek and various interpretations of what the Apostle Paul has to say about an issue in the early church in Corinth regarding prostitution. I should note: by no means do I wish to add to the demonization of sex workers. Rendered in English, the language of the passage in question, which I do not quote below, requires, I think, a trigger warning. With that said, there are important contextual and historic details that do not make it into “plain English.” In short, Paul seems concerned with Christians engaging in pagan rites through what as known as temple prostitution.)
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I was doing some reading on the metaphorical linguistics of the Apostle Paul, chasing a hunch that what he has to say about prostitution in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 may be metaphorical, or, at the very least, practical in ways that have nothing to do with sex work. What if, for example, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians wed to Donald Trump considered the possibility that they were engaged idolatry? Certainly, that’s not a new charge. But passages like this excerpt from Psalm 146 haven’t seem to taken hold:
Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord, my soul.
I will praise the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
We know a thing or two about the ways some evangelicals and fundamentalists, when convenient, fixate on sex. What if the real sin is joining yourself (and by extension, in Paul’s thinking, joining Christ) to the bacchanal of hatred, racism, carnage, and terror that was January 6? If a certain set of self-identifying “conservative Christians” yawn away the charges of idolatry, maybe something more scandalous will be more convicting.
So I knew all about dying metaphors, but I had never heard of frozen metaphors (given the context, the term brought to mind old jokes about Calvinists). There seems to be some conflation, at least on Wikipedia, between frozen and dead metaphors. Frozen metaphors seem to have gone more fully and more finally through the process of literalization. I had never really thought of “table leg” as a metaphor of any kind, or even a turn of phrase. I have always thought of it as the literal object. What else would you call the leg of a table, anyway? Was there some point in the history of English language where “hands of the clock” was considered a poetic expression? When we think of metaphors, it’s usually in the context of literature, polemics, propaganda. Turns out they’re right in front of us in the every day use of things we take for granted.
In the end, of course, we might admit that because we can only know objects through our senses (Kant, and others), every single one of our experiences is a kind of metaphor. In that case, to use another, Gibbs is probably low-balling.
This footnote is from Wanamaker, Charles A. “METAPHOR AND MORALITY: EXAMPLES OF PAUL’S MORAL THINKING IN 1 CORINTHIANS 1-5.” Neotestamentica, vol. 39, no. 2, 2005, pp. 409–433. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43048553. Accessed 12 Jan. 2021; the original Gibbs paper is here.
Yesterday I read all of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and about a third of My Antonia by Willa Cather. I have read a good deal more of the Cather today.
The Baldwin is, of course, very brilliant. There’s not real space here to unwind my thoughts about it. And perhaps my thoughts and words about it aren’t needed. Everything I think of seems too little, and also too self-centered and too big and too presumptuous. Which does not get me off the hook.
As for the Cather. I started this book years ago but couldn’t make it stick. That has nothing to do with Cather and much to do with my personality and obsessive ticks and sins of omission. I am older now, and hopefully wiser, and more disciplined. I love this book, and I can tell that I will miss it, and its people, when I finish. It reminds me on one level of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books my grandmother read to me when I was very small: the descriptions of frontier life, the harsh winters, the sod houses on the plains. It also reminds me how very close, in a real sense, my grandmother (born in the 20s) was to this kind of life. She was raised in town, but spent time with her cousins on their homestead with their heavy work and homemade toys and pig bladder balloons. I remember very vividly the story about the doll frozen in the puddle in the field. I remember very vividly my Grammy reading to me about the houses on the prairie, and the comic strips in our paper, which she called the funnies, and I remember her stories of the Depression, her impressions, later, of things like segregation. I think about James Baldwin saying that the writer’s task is to excavate the experience of the people that produced them, and about Robert Antoni’s idea that what so many of us are doing, across cultures, is preserving and re-telling our grandmother’s stories. That is very often what I’m doing. And it started with her determination that I should be read to, and that there were certain things that I should know, that certain things were good and certain things were not worth gretzing over.
I have not read Laura Ingalls Wilder ever on my own. 1983, 1984 are not so far back as I would have thought they’d be by now. Grammy’s voice and warmth still very much surround me. I am fortunate and grateful.
Chris Cocca 