IMAGINATION IS LITERAL
LIKE A BIRD IS A TRUCK
MAY 28, 2011. Once upon a time, each thing was itself and nothing else. This suited the clan.
Then on a slow Tuesday afternoon, a member made a comparison in language—one word to another.
Half the clan wanted to throw him over a cliff, and the other half wanted to get down on their knees and pray to him.
They flipped a coin—or a wheel or a rock—and decided to reserve judgment because, fortunately for the future, the coin landed on its edge.
Thus metaphor was allowed to expand.
Something heretofore unknown was stimulated: imagination.
Immediately, an underground movement was formed to stop this. It was illegal by a Higher Standard, and it would certainly corrupt the young.
I’ve lobbied for a bill that would require every child, by the age of 18, to come up with one interesting metaphor, or face death, but the bill has stalled in committee.
And green and golden, I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
(Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas)
In the New Age—rainbow and pot of gold—there is no more metaphor, because that is confusing. Better to reinterpret it as literal truth and make believe it’s so. Flatland revisited.
In another venue, walk up to Security at a major airport and say, “My God, this is a Venice brothel without the cheap champagne,” and see whether you wind up in a small room with four cops.
The literalists take over. And they don’t even care anymore whether the trains run on time.
If you write a sentence that is more than declarative, the majority is baffled.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel, Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding resides
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
(WB Yeats, “Long-Legged Fly”)
This is this. That is that. This is THIS. That is THAT. On and on, like a steamroller, until the mind and imagination go to sleep.
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
(William Gibson, “Neuromancer”)
Deploying imagination (or understanding it) is not like sending columns of troops out to battle.
And without irony or metaphor—two of the million children of imagination—there is no laughter.
Just stolid old USSR eyes asking for records.
Imagination doesn’t work in a straight line. You can’t take a simple declarative sentence and make a one-for-one translation and turn it into imagination.
Conversely, you can’t ask Melville to write a children’s book. You can’t put imagination in a step-down decompression chamber and come out with anything except mush.
The literalists think there is something good about taking a star a million times bigger than our sun and icing it until it looks like our moon.
They are trying to engineer a Flatland reality for the masses. They may not know it, but that’s the limit of what they can conceive.
These are the letters of my ancient fathers,
And these are the letters of the roses
Blowing across the rolling apparatus
That moves the sun,
Shining through old windows
On statues of drowned men.
Now they shake off the rime
And stagger up from their trench,
Without a city.
They form a many-rayed subconscious moon.
(Rappoport, from The Thunderhead Cantos)
Society: all the possibilities of metaphor harnessed to produce a non-metaphoric cartoon.
JON RAPPOPORT
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