...got lots of response to that skeleton post...about skeletons as metaphors for...something.....a couple nights ago I was walking past this health club...in my peripheral vision coulda sworn I saw naked people...so, then, turned and looked more closely...turned out they were skeletons, next to the massage tables...so, basically, I was right...it’s just that they were really really naked people...
...one time when I was a kid my mom was reading this book...think it was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou...I asked her what it was about...she told me it was about this girl growing up in the south and dealing with racism and...basically nothing to do with birds or singing....I said so why don’t they just call it that instead o’ this misleading crap about birds singing?...or something like that...quite indignant about the willing obfuscation...
...my understanding of metaphor has evolved since then...somewhat...though, I still don’t actually know why the caged bird sings...since...gotta admit this...I still haven’t read the book...but I have a copy and I’m planning on it...
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Shakespeare
...Shakespeare was good with metaphors, but he didn’t seem to like them much...since neither a summer’s day nor the sun itself really seemed to do justice to anybody worth writing a poem about....Lawrence Sterne went on and on insisting that, when he mentioned a nose, all he really meant was, in fact, a nose...and some time later, Freud said sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar...though I’m less likely to believe him...
One problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor.
Joseph Campbell
...of course it’s also been suggested that life and existence are themselves nothing more than metaphors...though the question remains for what?...then, if that could be answered there might not be any need for metaphors in the first place....anyway, what if it’s the other way around?...what if those great unspeakable mysteries are all just metaphors for stuff that’s in your kitchen cabinets?...or what if everything’s simply a metaphor for itself?
...if this blog is a metaphor, I can only hope it’s for something not too onerous...like a minute or two spent sitting in full lotus on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream, margarita in hand, music whirring through the pines, and a loved one nearby...
...as opposed to slopping through rancid muck to get nowhere....though, if it’s that, you really should’ve stopped reading by now...
