Metaphoric Mammal

Easter Edition

Metaphoric Mammal

Easter Edition

We scurry through a world of linguistic loop holes, language forms that lurk in plain sight. They sway us profoundly. Camouflaged thought forms with powerful influence are stumbled through habitually.

Like mangled bunnies, our senses are on the blink.

Unlike Easter egg hunts where hunted eggs are well hidden for fun, metaphors that drive our lives significantly have emerged and expanded, largely unnoticed, for as long as we’ve used language. 

A next stage eruption of symbolic confusion.

Probably a good idea to pay attention. 

Metaphoric Mammals ‘R Us

Those of us who write poetry, or lyric, traffic in metaphors with intention. They are grist for the mill. The rest of us stumble unwittingly.

We all use analogies in everyday conversation.

We have a sense of the value, feeling, and sound of one thing in terms of another. 

The extent to which more subtle analogies, i.e., metaphors, are embedded in body and mind rarely attract our attention. They push us around. We’re dinghys at high tide.

Metaphors go well beyond mere linguistic phenomena. They are fundamental to our perception of so-called reality at every level of experience, activity, and comprehension. They are ubiquitious.

Luckily, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have taken big-time interest in this pesky matter. They’ve written a fat book entitled, “Metaphors We Live By.”

I’ve read and reread it, in part and whole, at intervals, over many years. Never once at the beach.

The next several dispatches will delve into our Metaphoric Mammalian nature.

A Lakoff tease:  “One can be both free and economically secure while leading a totally meaningless and empty existence.”

Stick around, won’t you?

For now, I have chocolate bunnies to slaughter. 

Gotta run. 

I’m late for an appointment with Reb Shlomo at sundown sharp. 

This Easter - it’s ixnay on treyf, going Glatt.

Until next time,

Lights Up!