Metaphoric Mammal - Part III
Dive In AND Out
“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” ~George Lakoff
I’d confidently wager all the filthy lucre I could get my hands on that everyone reading this newsletter groks that ACTING HUMAN is pure metaphor.
We act in universal theater.
A holographic theater where all parts are wholes, and all wholes are parts. Where truth sparks from charged polarities. We spin. Implicate to explicate, back and forth, adinfunnytime.
Black and white, for instance, two sides of a single truth separated by language. All light, all the time. Shades parted by pesky language.
Similarly (a simile) with time. Tempus fugit and tempus tardus. That’s Latin, in case someone needs to grab a piece of this writing to dump into a thesis. I feel you. I have, believe it or not, been arm twisted onto a few thesis committees. I want to help you escape without further scathe.
No fast without slow. No time without a sense of natural rhythm, from which we imaginatively conjure time.
To act human is a metaphor AND a life practice.
We, when ACTING HUMAN, conceive and live our lives in terms of theater craft. Learnable. We are our instruments. We can can continuously practice, to play ourselves with enhanced skill, unique expression, and creative value. If we practice.
So Not So
Our lives are footprints in the sands of time.
We’re running out of time.
Bye bye sand.
Back to the Show
The Universe is our theater. We play in an infinite way. No end. No set performance. No product.
As has beaten to near death here - how many newsletters offer near death experiences? - we crave security. Despite knowing in our gut that what we crave is folly.
Everything. Changes. Life is impermanent.
Always a new NOW!
“Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.” ~Alan Watts
READ THIS BOOK! (A suggestion.) You’re welcome.
We grasp for ‘ontological security,’ to support belief in ourselves. A cliched self improvement trope. We want a stable sense of self, a consistent and easily understood identity. This notion puts us at odds with life and plops us into the thick muck of anxiety.
Identity shifts. It sings and dances. Learning to flow with that vaudevillian vision is at the essence of our practice.
Identity is circumstantial. Imagination births both identity and circumstance. We are co-creators of the WHOLE shebang.
ACTING HUMAN offers us, with practice, a skillful means to play the many identities we inevitably play in life lived alive. It takes no practice to live life dead. No one will force you to practice.
Operational Metaphors
Operational metaphors are deeply embedded in everyday life. They map abstract concepts onto familiar actions and processes.
Run a business. Grasp an idea. Play a role.
They serve as mental shortcuts. Heuristics, for the thesis inclined. Time, complexity, and ambiguity limit our capacity to make anything like fully reasoned choices consistently. We take shortcuts.
We use habits of mind. We react in the predictable ways we’ve been taught. Creative response has not found enthusiastic embrace in school nor in the curricula of everyday life.
Heuristics lead to excessive categorization. They separate excessively and mindlessly. Quick judgements. There’s a long list of well known biases. Cognitive and perceptual. We are constantly fooling ourselves into sloppy and slippery decision making and destructive actions.
Habits of mind and the biases they engender offer nothing but time saving and “go along to get along” direction in life. Often at great cost to our sanity and humanity. (More next time.)
Once we realize that time is in continuous supply we can practice life lived creatively, and use mental models only when absolutely necessary. The degree of necessity will diminish as we practice. As we pay attention. Don’t expect your relationship to all of life to change all at once.
More and more, WITH PRACTICE, we can ACT HUMAN, alive in a Universal Theater where there is no time apart from time we create.
Life then becomes an infinite game without strict rules or firm boundaries. We can heal, reveal, and love more fully.
Embodied Metaphors
Embodied metaphors extend operational metaphors into the realm of physical experience.
You will note the verbs in the examples above are physical actions. Run. Grasp. Play.
One of the earliest descriptions of Stanislavski’s innovative system of acting techniques was the Method of Physical Actions.
A quality of muscular-motor experience, evocations of felt effort together with body movement through time and space permeate embodied metaphors.
They connect the body to emotional states. Like proximity to warmth. Embodied metaphors capture and transform sensory data. We feel close.
“The heart of metaphor is inference. Conceptual metaphor allows inferences in sensory-motor domains (e.g., domains of space and objects) to be used to draw inferences about other domains (e.g., domains of subjective judgment, with concepts like intimacy, emotions, justice, and so on). Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.” ~George Lakoff
Rehearsal
Contrary to popular belief, rehearsal is not a period of practice leading to a presentation. We have, however, been conditioned to see it that way.
Try this instead: rehearsal is a time for discovery and risk in a safe space. A time and place to tune into your self talk and subtle body cues. To find embodied and operational story structure that tells the truth about each of us in relationship to the unfolding WHOLE STORY.
As we learn to treat ourselves to life as creative rehearsal, in a safe space, where feelings of ‘fear’ do not scare us, we find we are attracted to trust and truth. A welcoming space that encouages and enlivens our lives.
As a director, my first order job is to create a safe space. One in which we can express ourselves truthfully without fear of ridicule or negative sanction.
With freedom to discover, actors will find apt elements of story to play that give us all portals into universal truth. We, through a clear sense of felt truth, share the WHOLE universe, as we are in it, and it is in us.
Trust. Truth. Courage.
Remember: All story, all the time. The universe is made of story.
We are ONE singular sensation when we see and feel as WHOLE story.
When we ACT HUMAN our intention is to story. Story is a verb.
Our practice develops a dynamic sense of story. We feel story as we pay attention.
We soften into a WHOLE UNIVERSE to live life alive as story eternally emergent.
Until next time,
Lights Up!