Is human expression becoming more and more metaphorical ?

Something I have been noticing in the way human expression has shaped up in the recent times.Aren’t we slowly going into a language which is more metaphorical than it has ever been ? Language has heavily come to depend upon analogy and discarding exactness or precision of a scientific expression ,it now uses symbols which are thinly veiled poetic expressions or imagery. Everything that we have invented has been conceptualised or realised as an idea through the use of metaphors. The use of metaphors is not merely for the sake of better articulation but as an effective connecting link between different stages of idea forming and idea evolution .The distinction between expression and thought gets effectively blurred as thought at some stage becomes expression and expression ,once achieved, becomes a thought in itself.

Apart from the use of metaphors by science scholars and science thinkers ,the geeks use metaphors in a big way .In a typical paragraph of technical writing you will always find a large number of metaphors .Everything that the geek expounds uses metaphors and it is through metaphors that new concepts evolve in internet and technology . Knowledge aggregation through tagging becomes possible through metaphors and lateral linkages by way of analogy and ontological methods.

“A tag cloud ” is a pretty metaphor used for the collection of the frequently used tags on the blog or website-a highly visual image. “Avatar” is a beautiful metaphor for a virtual representation of your identity.The word is Sanscrit for the incarnations of God Vishnu on the earth to rid it of its accumulated sinfulness from time to time. “Akismet” is Arabic word for “automatic Kismet”,meaning each spam comment deserves what its content is i.e.the bad ones get the boot,the good ones get the approval. “Twitter” is another beautiful metaphor for a tiny 140 character micro-messenger and the “tweets” are an extension of the bird image which has become so popular .

“Being woken in the dead of night by noisy neighbours blasting out music could soon be a thing of the past.

Scientists have shown off the blueprint for an “acoustic cloak”, which could make objects impervious to sound waves.

The technology, outlined in the New Journal of Physics, could be used to build sound-proof homes, advanced concert halls or stealth warships.”

In this piece of science writing ,watch out for the metaphors galore-neighbours blasting out music,blueprint,”acoustic cloak”,”stealth warships” etc.
The metaphors make the expression visually effective and the assimilation of the idea becomes easier .For instance , the metaphor “acoustic cloak” is a highly visual representation for the gadget developed by the scientists and the same thing would take a long time for a lay reader to understand without the extremely pretty image of the cloak.

Do you exist if I do not believe you exist?(Big Think)

Do you exist if I do not believe you exist-is the question. Of course one is not sure.An objective reality cannot exist without somebody perceiving it.If you believe it still exists independent of your perception,you may do so but that is only a belief and hence is subjective. It is therefore safe to presume that nothing exists without our perceiving that it exists. The question that arises is whether a reality has necessarily to exist if we believe it exists.By way of example ,I believe ghosts and gnomes exist and does that mean they exist as an objective reality ? No.Additional conditions apply .Verifiability of the evidence suggesting their existence should possibly be one of the conditions. Of course one would ask what we mean by verifiability.Suppose there is a mountain near the horizon and everybody’s perception and everything else points to the possibility of its existing. Which means the sensory impressions of all the people with respect to the object tally in all respects. We may therefore conclude the mountain exists. The unanswered question is whether several assessments tallying with one other and based upon “physical verifiability” make the mountain an objective reality . Since we cannot separate our consciousness from what we perceive outside of ourselves the only way of verifying the existence of the objective reality is to cease to be the experiencer and become a part of the experienced. This is what the Hindus call brahma gyan(knowledge of Brahma)

A “made up” past

“…we know almost nothing about our pasts. What we remember is often false. For instance, when I try to think about when I was seven years old I can just recall two or three episodes, two or three images. And I only remember them because they are always the same: I remember remembering them. A lot of people would like to have another past; some are able to make it up and believe in their own versions. The writer Bruce Chatwin, for example, according to the biography by Nicholas Shakespeare, invented such a story for himself. It appears he believed in this past, which led us as his readers to believe in it, too.

PP/AT: Do you think a made-up past can come to define somebody’s future, too? And does this idea apply to nations as well?

JA: Yes, no doubt about it: by making up a past you’re able to alter your future. That’s why the idea is so attractive. The final objective is to modify everything. Science fiction writers know that by playing with the past you are also playing with the future. There are a lot of books that explain how some so-called “traditions” were made up in a matter of days. In newer countries like Angola the temptation to create national heroes and traditions is very strong and answers a collective need. It’s been done before and it’s being done again now.”

Words Without Borders: An Interview with José Eduardo Agualusa

I have seen this happening in my own life . I try to make up a past which will make me free of guilt. Because guilt is what you feel all the while when you think of the past events .Rather than wallowing in self-misery born of a painful realization of one’s own failures I would prefer to make up my past ,which gives me a better interpretation of my visions for future Not that I try to make a romanticized past with imagined glory.It is just the thought that some of the blandest events that had happened could not have been better and that some of the painful events were not in fact all that pain-causing and could have happened any way without their origin in my own failure.

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Using visual imagination to develop memory

“Develop Perfect Memory With the Memory Palace Technique

tags: “memory palace technique”

“The Memory Palace technique is based on the fact that we’re extremely good at remembering places we know. A ‘Memory Palace’ is a metaphor for any well-known place that you’re able to easily visualize. It can be the inside of your home, or maybe the route you take every day to work. That familiar place will be your guide to store and recall any kind of information”

I have never used this technique but a similar thing I have tried to use in fixing the mind on a single continuous activity .Like for instance ,while praying .I have never properly understood how to focus my mind on God during the five or ten minutes of prayer because the mind does not remain thoughtless in the duration .In the Hindu religion idol worship is practised primarily to enable your mind to be fixed on God during prayer. But then the mind has to be fixed on a static object for a full five or ten minutes ,which is a difficult thing to do. I have therefore evolved my own method of fixing the mind on the mental activity of doing “the walk around” in the temple .Visual imagination can perhaps be used to do such a walk around .I am not sure if my thoughts do not stray during the walk around in the process of making the journey as pleasant as possible.

The obvious inconvenient question that should arise out of this is: “is this prayer?” I am not sure of the answer.

I now like to think that to stop train I can pull chain

When there was a volcanic disturbance in the tummy there were sure to follow the dreams that soured in the pit of the stomach. Baby corpses in yesterday’s unreal sleep were a sequel to the previous day’s fitful dalliances with the macabre full-grown corpses that had refused to be cremated. It was the foretaste of the horrors that were to follow.

“To sleep,perchance to dream”-no ,sir. The unreality of the horrors made them no less horrors. At the time the horrors occurred ,they were real. In the train ,here, the music of the clackety goes on -”to stop train,pull chain”.Luckily this will go on in the remainder of the journey.

“To stop  train ,pull chain”.How nice. Quite reassuring that I can always pull chain ,to stop train.  But the other day ,in a fantastic situation in this very train ,I thought my son had got out of the train in a station and could not get back into the train before the train started back.I tried to pull chain but could not stop train. The horror was unreal because later I found out that he had not actually got out of the train at all. I now like to think that I can pull chain to stop train.

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The pantomime

Apart from the comic refrain that goes on in the mind all the while, there is the sound of a pantomime, the flapping of hands ,thumping of large feet and fluttering of drooping wings and a terrible satire negating all that is good and positively held in beliefs. A running commentary goes on dully as an undercurrent. We are trying to destroy finiteness, the borders of consciousness , the physical world which ends where our eyes end and the sky begins. Then why this slapstick within, the vulgar shadowy figures which seem to be acting out a meaningless play with no apparent theme in particular? I want to be just like others, playing out the general theme , the theme of waving about my physical limbs loosely to some purpose and trying to stretch the mental limits to understand where all this activity leads me to. If they too are playing out a similar theme in their world, their pantomime may be different or may be, in some ways ,of the same kind and a part of my theme .The laughter is resounding as though it is an after-thought.

In the silence of the pigeon’s moans I stop growing

Here, in the Staff College guest house I sit alone in the room ,watching a mute T.V., which I have come to like ,because I could see the mime of human actions without the meaning attributed to them by the accompanying sound. The meaning is still there but a garbled meaning which stills the running commentary within our selves. The mute T.V. freezes time temporarily putting the human actions out of perspective and suspending the operation of the clock. For a while I hear the pigeon’s moans which seem to somehow unmark time .This happens to me when I hear the pigeon’s moans in the stillness of the room away from the road’s traffic sounds. The moans sound as though they unmark time ,as though it does not really matter it is now 10.30A.M. or 7 P.M. Or rather, as though it is always 10.30 A.M. When the pigeon moans, my body remains still and stops growing because it unmarks my body’s time.The screeching sound of the furniture on the first floor comes luxuriously floating through the walls ,hitting the muteness of my T.V. which responds by a brilliant blink of the screen.The pigeon has stopped moaning as though it has now decided to mark time again for the time being. My body has started aging once again.

Faith

Faith

These flowers would not talk to us
About their previous night’s growth pain
The pain of their petals unfolding
When the stars sprinkled dust on our roof
And the night’s queen whitely bloomed.
All the while our pleasures stuck to us
There was déjà vu in the night’s smell
The left over one of the previous day
That had mixed with tar and hot sun
Which had in turn mixed with bodies.
That night was hope and some angst
While nothing ever happened , it would.

We were talking about faith, which helped fight despair in the face of a crisis. While things have always happened in a most unexpected fashion we have always believed that this thing is not going to happen to us . Yes ,other things have happened to other people but we have a long unhappening future ahead . Against all these unhappening things there are a few things which our faith prompts us to believe ,will happen.These are the miracles which ,we have always believed ,will happen.Somehow these miracles will happen . In yet another way of speaking, I don’t believe they will not happen

Miracles

The leaves felt disconnected on the sudden earth
The sky was broken in parts, teasing through
Tiny leaf-spaces full of squirrel tails and red ants
For some reason all our prayers were held up
On tiled roofs and history’s banyan treetops
We squatted on the cement steps, waiting for miracles
The neighborhood thatched hut sat immobile
The gold of its last summer turning to weary grey.
The grass walks tired of several days’ soundless feet
Between us arose questions of unspoken skepticism
Our eyes shone with wet anticipation behind their lids
In the evening the rain obliterated our foot-prints
It is as though we have never existed under the sky.
It is as though these things will never happen to us.

The scepticism here is only a fleeting thought. Actually ,deep within us we believe that miracles do take place and to that extent we are often willing to “suspend our disbelief” . Other wise we have to grapple with this problem of continually carrying transience with us like the Buddhist monk who, when asked if he has seen a pretty princess passing by in the jungle ,has said, ” I don’t know if it was a  woman or it was a princess or a human being or an animal ; I  saw some bones and some flesh passing by ” .
We do not carry such a feeling of transience with us because that strikes at the root of our existence whose continuance is  assured only by the survival instinct ingrained in us. Actually we believe, deep within ,in our own immortality .As the belief goes against the human logic which tells us in unequivocal terms that whoever is born shall die ,as has been the emprical evidence so far, we invent our own miracles which enable a temporary suspension of the logic inherent in our thinking. Actually faith is a way of insuring ourselves against uncertainty which dogs us at every step.We do not know what lies ahead and the future is filled with too many possibilities. The birth is itself a massive accident being a product of millions of possibilities and sustaining the existence is a matter of innumerable parameters .Continued existence is subject to all these parameters even a single one of which can bring about cessation of existence.The unpredictability has to be fought in our own way ,not certainly with the puny logic system we have inherited from the human race. A more comfortable survival mechanism lies in the wiping off of what we have learnt from the logic system at least for the time being .

It is not the tree who started the wind

The question about the wind that bothered me as a child was whether the tree started it all. We used to think the tree has something to do with the formation of the wind. The next doubt that followed was if the tree started it ,whether it would shake and move by itself and stir up the atmosphere to create the wind  like the hand fan.It was only later that it occurred to us that it is not the hand fan which created the wind but it merely caused the disturbance in the atmosphere , a temporary difference in the air pressures leading to the moving air ,which is the wind. But the tree is not doing a similar thing.The tree is merely shaking due to the wind as it passes through its foliage.

Here is a case where knowledge disappoints.We love our trees to shake and  create the wind .We want them not to helplessly shake and shiver when the wind comes.We want them to take the law in their hands. Because the pipal tree near our house creates ripples of music at night as the wind passes and we like to believe that it is the tree which creates the wind. This is what suits us to believe ,whatever science says.

The pipal tree near our house whistled at the passing wind
At the street-corner the neem tree trembled with pleasure.

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How do we write ?

The question is how we write,not why we write.Probably it has something to  do with the process.I look at writing as the process of forming and re-forming ideas because it is while writing that a majority of the ideas begin to form ,evolve and grow into bigger ideas and thought movements. The logical process within takes a concrete shape while words are being formed .This can be evident from a stopping in -between while words are forming when suddenly you realise that you have reached a point which was far away from your starting point.You begin to realise that you have reached certain recesses of your thinking which you never thought had existed in your mind.

http://www.bigthink.com/arts-culture/literature/3645