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Help me Get my Head Around Multiple Metaphors

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:29 / 02.07.04

I had a conversation about 'Gullivers Travels' with a friend a few months back, I'd studied it at A Level, ze'd done it on her university course. Obviously they'd examined it in a much more detailed way than I had. So much so that in the problematic last journey our A Level course had glossed over a number of items whereas the degree course went straight at them and apparently it was all about the metaphors....

But where I really want to take this and which might be the most useful area to discuss this, is with our old friend The Invisibles. GM's work, and this in particular, seems to revolve around things being metaphors for several different things at the same time. And I think this is one of the main reasons I have difficulties getting my head around it, for some reason I have difficulties when something is several different things at once, which aren't equal.

At this point it should probably be mentioned that what I'm talking about may not be metaphors at all. But it was a toss-up between that and calling the thread 'Help me get my head around multiple wossnames, thingies, oh buggerit'.

So, take the magic mirror in The Invisibles. It's an alien creature, a magical device for skipping across dimensions, the stuff Invisible antibodies are made out of, the human soul. It's a pliant substance that reshapes itself according to the wishes of someone looking at it (1.25) and it's a device for traumatic reimprinting of people (2.17-ish). It's all these things at once, but all the things it 'is' are contradictory. So help me deal with stuff that IS and IS NOT at the same time.

'Help me get my head around contradiction' perhaps?

15:59 / 02.07.04

I think the idea behind metaphor is finding a common ground between things that appear not to be the same, such that on one level of perception, a mirror, an antibody, a human soul, and an interdimensional alien are all the same thing – they’re all sharing a set of qualities.

In the case of that set of objects (each of which are really representing a set of relations), they're all about self/other differences.
* Mirror=Reflections of self (I am here, I am also out there).
* Antibody=autonomous component of self (I am out here, I am also inside myself fighting not-self that gets into myself).
* Human soul=self as insubstantial (I am in this body, but I am not this body, although this body is me).
* Interdimensional alien=consciousness and selfness transforming across states of reality (I am not this other thing, but this other thing is made up of me and others as we relate through time. I am an antibody within a larger self of which I'm not entirely conscious.)

So metaphor like this isn't comparing shape as much as process -- it's about the verbs, not the nouns.

03:15 / 03.07.04

Pretty much what grant said. For example, one way of teaching you another word for 'red' would be to translate it into English, but a better one is to show you an apple and say the word, and a fire engine and say it, and a barn and say it, and so forth, until you realize that their overlapping quality ("redness") is what you're meant to understand. And that will work even if I'm trying to teach you a word that has no direct one-to-one translation to one you already know; I show you many instances that have the quality I wish to tell you about, and you draw the intersection on the Venn diagram for yourself.

10:20 / 10.07.04

A metaphor is just 'something' that represents 'something else'.

I find that it helps to remember that all languages and maths are metaphor systems. Every word in every language is a metaphor for something that exists in the 'real world', one way or another. So it makes some sense that existing metaphors could be shuffled around based on common properties (however abstract).

I'm not entirely sure we're addressing your actual question, though...

Charlie's Horse

23:07 / 17.07.04

So help me deal with stuff that IS and IS NOT at the same time.

You might check out 'Black Science Part 3: Sorted' (not sure of the issue number, but it's in the second volume. or check trade paperback #4 pg. 66). Go through the White Flame meditation. If it hits you, it tends to give a flash of the underlying unvoiced beneath all our crawling, shagging metaphors.

It sounds like you've encountered some difficulty with the good ol' 'as above/so below' proposition. Something as big and complex as The Invisibles reflects whatever interests, obsessions, and filters you already have back at you, all the better to quietly slip new ones in. It's like when something gets enough complexity, it comes to life - it moves, it changes as you do, and it seems to wink at you through some lovely in-joke that's always on the tongue's tip. You re-read it and find entirely new systems of relating everything together, as though comic panels move around in the closed book's secretive darkness. The series 'is' all the things brought up above, because WE have to pare the work down to these things to help us understand it. Or to help it absolutely bewilder us.

Listen, my rambling aside - go watch some Groucho Marx movies. That man has incredible skill at 'bisociations' - phrases that he gives 2 or more meanings. He turns it into sheer comedy.

'So I've explained everything. You follow me?'
'Yes..'
'Well don't. That's stalking - I could get you arrested.'

'I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How it got into my pajamas, I have no idea.'

Groucho can explain words with many meanings better than I can. And he's funnier.

So, did any of this help, from me or those above?