Power of Metaphors

I do not profess to be any sort of a music connoisseur but in my limited experience the one piece that astonishes me to no end is Ralph Vaughan Williams's 'The Lark Ascending'. And I have used the word 'astonish' not by mistake. The primary emotion that I have when listening to this piece is not one of happiness or satisfaction but astonishment. Somehow while listening to this piece with my eyes closed, the abstract idea of a graceful skylark slowly rising up above the crystal water into the endless sky manifests itself in the mellifluous sounds of the lone violin. And it amazes me that something as disconnected as music is able to evoke such a specific emotion. I suppose this is a very subjective experience but allow me to develop the point.

I feel that the lone quality that separates a genius thinker from a mediocre wannabe and an ignoramus is the capacity for metaphorising, so to say. The power to draw striking analogies between seemingly very different fields is the stuff brilliance is made of. I suppose we all have some sort of 'knowledge specialization' now that we have ventured beyond the dark ages of immaturity and pointlessness and I suppose we shall continue to add to our repository of existing understanding for the rest of our lives. As is probably done by any and every human being. But at the cost of sounding a bit defeatist most of us would vanish without a whimper in the cosmic sonata or without a flash in the divine pan. And one of the most important reason for this, I feel, is that the power to discover the underlying simplicity of this seemingly chaotic universe doesn't come easy. And to most, it doesn't come at all. And this power to find an underlying order simpler and more beautiful than the mess it bedrocks is the power to form metaphors and analogies. We can see it everywhere but lets take science for the sake of our hardwired brains. The story of science and its heroes is a classic case of gradual simplification and continued unification of our concepts. From Newton's brilliant insight that the forces that make the heavens go round are the same as the force that squashed the most famous apple in history to Maxwell's observation that electricity and magnetism can be combined beautifully into one elegant theory to Einstein's leap of imagination which unified space and time to Bohr's fruits which managed to provide a unified umbrella theory to 3 out of 4 fundamental forces of nature and the present quest for the final frontier that seeks to unify gravity with the rest, it's one breathtaking story of a string of ideas that are the scientific equivalents of the literary concept of 'metaphor'. In fact, our theories are nothing but self consistent set of metaphors relating mathematics and the observable reality and that is the poetic beauty of our simple universe. And like a great piece of music, like Beethoven's 9th, like Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace, like Wilde's essay on lying, like Fry's wonder at cheese and wine, like the soaring flight of the skylark, the joy of finding that there is an order under this chaos, that things are interconnected and simple below this mind-numbing physical complexity is one that gives me goosebumps.

'Metaphor' in fact is hardwired into our systems and we cannot speak a simple sentence without resorting to it in one way or another. As Guy Deutcher mentions in his brilliant book 'Unfolding of language', language itself is built upon a reef of dead metaphors. If you go back long enough in history simple words like 'back', 'have', 'will' etc. will turn out to be metaphors. And as we start maturing as a civilization, as our 'tolerances' for existing metaphors increase, the more experimental and cutting edge of our writers begin exploring other metaphors which are more radical than the old ones but nevertheless stomachable for an age of increased sensitivity. The same happens with ideas and concepts which increasingly seek to interconnect hitherto disconnected notions with more flamboyant analogies and more radical metaphors. So when Nabokov wonders about the dancing electric wires as he sits on the window seat of a traveling train and compares the motion with the life of a human being suffocated by social clutches or when Fry compares language with sex, one has to sit back, shake his head in reverence and give it to the genius who could connect such uncoupled ideas. And it's not that their analogies are contrived. I suppose you need a sufficiently developed sensitivity to appreciate the brilliance required to come up with such unifications in very much the same way wherein an average person will be able to relate the concepts of love and rose because the metaphor has been so beaten to death. So if one is willing to give legitimacy to the connection between a love and a rose, ideally, every connection should be beyond reproach and hence our snickering disapproval for the avant garde seems baseless.

But the more important and 'underlying' argument is that simplification and unification are concepts that a human being seems to strive for in all his endeavors. And when such comprehensibility and interconnectedness emerge from a heap of confused mess, it's a very primal joy. That it's an effort that is beyond the average human being is without doubt. Knowledge by itself is not of much use. I mean, Dan Brown seems to have a lot of knowledge but he doesn't bring anything really new and interesting and thought provoking to the dinner table. We are super specialized in our fields but as to our ability to further our fields by any respectable jump, the lesser said the better. But knowledge definitely is the bedrock upon which a greater understanding is constructed. It's like Fry's complaints about the sorry state of the 'verse libre' generation who do not write metrical poems not because they do not want to but because they cannot. Newton famously said, 'The reason I have been able to look beyond others is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants' and he was referring to Galileo. So genius is a rare combination of a voracious appetite for existing knowledge and an uncanny ability of simplifying the current scheme by discovering hidden and often surprising connections. That is why Wilde was such a great genius. What we often overlook, overwhelmed by his brilliant wit, is his encyclopedic grasp of literature before his age. What we often gloss over, however, is his unmatched capacity of elucidating faint connections. 'No man is ever completely unhappy at his friend's success'! It's a faint connection, a frail analogy, a tenuous 'metaphor'. But it's there, vital and universal.