for the birthday of Walter Benjamin, one (but not about him)

Metaphor and reality, with an aside on monsters of the maize


Ever since my excursus on the 1960s, I have been pondering Norman O. Brown’s loveliest bit of, I thought, nonsense, “Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.”

Of course I adored it at age twenty-one and took it very literally.

Still taking things literally, I was prepared to write, “If everything is a metaphor, then nothing is,” which is a pretty piece of rhetoric that also is not true.

But it has come to me that you do not need to know the original terms of comparison to have a metaphor; you only need to have something carried across a perceptual gap, one thing understood in terms of something else.

And of course (of course) we do not ever have the thing itself, no matter how primal the interaction; we “have,” in the sense of “having in mind,” only our perception, which is always pre-conceived by a whole host of cultural and chemical factors. (Cf. Oliver Sacks on the brain chemistry, or Lewis Carroll (I think) via Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances: “He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk / Descending from a bus; / He looked again, and found it was / A Hippopotamus.”)

It isn’t that there is no physical reality, it’s that we view it through a scrim of variously colored cultural and psychological hallucination. When reality whops us one over the head, we literally (metaphorically, that is) “never knew what hit us.”

Operationally speaking, of course, we adequate our perceptions to the phenomena themselves, and we call it physics or economics or whatever, with the adequation going down in quality as the number of perceived variables increase. The numbers of money, having no direct relationship to the objects that can be gotten with it, are extraordinarily metaphoric; hence Wallace Stevens’ observation, from the comfortable position of one who had a large amount of both, “Money is also a kind of poetry.”

With regard to the passions through which we perceive the world and our relationship to it, I’ve just encountered a bizarre but potentially revelatory theory regarding one widespread cultural phenomenon in the Americas. Corn poisoning, and I am not referring to its effects after it has been turned into an alcoholic beverage.

Apparently when one consumes nothing but good old American maize, or mostly maize, the lack of lysine and tryptophan, plus the unavailability of its niacin for absorption, leads to serotonin levels comparable to those found in extreme sleep deprivation. The whole complex of biochemical changes have been clinically linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder, and to extreme aggressiveness, and also to states of mystical ecstasy.

Farming peoples in the Americas long ago learned intuitively that combining beans and/or meat with the corn provides the missing nutritional ingredients for mental health, but some archaeologists hypothesize a priesthood feeding on almost nothing but the stuff, growing ever more obsessive, aggressive, and ecstatic. And as a result, you have obsidian knives and pyramids of sacrifice from Mesoamerica to Chaco Canyon.

There are quite a few unfair metaphors that could be wrung from this with regard to the present-day economics of corn, but I would prefer to avoid cheap comparisons and restrict myself to the rather costly ones.

The information on the mass psychosis of maize comes from Craig Childs’ 2006 book House of Rain, an account of his trek across the American Southwest in an effort to figure out how and why the ancestors of today’s pueblo peoples abandoned whole cities and moved southward. His hypothesis is that it was done by conscious choice in response to climate fluctuation, but that some of them kept on moving.

for the birthday of Walter Benjamin, two (but still not about him)

Reading the account in House of Rain of the contradictory interpretations of the storehouses of live tropical birds in the desert Southwest's Chaco Canyon brings to mind several topics. (Were they brought there as ritual offerings? as a nine-hundred-year old equivalent of a regional superstore? dysfunctional in either case, since the birds seem to have been kept in complete darkness where they did not thrive.)

I was reminded of a cruel parody of a few decades ago, The Motel of the Mysteries, wherein future archaeologists manage to misinterpret every object they find in an abruptly buried motel. But of course the notion of misinterpreting objects is an old one, usually allowing us to feel superior as when we read the Anglo-Saxon poetic reference to Roman ruins as the work of giants.

Part of the interpretation issue is incompatible aesthetics. I have often noted that we seem to take seriously Roman gewgaws that probably were meant as unseriously as home design in general is in our day...pretty, but not high art, and not meant to be part of a religious context or whatever. On the other hand, the history of religious objects does not allow for such a confident interpretation, especially since the Romans had more of a sense of humor about their divinities than other cultures.

Our own earnestness is sometimes misguided in its homages to other cultures; I bought a few cards yesterday celebrating Andean beliefs about the spirits inherent in the seeds of food plants, and realized that what distinguished them was that most of them maintained integrity as works of art, whereas so many such would-be celebrations of other peoples' beliefs are inferior to the art of the peoples in question, so that we would rather have the original art rather than someone's re-interpretation of it.

I don't want to go on at great length about this topic, but it is an excellent illustration of how we project our own backgrounds and our own artistic preferences on the world in general.

We don't have to accept objects in terms of their original intention, of course; I was as charmed in childhood by the fly in the plastic ice cube as the inhabitants of Little Belaire are in Engine Summer, and it didn't matter to me that it was supposed to be a joke. It was an appealingly odd object to hold in the hand and appreciate for its particular heft and its reflective properties...I suppose in all the meanings of "reflective."

That fly in the plastic also serves as a deliberate fly in the ointment in Crowley's novel" present in previous tellings of the tale." Well, we do remember different details every time we tell our own stories; if the story itself is from elsewhere, we put different weights on the elements just as we put different weights on the aesthetic elements of visually oriented art.

But of course there are issues of consciousness at work here, worth much longer discussion, since we must take the text at its word regarding the world it has created, and not slip off into a re-interpretation in the terms familiar to our own world. So, behind the LJ-cut, here goes.

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