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fishy

Aphorisms by Isaac David Garuda

James Geary

A reader in Madrid sends news of Casitodo El Mundo Esta Chiflado: El Ingenio y Saber de Isaac David Garuda Un Pequeño, Libro Rojo Para No-Maoistas (a.k.a. Most People Are Nuts: The Wit & Wisdom of Isaac David Garuda, A Little Red Book For Non-Maoists), a small English-Spanish book of aphorisms published by Hapi Books in Manzanares El Real, Spain. October, 2010. Isaac David Garuda is new to me. Here are some of the non-Maoisms from his little red book:

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. A sage is a philosopher who lives the wisdom that he/she loves.

The great paradox of human existence is this: On the one hand, we are 100% accountable for everything that happens, and on the other, we have no control over anything.

Religion is for people who are afraid to burn in hell. Spirituality is for people who’ve already been there, done that.

Life is like a joke. You don’t understand a joke; you either get it or you don’t.

David Brooks on Metaphor

James Geary

David Brooks penned an interesting piece on metaphor in yesterday’s New York Times, Poetry for Everyday Life: “Being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses. Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called ‘pedestrian poetry’.”

Aphorisms in Hotel Amerika

James Geary

Hotel Amerika CoverIn magazine journalism, writing a cover story is a big deal. Your first cover story is one of the milestones in your career. These stories can be several thousand words long and take weeks, if not months, to report and write. The actual covers themselves are the kinds of things you frame and hang on your office wall. So I was honored and delighted to see that I have a cover story in the current issue of Hotel Amerika, an issue entirely devoted to aphorisms. Unlike my previous cover stories, this one consists of just six words and took me about one second to write (or about 40 years, depending on if you count all the background research I had been unwittingly doing simply by being alive). That story, in full:

When in doubt, remain in doubt.

If you’re interested in aphorisms, this issue is a must-have. It’s not online, so contact Hotel Amerika and order a copy. It is a brilliant compendium of contemporary aphorisms and aphorists. Regular readers of this blog will encounter many familiar aphorists, but there are just as many that will be new. Editor David Lazar has assembled a lively collection of aphorisms that chronicles and celebrates the diversity and vitality of the form. Below is just a brief sampling of some of the treasures. Get your own copy and enjoy!

A series of aphorisms, however well executed, is torture to get through, with the possible exception of books where one aphorism only is printed on each page. Then the field of white space relaxes the eye, and in the luxury of the pause, one realizes how deeply one wants to throw the book across the room.  — Sara Levine

You might get away with murder, but you can never get away with life. — Holly Woodward

Hatred, like love, thrives on silly details. — James Richardson

I am an excerpt from my own life. —Denis Saleh

Comedy, like religious ritual, needs an assembly of like-minded people. —Manfred Weidhor

Faith is a room with more exits than entrances. —George Murray

My watch band broke leaving my arm exposed to eternity. —Daniel Liebert

Leading horses to water is management;

Making them drink is leadership. —Rick Rauch

How hard is it to concentrate? Any garden hose can do it. —Anne Lauinger

Language was created not to break our silence, but as an alternative to screaming. —Matthew Westbrook

Better to do nothing
Than waste time.
—Eric Nelson

The people that we are tired of we usually sleep with. —Richard Krause

At Flatford Mill: Real Life as Metaphor

James Geary

Yesterday I was at Flatford Mill, the site of John Constable’s family business and the setting for some of his most famous paintings. Constable, like Van Gogh, is one of those painters whose work is so famous that it is difficult to actually ‘see’ it anymore. With Van Gogh, usually you ‘see’ the paintings once, the first time, and then you just see the t-shirts, coffee cups, and place mats after that.  I never ‘saw’ Constable at all, though. His paintings are so famous, and so ubiquitous on tea towels, coasters, and jigsaw puzzles, that I never even looked once, much less actually ‘saw.’ But with my daughter’s class at Flatford Mill, I looked at Constable for the first time—or at least, at the color reproductions we carried with us as we walked around the lush, green countryside visiting the places that he painted—and was amazed at what I saw: vivid, vivacious scenes of everyday life, painted with incredible intensity and love for the people and places depicted. I finally understood why Constable is so famous.

So yesterday morning, I was sitting in front of Constable’s father’s mill, on a bench that afforded me a view of Willy Lott’s house identical to the one that Constable painted in The Hay Wain, when a FedEx van drove up and parked right in front of my nose, blocking my view of Willy Lott’s house and the little mill pond and replacing it with the passenger door of the FedEx van, which had the slogan

The world on time

painted on the side of it. I was annoyed at the driver’s thoughtlessness—disrespect even—until I realized what a perfect example this was of metaphor imitating life, or life imitating metaphor, I’m not sure which. The FedEx van and its slogan are the perfect metaphor for the way the constant pressure of work and worry and deadlines obstructs my appreciation of the commonplace beauty of daily life—of looking at, really looking at paintings; of walking in the countryside on a gorgeous sunny day with my daughter; of sitting on a bench and simply doing nothing.

FedEx delivers the world on time, and for that I am truly grateful. But it also gets in the way of another world, a world that is just as important and, in fact, far more permanent than the one FedEx delivers. Constable painted a world so intensely present and so detailed that it is both a world completely in and of its time and a timeless world, too. The world that’s happening in The Hay Wain happens forever, and the fact that it happened at all is because John Constable stopped the other things he was doing and ‘saw’ it.

The FedEx driver picked up or dropped off whatever package he needed to pick up or drop off, and then he drove away, restoring to me my unobstructed view of Willy Lott’s house and another world—just in time, too.

The ‘Savings’ versus ‘Cuts’ Metaphors

James Geary

In the U.K., the Labour Party has complained to the BBC over the broadcaster’s use of the word “savings” to describe the coalition government’s efforts to reduce the budget deficit. The Labour Party insists these efforts should be described as “cuts,” as this piece from The Guardian makes clear. All the fuss about cuts versus savings has to do with “associated commonplaces,” the term coined by philosopher Max Black to describe the clouds of metaphorical associations and connections conjured up by even the simplest words.

Metaphors—and the associated commonplaces they activate—matter because they frame how we think. A metaphor opens up certain avenues of thought even as it closes down others. Just think of the different associated commonplaces created by the terms ‘estate taxes’ versus ‘death taxes’, ‘healthcare reform’ versus ‘socialized medicine’, ‘collateral damage’ versus ‘dead civilians’, ‘rightsizing’ versus ‘mandatory job losses’. Each of these terms conjures up very different and typically contradictory associations. And the more metaphors like this are repeated, the more firmly entrenched the attendant associated commonplaces become.

The Labour Party doesn’t want the deficit reduction effort to be described as ‘savings’ since ‘savings’ has an overwhelmingly positive connotation, especially during an ‘age of austerity’. Conversely, the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition doesn’t want the deficit reduction effort to be described as ‘cuts’ since ‘cuts’ has an overwhelmingly negative connotation, and implies inflicting real pain.

If this all seems kind of obvious and harmless, consider the dramatic effect different associated commonplaces can have. In Miller-McCune, Tom Jacobs describes how University of Michigan researchers asked two groups of people a question about the environment. One group was asked whether they believed ‘global warming’ was happening; the other group was asked whether they believed ‘climate change’ was happening. Around 86% of self-identified Democrats believed the environment was altering, regardless of how that process was described. Among self-identified Republicans, however, 60% endorsed ‘climate change’ but only 44% endorsed ‘global warming’. Why?

“‘Global warming’ entails a directional prediction of rising temperatures that is easily discredited by any cold spell,” Jacobs quotes the researchers as saying, “whereas ‘climate change’ lacks a directional commitment and easily accommodates unusual weather of any kind … Moreover, ‘global warming’ carries a stronger connotation of human causation, which has long been questioned by conservatives.” In other words, different associated commonplaces trigger dramatically different responses. Maybe useful to remember as we try to figure out how to save the planet by cutting CO2 emissions…

Metaphor and Euphemisms for Death

James Geary

At a talk at The School of Life last week, someone drew a blank strip of paper from the globe, which entitles them to either 1) read a random passage from that day’s newspaper and I have to spot at least one metaphor within 30 seconds or 2) name any theme and I have to think of a relevant aphorism on the spot. If I fail in either of these tasks, that person gets a free copy of my book. In this particular case, the audience member did both. When she read from the Evening Standard, it took about 5 seconds to spot the first metaphor: ‘opaque’ in reference to a situation whose outcome was unclear. When she came up with ‘death’ as her theme, though, I had a brain freeze and couldn’t think of a single aphorism on that subject. (‘Brain freeze,’ by the way, a phrase I picked up from my kids, is a kenning.)

Of course, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of aphorisms about death. So it irked me to no end that I couldn’t think of one. About 15 minutes later, after having conceded defeat and moved on, the old chestnut

There are only two things certain in life: death and taxes

popped into my head. But it was too late: I had already given this person a book. The next morning I awoke with the perfect aphorism for death in my head, Malcolm de Chazal’s

Death is the bowel movement of the soul evacuating the body by intense pressure on the spiritual anus.

The incident reminded me of the role metaphor plays in disguising or sidestepping issues we’d rather not talk about, death being a prime example. Just think of all the euphemisms—gentle metaphorical circumlocutions—we have for death: passed on, passed away, no longer with us, gone, etc… Many of the euphemisms for death are funny, too, like ‘pushing up daisies.’ I remember a joke my Dad used to tell when I was a kid every time we drove by a cemetery: “You know, Jim, people are just dying to get in there.” I thought of it many many years later as I rode into the cemetery to bury him. Black humor suits a funeral as much as black suits.

Which makes Paul Hensby’s list of euphemisms for death worth a quick perusal. Hensby is proprietor of My Last Song, named “the best funeral website in the world” by the Your Funeral Guy website, and lists several dozen mortuary metaphors, including

Bit the big one

Fallen off the perch

Bought the farm

Gone West

Given up the ghost

Popped his/her clogs

and my personal favorite

Assumed room temperature (popular among mortuary technicians)

The ‘Ideas are Food’ Conceptual Metaphor

James Geary

George Lakoff and his collaborators have identified scores of what they call “conceptual metaphors,” figurative phrases that describe fundamental abstract concepts using the language of physiology and physical experience. Expressions like “Your claims are indefensible” and “He shot down all of my arguments,” for example, are instances of the conceptual metaphor ‘argument is war’; “This relationship is a dead-end street” and “We’ll just have to go our separate ways” are examples of ‘love is a journey’; “This plan is half-baked” and “Let me chew it over for a while” exemplify ‘ideas are food’.

Without conceptual metaphors like these, Lakoff and other advocates of conceptual metaphor believe, we would have no way of talking about—or even thinking about—abstractions like love, beauty, suffering, and joy. According to Lakoff and Mark Turner, another cognitive scientist: “Basic conceptual metaphors are part of the common conceptual apparatus shared by members of a culture . . . We usually understand them in terms of common experiences. They are largely unconscious, though attention may be drawn to them. Their operation in cognition is mostly automatic. And they are widely conventionalized in language, that is, there are a great number of words and idiomatic expressions in our language whose interpretations depend upon those conceptual metaphors.”

A fun illustration of the pervasiveness of the ‘ideas are food’ metaphor comes from this poem by Phil Isherwood, a research student in cultural and creative studies at the University of Bolton:

Food for Thought

Chewing on the half-baked.
Had to suck it and see.
What I couldn’t digest
only ate away at me.

Years of stodgy literature,
chewing on the cud,
snuffling for morsels
buried deep in mud.

I tried the candy floss
of fluffy inspiration, so
sweet to get your teeth into
but leads to constipation.

Best aphorism appetizers
before a poem or two.
Fully fed with metaphors
I can leave my mind to stew.

Metaphor and ‘Jumping the Shark’

James Geary

On The Kathleen Dunn Show yesterday, on Wisconsin Public Radio, a caller expressed consternation about apparently incomprehensible metaphors. He complained in particular about sports metaphors, specifically the use of ‘Hail Mary pass’ in political speeches, and cited “jumping the shark” as an example of a metaphor he had often heard but never understood. I had never heard “jumping the shark” so I found it incomprehensible, too. Fortunately, another caller knew that the metaphor refers to an episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie, dressed in leather jacket and swimming trunks, actually jumps over a shark on water skis. The stunt was seen as a desperate attempt to come up with fresh plot lines for the show. Arguably, the writers failed in this case and “jumping the shark” became a metaphor for the point of no (or diminishing) return in TV or, indeed, any creative endeavor.

Here’s Wikipedia’s pretty comprehensive explanation of the “jumping the shark” metaphor: “an idiom used to denote when a particular production effort has surpassed its relevance and reached a point of decline in quality that it is incapable of recovering from. It refers specifically to the point in a television program’s history where the plot spins off into absurd storylines, unlikely characterizations, and adding or replacing characters. These changes were often the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose audience had begun to decline.”

The Wikepedia entry goes on to provide a similar metaphor, this time applied to films: “nuking the fridge.” This metaphor, according to Wikepedia, is “an allusion to a scene early in the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In the scene, Indiana Jones is hit by the blast of a nuclear weapon while hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator in a desperate attempt at survival. The refrigerator is hurled a great distance through the sky and tumbles hard to the ground, while the structures surrounding it are utterly obliterated. A relatively uninjured Jones emerges to witness the mushroom cloud miles away … Some moviegoers found the absurdity of this event disappointing and reflective of the decreased quality of the series.”

I can’t speak to the decline in quality these scenes may or may not represent, but both these metaphors are fantastic and reflective of the endless inventiveness of the metaphor-making mind.

Metaphor, I.B.M.’s Watson, and Jeopardy

James Geary

It’s funny how the things that turn out to be important are somehow never the things you thought would turn out to be important, like the importance of a Jeopardy-playing computer program to what it means to be ‘human’. Tomorrow, the face off between I.B.M.’s Watson computer and the two best human Jeopardy players will be broadcast—and Watson is expected to win. This is technologically a big deal, as explained brilliantly in this Mashable article,  because of the awesome computing power needed to get computers to parse the puns and allusions characteristic of Jeopardy answers. It’s humanistically a big deal because, until tomorrow (maybe), playing Jeopardy was one of those things that only humans were thought to do well. Before Watson, only homonids were thought to be any good with homonyms.

What does this have to do with metaphor? Well, the kinds of things Watson and his human opponents will be parsing tomorrow are the same kinds of things that go into metaphors: loose associations, punning relationships, sidelong and sidereal correlations. Until now, computers have not been very good at making these kinds of intuitive connections, as the wealth of useless information thrown up by the simplest Google search demonstrates. If Watson can do it, though, that is one giant leap for computerkind…

There has been research, usually involving the painstaking compilation of crucial keywords, designed to teach computers to understand metaphors. Watson may well turn out to be the first proof of concept. And there is no reason, theoretically at least, why computers shouldn’t understand metaphors. The one crucial ingredient is context.

You don’t have to look to computers for examples of poor metaphor comprehension. Children are pretty poor at comprehending complex metaphors, too, at least until they reach adolescence. As children’s knowledge of the world grows, though, so does their metaphorical range. The same is true for adults. Any metaphor is comprehensible only to the extent that the domains from which it is drawn are familiar. If you have the context, you can figure out the meaning.

The lack of essential context is what perplexed the crew of the Starship Enterprise when they encountered the Tamarians in the “Darmok” episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation. The Tamarians speak a language no one has yet been able to fully decipher. The Tamarian tongue is so elusive because it is so allusive, consisting entirely of metaphors from the alien race’s mythology and history. In Tamarian, for example, “cooperation” is expressed by the phrase “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” because Tamarian folklore includes the tale of Darmok and Jalad, two warriors who banded together to fight a common foe on the island of Tanagra. Other Tamarian metaphors include “Darmok on the ocean” for loneliness, “Shaka, when the walls fell” for failure, “The river Temarc in winter” for silence, “Sokath, his eyes open” for understanding, and “Kiteo, his eyes closed” for refusal to understand. In comprehending metaphor, context is king. There’s absolutely no reason why a computer can’t do it.

And it’s funny how books you’d almost forgotten turn out to be unexpectedly relevant, like The Body Electric, which, like this piece on Watson in the NYTimes, explores how computers could be considered living things—given the right senses and enough context.