An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
Story at a Minuscule Scale
At a certain point in my practice, I became obsessed with making tiny things. I was having to move all of the time, always with this ghost of temporality. Under the impression that I would take everything with me, I started to only make very small things. But the smallness has other side effects: it also invites a different kind of attention. You have to be moving more slowly to see a small thing. It can draw a person in differently to interact with something tiny, they have to move their face towards it, focusing, to see its detail.
What is the smallest form a story can take, if story is understood to be an expression of relation (this definition itself a distillation)?
If story is about relation, if story is about the generative space between agents, I would argue that the smallest form a story can take is the interaction between the idea of two things. A metaphor is the overlap of the idea of two things. Is the smallest shape a story takes a metaphor?
The word metaphor comes from the Greek metaphora: literally "a carrying over," being comprised of the two parts meta "over, across" + pherein "to carry, bear,”, as in of children (etymonline.com).
A womb-word, a container-shape. A perfect shape to carry something and to let those little ghosts take shape, ready to pop out as their own unpredictable entities.
One thing overlaps one other thing, and in that space of overlap, something new can enter. I started out this essay using a metaphor to describe usages of story. I bend this now, using metaphor itself as that variety of tale: something to make a space for something else.
The smallest space, through overlap, becoming opening.
in answer to no questions is a series of small books written about celestial bodies, as experienced from the earth.
more about that later.
Ubiquitous Relation: some background on metaphor
The field of Cognitive linguistics argues that language is built of metaphor, that it is one of language’s most essential building blocks. Without metaphor, we would need a specific word for every single thing: language would be too cumbersome, and unable to adapt with any flexibility or nuance to new information (Leezenberg, 301-302).
Language itself could also be seen as the overlap of two things, to carry meaning. It is a conflation of space: what is here is overlapped with what is not here, in time and space. Something holds the idea of something else. Perception philosopher David Abram argues that in its written form, this is a variety of animism: marks on a page make a sound in the head, bringing images like visions. Is the spoken not also like this, a representative sound standing in for something?
Are language and assemblage essentially the same processes? Is contemplation and listening also? All of these a processes where meaningfulness, information, or understanding arise like ghosts from the resonant between.
I am trying to make an argument for listening, for being-with, for time spent…or to articulate why this is such an important part of my practice. This is not a logocentric argument: what I reach for through looking at metaphor is not the explication of resonant overlap using words, but rather an acknowledgement of the richness of that overlap beyond language, as something embodied, felt. Like Jane Bennet’s materialities resonating with each other, that it is ok to feel something sparkle in the space between, and to reach new (non-linear, continually unfolding) understandings through this encounter. That this is human, that it is everyday, that it is real. Metaphor as relation. Relation as basic, and also beautiful. Relation as a container that comes up between. Over and across. Carried, maybe.
Is this another way
that an object outside of the self can call to the inside of the self
as if it is calling it by name?
Reach for a Single Feather
In the documentary we are watching, a man is walking in a protected forest along a platform.The platform is raised and wooden. It demarcates and communicates an area where he is permitted, but it also has the affect or association of demarcating something safe. A protected space extending through protected space, it preserves the humans and the forest from each other, while still allowing interaction. The human feet must never touch the forest floor.
In the film, the man steps to the edge of this platform and exclaims: a cormorant feather! He holds tightly to the railing and then he steps off. Still holding, one foot comes down, off the platform, while the other foot stays firmly planted on the deck. As if so tethered he is safe, moored, hinged. Transgressing while still staying safe, maybe, or moving only to the edge of the transgression. While he reaches what he reaches for.
He returns elated; he turns from the camera and takes a few steps looking at the feather, then kisses it and gestures upwards with his hand and face. It is a private gesture; the camera is a hidden camera. The feather seems for him to hold some kind of power, of that place or of the birds, a meaning or a gravity inaccessible to the outside viewer.
Acid Forest, 2018.
Ethical Metaphor
I wrote: it is ok to feel something sparkle in the space between, and to reach new (non-linear, continually unfolding) understandings through this encounter. My emphasis here on non-linearity comes from a resistance to the idea of possessing a total knowledge of the other.
I come from a culture that wants to know everything. It wants to own and to know everything. Possess the land like it possesses true knowledge. Like a lover is possessed—everything is illuminated. Everything serves.
Cultural philosopher Édouard Glissant calls for the right to opacity (61-62). Glissant’s thinking contends with the complex interplay of cultural identity caused by forced dislocations of slavery, colonization, and conquest. Asking for total knowledge of any other, he argues, is a form of assuring domination through reduction. The right to opacity, to remain unknowable and to be respected as unknowable, still an equal, is an essential factor in non-hierarchical relation.
Metaphor can certainly be used in a way that is reductive, hateful, harmful. There are many racist and sexist symbols that do not bear repeating here, but whose usage of the metaphor I acknowledge.
I am not arguing for the reductive, but against it.
How can I use force of metaphor work in this other direction, opening towards opacity of meaning instead of locking meaning down? Can it be a way to give the subject considered back to itself, free it for a bit from culture, see what else can enter? A force for reaching an understanding that is non-reductive, inconclusive. Anti-conclusive. Opaque. A force that lets something flash out incomprehensibly, beyond understanding?
I am not arguing for this type of symbol, but against it (as a symbol is an attempt to lock something in, pin it down as with the arrow, a version of the dead or dying). I am arguing for a state of receptivity through overlap. A form of anthropomorphism, an everyday form, that has potential to be generative, perhaps because it continues to live and to let the other live.
A focusing in, a getting smaller that is generative, and not reductive. A tiny opening.
swan thought
maybe you don’t connect or empathize or communicate,
looking out at that swan
maybe you enter into a swan thought.
the swan is the thought,
some stretch of swan time
a thought like an egg in your dream
you didn’t think it but you can reach for it —
ghost hands stretching
— with your own thinking and
try to align yourself, to focus there
inside of the swan
not understanding or knowing
but
sent like a ghost
Life and Death Inside the Swamp
There is an important book about metaphor, called Metaphors we Live By, written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 2003. In that book, the authors identified, for the first time, the presence of metaphors so common as to be imperceptible; metaphors so common they get all mixed up with reality. Good as up, progress as forward, arguments as battles. These they dub “conceptual metaphors” (ch. 1). Something can get caught up in the complexity of a conceptual metaphor, a wriggling fish in an accidental net. An argument does not have to be a battle, how did it get so tied up in there?
Cognitive Linguistics considers conceptual metaphors dead metaphors. Dead metaphors are the metaphors of the status quo: they are so common that they have no spark to them. A live metaphor, on the other hand, brings the mind into active relation, in need of navigation.
I like this, but the life/death binary is as stagnant as any, and I am after a swamp that’s teeming. Marietta Rodomska, Queer Death scholar and artist, argues that life and aliveness are not as clear-cut and straightforward as they are often, within neo-liberal constructs, imagined to be. There are political implications of this binary, not the least of which is a hierarchy of the worth of beings. This hierarchy not only places the value of living beings over that of the non-living, but also contains hierarchies within the category of the living: “Some lives are more grievable than others”, Judith Butler observes. Internment camps for refugees, the lives of criminals or the insane, working conditions in distant countries…all these can represent not only lives “less grievable”, but lives lived liminaly (introduction).
Rodomska suggests instead a non-binary definition of life as a form of “uncontainability”— that is to say, a process of becoming, wherein difference is understood as a process and not as a fixed identity:
“such a theorisation of life is built upon a non-dialectical understanding of difference (difference that is not based on identity, but is understood as a process), a dynamic idea of matter and duration (a non-quantified flow of time experienced in its immediacy), and the concept of becoming (open-ended processuality, ongoing transformation)” (“Uncontainable”, 29).
This is no attempt to get around death. Such thinking can only be a form of insanity. The swamp needs death, it needs it badly. Decay is integral to its richness.
About the Small Books
These books came from a long-standing contemplative engagement with celestial bodies. They take the form of koans, adages or aphorisms that act as responses to unasked questions, are cryptic, and have indeterminate metaphorical capacity. On a literal level, they describe features of celestial bodies, and how they are experienced by a human body.
Premised on scientific research into the physical processes at play, I thought about how these process felt, and how those experiences manifest on the level of metaphor (both live and dead).
Necromatic Uncontainer
Can metaphor be a process of relating that is both uncontainable and opaque?
In large part this question is out of a variety of love for the constituent parts: the animals and entities and landscapes that become pinned as a part of a persistent, symbolic or conceptual conflation. Perhaps by doing this I am working at odds with the life/death binary. Perhaps it is a political stance—if I am working towards an approach that embraces opacity through metaphor, where better to start than with subjects who have been so over-assumed in their associations as to be the subjects of a dead metaphor?
My focus here is wandering. I have worked with three animals (swans as purity and nobility, and the national symbol of Finland; rats as invasive and destabilizing; the frog as a tool of the alt-right). I also work with celestial bodies (the sun, the moon, and comets), and one shape (the golden ring as unity, circular time, and heteronormativity). My approach combined research (both academic and embodied) with contemplation and experienced, eventually, as a form of opaque collaboration. Maybe I was overlapping my self with these others, through encounter. Maybe that is the way to be an uncontainable metaphor, an uncontainable container! By refusing all reduction, in defence of both relation and opacity. By implicating the self.
This approach—of keeping in active engagement with the generative fizz of a resonant murk—is also a way to resist, avoid, or to stay alert to the misuse of metaphor. To the way it can be used to assert one shape of reality in ways that serve social control, power structures, or domination. In ways that shut things down. I don’t labour to create an opening to keep it open. I am not playing with relation to make new contextual metaphors, tropes and symbols. A dead metaphor. I do not mistake metaphor for reality. I use it as a method of encounter.
Metaphor as method. I extend and overlap myself.