The Blackberry Walk

Metaphors are real. This eternal truth marks the cornerstone of every misunderstanding in the world today. Our literalism, our fundamentalism, is the lock that gates us off from one another. Only the key, the olive branch, can undo this lock. So what does this principle of metaphors being real mean? First we’ll have to figure out some definitions. Metaphor: A metaphor is to say one thing is another thing. For example, “The man is a pig” is an example of a metaphor. Here, it is important to note, the man is a pig – the verb ‘to be’ – he is be-ing a pig. In other words he is acting like a pig – participating in pig-ness. Myth: A myth is a story. Whether true or false, fantastical or realistic, is of no regard. King Arthur is a myth insofar as Zeus is a myth insofar as World War 2 is a myth. In a myth, mythologisation has occurred – ideas are digested and composited by the unconscious mind to form a hagiographised story. The Universal and the Particular: The universal is the general thing. An example is to say “Men are pigs”, making a comment on the essence of men as a universal principle. The particular, on the other hand is to say “The man is a pig” which is to single out a single, unique individual as the one participating in pig-ness. Form: Form can be thought of as the structural-functional organisation of an object, which is essentially the essence of the object. It is form which, for Plato, was the commonality between the universal and the particular. You have the form of a table (the universal) and you have the table in your living room (the particular) which engages in the form of the table by possessing its qualities. Object in-of-itself: A Kantian idea. The object without any of the forms in our head being projected (much like a projector) onto the object. The object in-of-itself is the object which exists beyond human perception and comprehension. Comprehension being done by projecting these ideas, or forms, from our mind onto objects in the world, making order out of chaos. Yet the object in-of-itself is pure chaos: the chaos egg. The reality Now that we’ve defined some key words, I will destroy nouns. Common nouns and adjectives are the same things. They are both qualities of an object – an object in-of-itself which we can never know. An object which is given it’s properties by our perception. Unlike in Plato’s day, we now believe that these forms exist in our mind (the underworld) rather than in the heavens. Instead of objects in the world intrinsically having ‘table-ness’, we develop a form of table-ness through experience and abstraction, and, given the correct sensory perceptions, we project that form onto the object in-of-itself in the world. Table-ness, therefore, is a quality given to an object in-of-itself insofar as red-ness is a quality given also. Table is just a way of describing something – an adjective. Similar to the definition I gave for a metaphor, these objects in-of-themselves participate in these forms which are themselves adjectives. Participate may be a controversial word to use here. But when we are sad, we are participating in the act of sadness, the act of being in a particular state. When we are being a pig, we are participating in the act of being a pig, being messy, eating without manners. A book spends its days being a book, participating in book-ness. The chair, in chair-ness. I am a human so I participate in human-ness. The list is endless. My point here is only to say that qualities should be viewed as active engagements rather than passive attributes. I am usually, being myself. Some days however a friend may say “Hey, you’re not quite yourself today”. That phrase is absurd from a literalistic perspective, but as a participatory action, I am not participating in me-ness, in the form of me. The form of me, in this case, being the image of me that my friend has. In essence, this is what knowing is. The model in my mind is the model in the world. Simple as that. If my model of someone doesn’t fit the way they act, I feel like I don’t understand them properly and the model has to be updated. However the model in the mind can be mortally wounded, say if someone is cheated on. Their model of their partner and how they expect them to act is ravaged, often leading to some kind of neurosis. So how does all this link back to how metaphors are real? The question becomes what is this. I am currently writing this on my bed. Bed? What’s a bed? Bed is the abstraction I’ve created across the instances I’ve experienced it – a useful model to project onto the object. Bed, as a form, resides in my mind, but the object in-of-itself upon which I lie can be anything, really. It’s a thing. But I can’t call it my crayfish. If I started calling my bed my crayfish, you’d think me mad. But if I call it my resting place or my relaxation station, it makes more sense. You can make sense of what I mean. Information regarding the object in-of-itself as I’ve perceived it has been transferred – often with extra nuance. Metaphors, through the use of symbolism (inexhaustible data), get more across than the simple word ‘bed’. Bed is just as much a signifier as the metaphorical phrase, albeit with subtly different connotations. Why, then, are metaphors real? The short answer is that the we project a form onto the object in-of-itself, giving it its character. However an object can possess many forms – polymorphism, as it’s known in programming. And, as a result, ‘wooden pillar’ is just as valid a form to give the object as ‘tree’. They’re on equal footing. Different forms to give the same ‘that’. They are just as real as one another. Neither word can truly understand the thing in-of-itself since each and every one of them are unique. They’re particulars. We are just making groupings, universals, to distribute intelligent information to one another. They’re forms – immaterial, yet very much real. Myths as real Like with metaphors mentioned above, myths are models for the world – mythic corpuses – which are projected onto the object in-of-itself. The object in-of-itself can’t be seen; all we have is our mythologised version. Given all of this, what does it even mean for myths to be real? Once we can accept that the unbiased truth of our past, present or future can’t be witnessed or known, all we’re left with are the myths. For one, if the myths aren’t real, all we’re left with is the nihilistic maya of Vedanta, wherein we live in a world of pure illusion. But then you wonder, is this nihilistic? Instead of nihilistic, Hindus see nothingness as infinite potential, as an egg waiting to hatch. What could be more hopeful than that? It’s all myths at the end of the day. Ironically, even the Vedantic deep feeling of nothingness and illusion is a myth. We cannot see beyond myth, beyond the veil, as we can never see the object in-of-itself. But even if myths differ between culture, one constant remains among each and every tribe of the earth: myth making. To look deeper, we’ll return to Kant, specifically his idea of the a priori. The a priori, short here for synthetic a priori, is a phrase Kant used for knowledge which is universally true but not present in the statement. The classic example is that all the angles of a triangle add up to 180°. The statement is universally true – you’ll struggle to find a triangle where this is not the case. But the idea of the angles adding up to 180° isn’t built in to the triangle’s definition. Jung, a big fan of Kant, took the idea of the a priori a step further. To Jung, the a priori was the archetypes – the very building blocks of cognition. The a priori functions of the mind which masticates the object in-of-itself into an understandable object. The a priori knowledge of the psyche is the myth making mechanism, common to each and every one of us. Following Jung, the a priori he posits – the myth making mechanism called the mind – is the greatest truth. All we can know is our cognition. Not the world which is contaminated by mythic projections, nor our thoughts which are much the same. But those very mythic projections – they hold the reality inside of them. Not the object in-of-itself, for that cannot be seen. Rather the way we see it, which is the mythologisation. Which myths are real? As defined at the top, myths can be fantastical like Zeus, legendary like King Arthur, or historical like WW2. WW2 does have people who remember the event, but what makes it mythic is that knowledge of the event isn’t derived empirically by our own sense in the present, but has instead been mythologised by other people, masticated by society, into a story: a myth. The mythologising of events, I’d argue, is unavoidable. We can never know the material reality of the event unless we were there in the moment – and even then we mythologise our memories. Take memories of primary school, for example. You’ll meet up with your friends and go over stories from your shared past, and end up with entirely different memories of the series of events. Like a tabloid, both of you have mythologised the events – put your own spin on them – and come out with different myths of your pasts. Insofar as you do that yourself, so too do entire societies about their shared memories. The British, the Russian and the Japanese all have very different mythologisations of WW2, for example. Unfortunately, this leaves us a very narrow sliver of ‘reality’. Every memory is ‘tainted’ by unconscious association, and mythologised. Every story of the past and present, has been mythologised by someone else. All that has material reality is the present spacetime snapshot – our senses in the current moment. But even though we consider Santa and Zeus not to be real, we’re fine with saying World War 2 was real. What’s the difference? The main difference is corroboration. We trust that something happened through consensus. Everyone agrees WW2 happened. Even we agree the Napoleonic wars happened even though everyone alive from the period has passed away. Yet we can derive corroboration from the numerous letters and the memories of the society as distinct from the people. Turn the clocks back again, and we have the Trojan war and King Arthur. Legendary stories which may have reality in their mists. Further still is Greek myths with gods and fantastical beings. Stories which we see as fake because they contain fantastical elements – a secondary flash-point of disbelief in a myth. Now we’ve seen how a myth is made real – by consensus – next we’ll put etch on a face, a who. Every society has a truth-making institution which can be called a church. Much like a religious institution, there is a truth-making body which decides which myths are allowed in the canon, and which should be excluded. The canon of the Britain consists of our birth myths, like Saxon invasions and William the Conquerer; the birth of our greatness in the Spanish Armada and the Napoleonic Wars; our brave resilience in WW1 and WW2, despite the loss of the empire; our great writers, musicians, scientists, who gave life to our culture. The list goes on. The mythology of Britain can’t possibly contained in a list. All of these events are mythologised by our society, by our church. In mentioning WW2, we aren’t talking about the Japanese perspective, we’re talking about the British mythic understanding. It’s worth noting that the mythology is ever changing. In medieval times, the legendary history of British of Brutus slaying the giants who once lived in Albion is a bygone idea. But that was the history of Britain. For medieval man, these myths were real, just like the Battle of Hastings is for us. Myths ground us. They contextualise our lives, telling us the spatio-temporal location of where we were born. Without this bedrock, we are lost, adrift in abstraction since only with where we’ve come do we know where to go, whether that be on a personal or societal level. In a sense, myths help us make sense. Sense doesn’t really exist in the world. Without man to subdivide matter, the world in-of-itself is just a continuum of ‘stuff’. It is, therefore, our duty to make sense of the world. We generate it. Or rather the sense is made in the womb of the church, birthing understanding in the minds of the people. Through the church, a society’s corpus of myths, sense can be made of the world. And, as we’ve said above, the church relies on con-sense-us. It is making sense together as a group. So, as we have seen, sense, truth, is produced by consensus, which can be understood like a church. This church then dictates our mythic canon – the true interpretation of events, which events are true and which are false. And, so long as you all belonged to the same church, everyone could make sense of one another. All was in harmony. A schizoid society Society has become schizoid. Like a troubled mind, we’ve fractured and schismed into a multitude of churches. Why? Because no longer do we need to rely on a community. The government can take care of such matters for us. We live in the age of individualism, after all. This divorce from society and community leaves us homeless. Where shall we go? So the nomadic spiritual seekers in need of a church find a community for themselves. Groups organised not on old location-based notions like nationality and township, but rather on personal ideas of interests and worldviews. The most prominent of these worldviews today is politics. Through politics, many believe, you can grasp a person’s values and their value. Lefties, conservatives, liberals, fascists, whatever other ideology is on the menu; all of them pray to a different church and believe in a different set of myths. A fascist may deny the holocaust – a lefty will have attribute different reasons for the start of Napoleonic War. Despite their internal consensuses, they hold no similarity to one another despite living in the same country. They can’t understand the other. They can’t make sense of the other. Ancient societies somehow dealt with this same problem. There were Roman Gods, Greek Gods, Egyptian Gods, Gallic Gods, all being prayed to in the most metropolitan cities of the Roman empire. How did they understand one another? The term used is syncretism. Roman syncretism was the mixing of mythologies in the melting pot of metropolitania. As the Romans invaded Celtic lands, they saw the Celtic Gods and said ‘they’re basically the same as ours’ and incorporated them into the pantheon. In many ways, Judaism, in refusing syncretism, was the odd one out at the time of Christ. Their religious persecution was out of the ordinary, and originated in their refusal to accept the other Gods of the Roman pantheon. Today our understanding of multiculturalism is very different. Instead of incorporating other cultures and alloying them with our own, we insist on keeping them an arms distance away. Their culture cannot be touched and neither can our own. Practices such as these prevent cultural integration from ever occurring. And, in the context of the church as a mythos, we need a syncretism between political ideas. Once we realise we actually all believe the same myths with slight differences and that we can hold conflicting views in our heads, we will once more be able to make sense of one another. Saying, “I respect that you’re different” is not the best long term strategy. Only when we realise we aren’t different, and that we all belong to one unifying church, will we become part of the same church and heal our schizoid society. Hence why metaphors and myths should be made real. Each church believes their own metaphors and myths to be real but refuses to acknowledge the other sides, taking their views to be literal. When a right winger hears a feminist talking point like ‘Patriarchy’, they’ll often take this to mean the absolute literal interpretation of the word. Yet when a step back is taken, and you give your foes the benefit of the doubt by granting the reality of the metaphor, you’ll realise what is actually meant by the phrase. You are now able to make sense of what they’re saying. You can now understand their mythology and metaphors and bring them into the church, the society. Just as when Alex Jones goes on about psychic vampires, however much of a madman he may sound, you must believe that his metaphors and myths are real and see how ‘elites’ prey on our life energy. And all of a sudden these madmen you never wanted to associate with are brought into the church. A difficult journey it may be, but it is to each of us our responsibility to give the benefit of the doubt to the enemy. Only then can they be made sense of. Only then will the schisms be healed – all beneath one inclusive church. Only by acknowledging the myths and metaphors of others are real, can we heal.