Definition: "A rose _is_ a plant with thorns on it."Metaphor: "My love _is_ a rose."Simile" "My love _is like_ a plant with thorns in it."
This is what throws people. Metaphors can be mistaken because they don't give you that all important "is like". This is not an epistemological issue. It's just about forms of expression. In terms of theism, then, you'd think it might actually help a little to rephrase things to tip people off. Instead of saying "God is the creator" you'd say "God is like a creator or like a father". But that won't work because the metaphors refer to psychospiritual experiences that are ineffable in a way that roses and fathers are not. This is also complicated by the fact that religious metaphors are not deliberately constructed the way novels and poems are. They're more like collective dreams inherited from the deep, dark past. Even a simple thing like, "my love is a rose" can have any number of meanings. In mythology they use the word "multivalent", which means that many different meanings and different levels of meaning can attached to them. Unless you're talking about comedians or something, to say your love is a rose is not to say your love is like a thorny plant. It'll probably mean love is sensual and it's about opening up, being vulnerable and the like. In this sense, most metaphors will play off of the things people already know about the thing being employed as your image. But a novelist can more or less arbitrarily choose any object and load it up with meaning as the novel unfolds. A blue vase, a wooden box or whatever. But religious myths don't just refer to stuff you might see in the garden and they don't need to be filled up with meaning by an artist. They're supercharged with meaning. Levi-Strauss observed that such myths have a quality that makes them recognizable AS myths even across cultures and that they are the opposite of poetry in the sense that poems are always very distorted by translation into another languages whereas myths lose almost nothing in translation. My love is a matchstick, by the way. Just thought you'd wanna know. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469227/direct/01/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
