Why write? Why art?: Metaphor

Why write? Why art?: Metaphor Why do we write? Why do we create art? Why do I write on this blog? I suppose an argument could be made for it being a waste of time, but this is one of the reasons why it isn’t. Metaphor. From Wallace Stevens’ “The Motive for Metaphor” “The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be, Desiring the exhilirations of changes: the motive for metaphor” The mental act of metaphor changes the subject and the writer. It expresses something that will never be fully and satisfyingly expressed, and once exposed to or having created a good metaphor a person is forever changed. For example, in Moby Dick Melville compares the soul, or the inner man, or an inner need inside of us, to a miner. The quote deserves to be placed here again: “The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag?” - Melville. Reading Moby Dick changed me in several ways. To get the full effect of the quote it is necessary, I believe, to read the book, but ever since I read that (it took the second read for it to really sink in) I’ve had an image of a miner digging through the mine shaft of my soul. Sometimes I think I can even hear that muffled pick chipping away at the rock. But still, why? The above almost sounds horrifying, but the soul is an idea that we will never fully express or understand. This metaphor has given me a place to start. The most amazing thing is that this metaphor combined with a D.H. Lawrence metaphor about a soul being a pile of unlit tinder. My understanding of the soul grows the more metaphors I discover. I will add another, happier, metaphor here. After I wrote about the following poem I added another reason for writing and art: happiness. “Of Mere Being” Wallace Stevens The palm at the end of the mind, Beyind the last thought, rises In the bronze decor, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. According to me and some others, the bird is the imagination. The imagination is beyond the mind, beyond reason, something we cannot control, something free and beautiful and singing. Happiness comes not from reason, but from our imaginations. Happiness comes from art.

Literature: Exercising the Imagination

One thing I love about literature, one thing that might be unique to literature, is that it forces the reader to imagine and view the world form a different perspective. Fiction forces belief and emotional connection to a world that is created from the imagination, vision and beliefs of another person. By believing and imagining this world, a similar mental journey is taken by the author and reader, and the reader becomes a unique combination of their own imagination and the thoughts and imaginings of someone else. This does not mean the reader adopts the beliefs of the writer, but some kind of alteration will occur to someone who has been so deeply exposed to something so powerful and personal. It is growth. It is change. Self-discovery and experience gained through the exercise of the imagination. Literature is the unique and personal imagination and vision of one concentrated into their fingers, gripping a pen or hovering over keys slowly being forced into the form of sentences. Forms may not be the same as the original imagination, but they allow the reader to create a new world unimagined by the writer. Each book is an infinite world and minds take one of those worlds and populate it with their own imaginings influenced by other books. The simple act of reading literature forces the reader into a metamorphosis, and after each book the reader is a new person, a stranger, even to themselves.