Lesson #9: Metaphor is Meaning.
Since ancient times, writers, artists and sages have spoken of how all things on this planet, and beyond, are connected. Of how we are not separate individuals but inter related beings.
Of how, beyond our verifiable human existence, there is an unseen energy connecting all.
In our time, science has confirmed this intuition. Quantam physicists since Einstein, while balking at experimental conclusions that often emerged as they were trying to disprove them, now clearly assert that (at the atomic and subatomic level) everything is composed of energy.
Just energy, oscillating and vibrating at different rates – sometimes so slowly that to us it appears to be solid matter.
Analysis of matter and energy seems to tell us that either objective reality does not exist at all — the Copenhagen interpretation, most famously illustrated by Schrodinger’s Cat.
Or else that it exists at multiple levels.
Or, even more mind-bendingly, both.
From a creative perspective, the deepest expression of this web of interconnected energy, is metaphor.
What the science is saying is that life is not solid and set, as it appears to us, but only experienced subjectively through our sense perceptions of it. It is we, together with the gift of life within us, who (co-)create our own experiences — either consciously or unconsciously.
What supports this is our ability to make creative connections and comparisons. Metaphor is our tool, allowing us to interpret our world and our relationships to it and within it.
It is our vocabularly for connecting what we are experiencing here and now with what we experienced there, before.
It is how we transform the strange into the familiar, the unknown into the imaginable.
“Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself,” says choreographer, and author of The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp.
We might also say that metaphor is the artblood of all life, if it is not life itself.
What connections might you spark if you began to think of life, and art, in this way?
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