I came across a quote by E.O. Wilson who suggested, in his book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, that scientists ought to “offer the hand of friendship” to religious leaders because “science and religion are two of the most potent forces on Earth and they should come together to save the creation.” I was almost hopeful that Wilson was suggesting a possible détente and that the Church had been forgiven by at least one secular humanist for its imprisonment of Galileo and the execution of Giordano Bruno Continue reading “The Near Side of the Road”
Do Metaphors Really Resonate?
What do we mean when we say that a metaphor resonates. Is it as simple as saying that a connection between two disparate domains takes on a special meaning, intersects with, maps into or ‘highly resonates’ on a Likert-like scale of ‘I get It’? Ask a hundred people if their life is a journey and I will wager that on a scale of ‘does not resonate’ to ‘highly resonates’, their responses would measure off the scale. Ask if our roads begin with a ‘shush’ and the rating would bottom out. No one else but me, a few fellow travelers, my mom, a Talmudist sage, folks from any shtetl in Central or Eastern Europe and the guy who wrote the screenplay for Key Largo would get it. Cultural differences concerning the Journey tip the scale in one direction or another depending upon the different narratives that follow us from one generation to the next. But the Journey metaphor transcends most cultural divides. The Journey is central to family life, flows from one generation to the next; it is the cultural glue that binds us together.
From the Talmudic tradition, the Midrash tells us that:
While a child is still in the uterus… an angel teaches it all of the Torah. When the child passes into the world, the angel touches the child just above the lips, creating the vertical groove between the upper lip and the nose (philtrum), and the child forgets everything he/she had known… [ed note: in the Talmud Niddah (30b) an angel slaps the fetus in the mouth]
…In this way, when a person is confronted with emet, with truth, emanating from the Torah, he/she will be more likely to recognize it and be drawn to it. An example: the mitzvah not to steal. Your average person will feel that this is just an obvious law. But it is obvious only because it is something that was learned years before in that “mysterious” time just before we entered the world.
http://www.jewishtreats.org/2010/08/touched-by-angel.html
What are the chances that a screenwriter, a son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, would pen the ‘shush into Key Largo (1948) where it became part of cinematic history?
McCloud: Three days and three nights he stayed awake directing our fire. Most of that time I was on the other end of the line. To keep himself awake, he talked into the phone. Talked and talked . . . Most of his talk was about you two. You’d be surprised how much I know about you both. For instance, inside your wedding ring there’s an inscription: “Evermore.”
Nora Temple: That’s right.
Frank McCloud: And you, Mr. Temple. Remember telling George what this hollow is above the upper lip? Before he was born, you said, he knew all the secrets of life and death. And then at his birth, an angel came and put his finger right here [touching his upper lip] and sealed his lips.
James Temple: I remember that! Yep. He couldn’t have been more than seven years old when I told him that fairy story.
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1715/how-the-baby-got-its-philtrum/:
Metaphoric variants of life is a journey like on the straight and narrow, changed course, stuck in the middle of the road, took a detour, lost my way, hit some bumps in the road, and got stuck in a rut would probably ‘highly resonate’ if resonating were all about assigning some level of meaning or a probability mapping between source and target.
But what if metaphors really do resonate?
Life's Lessons on a Road Less Travelled 