metaphor | freethoughtandmetaphor

Light as in . . .?

March 26, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized enlightenment, history, light, metaphor, theory, weight Leave a comment

The term “Enlightenment” for that era some two centuries back when men (as they thought then) were gaining knowledge and science was beginning to separate from religion, is metaphoric and powerful in ways that later period names, such as Romantic, Modern, and Postmodern, are not. The term has a draw, as if we could never get enough of light, whether literal or of the mind.

I’ve been pondering the thought that the Enlightenment was light in the other sense of the base word: light as in not heavy. It was not grounded, not weighted with all the reality of our bodily existence. If thinkers place too high a value on observation and thinking, they too easily miss the other half of the Myers/Briggs quartet, the intuitive and feeling aspects of the human mind.

Has this issue been raised, outside of women’s studies programs?

Are Poets Freethinkers?

March 9, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized dogma, freethought, metaphor, poetry, rules Leave a comment

You already know the answer: every creative artist has to keep an open mind about the “rules” of his craft. Some of the rules for poets that come to mind are these:

Avoid gerunds (-ing words)

Don’t use question marks in poems

Haiku must have seventeen syllables. (There are in fact two camps on this one. It depends on which website you go to.)

Poetry is supposed to rhyme. (This one only comes from the audience these days.)

Nobody uses metaphor any more. Of course I consider this one a minority opinion, but it was spoken by a teacher of poetry.

All these I consider optional. There is only one doctrine to which I still cling:

There is always another way to say it

Advice for Today

March 1, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized freethought, history, metaphor, truth 1 Comment

In working with history, especially the history of ideas, I am often struck by how much has changed: how what was taken as truth turned out to be false, how optimism gave way to pessimism, how what looked like a cure turned out to be a curse. Now and then, one comes across a statement that holds value. John Emerson Roberts said this in 1895:

People sometimes ask, with an implied reproach, ‘What do liberals believe?’ as if truth were something that could be minted and stamped and carried about in an ecclesiastic wallet and shown to prove how rich one is. The first step in the higher life of the soul is to give up the hope of having any absolute criterion of truth.

And didn’t he choose a vivid metaphor!

See the Books page for more on John Emerson Roberts, Kansas City’s Freethought Preacher.

What Is Metaphor?

February 22, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized definitions, Greek, metaphor, poetry 1 Comment

Metaphor is a good Greek word which means “a carrying from one place to another.” It is, originally, an action, not a thing. It is the operation which changes a word by a new association. The Greeks thought of it as “transferring to one word the meaning of another.”

The Greeks were better at abstractions than the English, apparently, since the current usage of “metaphor” usually refers to the thing to which the original word is compared.

According to this research in my old, patched together on both sides of the spine, Greek Dictionary, then, metaphor is not something you can choose, as from a list (“Shall I call this state a ship? Shall I call this life a hard road?”)

Shall I say that research may upset the apple cart? My poetry may be in for metamorphosis – a change of form.

A Freethinker’s Metaphors

February 11, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized freethought, metaphor, rhetoric Leave a comment

John Emerson Roberts, freethought preacher (see Books) believed in clear thinking. He believed that encouraging people to think for themselves was his mission, his contribution to society. He lifted up free thinking against all doctrine, all dogma. He could not lecture without metaphor. Sometimes he even mixed his metaphors, as in the following example:

“The brain is the sun. Civilization is its light. Thought is the mother of progress. The mother must be free in order that the child may be well-born.” (Roberts, Lecture on Ingersoll, 1902.)

Light is a popular metaphor among freethinkers. Robert Ingersoll used it extensively. Motherhood was a beloved concept of the latter half of the nineteenth century. There is more to say on both of these.

Why Freethought and Metaphor?

February 8, 2012

ellenrobertsyoung Uncategorized freethought, metaphor, poetry Leave a comment

To begin with, these are the focus of my two kinds of publications: a freethought biography and books of poetry.

Beyond that, they are two ways the creative mind should address the world: always looking beyond dogma and ever on the lookout for unexpected parallels.

freethoughtandmetaphor