The title isn't intended to be a question. In my senior years with all these opinions I've accumulated and no one to bore them onto, I'm leaning more to assertions. Here's the book I never wrote in the 1990s, when I was sure I knew even more. Well, here's the introduction anyway, with some updates in the bad news wake-up inserts.
From the top of one of the hills of San Francisco I looked out over the city toward the bay now obscured in morning fog. As I turned back toward the tour bus, I was startled to see two great horns of orange metal girder jutting out of the clouds higher than any such chunks of metal had a right to be. It was probably commonplace to the locals, but that appearance of the top of the Golden Gate Bridge towering out of the clouds was the most eerie and magical thing I had ever seen and stays with me now as the singular, memorable instant of San Francisco and a powerful moment in my life. Why?
The conflicting tugs of reason and belief were the source of the shock – great pieces of orange girder seeming to float on cloud. Of course it's the bridge and the rest is hidden in the mist. But it can't be that high. Don't be stupid; of course it's the bridge. It was the hard shift from figure to ground, the visual test of a drawing where your apprehension shifted alternately to see a face of an old woman to a young woman, or face to vase, where the two images could only be accommodated sequentially, never at the same time.
While I was indulging myself with my reflections on these deep, philosophical ideas, fifteen children died from chronic hunger and diseases of malnutrition.
That experience emphasized for me the gap between what is actually so and what my senses told me must be so, a gap in which I have been conducting a cultural "dig" off and on for the past twelve years. It started – or I assign as its starting point – the weekend when I heard the biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana speak in Vancouver on Language & Being. He spent two days describing a theory to show how our individual (and of course, cultural) reality is constituted by our language.
"Everything is said by an observer," was his succinct expression of the theory, and he closed his talk on the Sunday evening with a final anecdote to illustrate his point. As a child, he had been particularly impressed by a religious painting which represented the temptations of Christ. In this painting, there are the people representing power and wealth, of course, but standing by the side of Jesus there is a figure gripping his arm pointing to a space in the foreground out of the picture on which his eyes are clearly focused. That figure is Certainty, the knowing beyond all doubt, and in that gaze there is no question and no possibility for a knowing other than what our senses tell us must be there.
When the observer is in charge of a nation and a nation's armaments, the temptation of certainty can be very dangerous.
What is knowable is that in the time it took to relate that anecdote, an acre of rainforest was destroyed in British Columbia and Brazil and one species of animal became extinct.
We live as human beings in our language. As homo sapiens, this collection of co-operating cells, this biological phenomenon, we may live in a biosphere of temperature, moisture and gravity, but the dimension which we designate as human being-ness exists in our language. We exist as members of a group, and take on an individual identity only by contrast to other members of the group, so that if you had only one of this species you could learn something about the biology of that specimen but little about the culture of the species.
For culture, you would have to study a group and we as groups exist as networks of communications. I know of no other behaviour than the activity called communicating for establishing the patterns of our culture (in its broadest, global sense) and of our sub-cultures, for it is from this culture's agreements that our social reality proceeds. It is our source of knowing the facts we are certain that we know.
One of those facts tells me that North America has lost 75% of its topsoil.
This notion, that human being-ness – our sense of being – is a product of our use of language is not new, although it can be the source of much surprise as I discovered in San Francisco, and it can be the source of much misdirection in our lives as I have often learned to my sorrow, but it is an aspect of our experience that many have noted throughout our history.
A significant observation is contained in the fable related by Plato regarding the gift of writing. Thamus, king of a great city of Upper Egypt once entertained the god Theuth, inventor of writing who had bestowed this gift of literacy on mankind and felt Thamus would be pleased. Thamus responded in this way:
Theuth, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society. (Plato: Phaedrus)
My news feeds tell me that this "conceit of wisdom" directs the minds of some political leaders to encourage their conquest if not genocide on neighbouring nations and that doctors in Gaza must complete amputations on children without anaesthetic. Bet that factoid lost some of you.
The fact that our ontological address is our mouths, or wherever else we make language, when coupled with our fundamental need for certainty, has produced some attachments to often bizzarre and empty beliefs. When we speak of unpleasant personal events as "heavy," our bodies look bowed as if supporting a burden, and our language offers a number of physical-linguistic connections to validate the experience.
It may be that we are heavy-laden or bowed down with cares or need to get something off our chests, or that we have the cares of the world on our shoulders, or are just feeling crushed, flattened, deflated or dumped on. The physical symptoms and the manner of describing the emotional state will have a strong correlation.
Something happened; we don't like it. We say that it is relevant to our lives; we don't like that it is. And then we have all of these physical sensations. Often we have more than just the sensations with some real i.e., demonstrable in X-ray film and muscle chemistry with bodily damage.
Go into a bookstore and take a book from the self-help shelf. Open it at any page and there will be within two paragraphs of the place your eyes come to rest, an anecdote about someone's physical ailment disappearing when s/he nurtured the "child within" or uttered the primal scream or transcended the archetypal poisoned-apple experience of the witch-mother to regain the fire in the belly on the path of the warrior.
And countries in South America where Infant Mortality Rates are soaring continue to clearcut tropical forests to create grazing land so as to export beef to fast food outlets in North America. And they arrest Indigenous tribe members for "trespassing" in the process.
Because we have words such as romantic love, stress, and codependency, we act as if these things are real, and moreover; we then quantify these made-up experiences to provide nuances of made-up responses so that there can be emotional stress and mental stress and such a battery of codependent relationships as would stagger the imagination of another Freud.
I'm completely in favour of a metaphor, a happy state of affairs since metaphor is the constitutive material of language – the clay in the bricks and the mortar so to speak – and in the last hundred years we have coined many figurative expressions which give us therapeutic insight into our more distressing behaviours. Such metaphor making is a process which we as a species have been using forever to make sense of our environment. But, acknowledging the power of metaphor is not the same as succumbing to it, for we can use them consciously or be used by them.
There were no metaphors, however, in the Lancet report on Gaza in January 2025 which estimated 64,260 deaths from traumatic injury during the period of the war, and likely exceeding 70,000 by October, with 59.1% of them being women, children and the elderly.
There must have been a time when our forebears gave up the notion that the volcano didn't like them sometimes, for a more useful explanation for its activities – useful, that is, in possessing some predictive power. Recently we have returned to this type of anthropomorphism on a grand scale with the Gaia concept of the earth as an intentional organism, but it's too early to say where that will lead us. Hoping She'll open a sinkhole and swallow some dangerous politicians is just a pleasant fantasy.
At some point, also, we abandoned the notion that some things possess levitas and therefore are predisposed to move upwards while other things possess gravitas and therefore will tend to move downwards in favour of Newton's ideas about gravity because the latter notion explained things more consistently.
Now, if a patient explains sore shoulder muscles as the result of carrying a heavy load of responsibility and that explanation can produce results such that removing some of the responsibility, or if having someone share that "burden" actually lessens or removes the pain, well then, that metaphor has value. It still should be seen as only a made-up notion however, with dangerous consequences if generalized. If the pain in your neck doesn't disappear when you express yourself to the current "pain-in-the-neck" in your life, go and get some medical assessment.
And then get on with your life, even if it includes some pain, and remember that all of us in the first world and many in the developing world are living better today than royalty did in the last century. With toilet paper. Except for some.
My intention in writing a book about metaphors as life was to look at this propensity we human beings have for making up emotions and then treating them as real forces in our lives, and then obscuring our own slight-of-mind in having done so. I hoped that when you had examined these notions-obscured-in-language or forgotten metaphors which I collected from students, friends and strangers – people such as yourself - you would be more fully here rather than there, like the disciple who responded to the follower of rival guru who claimed he could teach one to see the future by asserting that his master was teaching him to see the present. The book may never get written, and I realize that the people in my life are fine just the way you are – always present.
While "being present" you might consider that Zionists would ask that we accord them ownership of a land based on a myth of occupancy of 2000 years ago but ignore the occupancy dispossession of a people some 70 years ago.
It is after all, here in the present that we must mend the rift in the ozone layer and the widening wealth gap in our societies, and stop pouring CO2 into the atmosphere in spite of a oil-serf's threats to take her province out of Canada if her sponsors don't get to pollute for free. It is also right here and now that we must manage our biological impulses or breed to death. No question about it.
And A.I. isn't likely to help.