"To make one thing stand for another is the fundamental activity of consciousness."
- Susan Griffin
My poet friends have been laughing at me lately because I've been saying I hate metaphor. How can you be a poet and hate metaphor?? You really can't, because metaphor is how we think, how we make consciousness. I've been tired of tired metaphors, though, my own and those of other poets. It's tricky to make new metaphors, because it requires new thought, new excursions into psyche. I find myself working over the old metaphors until they no longer have savor for me. So, somewhere along the line, new kinds of consciousness and new metaphors have to come into being. Partly writing, and partly waiting, is how this basic activity of consciousness arrives.
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While waiting do you let your mind empty and wait for the new metaphor explode from the nothingness?
ReplyDeleteNo--I scurry here and there, completely unable to hold Keats' negative capability idea ("without irritable striving"). Eventually, I start scribbling because scrabbling is so hard...:)
ReplyDeleteme too.
ReplyDelete(tired of same old. wondering how to make the new. or have it make me.)