••••

Poetic technique as obscure condemnation: Milton in Paradise Lost using the epic simile almost exclusively on the fallen.

Similes don’t typically gain from exertion — if anything, a brief second narrative only diverts from the subject, lets one forget about it for a few lines. In multitudes is a possibility of diminishment. Even defeated, Satan is still an angel; leviathan is a very big fish. 

Intentionality carries Miltonian simile beyond just a literary device: it suggests something we’d normally call proposition — but it is not disinterested, as in a philosophical study. This is more of a promise — but what is the promise?

••••

The semiotic peculiarity at play is a joining of signifiers without a signified: they mean each other, but not in a way a numeral means a number. Simile, metaphor, symbol, allegory, synecdoche, metonymy, antonomasia, conceit, parable, exemplum, periphrasis, euphemism, dysphemism — scale and complexity aside, all allow substitution through likeness, or create likeness through substitution.

Which requires for both to already exist in the potentialities of language, making the question not necessarily of truth, but ground: we could run exhaustively long reasoning all looping back to produced meanings, but without their ever connecting to the outside world, things irreducible to experience — trees, water, gravity, the dimensional space.

This may be the only real task of poetry. Nothing is simply like anything else. A metaphor must be a statement about a shared reality, or else it is not a statement at all.

We already knew this. No one picks metaphors at random, unless they are intended to be absurd. 

••••

Our own condition does not help, of course. We have to read intermittently, never experiencing a unified λόγος. Even Parmenides relays his epiphany in dactylic hexameter in order to be understood.

Yet in that epiphany, the unspecified goddess cites love as the singular cosmic force — somewhat redundant in an ontology defined by a formal schema, but suggesting the separation unproblematic, either not sufficiently relevant, or not real. Trees unseparated from kindness, reality unbreakable at the seams since it has no seams — and in which violence, misanthropy and distortion are not mere psychological failures, but cosmological ones, attempts at withdrawal, the Being’s own ambiguity about Being.

In Parmenidean metaphysics, a metaphor is a metaphor for the condition of things, everything answering for everything else, the plurality not of essences, but the acts of saying. 

••••

In contrast: when multiplication does not expand the possibilities, it reduces them. A poem that is a chain of likenesses gets nihilism-adjacent precisely by making them interchangeable, only in a reductive way. Relativistic not within, but outside interpretation.

A ground is something to stand upon. Twelve grounds don’t constitute even a single one.

••••

Emanuele Tesauro — in favor. Paul Ricœur  — in favor. Heidegger — sceptically in favor. Derrida — rejecting a duality. Zukofsky and Reznikoff — opposed. Ponge — opposed. Graham Harman — in favor, though indirectly.

Disagreements don’t always need a resolve, and neither does synthesis always depend on it.

••••

Name taboos reveal the uncanniness inherent in semiotics. Objects do not complain, for the most part, but having a word for ourselves strikes at something beyond ourselves, and the relationship is unclear.

One can suppose the world an embodied uncertainty, something one wishes to hide from, and there is nowhere to hide in but the world itself.

Superstition is a degree of baseline distrust that could make one fundamentally unreceptive — yet the ambiguity goes both ways. People died by the protection of their names, yes — but they lived by it also.

••••

The reality of integers. Enough of it to be mentioned.
An ontological problem seems to always be also a theological one.

••••

In Medieval art, commonly derided for its lack of naturalism, the kings all look the same, being defined by nothing but their crowns. One can imagine them properly as individuals — some must have been kind — but the crowns weren’t. The form of power does not participate in the form of character.

••••

Enter the monetary system. Even on fiat money, the number continues to stand for the exchange value — while the practical side of that value is determined by the daily fluctuations of purchasing power. One could imagine a temperature system completely different from our own, where the melting point of ice would depend on how much ice is melting at any given moment.

Lack of intrinsic value is the entire mechanism of fiat, making it a quantifiable space of transactional relationships and a non-object. The reactionary push to return to the gold standard can be empathized with as yearning for something real, but the problem is not that a medium of exchange is a wrong metaphor, it’s that it is a metaphor to begin with. An anonymous text imagines Saint Francis speaking to Lady Poverty, who condemns the very idea of universal substitutes as an illusion of sufficiency, having enough of something that could be converted into anything else.

One could say that people mistake the capacity to carry meaning for the meaning itself. One could say the opposite mistake occurs in the humanities.

••••

It’s the metaphysically indifferent attitude to objects: we refuse to decide exactly how haunted they are.

The burial gifts, for instance, were purposefully taken out of circulation, effectively deemed uninheritable in an inheritance-driven world.

Were they symbolic, certainly. They were also copper.

••••

Sufficiency is worth pausing on. Weregild, when it was practiced, worked not by suggesting that human life is equivalent to a monetary sum — but that it isn’t. If an irreplaceable could only be traded back through an irreplaceable, the blood feuds could have no possible resolution.

This is a paradox of market economies coinciding with human economies: where societally there are both self-expunging and self-propagating ways of unequal trade — human economies, in this case, being the ones that see the exchange of goods, gifts and favors not as the means of improving material conditions, but as the making of social ties.

Curiously then, human economies appear to strive for unsubstitution. A gift is not meant to be a symbol of personal love — unless it is, and then could conceivably harm it.

••••

Symbol is participatory in a direct way, the closest to things being one and the same, at least in a certain context. Transfiguration. Ritual effigies. Sacred groves being the place that the god inhabits and also the god itself. Statues, of course, divinity lending itself to marble — a scandal of particularity if ever there was one.

But then, if the symbolic objects were not substantially different, that would make them tautologies — and so a doubling of access requires a doubling of action too. Fertility is both at the shrine and in the field, and both need to be tended.

This has unsettling repercussions.

••••

Reality, when infinitely connected, is infinitely negotiable. Every year a party set off from a village. They would travel around the region until they found a stranger passing a crop field, someone that no one around would know. They were killed, their body brought back to the village to great elation, ground into a soft paste, and rubbed into the crop leaves — a marriage.

It’s stupefying how little can even be said about this — an act that is monstrous, but having no malice escapes a straightforward judgement. It’s not an error; it’s not a crime. Explaining it in our terms is plausibility without comfort. We can only be horrified.

It does, of course, participate in violence more so than it does in metaphor — but the substitutional mechanism is close. Someone is “like” a corn spirit. They understood it too, just as they did agriculture — thus, over time, killings would change into mock killings, the giving of votive gifts and patrician burials with artificial retinue. A substitute for a substitute.

••••

There should be a Neoplatonic study of nitrogen, its place in the pantheons of growth, explosives, and being most of the air we actually breathe, letting it pass nonreactive, ever determined to only bond with itself.

Everything everywhere a wonder.

••••

If things are being incongruous, perhaps incongruity is simply a way of being. Excluded middle is not law, and not every duality is necessarily Manichean. The counterflows we observe in conceptual space and that metaphor essentially contours — might just be the way that thickness and permeability come into the world.

If so, it comes at a cost. The meaning produced in metaphor is agonic, a transubstantiation of seed into sacrament through being ground and fired before it is brought to light.

No final statements may be attainable, but the ones we do make should press against the edge of what is. Things have only an indirect way to reject our impositions. We want poetry to succeed in ways that are not arbitrary, and most literature is description.

There is much at stake.