Creatively Transforming Your Way Out

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As I mentioned in a recent message to subscribers, I am not expecting to add essays here that often. The idea I’m presenting today has been knocking around in my head for a couple of months, and I found a few hours to get it down… so here it is! For all you new subscribers, you may be interested to know that I’m presently focused on another Substack called Dovetails, which is about nature, ecology, landscape design, and permaculture. I encourage you to stop by and check it out. I also encourage you to peruse analogy further, since the work presented here is often philosophical, interconnected, and hopefully intellectually liberating.

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Language has a magical quality to it that we generally fail to appreciate because we use it so often for mundane affairs. The quality I’m speaking of has to do with the metaphorical aspect that is the baseline subject of analogy magazine. What I mean is that all language is fundamentally metaphorical since words are both written symbols and sound symbols of objects and ideas. So language leads us into a symbolic world even when used for mundane communication. The further we drift into the representational end of communication (think philosophy and science), the further we enter a paradigm, or worldview. For example, if we consider the phenomenon of the sun illuminating the sky following the night, and express that as “sunrise,” we are applying a metaphor of rising to the sun. That metaphor then becomes embedded in our minds as the phenomenon itself. In other words, we forget the magic of metaphor and actually conflate the phenomenon with the model we’ve imposed upon it. When, one day, some scientist comes along and says, “Umm… so you know how y’all are saying the sun rises, well, I have news for you: that’s not what’s going on at all. The sun isn’t moving. The sphere we’re standing on is rotating in such a way that makes it appear as though the sun were rising”—when someone comes along and points this out, he’s pointing the way out of a kind of psychic prison.

It may feel like enlightenment, and perhaps it is. But we must always guard against locking ourselves into the new paradigm because all perspectives are ultimately incomplete, and there will always be a new horizon and a new enlightenment. What’s important is that we regularly experience new revelations, and regularly undergo transformations of consciousness. No one who learns the new way of seeing things will ever see the world the same way again. Such an experience can be euphoric, but I caution against cultish commitments.

Anyone hearing a new idea for the first time—that the sun doesn’t really rise, for instance—will think these are the utterings of a madman. The rising metaphor is so fundamental to their worldview, they are essentially locked in. It’s like looking at a Necker cube and getting stuck on the image pointing down and to the left and not being able to view it pointing up and to the right (or vice versa). In other words, metaphor can be a kind of trap or prison unless we learn to use its magic to our advantage.

Necker cube. The 3D effect makes the cube appear to be springing off the screen (or page), pointing either down and to the left or up and to the right. Key to seeing both cubes are the vertical lines at centre. When the cube points down, the centre-right vertical appears in the foreground while the centre-left vertical appears in the background. When the cube points up, the centre-left vertical appears in the foreground, while the centre-right vertical appears in the background.

I’ve explored this subject before from the perspective of idol worship, and I’ve examined things like probability math, and discussed the tyranny of models imposed upon phenomena. This time, I’m coming at the subject from a different angle to show how analogies can completely lord over us and shape our experiences and even our destinies (or certainly the qualities of our destinies).

The most obvious trouble we’re experiencing with this metaphor magic today has to do with what’s become known as the echo chamber. This term is a metaphor that arose from social media behaviour, and expresses how folks tend to create social silos by blocking out and selectively curating sources of information and opinion. These echo chambers actually trap us in worldviews.

As I pointed out in a previous article, this behaviour carries out into the real world where folks get triggered by contradiction. Dialogue is essentially dead. What we get instead are mic drops, opinions simply stated like a text message. If one doesn’t “like” said statement, one is an avatar of an enemy echo chamber. The reaction is outrage. The ability to open a dialogue on whether the sun actually rises becomes impossible. How often have I heard a friend say, “Oh, I hate that guy,” referring to some influencer or other in the echosphere. Anyone who echos the hated guy is an avatar of all followers and likers of that guy.

If I am not me, but an avatar of an echo chamber, and if you are not you, but an avatar of an echo chamber, then how can we ever dialogue as one individual to another? How can we ever truly connect? I think we’ve all experienced this inability to connect when trying to engage with others on controversial topics. I’m hoping that by drawing attention to this dynamic, we may be able to get a handle on it.

Of course, this behaviour is not exactly new, it’s just that social media has enhanced and amplified the phenomenon, which I have referred to elsewhere as the will to incorporation: i.e. the instinct to bring all minds under one paradigm, whether via religion or scientism. What I have been at pains to elucidate in analogy magazine is how on the one hand, a paradigm can be productive, while on the other hand, it can imprison our minds. Exposure to new perspectives is therefore paramount if we ever hope to understand the nature of knowledge as organic in its own way, and to keep ourselves from over-committing to a worldview.

If we’re talking about climate change, for instance, and we’re committed to the notion that atmospheric CO₂ from fossil fuel emissions is the cause of global warming, then we are likely to view contrary ideas as offensive and even dangerous. If, however, we believe that rising atmospheric CO₂ is primarily a symptom of soil degradation and loss of biomass, we are likely to find proponents of the former view as offensive and dangerous.

The same happens when considering virus theory and terrain theory. The paradigms determine our approach to the world, indeed shaping our experiences and our destinies. One who believes CO₂ equals global warming will be ready to endorse all manner of measures that actually cause soil degradation (wind farms and massive solar farms, for instance) because the person committed to the paradigm is as convinced of the presiding metaphor as our friend from earlier was convinced of the rising sun. These worldviews are difficult to break free of in their own right; add social media behavioural training and the whole psychological mess gets worse. I have met people in the social justice sphere who are locked in misery because their focus is on injustice, inequality, hate—and especially on what others have that they do not.

All of these worldviews have ruling metaphors the same way astrological signs have ruling planets that lend character to one’s experience of the world. It’s not always a bad thing. I repeat, incomplete or even untrue paradigms can be productive. The proponent of CO₂-driven global warming often enough shares with his opponents a desire to promote ecological health, and this can be a way of bridging the divide. A lot of the actions being taken for the sake of CO₂ reduction have some merit in the eyes of one who believes the reasons motivating those actions are misguided.

It’s interesting to observe too that one who rejects virology and subscribes instead to terrain theory will likely have a predisposition to embrace ideas regarding soil health and to pursue activities in permaculture and regenerative farming. These paradigms frame a way of life. That’s where one’s destiny figures into the magic of metaphor. I suggest that it’s worth considering which worldviews are healthier whenever trying to determine which is the wiser path. One of the implications here is that being in possession of the one true Truth is not what knowledge is about: knowledge is not about being right; it’s about dialoguing with new analogies.

Poetry has the power to teach us this flexibility, this ability to transform consciousness, which is why poetry has been a feature of this magazine. A poem can guide you through so many surprising transformations, that it can confer its creative magic, if you’re paying attention. I’ll leave you with a poem on the subject, and I’ll let you puzzle over the magic of our minds engaging with the ever shifting Logos manifesting through the various phenomena of life, death, decay and the whole cosmic dance. If the poem looks familiar to some of you, that’s because I shared it a few months back in this article.

Release

I climb like I’m climbing out of my skin, climbing out of my own hair
as I climb out of traffic, away from thundering machinery.
I climb past joggers and cyclists snug in their spandex.
I bolt through woods, bound rocks, teeter across mud-locked logs.

The fine drizzle sizzling over the ground is the tearing sound  
as I come loose, a stone dislodged from peach-flesh or apricot.
Once out of the pollutiosphere, even the bird chatter is thin.
I inspect a feather, an acorn, a vacant web, and each time,

kaleidoscopically, the whole world pivots on the axis of a new design. 
What is a park in darkness or in rain when it no longer serves?
When the purpose departs a field, an old wheel, a clawfoot tub,
what does it become—when it slips the syntax of our hands?

I pick a button from the grass; the lawn bares its chest to the sky.
Let go the strings of constellations, the stars fly back to themselves.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine. He has turned his attention to landscape design and permaculture, and is presently focused on another Substack entitled, Dovetails magazine, which you can find here.