PEN America Issue 4: FactFiction (PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PEN American Center
Published: 2002-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

On one level metaphor is naming, however provisional and temporary the name is. Metaphor has interested me more as a way of knowledge, a way of grasping something. I like to take a metaphor and look at it, then do something like what I do with idiomatic expressions—discover a kind of mythic structure, use the metaphor as a way to discover something about the nature of reality. You have to accept the metaphor’s premises and follow its logic. Take the expression, “a bladeless knife without a handle,” where you have a figurative proposition which doesn’t mean anything. Yet by simply saying the expression, it exists somehow. Looking at the expression, you realize it is possible to construct a poem around it, but a poem that would follow the logic of a world where there are bladeless knives without handles. You couldn’t have ordinary tables and chairs around it. The other objects would have to have some distortion to accommodate themselves to that new world. So the poem becomes a statement about a kind of reality with a logic of its own. That little cosmos is there and yet it isn’t. It almost seems to cancel itself. That brings us back to Heidegger and the suspicion of utterance. You really can say anything and make it exist; existence is saying, speaking.

—Charles Simic

from The Uncertain Certainty

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