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December 13th, 2005
01:21 am - Very Like a Whale
Ogden Nash
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can’ts seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out
of their way to say that it is like something else.
What foes it mean when we are told
That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn’t just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus
hinder longevity,
We’ll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming
in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on
the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are
a great many things,
But i don’t imagine that among then there is a wolf with purple and gold
cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I’ll believe that this Assyrian was actually
like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and
big white teeth and did he say Woof woof?
Frankly I think it very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the
very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts
about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn’t fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to
invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to
people they say Oh yes, they’re the ones that a lot of wolves dressed
up in gold and purple ate them.
That’s the kind of thing that’s being done all the time by poets, from Homer
to Tennyson;
They’re always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a
winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and
I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and
we’ll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you’ll begin to comprehend dimly,
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.
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October 26th, 2005
July 10th, 2001
03:05 pm - The taught rope
2. Imagine two men holding a captured puma on a rope. If they want to approach each other, the puma will attack, because the rope will slacken; only if they both pull simultaneously on the rope is the puma equidistant from the two of them. That is why it is so hard for him who reads and him who writes to reach each other: between them lies a mutual thought captured on ropes that they pull in opposite directions. If we were now to ask that puma--in other words, that thought--how it perceived these two men, it might answer that at the ends of the rope those to be eaten are holding someone they cannot eat....</p>
( other pumas... )
Current Music: silence
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July 7th, 2001
10:43 pm - Play
"This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously."
-- C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"
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