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[Inaudible Remark]
>> [Laughs] That's okay.
[Inaudible Remark]
>> Okay. Okay, hello everyone.
My name is Matt Murray and I'm going to be giving a talk today
on Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.
We'll be taking a look at metaphors as you can tell.
The title of the talk is originally "Coping
with Alien Metaphors" but the more I dug into it,
the things that I found fascinating as far as, you know,
this time through the novel were the ways in which Billy Pilgrim,
the main character, not only becomes unstuck in time
but really what I'm going to argue is
that in the end he actually becomes unstuck in metaphor
and that's really-- that's the beauty of what happens to him
and maybe the power behind whatever gospel he may have
that he's trying to disseminate via radio, television,
whoever he can get to listen to him.
So, as we know, Billy Pilgrim is struggling in the novel with--
is struggling to come to grips with his experience of life,
his lived experience and a lot of the way that we do that is
of course via metaphors often but of course struggling
with post traumatic stress disorder, one of the things
that he is facing as a lived experience is being unstuck
in time as the book describes it.
And so, we're going to go through some ideas connected
with that and see maybe what that means
on a deeper level hopefully in the next few minutes.
So as we know, of course, metaphor really--
the basis of metaphor is comparison.
And so when we think about Billy coming unstuck in metaphor,
we're talking about the metaphoric concepts
that are underlying our idea, for example, of time.
So when we think about metaphor is we know
that they're built on comparisons.
We understand one thing in terms of another, right?
We could say life is a beach and we have some sort
of an understanding of that but we only do
if we know what a beach is and I know
that you folks probably know what beaches are
because you live in an area
where there are beautiful beaches.
The last 10 years I was in Southern California
so when I think of beaches I think of dirty diapers,
hypodermic needles, things like that
but we have better situations up here
so it's a better metaphor maybe in Northern California.
But we also have other metaphors
that we could use, but life is a beach.
You're familiar with this probably
with the Corona Beer ads that are all over the place, right,
where suddenly all you had to do is pop open a Corona
and you're suddenly on the beach, right?
And everything is wonderful, everything is nice.
We know that's not always true and this is, of course,
expressing a philosophy of life
and there's another philosophy that's very similar,
life is a ***, right?
And so you've got a whole other set of things that we think
of with this half of the equation, right?
Now again, we know that it's not a literal thing.
We know that we're not talking about a literal female dog
or a mean spirited woman.
We're talking about something else, right?
We're talking about life being a tough proposition
or life being difficult at times, right?
So let's see.
So those are metaphors, right?
When we think about life is a beach or life is a ***,
those are metaphoric comparisons.
We see these kinds of things all the time
but there's something else that we don't know that's quite
as often and that's our metaphoric concepts
or our conceptual metaphors
that are basically grounding our understanding of reality.
And these are the metaphors that I feel like are important for us
to explore when we think about what's happening
to Billy throughout the course of the novel.
So conceptual metaphors are metaphors
that are underlying our experience of the world
and we can-- I've got some information that I'm going
to share with you for a few minutes
from a wonderful book called Metaphors We Live By
and I would encourage you to check it out if you haven't.
It's a wonderful book exploring the metaphors that are important
to us in life and in fact to do very much of--
they define our everyday realities in many ways.
They help us to understand our experience of life
and so our conceptual system that's made
up of these metaphors is, of course,
something that we really don't think of on a regular basis.
We're not required to do that.
So let's think about some examples
so we could bring this to the forefront.
And again, some of the examples I'm going to bring up are
from the book Metaphors We Live By.
The one of the many examples they used throughout the book is
the metaphor-- the metaphoric concept
of argument is war, right?
And so the concept argument is being understood
with a certain conceptual metaphor argument is war,
meaning that we understand the idea of argument
in the same kinds of ways that we understand the concept
or the idea of war and we use a lot of the same terminology
and that's what's pointed out here, right?
We use-- we not only think about--
or we not only describe argument as war
but we actually use war-like terminology
to describe our arguments, right?
You can say your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I've never won an argument with him.
You disagree?
Okay, shoot.
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.
So we can see how a lot of the terminology we use
for war often applies to the same kinds of things
that we think about with argument
and we don't just describe argument in that way.
It's how we experience arguments.
So you actually win or lose an argument
and we get those concepts
from that related category war, right?
So as an example of thinking about how hard it is
to get outside of our maybe culturally inherited metaphoric
concepts, I'd ask you to consider, what would metaphor be
like if we described it instead of war?
What if metaphor is dance-- or not metaphor, argument is dance.
Can we even imagine what argument would be
like if we described it in terms of dance?
It's more of a partnership, right?
Something that evolves together.
I don't know where we could take that.
There's a lot of different directions you could with that
but you can see how even just a small shift like that we have
to suddenly rearrange the way we think about argument, right?
Argument is not necessarily now something that's antagonistic.
It's something that's maybe an interplay
between two people, right?
Another example that I could give you
about how our lives are full of these kinds
of metaphoric concepts relates to my own personal life.
I'm sorry about that.
My-- I don't consider myself necessarily a religious person
but I did grew up in a religious household and so,
of course my parents were concerned with setting me
up with metaphoric concepts.
They didn't know what they were doing, of course,
but they were trying to set me up with some ideas
that would be the foundation of my understanding, for example,
of a really-- a difficult concept to grasp,
the concept that we call--
or that some people call it god, right?
So you could think about how would you explain the concept
god to a child, right?
You can imagine that it's going to be a difficult thing to do,
right, because of course
in the first place children have very limited range of experience
and the concept god is almost impossible probably for any
of us as adults to understand in and of itself, right?
So if we think about the concept of god, my parents--
I asked them about it and they don't have a recollection
of this but a couple of years ago I went through a box of toys
that my parents had set aside for me.
It's toys and books from my childhood and that's why I went
through that box and I discovered a book
that I didn't remember from my childhood
but it was really intriguing to me.
It was a book called "What Is God Like?"
And it was clearly written for a little kid.
I mean it was written, you know,
in the kind of Dr. Seuss poem kind of approach,
that sort of language but each page
in the book was a metaphoric comparison, right,
to help a child to understand God 'cause how is a child going
to understand God but to connect it with something else
that they already know about in the world, right?
So some of the examples-- I wrote down a few here for us
to check out "What Is God Like?"
So we have a concept God.
What is our conceptual metaphor going to be?
God is what?
Well, these are actually, of course,
we might say more specifically similes since we have
like in there but a simile is just really a modified metaphor
you might say on a certain level, right?
So God is like dad and I think the way the poem was going--
because dad is big, right, and can do big things.
He's strong.
Mom-- God is like mom because mom listens to you and of course
on a certain level we could say your mom maybe had a part
in creating you but the poem goes on to talk
about God being your ultimate creator
from the Christian point of view of course.
The brother-- God is like a brother.
It said maybe like a brother is busy or I think more importantly
that the little kid could understand a brother maybe
that shares or that is giving, you know, to a sibling.
God is like a grandmother in the sense
that grandmothers have maybe a special sort
of unconditional love for their grandchildren.
I don't know how food got connected with this
but I'm sure I have a lot of great food memories
with my grandmother so maybe, yeah, that's part of it.
My grandmother used to make some wonderful turtle pancakes
that I'll tell you about later on if you're curious.
Also, God is like a doctor because a doctor heals us
and the doctor knows us on a physiological level,
on a level of our physical being whereas God might know us maybe
in a deeper way but at least God knows our being, our totality
in a way at least again from the Christian point of view.
The scariest one in my estimation
of the book was the last one that I wrote down here
that I included was policeman, right?
God is like a policeman because, well,
policemen protect us, right?
That's not always the associated idea we have
with police officers but many times it is and these are
in the best possible world.
I guess that's what it would be.
So what is God like?
This is the last stanza of that book, the poem that was--
the main meat of that book.
What is God like?
I'm learning everyday.
How do we learn this stuff?
Where do we get these ideas?
We learn them from the people that we know.
We learn them from places we go, right?
It sounds very Dr. Seuss, right?
But everything that we learn about life comes
from other people, right?
It comes from the places that we visit and so, what kept coming
to my mind again and again when thinking about metaphors is
that in a way, you know, Billy embraces the Tralfamadorian
or alien concept of time
but in a way all metaphors are alien metaphors, right,
because we take them from others, we take them
from our experience that's outside of us
and so there's a way in which maybe all metaphors are
at least partially alien in nature.
So what I was saying,
as children we inherit these metaphors from our parents,
from our teachers, from the people around us but one
of the great things is as an adult you have an opportunity,
right, to maybe-- to acknowledge the metaphors
that are important part of your life, the concepts
that are an important aspect of your being, your experience
of life but you also have the opportunity
to assess those metaphoric concepts.
You have the opportunity to maybe, as we saw it with Billy,
to change out some metaphoric concepts if you find
that the concepts that you've been working
with don't really fit your life experience, right?
They don't help you.
They're not beneficial to your life experience.
So thinking about that idea, if it is possible
to shift our metaphors, to shift our conceptual metaphors,
I guess we could ask first of all, you know,
how that might benefit us and one of the things that came
to my mind as I was thinking
about that question was I don't know how many
of you maybe have heard the TED Talk
by Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight.
Have any of you checked that one out?
Anybody? Nobody.
Okay, a few of you have.
If you haven't, I highly recommend it.
In fact, the book that the talk is based on is also called
"My Stroke of Insight" and it's an excellent book
if you haven't checked it out.
And one of the things that you can even tell
from the title My Stroke of Insight, she's using stroke
in a way that we don't normally think of, right?
She was diagnosed as having a stroke and in fact
because of the ways that we define stroke and because
of the ways that her doctors understood her condition
as a stroke victim so to speak, they were less willing
to do anything for her because they felt like there was nothing
that could be done for her, right?
And so it was very difficult for her to get any sort
of treatment, any sort of even good will from the caregivers
around her and she had to really push hard for that.
There's another really great exploration of the ways
in which metaphors are a part of our understanding of illness
and it's a great book by Susan Sontag.
It's actually a collection of two of her books,
the first one is called "Illness as Metaphor" and the second one
which I think is even more interesting is the volume called
"Aids and Its Metaphors."
And it's a wonderful book.
Again, they've published both of them now together
so you can get two for the price of one if you want
to check this one out.
But Susan Sontag wrote the first one
when she was herself diagnosed with cancer and the thing
that she kept running up against is that the ways
that people defined cancer
and defined cancer victims made it almost impossible
to get any sort of meaningful help and it also--
of course it has a lot to do with the kinds of treatment
that we even think are possible for people in these situations.
So shifting our metaphor is in the way that we understand,
the way we define disease is not only going
to affect our own conceptual understanding of it
but it has impact on our actions, right, how we respond
to the people that have these diseases, how we respond
to providing treatment, therapies for people
with these sorts of diseases.
And in fact, Susan Sontag was pointing out that most
of the metaphors connected
with illness basically could be described--
well, they often focus on describing the body
and they describe the body either as a factory.
So of course a body that's not working properly is a factory
that's maybe in disrepair, or the body as a fortress, right,
where you're under attack.
A lot of military metaphor is connected with that
and of course it's not too difficult
to see how we use military metaphors when we think
about disease and fighting disease
and of course diseases attacking us and things like that, right?
So I guess we could say in the end
that our conceptual metaphors can help us.
They can aid us in understanding our experience of life
and dealing with life or they can sometimes even hinder us
in our experience of life, our understanding of life.
Maybe there's some options even for us on ways
in which metaphors can be neutral but let's start to look
at maybe some specific metaphors of time here so that we can,
again, provide some more examples.
We think about time from our point of view, there's a couple
of different ways that we could do that, right?
We could talk about time as a moving object.
The time will come when, the time has long since gone when,
or the time for action has arrived.
So we can see then that time is a moving object that often
in fact is coming towards us, right,
when we think about it that way.
Another metaphor for time.
Time is stationary.
So time is not moving in this metaphor
and we move through time, right?
So as we go through the years, as we go further
into the 2000's, we're approaching the end of the year.
All of these statements include in them the idea
that time is stationary and that we're moving through it
and in fact we can see that one of the metaphors
from Slaughterhouse-Five then that we run into in the first--
I think it's in the first chapter, right,
when the narrator is describing his attempts to write the novel,
his great Dresden novel, he makes that wallpaper timeline
with his Crayolas, daughter's Crayolas, right?
So thinking then about the metaphors that we run
into in Slaughterhouse-Five that relate to time, we've got that--
the narrator's wallpaper timeline and so that fits
with our idea of time
as a stationary object perhaps that we move through.
We've got the string of beads metaphor that's used for time
as a series of connected units that we experience sequentially
and there's even one that I notice
as I was rereading this last week, time is a fruit, right?
At one point I think Billy's daughter Barbara's asking,
"Why didn't you do this?"
And he said, "Well, I didn't"--
oh, she says, "Why are you just now, you know,
talking about all this time travel and all this business,"
and he said, "Well, I didn't think the time was ripe yet,
you know, but now the time is right."
So we've also got another set of metaphors connected with time.
We've got the Tralfamadorian perspective on time.
One of those is that he talks about Tralfamadorians being able
to see in four dimensions and that's--
I'm not exactly sure how we could deal with that.
The closest we'd get of course is
that we actually do have a realm of Physics that thinks
about time as being the fourth dimension and so that's,
you know, connected with space-time theories and so,
we do have theoretical physicists that use this type
of concept all the time in their work.
We also have the idea of the insect
that is locked inside an amber block, right?
That time is an object then the moment is structured.
We see that phrase coming up again and again in the novel.
The moment was structured this way
or the moment was orchestrated in such a way.
And the most interesting one of course is--
or the most fully developed metaphor
from the Tralfamadorian perspective is the metaphor
that develops from the mountain range.
So I'm going to just read that passage
because I think it's worth doing and if you have your books
if you want to read along of course you can.
This is-- it starts on page 146,
about the middle of the page there.
There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish
to the Tralfamadorians.
I guess I should back up.
This is when Billy is in the zoo, right, and he is being--
he was being put on display and so of course as we know
with most zoo-type exhibits the idea is to try to understand
that creature and its world, right?
And so the Tralfamadorians were trying to understand Earthlings,
trying to understand Billy as an example of Earthlings.
And one of the things of course that is the striking difference
between their culture and our culture is their understanding
of time and in fact they have an--
it's almost impossible for them to understand time
from an Earthling point of view.
And so, these are-- this is an attempt to explain earth time
to other Tralfamadorians.
There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish
to the Tralfamadorians too.
They couldn't imagine what time looked like to him.
Billy had given up on explaining that.
The guide outside had to explain as best he could.
The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking
across a desert at a mountain range on a day
that was twinkling bright and clear.
They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud,
at a stone right in front of them or even
down into the canyon behind them,
but among them was this poor earthling
and his head was incased in a steel sphere
which he could never take off.
There was only one eyehole through which he could look
and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.
This was only the beginning
of Billy's miseries in the metaphor.
He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted
to a flat car on rails and there was no way he could turn his
head or touch the pipe.
The far end of the pipe rested on a bipod
which was also bolted to the flat car.
All Billy could see was the little dot
at the end of the pipe.
He didn't know he was on a flat car.
He didn't even know there was anything peculiar
about a situation.
The flat car sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast,
often stopped, went uphill, downhill,
around curves, along straight ways.
Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice
but to say to himself, "That's life."
And so as they try to explain to another--
as Tralfamadorians tried to understand Earth time,
the difference they were beginning to see is that we
as Earthlings when we experience time no matter how much we worry
about the future and no matter how much we worry
about the past, we still are stuck in a moment, right?
We're all here right now listening
to this lecture even though you may wish you were somewhere else
eating a hamburger or whatever, right?
It's-- we're here right now and there's nothing--
well, you can't get up if you'd like
but maybe we can wait a few more minutes.
The-- so, from the Tralfamadorian perspective,
they can see everything.
They can see the totality of time and what's interesting
about that at least the implications
for their lived experiences
that they can choose what they want to look at.
They can choose what part of life that they want to view
and what that means for them at least is if you want
to have a happy life, pay attention to the happy stuff.
Focus on the things that were beautiful,
the things that were wonderful, right?
And of course they admit that there are terrible atrocities
that happen in their world but they just choose to zoom
through those times or remember also
that for example however tragic it is, that someone might die.
There's also another moment crystalized in amber
where that person is living, right and so,
what need is there to be sad, right?
Both of those moments exist.
There's life and there's death.
That may not be a consolation to us as Earthlings
but it may be begins to get there and of course Billy--
one of the things that's troubling for Billy is
that he is not stuck in time in the same way that we are.
Because of his experiences in the war,
we know that he actually is shifting back and forth in time.
In fact, there are several descriptions of time
that are connected to that.
He's described as being spastic in time which maybe
of course we would think of as being out of control.
He's also unstuck in time in the sense that maybe he's ungrounded
and that he's not, you know, situated in one place.
Of course I guess that would be another conceptual metaphor
underneath the conceptual metaphor.
We also have the metaphor for Billy's experience
of being life being like a pendulum that swings--
or time being a pendulum that swings in and out of life.
And so his experiences, you know, can be described
by that arc as the pendulum swings into death
and it swings back all the way to his birth.
And it tells us-- or the narrator tells us in the novel
that Billy has experienced his birth and death many times,
that in fact at one point he--
his wife says, "I'm going to lose some weight
for you," or whatever.
She's trying to be, you know,
whatever she thinks a good wife is for him and--
but he's not worried about it.
Why is that?
Because he's traveled through their whole life together many
times being unstuck in time and he knows
that for the most part their life together is going
to be a very wonderful, pleasant experience.
And so, he doesn't have any fears about, you know,
what she may do or what she may not do in order to try
to be a better wife because he knows the past,
he knows the future and there's nothing really
for him to worry about.
But of course a psychologist would have another definition
of Billy's experience.
They would say that perhaps he is having flashbacks,
one of the major symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.
But in the end I'm not sure that that definition is going
to be very helpful to Billy, right, because you can label it,
you can call it something but is that going to help him
to make his way through life any more easily.
It may but it may not.
And what turns out to be I guess more helpful
for Billy is this attempt
to embrace the Tralfamadorian concept of time.
And in fact, once Billy starts to understand that,
it seems like a lot of his anxieties about his flashbacks
and flash forwards start to drop away, right?
He's not so concerned about it anymore, and it even seems
that there's a point at which he starts to be able to shift
in time under his own volition.
At least once or twice it seems like in the novel it seems
like there was an uncomfortable moment arriving
and so he decided to shift in time to another moment in order
to avoid that uncomfortable experience.
At one point in the novel, Billy goes to the city and he's trying
to find a TV station or a radio program
or somebody that'll get his ideas out there, right?
He's got a burning desire inside
to share this new information about time.
He feels like if other Earthlings can just understand
this idea of time, that maybe a lot of things could be avoided
and he's still stuck in this idea and maybe even,
I don't know, perhaps that things could be better
in some way but the Tralfamadorians don't
necessarily see it that way, right?
Things just are.
Now they are what they are and this is the moment
and it's structured this way
and there's nothing you can do about it.
But Billy feels like that maybe there's something
that we can do, there's something we can change
and that's our metaphors, right, our concepts that are--
they're behind our understanding of our experience in life.
[ Pause ]
So when we think about Billy's experience,
once he embraces this, he's got a new way
of understanding his flashbacks.
He's not as concerned about it anymore.
He's got a desire to share these new ideas with people
and the idea, of course, is good change will come from that.
And I guess the question for us then as readers of the novel
or at least one question that comes to my mind is, okay, well,
what about for us, right?
Most of us-- of course, I don't know very many of you
in this room but I haven't actually met anyone
who has claimed to be abducted by aliens
but there are many people out there who have.
Most of us will not have the opportunity
to be abducted I don't think so without that opportunity,
I wonder what we could do to unstick ourselves
from our own conceptual metaphors 'cause I think there
could be some benefit to that from time to time, alright?
So we don't have alien abduction to work with.
One of the first things that came to my mind though
that would be a similar type experience is travel, right?
How many of you folks like to travel?
I love traveling.
It's one of the things that my wife and I are dedicated to,
is traveling to various parts of the States, various parts
of the world experiencing other cultures.
Even-- of course that includes often
at least partially learning new languages.
In any time you learn a new language
of course you learn new concepts.
You learn new ideas.
You learn new ways of looking at the world.
It's not just a matter of conjugating verbs
and learning new vocabulary.
It's about the ideas.
It's about the idioms.
It's about the conceptual metaphors
that are behind the language.
So there's other opportunities though for us even
if you don't have the time or the money
to do any great traveling.
You can visit an art museum, plenty of those around.
You can enjoy work of music, work of literature,
Slaughterhouse-Five, films.
You could even go to a lecture, right?
So, coming back to some of that religious talk even though I
claim I'm not a religious person it comes
up in my life a lot 'cause that's where a lot
of my concepts came from when I was growing up.
I remember one of the stories
from the Christian tradition came to my mind
when I was thinking about all these ideas with metaphors
and Billy's situation.
Let's think about the parable of--
that Jesus told that we think of as the Parable of the Wineskins.
And the Parable of the Wineskins for those of you
who aren't familiar with it--
there's some discussion about the followers of Jesus
and whether they should be continuing the Jewish traditions
that are a part of their heritage and their culture,
if they should drop those by the wayside and take
on new traditions and in some ways
of understanding the parable, it seems like Jesus is saying
that some of the things are going to be thrown
to the wayside and some things maybe will be retained.
But the idea is that you've got a wineskin, the old school way
of storing wine, right?
We use bottles now so it's not as big of a deal, right?
But if you have a wineskin made out of leather, right,
and when you put new wine
in there what happens when wine ages?
It expands and it's going to expand that leather to the point
to where if any more expansions happen it's going
to break, right?
So if you try to put new wine into old wineskins,
once that expansion happens they will rupture
and you've lost all your good juice, right?
So the idea is don't put new wine into old wineskins
and like I say, a lot of people see that as being a matter of,
you know, trying to maybe tear down the Jewish traditions
that preceded the message of Jesus in the Christian tradition
but I think it maybe goes even deeper than that, right?
That it's a matter of metaphors, right?
That he's saying perhaps that from time to time
as human beings we need to remember
that metaphors don't last forever, right?
That maybe there are times when we need to seek
out new metaphors, novel metaphors, our new ways
of understanding our old metaphors
because our experiences of life change and as we evolve
as human beings certainly our metaphors
and our concepts behind those metaphors should hopefully
change as well.
And so I was thinking how can we connect that to what Billy's
up to here with his burning desire to spread his new gospel?
Trying to get us to see that if we can maybe unthink
or unstick ourselves from some of these metaphors,
some of the things that we experience
in life might not be quite so troubling, right?
Even something as crazy as being out of control
with flashbacks, right?
Maybe there's a way to understand that we're--
it doesn't, you know, mean that you are a broken machine,
a broken factory or a fortress under attack, right?
That there may be other metaphors that we could use
to understand that experience
that might actually be not only beneficial for us as we try
to deal with people that we know who are suffering these kinds
of things but also for those very people themselves
as they try to understand their own experience of life.
[ Pause ]
So I guess I'll end with one other quote here from the book
that connects with all this idea about new metaphors perhaps.
This is from Eliot Rosewater.
Billy-- one of Billy's roommates at the hospital, right?
This is what he-- what Eliot was saying
to his psychiatrist at one point.
"I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot
of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going
to want to go on living."
And I guess maybe we could connect
that with the Picasso idea, right, that art is a lie
that helps you to see the truth, right?
When we think beyond categories like that of truth and lies,
what we really have are metaphors, right?
The different metaphors that we use to describe our experience.
So what Rosewater's really saying is you guys are going
to have to come up with some new concepts
or people aren't going to--
we're going to run out of the energy and the desire
to keep living under these same, you know,
ways of understanding our experience.
I guess that's my talk.
That's Billy's gospel.
I hope you're edified and if you want to come down to be prayed
over at the end of the service you're welcome to do that.
[ Applause ]
So we've got plenty of time for some questions if there are any?
Yes?
>> Turtle pancakes?
>> Turtle pancakes, yeah, well they're not made
out of turtles I'll tell you that much.
That does sound more interesting maybe but it's just one
of those things where grandmas are really adept
at making pancakes in special shapes,
right and so she would make it look
like the overhead look at a turtle.
[Inaudible Discussion] You had a question?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Well, I can't think of anything in particular
that I remember from that box.
The only other things in the box that had that book
that I remember, the question was, were there any other items
in the box that caused me to reflect in the same kind of way?
The only other items that I really kept
out of the box were my Star Wars action figures
from the late 70's.
[Laughter] But I have to say
that my beagle just chewed the head off of Yoda a couple
of weeks ago so I'm very sad about that.
Other questions?
No? Thanks everyone for being here.
Don't forget that there's going
to be a lecture tomorrow evening.
Michael Krasny will be here at five thirty
and we would love for you to be here.
We have one more question here.
>> So, on the characteristics on metaphors,
are those characteristics mentioned
or they [inaudible] between them?
>> What do you mean?
>> Okay, metaphor is being used per se [inaudible] as well,
talking about different types of speed to comparisons.
You have continued a huge comparisons
in their characteristic of speed
so you can't say all cars are fast and people run quickly too.
You can't just say dogs run [inaudible] and so do cars.
Or sorry, dogs run [inaudible]--
>> Well, probably I'd have to investigate it,
explore it a little bit but we're probably--
we may even be talking about two underlying conceptual metaphors
instead of just one.
There-- it maybe that we had two ideas about running
that we'd use in different context, right, that the kind
of running that we think of as humans are dogs or animals doing
versus machines, right?
>> [Inaudible] in light of speech, I wouldn't say--
sure I would say beaches are very calm and [inaudible].
>> Yeah, of course we know that crossing metaphors
like that would get you into trouble with your teachers
but also with your own life experience even sometimes.
But, yeah, there's some ways that, you know,
all metaphor comparisons are partial.
I mean now that's one thing we have to remember.
There-- it's never going to be a hundred percent connection,
right?
So some things may apply
and some things may not depending upon the context,
okay?
Other questions?
We've got plenty of time.
I might be able to explain the mysteries of life.
[Laughter] I guess not.
Okay. Oh yes, one more?
>> [Inaudible] but why is it important for the common person
to be unstuck in time?
Is it to be able to heal and interpret the world
in such a way that [inaudible]?
>> Well, okay, so the question is, why would it be important
for us as humans as any average everyday person
to become unstuck in time?
I'm not sure that it is important for us to do that
and that's why I ended up changing one of the titles
at least of my talk to how to become unstuck in metaphor,
right, instead of being unstuck in time because time is just one
of many conceptual metaphors that are a part
of our lived experience.
It may be important for some of us to bust
out of that idea of time.
I think when it becomes important is when we start
to realize that our metaphors aren't serving us well, right?
When they're actually may be causing us more problems
than they're helping, right?
And so it may-- it's possible that that--
that we would have different needs, each individual,
one of us in attempting to become unstuck
in various metaphors that are part of our experience
because none of us have the same conceptual metaphors a hundred
percent exact across the board even though we get a lot
of those from our culture in general, so.
>> Are there [inaudible] you are sort of creating a metaphor
that would be helpful towards breaking
out of [inaudible] dimensions?
>> I would say that that's a characteristic of the best art
and the best literature of all time, any time.
What's going on now?
What's going on in the past?
As far as any particular names, you know, it's--
it would be hard to say.
I think part of it depends on your personal proclivities
as a reader and what you're in to.
I know-- a favorite author of mine is Tom Robbins and he--
I love him for many of the same reasons I love Kirk Vonnegut
and I love 'em even more because often when I'm--
when I walk away from a Tom Robbins novel I'm usually a
little bit less bummed out and depressed than when I walk away
from a Kirk Vonnegut novel.
So that's the main difference for me anyway, so.
Yes?
>> You spoke a lot about time and time metaphors.
You specifically [inaudible] about place and assessment place
because everything
about Slaughterhouse-Five really takes place in a dressing room.
>> Right.
>> Even World War II, can you speak a little bit about that?
>> I don't know.
I could if I was-- what's that?
[Inaudible Remark]
>> Okay, it sounds like that's in fact exactly what our talk
on Monday is going to cover.
In fact, yes that's right.
Marc Bojanowski is going to be giving a talk on Monday at noon
on the Concept of Setting in Slaughterhouse-Five.
So that one will certainly--
I'll let him step up to the plate for that one, okay?
Yes?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Sure. But we don't always--
not all of us have that concept about argument.
One of the things Eric is pointing out is that, you know,
some of us don't think about argument in negative terms.
In fact a lot of us English teachers
of course we make our living
by teaching people how to argue, right?
So for example I can tell you that I grew up--
as I was mentioning before in a very,
very conservative Christian household and one
of the ramifications of that is that I never
in my entire life saw my parents have an argument, never saw it.
My experience as a married man is
that arguments happen all the time-- [Laughter] Right?
So I don't know.
But so when I did see arguments
as a child they were disturbing to me, right?
And so as I was growing up I found
that I was avoiding arguments as much as possible in my life
and I would do various crazy, you know, insane strategies
to try to avoid any kind of argument in any, you know,
context and that's-- that in in of itself is crazy,
right, because you're right.
Well, maybe it's only crazy
from another metaphoric point of view.
There are a lot of different ways that we could think
about argument and the more I explore them,
the concept argument is dance.
I'm fascinated and intrigued by that metaphor but--
and part of the reason I like to compare those two concepts is
that they're so vastly different, right?
And we're so stuck in the idea of argument as war
that it's almost impossible to think about it as being
in any other kind of way.
Even if we like argument, we still use
that same terminology, right?
In fact, I know people--
one of my best friends in Southern California,
he argues more than anyone I've ever seen, right?
He always-- anytime you get in a conversation with him it's going
to turn into an argument.
So I asked him one day.
I said, "Look Dave, it seems
like to me you don't even care what point you're arguing."
He said, "You're exactly right,
I don't care what point I'm arguing.
I just like to get into arguments"
and so whatever this person is arguing,
I'm going to take the other position, right?
And that seems crazy on a certain level
but he's also a very interesting person to hang out with
and we ended up having a lot
of interesting conversations because of that.
So, you know, that approach to life isn't always a bad thing.
Sure.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Well, you know, finality, again, is connected
with our metaphors, right?
I mean so if we think about time as an object that we move
through when we think about it orientation-wise
in our culture we might set it up as the beginning,
is it the left and the end, is that the right and so
when we think about beginnings and ends, we think about it
in terms of that kind of a continuum, right?
But when you think about maybe other cultural metaphors
for time that are more like loops and loops of loops
or whatever, then there's not those same kinds of concerns
about beginnings and endings that we have
because it's not a final situation, you know,
and even if we think about the Tralfamadorian perspective,
it's just a range of things and there's no beginning and no end,
it's just there's this field of perception there, right?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
Well, I don't know about that but I will say
that a few weeks ago I was trying to figure
out if there could be such a thing as a Daoist metaphor
and so what I came up with and a friend helped me with this,
this is what we came up with.
Everything is everything else but nothing is anything else.
I don't know if it works or not.
What time?
[Inaudible Remark] Repeating the question, okay.
So the question there-- I don't even remember
after I've answered it now.
[Laughter]
>> Do you have a certain metaphor--
>> Okay, do I have certain metaphors that come up again
and again in my life and of course that's why I bring
up some of the experiences like that book
"What is God Like" 'cause
like I said I'm not a serially religious person
but because that's a part of my experience,
it's a part of the things that were--
that went into creating my understanding of the world.
I have to account for those things and I have to--
or at least I feel like it's important for me to do some sort
of an analysis of those to make sure
that they are serving me well in my life.
Okay.
>> And I wish that Obama and Romney were here.
[Laughter] Instead of listening to their sort
of detailed differences, that they can speak in terms
of conceptual metaphors and then the electorate would know
that they really are truly choosing
between two different understandings of life.
>> Sure. Sure.
Yeah, and I think there are a lot of ways
that we could get more out of those situations
than we typically get, right?
That those really seem to be non-helpful scenarios
for the most par but you're right.
I mean I think that again in the same way that the best art
and the best literature challenges are
conceptual metaphors.
I think for someone to be a true leader,
that's part of what's going to be involved with that
and I think that's part of what we see not happening
with our leadership in general in our country.
It seems right now as if maybe they're not even aware
of their own conceptual metaphors that they're dealing
with but they're not dealing with things at that level.
They're just-- it seems like every four years
or so they just whip up the hatreds
so we all hate each other and forget
about that we're not really the enemies of each other, right?
We're in this together, right?
Other questions?
All right.
Well, I thank you once again for being here, for your patience
and if you have any other questions please feel free
to stop by.
[Applause]
[ Inaudible Discussion ]
[ Silence ]