iulie 21, 2015

underpinning

  • A parable can be viewed as an allegory miniaturised, just as an allegory can be viewed as a manifold of metaphors extended into narrative.
ALLEGORY IS A hinge that lets us swing from one plane of meaning to another. This, as the image suggests, goes both ways. We can convert the unknown into the known, allegorise it into the recognisable landscape of our own mythology, or we can discover meanings in the text to which our intellectual world made us previously blind. The technique of reading the Old Testament typologically permitted Christians to see in the Hebrew Scripture a series of promises of the coming of Christ. This was an allegorical reading Talmudists found perverse

iulie 17, 2015

limitation and opportunity.

....'metaphor started growing ragged and incoherent very quickly; it went from positive analogy to negative analogy. If the model was a planetary one, then how come the electrons were not continually losing energy in their orbits, as one would expect? If the inside of an atom were really functioning according to its metaphoric other half then the electron would soon lose its necessary energy and spin counter-clockwise into the nucleus. And in any case, since the force of the nucleus is positive and that of the electron negative, why don’t the two simply get together as soon as possible? Either way, there would be no atom. The metaphor only works if (however remotely) this can still be said to be that.'