[Their] films are the embodiment of an action-packed thrill ride, so naturally, we had to have the rails of the track transition into the sprocket holes of a filmstrip, as the logo is thrust onto the screen.

— Filmograph, “Studio Logo” for Thunder Road Pictures (2024)

Logos are usually still-images. This one is animated (see link below). It presents two visuals — a roller coaster and a strip of movie film — one blending into the other. You understand intuitively and intellectually: Movies from Thunder Road are like a thrill ride.

The comparison is poetic but also not far from literal. Car chases in movies provoke physical reactions, as a thrill ride does in real life. A blood pressure cuff will measure responses to all the usual provocations, as in scenes with:

• ax murderers leaping out of shadows
• clothes coming off attractive persons
• not being able to hit back when a bad guy is in your face

Movie images are convincing — even when they are unrealistic. The flashes of light are real flashes. The sounds are real sounds.

On the other hand, “like in a movie” has always been a catch-phrase for not real. In a Google Books search (1930-1960):

“Like in a movie” =

• dreamlike — exaggerated, fragmented, hallucinatory

• distanced — as if happening to someone else

• pollyanna — fatuously optimistic about the way things are

The ultimate example of the meaning of “like in a movie” is the movie detective who grumbles: “Real policework is not like in the movies.”

It’s interesting to consider, what is the ultimate metaphor for the way movies make us feel? Roller-coaster ride deserves to be a nominee.

A movie is an engineered sensory experience, which you can enjoy for the price of a ticket.

Roller coaster video: https://www.filmograph.tv/project/thunder-road-pictures

See also Metaphor Awareness (6/21/18) about riding an emotional roller-coaster at https://metaphorawarenessmonth.wordpress.com/2018/06/21/dont-ride-an-emotional-roller-coaster/.

Posted May 1, 2024

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Scop hwilum sang hador on Heorote.

— Beowulf, lines 496-497 (circa AD 750)

bard then sang brightly in Heorot

That’s a word-for-word translation from Old English. A translation with feeling might be more like:

Then the bard sang, like sunlight in the torch-lit hall of Heorot.

The word “scop” rhymes with hope, and the “sc” is pronounced “sh.” Scop comes from the Old English verb “scieppan,” to shape.

When the scop recites, a story “takes shape” — as when a carver cuts figures in whalebone. An audience may believe the story to be true, but they also understand the telling is a representation. In Aristotelian terms, it’s an “imitation” of life.

The Old English word “scop” is related to Old High German “scoph,” variously meaning poetry, fiction, or mockery (laughable imitation).

It’s surprising to find poetry and mockery under the same umbrella, but sincere imitation and ridicule are two sides of the same coin.

The “coin” of course is imagery, a “shape,” a metaphor.

Photo: Detail from Franks Casket, an Anglo-Saxon carving in whalebone. British Museum, via Wikimedia:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Franks_Casket_back_panel.jpg

Posted March 9, 2024

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UPDATE: her little finger

The expression “wrapped around her little finger” seems to arise out of nowhere in the 1910s. As it turns out, so to speak, it’s a variation on an earlier expression — as seen in “If You Give a Girl a Chance,” from The Thousand Best Songs in the World, compiled by Edward William Cole (1892):

There never was produced a man
Who did so brave become
But that a girl whene’er she liked
Could twirl him round her thumb.

Robert Louis Stevenson (Catriona, 1893), William Makepeace Thackeray (The Wolves and the Lamb, 1863), and William Godwin (The Orphans of Unwalden, 1835) use “round her thumb” in this proverbial way.

Jacob Lennep (The Rose of Dekama, 1847) adds this clarifying detail:

round her thumb like a thread

The recurring themes of twirling and spinning (thread) — seen in dozens of examples from the 1800s — lead eventually to witchery:

They call me a witch, but let [the laird of] Quagglewaas look to his own fireside for a witch that will soon twine him round her thumb.
— Cospatrick of Raymondsholm (1822)

Thumbs are associated with enchantment, deception, and devilry in Macbeth (“By the pricking of my thumbs / Something wicked this way comes”; IV.i.44-45) and in OED quotations from the 1400s to 1600s, including this from Edward IV (1442-1483):

though thou canst beguile the Duke of Norfolk and bring him about the thumb as thou list, I let thee weet [know] thou shalt not do me so… (The Paston Letters, April 1469)

The modern expression “wrapped around her little finger” has a clear meaning but a muddled mental picture, until it’s seen in the context of spinning and weaving. By the 1910s, industrial manufacture of textiles had made spinning cloth irrelevant to women’s everyday  lives. The metaphorical power to enchant then drifted from a woman’s thumb to the hyper-femininity of her little finger, curled delicately when holding a teacup.

This post January 12, 2024. See earlier (2014) post about “She has him wrapped around her little finger.”

Illustration: Jane Austen’s World  https://janeaustensworld.com/2012/03/31/jane-austens-spinning-wheel/

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Hello again, Butterfield 8

People are not ships, chess men, flowers, race horses, oil paintings, bottles of champagne, excrement, musical instruments, or anything else but people.

— John O’Hara, Butterfield 8 (1935)

Near the end of this gossipy (and very readable) novel of the Jazz Age, John O’Hara insists facts are facts. Metaphors cannot accurately convey the reality which Wes Liggett must now live in: he has a secret so dirty he will never be rid of it.

Shakespeare describes a similar case, and presents it as inadequately as any other writer, O’Hara says, launching a rant in parentheses. Lady Macbeth washes her hands while sleepwalking and cries out: “Not all the perfumes of Arabia will sweeten this little hand” (V.1.48-49). The problem with metaphor, O’Hara claims, is it redirects attention to the perfumes of Arabia.

Sticking to observable facts was a wholesome discipline for writers in the era of Hemingway, Hammet, and Henry Miller.

But even bare facts are founded on metaphor. The fact that a doctor brings Lady Macbeth’s behavior to our attention makes her guilty torment a “disease.” Her reference to perfumes means murder (“most foul” in Hamlet) has a metaphorical stench. The imagery of “washing” sin away is so built into our language it all but counts as literal.

O’Hara does not acknowledge “borrowing” Lady Macbeth to describe Wes Liggett’s state of mind. He admits, “Metaphors are all right to give you an idea.”

See also “You can’t make an omelet…” (people are not eggs), 2021: https://metaphorawarenessmonth.wordpress.com/2021/06/11/you-cant-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-eggs/

Collage: Assembled from images on Wikimedia Commons

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You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy…

— Peter Shaffer, Amadeus (1984 movie)

Salieri is a composer. Mozart is a musical instrument. Salieri is pious, diligent, and moderately talented. Mozart is a capricious pleasure-seeker, and yet he is the one who gives voice to the mind of God.

Metaphorically Salieri is an ear, able to hear genius. The injustice of not being the humble instrument changes Salieri. He devotes his life “from now on” to throttling the divine music in Mozart.

Oscar Wilde takes an opposite, unhumble view in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891):

The aim of life is SELF-development. (capitals added)

According to Wilde (speaking through Lord Henry Wotton), submitting to any external influence takes away part of your soul. and you become “an echo of some one else’s music.” Lord Henry congratulates Dorian Gray on never learning how to carve a statue or paint a picture: “Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music.”

In “The Eolian Harp” (1796), Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposes that all living things are musical instruments — reverberating in beauty to the motions in Nature.

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

Reflecting on O’Hara’s antimetaphorical list, it’s clear that people are not musical instruments and clear as well that metaphor illuminates our many ways of being who we are.

Poster: Via Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_%28film%29

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[A spider] turns all into excrement and venom, producing nothing at all but flybane and a cobweb.

— Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books (1704)

If someone is “full of excrement,” we don’t really want them to share. We certainly don’t want to read their new book.

In Battle of the Books, the Modern writers are like spiders. Their books express new ideas and individual perspectives — flimsy webs that catch mere flies. The inner life and insights, which the Moderns so pride themselves on, are just so much intestinal gurgle. Excrement waiting to happen.

By contrast, the Ancient writers embrace time-tested wisdom and universal themes. Aesop, speaking for the Ancients, says they are like the bee producing honey — “sweetness and light.”

Assuming no fundamental change in human nature between ancient times and the eighteenth century, it seems a change in authorial decorum took place between the self-detached Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, circa 175 AD) and the self-celebrating Colley Cibber (Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, 1740). The self-inventory of St. Augustine (Confessions, circa 400) is a landmark along the way, reflecting the Christian concern with the individual soul.

Confirming the absence of any fundamental change in human nature across the ages, OED cites a letter written by E.M. Forster in 1922:

I think that most Indians, like most English people, are shits.

Photo: Karl Stull, a neighbor’s quirky fence

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[It is] the champagne of the blood . . . the babbling of the life that is insane with the consciousness that it is alive.

— Jack London, The Sea-Wolf (1904)

To Wolf Larsen, every human being is a bottle of champagne — a container of yeasty biochemistry that bubbles at times with excitement.

In moments of “effervescence,” you are aware of being alive in a world that is teeming with life and much more that is not alive and not aware. Others of your kind, most of the time, are not aware in the way you are. You imagine possibilities both for yourself and a still higher awareness. You see a God that you cannot see. You invent a religion.

But all that is merely “the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast.” After a time, the euphoria passes. The mind returns to daily business. The splendor of flowers, sunsets, fried potatoes, and pencils with erasers…

Bah! And bah! again. The champagne is already flat. The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.

Photo: Vindulge at https://www.vindulge.com/sparkling-wine/

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[Lesbians] are seen as incomplete women, much like an unfinished painting…

— Angela Pattatucci Aragon, Challenging Lesbian Norms (2006)

Which of the following best describes the above portrait of Sappho? “Sappho” is part of a fresco uncovered in Pompeii and named for the Greek poet who wrote passionately about other women.

A. Finished painting of an incomplete woman.
B. Unfinished painting of a woman who is emotionally complete.
C. Finished painting of a woman whose experience of love is as complete as anybody else’s, as far as anyone can tell.
D. Unfinished painting of “My Last Duchess.”

Confusion arises from any “pretty as a picture” metaphor, because it compares a person or thing to an image of the person or thing. Often the image is softened or sharpened toward an ideal (Platonic, Biblical, or Vogue-o-tropic). Differences between the image and the actual register as dissonance — or, sometimes, as beauty beyond description in life.

Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat,

admits the painter in “My Last Duchess” (Robert Browning, 1842). Yet somehow his painting does capture a “spot” (flaw?) in her cheek that expresses delight in things all around her.

Now dead as the wall that holds her portrait, we see Ferrara’s last duchess: “Looking as if she were alive.”

Read “My Last Duchess”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43768/my-last-duchess

Fresco: “Sappho” (young woman with stylus and wax tablets), Naples National Archaeological Museum, via Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fresco_showing_a_woman_so-called_Sappho_holding_writing_implements,_from_Pompeii,_Naples_National_Archaeological_Museum_(14842101892)_restored.jpg

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He was exceedingly samoliubiv [like a racehorse].

— Max Eastman, Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (1926)

For centuries, racehorses have been bred for speed and competitive spirit. Top performers go ballistic if challenged in a race. Even when ambling, they “keep at least one eye backward along the track to see if there is anything in the field that considers itself an equal.”

Eastman uses the racehorse comparison in English to clarify samoliubiv, which in Russian refers to the trait as observed in humans — an “instinct for rivalry” with an “alert awareness of self.” A samoliubiv personality turns up in every workplace and perhaps in every family, causing others in the room to clench. “Uncle Leon is very competitive,” apologists say.

Racehorse temperament is also associated with balky behavior by star performers. Marias Callas once said: “I’m a racehorse, rather delicate and sensitive. Damn it!” (Lyndsy Spence, Cast a Diva, 2021).

Painting: Eugene Delacroix, “Horse Frightened by Lightning” (circa 1825) via Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eugene_Delacroix_-_Horse_Frightened_by_Lightning_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

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She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned under water, he thought.

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

The drowned-lily wording is a shock. Virginia Woolf died by drowning in 1940, a suicide. Woolf was no pale lily, meeting an Ophelia-like end. Her depression was clinical.

Nor is Rezia a drowned lily, though she trims ladies’ hats with flowers. This metaphor is one that says more about the observer, Septimus Smith, than the observed. He is a veteran, emotionally shattered by the war. He sees acutely but has no feelings for people and things he should love. It’s as if they were seen through a pane of glass. In the end, Septimus jumps from a window, overwhelmed by the nastiness of people in general and Shakespeare in particular.

For Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter, the inexplicably dark-haired Elizabeth, it’s a burden being compared “to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies.” She is seventeen, blossoming into womanhood and therefore expected to attend parties in town. She “preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies.”

Noticing her daughter’s reluctance to blossom, Mrs. Dalloway imagines “a hyacinth which has had no sun.”

Painting: Claude Monet, The Water-Lily Pond (1895) via Wikimedia at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Water-Lily_Pond_-_Google_Arts_%26_Culture.jpg

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