Symbol, Archetype, Tug of War, Metaphor

Flint on steel today from a ran­dom bab­ble on mak­ing a eunuch out of Vin Diesel. A fel­low friend fel­low teach­es an Eng­lish course to col­lege frosh, they’re doing poet­ry and now think every­thing is a sym­bol. I’ve been there.

The stuff I wrote in col­lege [I’ll upload my chap­book and link it tonight] was more ref­er­en­tial than sym­bol­ic I think. But folks seemed to read it as sym­bol­ic. Maybe it is. Maybe they did­n’t know what sym­bol­ism means. Maybe I don’t know. I think in arche­types, I think; not sym­bols. I’m ref­er­en­tial. Or was. I’m try­ing to be broad­ened now. Any­way.

I like the mak­ing of asso­ci­a­tions between eas­i­ly under­stood arche­types and then pluck­ing the string of that asso­ci­a­tion in order to write the sound instead of writ­ing the means of the sound. At least try­ing to. I tried to asso­ciate arche­types that would­n’t nor­mal­ly run into each oth­er so the sound of the string would be in a note not nor­mal­ly heard. Cre­at­ing a tug of war between what the two arche­types are is what i am being been wont to pay[ing] atten­tion to.

I nev­er think “This flower shall be a sym­bol of cap­i­tal­ism” or “the mon­key will rep­re­sent ignominy.” So I use[d] things that are already there and rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pegs from which the sound of sym­bol can be writ­ten. Uh huh. So maybe arche­types are sym­bol after all, and I did in fact write with sym­bols. I doubt it, but revis­ing, per­haps I felt no need to cre­ate my own sym­bols because they are already extant if you look for them. Maybe I thought then, as I sort of do now, tha sym­bol­ism only gets you in tune to play the metaphor.

That is what I’ve been try­ing to do late­ly, work on metaphor. Haiku is good prac­tice on that. I sort of cut my teeth on sym­bol, played chop­sticks with its pos­si­b­li­ties and now I attempt larg­er works, maybe a sonata or some­thing rag­time with metaphor. I think metaphor is more resilient, more uni­ver­sal. I would think that peo­ple would find it eas­i­er to grasp a metaphor rather than a sym­bol, espe­cial­ly if they are from anoth­er plan­et and do not have the nec­es­sary cul­tur­al back­ground to com­pre­hend a sym­bol.

Sym­bol and metaphor seem com­ple­men­tary, one is strong where the oth­er is weak and they face dif­fer­ent direc­tions. It is all music though.

6 thoughts on “Symbol, Archetype, Tug of War, Metaphor”

  1. Yes. Der­ri­da. Yes.

    And, if you want to get (lit­er­ary) the­o­ret­i­cal about it, read selec­tions from Roland Barthes. He plays with this kind of stuff, too. And, he is gen­er­al­ly more acces­si­ble than Der­ri­da. See Mytholo­gies; S/Z; Roland Barthes; Image, Music, Text.

  2. Six of one half dozen of the oth­er. Ref­er­en­tial v. Sym­bol­ic, because in either case you’re going to some­thing that has to be inter­pret­ted and the inter­pret­ing process will vary from per­son to per­son — don’t you just love der­ri­da. so maybe to you it’s a ref­er­ence, and to some­one else it’s a sym­bol and maybe those two things are the same? i mean, if we’re all always in the pro­ces of see­ing and “decon­struct­ing”, then a ref­er­ence is still no more than a sign post.

  3. to read oth­ers books on the­o­ret­cal thoughts, means that you stop think­ing of you own. your lit­er­al­ly dumb­ing your brain. please, i would love for you to email me and have a heat­ed diss­cus­sion about this. thank you

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