The Mathematics of Metaphor

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I have titled this post "The Mathematics of Metaphor." Or, should I entitle this the metaphor of mathematics? These two titles seem very similar and yet denote two very different things.

How is a metaphor mathematical? When I first proposed to tell you the parable of the Attack of the Uberachnid, I mentioned that it would exercise your “moral calculus.” It was not until the late 1970’s that spreadsheets ceased being something passive on a large sheet of paper, jumped onto the recently invented computer monitor and became something living and dynamically changing as the “what if” scenario. What if interest rates rise to this level, and wages are lowered, and units of production fluctuate seasonally in the following fashion, what then? When the teenaged Einstein climbed upon that light beam for a ride, he was climbing upon a metaphor. We have looked at Homer’s logarithmic slide-rule in the Iliad’s Catalog of Ships, which calculates Odysseus as the middle way or mean between extremes. And why does Aeneas depart from Hades through the gate of false dreams? What if all the women of the world really did go on a sexual strike until the waging of wars ceased? What if the Biblical accounts are fable but Biblical ideas and ideals are real and transforming. And if we have become more noble through fable, then is ours the nobility of the “Noble Lie” which Plato mentions?

Let us look to what Robert Frost had to say about metaphor. I have already mentioned Hemingway to you and now I am bringing up Frost; Frost and Hemingway, another dynamic duo, a team from the Vaudeville era. Wait! What am I saying? Frost and Hemingway are not Walrus and Carpenter opposites. Frost and Hemingway are two peas in a pod. Both writers, one a poet, the other a novelist, acquired a rustic voice of simplicity, a rural voice, a farmer’s voice, a stevedore-ironworker-miner voice. No need for lumbering dictionaries with these two. Yet, in the everyday, natural simplicity of the voices which they found they could say things profound. Well, at least Frost was profound. Hemingway still perplexes me on the question of profundity.

I am reading Robert Frost’s address given at Amherst College, in 1930, entitled “Education By Poetry: A Meditative Monologue.” I found his address reprinted in “The Norton Reader,” an anthology of expository prose. The Norton Reader is a wonderful book to acquire and have on your shelf, and en even more wonderful book if you actually read through it, cover to cover, all twelve hundred pages. We live in a time where there is such a wealth at our fingertips, in every used bookstore, for a few dollars, and yet we live in such a self-imposed poverty amid riches.

Frost states that (paraphrased):

Education by poetry is education by metaphor…

I have wanted … to make metaphor the whole of thinking…

Best and most fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number.

Everything is an event…

Bohr said that the individual atom has its freedom but the mass is under necessity.

We have been lead into our present moral position by metaphor by using all the good words which virtue has invented to maintain virtue such as honesty, frankness, sincerity, joy, health.

All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it! It is a very living thing. It is life itself.

The greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make a final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever failed.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.