Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

I wasn't going to read this book.

At all.

In fact, my life has been so filled with school work that letting this one thing go seemed like a blessing. So I opened it up today so that I could post this having said that I tried.

Ooops.

What I found instead is that Dillard is a phenomenal writer. She writes prose the way mere mortals write poetry. Her paragraphs have rhyme and meter. Her prose flows in a way that makes it seem like some other medium entirely. The words are grotesque at worst and intricately detailed at best, but intoxicatingly easy to read.

What I'm trying to say is this: I guess I am reading this book after all. Please forgive me for being so far behind the curve.

Self-Actualizing Metaphors and Evolution of the Personal

I criticized this book last week because I couldn't see how it could be applied to my own life, as a student, writer, or general world inhabitant.

It turns out that if I had just gone on to finish the book, that would no longer have been a complaint. I was, in particular, interested in a tiny section in the back of the book, titled "Self Understanding." Self-understanding, like most other types of understanding, is an area in which I could use some work. My process, I think, would be more efficient if the curriculum were not constantly changing.

But in the context of the book and it's examination of metaphor and its unconscious purpose in our lives, self-actualization requires a conscious look at our use of language.

For me, it relates to the section of the book where Lokhoff and Johnson were discussing the placement of words within a sentence, where "I taught Harry Greek" implies better learning and more direct communication than "I taught Greek to Harry."

"Well, yes, officer, technically the cocaine was a drug procured for me."

This is a common complaint among high school composition teachers. Student spend too long getting to their point because they are trying to sound smart. It seems worth at least mentioning here that there is something wrong with the fact that we connote confusing and cyclical with "professional."

But if it is important to speak clearly, it is equally important, in terms of self-acceptance, to understand what rhetorical moves we are making when we speak complexly and why.

What I finally took out of this book was the knowledge that an understanding of metaphor (the why) and the resulting action (the what) can help me understand the movements my brain makes in between them.

And it doesn't get much more relevant than self understanding.

"I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like" and other books about this magical wordform

When I turned 18, my uncle gave me a book of metaphors as a gift. This is probably because he only sees me once every two years and I'm the only other member of our family that might find this book remotely interesting - and it is. But I also think there's a reason it's been relegated to bathroom reading in our household.

Besides its heartwarming and engaging cover, of course.

Metaphor, as our class text clearly states, is present in every level of our lives. It is in our turns of phrase and essay cliches as well as the fabric of our conversations. As a defense of the use of metaphor in writing as valuable and relatable, rather than lazy and trite, I appreciate this book.

But I don't think that is what the authors intended it to be used for, and, while I find their theory in general mind-bending, I don't particularly see how it applies to me as a writer. In fact, of our three texts, this one seemed by far the least applicable to my writing life.

I was strongly reminded of my literary theory class while reading this text: the magnitude of the importance of metaphor was staggering but distant. Unlike the frustration of Macrorie and the search for peace and learning of Pirsig, I did not connect with this book on a personal level. Where I lived the struggles of the other authors and sympathized (sometimes limitedly) with their experiences, the metaphor study seems too big to be narrowed into one application. It is more like the discovery of a theory than the development of a single rhetorical argument.

In summary, this book while profoundly cool, is going to require a large bit of class discussion before I really understand what it was trying to tell me.