a study in tangents: value judgements and metaphor

she's as addicted as i am.
were told that we ought not judge each other, yet i cant help but try to take evidence and convert it into inferences. Everyone who judges is trying to predict the future based on the past. We are stuck in these tiny moments, boxed in by the entire world. We want to experience something authentic, some actual movement; weightlessness, and because the future is always rushing toward us, or us toward it, we want to gaze into it. This is inference, trying to take the past and turn it into the future. No wonder history repeats itself. These judgements we make, make us into our past selves. We try to mimic the dance steps of our past selves, but by then the song is over. We dance to the wrong rhythm and are out of step with reality. This is why we always hear people complaining about how no one lives in the moment. We wish to participate in something unconstrained. the future looks unconstrained so we try that, but we are too scared to dance to the drums we hear in the moment. Yet the moment is the closest thing we have to being unconstrained. It is the closest moment to the freedom of the future. So instead we go further and further backward, and thereby mimic the past.

Therefore, the art of living is to be found in the present moment. Dancing to the drums we are currently hearing, and no matter how clumsy we look at first, we then begin to live authentically. As close to freedom as a human can get without bending backward into the past.

Now, metaphor exists to explain obvious intangibles by things that are just as obvious, yet less authentic, BUT are a part of common experience. We may conjure up different mental pictures when we express a notion through a metaphor, but each metal picture is still within the boundaries found on the gradient of the thought the speaker wishes to express (if the metaphor is properly constituted) For instance: if i told you to picture a square, you will no doubt know what a sqaure is (if you speak english, and you are familiar with what the word expresses). You will conjure a mental image. One with four equal sides, however, my image may be solid and bright pink. Your image may be a wire-frame like picture of a four-sided shape, it may be something different entirely; but i have placed an image in your mind. The image or the form of the image is well established, yet the content of what substances constitute the image will probably be different. What matters is that you have the establishment of the form. The content can and will always be subjectively contrived.

However, I can help you constrain your definition of square. If I tell you it IS a bright pink square, you will now modify your image (if youre still inclined to listen to my ramblings, that is).

I can then say 'imagine a neon-pink square! (that is, very bright and glowing) now imagine it with eyes and a mouth devouring other squares! Growing and growing in its evil cannibalism till it turns its foaming mouth and evil gaze to time square New York!!'

Interestingly, at first, my descriptions made you manipulate the picture to follow my thought to stay on board with the conversation. You had to picture an equally fashioned, four sided shape which held the property pink within its constituents (presumably a variant on the gradient 'red'). But the pink was bright, so the shape was further modified into a new shape which was not only four-sided but possessing the property pink which shined outward, possibly even illuminating something else for reference. So now not only is it itself, but it is a shining shape in a space, not just a shape projected on to the darkness (if your mind is like mine, you see mental pictures against a black space).

But here is where it got interesting. I added a metaphor and, i can guess, your imagination was no longer constrained, but impregnated. It was to picture the shape with eyes and a mouth. The way i pictured it was suddenly purple (for some reason) and the mouth formed along a newly opening and closing side of the shape. It had teeth all of the sudden! The eyes bulged with cartoon strangeness and the picture came to life!

Interestingly, i know almost for certain, that no matter how closely our mental pictures of this scene overlap, you will no doubt have pictured something different than I did. The simplicity is not the key though. It is the complexity that the image took on as I anthropomorphized it. I said it had eyes and a mouth. You may have pictured a hand coming in and drawing eyes on the shape. You may have suddenly pictured them blinking to life, realizing new awareness and motivations.

My point is, metaphors, unlike other mental pictures cannot constrain to nail down, but they can and must breathe life into the image they conjure. They must build a narrative for the life inside them, but that life is not directly controlled by the thinker anymore. They are alive and maybe it is the job of a metaphoric writer to build the proper world they live in. A good writer is one who appropriately constitutes a character with its narrative. One who build shapes such that when the life enters them, they have a good life, or at least, an interesting one.

**
These thoughts seem like they should be separated, but for some reason one came from the other. There was a impression of a girl (how most poetry starts), then the appropriation of certain reflexive value judgements (not ones i made on purpose) within certain more realistic constraints, then i started thinking about what my mind had just done. That was the basics of the tangent i just went on... i wonder if these thoughts could be put to any use.