Ah, I See! Metaphorical Thinking and The Pleasure of Re-Cognition

C. Goulet Ah, I see!
Metaphorical Thinking and the Pleasure of Re-cognition

Clare Goulet
Mount Saint Vincent University
Ah, I see! Metaphorical Thinking
and the Pleasure of Re-cognition
Abstract
Despite the explosion of research into metaphor for the past half century, many educators at
academic institutions seem resistant to the idea of metaphoric thinking as a mode of sustained
scholarly inquiry, as an educative responsibility, or as a form of student assessment. This simple
piece takes a lightly metaphoric approach to reviewing recent ideas in philosophy, poetics, cognitive
psychology, and fMRI brain imaging results that support the teaching of metaphor. From historic
resistance to more recent acceptance, looking at the dangers of misuse and neglect, this paper
considers the gestalt-shift of metaphor and discusses how to teach this form of thinking as a serious
form of thinking in the classroom. The paper and its appendices list sample assignments to increase
student facility in this style of irrational thinking.
What too are all poets and teachers but a species of Metaphorical Tailors?
Carlyle
A Single Stone
A few Octobers ago I sat in a field above the town of Windsor, Nova Scotia,
with eight junior-high students, for a poetry workshop. As no one had told me
this was the wild class (too hyper, a staff member said later, to work outside),
we sat for half an hour and passed around a palm-sized hunk of granite, making
metaphors: the salt-and-pepper granite lump becoming iceberg, broken dish,
tired face, crumpled-up newspaper. What animal is this? I asked on one round.
What if it was a day of the week? said another girl. A noise? A kind of
silence?all of us racing to keep up with the orbiting stone, the children sharp,
energized, focused, engaged, their quick communal yeahs or grunts affirming
the apt metaphors with no need to explain: they got it.
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C. Goulet Ah, I see! Metaphorical Thinking and the Pleasure of Re-cognition
Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy:
Art, as most of us have experienced, can give us access to complex possibilities
of understanding and perception, remote from our own. (L45)
Passing around that same stone at universityin the context of the Dalhousie
Integrated Science Program or English Department courses at the Mount
elicited similar responses: bursts of thought, quick physical affirmation in
involuntary nods and grunts, sudden intakes of breath, faces bursting open in a
grin, the same laughter, the same hard focus. But most metaphors created by the
undergrads seemed no more original or complex than those of the 12- and 13-
year-olds in Windsor. And the adults had more trouble letting go of literal
language (the stone is rough, theyd say) or obvious connection (the rock is
like a mountain). Exceptions came mainly from students with self-taught
metaphoric practice outside the university (songwriters, poets, dancers,
photographers); first-timers found the exercise fun but silly; you cant be
serious said one woman, rolling her eyes in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes and
Locke.
What is most peculiaris not how art does this, but why, given that it does do it,
art has become divorced from what we recognize as thinking. (L45)
One possible adaptive advantage to human evolution
1
and to many (some say
all) significant leaps in human thought, metaphoric thinking is limited, often
deliberately, in many university environmentscertainly in traditional
undergraduate core curriculum, where most students receive only accidental
exposure to this style of thinking. We want them to be original (English 1), to
offer new perspectives and surprising, apt connection, yet A papers are too
often treated as if they fell from the heavens, gifted to us, as if we have no
responsibility to teach that kind of thinking: the one we value most.
Programs that provoke metaphors far-flung apt connection are increasing, true:
a handful of students choose double-majors in diverse areas or attempt self-
created, mixed-discipline directed studies; a few students will win a spot in an
interdisciplinary program such as the Kings Foundation Year. But for the rest,
few or no courses devoted wholly to metaphor exist (compare that to reason and

1
See for example White and Geshwind qtd. in Bowdle and Gentner.
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logic), with occasional study possible in creative-writing courses (if available),
or fine arts electives (ditto), or film, if students make the effort. Even the
abundant metaphors encountered in English Lit classes tend to be treated non-
metaphorically, that is, via analytic assessment, explained in mainly literal,
expository prose as part of the dissection of a text.
2
Some academics are openly
hostile to metaphoric modes of study: in 2005, while a photocopier spat out
sheets, a senior member of another department, waiting, asked what the pages
were for. Poetry portfolio, creative-writing class. He told me such a course
shouldnt be taught at university, while my assignment slid off the rollers: a
30-page midterm requiring a dozen responses to essays in poetics, followed by a
speculative essay of the students and an extended series of poems (after weeks
of drafts) circling a central focus in classical structures, free verse,
phenomenological approaches, and translation/transposition. I took my sheets
and left, wishing Id thrown him Ted Cohens question: Is a [metaphor] less
important than a theorem even if its a good [metaphor] and a trivial theorem?
3
Linn [Linnaeusdesignated lichens as rustici pauperrimi, which might
well be translated as the poor trash of vegetation. (Schneider 6)
If 'getting it'that is, genuine understandingis what we're after at university,
4
if we speak in metaphorical phrases (I see what you mean) and analogy (a
parenthetical phrase is a thought-pocket, a benzene molecule looks like a
closed ring) as we try to impart crucial ideas that others have discovered via
metaphor (Kekules famous snake-eating-its-tail daydream which gave him that
structure of benzene)why is it that we rarely teach university students how to
think clearly and with precision in metaphor themselves?
They are found from the poles to the tropics, from the intertidal zones to the
peaks of mountains, and on every kind of surface from soil, rocks, and
tree bark to the back of living insects! (Brodo, Sharnoff, and Sharnoff 3)

2
What Susan Sontag once called the revenge of the intellect upon art (7).
3
Is a joke less important than a theorem, even if its a good joke and a trivial
theorem? (Cohen, Cultivation 6).
4
It is an extremely important result that metaphorical teaching strategies often
lead to better and more memorable learning than do explicit strategies (Petrie &
Oshlag 581).
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This paper braids three strands, which may be read separately or concurrently.
Thread 1 makes a case for teaching metaphoric thinking by offering ideas from
philosophy, poetics, cognitive psychology, and brain imaging studies. Thread 2
(right-justified) drops pieces of Jan Zwickys Wisdom & Metaphor and Lyric
Philosophy into the discussion, two central texts. Thread 3 (centred, italic) links
lichen fragments drawn from botanical texts: this thread serves as a kind of
metaphoric counterpoint to the other voices. After all, a metaphor, like lichen
that crusty, vomit-coloured growth you see on rocks and trees and old roofs
describes a relationship between two once-disparate things that, for a moment,
share a space.
A lichen is not a single entity, but a composite of a fungus and an organism capable of
producing food by photosynthesis [usually green algae]. (Brodo, Sharnoff, and Sharnoff 3)
(Dont sweat the lichen stuff; you can read it to see what, if any, connections
arise, or pay closer attention, or skip it; same with the Zwicky bits: each thread
works independently and collaboratively, readers choice. The lichen pieces
make this paper itself a (rough) example of the kind of thinking it describes,
offering a metaphoric reading experience, if you choose.) Notes provide
marginal murmur and heckling from the back of the class; appendices hold ideas
for course and class approaches. Heres one: what does the lichen-metaphor link
illuminate? Fail to? Where is the congruity meaningful and where does it break
down? If the analogy, like Kekules coiled-snake-for-benzene, fails to fit all
areas, does that render any ideas the analogy provoked false?
I do find it curious that studies of both metaphor and lichen shared
unprecedented resurgence in the mid-20
th
century, with key conferences in the
1970s assembling fragments from an explosion of scholarly debate; and not until
1981 did members of the International Association of Lichenology accept,
finally, that lichen is an association of a fungus and a photosynthetic symbiont
resulting in a stable vegetative body having a specific structure (qtd. in Brodo,
Sharnoff, and Sharnoff 8). The metaphor crew has not yet agreed on definition,
and increasing evidence of metaphors peculiar kind of thinking continues to be
resisted.
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This resistance has a long history.
Throughout most of the last century the botanical establishment treated with contemptuous
disbelief de Barys notion (1866) that lichens were dual organisms. Indeed, many refused to
accept it right into the present century. Leading contemporary lichenologistsbitterly opposed
the hypothesis. Crombie characterised it as this sensational Romance of Lichenology, or
the unnatural union between captive algal damsel and tyrant fungal master (Crombie 1874),
while M.C. Cooke in 1879 asserted of the dual hypothesis that even if endorsed by the
nineteenth century it will certainly be forgotten in the twentieth. It was not forgotten and
gradually became universally accepted. (Gilbert 16)
Irrational Thinking
We are like the black-frocked guardians in a 19
th
-century English novel: certain assertions
strike us as vaguely disreputablewe hear passion lurking in the wings, ready to rush in
and wreak havoc with our heroines hitherto faultless comportment. (L21)
Theophrastus (371-286 B. C.), a pupil of Aristotle, was perhaps
the first writer who left any record of lichens. (Schneider 3)
If there is a villain in the Western philosophical tradition, it is the Literal
Meaning Theory. That theory has, for two millennia, defined meaningfulness,
reason, and truth so as to exclude metaphor (Lakoff and Turner 215). Aristotle
has been held responsible for a range of conflicting opinion on the subject: that
similarity between different things can assist understanding, and that metaphor
is ornamentation inappropriate to argument. The latter idea has dominated our
own era, reinforced by philosophers such as Hobbes who, in 1660, declares in
Leviathan Chapter V: Of Reason and Science that metaphors are not to be
used in the seeking of truth (115), being senseless and ambiguous
wordsand reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable
absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt (116-17). In the
so-called Age of Reason, Locke goes further:
all the artificial and figurative application of wordsare for nothing
else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby
mislead the judgment, and so indeed are perfect cheats, and,
thereforethey are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or
instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are
concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or
person that makes use of them. (qtd. in Cohen, Cultivation 2-3)
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During this entire period, which extended over two thousand years, scarcely anything
more was doneScarcely a ray of scientific light had as yet penetrated the Stygean
darkness in which these highly interesting plants were enwrapped. (Schneider 8)
Meta PhereinTo Carry Across
Jan Zwicky:
Metaphor is a species of understanding, a form of seeing-as: it has, we might say, flex.
We see, simultaneously, similarities and dissimilarities. (Wisdom L4)
A quarter-century after the 1978 Chicago symposium on metaphor gathered key
fragments from an explosion of cross-disciplinary discussion, my friend and
colleague Dr. David Wilson still insists that metaphors are ornamental, effective
in persuasion, a colourful figure of speech, and nothing more. Off to class he
goes, under his arm Diana Hackers latest edition of A Canadian Writers
Reference, university-issued bible of first-year students wholl find therein that
metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two seemingly unlike things to
reveal surprising similarities, that in a simile the writer uses like or as to
make the comparison while a metaphor does not, as the comparison is implied
(143-144). In this 465-page book, students get this scant half page on metaphor
and learn two guidelines: to keep figures of speech logically consistent (vs.
Lets push this hot potato down the road) and to avoid clichs, those too-
familiar comparisons that lack surprise (We need to think outside the box).
5
No mention here that metaphor might be a figure of thought, nor that some
consider human language inherently metaphorical (I feel down), nor of its
dangers. Nothing on how to evaluate and construct metaphor, nothing on what
makes a good metaphor work.
Perhaps Hacker was avoiding a mess of debate in linguistics, psychology,
philosophy, and neuropsychiatry, whose literature tells us that a metaphors idea
can be paraphrased in literal language (Davidson 43)and that it cannot be
paraphrased in literal language (Black 22, 33). That all ordinary language is
rooted in metaphor (Lakoff and Turner xi)and that ordinary language is not
metaphorical because a dead comparison is not a functioning metaphor (Black

5
The same reference book has two chapters (sixteen pages) on constructing and
evaluating reasonable arguments (2).
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25). That metaphor ruins character, as weve heard from Lockeand that a
capacity for metaphor is vital for the health of character and culture (Booth,
Ten 174).
6
That metaphor is strictly a linguistic feature (Dreistadt cited in
Seitz; Davidson 31)and that metaphor is conceptual, with language just the
delivery vehicle (Lakoff and Turner 55, 138; Seitz). That a metaphor means only
what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more
(Davidson 30)and that literal modes are insufficient to express our sense of
the rich correspondences, interrelationships, and analogies of domains
conventionally separated (Black 33).
At first there was a tendency to classify lichens as a distinct group of plants, later to consider
them as mosses or as fungi. This doubt and uncertainty continued to grow until the close of the
seventeenth century, when the confusion reached its height. They were not only classed a
mosses and fungi, but also as algae, sponges, liverworts, etc.Sprengel and others were
convinced that, under favourable circumstances, lichens were evolved from decaying
substances, or the decomposition of water. (Schneider 7)
Here, today, I ask you to consider that metaphor
is the result of thinking of something as something else, a claim of the
form x is y where x is not y is true (Zwicky, Wisdom L5)the stone is
and is not a tired facean association that includes simile and analogy
7
can occur in word, image, gesture, sound
refers only to an active, novel comparison (dead comparisons and clichs,
absorbed into ordinary language, are no longer fully metaphoric)
(many lichen fungi have been grown in culture in the laboratory where they are
characterized by a slow growth rate, have little organised structure and do not
produce fruit bodies; in other words, they fail to resemble a lichen. [Gilbert 29])
I believe that such a metaphor
surprises or astonishes in the moment of making sense

6
A good measure of our culture would be our capacityto produce metaphoric
visions (Booth, Ten 174).
7
For (i) see, among others, Booth, Rhetoric 50-53; Bowdle and Gentner;
Zwicky Wisdom L1; (ii) Seitz; Bowdle and Gentner; (iii) Black 25; Bowdle and
Gentner; Mashal et al.
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is apt (strong, good) depending on both distance + congruity of the things
compared (a wide distance and a close fit)
8
which is what gives, I think,
that sense of surprise and making sense
9
like a good joke, cannot be explained and its full meaning dissolves in
literal explanation
can present in a distinctive and irreplaceable way, insight into how things
are (Black 21) or (not quite the same) attempts to get at the shape of
what-is (Zwicky, Wisdom L9).
Intimate Collaboration
Jan Zwicky:
The metaphor tells two truths at once: not two, it says, while remembering not one. (L16)
Of particular relevance to university teaching is the way in which two parts of a
metaphorical phrase work together (without fusion, without one being absorbed
or destroyed by the other)
The special biological relationship found in lichens is called symbiosis.
(Brodo, Sharnoff, and Sharnoff 3)
in a collaboration that admits its own failure to describe the world: something is
and is not like something else; likebut not exactly the same; true and not
true, thus it always invites other ways of seeing, the metaphor throwing out its
metaphoric hands, pulling students out of their desks.
10
Wallace Stevens
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird doesnt, for example, attempt to be

8
Where strong fit occurs, metaphorical language is processed as quickly and
easily as literal language (Ortony, metaphor 479; Blasko and Connine in
Bowdle and Gentner); other studies have reported both slower and faster times.
9
According to Mednick, the more mutually remote the elements of new
combination, the more creative the process or solution (qtd. in Mashall et al).
10
Separate studies a decade apart both showed that students become interested
in learning difficult concepts that are presented through metaphor and analogy
(Petrie and Oshlag 602). Halifax student Eleanor Queripel, remarking on work
for a first-year class, noted that the readings that most interested her, regardless
of author or subject or difficulty, were those that chose a metaphorical approach.
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the final word on blackbirds; instead the poem opens up ways of looking and the
idea of perception itself, provoking students into producing 13 more ways of
looking at blackbirds or tumour growth or granite: Like an hourglass / sifting
bits / of clay, and quartz, glitzy / sparks and specks on the seafloor, changing /
still (Drisdelle 33-37).
That metaphor, already a conversation between two or more things, invites
further collaboration has tremendous practical implication for educators; those
in other fields have been paying more direct attention. Henry Seiden uses
metaphor in his clinical practice to provoke change in patient thinking and
behaviour: My patient and I are collaborators, having moved into the
metaphorical space together. In his practice, Seiden makes various metaphors
for the patient to consider (perhaps as a prof might offer students an analogy),
but this is spun around by cognitive therapists Richard Kopp and Michael Craw,
who describe constructive change [not previously seen] in ideas, behaviours,
and relationships in those cases where metaphors were created and developed
solely by the patient, without therapist comment or interpretation. The authors of
this study suggest that therapists attend to their clients metaphoric speech and
select a metaphor to explore by asking open-ended questionssomething we
might try in the classroom: listen for any metaphors the students speak or
gesture as they try to explain a concept, then pick one to explore, in class
discussion or in a paper, to see if and where and how the metaphor fits.
Together, says Seiden, weve created a meaning we can point to.
When the two partners come together, they form a lichen thallus [plant body.] (Gilbert 33)
Contributions to Geometry: Lichen
Think of yourself as an agreement:
arms and legs in step,
each cell holding up the walls of another. (A. Dickinson 12-14)
At Chicagos 1978 symposium, Ted Cohen famously described this
achievement of intimacy in the metaphoric act, where maker and appreciator
of a metaphor are drawn closer to one another, arising from a desire to initiate
explicitly the cooperative act of comprehension (Cultivation 6-7). Twenty
years later he goes further, saying that metaphors aim to induce intimacy
(Feeling 239; italics mine). In my own experience, in a Childrens Literature
class the act of making and receiving metaphors transformed a gaggle of
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strangers into a single, alert organism for a class poem In Which the Student
Studies Lewis Carrolls Alice, where the moral of the story / shrinks alongside
her. / Nonsense (Zinck 5-7); any decent shared metaphoreven the chalk-as-
Hitler-moustache experienced in the crude object-game played at the AAU
conferencecan result in a sense of close community (Cohen, Cultivation
7). Of course, metaphors can play dirty. Wayne Booth tells the story of a
southern US court case where a lawyer, defending a large corporation against a
small local firm, hears the smaller business present itself to the jury as a
dangling catfish squirming in the grasp of the bigger company and about to be
gutted. At that moment, my friend reports, he knew he had lost the case
(Rhetoric 50): The speaker has performed a task by yoking what the hearer
had not yoked before, and the hearer simply cannot resist joining him; they thus
perform an identical dance step, and the metaphor accomplishes at least part of
its work even if the hearer then draws back and says, I shouldnt have allowed
that! (Rhetoric 52).
Dangerous Liaisons
Simone Weil:
The mind is enslaved whenever it accepts connections which it has not itself established.
(qtd. in Zwicky, Wisdom R109).
This sudden, seductive intimacy, like that of jokes, has consequences and we
dont have to look far: Bushs Axis of Evil, the idea of mixed blood, the Great
Chain of Being (affecting everything from what languages are taught in schools
to insecticide to slavery to who gets the corner office), and the university as
business corporation (one consequence of which was a letter informing me in
1999 that I was no longer teaching students but servicing learnersand what
will be the consequence of that?)
Metaphors also fall into the hands of people who fail (or refuse) to recognize
what theyre holding, who fail to see that x is and is not y and attempt fixed
literal interpretation, as the 2005 Kansas City School Board did with a poetic
creation story. As for ourselves, our own conventional metaphorsthis
supposed need to move forward, to explore our options, to accept the bottom
linecan be used so automatically and effortlessly, we find it hard to question
them, if we can even notice them (Lakoff and Turner 65). What is the cultural
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consequence of a widespread failure to teach the difference between literal and
metaphorical styles of thinking? Or of neglecting to discuss with students some
criteria for evaluating metaphor (just as we routinely address logical fallacies) or
failing to discuss the way in which unquestioned dead metaphorical concepts
shape their thinking and their lives? Where do we teach students the intellectual
value in making their own connections?
Surprise! Transgression and Recognition
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant/ Success in Circuit lies (E. Dickinson 1-
2)A black umbrella popped open is a bat-flower, is a surprise on a stick. A
metaphor is born of distance and unexpected fit: we experience this as surprise,
an idea-image bursting through walls previously thought solid (in the first,
domestic object = animal+plant; in the second, an abstract emotion perches atop
a concrete object).
11
Dalis languid timepiece draped over a branch. You could
say that, as we drive down our habitual thought-road, metaphor pushes the
button on the James-Bond-ejector seat and from our rather shocked chairs in the
sky we havefor a moment, before we fall back to eartha startling and much
expanded view.
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
565. I think it could also be put this way: Astonishment is essential
to a change of aspect. And astonishment is thinking.
(qtd. in Zwicky, Wisdom 1R)
One way that metaphor might elicit the new understanding so vital to academic
work is that it disregards conventional boundaries, breaking implicit and
discipline-specific rules. When Rosemary Drisdelle, a laboratory technician in
microbiology, wrote a sonnet on the life cycle of the intestinal roundworm
Ascaris lumbricoides, she told me she felt as if she was doing something
forbidden in representing the creature as an infant in a bassinet / curled in an
alveolar eddy (Life Story 4,14). Metaphors friends and foes concur: the act
has been variously described as seditious (Hobbes again), deviant (Lakoff and
Turner 124), rule-violating, (Black 23) a category-mistake (Seitz), a

11
Metaphors on loan from Dr. Graham Fraser.
215
deformation of human categories (McKay, Vis 31), smuggler or trickster
(Vis 69-70), and a linguistic short-circuit (Zwicky, Wisdom L68).
The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow
by spreading, grey, concentric shocks. (Bishop 1-3)
lichen: 2. skin disease with reddish eruption L. f. Gk. leikhn [eruption, disruption]
Charles Simic:
The ambition of each image and metaphor is to redescribe the world, or, more accurately, to
blaspheme. Stevens knew that and Dickinson suspected it. Thats why they kept a low profile.
(qtd. in Zwicky, Wisdom 46R)
But how is this transgression a gestalt shift?
Because to deal with anomaly you have to change: you must let gohowever
momentarilyof one way of looking in order to see the other.
12
We can see this in Jastrows duck-rabbit,
in the Necker cube, and in the linguistic
equivalent of these images: H.D.s Oread:
Whirl up, sea
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.(1-6)
This unfinished business, this restless flickering-
back-and-forth (forest imagined as sea? sea as
forest?) occurs not only between the two things
being compared in a metaphor, and between possible
schemas (duck or rabbit) but also in disturbing

12
Literal language requires only assimilation to existing frameworks of
understanding.Accommodation of anomaly requires changes in the
framework of understanding which secures the importance of metaphor in
considering how radically new knowledge is acquired (Petrie and Oshlag 587).
216
reverberations between ourselves and a supposedly passive or inferior subject: a
metaphor looks back.
How the slash looks: not
ruin, abattoir, atrocity; not
harvest, regen, working
forest. How it looks. The way it
keeps on looking when we look away,
embarrassed. How it gawks,
with no nuance or subterfuge
or shadow. How it seems to see us now
as we see it. Not quick.
Not dead. (McKay, Stumpage 1-10)
In this mutual gaze, metaphoric thought brings ecological perspective to our
teaching: A style of knowing shapes the world technology has wrought,
speculates philosphy professor and poet Tim Lilburn; the ghost of Descartes
hovers over the waste dump, the clear cut. Is there another way to look at things,
something more benign? (8). What if we share our joke with the subject rather
than at its expense, or take up Don McKays suggestion that we read the field
guide to the creature? At Dalhousie and Mount Saint Vincent, Ive seen the
latter approach foster deep and long-term appreciation by the student for any
subjectan appreciation where none, prior to the exercise, existedfrom
laboratory technician Drisdelles formal address to a parasitic worm to a four-
woman interpretative dance of Alices Adventures to 25 students crammed in a
campus bathroom as Dominique read her poem to the toilet-paper dispenser (a
study in approaching what is other).
Finally: what does it mean for university teaching if metaphors not only help
reveal a known concept to others in swift, participatory, gestalt-inducing ways
but are perhaps essential? Whether abstract concepts can be understood only
metaphorically is[a] highly controversial issue (Bowdle and Gentner), with
researchers seriously investigating the claim that radically new knowledge
requires the operation of metaphor (Petrie and Oshlag 582).
Lichens have been nicknamed natures pioneers because they have the ability to colonize
bare rock and are often the first plant-like forms to become established on newly exposed
surfaces. We know that certain lichen substances can chemically combine with rock
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minerals, creating metal complexes that make the rock slightly more soluble, thus speeding
the weathering process.the first stage of soil formation. (Brodo, Sharnoff, and Sharnoff 54)
In the past two years, one piece of that idea has amassed strong supporting
evidence: some of the metaphoric phrases youve just read, the ones you got,
provoked distinct and visible change in your brain, including heightened
collaboration of your right and left hemispheres.
Re-cognition
Jan Zwicky:
Non-metaphorical ways of speaking conduct meaning, in insulated carriers, to certain ends
and purposes. Metaphors shave off the insulation and meaning arcs across the gap. (L68)
You may have noticed that your own experience of getting a metaphor, like
getting a joke, is physical; in groups, recall the small involuntary sounds that
happened for the more surprising metaphors in the object-game we played here,
or the small noises routine at public poetry readings when a good metaphor
happens; in class, people gasp, grunt, shift, mmmm, ohhh, heads re-angle
playing a metaphoric game in a composition course, I realized, after, that Id
been leaning forward, said one student, the whole time.
13
A few years ago I wondered if something measurably different was going on in
our brains at such moments, but fMRI imaging studies at that time showed
minimal or no distinction between literal and figurative language processing
though I saw, to my horror, that the metaphoric pairings tested in those studies
were tired clichs (e.g. coldunfriendly).
14
I wasnt the only one: in October
2005, four researchers in psychology, medicine, and cognitive brain mapping
used fMRI to test novel metaphorsdrawn mainly from poemsseparately
from what they termed conventional metaphors (clichs), literal language, and
unrelated jumbles (Mashal et al.). Results confirmed increased brain activity
unique to metaphor: when grasping novel metaphorical word-pairs (e.g.

13
Elizabeth Edgett, in ENGL 1120.12 at Mount Saint Vincent U, March 2007.
14
functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) shows parts of the brain
activated by certain stimuli (language, sensations, etc.) by using an MRI
machine to reveal areas of increased blood flow during that particular activity.
218
imagination caves), your brains right hemisphere (RH) shows significantly
stronger activity
15
than it does for ordinary literal language (walking shoes)
or for familiar clichs (iron fist) (Mashal et al.). Results pointed to selective
RH involvement in the processing (and perhaps the generation of) novel
metaphoric mappings, the cooperation of right and left hemispheres, and a
special role for specific areas of the right hemisphere in generating novel,
unfamiliar connections between words (Mashal et al; see also Sotillo et al. and
Bottini et al. qtd. in Mashal et al.)
In most lichens, the fungus envelops the algal or cyanobacterial cells with tiny branches
of its hyphae, the tips slightly expanded and tightly pressed against the photobionts
cell walls. The fungus apparently recognizes the right alga by virtue of certain
proteins (lectin) on the cell wall. (Brodo, Sharnoff, and Sharnoff 6-7)
What does this mean for educators? Even before that 2005 study, research
already suggested the RH may be particularly adept at using mutually remote
elements of new linguistic combinations, a process that may lead to the more
creative process or solution (Dorfman, Shames, and Kilstrom in Mashal et al.)
But the 2005 study tells us that the newness of a metaphor affects the kind of
neurological activity that takes place: in other words, a good metaphor makes
all the difference. And it means the late Max Black was right: dead metaphors
are perhaps not metaphors at all, and the simple fact of comparing one thing to
another is indeed an ill-fitting definition for metaphor, which may belong to
another species of language altogether (jokes? irony?), leaving The Canadian
Writers Reference section W5-f about as inaccurate as a 19
th
-century text on
lichen.
New Lamps for Old
Jan Zwicky:
There is, however, no simple recipe for communicating gestalts; or,
rather, there is only the roughest and readiest: point and hope. (L92)

15
Specifically: in addition to usual left-hemisphere (language dominant)
functions, fMRI results revealed significantly stronger activity in right posterior
superior temporal gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus, and left middle frontal
gyrus (Mashal et al.)
219
Lichens have evolved several ingenious methods of vegetative reproductionparts that break off
are capable of growing into new plants. Rather than rely on chance fragmentation, many species
produce special structures known as isidia.Once dispersed, they attach themselves to the
substratum by producing establishment hyphae, then growth proceeds. (Gilbert 34-35)
In my own teaching, metaphoric approaches have worked no matter what the
cultural background, academic experience, diagnosed learning disability,
attitude, or subject under study: in metaphoric tasks, students think faster, work
harder, care more, and tell me so both during and after the course in written
evaluation. I attempt in each course to present a few ideas on metaphor and to
have students make metaphors (alongside analysis) for assessment and
assignment; we discuss the danger of clichs, particularly political implications
and effect on thinking; and in essays, obvious clichs are treated as significant
error (students become ruthless readers of each other and of me). I drop poem-
bombs: passing outno explanationa poem on the subject were examining
(e.g. excerpts from Stephanie Bolsters White Stone: the Alice Poems for a
section on Lewis Carrolls Alice) and allow for at least one polyphonic project
per course (multiple voices on the page, with arrangement, in place of
explanation, carrying the idea). Interdisciplinary directed studies (one-on-one)
have proved most fruitful as exercises in extended metaphoric thinkinga play
on astronomer Henrietta Leavitt crossed with a 1970s suburban mother
(Mathematics/Creative Writing; see Appendix C), for example, and a multi-
voiced essay on the siege of Fallujah and the limits of reason (International
Development Studies/Creative Writing). Still this seems flimsy, hardly enough.
Even commoner than the formation of isidia is the production of powdery granules.
mainly dispersed locally by rain water trickling over the thallus or by the action
of invertebrates, or, more widely, by wind. (Gilbert 35)
In sum, we can engage in metaphoric thinking to teach new ideas (help students
grasp abstract concepts), to explore (discuss, debate, clarify) these concepts, and
to assess student understanding (see Appendix A). We might question the
aptness of a particular metaphor, or its consequences. Thinking back to your last
class, how could you present that material via analogy (in words or image or
music or gesture)? If you assessed student understanding by having them invent
metaphors for a particular concept, would you require that they also explain
their metaphors in literal language? Why?
220
Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor:
if the perception of such gestalts is the basis of human insight, there can be no rules
or procedures whose application constitutes the practice of philosophy. (L117)
Albert Henderson has researched the meaning behind the Latin names of a number of our
lichens.
Absconditella celata A tiny hidden secret
Candelariella aurella A small candle holder, with minute yellow flame
Haematomma ventosum With blood-red eyes and puffed up
Parmelia sulcuta A small, round, furrowed shield
Umbilicaria hyperborea Springing from a navel and found at the back of
the north wind
(Gilbert 32; Henderson qtd. in Gilbert 32)
Lichenologist Trevor Goward has described lichens as fungi that have discovered
agriculture, and there is much truth to that. (Brodo, Sharnoff, and Sharnoff 4)
Seeing-as: seeing lichena kind of food-for-protection collaborationas
fungi that have discovered agriculture: I remember reading that phrase in the
lichen section of Plants of Coastal British Columbia, writes poet Don McKay,
and being immediately engaged (Vis 105-6). Engaging, surprising, active,
intimate, connecting teacher and student and subject, facilitating understanding,
sparking a particular kind of brain activity, demanding original thinking and (I
speculate) rewarding us with pleasure in the process: metaphor is a students
best and built-in overhead projector
16
, provoking genuine delight in the
classroom, in the subject, and in the world beyond the self.
Jan Zwicky:
To get it, to understand, is to experience meaning. It is to be able to go on. (L82)

16
Metaphor vs power point: Arnheim (1969) argued that thinking may be
largely imaginal and that visual, not verbal, thinking is perhaps the most
important and central mode of thought (Seitz 13); K. Pibram [in 1995] suggests
that metaphor functions as a transformer through which words are translated
into images (qtd. in Kopp and Craw).
221
Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Shampoo. Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems
1927-1979. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. 84.
Black, Max. More about metaphor. Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Andrew
Ortony. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 19-41.
Booth, Wayne C. Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation. On
Metaphor. Ed. Sheldon Sacks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
47-70.
---. Ten Literal Theses. On Metaphor. Ed. Sheldon Sacks. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1979. 173-74.
Bowdle, Brian, and Dedre Genter. The Career of Metaphor. Psychological
Review 112.1 (2005): 193-216. EBSCOhost. E.M. Fulton Lib., MSVU. 9
June 2006 <http://web.ebscohost.com>.
Brodo, Irwin M., Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, and Stephen Sharnoff. Lichens of
North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Cohen, Ted. Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy. On Metaphor. Ed.
Sheldon Sacks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 1-10.
---. Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative. Philosophy and Literature 21.2 (1997):
223-244.
Davidson, Donald. What Metaphors Mean. On Metaphor. Ed. Sheldon Sacks.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 29-46.
Dickinson, Adam. Contributions to geometry: lichen. Kingdom, Phylum.
London, Ont. Brick, 2006 (no page; e-mail to the author. 21 Jan. 2007).
Dickinson, Emily. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant. The Complete Poems of
Emily Dickinson. Ed. by Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.
506-507.
Drisdelle, Rosemary. Interview with a Granite Rock. Poem for ENGL 4411
course work, Mount Saint Vincent University. 2003.
English Department (MSVU). English Department Marking Scheme. Halifax,
N.S.: Mount Saint Vincent University, 2005.
222
Fraser, Graham. Personal interview. 11 Jan. 2007.
Gilbert, Oliver. Lichens. London: Harper Collins, 2000.
Hacker, Diana. A Canadian Writers Reference. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St.
Martins 2004.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651. London: Penguin Classics-Penguin Books,
1988.
Jastrow, Joseph. Do you see a duck or a rabbit, or either? 1899. In The mind's
eye. Popular Science Monthly, 54 (1899): 299-312. 21 Jan. 2007
<http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/images/
Jastrow/JastrowDuckPopSci.jpg>.
Kopp, Richard, and Michael Craw. Metaphoric language, metaphoric
cognition, and cognitive therapy. Pscychotherapy:TRPT 35.3 1998: 306-
311. EBSCOhost. E.M. Fulton Lib., MSVU. 9 June 2006
<http://web.ebscohost.com>.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989.
lichen. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 7th ed. 1982.
Lilburn, Tim. Preface. Poetry & Knowing. Ed. Tim Lilburn. Kingston, ON:
Quarry Press, 1995. 7-8.
Mashal, N., et al. An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the
processing of novel metaphoric expressions. Brain and Language.
Corrected proof. Oct-Nov 2005. ScienceDirect. E.M. Fulton Lib., MSVU.
16 Oct 2006 <http://web.ebscohost.com>.
McKay, Don. Stumpage. Strike/Slip. Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 2006.
22.
---. Vis Vis: fieldnotes on poetry & wilderness. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau
Press, 2001.
Ortony, Andrew. metaphor. The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Ed. Richard
L. Gregory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. 478-481.
223
Petrie, Hugh G., and Rebecca S. Oshlag. Metaphor and learning. Metaphor
and Thought. Ed. Andrew Ortony. 2nd ed. [1
st
ed. 1979] Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993. 579-609.
Queripel, Eleanor. Reading response #8 for ENGL 1120 course work. Mount
Saint Vincent U. 2007.
Schneider, Albert. A Guide to the Study of Lichens. Boston: Bradlee Whidden,
1898.
Seiden, Henry. On the music of thought. Pschoanalytic Psychology 21.4
(2004): 638-644. EBSCOhost. E.M. Fulton Lib., MSVU. 9 June 2006
<http://web.ebscohost.com>.
Seitz, Jay. Nonverbal metaphor: a review of theories and evidence. Genetic,
Social, and General Psychlogy Monographs n.d. 124.1. EBSCOhost.
E.M.Fulton Lib., MSVU. 30 May 2006 <http://web.ebscohost.com>.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. Against Interpretation and other
essays. 2nd ed. NY: Farar, Strauss & Giroux, 1986.
Zinck, Erin. In Which the Student studies Lewis Carrolls Alice. Poem for
ENGL 2205 course work, Mount Saint Vincent U. April 2006.
Zwicky, Jan. Lyric Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.
---. Wisdom & Metaphor. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2003.
224
Appendix A
Thinking in Metaphor
i. within existing courses
create more assignments and examination in metaphoric thinking e.g. Of
the 3 analogies below, choose the one most apt for _______ and discuss;
Could we call Catullus a Romantic?; Invent five metaphors for cell
division; Is Frankenstein a retelling of Paradise Lost? Create a
soundtrack for tumour growth.
treat clichs as an academic offense (thinking that is not ones own); treat
the thoughtless use of extinct metaphors (e.g. take it to the next level) as a
serious intellectual problem. This would require students to translate
unoriginal comparisons into clear, ordinary terms or to create their own
metaphors. In doing so theyd begin to routinely attend to and question their
metaphorical inheritance.
ii. as a course focus
more course offerings in the formal study of metaphor, at both beginning
and advanced levels e.g. Introduction to Metaphor, cross-listed for
Phil/English/Education/Psychology
discipline-specific courses on metaphoric thinking in a particular field
(use/effect of metaphor in physics, or biology, or computer studies or
history, e.g. Andreas Mussolfs Analogical Reasoning in Debates About
Europe)
classes or units within a course devoted to metaphoric study, either to
discipline-specific metaphors or to metaphor as a way of thinking (or both).
as a means of organizing a course structure
iii. via credit-gathering programs at the undergraduate level
inter-departmental approach for single units of study e.g. course-credit,
directed study
metaphoric-thinking courses as undergrad requirements, e.g. music, creative
writing in any genre, dance, visual arts, film studies, drama, lyric
philosophy
instead of a dept.-bounded, major/minor approach, create individual
programs from a wide range of credits in many departments but with a
specific declared focus (e.g. translation, writing gender, early childhood,
marine ecology
mandatory double majors in a traditional Arts and Science discipline
(English/Biology; Music/Math)
225
iv. via interdisciplinary programs of study
(undergrad) 1 year, e.g. FYP/Kings; DISP/Dalhousie
(undergrad) 4 year CSP & EMS/Kings; History of Science/Kings;
Cultural Studies/MSVU
(graduate) interdisciplinary Masters, PhD
v. via a movement within universities towards an inter- or non-
departmental approach
226
Appendix B
Dalhousie ENGL1000: Introduction to Literature / Dr. G. Fraser 2005-06
Metaphoric Thinking Exercise [topics of study: the haiku, translation]
There are two parts to this assignment. Do both of them. Keep your answers
brief and clear.
1. Provide a metaphor to describe a haiku. You can describe anything
relevant about a haiku its form, its subject matter, the way in which it
communicates meaning, the readers experience of it, or any other
property of the form that we discussed in class. Then provide a brief
explication (an analysis) of that metaphor.
2. Provide a metaphor to describe either the task of a translator or the
nature of a translated poem itself. Again, provide a brief explication of
that metaphor.
Dr. Graham Fraser comments on the above assignment: Some responses just
covered a haikus structure or smallness: a haiku is a 17-syllable sandwich was
one that worked. Others managed to capture its compressiona haiku poem is
like a bouillon cubeor the experience of reading a haikua face hidden in
leavesor how a haiku functions as a trigger, the way it requires the reader to
see an image, and all of a sudden insight it provoked: its like lifting the lid on a
jack-in-the-box. Because a haiku works much like metaphor, having students
define haiku in metaphor makes sense: they have to think like a haiku in order to
complete the assignment.
Fraser reported the task of reading and grading these assignments as being more
pleasurable for him than previous non-metaphorical assignments, with more
frequent occurrence of originality from a wider range of students, giving himself
new ideas on the subject. Despite initial uncertainty, he found the metaphorical
responses gave a clearer indication of student comprehension of the topic under
study than any previous form of assessment, with the task of evaluation (a mark
out of 5) no more difficult than usual.
227
Appendix C
English/Math Directed Study (playwriting): The Phenomena of Transmission / 2007
Student: [name omitted] Supervising instructor: Clare Goulet, Dept. of English
In this interdisciplinary Directed Study, fourth-year Mathematics Honours
student [name omitted] will research, write, and present (via reading) a play,
The Phenomena of Transmission, integrating the life and scientific work of
Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921), a theatre piece that will also integrate Leavitts
voice with that of an imagined 1970s female contemporary counterpart, the
whole piece assembled from the few known facts and an imaginative
revisioning, with attention to accuracy of scientific detail and to a lyric style in
both presentation and language. As a project, this play will itself enact one of
its own themes: that ideas have a way extending their own lives, much to the
surprise of us all:
My goal is to write a theatre piece depicting the silent influence that
social standing has on the creative output of an individual. There are
two main characters: a little-known historical astronomer and an
imagined suburbanite. Henrietta Leavitt made the significant
astronomical discovery of the Cepheid variable-luminosity
relationship. Ms. Leavitt was unable to publish her brilliant work
because, at that time, Harvard University did not allow women to
publish. Her work was published (and credit taken) by her employer. . .
. I plan to juxtapose Ms. Leavitts situationa talented turn-of-the-
century scientist, a woman, unmarried, university educated, and yet in
no way in creative control of her discoverywith a pregnant, married
woman in the early 1970s who is high-school educated, forced to leave
her job due to pregnancy, alone at home, overwhelmed with the
changes happening, for she has a growing realization that she has no
control over this creative endeavour. . . . I will be using domestic
activities such as knitting and cooking to illustrate the beliefs of the
scientific method (specifically with regards to physics); I will consult
with Dr. Tina Harriott to ensure that the plays physics is accurate and
will draw on my own experience regarding emotional reactions and
responses to being pregnant.
The themes I plan to explore include intellectual and physical
isolation, inner space/outer space disparity, the lure of insanity as a
place to lay ones burdens down, and the perceived loss of creative
controlthat ideas have a way extending their own lives, much to the
228
surprise of us all. I believe that Henrietta Leavitts name deserves more
recognition. I believe that weaving together an emotional tapestry of
words through juxtaposed voices can inspire audiences to question
their own creative future: to cover an ancient sky with modern stories.
[The Directed Study components require research and annotated bibliography
of 20-25 readings in gender and science, plays of scientific biography and
discovery, lyric writing by women on creative work/motherhood/mental
health, and available text on Leavitt. Faculty readers/consultants: T. Harriott
(Mathematics); R. Zuk (English)]
229

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