Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have one's nose open. A metaphor of sexual passion: "She had his nose so wide open he was pawin' at the ground...
...Seeker" ("Die Suchende") is a poem of die Leidbseessene, the "woman possessed by sorrow," who serves as a metaphor for the nation of Israel. On first reading, it seems just too simple to be really good, but the subtlety of the poem only emerges after several exposures. The translation is almost totally literal, and thus loses some of the devices which make the original succeed. An effective alliteration ("die Wande der Wiiste wissen von Liebe") is lost in translation as "the walls of the desert know of love." The strict rendering into unwieldy English detracts immeasurably from the starkness...
Precisely. The physical shape of angels is only a metaphor, but the spiritual experience to which the now dead form refers may be very much alive. That is the process of revelation, of stepping between levels of awareness. "The angel," Carl Jung wrote, "personifies the coming into consciousness of something new arising from the deep unconscious." As the rigid boxes of 19th century positivism disappear from our culture and new epiphanies of consciousness unfold themselves, it is possible that we may return to that receptiveness in which earlier civilizations saw their angels. Except that, inevitably, we will call ours something...
...Chiden, is poised to whip a fish from a stream; the bird becomes a metaphor of the mind and its power to seize what is spiritually relevant. The monk Hakuin Ekaku meditated on a terrifying Buddhist deity and expressed that terror by simply "writing" the deity's name-the heavy strokes conveying a menace beyond what the ideograms spell out: "Blue-countenanced Bearer of the Thunderbolt." A swift sketch of two cackling women gets the inscription...
Movement and Metaphor: Four Centuries of Ballet by Lincoln Kirstein. 290 paqes. Praeger. $17.50. A delightfully idiosyncratic history of classic dance by the co-founder and general director of the New York City Ballet. It minutely and wisely analyzes 50 landmark ballets, from Balthasar de Beau-joyeulx to George Balanchine. Kirstein's prose is suave and evocative. The stunning black and white illustrations, many of them never before reproduced, are a far cry from the expectable salon-photography narcissism...