Natural Language Processing

I am writing this during allergy season, which many people associate with the appearance of goldenrod. However, goldenrod is not a problem for allergy suffers, because its flashy flowers mean it depends on attracting insects to spread its heavy pollen. If you are searching for a culprit, look among those plants who do not care whether anyone notices them, those with, say, green flowers, like ragweed, which blooms at the same time as goldenrod. Its nondescript flowers sticking straight up in the air depend on wind pollination, so they fill the air with their pollen that we then breathe in. How we understand the world influences how we see it.

Monarch Butterfly on Golden Rod

I have thought that perhaps I can help people find that richer relationship with the natural world through the power of metaphor, which charges the world with the electricity of imagination and enables us to see and feel the excitement inherent in the world that surrounds and includes us. Just look at the names of those two late summer plants: “golden rod” for the tall beautiful plant that entices insects to itself as part of its sexual reproduction and “rag weed” for the unattractive, low down plant that promiscuously spreads its pollen to unwelcome passages. The contrast in their natures is captured in the imagery of the popular name—riches and rags.

I call what I want to do “nature writing” rather than “environmental writing”, because environmental writing seems more journalistic and news/event driven and shifts focus as the news of the day shifts focus. Nature writing, in my lexicon, strives to be reflective and universal; I want my writing to be powered by our engagement with the nature where “lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” However, I am beginning to think that I can no longer write about nature without some environmental undertones or overtones. To deal with a real place is to deal with its ecology, and as McKibbon pointed out in 1989 (and is even more obvious today) there is no ecology that is unaffected by human decision making.

But even my dependence on explicit metaphor may be suspect. As George Lackoff and Mark Johnson pointed out in Metaphors We Live By, first published in 1987, even our everyday language is shot through with metaphor, and we use interconnected networks of metaphor to define and clarify our expression. For example, an idea is like a plant: it grows and spreads and can be nurtured and can die. Metaphors drawn from concrete experience of nature weave their way into our thinking, and those ideas then echo in our descriptions of nature, so that the ancient forest becomes majestic and inspiring like a grand idea. That relationship suggests that language is a good way into nature because language and nature interact in our experience, just as our abandoned fields of disturbed earth create an environment for ragweed, and ragweed creates an environment for us. And now I will go blow my nose.

The Metaphorist in the Metaphorest

[The last paragraph of the original version of this post has been revised: The last paragraph has been split in two, and some hard-to-follow leaps of thought have been clarified (he said, confidently)]

The same mental predisposition that attracts us to the satisfying uncertainty of open-ended questions may explain the essential power of metaphor as a tool for expressing the balance and tension that characterizes experience. In another place, in answering the question “Is the Self an Illusion?” I suggested that metaphors are a way to clarify irreducibly complex ideas because metaphors combine resolution and ambiguity.

Metaphor is normally introduced in school in contrast to simile, which is “a comparison using like or as.” Metaphor then becomes a comparison that does not use like or as. This approach is so unhelpful since it underestimates the complexity of the difference. For one thing a simile advertises that it is a comparison and makes clear that what is being compared maintain separate identities. T. S. Eliot begins his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock,”

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

And a little further on, he speaks of,

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

These comparisons (with their wonderful evocative language) make a clear distinction between the two things being compared and they communicate across the like. The sky and the patient share characteristics, perhaps a different one for each person: a sense of time suspended before some great event—night and an operation—a sense of blankness or clouds like the white hospital gown. The same is true of the image of the back streets and the tedious argument.

Later in the same poem are these lines:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

Purdue Cooperative Extension

Here is the comparison without like or as, and we are in the middle of the comparison before we even know it has started. Not until “sprawling on a pin” do we realize that we cannot take what is being said literally. Because there is no clear signal that a comparison is being made, the writer depends on the reader not only to interpret the comparison but even to know it is happening. So we can see the speaker as an insect, mounted and labeled in some collection, pinned in place while still alive, at the same as being subjected to the judgmental eyes of those attending a social gathering. The two parts of the comparison remain separate and blur together at the same time. The metaphor of the bug is then displaced by the metaphor of how talking at such an event involves people merely spitting out the conclusions they have drawn, a shift which brings us back to the social event. Each of the metaphors involved in the example requires at least two frames of reference present at the same time, frames of reference that must still coexist after the metaphor is deployed: the eyes fixing and the pin fixing.

This preservation of the frames of reference is the key to metaphor’s power. Deciding what to do within a frame of reference—which vegetable to plant first, which book to read next—involves comparing conventionally similar objects, but deciding whether to plant a vegetable or read a book requires a larger frame of reference so that planting and reading also become two instances of the same thing--two self-nurturing activities for example. Looking for a logical solution requires the platform of a single frame of reference. Because most complex and interesting problems do involve different frames of reference, that preliminary step means the subsequent solution is always simpler, flatter, than the formulation of the original problem.

Thus some complex problems will not be solvable in a single frame of reference. Thinking metaphorically may be the only way to understand such problems, since a metaphor creates a comparison in two frames of reference at once, a relationship that is both true and untrue at the same time: you are pinned to the wall and not pinned to the wall.