Paraphrand
Paraphiers project back into the metaphrand as what what may be called the paraphrands of the metaphrand. Consider the metaphor that the snow blankets the ground. The metaphrand is something about the completeness and even thickness with which the ground is covered by snow. The metaphier is a blanket on a bed. But the pleasing nuances of this metaphor are in the paraphiers of the metaphier, blanket. These are something about warmth, protection, and slumber until some period of awakening. These associations of blanket then automatically become the associations or paraphrands of the original metaphrand, the way the snow covers the ground. And we thus have created by this metaphor the idea of the earth sleeping and protected by the snow cover until its awakening in spring. All this is packed into the simple use of the word ‘blanket’ to pertain to the way snow covers the ground.
Not all metaphors, of course, have such generative potential. Take the metaphor of a ship plowing the sea, the metaphrand is the particular action of the bow of the ship through the water, and the metaphier is plowing action. The correspondence is exact. And that is the end of it. But if I say the brook sings through the woods, the similarity of the metaphrand of the brook’s bubbling and gurgling and the metaphier of singing is not at all exact. It is the paraphiers of joy and dancingness becoming the paraphrands of the brook that are of interest.
Or in the many-poemed comparison of love to a rose, it is not the tenuous correspondence of metaphrand and metaphier but the paraphrands that engage us, that love lives in the sun, smells sweet, has thorns when grasped, and blooms for a season only. Or suppose I say less visually and so more profoundly something quite opposite, that my love is like a tinsmith’s scoop, sunk past its gleam in the meal-bin. The immediate correspondence here of metaphrand and metaphier, of being out of casual sight, is trivial. Instead, it is the paraphrands of this metaphor which create what could not possibly be there, the enduring careful shape and hidden shiningness and holdingness of a lasting love deep in the heavy manipulable softnesses of mounding time, the whole simulating (and so paraphranding) sexual intercourse from a male point of view. Love has not such properties except as we generate them by metaphor.
References
- Jaynes, Julian. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Chapter 2 Consciousness (Epub p. 65). New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.
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