More on metaphor
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
~ Rudyard Kipling
That’s one of my favorite quotes these days. It does what words do so well, says about ten bajillion things at once.
For one thing, taken at face value it’s a penetrating insight, as true as a true thing may be. One could disprove it with words, of course, since it’s only words to begin with. But it reeks to me of truth. And aroma, as we know, is a keystone to good fiction. A good tale is highly pungent. Puts you there. In that foreign country.
But what about these implications? Did Kipling have something metaphorical in mind when he wrote that? Does it matter what he thought?
I smell something fishy. Not fishy, actually, much less fish-like than that. I smell something that makes me want to go that way. Toward the mystery, into that foreign country. Which country that is, Kipling doesn’t say. Could it be the country of the imagination, that strange mix of reality and wonder where you don’t have to say “it was stinky and bitter and sharp and made her stomach heave”? You just say
and let the reader’s memory and imagination take over.
Smell is of the body, smell is of the earth, something visceral and not intellectual. Could it be understanding starts with a stench? What we know with the mind perhaps first must be reckoned with the nose. The nose knows. Those who have not smelt death may never understand it.
Ever-smelly,
LWIII
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
- Frank Zappa
I think you, like many visionaries of the past, are on to something.
ClX
Sweet, a Zappa quote for the extracto! Finally! And I’m not a visionary, I’m a smellonary, fyi.