Scribbles and Horrors

When simulations fail, we lay our hopes at the feet of metaphor.

And metaphor is no thing at all, only an illusion peddled by foolish people lacking the stamina to see things as they are.

To metaphor we sacrifice perceptions out of vain conviction they will be reborn as truths. We slay substance for effervescence, mistaken for essence. Metaphor is all sparkle, only glimmer, mere gleam–gold paint slopped carelessly upon delicate reality. Ostensibly of course done to protect reality—to emphasize its salient aspects—but everyone knows metaphor is garish and spiritually bleak. Only out of fear, fear of true meaning do we cling to the notion.

To gaze upon the face of the world is to gaze into the face of God: infinite and almighty Being. Doing so will ruin us. We know it will ruin us, which is why we invented philosophy and science to cushion the blow: measuring out truth in drips and drams ‘til we work up a tolerance.

—

The problem with metaphor is not that it claims too much, but that it accounts for too little.

Metaphor-mongers insist there is revelation in the differences between similar objects. But to do this they must hold apart pieces of the world, claiming the world as incommensurable with itself, maintaining artificial dichotomies. For metaphor to work you have to deny the fabric of the world, and this is too great a sacrifice.

The hard reality is that things are indeed literally other things. Mathematicians know this. Poets know it, too. Beauty is sharp-edged and ungainly, terrifying beyond belief.

And so the metaphorists try to soften the world, make jelly of human experience. They sneer at absurdities as only illustrating a point. Their toothless arguments they celebrate for the sake of being simulacra. Their aesthetic senses are gooey, murky messes. They applaud seeming as delightfully untrue, and refuse to consider the scary possibility that it might really be. As if shadows were the things worth thinking about.

What a bunch of hogwash. Discard it. The metaphorical is a bankrupt concept: useless, saccharine, and ugly.

When you no longer believe in metaphor, all that’s left is simulation.