The Nomadic Alternative – Page 32

Leonardo advised painters to look at the marks on walls, “the embers of the fire, or clouds, or mud, or other similar objects from which you will find most admirable ideas … because from a confusion of shapes the spirit is quickened to new inventions.” Similarly the brain uses confused wildness to create inner balance. Man invents the Universe in his mind and then joyfully recognizes his own creation as a place for him to live. Such is the primal act of human creativity. But once a man sees that his created universe is good, his brain is satisfied to rest. He has achieved contentment. Thereafter if the universe does not change, he does not have to change with it.

But if he suffers derangement or expulsion, if the ‘ideal’ universe in the mind is marred, he is forced to extend his spectrum of knowledge in ever-widening circles, recreating his shattered world to avert mental disintegration. Each of his creations, inventions or advances in knowledge is an anchor dropped in a wild sea to prevent a further drift onto the rocks of insanity. This is a dangerous business. Aristotle said that “the apt use of metaphor arising, as it does, from a swift perception of relations is the criterion of genius.” Sometimes the metaphor-making-mechanism snaps under the load. But genius and madness are old travelling companions.

Finding in some languages a lack of abstract terms to express ideas, linguists once mistook this for ‘primitiveness’. Until they came to appreciate the vitality of these languages as vehicles for thought, they failed to realise that metaphor was not just a means of expression, but the very stuff of language. “Metaphor”, to quote Ernest Fenollosa, “is at once the substance of nature [and] of language.” Used metaphorically, the energy latent in natural phenomena quickens language and makes it live in the minds of its speakers.

Named things are the raw materials of language and symbolic thought. A language lives because these raw materials can be taken in the hand, scrutinized and endowed with a ‘living’ personality. It cannot survive in time-honoured books and dictionaries. Languages which do