"Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor." -- Wallace Stevens, Adagia
And metaphor, as Stevens also knew, is the anti-cliche in which we capture reality. Metaphor brings together two disparate electrodes until meaning arcs between them with a light that burns and brightens.
A metaphor for the present crisis: Corporate capitalism has run off its rails, plowed across an open field and smashed into a suburban housing development, demolishing a swath of middle-class homes, but capitalism's ideologues stand idly by and insist, like good Brezhnev-era commissars, that the system is fundamentally sound. "What rails, comrade?" the CNBC apparatchik insists in his thick Boris Badinov accent, "Train is supposed to run on ground."
Monday, May 28, 2012
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