Picking Up Tofu with Chopsticks
by Honora Foah
Creative Director — Mythic Imagination Institute
Photo by Anne Parke Photography

Mythic Imagination Institute is a helluva thing to try to raise money for. Hey, I know children are starving in Africa, but could you please give some money for mythology?

So, in the overall scheme of things, what are we doing?

Well... .making the world safe for metaphor. Lately, there have been some heartbreaking conversations I have had with people working with aid organizations and NGO's about their feelings of hopelessness. 'I have been working all of my life to combat starvation and the situation is worse than ever.' And then they turn and say, 'Tell me about what you are doing with your work at M.I.I., I think there may be something there.'

Though I have been working all of my life with mythology, or perhaps because I have been working all of my life with mythology, I am startled by this response. Mention mythology to most people and they develop instantaneous MEGO*. But, lately, here we are speaking about world crises and mythology is actually on the agenda. (!)

Why? The matrix that is mythology is a rich one. Here, I just want to concentrate on one element- making the world safe for metaphor, through metaphor, from metaphor.

For instance: the people who drive airplanes into skyscrapers are people with a serious inability to understand metaphor.

Here is Patricia J. Wilson in an article in The Nation on this disease:

What triggers the disinclination to metaphor? What would make someone so resistant to the wordplay, the poetry, the malleable space that allows the mind to leap and compare and fictionalize and pretend? Literal readings make words holy; and whether that is an impulse motivated more by respect, fear of blasphemy or mere authoritarianism is becoming an issue in a world where hundreds of millions are newly born-again evangelical / literalist / fundamentalists of one sort or another.

I must confess that I am suspicious of a mindset that never veers from face value. I think that metaphor is related to the ability to empathize. You substitute one concept for another; you imagine that two very different things are somehow the same. When I say that the room is hotter than an oven, I'm invoking the oven symbolically, parabolically and yes, hyperbolically. Metaphor is a tiny unit of relativism, I suppose, and relativism is certainly under siege as the property of atheists and communists. But while the image of me-in-the-roasting-pan is not true in one sense, it is accurately evocative as a communicative matter, the kind of expression that connects us in our distinct and foreign bodies one to another. You are likely to feel the urgency of my misery just a little bit more than if I said, "I'm hot."

Empathy could be the single most important ability we must possess in order to move our world into a more peaceful and livable place. Even beyond the human, empathy creates understanding. The sense of separateness from Nature and Her consequent destruction, is as much a problem produced by a lack of empathy for Nature Herself and our place within Nature, as it is a failure of reason. Lack of imagination is the essence, and lack of desire to imagine is the sorrow and the shame of it. Metaphor is the prime tool of imagination. We imagine, we feel, we think and we ultimately understand by analogy.

It may be that the pleasure of metaphor is the affirmation of freedom, the eluding of capture. This may also be why it makes people nervous and unwilling to participate.

In metaphor, the multi-valent meaning is never entirely possessed. It DOES mean lion, but it also means king. It does mean predator; it also means protector. In words, metaphor cannot be held all at once. The perception of all the meanings at once requires a suspension of final capture. It dies on contact. It remains free and elusive because to hold it you cannot fully close your grasp. Metaphor requires the open palm.

But here's the funny thing. You have to hold the image with great strength at the same time as you surrender the meaning. It is like picking up tofu with chopsticks. Too loosely held, it slips away; too tightly held, you sever it and it falls away.

At Mythic Journeys '06, we had a Conversation entitled 'Living With Uncertainty, Loving the Questions'. That Conversation was well attended. There is no escape from the central fact of existence that we just can never be sure. That is the glory of freedom; that is the bitch of insecurity. We must learn the art of surfing and we must suffer the falls. Metaphor is an excellent teacher — riding the simultaneous waves of meaning.

The joy of being with the power of the water and the wind, the pleasure of your own skill, the being-one-with and being-separate-from, combines into exhilaration on the joy/fear edge. It is an experience of being engaged, at total attention — alive. I'm pretty sure that's all we can hope for in life, to be thoroughly alive. And it's enough. It's everything we could wish for.

Through the experiences of empathy and freedom, we form the inner basis of our capacity for relationship. Allowing the play, the koan, the insecurity of metaphorical understanding gives room for the reality and the needs of other people to enter into us/the world/the problem/the solution.

To empathetically realize the necessity for the freedom of other people and to feel their joy and fear in being alive, is how we overcome our narcissism and begin to be confident and diffident, full-bodied and modest, strong and yielding. To do so requires heroic efforts of imagination, courageous forays into uncharted metaphor, strenuous stretches of sustained attentive silence. When we do so, we are far more likely to be able do what is truly needed.

Picking up tofu with chopsticks. Shall we call these practices of imagination 'virtuous reality'?

* MEGO =Acronym for My Eyes Glaze Over

Photo compliments of Anne Parke

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