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Geology Is Not a Metaphor (and Other Really Geeky Reflections)

by Vanessa Veselka, May 25, 2011 12:09 PM
I was pruning a rose bush two years ago, which I had never done before. It was raining and I was meditatively thinking about how a plant only has so much biological energy to support so many buds and blossoms and how branches need to be cut away for it to really bloom and how that was like such a great metaphor for things in one's life and blah, blah, blah... Then suddenly it hit me — the rosebush is not the metaphor. We are. The rosebush is real. It was demonstrating a real set of functions. Our social consciousness, our culture and habits, these were the metaphors. It was all backwards.


In Zazen I relied heavily on the language of geology and how it's easy to look at it and think, metaphor. But geology is as real as it gets. I tripped over the geological language by freewriting Della's voice. It perfectly reflected her own crisis because, geologically speaking, we're always on the precipice of annihilation. Always have been. When's that devastating earthquake coming? Anytime between five minutes from now and the next 10,000 years. That's a geological second. So, through that lens, the lens of "deep time," everything is damn near eternal and everything is now. How can you live like that? That's part of what Della has to figure out. To quote good old Vladimir Ilyich: "What is to be done?" Apparently in my book the answer involves sex parties and bombs and topographical mapping.

The box-mall-church is a construction with which Della is obsessed. She maps the parking lot the way one would map a section of rock, in 10-foot sections. Seen from above some parking lots look like this:


Photo credit Corbis / SuperStock

Photo credit leinaDoli

 


Other parking lots look like this:


Via parkinglotplanet.com

Via 1000 + Words

Via Four Corners blog


I wanted to write in a way where the metaphor was not the point but the platform, the jumping off place. I wanted the natural world to be bigger than ours. I wanted to use the language of time.




Books mentioned in this post

Zazen

Vanessa Veselka
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3 Responses to "Geology Is Not a Metaphor (and Other Really Geeky Reflections)"

Capt. Red June 11, 2011 at 04:04 PM
Does it really matter as long as you enjoyed it?

Renaldo June 1, 2011 at 05:30 AM
Both Vanessa and Joe the commenter have things a bit confused here. A metaphor is a construct, a symbolic one that we use in various ways, poetically and otherwise. While reality is conditioned by the society that embodies it, reality is decidedly not a metaphor. Native American reality was very different from Medieval European reality, indeed Iroquois reality was different from Cherokee. But this doesn't mean that reality is relative, or a metaphor. To equate reality with a metaphor is, well, insanity, and I'm not saying this metaphorically.

Joe Schmelzer May 25, 2011 at 03:19 PM
I've had the same thoughts, but taken them in a different direction (sort of). The universe operates under a series of rules, axioms, codes. If you think about that, it's really easy to start noticing that reflected in EVERYTHING. Hofstadter is/was on the same trip in 1979 with his "Godel, Escher, Bach;" although he looked at things through more of a mathematical lens (fractals, et al). But, yeah, totally. We are the metaphor. The universe -- every aspect of it -- expresses itself in really obvious, non-interpreted, ways, which are incredibly easy to observe, from which one can derive more tactile things like "ethics" and "gardening"... Quick ramble.

Result(s) 3

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